The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (4 page)

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.’

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.

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 meticu
lous 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.

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 sounds 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.’