The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise (33 page)

Sheltering his hands between his thighs from the draught, he looked around the room wondering what to do with his wife’s belongings. There, on the dressing table, was the colourful pot he had bought her on their honeymoon in which she kept her earrings. Hanging from one of the knobs on the chest of drawers were her necklaces that once swayed across her neat chest as she walked. And on top of the wardrobe was the box containing her wedding dress that she had refused to leave in the loft in their house in Catford, insisting it was the first thing she would grab in the event of a fire. Deciding that everything belonged exactly where it was, the Beefeater put on his uniform, and left the Salt Tower without breakfast, not having the stomach for it alone.

Entering the enclosure on the grass next to the White Tower, he looked for the reclusive ringtail possums, which had gone into shock the night they were released. As he hunted for them amongst the leaves, his mind turned to the man responsible for the treachery, whose vest was still hanging in his airing cupboard. Without any proof of his culpability, he doubted whether the Ravenmaster would ever have to account for his actions.

Eventually he found the secretive animals hiding at the back of their enclosure, only their magnificent coiled tails visible
amongst the foliage. Satisfied that they had fully recovered from the trauma, he opened the wire door that led to the tiny sugar glider, a gift from the Governor of Tasmania. The pearl grey creature, which suffered from depression when left alone, immediately opened its huge brown eyes. After teaching it to climb the little ladder he had made for it, he tickled its fur with a feather shed by one of the toucans. And after they had engaged in a mutually enjoyable game of hide-and-seek, he fed it pieces of fresh fruit to satisfy its addiction until it fell asleep in his hands.

Leaving the nocturnal creatures to their dreams, he headed for number seven Tower Green and looked up at the White Tower weathervane. He stared at the emerald dot still swinging upside down in the breeze and turned away in frustration. At the same moment, he felt what he recognised as a parrot indiscretion land on his shoulder. Furiously wiping his uniform with a tissue, he pressed on through the crowds of tourists that had started to seep in. After knocking on the pale blue door, he stood surveying the clouds as he waited. Several moments later, he rapped again. Suspecting that the Yeoman Gaoler was in, he took off his hat, bent down, and looked through the mail slot. The man was sitting on the bottom of the stairs in his pajamas, his head in his hands. Slowly his fingers opened, and two eyes looked at Balthazar Jones.

“Open the door. I’ve got some more crickets for the Etruscan shrew,” the Beefeater called.

The Yeoman Gaoler approached the letterbox and bent down.

“Just pass them through,” he replied.

As the Beefeater began to feed the plastic bag through the door, he was suddenly gripped by suspicion. Snatching it back out again, he declared: “I think it might be easier if I give it to you. It doesn’t seem to fit.”

The Yeoman Gaoler opened the door just wide enough to get his hand through. Ignoring the plump outstretched fingers, Balthazar Jones leant a shoulder against the wood and pushed. “If it’s all right with you, I think I’ll just check on the shrew while I’m here.”

Once Balthazar Jones had got past the Yeoman Gaoler, a feat that required an ungentlemanly tussle, he walked straight down the hall to the kitchen. Placing his hat on the table, he opened the cage, reached inside, and lifted the lid off the tiny plastic house. He gave the creature a gentle prod. It failed to stir. He poked it again, but it was useless.

Turning to the Yeoman Gaoler he asked: “Any idea why it’s not moving?”

The Yeoman Gaoler’s eyes slid to the other side of the room, then returned to his visitor with a look of infinite innocence. “It’s having a nap?” he suggested.

Balthazar Jones reached inside, drew out the creature by its tail, and held it up in front of him, where it swung as lifeless as a hypnotist’s watch. “So when did it die?” he demanded.

Sitting down, the Yeoman Gaoler ran a hand through his hair and confessed that it hadn’t stirred for almost a week. The two men looked at the stiffened corpse in silence.

“We’ll just have to tell everyone it’s gone into hibernation,” Balthazar Jones decided. “And in the meantime you’ll have to find another.”

The Yeoman Gaoler looked at him in defeat. “I don’t think they have Etruscan shrews in England,” he pointed out. But Balthazar Jones ignored him, and let himself out.

As he walked towards the moat to feed the rest of the animals, the Beefeater remembered collecting the Queen’s gift from the President of Portugal, and their pitifully slow journey across the city together listening to Phil Collins’s
Love Songs
. He thought of the night it had spent on the old dining table on the top floor of the Salt Tower, unknown to Hebe Jones, while he tried to think of the best person to look after it. And he remembered its pointed velvet nose that no longer quivered as it swung by its tail before the Yeoman Gaoler. He passed through Byward Tower and stood on the bridge over the moat. But not even the sight of the enormous queue outside the fortress waiting to see Her Majesty’s collection of exotic beasts lifted his mood.

REV. SEPTIMUS DREW FILLED UP
the orange watering can in the bathroom, then carried it to his workshop dedicated to the extermination of
rattus rattus
. It had been several weeks since he sat at the table with the Anglepoise light, toiling until the early hours on his latest apparatus aimed at bringing a swift and irrevocable end to a life nourished by his tapestry kneelers. The change had not come about because of a decrease in the whiskered population—which continued to discharge its droppings throughout the chapel without the slightest blush—but out of respect for Ruby Dore’s unfathomable affection for the vermin.

As he watered the anemic spider plants, in a state of collapse from lack of attention, his thoughts turned again to the landlady’s sudden
froideur
. After the hours they had spent together in the Rack & Ruin following the recapture of the fancy rats, he had returned home high with exaltation. It wasn’t the vintage champagne that had put him into a state of grace, though the year was certainly exceptional, but the conviction that Ruby Dore was without a doubt the most sublime woman he had ever met.

As they had sat alone in the tavern, the canary’s head long tucked under its wing, the landlady had told him the most fascinating tale about Thomas Hardy’s heart, which he had never heard before despite his lifelong passion for Westminster Abbey. As the landlady poured him another glass, she revealed that the author had stipulated in his will his desire to be buried in his home county of Wessex. However, after his death in 1928, the government had insisted that the national treasure be buried in the Abbey alongside the other famous poets. An undignified row broke out, after which Hardy’s heart was removed to be buried at Stinsford and given to his wife. The rest of his body was cremated and ceremonially entombed in the celebrated Abbey. However, legend had it that the heart was placed in a biscuit tin and put in the garden shed for safekeeping, only to be found by the household cat, who consumed the delicacy. It was said that on discovering the atrocity, the undertaker promptly wrung Cobweb’s neck, and placed its body in the casket before it was buried. When the landlady had finished her tale, it was all the chaplain could do to stop himself picking up her soft, pale hand and kissing the back of it in admiration.

But despite those intimate early hours spent with only the sticky wooden bar top separating them, the following evening Ruby Dore had acted as if they were little more than strangers. Every day since, no matter when he arrived at the bar, he would find himself the last to be served, the greatest indignity to befall an Englishman. Whenever the Beefeaters moved away to find a table, he would linger to talk to her, but the landlady would either pick up her knitting and start thrusting her needles, or disappear to change the barrels.

As he watched the soil greedily soak up the water, he wondered again what he had done to offend her, but was at a loss as to what it might be. Unable to stand the uncertainty any longer, he descended the battered wooden stairs, returned the watering can to the cupboard below the kitchen sink, and drew back the net curtain. As he feared, the chairwoman of the Richard III Appreciation Society was sitting like a sentinel on the bench by the White Tower, her knees pressed tightly together and the breeze lifting her gunmetal hair. Nevertheless, the clergyman grabbed his keys, and strode out of the house.

He made it as far as the Bloody Tower before he felt a tap on the shoulder. He turned round, and before the woman had a chance to speak, he held up his hand and told her that there was nothing she could say to convince him of the merits of the hunchback king. “If it’s a Richard III apologist you’re after, try the Yeoman Gaoler. He’s convinced that the Duke of Buckingham murdered the two little princes. He lives over there,” he added, pointing in the direction of number seven Tower Green.

As he continued towards the tavern, he felt a second tap on
his shoulder. Assuming he still hadn’t shaken off the chairwoman, he turned swiftly to tell her that he was engaged in a matter of utmost importance. But standing next to him was the Keeper of Tower History, wringing his covetous fingers.

“Have you seen Yeoman Warder Jones?” he asked.

“Not today,” the clergyman replied.

“Well if you do see him, tell him that a couple of oryx have just arrived,” he said.

Rev. Septimus Drew continued easing his way through the tourists. Passing the “Private” sign at the top of Water Lane, he pushed open the door of the Rack & Ruin. A crowd of Beefeaters stood in captivated awe around a table at which Dr. Evangeline Moore and the Ravenmaster were engrossed in a game of Monopoly started the previous evening. Since the game’s ban had been lifted, the Tower doctor hadn’t lost a single game, all of which she had played with the threepenny bit. After each win, during which the general practitioner would seize property with the ruthlessness of a bailiff, her next opponent would insist on playing with the coin that still bore the scars of having been lodged inside a flaming plum pudding. But nothing could convince the doctor to surrender the threepenny bit.

The chaplain approached the bar, and, when he was finally served, ordered a pint of Scavenger’s Daughter. But his choice of beverage did nothing to mellow the landlady, who silently slid his change towards him through the puddles of beer on the bar. She returned to her stool, picked up her knitting, and lowered her head. Rev. Septimus Drew watched as each furious stitch was dispatched onto the other needle the instant
it was formed. He set down his pint, looked around him, and leant forward. “May I have a word with you in private?” he muttered.

Ruby Dore looked up, said nothing for a moment, then replied: “I’ll meet you in the Well Tower in a minute. You’d better go before me or the gossip will be unbearable.”

As the chaplain waited in the gloom with his back to the fancy rats, he tried to keep his mind off the gruesome scrabbling by thinking about the magnificent carrots the retired ladies of the night were growing in the kitchen garden. It wasn’t long before the landlady entered, closing the door behind her with such force that the rodents fled to their burrows. She reached inside her jeans pocket, pulled out a piece of paper, and offered it to him. “I think you might have lost this,” she said. “One of the howler monkeys got hold of it when they ransacked your house and dropped it outside the pub.”

Rev. Septimus Drew unfolded it and started to read. Instantly recognising his own prose, he quickly folded it up again, and pushed it deep into his cassock pocket. He then told her of his passion for creative writing, inspired by his widowed mother’s love affair. He explained that he had attempted all other literary genres, but the country’s leading publishing houses had banned him from sending any more submissions. And he added that every penny he received went to a shelter he had set up to help prostitutes find a more wholesome means of employment and stop peddling their self-destructive love.

But the succulence of the ladies’ cabbages was not enough to appease Ruby Dore. She informed him that as a clergyman
he had no place to be writing about rosebud nipples, and that he was putting not only the reputation of the Church in jeopardy, but also that of the Tower.

“Why aren’t men ever who they say they are?” she finally hurled at him as she headed for the door, her ponytail swinging. As he stood alone in the dark, her words echoed with such volume that he no longer heard the gruesome sound of gnawing coming from the enclosure behind him.