The Lady in the Cellar

by Sinclair McKay

  This did not go quite as it should, she wrote; for she and her fellow servants, who all slept in one large bed downstairs, went for a nap at 11p.m. and fell asleep – so Hannah missed her appointment. They were woken by two policemen who had investigated the back door, which had been left open.

  After this mishap, the following evening went a little more smoothly for Hannah. She managed to effect a solo exit from Torrington Square, and met Bastendorff at a pre-arranged spot. Hannah did not go back home, she said, ‘until half-past two o’clock’.

  Hannah related how she then went on to see Mr Bastendorff ‘several times’ in Torrington Square; and she continued to see him when she decided to leave Mrs Pearce’s service and go to work nearby for a Mrs Cripps in Russell Square, who was offering a little more money. It was while she was adjusting to this new job when Hannah learned that Bastendorff was a married man. She seemed not to have been deterred.

  ‘I learned that his wife would soon be in want of a servant,’ she wrote, ‘and that the wages were but £11 a year and that the difference might be made up in another way to me.’ According to Hannah, Bastendorff told her that his wife Mary was shortly to advertise the position. ‘I went to 4, Euston Square on 17th June, 1876.’ In fact, there was another servant starting there too: a younger girl called Ellen Peek. She was to stay seven months; Hannah was there, as she recalled with striking precision, ‘two years, two months and three days’.

  The house then was a bustling establishment. The most important tenants were a Mr and Mrs Brookes, who retained their own servant. They had ‘the dining and drawing rooms, the small top front room and the back kitchen’. The Brookes servant left just a few days after Hannah arrived; and Mary Bastendorff and Mrs Brookes agreed that Hannah Dobbs should begin working for them, as well as attending to everyone else in the house. Hannah noted of this that her ‘wages were not increased’ accordingly. Indeed, she also alleged that she only received her first wages an extraordinary four months after she started working there; making that summer of 1876 a period of unpaid labour. Hannah did not reveal in this memoir quite why she didn’t leave; she would have had no difficulty finding non-exploitative work elsewhere.

  It was also in the first few months that possessions belonging to Mary Bastendorff started finding their way to local pawn shops. ‘Her ear-rings and brooch were pawned,’ wrote Hannah, ‘one in Hampstead-road and the other in Euston-road.’ On top of this, ‘a ring of Mr Bastendorff’s and the family Bible were also pawned, but not by me’. Then by whom? Hannah Dobbs chose not to say, although she then went on to relate how the Brookes’ were being systematically swindled. ‘There were no coals to speak of then in the cellar where THE BODY OF MISS HACKER was found,’ wrote Hannah, teasing her readers with the horror that was yet to come. ‘In fact at this time I used Mr Brookes’s coals for Mr Bastendorff’s fires.’

  It was at this stage that Hannah’s account started to darken.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Bastendorff then slept in the large front bedroom at the top of the house and I slept in the large back one with the children,’ she wrote.

  ‘He used to come in between twelve and one o’clock when his wife and children were asleep.

  ‘In January 1877 I was afraid that I was with child,’ she continued. ‘I was told by the father that I need not fear, as I should not be allowed to want for anything. Also that I was to write home, telling my parents I was married, and when the time for my confinement approached, to go home on the pretext that I wished to be taken ill [sic] there, my husband being abroad.

  ‘It was on the day that the Brookes’ left – in December 1876 – that Peter Bastendorff … first sought to engage himself to me,’ she continued. ‘By an arrangement, Peter was to be imputed the paternity of the expected child and a key of the street door was furnished him so that he could let himself into the house at night to see me. That part worked as desired.

  ‘I wrote to my mother telling her I was married and she never knew to the contrary until the discovery of the dead body at Euston Square. But I never became a mother. An illness prevented that.’3

  In a few short paragraphs, Hannah’s account had depicted a house of shame; of adultery and casual sex, of brothers complicit in sordid transactions, and worse: a house in which such acts took place near where children were sleeping. The publisher George Purkess (later to achieve stratospheric circulation of his torrid Illustrated Police News when Jack the Ripper struck in 1888) knew the laws of libel; but clearly his hard-eyed desire to cause sensation and maximise sales must have over-ridden any cautiousness about the outrageousness of these printed allegations.

  Hannah wrote of some of the lodgers who came and went at number 4, and their sometimes equally immoral arrangements. There was the arrival in January 1877 of a Miss Griffith. She took ‘the drawing room second floor and three rooms at the top of the house as well as the back kitchen and outside coal cellar’. And moving in with her, it seemed, was the strange salesman, Mr Findlay. Implicit was the suggestion that Mr and Mrs Bastendorff were fully aware of all the liaisons of their lodgers. Rather than being the guarantors of genteel behaviour, as most live-in landlords were presumed to be, they were, by Hannah Dobb’s account, encouraging licentiousness.

  After several months, wrote Hannah, ‘Miss Griffiths’ left and for a time, Mr Findlay went with her. But then he came back. ‘Mr Findlay seemed to be a very mysterious personage,’ she wrote. ‘He had lots of money, got I know not how, but where he and his money have gone to, I am only permitted to suspect.

  ‘The police have been too stupid to guess,’ she added, ‘their officers too imbecile even to accept a broad and STARTLING CLUE. Dogberry and Noodledum – no matter, that is public business now.’ But what did she mean by this (apart from taking the opportunity to hit out at Inspector Hagen?) ‘One day,’ she wrote, ‘I found a loaded revolver in Mr Findlay’s bed. At my request, Mr Bastendorff went up and took it downstairs. Before I had finished the room, Mr Findlay came back for it, saying he had forgotten to put it in his pocket. Mr Findlay went away at length to Liverpool.’

  After this cryptic passage, Hannah outlined a period of calm at 4, Euston Square, before the salesman’s return. She described the arrival of the respectable sugar merchant Mr Riggenbach, who brought his own furniture with him. Then came a Mr and Mrs Loeffler who ‘took the two rooms on the second floor.’ When Mr Findlay came back, he ‘took the large top front room’.

  According to Hannah, Findlay and Severin Bastendorff became close during this period; and ‘went out together’. She took a period of leave from the house in August 1877 ‘as the letters prove’; and when she came back ‘I was told he (Findlay) had gone.’ Added to this, soon afterwards, ‘I had a gold watch and chain given me’ (she declined to say by whom). ‘It was a large keyless watch with a white dial, the chain was of gold with large links and now,’ she added, ‘when I recall the facts, it strikes me they were just like the watch and chain that Mr Findlay used to wear. Mr P. Bastendorff corroborates this. I returned the watch and chain before I received Miss Hacker’s watch. What has become of Mr Findlay? That was the question which was asked at the trial but never answered.’

  The woman who stood in for Hannah during her absence, Mrs Hobson, told the maid that she had not seen Mr Findlay leave; and more, ‘that more than ordinarily liberal man had only left a shilling on the mantel-shelf for her.’

  Yet Hannah Dobbs seemed to be throwing out ambiguities of her own; the suggestion here was that Mr Findlay had somehow fallen victim to Severin Bastendorff; and had been murdered. The next section of the pamphlet was intended to pull Bastendorff deeper into this mire, while also suggesting that the younger brother Peter was being dragged down too.

  This curious side-plot started with Peter Bastendorff and Hannah Dobbs at Waterloo railway station in August 1877; he was under the impression that she was going home to Bideford for extended leave. But in fact, according to her own account, she was not. She took a train ‘to Box Hill only’, about an hour’s
journey away; then took the next train back. She met Severin Bastendorff at Victoria station and, she wrote, ‘we went to Redhill together’.

  It seems there was an illicit tryst at a Redhill inn. They returned to London the following day; and their aim, implied in the text, was to avoid being seen either by Mary Bastendorff or by brother Peter. ‘Next night, a room was taken in the Edgware Road,’ she wrote, ‘and there I passed the night alone.’ Hannah moved from rented room to rented room all over; from Kew to King’s Cross. But then she alleged that she became a secret nocturnal visitor to Euston Square.

  ‘The rest of the time I was ostensibly away in the country,’ she wrote, ‘I slept at 4, Euston Square every night, being let secretly into the house at night and slipping away unobserved in the morning, spending the day walking in Hyde Park and elsewhere.’

  Here, Hannah seemed to become tangled in her own narrative web: she related that while she was supposedly away, she sent Peter a letter telling him that she would soon be returning from Devon, catching the train from Exeter to Waterloo, and asking him to meet her on the date she gave.

  Yet Peter was apparently no fool; he noticed that the post-mark on the letter bore a ‘London’ stamp. He knew that Hannah had not been in Bideford at all. He declined to go and meet her as she supposedly ‘arrived’ at Waterloo; his brother Anthony Bastendorff – known to the family as ‘Toon’ – was sent to fetch her instead. Peter and Anthony, as Hannah related, had formerly worked with their brother Severin but had lately started up their own breakaway furniture concern in Francis Street, just off the Tottenham Court Road.

  Hannah told the jealous Peter she was staying at her former place of employ at 42 Torrington Square; and when Peter returned from a business trip in the country and caught up with her, she maintained a charade of allowing him to walk her to the gates of Torrington Square (many Bloomsbury squares were gated at that time). When away from Peter’s gaze, and under the cover of darkness, Hannah – by her own account – would steal back to 4, Euston Square.

  Her claim to have slept there every night throughout that period stretches credulity; surely Mrs Bastendorff would have had some sort of inkling? And yet the idea evokes the image of the unlit house at night, and the stealthy movements on the stairs of one who is familiar with every creak and groan. A midnight interloper: the confessions of extra-marital sex were one thing, but Hannah Dobbs was maximising this outrage by portraying herself as a sexual intruder, the husband’s betrayal of his wife taking place under his very own roof as his family slept oblivious.

  One day in the midst of this sinister arrangement, Hannah Dobbs – she claimed – chose an afternoon to go and see Mary Bastendorff; Hannah pretended that she had just returned from Devon. It was at this point that Hannah’s stand-in, Mrs Hobson, was working there; but it seemed she was unsatisfactory. Mrs Bastendorff asked Hannah if she wished to return ‘to her employ’; Hannah told her she would ‘think about it.’ But as well as her night-time visits, Hannah often went back during the daylight hours, by her own account, sometimes to take the children out to the Square gardens or ‘for a walk’.

  But it seemed Peter Bastendorff was getting more jealous, and suspicious. He ‘charged’ her with ‘secretly meeting Severin’ which she ‘denied’. ‘One evening, Peter, after saying ‘good night’ to me at the Torrington gates, went around the square,’ wrote Hannah, ‘and as I passed round on my way to Euston Square we met face to face and then he knew that I did not go into the house at 42, Torrington Square.’ But Hannah was ready with a riposte to him: ‘I told him I had come around just because I knew he remained to watch where I went to.’ Peter apparently accepted this; the two of them walked a little further, towards his furniture workshop in Francis Street; the two of them bade farewell again; and Hannah by her own account ‘then went out and met one of his brothers’. That brother being Severin.

  There was one weekend when Mrs Bastendorff, seeing Hannah in the daylight, told her that she and Severin and the children were going to the country for several days; would she care to stay at Euston Square with the (inadequate) Mrs Hobson to help run the establishment in their absence? Hannah assented. Mrs Hobson was very shortly to leave; and Hannah moved back into Euston Square openly, now once more employed full-time.

  It was a little after this that Matilda Hacker came asking about rooms. ‘I showed her the rooms we had to spare on the second-floor front and the rooms at the top,’ wrote Dobbs. ‘She did not want to give 12 shillings a week for the second floor – that was the price asked. I then went and asked Mrs Bastendorff about letting Miss Hacker have the second-floor back, while Mrs Bastendorff took the second-floor front for her bedroom. Miss Hacker waited while I went to ask. Mrs Bastendorff said she was willing to change rooms but Miss Hacker, on seeing the back room, did not like it, because it had such a dull view, overlooking the mews. She then agreed to take the front room at 12 shillings a week and said she would come in the afternoon the next day.’

  Apart from the minutiae of boarding house life, Dobbs might also have been slyly commenting on the state of the Bastendorff marriage; earlier she had stated that Severin and Mary slept at the top of the house; she now seemed to be suggesting that they were occupying separate rooms. She also emphasised the fact that she – and not Mrs Bastendorff – was running the establishment: that Mrs Bastendorff, sitting in the kitchen, had not even glimpsed this new lodger, and that it was left to Hannah to describe her as a ‘grand old lady’ who wore ‘a blue silk dress, a black dichu, and white hat with a lot of white feathers’. The one concession Mrs Bastendorff made for her new guest was to go out that day and buy a new lamp for the room.

  The next day, Miss Hacker ‘came to the door in a cab with all her luggage, which consisted of a large trunk covered with American oilcloth, over which was a coarse wrapping, one or two small parasols, and an umbrella. She had on a black bonnet with blue feathers, the same blue silk dress, and a small black lace cape … The cabman helped me up with the luggage to her room, while Miss Hacker waited in the hall until the cabman came down, when she paid him. The trunk was very heavy … I did not see what Miss Hacker paid him but I think he wanted two-pence more for carrying the trunk upstairs and I think he did not get it.’

  Hannah Dobbs was fascinating on the eccentricity of this new lodger. On that first day, the old lady went out to buy herself some food. She returned with ‘a mutton chop, a loaf, and some butter’. Hannah ‘cooked the chop for her and took it up to her with a kettle of boiling water with which she made tea’. Hannah showed Miss Hacker to a cupboard on the landing in which she could store ‘eatables’ as well as clothes.

  Hannah went upstairs to clear away the plate for the mutton and the tea things; a little later, as the evening drew on, she went up again to ‘tidy up’ the room. She asked Miss Hacker what she would like for her supper; the lady explained that she did not ‘take anything more than a glass of ale’. She did a little later give Hannah six pence to go out to the pub and fetch for her ‘half a pint of stout’. As the day drew to a close at midnight, Hannah knocked and asked her if there was anything else that she required. Miss Hacker told her no, and Hannah noted that she ‘was not in bed at that time’. She also noted that Mrs Bastendorff had still not introduced herself – or had even seen – her new lodger.

  Matilda Hacker was not an early riser; she rang the maid’s bell for her breakfast at 9a.m. ‘She asked me to go out and get her a rasher of bacon,’ wrote Hannah. The maid was reluctant to trouble the butcher for such a singular purchase; and Mrs Bastendorff authorised her instead to by ‘half a pound’ which she would use herself. Miss Hacker’s rasher was cooked in the kitchen; Hannah took it up to her second-floor room. ‘She was not pleased with the bacon,’ wrote Hannah, ‘saying she was glad she did not send for more than a single rasher as no-one could please her.’4

  And so the rhythms of Matilda Hacker’s remaining days – those days at Euston Square – were established. After breakfast, and at some point in the mid-morning, she would g
o out (Hannah knew not where) and she would take her lunch at other premises. Miss Hacker returned for tea; and at around 6p.m., Hannah would take a kettle of boiling water up to that room looking out over the gardens and the square. At 9p.m., Miss Hacker rang down with her request from the local public house; she had not been pleased with the stout so this time she requested that Hannah fetch her a ‘half-pint of “four-ale”’. And this again satisfied all of the old lady’s needs for that day; Hannah checking with her about midnight that she had everything required.

  And the maid got a clearer sense of this new lodger; not merely her quirks but also the secluded nature of her life. The old lady always took her lunch elsewhere; but in the afternoon, she was back and either she would be writing a number of letters, or she would be consulting what Hannah called her ‘dream-book’. There was an image of Matilda Hacker sitting at the table near the window, either thoroughly absorbed in the pages of this astrological almanack; or dealing Tarot cards to herself.

  Hannah also caught a note of vulnerability; there was one day when Matilda Hacker had to turn aside from The Book of Dreams, with her head held back. The maid asked if she was quite well, and the old lady told her that she had a headache; that it was possibly a cold. Hannah asked her if there was anything she could fetch that would help: the answer was ‘gruel with a little rum in it’. Hannah accordingly went out to buy some oatmeal; she then mixed it with half a pint of milk and a ‘quartern of rum’. She heated it all up and took it to the old lady who drank it gratefully, declaring that it was ‘very nice’. A little later that evening, Hannah looked in on her again and asked if perhaps she might like some of her habitual ‘supper beer’; the old lady declined this but did said that if Hannah brought some boiling water upstairs, she would instead happily have hot rum. This she did.