Belle - Lesley Pearse [3]
‘I want to be a milliner,’ she admitted. ‘I spend all my spare time drawing hats. I daydream of having a little shop in the Strand, but I’ve never told anyone that before.’
He took her two hands in his and drew her closer to him. His breath was like smoke in the frosty air, warm on her cold face. ‘Ma always said that if you want something hard enough you can have it,’ he said. ‘All you have to do is work out how you’ll achieve it.’
Belle looked at his smiling, freckled face, and wondered if he wanted to kiss her. She had no experience of such things; boys were something of a mystery to her as she’d grown up with only women. But she had such an odd feeling inside her, like she was melting, and that was ridiculous as she was freezing cold.
‘Let’s just whizz round the park, then I really must go home. Mog will be wondering where I am,’ she said quickly, for the strange feeling was making her nervous.
They began to walk fast across the bridge over the lake. ‘Who’s Mog?’ he asked.
‘I suppose you’d call her the maid or the housekeeper, but she’s more than that to me,’ Belle replied. ‘She feels like mother, aunt, older sister all rolled into one. She’s always been the one who took care of me.’
As they walked briskly round the park, Jimmy talked about how nice it would be in summer, about books he’d read and about the school he went to in Islington. He didn’t ask Belle anything about her home; she guessed he was afraid to, for fear of saying the wrong thing.
All too soon they were back in grimy Seven Dials, and Jimmy said his first task when he got in would be to wake his uncle with a cup of tea, and then scrub the cellar floor.
‘Can we meet again?’ he asked, looking anxious as if he expected her to refuse.
‘I can get out most mornings at this time,’ Belle replied. ‘And usually about four in the afternoons too.’
‘I’ll look out for you then,’ he said with a smile. ‘It’s been nice today. I’m really glad your ribbon fell off.’
Chapter Two
Belle felt a bit flat as she watched Jimmy walking on down Monmouth Street. For the last hour she’d felt free and happy, but she knew as soon as she went in it would be back to a series of chores, including emptying chamberpots and clearing and lighting fires.
They had more in common than Jimmy realized. He had his bad-tempered uncle to contend with; she had a bad-tempered mother. They were both surrounded by people, but it was clear that Jimmy was as lonely as she was, with no friends of his own age to talk to.
The sun that had come out fleetingly while they were in the park had vanished behind black clouds, and as they’d passed the man who sold matches on the corner, he’d called out it was going to snow later. Reluctant as Belle was to go in, it was too cold to stay outside any longer.
She knew very little about the world beyond Seven Dials. She’d been born in the same house she still lived in. The story was that her mother had delivered her alone upstairs, put her baby in a drawer wrapped in an old quilt and gone down to the parlour again with the other girls as if nothing had happened.
Belle had learned at a very early age that she had to be virtually invisible. Her place, once she was too big to sleep in the drawer, was down in the basement of the house, and she must never, ever venture up the stairs after five in the evening, or ask her mother questions about what went on up there.
She had gone to a little school in Soho Square from the age of six until she was ten, where she learned to read and write and do sums, but that ended abruptly after some kind of disagreement between her mother and her teacher. She then had to go to a much bigger school which she hated, and was very relieved when she was allowed to leave at fourteen. But since then she’d found the days long and dreary. Yet when she voiced this thought aloud one day her mother rounded on her and asked how she’d like to be a scullery maid or selling flowers on the streets as so many girls of her age were forced to do. Belle wouldn’t like to do either job: the girl selling flowers further along