The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (20 page)

The letter, as Violet acknowledged, was desperately harrowing – not least in its exposition of a grief so overwhelming, so excluding, that it had stifled her love for her other children.

‘
He was the best, the kindest, the tallest, the most beautiful amongst them all … If all the others were swept away it would mean nothing more of pain to me.
’

Yet in one short sentence, Violet had glossed over the event that was the source of all her pain. ‘
It was just only a tiny acrobatic trick that twisted something inside.
’ She had even said, ‘I do not blame anyone.’

But all the circumstantial evidence points to the fact that Violet
had
blamed John, and that he himself had felt to blame for the accident – or, at the very least, had wanted to conceal the fact that his mother had held him to blame. She had sent him away after Haddon had died: he had spent a good part of his life removing all trace of what had happened from the Muniment Rooms at Belvoir. And if the cause of Haddon’s death was ‘only a tiny acrobatic trick’, why had the family gone to such lengths to cover it up at the time?

So much of what Violet had to tell Mary was in flat contradiction to the official version of events.

‘
He was not ill
’ … ‘
So well
’ … ‘
Never ill.
’

Yet the newspapers were told that he was ill. Then there was the notice beside his tomb which stated that he had died of tuberculosis. By Violet’s own admission, this was entirely untrue.

My first thought after seeing her letter was that it was in fact John who had injured his brother. Violet was claiming that Haddon’s injury was self-inflicted. But could he really have ‘twisted something inside’ simply by performing some sort of ‘acrobatic trick’, or was his internal injury caused by an external blow? Had John hit his brother in the stomach or caused him to fall awkwardly against some kind of obstacle?

I showed Violet’s letter to a gastroenterologist. He immediately dismissed the theory. Based on the medical procedures she described, Haddon had died from a twisted gut. More than likely, it was a condition that he had been born with. At any stage in his life, even ‘walking down a garden path’, his gut could have twisted of its own accord. He had not hit, or been hit by something or someone. It
was
the ‘acrobatic trick’ that had killed him.

A handstand, a cartwheel, a somersault off something – it was
awful to think that something so innocent had had such tragic consequences. Haddon’s death haunted both John and Violet for the rest of their lives, and yet with the benefit of modern medical knowledge, it is clear that it was an accident waiting to happen.

But I still hadn’t discovered why the blame fell on John. In one final effort to shed further light on the episode, I spoke to David, the present Duke. I told him about the discrepancy between the information contained in Violet’s letter to Lady Wemyss and the notice in the chapel beside Haddon’s tomb.

John was David’s grandfather. Yet it was the first time he’d heard that Haddon had died as a result of an accident.

‘It must have been a cover-up,’ was his immediate reaction.

But a cover-up of what, or why, it is impossible to know. I could only think that in some way, whatever the trick Haddon was performing, John had egged his brother on. After all, almost by definition, an acrobatic trick is something performed for someone. Less than a year separated the two boys; they played together constantly. The most likely person
was
John.

This was as far as it was possible to go in reconstructing the story behind the first gap in the records at Belvoir; midway through researching it, I received a lead to the events that lay behind the second.

I was at Cadlands on the Solent looking at the Drummond family archive, when I got a call from George Davis, a computer analyst with an interest in cryptology. He had managed to decipher John’s letters from Rome.

Potentially, it was an important breakthrough. Just nine letters remained at Belvoir for the period between 6 June and 28 October 1909. John had used the cipher in the months leading up to the gap.

There were thirty-four coded letters and telegrams in total. The first, a letter to Charlie, sent from the British Embassy in Rome, was dated 11 February 1909; the last, a telegram that John had wired from Rome Terme, the main railway station in the centre of the city, was dated 5 June. The void in the correspondence at Belvoir began the
day after
. The gap in 1894 had concealed a series of truly awful events; the natural suggestion was that something startling had also occurred in the summer of 1909.

The question, of course, was what.

Until now, I had drawn a blank. Looking at the letters that John was working on when he died, I had found nothing to shed light on what he had wanted to conceal – or why. But something had clearly been going on in the run-up to the gap: something of such importance that John had felt compelled to communicate it in a secret code.

George was sending the decrypted material through by email. In 1909, post boys had delivered the original coded messages from door to door, but a century later, I needed a wi-fi signal to read them, and Cadlands, which was in the New Forest, was an internet blackspot.

I left the house and drove off in search of a signal. As I turned out of the long drive that led up to it, the light in the forest was magical. High above, the leaves of the oaks formed a canopy. It was early evening and the sun was at a low angle, casting checkerboards of light
through the shadow. I thought about my conversation with George. John had apparently created a replica of the King Charles I’s cipher. Evidently, it had been more than just a game to him: mimicking the patterns of numbers the King had used, he had gone to considerable lengths to devise a numerical vocabulary. It was a substitution cipher: the numbers represented words, syllables and letters: using it would have been both laborious and complicated.

By a strange quirk of coincidence, Carisbrooke Castle, where Charles I had been imprisoned before his execution, was nearby. It was at Newport on the Isle of Wight. Weeks before the King faced the scaffold, hundreds of encrypted letters were smuggled in and out of his bedchamber. The long sequences of numbers concealed details of the last, desperate plots to spring him from the castle and restore him to the throne. Two hundred and fifty years later, John had created a similar cipher to encrypt his secrets from Rome.

It was such a bizarre thing for John to have done. Why replicate Charles I’s cipher? Given his knowledge of cryptology, he could have invented one of his own. Had the 22-year-old felt some sort of affinity with the Stuart King? Had something about the King’s life or character drawn John to him?

At this stage in his life, I realized I understood very little about John. His letters sketch only the faintest picture of him. His personality remained hidden, as if he were guarding it. From Messina in Italy, he wrote graphically of the devastation caused by the earthquake, and the scenes that he had witnessed at the British relief camp. But this was reportage. After the pain his parents had inflicted on him as a child, it was hard to determine what sort of young man he had become. I certainly had no inkling of what he was hiding in the pages of encryption.

I knew where he had been in the months before he went out to Italy. Having left Cambridge in the summer of 1908, he was living at 97 Cadogan Gardens – Charlie’s house in Chelsea. Their life together appears to have revolved around their shared interests: antiques, books, rare manuscripts and John’s bulldogs – Ariel and Togo. Though Charlie was thirty years older, they seemed inseparable.
Most weekends, they went shooting or fishing together. Then there were expeditions to excavate archaeological sites on the family’s numerous estates. In September 1908, they spent three weeks at Croxton Abbey, the medieval priory close to Belvoir Castle, where John found the monks’ tombs.

When he wasn’t with Charlie, John saw his friends. In London, he belonged to a fashionable, bohemian set; besides other wealthy aristocrats, it included the leading lights of the day – painters, writers, actresses and musicians. Their evenings were spent at the theatre, or at dinner parties hosted at houses in Mayfair and Belgravia. After dinner, they raced their cars along the Mall, or joined in the midnight treasure hunts that were all the rage.

This was the surface of John’s life – but I wanted a sense of the person beneath it. There was a telling photograph of him in the family album the Duchess had shown me. It is late in the summer of 1909 and John is standing with a group of friends. He is leaning against a wall, looking down, his arms folded. There is a cigarette in his mouth, which is unlit. He has dark, glossy hair; his handsome face is caught in profile. There is an aura of rebelliousness about him; his striking looks single him out: he appears more worldly, more sophisticated than the conventional, awkward-looking young men he stands beside.

There are other pictures of him taken that summer: posing with his sisters on the battlements at Belvoir; at Croxton Abbey, with his sleeves rolled up, digging an excavation trench; on the banks of the River Wye in Derbyshire, fishing for trout; The impression they leave is of an active, engaging young man. But there is also a hint of distance. John, I noticed, never looks at the camera. His gaze is always averted.

Thirty years later, as he was dying in the Muniment Rooms, he returned to the events of that summer. Something had happened that he was determined no one should remember.

I parked by the thin strip of beach. I’d finally found a wi-fi signal in a small village overlooking the Solent. Directly opposite, about two miles distant, I could see Cowes. It was a still summer’s evening and
the sea shimmered. There were yachts and motor cruisers out, their wakes dazzling white against the blue. Three hundred and fifty years ago, in the depths of winter, Charles I’s devoted servants had risked their lives crossing this very stretch of water to deliver the encrypted letters from his exiled courtiers. It was incredible to think that I was about to see the text that John had hidden in his replica of the King’s code.

The signal was weak; it took a while for the document to download. Watching the blue indicator flickering slowly forwards, I wondered why John had left the encrypted letters in the Muniment Rooms. Why hadn’t he destroyed them? Was it because he thought his version of Charles I’s cipher was unbreakable?

There were 148 pages to go through. John and Charlie had used the cipher throughout their letters; frequently, they had encrypted a single word within a sentence. For this reason, their entire correspondence was included in the document.

The letters were in date order. I scrolled down to 11 February, when John had first used the cipher. It was his second week at the embassy and a letter had come from Charlie in that evening’s post. Before joining the ambassador and his wife for dinner, he had replied immediately:

‘My dear Old Boy,’ he began:

During the course of this letter I am going to put one or two things in cipher but do not trouble to make it out in a hurry as it will be of no importance …

It looked as if this was a practice run. I stopped reading and scrolled back up to Charlie’s letter to see if he had mentioned anything that would have prompted John to use the cipher. I couldn’t see anything of consequence. Having spent the weekend at Belvoir, Charlie was missing his nephew; the letter was mostly devoted to news of John’s dogs, Ariel and Togo:

Belvoir Castle

Jacko – I am here till Sunday, with little Ariel who is extremely well.

I am now writing at your centre table and the little boy is lying spatchcock by the fire, thinking of you. It is almost painful to see the way he dashes into this room and then his deep disappointment not to find you here, and he is by no means the only one who misses you really badly here. Togo is also well, as long as he doesn’t swallow bones. He was very sick the other night and produced a chicken’s pelvis.

Charlie relayed other news from the castle. ‘We had a ball for the servants last night. I danced the opening dance with Mrs Walker
*
and a valse (!!) with Miss Tritton,’
^†
he reported. Then, after telling John about the proposed reorganization of the library at Belvoir, he asked whether he could use the diplomatic bag to send out the parcels of cigarettes he wanted.

I returned to John’s reply:

I find out now that the Foreign Office will not send out anything at all in the bag, except in the form of a letter, so that is no good for cigarettes. So if you could send out some more as soon as you can, I should be very glad.

I wonder if you know of any references to cipher letters and keys in the Vatican Library? If so, I might go and do some work there some time. I think I shall go there on the chance and have a look about.

He continued by asking Charlie to do one or two chores for him:

When you have a chance I should be awfully grateful to you if you would telephone to Mr Rye
^‡
and get as much information as you can out of him about the roof and ask him when he is going to send me the plan and the vellum and powder. I am also writing soon to Cousins
^§
to ask him again to look out for a wife for Ariel and will tell him if he finds a good dog to get your approval first. You don’t mind this, do you?

Then came the cipher:

51349 44695 35963 59823

83358 27472 79901 12211

54370 54151 94731 77336

695 514 543 831

390 921 946 236

837 dogs it isn’t the being 390 910 489

that 501 650 but it is the 200 771 231

441 358 385 140 695 444 122 not only to body but to mind never 433 130 120 543 one has got a moment to one’s self – even while I am

93245 54372 84006 44601 24200

24329 91034 53592 61271

59445 69226 54364 behind

83305 81273 50139 53121