As Balthazar Jones passed Wakefield Tower, the sound of the Thames lapping through Traitors’ Gate seemed louder than usual in the darkness. He looked to his left and saw the vast wooden watergates that had once opened to let in the boats carrying trembling prisoners accused of treason. But he spared not a thought for such matters, the details of which he had to relate countless times during his working day to the tourists who were only interested in methods of torture, executions and the whereabouts of the lavatories. Instead, he pressed on, past the Bloody Tower with its red rambling rose, said to have produced snow-white blossoms before the murder of the two little princes. Neither did he notice the dancing candlelight at one of its windows, where the ghost of Sir Walter Raleigh nibbled the end of his quill as he sat at his desk in what had been his prison for thirteen years.
Climbing up the stone steps, the Beefeater quickly reached the battlements. In front of him stretched the Thames where Henry III’s white bear had once swum for its dinner. But Balthazar Jones kept his pale blue eyes raised as he tried to work out from which direction the precious rain would come. Touching his white beard with his fingertips as he made his calculations, he scoured the sky through which the dawn was starting to leak.
Unable to sleep since her husband woke her as he left, Hebe Jones sneezed twice, irritated by the dust on her pillow. Rolling on to her back, she dragged a clump of damp hair from the corner of her mouth. Instead of coursing down her back as it had done during the lusty days of youth, it meandered slowly to her shoulders. Despite her age, apart from the odd strand that flashed like a silver fish in certain lights, it was the same luminous black it had been when Balthazar Jones first met her, a defiance of nature that he put down to his wife’s obstinacy.
As she lay in the darkness, she imagined her husband walking through the Tower’s grounds in his pyjamas, clutching an Egyptian perfume bottle in a hand that no longer caressed her. She had tried her best to rid him of his compulsion. During his first few attempts, she had caught him before he reached the bedroom door. But he soon improved his technique, and before long he was able to make it halfway down the stairs before he heard the seven words which he had grown to dread, uttered with the same red breath as his mother’s: And where do you think you’re going? However, dedication to the high art of vanishing resulted in a number of spectacular successes.
Hebe Jones began to monitor the escape manuals he borrowed from the public library, and locked the bedroom door before they turned out their reading lights, hiding the key while her husband was in the bathroom battling with the loneliness of constipation. But the trick backfired one morning when she could not remember where she had put it. Through a mouthful of humiliation which threatened to choke her, she asked him to help her in her search. He removed the loose stone next to one of the lattice windows, but all he found were the more aromatic love letters he had sent her during their courtship. He then strode to the fireplace, put his hand up the vast stone hood, and retrieved an old sweet tin from a ledge. Upon opening it he discovered a pair of silver cufflinks bearing his initials in the most alluring of scripts. His wife revealed that it was a gift she had bought for him four Christmases ago, which she had never been able to put her hands on. Her joy at seeing them again, and Balthazar Jones’s delight at suddenly receiving an unexpected present, distracted them both from their predicament. But before long, the hunt resumed until Balthazar Jones found what was indisputably a sex aid in the drawer of his wife’s bedside table. ‘What on earth is this for?’ he asked, pushing a button. Their dilemma was forgotten again for the next thirty-four minutes, during which many questions were asked. The answers that were forthcoming led to further questions, which in turn produced a series of accusations from both sides.
It was over an hour before they returned to their search. By then the cufflinks were back in the tin up the chimney with the announcement that he would have to wait until Christmas for them. Eventually, the pair admitted defeat, and Balthazar Jones reached for the phone and called the Chief Yeoman Warder to release them. The man made four attempts before the spare key sailed through one of the open windows. It was then that Hebe Jones spotted the original still in the keyhole, and she secretly removed it.
From then on the bedroom door remained unlocked, and no amount of protests would keep the Beefeater from his nocturnal wandering. It was with relief that Hebe Jones took the news one morning that her husband had been caught by the Chief Yeoman Warder. However, her relief turned to indignation when the rumours quickly followed that Balthazar Jones was carrying out a secret liaison with Evangeline Moore, the Tower’s young resident doctor, who quickened the heart rate of many of her patients. The claim was not without credibility as most affairs conducted by the Tower’s inhabitants took place within its walls, as they were locked in from midnight. While Hebe Jones knew instantly that there was no truth in the rumour – since Milo’s death her husband hadn’t allowed himself the pleasure of love-making – she nevertheless banished him from the matrimonial bed for a fortnight. Feet either side of the taps, Balthazar Jones slept in the bath. He endured the cramped, damp conditions dreaming amongst the spiders of being lost at sea in a sinking boat. Each morning Hebe Jones would get up early to run a bath, being careful not to remove her husband beforehand, and always ensuring that she ran the cold water first.
Now, as she looked at the bedside clock, fury coursed through her veins at yet another night of disturbed sleep. Her usual revenge, performed each time her husband returned to bed reeking of the night, was an anatomical masterstroke. Once she heard the muddy breath of a man descended deep into his dreams, she would suddenly leap from the bed and make the short journey to the bathroom with the gait of a demented sentry. Once installed on the lavatory, she would proceed to empty her bladder with the door wide open. The clamour of the catastrophic downpour was such that her husband would immediately wake in terror, convinced that he was lying in a nest of snakes. When the infernal hissing eventually came to an end, the Beefeater would instantly sink back to his dreams. But several seconds later, in a feat of immaculate timing, his wife would release a second, much shorter but equally deafening cascade, which would finish with a tone-perfect rising pitch, and wake her husband as brutally as the first.
Pulling the shabby blanket up to her chin, Hebe Jones thought of the cabinets of Egyptian perfume bottles filled with rain in the top room of the Salt Tower, and then of the cruelty of grief. Compassion suddenly chilled her rage. Ignoring the glass of water on her bedside table that she usually drank in its entirety on such occasions, she turned back on to her side. When her husband eventually returned home with his empty vessel after the clouds had fled, Hebe Jones pretended to be asleep. And when the torment of a full bladder woke her an hour later, she rolled on to her back to alleviate the suffering that eventually reached her ears.
It was the sight of her husband’s dressing gown hanging on the back of the bedroom door, an Egyptian perfume bottle still in its pocket, that reignited Hebe Jones’s anger the following morning. She pressed down on the latch with irritation, having lost all compassion for her husband because of a headache brought on by her broken night’s sleep. She descended the stairs in her pink leather slippers and nightclothes, recalling the previous occasions that her dreams had been disturbed by her husband’s obsession. When he joined her for breakfast at the kitchen table, she placed in front of him a plate of eggs that had been scrambled more vigorously than usual, then released the full fury inside her.
Several minutes later, the Beefeater’s stomach shrank again as she suddenly veered away from his compulsion, and launched into the many injustices of living within the fortress. She started with the Salt Tower roof that was such a poor exchange for her beloved garden at their house in Catford, which the wretched lodgers had let go to seed. Then there was the gossip that spread through the monument like fire. And finally there were the mournful sounds that permeated their home, once the prison of numerous Catholic priests during the reign of Elizabeth I, which both had pretended to Milo that they couldn’t hear.
For a moment Balthazar Jones closed his ears, having heard the complaints on countless previous occasions, and picked up his knife and fork. But suddenly his wife came up with a wholly new deprivation that caught his attention. Despite her unrepentant aversion to Italian food, which her husband put