Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [1]
It was fashionable, in its day. The well-dressed gentlemen of London would parade before the cages in the room of animals, with equally well-dressed women on their arms, examining the beasts as if they’d somehow caged their own animal natures and could now look the wilderness in the eye with impunity. Some claimed that you could hear the apes screaming as far away as St James’s, while others held that the hall was a wilderness in smell rather than sound, and that most of the screaming was drowned out by the hackney cabs on the cobbles outside. Nonetheless, those who lived in the streets near the Strand still believed they could hear the growling and the scratching at night, ringing through the wooden beams of the zoo and into the ground, the streets themselves purring with the dreams of the jungle.
Of course, by 1782 the zoo had lost something of its appeal. Animals weren’t the fashion any more, said the haut ton, not in an age when de Vaucanson could fascinate the masses with his clockwork defecating duck and the grand masters of Europe could play chess against a machine which (allegedly) had the mind of a man. It was even rumoured that Mr Pidcock – the owner of the establishment – had deliberately set some of the animals free on the streets of the city, to once again pique the capital’s interest, although less gullible Londoners pointed out that the worst thing Pidcock had ever done was spread those kind of rumours himself. Nonetheless, every now and then ‘beast’ stories would circulate in high society, usually regarding the more dubious members of the aristocracy. The Duke of Such-and‐Such once murdered his servant and disposed of the body by feeding it to a panther; Catherine of Russia had given King George himself a mammoth, a live mammoth, as an arcane gift; and so on. But the age of the animal, said the men in the coffee-houses and the women of the bagnios, had ended at the same time that the infamous Hellfire Club had disbanded. The Club had owned some great vicious ape, it was said, and when they’d held their blasphemous rituals in the caverns of their Abbey this hairy, slavering creature had presided over the ceremony as a representative of Satan himself.
Lisa-Beth Lachlan had her lodgings in one of the streets off the Strand, a good half-dozen doors away from the menagerie. And yet she’d still occasionally hear the screeching in the rafters, although she suspected that she could have been imagining it: the woman in the rooms immediately below Lisa-Beth’s had a smoking-jar permanently stationed in a room near the bottom of the wooden stairway, so late at night the opium fumes would frequently make their way up to the landing. It wasn’t hard to work out that under that kind of stimulus any creaking of the floorboards could sound like an entire bestiary on heat.
But then, to begin with, Lisa-Beth never heard the apes. That only happened one night in Match 1782, while she was occupied with what her associates might have called a ‘gentleman of the Westminster persuasion’.
The man was, without doubt, a Member of Parliament. Lisa-Beth knew this, because he seemed to expect everybody to know it, but even though she was more or less sober there was enough alcohol in the atmosphere of the Shakespeare’s Head to convince her that one politician was much like another. He’d sat with her in the Tavern – along with two other women from Covent Garden, although they’d left when it had become clear that His Lordship was only interested in paying for one of them (and Lisa-Beth was, the others had known, the best at putting up a good fight) – where he’d made a great show of hiding his face, pretending to be terrified that the other patrons of the Head would recognise him.
Wants to be a libertine and a gentleman-around‐town, Lisa-Beth had thought, the kind of man who could stand up in the little cramped hall of the House of Commons and speak to his peers as a man of great appetites as well