The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (31 page)

What was so special about John?

His War Office file had revealed this mystery; it did not resolve it. The irregular circumstances of the board – and its coincidence with the resumption of the records at Belvoir – convinced me that, in making his meticulous excisions in the correspondence in the Muniment Rooms, there was something else that John wanted to hide.

I now had a clearer idea of what I was looking for. There were sixty-three letters at Belvoir; I had looked at four of them. Fifty-nine remained in the pile that I had extracted from the trunk of correspondence that he was working on when he died.

As soon as I saw the letters, I knew there was something special about them. Carefully, I spread them out on the long map desk in Room 4. It was hard to tell in the dim light but, if I peered closely, they had a peculiar sheen to them; they appeared to be coated in a thin film of translucent powder. I ran my finger along the surface of a page; the powder felt silky, rather than gritty.

Going over to the window, I tilted the page to and fro against the light; the paper sparkled as if it had been dipped in fine filaments of gold. It looked like compact powder, or some type of pigment used in mixing paint.

It was the first time I had come across it. I had found the letters, stuffed inside one large envelope. Violet had evidently kept them separately. The mysterious substance suggested she had put them inside something – as if she had wanted to hide them. Had they once lain in the box or drawer where she had kept her painting materials? Or had she secreted them in one of the compartments of her dressing table?

I settled down to read them. When I saw their contents – and the names of the correspondents – it was obvious that Violet
had
been at pains to conceal them.

Woven through these letters – seventeen of them, spanning the first thirteen months of the war – was a web of intrigue that stretched from the Duchess to the highest military authorities in the country. Evidently, her position at the very top of society had allowed her to call in favours, no matter how dishonourable, whenever and from whomsoever she pleased.

It was a telegram from John that changed everything. Dated 23 September 1915 – the day after he attended his second medical board – it was to his sister, Marjorie:

Six weeks more leave
STOP
Damnation
STOP
Bitterly disappointed
STOP
.

The letter pinned to it explained the source of his disappointment. It was not cowardice that had prevented him from fighting in the Battle of Loos. It was Violet.

The week before, she had written to a senior official at the War Office to ask him to fix the outcome of the board.

‘Darling – I must fight! Don’t be cross with me!’ she told Charlie afterwards: ‘Other mothers do
nothing
. What do they get for their bravery?
The worst.
’

The two documents cast John in an entirely different light. Here was proof of a conspiracy to which he was unwitting. Far from wanting to escape the fighting, he had wanted to be in the thick of it.

But how had Violet succeeded in keeping him in the dark?

I had stumbled across a treasure trove. The names and details contained in this small cache of letters offered a route map to sources outside the Muniment Rooms that finally enabled me to piece together what had happened.

Together with the letters in John’s blue files and the others that I found in the trunk of correspondence he was working on when he died, they from the basis of the narrative that follows.

The story begins on a summer’s day in August 1914, when Violet received news from General Stuart Wortley, John’s commanding officer. What he had to tell her came as a bolt from the blue.

It was first light on the morning of 27 August
1914 – the twenty-fourth day of the war – and Violet lay, half awake, in the master bedroom at Stanton Woodhouse, the family’s home in Derbyshire. A low, rambling Tudor mansion, with gables and lattice windows, it stood, nestled in a cluster of trees, at the end of a mile-long drive. Outside, wood pigeons cooed in the boughs of the tall elms that framed the house; beneath her window came the soothing sound of running water from the stream that ran through the steep hillside garden. Earlier, while she was sleeping, her maid had crept into her room to draw the curtains. The view stretched before her: over the sculpted yews and the gravelled pathways in the garden below, to the moors beyond, pale mauve in the hazy morning light.

By any standards
Violet’s appearance at this hour was eccentric. Her silk-frilled nightdress was worn under a cream flannel kimono-shaped garment and her head was bound, seemingly in a knitted vest, the long sleeves of which wound around her chin. This elaborate structure, designed to keep her hair in place, accentuated the coarseness of her features. Forty years before, when she was eighteen, Mrs Patrick Campbell, the actress and muse to George Bernard Shaw, had described her as the ‘most beautiful thing I ever saw’. While her former beauty was still evident in her bone structure, age had added a fleshiness to her face. There was a ruthlessness about it too.
Unkindly, Margot Asquith
, the prime minister’s wife, likened her to a ‘Burne Jones Medusa’.
Her daughter-in-law
, Cynthia, had been crueller, noting ‘the faintly sinister strangeness of her eyes so deeply set in shadowy caverns’.

Propping herself up in the Elizabethan four-poster bed, Violet opened her mouth wide and screamed. Invariably, this was her first action on waking.
The ‘stylized scream’
, as Diana, her daughter, described it, was the signal to Tritton, her maid, to bring in her breakfast tray.

It would be lunchtime before Violet left her bedroom. The first half of her day followed a set routine. ‘
My mother spent the mornings
in bed,’ Diana remembered: ‘I see her sitting cross-legged writing endless letters with a flowing quill pen. On her knee was balanced a green morocco folding letter-case, with blotting paper and a pot of ink which, curiously enough, never got splashed on the Irish linen sheets.’

Downstairs, Henry
was up and dressed for breakfast. Seated at a long black oak table in the panelled hall, he was going through the morning’s post.

Among the letters was one from John’s general:

Headquarters, North Midland Division

Stockwood Park

Luton

My Dear Henry,

One line to tell you that your boy is doing excellent work. He is really first rate, and I am very glad to have him on my staff. I hope we shall all be over the water in about 6 weeks’ time, prodding the Germans in the back part of their front!

Yours ever

Eddy Stuart Wortley

Reaching for the fountain pen he kept in the breast pocket of his suit, Henry wrote a note to his wife:

I think you ought
to see this.

R [Rutland]

Then he summoned a footman to take the note, and the general’s letter, up to Violet’s bedroom.

‘John
going
!!! At any moment!!!’ Violet wrote to Diana: ‘I am cracked with fear.’

The letter from General Stuart Wortley lay beside her on the bed.
His news was the last thing she had anticipated. The North Midland was a territorial division. On 4 August, the day war had been declared, the government had announced that all territorial divisions would remain in England. The war was expected to be over by Christmas. Violet had not, for an instant, imagined that John would actually be drafted to the Front.

Only the previous week, her great friend Winnie, Duchess of Portland, had written to congratulate her on her luck: ‘How heavenly for you that J is only to be in England. Gen. E. Wortley, I hear, is to stay
here
and defend us!!’ On numerous occasions, the general himself had written to reassure her. His last letter – sent to Belvoir by dispatch rider the night the North Midlands arrived at Luton – had been particularly avuncular:

North Midland Headquarters

Stockwood Park

Luton

15 August 1914

My dear Duchess,

Your boy drove me in the Rolls Royce to this place today – he drove very well – and we came from Derby in 3 hours!

I have told him to join my Staff tomorrow as Galloper (I hope he will not tumble off his gee!) and he will remain with me – so do not be worried.

Yours ever,

Eddy Stuart Wortley

Now, out of the blue, she had every reason to worry. In a panic, and determined to find some means of stopping John from going to the Front, Violet turned to her brother:

Charlie darling,

Eddy Wortley writes ‘I expect we shall all be over the water in 6 weeks’ time’!!

Now what can you and I do
secretly
– think and tell me? Surely
J could go on the staff of someone
remaining
here to
teach
new army? Think hard – I am up to
anything
secret.

Sir George Arthur
*
– is he any use to us? Or shall I come to London soon and see Kitchener of Khartoum, or what or what!? Shall I write a little secret letter to Eddy Wortley begging him to tell to me when he knows his own news, and telling him of my intense wish to keep J under a General left in England?

I wish you were here. Find out all you can.

There was no time to write any more. ‘Post going,’ she scrawled.

The calling in of favours was Violet’s métier. Until her late middle age, she had traded on her beauty to obtain what she wanted. Her many admirers had been only too happy to oblige, even to the extent of lending her husband huge sums of money.
In the 1890s, she had persuaded
the Duke of Portland to lend Henry £20,000 to purchase their London house, Number 16 Arlington Street. A large Queen Anne mansion, it was situated behind the Ritz in Piccadilly. The terms of the loan, which Violet had negotiated, were absurdly favourable: only the capital sum was repayable – and this only when Henry could afford to pay it. Before then, Lord Brownlow, one of the wealthiest men in Britain, and the uncle of her then lover Harry Cust,
^†
had provided their first family home. This was Cockayne Hatley Hall in Bedfordshire, the house where Haddon had died.

Now approaching her late fifties, Violet had only her charm – and her position – to fall back on. The former, when she chose to deploy it, was considerable: ‘
I had a letter
from Violet Rutland on Saturday that really would have melted one, if one were not so convinced of her evil character and falseness,’ Lady Desborough reported to a friend.

Violet spent the rest of that morning going through her address book.
By the end of it, she had drawn up a list
with six names on it:

General Sir Ian Hamilton [Aide-de-Camp to King George V]

Field Marshal Lord Grenfell [former Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in Ireland]

Sir John Cowans [Quartermaster General to the Armed Forces]

Major-General Frederick Hammersley [Commanding Officer of the 11th Division]

Lord Curzon of Kedleston [former Viceroy of India]

Sir George Arthur [Private Secretary to Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, Secretary of State for War]

These were the men Violet believed could help in her bid to keep John back from the war. She knew each of them personally; they had been guests of hers at Belvoir. The difficulty was, if she was to avoid both her husband and her son getting wind of her plan, she would have to approach them surreptitiously; then she would have to persuade them to collaborate with her in secret.

At Luton, as Violet plotted a means to stop John from going to the Front, the machinery of war was gearing up to send him.

Three weeks later, on an overcast morning
, John stood with General Stuart Wortley at the centre of a windswept parade ground. They were dwarfed by the scene around them. Ahead, some four hundred yards distant, was the magnificent neo-classical façade of Luton Hoo, the home of diamond-mine heiress Lady Wernher. Behind them, drawn up in razor-straight lines, were five thousand soldiers.

They were waiting for King George V, who was on his way to review the North Midlands. John, ADC to General Wortley, had taken the call from Buckingham Palace to say that the King would be with them at half past ten. It had been a long day already.
To allow plenty of time
for the troops to form up on the parade ground, after reveille at five, they had marched the two miles from the North Midlands headquarters at Stockwood Park. The infantry were lined up along the boundary, with the Field Ambulance on the extreme right, and the artillery on the slope of the ground to the left. A significant number of the men were still dressed in civilian clothing; with just a few weeks to go before their departure for the Front, their uniforms had yet to be supplied.

Opposite the troops
, in the far corner of the ground, half a dozen cars were drawn up. Beside them, huddled against the wind, stood the mayor and the town clerk of Luton and the handful of guests General Stuart Wortley had invited to watch the parade – among them, John’s father, who was Honorary Colonel of two of the division’s battalions. To the left of this group – gathered at a respectful distance – were a small number of estate workers. There were no other spectators. The parkland that framed the ground was deserted. The King had insisted that his visit be kept as private as possible. This was business, not public ceremony.

Morale among the troops
was high. As they formed up into position, a local newspaper reporter spoke to some of them. ‘We are the
first Division in the Territorial Forces to be selected for service in the field,’ one soldier boasted: ‘other Divisions have been accepted for Colonial and Garrison services abroad whereas we, the North Midland Division, are bound for France early next month. Hurrah!’