The Secret Rooms: A True Story of a Haunted Castle, a Plotting Duchess, and a Family Secret by Catherine Bailey

Author:Catherine Bailey [Bailey, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101636749
Google: 5XE2AAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 37945697
Published: 2013-12-30T16:00:00+00:00

PART VI

37

It was first light on the morning of 27 August 1914 – the twenty-fourth day of the war – and Violet lay, half awake, in the master bedroom at Stanton Woodhouse, the family’s home in Derbyshire. A low, rambling Tudor mansion, with gables and lattice windows, it stood, nestled in a cluster of trees, at the end of a mile-long drive. Outside, wood pigeons cooed in the boughs of the tall elms that framed the house; beneath her window came the soothing sound of running water from the stream that ran through the steep hillside garden. Earlier, while she was sleeping, her maid had crept into her room to draw the curtains. The view stretched before her: over the sculpted yews and the gravelled pathways in the garden below, to the moors beyond, pale mauve in the hazy morning light.

By any standards Violet’s appearance at this hour was eccentric. Her silk-frilled nightdress was worn under a cream flannel kimono-shaped garment and her head was bound, seemingly in a knitted vest, the long sleeves of which wound around her chin. This elaborate structure, designed to keep her hair in place, accentuated the coarseness of her features. Forty years before, when she was eighteen, Mrs Patrick Campbell, the actress and muse to George Bernard Shaw, had described her as the ‘most beautiful thing I ever saw’. While her former beauty was still evident in her bone structure, age had added a fleshiness to her face. There was a ruthlessness about it too. Unkindly, Margot Asquith, the prime minister’s wife, likened her to a ‘Burne Jones Medusa’. Her daughter-in-law, Cynthia, had been crueller, noting ‘the faintly sinister strangeness of her eyes so deeply set in shadowy caverns’.

Propping herself up in the Elizabethan four-poster bed, Violet opened her mouth wide and screamed. Invariably, this was her first action on waking. The ‘stylized scream’, as Diana, her daughter, described it, was the signal to Tritton, her maid, to bring in her breakfast tray.

It would be lunchtime before Violet left her bedroom. The first half of her day followed a set routine. ‘My mother spent the mornings in bed,’ Diana remembered: ‘I see her sitting cross-legged writing endless letters with a flowing quill pen. On her knee was balanced a green morocco folding letter-case, with blotting paper and a pot of ink which, curiously enough, never got splashed on the Irish linen sheets.’

*

Downstairs, Henry was up and dressed for breakfast. Seated at a long black oak table in the panelled hall, he was going through the morning’s post.

Among the letters was one from John’s general:

Headquarters, North Midland Division

Stockwood Park

Luton

My Dear Henry,

One line to tell you that your boy is doing excellent work. He is really first rate, and I am very glad to have him on my staff. I hope we shall all be over the water in about 6 weeks’ time, prodding the Germans in the back part of their front!

Yours ever

Eddy Stuart Wortley

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