Belle - Lesley Pearse [51]
Noah was deeply shocked. ‘Especially when you are young,’ he agreed. ‘I doubt I’d last one day without food or warm blankets.’
Annie nodded her agreement. ‘Well, finally they came and got me and took me over to Tooley Street. It’s still a brothel now, though I didn’t know what it was then. I was bathed, my hair washed and brushed, and I was put in a clean shift, then taken down to a larger room with a big bed on the floor below. They had given me something to drink that made me feel a bit woozy, but when the first man came into the room and started in on me it hurt so much I screamed.’ She paused, her eyes welling up with tears. ‘He liked me screaming,’ she whispered. ‘He really loved that.’
‘I am so sorry,’ Noah said with the utmost sincerity. He felt ashamed that he was male and thought about bedding women so often.
‘It didn’t end with just him. There were three others too that night. The woman who’d seen to bathing me came into the room after each man to wash me. Then the next came in. I thought I would die that night, for surely no child could suffer such pain and degradation and survive.’
Noah put his hand on her shoulder as she broke down in tears. He thought of taking her in his arms as he would almost any other woman who was breaking her heart, but he was afraid to overstep the mark.
‘They were what most people would call gentlemen,’ she spat out viciously. ‘They had good clothes and linen, rings on their fingers. They were probably professional men, lawyers, doctors, politicians, scientists. Intelligent men with money and almost certainly with wives and children at home. But they found their pleasure in raping a girl too young to even know what the act was.’
Noah couldn’t speak, for the picture she’d painted was too awful to contemplate.
‘It goes on everywhere,’ she said, her eyes burning with anger. ‘Every single day there are pretty young girls going missing, usually from the slums and back streets where their parents don’t have the power or money to have a voice. But there’s plenty of little country girls like I was too. Sometimes these girls end up dead, killed once their usefulness is over, or sent abroad. The rest are ruined, they can’t return to a respectable life, they are too damaged.’ She paused to gather herself.
‘And that is what I’m afraid Belle is going through right now,’ she went on, her voice sharp with pain. ‘Her life is going to become a replica of mine. And it’s all my fault. I should’ve sent her away to school. Why didn’t I?’
‘Because you loved her and wanted her near you?’ Noah suggested.
‘That is the truth, but the saddest thing is that I never showed it.’ Annie sobbed. ‘She was always closer to Mog than me. That was the real curse of what those men did to me all those years ago – I couldn’t love, I was an empty shell with no feelings, and I stayed working as a whore because I felt it was the only thing open to me.’
Noah sighed deeply. He had a feeling Annie had never said all this to anyone before, and he wondered if she would despise herself afterwards for revealing so much.
‘I’ll do whatever I can to get Belle back and see that bastard hang for what he’s done,’ Noah said fiercely. ‘Young Jimmy is beside himself with worry about her, he really cares, you know, and his uncle will do what he can too. I feel I haven’t done anything yet, but come what may I will get my newspaper to speak out about the police sheltering criminals. And maybe if we told people about these beasts that abduct