Belle - Lesley Pearse [228]
She had told Jimmy and Mog that she learned hat-making while she was in America and that she wanted to open a shop, but because of all the excitement of her being back, and the business with the police, they hadn’t reacted to the idea at all.
‘It would be ideal,’ Jimmy said. ‘It’s that kind of a village, very middle-class with lots of men who work in the City, and wives who pride themselves on being fashionable and well dressed.’
Belle felt a surge of excitement at the idea of starting out somewhere where no one knew about her. But almost immediately she felt deflated because as a chief witness in a murder trial, her history would follow her.
‘What is it?’ he said when her face fell.
She explained.
‘People don’t keep things like that in their heads for long,’ he said soothingly. ‘They use the old newspaper to light the fire, and that’s it, over and done with. It’s only family and close friends who find it hard to forget. But you could change your name, then no one would connect you with the trial.’
Belle thought about that for a while. ‘I can’t imagine myself as anything but Belle Cooper,’ she said eventually.
‘You could be Belle Reilly if you married me.’
Belle had been afraid of him pressing her in some way, but the flippant way he’d made that remark made her giggle. ‘A girl is supposed to agree to marry someone for much deeper reasons than changing her name,’ she said.
‘That’s true,’ he said equally lightly. ‘But if we all moved to Blackheath where it’s terribly respectable, I’d have to pretend to be your brother to avoid people talking. And that would become very complicated. It would be much easier to introduce you as my wife. And easier for you to get a shop – landlords are very prejudiced against lone women taking on a lease.’
Belle thought she ought to be nervous at the way this conversation was going, yet she wasn’t. Everything he’d said was quite true.
‘I meant husband and wife in name only,’ he said quickly, before she’d even thought how to reply. ‘I do realize after what you’ve been through that the last thing you would want is another man taking over your life.’
She felt his complete sincerity and was deeply touched by it. ‘That wouldn’t be fair on you, Jimmy,’ she said quietly.
‘You mean if you didn’t want to share my bed?’ he asked bluntly.
‘Well yes, and not feeling that way about you,’ she said awkwardly. ‘I like you such a lot Jimmy, I trust you too and we could be the best of friends, but …’ She paused, not knowing how to round it off.
‘Listen to me,’ he said, taking one of her hands in his. ‘I’ve made a suggestion, nothing more. All I really want is for you to recover from what you’ve been through. To be your friend and support whatever you decide to do.’
She looked into his tawny eyes then and saw exactly what she’d seen the first time they’d met. Honesty.
They walked on up through Greenwich Park right to the iron gates at the far end, and he told her that the huge expanse of grass in front of them was Blackheath. There were some children sailing boats on the pond, the boys in sailor suits, the girls in pretty dresses, watched by their mothers, some with perambulators, sitting on benches.
Beyond the Heath she could see a church with a spire. The scene was so far removed from the hurly-burly and squalor of Seven Dials that she felt choked up.
‘My mother brought me here once when I was about that boy’s size.’ Jimmy pointed out a boy of about seven. ‘She never said, but I felt she wished we lived somewhere like this and I could sail boats instead of playing in the street. She had to work so hard to keep us. But she never complained.’
‘Is that why you’d like to come and live here?’ Belle asked.
‘I suppose it is, well, partly. I’d like to have children one day and bring them over here to sail boats and play cricket with them. But mostly I’d like to live in a place with wide open spaces like this, to wake up each morning and hear birds singing, and just be happy.’
‘I think that’s a lovely ambition,’ Belle said, and it struck her that she shared it.
In the days that followed,