Excerpt from The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife, and the Missing Corpse by Piu Marie Eatwell, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Thoroughly exhausted by their long journey, the members of the new duke's party retired to bed, Charlie, the sickly half-brother, being accommodated as best he could in the chilly rooms. When the party embarked on a full exploration of the house the next day, they found that – apart from the ducal suite – it was entirely empty. All the rooms were painted pink, with parquet floors, bare of any furniture save that each had a 'convenience' in the corner – completely exposed to public view. In one room lay a huge stack of paintings: Old Masters, and other priceless treasures. Many were cut out of their frames, and all were dusty and neglected. In the great kitchen there was a large cooking spit, where a chicken used to be kept permanently roasting for the 5th Duke. He would eat one half in the morning, and the other in the evening. Rare Gobelins tapestries tumbled out of long tin boxes, preserved with peppercorns. One room was lined with stacks of green boxes, in each of which was a dark brown wig. In other cupboards were boxes of cream Balbriggan socks and white silk handkerchiefs. Some of the handkerchiefs were embroidered with the initials 'SP' for 'Scott Portland', others with the ducal coronet. Yet others carried mysterious initials, such as 'LL', 'HH' or 'T'. These were thought, at the time, to be the locations in which they were kept.

Most extraordinary of all, however, was the vast network of underground tunnels, passages and rooms that the 5th Duke had constructed. These criss-crossed beneath the abbey in a vast labyrinth, like a Nottinghamshire Palace of Knossos. The 5th Duke seemed to have inherited more than a share of the mania for building that characterized his distant ancestor, Bess of Hardwick. In his case, however, the results were below, rather than above, ground. There was a tunnel over one thousand yards in length, leading from the house to the colossal riding school that the duke had built. This was wide enough for several people to walk side by side. A longer and more elaborate tunnel, one and a half miles long and intended as a carriage drive broad enough for two carriages to pass, led towards Worksop, although this had been abandoned a few years before. Railway lines ran along some of the tunnels between the kitchen and dining rooms, so that food could be conveyed in heated trucks.

Radiating out from the tunnels was a network of underground rooms. Three of these were very large and the third was truly immense, being a hundred and sixty feet long and sixty feet wide. The underground rooms were painted pink like the rooms above them, with skylights in the roof to let in the daylight. These skylights could be seen above ground, where they appeared as circular glass windows set at the edge of the paths that tracked over the estate. The skylights had been installed, at intervals of twenty feet, to light and ventilate the underground rooms and tunnels. Even today, both tunnels and skylights are marked on Ordnance Survey maps of the area.

The largest underground room, which had been intended originally as a church, was later used as a ballroom. And yet the 5th Duke never entertained. The whole place was a construction site: shovels, wheelbarrows and builders' rubble lay everywhere. For the child Ottoline, there was 'no beauty in these rooms – they were just vast, rather bare, empty rooms, and except for the top lighting, one would not have been aware that they were sunk into the earth.' The only relief from the endless miles of pink walls was the ceiling of the old riding school, which the 5th Duke – in what must have been an unaccustomed fit of gaiety – had painted in soft and rosy sunset hues, before lining the walls with mirrors, 'leaving the mock sunset to shine on the lonely figure reflected a hundred times in the mirrors around him'.

The new duke shuddered at the chilly emptiness of the cavernous space that he had inherited, and was minded simply to shut it up and leave. However, his stepmother – a kindly but formidable lady – persuaded him to stay and do his duty. She then set about making something approaching a normal home out of the vast mausoleum of Welbeck Abbey, ordering furniture from London, trawling through attic rooms and chests, beginning the immense task of cataloguing the -abandoned treasures of the neglected mansion.

Excerpted from The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife, and the Missing Corpse by Piu Marie Eatwell. Copyright © 2015 by Piu Marie Eatwell. Excerpted by permission of Liveright / WW Norton. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.