Hearing her voice brought him out of the dark place he’d slipped into and he let Pascal slide down the wall to the floor, unconscious.
He turned to see Belle standing there, Pascal’s knife in her hand, tears running down her cheeks making white tracks through the blood and grime. Her hair was matted and she was still naked.
‘There’s rope under the mattress,’ she sobbed. ‘Just tie him up and let’s get out of here.’
Etienne picked up the blanket from the bed and wrapped it round her.
Suddenly they both heard the sound of breaking glass downstairs. Etienne guessed it was Noah and Philippe, but Belle quaked visibly. ‘Don’t be scared, that’s reinforcements,’ he said, holding her to him tightly. ‘It’s all over now. We’re going to take you somewhere safe.’
Chapter Thirty-four
Etienne couldn’t bear the sound of Belle whimpering any longer. Twenty-four hours had passed since he had rescued her from Pascal, and Philippe had arranged for her to be brought to this private nursing home. A doctor had attended her as soon as she got here, and he’d dressed the wound on her belly, which mercifully wasn’t deep enough to need stitching. He said he thought she would recover completely with rest and good food. Etienne had taken it upon himself to keep a vigil outside her door as he felt the doctor was being too complacent about what she’d been through.
He opened the door and went in. It was a small, all-white room with an iron bed and a wooden crucifix above it. One of the nurses had lit a night-light when it grew dark, and Belle’s hair stood out in stark relief against the white bed linen.
‘Can’t you sleep?’ he asked gently. ‘Would it help if I sat beside you in here? Or would you like to talk?’
‘I’m afraid to fall asleep,’ she whispered. ‘I think I’m scared I’ll wake up later and find I’d dreamt you rescued me. I don’t even understand how you found me.’
After what she’d been through Etienne found it unsurprising that she’d hardly said a word after her rescue. He thought it was quite possible she’d never be able to tell anyone exactly what Pascal had done to her, though the bleeding, bruises and her terror told much of the story. But he thought it was a good sign that she had questions to ask.
‘Noah and I have been like your English Sherlock Holmes,’ he said lightly, perching on the edge of the bed. ‘We snooped, bullied and pushed our way into finding you. What was that phrase Holmes used to say to his companion? “Elementary, my dear Watson.” ’
He was rewarded with a faint ghost of a smile.
‘Who is Noah? He spoke as if he knew me well but I’m sure I’ve never met him before,’ she said, frowning as if she’d been puzzled for some time.
‘He was a friend of Millie’s, the girl who was killed at your mother’s,’ Etienne said. ‘Mog, the lady you told me about, went to him to ask for his help in finding you when you disappeared. You see, he’s a journalist. He’s been backwards and forwards to France several times trying to find you. On one of those trips he met Lisette, who nursed you before I took you to New Orleans, and she told him you’d been taken to America. But it is really Madame Herrison you have to thank for your rescue. When you didn’t come home on the night of the eleventh she was afraid for you. Lisette is an old friend of hers and she went to her for advice. She was amazed to find Lisette knew you and furthermore had Noah’s address in England, so she sent him a telegram, and she got word to me in Marseille.’
‘Gabrielle did all that?’ Belle whispered.
‘She’s been hurt by men herself and she is fond of you,’ he said. ‘But I can explain all of it more clearly when you feel better. The gendarmes have Pascal now, and Philippe Le Brun is arranging papers for you so that you can go home to England.’
‘But wasn’t Philippe in with Pascal? It was his house I was kept in.’
Etienne smoothed her hair back from her face tenderly. ‘No, it was Pascal’s house, Philippe knew nothing of it until Noah and I went to see him. He is a good man, and he’s another person who likes you very much. He and Noah have spent the day with the gendarmes explaining everything. As you must be aware, my credentials are not as good as theirs, so I opted for staying here with you.’
‘So Noah knows my mother and Mog?’
Etienne felt a surge of emotion at the hope in her eyes.
‘Very well, from what he said your Mog has almost adopted him as family. She has never given up hope of you being found.’
‘And my mother, Annie?’
Etienne had hoped Belle would wait to ask Noah about her mother. From what he gathered, she hadn’t taken any part in trying to find her daughter. ‘You’ll have to ask Noah about her,’ he said carefully. ‘We only met a few days ago and we’ve been too preoccupied with finding you to talk about anything much else.’
‘Does everyone know what I am?’ she asked in a small voice.
‘They know only what we told them, that you were abducted from England.’
‘But Pascal will tell them how I went to him for clients.’
Etienne’s heart tightened in sympathy for her. There was so much in his life that he was ashamed of, but he had chosen his path, she had been pushed on to hers. ‘I think you’ll find Philippe can tell a plausible tale or two, and no other man is going to come forward and say something different. Besides, Pascal is a madman, no one will pay much attention to anything he might say.’
She was silent for some little time, and he guessed she was mulling that over.
‘Tell me how you have been,’ she asked suddenly, as if she wanted to dispel memories of Pascal and her ordeal in that attic room. ‘I didn’t expect to ever see you again, but I’ve thought about you a great deal in the last two years.’
‘I’ve got a little cottage now, I’m clearing the land to grow crops. I’m out of the business I used to be in.’
‘I’m glad of that,’ she said. ‘It must be a great relief to your wife too.’
He nodded. He wasn’t going to tell her about his misfortunes, she’d had enough of her own. ‘Try to sleep now,’ he suggested. ‘I’ll be close by if you need me.’
‘Don’t you want to know how I ended up back in France?’ she asked.
‘Of course I do, I just didn’t think you were ready for that.’
‘It might help me lay some ghosts.’ She grimaced. ‘I did become the top girl at Martha’s, there were times I even loved it there. But Martha was a snake, she only paid me a pittance because she said she had to get back what she’d laid out for me.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. When I told you she was a good woman I was repeating what I’d heard. But even basically decent people can turn where money is concerned. So how did you get away from there?’
‘I pretended I was just going for a walk, and went off to become the mistress of one of my clients,’ she said. ‘It was the only way I could get free, and I thought I could then save up enough to get back to England.’
‘I hope he was a good man,’ Etienne said, and caressed her cheek gently.
‘I believed he was, he was kind and I liked him. I really wanted to make him happy,’ she said as her eyes filled with tears. ‘But he changed as soon as he’d set me up in a little house. He didn’t talk to me, he’d never tell me in advance when he was calling, wouldn’t take me out anywhere, he just used me and made me feel so bad about myself. Why did he change like that, Etienne? It was like I’d just swopped one prison for another.’
Etienne sighed deeply, and picked up her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers. ‘It was probably because he’d fallen for you and he was afraid you’d deceive him. I’d say he was very unsure of himself.’
Belle explained briefly about how lonely she was and how she got to know Miss Frank in the hat shop and arranged to help her make hats.
‘I never dared tell Faldo where I went every day, but learning to make hats cheered me so much. On nights when he didn’t call on me I spent my time designing too. Miss Frank even got an order for one of my designs and I really thought I was getting somewhere. But then Faldo died.’
‘He died? How?’
‘He had a heart attack, while we were –’ She stopped abruptly, dropping her eyes. Etienne guessed by that exactly what Faldo was doing when he died.
‘He was hateful to me that night,’ she said in a small voice, tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘I asked him why he didn’t talk to me or take me out anywhere, and he said all kinds of horrible things and hit me. Then he started pleading with me and saying he couldn’t help himself because he wanted my heart. He said that, then he forced himself on me like a madman.’ She broke down then and all Etienne could do was hold her hand and wait till she could finish.
‘He had some kind of turn while he was doing it,’ she sobbed. ‘I ran for help, but by the time I got back with a policeman he was dead. Later, when a doctor got there, he said it was a heart attack.’
Etienne could well imagine just how terrible all that was to a young girl who had no one to turn to. He’d met plenty of young women who when anxious to get out of a brothel had put their trust in an older man. It usually turned sour, perhaps because the kind of men who offered a new life to a one-time whore were usually inadequate themselves.
‘You must have been so frightened,’ Etienne said.
Belle nodded. ‘I went to Miss Frank, I thought she would help me, but when I told her about everything she turned against me too. So I packed up my things and got a passage on the only ship that would take me. That was bound for Marseille.’
Etienne raised one eyebrow. ‘I wish I’d known.’
Belle squeezed his hand. ‘I thought about you on the voyage, but I wouldn’t have dared ask anyone if they knew you, in case the wrong people got to hear about it. But I was a fool there too. You’d think I would have learned by then not to trust anyone.’
‘Who did you trust there?’
‘Well, first it was another passenger on the ship, a man called Arnaud Germaine. He took me to the house of a friend of his, Madame Albertine. Do you know either of them?’
Etienne gave a wry half-smile. ‘I don’t recognize the name Germaine, but I have heard of Madame Albertine. She is well known for introducing handsome young men to rich older women.’
Belle frowned at this, wondering if the young men she had met at Madame Albertine’s house, Clovis included, were potential gigolos. Afraid she might have been mistaken about the older woman’s intentions towards her, and embarrassed about what happened with Clovis, she didn’t wish to say anything further about Marseille.
‘Well, let’s just say I regretted telling her all about myself,’ she said. ‘So I caught the train to Paris.’
Etienne remembered that Gabrielle had said Belle arrived at the Mirabeau wearing an evening dress beneath her coat, without any luggage, so he guessed she had had some kind of humiliating experience in Marseille which she didn’t wish to reveal.
‘We all make the mistake of trusting the wrong people sometimes,’ he said soothingly. ‘I certainly have, many times. But sometimes we also put our trust in the right ones, as you did with Gabrielle, and I did with Noah and Philippe.’
‘I thought I was seeing things when you came hurtling through that door,’ she said with a faint chuckle. ‘I even forgot to be embarrassed at having no clothes on.’
Etienne smiled back at her. ‘In years to come we’ll think we were in a scene in a penny dreadful. It’s a shame I didn’t think to say, “Unhand her, you scoundrel.” ’
Belle managed a real laugh at that. ‘It is so good to see you again. When I was back in New Orleans I used to wonder if you were really as handsome and mysterious as I remembered or whether that was just because I was so young and naive. But you are everything I remembered.’
‘I’ve often recalled how you took care of me when I was seasick, and how beautiful you looked that last night before we got to New Orleans. It was so hard to leave you in New Orleans, Belle, I’ve always wished I hadn’t taken you there.’
‘You had no choice,’ she said firmly. ‘And don’t feel bad about it, for in some ways it was the making of me.’
‘How can you say that?’ he asked.
‘I grew up, I became self-reliant,’ she said with a shrug of her shoulders. ‘I learned a lot about people. But don’t let’s do this “I wish I hadn’t” stuff. All the time I was in that room at Pascal’s I kept doing that, and it just drives you mad.’
Etienne had been impressed on the way to America by Belle’s ability to accept things she couldn’t change, and he was very glad she was still that way. ‘Fair enough. So what else would you like to tell me, or ask me?’ he said.
‘I left a lot of money in my room at the Mirabeau. Did Gabrielle find it?’ she asked.
‘I found it,’ he said. ‘It’s all still there, perfectly safe. And Gabrielle has a big heart underneath her dour exterior. Noah went back there last night and told her you’d been found and where you were. He said she lit up like the Eiffel Tower, she’d been beside herself with worry. But tomorrow or the next day you can go back to see her. She can’t wait to see you.’
Belle closed her eyes then, and Etienne thought he would wait until she was sound asleep, then creep out.
But a few minutes later her eyes flew open. ‘I know I said we weren’t to do the “I wish I hadn’t” stuff, but have you ever felt that it would be better to just die rather than live with the awful things you’ve done?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I have,’ he admitted, remembering that it was only a few months ago that he thought of nothing else. ‘But listen to me, Belle. One in every five women in Paris are
filles de joie
, and a large percentage of them have had no choice but to make a living that way, just like you. You didn’t steal or hurt anyone, in fact you gave your clients a great deal of pleasure, so you must not feel bad about it.’
‘I didn’t feel bad, not until Pascal. But he brought home to me what selling my body really meant. In his way he was right, why wouldn’t I let him have me? I was up for sale. Why didn’t I see just how low I’d sunk? I could have worked as a waitress, or cleaned for people. But I thought I was too good for that. How could I think being a whore was better?’
Etienne leaned forward, scooped her into his arms and held her tightly. ‘He was bad, not you, Belle. Don’t you dare begin to think you deserved what he did to you. Death isn’t a solution, it’s just the coward’s way of escaping the hurt. The brave thing to do is to put the past where it belongs, behind you. I’ve seen those hats in your sketchbook, and you have real talent. So think of going back to England with the slate wiped clean, of becoming a milliner and achieving your dream.’
She began to cry then, not the sad little whimpers he’d heard before, but great heaving, cleansing sobs. Etienne continued to hold her as she wept, knowing that the healing process could not begin until she let it all out.
She cried for a very long time, but gradually it began to abate. Etienne got a wet facecloth and bathed her swollen eyes. ‘Do you think you can sleep now? Have I convinced you that you are safe, that Pascal is locked up and that you are going home to England very soon?’