Belle (9 page)

Chapter Eight

Sly returned to the kitchen after seeing Belle into her room. Kent was still sitting by the stove, bent over in his chair as if mulling something over in his mind. Sly didn’t speak, but took a bottle of whisky from the cupboard, poured two large glasses, and sat down by the stove too, handing one of the glasses to Kent.

Belle had been right in thinking the house belonged to Sly. His real name was Charles Ernest Braithwaite, but he had acquired the nickname of Sly because he was a gambler who appeared to have almost telepathic powers which told him which game to play and which ones to walk away from. Like any gambler, he did lose sometimes, but not as often as others, and never large amounts.

Belle had also been correct in thinking he had gypsy blood, for his mother, Maria, had been a Romany. She had turned up at this remote farm near Aylesford in Kent late one winter night when she had run away from her family. Frederick Braithwaite, Sly’s father, was a forty-year-old bachelor at that time, struggling to look after his sick mother along with the farm.

Fred was not a generous or benevolent man, but when Maria begged him to give her food and let her sleep in his barn, he saw this could be to his advantage, and he agreed she could have both in return for help in nursing his mother.

Maria was equally hard-headed. She had run out on her family because they were forcing her to marry a man she hated. It didn’t take her long to discover that most people were prejudiced against gypsies, and no one would give her work or shelter. She didn’t really want to nurse a sick old woman who meant nothing to her, nor did she want to end up in Fred’s bed, but she was desperate and she liked the look of his farm. She took the view that she could fare far worse than looking after an old lady, and she might grow to like Fred.

They were married within four months. Within a year of their marriage Charles was born and the old lady died peacefully in her bed.

It may have started out as a marriage of convenience, but Maria worked hard at being a good wife to Fred and a loving mother to Charles and they became a happy little family. Fred died of a heart attack when Charles was only nineteen, but Maria kept everything going while allowing her son to play the part of the young gentleman around town.

Charles had been twenty-seven when his mother died and it was only then that he turned to illegal enterprises to make more money. The farm was his, and it was profitable, but he had very little interest in it. Knowing it would make a good front to hide his questionable sidelines, all he had to do was pay someone else to run it.

He had always been able to justify any action of his which society would frown on by asking himself whether it harmed anyone or not. Gambling and drinking harmed no one but himself, even though his mother might have disagreed. So when he embarked on procuring young women for brothels, he reasoned that he was helping them out. Most of them had been pushed out, or run away from home; many had been brought up in orphanages. He felt that but for his intervention they were likely to starve or die of cold on the streets.

He could find young women and girls at the train stations, lurking outside public houses, in markets, anywhere in fact where they hoped to be offered food or a drink by a kindly stranger. He was that kindly stranger. He truly believed that he was giving them far more than a hot meal and sympathy; he was getting them work in some of the best bawdy houses in town.

Charles was not a cruel man, and he didn’t like the circumstances of acquiring this latest girl one bit. He had never before taken anyone against their will, and certainly never snatched an innocent from the streets.

‘She ain’t like my usual ones,’ he said as he downed the last of the whisky in his glass and then topped it up again. ‘I don’t like it.’

‘Don’t be a fool, what’s so different about her?’ Kent asked, somewhat surprised at his friend’s view. ‘She’s older than some you’ve taken, and her home wasn’t good. Besides, you know that I had no choice but to take her. She could’ve got me strung up.’

Kent had admitted that he had strangled a whore in Seven Dials, but Sly wasn’t entirely sure he believed that the girl who witnessed it was about to blow the whistle. People in Seven Dials learned at an early age not to squeal on anyone. Kent was his partner, though, and aside from being the kind of man no one would want to cross, he was also the one who liaised with the brothel owners when they had a new girl to sell. Sly needed to keep him sweet, but he also hoped he could talk him round.

‘She’s smart and it won’t be easy to mould her,’ Sly argued, for Kent planned to sell Belle to a brothel in France. ‘I tell you, she’ll be more trouble than she’s worth. Let’s take her back to London tomorrow night and drop her off near her home?’

‘Don’t be bloody stupid. We can’t do that, you know why.’

‘But she’s got no idea where this place is,’ Sly argued. ‘Neither does she know anything about you. And her mother ain’t going to make a fuss if she gets her back unharmed. We can go straight on to Dover after dropping her off and catch a boat to France like we planned.’

Sly might not have been lucky enough to be born with good looks, for he was short, stocky and pug-nosed, but he did have a certain charisma which served him well with both sexes. Other men saw him as an entertaining companion, admiring his wily nature, determination and strength. Women liked the way he made them feel they were the most important person in the world when he spoke to them. He had the manners and bearing of a gentleman, but with an animalistic undercurrent they found very attractive. Such was his charm that many a girl who ought to have seen him as her destroyer stubbornly defended him to all who criticized him.

Kent, or rather Frank John Waldegrave, which was his real name, was born to landed gentry in the north of England. But although the family estate was large, as the third son and the one his father liked the least, he knew at an early age that he was not going to inherit anything of value. Jealous of his favoured older brothers, and hurt that his mother and sister never took his part, Frank took himself off to sea with a chip on his shoulder which grew larger with each slight or humiliation he encountered.

Joining the merchant navy was possibly the worst possible career choice for a young man who didn’t like taking orders, found it difficult to make friends and had been used to the wide open spaces of the Yorkshire Moors. He had a sharp mind which would have been far better suited to accountancy, law or even medicine, but instead he found himself forced to share all his waking hours with the kind of uneducated men who had worked as labourers on his family estate.

Frank wasn’t any more successful with women than he was at making friends with his own sex. Back on dry land in Dover, a well-educated gentleman who was just an ordinary sailor was neither fish nor fowl. He liked to think that the shop girls and housemaids he ran into thought him too far above them, but the truth was that he didn’t know how to talk to women. The kind of middle- or upper-class girls he might have felt more comfortable with didn’t frequent the saloons and dance halls where sailors gathered.

He was in his early twenties when one night in Dover he was taken to a brothel and found that the girls there liked him. He chose to believe this because they listened attentively to him and were willing to give him exactly what he wanted. He’d even proved it to himself dozens of times when he’d been rough with one of them because he felt angry. They didn’t complain or refuse to see him the next time his ship docked. They liked it.

Then ten years ago, when Frank was twenty-eight, his Uncle Thomas, his father’s younger brother, died. To Frank’s surprise he had made his nephew his sole heir. Frank had no real idea why this was, for he’d never had much to do with his uncle, but he could only suppose Thomas had felt ill-treated by his family, and sympathized with Frank.

Thomas wasn’t a very wealthy man; he owned no large estate in the country, just a couple of tenements in Seven Dials and a dozen squalid houses in Bethnal Green. Frank was horrified the first time he saw the place they called the Core. The dilapidated buildings in Seven Dials were filled to capacity with the desperate human flotsam and jetsam that ends up in inner cities. The houses in Bethnal Green were as bad – even as shelters for animals they’d have been inadequate. Frank covered his nose, closed his eyes to the appalling sights all around those mean streets and retreated to a comfortable hotel.

But by the next day any qualms of earning a living off the rents of such places had left him. He realized that it meant he could give up the sea and live a very comfortable life with the minimum of effort. He’d grown tough in his time in the navy, and become well used to pushing others around. The prospect of becoming a slum landlord excited him.

That was when he took the name Kent.

Down in the pretty Kentish village of Charing, not far from Folkestone where he intended to make a permanent home, he would be a quiet, respectable gentleman of leisure, Frank Waldegrave. But in London, as John Kent the ruthless property manager, he could play out all his fantasies – whoring, villainy, gambling and extortion. He didn’t need friends if he had people doing his bidding because they were afraid of him.

Ironically, just when he truly believed friendship wasn’t for him, he met Sly at a card game in the back room of a saloon in the Strand. Something clicked between them; they were in tune with each other. Sly had once laughingly said it was because they both had traits that were missing in the other. Perhaps he was right, for Kent admired Sly’s easy way with people, and Sly in turn admired Kent’s ruthlessness.

Whatever the reason for their friendship, they both had the same goal, although at the time neither of them had known what that goal was. But it soon manifested that this was to take control of the vice and gambling in Seven Dials and make themselves extremely wealthy in doing so.

It was Sly who dubbed Kent the Falcon. He claimed he’d never before met any man quite as sharp-eyed and predatory. And Kent liked the name to be bandied around, for he knew it would make others fearful of him.

Belle woke to hear a cock crowing somewhere close by and her first thought was that it must be a crazy cock for it was still the dead of night. But as she lay there, filled with dread about what the coming day would bring, she noticed three tiny strips of light across the freezing room and realized she was looking at cracks on a boarded-up window and that it was light outside.

She had forgotten about her ankles being hobbled and as she got up to use the chamberpot, she almost fell over. She managed to peep through the biggest crack on the window boards, and although her view was very limited, she could see trees close by and beyond them open countryside with patches of snow still lying on bare earth. To a city girl who had grown up surrounded by houses and bombarded with the noise of traffic, it was bleak and frightening.

As she had slept in her clothes and had no hairbrush or water to wash in, she got back into bed to await whatever fate the men had in store for her.

Despite her terror she must have fallen asleep again, for the next thing she knew, she was being told to get up by Sly.

‘I’ve brought you hot water to wash,’ he said, and in the gloom she could see steam rising from a ewer on the washstand. ‘There’s a comb there too. I’ll be back for you in ten minutes.’

Her terror abated a little for surely no one would give hot water and a comb to someone they were going to kill. She started to plead with Sly for an explanation but he quickly backed out of the door and locked it behind him.

Sly was back as he said he would be. He picked up her cloak from the bed, then held her arm as far as the stairs, but once there he picked her up and flung her over his shoulder instead of making her walk.

Now Belle got a chance to see more of his house because daylight was streaming in through the windows. It was a fair size – she thought about six rooms on each of the two floors. It was a very old place with low ceilings, beams and uneven floors, without even gas lighting. Through a window up on the landing she’d caught a glimpse of cows being herded into a shed next to the house, and realized she was in the farmhouse. But it was also clear Sly didn’t run it, someone else, probably the man called Tad did, and she didn’t think any women ever came in here for it was all so dusty and neglected. Belle looked from one man to the other as she ate the bowl of porridge Kent had given her. Both men were silent, she sensed they were in disagreement about something, and it was probably to do with her.

‘Can you read and write?’

The question from Kent took Belle by surprise.

‘Why do you want to know?’ she asked.

‘Just answer me!’ he snapped.

It occurred to her that it might be a very good idea to play ignorant, that way he’d be less wary of her. ‘No, I can’t,’ she lied. ‘I never went to school.’

He made a scornful face as if that was what he had expected, and Belle felt she’d won a point.

‘What are you going to do with me?’ she asked.

‘Don’t ask so many questions,’ he replied. ‘Finish that porridge – you won’t be getting anything else for a while.’

At that Belle felt she must eat as much as she could and not only finished the porridge but had two thick slices of bread which she spread generously with butter. Sly poured her a second cup of tea and winked at her companionably.

The wink lifted her spirits, for it did seem he was on her side.

She had barely finished drinking the tea when Kent put on his greatcoat and wound a scarf around his neck. He then picked up her cloak and passed it to her, curtly ordering her to put it on.

Within less than ten minutes she was ushered out of the front door where a carriage, probably the same one from the previous night, was waiting. Sly escorted her out to it, lifting her in, while Kent went back into the house for something. The sun had come out, and although it was weak and wintry and the trees surrounding the farmhouse were bare of leaves, it made a pretty scene.

‘Did you live here when you were a boy?’ she asked Sly.