The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (54 page)

Between 1916 and 1925, John and Kakoo had five children. To the frustration of Violet and Henry, the first two were girls. It wasn’t until May 1919 that Charles, an heir, was born. A second son, John, followed, and then Roger, born three years later, in 1925.

From early on, however, the marriage proved to be an unhappy one. Two years after her wedding, Kakoo confided in Cynthia Asquith. ‘
Talking of Kakoo’s second baby
not being a boy,’ Cynthia noted in her diary, ‘she said she didn’t think the Rutland family was one which should be perpetuated.’ The letters at Belvoir show that John was frequently short-tempered with Kakoo. He was also, as we know from his affair with Hilda Lezard, unfaithful to her. By the early 1920s, John was having numerous affairs.
One with the children’s nanny
, by whom he had a child, threatened to break up his marriage.

Hilda Lezard had taken her secret to her grave. I was unable to find out why she broke into the castle in the dead of night after John died, or what – if anything – she took with her. While her family acknowledged the affair, they had not heard of the break-in.

Of the other protagonists in this story, there are few happy endings.

In 1920, Henry’s vast debts finally caught up with him. He was forced to sell a large portion of his estate – a step he had resisted since succeeding to the dukedom in 1908. Twenty-seven thousand acres in Leicestershire and Derbyshire were sold at auction for £1,100,000.
*
Thirteen thousand three hundred
of these acres were at Belvoir, reducing the size of the estate by half.

After the sale, Henry was beset with depression. Haunted by guilt at being the first in a thousand-year-long line of custodians to break
up the family’s main estate, and still haunted by the loss of his favourite son, he could see no point in living. Increasingly, he sought comfort in visiting Haddon’s tomb. In a symbolic gesture, on 28 September 1920, the twenty-sixth anniversary of Haddon’s death, Henry laid the dark-blue velvet mantle that as a Knight of the Order of the Garter he was entitled to wear on his son’s tomb. The award of the Garter, which he received in 1918, was for his work in raising volunteers for the war.

‘Darling,’ he wrote to Violet:

I have this moment placed the Gown and my bunch of leaves on the stone at the Mausoleum.

It is a glorious day, and Haddon’s robin sang, as I hoped it would. It all made one very hopeful that when one is finally taken there as very soon must happen – one will at last rest in peace.

Henry died five years later at Belvoir at the age of seventy-three.

George Gordon Moore
, the man John had to thank for the introduction to Field Marshal Lord French, left England under a cloud in January 1916. The rumours circulating in the foreign press had at last been published in a British newspaper. Moore, the report alleged, was an enemy agent; through his special relationship with French, he was passing secret information to the Germans, gleaned from his many visits to General Headquarters. The rumours were without foundation, and Moore sued the newspaper for libel. Though he won the case, it left him feeling bitter and vengeful.
On his return to America
, he claimed to have documents in his safe which, if published, would shake the foundations of the British Empire. They were never published, but the scandal brought to an end his love affair with England and the English – and his friendship with Lord French.

In America, Moore’s notoriety – based on his immense wealth and his brooding presence – continued.
A celebrated breeder
of polo ponies, the matches he hosted at his palatial Californian ranch were attended by Hollywood film stars and some of America’s wealthiest families. When F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
was published in 1925, it was thought that Moore was the model for the novel’s
mysterious hero, Jay Gatsby. Four years later, Moore lost the bulk of his fortune in the stock-market crash.

His ‘Great Friend’
, Lord French, fared little better. In 1921, after serving as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland for three years, he left the sumptuous surroundings of Vice Regal Lodge in Dublin. It was his last official posting. Without Moore’s financial support, French was unable to afford a home in England. Shunned by his wife and family for his many affairs, he led an itinerant existence. Much of his time was spent in France, where he spoke at ex-servicemen’s gatherings and unveiled war memorials on the battlefields of Flanders. In 1923, after he was given an earldom, Lord Beauchamp, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, offered French the appointment of Captain of Deal Castle, an honorary position which gave the field marshal the right of residing at the castle.

He died there in May 1925
. Two weeks later, a funeral service was held at Westminster Abbey – the first of a major war leader. Spectators stood twelve deep outside the abbey and in the nearby streets. The majority of them were veterans of the original British Expeditionary Force that had set out for France in August 1914, and which French had commanded. As his biographer wrote, ‘they stood stiff and hatless as the coffin passed. Some wept unashamedly; not so much for their old chief, perhaps, as for their own youths and for a past which now seemed as remote as the long aching summer of ’14.’

Charlie Lindsay also died that spring. He was sixty-three and had cancer. His last letter to John, written a few weeks before his death, is in the Muniment Rooms at Belvoir. He had entrusted John with looking after his valet, to whom he’d left a large sum of money. He was anxious that the legacy should be kept secret. At the time, homosexuality was illegal; the implication in Charlie’s letter is that his valet was also his lover:

Dear Jacko

I explained to you a few days ago what I wanted done. So this is only to remind you. Alongside of this letter is my will, in which you will see that I have left Birt some money, as I mentioned to you. He has
behaved well to me, and I have been selfish in keeping him in my service when in my opinion, with the talents which I believe he possesses, he might have started some career which would have been more lucrative. I therefore take this opportunity of thanking him, as well as making up – to a certain extent – for my selfishness. At the same time I do not feel very happy in the way I have done it, and if I am given time, I propose to make you a trustee for this money, which I feel, though it might give you a little trouble, you would do for me as a great kindness.

The money I have left him is too much for him to have command of all of a go. What I should have wished would be that he should have had the interest only of the money for a certain number of years – say till he was about 30 years old … Anyhow would you do the best you can for him. I shall speak to him myself and recommend him strongly to take your advice. And Jacko, keep an eye on him, that he doesn’t go to hell – he hates service I believe, and hankers after stage and dancing, the latter he is very good at, and it may be his metier – I don’t know – abroad and colonies I cannot believe he would prosper in.

I am writing all this very fast, and can think of very little else to say. I don’t want my will read out, if that can be avoided, and, of course, no funeral ceremonies or expenses that can possibly be avoided. And Jacko I have a pleasant fancy for that mausoleum at Belvoir – isn’t it odd! – a dislike to being away from my friends perhaps, but really indeed it cannot possibly matter one little bit – so don’t even suggest the thing unless it seems to you right, and quite easy.

So, to a possible future meeting, you dear old pet, what wouldn’t I give to think it could be so.

Charlie

John had mourned his uncle’s death deeply. It was only when he came to go through his mother’s papers in the last years of his own life that he discovered that Charlie, the person he had depended on as a boy and whom he had loved and trusted more than anyone else, had betrayed him. Not a single one of Charlie’s replies to the many conspiratorial questions Violet asked him in the first year of the war has
survived in the Muniment Rooms. We cannot be certain of John’s motives, but it seems he destroyed his uncle’s letters because the evidence of his betrayal was simply too painful to him.

Nor had John kept many letters from his sister Diana. She was the one true patriot in the family; her war was spent tirelessly nursing the sick and the wounded. Many of her closest friends were killed, a loss she wrote movingly about, and which remained with her for the rest of her life. She, of course, was instrumental in John’s escape from the war. Yet after it, their relationship seems to have been distant. Again, we cannot be certain, but the suggestion from the absence of letters between brother and sister is that it was the cause of some sort of rift between them.

After the war ended, Diana disappointed all of her mother’s dreams by marrying Duff Cooper.
‘That awful Duff,’
as Violet called him, was neither a royal prince nor the heir to a great fortune: he was a career diplomat earning the paltry sum of £300 a year. His pedigree also fell far short of Violet’s expectations: though Duff’s maternal uncle was the Duke of Fife, his mother was a ‘bolter’, and his father a doctor who specialized in venereal diseases.

When Violet first learned
of the engagement, she was beside herself. She told Diana that she would rather John had been killed in the war, or that Diana had cancer, than that she should marry Duff. ‘Her Grace is raising tally-whack and tandem all over London,’ wrote Lady Desborough, who disliked Violet intensely and was thrilled at her disappointment. The press were equally thrilled when news of the engagement leaked out.
Cassell’s Saturday Journal
gleefully reported that the couple would have to live on ‘£300 a year and a ducal curse’.

Diana’s old admirers
rallied around her. George Moore offered to give her £6,000 a year from the time of her marriage. The offer was refused, but Diana allowed him to deposit £500 in her bank account and to guarantee her overdraft.

Violet retaliated by insisting that her engagement should last for at least a year. She accused Diana of wanting to marry Duff purely to spite her and, in a series of acrimonious letters, did her best to put her off:

What has always been my cry to others who have repeated it to you? That
I cannot believe in your love
, since you have always given it to others to tell me of.

I never have in my life had the feeling ‘
I don’t want to be beaten
’. ‘To win’ never gives me pleasure at the expense of anyone I love ‘giving in’ to me – in fact I always have the feeling ‘please don’t’. But you have always, I think, seen in this a
fight
. Why?

God knows, I have said to you – before Letty and Kakoo – if only I could believe you loved as I understand love!

My nature is
not
snobbish. I shall always maintain that – however much you and friends may think so. If you are born in a set that without snobbish struggling
is
‘up there’ – say in highest
worldwide interest
–
there is no need to fling it all away as you have always loved to do triumphantly
as against me
.

After raging at Diana, Violet had tried to make her feel sorry for her.

‘Anyhow,’ she wrote, ‘your friends completely took you from me – and I have been
very very
miserable in consequence in a year and a half.’

Diana married Duff in June 1919.
Soon after their wedding
, she became a successful actress. By 1923, she was earning $1,500 a week touring America playing the lead role in Max Reinhardt’s play,
The Miracle
. Mobbed and fêted wherever she went, her success, combined with Duff’s burgeoning political career, ensured that they became one of the most glamorous, most sought after couples of their generation.

And finally to Violet.

When Henry died
, she sold the contents of 16 Arlington Street, and moved into the Lodge, where Mrs Seed, her gatekeeper, had lived. Then, after the house itself was sold, she devoted the last years of her life to creating a home out of the two houses she bought in Chapel Street, Belgravia. ‘
With the huge nest-egg
laid by Arlington Street’s sale,’ Diana recalled, ‘my mother doubled its length, lit it with high orangery windows, joined the two houses and built a second orangery drawing-room on the opposite side which still left a large garden with a terrace, a lawn, flower-beds and a statue.’

Her days were spent
finishing Haddon’s tomb and filling her house with things that dated from his childhood at Cockayne Hatley. She even wore the clothes she had worn then.

‘
The Hatley brocade curtains
, at last bleached to her desired faded blue, were hung,’ Diana recalled: ‘The lace drawer, the feather drawer, the one for ribbons and the one for furs found their places, as did the immovable chest for stuffs and dress-lengths and patterns, a yard square, taken on trial from furnishers and never returned. Shelves were filled with Tauchnitz books bought on journeys in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, bound extravagantly enough in half-vellum and marbled paper … There was nothing ordinary in her house, not even the meals, which would have been unusual had they existed. She disapproved of spending money on food, and still more upon drink, so it was abandon hope the greedy and the alcoholics. She herself nibbled Marie biscuits and sipped Ovaltine, living comfortably and healthily upon nothing.’