Clara walked beside Julian, one hand resting lightly on the pram’s side. She had, she could privately acknowledge, taken rather more care than usual in dressing that afternoon. The Pomona green muslin was her best day dress, and the cream bonnet trimmed with matching ribbon was doing excellent work against the sun. Whether that had anything to do with wanting to look well for reasons entirely unconnected to the scandal sheets, she chose not to examine too closely.
The Royal Menagerie at Exeter Change was a great roaring, rustling, magnificently peculiar collection of creatures housed above the shops of the Strand, reached by a broad staircase that already smelled unmistakably of animals before you had even paid your shilling. Inside, the noise was extraordinary. The lions paced in their enclosures, their amber eyes moving with slow, sovereign indifference over the visitors. Exotic birds shrieked from their cages, a riot of green and gold and scarlet.
Everywhere there was movement and noise and the warm press of curious people craning to see.
David’s eyes were enormous.
“He looks as though he is trying to decide whether to be frightened or delighted,” Clara said.
“That is more or less the correct response to the menagerie,” Julian agreed.
They pushed the pram slowly along the main passage, pausing here and there. It was at the far end, before a long glass terrarium housing an enormous and very still python, that Julian stopped.
“I believe,” he said, “that you have been here before. Do you recall?”
She looked at the snake which made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. She’d never been fond of them and was even less so now. David, who sat up in the pram as much as was possible, was oblivious to her discomfort.
“You were about seven. I was fifteen or sixteen.” He nodded at the terrarium. “You and Arabella had lobbied my father to bring you here and he agreed. You were so excited until you saw the snakes. You both stopped here, and you went completely white.”
“Oh,” she said, watching the reptile slitter about.
“You seized my arm,” he continued, his tone entirely conversational, “with a grip that I can only describe asextraordinary for a child of seven. I was genuinely concerned for my coat. You nearly ripped it.”
“I never?—”
“You did. You and Arabella both gripped me though I think you had the stronger grip.”
“Well, now that you say that, I do recall. And I also recall why I was so frightened. You told me that there was no glass on the terrarium and that the snake could come out at any moment and eat me whole. If you had not said so, I might have behaved with greater composure.”
He stopped walking entirely. A broad, genuine grin broke across his face. “I forgot that I said that.”
“You did.”
“That does sound,” he conceded, “very much like something I would have done.”
“I should slap your arm just on principle.”
He laughed at that, and she found herself laughing too, the ease of it surprising her. They moved on, away from the python and into the warmth of the wider hall.
“I always loved the monkeys,” she said, as they rounded the corner towards the primate enclosure. “They seemed so much like people. Somehow better than people, though. Less vicious.”
Julian looked at her sideways. “You haven’t spent enough time here.”
“I beg your pardon?”
He gestured toward a cluster of monkeys arranged on a rocky outcrop at the center of their enclosure. They were, on the surface, charming—small, bright-eyed, chattering amongst themselves. “I was here some months ago,” he said. “You see that one on the left? The one with the particularly self-satisfied expression?”
She looked. “Yes.”
“He grabbed the smaller one by the ear, pulled him clean off the rock, and then settled back into exactly that expression as though he had done nothing at all.”
Clara stared at the monkey. “Animals,” she said, “are not supposed to be mean.”
“At the end of the day, we are all animals in rather fine packaging,” Julian said. “There is genuinely very little difference between that monkey and half the men I have encountered in the House of Lords.”
“When is the last time you pulled a peer by the ear and pushed him off a rock?”
He grinned at this. “I have not, not yet. But I have been tempted more than once.” He looked down at David, who was reaching one small fist towards a nearby bird cage with intense concentration. “Would you like an ice? I think I saw a vendor near the entrance.”
