“a family saga, a love story, and a history of nineteenth-century Boston all rolled into a truly enchanting whole”
George Nixon Black spent a lifetime hiding in plain sight. In an art-filled townhouse on Boston’s Beacon Hill and in the architectural masterpiece Kragsyde, his house at Lobster Cove, he lived in obscurity, harboring a secret of violence and a secret of love.
If Black were mentioned at all in his time, it was almost as rumor. As Boston’s largest taxpayer he traveled to the opera in a carriage that was the envy of his peers. Glimpsed on the street, it was usually only with one of his beloved dogs by his side. His collections of antiques and paintings were said to be extraordinary. When his own portrait was painted, just twice, he chose women artists. Each winter he quietly boarded a luxury Europe-bound steamship with a man eighteen years his junior, with who he had lived for years.
In the end it was his house that gave him away. While Black was probably content to slip unnoticed into history, Kragsyde was to have no such fate. Published many times and adored by architects and scholars, the famous house has made it impossible for Black to disappear. In The House at Lobster Cove you will see behind the doors of the house that sheltered and shaped this elusive Boston bachelor and continued to tell his story long after both were gone.
***Read an excerpt.***
Love is a mystery about which no one knows. Why it comes, why it does not, what disguise it may wear, what suitability it abjures, what trespass it dares, where it goes. It is perhaps the one thing that looks like everything but remains, nonetheless, singular. There are kinds of love that never will be again, that have disappeared into histories, and there are kinds of love which are yet to come.
Late in April of 1883 the crews from the building firm began turning over the land. With small charges of explosives and digging tools, the site began to take shape. George Nixon Black rode his horse out daily to the building site to observe the foundation walls rise under the architects guiding hands. He found it pleasant to watch the masons. Working in silence and concentration, these older men lifted the stones freed from the site carefully, bathing them in hogsheads filled with water with a strange tenderness which resembled a baptism. Younger laborers tended to the mixing of the mortar, filling endless pails of it, and lugged the stones from their size-sorted piles to the older masons. Trowels scraped and rang in the air as they slathered the stones, snugging them into their appointed places, tapping them tightly with the butt end of their tools. The air tasted of the sweetness of the cement lime and smelled of wet and ancient stone.
The curious thing was, as the house was built, Nixon felt built-up too. As the mortar cured and the stones became walls he felt an exaltation pass through him. Later as the rafters rose in the glinting sun, placed by exuberant, loquacious carpenters who romped fearlessly, with their tools lashed to their waists, on the thin ribs of wood which rose a hundred feet above the sea, Nixon felt an even greater change. He paced through new spaces that were soon to be rooms, gazed through apertures at views never before seen. Kragsyde began to take shape, lying like a coiled dragon atop its cliff, its roofline the backbone, the greying shingles the scales, the sea thrashing and bellowing below. As Nixon smelled the sharp raw wood and stood in the showers of sawdust swirling around him like snow the part of his personality that had cowered within him stirred, and shuddered, and grew braver. He had become lighter and more full all at the same time.
All content © copyright Jane Goodrich 2024