Belle - Lesley Pearse [71]
But he didn’t talk much. Not a word about his own situation or where she was bound for. In the dining room he replied if another passenger spoke to him but didn’t start conversations. Belle guessed he was afraid she would entreat someone to help her, and of course she was watching out for the right person.
They were second-class passengers, as everyone was who had a cabin on the same level as them. There were only about twelve first-class passengers, whose cabins were on the deck above, and they ate in their own dining room where the food was probably much nicer.
At Cork they’d taken on a hundred or so third-class or steerage passengers. They were housed down in the bowels of the ship, and Belle had heard one of the officers informing them very curtly that they were only allowed on certain parts of the deck at certain times. From the glimpses Belle had got of them as they embarked at Cork, she could see by their worn clothes and boots that they were poor. She remembered from school being told about the early Irish immigrants to America, and that they suffered terrible conditions on the voyage; she hoped these poor people wouldn’t be treated so badly.
Almost as soon as Belle had found herself locked in the cabin, she’d made a plan. Realizing that Etienne was not going to tolerate disobedience or rudeness, she decided to try to soften him up with charm. Each time he came back to the cabin she greeted him warmly, asking how cold it was on deck, who was up there and other such things. She made his bunk for him, kept her things tidy and as far as was possible treated him as if he really was her uncle.
She felt he was responding to this too, for he came back to the cabin often to suggest they had a stroll around the deck or went and sat in the comfortable chairs in the lounge on the top deck to look at the sea.
She turned away from the porthole as she heard Etienne coming in. ‘Hello, come to liberate me?’ she said with a smile.
‘There’s a storm brewing,’ he said. ‘Some folk are already feeling seasick. It’s usually better to be closer to the fresh air when the sea’s rough. Would you like to go up to the lounge?’
Belle had decided that Etienne was an attractive-looking man. His icy blue eyes might have been a little frightening at first, as was his threat to her, but he had a well-proportioned nose and a generous mouth, and his skin was smooth, clear and golden as though he’d been in the sun recently. Unusually, he didn’t have a moustache or beard, and she liked that. His hair was good too; she was so used to seeing men with thinning hair slicked down with oil, or around Seven Dials they left it unwashed and untrimmed. But Etienne’s hair was clean, thick and fair, the kind she was sure Mog would say was made to ruffle.
Belle had peeped out from behind the curtain earlier today to see him stripped to the waist to wash and shave, and had been quite taken aback to see he had a hard, powerfully built muscular body like a prize fighter’s. He was younger than she had first thought too, she would guess only about thirty-two or thereabouts. It was all this, his comparative youth and good looks, that made her feel hopeful she could get him on her side.
‘That would be nice, Uncle,’ Belle said with a grin. ‘Maybe we could have a cup of tea too?’
Etienne did order them tea and a cake, and as they sat by the window looking out at the sea, Belle noticed three smartly dressed young women sitting together. They were no more than twenty-three or -four and they must have come on board in Cork for she hadn’t seen them before. Two of them were quite plain, but the third was very pretty, with flame-red curly hair.
‘That red-headed