Guardian Angel

by Brian John

  So it was that a few days later I travelled up to London by train. I recall that it was a Wednesday, and that the countryside which raced by looked bright and fresh beneath a cloudless sky. I jumped down onto platform nine and three-quarters at Paddington and made my way via the Underground to Green Park and thence to the ancient office of Pickersniff and Jebson in Gabriel Lane. I was not at all convinced that anything interesting would come out of the trip, but with the garden all planted up I had nothing better to do, and I planned to combine the manuscript search with a visit to my son Tom, who needed help with the redecoration of his small apartment. I thought I should be away for four days.

  As I travelled, I pondered. I was quite certain that the woman who called in at the office in 1858 was not Martha -- she was long since in her grave, and in any case she had long white hair and was above medium height. But might the mysterious woman have been her daughter Betsi? She would have been over 60 years old, and might fit the description. Or maybe the author was Martha’s second daughter Daisy? She was three years younger than Betsi, but perhaps more wrinkled and battered by the excesses of her younger days. She had certainly been very beautiful when she was young. She had spent much of her wayward early life in London, consorting with noblemen and politicians. And in 1858 she had two of her illegitimate children (and possibly some grandchildren) living in London. So she would have had a reason for visiting. She would also have been comfortable here, and she would certainly have known her way around.

  So Daisy it was. She would of course not have used her own name -- given her somewhat interesting past in London. I felt very pleased with my powers of deduction, and further deduced that she might have been inspired to take up her pen and write a book following her mother’s death, since she would have been in comfortable circumstances as George Havard’s wife, with no children of her own at home, and time on her hands. And the pseudonym - Mrs Susanna Ravenhill - would have been a good one for Daisy to use, since as a child she had once been lost upon the mountain and had been found only after a frantic search extending into the hours of darkness. Daisy had stormed off to London as a girl, after a dispute with her mother. She had been effectively dead as far as Martha was concerned, and had later been “brought back to life” when she suddenly reappeared in 1844 after an absence of more than 20 years. Even the name Susanna was apposite, since it was a family name used in Brawdy, on Martha’s side of the family. It all added up...... but to call her tome “a memoir”? I began to get excited, since I saw before me a book of scandals involving the Prince of Wales, assorted Prime Ministers, and several bishops, the like of which even the steamy side of London had never seen before. Had Daisy really revealed all in her manuscript? Could that be the explanation of the manuscript’s convoluted sub-title? It all made perfect sense. I was looking for Daisy’s confession before God and man -- her belated attempt, as a woman of mature years, to find redemption and to warn others who might be tempted into lives of hedonism and fornication.

  But why would she want a scandalous memoir published? As an act of revenge, maybe against the fathers of her illegitimate children? As a desperate means of making money? But what would her gentle husband, Doctor George Havard, have made of Daisy’s revelations? Perhaps he had died some time between 1855 and 1858, thus releasing Daisy from any obligations she might have had towards his family and towards the ideals of gentility and discretion? Questions, and more questions...........

  When I arrived at the Gabriel Lane address at around 2 pm I looked up from the street at an imposing Regency building of four stories. The stone facade was clean, and the windows were in perfectly good repair. The owners had looked after it well, I thought. Between a sandwich bar on one side and a small private art gallery on the other, I found a heavy wooden door which was of course locked. On the adjacent wall there was a long list of names and buzzer buttons. Most of the little name-plates belonged to assorted small businesses which clearly had no great need for visits from the public. I supposed that this situation had been very convenient in ensuring the survival of the officess of Pickersniff and Jebson. I pressed the button for “Hyde Park Publishers” and a voice came from somewhere. “Yes? Who is it?”

  I recognized Carol’s voice at once. I introduced myself, and she sounded pleased as she pressed a button to release the lock and let me in. I had to climb a winding stone staircase to the third floor, and found Carol waiting for me on a landing. She was a very pretty young lady with short blonde hair, and she wore jeans and a large Harlequins rugby shirt which she said were just the right clothes for sorting out a dusty office. She was not at all bookish, and proved to be a thoroughly vivacious and intelligent girl. We drank some coffee and then started to look around.

  The office suite which had been the centre of the Pickersniff and Jebson publishing empire was just as Dickensian as I had imagined. Luckily, Carol had had the cleaners in before she started work, so most of the accumulated dust and cobwebs of a century and a half had been taken away. But there was still dust dancing in the sunbeams that shafted through the open window. There were three rooms, two of which were well lit by substantial sash windows. The biggest room, which had two windows looking down on Gabriel Lane, must have been the office used by Messrs Pickersniff and Jebson, for there were two very fine oak desks with leather tops, facing each other across the room. Behind these desks there were highly polished captain’s chairs, their sheen now somewhat dulled by Father Time. There were finely crafted wooden shelves ranged along two of the walls, packed with leather-bound volumes of all shapes and sizes, and with bundles of papers tied up with red ribbons. In a corner there was a high desk with a sloping hinged lid which had been used, perhaps, by the young clerk Martin for copying and editing manuscripts and for writing letters. The back wall of this office had a fine stained glass screen allowing light to penetrate through to the larger back room, which had only a small window looking down on a dark courtyard. This room was filled with tables, shelves and heavy cupboards, all heavily laden with piles of papers, ledgers and tin boxes. There were no carpets anywhere, and here and there between the piles of boxes one could see ten-inch floorboards, finely polished and well worn. The final room, approached along a dingy passage, was small but brightly lit, and it was filled with what can only be described as junk. There were broken chairs, two hat-stands, a wash-stand with a cracked marble top and a tiled splashback from which two tiles were missing, assorted leather bags, a jumble of tin boxes, and yet more piles of leather-bound books, penny dreadfuls and manuscripts tied with red ribbon. Two or three of these piles literally reached up to the ceiling, and posed a threat to the safety of anybody who dared to disturb them. When I saw the sheer scale of the task facing Carol, my heart sank; and I realized that she had not even started on this room yet. I looked at her and raised my eyebrows, and she shrugged her shoulders and giggled.

  “Yes, I know what you’re thinking!” she said. “This is needle in haystack territory, if ever I saw it. I’ve no idea where to start, and I’ve not touched this room yet. I’ve been working my way through the front office, and I’ll get to the back eventually. You can help me if you like, but I can’t give you a clue as to where to begin, or what to look for. I reckon we should be looking for a hefty bundle of papers, maybe six inches think, and tied up with a ribbon. They seem to have liked tying things with red ribbon at Pickersniff and Jebson.”

  “Have you not been able to discern a system of some sort? Surely those old fellows must have had a method in their madness? For example, accounts and ledgers here, printers’ correspondence up there, published volumes down there, and publications pending somewhere else?”

  “That’s what I assumed from the beginning,” sighed Carol. “But I’ve been forced to give up on it. Now I think that their state of disorganization must have contributed to their downfall. We know already that Pickersniff kept the ledger of debtors’ and creditors’ accounts at home, under his bed. This wasn’t the best-run office in London.”

  There was nothi
ng for it but to go rooting through every pile of manuscripts in every room, in the hope of coming across something labelled The Ghost of Inglestone. So Carol and I searched, without success, for the rest of the afternoon, until it was time for her to go off home and for me to meet up with my son Tom. Next morning I turned up in Gabriel Street again, and the whole day passed in another prolonged, dusty and ultimately fruitless search. Both Carol and I began to feel that we were going nowhere, and that this expenditure of effort was just a waste of time. At 5 pm we went our separate ways, and I told Carol that I could only afford one more day in the city before picking up my paint-brush in my son’s apartment.

  As on the previous evening, I had to travel across London on the Underground, in the rush hour. That was not a happy experience, and although I had done it many times before, I still hated the cold anonymity of stuffy packed carriages, impassive faces, and hordes of human beings of all shapes, sizes and colours rushing, rushing, rushing............

  I was feeling miserable anyway, because my nose was running like a tap, as it always does when exposed to clouds of dust and the strange micro-organisms that inhabit ancient piles of paper. But I was also irritated by the fruitlessness of the search in the Gabriel Street office, and because I could see my high hopes of progress crashing into the ground. I began to resent those eccentric old men and their chaotic publishing house, and somewhere beneath Oxford Circus I vowed that I would never again rise to the bait of discarded documents, missing memoirs and fantastical works of fiction. I would henceforth remain back home in Wales, where the air was fresh and clear, and where there was room to move beneath a wide sky on my heather-clad mountain.

  The carriage, packed even more tightly with human flesh, rattled and rushed its way towards Baker Street and a change to the Circle Line. Blank faces, bored faces, tired faces; hardly any animated faces. Idly, I glanced at the front page of somebody’s Evening Standard while he was reading the inside pages. I was jolted out of my state of jaded discomfort when I read these words, printed bold and brash in red ink: TOWER RAVENS DISAPPEAR. Beneath the headline were these words: Ravenmaster Mystified -- will White Tower now crumble? Suddenly I was fully alert, with my mind racing. Something was going on here, but I was not sure what it was. Ravens were the guardian angels of Carningli, and Martha Morgan, Mistress of Plas Ingli, had had a very special relationship with them. Indeed, a raven had been instrumental in helping me to discover the final part of Martha’s diary which I had published as Flying with Angels. Were the Tower ravens about to lead me to Mrs Ravenhill? I tried to read more, but the newsprint was too small for me to decipher. The carriage was turned inside out as some (including the man with the newspaper) poured out and others poured in at Regent Street. At Baker Street I had to get off and walk to the eastbound Circle Line platform, with my thoughts still whirling around inside my head. On we juddered and shuddered towards Aldgate, and as station succeeded station the crush was lessened. At last, at Moorgate, I managed to find a seat. On it was an abandoned copy of the Evening Standard. I grabbed it and read on.

  According to the legend, the White Tower will fall and England will suffer from a spectacular disaster, should the resident ravens disappear. It’s said that the monarchy will fall, and that the state itself will also collapse. Well, the ravens have gone, and nobody knows what has happened to them, or what will happen next. Our reporter Tom Willis has been to the Tower, and here is his report.

  Tower of London, 3 pm -- Ravenmaster Ivan Stobbings noticed that the birds were missing around mid-day. He told me that there were six birds which were free to wander around across four territories, at Tower Green, Tower Steps, Coldharbour and Roman Wall. He first noticed that the two birds from Tower Green were nowhere to be seen. He called for them, and they didn’t appear. Feeling apprehensive, he then searched the other territories and called each of the missing birds by name, with no result. Next he searched all of the buildings of the Tower, for more than an hour, and again found no trace of the birds.

  “That’s the first time this has ever happened to me in twelve years at the Tower,” said Mr Stobbings. “The birds respond to my voice only. If anybody else tried to attract them or feed them, they would move away. And if anybody tried to grab them they would defend themselves. They are big birds, and an angry raven can go for your eyes. They are not to be tampered with.”

  Having lost the six birds from the stations around the Tower, the Ravenmaster then checked the nesting cages where two auxiliary young birds were kept. The cages were still locked, but the birds were gone. With eight ravens now missing from the Tower, this is the first time since 1946 that the ancient and iconic fortress has not had a single bird in residence. The police were called in at around 2 pm, and are now working on the theory that the bird-food might have been poisoned so that the ravens could be picked up in a drugged state. They have set about a systematic questioning of all the visitors who were at the Tower around 12 noon and who have not yet left the premises. But thousands of others are of course long gone, since the total number who buy tickets during the day is almost always over 5,000. I have questioned all the Yeoman Warders (Beefeaters) who were on duty, and none of them saw anything untoward.

  One possibility which can be discounted is that the birds have flown away. They have the flight feathers of one wing regularly clipped, so that they can flap about but not actually fly for any distance.

  The legend of the Tower ravens probably goes back to the Middle Ages. In the seventeenth century King Charles II wanted to move the birds out of the Tower, but thought better of it when he was told that should they leave, the monarchy and the kingdom would fall.

  Will the Queen and her United Kingdom now collapse? We hope not. We are not quite so concerned about the fate of the Government. But the Tower authorities are taking no chances, and messages have gone out to zoos and aviaries across the UK where young ravens (some of them raised at the Tower) are kept, in the hope that there will be at least some birds back in residence by tomorrow.

  It was now a quarter to six, and on checking the route map on the wall of the carriage I realized that my destination station, Aldgate, was only one stop away from Tower Hill. On impulse or intuition I continued to the stop used by many thousands of tourists each year who flock to Britain’s top tourist destination. An idea connected with the name “Jebson” was beginning to take shape in my mind, but I had no idea what it would look like when fully formed. I rang through to my son Tom on my mobile to tell him that I would be late, and hurried to the main entrance of the Tower in a state of rising excitement. It was close to closing time, but I was confident that it would not be locked this evening, of all evenings, with a full-scale investigation under way. Having talked my way in on the pretext that I had information about the ravens, my next task was to find the Ravenmaster, Ivan Stobbings, and to have a word with him. However, the media scrum had arrived before me, and there were reporters, press photographers, police and TV crews everywhere. I realized then that this was a story of international interest, and that the evening news programmes across the globe would all be reporting on the loss of the ravens and speculating on terrorist plots and on the downfall of both the British monarchy and the government. I made my way along Water Lane and at last reached the oldest part of the Tower site. There was a security cordon around the great door of the White Tower, and the police would not let anybody pass through it. There was virtually no chance of me getting inside the imposing gleaming white structure, since I did not even have a press badge.

  A dozen or so Beefeaters were milling around on the lawn, some of them talking to reporters holding microphones and others positioned carefully in front of TV cameras. One of the Beefeaters was in particular demand, and I deduced that he must be the Ravenmaster. I could get nowhere near him, so with my mad idea now fixed in my mind I decided to try my luck. “Ivan!” I shouted. “I think I know where the birds are!” That caught the attention of almost everybody in the melee, and suddenly there was silence. The police, who
were doing their best to control proceedings, were uncertain where my voice had come from, and so a senior officer said in measured tones: “Would the gentleman who just shouted please come forward, if he thinks that he can give us useful information?” I swallowed hard and pushed through the throng to the plastic barrier which the police had erected around the door. “I think that I may be able to help,” I said, “but I need to speak to the Ravenmaster first, and preferably away from the eyes of the world.” The officer nodded and opened a section of the barrier so that I could pass through. As I walked forward I realized that now I was the centre of attention, and that made me very uncomfortable. Press cameras flashed and TV lenses were pointed towards me, and my instinct was to defend myself by holding my copy of the Evening Standard over my face. Before they would allow me into the White Tower the police frisked me, presumably on the basis that I looked like an Al Khaida suicide bomber, and then I was admitted. Ivan the Ravenmaster followed me, and I agreed that I would talk to him and the Police Inspector in private. We went into one of the cavernous rooms on the ground floor, and it struck me that I was about to become either a hero or a prize buffoon. I swallowed hard, and the Inspector picked up on my nervousness.

  “Well, sir? Would you care to give us your name?”

  “All in good time, Inspector. There is no time for formalities. The sun is still well up, and if we work fast I hope we might get the birds back here before nightfall. Ivan -- may I call you that?”

  “Not a problem.”

  “Thanks. Ivan -- those eight birds. How long have they been here?”

  “Well, some are old and others are young. Hardey is the oldest male, who came from Dorset in 1992. Cedric is another male, brought from Lincoln in 1995. Then there are two females who are their mates -- Munin and Hugine, who both came from North Uist in 1996. Odin and Thor are both males, from Hampshire. They came here in recently, in 2006, and we keep them as the auxiliary birds. They were locked inside their nest-boxes this morning, so God knows how they got out. The last two of the established birds are Sigmund, who came from Cumbria in 2001, and Rhiannon......”