Belle - Lesley Pearse [211]
‘I hope he was a good man,’ Etienne said, and caressed her cheek gently.
‘I believed he was, he was kind and I liked him. I really wanted to make him happy,’ she said as her eyes filled with tears. ‘But he changed as soon as he’d set me up in a little house. He didn’t talk to me, he’d never tell me in advance when he was calling, wouldn’t take me out anywhere, he just used me and made me feel so bad about myself. Why did he change like that, Etienne? It was like I’d just swopped one prison for another.’
Etienne sighed deeply, and picked up her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers. ‘It was probably because he’d fallen for you and he was afraid you’d deceive him. I’d say he was very unsure of himself.’
Belle explained briefly about how lonely she was and how she got to know Miss Frank in the hat shop and arranged to help her make hats.
‘I never dared tell Faldo where I went every day, but learning to make hats cheered me so much. On nights when he didn’t call on me I spent my time designing too. Miss Frank even got an order for one of my designs and I really thought I was getting somewhere. But then Faldo died.’
‘He died? How?’
‘He had a heart attack, while we were –’ She stopped abruptly, dropping her eyes. Etienne guessed by that exactly what Faldo was doing when he died.
‘He was hateful to me that night,’ she said in a small voice, tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘I asked him why he didn’t talk to me or take me out anywhere, and he said all kinds of horrible things and hit me. Then he started pleading with me and saying he couldn’t help himself because he wanted my heart. He said that, then he forced himself on me like a madman.’ She broke down then and all Etienne could do was hold her hand and wait till she could finish.
‘He had some kind of turn while he was doing it,’ she sobbed. ‘I ran for help, but by the time I got back with a policeman he was dead. Later, when a doctor got there, he said it was a heart attack.’
Etienne could well imagine just how terrible all that was to a young girl who had no one to turn to. He’d met plenty of young women who when anxious to get out of a brothel had put their trust in an older man. It usually turned sour, perhaps because the kind of men who offered a new life to a one-time whore were usually inadequate themselves.
‘You must have been so frightened,’ Etienne said.
Belle nodded. ‘I went to Miss Frank, I thought she would help me, but when I told her about everything she turned against me too. So I packed up my things and got a passage on the only ship that would take me. That was bound for Marseille.’
Etienne raised one eyebrow. ‘I wish I’d known.’
Belle squeezed his hand. ‘I thought about you on the voyage, but I wouldn’t have dared ask anyone if they knew you, in case the wrong people got to hear about it. But I was a fool there too. You’d think I would have learned by then not to trust anyone.’
‘Who did you trust there?’
‘Well, first it was another passenger on the ship, a man called Arnaud Germaine. He took me to the house of a friend of his, Madame Albertine. Do you know either of them?’
Etienne gave a wry half-smile. ‘I don’t recognize the name Germaine, but I have heard of Madame Albertine. She is well known for introducing handsome young men to rich older women.’
Belle frowned at this, wondering if the young men she had met at Madame Albertine’s house, Clovis included, were potential gigolos. Afraid she might have been mistaken about the older woman’s intentions towards her, and embarrassed about what happened with Clovis, she didn’t wish to say anything further about Marseille.
‘Well, let’s just say I regretted telling her all about myself,’ she said. ‘So I caught the train to Paris.’
Etienne remembered that Gabrielle had said Belle arrived at the Mirabeau wearing an evening dress beneath her coat, without any luggage, so he guessed she had had some kind of humiliating experience in Marseille