Tom Charke’s death at Bartram-Haugh becomes both a public scandal and a test of how far appearances can be trusted. At first, the locked room and the inquest support the conclusion that Charke died by his own hand; later, letters describing his financial claims against Silas Ruthyn make murder seem possible, while Silas’s forceful denial fails to clear his name. The concealed window mechanism eventually found in the room provides the missing explanation for how someone could have entered. In retrospect, that discovery transforms the apparent certainty of the original investigation into its central error.

Background and the death

On the second night after the races, Silas and Charke remained alone together in the parlour until between two and three in the morning. Charke’s servant, who had been staying at the Stag’s Head Inn at Feltram, arrived at six the next morning. Charke’s bedroom door was locked from the inside, with the key in the lock. When the door was forced, his master was found dead beside the bed. Silas was summoned, preserved the scene as closely as possible, sent for the coroner, and, as a justice of the peace, took the servant’s deposition while the events were fresh.

The inquest initially treated suicide as the compelling explanation. The window had been fastened from within with a screw when the chambermaid arranged it the previous evening, and the room was on the third storey, overlooking a narrow interior court. Its door was also locked from inside, and the key remained in the lock. The court had only one entrance, a door that appeared not to have been opened for years; investigators found no ladder long enough to reach the window. With no apparent route into the room, only one juryman, Mr. Manwaring, seemed to entertain the possibility that Charke had been killed by someone else.

Doubts and the public scandal

Although the inquest supported suicide, details of Charke’s last hours complicated that account. He had gone to bed intoxicated and was heard singing and making noise, conduct Lady Knollys later cited as difficult to reconcile with an intention to die. Charke’s razor was found near his right hand, but the fingers of his left hand had been cut. His betting memorandum book was missing, though his keys and the gold and trinkets he wore remained. These facts did not establish murder, but they left openings for speculation around a case whose physical circumstances seemed to exclude an intruder.

The room was examined beyond the initial inquiry. Investigators considered whether someone might have entered through the door or chimney; an iron bar had been placed across the flue near its top. The damp ground in the court showed no footprints. Months later, when the controversy intensified, the wainscoting was removed and the walls searched; no concealed access was found. The investigation thus reinforced the sealed-room interpretation, even as it could not quiet suspicion.

The controversy changed sharply when two letters Charke had written to an agent were published about two months after his death by a recipient seeking to extort money. The first attracted little attention; the second, according to Lady Knollys’s retrospective account, caused a sensation. It said that Charke had made a profitable visit to Bartram-Haugh and specified the amount of Silas’s IOUs, allegedly given because Silas could not pay him. The letter represented the debt as substantial, said that Charke had kept it secret at Silas’s request, and suggested that repayment depended on Silas obtaining money from his wealthy brother. Its timing—written on the evening of Charke’s death—and its writer’s reported high spirits further unsettled the suicide explanation.

The letters did not prove that Silas had killed Charke or taken his money. They did, however, provide a possible financial motive and made the missing betting book seem newly significant. Silas stoutly denied owing Charke anything and argued that Charke boasted and invented stories about gambling. He also suggested that the letters were forgeries, and countered the inference drawn from Charke’s spirits by observing that apparent high spirits did not rule out suicide. His printed pamphlet, produced with speed and admired for its force and ingenuity, framed the accusations as physically impossible and politically malicious. His defense was an argument, not a resolution of the physical mystery.

Silas’s defense and its consequences

Public opinion remained divided, and in Derbyshire it was decisively against Silas. His own bitter attack on local opponents, in which he portrayed himself as the victim of a political conspiracy, helped deepen the conflict. He announced that from the catastrophe onward he had given up the turf and its associated amusements; some observers treated this not as a moral change but as a sign that he had withdrawn because he expected rejection. For a time he was furious and prepared to challenge the county, but he later said that his habits and aspirations had changed.

No lawsuit produced a verdict, and no new evidence emerged for years. Those who had denounced Silas died without seeing the mystery resolved, while he remained an outcast. The uncertainty also informed the later arrangement of Austin Ruthyn’s estate. Austin left Silas £15,000, provided for his children, and appointed him Maud Ruthyn’s sole guardian, with parental authority until she reached twenty-one and a yearly payment of £2,000 for her maintenance, education, and expenses. In letters to the trustees, Austin described the old accusation against Silas as a slander born of political malice and presented the guardianship as an ordeal intended to vindicate his brother. The provision made Maud’s safety and inheritance part of the continuing test of Silas’s reputation.

The concealed entrance and the solution

The apparent impossibility of entering Charke’s room was overturned by a later discovery in another crisis. When Dudley Ruthyn entered Maud’s room through a window, she saw him descend by rope and work at the side of the window until the bars swung open. The episode showed that a window could appear secured yet be made to open by a concealed device.

After Lady Knollys described Dudley’s entry, Doctor Bryerly inspected the windows in the room where Charke had slept. He found powerful steel hinges craftily sunk into the window-frame’s timber. An iron pin on the outside secured the window; once it was removed, the window could swing open. It was the room in which Maud had been placed, and Bryerly identified this construction as the means by which Charke’s room had been entered. The decisive evidence did not come from the original inquest or the later wall search: it came from recognizing that the window itself had been misread.

Nearly a year after the events at Bartram, Dickon Hawkes was arrested for an older crime committed in Lancashire. After his conviction, he tried to disclose what he knew about the Frenchwoman’s death. Her body was found where he indicated, in Bartram-Haugh’s inner court, and after a legal inquiry was buried in Feltram’s churchyard. This later case confirms that the house concealed a separate death as well as the means of entering Charke’s room; it does not, by itself, supply a complete account of the circumstances of Charke’s death.

Significance

Charke’s death is narrated first through a delayed account by Lady Knollys, who distinguishes the agreed circumstances from the disputed interpretations and repeatedly marks what she can no longer recall precisely. The reader encounters a chain of testimony, public claims, and retrospective reconstruction rather than an immediate, comprehensive investigation. That form keeps physical facts—the locked door, the screw-fastened window, the absent betting book—distinct from conclusions drawn from them.

The eventual solution gives the room’s architecture a double meaning. The door, key, chimney, and courtyard seemed to make entry impossible; the hidden hinges show that the apparent security was not proof of exclusion. The scandal likewise separates what could be demonstrated from what people chose to believe about Silas. The concealed entrance solves how an intruder could reach Charke, but the evidence presented does not establish every disputed detail of the death or settle Silas’s guilt. The mystery’s resolution therefore corrects the inquest’s confidence without converting suspicion into a complete account.