The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery Read online

  ‘Perhaps the letters have been lost?’ I suggested.

  ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘John kept everything. Letters and historical documents were his great passion. Especially anything to do with the family. He spent his life cataloguing and filing their letters. They’re all up there on the shelves,’ she said, gesturing at the cases around us. ‘Roger – John’s youngest son – told me that his father always used to say you must never throw letters away. It is thanks to John that we have the Muniment Rooms. He created them. He was completely fascinated with history. Anything to do with history.’

  ‘So when did he set the rooms up?’ I asked her.

  ‘It was soon after the First World War. The family’s letters – some five hundred years of them – were scattered all over the castle. These rooms didn’t exist then: or at least not as they are now. They were used as offices. John cleared them out, and he gathered together all this material. He also bought a lot of historical documents at auction. It was his life’s work. He spent a lot of time in here. In the last years of his life he rarely left these rooms.’

  ‘He was supposed to have hidden five precious gems in here – rubies,’ she added, laughing. ‘A family myth, I expect, but his daughter, Ursula, told me. We’ve all had a good look for them, but they’ve never been found. Apparently, they were his insurance against bad times. Before he died, he was convinced the Communists were going to take over – this was where he died, you know – on the sofa in Room 1.’

  ‘What did he die of?’ I asked.

  ‘Pneumonia,’ she replied. ‘He was only fifty-three. He had an oxygen tent moved in here. It was where he wanted to be, Roger said.’

  The Duchess got up to leave. ‘It’s very peculiar. I can’t believe the letters are missing. Are you sure you’ve had a really good look for them?’

  I explained that I had only looked through the files relating to 1915.

  ‘I’d go through the other boxes, if I were you. Maybe the missing letters have been misfiled.’

  My face must have fallen. There were several thousand box files in the Muniment Rooms. It would take me days to go through them.

  The Duchess laughed. ‘Good luck,’ she said.

  She left the room. I could hear her footsteps receding along the passage. Then she stopped.

  ‘Oh,’ I heard her say. ‘Wait a minute.’

  She came back into the room.

  ‘Have you tried the Tower Rooms? You might find the letters up there.’

  ‘The Tower Rooms?’

  ‘Yes, they’re up in the East Tower. It was where John lived before he married. It was a sort of bachelor apartment. A lot of his things are still there.’

  The East Tower, a fanciful structure with a canted end and Gothic buttresses and corner turrets, was in the far north-east corner of the castle. John’s bachelor apartments were right at the top of the tower. Climbing the spiral staircase leading up to them, it struck me how remote these rooms would have been from those occupied by the rest of his family. At last – after ninety-four steps – I reached a landing. I kept straight on, heading towards the door at the end of the corridor.

  It led into a bright, spacious hall. The view from the window that ran along one side of it was spectacular. Fields of crops stretched green and golden across the plain going towards Lincoln. It was exhilarating to be high up and in the open, away from the oppressive Gothic style of the floors below.

  Three rooms led off the hall. Before beginning the search for the missing letters, I had a quick look through them. It was evident that no one had lived up here since 1916 – the year John had married and moved out. The rooms were in a state of disarray: items of his furniture – worn leather armchairs, ancient lamp stands and boxes of old crockery – were stacked against the walls. In the room that he had used as a bedroom, the iron bedstead and the mattress that he had slept on were still there. It felt as if John had just left. Jumbled on the floor were the books and magazines that he had read. There were stuffed birds – the decoys he had used out shooting – and an old wooden globe. Even his hipbath was there. My spirits soared: the missing letters had to be in these rooms somewhere.

  I began the search in the hall. It seemed the most promising place to start. Along one side of it, there were two Victorian writing desks; opposite them were three cabinets, each with sixteen numbered drawers. Beside them, piled up against the skirting boards, were rows and rows of boxes. These were places where the missing letters might be.

  I started with the boxes. They were crammed with medieval corbels and gargoyles, each of the figures as grotesque as the next. I picked up one of the smaller ones; the severed stone head of a woman, clad in a wimple, sat easily in my hand. A label was attached to it. It had come from the site of Belvoir Priory, an eleventh-century abbey, which John had excavated in 1923. It was extraordinary to think that the carving, one of many that had lain, forgotten, in these boxes, was almost a thousand years old. I got up and walked over to the window. I could see the site where the priory had once stood: it was just below the castle, opposite the gates to the lodge.

  Next, I tried one of the cabinets. The top drawer slid open easily. Inside were rows of glass boxes filled with birds’ eggs. They were carefully labelled in John’s hand. The kitsch way they were displayed was disconcerting; in each of the boxes, five eggs sat snugly in a tiny nest of delicately woven twigs and leaves. The twigs looked as if they had been specially gathered and cut to size. Had John made the nests himself, I wondered?

  I opened the other drawers. These too were filled with eggs. There was something oddly compelling about the range of species and the meticulous way the collection had been ordered. The further I went down the cabinet, the bigger the eggs became: linnets, kingfishers, red-backed shrikes, snipes, dotterels, little grebes – until I got to the bottom drawer, which was full of puffin eggs.

  I moved on to the two cabinets beside it, and began working my way through the thirty-two drawers. They contained yet more birds’ eggs. In one drawer, I discovered some nightingale eggs that John had found on the Western Front in May 1915. Inside the box, there was a letter, which had been carefully folded. John had found the eggs at St-Jans-Cappel, a few miles behind the front-line trenches at Messines. The letter – to his uncle – was dated 23 May. It was a Sunday – a little over six weeks before John had vanished into thin air.

  ‘Old Boy,’ he had written:

  Just a line to say good morning. I have no news whatsoever to give you. The French seem to be making gradual slow movements in the right direction. This afternoon Rothesay and I had nothing on earth to do so we went out into a jolly wood with books to read – very nice and quiet and peaceful, also lots of birds about.

  I noticed a pair of nightingales and after a little trouble tracked them to their nest – which I took – a nice clutch of 5 – but also I forgot to bring my nesting appliances for blowing, etc. Would you look, old boy, in my bedroom, and on one of the bookshelves you will see a cigar box. Will you take out all the blow pipes and drills and send them to me in another box – and place the cigar box back on the shelf – I wanted a nightingale’s clutch and also it will be interesting as taken in France in 1915, won’t it? I blew one egg this evening with a straw but it was an awful job.

  Goodnight old cock – don’t worry for the present.

  It was the only letter I’d found. I looked through the two desks in the hall – and another chest of drawers. There was no sign of the missing correspondence.

  Leaving the hall, I went into the room that John had used as a bedroom. Painted a pale shade of blue, it faced west, with a view across the terraced gardens. A tall glass-fronted cupboard stood against one wall. I turned the key to open it and peered inside. On the shelf directly in front of me was a large porcelain fruit bowl, prettily decorated with patterns of flowers. Looking closer, it appeared to contain fragments of bones. Gingerly, I read the label attached to it. The bones were the remains of the medieval monks that John had exhumed from Belvoir Priory
. Next to the bowl, there were pieces of seventeenth-century slipware and saltglaze pottery. There was also a pile of clay cuneiform tablets dating from the Babylonian period. I knew that John had been passionately interested in archaeology: the things in this cupboard had come from the sites that he had excavated. But to have kept the fragments of human bone suggested a fascination that verged on the morbid.

  I focused on the rest of the room. It was crammed with John’s furniture. There were no other places where the missing letters might be. The large room at the end of the hall was virtually empty. There was just one room left to search.

  As I entered, a wooden gantry, suspended from the ceiling, startled me. I had not spotted it earlier: it was in a corner to the left of the door. From a distance, the sinister-looking racks and pulleys lent it the appearance of some sort of instrument of torture. Littered across the floor in front of it were hundreds of small oblong wooden boxes; once stacked in piles, they had collapsed and fallen sideways.

  Stepping around the boxes, I went over to have a look at the gantry.

  At close hand, it was evident that it had been constructed as a housing for photographic equipment. A series of brass lamps, of different sizes, hung from the racks; the pulleys had been used to adjust the lighting. I bent down and picked up one of the wooden boxes. Inside it, there were some forty glass negatives, each wrapped in glassine paper. I held one up to the light. It was a photograph of John, aged four. The picture had a melancholy air about it. He stood, leaning against a pillar, holding the lead of a large dog which lay at his feet. He was wearing a velvet smock; his delicate, elfin face had a forlorn expression. ‘Myself. Belvoir Castle. 1890,’ the caption read.

  I turned to look at the hundreds of boxes scattered over the floor. Here was yet another collection. The gargoyles, the birds’ eggs, the bones and the bits and pieces in the cupboard in the blue room were all things that John had collected. And now these. Thousand upon thousand of glass negatives – photographs that he had taken, and which he had catalogued himself. Then I thought of the rooms below, deep in the bowels of the castle, and the hundreds of files spanning nine hundred years of history: John, I knew, had also catalogued every one of those tens of thousands of documents.

  This man’s obsession with collecting struck me as pathological. The pursuit and ordering of objects appeared to lie at the core of his personality. It seemed to go far beyond mere interest – it was all-consuming, a compulsion. It looked as if these collections represented some sort of refuge, a form of escape into a private world. But what had he wanted to escape from? I had read Honoré de Balzac’s Le Cousin Pons, the story of a man who was a dedicated collector. The novel was autobiographical. Balzac blamed his own obsessive interest in collecting on his mother’s ill treatment of him. ‘I never had a mother,’ he said. Sigmund Freud had also suggested that a compulsive interest in collecting pointed to emotional deprivation, or abuse, in infancy.

  I had been in the Tower Rooms for nearly two hours. I had searched every box, every drawer, every cupboard. I had found nothing to shed light on John’s disappearance in the summer of 1915; the missing letters that I had hoped to find were not up here. All that I had discovered were the signs of an obsessive personality – a man who appeared to have been fascinated by order, and by things that were deathly and grotesque.

  Retracing my route – down the spiral staircase and along the passages in the old servants’ quarters – I made my way back to the Muniment Rooms. The only hope I had of finding the missing letters was if, as the Duchess had suggested, they had been misfiled.

  11

  I put the file back in its place on the bottom shelf of the case. It was the last one. It had taken me three days to go through the five rooms. Systematically, I had looked through 2,096 files. It was now clear that the missing correspondence was nowhere in the castle. The letters had not been misfiled. They were lost.

  I shut down my computer and began to pack up my things. I was never going to find the letters. Without them, I would have to look for another setting for the book. It was bitterly disappointing. I had set my heart on writing about the Belvoir estate in the First World War. With the exception of the missing months in 1915, the material I needed to bring that world back to life was all here; the Muniment Rooms were a treasure trove. But the vital piece had turned out to be missing. It was only in the summer of 1915 that the horror of the war had begun to hit home. It was then, after months in training, that the volunteers from the Duke’s estate – and John, the man who would one day inherit it – had been drafted into action on the battlefields abroad. I had no means of following their stories; extraordinarily, at this key moment, the record was blank.

  But as I packed away my things, the puzzle kept turning in my mind. The four days at Belvoir Castle had left me with an uneasy feeling. It was not just that the letters were lost. A process of filleting had gone on. 7 July to 5 December 1915. The same 152 days had been excised right across the different collections of correspondence. The fact that the letters had been extracted for the same period suggested that it was one person who had removed them. The precision with which the documents had been removed was unsettling. I’d found twenty-two files relating to the year 1915; a large number contained letters spanning the years on either side: whoever had extracted the missing months had assiduously rifled the files.

  I found it impossible to shake off the niggling feeling that something peculiar lay behind the void in the records. I was not going to leave just yet. I wanted to know who had taken the letters and why.

  It seemed a futile exercise, but I took out my notebook and began to jot down a list of possibilities. The Duchess, I noted, was sure that the letters had not been removed in the ten years since she and the Duke had been living at the castle. David, her husband, had become Duke in 1999; before that, his father, Charles – John’s eldest son – had been Duke. The Duchess had dismissed the thought that anyone could have removed the correspondence in Charles’s time; her father-in-law, apparently, had closed these rooms to outsiders. Yet it was impossible for her to be absolutely certain on this point. How could she be? She had not been there. Assuming the Muniment Rooms had remained out of bounds to outsiders, they would still have been open to members of the family.

  John had had five children; they in turn had had children of their own. Between 1940 – when John died – and 1999 – when the present Duke had succeeded his father – upwards of twenty members of the Manners family had either lived at the castle or visited it regularly. The most likely scenario was that someone inside the family had removed the letters at some point in that period. Quite why they might have wanted to hide the entire correspondence for five months in 1915 was baffling, but as I didn’t know the content of the letters, they could have had any number of motives. Whichever way I looked at it, the permutations appeared endless, the trail to the missing correspondence completely cold.

  Wearily, I set the notebook aside. In three days, I had performed the same mechanical action 2,096 times: reaching for a file; lifting the blue lid; raising the butterfly clip; thumbing through the letters to check they matched the label on the box. The sheer tedium of it still resonated.

  Then a thought suddenly struck me. Surely the butterfly clips offered an important clue? Every time I had opened a file containing material that spanned the early twentieth century, I had noticed that the clips, which had corroded, had left a single, pristine imprint on the top letter. The mark, stencilled in rust several millimetres thick, suggested that the letters had never been looked at. If someone had removed them after John died, the clips would have left a double imprint. In raising them, I had broken time’s seal.

  No one – aside from John – had had access to the files before he died. The most logical hypothesis was that the man who had created this historic archive had also created the void in the correspondence.

  But was this right? It seemed so counter-intuitive as to be almost implausible. The empirical evidence, both in these rooms and in
his rooms up in the East Tower, pointed to a man who had collected, ordered – even hoarded – historical papers and artefacts. He had devoted twenty years of his life to cataloguing and filing the tens of thousands of documents in the Muniment Rooms. In doing so, he had set out to build a seamless record of his family, going back to the mid-eleventh century. It was John who had compiled the volume ‘Specimens of the handwriting of the Manners Family’; painstakingly, he had pored over the many thousands of their letters to select an example of each of their handwriting. Could he really have deliberately punctured the record – one that he had created, and which, up until the summer of 1915, appeared otherwise flawless?

  It was his war diary that convinced me that he had. On exactly the date the diary stops – 6 July 1915 – so too did the stream of family correspondence. It was too much of a coincidence. I could only assume that John had destroyed these letters because they contained information about whatever had happened to him in the summer of 1915.

  Possibly, by working back through the family’s correspondence over the preceding months, I would find something to shed light on it. But before going any further, I wanted to check whether these were the only months that were missing. I was still troubled by the fact that the excisions contradicted what I knew of John’s character. Was this the only gap in the correspondence? Or had he removed other chapters from his life?

  I decided to look at the correspondence between John and his uncle, Charlie Lindsay. There were twenty-two blue files. Beginning in the 1890s, when John was a small boy, their letters spanned more than thirty years and numbered several thousand in total. If there were other missing periods, these files would reveal them.

  It was then that I discovered that John had created not one but three gaps in his biography.

  The first began on 23 August 1894, a few weeks before his eighth birthday; the second on 6 June 1909, when he was twenty-two. Including the void in 1915, he had obliterated 356 days from the archive. It was clear that the gaps were no accident. They recurred in each of the collections of letters.