The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (22 page)

Henry’s father’s solution had been to borrow huge sums of money. By 1899, his estates were heavily mortgaged: £234,000 was owed to various creditors, the interest payments alone coming to £10,474 a year.
^‡
Ten years later, Henry had only succeeded in adding to the debts – in 1909, they stood at £289,000.
^§

Henry’s problems were intractable; but the ledgers for this period do more than illuminate the cause of his anxiety. They offer a telling insight into his character. Leafing through them, it is clear that he was the sort of man whose private troubles made his public face all the more important to him. Faced with the collapse in land and rent values, many of his contemporaries, including the Dukes of Bedford, Devonshire and Westminster, were cutting their losses and starting to sell off their subsidiary estates. Pride prevented Henry from taking such a prudent step; instead, he kept on spending. Regardless of the reality of his financial position, he was determined to keep up appearances. Despite the staggering levels of debt attached to his father’s estates, in the early 1900s, he made little attempt to balance the books, or rein in his expenditure. Evidently, all that mattered to Henry was that his father should be seen to be maintaining the lavish
tenue
expected of a Duke.

To sustain this pretence, between 1899 and 1907 he sanctioned an outlay of £12,887 per annum.
*
The ledgers disclose that he found the money by juggling the overdraft limits on his father’s various bank accounts; a glance at the payments summaries for any one of these years tells us exactly what he spent it on:

Household Accounts
for the year ending 1899
(The figures in parentheses represent modern values
)

These were the figures; Diana’s recollections of her father’s regimen at Belvoir offer a glimpse into the lifestyle they purchased.

There was never an hour
when a servant of one sort or another was not labouring away in some far corner of the castle. Heated only by coal, in 1899, it had no electric light. Above the ground floor there was no water, hot or cold, and no baths or lavatories.

As she looked back nearly sixty years later, the armies of servants who traipsed its corridors and on whom the family depended for their basic amenities loomed in Diana’s memory: ‘
The watermen are difficult to believe in today
,’ she wrote: ‘They seemed to me to belong to another clay. They were the biggest people I had ever seen, much bigger than any of the men of the family, who were remarkable for their height. They had stubbly beards and a general Bill Sikes appearance. They wore brown clothes, no collars and thick green baize aprons from chin to knee. On their shoulders they carried a wooden
yoke from which hung two gigantic cans of water. They moved on a perpetual round. Their job was to keep all jugs, cans and kettles full in the bedrooms, and morning or evening to bring the hot water for the hip-baths.’

Joining the watermen
on their round were the castle’s lamp men. Paraffin lamps, candles, and the glow from the many coal fires were the sole sources of light after dark. ‘There was no other form of lighting. Gas was despised, I forget why – vulgar, I think,’ Diana recalls. As dusk fell, it was the lamp men’s job to light each of the castle’s 356 rooms. Working their way through them, they placed the lamps they had cleaned, and fine candelabra, on tables and sills, and lit the wall sconces along the corridors. Later, when the Duke and his guests had retired from the state rooms, they busied themselves turning wicks down, snuffing candles and de-waxing extinguishers.

Throughout the night
, watchmen patrolled the passages, terraces and battlements. ‘They were ghostly figures one never quite saw,’ Diana remembers: ‘They frightened many a newcomer to death. There was a little of the watermen about them, but they were dreadfully silent and they padded. Always if one woke in the night, as the fire flickered to its death, one would hear a padded foot on the gravel outside and a voice, not loud enough to waken but strong enough to reassure, saying “Past twelve o’clock. All’s well.” ’

Then there was Betsy
, the still-room help, who was well into her nineties when Diana first met her: ‘She was born in the castle, no one quite knew how, and for seventy-five years she washed and dried the plates for the lesser meals. She was felt to be one of the castle’s treasures, together with the Benvenuto Cellini ewer and basin. The visitors were always shown her. She had never learned to read or write – no disgrace, I think, to the family, as what child of her class did learn to read before Waterloo? But maybe she was the happier for her ignorance, for she was always laughing, lived to over a hundred and had a grand funeral.’

Diana’s favourite was the Duke’s tailor
, who worked in the upholsterer’s room at the foot of the East Tower: ‘He was exactly like a Hans Andersen tailor. Cross-legged he sat in a tremendous confusion of curtains and covers, fringes, buttons, rags and carpets, bolsters,
scraps, huge curved needles like scimitars, bodkins, hunks of beeswax to strengthen thread and hundreds of flags. The flags on the tower-top, I suppose, got punished by the winds and were constantly in need of repair. I never saw him actually at work on anything else. There were slim flags for wind, little ones for rain, huge ones for sunshine, hunting flags, and many others.’

And there were countless others on Henry’s £900,000 wage roll.

In 1899, the castle had a groom of chambers, a house steward, an usher of the hall, a chef, a pastry chef, a confectioner, a plate butler, a clockman, a steward’s room boy – and housemaids, kitchen maids, scullery maids, footmen, odd-job men, and porters galore. These were just the indoor servants. In the castle’s grounds, there were hundreds more: grooms, stable lads, dairy maids, studmen, brewers, rat catchers, mole catchers, millers, mechanics, gardeners, groundsmen, gamekeepers, river keepers, huntsmen, kennelmen, slaughtermen, stockmen, horsemen, farm hands and woodsmen.

This vast establishment, paid for largely with borrowed money, revolved around just one person: Henry’s father, the elderly John Manners, 7th Duke of Rutland.

As the century turned
, the Duke entered his eighty-third year. His bent frame and his shock of shining white hair marked him out as he went about his castle. ‘I can see him very clearly walking down the endless corridors of Belvoir, wrapped warmly in a thick black cape buttoned down the front, for these passages in winter were arctic – no stoves, no hot pipes, no heating at all,’ Diana remembered: ‘He would unbutton his cape at the drawing-room door and hang it on a long brass bar with many others. He joined his large family at lunch, but I do not remember his talking very often.’

After serving in three Tory cabinets as Postmaster General and Chancellor to the Duchy of Lancaster, the Duke had retreated to Belvoir. His life there was sybaritic and self-regarding; from Diana’s description of his daily routine, the
tenue
Henry was keeping for his father served no other purpose beyond being –
and being seen to be
– a Duke.

Every day, after lunch, the old Duke
liked to tour his estate.
‘Tingaly the bingaly, Farver,’ one of his daughters would say at the end of the meal – the ‘bingaly’ being the small gold bell that stood on the table beside him. ‘The groom of chambers, thus summoned,’ Diana recalled, ‘would ask what orders for the stables. Some days, the answer was “Perfection round at a quarter before three, if you please.” ’

Perfection – ‘snow-white
and very fat and quiet’ – was the Duke’s horse. Watched by Diana and his other grandchildren – a footman in attendance to hold the horse’s bridle – the Duke would clamber on to the horse from the mounting stone at the entrance to the castle. As he set off, he was always accompanied: ‘Either one of his sons or Mr Knox, his private chaplain, would ride beside him, while a smart old groom, liveried in blue and buttoned in silver, top-hatted and cockaded, jogged behind.’

On the days he chose not to ride
, the Duke would tour his estate by carriage. ‘A lengthy discussion,’ Diana recalled, ‘would be carried on between him, some aunts and the groom of the chambers as to whether it was to be the landau, the Victoria or the barouche that should be used for the drive. I never understood what the issue was – the size of the vehicle, the state of the roads or the condition of the horses. Anyhow, the decision was made and the children were dressed for the drive. I remember genuinely hating it, I don’t know why. Perhaps it was because I, for one, always felt sick and dreaded the smell of the blue leather padding and the hot horses, and sitting backward, sometimes on the vast landau seat, sometimes on the minute stool of the Victoria. We would drive for an hour and a half through country roads of very little interest. There was no town within eight miles and scarcely any neighbours to leave cards upon. So round and round the muddy lanes of the estate we splashed, with an immense apoplectic coachman on the box and an alert footman in a fawn boxcloth liveried coat, check-lined and almost to the ground, who sprang up and down to open the too many gates.’

Often, as the Duke’s carriage wound its way back up the single-track road that ran through the woods to the castle, large crowds of tourists were gathered on either side.
‘My grandfather would uncover his head
and bow very slightly with a look of pleasure and welcome
on his delicate old face. He loved his tourists. They represented to him England and liberty and the feudal system, and were a link between the nobility and the people.’

On Sundays, the Duke’s post-lunch routine
altered. Instead of Perfection – or the landau or the barouche – a pony chaise was ordered for the purposes of touring the castle’s grounds. In all weathers, the Duke expected his family, his guests, his gentlemen secretaries and his chaplain to follow on foot. As Diana recalls, this ritual was as tedious as the carriage drive, involving as it did a ‘trudge of a good three miles’.

The stables, located at the bottom of the long drive up to the castle, were the first port of call: ‘Mr Durrance, the head groom, would be standing there in blue and silver, carrots in hand, to receive us. The gigantic Princes, Belvoirs and Wellingtons that drew the carriages, lined up hind-end foremost, were given a pat on the withers by my grandfather’s withered hand, and a carrot was proffered to each twitching muzzle.’ A quick inspection of the harness room followed, where armies of grooms had polished the deep mahogany leather saddles, and the solid-silver peacock crests on bit-rings and blinkers, until they gleamed.

After the stables came the kitchen garden
, a walk of several hundred yards along the Park road. Its high walls, encompassing fifty acres, were topped at intervals by yet more peacocks – these ones carved in stone. At the wrought-iron gates leading into the garden, Mr Divers, the head gardener, a sombre figure clad in a black cutaway coat and a Homburg hat, waited to show the party around. ‘He would cut us off a fine bunch of white grapes from the thousand hanging clusters in the vinery, pick us a camellia apiece and offer us apples to munch on the walk. My grandfather would congratulate him on his last-won horticultural medal and pretend to understand the Latin names of his flowers.’

The inspection continued
at the poultry yard, followed by a tramp across the fields to the dairy to see the prize-winning Stilton cheeses and the creamy yellow butter pats, churned by Miss Saddlebridge, the Duke’s dairy maid. These too were stamped with peacocks.

Last came the kennels
, which housed the famous Belvoir foxhounds and ‘smelt of dead horse’. Only then, after ‘a good two to three hours’, would the Duke allow his followers to process back up the hill, through the beech woods, to the castle.

Somewhere among them was John. The Sunday inspection was obligatory; on his visits home, he would have been there too.

Vividly, Diana describes its route and its rituals. But what were the dynamics within the family group?

‘
Asshole. C***.
’

The ferocity of the language John used to describe his father suggested a murkier reality beneath the glittering surface. Over the course of the ‘good two to three hours’, who had walked with whom? Where were John and his father in the straggling line of followers? Had they positioned themselves as far away from each other as possible?

Diana’s memoirs delineated the
tenue
her father insisted on maintaining; they hinted at a cantankerous side to his character. But they did not account for the hatred John had concealed within the pages of encryption.

Money – or the lack of it – appeared to lie behind the row between them. But what had sparked it? And why had Henry wanted to frighten his son?

Somewhat desperately, I asked the archivist at Belvoir whether there was any other material for the period. He steered me towards two boxes of correspondence.