The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery Read online

  The trunks stood open on the floor around me, the bundles of letters piled high inside them. I had barely looked at them. In my haste to fill in the gaps in his biography, I had done exactly as John had done: I had looked at the postmarks on the envelopes.

  I took the bundles of letters out of the trunks and spread them over the long map desk. Until now, it was as if I had been locked in a chase with him; whenever I had searched for something important, he had got there first. It seemed brutal, but, at last, I had the upper hand. I was looking at the work of a dying man. As he had hurried through the bundles, it was likely that he had overlooked something. He had had no time to read these letters. There were bound to be ones that he had missed.

  There were about eighty bundles, spanning the years 1870 to 1920; some contained only a handful of letters; others, forty or fifty.

  First, I had to identify those that might contain sensitive material. I focused on the three missing periods. There was the gap in the summer of 1915 when John had been on the Western Front, and which had begun with the blank pages in his war diary. Then there was the one in the summer of 1909 – the year he was at the embassy in Rome. The third gap – in 1894 – was the most mysterious of all. The thought that John had felt compelled to cover up an event in his childhood was disquieting.

  Scrutinizing the postmarks, I combed through the envelopes keeping a careful eye out for any postmarks that were illegible. These, possibly, were letters that John had missed. I was also looking for any dated either side of the gaps: these too might shed light on the periods he had been trying to protect.

  After several hours, I had three piles of letters: one for each of the years 1909 and 1915 – and a collection of around sixty letters that I had been unable to date. There were no letters at all, I noted, for the year 1894.

  The pile for 1909 was the smallest. It seemed logical to begin with these. This was the year John had used the cipher to encrypt his letters from Italy. The events of that period were still fresh in my mind.

  As I began to go through the pile, the content of the letters struck me as utterly bizarre. A few weeks before John had arrived at the British Embassy in Rome, Violet had approached Lady Rodd, the wife of the ambassador. Here was a mother asking another woman to spy on her son.

  PART III

  16

  John arrived in Rome on the evening of 27 January 1909. The embassy, an impressive neo-Palladian villa, was situated inside the walls of the city, next to Michelangelo’s Porta Pia. Once the home of the Duke of Bracciano, its splendid reception rooms on the piano nobile were the setting for the party the ambassador and his wife hosted to welcome him.

  A little before midnight, Lady Rodd showed John to his room. After bidding him goodnight, she retired to write to his mother:

  My dear Violet – your John has arrived looking well, and is charming to talk to. He has plenty of aplomb and conveys an atmosphere of dignity and calmness by his manner. We do not find him in the least shy – much less gauche which is remarkable considering age and circumstance. I am sure he will find the rest of the staff very friendly and good company. They are all delightful people and they have promised to look after the boy and teach him everything and put him au courant of the diplomat’s duties! You may be quite at rest and whenever I have time I will send you a line.

  A month later, the ambassador’s wife wrote again. Her letter contained a series of remarks that went far beyond the ordinary. Violet had evidently given her carte blanche to say what she liked about John. This in itself was unusual. More peculiar, however, was the fact that Violet had felt it necessary to seek the opinion of a woman who had only known her son for a matter of weeks:

  Dearest Violet,

  John went off again last night to Messina where he is really happy – doing useful work and coming into daily contact with working people who he likes so much better than folks he meets in drawing rooms.

  We all like John immensely – he is fuller of good qualities than bad. He has the most charming manners I have ever seen and is full of consideration and kindly thought for everyone. Of course, he is not socially inclined but he always does his duty and talks to anyone he sits next to. I wish he would take up Italian – he would find it useful and the knowledge of it would make travelling about so much more enjoyable. I have suggested it several times and he always seems eager to begin – but somehow he puts it off till a more convenient moment. The same with golf – he wants to begin, but seems shy of making the first effort. The fact is, he is very proud, and unless he does a thing well he hates doing it at all. I hope when he knows us better he will lose that sort of shyness – it is nothing else but a sort of self-consciousness which is not uncommon in boys of John’s age. He is developing very much and I expect when you see him you will be immensely struck with his increased personality. If only he would smoke less – but how we are to compass this baffles me. The best way would be for him to fall violently in love with some fair lady, but that is a dangerous solution to try, and as far as I know John very unlikely to happen for some time to come.

  I wish you could manage to come out and see him some time this spring. I should like to know if he is really happy. He seems so but one never knows.

  Goodbye and rest assured we will look after him all the time.

  Violet forwarded Lady Rodd’s letter on to her brother. His reply was odder still. Charlie was writing from London; he had no plans to visit his nephew in Rome, yet he appeared to be acting in loco parentis.

  ‘Lil dear,’ he wrote:

  Thank you for sending me Lady R’s letter, which I now return.

  I will, as you suggest, have a go at Jack about smoking, golf, and Italian. As to smoking, you know I am entirely converted and believe it is the root of most evils, if not, perhaps, quite all. Of the use of knowing Italian there can be no question. With regard to golf, it won’t be so easy to urge it wholeheartedly. To me it seems the rottenest of all exercise games which young people should play.

  I am not much impressed with Lady R’s letter, with the exception of the smoking, about which she is right. The rest is unconvincing. Self-consciousness is not one of John’s failings. I sometimes think his character must be a difficult one to read – it is so seldom one hears it rightly described.

  Violet, above anyone else, ought to have understood her son’s character. Nonetheless, Charlie proceeded to describe it to her:

  John’s tastes are formed and no persuading or fault-finding will ever alter them. It is not self-consciousness which makes him prefer to pore over old manuscripts, to grub about amongst ruins, to go and see old sights, than to play golf and enjoy society – they are his formed tastes, part of his character. Rare and wonderful tastes to have – for his friends to understand and congratulate him upon. Not one in a hundred is so fortunate as to possess them. It is a pity, as he is young, that he does not better combine and enjoy all the good things – the society and the games and company – but it’s no use not understanding or trying not to see the real motive in his actions. You cannot, and never will get him to take active pleasure in things which don’t interest him. It is, quite possibly, a matter for argument, whether the time may not soon arrive when it would be wisest to urge him towards things he has a turn for and will do well, rather than push him towards things which you preconceive to be better and which certainly are better for other people.

  I believe I can in a way visualize the life he is leading now. He finds himself in a ‘profession’ which, for the small fry, means little else but society, parties and things of that nature, for none of which he cares a two-penny damn. A good deal of the day is occupied in it, and he probably does the work conscientiously. When he is free he occupies the rest of the day with his books and old things. He hates and detests the life at the Embassy. These Messina expeditions are his only enjoyment and makes it all the worse when he returns from them.

  The picture Charlie painted was of a withdrawn, antisocial young man who appeared to prefer ‘books and old things’
to people. John’s character, Charlie admitted, was a ‘difficult one to read’. But why had Violet found him difficult to read? The impression I was left with was of a mother who barely knew or understood her son. More than that, she appeared to have lost her way in trying to understand him. Why else would she have felt the need to benchmark her perception of his character by eliciting the opinion of others? Violet had asked Charlie to persuade John to give up smoking, and to take up golf and Italian. These were straightforward things that any mother could have broached with her son. The fact that they were so prosaic served to suggest some sort of rift between them.

  I went back to John’s blue files for the period. He had barely written to his mother from Italy. In the handful of letters that there were, his tone was cold and aloof. Frequently, when writing to Charlie, he had added the postscript ‘Don’t show this to mother,’ or ‘Keep this private.’ Their content offered no explanation as to why he had stipulated this. There was nothing secret or controversial about them: it seemed that he added the postscript purely because he had wanted to keep his mother at a distance. Had they quarrelled before he left for Italy? Or did these letters – and the ones from Lady Rodd and Charlie – point to a more serious estrangement?

  Looking at Violet’s correspondence with Charlie in the years before John left for Rome, it quickly became evident that this was no ordinary family row.

  ‘Darling Charlie, I have not and cannot say much to John naturally. I can never speak to him,’ she told her brother in the autumn of 1907: ‘It does hurt me so, I can’t tell you how much. Don’t let him dream I have spoken to you, will you, dear. And you, please don’t lose your temper with me on the subject of John.’

  Violet had written endlessly to Charlie on the ‘subject of John’. She had poured out her heart to him; ‘You see,’ she told him, ‘I have no one else I can confide in.’

  The complexity of her relationship with her son, and the friction it caused, leapt from the pages. Jealousy – sparked by the hold Charlie had over John – consumed Violet. She was convinced that her brother had turned her son against her. The letters pointed to a profound, often histrionic insecurity. At times, she pleaded with Charlie; at others, she was manipulative and mistrustful. Fear – that John would discover her letters, or that Charlie would betray their contents – also gripped Violet: ‘Burn’; ‘Destroy’; ‘Please don’t tell him we’ve spoken,’ she had written in large capitals whenever she confided in her brother. Whether it was because she was afraid of alienating John further, or whether she was actually frightened of him, it was impossible to tell.

  But it was the depth of Violet’s anguish that was so startling. It was as if the rift with her son had driven this woman to the point of distraction. ‘Darling C, I think you always think I speak to you about John in a fault-finding humour,’ she told Charlie after John failed to apologize to his sister, Marjorie, following a trivial row at Belvoir:

  If I say John ought to say he’s sorry it is not for my own satisfaction because I may think he is wrong and I right! It is not that. It is that in his future (people don’t get gentler as they get older but rather, harder) to be able to say ‘sorry’ to a woman – a sister, or a mother, is a most helpful thing, whether sorry or not. Still, for the sake of peace and gentleness at home just ‘Sorry’, which doesn’t bind you to anything – but it turns away wrath! And soreness! And is like sunshine and hurts no one.

  I left Belvoir next day for 1 night and wrote John a darling letter saying just say ‘sorry’ to Marjorie for she is so hurt. Get it over before I get back, darling, do.

  If you had perhaps added 1 word to my prayer, John would have thought it a nice thing to do, not a stupid thing – and would have done it, and Marjorie also would have been taught to see how ‘sorry’ helps all round – and would have said ‘sorry’ too!! and all would have been smooth. As it was my long deeply felt and affectionate letter to him was taken absolutely no notice of because he thought it grand not to unbend.

  The one and only time you spoke for me to John he rushed back and said so sweetly, ‘I am sorry’ and it warmed me and surely did him a world of good as never before or since!

  You see, if you are silent as if to keep peace it makes his young mind think Charlie is right. You know dear, it is just you siding with him that makes him like that!!

  On the face of it, Violet’s letter was about a trivial row between John and his sister. But it wasn’t an apology she was wanting: it was his affection she craved.

  It was clear the rift had gone on for some time. But, working back through hundreds of letters, it was impossible to establish what had caused them to fall out in the first place. It wasn’t as if John was incapable of forming loving relationships: he had obviously been exceptionally close to his uncle. So why had he denied Violet his love?

  A vituperative letter, written in the summer of 1907, provided an important clue. The note scribbled on the back of the envelope suggested that Violet had had second thoughts about sending it: ‘Read in the train and tear up,’ she instructed her brother: ‘And forgive if I have said anything I have not time to go over and alter.’

  Extraordinarily, the letter, which was entirely about John, was thirty-one pages long.

  Aged twenty at the time, John, who was studying for his final exams at Cambridge, was living with his uncle at his house in Chelsea. Relentlessly, in what amounted to little more than a stream of consciousness, Violet accused her brother of failing in his ‘parental duties’:

  ‘What do I fuss about his cavern of a chest for?’ she snapped at Charlie:

  Half for health – those who expand their lungs, it is now well proved, are the people who send good blood through their veins! Half for looks! Look at all the men you know who look ‘poor creatures’, naturally well made but for want of care in their 17 to 22 years – having no wish to be proud of their upstandingness and honest look – become stiffened in a stoop. You may not see it, but I fret very very much about John not holding himself up because he can’t – unless exercising helps him to biggen the muscles of chest to counterbalance the very much too big muscles across his shoulders. Therefore, even at the risk of worrying him, you might say every morning, ‘I say, let’s both make a run of 5 minutes – exercise is good for both of us.’

  Exams!! You both wrote promises that the French should be taken up earnestly and thoroughly and pursued right through the holidays. Whenever these kind of promises are given to me – and broken – you distinctly ought to make a point of saying, ‘I say, John, if you can’t manage to keep your promise, well, I’m not going to help you waste your time.’ By this I mean that a little displeasure on your part, and not always being ready to amuse him at your house, might make him see that play is better when some ‘bit’ of work has been accomplished.

  The letter bore the hallmarks of others I had seen of Violet’s on the subject of John. Her frustration was out of proportion to the things she was complaining about – as if it stemmed from a hidden cause. But, on this occasion, anger provoked her into levelling an accusation against Charlie, which previously she’d left unsaid. For thirty pages, her frustration had gathered momentum, until, on page 31, in one final outburst, she at last revealed the root cause of her resentment:

  You see dear, from the age of 9 he became your boy. Therefore you who took him, with your spoiling kindness away from his home, have a stern duty in it I think, and your saying now to me ‘Well, please do place him in his father’s hands’ comes when it is too late.

  ‘From the age of 9 he became your boy …’

  The rift between John and Violet had originated in his childhood.

  The revelation was startling in itself. But there was something else. The break with his mother appeared to coincide with the first gap in the family records.

  17

  The Duchess frowned. ‘That’s not right,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t Charlie who took John away from Violet. Violet sent him away.’

  I had run into the Duchess by chance in the
passage outside the Muniment Rooms; briefly, I had explained what I had discovered.

  ‘Sent him away?’ I said. ‘Why?’

  ‘She couldn’t bear the sight of him,’ she replied.

  We were standing by the fire in the Guard Room; the light from the flames flickered on the blades of the sabres displayed on the walls.

  ‘Violet sent John to live with Charlie after Haddon, her eldest son, died,’ she continued. ‘Haddon was the apple of her eye. He was her favourite. He was only a year older than John. The story in the family is that John was sent away because Violet found the sight of him too painful. He reminded her of Haddon.’ She paused for a moment, looking down at the fire. ‘It must have been awful for John. But then in Victorian times I suppose that sort of response was quite common. Families didn’t necessarily talk about things. It was the great tragedy of Violet’s life. She never got over it.’

  ‘When did Haddon die?’ I asked her.

  ‘In the autumn of 1894. He was only nine. There’s a scrapbook full of newspaper cuttings in the Muniment Rooms. You might want to have a look at it.’

  ‘But that’s extraordinary,’ I said. ‘His death coincides with the first gap in the records. Why would John have wanted to remove all mention of his brother, even if his death had caused the rift with his mother?’

  The Duchess looked puzzled. It was some weeks since I had seen her. The last time we had spoken was when I had been looking for the missing letters. I was about to explain how I had failed to find them and how I had pieced together that it was John who had removed them, but she was in a hurry.