Belle - Lesley Pearse [125]
‘What did that last thing he said mean?’ she asked, drying her eyes on her apron and looking up at him. Garth felt that same butterfly-in-his-belly feeling he often got around her. He thought she had the sweetest face, he loved the way she bit her lip when she was nervous, and the gentleness of her grey eyes. He knew he had to speak now or maybe he never would be able to.
‘About the right man there to make it with! Well, I reckon he knows I’ve got feelings for you, Mog,’ he blurted out.
Her eyes widened and her hand fluttered up to her mouth. ‘For me?’
‘Yes, you, who else?’ he said, his voice croaky because it seemed a lifetime ago that he’d tried to woo a woman, and she hadn’t meant as much as this one did. ‘But maybe you don’t feel the same? If so, speak out and I’ll say no more.’
‘Oh, Garth,’ she said softly, her lower lip quivering as if she was going to cry again. ‘I do feel that way, but I thought it was just on my side.’
Realizing this kind of talk could go back and forth like a tennis match and never be resolved, Garth reached down, took her hands and pulled her up into his arms and kissed her.
She tasted of the apples she’d been slicing for a pie earlier, and she smelled of soap and lavender water. He wrapped her tightly in his arms, lifting her right off her feet as he kissed her, and his heart soared because he could sense by the way her lips were yielding that she felt the same as he did.
‘I reckon it’s high time I opened the bar,’ Garth murmured against Mog’s neck a little later. He had sat down on a kitchen chair and taken her on his lap to kiss her again and again. He didn’t really know how to proceed now. Courting was for young people, but he sensed Mog was likely to be frightened off if he tried to go too fast with her. Besides, there was Jimmy to think of. He couldn’t just take Mog off to his bed without making it right with the lad first.
But he had a feeling that Jimmy would think marriage was the only right way to do that, and perhaps he’d be right.
‘I never thought this would happen to me,’ Mog said, blushing prettily. ‘But we have to think of Jimmy’s feelings; we can’t let him walk in and catch us like this.’
Garth thought it was astounding how she always seemed to pick up on what he was thinking. ‘I didn’t ever think it would be my young nephew that would make me get married again,’ he said.
Mog stiffened on his lap and began biting her lip again, and Garth realized that hadn’t come out the way he intended.
‘I meant, I can’t set a bad example to him,’ he said, and realizing that didn’t sound so good either, he felt his face turning as fiery red as his hair. ‘What I really mean is, I want to marry you, Mog. Will you be my wife?’
She laughed then, a soft little trill that sounded like water over stones. ‘I’d like nothing better, Mr Franklin,’ she said. ‘And we’d better make it soon if we don’t want to set Jimmy a bad example.’
Noah was still smiling about Mog and Garth as he walked up Tottenham Road towards his lodgings. He thought they made a perfectly matched couple, and he felt certain that Jimmy might stop fretting quite so much about Belle if they decided to marry.
But, as so often happened when he thought about Belle, his mind turned to all those other missing girls and he recalled what one of the senior policemen down at Bow Street had said to him.
‘We know it goes on, young girls lured away to France or Belgium to become prostitutes. And girls there are brought over here for the same purpose. We found two French girls at a bawdy house in Stepney we raided a few months back. They were in a sorry state, stick-thin, dirty and addicted to opium. Once we got them cleaned up and got someone in to speak to them in French we found they thought they were coming to England to be ladies’ maids. Seemed they’d both been interviewed in the same big house in Paris by the same woman, who told them they would be coming to England with her for a year. They were both broken in by “gentlemen” in a big house, where they