The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery Page 16

There were 148 pages to go through. John and Charlie had used the cipher throughout their letters; frequently, they had encrypted a single word within a sentence. For this reason, their entire correspondence was included in the document.

  The letters were in date order. I scrolled down to 11 February, when John had first used the cipher. It was his second week at the embassy and a letter had come from Charlie in that evening’s post. Before joining the ambassador and his wife for dinner, he had replied immediately:

  ‘My dear Old Boy,’ he began:

  During the course of this letter I am going to put one or two things in cipher but do not trouble to make it out in a hurry as it will be of no importance …

  It looked as if this was a practice run. I stopped reading and scrolled back up to Charlie’s letter to see if he had mentioned anything that would have prompted John to use the cipher. I couldn’t see anything of consequence. Having spent the weekend at Belvoir, Charlie was missing his nephew; the letter was mostly devoted to news of John’s dogs, Ariel and Togo:

  Belvoir Castle

  Jacko – I am here till Sunday, with little Ariel who is extremely well.

  I am now writing at your centre table and the little boy is lying spatchcock by the fire, thinking of you. It is almost painful to see the way he dashes into this room and then his deep disappointment not to find you here, and he is by no means the only one who misses you really badly here. Togo is also well, as long as he doesn’t swallow bones. He was very sick the other night and produced a chicken’s pelvis.

  Charlie relayed other news from the castle. ‘We had a ball for the servants last night. I danced the opening dance with Mrs Walker* and a valse (!!) with Miss Tritton,’† he reported. Then, after telling John about the proposed reorganization of the library at Belvoir, he asked whether he could use the diplomatic bag to send out the parcels of cigarettes he wanted.

  I returned to John’s reply:

  I find out now that the Foreign Office will not send out anything at all in the bag, except in the form of a letter, so that is no good for cigarettes. So if you could send out some more as soon as you can, I should be very glad.

  I wonder if you know of any references to cipher letters and keys in the Vatican Library? If so, I might go and do some work there some time. I think I shall go there on the chance and have a look about.

  He continued by asking Charlie to do one or two chores for him:

  When you have a chance I should be awfully grateful to you if you would telephone to Mr Rye‡ and get as much information as you can out of him about the roof and ask him when he is going to send me the plan and the vellum and powder. I am also writing soon to Cousins§ to ask him again to look out for a wife for Ariel and will tell him if he finds a good dog to get your approval first. You don’t mind this, do you?

  Then came the cipher:

  51349 44695 35963 59823

  83358 27472 79901 12211

  54370 54151 94731 77336

  695 514 543 831

  390 921 946 236

  837 dogs it isn’t the being 390 910 489

  that 501 650 but it is the 200 771 231

  441 358 385 140 695 444 122 not only to body but to mind never 433 130 120 543 one has got a moment to one’s self – even while I am

  93245 54372 84006 44601 24200

  24329 91034 53592 61271

  59445 69226 54364 behind

  83305 81273 50139 53121

  80647 69685 13092 is coming in.

  Decrypted, the numbers read as follows:

  how i Do Long

  to Be si T.

  ing in Your ro

  om have. ing teA. with you And

  the dogs it isn’t the being A. wa Y

  that i mind but it is the D. re ad

  full Di S. C. om for T. not only to body but to mind never fe E. L. ing

  one has got a moment to one’s self – even while I am

  write ing this i Am

  All wa Y

  Lo ok ing behind

  to see i F

  some on E. is coming in

  John had told Charlie this was of ‘no importance’. But it was important to me. I was seeing a side of him that I had not seen before. The vulnerability which the cipher concealed was absent from his other letters. It was also at odds with the assured, handsome-looking man I had seen in the photographs.

  I read the translation again:

  How I do long to be sitting in your room having tea with you and the dogs. It isn’t the being away that I mind, it is the dreadful discomfort not only to body but to mind, never feeling one has got a moment to one’s self – even while I am writing this, I am always looking behind to see if someone is coming in.

  His paranoia was disconcerting; he seemed at pains to conceal his unhappiness from those around him. The ‘looking behind’ as he was writing, and the fact that he had chosen to express his unhappiness as a series of mathematical equations that only Charlie could understand, suggested that he was afraid of anyone knowing what he really felt.

  John had written ‘important’ by the blocks of cipher in the letters that followed. I was expecting the translations to reveal the details of a particular event, or a sequence of events: something that had happened to him, or that was about to happen to him. But he hadn’t used the cipher to communicate information. Time after time, he had used it to encrypt raw emotion – feelings of deep loathing for his father:

  238 385 503 592

  As S. ho le.

  312 541 401 122

  C u N. T

  50000 53741

  47314 54330 83309 86154

  and 53131 78042 40319 62731

  he is

  go ing to Try

  and F right En Me

  Quickly, I scanned the rest of the pages. There were gaps in the translations; places where the cipher hadn’t been broken. John was obviously locked in a bitter row with his father, but it wasn’t clear what they were fighting about.

  I wondered whether the hatred concealed in the strings of numbers stemmed from the way the Duke had treated John after his brother died – and whether the row was in some way a byproduct of that. But, on closer reading, it looked as though it had something to do with money. Family heirlooms, and the terms of John’s allowance, appeared to come into it. Yet it was impossible to pinpoint how – or why – the Duke had wanted to frighten him. Or why John had loathed him so intensely.

  Until now, the Duke had played only a small part in the story I was following. He was a remote, mysterious figure; I knew very little of substance about him. At Belvoir, I had come across just one letter of his: the short note that he had sent to Violet on her birthday, a few months after Haddon died. He had barely featured in the other letters that I had seen: his family rarely mentioned him.

  In the few glimpses I’d had of him, he struck me as a kind, socially responsible man. On becoming Duke, his concern for the welfare of the poor in his villages had led him to donate generously to local charities. In 1914, in the first weeks of the war, he had offered to support the families of men anxious to fight abroad. But it was the strength of emotion that he had shown at Haddon’s funeral that jarred against the crude insults that John was levelling at him. Unable to maintain the stiff reserve of Victorian times, the Duke had wept throughout his son’s funeral: his own father had had to support him as Haddon’s coffin was lowered into the ground.

  Fifteen years later, this same, apparently sensitive, man had wanted to ‘frighten’ his only surviving son.

  Whatever John’s feelings towards his father, Charlie clearly shared them. Looking at the decrypted material, it seemed the two of them were tapping into a conversation that had been going on for some time. ‘Blitherer’; ‘rotten’; ‘cheat’; ‘liar’: these were all words Charlie used to refer to the Duke.

  The suggestion was that there was a hidden side to Henry Rutland. The material at Belvoir was thin, but what had his contemporaries made of him? Printed sources – the newspapers, and published letters and biographi
es of the period – seemed the obvious place to start.

  26

  Henry’s life passed his contemporaries by. They had little to say about him. Famous only for his handsome looks and his putative charm, he was, so the press baron Lord Beaverbrook believed, ‘a man of considerable stupidity’.

  Born in 1852, the year the new Houses of Parliament were completed in Gothic Revival style, he was the only child of John Manners, the 7th Duke of Rutland, and his first wife, Catherine, the granddaughter of the 2nd Earl of Lanesborough.

  The newspaper reports published around the time of his birth pointed to the family’s reach and power. At that time, his grandfather, John Henry Manners, had been Duke. Within his domain, he inspired awe. As a matter of course, whenever he entered the villages on his estate, peals of bells sounded and his flag would be hoisted on top of the parish church.

  Further afield, in the Midlands cities where the Duke had political and commercial interests, the adulation was on a grander scale. At Leicester, a few weeks after Henry was born, a crowd of fifty thousand turned out to see the unveiling of a statue of his grandfather. The Duke himself was the guest of honour. He had arrived in a gold carriage, emblazoned with his coat of arms, and accompanied by retinues of servants and his own personal band; trumpeters had walked ahead of the carriage to announce his presence. Later that evening, a magnificent firework display was staged, the details of which the local newspaper rapturously reported in advance:

  A beautiful set piece, formed by thousands of diamond lights, will represent the Duke of Rutland’s coronet, supported by a motto of ‘God Save the Queen’ in beautiful-coloured fires, surrounded by double rainbow-wheels, and mounted with a great variety of beautiful colours. Another beautiful set piece will represent his Grace the Duke of Rutland’s crest, formed by thousands of beautiful-coloured lights, supported by the motto ‘Three Cheers for the Duke’ in beautiful diamond lights, the whole surrounded by Chinese flyers, with coloured centres fronted with emerald fires. Several splendid balloons will ascend during the evening, and the illumination of the ground will be superb in the extreme. Special trains will run from Derby, Nottingham and Peterborough, taking up passengers at most of the intermediate stations. A medal will be struck for the occasion, the children of the schools will be regaled with tea etc, and the day will be a general holiday.

  Such veneration was Henry’s birthright. From the very beginning, wealth and prestige on a scale that seems scarcely credible awaited him.

  Fifty-four years later, when he succeeded his father to become the 8th Duke, he was a man of few achievements. Briefly, in the 1880s, he had been private secretary to Lord Salisbury, the Tory Prime Minister – a job secured by family connection. Derided by his contemporaries for his old-fashioned courtly ways and his lack of intelligence, he was known as ‘Salisbury’s Manners’.

  In 1895, after serving as MP for North Leicestershire, a seat his family had held since the beginning of the century, Henry retired from public life.

  The 8th Duke was six feet two inches tall, with a firm set to his jaw and a powerful physique; pheasants, dry-fly fishing and actresses were his principal interests. Famously, he and King Edward VII fought to seduce Maxine Elliot, America’s most celebrated actress, who had made her debut on the London stage in 1905. Henry’s charms proved the more alluring and he and Maxine began a long affair. Simultaneously, he was seeing Violet Vanbrugh, another actress, by whom he had a child.

  Elegant, affable, a legendary philanderer: this was the public face of Henry Rutland. But, at home, as the memoirs of Lady Diana Cooper, his daughter, reveal, his family saw a very different character.

  The picture she paints of him is of a brutish, unsophisticated man with a ‘ferocious temper’ who hated ‘abroad’ and ‘soap in his bath’, and who terrorized his children with the prospect of nemesis. ‘Ruin stared us in the face – everything sold, beggars in the street,’ she recalls.

  Day and night, Henry’s financial worries gnawed at him, sparking the flashes of ‘ferocious temper’ so feared by his staff and family. His moodiness seeped into the atmosphere at Belvoir Castle. On a low day, he was approached with trepidation; whenever Diana and her siblings wanted to talk to him, they would first ask his butler if it was a propitious moment to disturb ‘His Grace’.

  The enormity of his financial difficulties had apparently induced a sort of paralysis. Though he ‘worried and fretted’ and forced himself to do a ‘good two hours of tiresome work every morning’, he was ineffectual and prone to distraction. When in London, as Diana describes, he worked in the library of the family’s fifty-room townhouse behind the Ritz in Piccadilly. ‘Seated at a large writing table, surrounded by bound copies of the Burlington Magazine, the current works of Conan Doyle and Kipling, Burke’s Peerage and Turf Guides, he wrote letters to Drummond’s Bank, the Leicestershire Agricultural Club, the Sun Insurance Co, occasional articles on dry-fly fishing for the Badminton Magazine and a blue-moon letter to The Times’ On the stroke of twelve, this ‘tiresome routine’ would end, to be followed by one more agreeable: he laced on his boots at midday and walked down Bond Street, taking off his top hat to bow to acquaintances at every other step.’

  Diana went on to become one of the most celebrated society figures of the twentieth century. Her memoirs run to 753 pages; yet her father’s death, in the spring of 1925, merits one short paragraph. ‘Sadness fell from the air one bright day in May,’ she recalls:

  The Gower Street telephone rang to tell me, and my mother with me, that my father, slightly ailing and in bed, had been seized with a heart attack. We got home as quick as could be, but it was too late. The good old man (he was over seventy) was dead. He had been a loving and wise father. What hot tempers he had started with had long since abated into serenity.

  As I read these few words, and the cold, sparse entries that preceded them, it seemed there was much that Diana had left out.

  27

  The castle was wreathed in late-summer sunshine, the rays slanting through the iron bars that secured the windows. I was back in the Muniment Rooms.

  I levered the book down from the shelf. Bound in burgundy leather, the year ‘1899’ was embossed on the spine. It weighed twelve or thirteen pounds. Stacked along the shelves beside it, there were seventy others like it.

  These were the castle’s ledger books. Henry’s preoccupation with money had dominated Diana’s characterization of him; money, so John’s decrypted letters had indicated, was the most likely cause of the row with his father. I was interested to see whether the family’s financial records for the period would shed light on it.

  The year 1899 was an important one. When Henry’s accountants had presented him with the ledger, it had marked a rite of passage. His father was in failing health; this was the year he had taken over the running of the family’s financial affairs. The pages of this weighty volume had shown him how he had fared in managing his father’s estate for the first time.

  The ledger was in pristine condition. The leather binding, and the expensive cream paper, a millimetre thick, exuded the smell of newness – just as they must have when Henry had first looked at it. The pages listed the annual income and expenditure in each of the castle’s various departments: ‘Farms in Hand’; ‘Game and Fisheries’; ‘The Household’; ‘Forestry’; ‘Minerals’. Each receipt, and every item of expenditure, had been entered. The figures were fascinating, conjuring up the way life had been lived in this remote rural community in the last year of the nineteenth century. On the home farm that winter, £1 was spent on turnip seed; £8 18sh 1d was paid to Nottingham City Corporation for night soil – human waste – to spread on the fields; W Sopps had charged £4 2sh for mole-catching at Woolsthorpe; and William Wright, one of the Duke’s farm labourers, received £3 3sh for castrating the lambs and other newborn livestock. The figures, written in a neat, confident hand, ran to 420 pages.

  At the centre of the ledger, where the stiff pages opened flush with the spine, there was a profit and los
s summary. Presumably, it was to these pages that Henry had turned first. Income was summarized in the left-hand column: expenditure, on the right. The results for his first year in charge showed a deficit in the region of £41,559.*

  The ledgers for the decade that followed told a similar story. Year after year, Henry’s losses had mounted. So had the interest on the huge sums he was borrowing. No wonder he had terrorized his children with the threat of bankruptcy.

  Looking at the ledger books prior to 1899, it was painfully evident that the family’s financial difficulties went back several decades.

  Henry had taken over from his father at a time when the farming industry was caught in the grip of the longest depression that anyone could remember. From the mid-1870s, cheap food imports from abroad, made possible by the new refrigerated ships, had caused food prices to collapse and land values and agricultural rents to fall. At Belvoir, the consequences were catastrophic. Steadily, as the depression bit deeper, the large profits the family had grown accustomed to expect from their 65,000 acres evaporated until, by the early 1880s, the estate was operating at a loss. In 1897, the position was made the more precarious by the need to write off another £31,000 in rental arrears from farm tenants hit by the depression.†

  Henry’s father’s solution had been to borrow huge sums of money. By 1899, his estates were heavily mortgaged: £234,000 was owed to various creditors, the interest payments alone coming to £10,474 a year.‡ Ten years later, Henry had only succeeded in adding to the debts – in 1909, they stood at £289,000.§

  Henry’s problems were intractable; but the ledgers for this period do more than illuminate the cause of his anxiety. They offer a telling insight into his character. Leafing through them, it is clear that he was the sort of man whose private troubles made his public face all the more important to him. Faced with the collapse in land and rent values, many of his contemporaries, including the Dukes of Bedford, Devonshire and Westminster, were cutting their losses and starting to sell off their subsidiary estates. Pride prevented Henry from taking such a prudent step; instead, he kept on spending. Regardless of the reality of his financial position, he was determined to keep up appearances. Despite the staggering levels of debt attached to his father’s estates, in the early 1900s, he made little attempt to balance the books, or rein in his expenditure. Evidently, all that mattered to Henry was that his father should be seen to be maintaining the lavish tenue expected of a Duke.