The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise Read online

  For Joan

  We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.

  —IMMANUEL KANT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am indebted to the authors of numerous guidebooks for sale at the Tower of London. The Funeral Effigies of Westminster Abbey, edited by Anthony Harvey and Richard Mortimer, provided insight into the Abbey’s curious exhibits, though the story told here of the Duchess of Richmond and Lennox’s very real stuffed parrot is a flight of fantasy. Daniel Hahn’s wonderful The Tower Menagerie: The Amazing True Story of the Royal Collection of Wild Beasts was a fascinating source of information. My thanks also go to Dr. Elijah R. Behr, my super agent Gráinne Fox, and all at Doubleday. No animal was harmed in the writing of this novel.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Map

  Cast of Characters

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Author’s Note

  Copyright

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Balthazar Jones: Beefeater, overseer of the Tower’s royal menagerie, father to Milo, and collector of rain

  Hebe Jones: Balthazar’s wife, who works at London Underground’s Lost Property Office

  Mrs. Cook: Balthazar and Hebe’s one-hundred-eighty-one-year-old tortoise—the oldest tortoise in the world

  Arthur Catnip: London Underground ticket inspector of limited height

  Rev. Septimus Drew: Tower chaplain, who writes forbidden prose and pines for one of the residents

  Ruby Dore: Barmaid at the Tower’s Rack & Ruin pub, who has a secret

  Valerie Jennings: Hebe’s eccentric colleague, who falls for someone of limited height

  The Ravenmaster: Philandering Beefeater, who looks after the Tower’s ravens

  Sir Walter Raleigh: Former Tower prisoner and its most troublesome ghost

  Chief Yeoman Warder: Suspicious head Beefeater

  Oswin Fielding: Equerry to The Queen

  Samuel Crapper: Lost Property Office’s most frequent customer

  Yeoman Gaoler: Deputy to the Chief Yeoman Warder, who is terrorized by ghostly poetry at night

  Beef•eat•er ′bē-fē-tәr: the popular name for the official guardians of the Tower of London. They are descended from the warders who, from early in the fortress’s history, guarded the gates and royal prisoners. From the reign of Henry VIII (1509–47), these duties were carried out by the King’s Yeomen at the Tower, who were entitled to wear the royal livery, a version of which is still worn. The warders were also responsible for carrying out torture under the command of the Lieutenant of the Tower during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  The full and proper title of a Beefeater is Yeoman Warder of Her Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress the Tower of London, and Member of the Sovereign’s Body Guard of the Yeoman Guard Extraordinary. The most likely explanation for the warders’ less glamorous nickname, which dates from at least 1700, is that they were given a daily ration of meat for their duties. They much prefer being called Yeoman Warders.

  They have been showing people around the Tower for centuries. Early visitors came by royal or government invitation, but from the middle of the seventeenth century records show that people were simply turning up ready to pay to be taken around. In 1838 the Tower reformed its entry fees and produced guidebooks and tickets. In three years annual visitor numbers rose from 10,500 to 80,000. It was during this time that the Yeoman Warders became official guides.

  Today, as well as guarding the fortress and leading tours, Yeoman Warders attend the Coronation of the Sovereign, the lying in state, the Lord Mayor’s Show, other state functions, and charity events. They are all former warrant officers from Her Majesty’s Forces with an honourable service record of at least twenty-two years.

  CHAPTER ONE

  STANDING ON THE BATTLEMENTS in his pajamas, Balthazar Jones looked out across the Thames where Henry III’s polar bear had once fished for salmon while tied to a rope. The Beefeater failed to notice the cold that pierced his dressing gown with deadly precision, or the wretched damp that crept round his ankles. Placing his frozen hands on the ancient parapet, he tilted back his head and inhaled the night. There it was again.

  The undeniable aroma had fluttered past his capacious nostrils several hours earlier as he lay sleeping in the Tower of London, his home for the last eight years. Assuming such wonderment was an oasis in his usual gruesome dreams, he scratched at the hairs that covered his chest like freshly fallen ash and descended back into ragged slumber. It wasn’t until he rolled onto his side, away from his wife and her souk of competing odours, that he smelt it again. Recognising instantly the exquisite scent of the world’s rarest rainfall, the Beefeater sat bolt upright in the darkness, his eyes open wide like those of a baby bird.

  The sudden movement of the mattress caused his wife to undulate for several seconds like a body drifting at sea, and she muttered something incomprehensible. As she turned away from the disturbance, her pillow fell into the gap between the head of the bed and the wall, one of the many irritations of living within circular walls. Balthazar Jones reached down into the dusty no-man’s-land and groped around. After carefully retrieving the pillow, he placed it gently next to his wife so as not to disturb her. As he did so, he wondered, as he often had throughout their marriage, how a woman of such beauty, the embers of which still glowed fiercely in her fifty-fifth year, could look just like her father as she slept. For once, he didn’t feel the urge to poke her awake in order to rid himself of the harrowing illusion of sharing his bed with his Greek father-in-law, a man whose ferocious looks had led his relatives to refer to him as a good cheese in a dog’s skin. Instead, he quickly got out of bed, his heart tight with anticipation. Forgetting his usual gazelle’s step at such times, he crossed the room, his bare heels thudding on the emaciated carpet. He peered out, nose and white beard against the pane, which bore the smudges of numerous previous occasions. The ground was still dry. With mounting desperation, he scanned the night sky for the approaching rain clouds responsible for the undeniable aroma. In his panic not to miss the moment for which he had been waiting for more than two years, he hurried past the vast stone fireplace to the other side of the bedroom. His stomach, still bilious from the previous evening’s hogget, arrived first.

  Grabbing his dressing gown, its pockets bearing the guilty crumbs of clandestine biscuits, the Beefeater pulled it across his pajamas and, forgetting his tartan slippers, opened the bedroom door. He failed to notice the noise the latch made and the subsequent incomprehensible babble it produced from his wife, a slither of hair skimming her cheek. Fingers sliding down the filthy rope handrail, he descended the corpse-cold spiral stairs clutching in his free hand an Egyptian perfume bottle in which he hoped to capture some of the downfall. Once at the bottom of the steps, he passed his son’s bedroom, which he had never brought himself to enter since that terrible, terrible day. Slowly, he shut behind him the door of the Salt Tower, the couple’s quarters within the fortress, and congratulated himself on a successful exit. It was at that precise moment that h
is wife woke up. Hebe Jones ran a hand along the bed sheet that had been a wedding present all those years ago. But it failed to find her husband.

  BALTHAZAR JONES HAD BEEN COLLECTING RAIN for almost three years, a compulsion that had started shortly after the death of his only child. At first he thought that rain was simply an infuriating part of the job, which, along with the damp from their abominable lodgings, produced in all the Beefeaters a ruthless specimen of fungus that flourished on the backs of their knees. But as the months grated by following the tragedy, he found himself staring at the clouds, frozen in a state of insurmountable grief when he should have been on the lookout for professional pickpockets. As he looked up at the sky, barely able to breathe for the weight of guilt that pressed against his chest, he started to notice a variety in the showers that would invariably soak him during the day. Before long he had identified sixty-four types of rain, all of which he jotted down in a Moleskine notebook he bought specially for the purpose. It wasn’t long before he purchased a bulk order of coloured Egyptian perfume bottles, chosen not so much for their beauty but for their ability to conserve their contents. In them he started to collect samples, recording the time, date, and precise variety of rain that had fallen. Much to the annoyance of his wife, he had a cabinet made for them, which he mounted with considerable difficulty on the living room’s curved wall. Before long it was full and he ordered two more, which she made him put in the room at the top of the Salt Tower, which she never entered because the chalk graffiti left on the walls by the German U-boat men imprisoned during the Second World War gave her the creeps.

  When his collection had swollen to the satisfying figure of one hundred, the Beefeater promised his wife, who now detested wet weather even more than was natural for a Greek who couldn’t swim, he would stop. And for a while it seemed that Balthazar Jones was cured of his habit. But the truth was that England was going through an extraordinary dry patch, and as soon as the rain started to fall again, the Beefeater, who had already been reprimanded by the Chief Yeoman Warder for gazing up at the sky while he should have been answering the tourists’ tiresome questions, returned to his compulsion.

  Hebe Jones satisfied herself with the thought that eventually her husband would complete his collection and be done with it. But her hopes evaporated when he was sitting on the edge of the bed one night and, after pulling off his damp left sock, revealed with the demented conviction of a man about to prove the existence of dragons that he had only touched the tip of the iceberg. It was then that he had some official writing paper printed with matching envelopes, and set up the St. Heribert of Cologne Club, named after the patron saint of rain, hoping to compare notes with fellow wet weather enthusiasts. He placed adverts in various newspapers around the world, but the only correspondence he ever received was a heavily watermarked letter from an anonymous resident of Mawsynram, in northeastern India, which suffered from one of the world’s heaviest rainfalls. “Mr. Balthazar, You must desist from this utter madness at the most soonest. The only thing worse than a lunatic is a wet one” was all that it said.

  But the lack of interest only fuelled his obsession. The Beefeater spent all his spare time writing to meteorologists around the world about his discoveries. He received replies from them all, his fingers, as lithe as a watchmaker’s, quivering as he opened them. However, the experts’ politeness was matched by their disinterest. He changed tack and buried himself in dusty parchments and books at the British Library that were as fragile as his sanity. And with eyes magnified by the strength of his reading glasses, he scoured everything ever written about rain.

  Eventually, Balthazar Jones discovered a variant that, from what he could make out, hadn’t fallen since 1892 in Colombo, making it the world’s rarest. He read and reread the descriptions of the sudden shower, which, through a catalogue of misfortunes, had resulted in the untimely death of a cow. He became adamant that he would recognise it from its scent even before seeing it. Every day he waited, hoping for it to fall. Obsession eventually loosened his tongue, and one afternoon he heard himself telling his wife of his desperate desire to include it in his collection. With a mixture of incredulity and pity, she gazed up at the man who had never shed a tear over the death of their son, Milo. And when she looked back down at the daffodil bulbs she was planting in a tub on the Salt Tower roof, she wondered yet again what had happened to her husband.

  STANDING WITH HIS BACK against the Salt Tower’s oak door, the Beefeater glanced around in the darkness to make sure that he wouldn’t be spotted by any of the other inhabitants of the fortress. The only movement came from a pair of flesh-coloured tights swinging on a washing line strung up on the roof of the Casemates. These ancient terraced cottages built against the fortress walls housed many of the thirty-five Beefeaters who lived with their families at the Tower. The rest, like Balthazar Jones, had had the misfortune of being allocated one of the monument’s twenty-one towers as their home or, worse still, a house on Tower Green, the site of seven beheadings, five of them women.

  Balthazar Jones listened carefully. The only sound emerging through the darkness was a sentry marking his territory, his footfall as precise as a Swiss clock. He sniffed the night again and for a moment he doubted himself. He hesitated, cursing himself for being so foolish as to believe that the moment had finally come. He imagined his wife emitting an aviary of sounds as she dreamt, and decided to return to the warm familiarity of the bed. But just as he was about to retrace his steps, he smelt it again.

  Heading for the battlements, he noticed to his relief that the lights were off at the Rack & Ruin, the Tower’s tavern that had been serving the tiny community for two hundred and twenty-seven uninterrupted years, despite a direct hit during the Second World War. He did well to check, for there were occasions when the more vociferous arguments between the Beefeaters took until the early hours to be buried. Not, of course, that they remained that way. For they would often be gleefully dug up again in front of the warring parties by those seeking further entertainment.

  He started down Water Lane, the cobbles slimy underneath his bare feet from the fallen leaves. As he approached Wakefield Tower, his thoughts turned to the odious ravens, which had been put to bed in their pens in the tower’s shadow. Their luxurious accommodation, with its running water, under-floor heating, and supply of fresh squirrel meat at the taxpayers’ expense, had been a constant source of irritation ever since he had discovered the true depth of their villainy.

  His wife had taken an instant dislike to the famous birds when the family first arrived at the Tower. “They taste of shrouds,” announced Hebe Jones, who, with the exception of peacock, which she deemed inauspicious, claimed to have eaten most species of animals.

  However, the ravens had been an instant source of curiosity to Balthazar Jones. During his first week, he wandered over to one perched on the wooden staircase leading to the entrance of the White Tower, begun by William the Conqueror to keep out the vile and furious English. As the bird eyed him, he stood admiring the thousands of colours that swam in the oily blackness of its feathers in the sunlight. He was equally impressed when the Ravenmaster, the Beefeater responsible for looking after the birds, called the creature’s name, and it arrived at the man’s feet following a shambolic flight due to its wings having been clipped to prevent it absconding. And when Balthazar Jones discovered that they had a weakness for blood-soaked biscuits, he went out of his way to provide them with a splendid breakfast comprised of the delicacy.

  Several days later, Milo, who was six at the time, shrieked “Daddy!” and pointed to a raven standing on top of Mrs. Cook, the family’s historic tortoise. All affection instantly vanished. It wasn’t just that it was extraordinarily bad manners to hitch a ride—albeit at the most sedate of paces—aloft another creature that infuriated Balthazar Jones. Neither was it the fact that the bird had just left a copious runny deposit on top of his pet. What drove the Beefeater into a state of fury was the raven pecking at Mrs. Cook’s fleshy bits with its sa
tanic beak. And given the tortoise’s age of one hundred and eighty-one, there was a noticeable delay before she was able to draw her head and limbs into her worn shell, away from the vicious assault.

  It was by no means an isolated incident. Several days later, Balthazar Jones noticed that the ravens had assembled into what was indisputably an attack formation outside the Salt Tower, once used to store saltpeter. One of the birds squatted on top of the red phone box, three stood on a cannon, another perched on the remains of a Roman wall, and a pair sat on the roof of the New Armouries. The situation continued for several days, as it took considerable time for Mrs. Cook to explore her new lodgings. Eventually, she was ready for a change of scenery. As soon as she set a wizened leg out of the front door, there was a uniform advance of one hop from the massed ravens. The birds displayed remarkable patience, for it took several hours for Mrs. Cook to make sufficient ground out of the door to warrant a second hop. The Ravenmaster blamed the fact that it was well past their lunchtimes for what happened next. Balthazar Jones, however, vehemently insisted that their scandalous behaviour was not only a result of their allegiance to Beelzebub but how they had been raised, an insult that pierced so deeply it was never forgotten. Whatever the reason, one thing was for certain: by late afternoon Mrs. Cook, the oldest tortoise in the world, no longer had a tail, and one of the Tower ravens was too full for supper.