The Triple Goddess (6 page)

Chapter Four

What of me, your prune-faced roué of a city?

By nine a.m. the busiest trains have drilled

Into my sparse and carious mouth, except

The shabby hangovers who dull- and sullenly grind

From Haywards Heath, bearing ghosts who linger

In the coffee bars beneath the Bridge, HMS Belfast-

Grey, chewing the fat in bacon rolls.

My guts pulsate with bacteria and men who worm

The tubes sluggishly from Liverpool Street,

Paddington, Victoria, and “The Drain” from Waterloo.

Frequently there’s a wait while duodenal discomfort

Abates, and passes, temporarily. The beer

And grease of yesterday repeats; and nothing

Can settle the acid stomach,

The reflux of tomorrow and the years ahead.

*

As committed as she was to leading as unadventurous a life as possible, one devoid of emotional portamento, Arbella had welcomed the opportunity to work as an insurance broker. The sordid grey office building of Chandler Brothers, which squatted like a stucco-skinned toad next to the Tower of London with its legs wrapped around Tower Place, was admirably suited to her purpose. The only interesting thing about it was that because it was within a longbow shot of the Tower the Monarch had the right to raze it to the ground, and a five pound annual fee was said to be paid to insure against the possibility that His Majesty would have a George the Third moment and choose to exercise the privilege.

The King’s views on sixties’ architecture being as strong as they were, it was not inconceivable that he would, in which case Arbella’s delight could only be increased by the discovery that someone had forgotten to pay the premium.

Every morning, as soon as she had read the incoming cables and got her slipcase in order for the day, Arbella would escape from the office and make the hajj up to the Captain’s Room at Lloyd’s for coffee. It was a historic ten minute walk from Chandler Brothers to Lloyd’s, which was bordered by Fenchurch Street, Leadenhall Street, Lime Street, Billiter Street, and Cullum Streets.

The first notable place that she passed, if she did not take the alternative route via a subway under Byward Street to Great Tower Street and up either Mark Lane or Mincing Lane, was the church of All Hallows by the Tower. All Hallows, Barking, was the oldest church in the City, and in its crypt were buried a number of bodies of those who had been executed on Tower Hill, including Thomas More, John Fisher, and Archbishop Laud. William Penn had been baptized there, and John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States of America, had been married in it. Admiral Penn, William Penn the founder of Pennsylvania,’s father had saved the place during the Great Fire of London in 1666.

Ignoring another subway next to the church, Arbella would cross Byward Street, pausing on the central island to let the lorries thunder by on either side, and walk up Seething Lane. At the end on the left was St Olave Hart Street, which contained a pulpit carved by Grinling Gibbons and was where Samuel Pepys worshipped and was buried. Pepys lived and worked at the Navy Office, bordered by Seething Lane and what is now Pepys Street, and Trinity Square. Like Admiral Penn, he was instrumental in saving the church—later to be referred to as St Ghastly Grim by Dickens in his The Uncommercial Traveller—during the Great Fire by having the surrounding buildings destroyed.

But none of this featured in Arbella’s thoughts as she proceeded: they were directed behind her to the other side of All Hallows, where by far the most ancient and prestigious building in all London loomed: the Tower of London. Arbella had loved the Tower, which was founded by William the Conqueror, since childhood, and often thought of how wonderful it would be to have an apartment there, behind walls fifteen feet thick, where she could retreat during the day and pretend that there was no such place as Chandler Brothers, no job, no life in general. She had been gratified to learn upon joining Chandlers that although trainees and passed-over elder brokers were occasionally detailed to escort the wives of American clients to the Tower on sightseeing visits, despite its closeness employees were not interested in anything to do with the place.

If the Tower of London did inspire a pang of sorrow in Arbella it was by association with happier childhood days, when her mother Veronica was alive, and her father—then still gay and impromptu in his ways—would escort them through the Middle Tower entrance, reeling off dates from the Tower’s history and the names of people who had been incarcerated there. Such had been his enthusiasm for the place, she recalled, that before entering he would only reluctantly linger in response to the young Arbella’s tugging hand and urgent request that they spend a moment listening to the soapboxers as they availed themselves of their right to freedom of speech at the City’s equivalent of Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park; and listen to the kilted and untuneful bagpipe player, who was said to pull pints in the evenings at the Blind Beggar, haunt of the Kray brothers on the Mile End Road, and to be as Cockney as they come.

The future peer would ignore the Beefeaters—or, to use the proper designation that they were given when they were formed as Henry the Seventh’s bodyguard in 1485 after the Battle of Bosworth, the Yeomen Warders (not Yeomen of the Guard) of His Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress the Tower of London, and Members of the Sovereign’s Body Guard of the Yeoman Guard Extraordinary—and the guides and tourists, and launch into his personal account of everything that there was to see and much that had been or was not.

As a family they had visited the Tower at least once a month until Arbella was ten years old, and Charles, which had been his name in those days before he became Your Lordship, or Sir, never tired of going.

Charles Stace had been especially interested in Mary Queen of Scots, whose cousin, Arbella Stuart, was an historic antecedent of his wife Veronica. In honour of the pair of them the only Stace daughter had been christened Arbella Mary Stuart Stace.

Arbella grew up with every piece of the Tower’s history embedded in her memory. She was au fait with the execution dates and identities of every head that had rolled on Tower Green; and the noblemen who had been hung on the gallows at Tower Hill; and of the lesser sorts who had met the same fate at Tyburn, later to be called Marble Arch. She knew how the Knights of the Bath, before their investiture, held night-long vigils over their armour in the Chapel Royal of St John the Evangelist, in the White tower; and she could cite the owner of each torso that was interred beneath the floor of its twin, the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula. She had been as a child, and was still, friends with the Yeoman Ravenmaster; and what was now a very old castle cat, to whom she used to speak reprovingly about its habit of stalking the pigeons.

The ravens were a subject in themselves. Should their number fall to less than six, the legend went, not only would the Tower fall but the Monarchy too. Many of the birds lived to a ripe age, of up to forty years or more. Their quarters were next to the Wakefield tower, where they were fed a diet of raw meat, bird formula soaked in blood, and rabbit fur. They were also partial to eggs, and fried bread; and leftovers from the Yeoman Warders’ mess.

Arbella was familiar with how King James the Sixth of Scotland, and the First of England, started a menagerie that included leopards and lions, and an elephant; and a polar bear, which was tethered by an iron chain, and stout cord when it was allowed to swim and catch fish in the area of the Thames off the Tower known as the Pool. The menagerie came to be the Tower’s most popular attraction, and the origin of the phrase “seeing the lions”.

She could identify each item in the Jewel House, and loved to picture herself attending balls and banquets bedecked with her favourites. She knew the traditions of the Tower, such as the Ceremony of the Keys, which has been performed nightly since 1340. At seven minutes to ten the Chief Yeoman Warder emerges from the Byward tower in his long red coat and Tudor bonnet, carrying a candle lantern and the Tower keys. He proceeds along Water Lane to Traitor’s Gate, where his guard escort awaits him.

Marching to the Outer Ward and handing over his lantern, the Chief Warder locks the Middle and Byward tower gates. Returning to Traitor’s Gate, at the archway by the Bloody tower he is challenged by the sentry of the guard, with, “Halt! Who comes there?”; to which he responds, “The keys.” “Whose keys?” “King… Queen… ’s keys.” “Pass King… Queen… ’s keys, and all’s well.” The party proceeds through the arch, towards the broadwalk steps where the main guard is drawn up. The Chief Warder and his escort halt, the guard presents arms, the Chief Warder advances two paces, doffs his bonnet and calls, “God preserve King… Queen…!” The guard responds, “Amen!”, and the duty Drummer sounds Last Post on his bugle as the clock chimes ten o’clock. The guard salutes, the Chief Warder takes the keys to the Queen’s House, and the guard is dismissed.

Arbella also knew how the Gentleman Gaoler of the Tower would escort his prisoner back from trial, more often than not with the axe blade pointed towards him to indicate that he had been condemned. She knew that Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert had drained the moat, which was made by Longchamp, Bishop of Ely, in 1190 when Richard the First entrusted him with defence of the Tower against his brother John—and had it filled it with oyster shells.

And she was an expert on the Tower’s former insanitary conditions, in which typhoid thrived and resulted in it ceasing to be used as a fortress and prison in the 1850s. Herself arresting the tourists with her precocious beauty at ten years old, during her visits Arbella would inform them about this and that...and then, bestowing upon them an innocent smile, direct them to where they might view King Harry’s codpiece.

Most important to her were the prisoners. She adored “Braveheart” William Wallace; felt sorry for the Duke of Clarence who was drowned in a butt of malmsey; and wept over the fate of the Child Princes. Sir Thomas More; James, Duke of Monmouth; Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex; the Countess of Salisbury; Lady Jane Grey; Catherine Howard: she was acquainted with them all. Nonetheless she could not deny a thrill from the executioner’s tradition of proclaiming to the crowd, “Behold the head of a traitor!”, as he held it up.

She loved the story of how the bungling headsman Jack Ketch, he who lived on in the figure of the Punch and Judy hangman, so botched the job of dispatching the Duke of Monmouth, after he had paid him to do it well, that he had to finish the job off with a butcher’s knife; following which the family retrieved the body and sewed the head back on so that his portrait could be painted. She was versed in the picaresque stories of those who had escaped: fat Rannulf Flambard, bishop of Durham and the Tower’s first important prisoner, who had bribed the guards and got them drunk, and escaped in a wine barrel on a rope; and the Earl of Nithsdale and Carnwath, who had walked past his gaolers disguised in a dress, with such assurance that one suspected it was not the first time he had worn one.

And Lord Clancarty, similarly inventive, who left a periwig on a wooden head in his bed, with a message saying, “The block must answer for me.” The patron saint of them all, in her opinion, was Nicholas Owen, known as Little John, who specialized in building priests’ holes and escape passages in people’s homes, and hiding refugees in cupboards, under staircases and behind walls and chimneys. Unfortunately he ended his days in the Tower, after escaping once, but thereafter was successful in assisting others to regain their liberty permanently.

Little Arbella would interrupt her mother’s at-home conversations with guests at Eaton Square by reciting the names of the individual towers. Standing innocently in the doorway with a ribbon in her hair, her hands folded before her and speaking in a sing-song voice, she would clap her hands softly as she took a deep breath and listed them: “Beauchamp, Bell,
Bloody
—”; stopping to explain that the latter had originated as the Garden tower, but the designation had been deemed too insipid; “Bowyer, Brick, Broad, Arrow, Byward, Coldharbour, Constable, Cradle, Devereux—”; Devereux was an unwarranted change, she thought: as much as she loved the man, and was agnostic as to his guilt and in favour of his commemoration, she preferred its previous designation of Robin the Devil’s tower; “Devlin, Flint, Galleyman, Iron Gate, Lanthorn, Lion, Martin, Middle, St Thomas’s, Salt, Wakefield, Wardrobe, Well, and White.”

Having secured the society ladies’ undivided attention, she would horrify them by running through the disgusting crimes of Colonel Blood, who despite his proven guilt as a murderer was able to win King Charles the Second over with his silver tongue and be awarded a pension of five hundred pounds a year.

Saved until last were her
pièces de résistance
, the instruments of torture. She described with relish how Guy Fawkes had spent fifty days, with his associates, in a shoebox of a room called Little Ease, before confessing to his crime after half an hour of torture; the physiological effects of thumbscrew and rack, and being hung from a wall in manacles; and Skevington’s gyves, or the Scavenger’s Daughter, which crushed a body worse than the rack, bringing the head to the knees, compressing the body, and forcing blood from the nose and ears.