The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise (4 page)

Hebe Jones, whose own earnings were modest, knew that their savings would never stretch to the university education they both wanted for their son. Ignoring the dread that set like cement in her guts, she dismissed her husband’s warning that they would have to live at the Tower if he were successful. “It’s every woman’s dream to live in a castle,” she lied, not turning round from the stove.

When Balthazar Jones discovered that she had never visited the famous monument, he asked how it was possible, since she had spent most of her childhood in London. She explained that her parents had only ever taken their four daughters to the British Museum to see the Elgin Marbles. The sound of Mr. and Mrs. Grammatikos weeping as they stood in front of the Greek exhibits pilfered by the English was so catastrophic that the family was eventually banned from the museum for life. The couple consequently refused to visit any British landmarks, a protest Hebe Jones had kept up in adulthood out of familial solidarity.

In case his wife wasn’t aware, Balthazar Jones pointed out that not only was the Tower of London a royal palace and fortress, but it had once been England’s state prison, had witnessed numerous executions, and was also widely believed to be haunted. But Hebe Jones simply disappeared into the garden shed and emerged with a blue-and-white-striped deck chair. She sat down and pulled out of a shopping bag a guide to the Tower that she had purchased to prepare her husband
for his interview. With the ruthlessness of a gunner, she started to fire questions at the man who had failed his history O-Level to such a spectacular degree that the astonished marker kept a copy of his paper to cheer herself up during her most debilitating bouts of depression. Hebe Jones maintained the battery as her husband paced up and down the lawn, scratching the back of his neck as he searched for the answers in the empty birdcage of his head.

His wife’s determination was absolute. Balthazar Jones would receive a call at lunchtime asking not what he fancied for supper, but the name of the woman who was sent to the Tower in the thirteenth century for rejecting the advances of King John, who subsequently poisoned her with an egg. She would return home from work and enquire, not how her husband’s day had been, but in which tower the Duke of Clarence had been drowned in a butt of his favourite Malmsey wine. Bathed in sweat after love-making, she would lift her head from his chest and demand that he reveal not the depth of his devotion for her, but the name of the seventeenth-century thief who made it as far as the Tower wharf with the Crown Jewels. By the time the job offer arrived in the post, Balthazar Jones’s brain had been unsettled by so much English history, that it provoked in him a mania for the subject that afflicted him for the rest of his life.

REV. SEPTIMUS DREW WOKE
in his three-storey home overlooking Tower Green, and glanced at his alarm clock. There was still some time before the gates of the Middle Tower would
open to let in the loathsome tourists, the worst of whom still thought that the Queen Mother was alive. At times the chaplain rose even earlier to capture more of this exquisite period. The place was never the same when the infernal hordes eventually left, and the gates shut swiftly behind them, as the air in the chapel remained as putrid as a stable’s until nightfall.

His mind immediately turned to the new mousetrap he had painstakingly laid the previous evening. With the mounting excitement of a child about to inspect the contents of his Christmas stocking, the clergyman wondered what he would find. Unable to wait any longer, he swung his legs out of bed and opened the windows to clear the room of the mists of unrequited love that had clouded them overnight. The movement sent tears of condensation running down the panes. He dressed quickly, his long, holy fingers still stiff from his endeavours in his workshop the night before. Pulling on his red cassock over his trousers and shirt, he screwed his sockless feet into his shoes, not bothering to unlace them. As he rushed down the two staircases, he clutched the front of his cassock so as not to trip, the back pouring down the battered wooden steps behind him like crimson paint. Despite his purchase of a jar of thick-cut Seville orange marmalade from Fortnum & Mason, he didn’t stop for breakfast in the tiny kitchen with its window overlooking Tower Green, screened with a net curtain to prevent the tourists seeing inside. Not, of course, that it stopped them from trying. The chaplain was forever coming out of his light blue door to find them with their hands cupped against the glass, jostling for position.

His beetle-black hair still in turmoil, he walked the short distance across the cobbles to the Chapel Royal of St. Peter ad
Vincula. He had never got used to it being included in the Beefeaters’ tours. Many of the sightseers ignored the instruction to take off their hats before entering, only to receive a retired soldier’s reprimand once inside. Some even attended the Sunday service, and the chaplain would watch them from the altar, his fury mounting as they sat amongst the Beefeaters and their families, gazing at the walls around them. And he knew that their wonderment had nothing to do with being in the House of God, but everything to do with the thrill of sitting in a chapel which housed the broken remains of three Queens of England who had been beheaded just outside.

He naturally blamed the tourists for the rat infestation, assuming they showered the place with tantalising crumbs as they snacked while listening to the Beefeaters’ talks. However, the sightseers were entirely blameless, for any food they made the grave mistake of purchasing from the Tower Café went straight into the bin after the first mouthful. The truth was that the current rat population were descendants of the rodents that moved in not long after St. Peter’s was first built as an ordinary city parish church outside the Tower walls, before being incorporated into the castle following Henry III’s extensions. The rats had decamped briefly on the two occasions when the chapel was rebuilt, and for a third time during the nineteenth-century renovations when more than a thousand human corpses were discovered under the floor. But the vermin soon returned, lured by the succulence of the new tapestry kneelers. They had harassed a succession of chaplains to such a degree that each was obliged to wear his cassock several inches above the dusty chapel floor to prevent the ends from being ravished whenever he stood in contemplation. But it did
nothing to stop the nibbling while they knelt in prayer. Rev. Septimus Drew found such radical tailoring one humiliation too far, and had devoted his eleven years in the post to the extermination of the creature not worthy of a mention in the Bible.

His time had been spent studiously converting the humble mousetrap into a contraption of suitable robustness to annihilate a rat. First he turned one of the empty bedrooms, which he had hoped would be used by the family he had longed for, into a workshop. It was there that he laboured on his inventions late into the night, the shelves lined with books on basic scientific laws and theories. Numerous plans with perfectly to-scale drawings lay unfurled on a desk, weighed down by anemic spider plants. A series of models, made out of pieces of cardboard, off-cuts of wood and garden twine, were laid out on a table. The arsenal of weapons included a tiny sling and marble, a razor blade which had once formed part of a doomed guillotine, a tiny trebuchet, and a pair of minuscule gates complete with murder holes in the top, through which deadly substances could be poured.

Arriving at the chapel door, he pressed down on the cold door handle. His hopes mounting for a formidable body count, he pushed open the door and made his way across the worn tiles to the crypt. As he approached the tomb of Sir Thomas More, where he had set up his latest apparatus (which had taken two months of planning and execution, as well as a call to a weapons expert at the Imperial War Museum), he heard a sound in the main body of the church. Irritated at being disturbed at such a delicious moment, he retraced his steps to determine the source of the noise.

His resentment at being interrupted immediately evaporated the moment he recognised the figure sitting in the front row of chairs next to the altar. Caught off guard by the sight of the woman who had chased away his dreams, he quickly hid behind a pillar and stood with his palms flat against the cold, smooth stone. It was the moment he had been imagining for months: a chance to speak to her alone, take her hand in his, and ask whether there was any hope that she might feel for him the way he did about her. While still uncertain of the merits of such an antiquated approach, he considered it the best out of all those he had thought of since his heart had taken flight. But in all the wistful fantasies he had concocted as he stood at his window overlooking Tower Green hoping for a glimpse of her, his hair had always been perfectly combed into the style first inflicted at the age of eight, and his teeth had been brushed. Cursing himself for having left the house with hangman’s breath, he looked down at his skinny, bare ankles and deeply regretted not having taken the time to put on his socks.

As he berated himself for his unsavoury state, a burst of sobbing echoed round the ancient walls. Unable to ignore a soul in anguish, he decided to offer her comfort, despite his wretchedness. But at that very moment came a thud and a high-pitched squeak from the crypt. The woman jumped to her feet and fled, no doubt in fear of one of the many spectral apparitions said to haunt the Tower. Rev. Septimus Drew remained where he was, playing the scene over in his mind with a spectacularly different ending as the incense, which he burnt in copious amounts to mask the stench of rat droppings, curled around his skinny, bare ankles. When, eventually, he
returned to the crypt, not even the sight of a slaughtered rat improved his mood.

WHEN BALTHAZAR JONES HAD RECOVERED
the will to report for duty after his disastrous breakfast, he clambered into his dark blue trousers and pulled on the matching tunic with the initials
ER
emblazoned in red across the front, surmounted by a red crown. He reached up to the top of the wardrobe for his hat, and pulled it on with both hands. Like all the Beefeaters before him, he had initially worn the Victorian uniform with pride. But it hadn’t been long before it became a source of utmost irritation. The outfits were unbearably hot in the summer and insufferably cold in the winter. Not only that, but they itched from the clouds of moth repellent sprayed on them twice a year while the Beefeaters were still wearing them lest they shrink.

Descending the Salt Tower’s stairs, he locked the door behind him, and turned right past the Tower Café. Assigned the post outside Waterloo Barracks, which housed the Crown Jewels, he chose a spot at sufficient distance from the sentry who had won a fistfight with a Beefeater the week before. His pale blue eyes instinctively searched the sky, and his thoughts drifted with the clouds on their way to drench the washing of the residents of Croydon. When his concentration briefly returned, he braced himself for the battery of ludicrous questions from the tourists who had started to seep in.

An hour later, Balthazar Jones had failed to realise that it had started to rain. Such was his expertise, his subconscious had instantly dismissed the downpour as a particularly common
variety for January. He remained in exactly the same position, staring intently but seeing nothing, while the visitors had long since run for cover. When the man from the Palace eventually found him, he was still standing in the same spot, completely sodden and smelling fiercely of moth repellent. On hearing his name, Balthazar Jones turned his head, causing a raindrop to fall from the end of his nose onto the red crown embroidered on the front of his tunic. The man in the dry coat immediately covered the Beefeater with his silver-handled umbrella. Introducing himself as Oswin Fielding, an equerry to Her Majesty, he enquired as to whether he might have a word. Balthazar Jones hurriedly wiped his beard to rid it of water, but then found that his hand was too wet to offer. The man from the Palace suggested that they have a cup of tea at the Tower Café. But as they approached, he sniffed twice, flinched at the affront to his nostrils, and headed straight for the Rack & Ruin.