The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery

If you keep your head screwed on right in so doing, then your experience thus gained is most valuable in enabling you to gauge human beings and their ways. (Advice in letter from 8th Duke of Rutland, to his son later the 9th Duke.

Writing to her from America, her best friend remarked, ‘I’ve stopped reading fiction, I just read about you.

The closure of the rooms and the servants’ stories are pieces in the puzzle. Now it is necessary to step back to the true beginning of this story – the moment when I first entered these rooms, before I even knew they concealed a mystery.

that Whistler sensed – or was aware of – the tragedy in the family’s recent past.

Charlie that he was being

prompted questions to be asked at the time.

Large signs were painted on the outsides of the warehouses, which were named after the spices stored inside them. Cayenne Court; Cumin Wharf; the Cardamon Building; there was a warehouse for each variety. Centuries of spices had infused the brickwork of the buildings; the smell of spices, and the stink from the mud and slime on the banks of the the river was overpowering.

Don't shut yourself up with books entirely; that is an unhealthy process for anyone, and leads to no practical end.

To be able to say 'sorry' to a woman- a sister, or a mother, is a most helpful thing, whether sorry or not. Still, for the sake of peace and gentleness at home just 'Sorry''which doesn't bind you to anything---but it turns away wrath! And soreness! And is like sunshine and hurts no one.

People don't get gentler as they get older but rather, harder.

It is, quite possibly, a matter for argument, whether the time may not soon arrive when it would be wiser to urge him towards things he has a turn for and will do well, rather than push him towards things which you pre-conceive to be better and which certainly are better for other people.

In a note written shortly before her death, Violet had expressed the wish that her son should be the arbiter of what was left for history to judge of her life: 'He [John] may look and destroy, or keep everything.' she had instructed. The task had consumed him. From the moment she died, he had rarely emerged from the Muniment Rooms.

were ninety-four cases in the five rooms; together, they held over a thousand