She gave her best wide-eyed smile and held her hand out to the man. ‘I’m so pleased to meet you, captain. I am so grateful that you can take me as a passenger.’
‘I haven’t decided whether I will yet,’ he said sharply. His eyes were so dark they appeared to have no pupils, and despite being short and stout he was quite handsome, with clear, golden skin and well-shaped features. ‘I need to be sure you won’t be a liability.’
‘I will stay in my cabin all the time if that is better for you,’ she said. ‘Or I could help your cook. I’m a good sailor; on the way to America all the other passengers suffered from seasickness except me.’
‘Why don’t you have any papers?’ he asked bluntly.
‘Because I was abducted back in London,’ she said. ‘I was witness to a murder, and the murderer snatched me to stop me speaking out.’
‘A little extreme, bringing you so far away,’ the captain half smiled.
‘He made a great deal of money selling me on,’ she said tersely. ‘However, I want to go home and bring him to justice. Please tell me how much you are going to charge me for taking me to France.’
‘Two hundred dollars,’ he said.
Belle rolled her eyes. ‘Then I’ll have to find another ship. I haven’t got anywhere near that much.’
‘I’m sure we can come to some arrangement,’ he said.
Belle stiffened at his tone. She knew exactly what that meant. ‘No, we will decide on a fare here and now,’ she said. ‘Seventy dollars?’
He sniffed and pursed his lips, looking away from her.
‘I can just about manage eighty, but I can’t pay any more,’ she begged. ‘Please, Captain Rollins, take me with you, I promise I’ll be really useful to you.’
He looked back at her, shaking his head slowly. But then unexpectedly he smiled. ‘All right, ma’am, I’ll take you for eighty dollars, but if you get sick don’t expect any help from anyone.’
Twenty minutes after paying off Able and saying goodbye, Belle was in her cabin. It was so small she could only shuffle sideways along the gap between the bunks and the wall with the porthole. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have to share it with another person.
Captain Rollins had told her to stay in her cabin until after they had sailed, in fact she got the clear impression that he actually meant for her to stay in it until he said otherwise. But she didn’t mind, she was so tired with having had so little sleep the previous night that she would be quite happy to sleep the clock round.
The captain had informed her there were only two other passengers on board. Arnaud Germaine was French, but his wife Avril was American, and they were going home to his family in France. Belle had seen only a brief glimpse of them; Avril was around thirty-five, her husband at least ten years older. But even if they weren’t likely to be company for her, she was glad that there was at least one other female on the ship. As the captain showed her the way to her cabin, she’d been leered at by several crew members. They had all looked unkempt, wild-eyed and dirty. She intended to keep her cabin door locked at all times.
By the third day on board Belle had settled into a routine and she’d found that the disreputable-looking crew were a mixture of nationalities. About half of them were negroes, the rest were Cajun, Mexican, Chinese, Irish, Brazilian, and the cook was Italian. But so far they had been surprisingly polite to her, perhaps because the captain had told them she was a friend’s daughter.
She would walk on the deck for an hour after breakfast, then collect some coffee from the galley and take it to Captain Rollins to see if he had any jobs for her to do. So far he hadn’t asked her to do much, in fact it seemed he was hard-pressed to find anything for her to do. She’d sewn some buttons on a shirt and tidied his cabin, and she’d also helped Gino the cook prepare vegetables for dinner, but he wouldn’t allow her to do anything more in his galley. Talking to the captain filled up a chunk of the day, however, and she felt he liked her company.
During the afternoon she mostly sat and read in the small, shabby room they called the officers’ mess. There were hundreds of books there, on shelves, stacked in boxes and piled on the floor, some so well thumbed they were in danger of falling apart. Belle, Mr and Mrs Germaine and the five ship’s officers ate their meals in here too. And although shabby and cramped, it was homely and comfortable.
Arnaud Germaine studiously ignored her and she felt he knew about her background. His wife Avril looked at her curiously but had clearly been told not to talk to her. That suited Belle just fine as she didn’t want to have to answer questions. Captain Rollins could and did question her, but he was gentle about it and his dark eyes twinkled. During their chats in the mornings she’d told him more about herself than she had intended to, but even when she admitted she had worked at Martha’s sporting house he kept the same calm, faintly amused expression, and she felt that even if she was to disclose everything, he’d react just the same way.
The ship was due to berth in Bermuda to take on water, then cross the Atlantic to Madeira before finally docking in Marseille. The evening before they reached Bermuda the captain told Belle she must stay on board the next day. ‘The authorities are vigilant there,’ he explained. ‘Well, they would be, they are English,’ he added with a wry smile. ‘You might think that would make them sympathetic to your plight, but you’d be wrong. They’d just send you back to New Orleans and prosecute me. So stay in your cabin.’
It was stiflingly hot in her cabin once the ship had berthed. Belle knew that Bermuda had beaches just like the one in the picture she’d had to leave behind, and she so much wished she could see them. But she stripped down to her chemise and lay on her bunk with the porthole wide open and listened to the sounds of the tropical island which wafted in. Someone was playing a steel drum in the distance, and she could hear a woman calling out something, sounding just like the street traders back in London. She couldn’t see the harbour from the porthole, for the ship was facing out to sea, but as it had come in to dock, she’d seen shiny-faced brown women wearing vivid dresses carrying baskets of fruit on their heads. She’d seen men in long boats, which looked as if they’d been made from the hollowed-out trunk of a tree, casting fishing nets on the turquoise water, and plump, naked brown children jumping from the dockside to swim.
All the crew were very excited about stopping here. Second Lieutenant Gregson had remarked that they would be blind drunk within an hour of going ashore. He’d told her that this was the place men often jumped ship, sometimes intentionally but more often because they got too drunk to get back to the ship before she sailed. He complained that it was part of his duties to try to round them all up at the end of the evening, which meant he had to stay relatively sober.
Once everyone had disembarked and the ship became quiet, Belle felt very sad and dejected. She tried to sleep to make the hours go faster till they sailed again, but she remained annoyingly alert. She kept thinking that by the time she got to France it would be Christmas, and shortly after that it would be two years since Millie was killed and that until that night she hadn’t really understood what a brothel was. It was difficult to believe she’d ever been that naive, but then Mog and her mother had probably threatened the girls that they’d be thrown out if they talked to Belle about what they did upstairs.
How things had changed since then! She’d travelled thousands of miles and gone from virgin to whore, child to grown woman. She didn’t think there was anything new to learn about men now; all those romantic ideas she’d once had about courtship, love and marriage were gone.
One of Belle’s favourite ways to pass the time on the ship was studying crew members and imagining each of them in Martha’s. Gregson, the second Lieutenant, was the youngest officer and unmarried. He had the blond, blue-eyed look of a story-book hero; she thought he would be the kind to get helplessly drunk, and when he finally got upstairs with one of the girls he would pass out.
First Lieutenant Attlee, a forty-year-old married man from St Louis, believed himself to be some kind of Don Juan. Belle thought he looked like a weasel, for he was slightly built yet tall, with sharp little dark eyes that darted around a room as if afraid of missing something. She sensed that he was the peeping Tom kind, one of those men who got a bigger thrill watching others having sex than doing it himself.
Captain Rollins was harder to pigeon-hole. He was very much the family man – on his desk he had pictures of his pretty wife and three children, and he spoke of them fondly. Yet she also felt there was another side to him, for when she had admitted about Martha’s it was clear he knew his way about such places. She felt he was an opportunist, and that while he wouldn’t force himself on to any woman, he was the kind to inveigle his way into a situation where a woman would find it hard to resist him. She suspected he was a passionate man who would be a good and generous lover.
That thought made Belle smile. He might come in useful when they got to Marseille.
Belle passed a bowl for Avril Germaine to be sick in, and wiped her forehead with a wet flannel, feeling genuine sympathy. She remembered how ill Etienne had been with seasickness, and Avril’s wail that she thought she was going to die made Belle feel she must do what she could to help the woman. As she vomited again, her face was as green as the rough blanket Belle had wrapped round her after helping her out of the soiled sheets on her bunk.
‘You are not going to die,’ Belle said firmly, taking the bowl from her hands and emptying it in the slop pail. She sluiced the bowl with water, then handed it back in case Avril was sick again. ‘The storm will blow itself out in a few hours and you’ll feel better again then.’
Avril was a small, pretty woman with fair, curly hair, pale blue eyes and a complexion like porcelain. Her clothes were expensive and beautiful, and she reminded Belle of a china doll in a picture book Mog had given her when she was small. The doll had thought she was queen of the nursery because she was so pretty and the favourite toy of her owner. She was always nasty to all the other toys who she felt were beneath her. Avril was like her in every way.
‘Why are you being so kind to me?’ she asked in a weak voice. ‘I’ve been so mean to you.’
Belle half smiled. Both the Germaines had ignored her at the start of the voyage, but they had become much more unpleasant since leaving Bermuda, not just shutting her out of conversations in the officers’ mess, but making barbed comments about her. It was obvious they’d found proof she was a whore and felt affronted that they had to eat at the same table with her.
She had been tempted to tell Arnaud Germaine to go to hell when he begged her to help his wife when she became ill, but Belle had never been able to ignore another human being who was suffering.
‘Even whores have hearts,’ she said, as she reached across the bunk to tuck in the clean sheet. ‘In fact, some of us have bigger ones than ordinary folk. But I don’t know how you and your husband could be so hoity-toity about me. As I understand it, you’ve made your money from supplying sporting houses with liquor!’
Captain Rollins had let this bit of information slip. Belle suspected it was no accident either, and that he hoped she’d use it to her advantage.
Avril vomited again. Belle stopped her bed-making to lift the woman’s hair from her neck and cool her neck with the damp flannel. Then, when Avril had stopped retching, she bathed her face and gave her some water to sip.
‘You’re right,’ Avril said weakly, sagging back against the wall. ‘That is how we made our money. But I guess I chose not to think about it.’
Belle saw no reason to labour her point, after all Avril was very sick. The china doll in her books had come to grief too; she fell off a shelf and her face cracked, and after that she was never played with again.
‘Well, at least you are big enough to admit it,’ Belle said. ‘Now, let’s get you washed and into a clean nightdress – that will make you feel more comfortable.’
An hour later Belle left the Germaines’ cabin, taking the soiled sheets and nightdress away to wash. She was pleased that Avril’s seasickness appeared to be abating. After being washed and tucked back into her clean bunk, she had fallen asleep and her colour was much improved.
Belle was washing out the linen in the laundry-room sink when Captain Rollins put his head around the door. ‘How did your mission of mercy go?’ he asked with a twinkle in his eye.
‘Mercifully brief,’ Belle answered, and sniggered. ‘Mrs Germaine is a little better now.’
She put the edge of the sheet between the rollers of the mangle and turned the handle, watching the water being squeezed out.
‘You’d make a good nurse,’ said Captain Rollins. ‘I just saw Mr Germaine and he was very touched by the way you cared for his wife.’
Belle shrugged. ‘Whoring, nursing, they are quite alike, just looking after different needs.’
‘You could hold your head higher if you chose to be a nurse,’ he said.
Belle glanced round at the captain and found him looking at her very thoughtfully. ‘I could hold my head still higher if I had my own house, carriage and fine clothes,’ she said tartly. ‘But nursing doesn’t pay that well.’
‘So you will continue to earn money that way once you get back to England?’
Belle thought that was a strange question. ‘Not if I can help it,’ she said with a toss of her head. ‘I want to have a hat shop with a few rooms above for me to live in and have a workshop. But I have very little money left, and it is a long way from Marseille to London. So if you have any good ideas about how I can avoid selling myself to get that money, I’d be glad to hear them.’
‘It makes me sad to hear you speak like that,’ he replied, his voice soft and reproachful.
Belle let go of the wrung-out sheet and stepped nearer to the captain, and she caught hold of his cheek with her thumb and forefinger and squeezed it. ‘Like I said, you show me another way and I’ll gladly take it. But don’t trouble yourself about me, captain, as they say back in New Orleans, I’m a tough cookie.’
At nine that same night, Arnaud Germaine went up on the bridge to see Captain Rollins.