The Abominable: A Novel

same month).

“This is the place,” the Deacon says softly. “Precisely the place where Croz, Hadow, Hudson, and Lord Francis Douglas fell and went over that edge…” He points only 40 or 50 feet below, where the arching crest of the Matterhorn’s picturesque overhang becomes an invariably fatal drop.

“Merde,” says Jean-Claude, speaking for both of us. “Jake and I know that. You know that we know all that. Don’t tell us, Richard Davis Deacon, former schoolteacher that you are, that you brought us down this miserable route with no fixed ropes—we have a dozen or more to choose from just thirty steps to your right, and I’d be delighted to drive in a piton and clip in a fresh rope if you like—don’t tell us you brought us this way just so you could show and tell us a piece of history that everyone who loves the Alps and this mountain has known since we were in short pants. Let us quit talking and get off this fucking face.”

We do so, moving easily and confidently to our right, always aware of the emptiness below us here, until we move out onto the relatively safe slabs—a series of upturned steps was the way Whymper once described the ridge after giving up on the Italian side (downturned slabs) and trying this Swiss Ridge—and from there we unrope, and the descent becomes, despite the continued danger of rockfall or slipping on ice, “easy as eating your piece of pie,” as Jean-Claude would sometimes say.

We knew now that, barring any nasty surprise, we’d reach the Hornli Hut at 3,260 meters, almost 11,000 feet—a comfortable enough hut for one perched on a narrow ledge and wedged into the mountain itself—before full darkness fell. Two-thirds of the way down we reached an old cache of ours. (Our cache—mostly just some extra food, water, and blankets for the hut—was set almost exactly where Whymper’s people had left their rucksacks during their ascent. What must the three survivors have felt and thought on their silent descent as they lifted their dead friends’ four rucksacks and carried them down the mountain with them?)

I realize that I’m feeling morbid and depressed as hell—plus my week of climbing the Matterhorn, not to mention the many previous months with these two men, is now over. What am I going to do now? Go back to Boston and try to get a job? Literature majors tend to end up teaching literature they love to bored freshmen who couldn’t give the slightest bucket of warm spit about the material, and this thought of making my future living in the Fifth Bolgia of the Eighth Circle of Academic Hell depresses me even more. Jean-Claude looks pretty miserable as well, but he has a great job to return to as a Chamonix Guide. He’s very close friends with the Deacon and obviously sorry to see the long climbing vacation—and relationship—end for now.

The Deacon is grinning like an idiot. I’m not certain that I’ve ever seen Richard Davis Deacon fully grin before—smile ironically, sure, but grin like a normal human being? Much less grin like an idiot? Uh-oh. Something is very wrong with that grin. His voice, although audibly excited, is slow, almost formal in its Cambridge cadences. The Deacon is taking turns making serious eye contact with each of us as he speaks— something else he rarely does.

“Jean-Claude Clairoux,” he says softly. “Jacob William Perry. Would you care to accompany me on a fully funded expedition to climb Mount Everest in the next spring and early summer of nineteen twenty-five? It will just be the three of us as climbers and some necessary porters—including a few high-climbing Sherpas to help establish the high camps, but still just porters. We will be the three climbers—the three men attempting the summit. Only us.”

This is where Jean-Claude and I, knowing that this must be pure fantasy or mean-spirited bullshit, should be shouting, “You can’t be serious” and “Go tell it to someone who just got off the boat, Limey,” but this is the Deacon speaking, so the young French Chamonix Guide and I look at each other intently for a long few seconds, turn back to the Deacon, and say in total solemnity and almost perfect unison…

“Yes. We’ll go.”

And so it begins.

Chapter 2

So there at the center of the most beautiful 9,400 acres in the world resides a permanently broken heart and an eternally damaged mind.

T he car ride from London to the Bromley estate in Lincolnshire takes us about two hours, including a lunch stop in Sandy since we are running ahead of schedule and don’t want to arrive early, but by mid-afternoon, still a few minutes ahead of schedule, we’ve reached Stamford Junction. We are only a couple of miles from our destination, and I admit to feeling nervous almost to the point of nausea, although I’ve never been carsick before —especially not in an open touring car on a beautiful summer day with pleasant breezes smelling of farm fields and forest, astounding scenery on all sides, and a perfectly cloudless blue sky above.

A sign names Stamford Junction “Carpenter’s Lodge” in the usual British way of obfuscating everything, and we turn left down a narrow lane. A ten-foot-high solid masonry wall blocks the view on our left for all of these last two miles.

“What’s the wall for?” I ask the Deacon, who is driving.

“It encloses a small part of the Bromley estate,” says the older climber around his pipe stem. “That’s the famous Bromley Deer Park on the other side of the wall, and Lady Bromley doesn’t want her deer—tame as they are—jumping out and getting hurt.”

“Or allow the poachers to get in all that easily, I imagine,” says Jean-Claude.

The Deacon nods.

“How big is the Bromley estate?” I ask from the backseat.

“Well, let me think,” says the Deacon. “I seem to remember that the previous marquess, the late Lord Bromley, set aside about eight thousand acres for farmland—most of it usually fallow and used for hunting—about nine hundred acres of woodland, pristine forest going back to Queen Elizabeth. And I think only about five hundred acres for the deer park, gardens, and grounds, all tended year-round by a small army of foresters and gardeners.”

“Almost ten thousand acres of estate,” I say stupidly, turning to stare at the high wall as if I might suddenly be able to see through it.

“Almost,” agrees the Deacon. “In truth, it’s much larger than the ninety-four hundred acres here. The village of Stamford we passed through back there officially belongs to the Bromley estate—as did all the people living in it and in the other hundred and forty–some residences around Stamford and edges of the estate—and there are several dozen commercial properties, in and beyond Stamford, that Lady Bromley still owns and administers as part of the estate. When they said lord of the manor in the old days, they meant it.”

I try to imagine this. I’ve seen huge patches of privately owned land, of course. On my summer climbing trips during my years at Harvard, I’d headed out west to climb in the Rockies, and some of the ranches the train passed through probably approached or surpassed half a million acres—perhaps a million. Someone out there told me that while a cow needed a little less than an acre to graze on happily back in my home state of Massachusetts, the same cow would require more than forty acres just to stay alive in the high plains of eastern Colorado or Wyoming. Most of the huge ranches out there grew sagebrush, rabbit brush, and a few old cottonwood trees along the creeks—if the land had any creeks. Most of it did not. The Bromley estate, according to the Deacon, has 900 acres of ancient woodland used for…what? Hunting, probably. Strolling in. Shade for the tame deer when they get tired of hanging around the sunny parts of their dedicated park area.

The wall curves away to the south, we drive a bit further and turn left down a narrow and rather rutted road, and then suddenly we are passing under an ancient archway into the estate. There is a large gravel approach here—no estate house or gardens or anything of interest visible all the way to the green, hilly horizon— and the Deacon parks our touring car in the shade and leads us to a carriage, complete with mustachioed driver and two white horses, waiting near a narrow asphalted road winding away into the green depths of the estate. The carriage is so ornately bedecked with badges and doodads along the sides and back that it looks as if it might have been designed for Queen Victoria’s coronation parade.

The driver hops down and opens the topless carriage’s door for us. He looks old enough that he, too, might have taken part in Queen Victoria’s parade. I admire his long, pure-white twin mustaches, which make him look a bit like a very tall, very thin walrus.

“Welcome back, Master Richard,” the old man says to the Deacon as he shuts the door. “If I may be allowed