Too Close to the Sun Read Online Free PDF

black and ruled her territory like a despot, tyrannizing her kitchen maids with booming orders that were underscored by the rumble of the massy brick furnace in the windowless Still Room, and by the orchestrated plumbing of the condenser.
    Haverholme was not an obviously lovable estate. The Cistercian monks who had settled there in the twelfth century had not cared for it: too flat, damp, and marshy (“
locus vastae, solitudinis et horroris
”). But Denys responded deeply to the numinous light and the sense of space of the flatlands, and later tried to find those characteristics in other landscapes. His love of Haverholme, rooted early, was nourished by images of egg hunting in the nests of ancient yews; of collecting mosquito larvae from the filmy surface of the water butt behind the grape house; of racing Toby on the towpath along the north bank of the Slea on their Sunbeam bicycles. Haverholme was the setting for all the significant rituals of their early years. In the South Hall, on Christmas Eve, village children gathered with their mothers to receive presents. The untroubled world of pre-ordained classes might have been tottering, but its traditions flourished. There was no sense of patronage on either side when, after the villagers had left, the servants crowded into the hall, each man with a capacious red-and-white-spotted handkerchief that he unrolled on a trestle table so juvenile Finch Hattons could set upon it a hunk of raw beef and a packet of raisins sprigged with holly. Church was an inalienable component of these feudal rituals. Winchilseas and Finch Hattons worshipped at the fourteenth-century St. Andrew’s among relations entombed inside and out. They filed into their own pew, eyed by a congregation of tenants and employees, and during the Reverend Grayson’s incomprehensible sermons the children watched the reticulated tracery of the stained glass cast patterns on the pocked flagstones of ancestral graves.
    Like God, guns and animals were always part of their lives. Even before he could walk, Denys was loaded into the dogcart with his brother and sister and taken to watch his father shooting at partridge or rabbits. On one occasion, they went to a tenants’ shoot at Haverholme. Some guns were still muzzle-loaded despite the fact that breechloaders had appeared in 1865, and a ramrod was accidentally left inside one. A tenant, aiming at a hare put up between him and the cart, missed his target and peppered the cart with shot as the forgotten ramrod penetrated one side, whizzed between the children’s legs, and emerged on the other side. “My God, man,” spluttered Henry. “If you must kill my children, then pick one, but don’t brown the lot.” As far back as he could remember, Denys’s spirits rose at the sight of the racks in the gun room and the powder horn that hung on a nail. On shooting mornings, he and Toby ran out to find keepers and beaters stamping their feet in the stable yard while the head keeper, Mr. Garrod, a Pickwickian figure with white sideburns, a bowler hat, and a velveteen coat, stood, legs wide, fastening the leads of three curly-haired retrievers to a strap attached to his waistcoat. The boys carried the cartridge bag and walked behind the line as it rustled through the September foliage, while keepers cracked partridge skulls with their teeth. By the time he was eleven, Denys was allowed to go out alone to shoot rabbits with a twelve-bore, and the satisfaction of watching them tumble head over heels was one that he recaptured on a larger and larger scale as an adult until he saw the whole picture and realized that the killing could not go on forever.

    AT THE BEGINNING OF 1896, Toby and Denys went off to prep school, to warm them up for Eton, the royal establishment twenty miles west of London where generations of family males had been educated. Henry and Nan had settled on a place in Eastbourne, a prosperous resort on the Sussex coast sheltered from the prevailing