Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Having really enjoyed the authors previous book Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty, I was looking forward to reading her new work. The Secret Rooms is the story of how Catherine Bailey set out to do some research for a book which ended up taking a completely different direction. When the author came to Belvoir, family home of the Duke of Rutland, she was intending to write a book about the 1,700 men of the estate who left to fight in WWI. However, when she attempted to look at the correspondence catalogued by the Duke, she found that there were three gaps: one in 1894, just before his ninth birthday, the second in 1909 when he was working in Rome and the third in 1915. When she looked at his war diary, the first pages were crammed full of war progress and movements, but after July 1915, it was a blank. What follows is the author first attempting to find what happened to the missing letters and then her search for what happened during those blank periods becomes the story she wants to write. John Henry Montagu, the 9th Duke of Rutland, was a second son. His elder brother died shortly before the first gap in his edited correspondence. He had three sisters, one of whom was Diana, later the socialite and wife of Duff Cooper. Bailey takes us methodically through her search for the truth. She asks why the Duke died in 1940, locked away in a set of rooms to which only a handful of people were admitted, at his family home Belvoir Castle? What made him spurn a more comfortable sickroom for the spartan one he chose, in order to remain there completing his work, even when he was seriously ill? What, in other words, did he have to hide? This is a work of great research and the author involves you completely in John's life and that of his family. While I have read much about his sister Diana, I knew little about her parents. John and Diana's mother Violet was a woman who enjoyed intrigue and who never recovered from the death of her eldest child. The problem with the book is that much is conjecture and, although Bailey solves the main mystery concerning WWI, she glosses over parts of the story she is unable to solve - the section regarding John's time in Rome is quite weak compared to the rest of the book. However, I enjoyed following the authors progress as she unravelled the mystery of the missing letters, tracking down the story and uncovering long held secrets in a time when the aristocracy would do anything to present the image they wanted to show the world.