Belle - Lesley Pearse [145]
‘I could escort you to a boarding house for the night if you wish,’ Rendall said. ‘There is a quiet, decent one just around the corner in Canal Street.’
‘That’s really kind of you,’ she said. ‘But I can’t afford to pay for a room somewhere else. I’ll manage here.’
‘Do you have a job?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I work at a milliner’s,’ she said, hoping he wouldn’t ask where. ‘But it doesn’t pay very well.’
‘Was it Mr Reiss that hit you?’ Rendall asked, looking at her intently. ‘I thought it was a shadow on your face earlier, but I can see now you have a bruise coming up on your cheek.’
‘I tripped earlier on the back steps,’ she said. ‘I fell against the post on the balustrade.’
Fortunately the mortuary van arrived just then, the horse’s hooves sounding very loud in the quiet street. Two men came in, Rendall showed them into the bedroom and just a couple of minutes later they left with Faldo on a stretcher covered by a blanket.
Rendall said goodbye to Belle and hoped she would be all right, but he hesitated at the door, looking back at her as she sat by the stove crying.
‘I don’t like to leave you like this, miss,’ he said gruffly.
‘If you don’t leave people will talk,’ she said sharply. ‘It will be bad enough that a man died here, without one of the police officers staying on.’
‘Yes, I guess you’re right,’ he agreed. ‘What I kinda meant to say was that you should have someone with you.’
‘I’ve lived alone for a while now,’ she said. ‘I don’t have any other friends in the city; Faldo was the only one.’
‘Then I’m sorry for your loss,’ he said, and finally opened the door and left.
Once he’d gone, Belle locked and bolted the door, and went into the bedroom. She was trembling all over and her stomach was churning. She had never felt more alone.
She could see the indentation on the quilt where Faldo’s body had been and she could smell his hair oil and his sweat. She wanted to be able to cry for him, she owed him that much, but she was angry because he’d left her like this.
She remembered Suzanne back at Martha’s telling her about a man who had died on her. Like Faldo, it had been of a heart attack. But the way Suzanne and the other girls told the story, it was really funny. Suzanne even admitted she’d gone through his wallet before the doctor got there and helped herself to a hundred dollars.
But then, it was easy to laugh at an undignified death in an inappropriate place, when it was a stranger. Suzanne had claimed that most men, if they could pick their way to die, would choose to be fucking her. She joked she was going to send a card with some flowers to his funeral and write on it, ‘I always said I’d show you heaven!’
But even if Belle had all the other girls here right now, she knew she still wouldn’t be able to find anything even vaguely amusing about Faldo’s death. He was a complicated, contradictory man and he’d been a brute tonight. He’d said that he wanted her heart, so why was he so horrible to her?
Was this the way it would always be with men? They would want her body, but never her mind, and never be able to see past her being a whore?
She lay down on the bed and pulled the quilt over her. But all at once it dawned on her that she had far more to worry about than what men might think of her. She was in fact destitute. The few dollars Miss Frank gave her wouldn’t keep her. Once the rent stopped being paid, the landlord would reclaim the house too. How on earth was she going to live?
Martha would block her being taken on by any of the good sporting houses: that would leave only the dreadful places down in Robertson Street.
Panic overwhelmed her. What was she going to do?
Chapter Twenty-five
‘So that’s how it is, Miss Frank.’ Belle’s voice quivered a little because she could see the older woman was horrified by what she’d been told. ‘I felt I owed you the whole truth because you’ve been