Chapter Thirty-Three
RebeccaThe Long Gallery is on the upper story of the Jacobean section of the house—a pointless space, I’ve always felt, built for some long-dead Guest ancestors to show off how many paintings they owned, built for promenades and for amusing bored house guests in between their extramarital trysts and amateur theatricals.
The only good thing about the gallery is its absurd number of windows. Huge, diamond-paned things lining the wide space on both sides. It would have cost Auden’s ancestors a fortune to buy them all four hundred years ago, and it cost him a second fortune to restore them this year, but it was money well spent. They afford a view that’s like something out of a movie, something out of a magazine about period homes in the countryside. The green and an
