The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise
Read The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise Online
Authors: Julia Stuart
For Joan
We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals
.
—
IMMANUEL KANT
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.
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.
S
TANDING 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 his 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.