The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise by Julia Stuart Read Free Book Online Page A

who had clutched the urn while sitting in the passenger seat in a private state of agony, placed it on the coffee table next to Milo’s kazoo on her way to the kitchen to make three cups of tea. The couple sat on the sofa in suffocating silence, the third cup abandoned on the tray, neither of them able to look at the thing on the table that induced in them both a secret wish to die. Several days later, Hebe Jones noticed that her husband had placed it on the ancient mantelpiece. The following week,unable to bear seeing it any longer, she put it in the wardrobe until they had decided upon Milo’s final resting place. But each time one of them brought up the subject, the other, suddenly caught off guard, had felt too bruised to reply. So it remained at the back of the shelf behind Hebe Jones’s sweaters. And every night, before turning off her bedside light, the mother would find an excuse to open the wardrobe doors and silently wish her child goodnight, unable to abandon the ritual she had performed for eleven years.

CHAPTER FOUR

    F OR WHAT HE CONSIDERED to be very good reasons, Balthazar Jones decided not to tell his wife about the visit from the equerry with the splendid umbrella. When, several days later, at the demonic hour of 3:13 a.m., Hebe Jones sat bolt upright in bed and asked, “So what did the man from the Palace want?” the Beefeater muttered with the colourful breath of a man still embedded in his dreams that it was something to do with the drains. He instantly regretted his reply. Hebe Jones remained in the same erect position for the following eleven minutes as she pointed out that while their lavatory may very well be connected to an historic garderobe, the monstrous smell of petrified effluent left by centuries of prisoners that hung like a fog in their home whenever the drains blocked was not protected by any royal decree.
    The Beefeater had considered Oswin Fielding’s proposal to be utter lunacy. Once the tourists had been locked out of the fortress for the day, he spent the rest of his afternoons collapsed on his blue-and-white-striped deckchair on the battlements engulfed in the creeping darkness, hoping that royalenthusiasm for the menagerie would wane. While he didn’t suffer from his wife’s natural horror of them, animals offered little in the way of interest for him. The one exception was Mrs. Cook, whom generations of Joneses had completely forgotten was a tortoise. She was regarded more as a loose-bowelled geriatric relative with a propensity for absconding, such a protracted habit that nobody ever realised she had vanished until weeks later, as her sedate trajectory across the room was still burnt on their memories.
    It was only after being summoned to the office in the Byward Tower that the Beefeater realised that being in charge of the Queen’s beasts might in fact be to his benefit. He pushed open the office’s studded door to see the Chief Yeoman Warder sitting behind his desk within the cold, circular walls, his fingers, as soft and pale as an embalmer’s, laced over his stomach. He looked at his watch with irritation and then gestured to a seat. Balthazar Jones sat down, placed his dark blue hat on his lap, and held on to its brim with both hands.
    “I’ll get straight to the point, Yeoman Warder Jones,” the man said, his grey beard clipped with the precision of topiary. “Guarding the Tower and capturing professional pickpockets are very much part of the job for which thousands of retired British servicemen would give their back teeth, if they still had any, to be selected.”
    He leant forward and rested his elbows on the desk. “You were one of our best when you first arrived,” he continued. “I remember the time you rugby-tackled that chap on Tower Green. He had five wallets on him at the time, if I recall correctly. I know things haven’t been easy, what with that dreadful business with the little chap. But time has moved on. We can’tafford to have a weak link.