It is a long speech for the Deacon, and I’m not sure if it has convinced Lady Bromley until she finally speaks.
“I will provide three thousand pounds for your expedition,” she says softly. “But there will be one condition.”
We wait.
“I want a member of the family along,” says Lady Bromley in a tone I haven’t heard from her before. It’s almost royal in its there-will-be-no-argument-about-this, soft but infinitely certain finality. “Percy’s cousin Reggie has climbed in the Alps—with Percy and many of the excellent guides I mentioned earlier—and is fully capable of going with you at least to the lower reaches of Mount Everest, perhaps all the way to Camp Three or whatever high camp you number up on that icy ridge between the mountains. You will, of course, make all climbing decisions, Dickie, but Reggie will be in charge of the overall expedition, of disbursing funds—to the Sherpas, to the yak sellers at Kampa Dzong—whatever is required. And Cousin Reggie will keep track of every receipt, every pound spent, every farthing. Agreed?”
The Deacon turns to look at Jean-Claude and me and I can read his mind. Having another Percy-type amateur along…it will probably slow us down, possibly put us in dangerous situations if we have to rescue him on the glacier or North Col ice face. But Lady Bromley’s tone has been clear enough: no Cousin Reggie, no expedition. And this “Cousin Reggie” obviously won’t be doing any of the truly high climbing with us.
“Yes, ma’am, we agree,” says the Deacon. “We will be delighted to travel with Percy’s cousin Reggie. It frees me from keeping track of expenses, a task at which I confess to be terrible.”
Lady Bromley stands suddenly, and the three of us quickly get to our feet. She shakes the Deacon’s hand, then Jean-Claude’s, and finally mine. I see tears filling her dark eyes, but she does not allow them to fall.
“How long…,” she begins.
“We should have the expedition completed and our complete report back to you by midsummer of next year,” says the Deacon. “I’m bringing a small camera, but I promise that we’ll retrieve anything that we can…Lord Percival’s personal possessions, clothing, letters…”
“If he is dead,” Lady Bromley interrupts in a totally flat tone, “I believe he would have preferred to be buried there on the mountain. But I would so much appreciate a few of the tokens of remembrance you’ve mentioned and…as hard as it will be to look at them…photographs.”
We all nod. I feel absurdly close to weeping myself. I also feel very guilty. And exhilarated.
“If my Percy is alive,” says Lady Bromley, standing straighter and taller than ever, “I want you to bring him home to me.”
And without another word, she turns and leaves the room through the secret door in the library wall.
It takes a few seconds to realize that we’ve been dismissed and also that the Deacon got us exactly what he’d promised—a funded three-man (and one accountant now) alpine-style expedition to climb Mount Everest. If we find poor Percy’s body, all the better. If not, the tallest mountain on Planet Earth may well be ours to summit.
There’s a quiet cough, and we turn to find old Harrison, the butler, standing near the far door, ready to lead us back through the hallways and then the impossibly huge library and then more hallways and the Heaven Room and the foyers and God knows what else to the front door and freedom.
The carriage ride to the entrance of the estate seems endless. Benson, the walrus-mustachioed driver, says nothing, and we three in the carriage do not speak. But our emotions surge around us.
Benson drops us off at the white gravel chauffeured-car park, empty except for our coupe parked under nearby trees, and still we do not speak.
Suddenly Jean-Claude runs at the endless expanse of trimmed grass beyond the gravel, whoops loudly, and does a perfect four-circle cartwheel. The Deacon and I laugh and grin at each other like the pleased idiots we are at this moment.
But as we drive away, one thought keeps seeping through my joy and anticipation of this impossible expedition: there at the center of perhaps the most beautiful 9,400 acres in the world resides a permanently broken heart and an eternally damaged mind.
Can we bring some peace to her? It is the first time in all our planning—our “conniving,” as I’ve thought of it—that this question has entered my mind. I realize it should have been the first thing I’d thought of when we started discussing this impossible-to-believe-in three-man Everest expedition.
Can we bring Lady Bromley some peace of mind?
Riding in the open air in a beautiful English summer afternoon, with the shadows just beginning to lengthen across the fields and empty highway, I decide that perhaps we can—can do this climb the right way, can find the remains of Percy Bromley, and can bring back something, anything, from that mountain of death that will…will what? Not heal Lady Bromley’s broken heart, for she’s soon to lose her older son to the endless effects of mustard gas dropped on him eight years ago by British shells, and her younger son is lost forever on Mount Everest, but perhaps we can quiet her mind about the details, the reality, of Lord Percival Bromley’s senseless death on this particular mountain.
Perhaps.
The Deacon is grinning as he drives, and Jean-Claude is grinning as he rides in the front passenger seat, his head cocked to one side to catch the wind like a dog, and I decide to join them both in grinning.
We have absolutely no concept of what lies ahead for us.
Chapter 3
If we can find the remains of Lord Percival, we can certainly find Mallory or Irvine…or both of them.
T here are many memorial services for Mallory and Irvine in that late summer and autumn of 1924, but perhaps the most important one is held at Saint Paul’s Cathedral on October 17. It is essentially an invitation-only memorial service, and from our group, only the Deacon is invited to attend. He does so and says little about it to us afterward, but the London newspapers are filled with the eulogy by the Bishop of Chester. The bishop ends with an adaptation of King David’s lament from the Bible—“Delightful and very pleasant were George Mallory and Andrew Irvine; in life, in death, they were not parted.”
Jean-Claude points out to me the next day that if—as was probably the case—one of them fell first on their way up or down the mountain, they were certainly parted in their last minutes or hours.
The deaths of Lord Percival Bromley and Kurt Meyer are mentioned only in the abstract during the bishop’s eulogy for Mallory and Irvine—“as we remember others who also perished on the mountain that month”—and Lady Bromley holds no memorial service for her son that summer or autumn (perhaps because she still believes he is alive somewhere on Mount Everest or the Rongbuk Glacier below and truly does believe that the three of us will find and rescue him a year after he disappeared). Lady Bromley has urged the Deacon to start the expedition this very autumn of 1924 and to attempt the Everest “rescue” in winter, but he assured her that both the mountain and access routes to the mountain are impassable and unclimbable in the Himalayan winter. Deep within her, Lady Bromley—even through her shock and temporary mental instability—knows that our expedition the next spring and summer of 1925 will be, at best, a recovery attempt, not a rescue effort.