The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery by Catherine Bailey Read Free Book Online

richest, most glamorous, most intriguing of all.
    Through marriage and friendship, their tentacles stretched from the kings and queens of Europe to Prince Yusopov in Russia – the future assassin of Rasputin. In Britain, they were close to Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, and to other leading figures of their day. So opulent was their lifestyle at Belvoir that it prompted Julian Grenfell – himself the son of an Earl – to remark to a friend’ ‘Isn’t it an absurd thing, really, that there should still be places like Belvoir? It’s just like a pantomime scene.’
    When war came, the family threw themselves behind it. At Belvoir, while the Duchess supervised the transformation of the castle into a hospital for Belgian refugees, the Duke was touring his estate, appealing for battalions of men. In London, Diana, their 22-year-old daughter, thought to be the most beautiful debutante of her generation, was working as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse, and at Luton, John, their 28-year-old son, who would later become the 9th Duke of Rutland, was training with his battalion, the 4th Leicestershires, as it prepared to embark for the Western Front.
    Four years later, the scale of violence and destruction had altered reality, bringing an end to the life and values of Victorian England. ‘ It was not just that millions died ,’ Lady Mary Elcho, a relative of the Duke of Rutland’s, remarked: ‘it changed the world,
our world
, for ever, shaking all things to their foundations, wasting the treasures of the past, and casting its sinister influence far into the future.’
    The breadth of the correspondence in the Muniment Rooms at Belvoir Castle offered a unique opportunity to chronicle their world as they stood on the cusp. Among historians and librarians, the reputation of the collection was unrivalled. The family, I was told, had guarded it jealously. Few, I understood, had been given permission to research in the Muniment Rooms. A mystique attached to the collection: ‘It is the holy grail,’ one historian had whispered to me.

8
    I stood in front of Case 15 in Room 2, looking at the sea of blue box files. The case was nine feet tall; there were sixty files crammed along the five shelves. It held the family’s correspondence for the first decades of the twentieth century; it was just one of nineteen cases I needed to go through.
    I reached for the first file on the top shelf. It was labelled ‘Personal Letters from Violet, Duchess of Rutland, 1914’.
    Violet was to be an important character in the book. Aged fifty-seven in 1914, she was the granddaughter of the 24th Earl of Crawford. She was brought up at Sutton Courtenay, an impressive medieval hall near Oxford, and her father, Colonel Charles Lindsay, had been a favourite of Queen Victoria and an intimate friend of Louis Napoleon. Her life had been lived at the centre of events. Following her marriage in 1882, she had become one of the most influential and well-connected women of her generation. In the years leading up to the war, invitations to her parties were coveted. Besides politicians and other wealthy aristocrats, Rudyard Kipling, Feodor Chaliapin, Sergei Diaghilev and Sir Edward Elgar were among the guests she had invited to her townhouse a few hundred yards from the Ritz. A mother of four children, she was also the central figure in the Manners family.
    I lifted the lid of the box. It was exciting to open it. Here was a time capsule. I was about to be transported into the Duchess’s world in 1914. Inside, the letters were held in place by a metal clip. The spring on the clip was stiff; as I raised it, particles of rust scattered over the documents beneath. The letters had not been sorted: they appeared to have been bundled straight into the file from the case or drawer where Violet had kept them. The imprint of the clip, I noticed, was stencilled in rust on the top letter: clearly, no one had looked at them for many years.
    Leafing through the pile, I