Belle - Lesley Pearse [1]
‘If I lived in a palace I wouldn’t necessarily be a queen,’ she retorted angrily. ‘It’s true enough that I live in Annie’s Place, but I’m not a whore. Annie’s my mother!’
Jimmy looked hard at Belle, his tawny eyes repentant. ‘I’m sorry if I got it wrong. My uncle told me Annie’s was a brothel, so when I saw you come out of there …’ He broke off in embarrassment. ‘I really didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.’
Belle was even more confused then. She didn’t think she’d ever met anyone before who cared whether they hurt her feelings. Her mother certainly didn’t, or any of the girls in the house. ‘It’s all right,’ she replied somewhat uncertainly. ‘You weren’t to know, you haven’t lived around here long enough. Is your uncle treating you well?’
Jimmy shrugged.
‘He’s a bully,’ Belle stated, guessing that Jimmy had already been introduced to his uncle’s fists, for it was common knowledge Garth Franklin was hot-tempered. ‘Do you have to stay with him?’
‘My mother always said I was to go to him if anything happened to her. She died last month and Uncle paid for her funeral and said I was to come here to learn the trade.’
Belle surmised by his gloomy tone that he felt obligated to stay. ‘I’m sorry about your mother,’ she said. ‘How old are you?’
‘Nearly seventeen. My uncle said I’ve got to do some boxing to build up muscle,’ Jimmy responded with a cheeky grin. ‘Ma always said it were better for a man to have brains than muscle, but maybe I can have both.’
‘Just don’t assume all girls are whores or you won’t live to build up muscle,’ Belle said teasingly. She was warming to him; he had a lovely smile and a softness to him which was very different to all the other boys around the area.
Seven Dials wasn’t far from the smart shops of Oxford Street, the theatres of Shaftesbury Avenue or even the grandness of Trafalgar Square, but it was a million miles from gentility. Great swathes of its higgledy-piggledy tenements and rookeries might have been demolished in the last twenty years, but with Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market still at its heart, and so many narrow lanes, courts and alleys all around, the newer buildings had soon become just as shabby as the old. Its residents were in the main the underbelly of society – thieves, prostitutes, beggars, rogues and thugs – living alongside the poor who worked in the very lowliest of jobs – street sweepers, scavengers and labourers. On a grey, frosty January day, with many people bundled up against the cold in little more than rags, it was a depressing sight.
‘Next time I rescue a pretty girl’s hair ribbon I’ll be really careful what I say to her,’ Jimmy said. ‘Your hair is lovely, I’ve never seen such shiny black curls before, and you’ve got pretty eyes too.’
Belle smiled because she knew her long, curly hair was her best feature. Most people thought she must curl it up nightly and put oil on it to make it shine, but that was the way it was naturally – all she did was brush it. Her blue eyes had come from Annie, but Belle had to assume she had her father to thank for her hair for her mother’s was just light brown.
‘Well, thank you, Jimmy,’ she said. ‘Go on flattering girls like that and you’ll be a huge success around here.’
‘Back in Islington, where I come from, girls wouldn’t talk to someone like me.’
Belle had barely been out of Seven Dials, but she knew Islington was where the respectable, middling sort lived. She assumed by his last remark, and what he had said about his uncle paying for the funeral, that his mother had been in service there.
‘Was your mother a cook or housekeeper?’ she asked.
‘No,