The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (16 page)

The remainder of the article was devoted to an account of Haddon’s funeral. I imagined that this bleak event would have taken place in private; that his devastated parents would have buried him quietly. But the 9-year-old boy was accorded the equivalent of a state funeral: thousands of the family’s tenants and employees attended it.

Few who gathered on the battlements at Belvoir Castle that morning in October 1894 can have forgotten it. They were meant to remember it. Full of pomp and ceremony, it was a deliberate display of status and authority by a family who had ruled over the neighbourhood for eight hundred years.

The newspapers listed the family members who were staying at the castle. John was among them. But it was the detail that followed which was truly horrifying: John had left the castle with his uncle a few hours after the funeral. I checked the visitors’ book. It was three years before John returned to Belvoir. It looked as if Violet had sent him to live with Charlie immediately after Haddon’s funeral.

Less than a year had separated the two brothers – John had lost his friend and playmate; as the younger son, he had lived in his brother’s shadow, then, suddenly, it was he who was destined to become Duke. These were traumatic things in themselves. But then to be abandoned by his mother on this day of all days can only have been one of the most painful moments in his life.

It is in picturing what he had seen before he left the castle that her cruelty becomes incomprehensible.

The spectacle of mass grief began the day before the funeral, when Haddon’s body, enclosed in a coffin of unpolished oak, with plain silver mountings, was brought to Belvoir by train.

Haddon had died at his parents’ house at Hatley Cockayne, a tiny village near Sandy in Bedfordshire. It was forty miles from there to the castle. Early that morning, Henry and Violet left the house in a shuttered carriage, taking John with them. They were travelling ahead of the coffin, leaving the Duke of Rutland’s assistant to oversee the arrangements for the transportation of their son’s body.

The coffin left Sandy – a tiny station on a branch line of the Great Northern Railway – on the 12.55 train to Peterborough. There, it was transferred to the London–York Express. Special dispensation had been obtained for the express to make an unscheduled stop at Grantham, where another train waited to convey the coffin the last eight miles or so to Belvoir.

In the village below the castle, a crowd of thousands had gathered outside the station. They had come from all points on the Belvoir estate, crossing the recently harvested fields in large walking parties that had set out from the Duke’s villages soon after dawn.

The train bearing Haddon’s body pulled into the station shortly after two o’clock. Outside, on the forecourt, the coffin was loaded on to a dray, drawn by three grey shire horses, and covered with a pall of green velvet edged with a gold band. As the dray turned into the village high street, the lone figure of Mr Marvel, the Duke’s butler, walked ahead of it. The road to Belvoir – which was straight and two miles long – ran across flat, open country. The villagers followed behind the coffin as it progressed slowly towards the castle. On reaching the gates to the lodge, they dispersed. The long drive up to the castle was private; the ‘sad carriage’, as one paper described it, progressed the last mile alone.

Up on the terrace, John was the only small boy among the group of family mourners. They were assembled beneath the portico. The drive, which dropped steeply from the battlements, lay directly in their line of sight; on one side, it was flanked by tall yew hedges; on the other by an avenue of maple trees. As the three shire horses, led by Mr Marvel, appeared over the brow below, and the coffin made its slow, final approach up to the castle, the bell in the tower began to toll.

John walked behind the dray as the Duke’s stud groom led the horses through the great oak doors to the portico: in the confined space, he watched as the small coffin was lifted off the carriage and the green velvet pall that concealed it was removed. It was replaced with a white pall, ‘a symbol,’ so the
Grantham Journal
reported, ‘of innocence and youth’. Then he followed behind his parents and grandparents as the coffin was carried through the Guard Room, and along the passages, to the family’s private chapel, where it was placed in front of the altar.

The Duke’s indoor servants – 110 of them – joined the procession to the chapel. Seated in the family pew beside his brother’s coffin, John listened as his grandmother, Janetta, the Duchess, addressed the household: ‘It will, I am sure, be of the greatest consolation to the bereaved parents, my beloved husband, and to my children, to think that on this occasion, when our darling child has been released from pain and suffering to go, as we firmly believe, to a better world, we should greet him on his arrival here with sounds of prayer and praise. I thank you most gratefully for all your great kindness.’

The next morning, well before noon – the appointed time for the funeral – thousands of spectators made their way up the castle’s steep drive to the gun-carriage terrace.

Amid the throng of people, it took the cortège several hours to form up. Strict rules of protocol determined the order in which the mourners progressed. First to follow were the immediate members of the family, led by the Duke, and his son, Henry, Marquis of Granby. Precedence dictated that, because the Marquis was the father of the deceased, it was his personal servants, rather than the Duke’s, who followed next. Then came the household servants, dressed in mourning suits that had been specially bought for the occasion. They were led by the heads of the departments: the house steward, the housekeeper,
the head forester, the head gardener, the stud groom, the head keeper, the coachman, the Duke’s factor and Monsieur Thevenot, the
chef de cuisine
; behind them, in long, flowing black robes, came the clergymen from the forty-three churches on the Belvoir estate, followed by the Duke’s outdoor servants, and the huntsmen and whips of the Belvoir hounds, wearing scarlet hunting coats. Bringing up the rear came the huge numbers of the Duke’s tenants and employees.

The one person who was not in the cortège was John. He was inside the castle. Had a servant kept him away from the window as the cortège prepared to move off to the mausoleum? Or had he watched the distressing scene on the terrace below? The newspaper reports of the funeral did not include this detail, but, at twelve sharp, his brother’s coffin, hoisted on the shoulders of six of the Duke’s wagoners, was carried from the Guard Room and lowered on to the funeral carriage. Some moments earlier, his mother had left for the mausoleum ahead of the cortège. Policemen, mounted on black horses with mourning ribbons plaited through their manes and tails, had held back the crowds to allow her carriage through. The curtains in the windows were tightly drawn.

The family mausoleum stood on a hill opposite the castle. It was a Romanesque folly, built in the 1820s by the 5th Duke to commemorate his wife. A contingent of local militia, in full dress uniform and wearing brass helmets, formed a guard of honour along the route. It was half a mile from the castle to the mausoleum; such was the crush that the tail end of the procession was still on the battlements when the burial service began. Violet had chosen ‘There is a Green Hill Far Away’, a favourite of Haddon’s, as the first hymn. Twelve choirboys from the Duke’s churches – all of the same age as the dead boy – had been specially invited to sing.

As the clear, haunting notes of the hymn broke the stillness and carried along the line of mourners, up at the castle, John would have heard the thousands of voices that had joined in the singing.

A little after half past three, when the crowds had gone, the carriage taking John and his uncle to the railway station clattered down the deserted avenue below the battlements.

The image of the solitary carriage on the empty road – and the small boy huddled inside it – was heartrending. Along that very same route, only a few hours earlier, John had seen the thousands that had gathered to honour the memory of his brother. Yet he was being cast out. Had he been given a reason? Had his mother gently explained to him why he was leaving?

Violet had not sent her three daughters – Marjorie, Letty and Diana – away. They were aged ten, six and two. Her cruelty in banishing her only son was inexplicable.

So what drove Violet to send him away? This was a question that, unsurprisingly, the newspapers did not answer.

I put the scrapbook back in its place on the shelf and left the Muniment Rooms to look for a tour guide to show me the way to the chapel. I wanted to see the tomb that Violet had carved in memory of Haddon.

We turned a corner and entered a long passage, crossed a large hall and stopped in front of a sturdy oak door. The guide unlocked it and led me into a small, windowless hallway. We were in the depths of the old servants’ quarters. It was a part of the castle I had not been to before. A warren of pantries and sculleries ran off the passage to our left; to our right, a staircase descended into darkness.

I stopped and peered down it. The bare brick steps were broken and uneven. ‘Where does that lead to?’ I asked the guide.

‘Down to the Doom,’ she replied. ‘It’s where they kept the coal for heating the castle. They used to bring it here by barge from the Dukes’ collieries in Derbyshire.’

‘Why is it called the Doom?’

‘I don’t know,’ she answered. ‘It’s always been called that. There are forty or fifty rooms down there. It runs the whole length of the castle.’

I followed her into a long corridor. Our footsteps echoed on the stone flags as we passed a series of doors. They were firmly closed. These were the rooms where the servants had lived and worked in Haddon’s day.
The family had employed 110 servants then
. On the day of his funeral, it was along this corridor that, dressed in mourning livery, they formed up in order of rank before joining the crowds of mourners outside.

Ahead, the guide turned right into a narrow, crescent-shaped passageway; a few yards along it was a door that led into a turret. As we climbed the spiral staircase, she told me the story behind Haddon’s tomb. Violet had modelled the effigy of her son from a death mask. Sir Alfred Gilbert had cast the mask the morning after the boy died. Gilbert – who was famous for his statue of Eros in Piccadilly – was a friend of the Duchess’s; under his tuition, she began work on the effigy a few days later. It had taken her forty-two years to finish
it. Throughout that time, she had continued to work on it, keeping the unfinished tomb in the basement of the family’s house in St James’s.

At the top of the stairs, we arrived in a circular hallway. ‘I’ll leave you here. The chapel is through there,’ the guide said, pointing at the door ahead.

Stepping into the chapel, I was taken aback by the scale of it. The vaulted ceiling rose to the full height of the castle; along one side of it, the windows were set high in the rafters, the light entering tempered by the lattice of circular muntins that separated the panes of glass. Huge tapestries, depicting biblical scenes, hung beneath the windows. The plain white walls, and the black marble floor, accentuated their rich colours.

I went through the arch that led into the inner chapel and walked up the aisle, past the rows of empty chairs. The light cast from the high windows was subdued and mysterious, falling equally on everything. A heavy stillness pervaded.

I found Haddon’s tomb at the far end of the chapel. It stood in a corner to the left of the altar. Beside it, mounted in a wooden display case, there was a printed notice:

Here lies an effigy of the eldest son of the 8th Duke of Rutland, Lord Haddon, who died at the age of nine of tuberculosis. His mother, Violet, was consumed with grief at the death of her eldest son and was responsible for the moulding and sculpting of this effigy as a final token of her love.

The effigy, which was life-size and cast of plaster, was breathtaking in its simplicity and beauty. The little boy lay on top of the tomb, his head inclined to one side, sleeping. He was wearing a loose nightshirt and had a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. The intensity of emotion in the detail was remarkable: the curls of hair falling across his face, the tiny dimple in his chin, the contours of his neck where his shirt lay open. The thought that Violet had moulded these things with her own hands – and that she had spent more than forty years working on them – filled me with a sharp sadness.

I bent down to read the inscription that she had carved at the foot of the plinth:

HOPE OF MY EYES
SOMETHING IS BROKEN THAT WE
CANNOT MEND

WITH GRIEF, REMEMBRANCE,
PRIDE AND LOVE, I DECORATE
HIS MEMORY

DEAR DEAR LITTLE BOY
YOU GAVE US ALL PERPETUAL
BENEDICTION

ENTIRELY DESIGNED AND MODELLED
BY HIS MOTHER

It was the dissonance between the outpouring of grief over the loss of one son and the apparent cruelty with which she had treated the other which was so extraordinary. Yet Violet undoubtedly loved John: her letters to Charlie revealed her distress at their later estrangement. So why hadn’t she wanted to cherish him after losing her elder son?

There was something else I found puzzling. Violet had accused Charlie of treating John with ‘
spoiling kindness
’ after Haddon died. It was such a strange phrase for her to have used. Following his brother’s death, and her abandonment of him, John had been in need of every bit of kindness. If Violet, paralysed as she was by grief, had been unable to give him the love and attention that he had needed, why had she begrudged Charlie his kindness?

I turned to walk back along the aisle; I spotted the line of stone coffins that stood, some yards further down, against the wall of the chapel. The effigies of nameless medieval monks lay on top of them, their hands clasped in prayer. Reading the inscriptions, I could see that John had excavated the coffins from the site of Croxton Abbey,
a thirteenth-century monastery a few miles from the castle. He had exhumed other tombs from sites on the Belvoir estate: according to his servants, he had disinterred eight of his ancestors in the crypt at Bottesford Church.