The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery Page 21
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First, I counted the envelopes; there were sixty-three. Then, working from the postmarks, I made a quick note of the dates the letters had been sent. Fifty-seven were dated before 6 July, and two after 5 December. Four were impossible to date: the ‘killers’ – the rippled lines that prevented the stamp from being re-used – were sharp. So was the year. The rest of the information – the date, the time, and the month they had been delivered – was blurred.
I began with these. Potentially, as John hurried to cull the last of his mother’s papers, these were letters that he missed.
The first, written from Belvoir, was from Violet to her daughter, Marjorie, Marchioness of Anglesey. At the top of the dove-grey notepaper, a miniature of the castle, the size of a large coin, was embossed in white against a black background. Beneath it, there was a date – 15 June 1915.
The date was interesting. It was around the time that I had noticed a change in John – from engaged and engaging to terse and secretive. In his war diary, in April and May, he had written long, vivid accounts of the fighting at Ypres. He had expressed his thoughts and feelings on the progress of the war. But in these last weeks in June, just days before he mysteriously vanishes, he records very little: the short, flat entries amount to no more than one or two sentences.
Only once had he expressed any emotion. This was on 19 June. That morning, he left London to return to the Front after five days’ leave. When his ship docked at Boulogne, he learned that his division was about to be drafted to Sanctuary Wood in the Ypres Salient. There, for the first time – and in one of the most dangerous sectors on the front line – it was to take part in an attack. ‘Damn,’ he wrote later that evening.
After this brief eruption, his diary offers no further insight into his state of mind. Day after day, he had written just two words to mark the passage of war: ‘usual day’.
His brevity was troubling. As I had established, these were far from ‘usual days’. For the first time, the North Midlands were in the front-line trenches; they were coming under attack. Although John was nine miles away at division headquarters, he was aide-de-camp to the commanding officer: the dispatches from the Front had passed across his desk. Soldiers from his own battalion – men who came from the villages on his father’s estate, many of whom he had known since he was a child – were being killed and wounded. Yet, in his diary, he fails to make a single reference to the fighting, or to the casualties incurred by his regiment.
So what had changed between May and June? Something must have happened to account for his detachment. The terse entries suggest that he was preoccupied by something else – something he was not prepared to confide to his diary.
Was there a link between the change in his mood and his mysterious disappearance after 6 July? Violet’s letter to her daughter, written at such a crucial time, might point to what had occurred.
‘Darling – such a day as we’ve had – a great success – telegrams all day,’ her letter began:
Buckets of rose leaves, the nursery all roses. Caroline like a little drunk Bacchus with a wreath of red roses over one ear and as naughty as you please. All the rose effect done by me this morning. Also chairs and cushions and rugs in your top garden. Caroline got a new ball and a new perambulator. Great gossiping amongst the grown-ups and playing with the children, and so on, until tea – with a wonderful chocolate and sugar birthday cake with rose red candles.
It was not what I was hoping for. Violet, who was obviously an indulgent grandmother, was writing of a tea party that she and the Duke had hosted to celebrate their 2-year-old granddaughter’s birthday.
I read on, hoping to find a reference to John. ‘Lovely it was,’ Violet continued, ‘and Caroline getting naughtier and naughtier. Then George Paynter produced a walking stick that shoots cartridges like a gun and Father shot off at a swallow with it and it nearly knocked his front tooth out! This is terrible! I’m so sorry about it. Now the children are in bed, but Caroline won’t sleep a wink, I expect. The whole day was a great success and very pretty to look at. Father’s shooting out his own tooth the only sad moment. I feel worn out. My love, darling. VR.’
The absence of any mention of the war appeared to be a family trait. A few hundred miles away, on the other side of the English Channel, the British Army was sustaining heavy losses in its attempt to hold the trenches east of Festubert. Yet here was the Duke firing a makeshift gun at a swallow for fun. This, and the rose-festooned party for the 2-year-old baby, seemed to belong to another age.
I turned over the page. Violet had at least mentioned John. On the back of her letter, she had added a postscript:
John home on leave, I hear. I am glad. I wish he’d come here for a day. Will you tell him from me I shall leave here Friday, so if he doesn’t come to see me before that he must make a point of seeing me in London.
The imperiousness of her tone was bemusing. John had left for the Front in February; this was his first visit home. Violet appeared anxious to see him, yet evidently they were not in communication. She was asking her daughter to act as messenger. Her letter hadn’t pointed to anything that might have caused John to turn in on himself. But then judging from her request to Marjorie, she was not in a position to know. The suggestion was that her relationship with her son remained as problematic as ever.
I moved on to the second of the four letters. As I unfolded it, the paper, brittle after almost a century, emitted a sharp crack.
Immediately, the date caught my attention. Tuesday 19 October. The gap in the records extended from 6 July to 5 December: this was the first letter I had come across inside the missing period.
The date had a further significance. Six days earlier, on 13 October, the North Midlands had suffered severe losses at the Battle of Loos. In the space of just a few hours, 3,700 men had been killed or wounded as they fought to recapture the Hohenzollern Redoubt – a small piece of high ground made up of coal-mining waste. John’s battalion, the 4th Leicesters, had gone into the battle a thousand-strong; the morning after, just 188 men had answered the roll call.
The letter, written from Belvoir Castle, was from the Duke to Violet:
Dear,
My blasted tooth has gone wrong these last two days, and if it goes on I must come to London Tuesday for 1 night to have it looked at. So don’t be surprised at my movements.
The 4th and 5th Leicesters have had a bad knocking – very heavy casualty lists, I am told. 110 men and 10 (!) officers go from the 3/4th Leicesters to the 4th Battalion from Belton at once.
Your affectionate husband
Evidently news of the battalions’ severe losses at the Hohenzollern Redoubt had only just reached the Duke. Yet his letter seemed remarkably casual. In breaking the news to his wife, the absence of any heartfelt reference to the fact that their son had survived unscathed was surprising.
That same day, the Duke had written to John. This was the third of the four letters. On 19 October, John, it appeared, was back from the Front – or due back at any moment. It was the first indication I’d had of his whereabouts since he had vanished from Goldfish Château on 5 July:
19 October 1915
Dear Boy,
Re: Longshaw on Saturday next. I can’t come as I have arranged for some time past to be in London that night. Returning here the following day.
But as you know, of course, shoot there if you can arrange it. Mr Kerr will do this for you.
You had better arrange for the hire of a car to bring you back here after shooting, as the cars here will be pretty busy on Saturday, and could not get over to Longshaw.
I’ve just had your General’s divisional order thanking the Division for their gallant conduct in a recent engagement couched in very highly appreciative language. I hear the Leicester losses are very heavy.
Your affectionate father
Rutland
I found the letter as puzzling as the one to Violet. Longshaw, high on the moors in the Peaks, was the Duke’s shooting lodge in Derb
yshire. If John was hoping to shoot there on 23 October, he must have obtained leave from the Front almost immediately after the battle. But then why, if he had been in communication with his father earlier that week, had he failed to tell him what had happened at the Redoubt? The Duke had referred to the division’s ‘gallant conduct in a recent engagement’; evidently he had no other information. The North Midlands had suffered close to 3,700 casualties. Surely, at the very least, John would have told his father of their appalling losses? But he hadn’t: he hadn’t even mentioned the battle. The first the Duke had heard of it was via the North Midlands’ commanding officer, General Edward Stuart Wortley.
The last of the four letters explained the omission. It was from the general himself. He was writing to John on 16 October, a few hours after he had ordered the last of the North Midlands’ shattered battalions to withdraw from the trenches beneath the Redoubt.
It took a while for the implications of the letter to sink in:
My Dear John
Very many thanks for all the partridges which you are sending to us – they are most acceptable.
We had a great fight on the 13th, but the task given to us was much too big.
The Division advanced to the attack in successive lines with the greatest gallantry but were mown down by machine guns from many directions. We had a tremendous artillery bombardment but experience has taught us that it has little effect upon deep and narrow trenches. The enemy know that an attack is coming and remain in dugouts in their trenches until the bombardment is over. They then jump up, get their machine guns in position and rake the advancing infantry. Our losses were very severe. 160 officers and about 3,500 men, but many slightly wounded.
We gained and held the Hohenzollern Redoubt, which was an important advance but at great cost.
However, the Division is very cheery and well. We are now resting for a few days.
Yours ever,
Edward Stuart Wortley
John had not been with them. No wonder he had had nothing to tell his father. As his fellow soldiers were being raked by the enemy’s machine guns, it looked as if he had been shooting partridges in England.
Attached to the general’s letter was a list of the officer casualties in John’s battalion. He had been one of thirty to embark for the Front the previous February. On the afternoon of 13 October, twenty of them had been killed or wounded:
4th Leicesters
Killed:
Capt. R. D. Faire
Capt. F. S. Parr
Lt. T. Whittingham
Lt. R. S. Green
Lt. A. R. Forsall
Lt. R. C. Harvey
2 Lt. G. E. Russell
2 Lt. W. P. Scholes
2 Lt. B. E. Mogridge
2 Lt. F. T. O’Callaghan
2 Lt. F. W. Walker
Wounded:
Lt.-Col. R. E. Martin
Capt. R. S. Dyer-Bennet
Capt. B. F. Newall
Lt. J. F. Johnson
2 Lt. W. A. Riley
2 Lt. F. C. Blunt
2 Lt. O. H. Cox
Missing (reported wounded):
Capt. Corah
2 Lt. J. E. Barken
Somehow, John had managed to escape the battle. Loos had been the centrepiece of a major autumn offensive. The battle – the largest attack by the British Army since the start of the war – had opened on 25 September. In the weeks prior to it, all leave had been cancelled for the 75,000 soldiers assigned to take part.
So why wasn’t John there? When had he left the Front, and what – beyond shooting patridges – was he doing in England?
It was on re-reading the Duke’s letter of 19 October that I realized that the prosaic details regarding John’s hire-car arrangements for the shooting trip to Longshaw were significant: ‘You had better arrange for the hire of a car to bring you back here after shooting, as the cars here will be pretty busy on Saturday,’ he had told John. The Duke was writing from Belvoir; the implication was that John was planning to stay there on the night of the 23rd. Quite possibly, he had stayed there on other occasions when he had been shooting at Longshaw.
Unusually, the castle’s visitors’ book listed the names of family members in residence as well as their guests. Potentially, it offered a means to track John’s movements. If I could pinpoint his visits to the castle that autumn, it ought to be possible to determine roughly when he returned to England from the Front.
The visitors’ books were kept on the top shelf of Case 12 in the Muniment Rooms. They dated back to the 1820s, when the 5th Duke of Rutland had moved into the newly built castle.
The one I was looking for spanned the years 1905–33; it was bound in black leather, with the words ‘Visitors’ Book Belvoir Castle’ inlaid in gold on the cover.
It was the hall porter’s job to compile the visitors’ book. Seated at his desk in the lodge off the Guard Room, he had a clear view of the comings and goings at the castle: he could see the carriages and motors drawing up on the terrace outside. Meticulously, as the Duke’s footmen hurried to and fro with the visitors’ luggage, he had noted the arrivals and departures.
I turned to the first page; the names were entered in black ink in a neat, italic hand:
Leafing through the pages, it was fascinating to see whom Violet and Henry had invited to the many house parties they hosted before the war. Among the hundreds of names were men or women whose wealth or fame had granted them a passport into what was otherwise an exclusively aristocratic circle. Interspersed between the titles were some of the most celebrated figures of the early twentieth century. In December 1911, at the height of the success of his Peter Pan novels, J. M. Barrie had stayed at the castle. Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts, the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, and Madame Nellie Melba – the acknowledged prima donna at Covent Garden – had stayed that year too.
John’s name cropped up frequently among the eclectic mix of guests. The visitors’ book delineated his world, as much as his parents’. Senior politicians and leading figures from the international stage had also been invited. As the tension in Europe increased, it was surprising to see that Counts Benckendorff, Metternich and Mensdorff, the Russian, German and Austrian ambassadors, were frequent guests – often simultaneously. I counted four prime ministers: Lord Rosebery, Arthur Balfour, Herbert Asquith and Andrew Bonar Law. There were other famous figures too: notably Alice Keppel, Edward VII’s mistress, and Prince Yusopov, the future assassin of Grigori Rasputin.
Looking at the pages for the summer of 1914, the entries dwindled and the great house parties came to an end, a grim reminder of the passing of an epoch. After August, the Duke and his family were mostly alone at the castle. Only occasionally did they invite one or two guests.
I skipped through the months that followed to October 1915. I found John’s name halfway down the page: ‘Marquis of Granby 23rd to 28th October’. He had stayed at the castle the night he was shooting at Longshaw.
I looked at the previous page. There he was again: Marquis of Granby, 9th–14th October. This was where he had been as his battalion was fighting to capture the Redoubt.
I turned back another page. And another. I could not believe what I was seeing. John had been at the castle for most of the summer. He not only missed the Battle of Loos: his visit in July coincided with the fighting at Hooge, when the Germans attacked the North Midlands trenches with liquid fire.
So when did he return to the Front? Quickly, I skimmed through the entries after 28 October. ‘The Marquis of Granby November 20th to November 22nd’; ‘The Marquis of Granby, December 11th to December 14th’; ‘The Marquis of Granby December 16th to December 22nd’: his name appeared on every page until the following spring. From the frequency of his visits to the castle, it looked as if he was in England from July 1915 until April 1916.
Nine months. It seemed impossible. It had never occurred to me that John was not where he ought to have been. He had embarked for the Western Front with the 4th Leicesters on
26 February 1915. When he volunteered for the war, he had signed the Imperial Service Obligation. It committed him to ‘active service in any place outside the United Kingdom’ for its duration. Bar injury or illness, the pledge, signed by every territorial soldier, was unbreakable. He should have been with his regiment.
I returned to his war diary.
John had arrived at Belvoir on 14 July. He must have left the Front at some point between 6 and 13 July. His departure accounted for the blank pages, but, now that I was armed with this new information, would the last entries explain why he left?
The week leading up to 6 July filled just one page. The entries were disappointing. John hadn’t even hinted at the fact that he was about to return to England. But then had he known he was leaving? And if he had, was this why he seemed so detached?
Re-examining the curt entries, it was impossible to judge:
July 1st 1915 Thursday
Reninghelst Camp
Poperinghe Road
Usual day.
July 2nd 1915 Friday
Reninghelst Camp
Poperinghe Road
Usual day. I went after lunch to Ypres Cathedral to get a few more fragments of the frieze of the screen – found a lot more.
July 3rd 1915 Saturday
Hôtel de la Poste Rouen
Started at 8 alone with the General, and Tanner the chauffeur, to go to Rouen in the Rolls. Got there at one (two punctures) inspected the drafts. Then we went sight seeing. I rogered a woman after dinner in the Maison Stephane – not good.
July 4th 1915 Sunday