Belle - Lesley Pearse [37]
Charles was not a cruel man, and he didn’t like the circumstances of acquiring this latest girl one bit. He had never before taken anyone against their will, and certainly never snatched an innocent from the streets.
‘She ain’t like my usual ones,’ he said as he downed the last of the whisky in his glass and then topped it up again. ‘I don’t like it.’
‘Don’t be a fool, what’s so different about her?’ Kent asked, somewhat surprised at his friend’s view. ‘She’s older than some you’ve taken, and her home wasn’t good. Besides, you know that I had no choice but to take her. She could’ve got me strung up.’
Kent had admitted that he had strangled a whore in Seven Dials, but Sly wasn’t entirely sure he believed that the girl who witnessed it was about to blow the whistle. People in Seven Dials learned at an early age not to squeal on anyone. Kent was his partner, though, and aside from being the kind of man no one would want to cross, he was also the one who liaised with the brothel owners when they had a new girl to sell. Sly needed to keep him sweet, but he also hoped he could talk him round.
‘She’s smart and it won’t be easy to mould her,’ Sly argued, for Kent planned to sell Belle to a brothel in France. ‘I tell you, she’ll be more trouble than she’s worth. Let’s take her back to London tomorrow night and drop her off near her home?’
‘Don’t be bloody stupid. We can’t do that, you know why.’
‘But she’s got no idea where this place is,’ Sly argued. ‘Neither does she know anything about you. And her mother ain’t going to make a fuss if she gets her back unharmed. We can go straight on to Dover after dropping her off and catch a boat to France like we planned.’
Sly might not have been lucky enough to be born with good looks, for he was short, stocky and pug-nosed, but he did have a certain charisma which served him well with both sexes. Other men saw him as an entertaining companion, admiring his wily nature, determination and strength. Women liked the way he made them feel they were the most important person in the world when he spoke to them. He had the manners and bearing of a gentleman, but with an animalistic undercurrent they found very attractive. Such was his charm that many a girl who ought to have seen him as her destroyer stubbornly defended him to all who criticized him.
Kent, or rather Frank John Waldegrave, which was his real name, was born to landed gentry in the north of England. But although the family estate was large, as the third son and the one his father liked the least, he knew at an early age that he was not going to inherit anything of value. Jealous of his favoured older brothers, and hurt that his mother and sister never took his part, Frank took himself off to sea with a chip on his shoulder which grew larger with each slight or humiliation he encountered.
Joining the merchant navy was possibly the worst possible career choice for a young man who didn’t like taking orders, found it difficult to make friends and had been used to the wide open spaces of the Yorkshire Moors. He had a sharp mind which would have been far better suited to accountancy, law or even medicine, but instead he found himself forced to share all his waking hours with the kind of uneducated men who had worked as labourers on his family estate.
Frank wasn’t any more successful with women than he was at making friends with his own sex. Back on dry land in Dover, a well-educated gentleman who was just an ordinary sailor was neither fish nor fowl. He liked to think that the shop girls and housemaids he ran into thought him too far above them, but the truth was that he didn’t know how to talk to women. The kind of middle- or upper-class girls he might have felt more comfortable with didn’t frequent the saloons and dance halls where sailors gathered.
He was in his early twenties when