The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (24 page)

There can be few ‘happy’ families in which a child encrypted his letters to his uncle to describe one of his parents as a ‘c***’. Violet was being disingenuous. She was writing to the man who had looked after her son since he was a boy; until a few weeks before, when John had left for Rome, Charlie was still looking after him. During his childhood, she and Henry had barely seen him: they had sent him away. Yet here she was supporting her husband’s belief that ‘he had always been an indulgent and kind father’. Behind the dissembling, what her letter actually amounted to was a naked appeal to Charlie to bring John into line.

Looking at other letters from the period, the attempt to browbeat John was part of a greater pattern. It wasn’t the absence of a loving relationship with him that mattered to Violet and Henry: their overriding concern was to bludgeon him into becoming the son they wanted him to become. They had not moved on from the death of their beloved Haddon. John could never replace him: he had failed to come up to their expectations.

On 25 January, two days before John left for Rome – and before he contested the agreement – Henry wrote to him:

‘Dear Boy,’ it began:

I don’t want to preach, but this is just the beginning of whatever you choose to make of your life. You’ll be well advised if you throw yourself thoroughly into the job, and pick up and absorb all the information of all sorts of which you can get hold. Make yourself quietly popular if you can!

Go about and see and talk to people and things – all comes in useful later in life: and remember always that you’ve got to fit yourself for a troublesome heritage here when I slip my cable.

Don’t shut yourself up with books entirely: that is an unhealthy process for anyone, and leads to no practical end. In fact, in Kipling’s words, ‘buy an “am an” and see life’.

If you keep your head screwed on right in so doing, then your experience thus gained is most valuable in enabling you to gauge human beings and their ways.

Seeing this letter, and others like it, it was obvious that Violet and Henry thought John odd. His scholarly interests were alien to them; his rejection of the values and lifestyle of their world infuriated them. Socially, as one of the most eligible bachelors in England, he was in constant demand; yet he refused to attend the customary round of balls and Saturday to Monday house parties hosted by their friends. Why he should prefer to shut himself away in museums and libraries, or to spend weeks on an archaeological dig in some obscure part of the country, was a mystery to them. Among their friends and acquaintances, they put it down to shyness. Privately, they thought him peculiar.

Time after time, Charlie had tried to persuade them that there was nothing wrong with their son. This explained his letter to Violet of 1 April 1909, which I had discovered among the bundles of letters John was working on when he died. ‘Society and parties are things for which he does not care a two-penny damn,’ he wrote: ‘It is not self-consciousness which makes him prefer to pore over old manuscripts, to grub about amongst ruins, to go and see old sights, rather than enjoy society – they are his formed tastes, part of his character. Rare and wonderful tastes to have – for his friends to understand and congratulate him upon. It’s no use not
understanding
or trying not to see, the real motive in his actions. You cannot, and never will get him to take active pleasure in things which don’t interest him. It is, quite possibly, a matter for argument, whether the time may not soon arrive when it would be wisest to urge him towards things he has a turn for and will do well, rather than push him towards things which you preconceive to be better.’

Charlie’s pleas fell on stony ground. Violet and Henry persisted in their efforts to stifle John’s academic interests. After leaving Cambridge
in 1908, John told them he wanted to become a dealer in rare manuscripts and medieval ceramics. Henry refused even to contemplate this ambition. ‘If you are entirely without a profession it becomes a condition of things most eminently condemnable,’ he told him: ‘In these days, to be a loafer is more to be despised than even formerly (when he was more or less acknowledged). Now such a position is impossible.’

The label ‘loafer’ could better apply to Henry than to John. By the age of twenty-two, John had become a leading expert in medieval ceramics; others in the field consulted him. He had worked hard at it, teaching himself both the history and the languages of the period. He could read Early French and Middle English; he was also proficient in Greek, Latin and Coptic. Yet these achievements meant nothing to Henry; instead, in a series of threatening letters, he pressed John to look for an alternative career. ‘In your case it must be obvious that I could never even consider handing over to you during my life any portion of my property unless you had qualified for such a proceeding by putting in 8 or 10 years’ steady work at some profession where you are under discipline and compelled to work so many months in the year. Unless some part of the Estate is so given to you, when you succeed the death duties will smash you utterly. So, for every reason, as soon as you settle, or signify on what profession you wish to embark, I shall be delighted to assist you in any way I can.’

The word ‘settle’ was key. So hopelessly broken were the lines of communication between John and his parents that they were unable to articulate the true reason for their anger. The many rows over John’s choice of career were a smokescreen: they concealed the one issue that obsessed both Violet and Henry.
Whom was he going to marry?
His long-term happiness did not enter into it: it was all about blood lines and
money
.

Their preoccupation with the subject, as their letters reveal, was entirely self-regarding. Theirs was the highest title the Crown could bestow: they stood at the pinnacle of society, above all other subjects in the realm. If John failed to produce an heir, the dukedom held in direct line since 1703 would pass out of their branch of the family. For their progeny it would mean a drastic demotion in rank. Both Violet and Henry could trace their aristocratic lineage back to the Middle
Ages: in the absence of an heir to the dukedom, their direct line, blue for almost eight hundred years, threatened to turn an ordinary shade of red.

The future social prestige of the family was not all that was at stake. They were counting on John to resolve their financial problems by marrying a wealthy heiress.

That he
should
marry – and marry
well
– went without saying. Unthinkable, but lurking in both their minds, was the suspicion that he might not marry at all. ‘Peculiarity’ – the word Violet used to refer to any behaviour that deviated from her conventional view of the world – ran in the family. Both she and Henry had numerous relations who had failed to marry. Lady Kitty, Henry’s half-sister, had brought disgrace on the family by becoming a Catholic and a nurse. Then, one Sunday afternoon in 1903, decked in all the jewellery she possessed, and leaving her parasol behind her, she had jumped from a bridge below the castle and drowned herself in the lake. Lord Cecil, Henry’s half-brother, was homosexual. On Violet’s side of the family, Charlie was thought to have male lovers too. Their anxiety regarding John’s reclusive personality was driven by the fear that he had inherited his aunt’s and uncles’ ‘peculiarities’ and that, like them, he would prove disinclined to marry. Even if this was not the case, if he shunned society and immersed himself in books and ‘old things’, how would he ever capture the heart of a wealthy heiress?

Regardless of John’s feelings on the subject, the search for a daughter-in-law consumed Violet.

In her hunt for an eligible candidate, she spurned the traditional ducal marriage market. For centuries, the dual obsessions of marriage and rank had united all ducal families.
To avoid a dilution in rank
, more often than not the sons of dukes married the daughters of other dukes. The result of this vast incestuous dance was that, in 1900, all thirty-three dukes were related. But, as Violet recognized, she was unlikely to find a suitable bride for John among the family’s cousins.

The thirty-year depression in the farming industry threatened to bring an end to the intermarrying. Until its effects began to be felt, wealth had never previously been an issue in the marriage alliances
between ducal houses. No Duke owned fewer than 75,000 acres: his daughters were guaranteed to bring in a handsome dowry. But as land and rental values had collapsed, so too had the value of dowries, knocking the daughters of land-rich but cash-poor dukes out of the market. Only those whose families were protected from the crisis by coal, or other commercial interests, could offer the traditional combination of rank and fortune which every Duchess sought for her son. Consequently, the competition for the handful of eligible candidates was intense.

Violet did not rate John’s chances. She had known his rivals since they were children. There was the dashing George Stafford, the Duke of Sutherland’s boy. Also in the running was Hastings Tavistock, the heir to the Duke of Bedford. An intrepid explorer, he had recently returned from China, where he had been gathering zoological specimens for the British Museum. Then there was Sonny Titchfield, the eldest son of her great friend Winnie, Duchess of Portland. He stood to inherit the family’s coal fortune. Against such stiff opposition, how could her reclusive son hope to compete? But, Violet calculated, if wealth were to take precedence over rank, there was an alternative and, potentially, extremely lucrative marriage market.

In the early 1890s
, American girls had begun to descend on London in droves. The daughters of America’s new billionaires – steel magnates, railroad owners, real-estate and stock speculators – they had come in search of the one thing their money couldn’t buy at home: a title.

‘Until then,’ New York heiress
Jennie Churchill, the mother of Winston, remarked, ‘the American woman was looked upon as a strange abnormal creature with habits and manners something between a Red Indian and a Gaiety Girl.’ Among Britain’s cash-strapped aristocrats, dollars – millions of them – changed this perception.

In 1895, the Duke of Marlborough
set the precedent by marrying Consuelo, the daughter of American railroad billionaire Willie Vanderbilt.
Her dowry was a staggering
$2.5 million dollars.
*
That year
alone, nine American heiresses married members of the English aristocracy; by the end of the century, a quarter of the House of Lords had a transatlantic connection.

In this brisk, burgeoning marriage market, Violet had the advantage – a title was the only necessary credential.

In 1903, after seeing off the Duke of Manchester
, Henry, the 8th Duke of Roxburghe, won the heart of May Goelet, the daughter of Mr Ogden Goelet, a New York real-estate broker. Her personal wealth was estimated to be in the region of $5 million.
*
Violet could see the equation was simple: the grander the title, the greater the chance to capture fortunes so huge they were almost unimaginable.

One other factor persuaded her to jettison the all-important criterion of an ancient lineage, and this was the collapse of the Duke of Marlborough’s marriage to Consuelo.

Their recent separation was the talk of London. Consuelo, it was reported, had not wanted to marry the Duke;
Alva, her socially ambitious mother
– famous for her remark to her daughter, ‘I do the thinking, you do as you are told’ – had apparently forced her into the marriage. As she stood at the altar, Consuelo, it was whispered, had wept behind her veil.
The Duke had never loved her
: almost from the start he had been hopelessly in love with raven-haired Gladys Deacon, the daughter of a murderer. Secretly, he had continued to see her throughout his marriage. Now Gladys was a regular visitor to Blenheim. Her carriage, paid for by the Vanderbilt millions, was a familiar sight on the long drive up to the palace.

It was the Duke’s enviable temerity, rather than the loveless marriage, that had caused a sharp intake of breath in the gilded drawing rooms which Violet frequented. Consuelo’s dowry was non-refundable: cynically, the Duke had used his illustrious title to pocket $2.5 million worth of Vanderbilt railway stock while carrying on his amorous activities as usual.

His behaviour was an object lesson to Violet. No matter if John was ‘peculiar’ and his marriage failed to last: come what may, if she could only find an American heiress and persuade him to marry her,
the mere exchange of vows would secure the future of the Belvoir estate.

In the spring of 1908, as John entered his final term at Trinity College, Cambridge, Violet’s search began in earnest.

After carefully scrutinizing the lists of American debutantes in London, and after making enquiries via her
new
friend, Mrs Whitelaw Reid, the wife of the US ambassador, she selected her target: Miss Margaretta Drexel, the daughter of Anthony J. Drexel II.

Margaretta Drexel was the
wealthiest of all the American heiresses in London for the season. Her grandfather, worth a reputed $40 million, was the Philadelphia-born merchant banker, Anthony J. Drexel I. Beautiful, with a curvaceous figure and tresses of auburn-coloured hair, Margaretta was also the most celebrated: ‘Those who supply the matrimonial gossip of Europe,’ one newspaper reported, ‘have already married her off to the son of the German Emperor, the son of the King of Greece, several Dukes, and a few French Counts.’ Writing to her from America, her best friend remarked, ‘I’ve stopped reading fiction, I just read about you.’

The Drexels had arrived in style
, renting 22 Grosvenor Square in Mayfair, complete with Holbeins, Romneys and Chippendale furniture. They were to spend August grouse shooting at Dalgross Castle in Inverness-shire; they had also taken a house at Windsor for the Ascot Races, and at Cowes for the Regatta. There, moored in the harbour, Mr Drexel’s 300-foot yacht waited, having sailed across the Atlantic manned by a 68-strong crew. The yacht was named after Margaretta.

No sooner had Violet selected her future daughter-in-law than a rumour circulated that Margaretta had received a proposal of marriage: ‘Miss Dresel [sic] is going to be engaged to Reginald Fellowes! I go on hoping it is not true,’ she wrote to a friend from Belvoir: ‘I wish we had had a really good look at her – like having her here for a week to see if she is really the darling I think her. Jack Gilliat who has adored her – afar – says she is just a perfect darling, but not happy. Rather hating being dragged about to balls and parties to please her mother – and
very
lonely and sad. She is never allowed
to leave her mother’s side – that is the way the correct Americans treat their daughters when they first come out. I can’t see a better daughter-in-law! I hunt about and it’s the only one so far that has beauty and gentle sweetness and music.’