Hallie Rubenhold

And when she's very young, her father dies and her mother remarries immediately to a German man.

And they struggle.

I mean, it's an enormous family.

She gets a fairly decent education for the time because in the United States, they were quite keen on making sure that public school, as in state school education, was widely available to people.

She leaves school at about 16-ish and she goes and works as a servant for a family who have slightly more money.

And something happens, we don't know what, but I mean, this family were very strange.

I mean, when I tell you this story is so gothic at times, it really is quite surprising.

So she's working for a man called Charles Lincoln, who made a lot of money basically

being one of the people who helped to invent central heating in the 1890s, which is very interesting in itself.

And he was moving into property development.

And it just so happened that at about the time that Bell came to work as a housemaid in the house, he had just put his wife in an asylum, that wonderful Victorian chestnut.

And we don't know why, but then he and his brother basically took all of his wife's property.

And Belle worked for them and suddenly Belle finds herself pregnant.

So we don't know if this was a consensual relationship, if it was rape.

We don't know what the situation was, but she was pregnant and she was a pregnant teenager and she was hiding from her family.

Her family didn't know about it.

And he put her in a little flat of her own in Brooklyn and arranged for her to have an abortion.

And abortions at this time were highly illegal in New York.

I mean, you could literally go to prison for being in the same room where an abortion was performed.

Yet there were doctors who still did it because the money and because there was an enormous demand for it, as there have always been.