Belle - Lesley Pearse [36]
But there was no Mog now to help her make up the bed, to tuck her into it and blow out her candle. Although she could barely see through her tears she selected the two softest blankets to lie between as there were no sheets, then spread the rest out on top, with her cloak over them. Sitting on the bed, she reached down and took off her boots, then swung her hobbled legs up on to the bed and wriggled down under the blankets. They felt clammy and smelled of mildew, and the mattress was thin and lumpy too.
‘Please God, don’t let them kill me,’ she begged as she sobbed into the pillow. ‘Make Ma get the police to come and get me. I don’t want to die.’
She repeated the prayer over and over again in the hope that God would hear it.
Chapter Eight
Sly returned to the kitchen after seeing Belle into her room. Kent was still sitting by the stove, bent over in his chair as if mulling something over in his mind. Sly didn’t speak, but took a bottle of whisky from the cupboard, poured two large glasses, and sat down by the stove too, handing one of the glasses to Kent.
Belle had been right in thinking the house belonged to Sly. His real name was Charles Ernest Braithwaite, but he had acquired the nickname of Sly because he was a gambler who appeared to have almost telepathic powers which told him which game to play and which ones to walk away from. Like any gambler, he did lose sometimes, but not as often as others, and never large amounts.
Belle had also been correct in thinking he had gypsy blood, for his mother, Maria, had been a Romany. She had turned up at this remote farm near Aylesford in Kent late one winter night when she had run away from her family. Frederick Braithwaite, Sly’s father, was a forty-year-old bachelor at that time, struggling to look after his sick mother along with the farm.
Fred was not a generous or benevolent man, but when Maria begged him to give her food and let her sleep in his barn, he saw this could be to his advantage, and he agreed she could have both in return for help in nursing his mother.
Maria was equally hard-headed. She had run out on her family because they were forcing her to marry a man she hated. It didn’t take her long to discover that most people were prejudiced against gypsies, and no one would give her work or shelter. She didn’t really want to nurse a sick old woman who meant nothing to her, nor did she want to end up in Fred’s bed, but she was desperate and she liked the look of his farm. She took the view that she could fare far worse than looking after an old lady, and she might grow to like Fred.
They were married within four months. Within a year of their marriage Charles was born and the old lady died peacefully in her bed.
It may have started out as a marriage of convenience, but Maria worked hard at being a good wife to Fred and a loving mother to Charles and they became a happy little family. Fred died of a heart attack when Charles was only nineteen, but Maria kept everything going while allowing her son to play the part of the young gentleman around town.
Charles had been twenty-seven when his mother died and it was only then that he turned to illegal enterprises to make more money. The farm was his, and it was profitable, but he had very little interest in it. Knowing it would make a good front to hide his questionable sidelines, all he had to do was pay someone else to run it.
He had always been able to justify any action of his which society would frown on by asking himself whether it harmed anyone or not. Gambling and drinking harmed no one but himself, even though his mother might have disagreed. So when he embarked on procuring young women for brothels, he reasoned that he was helping them out. Most of them had been pushed out, or run away from home; many had been brought up in orphanages. He felt that but for his intervention they were likely to starve or die of cold on the streets.
He could find young women and girls at the train stations, lurking outside public houses, in markets, anywhere in fact