Read The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery for Free Online Page A

on every available surface; every inch of wall space was given over to cabinets and cases. Devoid of ornaments, or any attempt at beautification, they were rooms of hard lines and edges. There was nothing soft inside them.
    Room 1 was the last Mr Granger showed me. Two wooden steps led down into it from the passage. It was square-shaped and smaller than the other rooms, and the ubiquitous white cabinets crowded three sides of it. Along the other wall there was a fireplace, fitted with a small, cast-iron stove. A large Chesterfield sofa stood beneath a barred window.
    ‘That’s where the 9th Duke died,’ Mr Granger said, pointing at the sofa.
    It was covered in faded green chintz. Its springs had broken and it looked badly in need of re-stuffing.
    ‘What did he die of?’ I asked, curious.
    ‘Pneumonia,’ he replied. ‘He was relatively young. He was in his early fifties.’
    He moved across to the sofa and propped himself against one of its arms. ‘Most of these documents have never been seen,’ he said,looking up at the cabinets around us. ‘No one outside the immediate family has seen the twentieth-century papers. You are the first.’
    To his right, there was a window, secured by a folding iron grille. A small desk had been built into the alcove beneath it.
    ‘Why don’t you work over there?’ he suggested. ‘Most of the papers spanning the First World War are in here, and in the cases in Room 2. I’ll leave you to get on with it. If you need anything, you can find me at the end of the passage in Room 4.’
    He disappeared.
    I pulled up a chair to the desk. It felt strange to be working just a few feet from where the man who had assembled this remarkable collection had died.
    I had come to Belvoir to research a book about this small corner of England in the years of the First World War.
    In 1914, the Duke of Rutland’s estate had embraced thirty villages. In the first weeks of the war, 1,700 men – a fifth of the estate’s population – had left to fight on the battlefields abroad. They belonged to Britain’s villages’ lost generation: that mysterious army of ploughmen, horsemen and field workers who deserted the farms in the summer of 1914, many of them never to return.
    The testimony of farm worker Leonard Thompson , who grew up in a village in Suffolk, had inspired the idea for the book.
    In August 1914, at the age of nineteen, Leonard had volunteered for the Essex Regiment. ‘ We were all delighted when war broke out ,’ he remembered. ‘A lot of boys from the village were with me and although we were all sleeping in ditches at Harwich, wrapped in our greatcoats, we were bursting with happiness. We were all damned glad to have got off the farms. We were all so patriotic then and had been taught to love England in a fierce kind of a way. The village wasn’t England; England was something better than the village.’
    Early in 1915, Leonard’s battalion was drafted to Gallipoli. It is the confluence of what Philip Gibbs, the war correspondent, called ‘This’ and ‘That’ – the trenches, with life at home – which makes Leonard’s account of his first experience of war so heartrending:
We arrived at the Dardanelles and saw the guns flashing and heard the rifle-fire. They heaved our ship, the
River Clyde
, right up to the shore. They had cut a hole and made a little pier, so we were able to walk straight off and on to the beach. We all sat there, waiting for it to get light. The first things we saw were big wrecked Turkish guns, the second, a big marquee. It didn’t make me think of the military but of the village fetes. Other people must have thought like this because I remember how we all rushed up to it, like boys getting to a circus, and then found it all laced up. We unlaced it and rushed in. It was full of corpses. Dead Englishmen, lines and lines of them, and with their eyes wide open. We all stopped talking. I’d never seen a dead man before and here I was looking at two or three