The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise (38 page)

“So what happened to the keeper?” asked Milo.

Alfred Cops also sold some of his own animals to the Zoological Society, Balthazar Jones replied, but continued to show the rest at the Tower, and the entrance fee was dropped from one shilling to sixpence to continue luring the crowds. Following the escape of a wolf, and a monkey biting a member of Wellington’s garrison on the leg, in 1835 the keeper closed the attraction in accordance with the King’s wishes. The remnants of his collection were disposed to an American gentleman and exported to America. Six hundred years of keeping wild animals at the Tower of London finally came to an end.

Milo picked up the tortoise. “Was he a good keeper, Daddy?” he asked.

“Yes, son, a very good keeper. He loved the animals very much. Hardly any of them died. Unfortunately the secretary bird, which had a particularly long neck, stuck it into the hyena den, and that was the end of it.”

There was a pause.

Milo turned to his father. “A bit like Mrs. Cook’s tail?” he asked.

“Exactly. Wouldn’t have felt a thing.”

STANDING ALONE ON THE WHARF
as the early morning light flickered on the Thames, Balthazar Jones watched as the first vehicle slowly left the Tower, carrying the giraffes that had never been a gift from the King of Sweden. Next came the Komodo dragon with its eggs, the result of an immaculate conception. The reclusive ringtail possums followed, dreaming with their tails perfectly coiled below them, along with the
sugar glider that had been given one final tickle with a toucan feather. Sitting in the lorry’s footwell was the cage containing the male lovebird, its leg still in a splint following the assault by its partner. Sensing an emergency, the crested water dragons rose onto their back legs and started running back and forth inside their van, their hands stretched out either side of them to keep their balance. Then came the glutton, which, despite having been put on a diet, had managed to hide a number of raw eggs within its fur. The giant otters, which he had never gotten to know, were in the truck behind, and, judging by the smell, the zorilla left next. The monkeys followed them in a vehicle with blacked-out windows lest the Geoffroy’s marmosets feel threatened during the journey. And finally came the birds, which were flying from one end of their lorry to the other, headed by the wandering albatross exposing its pink patches. The only creature that failed to take to the air was the concussed hanging parrot, which clutched its perch with its toes for the entire length of its upside-down journey.

Feeling a chill as he watched the last vehicle leave, Balthazar Jones turned and walked to the van he had hired for the day, and drove out of the Tower headed for the zoo. Next to him on the passenger seat was the cage containing the common shrew, which had finally squeezed its colossal hips out of the door of the tiny house.

Arriving at the wrought-iron gates that had nearly decapitated the giraffes, he parked at the entrance and carefully carried the cage inside, putting the creature’s breathtaking girth down to a diet of Fig Rolls fed to it by the equally corpulent Yeoman Gaoler. He checked to see that all the animals had
arrived safely, and stood watching as they rediscovered their enclosures. After witnessing the extraordinary sight of the reunion between the wandering albatross and its mate, he gave a toucan feather to the sugar glider’s keeper, who looked at it in confusion. Returning to his van, he stood on the pavement checking each direction. Once he was certain that he wouldn’t be seen, he slid open the door and bowled a grapefruit along the ground through the main gates. The bearded pig hesitated for a moment, then bounded after it, its tasselled tail flying at full mast over its generous buttocks.

WHEN REV. SEPTIMUS DREW PUSHED OPEN
the heavy oak door of the Rack & Ruin, one of the Beefeaters was standing on his head performing an ambitious impression of the hanging parrot’s historic cry as it dropped from the White Tower weathervane. On recognising the chaplain’s skinny ankles, the Beefeater immediately turned himself upright and apologised for his rendition of the unholy avian profanity. It wasn’t the first time that the clergyman had heard it: the parrot’s lusty shriek had been repeated around the Tower with unreserved enthusiasm whenever the Ravenmaster passed, much to the man’s humiliation.

The chaplain approached the birdcage and looked at its yellow occupant, which suddenly started to disgorge a melody. Bending down to watch the creature empty itself of its cursed notes that threatened to choke it, he kept an eye on Ruby Dore. As soon as the landlady was free, he approached and asked whether he could talk to her in private. She looked up and hesitated. “They locked the Well Tower again after they
took away the fancy rats,” she replied. “I’ll meet you in Wakefield Tower in a couple of minutes.”

After looking at the small oratory, where the imprisoned Henry VI was said to have been murdered while kneeling in prayer, he joined the tourists heading to the lower chamber, which housed the instruments of torture exhibition. He listened to their murmurs of disappointment as they read the information panel stating that torture had been very rare in England. Their mood lightened, however, as soon as they saw the rack with its tantalising rollers that turned in opposite directions, the manacles from which prisoners would hang from their wrists, and the Scavenger’s Daughter with its gruesome metal bars that compressed the body into an agonising kneeling position.

When the landlady appeared, apologising for having taken so long, the clergyman guided her towards the shadows at the back of the room. He glanced behind him to make sure that he wouldn’t be heard, and told her of his decision: “I’m going to leave the Church,” he said, looking at her through the gloom.

The chaplain explained how he thought he could do more of God’s work at the shelter than at the Tower, whose congregation only seemed to come to his sermons to warm themselves against the radiators. His publishers had offered him another six-book deal with an even bigger advance than the first, which meant that he would be able to rescue many more ladies than he could at the moment. Not only that, but the succulence of the vegetables they grew was such that they had just secured a contract to supply a local restaurant.

There was silence.

“Where will you live?” Ruby Dore finally asked, fiddling with the end of her scarf.

“I’m going to rent a little place near the shelter. I don’t need much.”

Ruby Dore glanced away. “I haven’t been entirely truthful with you either,” she admitted. “I’m not going to be able to hide it forever, so I may as well tell you. I’m going to have a baby.”

It was Rev. Septimus Drew’s turn to be quiet, and both of them looked at the floor. The landlady eventually broke the silence. “I’d better get back to work,” she said.

As she turned to leave, the clergyman suddenly found himself asking: “Do you fancy visiting the Florence Nightingale Museum sometime? One of the exhibits is her pet owl called Athena.”

Ruby Dore stopped and looked at him.

“She rescued it in Athens, and it travelled everywhere in her pocket. She loved it so much she had it stuffed when it died,” he added.

VALERIE JENNINGS LAY ON HER BACK
in the empty sarcophagus, breathing in the dusty remains of an ancient Egyptian. She closed her eyes in the cedar-scented gloom, having just discovered that her favourite obscure nineteenth-century novelist had remained a spinster all her life.

Not even the sudden appearance of Dustin Hoffman at the original Victorian counter that morning had managed to lift her mood. She had simply asked for some identification and,
without a word to Hebe Jones about the exalted presence at the counter, collected the Oscar that had been standing on her desk for the past two years. She handed it to the actor as if she were reuniting a member of the general public with a lost set of door keys.

Opening her eyes, she stared at the underside of the lid, its decoration visible in the light that came in courtesy of a hardback placed under the lid to prevent suffocation. Once again she thought how ridiculous she must have seemed to Arthur Catnip, whom she hadn’t heard from since their dinner together. And she bitterly regretted having worn someone else’s dress to dinner with him.

Suddenly there was a polite knock on the sarcophagus’s lid. It had taken a while for Hebe Jones to find her colleague. She had walked the aisles of mislaid possessions piled up on metal shelves stretching far into the distance, until she came across a pair of flat black shoes with rubber soles. She looked around, turning three hundred and sixty degrees in the process, but it seemed that Valerie Jennings had vanished. Eventually her eyes fell to the sarcophagus, and she spotted the book wedged underneath the lid.

Hearing the knock, Valerie Jennings sat up like Dracula rising from his coffin. Smelling strongly of cedar wood, she clambered out, made her way silently back to her desk, and opened a packet of Bakewell slices.

Hebe Jones followed her and sat down. “I just asked one of the ticket inspectors why we haven’t seen Arthur Catnip, and he said that he hadn’t been to work for ages,” she said. “Nor has he called them to explain why he hasn’t come in. Someone
went to his house, but there was no reply and his neighbour hadn’t seen him either. They’re really worried about him.”

Valerie Jennings remained silent.

“Why don’t you try and find him?” Hebe Jones suggested.

“I wouldn’t know where to start,” she replied.

“If you can find the owner of the safe after five years, you can find a tattooed ticket inspector.”

Valerie Jennings looked at her. “Do you really think something’s happened to him?” she asked.

“People don’t just disappear like that. Especially him. He never even liked taking his holidays. Why don’t you ring round the hospitals?”

“Maybe he just got sick of the job.”

“They said all his stuff is still in his locker.”

Unconvinced, Valerie Jennings reached for the phone book. A few minutes later she replaced the receiver.

“Well?” asked Hebe Jones.

“They don’t have a patient there by that name.”

“Try the next one. The tree wasn’t felled by one stroke,” she said.

Less than half an hour later, Valerie Jennings moved aside a discarded copy of the
Evening Standard
and sat down heavily in a Tube carriage. She failed to notice the front-page story about the miraculous return of the bearded pig to London Zoo following its journey around Britain, and stared blindly ahead of her as the train started to rattle its way out of the station.

When she arrived at the hospital, Arthur Catnip was lying in a four-bed ward in much the same state that she had imagined. Despite his powers of intuition, he had not had the slightest premonition that he was going to suffer a heart attack
more catastrophic than the first shortly after kissing Valerie Jennings on the well-swept steps of the Hotel Splendid, an oversight he later put down to being befuddled by love.

The sight of her in her navy coat, smeared glasses, and flat black shoes immediately set his monitors shrieking. When the nurses finally calmed him, Valerie Jennings was called from her seat outside the ward and permitted to approach the patient. She sat by the bed, took his cold hands in hers, and told him that when he was discharged he could convalesce on her armchair with the pop-up leg rest, and she would lend him the works of Miss E. Clutterbuck to keep up his spirits. She told him she would help him regain his strength by taking him for walks around the local park, despite the geese, and if he fell into the duck pond she would pull him out herself, no matter how little hair he had left. And she told him that when he had fully recovered, she would pay for them to go on a cruise with the reward she had been given by the owner of the safe he had found on the Circle Line five years ago, and he could show her the island on which he had been marooned after falling overboard sodden with cider while in the Navy.