Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [22]
Naturally, exactly the same description applied within the walls of the House on Henrietta Street. As above, so below.
In addition to those notable ‘Votaries of Venus’ who lived in the House – Juliette, Rebecca, Lisa-Beth, Katya – there was one more young lady who deserves to be mentioned here. Her name was Emily Hart, and although she wasn’t a permanent member of the household she certainly visited the House on occasion: from what’s known about her, it’s unlikely that she was a true proponent of the black coffee arts in the way that, for example, Lisa-Beth was. Emily was an attractive, skittish, auburn-haired sixteen-year‐old, pretty but possibly a little on the childish side. Her letters suggest a young woman with an overenthusiastic love for drama and passion, inclined to sweep her arm across her forehead and cry out ‘o, woe is me!’ at the slightest tragedy. Probably not an actual demi-rep, she was kept as a mistress by a politician named Greville – one of the many who lost his position with the fall of the old Prime Minister – and by April 1782 she’d been moved by him into an address on Oxford Street (being a rough, undeveloped road in London surrounded by fields).
A flighty girl with a habit of becoming affectionate with everyone she met, she’s worth mentioning because it’s thanks to her that some of the most detailed descriptions of the House have been preserved. It’s in one of her letters, for example, that the first description of the Doctor’s study/laboratory can be found (in her usual messy, over-excited scrawl):
O! It is a strange and alkemical place. All around there are vats and such in glass, full of things I know not what that swim in water. There are devises that crackel with lightening, that even Mr. Franklin in America [sic: Franklin was in Paris at the time] I am sure would not touch. All is lit by oil and the sparks from the devises…
There is a girl, who helps Doctor _____ with his experimants. Her name is Juliette and she is quiet, but has been never less than plesant to me. She stands by with the gratest patience while the Doctor perfects his devises or even cuts into flesh… but never does she complain and once she smiled at me in a most anxious manner when it was the Doctor’s buisness to perform an examination of an animal… the Doctor too is most polite and funy, but he will not spare the feelings of a lady when about his work. He is I think too absent minded to be delicat.
Yesterday there was the body of a beast on the table in the middle of his study. It was an ape, which he tyed to the table though it was quite dead. When I came down into the study he was slicing into the chest of the animal making a grate deal of fuss over it, and Juliette thought I should look away though I conies I could not help myself but look.
There can be no doubt at all that the ‘beast’ on the Doctor’s table was one of the babewyn‐creatures. As Emily’s letter was written in April, it’s possible that Lisa-Beth’s aid was enlisted to summon the beast directly to the House, though one can only wonder who might have assisted her in such a ‘ritual’. Some of the Doctor’s notes from these autopsies survive. His handwriting is almost unreadable, but the rough sketches show what’s clearly meant to be the internal physiognomy of the animals. What’s puzzling is that, if the pictures are to be believed, the animals had very little physiognomy at all. Beneath the skin, the drawings suggest enormous blank spaces, and in some pictures the Doctor has filled in the blanks