The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise Read online

  The belief was not without its foundations, however unstable. He had watched his elderly mother, the colour of porridge, lying in a hospital bed for months, while the entire family was convinced that she would meet her maker at any moment. It was such a foregone conclusion that the music for the funeral had been chosen, and the florist put on standby for the approaching calamity. With her sheet pulled up to her whiskered chin, Florence Drew spoke of nothing other than joining her husband in heaven. Her only fear was that he would fail to recognise her on account of the disease that had infiltrated her body.

  One night the man in the opposite cubicle, who had never received a visitor, got out of bed and came to sit on the grey plastic chair next to her. Switching on the night-light, George Proudfoot reached into the pocket of the new dressing gown that would be his last, pulled out a paperback, and started reading to her simply to hear his own voice before he died. He returned each night, but never once did the widow acknowledge his presence.

  When, one evening, he failed to arrive, she called out to him, unable to bear the thought of dying without knowing the ending. George Proudfoot, by now so close to death he was barely able to speak, eventually made his way to the grey plastic chair. With the hermit’s voice that was all that was left to him, he proceeded to make up the dénouement, no longer able to read. The twist was so ingenious that Florence Drew immediately asked for another tale, and every night he arrived with his dose of storytelling. The widow would lie hypnotised, her head turned towards him, unable to take her eyes off his lips for a minute. Depending on the nature of the tale, her fingers, twisted like hazel by age, would grip the top of the sheet with dread, or reach for it to dry the tears that cascaded onto her pillow.

  Suddenly, she no longer looked forward to death, as George Proudfoot always left the ending to the following night, too weak to complete a whole story in one sitting. He also stopped praying that he would be taken as swiftly as possible, as he wanted time to think up the endings, which he was as eager to know as she was.

  One night, after several weeks, he straightened the top of Florence Drew’s clutched sheet and planted a kiss on her forehead before returning to bed. The footnote to their ritual continued after every visit. The widow’s colour returned with such force that the florist was stood down, and blood tests were repeated three times to check their accuracy. It wasn’t long before her heartbeat started to stampede out of range again, this time in the opposite direction, sending her monitors shrieking. Eager medical students formed a queue at the end of her bed to witness the patient who was seized by the mania of love.

  Eventually, the staff decided it was such a hopeless case nothing could be done, and the chaplain’s mother was discharged, along with George Proudfoot, who was just as badly afflicted. The pair moved into opposite rooms in a nursing home, their doors left open so they could continue their nocturnal courtship, and never once did the man’s imagination fail him. They lived in such a state of bliss they became the envy of the young nurses, whose romances were always in tatters.

  When, eventually, Florence Drew died, George Proudfoot followed within minutes. Both had left instructions to be buried in the same coffin, as neither could bear to be parted from the other even in death. Her six daughters opposed the request, but Rev. Septimus Drew insisted that the couple’s instructions be carried out, as the holy state of love wasn’t to be meddled with. And the couple were lowered into the ground together, the first time they had lain in each other’s arms.

  BALTHAZAR JONES SAT in the small black hut next to the Bloody Tower, no longer able to feel his toes. He had been unable to use the three-bar electric fire that usually acted as defence against the cold from the open hatch door. For, several moments after turning it on, he had been engulfed by the putrefying smell of bacon fat, a result of the Yeoman Gaoler’s second breakfast the week before.

  It had been a busy morning for the Beefeaters as an unfathomable dry spell had encouraged the tourists to wander round the monument instead of sheltering in the towers, and few could resist the urge to pose them a question of infinite idiocy. Balthazar Jones had already been asked in which tower Princess Diana had been kept following her divorce, whether he was an actor, and if the Crown Jewels, which had been on public display at the Tower since the seventeenth century, were real. These had come on top of the usual enquiries that came every few minutes regarding executions, methods of torture, and the location of the lavatories.

  Over the centuries the Beefeaters had kept a written record of the worst of the visitors’ queries, as well as their more questionable behaviour. The leather-bound volumes included the tale of the nobleman who, in 1587, read Sir Everard Digby’s De Arte Natandi, the first book published in England on swimming. Having rigorously studied the woodcut illustrations, the nobleman ignored the author’s advocacy of the breast-stroke and decided to attempt his first-ever aquatic maneuver on his back. He chose for his initiation not the overcrowded Thames, but the more tranquil waters of the Tower moat. The moment the Beefeater accompanying him turned his back, the gentleman whipped off his breeches and shirt, passed his wig to his wife, and scurried round to the steps next to the Byward Tower leading down to the moat. It was never clear whether it was the man’s lamentable rendition of the backstroke or the pestilent waters that were to blame. Either way, his bloated body floated around the fortress until the following spring and became the latest landmark people jostled to see, fuelled by dire warnings in the newspapers by doctors who insisted that his unsavoury ending was proof of the hazards of getting wet.

  Through the hatch door Balthazar Jones explained with utmost patience to a couple from the Midlands that Mint Street, which they had spotted upon entering the Tower, had nothing to do with the manufacture of sweets, as they suspected. Rather, it had everything to do with the fact that the Royal Mint, which produced most of the country’s coinage, had been located at the Tower from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Overcome by generosity, he decided to toss them another historical nugget, adding that the great physicist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton had been Master of the Royal Mint for twenty-eight years. But the couple looked at him blankly and then asked the location of the lavatories.

  As he smiled for the inevitable photograph, an evil wind sent the brittle leaves rattling noisily along the cobbles beside them. Dark spots appeared on the stones like the weeping sores of the Black Plague, and the stench of dust nine centuries old filled the air. When the tourists ran for shelter from the downpour, Balthazar Jones unbolted the lower half of the door, stepped outside, and squinted at the sky with the scrutiny of a veteran horse-trader. Cheered by the sudden arrival of a new variety, he reached into his pocket for a slender pink Egyptian perfume bottle. After propping it up against the remains of a wall erected on the orders of Henry III, he returned to the black hut, shut the top and bottom doors, and sat down. The rain hitting the roof with the frenzy of a cannibal’s drumbeat, he put on his reading glasses and unfolded the list of animals given to him by Oswin Fielding.

  He was scratching his beard trying to remember what a zorilla was, when there was a sharp knock on the window. The Beefeater looked up, took off his spectacles, and saw the Chief Yeoman Warder standing hunched against the rain. Balthazar Jones hurriedly opened the top half of the door.

  “There are two men sitting in a lorry outside the gates insisting they’ve come to erect a penguin enclosure in the moat,” shouted the Chief Yeoman Warder over the downpour. “Apparently you know all about it.”

  Balthazar Jones frowned. “Hasn’t the Palace told you?” he asked.

  “That lot never have the decency to tell me anything.”

  It took him several attempts to persuade the Chief Yeoman Warder that there was to be a second royal menagerie at the Tower. And it took even more to make him believe that Balthazar Jones had been put in charge of it. The Beefeater had never seen such fire raging in a man caught in the devastation of a rainstorm.

  “What the hell do you know about looking
after exotic animals, apart from that knackered tortoise? Good God, they couldn’t have picked anyone worse,” said the Chief Yeoman Warder, wiping rain out of his eyes with his embalmer’s fingers.

  Suddenly the monument flashed silver.

  “This is a fortress, not some ruddy theme park,” bellowed the Chief Yeoman Warder before running for cover as the thunder rolled.

  Balthazar Jones closed the door. Despite his dislike of the man, there was no denying that the Chief Yeoman Warder was right about his lack of experience. Putting his glasses back on, he looked down at his now sodden list with magnified eyes, and struggled to remember what all the creatures were. He had expected to be entrusted with the sorts of animals that had inhabited the Tower over the centuries, which had in some cases been the first of their kind in England, and which by modern standards would be deemed decidedly pedestrian.

  The original menagerie was a subject the Beefeater was intimately familiar with, having studied its history when he first arrived at the fortress in an effort to dispel Milo’s dread of his new home. The boy’s horror was a result of the tour on which some of the other Tower children had taken him while his parents were still unpacking, the tourists long since locked out for the day. When they called at the Salt Tower to meet the newest and youngest resident, the six-year-old was attempting to lure Mrs. Cook out of her travelling case with a fuchsia filched from one of the tubs his mother had insisted on bringing with her. But with the obstinacy of the ancient, the creature refused to move. After each child had lain on the floor and been formally introduced to the record-holder, whose antique features resembled a tribal shrunken head, they offered to show Milo around the fortress. Hebe Jones, who had no idea what lay in store for her son, immediately agreed, assuming they were going to show him where he could ride his bike.

  As the children ran to nearby Broad Arrow Tower, one of them asked Milo whether he knew what Bonfire Night was.

  “It’s when Daddy lets off fireworks from milk bottles in the garden, while Mummy watches from the kitchen with Mrs. Cook as the noise makes their ears go funny,” he replied. The son of the Chief Yeoman Warder then informed Milo that it was, in fact, the anniversary of the day when Guy Fawkes and his gang tried to blow up Parliament. He then pointed out where Sir Everard Digby, one of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators, had chiselled his name on the wall while imprisoned, before being hanged, drawn, and quartered. Milo, who had no idea what that meant, ran his tiny white finger along the carving, wondering where his father would nail the Catherine wheel now that they no longer had a garden shed. When there was no response, one of the older children elaborated: “All the plotters were hanged, then taken down before they died. After their private parts were cut off, and their hearts ripped out, they were beheaded and cut into quarters. Finally their severed heads were then displayed on London Bridge as a warning to others.”

  Feeling light-headed, Milo followed the children as they ran out of the tower. As they passed Waterloo Barracks one of them called out: “That’s where they keep the Crown Jewels, but we can’t show them to you as the alarms will go off and all the Beefeaters will shout at us, and then we’ll be sent to prison.”

  Another child then shouted: “It’s also where the East End gangsters the Kray twins were imprisoned in 1952 after going AWOL during National Service.”

  When they reached the scaffold site on Tower Green, they all sat cross-legged on the grass. One of boys lowered his voice and said: “This is the spot where seven prisoners had their heads chopped off, six with an axe and one with a sword.” Milo, his stomach in turmoil, immediately wanted to return to the sanctuary of the Salt Tower but was too scared to find his way back on his own.

  He followed them as closely as he could as they ran across the lawn, still pierced by the tobacco grown by Sir Walter Raleigh during his thirteen-year imprisonment. As they pushed down the cold door handle of the Chapel Royal of St. Peter ad Vincula, three rats feasting on a tapestry kneeler darted underneath the organ. Once the children had gathered at the altar, Charlotte Broughton, the Ravenmaster’s daughter, pointed to the spot at her feet and whispered: “Underneath here is the arrow chest containing the remains of Anne Boleyn. Her husband, Henry VIII, got the most fashionable executioner from France to come and behead her with a sword. She had an extra finger and the sound of them drumming on the box’s lid has sent the chaplain mad.”

  When they left, sending footsteps echoing round the walls, Milo ran as fast as he could to ensure that he wouldn’t be the last to leave.

  As evening slipped over the battlements, bringing with it the stench of the Thames, the children decided to take the boy on a ghost tour of the fortress. First they visited Wakefield Tower, which they pointed out was haunted by Henry VI, who was stabbed to death within its walls. Then they stood outside the Bloody Tower, and one whispered that two small ghosts in white nightgowns had frequently been spotted standing in the doorway. Next they ran along the stretch of the ramparts where the spirit of Sir Walter Raleigh strode in the most elegant of Elizabethan fashions. And, after they had visited the other dozen sites, they finally crept into Martin Tower, where the apparition of a bear had startled a soldier who later dropped dead in shock.

  Despite his new stegosaurus duvet cover, and the tyrannosaurus poster that Balthazar Jones had eventually managed to fix to the cold wall, that night Milo refused to sleep in his circular room, which had initially filled him with wonder. When it was time to go to bed, he clambered up the spiral staircase in his tiny slippers and crept between his parents’ sheets. He lay on his back, arms against his sides, and refused to close his eyes “in case they come and get me.” When he finally descended into his dreams, he kicked his father in the shins as he tried to escape his tormentors. Balthazar Jones woke up shrieking, followed within seconds by his wife and son, who instantly joined in the uproar.

  The Beefeater tried all manner of reassurance to lighten the shadow that the Tower’s abhorrent past had cast over his son. But although he pointed out that the death penalty had been abolished, the scientific world denied the existence of ghosts, and Rev. Septimus Drew was as sane as could be expected from a member of the clergy, it did nothing to calm the boy.

  Holding Milo’s hand, Balthazar Jones took him on a walk along the battlements. As they looked over the ramparts at Tower Bridge, the Beefeater explained that some of the prisoners had had a much more comfortable existence than the poor living in freedom outside the fortress.

  “Remember John Balliol, the Scottish king I was telling you about who was imprisoned in the Salt Tower? He had a splendid time,” the father insisted, leaning against the parapet. “He brought loads of staff with him. He had two squires, a huntsman, a barber, a chaplain, a chapel clerk, two grooms, two chamberlains, a tailor, a laundress, and three pages. And he was allowed to leave the Tower to go hunting. He had it better than we do. Your mother’s already sent me out twice to the laundrette because the washing machine isn’t working. Mind you, he was banished to France after serving his sentence, which was particularly cruel in my opinion.”

  But Milo, who was standing on his toes to see over the parapet, wasn’t convinced.

  “What about Sir Walter Raleigh, then?” Balthazar Jones continued. “Remember that man I was telling you about who discovered potatoes and was imprisoned in the Tower three times?”

  “Was he put into prison for discovering potatoes?” asked Milo, looking up at his father.

  “Not exactly. First it was for marrying one of Elizabeth I’s ladies-in-waiting without asking the Queen’s permission, then for treason, and finally for inciting war between Spain and England while searching for gold. But you’re absolutely right, potatoes are a very questionable vegetable. Personally, I would have locked up the person who discovered brussels sprouts. What was I saying? Oh yes, during his thirteen-year imprisonment in the Bloody Tower, Walter Raleigh was allowed three servants. Imagine that! You’d like someone to pick up your socks, wouldn’t you?”

  But Milo didn’t
reply.

  The Beefeater then told him that the explorer’s wife and son sometimes stayed with him in the Bloody Tower, and that his second son had been born there and was baptised in the chapel.

  “Raleigh was even allowed to grow the exotic plants he brought back from the countries he discovered in the Tower garden,” he continued. “They let him set up a still in an old henhouse there, where he experimented with medicinal cordials that he sold to the public. And he built a small furnace for smelting metals. We could get you a chemistry set, if you liked, and you could try out some experiments of your own. We could make a few explosions, and see if we can get your mother to jump higher than she does on Bonfire Night.”

  But that evening Milo returned to his parents’ sheets, where he juddered in his sleep as if possessed by demons. Balthazar Jones finally managed to reclaim the marital bed after a flash of inspiration during lunch in the Salt Tower’s shabby kitchen.

  “When can we go home to Catford?” Milo had asked, his mouth covered in bolognese sauce.

  “Every time the ewe goes ‘baa,’ she loses the same number of mouthfuls,” Hebe Jones said.

  The Beefeater looked at his wife, and then at his son. “I think what your mother is trying to tell you is not to talk with your mouth full,” he said. He continued to wind spaghetti around his fork, then added, without raising his eyes: “Milo, you really do live in a very special place, you know. For six hundred years the Tower had its own little zoo as there was a tradition of giving the monarchy live animals as presents.”

  Milo’s eyes shot to his father. “What sort of animals did they have?” he asked.

  The Beefeater kept his head lowered. “I’ll tell you before you go to sleep tonight, but only if you’re in your own bed,” he replied. “They may or may not have been descended from dinosaurs.”

  Balthazar Jones spent the rest of the day studying documents and records he prised from the covetous fingers of the Keeper of Tower History. When night fell, he closed each set of curtains he had made for his son’s bedroom. He then drew the duvet up to the boy’s chin and sat down on the side of his bed.