The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery

by Bailey, Catherine

  So convinced was Henry that the war would last for many years, on 21 August, a day when a partial eclipse of the sun shrouded the country in semi-darkness, he instructed his kennelmen to destroy all but four of the Belvoir Hunt’s twenty-four couples of foxhounds. The army had already commandeered fifteen thousand hunters and most lawn meets had been cancelled. ‘I am unwilling to pay for the upkeep of the kennels, when it is unlikely that the hounds will be hunted for many a year,’ he told Violet.

  Violet was not at Luton Hoo to see the King’s review. She had turned down General Stuart Wortley’s invitation. She chose instead to spend the day at Belvoir. Four weeks into her bid to keep John back from the war, she wanted to collect her thoughts.

  39

  It was harvest time and the wide, sloping fields below the castle were full of pensioners, women and children. The farmhands and horsemen had left for the war. The sounds of voices, shouting and trees being felled drifted from the woods that bordered the fields. Detachments of soldiers from the Army Service Corps were at work; out in Flanders, timber was urgently needed for duckboards and trench props, and for the miles of railway track hurriedly being constructed to rush troops to the Front.

  The clover had been cut and stored but rain had delayed the harvesting of the hay. As the old men struggled to wield their scythes through the corn, the women and children worked in groups, tying bands for the sheaves they had yet to gather. High on the hill, the castle loomed above them. There was no sign of life; the blinds had been tightly drawn to screen its treasures from the sun. But at some point that day, somewhere inside the gloom, Violet took out a piece of paper and wrote down a series of questions to herself:

  Should I write to Lord Grenfell?

  Or should I go and see him again?

  Should I write the pros and cons and what he must take in of the possible?

  Should I ask how he, Lord G, is going to get over the ‘difficulty’?

  Time was running out and she was making little headway in her bid to stop John from going to the Front. The ‘difficulty’, as she quickly realized, was his patriotic sense of duty. Her first thought was to find him a job on the staff of a general responsible for home defence; but she had abandoned this plan as it was obvious John would never agree to leave his division. Her next move – calculated on the basis that every division left a skeleton staff in England – was to try to persuade Stuart Wortley to leave him behind. ‘Spare him honourably,’ she had pleaded. Her callous reasoning – that John was the ‘last in his family’ and ‘Henry’s only heir’ – infuriated the general. ‘A son is precious regardless of titles or possessions,’ he replied sharply: ‘I have no possessions and my son is the last in my family and he is as treasured to me as my wife. Every one of the soldiers in my division is precious to someone: your son’s situation does not render him any more exceptional than any of the other boys.’

  Recognizing that the one chance she had of prising John from his division was if his transfer were to come as an order, Violet decided to go above the general’s head. Her sights were set high: Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, was her best hope. It was a plan she confided to Harry Cust, her former lover and closest friend. ‘Beloved, in these always terrible days I know a little how you must be suffering for others and fearing for your dear self,’ he replied from the War Office, where he was in charge of government propaganda:

  Of course Kitchener of Khartoum is absolute and could put John on his own Staff – or anywhere. Or on Sir John French’s Staff, which they say is safe. But I know you will be brave, my sweet, and understand that John’s own future has to be considered. That’s the awful difficulty of it, the two reasons of State.

  The words ‘King and country’ had no resonance for Violet: John’s obligation to his family – specifically, the preservation of its rank and prestige – outweighed any obligation to the state. Nor did she have any consideration for what John would feel were he to be denied the chance of going to war – or what he might feel in the years to come, having failed to play a part in it. Ignoring Cust’s advice, Violet was determined to find a route to Lord Kitchener. She knew him personally: he had stayed at Belvoir in the summer of 1911. Yet she dared not approach him herself. The stories she had heard from her friend Lady Wantage had warned her off.

  A maverick bachelor and a man of ‘arctic loneliness’, Kitchener disliked women. Preoccupied solely with forming the 500,000-strong army that he believed represented Britain’s only hope of defeating the Germans, he discouraged callers at his office in Whitehall. ‘Apart from soldiers, visitors to the Secretary of State’s room were only welcome if on important business affecting the war, and a rigid rule excluded ladies,’ Sir George Arthur, his private secretary, recalled: ‘One social aventurière was said to have wagered twenty pounds that she would obtain the desired access, but the bet was lost. Lord Haldane pleaded a special feminine case, and Kitchener told us to say that if he were to break his rule for anyone, it would be for Lord Haldane, but that he was obliged to be inflexible on this point.’

  Nor did Violet expect to run into the Secretary of State for War socially. As Sir George Arthur described, he shunned society: ‘Kitchener almost invariably dined at home, occasional exception only being made in favour of the Duke of Norfolk, whom he held in very high esteem. Men friends whom he knew well – his colleagues, soldiers home on leave – came occasionally to dinner, ladies very rarely. He shrank from being entertained and never entered a club or theatre except when invited by a Cabinet Minister – an invitation he thought it bad manners to refuse.’

  Kitchener’s dislike of women stemmed from his loathing of ‘their tittle tattle’. He was notoriously secretive and distrustful of politicians, and his Cabinet colleagues resented him for failing to keep them informed of his decisions. ‘If they will only divorce their wives,’ he complained to Sir George Arthur, ‘I will tell them everything.’

  The problem confronting Violet was to find someone who was prepared to lobby the Secretary of State for War on her behalf. Four of the six men on the list she drew up at Stanton Woodhouse on 27 August were close to him. Sir George Arthur was his private secretary; Sir John Cowans served under him as Quartermaster General to the Armed Forces; Field Marshal Lord Grenfell had promoted him after his famous victory at the Battle of Omdurman, and Sir Ian Hamilton, ADC to the King, was one of his oldest friends.

  Early in September, Violet wrote to each of them requesting an urgent – and private – meeting.

  Sir Ian Hamilton, one of the first to reply, gave her short shrift:

  9 September 1914

  Dear Duchess

  Just got back. Received yours of yesterday. Alas I am off at cock crow tomorrow for three days’ hard inspection work in Norfolk and Suffolk.

  Yrs always sincerely

  Sir Ian Hamilton

  Sir John Cowans, the Quartermaster General, also replied by return. He too claimed he was too busy to see her, suggesting they meet in mid-October. Sir George Arthur did not reply at all: ‘How odd “men” are about not answering!!!’ she complained to Charlie.

  Only Lord Grenfell agreed to see her immediately. On 3 September they met for lunch at the Ritz. A minute’s walk from Violet’s house in Arlington Street, it was a favourite dining venue of hers – one that she described as ‘cosy’. A kindly man, well into his seventies, Grenfell was an important contact. He was a veteran of the Kaffir wars and the Nile Campaign; in advancing Kitchener’s career, he had become a mentor to him. He was one of the few men the Secretary of State for War trusted and to whom he turned for advice.

  Violet was calculating in her approach to the lunch. Anticipating a second meeting, she concealed her true objective: she did not ask Grenfell to persuade Kitchener to appoint John to his staff. Instead, her tactic was to elicit his sympathy. Telling him of her grief at losing Haddon, she confided her terror of losing her second and only son. ‘He was sympathetic to the “last of his family line”!!’ she reported back to Charlie after the lu
nch.

  Grenfell parted from Violet with a promise that he would think hard about what he could do for her and that they would meet again soon. But their meeting was postponed. On 14 September, his nephew, Riversdale Grenfell, to whom he was guardian, was killed in action in France.

  Four days later, as the King was reviewing the North Midlands at Luton, Violet was in a state of nervous anxiety. ‘Believe me,’ she told Harry Cust, ‘Lord G is my only hope.’ Alone at Belvoir and anxious for guidance, she put to Cust the questions which she asked herself repeatedly, and which, throughout that morning, she committed to numerous scraps of paper as she tried to work out what to do. Could she afford to wait for Grenfell to come back to her? Should she write to him outlining exactly what she wanted from him? Or should she simply take the bull by the horns and see the Secretary of State for War herself?

  ‘Beloved,’ Cust replied: ‘Lord Grenfell sounds much the best way if he understands and can get Kitchener of Khartoum to put John on his personal staff. I should try that. If John must go to the Front, a big Staff – i.e. Field Marshal Sir John French’s – is much the safest, and Eddy Stuart Wortley (though I shouldn’t mind him much anyway) couldn’t possibly object to the appointment, which would be orders. At the worst, I should make Grenfell insist on Kitchener doing this. Bless, bless, my poor sweet sweet. I will go on thinking and thinking.’

  Harry Cust and Charlie were Violet’s only confidants. At home, she was careful to conceal her scheming from those around her. In the presence of her immediate family, the castle’s servants, and the workers and tenants on the Belvoir estate, she was at pains to project the image of a declared patriot.

  Her days were crowded with civic duties, and fundraising events which had been hastily organized in the villages to raise money for the dependants of servicemen fighting abroad. There were garden fêtes to open and harvest festivals to attend; there was the Leicestershire Patriotic Fighting Fund, of which she was a patron; and there were hospital visits to Leicester and to Melton Mowbray, where casualties from the first battles on the Western Front had been sent. At each of her appearances, local functionaries – thrilled to have a Duchess in their midst – had roundly applauded her and thanked her for her commitment to the war effort.

  In the evenings, she accompanied the Duke to recruitment meetings, convened in packed church halls, where he gave speech after speech to drum up volunteers for the war. Invariably, he spoke of John’s imminent departure for the Front: ‘My boy is on the path and he will do whatever he can when he gets there. I am proud of him.’ Sitting on the platform behind him, Violet had joined in the loud applause.

  While her husband was working assiduously to raise armies of volunteers, her daughters were also doing what they could for the war effort. At Belvoir, Diana was spending her mornings in the fields below the castle helping to bring in the harvest. Her afternoons were spent in the servants’ quarters, where, in pursuit of her ambition to become a Red Cross nurse, she watched the cook ‘taking out hares’ insides’ to acclimatize herself to the sight of blood. Marjorie was in constant touch from Beaudesert, her husband’s estate in Staffordshire. Keen to compete with her father, who had written to boast of the high numbers of Belvoir volunteers, she replied with the tally from Beaudesert: ‘Pups Darling, I am glad to hear of your recruits. We have hardly anyone left here now. My 2 footmen, odd man, 4 more gardeners, the estate chauffeur and the agent’s coachman all go off this morning, which totals in all about 17 or 18 recruits accepted from the people on the gardens, stables, house etc. Quite good I call it. I’m giving my footman my 1st pair of socks, knitted at Rowsley!’

  Anxious not to give grounds for suspicion, and keen to give the impression that she was as enthusiastic at the prospect of John’s departure for the Front as the rest of her family, Violet took it upon herself to find him a horse for the war.

  As John was known to loathe riding, his appointment as ‘galloper’ to General Stuart Wortley amused his father and his elder sister. ‘You will, after all, have to make the personal acquaintance of your enemy the horse,’ the Duke teased him. Marjorie, who was a keen huntswoman, wrote to offer him riding tips: ‘J Old Boy, If you are going to ride, for goodness sake begin at once and very gradually – 10 minutes a day and get the most comfortable saddle you can get. It’s nonsense people who say cheerfully “get on and gallop away.” The agonies I go through when I start hunting every year are immense. Yesterday, we chased a fox up and down a pit head!!! The most curious thing imaginable. The foxes lie on the great heaps of thrown away mess by the pit heads and men go up and wake them up!! The hounds were quite black – no trace of white and tan left by the end of the day! What a lark!!’

  For the most part, good horses were in short supply. In the first few weeks of the war, the government had requisitioned some nine million. Early in August, Violet’s favourite pony had been taken from Rowsley and, at Belvoir one Saturday, villagers were infuriated to find they had to walk the eight or nine miles back from Grantham market after army officials commandeered the horses that had taken them there.

  The search for a horse for John was ostensibly Violet’s chief preoccupation for some weeks. Disingenuously, in tandem with doing her utmost to ensure that he would never ride into battle, she wrote to her friends to ask if they had one to spare. ‘Violet darling – I wish I cd help you about a horse for J,’ Winnie, Duchess of Portland, replied: ‘We have none left except our personal hacks and a few hunters out at grass. Drape (the dealer) wd be the best person to find you one – he has such nice horses. It’s a disgusting war but I do hope the Germans will be forever eliminated some day. Your devoted W.’

  It was Tommy Bouche, the Master of the Hounds at Belvoir, who finally supplied the horse – a handsome bay gelding called Xenophon. His heartfelt reply to Violet, written from Tidworth Barracks in Wiltshire where he was training with the 11th Cavalry Reserve, illustrates the mendacity of her request:

  My Dear Duchess

  I wired my secretary at Woolsthorpe today and told him to send Lord Granby the horse I think would suit him best. I know him to be a nice ride, as I very nearly selected him to be my own charger, but came to the conclusion he was up to more weight than I required. I think you will consider him good looking and he is a fine hunter. There is some drawback to every horse in the world, and this one may be a little bit wide in the ribs for anyone who has not ridden much. I expect Lord Granby will feel fearfully stiff at first after riding him, but that will soon wear off. Anyhow, I hope he will like him.

  I have been posted to a Reserve Regiment with a lot of old brother officers, and it is nice being with them again. I have always hated soldiering, and am the last person in the world to think of ‘trying for glory’, as you call it! Killing other people has never seemed to be particularly glorious work in any case. But, of course, there is such a thing as duty to one’s country – duty of any sort is invariably unpleasant! – and it would obviously be inconceivable for me to remain behind in comfort and warmth and plenty, whilst other men (my friends) were fighting for me.

  It is an extraordinarily dull spot – miles and miles of barracks on Salisbury Plain. The most interesting things are the aeroplanes, which keep circling about over our heads. The arrangements are uncomfortable – no carpets in our bedrooms, and (until I got them from Woolsthorpe) no sheets or blankets on our beds. We have to keep expenses down for the sake of the poorer officers, and as we mess for 3/6 a day, you can imagine the fare is homely. I can hear you say ‘how good for you,’ but I always object to being done good to – it is invariably an uncomfortable proceeding.

  None of us have the least idea how long we shall be here – a week or six months. I personally am making preparations to stay for ever!

  Xenophon, Violet assured John, was ‘Bouche’s best’. Having found him the horse, she bombarded him with letters asking him if there was anything else he needed for the Front: ‘Darling, I wish you would give me commissions to do for you. Tell me anything, anything you need. Please
, darling, do your men want anything? I am still buying blankets and socks and shirts for the 20,000 army at Grantham. Bless you beloved. Give me something to do for you. Mother.’

  Violet was not equipping the ‘20,000 army at Grantham’ out of the kindness of her heart. General Hammersley, their commander, was one of the generals in charge of training troops for the Front. Stationed in England for the foreseeable future, there was a chance that at some point he could be prevailed upon to give her son a job. While she kept her true motive hidden in the letter she wrote to John, she revealed it in a letter written coincidentally to her brother: ‘I bought 2260 blankets for General Hammersley’s army at Belton yesterday! I curry favour with him,’ she informed him bluntly.

  There was one further piece of information Violet concealed from John. She had finally heard back from Lord Grenfell. He was suggesting they meet in London in the first week of October. To her relief, as she confided to Charlie, it would be possible to see him on a day when Henry was not expecting her to attend a recruitment meeting: