The Abominable: A Novel

“That took one hell of a lot of cheek to spy on him like that,” I say, my voice as harsh as I can make it while still speaking to a lady.

Reggie nods. “It did. It was an almost unforgivable violation of Mr. Deacon’s privacy. But I had to know. The three Swiss alpine guides I’d contacted to help me in the retrieval of Percival’s body had already set sail from Europe, and I had to cable them in Colombo if I was going to cancel their participation and climb here with the three of you instead.”

“Did Ree-shard pass your muster?” J.C. doesn’t sound angry, only a little bemused. I doubt if he’d use the same tone if it had been him whom Reggie had been peering at naked. Or, on second thought, perhaps he would.

“He did,” says Reggie. “But Pasang informs me that due to the placement and severity of some of the old wounds, your Mr. Deacon must be in constant pain.”

“So what?” I say. “A lot of world-class alpinists climb through pain.”

“Probably not this much pain,” replies Reggie. “And I regret that I lied to all of you about my dear cousin Charles succumbing to his wounds while you were in transit to India. In truth, he took his own life. According to my aunt Elizabeth—Lady Bromley—after more than seven years of bravely tolerating his wounds, he simply could no longer bear the pain. He used his service revolver.”

This silences us for several long minutes.

“Just out of curiosity,” Jean-Claude says at last, “would you tell us again the names of the three Swiss guides you’d hired?”

Reggie names them again and Jean-Claude whistles, eyes wide with awe or respect. “I am surprised, Lady Bromley-Montfort, that you turned them back and have come with us.”

Reggie smiles. “I paid the three Swiss guides a fee for their time, sent them a generous cheque when they turned back from Colombo, but you three were already being paid by my aunt. And my aunt receives her income from the plantation in Darjeeling which I’ve run since I was fourteen years old. Going ahead with you three—and Pasang and the Tiger Sherpas—seemed like the most economical thing to do. But I had to know about Mr. Deacon’s wounds…whether his body was up to this climb or not. He’s thirty-seven years old, you know.”

“George Mallory was thirty-seven when he disappeared last year,” I say idiotically. No one responds.

Jean-Claude shrugs his upper body out of the cocoon of his sleeping bag. He has to free his hands. He cannot talk earnestly without the use of his hands.

“But, Madame, you asked us if we had known Ree-shard Deacon in the years right after the War. Is that period somehow relevant to your concerns about our friend’s leadership?”

“Do you have any knowledge of Mr. Deacon’s actions right after the War?” asks Reggie.

“Only that he came to the Swiss and French Alps and spent most of his time climbing,” says J.C.

Reggie nods. “Mr. Deacon’s mother died some years before the War. His father died of a heart attack in nineteen seventeen. Mr. Deacon had an older brother, Gerald, but he was killed as an RAF pilot in early nineteen eighteen. That left Richard Davis Deacon not only in total possession of his two huge estates—Brambles, the larger home, makes my aunt Elizabeth’s Bromley House look like a shack in comparison—but also an earl, a peer of the realm, and a member of the House of Lords.”

“Earl Deacon?” I say.

Reggie laughs. “I love Americans. No, Mr. Deacon is, despite his objections, the ninth Earl of Watersbury.” She pronounces it in that slurry British way…Watrsbreee.

“Despite his objections?” says J.C., his palms upward now.

“Mr. Deacon cannot legally renounce his hereditary title,” says Reggie. “But he refuses to answer to it, has given away most of his estates, and will not take his seat in the House of Lords.”

“I didn’t know that someone would not want to be an earl,” I say. “Nor that he has to be, even if he doesn’t want to be.”

“Neither do many people in the United Kingdom,” says Reggie. “In the meantime, in nineteen eighteen, from France, I believe, Mr. Deacon donated his two estates and twenty-nine thousand acres and the estates’ revenues to the Crown. He suggested they turn his nine-hundred-year-old primary home, Brambles, into a convalescent home. He never returned to it after the war. He has a small income—I believe derived from royalties coming in now and then from novels or poetry he wrote under various noms de plume before the War—and he’s stayed in the Alps almost constantly since nineteen eighteen.”

“Are you saying that Richard Davis Deacon is nuts?” I ask her.

Reggie looks straight at me, and those ultramarine eyes are narrowed. “Nothing of the sort,” she says sharply. “I am trying to explain why your friend took your book of poetry and threw it over the ice cliff.”

“I don’t get it,” I say.

“Mr. Deacon knows that in September nineteen fourteen, when war with Germany was barely under way, the newly created—and top-secret—War Propaganda Bureau had a secret meeting with some of England’s top writers and poets at Wellington House, Buckingham Gate. Thomas Hardy was there, as was Mr. H. G. Wells…”

“War of the Worlds!” I cry.

Reggie nods and goes on. “Rudyard Kipling, John Masefield—the Catholic writer—G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle…G. M. Trevelyan, J. M. Barrie…”

“Peter Pan!” cries J.C.

“Evidently Mr. Deacon was a well enough respected poet that he was also invited,” she says softly. “Along with his poet friend Robert Bridges. All they were asked to do during the War—even the relatively younger men such as Mr. Deacon—was to be exempted from the military call-up and to use their literary talents for the war effort. Primarily in keeping the British public’s morale up and never…never…allowing them to know how terrible the actual fighting might turn out to be.”

“But the Deacon enlisted instead,” says Jean-Claude, his fingers now folded together as if in prayer.

“Yes,” says Reggie. “But his poet friend Robert Bridges stayed behind and didn’t write another word of his own poetry throughout the War. Instead, Bridges edited an anthology of inspiring English verse—the very Spirit of Man that George Mallory read from twice here at Camp Four and which you tried to read from this evening, Jake.”

I’m confused. “But it’s all good English verse,” I say. “Classic stuff. There’s even one of the Deacon’s early poems in it.”

“And no mention whatsoever of war,” says Reggie.

“That’s correct,” I say. “A lot of topics but no English verse about war. And…”

Suddenly I stop. I think I’m beginning to understand.

“The newspapers were part of the propaganda effort,” says Reggie. “Of course they had to be, hadn’t they? Casualty lists had to be published there, but the real war was never described in its terrible detail…not once. All newspapers were willing subjects of the Propaganda Bureau. My cousin Charles wrote me in nineteen seventeen that Lloyd George had told C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian that, and I think I quote correctly, ‘if the people really knew’—he meant what the slaughter in France and Belgium was really like—‘if the people really knew, the War would be stopped tomorrow.’”

My voice, when I try to speak, is slow and cautious, as if my words were threading their way through a crevasse field. “So The Spirit of Man…was part…of the Propaganda Bureau’s…effort to keep the War going no matter what the cost in lives.”

Reggie says nothing and doesn’t even nod, but I can see that she’s proud of me for catching up to things. I’m not used to being the slow pupil in the class, but I pride myself on being smart enough to know if and when I am.

Jean-Claude looks troubled. “Reggie—Lady Bromley-Montfort,” he says just loudly enough to be heard over the noise of the wind rattling the tent walls, “you must have another reason for telling us this incredibly personal information about Ree-shard.”

“I do,” says Reggie. “I know how eager all three of you are to use my aunt’s money to get a chance to climb Mount Everest. But you see, I’m not totally convinced that dear Mr. Richard Davis Deacon wants to return from the mountain.”