The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery Read online

  I turned to the next page of the diary.

  July 2nd 1915 Friday

  Reninghelst, 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.

  Again, there was no mention of the war. John, it appears, had spent that afternoon souvenir hunting in the shelled ruins of the Cathedral.

  He had already been there twice that week: ‘Went to Ypres Cathedral,’ he recorded on 28 June: ‘The only thing left, curiously, is the marble and brass screen against the Chapel in the south side of the nave. A portion of the screen at one end has been destroyed. I picked up a bit of the fragments of the frieze.’ The following afternoon, he was there again: ‘Got a good few more pieces,’ he noted: ‘I have put together the pieces I got yesterday and want to find more pieces to try and complete the frieze plaque which was broken to pieces.’

  On 2 July – having spent the afternoon at the cathedral – John returned to headquarters. At 8 p.m., General Clifford, the Commanding Officer of 138th Brigade, sent a communiqué from the Salient. The brigade had suffered thirty-five casualties in twenty-four hours: its highest figure in a single day so far. A number of the casualties came from ‘B’ company in the 4th Leicestershires. It was John’s own company; he had known the men personally. From 1909 – when the battalion was formed – they had spent their summers training together. It seemed incredible that he had failed to enter this distressing news in his diary.

  As I read on, it was clear that pressure of work did not account for the omission. I was left with the impression that, while 138th Brigade was fighting in the Salient, neither John, nor his General, Edward Stuart Wortley, were overly occupied.

  On the morning of 3 July, the brigade’s fourth day in the line, they had left headquarters: ‘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 sightseeing.’ They seemed to be in no hurry to get back to HQ; instead, they spent the night at the Hôtel de la Poste in Rouen. After dinner, John visited a nearby brothel: ‘I rogered a woman in the Maison Stephane. Not good,’ he records.

  Something wasn’t right. It was as if a different person was writing the diary. Throughout April, he had crammed the pages with vivid accounts of the progress of the war. Yet two months on, he appeared to have completely disengaged from the events going on around him.

  I turned back to look at the earlier entries. On the night of 22 April, when the Germans had fired poison gas for the first time, he had been with the 46th North Midland at St-Jans-Cappel, twelve miles to the south-west of the Ypres Salient. On the morning of the 23rd, he and a group of officers had driven to Sharpenburg Hill to watch the battle from an official observation point. It had continued for the remainder of that week. Keyed up by the fighting, John had followed the course of the battle, often updating his diary twice in a day:

  23 April: Up to Sharpenburg to see what there was to be seen of the battle just north of Ypres. Anxiously awaiting news all day. Canadians standing and attacking. Ypres completely wrecked by shells, half of it burnt. All inhabitants fled. The French are trying to retrieve the 3 miles they have lost. A perfect hell has been raging all last night and all day today and going on still (12 midnight). French sending up reinforcements as hard as they can – so are we. The gas felt by our own troops.

  24 April: News this morning bad, what there is of it. The Germans have got a little further over the canal and I hear the Canadian left has had to fall further back. Both the French and us are badly outnumbered by guns. We have practically none. We have sent up the 4th Division and two Cavalry Divisions but without any guns. The French talk a lot saying they are sending up a whole corps and lots of guns, but the guns have not opened fire yet and their soldiers seem unable to hold the Germans … It all looks quite bad, unless we can push the Germans back a bit. I don’t think the 27th and 28th Brigades will be able to hold out as they are being shelled from three sides. It looks as if we will have to give up the Ypres Salient and straighten our line behind Ypres.

  11.30pm: News bad. Both English and French counterattacks failed owing to gas.

  25 April: Battle has been going on all night with little result. The French are going to attack in force at 12 today. Again the French attack failed owing to gas. The French and English reserves still coming up. The battle still going on without ceasing.

  26 April: Battle went on all night again. The French and English now have over 200,000 men and a terrific battle has been going on all day. I watched it all the afternoon from Sharpenburg Hill. I never heard anything like the noise. The whole country is darkened by the smoke.

  12 midnight: At last we have made a little headway. All day we have been held back by this damnable gas. My God, the Germans are the limit. The gas kills the soldiers by causing an acute attack of pneumonia and bronchitis which makes them die black from suffocation. I am off to Boulogne to try to buy 1700 yds of gauze for our men to tie over their mouths. The whole civilized world ought to rise up in arms and wipe out Germany for this. The Canadians have done perfectly wonderfully. They saved the situation for two days. My God, what a hell it must have been and is … We all pray for a change of wind then we should give them hell, but this gas is a knockout.

  12.30am: News better just now – the French have made progress. The list of German prisoners will be small after this. I don’t fancy much quarter will be given now – the buggers.

  27th April: Started at 8.30am for Boulogne to buy gauze for the Division to put over their mouths to cope with this bloody gas. Bought a lot of gauze and we got back about 7pm. It takes three hours to get there. Not much news except the French can’t make much headway, nor can we. The casualties must be terrific. The battle still goes on.

  John paid for the gauze out of his own pocket. In that anxious week in April, he was viscerally engaged in the progress of the war and concerned for the welfare of his men. So why, two months later, when they were actually fighting in the Salient, had he become so detached? Did the terse entries, and the absence of any references to the fighting, or to the 4th Leicesters, conceal a bitter disappointment – even feelings of guilt on his part – at not being with them? His appointment as ADC to the division’s commanding officer had been an order; on the night his battalion marched up the wagon track into the Salient, he had no choice but to remain behind at headquarters.

  The 4th Leicesters left the trenches at Sanctuary Wood at 11.45 p.m. on 5 July. ‘The Companies marched back independently to Ouderdom covering the eight miles by 5am the next day,’ Captain Milne remembered: ‘It was a wonderful summer morning: the sun shone, the air was fresh, there was not a cloud in the sky. It felt very good to be alive, and to be back again by the quiet, peaceful-looking old windmill, with the prospect of six days’ rest, very good to be out of the wood, altogether too much stuff flying about up there.’

  John had felt none of their euphoria. Nor did he refer to his battalion in his diary. ‘Usual day – went to tea with Pulteney’* was all he wrote.

  ‘Usual day.’ It was a phrase that John had used repeatedly. Four of the days between 29 June and 5 July he had described as such. It did not make sense. Then I turned to the next page of his diary.

  The date – 6 July – was written at the top. The rest of the page was blank. I looked at the one that followed, and the one after that. They were blank too. So was every other page, right through to the end of the diary.

  It was frustrating. I knew that in the months to follow, there were dramatic events to come. After seventeen weeks in reserve, the North Midlands had spent most of that summer in the front line. In the autumn of 1915, at the Battle of Loos, it would experience its worst day of the entire war. On 13 October, in five ghastly hours, it lost a quarter of its strength: 3,763 men were killed or wounded – 180 officers and 3,583 other ranks. John’s diary had appeared to promise so much: a contemporaneous record, day by day. But he h
ad abandoned it at exactly the moment the North Midlands had entered the thick of fighting.

  I got up from my desk to fetch the catalogue to the Muniment Rooms. The blank pages in the diary were hugely disappointing. But at least the trail was not cold. On the shelves around me, there were John’s letters home. There would be news of him in other family letters. I could follow his story through the correspondence in the blue files.

  I made a note of the case and shelf numbers for every file relating to the year 1915. Two were of immediate interest: John’s letters to his mother, Violet, Duchess of Rutland, and to his uncle, Charlie Lindsay.

  John’s letters to the Duchess were kept in Room 2. I looked at these first. Thumbing through the months to find the ones he had written in the summer and autumn of 1915, my heart sank. I had almost reached the bottom of the pile and it was only June. In July, the stream of letters stopped: John’s last letter to his mother was dated the 6th.

  The 6th of July.

  The coincidence cast a shadow. It was the date John’s diary had stopped.

  Straightaway, I walked back along the passage to Room 1. John’s letters to his uncle were kept there. The correspondence between them spanned twenty-five years; I pulled at the file for 1915. Even before I looked at it, I had an inkling of what I was about to find. Quickly, I flicked through the pages. John’s last letter to Charlie was also dated 6 July.

  Twenty-eight-year-old John, Marquis of Granby, had vanished. I felt a rising sense of panic. This was far from being the pristine archive I had imagined. I went across to my desk and looked at my list. I had identified a further twenty files that related to the year 1915. They contained the Duke and Duchess’s correspondence, and that of their three daughters – John’s immediate family. Surely their letters would yield clues to his whereabouts and the reason – or reasons – behind his apparent disappearance.

  By the time I got to the fourth file, a clear pattern was emerging. It was not only John who had vanished. So, it appeared, had the entire Manners family. After 6 July, their letters to John – and theirs to each other – were also missing.

  The tour guides’ words kept floating into my mind. No one goes in there. But I was beginning to think someone had been in here. The apparent excision was meticulous. It extended with absolute precision from 7 July to 5 December 1915.

  The discovery of such a significant void was a major setback. Without the letters, I had no means of chronicling the family’s story – and the story of their great estate – at this important stage in the war.

  But it wasn’t just that. The fact that they were missing was so peculiar.

  These were 152 critical days. They coincided with a period when John’s regiment had incurred appalling casualties. On 13 October 1915 – the day the North Midlands had lost a quarter of their strength – the Leicestershires had suffered 820 casualties: the equivalent, almost, of an entire battalion. Twenty of John’s fellow officers had been killed or wounded. These were men he had dined with in the officers’ mess and alongside whom he had served day after day. A significant proportion of the regiment’s casualties had come from villages on the Belvoir estate. They were the sons of the butcher, the blacksmith, the postmaster – and the sons of gamekeepers, farmers, estate workers and tenants. John’s father, Henry, the 8th Duke of Rutland, had been Honorary Colonel of two of the regiment’s battalions; he had personally recruited a large number of the soldiers. And yet there did not appear to be a single reference to this terrible day in the family’s archives.

  10

  ‘What are you doing in there? Who’s let you in?’

  It was happening again. Another woman had approached me in the passage outside the Muniment Rooms.

  ‘Those rooms are forbidden,’ she said, pointing towards them. ‘When I was a housemaid here, the housekeeper used to lock us in there while we were cleaning. She used to come and get us at coffee time. Then we’d be locked back in again.’

  ‘You were locked in? Why?’

  ‘It was to stop us taking anything out,’ she said. ‘No one went in there.’

  ‘When did you work here?’ I asked her.

  ‘In the 1940s and ’50s,’ she replied. ‘Those rooms were sealed. They were sealed after the Duke died.’

  This woman seemed to be saying something other than the tour guides who had stopped me earlier. There really did seem to be a mystery attached to these rooms. I looked at her. She was in her early eighties and not in costume like the others.

  ‘Which duke?’ I asked.

  ‘John, Duke,’ she said.

  ‘You mean the 9th Duke?’

  The woman nodded.

  ‘Why were the rooms sealed?’ I asked.

  ‘The family had secrets they wanted to hide,’ she replied.

  ‘What secrets?’

  She gave me a thin smile and then turned and left.

  Outside on the terrace, it was a beautiful summer’s day. I walked over to the cannons to look at the view from the battlements. Beneath the parapet, the lawn fell gently away to the Rose Garden below. It was late August and the roses had faded; their petals scattered the walkways, vibrant pinks against the cool grey stone. A line of topiary stretched away to the right; the yew hedges were cone-shaped and clipped so smoothly you wanted to run your hand along them. Nearby stood the statues, sculpted by Caius Cibber in the seventeenth century, which the 5th Duke had acquired on a visit to Italy. Everything was so idyllic, so immutable, yet the beauty of it all jarred with what I had discovered: the sealing of the Muniment Rooms pointed to something dark beneath this perfect, ordered surface.

  I stood there for some time. There were so many questions. Had I stumbled across something? Was there a link between the missing war letters and whatever it was the family had wanted to hide? The coincidence between the blank pages in John’s war diary and the gap in the correspondence suggested that something had gone badly wrong for him on 6 July. But then if the void in the records concealed some sort of controversy, surely the present Duke of Rutland would not have given me permission to research this period in his family’s history? Or was the former housemaid in possession of a secret of which he was unaware?

  Thinking about it, there had to be a more prosaic explanation. Quite probably, I decided, the missing letters were stored in another part of the castle. I needed to find out where.

  I found Mr Granger in Room 4. He was sitting at a large desk in the centre of the room, immersed in his work. The desk was cluttered; parchment rolls, reference books and hundreds of letters were piled on top of it.

  He looked up, peering at me over the rims of his tortoiseshell spectacles.

  ‘How are you getting on?’ he asked.

  ‘Not very well,’ I replied.

  I summarized the gap I had discovered in the family’s correspondence. Mr Granger looked surprised.

  ‘Did you know the letters were missing?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘How odd.’

  He paused, thinking for a moment. ‘I haven’t come across any gaps. But then I’ve only been here for a couple of years. There’s so much material, I’m only just beginning to get to grips with it myself.’

  ‘Perhaps – because they were written in wartime – the letters were thought to be of special interest and kept together as a separate collection,’ I suggested. ‘Could they be stored somewhere else in the castle?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘As far as I’ve been given to understand, all of the family correspondence is stored here in the Muniment Rooms. It was as the 9th Duke wanted it.’

  I asked Mr Granger if the rumour that these rooms had been sealed after his death was true. His response was cautious.

  ‘The Muniment Rooms have been jealously guarded by the family. That I do know. In the last Duke’s time – the 10th Duke, that is – I believe access was barred to researchers. The present Duke is very selective about who he allows in. But no, I wasn’t aware the rooms had ever actually been sealed.’

  ‘So even if th
ey weren’t sealed, you think it’s unlikely that someone outside the family could have removed the letters?’

  ‘Very unlikely,’ he said. ‘But why don’t you ask the Duchess? I would talk to her. She’ll be here later on.’

  It was shortly after three o’clock when the Duchess came into the Muniment Rooms. We had met before. A lively, elegant woman in her forties, she was writing her own book on the history of Belvoir Castle and had a detailed knowledge of the documents in these rooms.

  Briefly, I explained what I had discovered: how, after 6 July 1915, until December of that year, there was a large gap in the family’s correspondence, and that the start of this void coincided with the date John’s war diary had stopped.

  The Duchess looked at me, amazed. ‘There can’t be such a large gap,’ she said. ‘The letters must be here somewhere.’

  ‘They couldn’t be somewhere else in the castle?’ I asked.

  ‘No, everything is kept in here,’ she said. ‘The family’s letters have been stored in here since John’s time.’

  ‘Could someone have removed them?’

  She frowned. ‘I can’t see how,’ she replied. ‘My father-in-law closed these rooms after John died. No one outside the family has seen the early-twentieth-century material. The letters can’t have been removed.’

  ‘Why did the Duke close the rooms?’ I asked.

  ‘They were of no interest to him,’ she said. ‘Why, I don’t know. But he didn’t want to have anything to do with them. He just shut them up.’ She paused for a moment. ‘It was odd, given that his father had spent so much time in here.’