The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (11 page)

Though John was based at the camp, most of his time was spent in the countryside around Catona. ‘Our work,’ he explained to Charlie, ‘is to go to the little villages and towns both along the coast and inland and find out the state of the people, what their losses are, how many of each family are left. Then we come home and the next day take up the blankets and boots etc on mules. Tomorrow we go to the mountains for two days.’

There was nothing controversial – or any hint of a secret – in the paragraphs of normal text in John’s letters. The impression I was left with was of a privileged young man who appeared genuinely moved by the suffering and devastation he had witnessed. And yet woven through the graphic descriptions were pages and pages of cipher. The central question remained unanswered. What had John regarded as so important, so confidential, that it could only be communicated in a secret code?

I was becoming more and more caught up in the mystery behind this man, and starting to follow a different story – his story. In creating the gaps in his biography, he had erased so much of himself – and so thoroughly. What I had discovered in these rooms – and in his rooms up in the East Tower – was disquieting; in my imagination, he
had become the dark force preventing me from writing the book that I had set out to write. Yet in the few glimpses I had had of him – the fragments that I had read, written in his own words – he struck me as a likeable, straightforward character.

So why were there these mysterious encrypted letters? And why had he filleted three chapters out of his life?

Whatever his story, it seemed that it was one that he had been determined no one should ever know. The fact that he had pruned the records for three different periods – 1894, 1909 and 1915 – could suggest that there was a single act or event and that the subsequent gaps covered times when there were repercussions from that original event. Equally, the gaps could relate to three separate acts or events. But could he really have had
three
secrets?

I returned to the encrypted letters.

John had first used the cipher on 11 February 1909. He had been at the British Embassy for a week. ‘I hate the sight of Rome and everything in it,’ he complained to Charlie: ‘I don’t think there is the slightest chance of being able to get away even for one day. So it would be no use you coming out this way to pick me up. 368 369 53 82 415 359 44 14 68 92 46 219 156 270 223 369 98 100 96 11 337 35 105 285 203 175 20 387 240 379. I am going to make a 279 94 105 4 200 some time and will send it you for your approval. Goodbye old boy, J.’

Did the numbers represent words or letters? And why, at times, had he used two numbers, rather than three? A letter, written a few days later, offered a steer. ‘If I send you a telegram in cipher,’ he told Charlie on 8 February, ‘this is the way to read it’:

Suppose the sentence which is in cipher is:

‘I hope you are quite well’ and that the numbers are: 52 109 110 11 16 400. Well – you have got to make each block of numbers up to 5 figures. So in the telegram you will have to cut off either 3 figures or 2. And let us say that we can put any numbers we like to make up the block – thus it would become 52063 10942 11072 11072 16704 40000.

It was helpful, but only up to a point. I could now see that the numbers represented words, not letters; I could grasp the principle of
adding random numbers to make up a block of five. Yet how John had arrived at ‘52’ for ‘I’ and ‘109’ for hope, and so on, was flummoxing. Without the key to the cipher, it was impossible to know.

The next letter provided a vital clue:

Old Boy, I enclose a new key. Let us use it in future. The way to use it is like this.

In old cipher key

Every word is of three figures. So in future 305 any 44.15.11. figures 415. 238x. after each word so to make each word 386. 368.181.389. figures therefore it will be like this.

In old cipher

204. 156. 415. 413. 489

In new cipher

51342. 35910. 94631. 93249. 10000

There is a note at the top-right-hand corner of the second page of the key which you should read carefully. Every time you write or wire in cipher, when you look up a word and do not find it, you should make a note of it and say in your next letter what you have given it.

The enclosure was missing. The ‘new key’ that John had sent to Charlie was lost. Nor was there anything to be drawn from the numbers. They were nonsensical. It was the information in the last paragraph that caught my attention. The clue to the cipher lay in the reference that John had made to the ‘note at the top-right-hand corner of the second page of the key’; he had instructed Charlie to ‘look up words’ and make a note of the ones that he could not ‘find’. Implicit in the letter was the suggestion that some sort of key to the cipher already existed. I kicked myself for being so slow. Countless times, working my way through the pages of the Muniment Rooms catalogue, I had passed the entry for the volume entitled ‘Key to Cyphers’.

The volume was listed in the section relating to the seventeenth-century material. The rooms held a large number of documents dating from the English Civil War, including a collection of coded letters which Charles I had sent from Carisbrooke Castle in the last months of his life. The ‘Key to Cyphers’ contained the King’s secret
code. Carisbrooke, on the Isle of Wight, was where he had been imprisoned before he was executed on the scaffold in January 1649. It seemed barely credible, but I was sure that John was using the cipher that the King had used in the letters that he had sent from the castle.

The cipher was one that Charlie Lindsay had known intimately. Through painstaking work, conducted over many years, he had managed to decipher a large number of the King’s letters. It was a remarkable achievement. For almost three centuries, historians had puzzled over the cryptic messages, the means by which they had been smuggled from the castle adding to their notoriety.
The King had concealed them
in his gloves before giving them to the gentleman usher, whose job it was to hold the gloves while he was at the dining table. He had hidden other messages in the water closet in his bedchamber. The maid who emptied his chamber pot had collected these.

I got up from my desk to fetch the catalogue. John’s code had looked impossible to decipher, but with the key to the King’s cipher, it ought to be possible to crack it.

John had filed the ‘Key to Cyphers’ below the rows of files containing his correspondence with Charlie. The two volumes beside it were also important: ‘Transcripts made by Captain Lindsay of a volume of original letters from Charles I in the feigned hand whilst prisoner at Carisbrooke in 1648’ and ‘Letters in Cypher’. Both were bound in crimson leather; the titles, and the edging on the volumes, were embossed in gold.

I pulled down the ‘Letters in Cypher’ and turned to the first page. There were two inscriptions on the inside cover. The first was written in Charlie Lindsay’s hand:

This volume contains transcripts of letters (Reign of Charles I & Interregnum) which are written either wholly or partly in cipher, none of which to my knowledge (after enquiry and research) has ever yet been deciphered.

Some of them I have been able to decipher without difficulty, either by applying the various ‘Keys’ of the period which I have collected, or by comparing them with other letters in the same cipher which possess the contemporary decipherment.

With regard to others I have been fortunate enough to work out the ‘Key’ myself.

A considerable number still remain undeciphered, in spite of some labour already spent over them.

On the page opposite, John had added his own inscription:

Left to me by Captain Charles Lindsay 1925 now at Belvoir Castle and I hope and wish that as long as the Castle remains the property of a Manners, this book will be kept and carefully preserved as part of the Belvoir archives.

I took the three volumes over to the sofa and spread them out, together with the bundles of his letters from Rome.

Outside, the sky had darkened. The afternoon was warm and close; I could hear the sound of the wind in the trees along the battlements and the low, nagging rumble of distant thunder.

Several hours had gone by and I was still struggling with the cipher. John, I had quickly discovered, had not used the King’s cipher. The numbers did not match. The volume ‘Key to Cyphers’ lay open in front of me. Besides the King’s cipher, it contained the keys to some seventy others. It was an extraordinary historical document. Here were the secret codes of the leading figures of the English Civil War and the Interregnum: Oliver Cromwell, Archbishop Laud, the Earl of Strafford, Charles II, and the Earls of Northumberland and Leicester.

The keys ran to 195 pages. I was sure that John had used one of them. But which? In the hope of identifying his cipher, I had tried comparing the blocks of numbers in his letters with those in the different keys – so far, without success. I had reached
page 27
, Cipher no. 10. It was the cipher that Charles I’s adviser, Sir Edward Nicholas, had used in his letters to Lord Jermyn.

In the spring of 1646, Lord Jermyn had been with Queen Henrietta Maria in exile in France. He was her closest confidant; later, in the winter of 1649, it would fall to him to break the terrible news of her husband’s execution.

The key to Sir Edward’s cipher ran to eight columns:

I stared helplessly at the page, scanning the numbers against the ones in John’s encrypted letters. Yet again, they did not appear to match. It would take hours to go through the rest of the book. I decided to photograph the pages and show them to a cryptologist.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon; with the sky heavy outside, the room was almost dark. I got up from the sofa to put the light on. The switch was at the top of the stairs, by the entrance to Room 2. Turning to come back down them, I paused, struck by the fall of light across the room. Illuminated by the naked bulb, the sofa on which I had been sitting, and on which John had died, now seemed to dominate the room. It bore the marks of its long service; the springs protruded from the faded chintz cover; one end of it sagged heavily. It was at this end, presumably, that John had sat so many times.

I had been so absorbed by the missing episodes in his life that I had barely given any thought to his death – or rather, to his manner of dying. He had died on this sofa of bronchial pneumonia.
It was not as if he had died suddenly.
He must have lain on it, seriously ill, for some days.

I looked around me, trying to visualize the scene. An oxygen tent had been brought in here. I could almost hear the sounds of despair: the shallow, rapid breathing of the dying man, the judder of the oxygen pumps. I imagined him lying under the canopy, isolated in the centre of the empty room, dwarfed by the tall glass cabinets that surrounded him.

A draught coming along the passage rolled a ball of dust across the bare floorboards. I watched it as it drifted past. It was such a perverse thing for John to have done, to have willingly immured himself in these rooms in the last days of his life. It was where he had wanted to be, Roger, his son, had said. But it simply didn’t make sense. There was a rudimentary form of under-floor heating – hot air blasted up through vents from the floor below – but otherwise the coal-burning stove in front of me was the only source of heat in the Muniment Rooms. John had died in April when the rooms would have been damp and the nights still cold. Not one of the five rooms had washing facilities or running water: the nearest bathroom was a good distance away beyond the old servants’ hall. On the upper floors of the castle,
there were suites of bedrooms. Lavishly furnished, they had huge four-poster beds with soft linen sheets and great stone hearths for blazing fires. During his final hours, any one of these rooms would have been more comfortable, a more fitting place for a Duke to die. Instead, he had died in a cramped, sparsely furnished room deep in the servants’ quarters.
Why?

It was a question I puzzled over for weeks. In some way, it felt as if the peculiarity of the circumstances of his death held the key to him. I spoke to numerous members of the Manners family, and their relations – men and women born in the early 1920s who remembered John. But they were unable to tell me why he had chosen to spend the last days of his life in the Muniment Rooms. With the passing of time, his final hours remained shrouded in mystery. It was not even clear whether there had been anyone with him when he died.

It was then that I began the search for a contemporary witness: someone who had been working at the castle and had been inside the Muniment Rooms before he had died.

The pool of potential witnesses, notwithstanding the decades that had intervened, was far smaller than I had imagined. The former servants I spoke to painted a vivid picture of the events at Belvoir in the last days of John’s life, but their memories were confined to the corridors and back passages of the castle. John, it emerged, had barred them from entering the Muniment Rooms. Just three members of his household were permitted inside them: his butler, Mr Brittain; his valet, Mr Speed; and Mrs Hayward, the housekeeper. They were all dead: Mr Speed was killed in 1941 as he cycled along the main road into Grantham; Mrs Hayward died in the 1960s; and Mr Brittain in 2005.