“Sorry. It’s just you look so strange. Black circles under your eyes and now your cheeks have gone bright red. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yes. Absolutely sure. If you won’t leave me alone, I’m going to go out again.”
“No, don’t do that. I’ve got a table booked for lunch. I’ll go and get ready soon.”
Thomas stood in the doorway with his hands thrust deep in his pockets. He looked irritable and morose.
“Come here, Tom,” said Lady Anne apologetically. “I’m sorry if I’ve offended you. Look, there’s something I want to show you.”
Thomas shuffled across the room and came to a halt on the other side of his mother’s desk. He hoped that she wasn’t just making an excuse for more cross-examination.
“Don’t look like that. I won’t show you if you’re not interested. It’s a secret.”
“A secret what?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“Come on, Mum. Tell me. You’ve got to now.”
“All right. But you’re not to tell anyone else. Your father might be upset if he knew that I told you.”
“Told me what?”
“About the drawer. Come round here and look. I’ll show you how it works.”
Thomas leaned over his mother’s shoulder while she reached into the bureau. He saw that there were two sets of three tiny drawers on either side of a recess in the center, which appeared to extend to the back of the desk. As Thomas watched, Lady Anne gently pressed the two tiny brass knobs on the bottom drawers on either side of the recess, and suddenly the back of it opened, disclosing a small, hollow cupboard.
“But there’s nothing inside,” said Thomas, sounding disappointed.
“That’s not the point, silly. It’s the mechanism. Don’t you think it’s clever?”
“Yes, but there should be something inside it. There’s no point in having a secret cupboard if you don’t keep something secret in it.”
“Well, we haven’t got anything in the priest’s hole at home. Nothing secret anyway.”
“That’s different. It’s bigger and everyone knows about it.”
“Oh, well, I’m sorry to disappoint you. Personally I’m rather glad that your father isn’t hiding any guilty secrets. Not that I suppose he’d keep them here if he did have them. He never seems to use this bureau much.”
“How long has he had it?”
“Oh, I don’t know. He had it when we were first together. Inherited it from his mother, I think. He showed me the secret cupboard ages ago and made me promise not to tell. I don’t know why. Perhaps he just wanted to make a mystery out of it. Anyway, don’t tell him I told you.”
“I won’t,” said Thomas, his mood brightening with the knowledge that his mother had shown him the secret even when his father had told her not to.
“When are we going?”
“Ten minutes. There’s a taxi coming. I’ll see you downstairs. I’m going to go and get ready.”
They ate lunch in a restaurant in Covent Garden and then walked back to Westminster Pier and took an excursion boat down to the Tower of London.
Thomas could hardly contain his impatience as the boat slowly chugged along the river. He had a book about the Tower in his bedroom back home in Flyte and thought it was the most wonderful building in the world. Once they had gone under London Bridge, the Tower’s high battlements came fully into view.
“That’s where they put the heads of the executed prisoners,” said Thomas, pointing behind them. “On spikes on London Bridge. I read about it in my book.”
“Were there pictures?” asked Lady Anne mischievously.
“No, of course not. And it’s not the same bridge. They sold the old one to the Americans.”
The boat’s pace got even more sluggish and there were signs of people getting ready to disembark, but Thomas kept his mother beside him looking out over the rail. He was waiting for the boat to pass its final landmark, the highlight of the journey.
“There it is!” he cried suddenly, pointing toward the Tower. “Look, Mum. The Traitors’ Gate. That’s where they brought the prisoners. Through there on their way to die.”
Lady Anne shivered in spite of herself. The gate’s name was chiseled into the stone above the portcullis, and the gray river water lapped against the black gates below. Sunlight did not penetrate this entrance to the Tower.
“God, Thomas, you’re ghoulish,” she said with a note of real concern in her voice. Her son’s preoccupation with darkness and death troubled her. It was something she needed to talk to Peter about. Anne found herself wishing not for the first time that Thomas was not so imaginative. She felt that nothing good would come of it.
Inside the Tower they did the full tour of dungeons and places of execution before waiting in line for over half an hour to see the Crown Jewels, but once inside Thomas was strangely disappointed. The huge jewels in their bulletproof cabinets held no meaning for him in contrast to the echoing stony interiors of the White Tower and the Bloody Tower, where Thomas could imagine the lives of the prisoners who had suffered there.
His mother felt the same. About the jewels at any rate.
“That’s why I wouldn’t let your father put our family jewelry in a bank vault,” she said. “Just like I was telling you yesterday in the car. If you take something out of its context, out of its history, then it stops having any meaning. For me at any rate.”
They headed for the exit.
In the evening they went to the Globe Theatre and saw Macbeth. Thomas was enthralled. He knew the story, but only now, under the open night sky, did the characters really come alive for him.
At first Thomas remained aware of the other spectators and his mother, wrapped up in a shawl on the seat beside him, as Macbeth met the three witches who hailed him as the future king. But soon he lost all sense of his surroundings as Macbeth began to argue with his wife about whether to kill King Duncan while he slept in the guest bedroom of their castle.
Thomas loved Macbeth, the brave chieftain who spoke so magically, and he willed him not to commit the crime even though he knew that Macbeth could not escape his fate.
Then at last the stage became almost completely dark and a hush fell over the evening as Macbeth crept into the King’s room and stabbed him through the heart. Now Thomas hated Macbeth, and he hated him more as Macbeth went on to kill all those who stood in his way. Then at last King Duncan’s son, Malcolm, returned to Scotland with an army, and Thomas’s heart went out once more to the murderer, Macbeth, as he faced up to his own death with courage.
As the play ended with a fanfare of trumpets and the characters turned back into actors bowing to the audience’s loud applause, Thomas felt almost drunk with the roller coaster of emotions that he had endured during the preceding two hours.
“Oh, Mum, wasn’t it extraordinary?” he said suddenly in the taxi on the way home as his enthusiasm overflowed.
“Yes, I suppose so,” replied Lady Anne coolly. Macbeth was not one of her favorite plays, and she’d had quite enough blood for one day.
Back at the house they found Sir Peter and Greta sitting upstairs in the living room with files of papers on their laps and glasses of red wine in their hands. Work never seemed to stop for his father, thought Thomas, as he dutifully bent down and kissed him on his upturned cheek. These greetings always seemed to Thomas to have nothing to do with affection and everything to do with acknowledging his father’s superior status in the family. There was something quasi-military about them.
“So, have you had a good evening?” asked Sir Peter.
“Yes, we saw Macbeth at the Globe,” replied his wife. “I got a little cold toward the end, but Thomas enjoyed it. Didn’t you, darling?”
Thomas nodded. Words couldn’t describe the wonder of his experience.
“Oh, you’re so lucky,” said Greta, joining in the conversation with sudden passion. “It’s my favorite play. I love Macbeth. The character, I mean. Not just the play.”
“Do you?” said Lady Anne frigidly. She already had her doubts about whether the Tower of London and Macbeth had been the best way to entertain Thomas when he was already so clearly in such an excited state. The
