Belle - Lesley Pearse [232]
Belle expected Jimmy to make some kind of waspish remark, but he didn’t. He went up another peg in her estimation.
Later that night, when the bar had closed, Jimmy reported back that all the conversation in the bar had been about Kent shooting a policeman.
‘They all make out they know Kent so well,’ Jimmy fumed. ‘But when we were trying to find him two years ago, not one of the gutless halfwits knew anything about him.’
Belle just laughed. She found it funny to see mild-mannered Jimmy getting so het up. ‘I doubt they know him at all, that’s just what people are like. I bet half the population in London is claiming to have a relative or friend that went down on the Titanic too.’
Jimmy agreed with her. ‘The day that news broke it was all we heard. I bet when Jack the Ripper was up to his tricks there were hundreds of girls who claimed they’d managed to escape his clutches too.’
‘Are the police still patrolling the street?’ Belle asked. Garth had forbidden her even to put her nose outside the door.
‘Yes, they are everywhere, and people are even complaining about that. The shopkeepers are saying it’s stopping people shopping, the street girls can’t get punters, and the pickpockets have got no pockets to pick.’
‘Has the pub had fewer customers then?’
‘No, that’s a funny thing, we’re busier than ever. We even got folk in tonight that don’t live around here.’
‘We got a surge of extra business at Annie’s when Queen Victoria died,’ Mog said impishly. ‘Now, you tell me why anyone would get a surge of lust because the monarch is dead.’
All three of them started to laugh, and once started they couldn’t stop. For Belle it was especially funny because she could imagine the frantic behind-doors scenes in the brothel. She wasn’t sure what tickled Jimmy so much.
But having a good laugh made them all feel better.
Since getting back to London Belle had taken it upon herself to clean the bar each morning, leaving Mog to do other chores. One of the advantages of the job was that she always got to pick up the mail. She was aware Jimmy might be hurt if she received a letter from Etienne, and Mog would probably want to know too much, so she’d rather they didn’t see any letter.
Now, still without one over two weeks since her return to London, she was almost at the point of giving up on Etienne. But when she went into the bar that morning and saw a white envelope on the floor beneath the letter box she flew over to it. To her delight it was for her. Putting it in her apron pocket, she nipped upstairs to read it in her room.
There was no stamp on it, French or otherwise, but she ripped it open eagerly, half expecting that Etienne had come to England and was letting her know. But she was disappointed to see the address at the top of the single sheet of paper was in King’s Cross. It was from her mother, and she felt a bit guilty at her disappointment.
‘Dear Belle,’ she read. ‘I am so glad you are safely back in England. Please forgive me for not calling on you, but there is some bad feeling between Mog and myself, and I really can’t come there. I slipped this through the door on my way to the market this morning, in the hope that you could meet me later this morning in Maiden Lane, in the café there. Don’t say anything to Mog, she has always liked to keep you all to herself and she’ll try and stop you coming. I’ll be there at 10.30.
Your loving mother.’
Belle read the letter several times before tucking it back in her apron pocket. Despite her deep love for Mog, she was mature enough now to see that Annie had never had a chance to be a real mother because Mog took over that role.
Now that she knew from Noah that Annie had been forced into prostitution, it gave her new perspective on why she could be so cold and distant. But Belle had never gone hungry as a child, no one was cruel to her, in fact she had fared