Nine Liars (Truly Devious, #5)(38)

It had even, the voice on the tour app continued, been host to an entire zoo for hundreds of years, because what else do you give to royalty who have everything? You give them baboons, leopards, tigers, an elephant or two. At one point, someone gave one of the kings a polar bear, which he put on a leash and took down to the Thames to fish. Because when you’re king, you have weird pastimes. But for most of those hundreds of years, no one knew how to take care of the animals, so the monkeys kept biting everyone, the lion ate someone, and the keepers thought ostriches could eat anything so they fed them metal. Eventually, the death zoo was closed and relocated to an actual zoo.

The audio started to devolve into dates and kings, various Henrys and Charleses or Richards or Edwards or whoever who lived or died there, who each built a tower or a chapel, until the place turned into such a maze that if you tried to attack it, you’d get lost inside, chasing whatever Henry or Charles or Edward owned the place at the time. Stevie tried, but she couldn’t get herself interested in who had a bed here in 1300-something, or why the fireplace mattered. Angela had tried to explain the significance of a lot of this last night, but once they got on the subject of murder, Stevie overwrote all those mental files. That information was gone.

The doors, however, attracted her. These were heavy doors, several inches thick, with great big locks.

There’s nothing about a lock. . . .

They left whichever tower they had just come through and were back out on the paths that wound around the Tower.

“I need to pee,” Vi said. “And more coffee.”

The Tower had multiple cafés and stalls within its walls. Nothing completed an eleventh-century fortress like a cappuccino, after all.

One of the yeoman guards stepped out in his distinctive hat and uniform with a plastic container. This, a tour guide pointed out to a nearby group, was the Ravenmaster, in charge of the ravens that were always in residence at the tower.

“Ravenmaster,” Nate repeated. “Ravenmaster.”

The Ravenmaster proceeded to offer his ravens their favorite snacks, which included biscuits soaked in blood.

“Gross job,” Nate added. “Still, best name.”

“Blood?” Stevie asked. “Just . . . blood? Loose blood? They should really say where they’re getting the blood.”

“Never explain where you get the blood,” Nate replied, looking at Stevie enigmatically.

“And now,” the tour guide said, “the spot everyone wants to see. This is Tower Green, the site of the execution of some of the Tower’s most famous prisoners. These include Lady Jane Grey, the nine-day queen, and Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry the Eighth.”

This was a true privilege, as most of the poor bastards imprisoned in the Tower (not the exact words of the tour guide) were taken out to Tower Hill to be killed in public; only fancy people got to die on Tower Green. There was artwork there now—a glass cushion—representing where they put their head for the executioner.

Everything in Stevie’s mind meshed itself into a single fabric—the Tower of London to Izzy’s aunt to Henry the Eighth and these poor students who were cut to pieces with an axe in the 90s. It wasn’t hard to follow this mental path, especially as the guide went into gleeful detail about how the severed heads used to be displayed outside and on the bridge, just so prisoners knew what was in store for them.

“Here for a bad time,” Nate said, “not for a long time.”

Janelle and Vi appeared from around a corner without coffee.

“Line was too long,” Vi said, a strange smile on their face. This may or may not have been true. Clearly, they had slipped off for a minute to be romantic and adorable, maybe to make out or take pics of themselves.

“It’s the jewels next,” Janelle said, consulting the app, “then the White Tower—that’s this big one—and then we’re done.”

They went into a large building that was dark and heavily guarded by real soldiers with real guns. They saw the Crown Jewels. (“Magic hats,” Nate said. “Magic wands. Magic orbs. Magic spoons. This is all wizard stuff.” “Literally all of this was stolen,” Vi added.) Then it was into the White Tower, the dominating structure at the center of the complex. This was an old palace, a fortress. Janelle couldn’t help but admire all the armor. (“It’s clothes and it’s metalwork.”) There was even a little murder mystery corner for Stevie—the place where the bones of two children were found, assumed to be the lost princes of the Tower, the ones supposedly murdered by Richard the Third. As they wound out, there were the rooms of weapons, weapons, cannonballs, and weapons. The tour cheerfully ended in the torture chamber, where they saw the rack, the manacles, and something called the Scavenger’s Daughter, that compressed people until they juiced. Like lemons.

After two hours of this, Stevie’s brain was raw from towers and cannonballs and ravens and kings. They found a place with Wi-Fi to get in touch with Ellingham and give Dr. Branfield from the history department their observations about what they’d seen. Vi had clearly been paying the most attention and gave a detailed report of many of their observations of pillage, detailing the jewels and where they had all come from.

There was time enough for a quick sandwich, then it was another walking tour, this one of the Old City of London, covering the square mile at its heart. She was not paying attention to the fragments of Roman wall, the magical stone called the London Stone that was hidden behind a bit of grating, or the re-creation of the Roman temple that was now located under an office building. London refused to stop. The main lesson of all the tours and the buildings and the dates and the spires and statues and stones was that everything took a long time to build. And then it would burn. Or someone wanted a new, different thing, and would continue building the thing in some other style. Everyone died in a plague? No problem. Build on a plague pit. The dead were stacked under them in some kind of archaeological seven-layer dip. Every once in a while, someone would try to repair a road and up came a skeleton, waving a bony hello. It happened so often they had teams of archaeologists to deal with it.