Belle - Lesley Pearse [38]
Then ten years ago, when Frank was twenty-eight, his Uncle Thomas, his father’s younger brother, died. To Frank’s surprise he had made his nephew his sole heir. Frank had no real idea why this was, for he’d never had much to do with his uncle, but he could only suppose Thomas had felt ill-treated by his family, and sympathized with Frank.
Thomas wasn’t a very wealthy man; he owned no large estate in the country, just a couple of tenements in Seven Dials and a dozen squalid houses in Bethnal Green. Frank was horrified the first time he saw the place they called the Core. The dilapidated buildings in Seven Dials were filled to capacity with the desperate human flotsam and jetsam that ends up in inner cities. The houses in Bethnal Green were as bad – even as shelters for animals they’d have been inadequate. Frank covered his nose, closed his eyes to the appalling sights all around those mean streets and retreated to a comfortable hotel.
But by the next day any qualms of earning a living off the rents of such places had left him. He realized that it meant he could give up the sea and live a very comfortable life with the minimum of effort. He’d grown tough in his time in the navy, and become well used to pushing others around. The prospect of becoming a slum landlord excited him.
That was when he took the name Kent.
Down in the pretty Kentish village of Charing, not far from Folkestone where he intended to make a permanent home, he would be a quiet, respectable gentleman of leisure, Frank Waldegrave. But in London, as John Kent the ruthless property manager, he could play out all his fantasies – whoring, villainy, gambling and extortion. He didn’t need friends if he had people doing his bidding because they were afraid of him.
Ironically, just when he truly believed friendship wasn’t for him, he met Sly at a card game in the back room of a saloon in the Strand. Something clicked between them; they were in tune with each other. Sly had once laughingly said it was because they both had traits that were missing in the other. Perhaps he was right, for Kent admired Sly’s easy way with people, and Sly in turn admired Kent’s ruthlessness.
Whatever the reason for their friendship, they both had the same goal, although at the time neither of them had known what that goal was. But it soon manifested that this was to take control of the vice and gambling in Seven Dials and make themselves extremely wealthy in doing so.
It was Sly who dubbed Kent the Falcon. He claimed he’d never before met any man quite as sharp-eyed and predatory. And Kent liked the name to be bandied around, for he knew it would make others fearful of him.
Belle woke to hear a cock crowing somewhere close by and her first thought was that it must be a crazy cock for it was still the dead of night. But as she lay there, filled with dread about what the coming day would bring, she noticed three tiny strips of light across the freezing room and realized she was looking at cracks on a boarded-up window and that it was light outside.
She had forgotten about her ankles being hobbled and as she got up to use the chamberpot, she almost fell over. She managed to peep through the biggest crack on the window boards, and although her view was very limited, she could see trees close by and beyond them open countryside with patches of snow still lying on bare earth. To a city girl who had grown up surrounded by houses and bombarded with the noise of traffic, it was bleak and frightening.
As she had slept in her clothes and had no hairbrush or water to wash in, she got back into bed to await whatever fate the men had in store for her.
Despite her terror she must have fallen