The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise (24 page)

“No. Why?”

“The suitcase under your desk.”

It didn’t take long for the tears to come. Hebe Jones cried for her husband, whom, up until the tragedy, she had still looked forward to seeing each day after three decades of marriage. She cried for Milo all alone in heaven, whom she couldn’t wait to join. And just when she thought she had finished, she cried for the stranger who had lost the remains of Clementine Perkins, whom she wasn’t able to find. It wasn’t until over an hour later, when Valerie Jennings had installed her in the armchair with the pop-up leg rest and carried her suitcase to the spare room, that her tears finally stopped.

R
EV. SEPTIMUS DREW STRODE
across Tower Green, leaving large, dark footprints on the stiff, frosted grass. Much of the night had been spent agonising over Ruby Dore’s affection for the creature not worthy of a mention in the Bible, and lamenting his failure to seduce her with his mother’s treacle cake. By the time he woke, there had not even been time for the delights of Fortnum & Mason’s thick-cut marmalade. He left the fortress as fast as his excessively long legs could carry him, ignoring the Yeoman Gaoler, who was calling his name from a bedroom window. As he sat on the Tube carriage, heading for the shelter for retired prostitutes, his fingers worked their way into the cake tin on his lap, and he broke off a small piece of biscuit from the batch he had baked for them. Each had been shaped into the form of a disciple, their distinguishing features meticulously piped with white icing. As he nibbled, he hoped that none of the ladies would notice that Judas Iscariot’s legs were missing.

By the time he arrived, the matron had already shown the
new resident to her room with its single bed surmounted by a wooden cross. Sitting opposite her in the communal living room, the chaplain explained that she would be given free board and lodging for six months, during which time she would be helped to find alternative employment. In the meantime, she could, if she wished, assist the other women in the vegetable garden, which had become a labour of love. For, he explained, apart from prayer, there was nothing more restorative for the soul than growing something in God’s good earth. He offered the woman the tin of biscuits, and she helped herself with painted fingernails. After brushing the crumbs from her red lips, she congratulated the clergyman on his talent for baking, and then politely enquired whether Judas Iscariot had really been disabled.

When the chaplain had returned to the Tower, and stood at his blue front door searching in his pocket for the key, a tourist approached and asked whether he knew where the zorilla was kept. “Down there, on the right,” the clergyman replied pointing. “Follow your nose.” Once inside, he locked the door behind him and headed up the battered wooden stairs to his study. Arming himself with his fountain pen, he started to compose a sermon of sufficient intrigue to keep the Beefeaters from sleeping, slumped against the radiators.

The clergyman was so engrossed in his work that he failed to hear the first knock at the front door. He ignored the second one, fearing it was the chairwoman of the Richard III Appreciation Society. He had spotted her sitting on a bench by the White Tower on his return, and instantly recognised a woman burning with desire to impart the society’s latest
evidence that the maligned monarch had the most waterproof of alibis.

On the third knock, Rev. Septimus put down his pen with irritation, and stood with his forehead against the cold window as he peered down to see who was beating at his door. His heart tightened the moment he saw Ruby Dore blowing onto her hands and stamping her feet in the cold. He descended with such a commotion that when he opened the door the landlady enquired whether he had fallen down the stairs.

Panicked and delighted in equal measures at the surprise visit, the clergyman stood back to let her in. He indicated the way to the kitchen, not wanting her to see his melancholic bachelor’s sitting room, particularly with its biography of Queen Victoria’s rat-catcher on the armchair. But as he offered her a seat at the scrubbed-top table, he wondered whether he had made the right decision after all. There, on the counter, was the mournful teapot for one, with its matching single cup; sitting in the vegetable rack was a solitary carrot sprouting roots; and propped up on the windowsill was an excessively thumbed edition of
Solo Suppers
. He busied himself filling the kettle to hide his unease, and eventually turned to face her again holding two mugs out in front of him.

“Tea or coffee?” he asked.

“Coffee, please,” she replied, taking off the lavender scarf she had knitted and resting it on the table.

Once they were sitting opposite each other Ruby Dore covered her face with both hands and muttered through her fingers: “I’ve got something to confess.”

The chaplain was about to explain that he didn’t do confessions,
and she’d be better off with the Catholics down the road, but the landlady continued. She had intended to return the cake that he had left behind in the pub, she insisted. But when she opened the lid and smelt it, she couldn’t resist having a slice. She then had a second just to confirm that it was as good as she had thought. Deciding that she couldn’t return a partially eaten cake, she promptly finished it. “I had thought about blaming the canary, but I didn’t think you’d buy that,” she admitted.

Rev. Septimus Drew dismissed the apology with a bat of a hand, insisting that her lack of resistance was a compliment to his mother, whose recipe it was. The landlady immediately asked for a copy, and he wrote it down with the flamboyant penmanship of a victim of love. As they drank their coffee, Ruby Dore told him of the latest object she had acquired for her collection of Tower artefacts: a pot of rouge said to have been used by Lord Nithsdale for his escape from the Tower in 1716 dressed as a woman. The clergyman replied that out of all the escapes, this was his favourite, and that he hoped one day to visit Traquair House in the Scottish Borders, where the woman’s cloak worn by the bearded Jacobite was on display.

As the landlady got up to leave, Rev. Septimus Drew suddenly felt the bruise of loneliness. “Do you fancy going to see the museum in Westminster Abbey this morning?” he suddenly found himself asking. “The exhibits include what is probably the oldest stuffed parrot in the world.”

Once Ruby Dore had left to find someone to take her place behind the bar, the chaplain fled upstairs. He took off his cassock, combed his hair hard, and returned to his place at the
kitchen table hoping that she would be in luck. It wasn’t long before she reappeared, having bribed a Beefeater’s wife with a bottle of wine to stand in for her.

They squeezed their way out of the Tower through the tourists, and were equally taken aback by the length of the queue waiting to get in. Sitting opposite each other on the Tube, they discussed the extraordinary popularity of the royal menagerie, which had taken everyone by surprise. It wasn’t until the chaplain had finished telling her of his affection for the Jesus Christ lizards that he noticed that he had forgotten to put on his socks before leaving.

When they arrived at the Abbey, Ruby Dore asked whether he minded if they had a quick look at the monument to Sir Isaac Newton, who had been Master of the Royal Mint, based at the Tower, for twenty-eight years. They stood side by side looking at the relief panel on the sarcophagus showing naked boys holding up a gold ingot and containers of coins, and firing up a kiln. Much to her delight, the chaplain then took her to Poets’ Corner to show her the grey Purbeck marble monument to Geoffrey Chaucer, who had been Clerk of Works at the fortress from 1389 to 1391.

Stopping briefly to point out Britain’s oldest door, thought to have been built in the 1050s, Rev. Septimus Drew led the way to the museum in the eleventh-century vaulted undercroft of St. Peter. Ruby Dore gazed in wonderment at the collection of life-size effigies of kings, queens, and society figures, most of them dressed in their own clothes, and all, except Lord Nelson, buried in the Abbey.

The clergyman explained that at one time the bodies of dead monarchs were embalmed and put on display for the
funeral procession and service. Later, effigies were used instead due to the length of time it took to prepare for the ceremony. After 1660, effigies no longer formed part of the funeral procession, replaced by a gold crown on a purple cushion, but were used to mark the place of burial.

He showed her the cabinet bearing the oldest: Edward III made from a hollowed-out piece of walnut wood. The fourteenth-century curiosity had been analysed by an expert from the Metropolitan Police Laboratory. “Its few surviving eyebrow hairs were found to be those of a small dog,” he added.

As they moved on to Henry VII, the clergyman pointed out that his face, with its lop-sided mouth, hollow cheeks, and tightly set jaw, was based on his death mask.

Ruby Dore wandered over to Nelson, bought in 1806 to attract people visiting his tomb in St. Paul’s Cathedral back into the fee-charging Abbey. Joining her, Rev. Septimus Drew pointed out: “His left eye appears to be blind, instead of his right.”

Finally, the couple approached the Duchess of Richmond and Lennox, dressed in the robes she wore for the Coronation of Queen Anne in 1702. Ruby Dore immediately bent down to take a closer look at the historic stuffed parrot perched on a stand next to the effigy, which for centuries had attracted a pilgrimage of myopic taxidermists from around the world, who knelt in reverence in front of the holy specimen.

As she contemplated the bird, Rev. Septimus Drew, whose fascinating insights into the collection had earned him a number of eavesdroppers, recounted the tale of the parrot and the Duchess. When Frances Stuart was appointed maid of honour
to Charles II’s wife, such was the teenager’s beauty, the King immediately fell for her. But he was not the only one to have noticed the considerable virtues of the girl, later used as a model for Britannia on medals. In an attempt to seduce her, an infatuated courtier gave her a young parrot as a love token, acquired from a Portuguese sailor who had been blown off course. The bird spoke nothing but Portuguese profanities, and Frances Stuart devoted so much time trying to coax out of it the simplest of English niceties that the King, jealous of the attention she gave the creature, attempted all manner of subterfuge to kill it. But the wily bird picked out the poisoned nuts from its bowl, instantly spotted the toes of the servants hiding behind the tapestries with nets, and immediately sensed when a hand approached not to tickle its throat, but to throttle it.

Frances Stuart eventually eloped and married the Duke of Richmond and Lennox. But when she returned to court, the King was as bewitched as ever, and his jealousy of the foulmouthed bird was as fierce as his adoration for its mistress. In his darkest moments, he swore that the parrot had been his life’s most confounding love rival. When, in 1702, the Duchess eventually passed away, the parrot mourned in the most eloquent of English, and then died six days later. The parrot was stuffed and displayed with her memorial effigy out of respect for its forty-year friendship. And the King, long since buried in the Abbey, was unable to overrule her instructions.

Ruby Dore was so delighted by the account that on the way out she bought a postcard of the Duchess, which sadly lacked her much more famous pet. And, as she walked back to Westminster station with Rev. Septimus Drew, she wondered why so many men spun stories of their own brilliance, when
women would much rather hear an intriguing tale about a stuffed parrot.