The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery Read online

  The curse, so it was believed, had been cast in the early seventeenth century by a coven of witches living in the castle’s grounds. In 1619, two of the women had been tried and executed at Lincoln for the murder by witchcraft of two of the 6th Earl of Rutland’s infant sons. They had also, it was claimed, cast a curse over future generations: aimed at the Rutland heirs, it determined that the two eldest boys in the family would die before they reached the age of ten.

  For more than three hundred years, it had seemed to the Rutlands and their servants that this was a curse from which the family could never escape. It had struck in all but three of the nine generations after the trial of the Belvoir witches. Four times, the family had lost their two eldest sons before they reached the age of ten; twice, the heir to the title had died in infancy.

  The memory of the witches also haunted the villagers at Belvoir. When Mr Tweed was a boy, the belief in the power of witchcraft was still strong. Looking back to his childhood, he could remember the bottles buried beneath the hearths in the cottages below the castle. Filled with the urine and fingernails of their occupants, they were a type of counter-magic to ward off the maleficium of a witch. The bottles were a legacy from the trial at Lincoln. According to court records, the women tried for murdering the Earl’s sons had wrought havoc across his estate. In two villages alone, five people were thought to have been murdered by the ‘witches’.

  ‘We didn’t take any notice of Charlie Tweed,’ George Waudby remembered. ‘We thought he was a bit simple. His age, we supposed, had made him senile.’

  In a voice cracked by his years, as Charlie went about his work, he often sang a ballad which the farm workers in the fields below the castle had sung when he was a boy. Written in 1619, it told the story of the Belvoir witches and their curse on the castle and its heirs:

  These women thus being Devils grown,

  Most cunning in their Arts

  With charmes and with enchanting spells

  They played most damned parts:

  They did forespeak, and Cattle killed,

  That neighbours could not thrive,

  And oftentimes their Children young

  Of life they would deprive.

  Yet so their malice more increased

  That mischief set in foot To

  blast the branches of that house

  And undermine the root.

  On Saturday 20 April, the Duke slipped into unconsciousness. That afternoon when Lord Dawson was admitted to see him, he pronounced him beyond all hope. But in the hours that remained before he died, his under-servants would glean some information about the Duke’s rooms which surprised them.

  At eight o’clock, two of the castle’s footmen were called to wait at table in the Fox Hunter’s Dining Room.

  5

  The doctors – Lord Dawson and Dr Jauch – were dining alone, leaving the unconscious Duke in the care of his valet. Their mood was subdued, the setting sombre. The long table, carved from mahogany, took up most of the room, which was small and oppressive, in contrast to the state dining room. The walls were painted a baleful yew green and the heavy velvet curtains were black. All the paintings were of hunting scenes.

  The two footmen stood at each end of the room and were privy to the doctors’ conversation. From time to time, one would step up to the table to refill a glass, or to remove a plate.

  What surprised the footmen was the doctors’ description of the Duke’s rooms. Gossip in the servants’ hall had conjured vivid pictures of their interiors, of rooms filled with sumptuous fabrics and valuable treasures far surpassing those that adorned the state rooms. But, from what the footmen could gather from the conversation, this was not the case. ‘They’re not fit for a servant,’ Lord Dawson had expostulated.

  The fact that the Duke had refused to leave the rooms apparently puzzled the doctors. Throughout the week of his illness, they had tried to persuade him to move upstairs. The rooms, in their view, were inappropriate for a man who was gravely ill. They were dusty, damp and draughty. Only one of the five rooms had a fire. Lord Dawson described it as a stove: ‘the sort that could be found in the maids’ bedrooms up in the Flag Tower’. Worse still, there were no washing facilities. Water – hot or cold – had to be brought in from the servants’ quarters.

  It was in these rooms at sunrise the following morning that the Duke died. His death certificate states that he died of bronchial pneumonia. It is not known who found him, or who was with him during his final hours. The principal dramatis personae – his wife, his eldest son, his butler, his valet and the doctors – are no longer alive to tell us. The hours between ten o’clock in the evening, when the doctors retired from the Fox Hunter’s Dining Room, and five minutes past six the next morning, when the Duke died, are blank.

  Even in death, the Duke was reluctant to leave these rooms: his last wish was that his body should remain there until the day of his funeral. This singular request flouted a family tradition. Prior to burial, his predecessors had been laid to rest in the chapel in the south wing of the castle. Then their coffins had been moved to the Guard Room, where their servants, and the hundreds of workers and tenants on their estate, had been invited to come to pay their last respects. The Duke had specifically asked that all but his family and his closest friends should be barred from his last resting place.

  At one o’clock on Wednesday 24 April, the day of his funeral, the great oak doors at the entrance to the castle were opened. The bier, a converted farm wagon, painted black and drawn by four chestnut horses, was brought inside the porch. In the enclosed space beneath the vaulted roof, the horses fidgeted, their hooves dancing on the polished stone.

  Outside, rain poured from the leaden sky, which had looked threatening for some days. Pools of water collected in the potholes on the battlements where the crowd of mourners waited. ‘The yeomen of the Vale of Belvoir put on their black broadcloth,’ the local newspaper reported. ‘And from all parts of the countryside made their way to the castle on the hill for the funeral of the Duke of Rutland, the ninth in an illustrious line. Because of the war, many of the notable county people were absent. Tenantry, servants and estate workers made up the greater part of the assembly that gathered on the turreted courtyard.’

  Inside the castle, the pall bearers, servants nominated by the late Duke, reached the Guard Room, where they lowered the coffin on to the chequered marble floor and draped it with his flag. It was yellow and blue and bore his crest and his coat of arms.

  The hall porter was at his post in the antechamber behind the Guard Room. It was his duty to keep up the visitors’ book, a meticulous record of the date of arrival and departure of the Duke and his family and their overnight guests. ‘His Grace the Duke of Rutland,’ read the entry for 2 April 1940, the date the Duke had arrived at the castle. As the coffin was borne slowly through the Guard Room, the porter reached for his quill pen. In the departure column, he entered that day’s date: ‘24 April’. Then, in brackets, with a flourish, in a befittingly neat Gothic script, he added the word ‘Corpse’.

  Punctually, at one o’clock, the wheels of the bier crunched over the gravel and the cortège moved off from the battlements and down the hill along the road to the mausoleum.

  Less than a week after the Duke’s death, the secret rooms were once again the focus of mystery. On the night of 27 April, three days after he was buried, someone broke into them.

  6

  It was shortly before three o’clock in the morning when a shadowy figure, dressed from head to foot in black, crossed the gun-carriage terrace. The night was cloudless, the moon almost full. A blackout was in force and the castle was shrouded in darkness. The light from the moon set tiny points of brilliance dancing in the blackened windows and on the barrels of the cannons that stood, pointing outwards, along the terrace. Up in the North Tower, the flag of mourning was at half mast. The barest crunch of footsteps moving stealthily across the gravel and the occasional cry of an animal from the woods below the castle were the only so
unds that broke the stillness.

  At ground-floor level, fourteen windows overlooked the terrace. Each offered a point of entry. Without hesitating, the figure approached the window that led into the room where the Duke had died. First a pane of glass was smashed; then a metal brace used to force the catch. The attempt at entry failed: the metal grille on the inside of the window was locked.

  Had anyone been about at that hour, they would have described the intruder as male: he wore a long worsted jacket and his trousers were tucked into a pair of laced leather boots. Yet – as would become clear just moments later – ‘he’ was in fact a woman who had come disguised as a man.

  Turning, and creeping back out on to the terrace, she stopped and looked up to take in the full expanse of the castle’s façade.

  A few paces to the right of the room where the Duke had died, two lead drainpipes, positioned a foot apart, ran up to the roof. Seen from the terrace, it looked an awkward climb. After pausing for a moment, she crept back up to the window; then, dropping the rose bit and the brace on the gravel, she grasped both pipes firmly and, using the brackets as footholds, climbed fifteen feet to the first floor. It was a precarious stretch to the window on the left, but it was possible to reach the stone ledge beneath it. The window was open and led into the nursery passage.

  Moments later, the night watchman ran into her in the passage outside the Duke’s rooms on the floor below.

  Whoever she was, she was not caught. After being discovered, she fled along the passage and escaped from the castle.

  The police arrived soon after dawn. When they interviewed the night watchman, he omitted to tell them that it was a woman, not a man, whom he had seen outside the Duke’s rooms.

  Missing this key piece of information, it was left to the police to try to make sense of the break-in.

  Immediately, the police suspected espionage. It was clear that this was no casual burglary. The Duke’s rooms had been specifically targeted. In the midst of war, all government establishments were on the alert for enemy agents. The police were aware that both a summary of the records stored at the castle, and a plan of the stacks, showing precisely where specific bundles of documents could be located, were kept in the rooms where the Duke had died.

  Police reports of their investigation into the incident have not survived. But a report written by John Gilkes, the caretaker appointed to look after the records, is now held at the National Archives.

  Midway through the morning, after inspecting the thousands of bundles of documents stacked along the passages and in rooms all over the castle, Gilkes communicated the facts – as he understood them – to the Keeper of the Records in London.

  His report is confusing, the detail sketchy: ‘I thought I ought to let you know of recent doings here,’ he began. ‘During last night an attempt was made to force the window of the Duke’s room from the outside with a brace and a rose sinking bit. One pane of glass was broken, but the gates and bars outside were not forced. Also a man was spotted in the passage. He escaped having been seen by the watchmen. It is thought they got in through the window above the Duke’s rooms. When told at breakfast of the occurrence, I walked all round our stacks but couldn’t find even a slight alteration in the dust sheets, which I replaced in position on Friday last. Whatever they were after must have been in the room where His Grace died. The police were here early and I cannot say if any clues were found, except the brace and bit. So it is rather a mystery. So far nothing has been noted as missing.’

  The break-in appeared motiveless: not a single document had been taken, nor a single item in the castle reported stolen.

  At breakfast that morning, the servants had purposely kept Gilkes in the dark. Like the police, he was not aware that the ‘man’ was a woman. ‘What went on up at the castle never went out the doors,’ Gladys Brittain, the wife of the Duke’s butler, remembered. ‘The castle – by that I mean the family – was the castle. It was nothing to do with anyone else.’ Gilkes, a cockney, and the police were outsiders as far as the servants were concerned; they belonged ‘out the doors’.

  So who had the night watchman seen? More than seventy years after the event, the trail is not quite cold. While the chief witness has long since died, among the descendants of those working at the castle on 27 April 1940, the memory of what happened that night lives on.

  It was Philip Stubbley who saw the woman in the passage. He was one of three watchmen on duty on the night of the break-in. Security had been stepped up to protect the government records; the men were armed with revolvers and machines tracked their progress through the castle.

  ‘The watchmen clocked into tachometer-type machines at various points on their round,’ George Waudby remembered. ‘They went everywhere. Up into the towers, out on to the roof, then they’d come down through all the different floors and levels. There were hundreds of rooms to go through, but they didn’t miss a single one. It took them a full hour to go round. Then they’d start again. I don’t know how many times they went round, but there were three of them circulating throughout the night.’

  It was a few minutes past three o’clock when Philip Stubbley turned the corner into the passage outside the Duke’s rooms. Bill Hotchin, the boiler stoker, started work at dawn that morning. He told his daughter, Dorothy, what Stubbley saw: ‘As he came round the corner into the passage a man ran past him. Or he thought it was a man. Philip shouted at him and she turned round. She was wearing men’s clothes. All in black she was. I remember my father saying he ought to have got out his pistol and challenged her – the night watchmen were trained to fire below the knee, you know. But he didn’t. He panicked and ran back to find the other watchmen. And of course, she got away. But she had been in the Duke’s rooms.’

  Stubbley – as Dorothy was later to discover from other servants at the castle – had every reason not to shoot. He had recognized the woman: ‘He said it was “the woman from Eastwell”. That’s what they called her. She lived in the manor house in Eastwell village, just across the Vale. She was the Duke’s mistress. Apparently, he used to see a lot of her. They said he’d left her a letter or some money, and that’s what she’d come to collect.’

  The moment’s delay – when Stubbley went in search of the other watchmen – gave the woman the vital seconds she needed. Dashing across the Guard Room, past the stands of pikes and muskets, she escaped through the great oak doors at the entrance to the castle and vanished into the night.

  While the servants claimed to know who the woman was, exactly what she was doing in the Duke’s rooms and what – if anything – she took away with her are among the many questions that hover over the strange events that occurred at Belvoir Castle in the week of his death.

  With the passing of time, even her alleged identity becomes mere hearsay. But an important detail relating to the means by which she first attempted to enter the castle suggests there is some truth in the servants’ second-hand recollection of events.

  Of the many windows overlooking the gun-carriage terrace, the one leading into the room where the Duke died was the most secure. On the inside, a concertina-style iron grille operated in a similar manner to the doors of an old-fashioned lift: it could be pulled across and locked. So why then, when the woman arrived at the castle, did she make straight for this window? Why break the glass and force the catch when the internal grille surely rendered it impregnable? There is just one possible explanation: when she smashed the pane of glass and used the brace to force the catch on the window, she had anticipated that the grille would not be locked.

  Someone, she presumed, had left it open for her.

  The servants suspected the Duke.

  According to George Waudby, the window was a route of entry that she had used many times before. In the servants’ quarters, it was known that the Duke ‘entertained the woman from Eastwell’ in his rooms. They knew she entered the castle via the window; discretion was a priority: it was a way of avoiding the Porter’s Lodge, where visitors were noted in a lo
gbook.

  So had the Duke instructed his valet or his butler to leave the grille open so that she could enter the rooms after he died? Had he told her to return in the dead of night after he was buried?

  ‘His Grace has something he must finish.’ Was the letter – or package – to his mistress the thing that preoccupied him in his final hours?

  Nothing the Duke’s under-servants saw or overheard explains what he was doing in those rooms before he died. Or why he chose to die in them. It is almost as if he died for them. Had he followed his doctors’ advice and moved to the upper floors of the castle, possibly they might have been able to save his life. Nor were the servants able to explain why the Duke kept the rooms so secret.

  ‘Never speak ill of the dead, they say, but some of us weren’t sorry to see him go,’ one of the housemaids said.

  Yet there is another side to this man whose dark moods and morbid interests terrified the junior members of his household. Among the servants closest to him, he was loved and venerated. ‘My father always used to say he was a very lonely man, but if you had him as a friend, you had him as a friend for life,’ Tonya Pacey, the butler’s daughter, remembered. ‘I never heard my father talk about anyone in the way he talked about him. He loved him.’

  Whatever it was that kept the Duke closeted in his secret rooms in the last hours of his life haunted his family too. Shortly after he died, his son, Charles, the 10th Duke of Rutland, closed them. In 1999, almost sixty years later, they were finally opened to outsiders. Today, only a handful of people have been inside them.

  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.

  PART II

  27 August 2008