The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (53 page)

‘It was all too wonderful – travelling down with my Kakoo and feeling her to really belong to me,’ John wrote in his journal. ‘Mrs Tennant had told me that my darling had started her monthly two or three days before and that she was in the middle of it – so I knew what to expect which I was very thankful for, so that I should not bother my darling when I got into bed with her for the first time. But the following night it was all right – so we did things together. I did my best to hurt my darling as little as possible. We had the most glorious 3½ weeks at Belvoir that could ever be. Then we went to London – to 28 Eaton Terrace.

‘My darling felt a little sick on Feb 1st and I knew that she had started a baby – but I did not tell her. She only knew when the time for her monthly in Feb. was passed. Then she knew – and we were so happy about it.’

We are now back in the Muniment Rooms in the early hours of the morning of 21 April 1940. John lies, shrouded under an oxygen tent, on the sofa in Room 1. A fire burns in the grate, the light from the flames reflecting on the tall glass cases that surround him. For two years, he has barely left these rooms. His days and nights have been spent sifting through his mother’s papers. They are almost in order, but not quite. He can do no more. He is dying.

One last letter from Violet, which was in the trunk of correspondence that John was working on before he died, explains what happened after his wedding in January 1916.

Two weeks after he married Kakoo at St Margaret’s, Westminster, dressed, for all the world to see, in his service uniform, he asked his mother to write to Field Marshal Lord French, the new Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces.

It was not an easy letter to write – as Violet’s draft reveals. She was having to go cap in hand to the man whose offers John had repeatedly spurned:

Dear Lord French

I am again in great anxiety about my boy/son. If I didn’t think this alone would excuse me in your eyes, I don’t know how I would dare to write/appeal to you again for help after all your very great kindness to me and to him last year, which indeed neither of us are likely to forget.

He goes before a Medical Board about March 2. I can only say how greatly/wildly relieved and happy I should be if something could be found for him by that time. Something, however humble/subordinate, but that would be under your own particular wing and protection.

I know quite well it is where he has wished to be, always, even when over loyalty to his General made him throw away so great a chance/opportunity.

You will think it ‘Mother’s talk’ but it is this very loyalty and faithfulness to those he serves which is so strong a trait in his character and upon which you, of all others, could absolutely and for ever depend. I fear his Staff experience has been too short to tell much in his favour, though he did very well, his General always praising him and relying upon him.

My great fear now, is that after the Medical Board (which is very unlikely to pass him for anything but light duty) the state of unrest and uncertainty in which he has been for some months, may drive him into taking some unwise and hasty course, which I shall not be able to prevent.

I do hope you will forgive me. It is indeed a very poor way of showing you how really grateful I am for all you have already done for me.

Early in March, John was appointed ADC to the field marshal – a post he held for the rest of the war.

John’s position as one of the most privileged young men in England gave him a choice and he took it. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, his reasons for doing so are compelling: he wanted to be with the woman he loved and to see his unborn child. But in the context of his time, his decision was unforgivable. The four million British men who served in the Great War, 673,375 of whom were killed, had no choice but to fight.

One last mystery remains. John has left nothing to tell us when he came to regret his decision. After March 1916, the war lasted for another two and a half years. He could have gone back to the Front at any time. But he didn’t. Whether the conflict between desire and obligation tormented him while he was in London, we cannot know. If he had confided in Kakoo, these letters are also missing from the Muniment Rooms.

The tragic irony is that, but for his brother’s death, he would not have been faced with a dilemma.

Haddon was the dagger in his back. Had he lived, John’s life would have followed a different trajectory. He would not have become Duke: the choice he made in the winter of 1916 would not have been open to him.
Some 1,500 members of the aristocracy
served in the war. Two hundred and seventy were killed in action, or died from their wounds. The heirs to Britain’s dukedoms were the exception; of those eligible to fight, more than a third had escaped the trenches. But their younger brothers had fought with distinction. Had John been a second son, I was sure he would have been among them.

Throughout the first year of the war, this gentle, sensitive man had tried, in the face of all temptation, to do the right thing. He had resisted every one of his mother’s efforts to keep him back from the Front. When he made his choice, he knew he was in the wrong. It was why he had held out against his mother for so long. Yet what he could not have known was the extent to which his decision would come to haunt him.

When that moment came, we don’t know. But after 1918, the source of his shame was all around him. Two hundred and forty-nine men from the Belvoir estate were killed in action. For the remainder of his life, John had had to look the families of these men in the eye. Every year, on Armistice Day, he had marched at the head of the columns of veterans that had paraded through the village streets. On becoming Duke, his position determined that he was the first to step forward to lay a wreath of poppies on the war memorial. The congregation in the remembrance service that followed had risen to their feet when he came to take his place in the front pew. All the while, he had kept up the pretence that he had served honourably in the war. It was no wonder he died in an agony of guilt.

The names of the war dead are carved on the memorials in the villages below the castle. It was this lost generation – ‘that mysterious army of ploughmen, horsemen and field workers’, as the historian Ronald Blythe described them – that had brought me to Belvoir in
the first place. In obliterating the records in the Muniment Rooms, John had prevented me from following their stories.

It seems fitting
to end by remembering them.