The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise Page 5

  The Beefeater looked through the arrow slit behind the Chief Yeoman Warder’s head as he remembered the last time he had been called into the office. On that occasion the man had bothered to get to his feet when he came in, and immediately offered him his condolences. “I know exactly how you feel,” he had insisted. “When we lost Sally we were just devastated. She had such an extraordinary character. One of the most intelligent dogs we’ve ever had. She’d been with us for nine years. How old was the little chap again?”

  “Eleven,” Balthazar Jones had replied. He then looked at his hands, while the Chief Yeoman Warder’s gaze fell to his desk. The silence was eventually broken with an offer of more time off work, which Balthazar Jones refused, insisting that the three days had been sufficient. He left to walk the battlements, hoping to find a reason to live.

  “ARE YOU LISTENING, Yeoman Warder Jones?” the Chief Yeoman Warder asked from behind the desk.

  The Beefeater, his cloud-white hair flattened from his hat, turned his gaze to him and asked: “How’s the new dog?”

  “She’s fine, thank you for asking. Top of the obedience class.”

  Balthazar Jones’s gaze returned to the view through the arrow slit.

  The Chief Yeoman Warder studied him with a frown. “I don’t think you realise that your future here hangs in the balance. I suggest you sit there for a while and think things over,” he said, getting up. “This can’t go on.”

  The Beefeater jumped as the door slammed. He looked down at his hat and slowly wiped away the raindrops that shone like diamonds on its crown. Too defeated to get to his feet, he stared ahead of him. His mind turned once more to the night Milo died and his terrible, terrible secret. When his stomach eventually settled, his eyes dropped again to his hat, and he wiped it with the tips of his fingers, though nothing was there. Standing up, he put it back on, tugged open the door, and returned to duty.

  By the time the letter arrived from Oswin Fielding asking him to come to the Palace to discuss the new menagerie, Balthazar Jones had convinced himself that his new duty would protect him from losing his job, which had given him a reason to get up in the morning when the weight of remorse pinned him to the sheets. He slipped the letter into his tunic pocket, where it remained hidden from his wife, along with the crumbs from the biscuits she forbade him to eat to safeguard his heart.

  ON THE MORNING HE WAS DUE to meet the Queen, the Beefeater sat on the bed in his dressing gown waiting for the final echo of his wife’s footsteps as she descended the spiral staircase. He scurried to one of the lattice windows to check that she was on her way to work. Through the ancient glass he recognised instantly the gait of a woman determined to reunite a lost possession with its absent-minded owner. He fetched from the wardrobe his red and gold state dress uniform, which Oswin Fielding had insisted he wear for the occasion. And, with the thrill of a woman about to put on her most alluring underwear, he retrieved his white linen ruff from the trouser press.

  He started to dress in front of the mirror, which for the last eight years had stood on the floor as he had been unable to mount it on the circular walls. It was a miserable room, as miserable as the living room downstairs, despite the efforts he and Hebe Jones had made to disguise the Salt Tower’s repugnant past as a prison. The cheerful curtains he had made for the windows not only failed to keep out the draughts, but threw into sharp relief the wretchedness of the place.

  The couple had pushed the wardrobe in front of the worst of the pitiful carvings by prisoners who had scratched onto the walls their hopes of keeping their heads. But the others could still be seen. At night, when the couple were unable to sleep, fearing the catastrophic dreams inspired by their lodgings, they were convinced they could hear the mournful sound of chiselling.

  When the family first arrived at the fortress, Hebe Jones had insisted that all the Salt Tower’s decrepit furniture be taken away and replaced with their own. But it was a decision both of them regretted. While a bed, a chest of drawers, and a desk had been easily carried into Milo’s bedroom on the ground floor, there was little they could maneuver up the spiral staircase to the floors above. As a result, the furniture had to be dismantled outside and brought up piece by piece. Not only did it refuse to fit back together correctly, but it failed to stand flush against the curved walls, a problem neither of them had foreseen. Despite the folds of cardboard that Balthazar Jones had wedged underneath, the furniture stood at precarious angles, made worse by the pitch of the floor, until the next thunderous collapse that invariably happened in the middle of the night.

  Savouring the opportunity to put on the famous uniform reserved for royal visits to the Tower and special ceremonies, Balthazar Jones clambered into his crimson tights. Pulling in his stomach, he managed to do up the matching breeches, which he concluded must have shrunk while they were hanging in the wardrobe. After putting on the tunic with the initials ER embroidered in gold thread across the chest, he tucked in the ruff’s hem, and saw in the mirror the remains of a man who had dedicated his life to serving his country. Gone were the waves of hair that his wife, an amateur artist driven by hope rather than talent, had once declared was the precise shade of mummy brown, a paint whose pigment came from the dusty remains of ancient Egyptians. Over the years, the rich, earthy crests had been replaced by a low, grey undulation that had suddenly turned white. And his once clean-shaven cheeks were hidden by a beard of identical colour, grown as insulation against the wretched damp.

  Sitting down on the edge of the bed, he attached red, white, and blue rosettes to the sides of his knees, and then to the front of his black patent shoes. Stepping over Mrs. Cook, he headed for the bathroom, where the cold penetrated with such intensity a woollen hat was required during the solitude of bathing. And, as he brushed his teeth with the vigour required for a royal appointment, he prayed that the button on his breeches wouldn’t burst when he bowed.

  As he walked down Water Lane towards Middle Tower, a sight that sent the tourists into raptures, he refused to tell the colleagues he met on the way the reason for his attire. Once outside the fortress, he hailed a black cab, his ability to drive thwarted by his Irish linen ruff. After shutting the door, he settled himself on the back seat, and leant towards the glass. “Buckingham Palace, please,” he said, straightening his tunic over his garnished knees.

  REV. SEPTIMUS DREW RETURNED from his morning walk around the grassy moat, which had been drained of its pestilent waters in the nineteenth century. He had spent the time contemplating his next Sunday school lesson for the Tower children, during which he would explain how animals such as unicorns appeared in the Bible, whereas rats, for example, didn’t. Just as he was about to enter the fortress, he spotted Balthazar Jones getting into a cab wearing state dress, and he was once again filled with regret over the collapse of their friendship.

  There was a time when the Beefeater had been a regular guest at his dinner table, and they would enjoy together the delights of a plump game bird and a bottle of Château Musar. Other evenings had been spent in the Rack & Ruin inventing stories about the mystery bullet hole in the bar as they sampled the real ales. When weather permitted they used to be found on the Tower’s bowling green, where they upheld their unspoken gentlemen’s agreement to overlook one another’s cheating. The chaplain was able to ignore the fact that, as a former soldier, the Beefeater had been prepared to kill for his country, just as Balthazar Jones had been able to ignore his friend’s unfathomable attachment to religion.

  Such had been the two men’s mutual appreciation that even Milo had got over his initial terror of the chaplain, who was said to have been driven mad by the eleven-fingered drumming from Anne Boleyn’s tomb. The boy would seek him out in the chapel, and the pair would sit on a bench outside as the clergyman told him tales of the Tower that had never appeared in the guidebooks. And when, one afternoon, Milo was eventually discovered hiding in Little Ease, the tiny prison cell in which no grown man could stand, he never admitted who had told him its secret location
.

  But since the boy’s death, the Beefeater had only once accepted an invitation to supper with the chaplain, and his bowling shoes had remained in the bottom of the wardrobe. Despite the clergyman’s best efforts to lure him into having a drink in the Rack & Ruin, Balthazar Jones had always gone alone, preferring the company of solitude.

  Arriving back at his home that overlooked Tower Green, the chaplain ran himself a bath in which he was unable to linger on account of the desperate temperature of the room. He searched for a pair of underpants that would afford him the appropriate dignity for what he was about to do. After putting on his favourite mustard corduroys, which revealed a breathtaking expanse of skinny ankle on account of his excessively long legs, he scrabbled inside his sock drawer and selected a pair that hadn’t been worn since its arrival in the Christmas post. Shrouded in his red cassock, he padded off to the bathroom lost in the silent ecstasy of wearing new socks. Looking into the mirror dappled with age spots, he carefully combed his dark hair into the style first inflicted at the age of eight, and took particular care in brushing his teeth. But despite his efforts, when he looked at his reflection, all he saw was a man who had reached his thirty-ninth year without having experienced one of God’s greatest gifts: the love of a wife.

  He made the short journey to the chapel, glad that there was still time before the tourists would be let into the Tower. Pressing down the cold handle, he descended the three steps and made his way to the crypt, where he sat out of sight, hoping that the woman who had stirred the very sediment of his soul would return. After the first hour had passed, he reached into his briefcase for his copy of Private Eye and searched for the unholy adventures of his fellow clergymen. For a while it managed to keep his mind off his predicament as he contemplated a particularly tantalising revelation, the details of which included a female lighthouse keeper, a sou’wester, a bottle of absinthe, and a cauliflower. But once he had finished the magazine and the joy of its scandal had faded, his mind turned yet again to the woman he was waiting for. As another hour creaked past, he wondered again why he was still single.

  His married friends had done their best to lift him out of the quagmire of bachelorhood. To each of their dinner parties they had invited a good Christian woman whom they insisted would be a perfect match. Forever hopeful, the chaplain would arrive freshly shaven and armed with one of his more treasured bottles of Château Musar. At first, it would seem that his hosts had been right. The woman would be instantly captivated by the engaging clergyman whose job obliged him to live at the Tower of London. Despite his hairstyle, he was perfectly agreeable to the eye. Not only did the man admit to a passion for cooking, music to a modern woman’s ears, but he recounted the most riveting tales about escapes from the fortress, which had everyone either wide-eyed or roaring before they had finished their cocktails. By the time the guests took their seats at the table, the woman would be flushed with desire. But despite the encouraging start, the evening always followed the same fault line whenever someone inevitably asked: “So how many people died in the Tower?”

  The chaplain, who had grown wary of the question, knew from experience to keep his reply brief. Crossing his excessively long legs underneath the table he would state: “Despite popular belief, only seven people were beheaded at the Tower.” But either the exceptional Lebanese vintage or the interjection of a fellow guest with surprising historical insight would get the better of him, and Rev. Septimus Drew would find himself disgorging the whole wretched truth:

  “But there weren’t only the beheadings, of course. Henry VI was said to have been stabbed to death in Wakefield Tower. Many people believe that the two little princes were murdered in the Bloody Tower by Richard III. In the reign of Edward I a senior official called Henry de Bray tried to drown himself on the boat ride to the Tower by throwing himself bound into the Thames. Once he was inside, he committed suicide in his cell. In 1585 the Eighth Earl of Northumberland shot himself in the Bloody Tower. Incidentally, Sir Walter Raleigh also tried to commit suicide while imprisoned in the Tower. Who else? Oh, yes, nine Royalists were executed during the Civil War. Then there were the three men from the Scottish Black Watch who were shot for mutiny in full view of their regiment next to the chapel. They had been ordered to wear their shrouds underneath their uniforms. Who have I forgotten? Oh, yes. Poor old Sir Thomas Overbury. While he was imprisoned in the Bloody Tower he was given poisoned tarts and jellies. He suffered a slow and agonising death over several months and was finally finished off with a mercury enema. Most painful.”

  On the assumption he had finished, there would be a momentary pause of condolence. But as soon as the guests reached again for their cutlery, the chaplain would continue:

  “Then there was the Duke of Clarence, who was drowned in a butt of his favourite Malmsey wine in the Bowyer Tower. Simon Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was dragged from the Tower during the Peasants’ Revolt and, after several attempts, beheaded outside. You can see his mummified head in the church of St. Gregory at Sudbury in Suffolk …

  “Where was I? Oh yes. Arbella Stuart, James I’s cousin, was imprisoned and possibly murdered in the Queen’s House. Her ghost is in the habit of strangling people as they sleep. There were eleven men of various nationalities shot by firing squads for espionage during the First World War. A German spy was shot during the Second World War in 1941. He was the last person to be executed at the Tower, by the way. We’ve still got the chair he was sitting on at the time somewhere. And I suppose I should mention the one-hundred-and-twenty-five-odd Tower prisoners who died, mostly by beheading, on Tower Hill, just outside the fortress, watched by thousands of unruly spectators. Well, that’s some of them, anyway.”

  By the time Rev. Septimus Drew had finished answering the query, the dinner was inevitably cold, and the woman’s cheeks had drained to the colour of the white linen napkins. When she would leave at the end of the evening, guarding her telephone number closely, the apologetic hosts would insist that his address was to blame. “What sort of woman would want to live in the Tower of London anyway?” they would ask. And each time the chaplain would agree with the explanation. But whenever he returned to his empty home on Tower Green and sat in the dark in his carpetless study, he always came to the bitter conclusion that the fault was solely his.

  ONCE HE HAD FINALLY ACCEPTED that the woman who invaded his dreams wasn’t coming, Rev. Septimus Drew got up, and headed through the chapel to the door. As he stepped out, the wind instantly rearranged his hair, and he headed home, the snowmen on his socks visible in the gap between the bottom of his cassock and the cobbles. He searched in his pocket for the key to his blue front door, which he had kept locked ever since the day he returned home to find two Spanish tourists in his sitting room, eating their sandwiches on the sofa. After locking the door behind him, he went into the kitchen that still smelt of the treacle cake he had baked using his mother’s faded recipe, and took down his solitary teapot for one.

  BALTHAZAR JONES ARRIVED at the gates of Buckingham Palace having spent the journey trying not to crush his ruff against the back of the seat each time the taxi driver hit the brakes. A police officer escorted him into the palace via a side door, then handed him into the care of a mute footman, whose polished buckled shoes were equally silent as the two men passed along a corridor of dense blue carpet. It was flanked with marble-topped gilt tables bearing billowing pink arrangements made that morning by a weeping Royal Household florist, whose husband had just asked her for a divorce. However, her tears were not those of sadness, but of relief, for she had never got used to the idea that her husband left for work each morning wearing what was irrefutably a skirt, tartan knee socks, and no underpants. Married to the Queen’s Piper for three disappointing years, she had found his talent for the bagpipes as insufferable as the Monarch did. His historic duty, dreamed up by Queen Victoria at the height of her Scottish mania, was to play every weekday under the Sovereign’s window. The commotion started at the absurd hour of nine o’cl
ock in the morning and lasted for a full fifteen minutes, much to Elizabeth II’s annoyance. There was no escaping the man, as he would follow her to her other residences at Windsor, Holyrood, and Balmoral, where he continued the loathsome ritual with undiminished devotion.

  The mute footman opened the door to Oswin Fielding’s office and indicated a green seat upon which Balthazar Jones was to wait. Once the door was shut silently behind him, the Beefeater sat down and removed from his crimson left knee a piece of fluff that upon inspection he failed to recognise. Looking up, he surveyed the room. On the pale blue walls were hung several engravings of Buckingham Palace mounted in thin gold frames, which were part of the courtier’s private collection. As he leant forward to inspect the photographs on the formidable desk, a drop of sweat started its descent inside his thick crimson tunic, tickling the valley of his chest as it fell. He picked up the nearest silver frame and staring back at him was Oswin Fielding, almost unrecognisable with a profusion of hair, in hiking gear with his arm around a blond woman in a baseball cap. He surveyed the man’s legs, which he immediately concluded were not as good as his own, despite his advanced years.

  Suddenly the door opened and in strode the equerry accompanied by a waft of gentleman’s scent. “I must say you’re looking splendid,” announced the courtier, undoing the button on his discreet suit jacket. “Her Majesty has been delayed unfortunately, so I’m afraid it’s just the two of us after all. Still, always fun to put on the old crimson breeches, I’m sure!”

  The Beefeater slowly took off his black Tudor bonnet and rested it on his lap in silence.

  “What we both need is a cup of tea,” the courtier announced as he sat down behind his desk. After making the call, he sat back. “It must be fun living in the Tower,” he said. “When my children were younger they were always asking whether we could move there. Have you got any children? All I seem to know about your personal circumstances is your tortoise.”