Chapter 5
Daisy shivered as she walked down Tower Hill in the dusk.
It was chilly, but her shivers had more to do with the veils of mist rising from the river, swathing the Tower in mystery, so that its menacing bulk loomed larger than ever.
Hoots and whistles from shipping on the Thames added to the eerie atmosphere.
Public visiting hours were over, the ticket office and refreshment room closed. The gates onto the wharf would be locked, by now. The world outside had changed, but the Tower was still a mediaeval town, huddled behind walls to keep out unwelcome travellers.
One of the pair of sentries at the Middle Tower challenged Daisy. She was glad to see the unmistakable silhouette of a Yeoman Warder approaching in the hazy gaslight under the arch.
“Mrs. Fletcher? The Governor sent me to meet you.” He spoke to the sentry, who lowered his rifle to the ground.
“Thanks,” said Daisy. “For a moment, I was afraid I was supposed to know a secret password.”
“No fear, madam. Wouldn’t be secret then, would it? ’Sides, you wouldn’t want to walk alone around here on a nasty night like this. Lovely weather for ghosts, it is.”
“Yes, isn’t it?”
They went through the arch and across the bridge. Fog flowed along the moat channel as if the Thames were returning to refill it. Tendrils twisted up to twine about the gas lamp in the middle of the bridge.
“Getting thicker. We’ll have a pea-souper by morning, I shouldn’t wonder.”
Daisy was dismayed. She didn’t want to have to choose tomorrow between being stuck in the Tower and trying to find her way home through one of London’s infamous yellow fogs.
The mixture of smoke from countless coal fires and the river’s natural exudations could become almost as impenetrable as it was unbreathable.
Under the Byward Tower arch, a yeoman was on guard.
From the right came the sound of jollity.
Seeing Daisy glance that way, her yeoman said, “The Warders’ Hall, madam.
” He turned to the door on the left. “I’ll just pop in here and tell Mr. Crabtree you’ve arrived, if you don’t mind waiting a half a tick. ”
“Please give Mr. Crabtree my regards.” Daisy hoped he meant “half a tick.” If he was gone any longer, she’d seek refuge among the merry warders in their hall.
But he returned very quickly, conveyed the Chief Warder’s respects, and accompanied her along Water Street, under the Bloody Tower, and round to the King’s House.
To Daisy’s surprise, Colonel and Mrs. Duggan were dining with the Resident Governor.
“I don’t believe in family feuds,” Mrs. Tebbit told her loudly. “Such a lot of childish fuss and bother over nothing! Besides which, I’m far too old to rein in those resty fillies, and Myrtle’s quite incapable of managing them on her own.”
“Oh, Mother!” Miss Tebbit succumbed to a fit of coughing.
General Carradine turned purple. The Duggans looked uncomfortable. Jeremy Webster remained as impenetrable as a pea-souper. Fay and Brenda grinned.
Mrs. Tebbit winked at them. “If Mrs. Duggan is willing to lend a hand, let her, say I.”
While Carradine fussed over drinks, the back of his neck gradually returning to its normal colour, Fay and Brenda converged on Daisy.
“Isn’t she marvellous?”
“We simply adore her.”
Though the girls were oblivious of constraint, the others struggled to make polite conversation.
Mrs. Duggan made a brave attempt to chat with Miss Tebbit, who coughed periodically and dabbed at her eyes, apologizing and saying she hoped she was not coming down with something.
Mr. Webster and Colonel Duggan remained speechless, the latter harrumphing now and then, which gave a curious effect of ventriloquism, as if the croaks of the fictional Jeremy Fisher were issuing from Duggan’s mouth. Fortunately, dinner was soon announced.
On the way downstairs, Daisy recalled Mrs. Tebbit’s mention of Lord Nithsdale’s escape from the room at the head of the stairs. Once seated, she asked General Carradine if he could tell her the details. The story turned out to be a favourite of his.
Everyone listened to the tale of how Lady Nithsdale, hearing her husband had been arrested for his part in the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, rode from the North through icy winter weather to plead for his life.
Failing to move George I, she had persuaded the Governor of the Tower to let her visit the prisoner.
“The evening before the execution,” Carradine related, “she brought several women friends with her to the Tower, and women’s clothes hidden under her cloak.
It’s said the earl wasn’t happy about dressing as a woman, but his wife convinced him of the necessity.
She used rouge to redden his eyes, as if he’d been weeping, and with a shawl over his head and the others around him bemoaning Nithsdale’s fate, they all trooped down the stairs and away.
He escaped the country dressed as a servant to the Venetian ambassador. ”
“A good story,” said Colonel Duggan. He laughed. “That must have taken the Governor and the warders down a peg, letting him run off like that.”
The general glared at him. If looks could kill, the colonel’s dinner would have gone to waste.
Mrs. Tebbit flung fuel on the flames. “It sounds to me as if someone must have been bribed. Not the Governor, I dare say,” she added with a vestige of discretion, as her cousin appeared about to burst a blood vessel. “A Yeoman Warder or two.”
“The very first prisoner at the Tower escaped,” said Webster, his enigmatic glasses making it impossible to gauge his intent, pacific or inflammatory.
“He was a churchman, Bishop of Durham. He had a rope smuggled to him in a cask of wine, made his guards drunk, and climbed down from the White Tower.”
“Oh, yes,” Daisy put in, “the rope was too short, wasn’t it?
He fell but then picked himself up and scurried away.
But that was when the Tower was still a royal palace—that is, when the royal family still lived here—centuries before the Yeoman Warders existed.
Mr. Rumford, the Yeoman Gaoler, told me about it.
You said he knows everything, General, and there wasn’t a single question I asked that he didn’t have the answer to.
You couldn’t have chosen a more helpful guide. ”
She succeeded in turning his attention from escaping prisoners. At least he ceased to look apoplectic, though his expression could hardly have been described as cheerful. “Glad the fellow made himself useful,” he muttered, and sank into a depressed silence.
Mrs. Tebbit glanced around the table. “What a lot of long faces,” she declared. “You all dislike him? What’s wrong with the man?”
“I’ve only spoken to Mr. Rumford once, briefly,” said Mrs. Duggan. “I can’t claim to know him.”
“He really was very knowledgeable and amusing,” Daisy reaffirmed. “But I must admit I found the Chief Warder more likable. Mr. Crabtree’s information was less useful for my purposes, but he was very pleasant and friendly. I gather he plays a major part in the ceremony tonight, General?”
At last she’d hit on a topic that offended no one.
Both garrison and Yeoman Warders, as well as the Resident Governor himself, had their parts to play in the seven-hundred-year-old ritual.
Everyone at the table had something to say, though all agreed one had to watch it to appreciate it.
Even when Mrs. Tebbit pointed out that on such a foggy night the solemnities would no doubt be interrupted by a good deal of coughing, Carradine kept his good humour—through gritted teeth at times, Daisy suspected.
Having been invited for dinner and the night because of the ceremony, Daisy had expected company when she went out to view it.
However, the night was much too unpleasant to expect an old lady to venture forth, and Mrs. Tebbit ordered her daughter to take her cough to bed.
The Resident Governor’s part in the proceedings demanded that he stay at home to receive the King’s Keys from the Chief Warder.
Daisy hadn’t much faith in either Brenda or Fay abandoning the comfort of the Council Chamber for the cold, clammy fog for the sake of mere manners, though Fay might for a cigarette.
Jeremy Webster had some papers to be dealt with before morning; Colonel Duggan had military duties awaiting his return.
“You go along, Sidney,” Mrs. Duggan proposed, “and I’ll watch the goings-on with Mrs. Fletcher.”
“I’d love to have your company,” Daisy said gratefully. “I expect I’d get lost out there alone in the dark and the fog.”
Fay and Brenda exchanged a shamefaced glance.
“We hadn’t thought . . .”
“Of course we’ll come with you, too.”
“It’s going to be beastly outside.”
“Would you like to borrow a woolly hat?”
“And a muffler?”
They rushed off and returned with a selection of warm gloves, scarves, and hats.
“Come on, let’s go.”
“They start at seven minutes to ten.”
“On the dot.”
“The gates are locked at ten.”
“After which no one can enter or leave the Tower.”
“Absolutely no one.”
“Not even Daddy.”
“Except the King.”
“They’re like a music-hall act, aren’t they?” said their aunt fondly.
Well wrapped, the ladies set out. The fog had thickened, but it still smelt of river muck, not yet of coal smoke and petrol fumes. Only the nearest of the gas lamps scattered about the Inner Ward were visible, haloed beacons that cast little light.
“I don’t fancy going down the shortcut in this,” said Brenda, shivering.
“We’d probably break our necks on those steep steps,” Fay seconded her.
“They’ll be invisible.”
“And slippery.”
“We’ll go round,” Mrs. Duggan agreed.
“Oh yes, let’s.” Daisy remembered the sinister impression of those walled-in steps in broad daylight.