The Deacon, more loudly: “Benson, could you tell us about the door for the royals on the west side?”
Ahead of us I catch a glimpse of formal gardens, perfectly manicured fields and low hills, and many spires and steeples rising above the horizon. Far too many spires and steeples for a house; too many for a mere village. It is as if we’re approaching a city amidst all this perfect greenery.
“Certainly, Master Richard,” says the driver. The long white mustaches are twitching slightly—I can see that even from the rear as he drives—perhaps because he’s smiling.
“Arrivals for Queen Elizabeth since the sixteenth century, Queen Victoria, King George the Fifth, and others were always arranged for late afternoon or very early evening—if convenient for the royals, of course, sirs—since, you see, the hundreds of windows there on the west side were specifically designed to capture the sunset. The glass was actually treated in some way, I believe. They would all glow gold, as if there were a bright fire behind every one of those many windows, you might say, sirs. Very warm and welcoming to His or Her Majesty, even on 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 ea
st 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 horizontal) protrusions: obelisks with no seeming purpose, a magnificent clock tower with the face of the clock turned toward the apparently unused-for-guests south face of the house, row upon row of high, ancient-Greek-looking columns that are actually smokestacks for the countless fireplaces in the city-sized house below, arches arching over nothing to speak of, crenellated towers with high, thin windows on their erect shafts and tiny little round windows under their priapic muffinheads, more windows on horizontal Old London Bridge–style hanging upper floors that connected some of these thicker and more windowed erections, and finally a series of taller, thinner, more sexually provocative towers scattered at apparent random around and between and above the other projections on the tower-cluttered rooftop. These last are graceful towers which look like nothing so much as Moslem minarets pilfered from some Middle Eastern mosque.
Another butler in very formal and old-fashioned livery—this gentleman apparently even older than our carriage driver but clean-shaven, bald as a proverbial billiard ball, and with a much more stooped posture caused by curvature of the spine—bows toward us at the open east entrance door and says, “Welcome, gentlemen. Lady Bromley is expecting you and will join you shortly. Master Deacon, you must forgive me if I comment that you look extremely well and tanned and fit.”
“Thank you, Harrison,” says the Deacon.
“Pardon me, sir?” says Harrison, cupping his left ear. He seems to be almost deaf as well as terminally stooped over and evidently not very good at reading lips. The Deacon repeats his three words in a low shout. Harrison smiles—showing perfect dentures—and rasping out, “Please follow me, gentlemen,” turns to lead us inside.
As we follow this ancient butler’s slow shuffle through anterooms and then into a series of Great Rooms on our march to God Knows Where, the Deacon whispers to us, “Harrison is the butler who paddled my arse when I punched young Lord Percival thirty years ago.”
“I would like to see him try it today,” whispers Jean-Claude with an evil smile that I’ve seen before and which somehow manages to look attractively roguish to the ladies.
We follow the shuffling old butler through a series of art-hung, Persian-carpeted, and red-drapery-laden foyers, then out into and through at least three “public rooms,” where the art and color and size and quality of the antiques alone take one’s breath away.
But it’s not the gilded antique furniture that almost makes me stop in amazement.
Harrison manages a feeble wave of his left arm toward the ceiling and room in general and announces in his old man’s croak, “The Heaven Room, gentlemen. Quite…”
I don’t catch the last word, but it might have been “famous.”
To me it seems more like “the Football Room,” since the ceilings are at least forty feet high and the room looks to be as long and almost as wide as an American football field. My thought is that you could set rows of bleachers up against these gilded, picture-addled walls and hold the Harvard-Yale game in here.
But it is the endless and elaborately painted ceiling that makes my jaw drop open again.
I’m sure that the hundreds (hundreds!) of naked or mostly naked male and female grappling forms up there are supposed to be gods and goddesses gamboling in some innocent pagan god way, but it just looks like the world’s largest orgy to my barbarian’s eye. Amazingly, the artist has many of the figures spilling off the ceiling itself and grappling and tumbling and evidently fornicating their way down the actual walls, stacking up in the corners in fleshy masses of thighs, breasts, and biceps, with more intertwined bodies painted onto side doors and mirrors, as if they’re trying to stop their tangled mass from falling to the Persian-carpeted parquet floor. The three-dimensional effect is dizzying and disturbing.
“Antonio Verrio did most of these murals in sixteen ninety-five and ninety-six,” the Deacon says softly, obviously assuming that our aged guide won’t hear him. “If you think this is something, you ought to see his Mouth of Hell murals on the ceiling at the head of the grand staircase—according to Verrio, the Mouth of Hell is the maw of a giant cat gobbling up naked lost souls like so many mangled mice.”
“Magnifique,” whispers Jean-Claude, also looking at the Heaven Room ceiling. And in an even lower whisper, “Although—what is your word?—ostentatious. Very ostentatious.”
The Deacon smiles. “Word is that during the year or so Verrio was here painting, he had his way with every female servant on the estate—including the peasant girls who worked in the fields. Actually the walls weren’t completely finished when they brought in a children’s book illustrator—I think his name was Stothard—to finish off this hell of a heaven.”
I stare at the scores upon scores of entangled, thrusting, intertwined naked male and female forms, many—as I mentioned—falling off the ceiling and writhing down the walls in their physical grapplings, and think, A children’s book illustrator painted some of this?
As I follow the shuffling, silent butler through the Heaven Room, I’m grateful that the Deacon insisted on my going to his tailor on Savile Row for a proper dark suit. Since J.C. had once mentioned to me that the Deacon, the last of his once well-to-do family, had little money these days, I protested strongly, but the Deacon said that he simply couldn’t allow me to meet Lady Bromley in that “dusty, dung-colored, misshapen tweedy thing that you wear when a suit is called for.” I huffily explained to the Deacon that this “dung-colored thing”—my best tweed suit—had seen me through all of the formal demands of Harvard (at least where evening dress wasn’t necessary), but my British climbing friend was not impressed with my argument.
So as we leave the Heaven Room to enter a smaller, much more intimate side room, I once again appreciate the tailored smoothness of my new Deacon-chosen and Deacon-paid-for Savile Row suit. Jean-Claude, on the other hand, has enough personal confidence that he’s wearing an old suit in which he’s probably guided climbs—it lo
oks as if it would go well with mountain boots, and I’m sure it has.
Old Harrison the butler finally parks us in a side room only two absurdly imposing hallways and a breathtaking library away from the Heaven Room. After the great expanses we’ve covered getting here, this cozy little side room seems like a dollhouse miniature, even though it’s probably half again the size of most middle-class Americans’ front parlors.
“Please have a seat, gentlemen. Tea and Lady Bromley will be with you promptly,” says old Harrison and shuffles out. The way he announces it makes the tea and the lady of one of England’s greatest estates somehow sound like conjoined equals. Perhaps one never travels anywhere without the other.
For a moment the small size and sense of intimacy of this little room—only a few pieces of furniture centered atop a gorgeous Persian rug surrounded by gleaming parquet floors, one high-backed chair upholstered in a fabric that looks to be from the nineteenth century, a low round table presumably for the imminent tea service, two delicate chairs on either side looking too flimsy for an adult male to sit in, and a red settee directly across from the upholstered chair—make me think that this is one of the private rooms in Bromley House, but then I immediately realize I’m wrong. The small paintings and photographs on the delicately wallpapered wall are all of women. The few bookshelves, unlike the impossibly huge library we glimpsed earlier, hold only a few volumes, and they look homemade, perhaps scrapbooks or photo albums or collections of recipes or family genealogy.
But, no, however much it looks like one, this room is not a private room for the house. I realize that Lady Bromley must use it to meet people of lesser social stature in an informal setting. Perhaps she’d talk to her landscaper or head gamekeeper or very distant visiting relatives here—ones that were not going to be offered a room for the night.