The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery Read online

  Lord Dawson had been in and out of the Duke’s rooms throughout the preceding week. What, the servants wondered, could be so important that the Duke was keeping Britain’s most trusted medical adviser waiting?

  In a castle alive with gossip, a moment of absent-mindedness on the part of the fourth housemaid yielded a key piece of information.

  3

  It was a few minutes past eleven when the five housemaids trooped into the ballroom. Taking off their white starched aprons, they formed up in a line. The room was lofty, echoing the sound of their footsteps and voices, as in a church. Along one side of it, there were nine windows; between them, stone piers, with flowered capitals, arched upwards to the vaulted roof.

  The oak floor – almost three thousand square feet of it – had to be polished by hand. It was an onerous task, one the housemaids least liked doing. Bending down, they placed their tins of wax on the floor. As they stooped on to their hands and knees, their long black dresses spread out around them.

  Working in unison, they dabbed their cloths in the wax; then they rubbed the floor vigorously in quick, tight circles. Along the five-strong line, the action was synchronized, the movement rippling the full skirts of their dresses, fanned behind them. They chatted as they polished: about the war, the state of the Duke’s health, and their families and children.

  The housemaids had climbed the spiral staircase in the Flag Tower to get to the ballroom. On the ground floor, where they had come from, there were fifty rooms. On this, the second floor of the castle, which was of a similar square footage, there were just twenty-three rooms. It was where the Duke and his family lived and entertained.

  Ahead, and a little off to the right, was the Elizabeth Saloon, a vast, fuchsia-pink drawing room of breathtaking opulence. Its painted ceiling depicted the myth of Jupiter and Io and the walls were fitted with panels of blue silk damask. Everything inside it was gilded: the ormolu console tables, the picture frames, the Louis Quatorze chairs and chaises longues, the fretwork on the walls and ceiling, even the curtain rails. Peacocks in their pride – the family’s crest – were emblazoned on the specially woven carpet and on the fireback in the huge hearth.

  The rooms beyond the Saloon were equally magnificent, and were filled with treasures the dukes had collected over centuries. There were the Chinese Rooms and the King’s Rooms with their exquisite hand-painted wallpaper and great canopied beds; the Tapestry Room, where Poussin’s Sacraments hung alongside the beautiful Mortlake tapestries of The Naked Boys; the two libraries, where the numbered bookcases – sixty in total – were lined with rare books. Then there were the two picture galleries which linked the rooms. Their walls were crammed with Old Masters: Holbein, Gainsborough, Stubbs, Reynolds and Rembrandt were but a few of the artists whose works were on display.

  Perhaps the most stunning room of all was the 132-foot long Regent’s Gallery, which the Duke used as his living room. Its walls were a pale pistachio green; the luxuriant velvet curtains and the fabric on the sofa and chairs crimson and muted pinks. Three Waterford chandeliers, sculpted from hundreds of tiny pieces of crystal, hung from the ceilings; marble busts, mounted on pillars, stood centurion-like along the gallery’s length. Above the fireplaces there were gilded mirrors; beside them, the famous Don Quixote tapestries.

  The ballroom, by contrast, was sparsely decorated. A hundred and twenty feet long and just twenty-four feet wide, it was rarely used for dancing; it was more of a corridor – a link to the state rooms beyond. That morning, it was looking more dismal than usual. Against the right-hand wall, piled six feet high, were hundreds of bundles of documents from the Public Record Office. All the furniture, with the exception of a glass cabinet, had been removed. The cabinet displayed a gruesome set of eighteenth-century surgical instruments. Neatly slotted in a faded leather case were the picks, scalpels, knives and hacksaws that surgeons had used to amputate the leg of Lord Robert Manners, an ancestor of the Duke’s who was wounded at sea during the American War of Independence. The leg had turned septic and he had died shortly after the operation. Above the cabinet, there was a macabre painting of the death scene.

  The housemaids hated working in the ballroom. The imposing staircase that took up one end of the room frightened them. ‘That staircase was haunted,’ a former maid remembered. We always did our polishing facing it. We wouldn’t work with our backs turned to it. That way the stairs were straight ahead.’

  The castle’s Regency Gothic style was a pastiche of the classic ‘house of horror’ – the sinister ancestral home that formed the central convention of the Gothic novel. In the evenings, when the sun set behind it, the towers, turrets and crenellated battlements were forbiddingly silhouetted against the dusk sky. Ghosts had entered its mythology; in the servants’ hall, many claimed to have seen them.

  The ballroom staircase was the place the servants feared the most. Sweeping down to the Guard Room two floors below, it was the main thoroughfare in the castle. Family portraits of former dukes and duchesses, resplendent in ermine, adorned its walls. The steps, of bare stone – framed by a wrought-iron balustrade, topped by a mahogany rail – were wide and shallow.

  ‘We were all scared of the ballroom stairs,’ Sheila Osborne, a former maid, remembered: ‘I was coming down them one evening. Halfway down, I felt somebody push me. They were behind me, trying to push me down the stairs. I turned round, and of course there was no one there.’

  A number of the male servants, sceptical of ghosts as they were, had experienced a similar sensation. ‘My father used to keep an eye on the castle when His Grace was away,’ Dorothy Plowright recalled. ‘He’d walk around in the dark with his dogs, no lights, no torches or anything. One night, he was coming across Forty-Acre – that’s what they called the landing on the first floor – and he got to the top of the ballroom stairs and he felt this hot breath on the back of his neck. He turned round. There was nobody there. But the dogs wouldn’t go any further; their hackles went right up. He said it was ages before he could get them to move.’

  It was coming up to lunchtime and the housemaids had almost finished polishing the ballroom floor. They had drawn level with the macabre painting of Lord Robert Manners that hung above the glass cabinet containing the surgical instruments used in the operation that had killed him.

  It was at this moment that Margaret, the fourth housemaid, ran out of polish. Mrs Ward, the housekeeper, often patrolled the castle to inspect her girls’ work; to be caught with an empty tin of wax was a grave crime, punishable by a severe scolding or, worse, the loss of a day off. Margaret had forgotten to bring a spare tin with her; she would have to go and fetch one from the pantry on the ground floor. If she cut down the ballroom stairs and along the passage outside the Duke’s rooms, she would be back within a couple of minutes.

  Taking the dreaded stairs at a run, she darted across the Guard Room and was soon in the passage. Immediately, she was struck by its emptiness. There was no sign of the doctors. The steel door to the rooms was ajar, and she could hear the low murmur of voices coming from inside. The door opened outwards. Curiosity overcame her. Stealing up to it, she hid behind it.

  Straightaway, she recognized the voice of Mr Speed, the Duke’s valet.

  ‘No, my Lord,’ she heard him say. ‘I’m sorry, but His Grace is not ready to see you.’

  Margaret could not catch Lord Dawson’s reply, only its note of protest. But she heard Mr Speed clearly.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ the valet said again. ‘His Grace has something he must finish.’

  Slipping out from behind the door, Margaret continued along the passage. What she had overheard gave her a pleasant feeling of her own importance; it was something to tell the other servants over lunch.

  4

  Lunch, in the servants’ hall, was at twelve sharp. Three stone steps led from the Flag Tower up into the hall; the steps were rutted, worn down by the hundreds of feet that had passed through its doors. The hall, paved with flagstones, was dimly lit. The single wind
ow, set high in the rafters of the timbered roof, let in little light. In high summer the smell of rotting carcasses drifted through it from the fish and game larders in the courtyard outside.

  The servants – maids of all descriptions, odd-job men, footmen, the flag man, the hall porter, the telephone boy, the boiler stoker and the stewards’ room boy – were seated on the two benches that ran either side of a long table beneath a photograph of King George VI. The hall was solely for the use of the under-servants. The senior members of the Duke’s household dined in the housekeeper’s rooms, an appropriately gentrified suite in the west wing of the castle overlooking the splendid terraced gardens.

  The under-butler, whose job it was to look after the Duke’s gold and silver plate, sat at the head of the table. On his right sat the head housemaid, with her four assistants in order of precedence. On his left was the first footman; next to him, the second footman – and so on through the ranks.

  The light from the fire in the huge grate flickered on the housemaids’ starched aprons, touching them with orange; it shimmered in the gold buttons on the footmen’s tailcoats. ‘Their tailcoats were fitted at the waist with four gold buttons on either side and two at the join,’ a housemaid recalled. ‘There were eight gold buttons along the sleeves. They all had the peacock crest on them. That was the Duke’s crest.’

  Towards the lower end of the table, the other servants appeared drab by contrast. The kitchen maids, scullery maids and pantry maids were a blur of grey serge; the workmen and the coal carriers were in dark three-piece worsted suits. The dull colours of their uniforms reflected their position. They were lowest in the chain and rarely seen ‘upstairs’.

  Charlie Tweed, who was well into his eighties, kept a glassy eye on proceedings. ‘He had a very long white beard did Charlie,’ George Waudby remembered. ‘He was in charge of the servants’ hall. He was meant to keep us in order. It was his job to make sure the men behaved themselves and that they took their hats off.’

  Born in the 1850s, Charlie Tweed had worked at the castle since he was six. When he was a boy, buglers, dressed in doublet and hose, had walked the corridors of the upper floors sounding their bugles to announce meals. ‘Mr Tweed wasn’t up to much,’ George Waudby recalled. ‘He was ancient. But the Duke kept him on. The castle was his life. One of his jobs was to bang the gong for dinner upstairs. I can see him struggling into his livery. He often forgot to do it. We used to have to cover for him, or else we’d have to remind him. “Come on, Charlie,” we’d say. “It’s time to bang the gong. It’s seven o’clock.” ’

  In the course of Charlie Tweed’s long years of service, the faces around the table may have changed, but the names remained the same: Stannage, Draper, Coy, Thornton. They were old local families who had moved up and down the ranks of servants at Belvoir Castle for centuries.

  They came from the picturesque cottages of brilliant yellow stone that stood in the lee of the castle, and from the hamlets and villages that nestled in the hollows and crowned the hilltops of the Duke’s six by nine mile estate. It was rural country, barely touched by the twentieth century. The soil, a rich clay, was ideally suited to corns and grasses, and field after field stretched to the horizon, broken up here and there by ancient copses.

  Many of the servants had been born in the Duke’s villages; rarely had they travelled far beyond them. Sparsely populated, these villages, with no more than a few hundred inhabitants at most, were backward, inward-looking places. In the fields around them, big-barrelled Black Shires with white-stockinged legs, the descendants of the great working horse of medieval times, still ploughed the land. Horse Key, Pringle, Break Back Close, Low Warm, Top Abbot, Middle Abbot: every field had a name. All the names were known.

  Outsiders rarely ventured on to the Duke’s estate. It was a landscape that anyone crossing it was expected to know. The lanes were narrow, bordered by towering hedgerows, the slender spires of the village churches the only landmarks. On winter evenings, and at dawn on summer mornings, a thick mist rolled across the fields, obscuring all. At the junctions and crossroads, signposts were few and far between; now, with the coming of war, the Duke had ordered his servants and employees to scratch out the names of the villages, a precaution against a German invasion.

  In the servants’ hall, one end of the long trestle table was empty. War had reduced the size of the household: a number of the under-servants had been called up and were absent on active service. The diminished numbers, the excited notes of conversation, the light from the flickering flames, lent the scene an intimacy.

  From the moment they had assumed their customary places on the benches, the conversation had turned on the bizarre events of the past twenty-four hours.

  The Duke’s secret rooms, by their very nature, held the servants in thrall. ‘It was an area that we never entered, never saw, or ever knew what went on. It was a place of mystery,’ George Waudby said. ‘We knew there were five rooms – you could see the windows from the gun-carriage terrace. But what he did in there, we had no idea.’

  The rooms were the subject of wild speculation, fuelled by the servants’ fear of the Duke, and their knowledge of his eccentric interests.

  To his servants, as George Waudby recalled, the Duke was a distant, Heathcliffian figure. ‘He was fierce-looking, a very frightening man. About six foot tall and very thin. We never saw him that much – he spent all his time in those rooms. But when we did, he was not an easy person to work for. He was very sharp. Often very cross in nature. I don’t think he was a happy man.’

  ‘He was a peculiar man with strange interests,’ said Footman Clarence Harper. ‘He collected things. All over the castle they were. Birds’ eggs, thousands of them; old brass fire-insurance plates; bits and pieces of pottery that he’d dug up. There was some as said collecting was what stopped him from going mad. On his right hand, he kept his nails an inch long. Curled they did, like talons. They said he kept them like that for scraping the mud off old tiles.’

  It was the Duke’s ‘strange interests’ that frightened his under-servants the most.

  His morbid interest in tombs and ancient corpses was well known. On 11 February 1923, in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt as a friend of Lord Carnarvon’s, he had been one of the first to see the interior of Tutankhamun’s tomb. When he was a young man, the Duke had opened a number of tombs in the vicinity of Belvoir Castle – reportedly in search of King John’s heart and the grave of Robert de Todeni, his eleventh-century ancestor. In the 1920s, there had been further exhumations. In the crypt at St Mary’s Church in Bottesford, where his predecessors, the earls of Rutland, were buried, he had exhumed eight tombs. According to a theory in vogue at the time, the fifth Earl of Rutland was believed to have been William Shakespeare. The Duke had apparently wanted to find his tomb. But why it had been necessary to exhume all the earls of Rutland mystified his servants.

  The Duke was also known to be fascinated by the occult. Sir Oliver Lodge, the founder and president of the Society for Psychical Research, and La Mina, one of the most famous mediums of her day, were frequent guests at the castle.

  His interest in supernatural phenomena played to his servants’ fears. ‘It wasn’t just that the Duke dug up dead bodies. He thought the castle was haunted,’ one said. He often had the mediums in. We never knew, of course, whether any ghosts or spirits were actually summoned. It all went on behind closed doors.’

  In the Flag Tower, the clock struck one. The single chime of the bell signalled the end of lunch.

  By the back door in the kitchen, the usual queue had formed. At this hour, every day, the poor from the nearby villages traipsed up the hill to the castle to collect the leftovers from the castle meals.

  It was time to return to work but, in the exceptional circumstances, a number of the servants lingered. The Duke’s sudden deterioration puzzled them. Two curses, one ancient, one modern – the details of which were discussed time and time again in the lower rooms of the castle – dominated their conversation.<
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  ‘They said it was the curse of the pharaoh that was killing him,’ Dorothy Plowright recalled. ‘The Duke was there when Tutankhamun’s tomb was opened. They said that anyone who went inside it would die within so many years. It was in all the newspapers.’

  The story of the pharaoh’s curse was one the servants had followed closely. The Earl of Carnarvon had died five months after discovering the tomb. He – so the press had claimed – was Tutankhamun’s first victim. Quickly, the legend of a curse had become firmly established as rival newspapers vied to announce the deaths of others who had entered the tomb.

  In the servants’ hall at Belvoir, each new report of a death was noted and debated. Over the years, Lord Carnarvon had often stayed at the castle. The servants had made his bed and served him his breakfast. His story was part of their story: it had lodged in their imaginations.

  Upstairs, the Duke’s diary for the year 1923 stood on display, carefully positioned on an occasional table in the library. One of the housemaids had peeked at it as she was dusting around it. It was open at the page for 11 February, the day the Duke had entered the tomb. ‘The whole thing is stupendous,’ he had written: ‘I consider myself the luckiest man to have lived to see it. The sight of the inside of that tomb is a thing to have lived for alone.’

  Among the Duke’s under-servants, the legend of the curse far outweighed any sort of truth. In April 1940, Howard Carter and countless others who had entered the tomb in the first weeks of February 1923 were alive and flourishing. ‘They believed in the story of the pharaoh’s curse,’ Dorothy Plowright remembered: ‘Oh yes. Anyone who entered that tomb was supposed to die within so many years.’

  It was old Mr Tweed, the gong man, who spoke of another curse. ‘Mr Tweed said His Grace was being taken by the witches’ curse,’ one of the Duke’s tenants remembered. ‘An ancestral curse, the family called it. We all knew about it. It had been going on for hundreds 0f years.’