The Abominable: A Novel

a winter’s eve. And in the center of the west wall of the House, used by no one else but royals, is the gold door— or, rather, gold carved portal might be more accurate, since it is only the outer layer of several beautiful doors, designed and constructed specifically for Elizabeth’s first visit. This was sometime before the death of the first Lord Bromley. I believe Queen Elizabeth and her court retinue came to stay with us for several weeks in fifteen ninety- eight. There is a beautiful courtyard at the center of the residential wings, sirs—totally private, although you may catch a glimpse of it when you have tea with Lady Bromley—where it’s said that Shakespeare’s troupe of players performed several times. The courtyard was actually designed—in terms of perfect natural amplification of the human voice and every other aspect—specifically for theatrical events with audiences of hundreds.”

I interrupt with a banality: “Jean-Claude, Deacon, look at that ancient ruin on the hill. It looks like a small medieval castle—or a keep—that’s gone to ruin. Tower all overgrown with ivy and stones tumbling down, an old tree growing out of that tall Gothic window on that broken wall standing alone. Amazing. I wonder how old it is?”

“Almost certainly less than fifty years old,” says the Deacon. “It’s a folly, Jake.”

“A what?”

“A folly. They were all the rage in the seventeenth through the nineteenth century—going in and out of style. I think it was the last-but-one Lady Bromley in the late eighteen hundreds who demanded her medieval folly on that hill, where she could see it when she went riding. Most of the landscaping, though, was redesigned earlier—in the late seventeen hundreds, I believe—by Capability Brown.”

“By whom?” asks Jean-Claude. “That would be a good name for a good climber—‘Capability.’”

“His real first name was Lancelot,” says the Deacon. “But everyone called him Capability Brown. He was considered England’s greatest gardener in the eighteenth century and designed the gardens and grounds for, I think—I’m not sure of the exact number—almost two hundred of England’s top country houses and estates, and for such noble piles as Blenheim Palace. I do remember my mother telling me about what Capability Brown said to Hannah More in the seventeen sixties, when they were both famous.”

“Who or what was Hannah More?” I ask, no longer embarrassed by my ignorance. England is a stranger land than I’d bargained for.

“She was a religious writer—very widely read—and a very generous philanthropist up until her death sometime in the eighteen thirties. Anyway, Capability Brown called his complicated gardens and grounds grammatical landscapes, and when he was showing Hannah More around some completed estate grounds—perhaps her own, although I have no idea if she hired him to do her country place—he put his landscaping in Hannah More’s own terms, and I remember most of what my mother, who was an avid gardener right up until her death twenty years ago, quoted from Brown’s soliloquy.”

I think even Benson up on the driver’s seat is listening, since he is leaning back further than before without reining in the horses in any way.

“Now there, Capability Brown would say, pointing his finger at some landscape figure which looked as if it had always been there but which he’d designed,” says the Deacon. “There I make a comma, and there—pointing to some boulder or fallen oak or other seeming natural element, perhaps a hundred yards away or in the gardens—where a decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a parenthesis; now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.” The Deacon pauses. “Or something fairly close to that. It’s been a lot of years since my mother talked to me about Capability Brown.”

I can see by the inward direction of his gaze that he’s been hearing his mother’s voice.

“Maybe that castle folly on the hill is a semicolon,” I say stupidly. “No, wait, you said Capability Brown didn’t do the folly.”

“He would not have constructed a folly for a million pounds,” says the Deacon with a smile. “His specialty was doing elaborate gardens where even the trained eye doesn’t realize there’s a garden there.” The Deacon points to a partially wooded hillside with an amazing variety of shrubbery, fallen trunks, and wildflowers.

But then the carriage tops a low rise, we make a slight right turn with hooves still clopping on asphalt, and all of our babble ceases.

The formal gardens are clearly visible now, surrounded and sometimes intersected by straight and circular driveways of pure white gravel—or perhaps crushed oyster shells, or maybe pearls for all I know. The gardens and fountains are breathtaking, but it’s the first full sight of Bromley House beyond the gardens that has me immediately standing in the carriage, looking over Benson’s shoulder, and muttering loudly, “My God. Dear God.”

Not exactly the most sophisticated entrance I’ve ever made. But quite probably the most American- fundamentalist-religion-sounding (though my family in Boston were Unitarian freethinkers).

Bromley House is officially a Tudor mansion, designed—as I mentioned earlier—by the first Lord Bromley, who was chief clerk and assistant to Queen Elizabeth’s Lord High Treasurer, Lord Burghley, when he began work on the house in the 1550s. The Deacon later told me that Bromley House was one of several prodigy houses built by rising young men in England around that time, but I’ve forgotten what the term really means. He also told me that although the first Lord Bromley and his family moved into the livable parts of the estate in 1557, the actual building period of Bromley House extended over thirty-five years.

Thirty-five years plus another three and a half centuries, since it is obvious even to my architecturally untutored eyes that generations of lords and ladies have added on to, subtracted from, fiddled with, experimented with, and altered this estate a thousand times.

“The House…”—I can hear the capital letters in Benson’s soft but proud old voice—“was damaged some during the Civil War—Cromwell’s men were beasts, absolute uncaring beasts, uncaring and careless about even the finest works of art—but the fifth earl enclosed the damaged south side with windows to create a great gallery. Filled with light, I’ve been told, and charming in all except the cold winter months. That gallery was enclosed and turned into a Great Hall—much easier to heat—sometime later in the seventeenth century by the eighth earl.”

“Earl?” I whisper to the Deacon. “I thought we were dealing with lords and ladies and marquesses with Percival’s family.”

The Deacon shrugs. “Titles change and shift a little over time, old boy. The fellow who designed this pile in the fifteen hundreds was William Basil, the first Lord Bromley. His son Charles Basil, also Lord Bromley, was anointed the first Earl of Lexeter in sixteen oh-four, the year after Queen Elizabeth died.”

I understand nothing of this except the part about Elizabeth dying. Our carriage is rolling around the south face of the huge structure toward a distant entrance on the east side.

“You might find this blank corner a bit interesting,” the Deacon says, pointing to a corner of the house we’re passing. On the west side, two vertical rows of beautiful windows rise sixty or eighty feet, but the corners of the building look less elegant, as if they had been covered almost hastily with heavy masonry.

“A few hundred years ago, whatever Lord Bromley it was at the time realized that while the elevation of his Great Hall looking out onto the Orangery Court was beautiful and light-filled, almost all glass across this entire exposure, there were just too damned many beautiful windows and not enough load-bearing walls. The incredible weight of the English oak roof, combined with the weight of the thousands of Collywestons…”

“What is a Collyweston?” asks Jean-Claude. “It sounds like the name of an English hunting or herding dog.”

“A Collyweston is a slab of a particularly heavy sort of gray slate used for the roof tiles in many of the larger old estates in England. It was first found and produced right here, on this property, by the Romans. Actually, that Collyweston slate is almost impossible to find in England today except here on the grounds of Bromley House and a couple of other remote sites. At any rate, you can see where the alarmed earl a few centuries ago covered over more beautiful vertical lines of windows and added more load-bearing stone. Those little windows you see up around where the fourth story would be as we came in from the north—they have glass panes but just more masonry behind them. That roof is one heavy bugger.”

The totality of Bromley House is staggering—larger within its myriad walls and interior courtyards than many Massachusetts villages I’ve visited—but it is the rooftop and above that pulls my gaze upward at the moment. (I suspect that my mouth is hanging open, but I’m too carried away by this sight to worry about that. I’m sure the Deacon will close it for me if I look too much the village idiot.) Benson spryly hops down from his perch and comes around to the side of the carriage to open the half-door for us.

Just the rooftop of the endless manor—so far above us—is an almost impossible mass of vertical (and some