The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery Read online

  So what was the gossip? More than likely, it had also circulated in the servants’ halls. In those days, lady’s maids and valets accompanied their masters and mistresses on the constant round of country-house visits. Had the Granbys’ servants told other servants what they had seen or heard at Cockayne Hall? Had they, in turn, reported the gossip – as was customary – back to their employers?

  I jotted down the names of those who had written to the family. Then I made a list of the friends and relations who had attended Haddon’s funeral. The long roll call of aristocratic families pointed to the archive collections that I needed to search.

  For months, the search proved fruitless.

  The pool of collections turned out to be far smaller than I expected. A significant number of the families who were close to the Rutlands in the 1890s had died out. Their possessions had been dispersed to distant heirs, and their papers lost.

  Besides scouring national and county records offices, I contacted archivists at the historic houses where Violet and Henry had stayed in the 1890s, and where the letters of those they were visiting were still held. Even here my hopes were dashed. Winnie, Duchess of Portland, and Mary, Countess of Minto, had been great friends of Violet’s, yet while large numbers of their letters had been preserved, there wasn’t a single one from Violet, or any that referred to Haddon’s death.

  At times, I came tantalizingly close to finding what I was looking for. At Cadlands in Hampshire, the home of the Drummond family – the Rutlands’ cousins – I found a wonderful cache of letters dating from the 1870s and 1880s. They were full of family gossip and vivid descriptions of visits to Belvoir Castle, but in the 1890s the letters came to an end. There wasn’t anything sinister behind it; it was simply that the next generation of cousins was not as close.

  Working my way through collections of correspondence belonging to other families on my list, I came across occasional references to Haddon’s death, but there was no mention of how his ‘accident’ had occurred.

  I found the answer to the question that had eluded me for so many months at Stanway House, the home of the Earl of Wemyss, near Toddington in Gloucestershire. There, in the family’s archives, was Violet’s reply to the letter of condolence Mary, Countess of Wemyss, had sent her – the only surviving reply to the mountain of letters Violet had received.

  She was writing three weeks after Haddon’s death. Mary’s third son, Colin, had died of an illness at the age of three. Knowing her friend would understand what she was feeling, Violet had poured out her heart to her.

  Violet’s letter, which was twelve pages long, brought the traumatic events of the last days of Haddon’s life into sharp focus. Yet it is only on the fifth page – en passant, and in one short sentence – that she mentions the accident. In her own words, she explains how it happened. But in light of the fact that she sent John away almost immediately afterwards, the glaring omission was that she failed to tell her friend why it happened. Particularly when, as she describes it, the accident itself was so tragically – and innocently – prosaic:

  Mary dearest

  It was dear of you to write. You know poor dear what it all means – and how bad it is!

  I couldn’t have imagined it could be so awful – and it all gets worse and worse. The memory of him ill and dying and the week’s agonies is torturing enough – and the cruel little bits of hope that gave one breathing time while watching and nursing and the dashing of hopes, and the tortures he suffered are maddening to live over again – and yet the thought of him alive, and strong and brimming over with eager happy life – the beautiful, beautiful face, and lithe, agile, peaceful body, and the darling, tender, artistic, dexterous hands and all that never again for my poor eyes to feast on – that is too heartbreaking to bear.

  Poor Henry misses his eldest son! Sees no joy or reason for the future in life and suffers dreadfully to have lost his companion. They were such friends and the boy was devoted to him, and Henry so proud of him.

  I haven’t got to the future yet. That’s got to come. I am only still raging that why should that beloved have suffered such tortures. Why should he have been given his beautiful life – and then have it taken away before having a chance of using it! Of making it! I fret at it being so unfair, so unjust to him. I am not thinking of what matters to me, or the missing him yet, but him, him, him.

  If he had been killed dead, it would have been easier to be patient now. Or if he had had an illness!

  But he was always so strong. So well. Never ill. And it was just only a tiny acrobatic trick that twisted something inside – and gave him intolerable tortures for 6 days.

  The operation was a successful one because they found the twisted thing and untwisted it. But just a day too long had he suffered – just too long had the thing been twisted. It could not regain power. The Drs marvelled at his wonderful strength and vitality – no weakness or collapse from the operation. And he just died of starvation – just the most awful death imaginable.

  The Drs loved him, and wondered at his strong character and will, and his clear brain (a strong constitution that would fight to live) and his patience. I heard one Dr say to him ‘Do you know what a hero is? You are one!’

  The Drs nursed him in the most devoted way. But I cherish a tiny thing he said – ‘Oh, you Drs, you are all so clumsy! Mother must do it – she is the only one who knows how to do it.’ And then: ‘Mother dear, if you hadn’t thought of doing that, I think I should have died really.’ I was stroking his forehead with a wet handkerchief and he kept saying ‘Lovely, oh lovely, Mother dear.’

  There is no comfort anywhere yet! No daylight. Nothing but gaping wounds.

  Nothing can be the same again. Nothing, also, can hurt again like this.

  If all the others were swept away, it would mean nothing more of pain to me.

  Mary dear, he was the best, the kindest, the tallest, the most beautiful amongst them all. The one who loved to draw, and to play, and who had the darlingest hand touch – the simplest, the most generous.

  If only he had not been so beautiful! My eyes govern me! And they seem now blinded to all else. All grieve who knew him, not for us, I mean, but just that they find he was a thing to miss.

  People write and say I ought to be pleased that he is out of this world, away from the troubles and the bufferings that must come to those who live, and that Death is better than Life.

  I say Death is good for those who are tired and sad and hopeless, and for those who are crushed and maimed and disappointed. It is good for those who have gone through fire and flames and tragedies. But it is not best for those who only know life’s sunshine and brilliant lookings forward!

  Dearest M, will you tell that dear Ld Wemyss about me and Haddon. I have not courage to write more to him than dear thanks for his sympathy. I have let my pen run away with me to you and I know you won’t mind. You know and understand.

  Yr most loving VG

  (What is so dreadful to me is, that if any of the others had the same thing happen, we could save them easily with our experience. I rage to think we had no experience ready for him, the best treasure of all.

  I do not blame anyone. It is a risky thing to have an operation if nature was likely to put itself right by itself. But another time I would not wait at all.

  They mentioned hoping till the end, because he was not ill. Only starving. What a selfish letter. Why do I harrow you? But you will forgive.)

  The letter, as Violet acknowledged, was desperately harrowing – not least in its exposition of a grief so overwhelming, so excluding, that it had stifled her love for her other children.

  ‘He was the best, the kindest, the tallest, the most beautiful amongst them all … If all the others were swept away it would mean nothing more of pain to me.’

  Yet in one short sentence, Violet had glossed over the event that was the source of all her pain. ‘It was just only a tiny acrobatic trick that twisted something inside.’ She had even said, ‘I do not blame anyone.’r />
  But all the circumstantial evidence points to the fact that Violet had blamed John, and that he himself had felt to blame for the accident – or, at the very least, had wanted to conceal the fact that his mother had held him to blame. She had sent him away after Haddon had died: he had spent a good part of his life removing all trace of what had happened from the Muniment Rooms at Belvoir. And if the cause of Haddon’s death was ‘only a tiny acrobatic trick’, why had the family gone to such lengths to cover it up at the time?

  So much of what Violet had to tell Mary was in flat contradiction to the official version of events.

  ‘He was not ill’ … ‘So well’ … ‘Never ill.’

  Yet the newspapers were told that he was ill. Then there was the notice beside his tomb which stated that he had died of tuberculosis. By Violet’s own admission, this was entirely untrue.

  My first thought after seeing her letter was that it was in fact John who had injured his brother. Violet was claiming that Haddon’s injury was self-inflicted. But could he really have ‘twisted something inside’ simply by performing some sort of ‘acrobatic trick’, or was his internal injury caused by an external blow? Had John hit his brother in the stomach or caused him to fall awkwardly against some kind of obstacle?

  I showed Violet’s letter to a gastroenterologist. He immediately dismissed the theory. Based on the medical procedures she described, Haddon had died from a twisted gut. More than likely, it was a condition that he had been born with. At any stage in his life, even ‘walking down a garden path’, his gut could have twisted of its own accord. He had not hit, or been hit by something or someone. It was the ‘acrobatic trick’ that had killed him.

  A handstand, a cartwheel, a somersault off something – it was awful to think that something so innocent had had such tragic consequences. Haddon’s death haunted both John and Violet for the rest of their lives, and yet with the benefit of modern medical knowledge, it is clear that it was an accident waiting to happen.

  But I still hadn’t discovered why the blame fell on John. In one final effort to shed further light on the episode, I spoke to David, the present Duke. I told him about the discrepancy between the information contained in Violet’s letter to Lady Wemyss and the notice in the chapel beside Haddon’s tomb.

  John was David’s grandfather. Yet it was the first time he’d heard that Haddon had died as a result of an accident.

  ‘It must have been a cover-up,’ was his immediate reaction.

  But a cover-up of what, or why, it is impossible to know. I could only think that in some way, whatever the trick Haddon was performing, John had egged his brother on. After all, almost by definition, an acrobatic trick is something performed for someone. Less than a year separated the two boys; they played together constantly. The most likely person was John.

  This was as far as it was possible to go in reconstructing the story behind the first gap in the records at Belvoir; midway through researching it, I received a lead to the events that lay behind the second.

  PART IV

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  I was at Cadlands on the Solent looking at the Drummond family archive, when I got a call from George Davis, a computer analyst with an interest in cryptology. He had managed to decipher John’s letters from Rome.

  Potentially, it was an important breakthrough. Just nine letters remained at Belvoir for the period between 6 June and 28 October 1909. John had used the cipher in the months leading up to the gap.

  There were thirty-four coded letters and telegrams in total. The first, a letter to Charlie, sent from the British Embassy in Rome, was dated 11 February 1909; the last, a telegram that John had wired from Rome Terme, the main railway station in the centre of the city, was dated 5 June. The void in the correspondence at Belvoir began the day after. The gap in 1894 had concealed a series of truly awful events; the natural suggestion was that something startling had also occurred in the summer of 1909.

  The question, of course, was what.

  Until now, I had drawn a blank. Looking at the letters that John was working on when he died, I had found nothing to shed light on what he had wanted to conceal – or why. But something had clearly been going on in the run-up to the gap: something of such importance that John had felt compelled to communicate it in a secret code.

  George was sending the decrypted material through by email. In 1909, post boys had delivered the original coded messages from door to door, but a century later, I needed a wi-fi signal to read them, and Cadlands, which was in the New Forest, was an internet blackspot.

  I left the house and drove off in search of a signal. As I turned out of the long drive that led up to it, the light in the forest was magical. High above, the leaves of the oaks formed a canopy. It was early evening and the sun was at a low angle, casting checkerboards of light through the shadow. I thought about my conversation with George. John had apparently created a replica of the King Charles I’s cipher. Evidently, it had been more than just a game to him: mimicking the patterns of numbers the King had used, he had gone to considerable lengths to devise a numerical vocabulary. It was a substitution cipher: the numbers represented words, syllables and letters: using it would have been both laborious and complicated.

  By a strange quirk of coincidence, Carisbrooke Castle, where Charles I had been imprisoned before his execution, was nearby. It was at Newport on the Isle of Wight. Weeks before the King faced the scaffold, hundreds of encrypted letters were smuggled in and out of his bedchamber. The long sequences of numbers concealed details of the last, desperate plots to spring him from the castle and restore him to the throne. Two hundred and fifty years later, John had created a similar cipher to encrypt his secrets from Rome.

  It was such a bizarre thing for John to have done. Why replicate Charles I’s cipher? Given his knowledge of cryptology, he could have invented one of his own. Had the 22-year-old felt some sort of affinity with the Stuart King? Had something about the King’s life or character drawn John to him?

  At this stage in his life, I realized I understood very little about John. His letters sketch only the faintest picture of him. His personality remained hidden, as if he were guarding it. From Messina in Italy, he wrote graphically of the devastation caused by the earthquake, and the scenes that he had witnessed at the British relief camp. But this was reportage. After the pain his parents had inflicted on him as a child, it was hard to determine what sort of young man he had become. I certainly had no inkling of what he was hiding in the pages of encryption.

  I knew where he had been in the months before he went out to Italy. Having left Cambridge in the summer of 1908, he was living at 97 Cadogan Gardens – Charlie’s house in Chelsea. Their life together appears to have revolved around their shared interests: antiques, books, rare manuscripts and John’s bulldogs – Ariel and Togo. Though Charlie was thirty years older, they seemed inseparable. Most weekends, they went shooting or fishing together. Then there were expeditions to excavate archaeological sites on the family’s numerous estates. In September 1908, they spent three weeks at Croxton Abbey, the medieval priory close to Belvoir Castle, where John found the monks’ tombs.

  When he wasn’t with Charlie, John saw his friends. In London, he belonged to a fashionable, bohemian set; besides other wealthy aristocrats, it included the leading lights of the day – painters, writers, actresses and musicians. Their evenings were spent at the theatre, or at dinner parties hosted at houses in Mayfair and Belgravia. After dinner, they raced their cars along the Mall, or joined in the midnight treasure hunts that were all the rage.

  This was the surface of John’s life – but I wanted a sense of the person beneath it. There was a telling photograph of him in the family album the Duchess had shown me. It is late in the summer of 1909 and John is standing with a group of friends. He is leaning against a wall, looking down, his arms folded. There is a cigarette in his mouth, which is unlit. He has dark, glossy hair; his handsome face is caught in profile. There is an aura of rebelliousness about him; his stri
king looks single him out: he appears more worldly, more sophisticated than the conventional, awkward-looking young men he stands beside.

  There are other pictures of him taken that summer: posing with his sisters on the battlements at Belvoir; at Croxton Abbey, with his sleeves rolled up, digging an excavation trench; on the banks of the River Wye in Derbyshire, fishing for trout; The impression they leave is of an active, engaging young man. But there is also a hint of distance. John, I noticed, never looks at the camera. His gaze is always averted.

  Thirty years later, as he was dying in the Muniment Rooms, he returned to the events of that summer. Something had happened that he was determined no one should remember.

  I parked by the thin strip of beach. I’d finally found a wi-fi signal in a small village overlooking the Solent. Directly opposite, about two miles distant, I could see Cowes. It was a still summer’s evening and the sea shimmered. There were yachts and motor cruisers out, their wakes dazzling white against the blue. Three hundred and fifty years ago, in the depths of winter, Charles I’s devoted servants had risked their lives crossing this very stretch of water to deliver the encrypted letters from his exiled courtiers. It was incredible to think that I was about to see the text that John had hidden in his replica of the King’s code.

  The signal was weak; it took a while for the document to download. Watching the blue indicator flickering slowly forwards, I wondered why John had left the encrypted letters in the Muniment Rooms. Why hadn’t he destroyed them? Was it because he thought his version of Charles I’s cipher was unbreakable?

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