Belle - Lesley Pearse [82]
‘I sure didn’t pay for you to be brought all the way from Paris to be a maid,’ Madame said. Her tone was sharp but her dark eyes were twinkling. ‘My house is one of the best in town because my girls are happy, and I guess I can wait a little while to see how things go with you, and see if you can be happy too.’
‘You are a good woman,’ Etienne said, taking her hand and kissing it.
‘I think you are sweet on her,’ Madame said lightly, raising one eyebrow suggestively.
‘Any man would be,’ he replied. ‘She’s a little pearl.’
Etienne said he had to go then and Belle followed him to the front door to say goodbye.
The hall was almost as grand as the drawing room, with a huge chandelier, a black and white tiled floor and walls covered in an ornate red and gold raised paper. Everything Belle had seen so far seemed fine, but she was aware that appearances meant little, and once Etienne had left she would be on her own, in a strange country, without anyone to turn to.
Perhaps Etienne sensed how she felt for he stopped at the door and turned to her. ‘Don’t be scared,’ he said, caressing her cheek tenderly. ‘Although I’ve never met Martha before, I have it on good authority she is a good woman. You will be safe here.’
Belle didn’t want him to go, but she was too proud to cry or look distressed. ‘Tell me something, would you have killed me if I’d run away or sought help?’
He grinned boyishly. ‘How could I kill you if you’d run away? And I couldn’t have done it if you’d got help either. But I had to scare you into behaving. I’m sorry if I frightened you.’
‘I’ll never be sorry I met you,’ she said, and blushed a becoming pink. ‘You’ve got a piece of my heart now.’
‘Stay as beautiful and as sweet as you are now,’ he said. ‘I believe you will come to see New Orleans as your home, and you’ll forget the past. Just make sure you never let anyone push you around, and put some money away for a rainy day too.’
Belle moved forward so she could kiss him on the lips. ‘Safe journey home and think of me sometimes.’
His eyes, which had seemed so hard and cold when she first met him in Brest, were now soft and sad.
‘It will be hard to think of anything else,’ he said, then kissed her with such feeling that she felt her legs were going to give way.
*
By the time Belle fell exhausted into bed at first light the following morning, she almost felt she was at home. The atmosphere in Martha’s was similar to Annie’s Place, overcharged with expectancy, faintly hysterical, yet warm and welcoming too. It even smelled and sounded much the same – perfume, cigars, the rustle of taffeta petticoats and girlish giggling. She might not have spent an evening upstairs back home, but the sounds and smells permeated the whole house.
There were only five other girls here, all around eighteen or nineteen and exceptionally pretty: Hatty, Anna-Maria, Suzanne, Polly and Betty. In the early evening when Belle saw them coming down the stairs, each in a different vivid-coloured silk dress that revealed enough of their charms to tease any man, it was like looking at five rare and beautiful hothouse plants.
They hadn’t looked that way at their first meeting. Although it was the middle of the afternoon, they’d only just got out of bed, and they wore only a loose wrap over a chemise, with their hair all bedraggled.
As the girls ate fruit and pastries and drank coffee, Martha had introduced Belle. She suggested she tell them something about herself, and as Belle wanted them to become her friends and allies, she told them that she had been brought up in a brothel and about the murder she’d witnessed.
Afterwards she wondered if she’d said too much, and that it might have been better to have kept her own counsel, but they had hung on her every word, full of sympathy for her, and wanted to know all about England. She had been surprised at their concern for her, remembering that whenever a new girl arrived back home there was always backbiting and bad feeling.
Raven-haired Anna-Maria was Creole, and her French accent was comfortingly like Etienne’s. Hatty and Suzanne