Balthazar Jones and the Tower of London Zoo. Julia Stuart

with the pop-up leg rest, she would rampage through the pages, intoxicated by the heady fumes of fantasy.

      On hearing the Swiss cowbell, she brushed away a kink of hair that had escaped from its mooring, pushed her glasses up her nose, and headed back to the counter. On the way she tried to open the safe, as was the office custom. But it remained as closed as the day it had been discovered on the Circle Line five years ago.

      Turning the corner, she found Arthur Catnip partially obscured by a bunch of yellow roses. It was the second bouquet he had bought her. When he found the shutter closed the first time, his courage instantly abandoned him, and he fled to the street. He offered the flowers to the first woman he encountered, but she, along with the eleven after her, rejected the gift in the common belief that all fellow Londoners had the potential to be psychotic lunatics.

      Flowers were not the only gift the ticket inspector of limited height had bought for Valerie Jennings. Recognising her weakness for literature on account of her habit of reading the back of each novel he handed in, he scoured the capital’s second-hand bookshops for something to give her pleasure. Ignoring the bestselling paperbacks, he eventually came across the work of the obscure nineteenth-century novelist Miss E. Clutterbuck. Skimming the pages, he found that the female protagonist who featured in all of her work was graced with stoutness, a fearsome intellect, and a long line of suitors of varying heights. Never once did a tale end without the heroine having discovered a new country, invented a scientific theory, or solved the most fiendish of crimes. It was only then that she would retire to her parlour with a bowl of rhubarb and custard to consider her numerous marriage proposals, surrounded by love tokens of yellow roses. Arthur Catnip bought all the novelist’s work that he could find, and would arrive at the original Victorian counter with his latest cloth-backed musty purchase, claiming he had found it in a carriage. Valerie Jennings’s face would immediately light up at the prospect of another instalment. And she would gaze with unfettered anticipation at the colour plates of the fleshy heroine throttling a serpent in a newly discovered land, introducing her latest invention to awed gentlemen in Parliament, and stepping out with one of her elegantly moustached admirers, a number of whom were of inferior height.

      Suddenly finding himself in the presence of Valerie Jennings while holding the flowers of choice of Miss E. Clutterbuck’s suitors, Arthur Catnip was unable to speak.

      ‘How lovely!’ she said, peering at the bouquet. ‘They must have been for someone special. Where were they left?’

      Panic rattled him, and Arthur Catnip found himself uttering the three wretched words that he spent the following week regretting.

      ‘The Victoria Line.’

      Rev. Septimus Drew crossed the cobbles on his way back from the chapel, where he had waited yet again in vain for the woman who had unsettled his heart. As he approached his front door, he looked around hoping to spot her, but all he saw were the first of the loathsome tourists who had started to seep into the Tower. As he reached into his cassock pocket for the key, he noticed that the visitors were not in fact the first, as there was someone already sitting on the bench next to the White Tower staring straight at him. Knees clamped together, and her short gunmetal hair lifting in the breeze, he recognised instantly the chairwoman of the Richard III Appreciation Society. For months she had been trying to persuade him to become a member, her passion for the maligned monarch inflamed by the gasoline of unrequited love for the clergyman. Fearing that she was going to try and convince him yet again of the injustice of the King’s reputation as a hunchbacked child slayer, Rev. Septimus Drew quickly unlocked his door and closed it behind him.

      He made his way down the hall to his bachelor’s sitting room where he spent more time than he cared to. Avoiding the unruly spring, he sat down on the sofa, a relic from the former chaplain, along with the rest of the mismatched furniture. Picking up a biography of Jack Black, rat-catcher and mole destroyer by appointment to Queen Victoria, he started to read. But he soon found his mind wandering after the woman who had failed to return to the chapel. His gaze settled on the family portrait on the mantelpiece taken on Christmas Day when his six sisters had come to his home for lunch with their husbands and numerous children. As his eyes ran along the familiar faces, he tasted the bitterness of failure for being the only one who still wasn’t married.

      His nose still invaded by the smell of rat droppings from the chapel, he picked up a bottle of Rescue Remedy from the side table, and released two drops on to his tongue. His belief in the mystical powers of the blend of five flowers, and the other more lunatic offerings distilled by the druids of alternative medicine, was as strong as his belief in the Holy Spirit. As the chaplain advanced towards middle age, he had begun to grab all the defences against ill health he could find, filling his bathroom cabinet with the latest tinctures and potions brewed for the worried well. For he was firmly of the conviction that the body was more susceptible to disease without the presence of love to warm the organs.

      The belief was not without its foundations, however unstable. He had watched his elderly mother, the colour of porridge, lying in a hospital bed for months, while the entire family was convinced that she would meet her maker at any moment. It was such a foregone conclusion that the music for the funeral had been chosen, and the florist put on standby for the approaching calamity. With her sheet pulled up to her whiskered chin, Florence Drew spoke of nothing other than joining her husband in heaven. Her only fear was that he would fail to recognise her on account of the disease that had infiltrated her body.