The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise

by Julia Stuart

  As they passed several men prodding the undergrowth with sticks, Arthur Catnip wondered what they were searching for. But Valerie Jennings didn’t even look up, as she was thinking about what she would find in the comforting foxed pages of Miss E. Clutterbuck that evening, while in the sanctuary of her armchair with the pop-up leg rest.

  When they approached the tea hut, she pointed with relief to a notice on the door saying “Closed.” But Arthur Catnip pushed it open, and invited her to step inside. Instead of the rows of battered tables and chairs filled with dog walkers and bird-watchers, she looked around to see a table set for two in the center, covered in a white linen cloth. A single yellow rose stood in a silver vase in the middle. Behind the counter was a man wearing a white chef’s hat, and a young waitress dressed in black. “Don’t worry, I asked for a French chef,” said Arthur Catnip as the waitress approached to take her coat.

  When the onion soup arrived, Valerie Jennings recalled the French onion seller of her childhood standing on the corner with his laden bicycle. Lowering his voice, Arthur Catnip revealed that his uncle had run away with one, after which the vegetable was banished from the house.

  Once the poulet à la moutarde was served, the ticket inspector topped up her glass and recounted the spectacle of the mysterious voodoo chickens he had seen while in Haiti with the Navy. Valerie Jennings took another sip of wine and found herself telling him about the cockerel owned by her godmother that had fallen in love with the kitchen mop and tried to mount it each time the woman cleaned the kitchen floor.

  As they were eating the tarte tatin, she muttered that she had been thinking about making cider from the apples in her garden in the summer, as they had never been good enough for baking. The tattooed ticket inspector said he thought it was a great idea, and confessed to having once drunk so much of the stuff, he fell overboard and spent almost a week on a desert island before being spotted by his ship and rescued.

  While they were drinking their coffee, one of the men they had seen earlier prodding the undergrowth with a stick put his head around the door and asked: “You haven’t seen a bearded pig by any chance, have you?”

  They replied that they hadn’t, and offered to keep a lookout on their way back, both thrilled at the thought of seeing a pig with a beard. But as they returned to the Lost Property Office, Valerie Jennings forgot all about it as she only had eyes for Arthur Catnip.

  THAT NIGHT, THE TICKING OF THE CLOCK on the bedside table seemed much louder in the darkness. As she looked at the time, Hebe Jones wondered whether she would ever fall asleep. She moved onto her side, away from her husband’s fitful slumber, and her mind turned to the evening they had just spent. Balthazar Jones had gone up to the room at the top of the Salt Tower as usual, without a word about what day it was, and she had remained on the sofa, pierced with shards of grief, wondering how he could have forgotten.

  She remembered Milo’s last birthday, when he had again requested a chemistry set. He had asked for one ever since his father first told him about Sir Walter Raleigh brewing his Balsam of Guiana in the Tower henhouse. Much to her annoyance, he had filled the boy’s head with wondrous tales of the Great Cordial, made with ingredients that included gold and unicorn, which had cured Queen Anne of a dangerous fever.

  “Daddy said the Queen was so impressed with it that she asked for some to save the life of her son Prince Henry,” the boy had said as his birthday approached. “He said that they’d tried to cure him by putting dead pigeons on his head and pressing two halves of a cock against the soles of his feet. But once he’d swallowed the Cordial, he opened his eyes and sat up and spoke!”

  Hebe Jones had continued peeling the potatoes. “What your father failed to tell you was that he died not long afterwards,” she replied.

  But despite Milo’s pleading, Hebe Jones refused to buy her son a chemistry set, fearing disaster despite her husband’s insistence that he would supervise each experiment. When the boy tore the wrapping off his present, he discovered a telescope that offered not the slightest possibility of eruption. His parents took him up to the Salt Tower roof, where Balthazar Jones showed him all the stars that the first Astronomer Royal who had lived in the Tower would have seen. “If the ravens ever get in the way of your telescope, let me know and I’ll fetch Grandpa’s shotgun,” the Beefeater promised. While Milo appeared delighted by the prospect of his father reducing the odious birds to a pile of black feathers, Hebe Jones knew that planet-gazing was no match for the experiments he had hoped to perform. Recognising her son’s disappointment, she assured him she would buy him the present he had always wanted for his twelfth birthday. But it had never come. As she turned over to escape the memory of the promise she hadn’t been able to keep, a hot tear slipped down her cheek.

  When she woke several hours later, the room was still dark. Immediately sensing the absence of her husband, she ran a hand along the bottom of the sheet, and found that his side was still warm. Pulling back the shabby blanket, she got out of bed and drew back a curtain. She gazed at the Tower, streaked with faint brushstrokes of light. Through the rain, which slid in greasy drops down the pane, she made out her husband slowly climbing the battlement steps, his wet nightclothes clinging to him. When he eventually returned, a new variety hidden in his dressing-gown pocket, he found that Hebe Jones and her suitcase were gone.

  CHAPTER TEN

  UNABLE TO REPORT for duty because of the weight in his chest, Balthazar Jones sat on the edge of the bed in a dry pair of pajamas and picked up the telephone. As he called the office in the Byward Tower, his eyes followed each revolution of the dial and its laborious spin backwards.

  “Yes?” replied the Yeoman Gaoler.

  The Beefeater rubbed the shabby blanket between his fingers. “It’s Yeoman Warder Jones here,” he said.

  “Good morning, Yeoman Warder Jones. The shrew’s fine. It ate a cricket while I was in the shower this morning.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Is it a he or a she, by the way?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ll find out.” Balthazar Jones cleared his throat, then added: “I won’t be reporting for duty today.”

  “And why is that, may I ask?” the Yeoman Gaoler enquired, standing up and surveying the room for his packet of Fig Rolls.

  “I’m not feeling very well.”

  “Oh?” came the muffled reply as the Yeoman Gaoler peered inside a bin, looking for an empty wrapper.

  There was a pause.

  “I’ve had a surfeit of lampreys,” continued Balthazar Jones, his mind drifting in the current of his despair.

  “A what?”

  The Beefeater tried to recall what he had just said, and suddenly realised that he had told the Yeoman Gaoler he was suffering from over-consumption of an eel-like fish that had caused the death of Henry I. But there was no going back.

  “A surfeit of lampreys,” Balthazar Jones repeated as quietly as possible.

  “Speak up, man!”

  “Lampreys,” he muttered. “A surfeit of them.”

  There was a pause.

  “Just a minute,” replied the Yeoman Gaoler, putting down the phone. He strode over to the bookcase next to the arrow slit and pulled out a binder in which absences were recorded. Returning to his desk, he sat down, picked up the receiver, and selected a pen from an old Golden Syrup tin.

  “And how are we spelling lampreys?” he enquired, finding his page. He twiddled his pen as he waited for a reply.

  “I’m not sure,” replied Balthazar Jones, gazing at his wet dressing gown on the back of the door.

  “Laammppreeez,” enunciated the Yeoman Gaoler as he noted down the affliction and filled in the date. He paused before adding: “They must have been good.”

  After putting down the phone, Balthazar Jones reached for the letter he had found on his pillow when he returned to bed earlier that morning, soaked with rain and reeking of the Thames. Despite the numerous times he had read it, he still failed to find in it any hope that his wife would
ever return. There was no mistaking her need to be away from him, her bitterness over his refusal to talk about Milo’s death, and her despair over the erosion of their love.

  As he stared at her name on the bottom of the page, he thought of the gust of serendipity that had blown him and Hebe Grammatikos together all those years ago. It was such a chance encounter, too random to be the reassuring hand of destiny, that he had lived in terror of luck’s capricious nature ever since.

  For too long he had been afraid that he was never going to marry. An only child, he had been woken at night by the sound of laughter coming from his parents’ bedroom above. He had assumed that all relationships were of equal delight, but the girls he met were disappointing. His parents assured him that his bride would eventually come, but as the years passed and their conviction failed to prove true, he decided to join the Army in order to distract himself from his loneliness, opting to become a guardsman in the belief that it would present fewer opportunities to shoot someone. The day before he was due to leave, his hair shorn and packed bag waiting outside his bedroom door, he met the extraordinary creature in the corner shop.

  About to buy some stamps for the letters he planned to write to his parents, he spotted the girl standing in an aisle holding a Battenberg cake, dark hair meandering down the front of her turquoise dress. She had the eyes of a fawn, which fixed on him as soon as he approached, and from that moment all sanity was lost. He walked up to her and informed her that the lurid yellow-and-pink-checked cake had been invented by a distant relative of his in honour of the woman who had captured the man’s heart. Unable to send her flowers because of her catastrophic allergies, he had made her a cake of the most alluring colours he could find in his garden. The four coloured squares each represented an aspect of her that had so beguiled him: the paleness of her skin, her modesty, her wit, and her piano playing. Each week, a carriage arrived at her home with a basket on the back seat bearing a cake. But the woman, whose doctor had forbidden her to eat sugar, never tasted them. Instead, she packed up some of her china and kept the love tokens in her dining-room cupboards. When the man learnt of the secret stash, he started covering the cakes in marzipan to ensure their preservation. He continued baking them, and she continued keeping them, a habit they maintained up until their wedding, and the creation was named after the German town they visited during their honeymoon.

  When Balthazar Jones finished his story there was a moment of pure silence. The Pakistani shopkeeper, as transfixed as Hebe Grammatikos, then declared from behind the till: “It is true, madam,” simply because he wanted it to be.

  The young couple sat on the wall outside the shop talking for so long that Balthazar Jones invited her for supper, to the initial devastation of his mother, who wanted her son to herself on his last night. But it wasn’t long before she was equally taken with Hebe Grammatikos, and she gave an extra serving of hogget to the tiny guest with the enormous appetite. When the girl’s last train home had long departed, Mrs. Jones made up the spare bed down the hall and retired upstairs with her husband. When all was quiet, Balthazar Jones eventually persuaded the extraordinary creature into his room, with the assurance of the most gentlemanly of behaviour. She sat on the end of his bed and asked why he was called Balthazar. He told her that he had been named after one of the Three Wise Men as he had been conceived on Christmas Day. In turn, she revealed that she had been named after the Greek goddess of youth. The pair talked until midnight, when they were suddenly reduced to silence by the realisation that they would be parted within hours. So they stayed awake, knowing that sleep would hasten the unthinkable moment. As the ruthless dawn heaved away the night, Hebe Grammatikos kissed the tip of each of his slender fingers, which would have to get used to holding a gun. And when it was finally time to say goodbye, she stood on the doorstep next to his parents and joined them in waving him off, each with a stone in their heart.

  He used the stamps he had bought for letters to the tiny creature he had met in the corner shop. But his writing on the envelopes was always so confused by love that they took several weeks to arrive at the correct address. Kept awake by terrible snores coming from the bunk above him, he was in such distress over the time it took to receive a reply that he wrote more and more frequently, presuming that his letters were going astray. Two years later, when he proposed, it was to the great relief of the postman, whose back had long ago given way.

  BALTHAZAR JONES IGNORED THE KNOCKING on the Salt Tower door. He remained in the same position on the bed, clutching the letter as the wind blew through the tiny gaps in the lattice windows. But the banging continued, and mounted with such urgency that the Beefeater, fearing the commotion would attract further attention, got up to answer it. He staggered down the stairs in his bare feet, heaved open the door, and shielded his eyes against the glare of the marble sky. Standing in front of him was Dr. Evangeline Moore carrying a black bag. “I understand you’re not feeling well,” she said.

  Too troubled to think of a credible reason not to let her in, he stepped aside and followed her back up the stairs, feeling their chill on his soles, blackened from his nocturnal foray on the battlements. Once they had reached the living room, the Beefeater suddenly felt embarrassed at being caught in his nightclothes by the young woman. Taking refuge on the sofa, he warned: “Mind where you’re treading.” The doctor, whose copper ringlets glowed whenever caught by a freak ray of sunshine, promptly sidestepped Mrs. Cook. She unbuttoned the jacket of her neat brown trouser suit and sat down on the armchair that failed to match the settee.

  Taking out a folder from her black bag, she opened it on her knees and ran a finger down a page. She frowned, looked up, and said: “According to the Yeoman Gaoler, you’ve had a surfeit of lampreys.”

  Balthazar Jones gazed at the floor and started digging at a threadbare patch of the emaciated carpet with a grimy toe. The only sound was a tiny creak as Mrs. Cook stood up and started her day’s journey across the floor. The Tower doctor looked at the tortoise while the Beefeater continued to look at the floor. She turned her eyes back to her patient, who had bored such a big hole that half his toe had disappeared.

  “It’s not that uncommon,” she suddenly declared. “You’d be surprised. How many are we talking about? Half a dozen maybe? Well, however many it was, I’m sure it’s nothing serious. Just take it easy for the rest of the day,” she concluded with a smile that he took to signify an end to the matter.

  But just as Balthazar Jones thought that the doctor was about to leave, she suggested a quick examination. Too defeated to refuse, he stood up, and the doctor proceeded to poke and hammer at him with a variety of implements that wouldn’t have looked out of place at the Wakefield Tower’s instruments of torture exhibition. When it was finally over, he retreated to the sofa and immediately felt for the comfort of his beard as he watched the weapons being returned to the black bag.

  “Everything seems to be fine. I’ll let myself out,” announced the general practitioner, stepping over Mrs. Cook and heading for the door. As she reached for the latch, she suddenly turned round and said: “I’m sorry to hear about your wife.”

  The silence that followed was eventually broken by the sound of heels descending the stone stairs. The Beefeater, not in the least surprised that word had already gotten out, remained slumped on the sofa. Unable to bear the thoughts that threatened to engulf him, he stood up and made his way to the bedroom. Preferring to report for duty rather than endure his own rumination, he slowly put on his uniform, wobbling as he clambered into his Victorian trousers.

  HIDDEN FROM VIEW, the Ravenmaster knelt down next to the bridge over the moat and took out his nail scissors. Carefully he snipped at the grass that grew around the tiny crosses marking the graves of long-departed ravens, a number of which had literally dropped off their perches. Despite the stories peddled to the tourists, the legend that the kingdom would fall should the ravens leave the Tower was utter poppycock. The kingdom had not so much as trembled when the birds were put into
cages just before the start of the Second World War and driven away at nightfall. Their unexpected holiday had been organised at the highest level to prevent them from receiving a direct hit, which would threaten the nation’s morale. The same day, the Crown Jewels had also been secretly removed, transported in coffins by armed guards dressed as undertakers, and hidden in Westwood Quarry, in Wiltshire. The caged ravens were taken by ambulance to the terrace house of a Beefeater’s aunt who lived in Wales and smuggled inside. The pebbledash home in Swansea remained in permanent blackout, and the aunt was forbidden from opening her door to visitors lest word get out that the ravens had left the Tower. Not only was the woman paid to look after the birds, but she was also granted a stipend for the rest of her life to keep silent about their temporary removal.

  When the war was finally over, it was not certain who had driven the other more mad. The wild-eyed aunt, desperate for human conversation, told anyone who would listen (as well as those who wouldn’t) about her top-secret mission during the war. But even the local paper refused to believe her. And the generation of wartime ravens, a species noted for its talent at mimicry, never lost their Welsh accents during the remainder of their days at the fortress.

  Satisfied that dignity had been restored, the Ravenmaster put his scissors back in his pocket and stood up. He then made his way to the entrance of the Tower and stood on the bridge waiting to take the tourists on the last tour of the day. His black-gloved hands clasped in front of him, he watched the visitors who were on their way out, eyeing their rucksacks closely lest one try to leave with a bird buried deep within as the ultimate souvenir. As one of the giraffes in the moat raised its head in search of a leaf, the tourists immediately pointed to it. A man with a video camera attached to his hat approached the Ravenmaster and asked when the menagerie was opening.