The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (35 page)

John replied straightaway:

My dear Old Boy

I am glad to hear you have gone to Brighton for the night as I can’t bear to think of you being depressed in the evenings at 97 – although 97 has quite the most un-depressing effect on me, I can quite understand its effect on you nowadays.

I should no doubt feel the same but, old boy, do not let it get the better of you, will you. We will have jolly times yet at 97 with all our old ideas of perfect interest and comfort in full force and tiles
*
running wild all over the place.

I hope you don’t mind my giving you all these commissions but you are the only person who is sure to get the right things.

No news of any importance. If little Ariel is of any comfort to you, mind you collar hold of him.

Take care of yourself old boy, won’t you – you will promise this, won’t you.

The next day – on 17 October – John wired Charlie to tell him that the North Midlands had received orders to embark for the Front. They were leaving on the 30th.

Violet’s intelligence, it appeared, was wrong.

Violet was at 16 Arlington Street
, her London home in Piccadilly, when Charlie’s telegram arrived. He had sent it as soon as he had heard from John.
It was almost three o’clock.
Outside, in the cobbled courtyard, which was screened from the street by an imposing set of arched gates, her chauffeur waited to take her to King’s Cross, where she was to catch the train to Belvoir.

The minute Violet received
the telegram she telephoned Dr Hood. It was his brother, Basil, who had told her that the North Midlands would not be going to France for ‘at least 3 months’. Before calculating her next move, she wanted to establish whether Charlie’s information was correct. ‘Go straight to the War Office,’ Hood advised her: ‘I’ll tell Basil to expect you.’

Some minutes later, a footman opened the front door in the pillared hall and Violet hurried past him.
She was dressed in the clothes
she habitually wore for an outing to London: a long tweed suit – ‘greenish-greyish-bluish-fawnish with tabs and smoky flat pearl buttons’, as Diana described it – high-heeled pointed shoes with buckles, and a three-cornered hat with panaches of cocks’ feathers. Clattering down the short flight of stone steps that led up to the front door, she crossed the courtyard to the waiting car.

The War Office was in Whitehall.
On the approach to it
, crowds of men spilled from the pavement on to the road. They were queuing to volunteer for the war. To accommodate the flood of recruits, the authorities had opened a second office in Trafalgar Square. The clothes, and the hats the men wore – bowlers, trilbys, flat caps and boaters – showed them to be of all classes. So great was the crush, they were pressed up against the car. Drawn by the Duke’s peacock crest, which was painted on the outside of it, they peered in curiously at Violet, looking to see who was inside it.

Valuable minutes were lost as her chauffeur was forced to inch
his way through the crowd. Violet did not have much time; she was in London on a pretext.
On leaving Belvoir
at ‘cockcrow’ that morning, she had told Henry that she had an appointment to see the senior matron at Guy’s Hospital, where Diana was hoping to work as a nurse. She had promised to be back by teatime.

The true purpose of her visit
to London, which Charlie alone knew, was to see Lord Curzon, the former Viceroy of India. Safe in the belief that the North Midland Division would not be going to the Front for some time, Violet had not attached any great urgency to the meeting. However, mindful that he might be of use at some point in the future, she was anxious to establish whether he would be prepared to help her. The meeting, which had taken place at midday in the privacy of her drawing room at Arlington Street, had not gone well. ‘I asked him private and loving advice, telling him not to preach at me,’ she wrote to Charlie after seeing him: ‘He wonders why I did not earlier in the day manage a Motor Ambulance thing for John for service in France. He gives me Lord Norreys’s address, St John’s Gate, as the person to apply to for Volunteer Motor Service. But he adds I daresay this may be too late if by going on ESW’s Staff he already looks upon himself, or is looked upon by others, as a full-blown soldier!!’

The War Office stood opposite Horse Guards Parade. A long, seven-storey building constructed of Portland stone in the Edwardian Baroque style, it was built as a symbol of Britain’s imperial power. It had four domed corner towers; along the roof were placed sculptured figures, representing Peace, War, Justice, Truth, Fame and Victory.

It was with a ‘heavy heart’
that Violet stepped from her car outside the main entrance to the building. She had failed to find a means of keeping John out of the war. Now, if the news contained in Charlie’s telegram was true, there was very little time left.

Entering the Grand Hall, she was met with a scene of chaos.

‘
One of the greatest worries
to which War Office officials were exposed during those anxious times,’ remembered Sir Charles Callwell, Director of Military Operations, ‘was a bent on the part of individuals, who they had not the slightest wish to see, for demanding – and obtaining – interviews.’

On that Saturday afternoon in mid-October, the Grand Hall was as crowded as the streets outside.
The thousand-room building
, with its ‘furlongs’ of corridors, was the engine room of the war. Its 2,500 staff – rising rapidly to 22,500 as the numbers joining Britain’s armed forces swelled – were in charge of all matters connected to the British Army. Effectively, they were responsible for five armies: the army fighting on the battlefields abroad; the army of men under training at home; the armies guarding garrisons in outposts of the empire; the army of sick and wounded; and the armies of soldiers’ dependants to whom the Ministry of War paid allowances and pensions.

‘
A mere recital of official events
would fail to convey a true impression of the life lived at that time in the War Office,’ Hampden Gordon, an assistant secretary at the War Office recalled: ‘The atmosphere of those crowded months is difficult to recapture now. Some personal impressions alone can be given; the thronged hall, the hurrying escorts, the countless enquirers, the sudden arrival of news – at last – flashed from the Front in secret cipher, the dispatch to Sir John French of the bag by means of which urgent and secret letters were carried by hand to headquarters in France, the painfulness of the casualty lists and the constant enquiries from relatives and friends, the comings and goings of Cabinet Ministers and emissaries from all parties, the procession of princes, over-age peers, politicians, journalists, cinematographers.’

To marshal unwanted visitors, the ministry employed a brigade of boy scouts.
‘They helped to keep such people at bay,’
Sir Charles Callwell recalled: ‘They took
lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate
*
for their motto, and adopted the method of herding the intruders into an unattractive apartment on the ground floor, as tube attendants herd subterranean travellers into the lifts, and of keeping the intruders there until they verged on a condition of mutiny. They then enlarged them in big parties, each of which was taken control of by a scout, who led his charges round and round and in and out along the corridors, and up and down between floors, carefully avoiding the
elevators, until the victims were in a state of physical and mental collapse. If one of the party quitted the ranks while on the trek, to read the name marked up on some door that he was passing, the scout called a halt – it would never have done to permit that sort of thing because the visitor might conceivably have noticed the name of the very official whom he had come to see.’

Violet had not been kept ‘at bay’
by the scouts. The word ‘Duchess’, printed on her calling card, ensured that she did not have to wait long to see Basil Hood. No sooner had she handed it to a scout than he escorted her up to his office on the first floor.

Hood, a bachelor
in his mid-fifties, was Private Secretary to General Edward Bethune, the Director of Territorial Forces. At the general’s invitation, he had joined the ministry a few days after war was declared. He did not fit the mould of a War Office official: a former captain in the Green Howards, he had retired from the army to become a librettist and lyricist. Best known for his long-running hit show,
Gentleman Joe
, he wrote musical comedies and Savoy Operas. He had also collaborated with the composer Arthur Sullivan, famous for his work with Sir William Gilbert, to adapt continental operettas – notably
The Merry Widow
and
The Dollar Princess
.

It was General Bethune’s love
of musical comedy and opera that led him to employ Hood as his private secretary. They had met in the 1890s when they were serving in India and had remained friends ever since.
Born in 1865, Bethune
– the second son of a Scottish laird – joined the Gordon Highlanders when he was twenty. A hugely popular officer, famous, as a contemporary noted, for his ‘fondness of theatricals and all other forms of social amusement’, he achieved notoriety following the accident that resulted in the loss of his right hand. ‘During a performance of
The Sorcerer
, in which he was playing a leading part,’
The Times
reported, ‘he placed too large a quantity of explosive in the magic teapot, which thereupon blew up, inflicting such injuries on his right hand that it was amputated at the wrist.’ To the amazement and admiration of his contemporaries, he continued ‘to ride uncommonly well’, commanding a troop of mounted infantry – known as Bethune’s Horse – in the Boer War. In 1901, his
bravery in action was rewarded with the command of a cavalry brigade. Thereafter, he rose rapidly to the rank of Lieutenant-General, largely thanks to his close friendship with Sir Ian Hamilton, then Chief of Staff to Lord Kitchener.

Hood’s office
was in an anteroom next to Bethune’s. The moment Violet arrived – and to her surprise – he ushered her in to see the general.

The chance meeting gave her the breakthrough she had been waiting for. As soon as it was over she wrote to Charlie in a state of breathless excitement:

I went straight to see Hood’s brother on receipt of your telegram and he made me see General Bethune – a divine man. Divine! (Ought to have got to him at the start. You and I would have been happier.) For
he
is going to take the matter in his own hands. He understands!

I mentioned
you
as a professional soldier who could see no way out, and that
you
and
you only
had my confidence. I told him John could neither wield a sword or shoot anything (but partridges or grouse)! Nor ride well enough and had had no teaching whatever like real soldiers have, as he had never been one – and had only been out 1 month all told with the Territorials, so he was utterly ignorant of warfare. But was a good chauffeur – and practical – otherwise no soldier!!

He heard my case and is going to ‘see to it’!! ‘Trust me,’ he said. It would be in the sense of John not being a soldier! And having no experience. ‘We shall do a lot of weeding. Leave it to me!’

Oh, Charlie, I nearly died. Thank God for Hood and for his brother, and thank God that I got your telegram when I did. Bethune considers ESW
*
a ‘blustering empty ass’.

Your wire came through just as I was starting for the train. I now go by the 6.30.

Yr loving VR

The following day – a damp, grey Sunday throughout the entirety of which the low cloud shrouding the castle failed to lift above its
turrets and towers – Violet did not emerge from her bedroom until after lunch.

The elation she had felt
after seeing General Bethune had faded. On waking, she had a splitting headache, and when Tritton, her maid, brought in her breakfast tray, the news from the servants’ quarters was upsetting. Few of the castle’s indoor and outdoor servants had clocked in for work that morning. They had stayed at home to spend the last precious hours with soldiers from the North Midlands who had been given leave to return to their villages to say goodbye to their families.

A telegram from Lord Kitchener, with whom she sought every opportunity to ingratiate herself, had also irritated her. A guest of Lord Brownlow’s at the nearby Belton House, he had declined her invitation to tea: ‘Kitchener lunching at Belton today – no time to come
here
,’ she wrote crossly to Charlie.

Uppermost in her mind, though, was John. In the cold light of day – and with just a fortnight to go before the North Midlands’ departure for the Front – she doubted whether Bethune would be able to do anything. Lying fretting in bed, she confided her thoughts to her brother: ‘Of course all my high hopes for things to get better for me seem to dwindle in face of “thinking it out”,’ she told him: ‘Bethune said something about untrained men (which he calls John) – “I shall do a lot of weeding.” But what can he do? I have sent him by train a long letter putting the details of John’s case before him – so that he
knows
details of how and when and where.
Now I must be silent to everyone but you.
He comforted me amazingly in the moment. But a fortnight is short, my dear, and can John be considered as untrained!!? I feel lots of hope at times and cold sweat at others. I wish I could see you.
Write
a lot. Nothing can make me worse than I am.’

That same day – 18 October – a hundred miles away, General Bethune was at his desk at the War Office in Whitehall. He had been there since dawn.

Though it was a Sunday, lights blazed throughout the building.
Out on the Western Front
, a major offensive was in progress. Everywhere, everyone was in a high state of alert; along the corridors, military aides and attachés hurried to and fro delivering memoranda between departments; in the principal rooms overlooking Horse Guards Parade, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, the Permanent Under-Secretary, the Adjutant-General, and their senior advisers stood scrutinizing maps of the battleground, which hung on the walls suspended from giant rollers. Two floors below, in the most closely guarded section of the building, armies of specially trained cipher clerks were working at full stretch to decrypt the reams of coded communiqués coming in from General Headquarters at St Omer.