The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery Page 20

  He has apparently got it into his head that you have treated him very badly. He was, it seems, very much cut up, in a state bordering on collapse and broken-hearted about it, talked about his son being the last person he wanted to defraud, saying he could never forget the way you had behaved and ending by saying he was absolutely determined not to give in any more etc. Of course the thing’s all rot …

  My advice is (or I am very strongly of the opinion) that you ought to correct this present mood by a friendly letter to your father, explaining that you never had any intention of behaving in an unfriendly or behind the back manner towards him. But I should leave the actual matter of the Agreement alone until later, or until some development occurs. I reason that you cannot possibly do any harm, or in any way give your case away by writing in this manner, whereas it might be the actual means of getting something out of him – you know the blitherer – he’ll probably be delighted with your letter.

  ‘No one of course knows that I am writing to you,’ he continued:

  To my mind the only thing to save the situation is for your mother to tell him he is all wrong. Your mother was fearfully against you when we began our talk, but I so put the matter that she altered her views and when I asked her point blank whether she would take the responsibility of advising you to sign the deal as it stood, she said certainly not.

  She means to write to you today – so do nothing till you get it.

  Therefore till my next

  Yours Charlie

  BURN

  Violet had broken Henry’s confidence by reporting their conversation to Charlie; he, in turn, had betrayed her trust by relaying it to John. Henry was claiming to be ‘broken-hearted’ when, purposely, he had set out to cheat his son. The deception and the double-dealing exposed the poisonous relationships within the family but, a hundred years later, they rendered it impossible to work out what was actually going on.

  It was Charlie’s advice to John that I found completely mystifying. The Duke was trying to divest John of a substantial part of his inheritance, yet three times in the course of a week he had urged him to write a ‘friendly letter’ to his father. And this despite the fact that John had told him that the Duke was going ‘to try and frighten him’.

  Why was Charlie being so conciliatory? In his coded letters to John, he had called his father ‘a liar’ and ‘a cheat’.

  And why the subterfuge?

  Charlie was tiptoeing around the Duke: ‘Burn’; ‘Destroy’; ‘No one knows I am writing.’ The secrecy and the whispered conversations with Violet implied that John was guilty. But he wasn’t. Before he left for Rome, he had told his father that he would be appointing his own lawyer to look at the resettlement agreement: the charge that he had ‘gone behind his back’ was completely trumped up. It was Henry who had gone behind his back; he hadn’t discussed the agreement with him – the first John knew of it was when it was presented to him for signature. As for the agreement itself, the law was on John’s side: to alter the legal status of the heirlooms, Henry needed his permission.

  It was almost a month since John had left for Rome and he had not heard from either of his parents since 2 February; yet, there he was, a thousand miles away, reading the dreadful things they were saying about him. Charlie had long since replaced them in his affections; still, they were his parents.

  At this stage in the proceedings, we can only imagine his feelings. Charlie is denying him a voice. His instructions are explicit: ‘Do nothing until you hear from your mother.’

  ‘Tiring, isn’t it all?’ he remarks acerbically in a note to Charlie. But what was he really thinking?

  It is only on 28 February, when, at last, Violet’s letter arrives at the embassy, that John’s voice kicks in.

  The letter came a few hours before he was due to catch the night train to Calabria. He was on his way to Reggio to coordinate British aid efforts following the devastating earthquake.

  Before leaving for the station, he wrote to Charlie:

  Old Boy,

  I’m off in an hour – no time for cipher.

  I have written the best letter to father that I could in the time, I am afraid it is not as good as I should have liked, but I am dreadfully pressed for time in getting things ready. On the other hand I think my letter will put things right for the time being.

  Mother’s letter was a lot of rotten ‘hurt feelings’ etc. My God, what rot the whole thing is – I still believe it is all got up to try and make me give in – but we shall see. I expect to be round about Calabria for a week and will write to you when I get back as I don’t suppose I shall get a chance till then.

  What a bombshell – and especially at this moment most unlucky.

  I wish I was with you. Mother says I don’t understand everything.

  Goodnight, old boy

  But a postscript, hastily scribbled on the back of the envelope, reveals that John did not send the letter he had written to his father. At the last minute, he had substituted one that Charlie had drafted for him:

  PS. Your draft is much better than mine. So have sent yours. My dear old boy, I can’t tell you how awfully grateful I am to you for helping me.

  The letter was among the Duke’s papers at Belvoir. Judging by John’s handwriting, which lacked its usual neatness, he had evidently copied it out in a rush:

  British Embassy

  Rome

  28 February 1909

  My dear Father

  I have just received a letter from Mother which has surprised me very much. I am very sorry indeed that you think that I have tried to be unfriendly and distrustful with you because I had no intention of doing anything underhand and I certainly did not think that what I was doing was making you feel miserable all the time, or I think I should have come and talked to you about it at once.

  Mother says you told her it was an unheard of thing going to another lawyer. As a matter of fact some man had been appointed by Dowling to represent me, for he sent me his name and address, just as if it was the usual thing, without my ever asking him to, and it was only because Dowling had been so rude and offhand when I wanted the epitome paper explained (not a word of which I could understand) that I thought of getting someone else who wasn’t a Dowlingite. Perhaps you have forgotten that I came and told you at once, in your bedroom in London, what I was doing and asked your permission to send particulars to the man, and you did not seem to object at all.

  I can see now that it would have been much better if I had come straight to you about it but it was very difficult to decide what to do. I had several messages from you through the lawyers, and I thought it was very likely you would rather not talk to me privately at all, especially as when we were at Belvoir together you were as friendly as possible. All that time I felt very uncomfortable not knowing what I had better do and expecting every moment that you would say something yourself. I did not tell Mother anything about it and the only time I asked Charlie he said I had better go straight to you, which I wish I had done.

  I don’t know whether I have explained myself properly but anyhow I hope you will see that I never meant to be unfriendly.

  I wish I was in England and could have a talk with you alone – without anything to do with the lawyers. If you would like it, I will write and explain everything that I can remember about it.

  Yours affectionately, John

  Given that his father was trying to take away a significant proportion of his inheritance, the emollient tone was astonishing.

  I imagined that John had torn up the letter that he had had second thoughts about sending. But he hadn’t. It was in the file of papers that he had kept from his time in Rome. This one was written from the heart; still, the anger I expected to find was absent:

  British Embassy, Rome

  My dear Father

  I have just received a letter from Mother which distresses me very much and the worst of it all is that it has arrived at a most inconvenient moment as I start for the Reggio Relief Camp in an hour, and so am
dreadfully pressed for time in getting things ready and so can’t put on paper well what I want to.

  I can’t tell you my dear Father what rot this all is, and can’t make out what you have got into your head, about trouble between Father and Son etc. This must be put right at once. I don’t believe for one moment that you really feel hurt, as Mother says you are.

  I originally went to the lawyer (which by the way I told you I was going to do) because of two reasons.

  The first was because Dowling was so infernally rude to me and would not help me to understand that enormous amount of writing which was just the same as Hebrew to me – that I should never have believed or trusted him – and as you have always instilled into me the one principle of never putting one’s name to anything one does not absolutely understand, I did not sign it.

  As to the not mentioning it to you, that was a just a matter of not bringing a subject of this kind into the family home. And, as a matter of fact, as you did not mention it to me, I thought that you thought the same thing – that it was unnecessary.

  I am afraid this letter is making no sense but I hope it will just put the one item right, which is that it is absolute rot for you to feel hurt and distressed. This is not a question of feeling that one’s son thinks that his father is going to have him.

  I beg of you to put all this out of your mind at once.

  I hope you will be able to read this and that it will convey my feelings to you of how sorry I am that you should have felt as no doubt you have over this matter. If you had only mentioned it before I left you would have had none of this hurt feeling – but I am sure this rotten letter will wipe it all out.

  Your loving son

  It was what he wasn’t saying that was revealing. While his anxiety to placate his father was undoubtedly real, the sentiments he was expressing were completely at odds with his true feelings. He hated his father. In the letters and telegrams he had encrypted to Charlie he had called him a cunt. He had gone out of his way to sooth his ‘hurt feelings’; but he hadn’t believed in them. As he told Charlie, he thought they were ‘got up’ to make him give in. Charlie had agreed with him; yet, though equally contemptuous of the Duke, he had been as obsequious.

  Given the true state of their feelings, the suspicion arising from both their letters was that they were conceding ground for a reason. It seemed they had an ulterior motive for wanting to keep relations on an even keel.

  I could only think it was because the Duke had some sort of a hold over John, one that he and Charlie had not needed to spell out in their letters to each other, not even in cipher, because it was so obvious to them.

  32

  The missing piece in the puzzle was not a huge debt, or an embarrassing relationship, but an abandoned medieval manor house. Ghostly, falling slowly to ruin, it stood on a limestone escarpment in the Derbyshire Peaks.

  The discovery gave me an uneasy feeling. The house was Haddon Hall. I knew that in 1909 it had mattered more than anywhere else to John.

  The clue lay in an angry outburst from Violet: ‘That Haddon Hall is at this moment nothing to do with John,’ she told Charlie: ‘Henry can sell it! Henry can let it go to ruin – he need not spend a penny on it!’

  The Hall, built of grey Derbyshire stone and dating back to the twelfth century, had come into the Rutlands’ possession in the 1560s, when Dorothy Vernon, a wealthy heiress, married John Manners, the second son of Thomas, 1st Earl of Rutland. At the time Violet was writing, the family had not lived in it for two hundred years. In 1703, after Sir John Manners, 9th Earl of Rutland, was created Duke of Rutland by Queen Anne, he had abandoned the Hall in favour of the larger Belvoir Castle, a more fitting residence for a Duke. Surplus to the Duke’s requirements and ill suited to Belvoir, much of the heavy oak medieval furniture housed in it had been left behind. Ever since, the Hall, a fortified manor house of turrets and battlements, had stood suspended in time.

  The romance of Haddon had captivated John. In the summer months, while staying at the nearby Stanton Woodhouse, he and Charlie had picnicked among the ruins. Steeped in the history of the Middle Ages and the Reformation, the Hall appealed to John’s fascination with the past. He was drawn too by its fine architectural features, and as a boy his ambition had been to make its restoration his life’s work. In 1907, when he came of age, he began work on the project, spending the bulk of his £1,500* allowance on building materials.

  The knowledge that Henry could at any moment take Haddon away from him was what had kept John in his thrall. It was the hold his father had over him. It explains why John accepted the job at the embassy and why, in the period before he left, he was beholden to his parents. It also explains why, in the row over the resettlement agreement, both he and Charlie had been so contrite.

  In 1909, the Hall, and the 20,000 acre estate that surrounded it, belonged solely to Henry. Under the terms of the complex legal arrangements that governed the passing of the family’s property from one generation to another, the Haddon estate was classed as ‘unsettled’, meaning it was not entailed and therefore did not automatically pass to John. As Violet had angrily – and correctly – pointed out, Henry could do with it as he liked.

  Henry had used the threat to sell the Hall to bully John into signing the resettlement agreement. While there is no evidence to prove the point, it is more than probable that this was John’s meaning when he told Charlie that his father ‘was going to try and frighten him’.

  So central was Haddon to the argument, and such was the depth of feeling vested in it, that the protagonists had not needed to mention it; it is only in the resolution of the row that its importance becomes apparent.

  On 12 June, five months after the row began, John told his father that he would sign the agreement. He did so only because he had extracted a promise that Haddon would be made over to him. Such was the mistrust between them, he asked his father to confirm his promise in writing. Three days later, the Duke wrote back to him: ‘The question of Haddon has been safeguarded in the settlement.’ Only then did John sign the agreement.

  They had fought each other to a standstill. While John was forced to concede his legal interest in the family heirlooms, so anxious was the Duke to raise the capital he needed to pay off his debts, he had had to surrender the one thing he had never wanted his son to have. It had nothing to do with the Hall’s material value. It was simply because it bore the name of his dead son.

  A letter – from John to his mother – written seventeen years later, offers a chilling coda. In August 1926, when the restoration works at Haddon were finally completed, John moved into the Hall. As he wrote to Violet, it was the fulfilment of a lifetime’s ambition; yet she defaced his letter.

  The cruelty of her gesture becomes apparent only after reading it:

  Haddon Hall

  Bakewell

  Derbyshire

  28 August 1926

  Mother darling

  I hasten to write to you on notepaper with an address on it, which I have been hoping to use for now just on 20 years. Although the house is not ready yet for occupation, I feel justified in making you the recipient of the first letter written from Haddon by a member of the family since they left for good in 1703. I am writing from my sitting room which is the uppermost room in the Nether Tower – the whole tower being finished and ready for occupation. My dreams, as far as my sitting room is concerned, are fulfilled. It is a perfect room with the sun pouring in.

  There is only one cloud over this moment and that is that old Charlie* is not here with me – then indeed my spirits would be overwhelming. But perhaps he may know that I am writing at his own writing table.

  Goodbye for the moment.

  Yours, John

  It was the address that Violet had defaced:

  The stabs of her pen spoke volumes: John was unworthy of the house that bore his brother’s name. The implication of her gesture was that she wished it was Haddon who was living there, not him.

  John’s encrypted letters
had exposed the tensions inside this troubled family. Evidently, the scar left by Haddon’s death had not healed: the loss of the 9-year-old boy had continued to haunt their relationships.

  The central mystery, however, remained.

  What had happened to John in the summer of 1909?

  I had no answer. The row over the resettlement agreement was resolved in June, before the gap in the records at Belvoir begins. I had looked at all the letters for 1909 in the bundles John was working on when he died. There were no pointers. I could only move forward – to the third and last gap in the Muniment Rooms: the missing months in 1915.

  PART V

  33

  7 July–5 December 1915. The correspondence from 152 days was missing from the Muniment Rooms. From what I knew of John, he had hidden things that were painful to him: I could only think that the excision related to some traumatic event that had occurred on the Western Front.

  It was where he had been in the summer of 1915. Aged twenty-eight at the time, he was aide-de-camp to General Edward Stuart Wortley, the commanding officer of the 46th North Midland Division. The division had arrived at the Front on 26 February 1915. John had been there for just over four months.

  I went back to the notes that I had made when I first discovered the missing letters.

  The last sighting I had of him was on 5 July. That afternoon, at around 4 p.m., he drove his general to Goldfish Château, the headquarters of III Army Corps at Vlamertinge. British troops had named the château, situated a few miles to the west of the canal sector at Ypres, after the fishponds in its gardens. There, according to the entry in John’s war diary, they had tea with Major-General Sir William Pulteney, the corps commander.

  It is at this point that John vanishes from the record. From 6 July, the pages of his diary are blank.

  The date coincides precisely with the start of the gap in the letters at Belvoir. Not a single document remains in the blue files that crowd the shelves of the Muniment Rooms to explain what occurred between then and 5 December 1915. John had made certain of this. My only hope was that something – or some clue – lay in the pile of letters that I had extracted from the trunk of correspondence he had been working on when he died.