The Lady in the Cellar

by Sinclair McKay

  Here, perhaps artfully, is a portrayal of the ideal boarding house relationship; the paying guest being looked after by a genuinely concerned servant. One of the contemporary concerns about such houses was their atomised quality; the absence of family leading to a soulless home filled with random souls who could form no connection. Instead, here, Hannah Dobbs was suggesting that there was not only a connection but also warmth. Even a wilful eccentric such as Matilda Hacker would not be left completely isolated.

  Yet Hannah also seemed alive to the less attractive traits of this unusual lady. Her fussiness over the type of beer fetched from the public house seemed soon to become something of a nightly nuisance; so much so that the teenaged lad Frank who worked in the furniture workshop at the back was deputed to go for it instead. Hannah was also intrigued as the old lady gradually divulged something of the nature of her own property interests.

  ‘When I took her tea up at six o’clock,’ wrote Hannah, ‘she asked if the house did not run to a very high rent. I said it did. She said, ‘Yes, I know they do because I have houses of my own. They cost a great deal of money to keep in repair.’ She also said, ‘I used to keep a pretty little house for myself when my sister was living but when she died I gave it up, as I preferred to travel about.’

  ‘People may ask,’ wrote Hannah in an aside, ‘why do I remember all these small details, but the fearful trial in which my life was placed in such jeopardy constrained me to rack my memory to recall every incident connected with the unfortunate Miss Hacker and my experience at the Bastendorff’s, so that my counsel could give me the truest, ablest and best defence.’ She wrote that since then, she had frequently lain awake at night thinking through those experiences. She was saving the darkest allegations until last.

  The old lady continued to settle into the house; but no-one apparently had any more concrete idea of who she was or where she had come from. ‘On Saturday, Miss Hacker had her breakfast as usual,’ wrote Hannah. At the time when Mary Bastendorff was climbing the stairs to go to her own room, she apparently met her new lodger for the first time, and they talked.

  On the following day, ‘Miss Hacker went to church’. She asked Hannah to ask Mrs Bastendorff if she might borrow the copy of the church service book that she had seen in the house. Hannah fetched it; and on Matilda Hacker’s return, it was time to cook the Sunday lunch that the old lady had bought for herself: a mutton chop. Matilda Hacker asked Hannah if she might have it with a few of Mrs Bastendorff’s potatoes; she indicated that she would pay for these. Hannah procured them, cooked the old lady’s dinner, and gave it to her.

  What then followed was a fascinating – and again – artful outbreak of ambiguity. Hannah’s narrative leaped forward two days. On the Tuesday, she wrote, ‘Mrs Bastendorff made out Miss Hacker’s bill, and I took it up’. ‘It amounted to 12 shillings, 4 and a half d (pence). Miss Hacker looked at the bill and asked what the 4 and a half d was for.’ It was for the potatoes. ‘I never had more than one and a half d or 2d worth altogether,’ the old lady apparently told Hannah. Hannah looked at the bill, turned to get it corrected – but then realised what was causing the misunderstanding.

  ‘In a minute more, I said, “it is all right. There is one and a half d for the potatoes and 3d for the cruet, for pepper, salt, mustard and vinegar.” The old lady asked if she would be expected to pay this every time for the cruet; she was told no, not unless she used it all. And with this, Hannah wrote, ‘she gave me a £5 note and I think I went and got it changed’.

  She wrote that she obtained the change and got the rent bill ‘receipted’ by Mrs Bastendorff; but she took it back upstairs to the old lady because it had not been possible to put a name on it. She said that the old lady had not given a name. And it was at this point, according to Hannah, that the old lady first told her that her real name was Matilda Hacker. ‘She never was called Miss Uish,’ wrote Hannah. This, she said, had been a name given by the Bastendorffs.

  And so she came to Matilda Hacker’s increasing integration into the house; a sense that the old lady was starting to feel at home. And her account seemed to overturn the chronology that had been heard in court. On one Saturday night, at twelve, Hannah went upstairs and saw a light under Matilda Hacker’s door. She knocked, and went in, and asked if there was anything further that she should like. The old lady was on the sofa ‘between the two windows’ and had the table drawn up close to her. Upon the table ‘lay her blue silk dress, white petticoat, lace cap and her bonnet.’ She explained to the maid that she was preparing her things for church the next morning – and this included her gold watch in chain which she said she only ever wore for church as she ‘did not trust’ flaunting them in London otherwise.

  She needed nothing more; and she said: ‘Good night, Hannah.’ Across the landing, Mary Bastendorff was also preparing for bed, with her door slightly ajar; there was a short exchange between her and Hannah and then ‘Mr Bastendorff came in’ and Hannah went up to her own bed. On the Sunday morning, Matilda Hacker went to church and when she came back, she asked Hannah if she might have the key to the gate that led to the gardens in the centre of Euston Square. It was her intention – if Mrs Bastendorff was agreeable – to take the little children Christina and Peter out to play there.

  And indeed out they went, with the children seeming to have a jolly time with this youthful seeming old lady. When they eventually came back in, Matilda Hacker went upstairs to change; Hannah noted that whenever she did so, the old lady would fold up her things and either lock them in her trunk or lock them in the landing cupboard; the chests of drawers in her room remained empty. Via Hannah, Miss Hacker sent down a request that little Christina and Peter join her upstairs in her room. She had a treat for them: a selection of nuts and ginger nuts that she had bought earlier.

  So the children went up for their little tea party; and Matilda Hacker beguiled the time, possibly by means of The Book of Dreams and the extraordinary stories around it; and Hannah went up at seven to tell Christina and Peter that it was now time for bed. She also carried a request from an apparently grateful Mrs Bastendorff: would she care to go down that evening to the dining room to while away some hours with the lady of the house?

  Miss Hacker was reluctant; she declared that she had nothing suitable to wear. But Mrs Bastendorff sent Hannah with word that they were not expecting any visitors that evening; and so the arrangement would be perfectly informal. And at this, according to Hannah, Matilda Hacker relented. The maid was sent out to secure several bottles of lemonade. Mary Bastendorff’s favoured refreshment for herself and her guests was lemonade and brandy.

  It seemed the evening was a success, according to Hannah (and this was a direct contradiction of Mary Bastendorff’s evidence at the trial in which she swore she had no dealings with the old lady); at one stage, Matilda Hacker withdrew briefly to go and fetch her ‘photographic album’; she then showed her hostess ‘her sister’s and others’ likenesses’. Indeed, she also handed over a likeness of herself for Mrs Bastendorff to appraise. In this account, the ladies remained in that dining room until 11p.m.

  The photograph of Matilda Hacker remained on the property, according to Hannah. First, the children apparently had it; then it made its way to the Bastendorff furniture workshop out at the back of the house, when little Peter took it to show his uncle Anthony (‘Toon’). ‘Toon stuck the likeness on the wall beside the bench where he was working, where it remained for some time,’ wrote Hannah. Indeed, one day, in a spirit of high jocularity, Toon called her ‘to come and see his sweetheart’s likeness’. ‘I went,’ she wrote, ‘and the moment I saw it, I said, “Why that was our old lodger.” I said it was a shame to put it there and I went and pulled it down. Peter and Toon Bastendorff then tried to get it from me; there was a struggle for it that ended with the likeness being torn up.’

  This was some time after Matilda Hacker’s disappearance; Hannah at this point almost off-handedly mentioned that she was ‘given’ (with no hint by whom) a gold bracel
et that had been found in the second-floor cupboard that had been used by the old lady. The idea was that she was to pawn it; and she took it to a nearby shop in the Hampstead Road – ‘and as far as I know, the bracelet is lying in that shop still,’ she wrote. ‘It was a rather large bracelet of plain plaited gold.’

  Hannah returned to the old lady’s period of residency, and some curious circumstances. One night, the maid ‘heard something go smash’. At the time, Hannah was in her own room, changing her dress; by her own account, she ran downstairs and into Matilda Hacker’s room. The old lady had had a mishap while trying to light the lamp; and its glass globe had shattered on the hearth. ‘I picked the pieces up,’ wrote Hannah, ‘and in picking them up I ran a piece of glass into my finger.’

  At that moment, Peter Bastendorff had knocked at the front door; Hannah went downstairs, wrapping a handkerchief around her finger. Peter was most attentive towards her injury; the landlady, on the other hand, when learning of the accident, seemed more concerned about the cost of the lamp. Miss Hacker was aware that she owed an extra two shillings for the breakage.

  The ordinariness of life, the perfectly undramatic details, served to give a sense of gathering and motiveless menace; what was happening in that house that would then lead to such murderous violence? Yet there were unsettlingly odd undercurrents, at least according to Hannah. One day, she was approached by Mary Bastendorff who told the maid that her sister and mother were coming to visit, and she wanted the girl to go to the pawn shop to pawn a ring for her. Hannah wrote that she offered her employer a loan of a few shillings; but Mrs Bastendorff refused. If she pawned the ring, Mrs Bastendorff could get her sister to buy it later.

  Her account came to the mysterious final hours of Matilda Hacker. She had been fully settled for a few weeks in her second-floor room. One morning, Severin Bastendorff interrupted Hannah as she was cleaning windows (an echo of the alleged first encounter three years previously) and told her to fetch the rent from the old lady. While it was certainly due that day, Hannah wondered at the peremptoriness of demanding it so briskly, and not even in person. The maid found Miss Hacker at her table, writing; she apologised for ‘troubling her’ and the lodger told the girl that at that moment, she didn’t have any change.

  This was the most crucial part of Hannah’s defence; the encounter that she and no-one else could testify to. The old lady told her that she would be going out after she had finished writing her letters, and then she could ‘obtain change’. Hannah offered to go and fetch it instead: and at this, she said, Matilda Hacker said ‘very well then’.

  According to Hannah, Miss Hacker got up, ‘and turning towards the sofa lifted her skirt and took a five-pound note from her flannel petticoat’. Indeed, she apparently took out several notes, also concealed within a flannel arrangement which was fastened with ribbon.

  ‘She smiled, and told me to look and see what a good plan she had got, and how nice it was to keep money for anyone who was travelling for no-one would think of looking in such a place as that for money,’ wrote Hannah. ‘This was the first occasion on which Miss Hacker showed that she had a considerable sum of money in her possession.’

  Hannah related how she took the five-pound note downstairs and as well as telling Severin Bastendorff that she would obtain the change for it, she claimed that she also remarked to him that Miss Hacker ‘had a roll’ of such notes. ‘A remark was made that it was desirable that she should drop her petticoat and let someone pick it up.’5

  And now the outlines of motive for murder, so carefully seeded by Hannah and her ghostwriter, were beginning to become apparent. Crucially, there was also a studied vagueness about the days; in court, it was held that the murder had taken place at the weekend and that the house had been empty. Hannah Dobbs’ pamphlet muddied this certainty.

  Matilda Hacker, in this account, went out to post her letters; and returned at lunchtime. By this stage, according to Hannah, the maid was preparing to take the children up to Hampstead. They set out, she and Christina and Peter and the small baby, taking the horse-drawn omnibus that ran up the Hampstead Road, through Camden and up towards the heights of the Heath. There, she said, she had the children photographed (this, like donkey rides at Whitestone Pond, was one of the side attractions). The photographer, she averred, was ‘a very fair man with a little moustache’. Then, she wrote, the weather turned. Hannah wrote that she took the children home and ‘we got out of the ‘bus at the top of Drummond Street and I sent the two children into the house through the (furniture work) shop’. She herself walked round the front with the baby, as the rain fell on Euston Square.

  Mrs Bastendorff was in the front dining room, drinking tea. Hannah put the Hampstead photograph in the toddler’s hand and told the child to take it to ‘mama’. Mrs Bastendorff first told Hannah: ‘The very idea of you having this taken. But don’t the baby look pretty?’

  And, Hannah added, ‘it was that night that I was told that the old lady had gone away’.

  20

  ‘Oh God! What a Sight Met My Gaze!’

  Up until this point, readers of Hannah’s pamphlet would have been brooding not only about her quiet hints concerning what had really happened to the old lady; but also whether they were being told the entire truth. The selling point of the pamphlet was no more and no less ghoulish fascination; and the style in which it was ghostwritten left some fascinating ambiguities about Hannah Dobbs and her own behaviour.

  But having set this occasionally seamy domestic scene – Hannah still in a romance with Peter Bastendorff while, readers were to presume, still engaging in sexual relations with her employer – the maid was now ready to turn the account into one of the starkest and most lurid gothic horror.

  She – or more especially her ghostwriter – built the suspense stealthily. Hannah recounted her puzzlement at Matilda Hacker’s departure; and Mary Bastendorff’s comment that ‘yes, she has gone into the country for a few days. She fancied she wanted a change and if the room is not let when she comes back, she will take it again.’

  And so Hannah, after having put the children to bed, went into Miss Hacker’s former room, puzzling (as she wrote) over her startlingly swift departure. ‘Her heavy trunk was gone,’ she wrote, ‘and the room appeared to be cleared of everything belonging to her.’ As Hannah went to pull down the window blinds, she noticed something curious: one of the panes was broken.

  On going downstairs, she told Mrs Bastendorff and asked how it had happened. She was told that it had been an accident caused in the course of lowering those window blinds.

  Hannah wrote that Peter Bastendorff came round that evening to see her; that she had wanted to show him the photograph of the children taken on Hampstead Heath, but it was already in the doting possession of Mrs Bastendorff’s mother Mary Pearce. She also wrote about the disposition of the coal cellar at this time; that for the house fires, she fetched coal upstairs by the shovel – and so did Mrs Bastendorff. Hannah was also certain that there were very few coals in the cellar at that time. The implication was that Matilda Hacker – or her remains – had been taken somewhere else first.

  The following morning, Mrs Bastendorff called to Hannah from Matilda Hacker’s room. ‘Whatever have you been doing to the carpet?’ she allegedly asked. Hannah asked her what she meant and Mrs Bastendorff pointed to the stain on the carpet, telling the maid that she was a ‘very tiresome girl not to have said anything about it’. And yet, Hannah wrote, this was the first time that she had seen it; she had not noticed it when she had been in the empty room the previous day.

  ‘Mrs Bastendorff seemed very cross’ and declared that she would rather be without lodgers if things got damaged this way; and that if Miss Hacker came back, ‘she should pay for the damage’. Hannah claimed that she told Mrs Bastendorff that she herself ‘should have looked out for it’ when Miss Hacker ‘went away’. And at this, she wrote, the conversation ended.

  Hannah set about remaking the bed in the room after this; and she once more che
cked the drawers. But now, according to the pamphlet, she did find something: Matilda Hacker’s beloved The Book of Dreams. She took it downstairs to Mrs Bastendorff and ‘remarked’ that Matilda Hacker would be certain to return, if only to retrieve this treasured possession.

  That week, a new lodger, Mr Ross – ‘an elderly gentleman of about fifty years’ – took the second-floor room. Hannah’s acquisitive eye had immediately fixed upon his two rings, ‘one a signet, the other a diamond ring’. This tenant only stayed one week. But in the course of that week, there was ‘a most remarkable incident’. ‘Mr Ross called me to his room,’ wrote Hannah, ‘and asked if we had any mad people in the house.’

  Why did he ask such a thing? He had apparently just found ‘a revolver’ which had been ‘lying on the small shelf in the water closet on the second floor, the same floor on which Miss Hacker’s room was’. The agitated Mr Ross told Hannah to go and fetch Mr Bastendorff; and presently, the landlord went up the stairs. The two men spoke for about ten minutes; and then Mr Bastendorff came downstairs again, holding the gun, which was apparently not loaded. He asked Hannah if she ‘had put it there’. She denied it. And now, in the pamphlet, she asked why Mr Ross had not been tracked down as a witness.

  Then there was a further curious twist in the alleged story of Hannah’s sexual arrangements. She claimed that Severin Bastendorff gave her a box, containing a gold watch and chain; the face of the watch was broken. He claimed he had bought it in a sale, and that he would have it fixed for her. The watch came back, repaired and cleaned – the watch, Hannah claimed, that only later in court would be proved to belong to Miss Hacker. Severin Bastendorff attached one condition to this gift, Hannah claimed: that she not say a word about where she got it from. Hannah told him that if anyone asked, she would claim it was from an uncle who had died. The first to hear this lie was her lover Peter Bastendorff.