Madam was the lady of the house – though veiled when outside owing to, well, what she like to call her ‘striking visage’. Strax – who had a striking visage all his own – was cook and butler and made a very dapper example of the London slavvy, I must say, despite his great potato head. And me, I did for Madam Vastra – general housekeeping, laying the fire and whatnot. I also did other things – but that come rather more under the heading of pleasure than work.

When we wasn’t at home, we was off having adventures, Madam being what she privately billed herself as, the world’s only consulting reptile detective. Clients had been thin on the ground to start with but word had eventually got around that if you had some queer business that needed sorting, if the official channels and the police could provide no succour, then Madam Vastra was your woman. Or your late-Cretaceous reptilian life form whose people had been the original rulers of Earth, if you want to split hairs.

But the Crimson Horror was a matter quite unlike any other we investigated.

It really began with— oh hang on, though. No! There was another case. A case that come first! Back in 1888, before old Straxxy was with us. And we didn’t know it at the time but it was sort of connected. It was a strange business (as all the good ones are), involving some of the highest and some of the lowliest in the land. And it was the case where I first clapped me peepers on the Doctor, having only heard of him by repute, as it were. So, if you’ve a moment or two to spare and you’re tucked up in bed or by a nice blazing hearth with a glass or three of madeira, I’ll tell you all about it. I’ll fill in the bits what I wasn’t concerned with in a sort of authory way, like Conan Doyle does or Dickens did or that other one that Madam likes who was a lot odder and always poorly.

You game?

Chapter the First

‘City of Dreadful Delights’

Being the reminiscences of Miss Jenny Flint, lady’s maid of Paternoster Row, London.

The year ’88 furnished us with a series of cases of greater or lesser interest. (This is me, you see, coming over all Authory!) Spring brought us the matter of Miss Gregory’s Disgrace, and then the business of the Man with the Manganese Teeth while all through the summer we was hard at it on the curious affair of the Sentient Battenburg. After these exertions, Madam had been all for a little holiday in Margate when an evening stroll through the streets of Whitechapel changed everything.