The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery

by Bailey, Catherine

  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.

  The contrast between this man’s morbid fascination with death and the peaceful, sleeping boy I had just seen was disturbing. I thought of the things I had discovered in John’s rooms in the East Tower: the bowls of human bones, the boxes of gargoyles, the bits and pieces of old pottery and the tens of thousands of glass negatives, all meticulously catalogued and labelled. Then I remembered the theory that a compulsive interest in collecting often pointed to a traumatic event in childhood.

  Without the letters that John had removed, it was impossible to determine the exact course of events in the autumn of 1894. But what had happened to him in the years after his brother had died? The catalogue in the Muniment Rooms had listed a small collection of letters that John had written between 1895 and 1901. These, possibly, would offer an insight into what had been going on in the mind of this small boy.

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  The file contained a photograph as well as letters; intriguingly, some of the material dated from the years before Haddon died.

  I looked at the photograph first. It was of the two brothers – John and Haddon – aged three and four. The composition of the picture, which had been taken in an empty panelled hall, was haunting; Haddon stood, leaning against a long footstool, in the centre of the large room; to his right, at a distance of some yards, John was seated, curled up, in an elaborately carved chair. In the background, the door to the room stood at an odd angle, as if it had come away from its hinges. This, and the emptiness of the scene, seemed to foreshadow the tragedy to come; and yet, of course, the two boys had been oblivious to it.

  The photograph was rendered the more poignant by the letters that followed. They were from Haddon and John. Full of love, and an innocent delight in small things, they testified to the happy times the family had shared before Haddon’s death.

  There were two letters from Haddon; one was a letter that he had written to his mother on her birthday, when he was six:

  Belvoir Castle

  Dearest mother – very many happy returns on your birthday.

  I wish you had been here yesterday then I would have given you loving kisses!

  This morning when I got up I found it had been snowing in the night. Have you got snow in London. Do you know dear mother I am writing this letter all by myself, no one is holding my hand. I am copying it from another paper. I hope you will like it.

  Your own dear little son Haddon.

  The other letter – also written when he was six – was to Father Christmas:

  Dear Father Christmas

  I will try to be a better boy and not so naughty at my lessons and not give so much trouble to those who take pains to teach me. I am afraid I have been too naughty to ask for anything.

  But dear Father Christmas I should be so pleased if you would be kind enough to give me a box of pencils.

  Please help the poor and give clothing to all the poor little children. Haddon.

  The two letters from John dated from the summer of 1894. He and his brother – and their elder sister, Marjorie – had been staying at Belvoir with their grandparents:

  Dear Papa

  Every day we fish in the pond and have caught lots of fishes; carps, tench, perch.

  On the heap of sticks in the paddock we have made a lovely hut. We get up to it by ladders and have the goats, Quiz and Rosey, with us.

  I have found a beautiful robin’s nest in the hay-stack near Marjorie’s hut. I took an egg out of it.

  Please give my love to all.

  Your affectionate boy

  Little John

  Some days later, John had written to his father again:

  Dear Papa

  I have found a spotted flycatcher nest with four eggs. We have lots of butterflies, some are very pretty. Mamma arrived yesterday and took us all to the station to give us a drive.

  I hope you are enjoying yourself with Uncle Bobby. We are going to London on Monday and I hope you will soon be there. Please give him my best love.

  With lots of kisses to you

  Your affectionate boy

  Little John

  Just six months later, Haddon’s death had evidently altered his relationship with his father. In his letters to him, he was no longer ‘Little John’; instead, he signed himself Roos – which stood for Lord Roos, his courtesy title.

  John had been writing to his father from Evelyn’s, a small boarding school of around a hundred pupils in Uxbridge, where he was sent in the spring of 1895. He appeared to be frightened of his father: his letters – which also suggest that he was depressed – were full of apologies for his poor performance at the school: ‘Dear Father, I hope you won’t be angry with me if my report is not very good because I am in a new class and I find the work very difficult indeed, but I am working very hard’: then again, a few days later: ‘Dear Father, You must remember I am in a new class and the work is awfully difficult. I am trying very hard. You don’t know how dull it is here, so that I have to think for about five minutes and then find nothing to say. Goodbye. Roos.’

  As John had anticipated, his report was terrible:

  Dearest Father – I am horribly sorry to hear about my report – it is dreadful of me but I don’t know why it was so bad but I will with all my might try and have a good one next time, do please forgive me, I will try very hard. Roos.

  John rarely saw his parents. He spent most of his school holidays with his uncle, whom he clearly adored. In early February 1900, around the time of the Siege of Ladysmith, John was anxious that Charlie, a bachelor in his forties and a former Guards officer, would be recalled to the Boer War: I do hope you won’t have to go to South Africa,’ he told him, ‘and if you do I shall have to come with you.’

  The letters that John wrote to Charlie from school paint a picture of a desperately lonely boy. I had seen others written by boys of his generation – and of a similar age and class – but John’s were different. The usual references were absent; he didn’t refer to the sports he played, or to the boys he made friends with; apart from the insects he kept, he didn’t mention other pets; there were no tales of pranks, or practical jokes. Though his uncle was being kind to him, it clearly wasn’t enough for this unhappy little boy. One constant refrain ran through them:

  I wish you could come down …

  Do try and come and see me I would love it so …

  Do try and come down some time soon …

  Oh, do come down and if you do, mind you bring chocs and pear drops. Do try and bring them, rather than send them. But don’t come down if you think it would bore you …

  Oh please come Wednesday because I shan’t be able to live without you …

  If you can’t come, please write. I do love your letters so much they make me jump all round the room when I see one from you …

  Sometimes, the plea for a visit was all that John had written:

  I won’t write to you any more if you don’t come down some time soon. Yours affectionately, SITM.

  The nickname that John had chosen for himself was sadder still: the initials SITM stood for ‘Stick in the Mind’.

  It was awful to discover that, despite John’s pleas, and despite the fact that Charlie lived just fifteen miles from the school, he never visited him once in his five years at Evelyn’s.

  There were times, too, when John appears to have been completely abandoned. The dual parental authority had caused confusion; at half term, he was often left behind at the school after his parents had failed to write to Matron. ‘I am so sorr
y that I could not come for my Exeat this week,’ he told Charlie one weekend in the summer of 1899, when he was twelve: ‘None of my family wrote to Miss Evans and told her I was to go, so I was not allowed to go without my people’s word. I hope you will be able to read this because I am writing with an etching nib. Dear Old Boy, one of my Emerican Buggs have come out innormous green – one with taills 2 inches long. I hope you will be in London on Saturday because I will come next Saturday.’

  In May 1900, at the age of thirteen, John left Evelyn’s to go to Eton. His arrival there coincided with an invitation his parents received to stay with Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle.

  Both Henry and Violet had close links to the Queen; Henry’s uncle, the 6th Duke, had served as Lord of the Bedchamber to Prince Albert in the 1840s; some years later, Violet’s father, Colonel Charles Lindsay, the second son of the 24th Earl of Crawford, and a great favourite of the Queen’s, had held the post of Groom-in-Waiting.

  Henry and Violet spent four days at the castle. While they were there, they arranged for John to be presented to the Queen.

  Afterwards, his father formally noted the occasion:

  Lord Roos Presentation to the Queen

  On Wednesday, May 16th 1900, my son, Roos, was by command of the Queen presented to Her Majesty.

  He, being then aged 13 years and three quarters, was told to be at Windsor Castle at 11.30 am. He, together with my wife and myself, was shown into Princess Beatrice’s sitting room, where Her Majesty was.

  The Queen asked several questions of him – as to whether he liked Eton (he had only been there a fortnight this being his first half there); how old he was; what his amusements were. He with considerable composure having answered Her Majesty’s questions, was finally permitted to kiss the Queen’s hand and the ‘audience’ was then concluded.

  I do not know how many boys have during their Eton career been presented to the Queen, but that Roos should have been thus honoured by Her Majesty just before her 81st birthday, is a most gratifying fact to me and my wife.

  John supplied his own version of the presentation to Charlie: ‘I had to go up to the Castle at 10.30 and so I got off all the morning work,’ he wrote: ‘I stayed at the Castle till 1 and then Mother and Father went and before they went, we went all over the Castle and I saw the caliph’s Black flag and his bible and a Car and all the Queen’s Jubilee presents. Please excuse writing but in awful hurry. Goodbye.’

  ‘P.T.O.,’ he had added at the bottom of his letter: ‘As none of my family are coming on 4th June you must.’

  Henry and Violet had found the time to stay with the Queen at Windsor Castle, but they hadn’t found time to return to Eton a few weeks later.

  The fourth of June was the biggest day of the year in the Eton calendar. A glittering social occasion, it involved games, races on the river and elaborate picnics. It was an important ritual for boys and their families to share; it was also the chance for Old Etonians to revisit the scenes of their youth and to catch up with their contemporaries. Henry had been at Eton in the 1860s; it was John’s first term at the school, his first 4 June. Yet both he and Violet decided not to go. They were unlikely to have had a more pressing engagement; 4 June was part of the summer season – the day London society decamped to Eton.

  Though his brother had been dead for six years, it seemed they still preferred to have little or nothing to do with John.

  There can have been few boys whose parents were not at Eton that day. For John as a new boy, the stigma attached to the absence of his own can only have added to the challenges that he was facing. A few days before the event, he hinted in a letter to Charlie that he was being subjected to some form of abuse. Whether he had made a neat copy of it and in doing so had missed words out, or whether the missing words pointed to his distress, it is impossible to tell. But his letter made no sense whatsoever:

  Dear Charlie – I am writing to bother one more for those photos which we look out but you did not cut them all they are all in a envelope I have which I am sory to do and that is that chap Bourke is the very worst chap in the School in for the thing which we talked about before I came here and so I have by letter let him know that I am going to have absolutely nothing to do with him. I would as you know let no one except you know about it.

  I am still looking forward to seeing you on the 4th.

  Goodbye

  Your affectionately

  Jack

  Given their neglect of him, it was hardly surprising that ‘Jack’ had chosen to confide in Charlie, rather than his parents.

  Two short notes from Henry and Violet had found their way into the file; they revealed the extent to which the loss of their elder son had overwhelmed them.

  One was a bleak note that Henry sent Violet on her thirty-ninth birthday, a few months after Haddon died.

  Darling

  So it’s your birthday. Well I wish I could make you happier on it, but as I feel myself to a large extent what you feel, empty phrases about ‘happy returns’ and so forth, are but of little use. Anyway, no one in the world wishes you more personal happiness than I do, or more earnestly prays that you may in the future be spared any such suffering as you have gone through.

  The other was a note that Violet left for Henry in the winter of 1899. ‘To open if I die,’ she had written on the envelope. In expressing her last wishes, her overriding concern, to the exclusion of all else, was Haddon’s unfinished tomb:

  My Dearest,

  If I die, have a little bust of Haddon cast at once by Gilbert and put the big thing of Haddon in the middle of the chapel,* looking towards the East with the back of his head lit by the West window. Gilbert to make the base and me and you to be buried in the ground on either side with nothing but stone slabs deeply engraved. His little body to be brought there. Your wife V.

  Violet had not even included a final message of love to her husband.

  Reading these letters, it was awful to see the evidence of the wreckage the death of this 9-year-old boy had caused. Here were three individuals – Violet, Henry and John – locked – cut off from each other – in their own worlds of misery.

  One letter remained in the file.

  It was from John to his father: he was almost fourteen and had failed his exams at the end of his first year at Eton:

  Darling Father – I have failed. I am a fool, but it is not my fault. My Tutor is going to try and keep me on but I don’t want to, because I don’t think it does me any good.

  You had better send me abroad with a man.

  I have never been quite so depressed as I am now though I have been very near it before.

  For goodness sake don’t keep me here. I shall never do anything in life so please don’t suspect it.

  Goodbye

  Roos

  Presumably, John had meant to say ‘don’t expect it’.

  I closed the file. The damage to this boy was undeniable. He had come from one of the most privileged backgrounds in England: to be confronted with the evidence of the neglect that he had suffered as a child was shocking.

  Yet these letters failed to resolve the central mystery.

  Precisely eighty-seven days were missing from the family’s correspondence. Haddon had died on 28 September. The gap in the Muniment Rooms began on 23 August – thirty-six days before Haddon’s death – and extended to 19 November.

  I could understand why John had wanted to erase the traumatic events that occurred after his brother had died. It had been an intensely painful moment in his life. It had also been a shameful one. He had been thrown out of the family home that he would one day inherit, as if he were unworthy of it. But the void covered the period when Haddon had been ill.

  What had happened then?

  From what I knew of John, the length of the excision was no accident. In putting together this historic collection, his primary objective had been to preserve the record. In removing material he had been meticulous. So why, if he had simply wanted to conceal the fact that he had been se
nt away after his brother died, had he removed the correspondence for the weeks before Haddon died?

  In those days, there was no cure for tuberculosis; the family’s world would have turned on Haddon’s illness: the weeks leading up to his death would have been agonizing for them. But this alone did not seem reason enough to explain why, half a century later, as John himself lay dying, he had felt compelled to remove the letters dating from this period.

  What I discovered next changed the course of my research entirely.

  It was the note that Violet enclosed inside the box containing Haddon’s death mask which cracked the mystery open.

  But this is to jump ahead.

  First, I had a long conversation with the Duchess.

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  It was a two-mile drive to Knipton, a pretty village of yellow stone houses in the valley below the castle. The Duchess had asked me to meet her for lunch at the Manners Arms. The hotel, which had once been the 6th Duke’s hunting lodge, belonged to her husband, David, the 11th Duke.

  We met in the stone-flagged hallway. ‘This was one of our first projects after David succeeded,’ she explained. ‘We wanted to turn it into a really nice country-house hotel. I designed all the bedrooms myself. They’re all named after the family’s ancestors – the Flying Duke, the Hunting Duke, the Gentleman Duke, and so on. There are things of theirs in the rooms – and photographs and portraits of them.’

  I followed her into the dining room. The tables were decorated with white linen cloths and horn-shaped glass vases, filled with peonies and lilies. One wall was dominated by a set of large windows which overlooked the garden outside; the others displayed pictures of horses and hunting scenes.

  ‘I’m longing to hear what you’ve discovered,’ she said as we sat down. ‘I’ve only had a quick look through the twentieth-century papers. You must have found some wonderful material for your book.’