Belle - Lesley Pearse [112]
Five minutes later James came down the stairs. His face was bright red and he was beaming. As the maid who’d let them in appeared from a doorway at the back of the hall to pass them their hats, the two men said nothing further until they were walking across the square.
‘She was wonderful,’ James blurted out. ‘So kind, so giving.’
‘But I bet she took the money,’ Noah said archly. He was glad his friend had finally got there, but realized he was now expected to spend the evening being told how marvellous the experience was.
‘I don’t think she wanted to,’ James said dreamily. ‘She’s too afraid of Madame Sondheim not to take it.’
‘So you did ask her some questions then?’
‘She didn’t seem to understand many of them. I asked about young girls and she just said she was better for me than someone very young.’
Noah couldn’t help but smile. He supposed it was an impossibility to expect his friend to interrogate a woman as lovely as Arielle when he was alone with her in a bedroom.
‘Does the word couvent mean convent?’ he asked unexpectedly.
‘Yes, why?’ James frowned.
‘Because that is where some of the young girls go after that place. Unfortunately I would imagine that looking for an unnamed convent in Paris will be close to the proverbial needle in a haystack.’
Chapter Twenty
1911
The heat woke Belle and as usual she was bathed in perspiration. She thought nostalgically of the cool English weather all the time now for the sticky summer heat of New Orleans was exhausting.
She remembered how thrilled she’d been back in April of last year when she was given this room. It was at the back of the house, so it was quieter, large and sun-filled, and had a beautiful big brass bed. It hadn’t occurred to her then that it would be like an inferno once the weather grew warmer and that was why none of the other girls wanted it.
But then, in sixteen months of being at Martha’s, she’d found that she couldn’t actually trust anything or anybody. What seemed good one day could become bad the next.
It had been a huge mistake to ask Martha for proof of what she’d paid for her, especially so soon after she’d arrived here. The woman had been really frosty with her and Hatty warned Belle she ought to apologize immediately.
‘We are all on some kind of a contract, honey,’ she explained. ‘The madam of a whorehouse has to hold the whip hand or the girls take advantage. Even for those of us who weren’t bought like you were, she still gives us board and lodging, she supplied us with dresses, shoes and the like, so of course she takes that back out of our money – she has a living to make. We have to earn her trust too. How would it be if she took on a girl and got up one morning to find she’d hightailed it out of town taking the silver teaspoons and a trunk full of dresses?’
Put like that, Belle could understand. ‘But all I wanted to know was how long it would be before she’d got all her money back,’ she explained. ‘I can’t see anything wrong in asking that. How else can I plan my life?’
‘Martha don’t see it that way, she’d say it was her business,’ Hatty insisted. ‘And us girls are just like flowers, we only stay fresh for a limited period. She’s got to make her pile out of us while she can. If we get pregnant, get the pox, get our face slashed by another girl, or beaten up by one of the men, we aren’t any good to her.’
That sent a shiver of fear down Belle’s spine. She hadn’t considered that any of those things could happen to her, but perhaps they could. ‘But the man who brought me here said she was a good woman, and she seemed so kind,’ she said in puzzlement. ‘How can she earn so much money from us and then sling us out if something bad happened?’
Hatty smirked as if unable to believe Belle was that naive. ‘She is a good woman, at least compared with most of the madams in this town. She feeds us well; if we’re sick she takes care of us. She don’t expect us to work when we’ve got our monthlies. Afore you start complainin’, honey, you gotta open your eyes and see how it