The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (5 page)

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 logbook.

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.

27 August 2008

It was one of those brilliant summer mornings that begins in a haze, promising the heat to come. A mist was rising from the fields as I dropped down the hill into the valley below the castle. I could see it ahead: a fairy-tale castle, all turrets and towers, standing majestically on the ridge.

I had arranged to meet Mr Granger, the Duke of Rutland’s archivist, in the castle’s Muniment Rooms. Then, I knew nothing of that sad day in April 1940; I did not know that John, the 9th Duke, had died in the rooms that I was about to see, or that they had been sealed after his death. Nor did I know that his servants had once called them the ‘Secret Rooms’. I had come to Belvoir to research a different book entirely.

‘There are five rooms,’ Mr Granger said. ‘I’ll show you Room 2 first.’

We were standing in a small hallway at the entrance to the Muniment Rooms.
*
I peered along the narrow passage. Odd angles of light slanted across it; it seemed to recede into infinity, as if I was viewing it through the wrong end of a telescope.

A few minutes earlier, we had met outside the steel door. A tall man of military bearing, Mr Granger was in his mid-seventies. His manner was diffident. It was hard to catch his words.

‘I think you’ll find the rooms interesting,’ he muttered. ‘Follow me. I’ll lead the way.’

He turned right into the passage. It was musty, the smell of damp rising from the bare floorboards. Rows of cabinets lined the walls on one side. Ahead of us, there was a small sign. Hand-painted in a plain font, it hung from the low ceiling. The sign was perfunctory: ‘Room 2,’ it said. Beyond, there was a pool of bright white light.

The passage led directly into the room. Stepping in, it was as if we had entered an apothecary’s shop. Tall white cabinets with glass doors jutted from the walls and formed bays at the centre of the room. There were sixteen of them, crammed into an area barely sixteen foot by ten. Tiny points of dust sparkled in front of us, caught in the light that flooded in from the single window. It was impossible to make out what was inside the cabinets: the glare from the sun struck the glass doors, obscuring their contents.

I moved closer, to alter the angle of light. Stacked along the shelves, I could see hundreds of box files. Every one of them was blue. Peacock blue: the colour of the Duke’s crest.

‘You’ll find the family’s private correspondence in there,’ Mr Granger said, pointing at the cabinets. ‘It’s all in the blue files. The letters span
almost five hundred years. They go back to the sixteenth century – to the time of Thomas de Ros, the first Earl of Rutland.’

He picked up a large, gold-embossed book from the desk beside him. ‘In here,’ he said, ‘are examples of the handwriting of every member of the Manners family since the 1540s. John, the 9th Duke, compiled it. We use it as an aid to identify the correspondents in the blue files.’

Tall leather volumes crowded the shelves opposite us. ‘Those are the household accounts,’ he said, walking over to them. ‘They go back to the eleventh century, when the Manners family first came to Belvoir.’ Reaching up, he pulled down one of the ledgers and selected a page at random. The entries were in Early English, written on parchment. A spidery hand had listed the amounts spent on breakfast at the castle in the month of March 1541. The meal – ‘collops, eggs, boiled mutton, braun and beef’ – had cost three shillings.

‘The household accounts and the family’s letters form the backbone of the collection, but there are countless other treasures,’ Mr Granger continued. ‘It is probably one of the most important private collections of historical documents in the country.’

He handed me the catalogue to the collection. It was eighty pages long and contained a summary of the contents of each cabinet. There were ninety-four cases in the five rooms; together, they held over a thousand rows of shelving. The range of the material was breathtaking. Besides the family’s correspondence and the Belvoir estate and household records, there were letters from King Charles I to Queen Henrietta, written days before his execution, and an unparalleled collection of printed broadsides published during the English Civil War. A large number of manuscripts dated from the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution; they included letters written by members of the
ancien régime
before they too faced public execution. Looking at the entries for the medieval period, two of the items, I noted, were extremely rare: the Chronicle of Adam of Usk – written in 1420 – and a map of Sherwood Forest, drawn in the fourteenth century, the time, purportedly, of Robin Hood.

‘Everything in here, everything you see,’ Mr Granger said, gesturing towards the rooms behind us, ‘was put together by John, the 9th
Duke. All the cataloguing and filing is his. It was his life’s work. Most of his time was spent in these rooms.’

He paused, and looked down at the floor.

Then, looking at me quizzically, he said: ‘The Duke died in here, you know.’

‘He died in here?’ I asked, surprised.

‘Yes. In Room 1,’ he replied. ‘It was sometime during the last war. The place has barely been touched since then. The rooms are exactly as the Duke left them.’

He turned and headed back along the passage. ‘Come on, I’ll show you the other rooms,’ he said.

Rooms 3, 4 and 5 were situated at the foot of the Norman Tower, the central feature of the west front of the castle. They were indistinguishable; each was equally austere. The wooden floors were bare; aside from a number of desks and several pairs of heavy Tudor chairs, they contained no furniture. Boxes and files were stacked on every available surface; every inch of wall space was given over to cabinets and cases. Devoid of ornaments, or any attempt at beautification, they were rooms of hard lines and edges. There was nothing soft inside them.

Room 1 was the last Mr Granger showed me. Two wooden steps led down into it from the passage. It was square-shaped and smaller than the other rooms, and the ubiquitous white cabinets crowded three sides of it. Along the other wall there was a fireplace, fitted with a small, cast-iron stove. A large Chesterfield sofa stood beneath a barred window.

‘That’s where the 9th Duke died,’ Mr Granger said, pointing at the sofa.

It was covered in faded green chintz. Its springs had broken and it looked badly in need of re-stuffing.

‘What did he die of?’ I asked, curious.

‘Pneumonia,’ he replied. ‘He was relatively young. He was in his early fifties.’

He moved across to the sofa and propped himself against one of its arms. ‘Most of these documents have never been seen,’ he said,
looking up at the cabinets around us. ‘No one outside the immediate family has seen the twentieth-century papers. You are the first.’

To his right, there was a window, secured by a folding iron grille. A small desk had been built into the alcove beneath it.

‘Why don’t you work over there?’ he suggested. ‘Most of the papers spanning the First World War are in here, and in the cases in Room 2. I’ll leave you to get on with it. If you need anything, you can find me at the end of the passage in Room 4.’

He disappeared.

I pulled up a chair to the desk. It felt strange to be working just a few feet from where the man who had assembled this remarkable collection had died.

I had come to Belvoir to research a book about this small corner of England in the years of the First World War.

In 1914, the Duke of Rutland’s estate
had embraced thirty villages. In the first weeks of the war, 1,700 men – a fifth of the estate’s population – had left to fight on the battlefields abroad. They belonged to Britain’s villages’ lost generation: that mysterious army of ploughmen, horsemen and field workers who deserted the farms in the summer of 1914, many of them never to return.

The testimony of farm worker Leonard Thompson
, who grew up in a village in Suffolk, had inspired the idea for the book.

In August 1914, at the age of nineteen, Leonard had volunteered for the Essex Regiment. ‘
We were all delighted when war broke out
,’ he remembered. ‘A lot of boys from the village were with me and although we were all sleeping in ditches at Harwich, wrapped in our greatcoats, we were bursting with happiness. We were all damned glad to have got off the farms. We were all so patriotic then and had been taught to love England in a fierce kind of a way. The village wasn’t England; England was something better than the village.’

Early in 1915, Leonard’s battalion was drafted to Gallipoli. It is the confluence of what Philip Gibbs, the war correspondent, called ‘This’ and ‘That’ – the trenches, with life at home – which makes Leonard’s account of his first experience of war so heartrending:

We arrived at the Dardanelles
and saw the guns flashing and heard the rifle-fire. They heaved our ship, the
River Clyde
, right up to the shore. They had cut a hole and made a little pier, so we were able to walk straight off and on to the beach. We all sat there, waiting for it to get light. The first things we saw were big wrecked Turkish guns, the second, a big marquee. It didn’t make me think of the military but of the village fetes. Other people must have thought like this because I remember how we all rushed up to it, like boys getting to a circus, and then found it all laced up. We unlaced it and rushed in. It was full of corpses. Dead Englishmen, lines and lines of them, and with their eyes wide open. We all stopped talking. I’d never seen a dead man before and here I was looking at two or three hundred of them. It was our first fear.