The Abominable by Dan Simmons Page A

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 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