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1 " 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. "
― , The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery
2 " People don't get gentler as they get older but rather, harder. "
3 " But they turned out to be prescriptions for medicines, and not for the common cold: opium, lavender oil, belladonna, orange rind, chloral hydrate, strychnine, potassium bromide. Such sedatives and stimulants were common remedies at that time for epilepsy. "
― , Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty
4 " 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. "
5 " 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. "
6 " Writing to her from America, her best friend remarked, ‘I’ve stopped reading fiction, I just read about you. "
7 " 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. "
8 " prompted questions to be asked at the time. "
9 " Charlie that he was being "
10 " 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. "
11 " that Whistler sensed – or was aware of – the tragedy in the family’s recent past. "
12 " were ninety-four cases in the five rooms; together, they held over a thousand "
13 " Don't shut yourself up with books entirely; that is an unhealthy process for anyone, and leads to no practical end. "
14 " 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. "
15 " agenda. After "
16 " The old adage that the sins of the father fall upon the children has no better example to prove its truth than the example of the bastard. He is the victim; he suffers the penalty of a sin committed before he was born. In a village where every cupboard skeleton is the common knowledge of all, where every tongue hat has a weakness for wagging, has plenty of material to wag about, the existence of an illicit sexual union is not made a pleasant one. "
17 " Other sounds woke the hamlet: the blast of a ship's foghorn blown at the pit top to mark the start of the shift; the echo of others - 'buzzers', as they were called - from the pits in the valley below. For the deep sleepers, there was the 'knocker-up'; a human alarm clock, he used a long pole to rattle the window panes of the households that paid him a few pennies each week. "
18 " Traipsing the tunnels alone, the boys depended on the ponies for companionship; if their lamps went out, as they frequently did, a pony could guide them home. 'The ponies knew their way around their own district of the pit and could always find their way back to the pit bottom. They did this by travelling against the air which was being fed down the shaft,' Jim remembered. 'If you got caught in the dark, you grasped your pony's tail and tried to get your head just below the level of his back while he walked slowly - never offering to kick you - straight back to the pit bottom. "
19 " cloak of secrecy: the private asylums and single-lodging establishments, both "
20 " The Duke of Portland was one of the richest coal owners in England. In the 1860s, when construction first began, a miner working at one of his collieries earned around £50 a year. The Duke’s annual income was in the region of £108,000. Whimsy, not wages, drove him to burrow underground; an eccentric and a recluse, he could not bear to be seen. The Duke spent his life wandering "