1903
In the centre of London, just off the junction of busy Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, was the jungle. A large carved screen carried images of wild animals: leaping lions, stalking ostriches, giraffes, monkeys, dancing bears, elephants. Ursula Grandison was captivated; surely no jungle could have contained all these animals? She remembered mountain lions back in the Sierra Nevada, where she’d lived in a mining camp. She’d heard one roar on a winter’s night, imagined it starving, seeking food, and had shivered in her makeshift bunk. Now she heard another lion’s roar, not coming through the silence of snow-covered mountains but rising over the crunch and clatter of traffic on a hot August afternoon in London.
Along one side of an opening in this show-stopping screen Ursula saw the wordsCrystal Palace Menagerie, and along the other,Patronised by Nobility and Gentry. A white-faced clown banged a drum in front, calling in the Londoners who thronged around the fair.
‘Something, ain’t it?’ said Thomas Jackman. He slipped a thumb inside an armhole of his waistcoat and sounded as proud of the scene as if he owned all of it himself. ‘That’s what’s known as “the flash”.’ He waved an arm at the screen. ‘In the trade they say “It ain’t the show that brings the dough, it’s the flash what brings the cash.” That’s what’s attracting all these folk.’
Ursula smiled at her stocky friend. When she had arrived in London, Jackman had been the only person she had contacted. A fresh start was what she needed, she told herself, after her tragic stay in the West Country. She had accepted his invitation for this afternoon with delight and met him at the fairground with real warmth.
Now, though, she saw the way his sharp eyes surveyed the crowds that excitedly pushed towards the opening, paying their entrance fee to view the wild beasts within.
‘Thomas Jackman, you haven’t asked me along here as a treat, you are on a job!’
He gave her a comradely grin. ‘I knew you were a fly one, Miss Grandison.’
She swallowed what she told herself was unreasonable disappointment. ‘Come on, now; didn’t we agree we’d drop the formalities, that you’d call me Ursula and I’d call you Thomas? After all, I’m a Yankee, not one of your high-falutin’ society women.’
‘American you are, and maybe not a society woman, but you got style, Miss Grand–, Ursula.’ He stood a little back from her and appraised her cream cambric shirt with its small red buttons and brown linen skirt trimmed with a band of darker brown just up from its hem.
‘Don’t try and soft talk me, Thomas. How dare you invite me here on my afternoon off on false pretences.’
‘False pretences?’
‘You send me a note suggesting I might like to visit what you call “an amazing menagerie”. You do not tell me the famous detective is on a job and needs a respectable companion
