by Julia Stuart
“As most people here already know, there was a royal menagerie at the Tower of London from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries,” he began. “At first the animals were just for the amusement of the monarch, but they became a public attraction during the reign of Elizabeth I. A lion was actually named after her. The health of the monarch and the menagerie’s lion was said to be interlinked, and the creature did in fact die several days before her.”
“Get on with it, man,” called the Chief Yeoman Warder.
“The tradition of giving the monarchy live animals continues to this day, and they are kept at London Zoo,” Balthazar Jones continued. He paused before adding: “The Queen has decided to transfer them to the Tower and reinstate the menagerie. She very much hopes that their presence will attract more visitors. The animals are due to arrive next week, and the menagerie will open to the public once they have settled in.”
There was an instant chorus of protests.
“But we don’t need any more tourists. We’re overrun by the buggers as it is,” called the Ravenmaster.
“One knocked on my door the other day and had the cheek to ask whether he could have a look around,” said one of the Beefeaters’ wives. “I told him to get lost, but he didn’t seem to understand. Then he asked whether I would take some photographs of the inside for him. So I took a picture of the loo, gave him his camera back, and shut the door.”
“Where, precisely, are these animals going to be kept?” demanded one of the Beefeaters. “There’s no room at my place.”
Balthazar Jones cleared his throat. “The construction of a penguin enclosure has already started in the moat, and it will be joined by a number of other pens. There will also be one on the grass outside the White Tower. Some of the disused towers will be used as well. The birds, for example, will be located in the Brick Tower.”
“What type of penguins are they?” asked the Yeoman Gaoler, whose sprawling beard covered his mountainous chins like grey heather. “They’re not the type that live on the Falkland Islands, are they? They’re more vicious than the Argies. Nip your arse as soon as look at you.”
Balthazar Jones took a sip of his pint. “All I remember is that they’re short-sighted when out of the water and are partial to squid,” he replied.
“Ex-servicemen looking after animals … I’ve never felt so humiliated in all my life,” raged the Chief Yeoman Warder, his embalmer’s fingers even paler than usual as he gripped the handle of his glass. “I hope you prove better at looking after animals than you are at catching pickpockets, Yeoman Warder Jones. Otherwise we’re all doomed.”
A number of Beefeaters got up to go to the bar, while the others continued to protest about the four-legged invasion. Balthazar Jones picked up his glass and walked over to inspect the canary, hoping that he would be forgotten. Bending down, he looked at the thinning bird. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a Fig Roll filched from a packet in the office bearing the words “Yeoman Gaoler” in black marker. He broke some off and offered the biscuit crumbs to the mute creature through the bars. Refusing to look him in the eye, it slowly sidestepped along its perch, then took a morsel in its beak with the speed of a pickpocket. The assembled Beefeaters turned in amazement to look at the crazed creature suddenly disgorging a surfeit of notes that had built up in its chest during its protracted period of silence. But while everyone gazed at the noisy bird, Rev. Septimus Drew turned his dark eyes once more to the heavenly Ruby Dore.
As the Beefeaters struggled to hear themselves above the yellow racket, the Ravenmaster finished his tomato juice. Despite the lure of the well-stocked bar, he avoided the soothing temptation of alcohol, as he needed his wits about him when handling his charges to avoid losing an eye.
“I’m just going to check on the birds,” he said to his wife, patting her on the knee. After blowing her a kiss from the door, which confused the Yeoman Gaoler who happened to be in his eye-line, he put on his hat and stepped outside. One of the few Beefeaters who had resisted growing a beard, he was immediately hit by the bitterness of the evening. Just as he was about to cross Water Lane, he saw Hebe Jones approaching on her way home from work, clouds of breath visible in the darkness as she hurried to escape the sadistic cold.
He paused in the doorway, taking his time to put on his black leather gloves. The pair had barely spoken since one of the odious ravens had relieved Mrs. Cook of her tail. In keeping with the duties of a mother, Hebe Jones had helped Milo in his fruitless search for the severed appendage. The boy was adamant that it could be sewn back on like the finger Thanos Grammatikos, his mother’s cousin, had lost during a misguided return to the dark art of carpentry. The six-year-old spent several hours scouring the Tower grounds, Hebe Jones on all fours next to him. Every now and again he would joyfully hold aloft a bit of twig, only to cast it aside upon closer inspection. Eventually, he came to the reluctant conclusion that it had been swallowed, one that his parents had reached much earlier, and the hunt was finally called off.
During the ensuing years, Balthazar and Hebe Jones had been obliged to remain civil with the Ravenmaster on account of the friendship that had developed between their two children. It started when Charlotte Broughton, who was eight months older than Milo, appeared at the Salt Tower one morning with what she insisted was a new tail for Mrs. Cook. Hebe Jones immediately invited her inside and followed her up the spiral staircase. The family sat on the sofa and held their breath as the girl slowly unfurled her tiny clenched fist. While his parents instantly recognised what was undeniably the end of a parsnip, Milo was thrilled with the new appendage. The two children immediately went in search of Mrs. Cook, whom they eventually found in the bathroom, and lay down on the floor next to her trying to fathom how to attach it. And, with the help of a piece of green wool, for a whole morning the oldest tortoise in the world dragged behind her the browning tip of a root vegetable, until Balthazar Jones spotted the creature and put a stop to the indignity.
THE RAVENMASTER TOUCHED THE BRIM of his hat as Hebe Jones walked past, and she nodded stiffly at him in return, her nose reddened by the cold. Once she was out of sight, he waited a few more minutes until he was certain that she had reached the Salt Tower. He then headed towards the wooden bird pens next to Wakefield Tower, barely visible for the clouds masking the moon. But when he reached them, he simply glanced at the closed doors and carried on walking, smoothing down his pigeon-grey mustache in anticipation. Arriving at the Brick Tower, he checked behind him, then felt for the enormous key he had slipped into his pocket while in the office.
He cursed under his breath at the noise the lock made when it eventually turned, and looked behind him once more. He then pushed open the door, and shut it behind him. Flicking on his lighter for a moment to get his bearings, he made his way up the steps of the tower that had once imprisoned William Wallace. Reaching the first floor, he groped in the darkness for the door latch and entered the empty room. He looked at his watch, a present from his wife, which glowed in the gloom. Still a few minutes early, he sat down on the wooden floorboards, took off his gloves, and waited, his heart clenched with anticipation.
Eventually, the Ravenmaster heard the bottom door open and gently close again. He rubbed his moist palms on his trouser legs as the sound of heels climbing the steps echoed up the stone staircase. It hadn’t taken him long to discover the delights of the Tower Café when it re-opened. However, his appreciation had nothing to do with the menu, which horrified the Beefeaters as much as the tourists, but everything to do with the delicious new chef. He immediately forgot Ambrosine Clarke’s lack of talent, which some believed bordered on cruelty, the moment he saw the glow of her formidable cleavage as she leant over to stir what was allegedly turnip soup. Her mind enfeebled by poor nutrition, she agreed to meet him at the Pig in a Poke pub, a short walk from the fortress. Sitting on the bar stool, she forgave him his lack of imagination regarding the choice of venue when he whispered into her ear his insurmountable appreciation of her eel pie. She forg
ave his repeated assertions that ravens were more intelligent than dogs when he placed a hand on her sturdy thigh and muttered exaltations about her tripe and mash. And she even forgave the fact that he had a wife when he ran the back of his fingers over her cheek, still flushed from the heat of the kitchen, and assured her that her suet pudding was better than his mother’s.
The Ravenmaster watched as the glow from a match crept its way up the wall towards him. Suddenly it was blown out, and the tower was plunged back into darkness. He listened as the footsteps approached the door, and passed slowly through the threshold. Recognising the smell of cooking fat, he got to his feet and reached for her. And when the Ravenmaster got to taste the succulent Ambrosine Clarke, he finally forgave her catastrophic cuisine.
ONCE SHE HAD LET HERSELF into the Salt Tower, Hebe Jones climbed to the roof to take down the sodden washing. It was stubbornness, rather than optimism, that had made her peg it out that morning before going to work. Lit up by a bone-coloured moon that had momentarily broken free of the clouds, she worked her way along the line, dropping into the plastic basket the heavy clothes that reeked of damp from the Thames. As she struggled to take down the bed sheets without trailing them in the puddles, she glanced over to Tower Bridge, and she remembered having to convince Milo, when he was still terrified of the place, that it had been old London Bridge, down the river, that had been mounted with severed heads.
When she walked into the kitchen with the basket, she found her husband sitting at the table with his head in his hands, his mustache still damp from a final swig of Scavenger’s Daughter to complete his reparation.
“Feeling all right?” she asked, squeezing behind his chair to get to the tumble dryer.
“Fine,” he replied, moving in his chair. “How was work? Anything interesting brought in?”
Hebe Jones’s mind immediately turned to the urn still sitting on top of the gigolo’s diary. “Not really,” she replied, feeding the sheets into the machine.
Once she had finished cooking supper, she reached for the two trays propped up against the bread bin. The couple no longer ate at the kitchen table in the evening, as neither could stand the silence that sat like an unwanted guest between them. After serving out the mousaka, a recipe passed down generations of Grammatikoses which she had hoped to teach Milo, she carried the trays to the living room and placed them on the coffee table in front of the settee. It was there that she found her husband again, dressed in a pair of ancient trousers with a hole at each pocket from the weight of his hands. They ate with their eyes on the television, rather than on each other. As soon as they had finished, Balthazar Jones got up to wash the dishes, which he no longer left until the end of the evening as it gave him an excuse to leave the room. Once he had finished, he stepped over Mrs. Cook and headed for the door to the staircase.
“What do you think Milo would have looked like now?” Hebe Jones suddenly asked as he raised his hand to the latch.
He froze. “I don’t know,” he replied, not turning round. After closing the door behind him, Balthazar Jones made his way up the spiral staircase, the scuff of his tartan slippers amplified by the ancient stone that surrounded him. Arriving at the top floor, he felt in the darkness for the handle and pushed open the door to the room that his wife never entered, as the chalk graffiti left on the walls by the German U-boat men imprisoned during the war gave her the creeps. He switched on the light, revealing the night at the lattice windows surrounding him on all sides, and sat down on the hardback chair at the table. Picking up his pen, he started to compose his next batch of letters that he hoped would secure him a fellow member of the St. Heribert of Cologne Club. And two floors below him Hebe Jones sat alone on the sofa trying to answer her own question as the cracks of her heart opened.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE DAY EXOTIC BEASTS RETURNED to the Tower of London, Mrs. Cook’s ancient bowels defeated her. Balthazar Jones discovered the disgrace as he made his way to the bathroom in the early hours of the morning. Still seeking the courage to tell his wife about the animals’ imminent arrival, he hadn’t slept. He had hoped that the news would have reached her, sparing him the onerous task. But she remained completely oblivious. This was due, he concluded, to her having given up all social activities within the fortress, which included folding herself up into mysterious positions after one of the Beefeaters’ wives indoctrinated her into the cult of yoga.
He sat in the darkness on the side of the bath, his pajama leg pulled up to his knee as he washed Mrs. Cook’s indiscretion off his foot. He gazed out of the lattice window towards the Thames, glowing with the sparks of a new day. And, as he looked at the Tower wharf, his thoughts turned to the tale he had told Milo of when the ship bearing England’s first ostriches arrived, courtesy of the Dey of Tunis, the North African ruler, in the eighteenth century. He and his son had been collapsed on deck chairs on the lawn by the White Tower, the loathsome tourists long since locked out for the day. After handing him a glass of lemonade, the Beefeater told the boy how the curious crowd that had gathered when the vessel docked at the fortress recoiled with dread as two giant birds stalked down the gangplank, shook their dusty behinds, and released a volley of evil-smelling droppings.
The Londoners quivered at the sight of their hideous two-toed feet, he continued, and gasped when a beaming crew member held above his orange turban a white egg almost the size of his head. The onlookers’ horror was complete when the birds fluttered their long, lustrous eyelashes at the crowd and lunged their pitifully small heads at the nearest bystanders to snatch a pearl button and a clay pipe, which were immediately swallowed. The pair were swiftly housed in a roofed pen to prevent them flying away. But it wasn’t long before one of them was dead, having swallowed too many nails fed to it by an eager public convinced of the rumour that the creatures could digest iron.
Milo listened in silence, gripping the sides of his seat as the story unfolded. Afterwards he kissed his father on the cheek and ran off to ride his bike around the moat with the other Tower children. Balthazar Jones didn’t give the ostrich tale another thought until two days later, when they rushed Milo to hospital white with pain, and the doctor tapped his pen on the X-ray of the boy’s twisted gut, indicating the edges of what was unmistakably a fifty-pence piece.
BALTHAZAR JONES ROLLED DOWN his pajama leg and returned to bed. Convinced his wife was safely settled on the seabed of slumber, he turned his head towards her and muttered that not only was the Tower about to have a new menagerie, but that he had been put in charge of it. Satisfied that he had finally done his duty, he turned away and closed his eyes. But Hebe Jones immediately rose to the surface of her sleep with the thrust of a sea serpent.
“But you know how much I hate animals,” she protested. “Putting up with that geriatric tortoise has been bad enough, and I only did that because you insisted that she was part of the family.”
The argument only came to an end when Balthazar Jones got up to go to the lavatory again, where he remained for so long battling against the obstinacy of constipation that Hebe Jones fell asleep.
When the shriek of the alarm woke them several hours later, they got dressed on either side of the bedroom in silence. Neither had breakfast so as to avoid having to sit at the kitchen table together. And when they eventually bumped into each other the only thing they exchanged was the word “goodbye.”
After his wife had left for work, Balthazar Jones ran a clothes brush over the shoulders of his tunic and grabbed his hat from the top of the wardrobe. He drove out of the Tower headed for London Zoo, his hands clamped tightly on the wheel as he tried to concentrate after so little sleep. Sliding around next to him was his partisan, an eight-foot pike-like weapon that could gut a man in an instant. Though it was usually reserved for ceremonial occasions, Oswin Fielding had insisted that he bring it along as the equerry wanted him to look as “Beefeatery” as possible for the press.
When he eventually found a parking space between the television satellite vans,
he remained behind the wheel for a few moments trying to summon enough courage for the task ahead of him. But it never came, so he got out anyway, forgetting his partisan. He walked through the wrought-iron gates and stood watching as a single file of penguins waddled up a gangplank into a van following a trail of glistening fish. Once they were inside, a solitary bird stood at the door looking back towards the enclosure. The driver, the sleeves of his checked shirt rolled up to his elbows, shooed it inside, swiftly removed the gangplank, and closed the door. Suddenly the Beefeater heard the sound of slapping. He turned to see a solitary penguin following the wet footprints, rocking from side to side as it attempted to run.
“You’ve forgotten one!” he yelled.
“For Christ’s sake!” said the driver, who had already reached for the cigarettes he had vowed to give up that morning. “I knew this job would be a nightmare. It’ll have to come in the front with me. I’m not opening that door again. It’s taken me over two hours and a trip to the fishmongers to get the ruddy lot in. They’re worse than bloody kids. And I should know, I’ve got four of ’em. What’s that you’re wearing, anyway? Fancy dress or something?”
Things began to deviate wildly from what Oswin Fielding had referred to as “The Plan” when he approached Balthazar Jones and informed him that the press wanted to take a picture of him with some of the Queen’s animals. After berating the Beefeater for leaving his partisan in the car, the equerry then herded the journalists towards the monkey house. He stopped outside the Geoffroy’s marmosets’ enclosure, seduced by the innocence of their white faces and their fluffy black ears. What he didn’t know, however, was that the creatures’ keeper had been trying all morning to entice them out of their cages in readiness for their journey to the Tower. But the longer she tried to lure them with pieces of chopped fruit, the more desperately they clung on to the bars, until she gave up and went to weep in the lavatory. When the man from the Palace introduced Balthazar Jones to the press as Keeper of the Royal Menagerie, and stood him in front of them, the marmosets displayed their most defensive behaviour yet. And the monkeys continued to flash their privates long after the most sexually depraved of the journalists had blushed to the roots of their hair.
