The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.

PART II

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.

7
    ‘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