The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (27 page)

Henry had used the threat to sell the Hall to bully John into signing the resettlement agreement. While there is no evidence to prove the point, it is more than probable that this was John’s meaning when he told Charlie that his father ‘was going to try and frighten him’.

So central was Haddon to the argument, and such was the depth of feeling vested in it, that the protagonists had not needed to mention it; it is only in the resolution of the row that its importance becomes apparent.

On 12 June, five months after the row began, John told his father that he would sign the agreement. He did so only because he had extracted a promise that Haddon would be made over to him. Such was the mistrust between them, he asked his father to confirm his promise in writing. Three days later, the Duke wrote back to him: ‘The question of Haddon has been safeguarded in the settlement.’ Only then did John sign the agreement.

They had fought each other to a standstill. While John was forced
to concede his legal interest in the family heirlooms, so anxious was the Duke to raise the capital he needed to pay off his debts, he had had to surrender the one thing he had never wanted his son to have. It had nothing to do with the Hall’s material value. It was simply because it bore the name of his dead son.

A letter – from John to his mother – written seventeen years later, offers a chilling coda. In August 1926, when the restoration works at Haddon were finally completed, John moved into the Hall. As he wrote to Violet, it was the fulfilment of a lifetime’s ambition; yet she defaced his letter.

The cruelty of her gesture becomes apparent only after reading it:

Haddon Hall

Bakewell

Derbyshire

28 August 1926

Mother darling

I hasten to write to you on notepaper with an address on it, which I have been hoping to use for now just on 20 years. Although the house is not ready yet for occupation, I feel justified in making you the recipient of the first letter written from Haddon by a member of the family since they left for good in 1703. I am writing from my sitting room which is the uppermost room in the Nether Tower – the whole tower being finished and ready for occupation. My dreams, as far as my sitting room is concerned, are fulfilled. It is a perfect room with the sun pouring in.

There is only one cloud over this moment and that is that old Charlie
*
is not here with me – then indeed my spirits would be overwhelming. But perhaps he may know that I am writing at his own writing table.

Goodbye for the moment.

Yours, John

It was the address that Violet had defaced:

The stabs of her pen spoke volumes: John was unworthy of the house that bore his brother’s name. The implication of her gesture was that she wished it was Haddon who was living there, not him.

John’s encrypted letters had exposed the tensions inside this troubled family. Evidently, the scar left by Haddon’s death had not healed: the loss of the 9-year-old boy had continued to haunt their relationships.

The central mystery, however, remained.

What had happened to John in the summer of 1909?

I had no answer. The row over the resettlement agreement was resolved in June, before the gap in the records at Belvoir begins. I had looked at all the letters for 1909 in the bundles John was working on when he died. There were no pointers. I could only move forward – to the third and last gap in the Muniment Rooms: the missing months in 1915.

7 July–5 December 1915
. The correspondence from 152 days was missing from the Muniment Rooms. From what I knew of John, he had hidden things that were painful to him: I could only think that the excision related to some traumatic event that had occurred on the Western Front.

It was where he had been in the summer of 1915. Aged twenty-eight at the time, he was aide-de-camp to General Edward Stuart Wortley, the commanding officer of the 46th North Midland Division. The division had arrived at the Front on 26 February 1915. John had been there for just over four months.

I went back to the notes that I had made when I first discovered the missing letters.

The last sighting I had of him was on 5 July. That afternoon, at around 4 p.m., he drove his general to Goldfish Château, the headquarters of III Army Corps at Vlamertinge. British troops had named the château, situated a few miles to the west of the canal sector at Ypres, after the fishponds in its gardens. There, according to the entry in John’s war diary, they had tea with Major-General Sir William Pulteney, the corps commander.

It is at this point that John vanishes from the record. From 6 July, the pages of his diary are blank.

The date coincides precisely with the start of the gap in the letters at Belvoir. Not a single document remains in the blue files that crowd the shelves of the Muniment Rooms to explain what occurred between then and 5 December 1915. John had made certain of this. My only hope was that something – or some clue – lay in the pile of letters that I had extracted from the trunk of correspondence he had been working on when he died.

First, I counted the envelopes; there were sixty-three. Then, working from the postmarks, I made a quick note of the dates the letters had been sent. Fifty-seven were dated before 6 July, and two after 5 December. Four were impossible to date: the ‘killers’ – the rippled lines that prevented the stamp from being re-used – were sharp. So was the year. The rest of the information – the date, the time, and the month they had been delivered – was blurred.

I began with these. Potentially, as John hurried to cull the last of his mother’s papers, these were letters that he missed.

The first, written from Belvoir, was from Violet to her daughter, Marjorie, Marchioness of Anglesey. At the top of the dove-grey notepaper, a miniature of the castle, the size of a large coin, was embossed in white against a black background. Beneath it, there was a date – 15 June 1915.

The date was interesting. It was around the time that I had noticed a change in John – from engaged and engaging to terse and secretive. In his war diary, in April and May, he had written long, vivid accounts of the fighting at Ypres. He had expressed his thoughts and feelings on the progress of the war. But in these last weeks in June, just days before he mysteriously vanishes, he records very little: the short, flat entries amount to no more than one or two sentences.

Only once had he expressed any emotion. This was on 19 June. That morning, he left London to return to the Front after five days’ leave. When his ship docked at Boulogne, he learned that his division was about to be drafted to Sanctuary Wood in the Ypres Salient. There, for the first time – and in one of the most dangerous sectors on the front line – it was to take part in an attack. ‘Damn,’ he wrote later that evening.

After this brief eruption, his diary offers no further insight into his
state of mind. Day after day, he had written just two words to mark the passage of war: ‘usual day’.

His brevity was troubling. As I had established, these were far from ‘usual days’. For the first time, the North Midlands were in the front-line trenches; they were coming under attack. Although John was nine miles away at division headquarters, he was aide-de-camp to the commanding officer: the dispatches from the Front had passed across his desk. Soldiers from his own battalion – men who came from the villages on his father’s estate, many of whom he had known since he was a child – were being killed and wounded. Yet, in his diary, he fails to make a single reference to the fighting, or to the casualties incurred by his regiment.

So what had changed between May and June? Something must have happened to account for his detachment. The terse entries suggest that he was preoccupied by something else – something he was not prepared to confide to his diary.

Was there a link between the change in his mood and his mysterious disappearance after 6 July? Violet’s letter to her daughter, written at such a crucial time, might point to what had occurred.

‘Darling – such a day as we’ve had – a great success – telegrams all day,’ her letter began:

Buckets of rose leaves, the nursery all roses. Caroline like a little drunk Bacchus with a wreath of red roses over one ear and as naughty as you please. All the rose effect done by me this morning. Also chairs and cushions and rugs in your top garden. Caroline got a new ball and a new perambulator. Great gossiping amongst the grown-ups and playing with the children, and so on, until tea – with a wonderful chocolate and sugar birthday cake with rose red candles.

It was not what I was hoping for. Violet, who was obviously an indulgent grandmother, was writing of a tea party that she and the Duke had hosted to celebrate their 2-year-old granddaughter’s birthday.

I read on, hoping to find a reference to John. ‘Lovely it was,’ Violet continued, ‘and Caroline getting naughtier and naughtier. Then George Paynter produced a walking stick that shoots cartridges like a gun and
Father shot off at a swallow with it and it nearly knocked his front tooth
out
! This is terrible! I’m
so
sorry about it. Now the children are in bed, but Caroline won’t sleep a wink, I expect. The whole day was a great success and very pretty to look at. Father’s shooting out his own tooth the only sad moment. I feel
worn
out. My love, darling. VR.’

The absence of any mention of the war appeared to be a family trait. A few hundred miles away, on the other side of the English Channel, the British Army was sustaining heavy losses in its attempt to hold the trenches east of Festubert. Yet here was the Duke firing a makeshift gun at a swallow for fun. This, and the rose-festooned party for the 2-year-old baby, seemed to belong to another age.

I turned over the page. Violet had at least mentioned John. On the back of her letter, she had added a postscript:

John home on leave, I hear. I
am
glad. I wish he’d come here for a day. Will you tell him from me I shall leave here Friday, so if he doesn’t come to see me before that he must make a point of seeing me in London.

The imperiousness of her tone was bemusing. John had left for the Front in February; this was his first visit home. Violet appeared anxious to see him, yet evidently they were not in communication. She was asking her daughter to act as messenger. Her letter hadn’t pointed to anything that might have caused John to turn in on himself. But then judging from her request to Marjorie, she was not in a position to know. The suggestion was that her relationship with her son remained as problematic as ever.

I moved on to the second of the four letters. As I unfolded it, the paper, brittle after almost a century, emitted a sharp crack.

Immediately, the date caught my attention.
Tuesday 19 October.
The gap in the records extended from 6 July to 5 December: this was the first letter I had come across inside the missing period.

The date had a further significance. Six days earlier, on 13 October, the North Midlands had suffered severe losses at the Battle of Loos. In the space of just a few hours, 3,700 men had been killed or wounded as they fought to recapture the Hohenzollern Redoubt – a small piece of high ground made up of coal-mining waste.
John’s
battalion, the 4th Leicesters, had gone into the battle a thousand-strong; the morning after, just 188 men had answered the roll call.

The letter, written from Belvoir Castle, was from the Duke to Violet:

Dear,

My blasted tooth has gone wrong these last two days, and if it goes on I must come to London Tuesday for 1 night to have it looked at. So don’t be surprised at my movements.

The 4th and 5th Leicesters have had a bad knocking – very heavy casualty lists, I am told. 110 men and 10 (!) officers go from the 3/4th Leicesters to the 4th Battalion from Belton at once.

Your affectionate husband

Evidently news of the battalions’ severe losses at the Hohenzollern Redoubt had only just reached the Duke. Yet his letter seemed remarkably casual. In breaking the news to his wife, the absence of any heartfelt reference to the fact that their son had survived unscathed was surprising.

That same day, the Duke had written to John. This was the third of the four letters. On 19 October, John, it appeared, was back from the Front – or due back at any moment. It was the first indication I’d had of his whereabouts since he had vanished from Goldfish Château on 5 July:

19 October 1915

Dear Boy,

Re: Longshaw on Saturday next. I can’t come as I have arranged for some time past to be in London that night. Returning here the following day.

But as you know, of course, shoot there if you can arrange it. Mr Kerr will do this for you.

You had better arrange for the hire of a car to bring you back here after shooting, as the cars here will be pretty busy on Saturday, and could not get over to Longshaw.

I’ve just had your General’s divisional order thanking the Division for their gallant conduct in a recent engagement couched in very highly appreciative language. I hear the Leicester losses are very heavy.

Your affectionate father

Rutland