Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [98]
When the Doctor concluded his briefing, and announced that they were to meet the Jonah at the Thames, Scarlette reportedly didn’t even flinch. There was an awkward pause once the Doctor had finished, in which ‘many glances were stolen’, but the silence was ended when the Doctor clapped his hands and announced that it was time they found out what had happened to Anji and Juliette.
Lisa-Beth adds a postscript to the scene. According to her, as those assembled began to disperse she saw Scarlette reach out her hand for the Doctor’s, while still keeping her expression neutral. As Lisa-Beth describes it, it sounds like a small act of affection. Perhaps it’s true to say, then, that although Scarlette knew they were going to have to walk into the middle of Sabbath’s empire – and although she in no way liked the path the Doctor was taking – she was willing to stand by his side when his battle began.
She just wasn’t prepared to let it show.
Nature
It’s the preserve of the upper classes, the English upper classes particularly, to turn everything into a sport. The aristocracy was as bored in 1782 as it ever was, and it didn’t take the youngbloods of English society long to see the potential in the carnivorous apes.
Ape-hunting as a pastime of the rich was most probably invented by the three brothers and one sister of the Barrymore family, four sociopathic siblings who in later years would cause a scandal by associating with the Prince of Wales in Brighton, and who throughout their ‘reign of terror’ would turn physical abuse into something of an art form (their victims were almost always of the lower classes, obviously). Reckless, bad-tempered, childish and irredeemably violent, the Barrymores moved in the same circles as such crypto-occultists as the Countess of Jersey, so it’s not surprising that they should have heard about the ape attacks. It’s not known which of the four might have hatched the scheme of culling the animals for fun, but by August at least one of the four was in London, scouring the streets whenever word would reach him (via the younger, less discreet; Masonic orders) that there might be exotic animals at large in the city. The ‘sport’ would largely involve the Barrymores’ phaeton speeding drunkenly through the streets in the early hours of the morning. Passers-by might have been unnerved to see a figure leaning out of the window of the carriage, usually armed with a crossbow, loudly threatening to shoot anyone who didn’t tell him where he could find a baboon to kill.
The Masonic archive records that the Lodges had a great disdain for this sort of activity, although many did feel a certain sense of satisfaction when ‘Hellgate’ Barrymore did actually succeed in slaughtering one of the wild animals. He later boasted that he’d chased the huge, grey-pelted ape through the narrow working-class warrens of the city, eventually cornering it in a dead-end alley and ‘as the brute turned to face [Barrymore] with a loud and bloody hiss’ piercing its heart with a crossbow bolt. The ape was said to have thrashed wildly on the cobbles for some minutes before dying. ‘Hellgate’ had the creature skinned, and for weeks afterward carried the pelt around with him as a trophy, until one night he left it in a tavern while inebriated and it disappeared forever. Later commentators claimed that Barrymore had never faced such a beast at all, and certainly there were stories that some months after this first killing the Barrymore clan broke into a private menagerie and stole a terrified barbary ape so that they could pursue it through the streets as a re-enactment of the glorious hunt.
Though the ‘official’ ritualists of England may have frowned on all this, many factions of the Grand Lodge began to hold their own, somewhat more sombre, ape-hunts. On September 5, for example, both the Countess of Jersey and Lord _____ (a perpetual double-act since Cambridge) were to be found in London, their carriage circling the area of Charing Cross. If they were indeed hunting apes, either out of a sense of duty or out of upper-class boredom,