The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (55 page)

It was in this house that Violet died, aged eighty, on 22 December 1937.
In the last week of her life
, after an operation for appendicitis failed, she lay delirious, singing, as Diana recalled, ‘snatches of old songs like Ophelia, and describing in some new-given idiom, the things strange and beautiful that passed before her half-blind eyes’.

John and Diana were with her at the end. And yet there is a macabre twist to Violet’s passing.

Within hours of her death, John released a statement to the press. It was published in
The Times
the next morning:

The condition of Violet, Duchess of Rutland, was stated last night to show a very slight change for the better.

For five days, John went on issuing bulletins to
The Times
and other papers, saying his mother’s health was improving, when actually she lay dead at Chapel Street.
‘I stayed with her,’
Diana recalled, ‘through this macabre holiday, warding off the inquisitive press, lying to anxious enquirers, trying to calm and silence the faithful maid and the rest of her people.’

John had not wanted his mother’s death to interfere with the family Christmas at Belvoir – a gathering of more than twenty friends and relations. It was only on 28 December, six days after Violet died, that he finally allowed the announcement to be made. It appeared in the Court Circular pages of
The Times
:

We have to announce that Violet, Duchess of Rutland, died yesterday morning. The funeral will take place at Belvoir on Thursday.

Violet was buried in the mausoleum alongside Haddon and Henry.

Two months after her death, John donated his brother’s tomb, which his mother had spent half her life sculpting, to the Tate Gallery.

It was only after his death in 1940 that a copy of the original was placed in the chapel at Haddon Hall – a wish that Violet had expressed from the beginning, and which John had denied.

Illustrations

1. Belvoir Castle, looking east towards Woolsthorpe,
c
.1935.

2. The Guard Room at the castle. The door leading to the former servants’ quarters is to the left of the fireplace.

3. John, 9th Duke of Rutland, with his wife, Kathleen, and Roger, his youngest son, at King George VI’s coronation in May 1937.

4. Room 1, where John died in April 1940. The sofa on which he died is at the centre of the picture.

5. The Elizabeth Saloon, one of the many state rooms at the castle.

6. The Guard Room, March 1940. Boxes containing documents from the Public Record Office are stacked to the left of the arch.

7. The Muniment Rooms (at the base of the Round Tower), as seen from the gun-carriage terrace. The two drainpipes that Hilda Lezard scaled to break into the castle are to the left of the tower.