The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery

by Bailey, Catherine

  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.

  There was no one left alive to explain why John had closeted himself away in the Muniment Rooms in the final hours of his life. Nonetheless, what I learned from the servants who had been on duty at the castle was startling. Evidently – based on what they had seen and overheard – they had been as mystified as to why he had chosen to die in a cramped suite of rooms in their quarters as I was seventy years after the event. The speed with which his illness had claimed him had also surprised them. It was then, in confusion, that those in the servants’ hall fell back on the two curses: the first cast by the three witches in the seventeenth century; the other, by the pharaoh prince, Tutankhamun.

  Yet these accounts, however extraordinary, brought me no closer to the answer I sought. Much of what the servants had to say belonged in the realm of gossip and conjecture. Without a first-hand witness, the circumstances of John’s death remained as bizarre – and as mysterious – as the blanks that he had created in the blue files. The notion that two curses – one ancient, one modern – could have a bearing on his story struck me as utterly fanciful. I could only assume that the rumours and theories that had circulated through the servants’ hall were gossips’ handiwork – the sinister embellishments, a consequence of the mystery and secrecy that surrounded the ‘Secret Rooms’.

  I focused instead on the few fragments of fact. It was the servants’ observations of the doctors’ movements that were particularly intriguing.

  In the last hours of his life, John, apparently, had kept his physicians at bay. Before he became unconscious, one of the castle’s housemaids had overheard his valet instructing the King’s doctor to wait in the corridor outside the Muniment Rooms. The Duke, Lord Dawson was told, had something he had to ‘finish’. This revelation could only mean that he had been working on something right up until the end. According to the servants, the doctors had urged him to rest. They had even tried to persuade him to move from the rooms to one of the bedrooms upstairs. John had ignored their protests. It reinforced my conviction that whatever it was that had occupied him in the days before he died mattered to him to the exclusion of all else – even at the risk of shortening his life.

  So what had kept him from seeking the medical attention he had so urgently needed?

  What had he wanted to finish?

  The one theory circulating among his servants was that it was a letter, or a package, for his mistress – the woman who broke into the Muniment Rooms a week after he died. None of the servants I spoke to could remember her name, but a former housemaid told me that she had lived at Eastwell Hall. It was an important lead. Situated three miles from the castle, the Hall belonged to the Belvoir estate. Whoever she was, she would have been a tenant of the Duke’s. It was more than probable that the rent books in the Muniment Rooms would reveal her identity.

  The rent books were kept in Room 2. Going back to the 1820s, they recorded the names of the Rutlands’ tenants – and the amounts of rent they owed. The books took up three cases. Each was identical: bound in burgundy leather, with the words ‘Belvoir Estate Rental’ – followed by the year – embossed in gold on the ridged spine. Above and below the title was a delicate, hand-stitched row of tiny fleurs-de-lys, also embossed in gold.

  I took down the volume for 1940. The Duke’s properties were listed by parish. Turning the pages, I could see that his tenants had paid rent twice yearly: on Lady Day – 25 March, the annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary – and at Michaelmas – 29 September, St Michael’s Day. There were some four hundred properties in total, yielding a rental income of nearly £20,000* per annum.

  I found ‘the Woman from Eastwell’ in a matter of seconds. The Hall was one of six entries listed for the parish and her name – Hilda Lezard – was entered beside it.

  A quick search on the internet provided further details. Born in Suffolk in 1891, Hilda was the daughter of Sir Daniel Cooper, 2nd Baronet, and his wife Harriet. On her mother’s side, her grandfather was Sir James Grant Suttie, the 6th Baronet of Balgone. She had been married four times; first, at the age of nineteen, to Viscount Northland, the heir to the Earl of Ranfurly; then, two years later – after Northland was killed in action on the Western Front – to Geoffrey Mills, a younger son of Lord Hillingdon, who had also died soon after their marriage; third, in 1918, to Captain John Wardell, an officer in the 10th Hussars; and, lastly, after their marriage was dissolved in 1929, to Julian Lezard.

  Intriguingly – so the links from his name revealed – in the Second World War, Lezard had worked for British Intelligence. His codename was Église. According to records held at the National Archives, he took part in Operation Cathedral, a secret SOE mission in the French Alps.

  Among the documents in Lezard’s file was a personnel form. ‘Next of Kin: Hilda Lezard’; ‘Marital Status: Married’. This was in 1944. Before joining SOE, Lezard had served in Egypt with the Parachute Regiment. As the form showed, from 1939 he had been absent abroad, allowing Hilda to carry on her adulterous affair.

  The details of Operation Cathedral were fascinating. Lezard was evidently a brave man. In August 1944, he had been parachuted into France with four other agents; enclosed in the file were the orders they had been given at the start of their mission:

  OPERATION ORDER

  Operation: CATHÉDRALE

  1. INFORMATION

  Operation CATHÉDRALE is being sent out to form an Allied Mission with ST SAUVEUR, VOILIER, RICHESOIR, CATHÉDRALE and INOCERE.

  2. METHOD

  A. you will be parachuted into the Basses Alpes on or after the 3rd August 1944.

  B. you will be received by ARCHDUC on ground ASSURANCE; lat. 44 deg 19’29” 4 1/2 km N.W.AVRET, longitude 6 deg 16’49”. 9 1/2 km. E.S.E.BAYONS

  C. should you by any chance miss the committee you will go to the following safe house:-

  Mme TURRE

  SEYNE-LES-ALPES

  Mot de passe: ‘je viens voir le vélo’

  D. you will wear uniform in the field and maintain your proper status as an Allied Officer save in exceptional circumstances.

  E. you will take with you two letters, one from the Allies, the second from the French which will accredit you with the local resistance authorities.

  3. FINANCE

  You will take with you the sum of 100,000 francs.

  The next document in the file was the report Lezard wrote on his return to England. From the start, the mission had gone wrong for him.

  REPORT OF CAPTAIN J. J. LEZARD

  (Église)

  I was dropped in the Basses Alpes area near SEYNE on 5th August 1944.

  Unfortunately I badly injured my spinal column as I landed on some rocks and rolled down a fairly considerable slope. I consider that we were dropped a goo
d deal too high (at least 2,500 ft) and I landed about 2 kms away from the lights on the landing ground. There appeared to be no reason for this as it was a clear night, but from this height I experienced a good deal of wind.

  I was a complete liability as I was unable to move at all for the first seven weeks. In the first days conditions were difficult as I was in great pain and I had to be moved each night to new hiding places for reasons of security. Colonel ROGER had been captured about this time so people were naturally uneasy. The French looked after me extremely well and never left me alone at all in spite of the fact that I was a great nuisance to them and they all had plenty of other work to do.

  After eight days when things had settled down I was taken to Doctor JOUVE’s nursing home where I was x-rayed and it was considered that I should be fit to jump again in about 6 weeks’ time. Whilst lying in this nursing home I was visited continually by numbers of resistance people and got to know them very well. The intelligent French are very worried about the future of France and count tremendously on their friendship with the English. Colonel ROGER was loved by everybody and was undoubtedly one of the most outstanding figures in the South East.

  It is impossible for me to enumerate all the French who helped us since I was in bed most of the time, but from my personal experience two families were outstanding. Doctor JOUVE and his wife (a doctor) both well known in the South of France, whose work was invaluable and who never failed to give any assistance that was in their power, and Monsieur and Madame TURREL, small shopkeepers in SEYNE. These two represented the finest types one could hope to meet in any country.

  I am now proceeding to LONDON with Major Karl NURE. And am a volunteer for work in the Far East, but if at any time there is further work to be done in France I should be pleased to do it.

  This was Julian Lezard. But aside from the brief biographical details that I’d found on the genealogy sites, there was no other information about Hilda.

  I returned to the rent books. The tenancy at Eastwell Hall was in her name. Working back through the years, I was able to establish that Hilda had moved into the Hall in 1938. The rent was £350 p.a.*; on arrival, she had paid an additional £10 for ‘the installation of electric light’.

  Interestingly, at the time of John’s death, the rent was in arrears; she owed the estate £370 – the equivalent of a year’s rental. The implication was that she could not afford to live there or at least had been allowed to fall behind with the payments.

  I asked the archivist if the Muniment Rooms held a description of the Hall. He steered me in the direction of the 1919 sales catalogue. That year, John’s father – the 8th Duke – had sold a large portion of his estate. The Hall – Lot 457 – had been included in the sale before it was withdrawn at the last minute.

  The particulars of the property were listed in the catalogue; clearly, it was a substantial residence:

  A very desirable old-fashioned seventeenth-century Manor house situated in the centre of the village of Eastwell and known as Eastwell Hall, together with Stabling, Gardens, Lawns and Spinneys, the whole comprising an area of approx. 4 acres.

  The residence is Stone-built and Slated and contains Entrance Hall, Inner Hall, from which the staircase ascends, Dining Room, Drawing Room, Smoke Room; Lavatory, Panelled Billiard Room, Kitchen, Scullery, Pantry and Cellar; five principal Bedrooms and Dressing Rooms, Bath Room and W.C., five Servants’ Rooms, and Attics.

  The Muniment Rooms yielded several further pieces of information. According to the visitors’ book, Hilda had first stayed at the castle in October 1936; her husband had not been with her. Four months later, she was there again. On both occasions the other guests were Hubert Duggan and Phyllis de Janzé. They, I discovered, belonged to the Kenyan ‘Happy Valley’ set. Had they introduced Hilda to John? Possibly, it was around this time that their affair had begun.

  I also found a list of the floral tributes that had been sent to John’s funeral. Hilda’s was the last name on it. Some forty people had sent flowers; they were referred to by their full name or title. The suggestion was that those who didn’t know who ‘Hilda’ was didn’t need to know.

  These were fragments; not one explained why, three days after John was buried, Hilda had returned to the castle in the dead of night and broken into the Muniment Rooms.

  She was almost fifty in 1940. In the pitch dark, she had climbed fifteen feet up a drainpipe and then negotiated a precarious manoeuvre to an adjacent window ledge. She was obviously determined to get into the castle at any cost.

  Importantly, however, before climbing the drainpipe she had first tried the window leading into the room where John died. According to his servants, this clandestine route of entry was one that she had used countless times before. It offered a means of seeing her lover without being seen. Their affair had been going on for some years; long enough for her to take a considerable personal risk in scaling the castle wall. She had evidently been breaking in for a reason. But was it because she wanted a keepsake – something to remember him by? Or because they’d arranged that she should retrieve something?

  John hadn’t known he was going to die; five days before his death, he appeared to be on the road to recovery. Had he spoken to her on the telephone and told her that he was leaving something for her? Or had he somehow managed to relay a message to her? The fact that it had been necessary for her to break into the Muniment Rooms suggested they had not seen each other during his final hours.

  So if she was there to retrieve something, the question of course was what? Was it something incriminating – love letters they’d exchanged? Or had he left her something of value?

  It was pure speculation of course, but there were the five rubies the present Duchess had mentioned. In the 1930s, John had apparently hidden them somewhere inside the Muniment Rooms. Discretion prevented him from leaving Hilda anything in his will. But the rent books suggested that she might have been hard up. If he had loved her, he might have wanted to provide for her future. His family knew the rubies were hidden in the Muniment Rooms – though where exactly they hadn’t known. Had he told Hilda to retrieve the jewels? If he had, it was understandable that he had not wanted his family to know.

  This was simply a theory – and one that was completely unsupported by facts. Hilda had died in 1961; it looked as if she had taken her secret to her grave. My only hope was that someone in her family might be able to resolve the mystery. In one last attempt to get to the bottom of the break-in, I wrote to her grandson. Until I heard back from him, there was nothing more I could do.

  I returned to the question of what John had wanted to ‘finish’.

  The servants at Belvoir had offered one further piece of information. In September 1939, the Public Records had been evacuated to Belvoir Castle for safe-keeping. Under the Act of Parliament that governed the stewardship of the records, it had been necessary for King George VI to make John their official custodian.

  So was it urgent war work that had kept him in the Muniment Rooms? Had a patriotic sense of duty compelled him to keep the King’s doctor waiting?

  14

  I tapped in my reader number and selected ‘Search the Catalogue’. It was a bleak afternoon in late November and I was at the National Archives in Kew.

  According to the servants, sixty tons of records had been delivered to the castle in the winter of 1940. Further deliveries had been imminent when John died. I wanted to look at the official correspondence relating to this material.

  When I entered ‘Evacuated Records’ in the search box, three references came up. One looked promising: ‘Public Record Office: Repositories for Evacuated Records, War of 1939–1945’. Following the link, all seven of the wartime repositories were listed. I selected ‘Belvoir Castle’ and ordered up the documents.

  It was entirely plausible that John was working on the records when he died. April 1940 had been an anxious month in the progress of the war; France was on the verge of surrendering to Germany. With the threat of a Nazi invasion esca
lating, the pressure had been on to evacuate the last of the records from London; it could have been work relating to the transfer of this material that he had wanted to finish.

  The documents arrived in a large cardboard box. It was the letters between John and the Keeper of Records – the Head of the Public Record Office – that I was interested in. Sifting through the box, I found twelve. As I began to go through them, it quickly became evident that, while John had been a conscientious custodian, his appointment as Assistant Keeper of the Records had been titular. The arrangements for evacuating the records had been handled by London; once they had reached the castle, John had had nothing to do with them. There was no reason why he would have been working on them when he died.

  But the other documents in the box were intriguing. The decision to use the castle as a wartime repository, I discovered, had been controversial.

  On 24 April 1939, Cyril Flower, the Keeper of Records, received a phone call, which he reported in a memo to a senior official at the Office of Works: ‘I’ve just had a call from the Duke of Rutland, who suggested that Belvoir Castle might be a good place for the Public Records in an Emergency. I explained to him that at the outbreak of War we should be fully occupied in evacuating to the two buildings already allotted to us.’