The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (9 page)

I stood there for some time. There were so many questions. Had I stumbled across something? Was there a link between the missing war letters and whatever it was the family had wanted to hide? The coincidence between the blank pages in John’s war diary and the gap in the correspondence suggested that something had gone badly wrong for him on 6 July. But then if the void in the records concealed some sort of controversy, surely the present Duke of Rutland would not have given me permission to research this period in his family’s history? Or was the former housemaid in possession of a secret of which he was unaware?

Thinking about it, there had to be a more prosaic explanation. Quite probably, I decided, the missing letters were stored in another part of the castle. I needed to find out where.

I found Mr Granger in Room 4. He was sitting at a large desk in the centre of the room, immersed in his work. The desk was cluttered; parchment rolls, reference books and hundreds of letters were piled on top of it.

He looked up, peering at me over the rims of his tortoiseshell spectacles.

‘How are you getting on?’ he asked.

‘Not very well,’ I replied.

I summarized the gap I had discovered in the family’s correspondence. Mr Granger looked surprised.

‘Did you know the letters were missing?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘How odd.’

He paused, thinking for a moment. ‘I haven’t come across any gaps. But then I’ve only been here for a couple of years. There’s
so much material, I’m only just beginning to get to grips with it myself.’

‘Perhaps – because they were written in wartime – the letters were thought to be of special interest and kept together as a separate collection,’ I suggested. ‘Could they be stored somewhere else in the castle?’

‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘As far as I’ve been given to understand, all of the family correspondence is stored here in the Muniment Rooms. It was as the 9th Duke wanted it.’

I asked Mr Granger if the rumour that these rooms had been sealed after his death was true. His response was cautious.

‘The Muniment Rooms have been jealously guarded by the family. That I do know. In the last Duke’s time – the 10th Duke, that is – I believe access was barred to researchers. The present Duke is very selective about who he allows in. But no, I wasn’t aware the rooms had ever actually been sealed.’

‘So even if they weren’t sealed, you think it’s unlikely that someone outside the family could have removed the letters?’

‘Very unlikely,’ he said. ‘But why don’t you ask the Duchess? I would talk to her. She’ll be here later on.’

It was shortly after three o’clock when the Duchess came into the Muniment Rooms. We had met before. A lively, elegant woman in her forties, she was writing her own book on the history of Belvoir Castle and had a detailed knowledge of the documents in these rooms.

Briefly, I explained what I had discovered: how, after 6 July 1915, until December of that year, there was a large gap in the family’s correspondence, and that the start of this void coincided with the date John’s war diary had stopped.

The Duchess looked at me, amazed. ‘There can’t be such a large gap,’ she said. ‘The letters must be here somewhere.’

‘They couldn’t be somewhere else in the castle?’ I asked.

‘No, everything is kept in here,’ she said. ‘The family’s letters have been stored in here since John’s time.’

‘Could someone have removed them?’

She frowned. ‘I can’t see how,’ she replied. ‘My father-in-law closed these rooms after John died. No one outside the family has seen the early-twentieth-century material. The letters can’t have been removed.’

‘Why did the Duke close the rooms?’ I asked.

‘They were of no interest to him,’ she said. ‘Why, I don’t know. But he didn’t want to have anything to do with them. He just shut them up.’ She paused for a moment. ‘It was odd, given that his father had spent so much time in here.’

‘Perhaps the letters have been lost?’ I suggested.

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘John kept everything. Letters and historical documents were his great passion. Especially anything to do with the family. He spent his life cataloguing and filing their letters. They’re all up there on the shelves,’ she said, gesturing at the cases around us. ‘Roger – John’s youngest son – told me that his father always used to say you must never throw letters away. It is thanks to John that we have the Muniment Rooms. He created them. He was completely fascinated with history. Anything to do with history.’

‘So when did he set the rooms up?’ I asked her.

‘It was soon after the First World War. The family’s letters – some five hundred years of them – were scattered all over the castle. These rooms didn’t exist then: or at least not as they are now. They were used as offices. John cleared them out, and he gathered together all this material. He also bought a lot of historical documents at auction. It was his life’s work. He spent a lot of time in here. In the last years of his life he rarely left these rooms.’

‘He was supposed to have hidden five precious gems in here – rubies,’ she added, laughing. ‘A family myth, I expect, but his daughter, Ursula, told me. We’ve all had a good look for them, but they’ve never been found. Apparently, they were his insurance against bad times. Before he died, he was convinced the Communists were going to take over – this was where he died, you know – on the sofa in Room 1.’

‘What did he die of?’ I asked.

‘Pneumonia,’ she replied. ‘He was only fifty-three. He had an oxygen tent moved in here. It was where he wanted to be, Roger said.’

The Duchess got up to leave. ‘It’s very peculiar. I can’t believe the letters are missing. Are you sure you’ve had a really good look for them?’

I explained that I had only looked through the files relating to 1915.

‘I’d go through the other boxes, if I were you. Maybe the missing letters have been misfiled.’

My face must have fallen. There were several thousand box files in the Muniment Rooms. It would take me days to go through them.

The Duchess laughed. ‘Good luck,’ she said.

She left the room. I could hear her footsteps receding along the passage. Then she stopped.

‘Oh,’ I heard her say. ‘Wait a minute.’

She came back into the room.

‘Have you tried the Tower Rooms? You might find the letters up there.’

‘The Tower Rooms?’

‘Yes, they’re up in the East Tower. It was where John lived before he married. It was a sort of bachelor apartment. A lot of his things are still there.’

The East Tower, a fanciful structure with a canted end and Gothic buttresses and corner turrets, was in the far north-east corner of the castle. John’s bachelor apartments were right at the top of the tower. Climbing the spiral staircase leading up to them, it struck me how remote these rooms would have been from those occupied by the rest of his family. At last – after ninety-four steps – I reached a landing. I kept straight on, heading towards the door at the end of the corridor.

It led into a bright, spacious hall. The view from the window that ran along one side of it was spectacular. Fields of crops stretched green and golden across the plain going towards Lincoln. It was exhilarating to be high up and in the open, away from the oppressive Gothic style of the floors below.

Three rooms led off the hall. Before beginning the search for the missing letters, I had a quick look through them. It was evident that no one had lived up here since 1916 – the year John had married
and moved out. The rooms were in a state of disarray: items of his furniture – worn leather armchairs, ancient lamp stands and boxes of old crockery – were stacked against the walls. In the room that he had used as a bedroom, the iron bedstead and the mattress that he had slept on were still there. It felt as if John had just left. Jumbled on the floor were the books and magazines that he had read. There were stuffed birds – the decoys he had used out shooting – and an old wooden globe. Even his hipbath was there. My spirits soared: the missing letters had to be in these rooms somewhere.

I began the search in the hall. It seemed the most promising place to start. Along one side of it, there were two Victorian writing desks; opposite them were three cabinets, each with sixteen numbered drawers. Beside them, piled up against the skirting boards, were rows and rows of boxes. These were places where the missing letters might be.

I started with the boxes. They were crammed with medieval corbels and gargoyles, each of the figures as grotesque as the next. I picked up one of the smaller ones; the severed stone head of a woman, clad in a wimple, sat easily in my hand. A label was attached to it. It had come from the site of Belvoir Priory, an eleventh-century abbey, which John had excavated in 1923. It was extraordinary to think that the carving, one of many that had lain, forgotten, in these boxes, was almost a thousand years old. I got up and walked over to the window. I could see the site where the priory had once stood: it was just below the castle, opposite the gates to the lodge.

Next, I tried one of the cabinets. The top drawer slid open easily. Inside were rows of glass boxes filled with birds’ eggs. They were carefully labelled in John’s hand. The kitsch way they were displayed was disconcerting; in each of the boxes, five eggs sat snugly in a tiny nest of delicately woven twigs and leaves. The twigs looked as if they had been specially gathered and cut to size. Had John made the nests himself, I wondered?

I opened the other drawers. These too were filled with eggs. There was something oddly compelling about the range of species and the meticulous way the collection had been ordered. The further I went down the cabinet, the bigger the eggs became: linnets, kingfishers,
red-backed shrikes, snipes, dotterels, little grebes – until I got to the bottom drawer, which was full of puffin eggs.

I moved on to the two cabinets beside it, and began working my way through the thirty-two drawers. They contained yet more birds’ eggs. In one drawer, I discovered some nightingale eggs that John had found on the Western Front in May 1915. Inside the box, there was a letter, which had been carefully folded. John had found the eggs at St-Jans-Cappel, a few miles behind the front-line trenches at Messines. The letter – to his uncle – was dated 23 May. It was a Sunday – a little over six weeks before John had vanished into thin air.

‘Old Boy,’ he had written:

Just a line to say good morning. I have no news whatsoever to give you. The French seem to be making gradual slow movements in the right direction. This afternoon Rothesay and I had nothing on earth to do so we went out into a jolly wood with books to read – very nice and quiet and peaceful, also lots of birds about.

I noticed a pair of nightingales and after a little trouble tracked them to their nest – which I took – a nice clutch of 5 – but also I forgot to bring my nesting appliances for blowing, etc. Would you look, old boy, in my bedroom, and on one of the bookshelves you will see a cigar box. Will you take out all the blow pipes and drills and send them to me in another box – and place the cigar box back on the shelf – I wanted a nightingale’s clutch and also it will be interesting as taken in France in 1915, won’t it? I blew one egg this evening with a straw but it was an awful job.

Goodnight old cock – don’t worry for the present.

It was the only letter I’d found. I looked through the two desks in the hall – and another chest of drawers. There was no sign of the missing correspondence.

Leaving the hall, I went into the room that John had used as a bedroom. Painted a pale shade of blue, it faced west, with a view across the terraced gardens. A tall glass-fronted cupboard stood against one wall. I turned the key to open it and peered inside. On the shelf directly in front of me was a large porcelain fruit bowl, prettily decorated with patterns of flowers. Looking closer, it appeared to contain
fragments of bones. Gingerly, I read the label attached to it. The bones were the remains of the medieval monks that John had exhumed from Belvoir Priory. Next to the bowl, there were pieces of seventeenth-century slipware and saltglaze pottery. There was also a pile of clay cuneiform tablets dating from the Babylonian period. I knew that John had been passionately interested in archaeology: the things in this cupboard had come from the sites that he had excavated. But to have kept the fragments of human bone suggested a fascination that verged on the morbid.

I focused on the rest of the room. It was crammed with John’s furniture. There were no other places where the missing letters might be. The large room at the end of the hall was virtually empty. There was just one room left to search.

As I entered, a wooden gantry, suspended from the ceiling, startled me. I had not spotted it earlier: it was in a corner to the left of the door. From a distance, the sinister-looking racks and pulleys lent it the appearance of some sort of instrument of torture. Littered across the floor in front of it were hundreds of small oblong wooden boxes; once stacked in piles, they had collapsed and fallen sideways.

Stepping around the boxes, I went over to have a look at the gantry.

At close hand, it was evident that it had been constructed as a housing for photographic equipment. A series of brass lamps, of different sizes, hung from the racks; the pulleys had been used to adjust the lighting. I bent down and picked up one of the wooden boxes. Inside it, there were some forty glass negatives, each wrapped in glassine paper. I held one up to the light. It was a photograph of John, aged four. The picture had a melancholy air about it. He stood, leaning against a pillar, holding the lead of a large dog which lay at his feet. He was wearing a velvet smock; his delicate, elfin face had a forlorn expression. ‘Myself. Belvoir Castle. 1890,’ the caption read.

I turned to look at the hundreds of boxes scattered over the floor. Here was yet
another
collection. The gargoyles, the birds’ eggs, the bones and the bits and pieces in the cupboard in the blue room were all things that John had collected. And now these. Thousand upon thousand of glass negatives – photographs that he had taken, and
which he had catalogued himself. Then I thought of the rooms below, deep in the bowels of the castle, and the hundreds of files spanning nine hundred years of history: John, I knew, had also catalogued every one of those tens of thousands of documents.