The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery Page 23

  The second paragraph contained what seemed to be a barefaced lie.

  Emphatically, Dr Hood had stated that John’s symptoms stemmed from ‘a rather severe attack of dysentery contracted in Rome’. John had been to Rome just once before the war. This was in 1909, when he was Honorary Attaché at the embassy. I had seen every one of his letters home; they were in the blue files in the Muniment Rooms at Belvoir. Not one of them had contained any mention of illness, least of all ‘a severe attack of dysentery’.

  ‘Since which,’ Hood had continued, ‘he has constantly been affected with gastro-intestinal disturbances.’

  But how could he possibly have been ‘constantly affected’ when he hadn’t had dysentery in the first instance?

  It looked as if I had found the answer to the mystery behind the gap in the records in the summer of 1909. John had returned from Rome on 10 June. On his return, he had been ill with a stomach complaint. The gap in the correspondence began on 6 June but I’d found a stray letter from the Duke to John. Until now, I hadn’t thought it of any consequence. ‘Dear boy,’ he wrote on 14 June. ‘Glad to hear you’ve recovered swiftly.’ This was the only evidence of illness I’d discovered in the period: it didn’t point to a ‘severe attack of dysentery’. So was John’s ‘illness’ an echo of Haddon’s ‘illness’? Had he destroyed the family’s correspondence for the weeks following his return from Rome to conceal the fact that he hadn’t after all been seriously ill?

  I re-read Hood’s medical certificate. Evidently, he was trying to keep John out of the war indefinitely. He wanted to convince the panel of RAMC surgeons that John was suffering from a condition that was ongoing and likely to recur. Hood knew the army doctors would not question his diagnosis. Why would they? He was examining physician to the Foreign Office and one of the most respected doctors of his day.

  His name cropped up frequently in the letters at Belvoir. Aged sixty-eight in the summer of 1915, he was a close friend to Violet and Henry and had been their GP for more than thirty years. He had delivered all five of their children, and was regularly invited to shoot and fish at Belvoir.

  That he was capable of falsifying John’s medical certificate did not surprise me.

  In the autumn of 1894, it was Hood to whom Violet and Henry had turned after Haddon’s accident. At their request, he arrived at Hatley the morning after it had happened; he spent the next six days there, battling to save the boy’s life.

  The note that Hood had sent to Violet on 30 September 1894, two days after Haddon had died, was at Belvoir:

  43, Green Street

  Park Lane. W.

  My dear Lady Granby

  After being with you so much it seems strange and trying not to know how you are today. I cannot tell you how my heart bleeds for you in this awful trial. It has been a bad time for me, but for you and Lord Granby, too terrible for words.

  You have shown such true courage that I trust you will keep well and able to bear up against the overwhelming truth.

  If you feel at any time that a little talk would do you good, or give you any comfort, send me a note.

  My Best From

  Donald W. Hood

  There had been no inquest after Haddon died; the authorities had not been informed of the accident. Legally, the obligation to report a ‘sudden, violent or unnatural’ death fell equally on the attending physician and the deceased’s relatives. In failing to report Haddon’s accident, Hood had been as much to blame as Henry and Violet.

  In the years after Haddon’s death, Hood went on to become one of the leading doctors in the country. His obituary, published in the British Medical Journal in the spring of 1924, paid tribute to his distinguished career:

  We announce with much regret the death on March 15th of Dr Donald W. C. Hood. He was born in June 1847 at Market Lavington, Wilts, the eldest son of the late Sir Charles Hood, a Lord Chancellor’s visitor in lunacy.* From Harrow he went to Caius College, Cambridge, and afterwards to Guy’s Hospital, and graduated M.B. in 1871, proceeding M.D. in 1879, and was elected F.R.C.P. in 1892. After a few years in general practice in the country, he was appointed consulting physician to the West London Hospital and until a few weeks before his death he remained in close touch with that institution. Dr Donald Hood’s other appointments included those of examining physician to the Foreign Office, a manager of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, governor and member of the committee of management of Bethlem and Bridewell Royal Hospitals and examiner in medicine to the University of Cambridge. He received the C.V.O. in 1901 for services rendered in connection with the fund for the relief of wounded and sick officers during the Boer war.

  Twice, despite his impeccable curriculum vitae, it appeared that Dr Hood had perverted the course of official proceedings; he failed to notify the authorities that Haddon had died as a result of an accident; he fabricated the illness that had led a succession of army medical boards to deem John unfit for active service.

  These were serious charges.

  Having failed to save one son, had he wanted to save the other? Or was he simply carrying out the family’s instructions?

  His papers have not survived to answer these questions.

  The medical certificate, written in the doctor’s cramped, barely legible hand, was a damning piece of evidence. Until now, I had thought John an innocent victim in the traumatic events that he had erased from the records at Belvoir; it had seemed that he had wanted to obliterate things and relationships that were painful to him. But it was impossible to escape the conclusion that, in removing this chapter, he had sought to remove evidence that would incriminate him. He had used an invented medical condition to escape the front line. Effectively, he was guilty of desertion, a capital crime, for which the penalty was execution by firing squad.

  It was not just his reputation that it had been necessary to protect. His father had raised thousands of men for the war. Day after day, the Duke had toured his estates, addressing school halls crammed with villagers who had turned out to hear him speak. In appealing for volunteers, the Duke had championed the chivalric ideals of honour, valour and sacrifice.

  ‘If we had attempted to keep out of this war, we should have violated every honourable principle,’ he told his audience at Redmile, a few weeks after war was declared:

  We should have been guilty of one of the most cowardly actions that a country and a Government has ever been guilty of. We should have forever stained the name of Great Britain with an infamy which could not be borne.

  This war is not going to end in 48 hours or 48 days. It is a big thing. Half a million men are needed. It is to be a big knock-out, and the opponents that must be knocked out are the Germans. Yes, it’s going to be a knock-out of a genuine kind. None of that slipping down to avoid punishment. We have to knock them out and cripple them. They have to get a dressing-down from which they will not recover for the next fifty years. There are to be no half-measures. It must go on until we have them on their knees. And go on and on until we have their noses on the ground.

  We want every available man to come forward to enlist and sacrifice themselves for the good of the Empire and of their country. I hear from Leicester that two more battalions of the Leicestershire Regiment – the 6th and 7th battalions – are to be formed. That is an additional two thousand men required. The more of you who go, the quicker the war will be over. Come Forward. This is what I want. And what England wants. And I am confident that what England wants, you will not forget to give her.

  Invariably, in those early weeks of the war, the Duke quoted John as an exemplar of the courage and patriotism he was demanding of his tenants and employees:

  The North Midland Division are now all around London and my son is on the Staff there. I’ve heard that they will shortly be going to the Front. If so, they will be one of the first Territorial Divisions to go to France. As for me, the Government will not take me. I am 62. But at any rate, my boy is on the path and he will do whatever he can when he gets there. I am proud of him
.

  In the summer of 1915 he must have known that John’s ‘illness’ was a sham. Yet for the next six months – until conscription was introduced, in January 1916 – while concealing his son’s desertion, he continued to urge the men from his estates to step forward and sacrifice themselves for ‘the good of the Empire’.

  Much of the mystery surrounding this episode in John’s life had vanished; his War Office file had explained a great deal. I now understood why his name was inscribed on the memorial in the chapel at Belvoir. It was there to reinforce a lie. Violet included it because the family’s employees had been led to believe that, while illness had kept him from fighting, John had served dutifully for the duration of the war.

  I could also see why there was a discrepancy between John’s actual whereabouts and his whereabouts as recorded in the contemporary Army Lists. Though published quarterly, the lists did not indicate periods of leave resulting from illness or injury: until an officer was killed in action, or transferred to another unit, he was listed as serving with his regiment. It explains why, between July 1915 and March 1916, when John was in England, he was listed as being on active service with the Leicestershires.

  But a number of things still puzzled me.

  I had found nothing to account for the marked change of tone in his war diary. This had occurred in mid-June, three weeks before he left the Western Front. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, he appears to have withdrawn from the events going on around him. Why? Was it because he was already planning his escape?

  And how had he managed to get himself invalided home from the Front in the first place? In supplying him with a fraudulent medical certificate, Dr Hood had given him a passport out of the war. But this was after John had returned to London. So who was behind his escape from France? Or had he somehow convinced his superiors he was ill?

  And there was one very obvious question that nagged at me. Five months after John arrived back in England, the Army Council convened his fourth medical board at the War Office.

  This was on 4 December, the day before the records resume at Belvoir.

  I had checked the proceedings of other medical boards held that month. I couldn’t find one that had taken place on a Saturday, or one that had been convened by the Army Council at the War Office. They had all taken place at Caxton Hall by order of the GOC, London District.

  So why had the Army Council, the highest military authority in Britain, intervened to call what appeared to be some sort of an emergency board?

  What was so special about John?

  His War Office file had revealed this mystery; it did not resolve it. The irregular circumstances of the board – and its coincidence with the resumption of the records at Belvoir – convinced me that, in making his meticulous excisions in the correspondence in the Muniment Rooms, there was something else that John wanted to hide.

  I now had a clearer idea of what I was looking for. There were sixty-three letters at Belvoir; I had looked at four of them. Fifty-nine remained in the pile that I had extracted from the trunk of correspondence that he was working on when he died.

  36

  As soon as I saw the letters, I knew there was something special about them. Carefully, I spread them out on the long map desk in Room 4. It was hard to tell in the dim light but, if I peered closely, they had a peculiar sheen to them; they appeared to be coated in a thin film of translucent powder. I ran my finger along the surface of a page; the powder felt silky, rather than gritty.

  Going over to the window, I tilted the page to and fro against the light; the paper sparkled as if it had been dipped in fine filaments of gold. It looked like compact powder, or some type of pigment used in mixing paint.

  It was the first time I had come across it. I had found the letters, stuffed inside one large envelope. Violet had evidently kept them separately. The mysterious substance suggested she had put them inside something – as if she had wanted to hide them. Had they once lain in the box or drawer where she had kept her painting materials? Or had she secreted them in one of the compartments of her dressing table?

  I settled down to read them. When I saw their contents – and the names of the correspondents – it was obvious that Violet had been at pains to conceal them.

  Woven through these letters – seventeen of them, spanning the first thirteen months of the war – was a web of intrigue that stretched from the Duchess to the highest military authorities in the country. Evidently, her position at the very top of society had allowed her to call in favours, no matter how dishonourable, whenever and from whomsoever she pleased.

  It was a telegram from John that changed everything. Dated 23 September 1915 – the day after he attended his second medical board – it was to his sister, Marjorie:

  Six weeks more leave STOP Damnation STOP Bitterly disappointed STOP.

  The letter pinned to it explained the source of his disappointment. It was not cowardice that had prevented him from fighting in the Battle of Loos. It was Violet.

  The week before, she had written to a senior official at the War Office to ask him to fix the outcome of the board.

  ‘Darling – I must fight! Don’t be cross with me!’ she told Charlie afterwards: ‘Other mothers do nothing. What do they get for their bravery? The worst.’

  The two documents cast John in an entirely different light. Here was proof of a conspiracy to which he was unwitting. Far from wanting to escape the fighting, he had wanted to be in the thick of it.

  But how had Violet succeeded in keeping him in the dark?

  I had stumbled across a treasure trove. The names and details contained in this small cache of letters offered a route map to sources outside the Muniment Rooms that finally enabled me to piece together what had happened.

  Together with the letters in John’s blue files and the others that I found in the trunk of correspondence he was working on when he died, they from the basis of the narrative that follows.

  The story begins on a summer’s day in August 1914, when Violet received news from General Stuart Wortley, John’s commanding officer. What he had to tell her came as a bolt from the blue.

  PART VI

  37

  It was first light on the morning of 27 August 1914 – the twenty-fourth day of the war – and Violet lay, half awake, in the master bedroom at Stanton Woodhouse, the family’s home in Derbyshire. A low, rambling Tudor mansion, with gables and lattice windows, it stood, nestled in a cluster of trees, at the end of a mile-long drive. Outside, wood pigeons cooed in the boughs of the tall elms that framed the house; beneath her window came the soothing sound of running water from the stream that ran through the steep hillside garden. Earlier, while she was sleeping, her maid had crept into her room to draw the curtains. The view stretched before her: over the sculpted yews and the gravelled pathways in the garden below, to the moors beyond, pale mauve in the hazy morning light.

  By any standards Violet’s appearance at this hour was eccentric. Her silk-frilled nightdress was worn under a cream flannel kimono-shaped garment and her head was bound, seemingly in a knitted vest, the long sleeves of which wound around her chin. This elaborate structure, designed to keep her hair in place, accentuated the coarseness of her features. Forty years before, when she was eighteen, Mrs Patrick Campbell, the actress and muse to George Bernard Shaw, had described her as the ‘most beautiful thing I ever saw’. While her former beauty was still evident in her bone structure, age had added a fleshiness to her face. There was a ruthlessness about it too. Unkindly, Margot Asquith, the prime minister’s wife, likened her to a ‘Burne Jones Medusa’. Her daughter-in-law, Cynthia, had been crueller, noting ‘the faintly sinister strangeness of her eyes so deeply set in shadowy caverns’.

  Propping herself up in the Elizabethan four-poster bed, Violet opened her mouth wide and screamed. Invariably, this was her first action on waking. The ‘stylized scream’, as Diana, her daughter, described it, was the signal to Tritton, her maid, to bring in her breakfast tray.

  It would
be lunchtime before Violet left her bedroom. The first half of her day followed a set routine. ‘My mother spent the mornings in bed,’ Diana remembered: ‘I see her sitting cross-legged writing endless letters with a flowing quill pen. On her knee was balanced a green morocco folding letter-case, with blotting paper and a pot of ink which, curiously enough, never got splashed on the Irish linen sheets.’

  Downstairs, Henry was up and dressed for breakfast. Seated at a long black oak table in the panelled hall, he was going through the morning’s post.

  Among the letters was one from John’s general:

  Headquarters, North Midland Division

  Stockwood Park

  Luton

  My Dear Henry,

  One line to tell you that your boy is doing excellent work. He is really first rate, and I am very glad to have him on my staff. I hope we shall all be over the water in about 6 weeks’ time, prodding the Germans in the back part of their front!

  Yours ever

  Eddy Stuart Wortley

  Reaching for the fountain pen he kept in the breast pocket of his suit, Henry wrote a note to his wife:

  I think you ought to see this.

  R [Rutland]

  Then he summoned a footman to take the note, and the general’s letter, up to Violet’s bedroom.

  ‘John going!!! At any moment!!!’ Violet wrote to Diana: ‘I am cracked with fear.’

  The letter from General Stuart Wortley lay beside her on the bed. His news was the last thing she had anticipated. The North Midland was a territorial division. On 4 August, the day war had been declared, the government had announced that all territorial divisions would remain in England. The war was expected to be over by Christmas. Violet had not, for an instant, imagined that John would actually be drafted to the Front.

  Only the previous week, her great friend Winnie, Duchess of Portland, had written to congratulate her on her luck: ‘How heavenly for you that J is only to be in England. Gen. E. Wortley, I hear, is to stay here and defend us!!’ On numerous occasions, the general himself had written to reassure her. His last letter – sent to Belvoir by dispatch rider the night the North Midlands arrived at Luton – had been particularly avuncular: