Belle - Lesley Pearse [76]
Etienne didn’t speak to her at all as they sat hunched up on the floor, and as Belle felt she might endanger herself even more by saying anything, she stayed quiet too. They had been on the boat for about twenty-five minutes when suddenly there was bright light coming in through the wheelhouse windows, and Belle could hear men shouting to one another.
‘We’re approaching the docks. They’ll be mooring any minute,’ Etienne whispered. ‘We stay here until they tell us it’s safe to go.’
‘Where do we go?’ she whispered back fearfully.
‘To a hotel, just like I told you,’ he said. ‘I didn’t tell you this was how we were going into New York, just in case you panicked.’
‘What if we get caught?’ she whispered. ‘Won’t they shove us in prison?’
He took her two hands in his and lifted her fingers to gently kiss the tips of them. His eyes were full of mischief. ‘I don’t ever get caught. Back in France they call me L’Ombre, which means the shadow.’
‘You make a very good guide,’ Belle said as they came down the gangplank of the little boat which had taken them out to see the Statue of Liberty. ‘Maybe you should take that up instead of working for bad men.’
It was dusk now, and growing very cold, but the last two days had been bright and sunny and they’d walked miles and seen so much: the Flat Iron Building, the first of New York’s skyscrapers, the Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park … they’d travelled on the ‘E’, a train which ran high over houses and offices. Belle had eaten her first hot dog and marvelled at the grand shops on Fifth Avenue, but also seen enough grim, overcrowded tenements to realize there were even more desperately poor people in America than there were back home.
Etienne had been as good as his word, getting her safely from the fishing boat to a guest house on the Lower West Side. Although the neighbourhood looked every bit as squalid as Seven Dials, and certainly didn’t live up to the way people back in England imagined Americans lived, the guest house was comfortable and warm, with steam heat, hot baths and indoor lavatories.
‘It’s been good to show you round,’ Etienne said. ‘I just wish we had a couple more days for there’s a great deal more I’d like to show you. When I get back to France I shall have to continue in the same line of work, for I have no choice, but when we get to New Orleans I will try to influence your new mistress into taking very good care of you.’
Belle was holding his arm and she squeezed it, knowing he really did feel badly about his part in her capture. She also knew why he had to go through with it, because he’d finally told her his story.
He was born and grew up in Marseille, but his mother died when he was six, and his father turned to drink. Etienne stole first out of necessity. His father spent every penny he made on drink, and someone had to put food on the table, clothes on their backs and pay the rent on their two rooms.
But by the time he was fourteen he had become a skilful burglar, and targeted the grand hotels all along the Riviera where the very wealthy stayed. He went after jewellery which he then fenced for a fraction of its real value in one of the many little jewellers in the narrow street down by the harbour.
He was eighteen when he was caught red-handed one night in the room of a man who had become a millionaire through, it transpired, extortion. He was offered a choice: work for this man, whom Etienne chose to call Jacques because he couldn’t reveal his real name, or be thrown to the police, who would no doubt make sure he got an extremely long prison sentence as he’d been a thorn in their side for years.
Etienne explained to Belle that at the time he thought he was the luckiest man alive to be offered work with Jacques.
‘I could hardly believe it. He sent me to London where I was given English lessons. I stayed in a nice place called Bayswater, and I had further lessons on the habits of the English aristocracy so that I could rob them. But whereas in the past I would be stealing a diamond ring