Belle - Lesley Pearse [132]
Belle smiled. ‘I did see a magazine recently with fashions from Paris,’ she said. ‘The hats the models were wearing were smaller, hardly bigger than a flower. I saw one which was like a small nest, with a tiny fluffy bird peeping out. I think that’s what she meant by cheeky.’
Miss Frank shook her head as if she couldn’t imagine anyone wearing such a hat. ‘Perhaps I’m getting too old? In my younger days it was sensible bonnets, straw hats with a nice ribbon and perhaps a flower trimming. Then in the fall and winter we had felt hats, fur if it was very cold. It was predictable what ladies would buy each season. It’s not that way any more.’
Belle went home a bit later, but that evening she could think of nothing but hats. She found some paper and a pencil and began to draw frantically, but somehow none of the sketched hats looked right.
Three days later, having spent almost every spare moment drawing, she went back to see Miss Frank.
‘I can’t seem to get anything right,’ she admitted to the old lady. ‘I think it’s because first I need to know how to construct a hat.’
Miss Frank just looked at Belle for some little while without speaking. ‘I can’t afford to pay an assistant, not unless trade picks up,’ she said. ‘But if you’d like to learn millinery, I’ll teach you.’
‘You’d do that?’ Belle said breathlessly. ‘I’d like it more than anything.’
From the first morning when Belle presented herself at Miss Frank’s little shop, and was given the task of steaming a felt cloche hat on a block, she felt she had hope again. Millinery was a proper trade; once she’d mastered it she could find respectable employment. But even if that was a long way in the future, all at once she had a reason to get up in the morning, a purpose in each day other than just waiting for Faldo to turn up.
She learned fast. Miss Frank said she had nimble fingers and a flair for it. And the old lady was a good teacher, as keen to pass on her skills as Belle was to acquire them. But there were perils attached to her new role of trainee. Miss Frank was inquisitive, and so were the regular customers who’d been coming to the shop for years. They wanted to know why Belle had come to America, how and when, where she lived and what she lived on. Even when they didn’t actually ask questions, their eyes enquired, and Belle guessed that when she wasn’t in the shop, they would be quizzing Miss Frank.
Lying didn’t come easily to Belle. She’d told Miss Frank she was sent to live with her guardian here when her widowed mother died. But as his wife and their children didn’t want her living with them, her guardian had found alternative accommodation for her. It didn’t sound plausible, not even to her, that any guardian would expect a girl as young as her to live alone in a strange city. Yet Miss Frank appeared to believe it; she tutted and said she thought it was disgraceful, but her sympathy only made Belle feel worse. She so much wished she could tell the truth, unburden herself with the whole sorry story. But however kindly Miss Frank was, she wasn’t worldly, she was a church-going spinster who probably had never been kissed, let alone had a sexual experience. She wouldn’t want a whore in her pretty little shop; she might even believe Belle had crept round her with the plan to rob her. She would find the idea of her being the mistress to a married man utterly despicable. She might even report Belle to the police, and that way it could get back to Martha where she was.
So Belle tried to keep her lip buttoned, saying as little as possible to both Miss Frank and her customers, while at the same time working really hard to master the new skills she was being taught, and practising designing hats at night.
She didn’t tell Faldo about her new interest as she knew he wouldn’t like it. But elated by new-found happiness in Miss Frank’s shop, she tried much harder to please him.
‘Tell me where you’ve been this week,’ she would say after she’d made him a mint julep, a drink with bourbon that he’d said was