The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (14 page)

It felt odd to be turning the key to the rooms. I had searched them many times before, but this visit was different. Previously, I had been looking for letters; this time, I did not know what I was looking for.

I began in the room where John had died. First, I went through the cases looking for things that I might have missed on a previous search. Then I pulled out the sofa and looked behind it and underneath it. Next, I examined the floor for loose-fitting boards – places where something might have been concealed. I did not find anything. Then
I checked Room 2 and the six cases along the passage. Again, I could see nothing of note. I repeated the process in Rooms 3 and 4.

It was when I got to Room 5 that I realized there was one place I had not searched.

Trunks and boxes, stacked one on top of the other, crowded the centre of the small room. Situated at the foot of the Round Tower, it was little more than a cupboard off Room 4. I had already had a quick look inside the trunks on the top of the pile. They had been empty. But I had not looked through the others. I had assumed they were empty too.

There were twelve boxes in total: gun cases, metal hatboxes, old leather suitcases and sturdy-looking wooden boxes that had once stored breakable items. The ones at the bottom of the pile were awkward to get at; four of the larger trunks had been stacked on top of them.

I levered the first trunk from the pile. It was black and made of metal and had thick brass studs. John’s initials were stamped on the side of it. Dating from the end of the nineteenth century, it was a travelling trunk – the type that would once have been strapped to the roof of a horse-drawn carriage. The other three trunks were smaller and easier to shift. But when I tried to move the box underneath them, it was too heavy. I lifted the lid. To my astonishment, it was crammed with letters. There appeared to be several thousand in total. They were still in their envelopes, neatly tied in bundles with slivers of pink ribbon.

My first thought was that this was the missing correspondence that I had been searching for all along. But, flicking quickly through the bundles, I saw that the letters were not confined to the missing months in 1894, 1909 and 1915, as I had hoped. They spanned fifty years, starting in the 1870s. Mostly, they appeared to be addressed to John’s mother, Violet, Duchess of Rutland. The family crests and stately addresses of the correspondents were embossed on the backs of the envelopes – men and women who had belonged to the Upper Ten Thousand (the term used in the late nineteenth century to denote Britain’s ruling elite). This was a huge cache of letters: they looked important. So why had John left them to gather dust in these trunks?

It was when I began to go through them that I realized their significance.

At first sight, it seemed these were letters that John had not managed to look at before he died. They were unlike any others I had seen in these rooms. John’s comments filled the margins of the letters that he had catalogued in the blue files; he had added dates to those that were undated; he had inserted the full name or title of the correspondent when it was unclear. The pages of these letters were unmarked. There was nothing to suggest that he had begun the process of sifting through them. They appeared to be original source material – the raw material from which he had intended to construct what would have been a long series of blue files.

But it soon became clear that he had in fact been through them. John had rifled these bundles. The months in 1894, 1909 and 1915 were missing. The gaps in the correspondence coincided precisely with the gaps in the blue files.

On close analysis, it seems that John had been working on these letters when he died. They explain why, after he fell ill in April 1940, he had refused to leave the Muniment Rooms. They also explain why, in the two years leading up to his death, his days and nights had been spent in them.

The letters belonged to Violet, Duchess of Rutland. In creating the gaps in the family record, John had had plenty of time to work on the rest of his family’s correspondence. But he had had to wait for his mother’s papers. It was only after her death in December 1937, when her letters finally came into his possession, that he could complete the task of constructing his version – the authorized version – of this period in his family’s history.

It was a formidable undertaking. Violet, Duchess of Rutland, was born in 1856. Over the course of her lifetime, she had been an inveterate letter writer: frequently, she wrote to those she was closest to several times a day. When John inherited her correspondence, the collection encompassed many thousands of letters.

In a note written shortly before her death, Violet had expressed
the wish that her son should be the arbiter of what was left for history to judge of her life: ‘He [John] may look and destroy, or keep everything,’ she had instructed. The task had consumed him. From the moment she died, he had rarely emerged from the Muniment Rooms.

Yet still, in April 1940 when he fell ill, he had not completed the work he had begun in December 1937. Some three thousand of his mother’s letters remained to be sorted.

These were the ones that I had found in the trunks.

John had failed to mark these letters because he hadn’t had time. As he was dying, it was the pruning of these letters to which he had had to give priority. In doing so, for the first and only time, he had deviated from his own exacting standards.

His previous excisions had been meticulous. His passion for history meant that he saw himself as both curator and censor: this was why the dates that signalled the beginning and end of the gaps that he had created had been so precise. But he had approached the last of his mother’s letters in a panic. Instead of reading through them, he had reached straight for the envelopes. He had known exactly what he was looking for: postmarks dating from the three periods which it had taken him twenty years to obliterate from the rest of his family’s correspondence. Had he thought that he would have time to return to them, had he intended to read through them, it was a method he would never have chosen. The postmarks on the envelopes were not always clear; often, the ink was blurred, or the hand stamp only half rolled. Without reading the letters, he could not be certain whether there were any he had missed. Scrupulousness had been John’s hallmark, yet in his haste to remove the evidence that he believed to be incriminating, this fallible method had been the one option open to him.

I had not doubted that John had something important he wanted to hide, but this pointed to something of vital importance.

There was an intense pathos in this immensely rich man spurning the trappings of wealth to die in discomfort for the sake of these letters. For John to have walled himself up in these dank rooms must
have required a remarkable act of will. He was gravely ill: his body must have craved rest and comfort. Instead, ignoring its demands, and against the advice of his doctors, his overriding concern had been to finish the process of sifting his mother’s letters. Something had hounded him up until his last breath. Whatever it was, he had made its concealment his final act.

The trunks stood open on the floor around me, the bundles of letters piled high inside them. I had barely looked at them. In my haste to fill in the gaps in his biography, I had done exactly as John had done: I had looked at the postmarks on the envelopes.

I took the bundles of letters out of the trunks and spread them over the long map desk. Until now, it was as if I had been locked in a chase with him; whenever I had searched for something important, he had got there first. It seemed brutal, but, at last, I had the upper hand. I was looking at the work of a dying man. As he had hurried through the bundles, it was likely that he had overlooked something. He had had no time to read these letters. There were bound to be ones that he had missed.

There were about eighty bundles, spanning the years 1870 to 1920; some contained only a handful of letters; others, forty or fifty.

First, I had to identify those that might contain sensitive material. I focused on the three missing periods. There was the gap in the summer of 1915 when John had been on the Western Front, and which had begun with the blank pages in his war diary. Then there was the one in the summer of 1909 – the year he was at the embassy in Rome. The third gap – in 1894 – was the most mysterious of all. The thought that John had felt compelled to cover up an event in his childhood was disquieting.

Scrutinizing the postmarks, I combed through the envelopes keeping a careful eye out for any postmarks that were illegible. These, possibly, were letters that John had missed. I was also looking for any dated either side of the gaps: these too might shed light on the periods he had been trying to protect.

After several hours, I had three piles of letters: one for each of the years 1909 and 1915 – and a collection of around sixty letters that
I had been unable to date. There were no letters at all, I noted, for the year 1894.

The pile for 1909 was the smallest. It seemed logical to begin with these. This was the year John had used the cipher to encrypt his letters from Italy. The events of that period were still fresh in my mind.

As I began to go through the pile, the content of the letters struck me as utterly bizarre. A few weeks before John had arrived at the British Embassy in Rome, Violet had approached Lady Rodd, the wife of the ambassador. Here was a mother asking another woman to spy on her son.

John arrived in Rome on the evening of 27 January 1909. The embassy, an impressive neo-Palladian villa, was situated inside the walls of the city, next to Michelangelo’s Porta Pia. Once the home of the Duke of Bracciano, its splendid reception rooms on the
piano nobile
were the setting for the party the ambassador and his wife hosted to welcome him.

A little before midnight, Lady Rodd showed John to his room. After bidding him goodnight, she retired to write to his mother:

My dear Violet – your John has arrived looking well, and is charming to talk to. He has plenty of aplomb and conveys an atmosphere of dignity and calmness by his manner. We do not find him in the least shy – much less gauche which is remarkable considering age and circumstance. I am sure he will find the rest of the staff very friendly and good company. They are all delightful people and they have promised to look after the boy and teach him everything and put him au courant of the diplomat’s duties! You may be quite at rest and whenever I have time I will send you a line.

A month later, the ambassador’s wife wrote again. Her letter contained a series of remarks that went far beyond the ordinary. Violet had evidently given her carte blanche to say what she liked about John. This in itself was unusual. More peculiar, however, was the fact that Violet had felt it necessary to seek the opinion of a woman who had only known her son for a matter of weeks:

Dearest Violet,

John went off again last night to Messina where he is really happy – doing useful work and coming into daily contact with working people who he likes so much better than folks he meets in drawing rooms.

We all like John immensely – he is fuller of good qualities than bad. He has the most charming manners I have ever seen and is full of consideration and kindly thought for everyone. Of course, he is not socially inclined but he always does his duty and talks to anyone he sits next to. I wish he would take up Italian – he would find it useful and the knowledge of it would make travelling about so much more enjoyable. I have suggested it several times and he always seems eager to begin – but somehow he puts it off till a more convenient moment. The same with golf – he wants to begin, but seems shy of making the first effort. The fact is, he is very proud, and unless he does a thing well he hates doing it at all. I hope when he knows us better he will lose that sort of shyness – it is nothing else but a sort of self-consciousness which is not uncommon in boys of John’s age. He is developing very much and I expect when you see him you will be immensely struck with his increased personality. If only he would smoke less – but how we are to compass this baffles me. The best way would be for him to fall violently in love with some fair lady, but that is a dangerous solution to try, and as far as I know John very unlikely to happen for some time to come.

I wish you could manage to come out and see him some time this spring. I should like to know if he is really happy. He seems so but one never knows.

Goodbye and rest assured we will look after him all the time.

Violet forwarded Lady Rodd’s letter on to her brother. His reply was odder still. Charlie was writing from London; he had no plans to visit his nephew in Rome, yet he appeared to be acting in
loco parentis
.

‘Lil dear,’ he wrote:

Thank you for sending me Lady R’s letter, which I now return.

I will, as you suggest, have a go at Jack about smoking, golf, and Italian. As to smoking, you know I am entirely converted and believe it is the root of most evils, if not, perhaps, quite all. Of the use of knowing Italian there can be no question. With regard to golf, it won’t be so easy to urge it wholeheartedly. To me it seems the rottenest of all exercise games which young people should play.

I am not much impressed with Lady R’s letter, with the exception of the smoking, about which she is right. The rest is unconvincing. Self-consciousness is
not
one of John’s failings. I sometimes think his character must be a difficult one to read – it is so seldom one hears it rightly described.

Violet, above anyone else, ought to have understood her son’s character. Nonetheless, Charlie proceeded to describe it to her:

John’s tastes are formed and no persuading or fault-finding will ever alter them. 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, than to play golf and 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. Not one in a hundred is so fortunate as to possess them. It is a pity, as he is young, that he does not better combine and enjoy
all
the good things – the society and the games and company – but 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 and which certainly
are
better for other people.

I believe I can in a way visualize the life he is leading now. He finds himself in a ‘profession’ which, for the small fry, means little else but society, parties and things of that nature, for none of which he cares a two-penny damn. A good deal of the day is occupied in it, and he probably does the work conscientiously. When he is free he occupies the rest of the day with his books and old things. He hates and detests the life at the Embassy. These Messina expeditions are his only enjoyment and makes it all the worse when he returns from them.