The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (26 page)

On 25 February – a day when the Duke is at Belvoir – Violet and Charlie meet at the family’s townhouse in Piccadilly. Aware of John’s encrypted note, Charlie presses his sister for an insight into her husband’s state of mind. As soon as the meeting is over, he reports back to John.

His letter does not tell us how the Duke is proposing to ‘frighten’ him, but he is anxious to impress upon his nephew exactly what his father thinks of him.

‘It appears that this talk your father had with your mother was even more serious than I first reported,’ he begins:

He has apparently got it into his head that you have treated him very badly. He was, it seems, very much cut up, in a state bordering on collapse and broken-hearted about it, talked about his son being the
last person he wanted to defraud, saying he could never forget the way you had behaved and ending by saying he was absolutely determined not to give in any more etc. Of course the thing’s all rot …

My advice is (or I am very strongly of the opinion) that you ought to correct this present mood by a friendly letter to your father, explaining that you never had any intention of behaving in an unfriendly or behind the back manner towards him. But I should leave the actual matter of the Agreement alone until later, or until some development occurs. I reason that you cannot possibly do any harm, or in any way give your case away by writing in this manner, whereas it might be the actual means of getting something out of him – you know the blitherer – he’ll probably be delighted with your letter.

‘No one of course knows that I am writing to you,’ he continued:

To my mind the only thing to save the situation is for your mother to tell him he is all wrong. Your mother was fearfully against you when we began our talk, but I so put the matter that she altered her views and when I asked her point blank whether she would take the responsibility of advising you to sign the deal as it stood, she said certainly not.

She means to write to you today – so do nothing till you get it.

Therefore till my next

Yours Charlie

BURN

Violet had broken Henry’s confidence by reporting their conversation to Charlie; he, in turn, had betrayed her trust by relaying it to John. Henry was claiming to be ‘broken-hearted’ when, purposely, he had set out to cheat his son. The deception and the double-dealing exposed the poisonous relationships within the family but, a hundred years later, they rendered it impossible to work out what was actually going on.

It was Charlie’s advice to John that I found completely mystifying. The Duke was trying to divest John of a substantial part of his inheritance, yet three times in the course of a week he had urged him to write a ‘friendly letter’ to his father. And this despite the fact that John had told him that the Duke was going ‘to try and frighten him’.

Why was Charlie being so conciliatory? In his coded letters to John, he had called his father ‘a liar’ and ‘a cheat’.

And why the subterfuge
?

Charlie was tiptoeing around the Duke: ‘Burn’; ‘Destroy’; ‘No one knows I am writing.’ The secrecy and the whispered conversations with Violet implied that John was guilty. But he wasn’t. Before he left for Rome, he had
told
his father that he would be appointing his own lawyer to look at the resettlement agreement: the charge that he had ‘gone behind his back’ was completely trumped up. It was Henry who had gone behind
his
back; he hadn’t discussed the agreement with him – the first John knew of it was when it was presented to him for signature. As for the agreement itself, the law was on John’s side: to alter the legal status of the heirlooms, Henry needed his permission.

It was almost a month since John had left for Rome and he had not heard from either of his parents since 2 February; yet, there he was, a thousand miles away, reading the dreadful things they were saying about him. Charlie had long since replaced them in his affections; still, they were his parents.

At this stage in the proceedings, we can only imagine his feelings. Charlie is denying him a voice. His instructions are explicit: ‘Do nothing until you hear from your mother.’

‘Tiring, isn’t it all?’ he remarks acerbically in a note to Charlie. But what was he
really
thinking?

It is only on 28 February, when, at last, Violet’s letter arrives at the embassy, that John’s voice kicks in.

The letter came a few hours before he was due to catch the night train to Calabria. He was on his way to Reggio to coordinate British aid efforts following the devastating earthquake.

Before leaving for the station, he wrote to Charlie:

Old Boy,

I’m off in an hour – no time for cipher.

I have written the best letter to father that I could in the time, I am afraid it is not as good as I should have liked, but I am dreadfully
pressed for time in getting things ready. On the other hand I think my letter will put things right for the time being.

Mother’s letter was a lot of rotten ‘hurt feelings’ etc. My God, what rot the whole thing is – I still believe it is all got up to try and make me give in – but we shall see. I expect to be round about Calabria for a week and will write to you when I get back as I don’t suppose I shall get a chance till then.

What a bombshell – and especially at this moment most unlucky.

I wish I was with you. Mother says I don’t understand everything.

Goodnight, old boy

But a postscript, hastily scribbled on the back of the envelope, reveals that John did not send the letter he had written to his father. At the last minute, he had substituted one that Charlie had drafted for him:

PS. Your draft is much better than mine. So have sent yours. My dear old boy, I can’t tell you how awfully grateful I am to you for helping me.

The letter was among the Duke’s papers at Belvoir. Judging by John’s handwriting, which lacked its usual neatness, he had evidently copied it out in a rush:

British Embassy

Rome

28 February 1909

My dear Father

I have just received a letter from Mother which has surprised me very much. I am very sorry indeed that you think that I have tried to be unfriendly and distrustful with you because I had no intention of doing anything underhand and I certainly did not think that what I was doing was making you feel miserable all the time, or I think I should have come and talked to you about it at once.

Mother says you told her it was an unheard of thing going to another lawyer. As a matter of fact some man
had
been appointed
by Dowling to represent me, for he sent me his name and address, just as if it was the usual thing, without my ever asking him to, and it was only because Dowling had been so rude and offhand when I wanted the epitome paper explained (not a word of which I could understand) that I thought of getting someone else who wasn’t a Dowlingite. Perhaps you have forgotten that I came and told you at once, in your bedroom in London, what I was doing and asked your permission to send particulars to the man, and you did not seem to object at all.

I can see now that it would have been much better if I had come straight to you about it but it was very difficult to decide what to do. I had several messages from you through the lawyers, and I thought it was very likely you would rather not talk to me privately at all, especially as when we were at Belvoir together you were as friendly as possible. All that time I felt very uncomfortable not knowing what I had better do and expecting every moment that you would say something yourself. I did not tell Mother anything about it and the only time I asked Charlie he said I had better go straight to you, which I wish I had done.

I don’t know whether I have explained myself properly but anyhow I hope you will see that I never meant to be unfriendly.

I wish I was in England and could have a talk with you alone – without anything to do with the lawyers. If you would like it, I will write and explain everything that I can remember about it.

Yours affectionately, John

Given that his father was trying to take away a significant proportion of his inheritance, the emollient tone was astonishing.

I imagined that John had torn up the letter that he had had second thoughts about sending. But he hadn’t. It was in the file of papers that he had kept from his time in Rome. This one was written from the heart; still, the anger I expected to find was absent:

British Embassy, Rome

My dear Father

I have just received a letter from Mother which distresses me very much and the worst of it all is that it has arrived at a most inconvenient
moment as I start for the Reggio Relief Camp in an hour, and so am dreadfully pressed for time in getting things ready and so can’t put on paper well what I want to.

I can’t tell you my dear Father what rot this all is, and can’t make out what you have got into your head, about trouble between Father and Son etc. This must be put right at once. I don’t believe for one moment that you really feel hurt, as Mother says you are.

I originally went to the lawyer (which by the way I told you I was going to do) because of two reasons.

The first was because Dowling was so infernally rude to me and would not help me to understand that enormous amount of writing which was just the same as Hebrew to me – that I should never have believed or trusted him – and as you have always instilled into me the one principle of never putting one’s name to anything one does not absolutely understand, I did not sign it.

As to the not mentioning it to you, that was a just a matter of not bringing a subject of this kind into the family home. And, as a matter of fact, as you did not mention it to me, I thought that you thought the same thing – that it was unnecessary.

I am afraid this letter is making no sense but I hope it will just put the one item right, which is that it is absolute rot for you to feel hurt and distressed. This is not a question of feeling that one’s son thinks that his father is going to have him.

I beg of you to put all this out of your mind at once.

I hope you will be able to read this and that it will convey my feelings to you of how sorry I am that you should have felt as no doubt you have over this matter. If you had only mentioned it before I left you would have had none of this hurt feeling – but I am sure this rotten letter will wipe it all out.

Your loving son

It was what he wasn’t saying that was revealing. While his anxiety to placate his father was undoubtedly real, the sentiments he was expressing were completely at odds with his true feelings. He hated his father. In the letters and telegrams he had encrypted to Charlie he had called him a cunt. He had gone out of his way to sooth his ‘hurt
feelings’; but he hadn’t believed in them. As he told Charlie, he thought they were ‘got up’ to make him give in. Charlie had agreed with him; yet, though equally contemptuous of the Duke, he had been as obsequious.

Given the true state of their feelings, the suspicion arising from both their letters was that they were conceding ground for a reason. It seemed they had an ulterior motive for wanting to keep relations on an even keel.

I could only think it was because the Duke had some sort of a hold over John, one that he and Charlie had not needed to spell out in their letters to each other, not even in cipher, because it was so obvious to them.

The missing piece in the puzzle was not a huge debt, or an embarrassing relationship, but an abandoned medieval manor house. Ghostly, falling slowly to ruin, it stood on a limestone escarpment in the Derbyshire Peaks.

The discovery gave me an uneasy feeling. The house was Haddon Hall. I knew that in 1909 it had mattered more than anywhere else to John.

The clue lay in an angry outburst from Violet: ‘That
Haddon Hall
is at this moment
nothing
to do with John,’ she told Charlie: ‘Henry can sell it! Henry can let it go to ruin – he need not spend a penny on it!’

The Hall, built of grey Derbyshire stone and dating back to the twelfth century, had come into the Rutlands’ possession in the 1560s, when Dorothy Vernon, a wealthy heiress, married John Manners, the second son of Thomas, 1st Earl of Rutland. At the time Violet was writing, the family had not lived in it for two hundred years. In 1703, after Sir John Manners, 9th Earl of Rutland, was created Duke of Rutland by Queen Anne, he had abandoned the Hall in favour of the larger Belvoir Castle, a more fitting residence for a Duke. Surplus to the Duke’s requirements and ill suited to Belvoir, much of the heavy oak medieval furniture housed in it had been left behind. Ever since, the Hall, a fortified manor house of turrets and battlements, had stood suspended in time.

The romance of Haddon had captivated John. In the summer months, while staying at the nearby Stanton Woodhouse, he and Charlie had picnicked among the ruins. Steeped in the history of the Middle Ages and the Reformation, the Hall appealed to John’s fascination with the past. He was drawn too by its fine architectural features, and as a boy his ambition had been to make its restoration
his life’s work. In 1907, when he came of age, he began work on the project, spending the bulk of his £1,500
*
allowance on building materials.

The knowledge that Henry could at any moment take Haddon away from him was what had kept John in his thrall. It was the hold his father had over him. It explains why John accepted the job at the embassy and why, in the period before he left, he was beholden to his parents. It also explains why, in the row over the resettlement agreement, both he and Charlie had been so contrite.

In 1909, the Hall, and the 20,000 acre estate that surrounded it, belonged solely to Henry. Under the terms of the complex legal arrangements that governed the passing of the family’s property from one generation to another, the Haddon estate was classed as ‘unsettled’, meaning it was not entailed and therefore did not automatically pass to John. As Violet had angrily – and correctly – pointed out, Henry could do with it as he liked.