Belle

by Lesley Pearse

  Back in the District it was almost impossible to walk down a street without someone stopping her for a chat. Street musicians always homed in on girls, often playing a tune especially for them – she couldn’t count the times she had stopped to listen and laughed as they flirted with her. She could buy an ice cream or a slice of water melon from a stall and the stallholder would tell her a bit of gossip. The shopkeepers were all friendly and greeted her with smiles; there was no uppityness – they didn’t consider themselves superior. All over the District there was a sense of everyone being in it together, very much like it had been back in Seven Dials.

  But so far not one person in this street had spoken to her, or even smiled. She doubted this was because they knew she was a kept woman – she didn’t see anyone talking to anyone else. She could only suppose this was how it was in ‘respectable’ areas. People kept to themselves for fear of something. Whether that was fear of involvement, or just common snobbishness, she didn’t know. But whatever the reason, she didn’t like it.

  Sometimes she felt so alone that she cried herself to sleep. The silence pressed in on her and made her feel threatened. There had been a couple of thunderstorms at night too, such heavy rain that it drummed on the tin roof, and such loud thunderclaps that she shook with fear. She got into the habit of going out for long walks, each time going further and further to delay going home, and making herself really tired so she could sleep when she got back.

  Faldo came once a week, but it was always on different days. At first she’d believed that was, as he said, because he didn’t have a routine and never knew how long he’d be in one place, but now she suspected it was just so he could check she wasn’t keeping company with anyone else.

  On his first visit after she moved in, he arrived with a box from a fancy lingerie shop. He’d bought her a beautiful red silk chemise with a matching wrap, plus some elegant red leather slippers trimmed with black swansdown. He was so lovely that night, really affectionate, complimenting her on how nice the house looked and concerned about her being lonely.

  She thought then that was how it was always going to be. She planned on making him special meals, arranging the table with flowers and candles, and that sometimes they’d go out to a restaurant or a theatre. She even imagined that perhaps one day he’d suggest taking her away for a holiday.

  But the next time he came he seemed cold and distant and she couldn’t make out why. It wasn’t as if she looked a mess; every evening she washed, did her hair and put on her new lingerie, just in case he turned up. As she was doing all she could to please him, it was very hurtful that he didn’t respond with any affection. But that night she forgave him because she thought he must have had an awful day.

  Yet that was how it had been ever since. She was never able to relax entirely in the evenings because he could walk in at any moment. If he wasn’t there by ten she knew he wasn’t coming, so she’d take off the pretty lingerie, put on her nightdress and go to bed. And on the evenings he did come round, he didn’t want to chat, ask how her day had been or tell her about his. He just took her to bed and did what he wanted to do, then fell asleep.

  By day she could convince herself that even if Faldo wasn’t being loving, she was still in a far better situation than she had been at Martha’s. She was a mistress, not a whore; she had a comfortable home too, for she’d gone to Alderson’s store and picked out bits of furniture, rugs, pictures and ornaments and charged them to Faldo’s account. She had plenty to eat and she could please herself what she did all day. But on the nights when he was with her, she would lie awake long after he’d gone to sleep, remembering that he’d said even less to her than he did the very first time he was with her at Martha’s, and she felt terribly used and hurt.

  She found herself thinking of Mog, her mother and Jimmy, and that was like sliding down into a dark tunnel which she knew led to nothing but despair. Again and again she thought of writing to them and asking for help to get home, but she couldn’t bear to tell them what had happened to her.

  One afternoon four weeks after she moved into North Carrollton Avenue, a small hat shop a couple of blocks away caught her eye. She went out walking every day, taking a different route each time in order to learn more about the city and its different neighbourhoods. But for some reason she hadn’t come this way before, even though it wasn’t far from where she lived.

  Belle waited for a heavily laden brewer’s cart to go by, then crossed over to the hat shop. The window display was lovely, and she stood looking at it for some time. It had an autumnal theme with a branch of a tree, and gold, russet and red paper leaves lying beneath it. Several hats were perched on the tree: a jaunty red one trimmed with long golden and brown feathers, a moss-green one with a wide brim and a veil, a brown velvet bonnet and a beautiful tawny gold cloche-style one decorated with amber beads.

  Since she left England she hadn’t once picked up a pencil to draw hats the way she used to back home. In fact, apart from telling Etienne it had always been her dream to have a hat shop, she hadn’t even thought about it once.

  But now, as she peered into the shop through the display, it all came back to her. At the back of the shop was a bench, and a very small woman with white hair was standing at it working on a black hat on a stand. She seemed to be fixing a veil to it.

  There were dozens of hats displayed all around the small shop, and Belle felt she just had to go in to take a better look. As she opened the shop door a bell rang, sounding exactly the same as the one in the sweet shop near her home in Seven Dials.

  ‘What can I help you with, madam?’ the old lady asked, stopping what she was doing.

  She had to be at least sixty, her face was heavily lined and her back was stooped. Yet despite her drab black dress with only a cream lace collar and cuffs to lift it, she had bright eyes and a warm smile.

  ‘I just wanted to have a better look,’ Belle said. ‘I love hats and your window display is so pretty.’

  ‘Well, thank you, honey,’ the old lady replied. ‘And you’re English too. I always think Englishwomen have such good taste.’

  Belle chatted to her about the hats for some little while, then, because the old lady seemed pleased to have some company, she admitted how she’d dreamed of becoming a milliner and having a hat shop.

  ‘Fancy that,’ the old lady exclaimed. ‘I never met anyone before who wanted to learn to make them. Most folk think I go somewhere and buy ’em ready-made. They don’t know it’s a real art doing the moulding and then the sewing and sticking.’

  Belle was prepared to flatter and praise the old lady just so she could stay in the shop and feel marginally less alone for a while. She admitted she had no money to buy a hat, but tried some of them on and marvelled at how beautifully made they all were.

  ‘It’s good to see them modelled on someone as young and pretty as you,’ the old lady said. ‘Now, I’m Miss Frank, and I was just going to make myself a cup of coffee. Would you like one too?’

  ‘I’m Belle Cooper and I’d love some coffee,’ she replied. It was only after she’d blurted out her name that she remembered she was supposed to be Anne Talbot. She couldn’t take back her real name, but she resolved not to divulge anything else.

  ‘I always wanted to go to England,’ Miss Frank said, as she opened a door at the end of the shop to reveal a small kitchen. ‘I don’t suppose I’ll ever get there now, getting too darn old. But I’d have liked to see King Edward and his palace. Then there’s that tower where they used to cut off kings’ and queens’ heads.’

  ‘King Edward died last year, and King George has been crowned now,’ Belle said. ‘I went to see the Tower of London once, it’s a scary-looking place. They have men in red and gold uniforms guarding it called Beefeaters. But no one gets beheaded now.’

  ‘I’m very glad of that,’ Miss Frank chuckled. ‘Beheading wouldn’t be good for my business.’

  Belle laughed, the first time she’d really done so since leaving Martha’s.

  �
��That’s better, hearing you laugh,’ Miss Frank said. ‘I saw your face as you were looking in the window and you looked so sad and forlorn. Are you homesick?’

  Belle nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak because the concerned question made her eyes prickle with tears.

  ‘Staying here with relatives?’ Miss Frank looked over her glasses at Belle as she spooned some coffee into a pot.

  Belle nodded, then, noticing a head-shaped contraption in the kitchen, she asked if it was for shaping hats, just to move the conversation away from herself.

  ‘Sure is. I fill the bottom part with water and boil it up, like a kettle. I put the felt or the canvas over the top and the steam shapes the crown. The big one at the top is called a block – I have many different kinds for all kinds of brims and crowns. I’ll show you how it’s done after we’ve had our coffee, that is, if you’d like to see it.’

  Belle stayed in the shop for almost an hour, and Miss Frank showed her all kinds of things to do with millinery. She displayed drawers full of ribbons and braids, boxes of artificial flowers, and more still of feathers. It was all fascinating, and Belle admitted how she used to draw hats all the time back in England.

  ‘If you feel like drawing some again, I’d love to see them,’ Miss Frank said. ‘I’ve been doing this for so many years I dare say I’m getting a bit stale. Angelica’s, the dress shop in Royal Street in the Quarter, buys hats from me, and she did say last time I saw her that she could do with some cheekier designs. To be honest, Belle, I didn’t really know what she meant by that.’

  Belle smiled. ‘I did see a magazine recently with fashions from Paris,’ she said. ‘The hats the models were wearing were smaller, hardly bigger than a flower. I saw one which was like a small nest, with a tiny fluffy bird peeping out. I think that’s what she meant by cheeky.’

  Miss Frank shook her head as if she couldn’t imagine anyone wearing such a hat. ‘Perhaps I’m getting too old? In my younger days it was sensible bonnets, straw hats with a nice ribbon and perhaps a flower trimming. Then in the fall and winter we had felt hats, fur if it was very cold. It was predictable what ladies would buy each season. It’s not that way any more.’

  Belle went home a bit later, but that evening she could think of nothing but hats. She found some paper and a pencil and began to draw frantically, but somehow none of the sketched hats looked right.

  Three days later, having spent almost every spare moment drawing, she went back to see Miss Frank.

  ‘I can’t seem to get anything right,’ she admitted to the old lady. ‘I think it’s because first I need to know how to construct a hat.’

  Miss Frank just looked at Belle for some little while without speaking. ‘I can’t afford to pay an assistant, not unless trade picks up,’ she said. ‘But if you’d like to learn millinery, I’ll teach you.’

  ‘You’d do that?’ Belle said breathlessly. ‘I’d like it more than anything.’

  From the first morning when Belle presented herself at Miss Frank’s little shop, and was given the task of steaming a felt cloche hat on a block, she felt she had hope again. Millinery was a proper trade; once she’d mastered it she could find respectable employment. But even if that was a long way in the future, all at once she had a reason to get up in the morning, a purpose in each day other than just waiting for Faldo to turn up.

  She learned fast. Miss Frank said she had nimble fingers and a flair for it. And the old lady was a good teacher, as keen to pass on her skills as Belle was to acquire them. But there were perils attached to her new role of trainee. Miss Frank was inquisitive, and so were the regular customers who’d been coming to the shop for years. They wanted to know why Belle had come to America, how and when, where she lived and what she lived on. Even when they didn’t actually ask questions, their eyes enquired, and Belle guessed that when she wasn’t in the shop, they would be quizzing Miss Frank.

  Lying didn’t come easily to Belle. She’d told Miss Frank she was sent to live with her guardian here when her widowed mother died. But as his wife and their children didn’t want her living with them, her guardian had found alternative accommodation for her. It didn’t sound plausible, not even to her, that any guardian would expect a girl as young as her to live alone in a strange city. Yet Miss Frank appeared to believe it; she tutted and said she thought it was disgraceful, but her sympathy only made Belle feel worse. She so much wished she could tell the truth, unburden herself with the whole sorry story. But however kindly Miss Frank was, she wasn’t worldly, she was a church-going spinster who probably had never been kissed, let alone had a sexual experience. She wouldn’t want a whore in her pretty little shop; she might even believe Belle had crept round her with the plan to rob her. She would find the idea of her being the mistress to a married man utterly despicable. She might even report Belle to the police, and that way it could get back to Martha where she was.

  So Belle tried to keep her lip buttoned, saying as little as possible to both Miss Frank and her customers, while at the same time working really hard to master the new skills she was being taught, and practising designing hats at night.

  She didn’t tell Faldo about her new interest as she knew he wouldn’t like it. But elated by new-found happiness in Miss Frank’s shop, she tried much harder to please him.

  ‘Tell me where you’ve been this week,’ she would say after she’d made him a mint julep, a drink with bourbon that he’d said was his favourite. On a couple of occasions he did tell her that he’d been to St Louis, or even further away, but most of the time he didn’t even bother to reply, just drank the mint julep and said it was time for bed.

  One night she asked him why he didn’t want to talk to her any more.

  ‘What is there to say?’ he shrugged. ‘I don’t come here to be quizzed, I’m tired at the end of the day.’

  On each successive visit Belle felt a little more deflated and used by him, but she counteracted this by reminding herself she had a roof over her head, and blamed herself for jumping into the arrangement without getting to know him better.

  By day, though, she was cheered considerably because her designs began to improve dramatically once she understood how hats were constructed. She would go rushing into the shop with them in the mornings and Miss Frank would laugh at her enthusiasm and say she would look at them carefully later.

  Mostly she told Belle they weren’t practical, sometimes because they would be too heavy or unbalanced, other times because they involved too much work, but finally she examined one design which looked like a large, flat rose and she said jubilantly that Belle had come up with a good design.

  ‘It’s perfect for women who don’t want a hat which will flatten or spoil their hairstyle,’ she said. ‘I can make the base it sits on quite small; it could be secured with a hat pin. I think they’ll love this at Angelica’s. So we’ll make one up and I’ll take it in to show them.’

  They made the first rose hat in pink. The stiffened, shaped base was covered in deep pink velvet, and the rose itself was made of wired silk, the underside of each petal just a shade darker. They finished it mid-afternoon, and when Belle put it on, Miss Frank clapped her hands in delight.

  ‘Honey, it’s a triumph,’ she said. ‘I’m going to take it along to Angelica’s right away. You go on home and I’ll shut up the shop.’

  It was nearly four in the afternoon when Belle left the shop, and on the way home it began to rain, so she ran the rest of the way.

  By the time she’d unlocked the door and gone in, the rain was coming down so heavily that the street was awash and it had become so dark she had to light the gas immediately.

  She’d felt so happy back at the shop because she’d pleased Miss Frank, but now, plunged back to reality, all alone for yet another long evening with the rain drumming on the roof, she suddenly felt she couldn’t stand much more of it.

  It didn’t feel right to be kept by a man who was so cold towards her. She should be able to tell him about learning to make hats, to show h
im her designs and admit her dream of having her own hat shop. She’d once told him she’d caught the tram to look at the big houses in the Garden District and his face had tightened with disapproval. Since then she only told him things like how she’d baked a cake, or started some embroidery or knitting, but it was all wrong that she felt unable to tell him anything else.

  ‘I swopped one slave master for another,’ she murmured to herself, and tears started up in her eyes. ‘All he wants is a place to stay when he’s in town and a girl in the bed so he doesn’t need to pay for one in a brothel.’

  Yet that didn’t make any sense to her, for it cost more to keep her than for a hotel for the night and a whore. It was so puzzling: she knew about men, and she knew few of them would set anyone up in a house and pay all the bills unless they were smitten with the woman.

  Why didn’t he ever tell her when he was coming next? Why didn’t he want to share a meal with her, take her for a walk or to the theatre? Why, when he’d been so warm and chatty back at Martha’s, had he changed so dramatically?

  As a kept woman Belle didn’t feel she could challenge him about anything, and she believed she must always show enthusiasm for his lovemaking too. She had even thought that would encourage him to try harder to please her. But that hadn’t worked; he made no attempt to please her, and that, along with his callous attitude that as his kept woman she should do whatever he said, made it increasingly difficult for her to pretend she enjoyed sex with him. She wondered how much longer she could keep up the pretence.

  She walked into the parlour, slumped down on one of the chairs and gave way to tears. The empty fireplace was a reproach – back home at this time of year there would be a blaze in every fireplace in the house. She imagined Mog in a clean white apron preparing the evening meal, chatting as she stirred pots on the stove and laid the table. Annie would be up in her parlour going over the household accounts; the girls would be doing their hair for the evening ahead.