The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (10 page)

This man’s obsession with collecting struck me as pathological. The pursuit and ordering of objects appeared to lie at the core of his personality. It seemed to go far beyond mere interest – it was all-consuming, a compulsion. It looked as if these collections represented some sort of refuge, a form of escape into a private world. But what had he wanted to escape from? I had read Honoré de Balzac’s
Le Cousin Pons
, the story of a man who was a dedicated collector. The novel was autobiographical. Balzac blamed his own obsessive interest in collecting on his mother’s ill treatment of him. ‘I never had a mother,’ he said.
Sigmund Freud had also suggested
that a compulsive interest in collecting pointed to emotional deprivation, or abuse, in infancy.

I had been in the Tower Rooms for nearly two hours. I had searched every box, every drawer, every cupboard. I had found nothing to shed light on John’s disappearance in the summer of 1915; the missing letters that I had hoped to find were not up here. All that I had discovered were the signs of an obsessive personality – a man who appeared to have been fascinated by order, and by things that were deathly and grotesque.

Retracing my route – down the spiral staircase and along the passages in the old servants’ quarters – I made my way back to the Muniment Rooms. The only hope I had of finding the missing letters was if, as the Duchess had suggested, they had been misfiled.

I put the file back in its place on the bottom shelf of the case. It was the last one. It had taken me three days to go through the five rooms. Systematically, I had looked through 2,096 files. It was now clear that the missing correspondence was nowhere in the castle. The letters had not been misfiled. They were lost.

I shut down my computer and began to pack up my things. I was never going to find the letters. Without them, I would have to look for another setting for the book. It was bitterly disappointing. I had set my heart on writing about the Belvoir estate in the First World War. With the exception of the missing months in 1915, the material I needed to bring that world back to life was all here; the Muniment Rooms were a treasure trove. But the vital piece had turned out to be missing. It was only in the summer of 1915 that the horror of the war had begun to hit home. It was then, after months in training, that the volunteers from the Duke’s estate – and John, the man who would one day inherit it – had been drafted into action on the battlefields abroad. I had no means of following their stories; extraordinarily, at this key moment, the record was blank.

But as I packed away my things, the puzzle kept turning in my mind. The four days at Belvoir Castle had left me with an uneasy feeling. It was not just that the letters were lost. A process of filleting had gone on.
7 July to 5 December 1915.
The
same
152 days had been excised right across the different collections of correspondence. The fact that the letters had been extracted for the same period suggested that it was one person who had removed them. The precision with which the documents had been removed was unsettling. I’d found twenty-two files relating to the year 1915; a large number contained letters spanning the years on either side: whoever had extracted the missing months had assiduously rifled the files.

I found it impossible to shake off the niggling feeling that something
peculiar lay behind the void in the records. I was not going to leave just yet. I wanted to know who had taken the letters and why.

It seemed a futile exercise, but I took out my notebook and began to jot down a list of possibilities. The Duchess, I noted, was sure that the letters had not been removed in the ten years since she and the Duke had been living at the castle. David, her husband, had become Duke in 1999; before that, his father, Charles – John’s eldest son – had been Duke. The Duchess had dismissed the thought that anyone could have removed the correspondence in Charles’s time; her father-in-law, apparently, had closed these rooms to outsiders. Yet it was impossible for her to be absolutely certain on this point. How could she be? She had not been there. Assuming the Muniment Rooms had remained out of bounds to outsiders, they would still have been open to members of the family.

John had had five children; they in turn had had children of their own. Between 1940 – when John died – and 1999 – when the present Duke had succeeded his father – upwards of twenty members of the Manners family had either lived at the castle or visited it regularly. The most likely scenario was that someone inside the family had removed the letters at some point in that period. Quite why they might have wanted to hide the entire correspondence for five months in 1915 was baffling, but as I didn’t know the content of the letters, they could have had any number of motives. Whichever way I looked at it, the permutations appeared endless, the trail to the missing correspondence completely cold.

Wearily, I set the notebook aside. In three days, I had performed the same mechanical action 2,096 times: reaching for a file; lifting the blue lid; raising the butterfly clip; thumbing through the letters to check they matched the label on the box. The sheer tedium of it still resonated.

Then a thought suddenly struck me.
Surely the butterfly clips offered an important clue?
Every time I had opened a file containing material that spanned the early twentieth century, I had noticed that the clips, which had corroded, had left a single, pristine imprint on the top letter. The mark, stencilled in rust several millimetres thick, suggested that the letters had never been looked at. If someone had removed
them after John died, the clips would have left a double imprint. In raising them, I had broken time’s seal.

No one – aside from John – had had access to the files
before
he died. The most logical hypothesis was that the man who had created this historic archive had also created the void in the correspondence.

But was this right?
It seemed so counter-intuitive as to be almost implausible. The empirical evidence, both in these rooms and in his rooms up in the East Tower, pointed to a man who had collected, ordered – even hoarded – historical papers and artefacts. He had devoted twenty years of his life to cataloguing and filing the tens of thousands of documents in the Muniment Rooms. In doing so, he had set out to build a seamless record of his family, going back to the mid-eleventh century. It was John who had compiled the volume ‘Specimens of the handwriting of the Manners Family’; painstakingly, he had pored over the many thousands of their letters to select an example of each of their handwriting. Could he really have deliberately punctured the record – one that he had created, and which, up until the summer of 1915, appeared otherwise flawless?

It was his war diary that convinced me that he had. On exactly the date the diary stops – 6 July 1915 – so too did the stream of family correspondence. It was too much of a coincidence. I could only assume that John had destroyed these letters because they contained information about whatever had happened to him in the summer of 1915.

Possibly, by working back through the family’s correspondence over the preceding months, I would find something to shed light on it. But before going any further, I wanted to check whether these were the only months that were missing. I was still troubled by the fact that the excisions contradicted what I knew of John’s character. Was this the only gap in the correspondence? Or had he removed other chapters from his life?

I decided to look at the correspondence between John and his uncle, Charlie Lindsay. There were twenty-two blue files. Beginning in the 1890s, when John was a small boy, their letters spanned more
than thirty years and numbered several thousand in total. If there were other missing periods, these files would reveal them.

It was then that I discovered that John had created not one but three gaps in his biography.

The first began on 23 August 1894, a few weeks before his eighth birthday; the second on 6 June 1909, when he was twenty-two. Including the void in 1915, he had obliterated 356 days from the archive. It was clear that the gaps were no accident. They recurred in each of the collections of letters.

What I discovered next served only to heighten the mystery. In the months leading up to 6 June 1909 – the start of the second gap in the records – John, who by then was Honorary Attaché at the British Embassy in Rome, had sent a flurry of telegrams and letters to Charlie. For the most part, they were written in cipher.

British Embassy, Rome

23 February 1909

Old Boy,

Just a line to let you know what I think of the 24906 35427 11411 53702 66892 27490 4732 21131 54224 it 89231 79619 23604 83705 72630 79967 83294 69631 50011 is 54123. 92141 77117 38519 72432 14041 60903 to the 14066/ 50215/ 12001/ 20039 77129/ 21115/ 61232/ 72603/ 19731 83220 69699 65906 and, 50999 70901 83110 21166 82915 70444 61291 23615 – and so 50000 53741 47314 54330 83309 86154 and 53131 78042 40319 62731.

I forgot if I told you to put the following numbers down for ‘ing’: 956 957 958 960 – as one uses ‘ing’ so often and it is so noticeable.

Goodnight old cock, J

This was one of thirty-four letters that John had encrypted to his uncle. Looking at the rows of meaningless numbers, I began to feel overwhelmed by the strangeness of what I was finding. John was evidently using a complex cipher. So how had he become such an accomplished cryptologist?

My first thought was that he had been involved in intelligence work at the embassy.

But then why would he have encrypted his letters to his uncle? A quick check through the records in the Muniment Rooms revealed that Charlie Lindsay was a well-known antiquarian and bibliophile. Cryptology was one of his hobbies. Most probably, he had taught John to write in code. So was it simply a game between them? Or did the cipher conceal important information?

The fact that John had used it in the weeks leading up to the moment when, for the second time in his life, he vanishes from the
record was surely significant. Yet without the key to the cipher, there was no means of knowing what it concealed.

I turned to the other letters. Interspersed between the pages of numbers, there were paragraphs of text. These were the things he was willing to communicate. What was to be gleaned from his authorized version of events?

Rome was John’s first diplomatic posting. He joined the embassy as Honorary Attaché on 27 January 1909.
In the months that followed
, he made several trips to Sicily, where, on 28 December 1908, a massive earthquake had devastated the region, killing upwards of 180,000 people.

John was charged with coordinating the relief efforts organized by the British government. Messina, situated on the northern coast of Sicily, was the first city he visited. It had been destroyed by the 40-foot-high tsunami that followed the earthquake and more than seventy thousand of its inhabitants had died. Throughout January and February, the aftershocks continued to claim more lives. On 1 March, the day John arrived, thousands of bodies were still buried under the rubble.

‘Old Boy – I got down here last Monday,’ he wrote to Charlie on 6 March:

On our way out we went from Naples to Messina in a little boat and had a terrible crossing, but you will be pleased to hear that I was the only one out of the four who was not sick.

We got to Messina in the early morning with splendid sun. The sight was quite extraordinary. We went straight to the American Consul who lives at the end of the town, where we had some food. Then he took us all over Messina – I never saw such a sight – practically every house is down. It is quite impossible for me to explain what a state the whole place is in. There are little bands of people everywhere looking for their dead relatives. One can always tell where the bodies are owing to the smell. All the inhabitants that remain live in huts made out of anything they can get hold of. The stench of the bodies with the present filth of the people living among the ruins is very bad.

Everywhere one sees the whole of a house down except for perhaps one or two rooms which are open to view like a section of a doll’s house and in one place I saw a man who had been dead since the earthquake caught up on a beam 3 storeys up – but he could not be got down.

From Messina, John crossed the Straits to Catona, a small town on the Calabrian coast. Like Messina, it had been badly devastated. Over two thousand people – two thirds of its population – had been killed in the earthquake.
Some weeks earlier, Herbert Asquith
, the British Prime Minister, had dispatched a Royal Navy ship to Catona to set up a relief camp. With aftershocks posing a constant danger, its crew had pitched the camp along the sandy dunes at the edge of the beach, away from the hazard of falling masonry.

‘We are living in tents on the seashore about 150 yards from the sea,’ John wrote to Charlie, a few days after he arrived:

Etna is in full view of us and when it is fine the view across the Straits is quite splendid. The weather at one moment is lovely and at another thundery and lightning, like nothing I have ever seen before. There are little earthquakes going on all day. Last night we had quite a nice one that lasted about 15–20 seconds. There are two sorts that we get here. We call them ‘Bumpers’ and ‘Rockers’. The Bumpers are up and down movements. The Rockers are from side to side. The one last night was a Rocker. When it is quiet in our camp it is quite uncanny the noises that go on. The sea is about 150 to 200 yards off. Even when it is calm, the little ripples coming in sound like large Atlantic rollers owing to the earth being so thin and hollow that it transmits the sound like a telephone. There are always rumbles going on underneath – which sound like thunder underground – and water bubbling and boiling.

The swallows here just arrived and they don’t know what to do as all their homes have been destroyed.

Must go to bed as it is very late and must be up by 5.30.

A hospital tent had been set up at the camp to treat the victims of the earthquake. John was shocked by the sights he witnessed:
‘The hopeless state the people are in is too appalling,’ he told Charlie: ‘In our hospital tent the cries and groans are terrible. People were brought in absolutely covered in wounds all over, great chunks out of their bodies. One man I saw had a large chunk taken out of his arms, showing the bone about six inches long, the same thing on one of his legs, the whole calf being taken away – the other leg broken. This is nothing to some of the people – and the worst part is that owing to many of the people being underground amongst the debris their wounds have become rotten and the smell is too terrible. Many in the hospital have died from lockjaw. A curious thing in the hospital tents was that when Vesper time came in the evening all the patients stopped groaning and screaming from their wounds and sung some prayers for ½ an hour, even people who were on the point of death did the same and one woman actually died after she had finished her chants.’