The Nebuly coat of arms.
The Nebuly Coat is a 1903 novel by J. (John) Meade Falkner.
Edward Westray, an up-and-coming young architect, has been sent to the sleepy West Country town of Cullerne to supervise long-overdue repairs to the church. But as he comes to know the town and its people, he finds himself caught up in a decades-old mystery. The late Martin Joliffe used to claim he was the real heir to Lord Blandamer's estates. Nobody took him seriously, and he died before he could prove the truth. But it's rather worrying when the next person to investigate the claim also dies suddenly. Maybe there's something in the talk of a family curse — or maybe someone doesn't want the truth to get out.
The title refers to the Blandamer coat of arms, rather than a garment.
This work provides examples of:
- The Alcoholic: Mr Sharnall, the organist, knows he drinks too much, but despite numerous attempts never manages to keep off the drink.
- Arc Words: "The arch never sleeps".
- Bland-Name Product: Cullerne is served by the Great Southern Railway — the real-life companies in the West Country were the Great Western Railway and the London & South Western Railway.
- Dying Town: Cullerne. It used to be a busy harbour, but it's been going downhill ever since the estuary silted up.
- Gossipy Hens: Cullerne has a mean-spirited set, to the extent that the narrative usually prepends 'lying and mischief-making' to Mrs Flint's name whenever she's mentioned.
- Good Shepherd: The Bishop of Carisbury is an old friend of Sharnall, and tries to persuade him to give up drinking.
- Kissing Cousins: Unknown to Anastasia Joliffe, Lord Blandamer is her half-cousin (they share a grandfather).
- Ripped from the Headlines: The poor structural state of the church's central tower, and its eventual collapse and rebuilding, exactly mirror the real-life events at Chichester Cathedral in 1861.
- This Is Reality: Westray cuts a poor figure as a romantic hero.If he had been the hero of a novel his brow would have been black as night; as it was he only looked rather sulky.
- The Vicar: The rector of the parish is Canon Parkyn, a pompous fool.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: An exact reversal of the same trope in Northanger Abbey. Anastasia imagines herself to be an Austen heroine, and is even reading Northanger Abbey when she first meets Lord Blandamer. She's actually in a Gothic novel, and doesn't realise his real interest in her is that she's the rightful heiress to his estate.
