Belle - Lesley Pearse [183]
She had always prided herself on being brave, but the brave thing to do would have been to have gone to the police in New Orleans and told them what had happened to her and why. This would have been so much better than striving to be the top girl and patting herself on the back because she’d learned a dozen ways to make her clients ejaculate quickly so she could move on to the next poor sod who hadn’t got a woman of his own.
How many other girls’ lives had been ruined by Kent and his associates? How many mothers and fathers were grieving over lost daughters? If she had only found the courage to speak out, she might have saved some of them.
It occurred to her then as she cried out her shame that it was all of this that had made her mother cold and seemingly indifferent to her child. Belle had no idea how and why Annie became a whore, and now she probably never would. But she could see now that Annie had done her best to shield her from what she did. All those rules about never going upstairs after six, keeping her away from the girls and encouraging her to read books and newspapers, were so she’d know about the bigger world beyond Seven Dials. Even allowing her to think of Mog as another mother was an act of unselfishness. For kind, gentle and loving Mog was the best of influences, teaching Belle right from wrong, good manners and to speak well, so that she wouldn’t go the same way as her real mother.
‘I’ve let her down,’ Belle sobbed into the mattress, and the thought of that was worse than anything Pascal could do to her.
Chapter Thirty
Gabrielle looked thoughtfully at the address Lisette had given her as she rode home on the train. If she was to write to Noah Bayliss at that address it could be a week or longer before it got to him. That was too long, she’d have to send him a telegram.
But what would she say in it? ‘Help needed to find Belle’ wouldn’t be much good if he’d already tried to find Belle and failed. ‘Belle in danger come quick’ would be frightening for the girl’s mother. Yet whatever she put, whether she frightened him or not, it was still going to be another couple of days before he got here.
She would send a telegram anyway, but meanwhile what she needed was someone, preferably a man, who knew the smartest hotels in Paris and those who procured girls for their guests and might even be able to identify the initials on that note Belle had been sent.
There was a time when she had known half a dozen such men, but not any more. She felt certain that Belle’s Etienne would have been ideal too, but if Lisette didn’t know how to find him, what chance had Gabrielle got?
It was a stroke of amazing luck that Lisette had nursed Belle, yet perhaps not such a coincidence as she first thought, for after all Lisette was employed by people who bought and sold young girls. Gabrielle thought that once Belle was found she must persuade Lisette to get away with Jean-Pierre and sever all links with those terrible people.
Out of the blue, just as the train was slowing down and puffing into the station, Gabrielle suddenly remembered that Marcel, who ran the laundry two doors away from the Mirabeau, was from Marseille. By all accounts he’d had a chequered life before going into laundry work. She was a good customer of his, so even if he didn’t know Etienne, he might be able to give her some advice.
Gabrielle went straight to the post office and sent a telegram to Noah. ‘Contact me for news of Belle’ she put and added the address of the Mirabeau.
‘The pretty, dark-haired girl?’ Marcel asked after Gabrielle had told him she was concerned about one of her female guests who had disappeared. ‘Yes, I’ve seen her go past the window.’
As Gabrielle began to tell him she suspected foul play, Marcel ushered her into a tiny office just off his laundry. It was very hot and steamy in there but she was glad to talk to him in private, as people kept coming in and out