The Secret Rooms
Courtesy my mother, (who always pays attention when you write notes in a catalog* with the words "I WANT THIS!!!!"), I received The Secret Rooms by Catherine Bailey for Christmas. This incredibly compelling book follows Bailey's search for truth while engaged in a relatively innocuous WWI research project at the Belvoir Estate in England. Stymied in her plans to find out about the war's devastation on the men in the nearby villages (many of whom lost their lives), she can not help but wonder why the estate's meticulous records should have such a deep hole during the war period. So Bailey digs a little deeper and finds other holes, all of them tied to the 9th Duke of Rutland (Belvoir is one of Rutland's holdings) who died in 1940 and apparently, until his final moments, was feverishly working to hide something in "secret rooms" beneath the castle.
This book has literally everything you would want in an epic family drama plus some serious upstairs/downstairs social commentary.
Bailey is a careful researcher--she methodically moves through the existing records at the estate and then sets out to other archive collections to find information to fill the Belvoir gaps. What she finds is a story of family strife and conflict that includes everything from parental neglect to attempts to sway military decisions during WWI. There's also a lot here about dukes in general and how one becomes a duke and what happens to a duke's holdings when he dies. That kind of thing was candy for me--I never get tired of trying to figure out how the royal thing works in England.
As an aside, the 9th Duke's sister, Diana, married Duff Cooper after WWI and they were quite the famous couple in their day. (Although he cheated on her with basically everyone if wikipedia is to be believed. How on earth do these men find the time for all this messing around?)
For all the dramarama in The Secret Rooms, it is surprisingly not all that gossipy. Mostly, I found it shocking how the Duke's family chose to live. For all their wealth and social status these were deeply unhappy people who seemed more intent upon inflicting pain on each other than anything else.
Which makes for fascinating reading, of course!
[Post pic of Belvoir Castle taken in 2011 via Creative Commons.]
*Bas Blue catalog - a great collection of carefully selected books and bookish gifts that I heartily recommend!
