I have been reading about the strange death of the 8th Marquess of Ailesbury

I have been reading about the strange death of the 8th Marquess of Ailesbury. Two years ago, Michael Brudenell-Bruce, aged 98, died after falling from a window of his London home in Shepherd's Bush.

The marquess's body was found by his partner; he lay in the inner courtyard of his house in a pool of blood on the concrete slabs of the patio. The version most often repeated is that the marquess fell from the window while letting out the cat, although his son, who became the 9th Marquess, has stated that there is no evidence whatever that the cat had anything to do with what happened.

The cat version comes from Teresa Marshall di Paoli, a former model who once dated Frank Sinatra and who was the marquess's partner for 37 years. She said that the marquess was trying to let the cat, named Hanibam, out through a first-floor window when he fell by accident.

Yet it sounds ominous: a 98-year-old aristocrat who falls from a window because of a cat, whose own mother died in exactly the same way, falling from a window of the Savoy Hotel 86 years earlier.

The tragic story of Joan Salter has a number of unexpected details. In 1924 she secretly eloped from Oxford with Lord Cardigan, heir to the marquessate of Ailesbury, when both were still minors. They were eighteen, and they married in secret. And in 1937 Lady Cardigan fell from a seventh-floor window of the Savoy Hotel in London. She had returned from South Africa not long before; she was 35, and her son Michael, the future 8th Marquess, was only 11. The countess was in an evening gown and landed beside three children playing in the street. The coroner returned a verdict of suicide while of unsound mind. The inquest brought out one more grim detail: Lord Cardigan stated that Joan's mother, too, had taken her own life. Which makes it a family curse across three generations.