The Secret Rooms

September 30, 2013
While researching another book, historian Bailey uncovered mysterious gaps in the correspondence of the 9th Duke of Rutland, John Manners. Wondering who had removed the letters, she unravels secret after secret of the wealthy family at Belvoir Castle circa WWI. These include coded messages, a cover-up of a young boy’s death, disputes over inherited property, and possible military desertion. Bailey brings to life the calculating matriarch, Violet, Duchess of Rutland, who abandons John as a child and then tries to control every aspect of his life in adulthood via surveillance and emotional manipulation. She ruthlessly pursues a potential wife for her son and orchestrates a massive campaign to have him removed from the war’s front lines that involved prostituting her daughter to a married military adviser. Bailey also recalls some of the major events of the war, including the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, where Britain suffered massive casualties while John was kept safe, due to his mother’s machinations, and the Battle of Hill 60 at Ypres, where the Germans first used chemical weapons. Bailey deserves commendation for her meticulous research as well as her storytelling. Illus.

October 15, 2013
A British documentary producer and historian creates a bang-up detective story around mysterious gaps in the archives chronicling the sad tale of the ninth Duke of Rutland. The master of the Belvoir Castle, commanding thousands of acres and priceless treasures dating from the 11th century, the Duke of Rutland--John Henry Montagu Manners--died of pneumonia in the bowels of his keep in April 1940, not long after a top-secret convoy of royal documents was delivered to the castle for safekeeping during the war. Bailey is truly a dogged detective in getting at the essential questions surrounding the reclusive duke's labored death: What was he so keen on finishing before he would give up the ghost? An obsessive archivist, he had spent the last decades of his life carefully sifting through and cataloging the records pertaining to his family history, even before King George VI had sanctioned the evacuation of important national documents to the castle. In 2008, Bailey was allowed access to the duke's private sanctuary, which had been sealed after his death. In her tireless digging, she discovered three important omissions of material encompassing three distinct dates in John's life: August 1894, when he was 8 and his older brother, then heir to the dukedom, suddenly took ill and died; June 1909, when he was 22 and corresponding with his uncle in cipher about his father, who had attempted to sell off his inheritance; and, finally, during much of 1915, when he was supposed to be serving on the western front but instead returned home to Belvoir at the instigation of his mother. What Bailey essentially uncovers is an entire moribund way of life in the great aristocratic families and the shockingly self-serving privilege put before the sense of national purpose. A compelling expose on the once-almighty laws of ducal inheritance.

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December 1, 2013
While researching a book on WWI, historian Bailey stumbled on a crackerjack real-life mystery revolving around the life and times of John Henry Montagu Manners, the ninth Duke of Rutland. A meticulous curator who organized his illustrious family's documents and correspondence, he died in the archives suite of Belvoir Castle in 1940, refusing medical treatment until he completely expunged all records pertaining to three distinct yet interrelated periods in his life. As Bailey painstakingly unearths secret after secret in order to deduce what really happened between the years 1894 to 1915, the ghosts of scandals past surface in full force. Populated with a bevy of real-life aristos who played by their own twisted and privileged set of rules, a searing portrait of family intrigue, dysfunction, and hubris la Downton Abbeyemerges.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)