The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (2 page)

The door was firmly closed.

The light from the dim bulbs along the windowless passage cast pools of inky shadows around the waiting figures. Piles of cardboard boxes were stacked against the bare stone walls. Marked ‘Secret – Property of His Majesty’s Government’, they were secured with steel binding.

The doctors – Dr Jauch, a GP from Grantham, and Mr Macpherson, an eminent chest specialist – had been in and out of the rooms since dawn.

Shortly before eleven o’clock, the first footman, dressed in an azure tailcoat and navy-blue breeches, escorted Lord Dawson across the Guard Room. A coldly sumptuous hall, it was the first point of entry to the 356-room castle. Rows of muskets, taller than a man, and hundreds of swords, their blades sharp-edged and glinting, lined its walls. From the vaulted roof hung the tattered remnants of regimental colours, captured in battle. Directly in front of them, a magnificent staircase swept to the state rooms on the upper floors; and yet, as the footman led the King’s doctor across the hall, he veered to the right, heading for its farthest corner. There, he ushered him through a discreet swing door. It marked the border between master and servant. They had stepped into the ‘invisible world’.

Behind the Guard Room, the entire ground floor was devoted to the smooth running of the Duke’s household. A gloomy hinterland
of fifty rooms, some cavernous, some no larger than a priest’s hole, it was where the servants lived and worked. From here, a network of passages coursed through the castle: hidden routes, which spiralled up the narrow turrets and towers to the splendid rooms above, enabling the servants to carry out their duties unobserved.

It was through this labyrinth of passages, deep in the servants’ quarters, that the footman conducted Lord Dawson, arriving at the steel door where the other doctors stood waiting.

They were at Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire. Built in the Gothic style and situated on a ridge eight miles from Grantham, it belonged to John Henry Montagu Manners, the 9th Duke of Rutland. Aged fifty-three, he was one of the richest men in Britain. Three years earlier, he had carried the Sovereign’s Sceptre at the coronation. His family had lived at Belvoir since the eleventh century. Looking south from the castle’s Flag Tower, he owned the land as far as the eye could see.

Earlier that morning, the Duke’s wife, Kakoo, had telephoned Lord Dawson. Her husband was desperately ill. He must come to the castle immediately.

Up in the Flag Tower, the clock struck eleven. Ten minutes had passed since Lord Dawson’s arrival, but he had yet to be admitted to see the Duke. The sounds of distant industry drifted along the passageway: shouted orders; the banging of tools; the clatter of footsteps approaching on bare stone.

The sight of the King’s doctor in the passage immediately caught the servants’ attention.

‘If there was something serious going on, the housekeeper and the butler would try and keep it quiet,’ George Waudby, the third footman, recalled. ‘They might talk together, but they’d be tight-lipped in front of us lower ranks. We were their inferiors. We were the lowest of the low. We were never told anything. Everything we knew depended on what we saw or overheard.’

‘We all talked. We weren’t meant to, but we did,’ said Dorothy Plowright, the daughter of the boiler stoker. ‘Every rank had its gossip: the upstairs maids, the kitchen staff, the footmen, they all had their grapevines.’

Until that morning, the servants’ grapevine had had nothing to report. They had seen and heard very little. ‘We knew the Duke was unwell. He had been ill for a week. But we didn’t realize it was serious,’ said George Waudby. ‘We rarely saw the Duke. He spent all his time in his rooms. Every day, all day, he was in there. That had been the case for months. We knew this because they were in
our
quarters. Of course we had no idea what went on in there. Those rooms were absolutely secret. But we were told it was where the Duke worked. Nothing struck us as unusual. His routine hadn’t changed. He had carried on working as normal.’

The servants had had no reason to believe the Duke’s illness was life-threatening. Only two days previously, after spending the night at Belvoir, Lord Dawson had returned to London, satisfied that the
Duke was on the mend. Before leaving the castle, he had issued a short statement to the press:

The Duke of Rutland is suffering from pneumonia at his home, Belvoir Castle, and is now stated to be making satisfactory progress. The Duke, who is 53 and succeeded his father in 1925, was taken ill during last weekend.

That morning, however, the servants had reason to suspect that the Duke’s condition had deteriorated. Shortly after breakfast, three mysterious-looking packages were delivered to the castle. From that moment, they were on tenterhooks.

The porter was on duty when the packages arrived at the lodge. Marked ‘Urgent’, they were addressed to Mr Speed, the Duke’s valet. Two of the boxes were long and bulky; one was very heavy. The labels gave away their contents; they had come from Bartlett’s of Jermyn Street, Suppliers of Oxygen Tents.

The castle’s odd-job men were summoned to take the packages to the entrance of the Duke’s room, where Mr Speed was in attendance. ‘Besides the butler and the housekeeper, Mr Speed was the only servant the Duke allowed in his rooms,’ George Waudby remembered. ‘The rest of us were forbidden to go in there.’

Lord Dawson’s hurried return confirmed what the servants suspected. The Duke was gravely ill. A thrill of suspense and excitement, usual in such circumstances, rippled through the household. ‘
Do you think he can last until morning?
’ Along the passageways, in the vast kitchens, and in the still rooms, pantry rooms and preserving rooms beyond, this was the question whispered.

Even before the Duke fell ill, the castle had been in a state of upheaval.

Six days after war was declared – on 9 September 1939 – a convoy of army lorries had turned off the Great North Road and trundled up the drive to the castle. For the last half-mile, the single-track road followed the contours of the ridge, coiling steeply through dense woods. The sound of the whining engines had shattered the peace, sending flocks of rooks wheeling gracefully skywards. Inside the cabins, fuggy after four hours on the Great North Road, the drivers
had cursed the sharp gradient and the ruts and potholes. Double-declutching, they had inched their way along the unmetalled road.

The convoy, one of a number to leave London that week, was top secret. German bombing raids were expected at any moment: the nation’s treasures were hurriedly being transported from the capital to various destinations for safekeeping. Works of art from the Tate Gallery had already left for Muncaster Castle on the remote Cumberland coast; the British Museum’s collections had gone to Boughton, the Duke of Buccleuch’s house, in Northamptonshire.

Belvoir Castle had been
selected as a repository for the nation’s most important historical documents – the records, spanning almost a thousand years, of the Royal Courts and the principal ministries of state.

At Chancery Lane in London
, where the records were kept, it had taken eight hours to load up the convoy. Seventy-five tons of documents, packed in bundles in specially made cardboard containers, had been stacked on to the lorries. Further convoys had been scheduled.

The oldest and most important
records were evacuated first. Among them were parchment scrolls and rolls, stamped with the seals and signatures of every monarch since William the Conqueror. There were War Office papers dating from 1660 and Treasury, Chancery and Exchequer records going back to the eleventh century; contemporary Admiralty and Foreign Office records had also been included: these were the boxes marked ‘Secret – Property of His Majesty’s Government’.

Ten days earlier
– on 30 August – the warrant to appoint the Duke of Rutland as Keeper of the Records had been rushed through Whitehall. The rules of the Public Record Office stipulated that, at all times, the records must be under the charge of a custodian appointed by the sovereign. The Master of the Rolls and the Lord Chancellor had sanctioned the Duke’s appointment on behalf of King George VI.

At Belvoir, it had taken two days to unload the boxes. The Duke had supervised, directing his servants to the various locations that he had earmarked around the castle. Forty tons of documents had been stored in the ballroom; the remainder, along the passages in the
servants’ quarters. ‘There were fifty-two steps up to the ballroom. It was a longer haul to the back passages on the ground floor,’ George Waudby remembered. ‘Every box had to be carried. Then they had to be unpacked, and the bundles of documents individually stacked. It was quite a chore, I tell you. I can see them now – all the boxes piled up in the ballroom and along the passages. All these documents. Boxes and boxes of them. They went back to Domesday, they said.’

A new shipment had been expected, when the Duke fell ill. With the prospect of a German invasion threatening, the remaining records at Chancery Lane were to be evacuated to Belvoir.

On the morning Lord Dawson was called to the castle, the servants had been busy making space in the Guard Room.

‘We were expecting several tons of documents,’ George Waudby recalled. ‘The Guard Room was so big it made sense to put them there. The problem was, there were lots of boxes in there already. We had to sort them all out, and then shift them into rooms that had been allocated in the servants’ quarters and upstairs. Some of the estate workers were brought in to help us. There were quite a few of us.’

The route to the storerooms in the servants’ quarters took them past the Duke’s rooms. ‘The passage was only about four foot wide and there were hundreds of boxes stacked along it from previous convoys,’ Jack Price, one of the estate workers, remembered: ‘There wasn’t much space to manoeuvre. Once the doctors arrived, we had to squeeze past them. We all felt uncomfortable about it. There we were, filthy in our working clothes, and we were brushing up against the King’s doctor.’

Jack and the other servants had noted the precise time of Lord Dawson’s arrival. It was ten minutes to eleven when the first footman had escorted him across the Guard Room. Fifteen minutes later, as they carried another load of boxes along the passage, they were amazed to discover that Lord Dawson and his colleagues were still there. ‘We were all talking about it,’ Jack recalled. ‘We didn’t know what to make of it. If the Duke was dying, what was the King’s doctor doing in the passage? Why wasn’t he attending him? It didn’t make sense.’

A cold stone passage, filled with servants, was foreign territory to Lord Dawson, who was used to being ushered directly into the opulent state rooms where he normally attended his patients.
Appointed Physician-extraordinary
to King Edward VII, he had served the royal household for three decades. Famously, in 1928, when George V had almost died from a respiratory illness, Dawson had been credited with saving the King’s life. It had made him a national celebrity – and the most sought after, most admired doctor of his generation. Invariably charming, he inspired his patients’ trust. He had been by the King’s bedside until the very end. It was he who had composed the memorable words on the notice posted on the railings outside Buckingham Palace: ‘The King’s life is drawing peacefully to a close.’

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.

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.