Belle

by Lesley Pearse

  Later that same morning Noah was sent out to interview a fruit wholesaler in Covent Garden. It was a rather amusing story, for a tarantula had crawled out of some bananas and on to one of the employees, a portly middle-aged man. It was spotted sitting on his shoulder by another woman employee who nearly fainted with shock. Once the poor man realized what was sitting on him, he was stricken with terror, but a young boy of only eleven who helped with odd jobs stepped forward fearlessly with a glass and a piece of stiff card and scooped it off him.

  The victim passed out on the floor when the young boy gleefully tried to show off his trophy to everyone in the wholesalers. Eventually the spider was transferred into a pot with a lid, and a message was sent to London Zoo for someone to come and collect it.

  All this had happened early in the morning, but by the time the story had reached Fleet Street and Noah had been dispatched to interview the people involved, the spider had been collected and the victim had downed so many brandies he wasn’t making a great deal of sense. But the boy was the hero of the story anyway and was thrilled he was going to be mentioned by name in the newspaper.

  As Noah was in Seven Dials he decided to go and talk to Annie Cooper before he went back to Fleet Street. He had spoken to her briefly the previous day, along with everyone else in the house, but now, as he had some new developments to tell her of, thanks to Jimmy, he hoped that by passing them on, she might respond with something she had kept back before.

  He went round to the back of the house in Jake’s Court and knocked on the door. It was opened by Miss Davis wearing a flour-splattered apron.

  ‘Good morning, Miss Davis,’ Noah said politely. ‘I’m sorry to trouble you again so soon, but I’ve found out a bit more about this man Kent. I wanted to tell Mrs Cooper about it.’

  ‘Call me Mog, no one calls me Miss Davis,’ she said, urging him to come in. ‘Annie’s in a bad way, I’m afraid.’

  Judging by Mog’s red-rimmed eyes she had been crying a great deal herself, but despite this she said she’d just made a pot of tea and offered Noah a cup. She had been in the middle of rolling out pastry on the table, and there was a good smell of stewing beef filling the room. She urged him to sit by the stove and asked him if she could get him something to eat.

  Sitting there in the warm kitchen with Mog fussing round him, Noah could now understand why Belle hadn’t become fully aware of the nature of her mother’s business. The basement was entirely separate from the rest of the house, a cosy, homely place, and Mog a kindly, motherly woman. On the previous day she had shown him Belle’s little bedroom, where there were old dolls, books and games on a shelf, the bed covered with a colourful quilt, and though it was a dark room with only a tiny window, it was pretty and reflected that she was a well-loved and cared-for girl.

  ‘Annie ain’t normally one for letting her feelings show,’ Mog said as she offered him an iced bun with his tea. ‘But this has hit her so hard I’m frightened for her. She needs to talk to someone about it, and if you’ve got a bit of news, that just might help her to open up.’

  Leaving Noah to drink his tea, Mog went up the stairs to speak to her mistress. She returned a few minutes later and said he could go up.

  Annie was in the room behind the parlour, which Millie had always referred to as ‘the office’. It was in fact Annie’s bedroom, but the room was L-shaped and the bed was in the smaller section and hidden by a fancy screen. It was a very feminine room, with a rose pink velvet couch in front of the fire. The small round table, the chairs and Annie’s desk were all of dainty black lacquerware and hand-painted with pink and green flowers and leaves. There were many pictures on the walls, all romantic ones, whether they depicted a soldier and his lass taking a walk across a cornfield, or a woman waiting on the quay to meet her sweetheart off a ship.

  Millie had said she often had tea in here by the fire with Annie in the afternoons and she’d said when she had a home of her own she wanted a room just like it. Noah could understand why now. It was a warm, welcoming room which hinted that Annie was not as stern, cold and humourless as she appeared.

  But the Annie sitting here by the fire, barely able to turn her head to greet him, was changed from the elegant, haughty woman he’d met on several occasions while visiting Millie before. Even the previous day she’d managed to maintain her cold and aloof manner and indeed her elegant appearance. If Noah hadn’t been told by Mog then that Annie was distraught at her daughter’s disappearance, he would never have known it, for she showed no emotion.

  She couldn’t have looked more different today. She was grey-complexioned and gaunt, as if she’d lost a lot of weight suddenly, and her eyes were sunken and dead. Her severe black dress with its high neck and leg of mutton sleeves made her look far older than she was, and her hair, which until today Noah had only ever seen in artfully piled curls, was now pulled brutally back from her face, with streaks of grey very noticeable amongst the brown.

  ‘I am sorry to disturb you again so soon,’ Noah said. ‘But I thought you might like to know that I’ve found out a little more about the man Kent.’

  There was a slight flicker of hope in Annie’s eyes as she looked at him. ‘Then I am indebted to you,’ she said, but her voice was flat and expressionless as if speaking was an effort.

  ‘It wasn’t just me, but Jimmy too. He’s Garth Franklin’s nephew at the Ram’s Head. He’s as keen as I am to try and find your Belle and bring that monster to trial for killing Millie.’

  ‘Mog told me he was Belle’s friend. Please pass on my appreciation for his help.’

  Noah thought it odd she didn’t ask more about how Jimmy knew her daughter, or even jump out of her seat to demand the news he’d brought with him. He thought she was a very cold fish.

  He went on to explain how he knew where the man lived now, and that in his opinion Kent had the police in the palm of his hand. ‘Short of entrapping the man and forcing him to tell us of Belle’s whereabouts, I really don’t know how to proceed,’ he admitted. ‘But I can’t really believe he has killed her. I am absolutely sure he is holding her alive somewhere.’

  ‘Sometimes that can be worse,’ Annie said, half turning on the couch to look at him. ‘I have discovered from my informants, as I’m sure you have too, that he is known to be a procurer of young girls.’

  ‘That was said by a couple of people,’ Noah admitted. ‘But they found him responsible for so many ills, I really hoped that one was exaggeration.’

  ‘It is one of the most lucrative sides of our trade.’ She sighed and turned pain-filled eyes on Noah. ‘It disgusts me, and I have never had any girl working for me who didn’t come here willingly, and old enough to know what she was doing. But the thought of my Belle being used that way is too much to bear.’

  Noah saw that her lower lip was quivering and she looked close to breaking down. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Cooper.’ He reached out and took her hand to comfort her. ‘But Jimmy tells me that she is a brave and clever girl, so maybe she’ll escape it.’

  ‘I was brave and clever too, I could be a little hell cat,’ she said, her voice cracking. ‘But they captured me too, imprisoned and starved me. Even without the beating or withholding food, no young girl, however plucky, is any match for an aroused fully grown male.’

  ‘So it happened to you?’ Noah asked gently. She was shaking with emotion and he didn’t know whether it was better for her to talk it all out, or if he should try to move her on to something else. ‘I am so very sorry.’

  ‘I was just a little younger than Belle and I so much wanted to see London that I begged a ride on the carter’s wagon to get there,’ she explained. ‘You know how you are as a youngster, you don’t think things through. I wandered around looking in all the shop windows, and suddenly it was getting dark and I had no idea how to get back. I began to cry and a woman came up to me and asked what was wrong. She looked just like any other wife or mother, not someone to be wary of. So I told her how it was, and she said I could come home with her and she’d
show me the Tower of London in the morning before she arranged for someone to take me home.

  ‘Well, I did see the Tower of London the next day, but it was through a crack in the boarded-up windows of an old warehouse on the river.’

  ‘She locked you up?’ Noah exclaimed.

  Annie nodded grimly. ‘One minute she was promising all the things she was going to show me the next day, the next I was locked in that place. I screamed and cried but she shouted back through the door that there was no one to hear me. She left me there with no food, just a straw-filled sack to sleep on and one thin blanket. I was so cold that night I couldn’t sleep. The next day, when a man came to give me some food, I tried to fight him. So he gave me a thrashing and took the food and the blanket away. I didn’t see him for another three days, by when I was ready to promise anything just for food and a blanket. Isolation, starvation and fear are the three things which can annihilate even the toughest person’s will.’

  Noah was deeply shocked. ‘Especially when you are young,’ he agreed. ‘I doubt I’d last one day without food or warm blankets.’

  Annie nodded her agreement. ‘Well, finally they came and got me and took me over to Tooley Street. It’s still a brothel now, though I didn’t know what it was then. I was bathed, my hair washed and brushed, and I was put in a clean shift, then taken down to a larger room with a big bed on the floor below. They had given me something to drink that made me feel a bit woozy, but when the first man came into the room and started in on me it hurt so much I screamed.’ She paused, her eyes welling up with tears. ‘He liked me screaming,’ she whispered. ‘He really loved that.’

  ‘I am so sorry,’ Noah said with the utmost sincerity. He felt ashamed that he was male and thought about bedding women so often.

  ‘It didn’t end with just him. There were three others too that night. The woman who’d seen to bathing me came into the room after each man to wash me. Then the next came in. I thought I would die that night, for surely no child could suffer such pain and degradation and survive.’

  Noah put his hand on her shoulder as she broke down in tears. He thought of taking her in his arms as he would almost any other woman who was breaking her heart, but he was afraid to overstep the mark.

  ‘They were what most people would call gentlemen,’ she spat out viciously. ‘They had good clothes and linen, rings on their fingers. They were probably professional men, lawyers, doctors, politicians, scientists. Intelligent men with money and almost certainly with wives and children at home. But they found their pleasure in raping a girl too young to even know what the act was.’

  Noah couldn’t speak, for the picture she’d painted was too awful to contemplate.

  ‘It goes on everywhere,’ she said, her eyes burning with anger. ‘Every single day there are pretty young girls going missing, usually from the slums and back streets where their parents don’t have the power or money to have a voice. But there’s plenty of little country girls like I was too. Sometimes these girls end up dead, killed once their usefulness is over, or sent abroad. The rest are ruined, they can’t return to a respectable life, they are too damaged.’ She paused to gather herself.

  ‘And that is what I’m afraid Belle is going through right now,’ she went on, her voice sharp with pain. ‘Her life is going to become a replica of mine. And it’s all my fault. I should’ve sent her away to school. Why didn’t I?’

  ‘Because you loved her and wanted her near you?’ Noah suggested.

  ‘That is the truth, but the saddest thing is that I never showed it.’ Annie sobbed. ‘She was always closer to Mog than me. That was the real curse of what those men did to me all those years ago – I couldn’t love, I was an empty shell with no feelings, and I stayed working as a whore because I felt it was the only thing open to me.’

  Noah sighed deeply. He had a feeling Annie had never said all this to anyone before, and he wondered if she would despise herself afterwards for revealing so much.

  ‘I’ll do whatever I can to get Belle back and see that bastard hang for what he’s done,’ Noah said fiercely. ‘Young Jimmy is beside himself with worry about her, he really cares, you know, and his uncle will do what he can too. I feel I haven’t done anything yet, but come what may I will get my newspaper to speak out about the police sheltering criminals. And maybe if we told people about these beasts that abduct young girls and children they would rise up and wish to lynch such men.’

  Annie looked at him with tear-filled eyes for what seemed a very long time. ‘You have helped already, Noah,’ she said eventually, wiping her eyes with a lace-trimmed handkerchief. ‘You let me say what was in my heart. It had been stuck inside for so long that it was poisoning me. Thank you.’

  Chapter Ten

  Belle was confused. She had been in the house in France now for four days. She was locked into a room at the top of the building like a prisoner, yet the two women who came in and out to bring her food, put coal on the fire, empty the slop bucket and bring water to wash in were kind to her.

  They didn’t speak English, but the way they looked at her, brushed her hair, and tutted when she hadn’t eaten the food they’d brought, showed they cared about her. She wondered if they were whores – they didn’t appear to be as they wore dark blue plain dresses, caps and aprons. Back at Annie’s the girls wandered around in a state of undress most of the day.

  Belle had tried with sign language and miming to ask them what was going to happen to her, and to try to make them understand she wanted to write a letter to her mother, but they just shook their heads as if they had no idea what she meant.

  So Belle fluctuated between thinking that she was like the children in Hansel and Gretel, being kind of fattened up before being presented to a man. Or alternatively, and ideally, that nothing was happening because Madame Sondheim hadn’t liked her or considered her unsuitable and was planning to send her back to England as soon as she could arrange it.

  The room she was being kept in was an attic room, and the ceiling sloped down sharply to the floor by the window. It was small, rather dark and simply furnished with just a small iron bed, a washstand and a little table and chair under the window. But it was warm and quite comfortable, though she found the food she was brought a bit strange. There was also a stack of jigsaw puzzles which helped to make the time go a little faster.

  Escape was absolutely impossible. On the very first morning Belle had climbed out of the window to see if she could get down to the street that way, but once on the window sill she found it was a sheer drop down the back of the house. Looking up at the roof, she was far too afraid of trying to climb up those slippery old tiles to see if there was a way down the front of the house. Besides, if there had been a way she doubted Madame Sondheim would have left the window unbarred.

  Listening at the door revealed nothing. She would hear voices and footsteps from time to time, but the people always spoke in French. During the evening she could hear music and occasional guffaws of laughter coming from downstairs, the same kind of sounds she’d heard back in London. But at home Mog had always come down to her a couple of times during the evening, the last time usually to tuck her into bed and kiss her goodnight. But here no one came up to see her after she’d had her supper, and twice the oil in the lamp had run out during the evening so she’d been forced to leave her jigsaw and get into bed.

  They usually brought her supper quite late in the evening; once she’d heard the church clock strike eight as she was eating. So on her fifth night, when her supper was brought well before it was dark, she sensed something was finally going to happen.

  The soup was vegetable, very tasty, with some chunks of bread, followed by a fish pie and boiled potatoes. There was the usual glass of red cordial too, but tonight it tasted different. She thought perhaps they’d put some wine in it, and she drank it down anyway.

  When the door opened again she assumed it was one of the maids to collect her tray. It was the shorter of the two maids, with Delphine the housekeeper who had
brought her up here on the first night. She spoke in very fast French and when Belle merely stared back at her, not understanding, she beckoned, as if to come with her.

  Belle was pleased to have an opportunity to get out of the room, but also afraid of what it might mean. Delphine took her down two flights of stairs and led her into a bathroom.

  The bath was already run, and the two women began undressing Belle.

  ‘I can do that myself,’ she said, irritably pushing them off her. ‘Leave me be!’

  They had taken her own dark blue serge dress away her first night here and given her a much nicer lightweight green one with a frill around the hem, and a collar and sash in a green spotted silky material. Scared as she was at the time, she was pleased by the dress because it was very pretty and it made her think they wouldn’t do anything bad to her if they cared about how she looked. Now she saw on the bathroom stool what appeared to be a clean, lace-trimmed white chemise and drawers, so maybe they were intending to take her out somewhere.

  Belle didn’t like the way the women stayed with her till she was naked, clearly intending to wash her like a small child. But, unable to make herself understood, she had to let it go and allow it.

  They scrubbed her as if she was a filthy tramp brought in from the street. Then, once they’d pulled out the bath plug, they rinsed her hair with several large ewers of warm water. It was only as they were drying her vigorously that Belle suddenly realized she’d been drugged. It wasn’t like the sleeping draught Kent had given her, she didn’t feel as if she was going to fall asleep. But she felt sort of numb and carefree, so much so that she started to giggle helplessly when the two women began drying her and helping her into the new clean underwear.