The Lady in the Cellar

by Sinclair McKay

  She would have understood very well that this was a city in which one could be whatever one chose. Her self-assurance made her an attractive prospect to her new landlords. Added to this, she brought diversion to her fellow lodgers by way of her interest in astrology and dreams. She cultivated the manner of one who could see beyond the veil. In the London of 1870s, this was a talent that many had the most acute interest in.

  Some compulsion led Matilda to move once more. And so it was that a ‘Miss Sycamore’ presented herself at a respectable house a little to the north of Euston station in a street called Mornington Crescent. With her came the minimalist luggage of the strong box, plus also her tarot cards and what she referred to as ‘the dream book’.

  Her new landlady, Mrs Nash, was greatly impressed and bemused by her new tenant, who had instantly conveyed to her the fact that she was enormously wealthy. And soon, Mrs Nash and her maid-of-all-work were engaging in lively debate as soon as ‘Miss Sycamore’ went out for one of her ostentatious silk-clad perambulations. That hair: was it dyed or not? Given the age of the lady, surely it must have been? And yet during the time she spent at Mornington Crescent, neither of the other women were aware of ‘Miss Sycamore’ keeping the lengthy appointments with the hairdressers that such a procedure would require.

  And as at Dorset Square, landlady, servant and fellow residents in that stuccoed Georgian house came to relish the evenings in the downstairs drawing room when, after the dinner things were put away, ‘Miss Sycamore’ would entice her companions either into readings from her cards, or consultations with The Book of Dreams, delivering celestial prognostications.

  It also seemed to be the case that ‘Miss Sycamore’, when she felt herself to be among friends and equals, was congenial and even kind company. But there was that consistent restlessness to her as well: she appeared to be a compulsive walker. And as Mrs Nash noted with some wonder, no day would pass when ‘Miss Sycamore’ would not dress in the ‘fashion of a sixteen-year old’ despite clearly being in her early sixties. Children would follow her and laugh. The clothes were a continual source of admiration: rich red silks, beautiful scarves. And ‘Miss Sycamore’ seemed for a time to have found some contentment in this simple life.

  Yet for some reason the tranquility disturbed her; and in the summer of 1877, after a few months’ sojourn in Mornington Crescent, she decided it was time once more to move. Her landlady had no idea where she was going.

  Days later, Matilda Hacker disembarked from a horse-drawn cab and presented herself at the doorstep of number 4, Euston Square. Now, she was ‘Miss Uish’.

  9

  The Book of Dreams

  In the summer of 1877, ‘Miss Uish’ was a welcome addition to the household at 4, Euston Square; several lodgers had just left. At the time, the only other resident was the salesman Francis Riggenbach. Another travelling salesman, an American called Mr Findlay, had departed with surprising haste; and even though there was every expectation that he might be back – it was thought there had been urgent business in America that he had to transact – the arrival of ‘Miss Uish’ brought both stability and also a welcome tone.

  Thus it was that ‘Miss Uish’, together with her strong box, her wicker trunk and The Book of Dreams, was installed in the front room of the second floor. We can imagine her first walking into the house, noting its clean smell; glancing at the handmade furniture in the ground-floor drawing room; then following the maid-of-all-work up the carpeted stairs, along the quiet and dark landing of the first floor – Mr Riggenbach’s door shut until his return that evening – and thence to her own rooms.

  Although not quite as grand as the tall ceilinged apartment of Mr Riggenbach immediately below, this would have been a slightly cosier prospect. In the dusty high summer of London, there was little need for the fire in the grate; the warmth from the kitchen below would have risen through the house. And the room was tastefully furnished; other than the bed, there was an easy-chair, a desk, and pictures and ornaments, including an attractive cut-glass lamp.

  The young Bastendorff family occupied the top rooms. For ‘Miss Uish’, this would have been a charming and pleasingly middle-class prospect: rooms which looked out over the leafy garden in the centre of Euston Square; the endlessly fascinating bustle of horse-drawn traffic riding to and from the mighty railway terminus; and then the household itself which occasionally pleasingly echoed to the noise of laughing children.

  Without the children, the house might have occasionally felt a little disconcerting. The habits of the departed Mr Findlay, for instance, had caused his fellow tenants a few moments of discomposure. He seemed excitable; prone to exaggeration. He imagined himself to have violent enemies. He kept irregular hours. As a valued resident, he had a latchkey to the house. He was not alone in this. Others had keys too.

  Deep into the night, Matilda Hacker, lying in her bed, would have occasionally heard an unfamiliar footfall on the landing outside her room; there would have been that moment of curious suspense when listening to the steps of one outside the door who is hesitating in the dark. These were steps of a furtive nature, when the rest of the house was still: careful footfall on carpet and creaking board.

  There were other houses nearby where such movement in the middle of the night was commonplace and tolerated. There were some squares in Bloomsbury in the late 1870s that had acquired a reputation for licentiousness and promiscuity; rooms occupied by women who invited men back. This was not the case with number 4, Euston Square. So far as the outside world knew, the Bastendorffs kept a decent house. Those footsteps in the dark were a secret never to be spoken of.

  Of the other resident, Francis Riggenbach, there would have been little congress between himself and ‘Miss Uish’. Mr Riggenbach was a very busy German travelling salesman, specialising in the sugar trade. He had a great many clients across Bloomsbury and neighbouring St Pancras, and down in the south London suburbs of Brixton and Camberwell. When Germans had first started coming to the city in great numbers in the earlier years of the century, many had set up bakeries; and in the late 1870s, a great many maintained this line.

  As a commercial salesman, Riggenbach had at that time an unusual amount of influence for one who might have simply been seen as a middle man between importers and customers. His business also took him frequently to the continent; and his buyers were reliant on him to obtain the most favourable prices for large purchases of sugar.

  His clothes, in which he took great pride, were expensive and colourful: brightly patterned waistcoats, eye-catchingly rich neckties. He would have been very little trouble as a tenant, were it not for the fact of his dog. He had only been allowed to keep the animal on sufferance, and there were suggestions that others in the household found it a short-tempered animal. When he went out – which was frequently – the unhappy dog was confined to Riggenbach’s room.

  And ‘Miss Uish’ would have been very swiftly aware too of the thriving industry that lay across the back yard of the house: the specialised furniture-making workshop. Severin Bastendorff was not often to be seen around the house. But whenever she met him, ‘Miss Uish’ would have been struck by his distinctly accented English.

  Nor was Mary Bastendorff a particularly pronounced presence around the house; all the work was delegated to the housemaid Hannah Dobbs.

  But if any of the residents found ‘Miss Uish’ a little unusual, the children of Severin and Mary Bastendorff apparently took to her immediately. There was something a little child-like about this lady of a certain age who promenaded up and down the street in sashes. It was later to emerge that during that autumn of 1877, ‘Miss Uish’ would take the younger Bastendorff children to play in the gardens immediately outside.

  It would not be long before ‘Miss Uish’ was charming all the Bastendorffs with her seemingly gentle eccentricity; beguiling them with The Book of Dreams.

  The full title of this work was Napoleon’s Oraculum: or the Book of Fate. It was also sometimes referred to as The Book of Drea
ms and a competitor later published a version entitled The Imperial and Royal Book of Dreams. The publishing hook was this: during the campaign in Egypt, Napoleon’s forces had in 1799, happened across an ancient mystic text that could offer a guide to the future. Napoleon himself had this work translated from the ancient Egyptian into French and German and was said to have become addicted to its prognostications.

  It worked by first requiring the sitter to draw out five sets of rows of stars on a piece of paper, at random and paying no heed to the number of stars in each row. Then the sitter was required to count up the number of stars in each line, noting which rows had odd numbers and even numbers. These stars would then produce their own code-like pattern.

  At the start of The Book of Dreams was a table of questions that might be submitted. Among these were: ‘Shall I have to travel far by sea or land or to reside in foreign climes?’ ‘Inform me of all particulars relating to my future husband.’ ‘Will my beloved prove true in my absence?’ ‘Shall I ever be able to retire from business with a fortune?’ ‘Will it be my lot to experience great vissicitudes in this life?’1

  Then by use of a table of numbers and letters, the sitter would delve through The Book of Dreams to find the page with the corresponding pattern of stars. And on each page of this book, ancient nameless powers, it was said, had formulated oracular answers. Among these were: ‘Be not buoyed up by hopes of inheriting property which thou has not earned.’ ‘Be prudent, and success will attend thee.’ ‘As the glorious sun eclipseth the light of the stars, so will the partner of thy bed be accounted the fairest among women.’2

  This book, ‘translated from the German’ had been a terrific sales success for some time in London. It was published by George Purkess, who also produced the hugely popular (and torrid) weekly journal the Illustrated Police News. (Ironically, Purkess’s shadow was soon to loom greatly over 4, Euston Square.) The advertisements for The Book of Dreams ran in the Police News alongside other quasi-mystical services: ‘Important!’ ran one regular advertisement. ‘Any unmarried person sending their description, including date of birth and 18 stamps will receive in return a beautiful and artistic likeness of their future husband or wife and date of marriage – also my wonderful secret on fascination, carefully sealed. Address J. Henry, 42 Cooper’s Road, Old Kent Road, London.’

  But there was something rather guileless about Matilda Hacker’s fascination with The Book of Dreams; later, various acquaintances would recall how she would happily spend hours poring over the artful prophecies.

  And it would certainly seem to be the case that this was part of the way that she charmed the Bastendorff children. When the children were invited up to Matilda Hacker’s room for a tea party of ginger biscuits on one occasion, the event would certainly have featured an atmospheric reading from The Book of Dreams, the children clamouring to know of the awful powers gathered beneath Egypt’s desert sands.

  In amid the old lady’s pathological skittishness – her deceit, her adoption of various new names – it is possible to imagine that she found 4, Euston Square a more agreeable lodging than the others; that after an initial disinclination to have anything to do with the life of the house, she found herself becoming a part of it none the less.

  All of which only made it more inexplicable that her ill-used corpse came to be found beneath that coal.

  In May 1879, the inquest at St Pancras was about to conclude. And before it did so, a key figure in the final days of Matilda Hacker’s life was taken to survey her decomposed remains.

  10

  ‘No, Not Me’

  He was an expert on the intoxication of greed. Inspector Hagen’s career had been built upon cases where money as a motivation blotted everything else out. But here instead he was confronted with something chillingly nihilistic; the emotional vacuum in which a woman could be murdered, dumped like rubbish and wholly forgotten. The detective was fixing his focus upon the tangible valuables, rather than the absence of love.

  The CID had been following the trail of the gold watch. It led to a pawnbroker called Mr Parkinson, who operated from a shop around the corner from Euston Square in Drummond Street. Could Mr Parkinson identify the person who had brought the watch to his shop and exchanged it for money? Inspector Hagen had an instinct that this person would be found at the Tothill Fields prison. And he arranged for a line-up to be staged.

  Hagen was thinking of the former maid-of-all-work Hannah Dobbs, serving her sentence for petty robbery; she ‘and over a dozen other criminals were placed in one of the passages of the gaol for this purpose’, reported a local newspaper, ‘and as soon as Mr Parkinson entered and scanned the features of those present he, without a moment’s hesitation, singled out Hannah Dobbs’.

  The press was immediately fascinated by Hannah; and most particularly by the question of her physical appearance and allure (although one newspaper noted ungallantly that prison had made her ‘stout’). Her coolness was also a source of fascination. ‘She did not deny having a knowledge of Mr Parkinson,’ one report stated, ‘and indeed it is stated that she was so often in the habit of pawning articles at … Drummond Street, it was merely a matter of formality to visit her at all, as he remembered her perfectly well and indeed knew that the watch and chain had been pawned with him by her.’1

  Inspector Hagen had been alert with interest to this, not least to the detail that Hannah had pawned this item not in her own name, but under the pseudonym ‘Rosina Bastendorff’. This was the name of one of Bastendorff’s daughters.

  Added to this, one newspaper report ran, ‘Hannah Dobbs has been questioned as to … £50 she is alleged to have stated she received as a bequest from a dead uncle, but she can offer no explanation. It is well known to the police that she had no relative who was able to make so substantial a bequest.’2

  Hagen was freely briefing the press concerning his instincts about Hannah and her acquisitive nature. And the gravitational push of the reporting was linking Dobbs closer and closer with Matilda Hacker’s death. So much so that even before the inquest had had its final session to pronounce on the cause of that death, the police were letting the press know their theories.

  ‘It is supposed,’ ran one report, ‘that Miss Hacker must have been first struck … by a heavy instrument, which doubtless drew a quantity of blood. Then it is thought either that the half-lifeless body was carried to the cellar, where it soon showed some signs of returning life, and was instantly strangled by the rope which was found on the neck of the victim; or that the rope was attached immediately after the first blow was struck and that she was dragged by the cord down the stairs and thrown into the cellar.’

  In addition to this, the report continued, it seemed certain that ‘some kind of acid’ was thrown over the corpse ‘by some person’.3

  It was now that the neighbour of the Bastendorffs, one Mrs Talbert, who lived with her husband at number 5, Euston Square, came forward with a curious and unsettling memory of one dark afternoon in the autumn of 1877. She told the police that she had been in her first-floor sitting room, facing the square. It was a Sunday, and the streets were quieter than their weekday bustle, and there was little sign of life in the streets and the gardens below. Mrs Talbert, enjoying the silence, suddenly received a jump-inducing shock.

  It was, she said, ‘a scream’; and one that was of a most unnatural kind. It was drawn out, it seemed to be the scream of a lady, and hurrying to the window, she could not ascertain the source of it. Presently, the square returned to the muffled quiet of the dark autumn afternoon. And very soon after, Mrs Talbert had forgotten all about it. Only by reading of the sensation in the newspapers, and observing with some distaste the sightseers who had been gathering and jostling outside 4, Euston Square, had her memory been jolted.

  Hagen meanwhile had a further instinct about Hannah; that it would be constructive to have her view the remains of the corpse at St Pancras mortuary. ‘Hannah Dobbs arrived in a carriage with Inspector Hagen and one of the matrons of Tothill Fie
lds prison,’ reported one newspaper. ‘She was attired in deep mourning, which had been supplied by the authorities.’ Again, there was some fascination with her appearance. ‘She was noticed to be in splendid physical condition,’ noted the journalist. ‘She was perfectly calm and collected.’

  Once escorted inside the mortuary, white-tiled walls flickering with the reflected gaslight: ‘She walked over to the coffin where the skeleton lies and looked very calmly upon the hideous and foul smelling sight.

  ‘She shook her head,’ the report went on. ‘She did not remember anyone whom she would expect to see in that state. She was shown a piece of floor cloth marked with a diamond pattern. She recognised it as having been on one of the landings in Mr Bastendorff’s house. This had been thrown over the body in the cellar.’

  Another item, this time clothing that had belonged to Matilda Hacker; Inspector Hagen was watching Hannah Dobbs with raptor eyes as these presentations were quietly made. ‘She thought the shawl was much lighter than Miss Hacker’s,’ ran the report, ‘but she remembered the lace shawl, or fichu, which Miss Hacker had worn. During all this time, Hannah Dobbs never lost her self-possession.’4

  It might have been precisely this apparent insouciance that was causing Inspector Hagen’s instincts about her to grow ever more concrete.

  Yet Hannah had her own instincts too; and when she wrote to her parents in Bideford, immediately after this visit to the mortuary, someone in her family ensured that the eager journalists in north Devon and in London knew about it.

  ‘She has written a letter to her parents from Tothill Fields prison,’ stated one local newspaper report, ‘expressing her deep regret at the disgrace that she has brought upon them.’ But this disgrace, it was to be understood, was for the petty theft that had consigned her to that jail. ‘She makes no allusion in her letter,’ stated the report, ‘to the Euston Square murder.’