Thirty years ago I first went to Piercefield. It’s a ruined house that stands cheek-by-jowl with Chepstow Racecourse. In fact the racecourse sits in a portion of what was once the 300-acre park surrounding the mansion.
Two hundred years ago, Piercefield would have been the sort of house a Jane Austen heroine would dream of. In those days, it was a splendid place, its austerely elegant central block designed by Sir John Soane (the architect of the old Bank of England), with ornate, classically-inspired wings, supported by the revenues from a magnificent 3000-acre estate.
In those days, its master was a black slave-owner named Nathaniel Wells. The son of a slave and her white master, he had inherited his father’s immense fortune. He spent some of it on Piercefield.
It has the reputation of being an unlucky house, and its subsequent history confirms this. It has become a roofless ruin. Here’s what it looked like a few years ago:
Now the house is masked by a viciously effective security fence. Here’s what it looks like today:
As soon as I saw Piercefield all those years ago, I knew I would use a version of it as a setting. My fictional version, Monkshill Park, was a major location for my novel The American Boy (2003) about the young Edgar Allan Poe. It showed the house in its Regency prime.
But Piercefield hadn’t finished with me, nor I with it. I wanted to return there to find out what Monkshill might be like over a hundred years later. That was where my latest novel started: by my thinking about Monkshill/Piercefield. The result of that is my latest book, A Schooling in Murder (2025), in which the house has become the ramshackle home of a third-rate girls’ boarding school in the closing months of World War II.
Which is as good a place as any to tell you that the novel is Amazon’s number one bestseller in historical thrillers and has reached number 4 in the Kindle bestsellers chart.
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Andrew Taylor Author 