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.
Jean-Claude, the Deacon, and I are squished thigh to thigh as we sit upright and waiting on the red settee. It’s an uncomfortable piece of furniture—perhaps another invitation not to stay too long. I nervously run my thumb and finger down the sharp crease in my new suit trousers.
Suddenly a door hidden in the library wall opens and Lady Elizabeth Marion Bromley comes through. The three of us almost stumble over one another in our hurry to stand.
Lady Bromley is tall, and her height is emphasized by the fact that she’s dressed all in black, a lacy sort of dress with a high frilly black collar that might have been from the nineteenth century but which looks strangely modern. Her erect posture and poised but seemingly unself-conscious way of walking add to the sense of height and importance. I’d expected to meet an old lady—Lord Percival Bromley was in his thirties when he disappeared on Everest this summer—but Lady Bromley’s hair, swept up in a complicated fashion I’d seen only in magazines, is mostly dark with only the slightest traces of gray at the temples. Her dark eyes are bright and alert and—to my deeper surprise—she comes toward us walking quickly, coming around the table to be closer to us, smiling kindly and evidently sincerely, and with both her hands—elegant, pale, with long pianist’s fingers, not an old woman’s hands in any way—outstretched in greeting.
“Oh, Dickie…Dickie…,” says Lady Bromley, taking the Deacon’s large, calloused hand in both of hers. “It’s so wonderful to see you back here. It seems like just yesterday that your mother was dropping you off here to play with Charles…and, oh, how irritated both of you older boys became at little Percy’s attempts to keep up with you!”
Jean-Claude and I risk a look and silent query to each other. Dickie?!
“It is wonderful to see you, Lady Bromley, but I am so deeply sorry about the circumstances which bring us together again,” says the Deacon.
Lady Bromley nods and looks down for a second as her eyes fill, but she smiles and lifts her head again. “Charles greatly regrets that he cannot greet you himself today—his health is very poor, as you know.”
The Deacon nods sympathetically.
“But you were also wounded during the War,” says Lady Bromley, still holding the Deacon’s hand with one of her hands above his, the other below.
“Mild wounds, long healed,” says the Deacon. “Nothing like the terrible gassing that Charles experienced. My thoughts have gone out to him a thousand times.”
“And your letter of condolence about Percival was beautiful, just beautiful,” Lady Bromley says very softly. “But I am being rude—please, Dickie, introduce me to your friends.”
The introductions and short conversations go smoothly. Lady Bromley speaks in fluent French to J.C., and I pick up enough of it to understand that she is expressing how impressed she is that such a young man should be known as such a fine Chamonix Guide, and Jean-Claude replies with his biggest, brightest grin.
“And Mr. Perry,” she says when it is time to turn to me, taking my clumsily outstretched hand gracefully in hers. A brief touch but somehow electrifying. “Even in my rural isolation, I’ve heard of the Perrys of Boston—a fine family.”
I stammer my thanks. I am from a well-known and fine old family, Boston Brahmins all down to the next-to-last generation, a family history traceable back to the 1630s, family members famous as merchants and Harvard professors, and a few brave ones who distinguished themselves in places like Bunker Hill and Gettysburg.
But alas, the Brahmin Perrys of Boston were now almost broke. Declining wealth had not kept my parents from calling the Harvard-Yale football game only “the Game,” or from doing their modest Christmas shopping downtown at the seven-story S. S. Pierce Company, which had been serving families like ours since 1831. Nor, initially, did our advancing poverty prevent me from experiencing the best private schools, the tennis courts and greens and formal dining areas of the Brookline Country Club (which, of course, we referred to only as “the Country Club,” as if no others existed in the world), and of having my parents pay my way through Harvard—which finally drained the last resources of the family. All so that I could spend every spare minute and all my college summers climbing rocks and mountains with friends, never worrying about the expenses. Even with the inheritance of my aunt’s $1,000 when I turned twenty-one, I never considered giving it to my parents to help them with some of their bills—or mine—but subsidized this year in Europe, climbing in the Alps.
“Please, sit down,” Lady Bromley is saying to us all. She’s moved to the other side of the low table and taken her place in the comfortable-looking high-backed chair. As if on cue, three maids—or servants of some kind—come in through another door with trays carrying a teapot, ancient porcelain cups and saucers, silver spoons, silver containers of sugar and cream, and a five-tiered silver serving dish with small pastries and biscuits on each layer.
One of the servants offers to pour the tea, but Lady Bromley says that she will do it, and she does, inquiring of each of us—except for “Dickie,” who, she remembers, takes his tea with a bit of cream, a bit of lemon, and two sugars—how we take our tea. I answer, idiotically, “Straight, ma’am,” and receive a smile and my saucer and a cup of tea only. I hate tea.
There are a few minutes of small talk, mostly between the Deacon and Lady Bromley, but then she leans forward and says briskly, “Let us discuss your other letter, Dickie. The one I received three weeks after the beautiful condolence card. The one about the three of you going to Everest to look for my Percival.”
The Deacon clears his throat. “Perhaps it was presumptuous, Lady Bromley, but there seem to be so many unanswered questions about Lord Percival’s disappearance that I thought I might offer my services in an attempt to clear up the mystery surrounding that accident or fall or avalanche…or whatever happened.”
“Whatever happened, indeed,” says Lady Bromley, her voice almost harsh. “Do you know, that German gentleman who was the only witness to that so-called ‘avalanche’ that he says carried away Percy and a German porter—that Herr Bruno Sigl—will not even answer my cables and letters? He sent one brutish note stating that he had no more to say on the matter, and he’s maintained that silence, despite the Alpine Club and Mount Everest Committee demanding more details from him.”
“That is not right,” Jean-Claude says quietly. “Families need to know the truth.”
“I am not fully convinced that Percival is dead,” says Lady Bromley. “He might be injured and lost on the mountain, barely surviving, or in some nearby Tibetan village awaiting help.”
Here it is, I think. The insane part of all this that the Deacon wants us to cash in on. I feel a little nauseated and set down my cup and saucer.
“I understand that the chances of that—of my Percy still being alive on the mountain—are very low, gentlemen. I still retain all my faculties. I live in the real world. But without a rescue or retrieval mission to the mountain, how will I ever be able to know for sure? Percival’s young life was so…so private…so complex…I have understood so little about him over the past years. I feel that I should, at the very least, understand the details of his death…or disappearance. Why was he in Tibet at all? Why on Mount Everest? And why with that Austrian man…Mr. Meyer…when he died?”