The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (18 page)

Darling Father – I have failed. I am a fool, but it is not my fault. My Tutor is going to try and keep me on but I don’t want to, because I don’t think it does me any good.

You had better send me abroad with a man.

I have never been quite so depressed as I am now though I have been very near it before.

For goodness sake don’t keep me here. I shall never do anything in life so please don’t suspect it.

Goodbye

Roos

Presumably, John had meant to say ‘don’t expect it’.

I closed the file. The damage to this boy was undeniable. He had come from one of the most privileged backgrounds in England: to be confronted with the evidence of the neglect that he had suffered as a child was shocking.

Yet these letters failed to resolve the central mystery.

Precisely eighty-seven days were missing from the family’s correspondence. Haddon had died on 28 September. The gap in the Muniment Rooms began on 23 August
– thirty-six days before Haddon’s death –
and extended to 19 November.

I could understand why John had wanted to erase the traumatic events that occurred
after
his brother had died. It had been an intensely painful moment in his life. It had also been a shameful one. He had been thrown out of the family home that he would one day inherit, as if he were unworthy of it. But the void covered the period when Haddon had been ill.

What had happened then?

From what I knew of John, the length of the excision was no accident. In putting together this historic collection, his primary objective had been to preserve the record. In removing material he had been meticulous. So why, if he had simply wanted to conceal the fact that he had been sent away after his brother died, had he removed the correspondence for the weeks
before
Haddon died?

In those days, there was no cure for tuberculosis; the family’s
world would have turned on Haddon’s illness: the weeks leading up to his death would have been agonizing for them. But this alone did not seem reason enough to explain why, half a century later, as John himself lay dying, he had felt compelled to remove the letters dating from this period.

What I discovered next changed the course of my research entirely.

It was the note that Violet enclosed inside the box containing Haddon’s death mask which cracked the mystery open.

But this is to jump ahead.

First, I had a long conversation with the Duchess.

It was a two-mile drive to Knipton, a pretty village of yellow stone houses in the valley below the castle. The Duchess had asked me to meet her for lunch at the Manners Arms. The hotel, which had once been the 6th Duke’s hunting lodge, belonged to her husband, David, the 11th Duke.

We met in the stone-flagged hallway. ‘This was one of our first projects after David succeeded,’ she explained. ‘We wanted to turn it into a really nice country-house hotel. I designed all the bedrooms myself. They’re all named after the family’s ancestors – the Flying Duke, the Hunting Duke, the Gentleman Duke, and so on. There are things of theirs in the rooms – and photographs and portraits of them.’

I followed her into the dining room. The tables were decorated with white linen cloths and horn-shaped glass vases, filled with peonies and lilies. One wall was dominated by a set of large windows which overlooked the garden outside; the others displayed pictures of horses and hunting scenes.

‘I’m longing to hear what you’ve discovered,’ she said as we sat down. ‘I’ve only had a quick look through the twentieth-century papers. You must have found some wonderful material for your book.’

I began by telling her that the book had changed course, and that my focus was now on John and the missing periods in the correspondence in the Muniment Rooms. I also told her it was now clear that he was responsible for the gaps in the letters. I went through them in detail: the gap in 1894 when John was eight, and which concealed his brother’s death; the one in 1909, when he was Honorary Attaché at the British Embassy in Rome, and which the coded letters presaged; and the gap in 1915, when he was twenty-eight, and serving with the 4th Leicesters on the Western Front. As we discussed them, the Duchess could not think of a single reason why John would have
wanted to remove the correspondence. His motives were as mysterious to her as they were to me.

‘You know Charles – John’s eldest son – closed the Muniment Rooms after his father died,’ she said. ‘It’s never been clear why. He appeared to have some sort of a block about them. It was almost as if he attached some sort of feeling of fear to them. Perhaps it was because John kept him at a distance. He never confided in him.’

‘Didn’t Charles get on with his father?’ I asked.

‘No, their relationship was complicated. John adored his second son, who was also called John. He was his favourite. No one thought Charles would live to succeed – he was a sickly child. It was why John lavished all his attention on his younger brother.

‘I know it sounds strange,’ she continued, ‘but it goes back to the witches’ curse. They lived in the castle’s grounds – up on Blackberry Hill, where the mausoleum is now. Two were hung at Lincoln for murdering the Earl of Rutland’s sons. It was some time in the early 1600s, I think. The women were said to have placed a curse on future generations. It has haunted the family ever since. Time after time, their eldest sons – or one of their sons – have died in infancy. It skipped that generation – John’s children. But Charles lost his second son. He was my husband’s brother. After we moved into the castle, I asked a priest to exorcize it. I was frightened the curse would strike our sons too.’

Our conversation returned to the closing of the Muniment Rooms. I mentioned the trunk of correspondence that I’d found which suggested that John was working on his mother’s letters when he died.

‘Charles was at the castle when his father fell ill. There was a stove in the Muniment Rooms. Perhaps he saw John burning the letters. We don’t know. But if he knew there was something he wanted to hide, he must have realized that the race to destroy whatever it was had not been completed when he died.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Why close the rooms? Wouldn’t he have wanted to find out what the letters contained.’

‘No, not necessarily,’ she replied. ‘Family papers and historical documents were of no interest to Charles. He hated those rooms. His father had created them. It was a place John had warned people
off from entering. I think Charles felt intimidated by them – a sense that his father was the great expert, and he didn’t know what was inside them. Perhaps it went back to his childhood – the memory of being kept out of this dark, secret place when he was a small boy. He knew there was something bad in there, but he couldn’t bring himself to confront it. The simplest solution was to close the rooms. That way, there was no danger of anyone discovering what his father had wanted to hide.’

I returned from lunch to find a note on my desk. Beside it, there was a bundle of letters, and a thick, well-thumbed journal.

The note was from the archivist:

Have you seen this? I found it at the back of the drawer in John’s desk. I can’t find the death cast – or the box. Both appear to be missing.

I’ve left you the letters of condolence that Violet and Henry received after Haddon died.

The journal is Violet’s.

The ‘this’ to which he had referred was the small pale-cream envelope that he had pinned to the note. Six ominous words were written on it: ‘A Death Cast of Lord Haddon’. The words – written in Violet’s hand – had been heavily underlined.

Cautiously, I opened the envelope; it obviously had something to do with the death mask Sir Alfred Gilbert had cast the morning after the boy died. Inside it was the note that Violet had enclosed in the box that had contained the missing cast:

April 9 1907

A cast of my best beloved boy of nine years old who died on 28th September 1894 after six days agonies and starvation from an accident twisting something inside. And then my heart was broken. He was my Joy and Pride.

But I hid it away. For it was not like my beautiful big fair child of beauty. And yet I cannot destroy it and shut it up now in this box to be sent to Belvoir Castle to rest there.

His mother

Violet Rutland

I leant back in the chair, stunned. This was a major discovery. Here, at last, was the secret that John had been determined to hide. His brother hadn’t been ill; he had died as a result of an accident ‘after twisting something inside’. The notice on the plaque beside Haddon’s tomb stated that he had died of tuberculosis. Contemporaneously, the newspapers had been told that the boy had died from ‘an illness’. Clearly, it wasn’t only John who had wanted to cover up the accident: his family had clearly been at pains to conceal it at the time.

Why?

Violet’s note pointed to some sort of internal obstruction: a blow to a vital organ. But what had caused the accident?

I made three further discoveries that afternoon.

By law – according to the Coroner’s Act of 1887 – any violent, sudden or unnatural death was subject to a judicial investigation. A call to the Bedfordshire Record Office revealed that there had been no inquest following Haddon’s death. Nor had there been a police investigation. The appropriate authorities had not been told that he had died as the result of an accident. The information on Haddon’s death certificate corroborated Violet’s note: ‘Cause of death – Intestinal Obstruction’. But the
underlying
as opposed to the
actual
cause of death had been omitted. In failing to report the accident, Violet and Henry – then Marquis and Marchioness of Granby – had broken the law – a crime, which, had it been discovered, would have resulted in a criminal prosecution.

Henry, it seems, had also concealed the truth from Queen Victoria. The day after Haddon died, he sent a telegram to Balmoral. I found the Queen’s reply among the letters of condolence:

I am most deeply grieved at the news you give me and much surprised as we knew nothing of the dear boy’s illness. Was it sudden? Say everything most kind and sympathizing to dear Violet.

The third thing I discovered was that Haddon’s accident had occurred on John’s birthday. This grim detail was buried in the pages of the journal which the archivist had left on my desk. Violet had kept the journal in the mid-1930s. At the time, she had been thinking
about writing her autobiography. In mapping out the chapters she proposed to write, she had noted the things that had happened to her over the course of her life. The entries were chaotic; no more than fragments. But still, the few lines that she had written about Haddon’s death struck a jarring note. They were hidden among a jumble of memories of the places she had visited and the people she had met in the weeks before he died:

Aug 14 Go to White Lodge. Draw Royal baby, future King Edward VIII. Difficult won’t go to sleep. Start at 9, finish at 4.30. German governess will clap her hands to wake him and make him open his eyes! I sit for Shannon. On 16th I go again to White Lodge.

I go down to Hatley – Haddon lovely at Station. To Longshawe. Babies with me. [Earl of] Wharncliffe, Charlie L [Lindsay], Sir Henry James, Miss James. Darling children arrive towards evening (Spt 7) cut Haddon’s hair. Lockinge – Manoeuvres – Blues and Horse Guards etc. in Camp. Big children arrive from Longshawe next day. Happy day for Haddon. He dines down. He sits next me. No hurrying to bed. Dance and play after. Haddon plays harmonium. Tea party for John’s birthday. Play after. Haddon
ill
that night – Sept 22. Operation 26th successful. Worse on 27th, despair. On 28th a spark of hope!
Died at
10
pm
.

Violet had not mentioned the accident. It was as if it had never happened. All that she had said was ‘Haddon
ill
that night.’ The loss of her eldest son had been the central tragedy of her life – ‘my great sorrow’, as she repeatedly referred to it. But half a century after his death, as she planned her autobiography, she had drawn a veil over it. She had opted to keep to the official version of events.

Clearly, the death of this 9-year-old boy had been no ordinary accident. It had happened at the family’s home at Cockayne Hall in the tiny village of Hatley Cockayne. If it had been straightforward – if Haddon had fallen from a tree, or a pony – his parents would not have gone to such lengths to cover it up. Someone must have been to blame for it: someone they had wanted to protect.

Awful though this was to contemplate, the finger of suspicion pointed at John. It would explain why he had been sent away within hours of the funeral. His parents had wanted him out of the way.

And there were the excisions that John had made in the family’s correspondence. The accident resolved the mystery behind the length of the gap he had created in the records. The correspondence in the weeks leading up to it would have revealed that Haddon had not been suffering from tuberculosis. Over the course of the six days it had taken the boy to die, the letters and telegrams that had flown between Belvoir Castle and Cockayne Hall would have contained details of his condition, exposing the myth of illness. In reporting the accident to the Duke and Duchess, in all probability, Henry and Violet had described
how
it had happened.

But what had actually happened?

If John
was
to blame for Haddon’s death, had it simply been a tragic accident, or had there been more to it than that?

The lengths to which both John and his parents had gone to cover it up presented the chilling possibility that he might have actually killed his brother. Of course, the likelihood that he had killed him by design was infinitesimal. But he might have wanted to hurt him.

My best beloved boy. My joy and pride
. These were the words Violet had written in the note she enclosed in the box containing Haddon’s death cast. As the second son, John had lived in his brother’s shadow. He had had every reason to be jealous of him. The accident had occurred at his birthday party. Had the two boys been fighting? Or had a game they had been playing gone wrong? Had something provoked him to harm his brother in a fit of jealousy?