Belle - Lesley Pearse [55]
All the following day Belle stayed in bed, crying into her pillow. The maids came in with food, and the younger one said some words which Belle was sure were ones of sympathy, but she didn’t feel in the least comforted. Then again after the supper which she hadn’t eaten, she was taken downstairs and pushed into the bath. They didn’t wash her hair this time, and she was given the same set of underwear again, then taken to the room just like the night before.
The man was a different one, older and thinner, and his penis was much smaller. After Madame Sondheim had left the room he tried to put it in her mouth, but when she gagged and then screamed at him he went straight to the main event. It didn’t hurt quite as much as the night before, but it was every bit as vile. She lay under him wishing she had a knife and could stick it in his skinny ribs and kill him.
For three more nights it was the same routine, with a different man each time. She had another who made her hold his penis in her mouth, one who took her from behind like a dog, and the final one made her keep her underwear on and sit on his lap, as if she was his daughter or niece. But he wasn’t showing fatherly affection, his hands were under her drawers touching her, and she knew he was playing out some sick little game in his head. He too took her from behind finally and he was so long at it that she thought the pain and soreness would stay with her for a lifetime.
The day after the fifth man Belle began vomiting and couldn’t stop. By the evening there was nothing left in her stomach to bring up, but she kept retching. As she became weaker, the housekeeper tried to make her eat and drink something, but she brought that up too.
Belle lay in bed unable even to want to get better for she felt dead inside. She was only vaguely aware of day turning to night, then back to day again. She had no idea how much time had passed, but she did pick up on the maids’ concern for her when she could no longer use the chamberpot unaided. They must have spoken to Madame Sondheim about her, for a doctor came in to examine her.
He spoke a little English, and the mere fact that he was attempting to communicate with her made Belle cry.
‘’Ow you come to France?’ he asked once he’d sounded her chest, taken her blood pressure and felt her stomach.
‘In a box, with bad men,’ she sobbed out, and caught hold of his hands so he would listen to her. ‘My mother in England must think I am dead. Help me!’
He looked round at Madame Sondheim enquiringly, but she just shrugged.
‘She is bad woman, make five men do this.’ She pushed down the covers and indicated her vagina because she didn’t know how else to explain.
‘I weel see what I can do,’ the doctor said carefully, and put his hand gently on her cheek as if to reassure her that he meant it.
Belle felt just a little better after the doctor had gone, not because of the medicine he’d left for her, but because she felt help was at hand. She fell asleep imagining herself back home in the kitchen with Mog and her mother.
She woke later at the sound of someone coming into the room. On seeing a man advancing on the bed she screamed at the top of her voice. But Delphine was with him and she darted forward and put her hand over Belle’s mouth, making hushing sounds. She then gabbled away in unintelligible French, but the way she waved her hands at the man, then sat Belle up and wrapped a blanket tightly around her implied that he was going to carry her somewhere else.
Belle hoped it was a hospital for the shock of seeing the man was making her retch again even more violently.
She thought she was dreaming the ride in the carriage, yet the whirring of the wheels and the clip-clop of horses’ hooves seemed very real.
It was the silence which alerted her when she woke that she had indeed been moved somewhere else. In the other house there had been constant sounds – people’s voices, horses’ hooves