Madame de la Rougierre’s murder is the violent climax of the conspiracy at Bartram-Haugh and the key to an earlier locked-room mystery. Hidden in her bedroom, Maud Ruthyn witnesses Dudley Ruthyn enter through a concealed window and kill the sleeping governess. The scene exposes the danger surrounding Maud, implicates Silas Ruthyn in the cover-up, and supplies the crucial clue that will explain Tom Charke’s death.

Background and the locked-room mystery

Tom Charke’s death had been judged a suicide, although the circumstances left room for doubt. The inquest found his room apparently secured from within: the window was fastened by an interior screw, the door was locked with its key in the lock, and the chimney was blocked by an iron bar. The room looked into a narrow inner courtyard, where investigators found no footprints. Later searches of the walls and removed wainscoting disclosed no obvious concealed entrance.

The apparent impossibility of entry made Charke’s death a public scandal rather than a solved crime. One juryman, Mr. Manwaring, questioned whether Charke had died by his own hand, but the physical arrangement of the room seemed to support the official verdict. The later discovery that the room had a window fitted with concealed hinges changes the meaning of those earlier observations: what appeared to be a sealed room could be entered by manipulating a hidden opening.

Dudley enters Maud’s room

On the night of the murder, Maud is awake and concealed in her room, watching the door. A strange grating sound above her draws her attention toward the window. Dudley descends there by rope, lets himself onto the sill, and opens the window together with its bars. The method is silent enough that he enters without alerting the household.

Dudley carries a modified hammer with a long, tapering spike at one end. He checks the window and tests the tool before moving toward the bed. Maud remains hidden, recognizing that discovery could put her life in immediate danger. Dudley goes to the sleeping Madame and attacks her; Maud witnesses the murder from her hiding place. The scene thus makes Maud not merely the person endangered by the plot but its surviving eyewitness.

Silas and the attempted cover-up

After the attack, someone outside the room answers Dudley’s call with the assurance that a friend is there. A key is inserted, and Silas enters. His presence turns the killing into more than Dudley’s isolated act: he is present immediately afterward, and his response is directed toward what must be done with the body.

Dudley tells Silas, in effect, that Silas has made him do it. Silas urges him to steady himself. When Silas says that Dudley and Hawkes must act quickly and get the body out of the way, Dudley refuses to touch it and throws the hammer to the floor. The exchange shows Dudley’s distress and resistance, but it also places Silas in the practical management of the crime’s aftermath. The murder is therefore followed at once by an effort to conceal what happened, with Dickon Hawkes named as an accomplice in the removal.

The body and the delayed revelation

The concealment succeeds for a time. Nearly a year later, Dickon is arrested on an unrelated old charge from Lancashire. After his conviction, he attempts a disclosure of the circumstances surrounding the Frenchwoman’s death and identifies where her body was buried. The remains are found in the inner court of Bartram-Haugh and, after a legal inquiry, are buried in the churchyard at Feltram. Maud’s account also explains why the secret had remained hidden: she had feared the ordeal of appearing as a witness as well as the burden of keeping silent.

The crime’s second consequence is the solution to Charke’s death. After Lady Knollys describes how Dudley entered Maud’s room, Doctor Bryerly inspects the windows in the room where Charke had slept. He finds powerful steel hinges craftily concealed in the window frame; an iron pin on the outside secures the window, which swings open when the pin is removed. The room is identified as the one Charke occupied on the night he died. What the earlier inquiry treated as proof that no one could have entered is reinterpreted as evidence that investigators had not recognized the entrance mechanism.

Narrative significance

The murder binds the present danger to Maud with the unresolved past at Bartram-Haugh. Dudley’s entry demonstrates that the locked-room problem was not supernatural or impossible: the room’s security depended on an unnoticed piece of carpentry. The concealed hinges also expose the limits of the earlier investigation, which had examined the room and removed its wainscoting without discovering the window’s construction.

The revelation arrives through accumulated testimony and inspection rather than through the initial verdict. Maud’s eyewitness account makes Dudley’s method intelligible; Lady Knollys’s description prompts Bryerly to examine the relevant window; and the hidden hinges supply the physical explanation. The murder consequently serves both as a personal catastrophe witnessed by Maud and as the belated key to Charke’s death. Its aftermath confirms that what had seemed securely closed at Bartram-Haugh—room, secret, and past—could be opened by means its investigators failed to see.