The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery Read online

  It was one of those brilliant summer mornings that begins in a haze, promising the heat to come. A mist was rising from the fields as I dropped down the hill into the valley below the castle. I could see it ahead: a fairy-tale castle, all turrets and towers, standing majestically on the ridge.

  I had arranged to meet Mr Granger, the Duke of Rutland’s archivist, in the castle’s Muniment Rooms. Then, I knew nothing of that sad day in April 1940; I did not know that John, the 9th Duke, had died in the rooms that I was about to see, or that they had been sealed after his death. Nor did I know that his servants had once called them the ‘Secret Rooms’. I had come to Belvoir to research a different book entirely.

  7

  ‘There are five rooms,’ Mr Granger said. ‘I’ll show you Room 2 first.’

  We were standing in a small hallway at the entrance to the Muniment Rooms.* I peered along the narrow passage. Odd angles of light slanted across it; it seemed to recede into infinity, as if I was viewing it through the wrong end of a telescope.

  A few minutes earlier, we had met outside the steel door. A tall man of military bearing, Mr Granger was in his mid-seventies. His manner was diffident. It was hard to catch his words.

  ‘I think you’ll find the rooms interesting,’ he muttered. ‘Follow me. I’ll lead the way.’

  He turned right into the passage. It was musty, the smell of damp rising from the bare floorboards. Rows of cabinets lined the walls on one side. Ahead of us, there was a small sign. Hand-painted in a plain font, it hung from the low ceiling. The sign was perfunctory: ‘Room 2,’ it said. Beyond, there was a pool of bright white light.

  The passage led directly into the room. Stepping in, it was as if we had entered an apothecary’s shop. Tall white cabinets with glass doors jutted from the walls and formed bays at the centre of the room. There were sixteen of them, crammed into an area barely sixteen foot by ten. Tiny points of dust sparkled in front of us, caught in the light that flooded in from the single window. It was impossible to make out what was inside the cabinets: the glare from the sun struck the glass doors, obscuring their contents.

  I moved closer, to alter the angle of light. Stacked along the shelves, I could see hundreds of box files. Every one of them was blue. Peacock blue: the colour of the Duke’s crest.

  ‘You’ll find the family’s private correspondence in there,’ Mr Granger said, pointing at the cabinets. ‘It’s all in the blue files. The letters span almost five hundred years. They go back to the sixteenth century – to the time of Thomas de Ros, the first Earl of Rutland.’

  He picked up a large, gold-embossed book from the desk beside him. ‘In here,’ he said, ‘are examples of the handwriting of every member of the Manners family since the 1540s. John, the 9th Duke, compiled it. We use it as an aid to identify the correspondents in the blue files.’

  Tall leather volumes crowded the shelves opposite us. ‘Those are the household accounts,’ he said, walking over to them. ‘They go back to the eleventh century, when the Manners family first came to Belvoir.’ Reaching up, he pulled down one of the ledgers and selected a page at random. The entries were in Early English, written on parchment. A spidery hand had listed the amounts spent on breakfast at the castle in the month of March 1541. The meal – ‘collops, eggs, boiled mutton, braun and beef’ – had cost three shillings.

  ‘The household accounts and the family’s letters form the backbone of the collection, but there are countless other treasures,’ Mr Granger continued. ‘It is probably one of the most important private collections of historical documents in the country.’

  He handed me the catalogue to the collection. It was eighty pages long and contained a summary of the contents of each cabinet. There were ninety-four cases in the five rooms; together, they held over a thousand rows of shelving. The range of the material was breathtaking. Besides the family’s correspondence and the Belvoir estate and household records, there were letters from King Charles I to Queen Henrietta, written days before his execution, and an unparalleled collection of printed broadsides published during the English Civil War. A large number of manuscripts dated from the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution; they included letters written by members of the ancien régime before they too faced public execution. Looking at the entries for the medieval period, two of the items, I noted, were extremely rare: the Chronicle of Adam of Usk – written in 1420 – and a map of Sherwood Forest, drawn in the fourteenth century, the time, purportedly, of Robin Hood.

  ‘Everything in here, everything you see,’ Mr Granger said, gesturing towards the rooms behind us, ‘was put together by John, the 9th Duke. All the cataloguing and filing is his. It was his life’s work. Most of his time was spent in these rooms.’

  He paused, and looked down at the floor.

  Then, looking at me quizzically, he said: ‘The Duke died in here, you know.’

  ‘He died in here?’ I asked, surprised.

  ‘Yes. In Room 1,’ he replied. ‘It was sometime during the last war. The place has barely been touched since then. The rooms are exactly as the Duke left them.’

  He turned and headed back along the passage. ‘Come on, I’ll show you the other rooms,’ he said.

  Rooms 3, 4 and 5 were situated at the foot of the Norman Tower, the central feature of the west front of the castle. They were indistinguishable; each was equally austere. The wooden floors were bare; aside from a number of desks and several pairs of heavy Tudor chairs, they contained no furniture. Boxes and files were stacked on every available surface; every inch of wall space was given over to cabinets and cases. Devoid of ornaments, or any attempt at beautification, they were rooms of hard lines and edges. There was nothing soft inside them.

  Room 1 was the last Mr Granger showed me. Two wooden steps led down into it from the passage. It was square-shaped and smaller than the other rooms, and the ubiquitous white cabinets crowded three sides of it. Along the other wall there was a fireplace, fitted with a small, cast-iron stove. A large Chesterfield sofa stood beneath a barred window.

  ‘That’s where the 9th Duke died,’ Mr Granger said, pointing at the sofa.

  It was covered in faded green chintz. Its springs had broken and it looked badly in need of re-stuffing.

  ‘What did he die of?’ I asked, curious.

  ‘Pneumonia,’ he replied. ‘He was relatively young. He was in his early fifties.’

  He moved across to the sofa and propped himself against one of its arms. ‘Most of these documents have never been seen,’ he said, looking up at the cabinets around us. ‘No one outside the immediate family has seen the twentieth-century papers. You are the first.’

  To his right, there was a window, secured by a folding iron grille. A small desk had been built into the alcove beneath it.

  ‘Why don’t you work over there?’ he suggested. ‘Most of the papers spanning the First World War are in here, and in the cases in Room 2. I’ll leave you to get on with it. If you need anything, you can find me at the end of the passage in Room 4.’

  He disappeared.

  I pulled up a chair to the desk. It felt strange to be working just a few feet from where the man who had assembled this remarkable collection had died.

  I had come to Belvoir to research a book about this small corner of England in the years of the First World War.

  In 1914, the Duke of Rutland’s estate had embraced thirty villages. In the first weeks of the war, 1,700 men – a fifth of the estate’s population – had left to fight on the battlefields abroad. They belonged to Britain’s villages’ lost generation: that mysterious army of ploughmen, horsemen and field workers who deserted the farms in the summer of 1914, many of them never to return.

  The testimony of farm worker Leonard Thompson, who grew up in a village in Suffolk, had inspired the idea for the book.

  In August 1914, at the age of nineteen, Leonard had volunteered for the Essex Regiment. ‘We were all delighted when war broke out,’ he remembered. ‘A lot of boys from the village were with
me and although we were all sleeping in ditches at Harwich, wrapped in our greatcoats, we were bursting with happiness. We were all damned glad to have got off the farms. We were all so patriotic then and had been taught to love England in a fierce kind of a way. The village wasn’t England; England was something better than the village.’

  Early in 1915, Leonard’s battalion was drafted to Gallipoli. It is the confluence of what Philip Gibbs, the war correspondent, called ‘This’ and ‘That’ – the trenches, with life at home – which makes Leonard’s account of his first experience of war so heartrending:

  We arrived at the Dardanelles and saw the guns flashing and heard the rifle-fire. They heaved our ship, the River Clyde, right up to the shore. They had cut a hole and made a little pier, so we were able to walk straight off and on to the beach. We all sat there, waiting for it to get light. The first things we saw were big wrecked Turkish guns, the second, a big marquee. It didn’t make me think of the military but of the village fetes. Other people must have thought like this because I remember how we all rushed up to it, like boys getting to a circus, and then found it all laced up. We unlaced it and rushed in. It was full of corpses. Dead Englishmen, lines and lines of them, and with their eyes wide open. We all stopped talking. I’d never seen a dead man before and here I was looking at two or three hundred of them. It was our first fear.

  Of the men who left the Belvoir estate for the war, 249 did not come home.

  At the edge of each of the Duke of Rutland’s villages stands an oak or an ash. They mark the point where the volunteers had turned to wave to their families, who stood in the middle of the village streets watching them go.

  Up at the castle, Henry John Brinsley Manners, the 8th Duke of Rutland, had played a large part in their going. Without his intervention, many of those who rushed to the colours in the summer of 1914 would not have done so. On the eve of the war, the Duke’s hold over the men and women living on the estate had barely altered since his family had first settled at Belvoir. Then, and over the centuries that followed, the power conferred by their thousands of acres had enabled them to raise huge armies, for a succession of monarchs. While the feudal obligation of military service in return for land had long since been abolished, the Duke’s power was undiminished: thousands lived in his cottages and were dependent on him for a living.

  A few weeks after war was declared, a memorandum, signed by the Duke, appeared on the noticeboards at the gates to the churches in his villages. It was an appeal for volunteers: ‘All who serve the Colours will have their situations kept open for them,’ the headline read. The Duke had offered his tenants and employees further inducements: the families of men who volunteered would be entitled to live rent-free in their cottages; the men’s wages – less their army pay – would continue to be paid to their dependants. The local newspaper had applauded the Duke’s generosity: ‘In common with all other great landowners of the country, the Duke of Rutland has come forward in a most patriotic manner. As an inducement to his employees who are able to serve with the Colours, he has made very generous guarantees, which no doubt will be accepted by a large proportion of the servants and workmen on the Belvoir Estate.’

  For the majority of those who accepted the Duke’s ‘generous guarantees’, it was the first time they had ventured more than a few miles beyond the villages where they were born. Aged between eighteen and forty, they belonged to a generation that knew little, if anything, of the realities of modern warfare. There had been no war between the Great Powers since 1871. ‘No man in the prime of life knew what war was like,’ wrote A. J. P. Taylor: ‘all imagined that it would be an affair of great marches and great battles, quickly decided.’

  I wanted to follow the journeys of the Belvoir volunteers: to look at what became of them and how, when the war ended, their experiences rebounded on the way of life on the Duke of Rutland’s estate. Yet it was not only the stories of these men that drew me to Belvoir Castle: it was the remarkable story of a ducal family.

  In an age when the word ‘nobility’ conveyed a meaning that was entirely secure, a mystique and an aura attached to the dukes, unlike that which attached to any other members of the aristocracy. The title was the highest honour that the Crown could bestow. In the 577 years since its first creation, in all, fewer than 500 individuals had had the right to call themselves Duke (or suo jure Duchess).

  In 1914, there were thirty dukes. Within living memory, they had enjoyed privileges that seem scarcely credible. Until the reforms of the nineteenth century, they were above the law: no one could arrest them; they could run up debts to infinity without punishment. In politics, they had control of Parliament, many of the seats in the House of Commons being within their gift. Such was their grandeur that, in the course of their public appearances, it was customary for trumpeters to announce their presence. ‘Flattered, adulated and deferred to,’ as Cecil Woodham-Smith wrote, ‘they were the leading celebrities of their day.’

  Of the ducal families, the Manners family was among the richest, most glamorous, most intriguing of all.

  Through marriage and friendship, their tentacles stretched from the kings and queens of Europe to Prince Yusopov in Russia – the future assassin of Rasputin. In Britain, they were close to Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, and to other leading figures of their day. So opulent was their lifestyle at Belvoir that it prompted Julian Grenfell – himself the son of an Earl – to remark to a friend’ ‘Isn’t it an absurd thing, really, that there should still be places like Belvoir? It’s just like a pantomime scene.’

  When war came, the family threw themselves behind it. At Belvoir, while the Duchess supervised the transformation of the castle into a hospital for Belgian refugees, the Duke was touring his estate, appealing for battalions of men. In London, Diana, their 22-year-old daughter, thought to be the most beautiful debutante of her generation, was working as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse, and at Luton, John, their 28-year-old son, who would later become the 9th Duke of Rutland, was training with his battalion, the 4th Leicestershires, as it prepared to embark for the Western Front.

  Four years later, the scale of violence and destruction had altered reality, bringing an end to the life and values of Victorian England. ‘It was not just that millions died,’ Lady Mary Elcho, a relative of the Duke of Rutland’s, remarked: ‘it changed the world, our world, for ever, shaking all things to their foundations, wasting the treasures of the past, and casting its sinister influence far into the future.’

  The breadth of the correspondence in the Muniment Rooms at Belvoir Castle offered a unique opportunity to chronicle their world as they stood on the cusp. Among historians and librarians, the reputation of the collection was unrivalled. The family, I was told, had guarded it jealously. Few, I understood, had been given permission to research in the Muniment Rooms. A mystique attached to the collection: ‘It is the holy grail,’ one historian had whispered to me.

  8

  I stood in front of Case 15 in Room 2, looking at the sea of blue box files. The case was nine feet tall; there were sixty files crammed along the five shelves. It held the family’s correspondence for the first decades of the twentieth century; it was just one of nineteen cases I needed to go through.

  I reached for the first file on the top shelf. It was labelled ‘Personal Letters from Violet, Duchess of Rutland, 1914’.

  Violet was to be an important character in the book. Aged fifty-seven in 1914, she was the granddaughter of the 24th Earl of Crawford. She was brought up at Sutton Courtenay, an impressive medieval hall near Oxford, and her father, Colonel Charles Lindsay, had been a favourite of Queen Victoria and an intimate friend of Louis Napoleon. Her life had been lived at the centre of events. Following her marriage in 1882, she had become one of the most influential and well-connected women of her generation. In the years leading up to the war, invitations to her parties were coveted. Besides politicians and other wealthy aristocrats, Rudyard Kipling, Feodor Chaliapin, Sergei Diaghilev and Sir Edward Elgar we
re among the guests she had invited to her townhouse a few hundred yards from the Ritz. A mother of four children, she was also the central figure in the Manners family.

  I lifted the lid of the box. It was exciting to open it. Here was a time capsule. I was about to be transported into the Duchess’s world in 1914. Inside, the letters were held in place by a metal clip. The spring on the clip was stiff; as I raised it, particles of rust scattered over the documents beneath. The letters had not been sorted: they appeared to have been bundled straight into the file from the case or drawer where Violet had kept them. The imprint of the clip, I noticed, was stencilled in rust on the top letter: clearly, no one had looked at them for many years.

  Leafing through the pile, I pulled out the ones for August through to December. Mostly, they were letters that Violet had written to John, her son, who was with his regiment. Her handwriting was chaotic, her style breathless. The pages were punctuated with exclamation marks and words that had been heavily underscored. They captured the excitement and confusion of the first heady days of the war. ‘John darling, No news of sea battles but news of 7 regiments of Germans having crossed Meuse, caught by Belgian Cavalry – practically annihilated,’ she wrote from Stanton Woodhouse, the family’s estate in Derbyshire, the week after war was declared: ‘We stay here as long as you remain at Belper. I want to be buying comforts for you – what about waterproof boots and coats, for it rains here every day? Wire to me if you are going to be under cover – in tents or barracks, or factories and for pity’s sake tell me if anything to buy. I may go to London 1 day soon – think of anything you want. Bless you my dear darling, Yr mother.’

  John, Marquis of Granby, was Violet’s only surviving son and the heir to the dukedom. On 4 August he had been fishing on the banks of the Wye when the river keeper came running to tell him that war had been declared. Immediately, he left for Leicester to join his regiment at its headquarters in Magazine Square.