Belle - Lesley Pearse [72]
‘And what makes you think I want to find a young lady?’ Etienne replied, a faint smile playing at his lips.
‘All men do, don’t they?’ she retorted.
‘Maybe I’ve already got a wife,’ he said.
Belle shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘What makes you say that?’
She wanted to reply that no wife would like a husband who took young girls to work in brothels, but that was likely to anger him.
‘You look lonely,’ she said instead.
He laughed for the first time and his eyes seemed less cold. ‘You are a funny girl, old beyond your years. How does someone look lonely?’
‘Like they’ve got no one to care about them,’ she said, and she thought of Jimmy and how his face had lit up when she said she’d be his friend. She wondered if he had asked Mog where she was. If he knew she’d been snatched, was he worried about her?
‘I do sometimes feel lonely, but then everyone does,’ he said.
‘Back home there was a lady who looked after me when I was small. She said that it was good to feel lonely sometimes because it makes you appreciate what you have,’ Belle said. ‘I didn’t appreciate anything at all, not until I was snatched off the street and taken away. Now all I can think of is back home, and that makes me lonelier still.’
‘You were snatched off a street?’ Etienne’s brow furrowed and he looked very surprised.
Belle had assumed that he knew everything about her background and why she was in France. To find he didn’t gave her a ray of hope that she could gain his sympathy.
‘Yes, I witnessed a murder, and the man that did it brought me to France. I was sold to a brothel and I was raped by five men in as many days before I became ill. It seems the madam in that house sold me on then, and my new owners, whom you must work for too, nursed me back to health.’
He looked a bit shaken by this.
‘It’s no good you looking like you didn’t know this, you must have known what I’d been through, and what’s ahead of me,’ she said tartly.
‘I never ask anything, I just do what they require,’ he said. ‘But then, I’ve never before been asked to take one of their girls anywhere. This is the first time.’
‘Do you think it is right to force a young girl into such a thing?’
‘No, no, of course not,’ he said hurriedly. ‘But that is my personal view. You see, in my line of work I have to do many things I would rather not do, but that is part of the job. I have no choice in the matter. They gave me this job because I know America well.’
‘But aren’t you ashamed of doing bad things for money?’
He looked at her hard for a moment and then smiled. ‘You have been so composed so far that I thought you were eighteen at least, but I see now that you still have the idealistic mind of a child. What did your father do for work? I’m sure that even he had to do some tasks he didn’t like.’
‘I don’t know who my father is,’ Belle said truthfully. ‘But I know what you are getting at because I was brought up in a brothel. My mother ran it. Some people would say that was bad, but I know she didn’t hurt anyone, and none of the girls who worked for her were forced into it.’
He looked so surprised at her coming from such a background that she went on to tell him a little more about it, and how she was kept unaware of the exact nature of her mother’s business until that fateful night when Millie was killed. ‘My mother wouldn’t have made me be a whore,’ she finished up. ‘She and Mog wanted me to have a respectable life and they must be in agony not knowing where I am or what has been done to me.’
‘I haven’t hurt you, have I?’ he said, as if that made his part in this all right. ‘Like your mother, I had little alternative but to do what I do, and I always try to use the minimum of force. You are a smart girl, Belle. I know you have decided to try and win my trust, which is always the best ploy in a situation like we have. But however much I sympathize with you, I have to follow the orders I’ve been given, or I will be maimed or killed.’
He said this so casually that Belle knew it had to be true.
That night