The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (7 page)

A newspaper cutting was pinned to the inside cover of the diary.
John had been appointed Aide-de-Camp to the Commanding Officer of the 46th North Midland Division. The order to embark had been issued at short notice; in anticipation of a spring offensive, reinforcements were needed at the front.

A week earlier, on 19 February, King George V had reviewed the North Midlands at their training camp in Hertfordshire. They were the first territorial division to be sent out to France. ‘The troops,’ the newspaper reported, ‘were honoured by the visit. But when the King addressed the twelve thousand men, the honour, he said, was his.’

John’s father, Henry, Duke of Rutland, had accompanied the King. He had helped to raise the division’s twelve battalions. They were drawn from the Midlands county regiments – the Sherwood Foresters, the Lincolns, the Leicestershires and the North and South Staffordshires. The Duke had a number of subsidiary estates in the Midlands; he had offered the same inducements to the young men in the villages he owned in Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire as he had offered at Belvoir.

The King and the Duke had wished the men good luck and God speed.

Attached to the news cutting was a photograph of John. He is dressed in uniform: the battle dress of a lieutenant in the Leicestershires. Written on the reverse of the picture was the date it had been taken – 11 February 1915, just two weeks before he left for the Front. He is smoking a cigarette and smiling. The shoulder strap of his revolver holster lies taut across his chest; the jacket of his uniform is immaculately fitted. His pose is relaxed, communicating an easy, unassailable authority. The silver tiger on his cap – the cap badge of the Leicestershires – is polished to a high sheen. The image is of a young man almost impossibly blessed. The bachelor heir to a dukedom, and one of the most substantial fortunes in Britain, he is strikingly good-looking.

I studied the photograph for some time. It was the first I had seen of John. Here was the man whom the servants at the castle were eager to serve alongside, the man who, a quarter of a century later, died feet from where I was sitting.

Leafing through the first few pages of his war diary, I could
see that it had been meticulously kept. Hundreds of men from the villages on his father’s estates had served with the North Midlands: the diary not only offered a record of his experiences, but theirs too.

It was an important discovery in the story that I had come to research.

However, that story was about to change shape dramatically. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, looking back I can pinpoint the moment exactly. Prosaic as it may seem, it came when I went to get a cup of coffee before settling down to read the diary.

Closing the heavy steel door behind me, I left the Muniment Rooms to find my way along the labyrinth of passages.

The castle was quiet and there was no one about. Mr Granger had given me directions to the kitchen: ‘Follow the passage. Go past the servants’ hall. You’ll see a swing door. Go through there and you’ll find it on your left.’

I stood in the corridor outside the Muniment Rooms. Doors and passages appeared to lead off in every direction. I was not sure which way to go. To the left, a long passage receded into the distance. It was gloomy, lit only by the strip lighting in the display cases that ran along one wall. Ahead, there was a solid oak door, carved in the Gothic style. Another passage led off to my right. I could see that it branched in two. One end led into a small hall. It was in darkness.

‘No one goes in there,’ a voice whispered behind me.

The woman gave me a fright; I had not heard her coming. I turned round. She was in her early seventies and dressed in the costume of an eighteenth-century parlour maid. A lace mobcap covered her head. Her black dress reached to the floor; her white linen apron was heavily starched.

She stepped forward. ‘What are
you
doing in there?’ she hissed, pressing her thin face close to mine. ‘No one goes in there. Who’s let
you
in?’

I realized she was asking about the Muniment Rooms. Startled by her appearance and her hostile tone, I explained briefly why I was there.

Reassured, she seemed keen to stop and chat. She was a tour guide, she told me. In August, from Sunday through to Thursday, the castle was open to the public. ‘The visitors like us to dress in costume. It makes the tour more authentic,’ she said. The guides, she added proudly, came from families who had served the Dukes of Rutland across generations.

After a few minutes, I said I must be going and asked for directions to the kitchen. She told me to take the passage to the left.

I went on. Some distance ahead, there was a kink in the passage.
A man emerged from it, walking towards me. He was wearing knee breeches and a nineteenth-century coachman’s jacket. As we drew level, he stopped.

‘
Those
rooms are forbidden,’ he said. ‘What were
you
doing in them?’

On my way back to the Muniment Rooms, other members of the castle’s staff approached me. Their questions were the same: ‘Who are you? Who’s let you in?’ Invariably, after the questions, came a statement: ‘No one goes in there. Those rooms are forbidden.’ Then they would tell me it was where John, the 9th Duke, had died.

I didn’t want to stop and talk; I was anxious to get back to work. I assumed that the guides were being proprietorial – that no one had told them that I would be working there. When they said the rooms were ‘forbidden’, I understood them to mean to visitors straying from the public route.

The clock in the Flag Tower struck twelve. I had been reading John’s diary for almost an hour. I paused for a moment to listen to the bell; its tone was surprising: the high, musical notes seemed out of keeping with the castle’s solemn Gothic style.

I was halfway through the diary. I had reached 18 June 1915. John and the 4th Leicesters had been out on the Western Front for sixteen weeks. I knew this was a key moment. I had read the battalion’s war diary: a harrowing chapter in their story was about to begin.

On 19 June, after spending five days on leave in London, John returned to the North Midlands headquarters at St-Jans-Cappel, nine miles to the west of the front line at Messines:

June 19th 1915 Saturday

St-Jans-Cappel

Got up very late and did practically nothing. Caught 2pm train to go back to France. Punctured three tyres on the way from Boulogne to St Omer, getting there at 11.30pm. Got letter at Boulogne from Rothesay saying he and GOC
*
were on the water and that we are going to leave our happy home for Reninghelst, Poperinghe Road – damn.

It was against War Office rules to keep a diary. John’s last sentence was obtuse, deliberately so. The letter waiting for him at Boulogne contained two pieces of momentous news. His division was about to be drafted to Sanctuary Wood in the Ypres Salient, the scene in recent months of the bitterest fighting on the Western Front. Within the fortnight the division would be ‘going over the top’.

It was the first time the division was to be deployed in an attack. Since landing in France, the North Midlands had had a comparatively quiet time. Periodically, for the purposes of training and acclimatization, the three brigades had been rotated into the trenches on the western slope of the Messines ridge, but there was little fighting in their sector.
Even so, in the sixteen weeks since the division
had arrived in France, 325 officers and 1,600 other ranks had been killed or wounded.

These numbers paled in comparison to the casualties suffered by the divisions that had fought in the Ypres Salient. In the first nine months of the war, this small corner of the front, barely three miles by four, had claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. In April, the 1st Canadian Division had lost 7,000 men in forty-eight hours; the previous October, the 7th Division – named the ‘Immortal Seventh’ after its heroic stand – had incurred 8,373 casualties.

John’s battalion, which was attached to 138th Brigade, was one of the first to be drafted into the Salient.
On a warm summer’s evening
– Tuesday, 22 June – the four thousand men marched the six miles from their camp at Dranoutre to Ouderdom, a hamlet outside Ypres. By midnight, they were bivouacked in an open field. Here, the brigade was to wait until 19.00 hours on 29 June, when it was to proceed to Sanctuary Wood.

‘
It was a pleasant bivouac
,’ Captain Milne, an officer in the 4th Leicesters recalled. ‘There was a farmhouse with its usual supplies of café au lait; there was a homely-looking windmill; there were one or two cows and a very young bull in a field; there was also “Les Trois Amis”, an estaminet, where beer was supplied in a little back garden where one sat on a rickety chair by a tin-topped table and the daughter of the house (a rather plain girl) wearing a black dress and black
cotton stockings came to and fro with glasses. It was warm weather and for a week it was not a bad war.’

But as Milne recorded, the thought of what awaited the battalion at Ypres cast a shadow over that week: ‘
Everybody knew what a visit there
meant. Shelling by day and night, gas attacks, mines, bombing and all kinds of bloodiness.’ As they waited to go up the line, their days and nights were spent watching the activity along the wagon track that ran to the south of the hamlet. The track led to the trenches in the Ypres Salient.

‘
What a track it was
,’ Milne remembered:

All sorts and conditions of soldiery passed along it; mounted staff officers with orderlies riding behind at a respectful distance; galloping Belgian interpreters hanging on by their spurs; limbered wagons with highly burnished hubs, obviously belonging to some Regular unit with a proper appreciation of spit and polish; Royal Engineers with mules bearing telephone equipment; an occasional Sepoy with thin legs and inscrutable countenance; an occasional section of field guns; an occasional platoon.

It was at night that the track became really imposing, the artery up which flowed the blood for the Salient. Every evening infantry battalions could be seen ‘going up’ complete, swelled with recent drafts. Every evening miles of limbered wagons bumped and clanked bearing rations, water, Small Arms Ammunition, Royal Engineer stores and the post. Sometimes there was a block in the narrow street of Kruisstraat. Sometimes the transport was shelled during the block; then there were casualties, then mules broke loose in the dark. Then in the early mornings the transport could be seen coming back at the trot, everybody happy, even the mules; and battalions ‘coming out’ dog tired, dirty, dusty, mostly lousy, sometimes sadly depleted, strange dark figures of men and horses silhouetted against the first grey streaks of dawn, with the mouth organs in full song.

John was not at Ouderdom with his battalion as it waited to go up the line. On 19 June, the day he returned from leave in London, his
commanding officer, General Edward Stuart Wortley, had charged him with setting up the North Midlands’ new headquarters.

Situated at Reninghelst, a safe nine miles west of the killing grounds in the Salient, it was the nerve centre of the division. Battle orders, gun positions, evacuation routes for the wounded – details of the division’s every move had passed across John’s desk. I had read Milne’s memoir and the battalions’ war diaries for the weeks that followed: it was thrilling to think that his diary offered another contemporary record of the difficult days to come.

I turned the page expectantly. Frustratingly, the entries were brief. John had recorded only the barest of information:

June 20th: Spent most of the day looking at the farm and arranging how to place tents and huts etc …

June 21st: … Went over to our future headquarters again – took Commander Royal Engineers round etc

June 22nd: ditto

‘Ditto’? This was odd. The 22nd of June was the date his battalion had marched to Ouderdom: it was on its way to Sanctuary Wood, one of the most notorious sections of trenches on the Western Front. Yet he had not thought it worthy of mention.

I read on:

June 24th: Got up at 6 am, started seeing the headquarters packing up etc. I went on with the three motors full and Guthrie brought the wagons and horses on. I had a hard day pitching the camp and arranging everything – including all sanitary arrangements, building huts etc …

June 25th: Spent all day in camp as I am acting camp commandant.

June 26th: Spent all day in camp working hard. There is a lot to do to look after a Div. staff.

June 27th: In our camp all morning. Went over with General to see Corps Commander General Allenby. We are now in V Corps …

John’s brevity was curious. Another week had passed, and he had said very little. Given the hectic preparations for the coming days, one explanation was that he had been too busy to keep up his diary. Except, I noticed, on 23 June, he had ‘Spent most of the day doing nothing.’

The page that followed was even more puzzling. Four days – 28 June to 1 July – were entered on the one page.