The Promise (2 page)

Belle nodded. ‘It’s the Railway, just down the hill. I’m sure you remember me telling you about Mog, my mother’s housekeeper. Well, she married Garth, Jimmy’s uncle, two years ago in September, then Jimmy and I got married soon afterwards.’

‘And you got your hat shop at last!’ Etienne glanced appreciatively at the pale pink and cream decor. ‘It’s lovely, as feminine and chic as you are. A woman out on the street told me you couldn’t get better hats even in Regent Street.’

She smiled then and seemed to relax a little. ‘Why don’t you take off that wet raincoat and I’ll make us both a cup of tea?

‘Are you still on your farm?’ she called as she went into a little room at the back of the shop.

Etienne hung his coat on a hook by the door, and brushed his damp fair hair back with his hands. ‘I am indeed, but I also do a little translating, which is the reason I came to England to meet with a company I have done work for in the past,’ he called back.

‘So your life is about more than chickens and lemon trees now?’ she said as she came back into the shop. ‘Please tell me you
have
kept to the straight and narrow?’

Etienne put his hand on his heart. ‘I promise you I am a pillar of polite society,’ he said, his voice grave but his blue eyes twinkling. ‘I haven’t escorted any more young girls to America, and neither have I rescued any from the clutches of madmen.’

He had never forgiven himself for not making a stand when the gangsters he had worked for back then blackmailed him into delivering Belle to a brothel in New Orleans. He might have partially redeemed himself two years later when he rescued her in Paris, but in his eyes that didn’t wipe the slate clean.

‘I really don’t believe you could ever be a pillar of society,’ Belle giggled.

‘Do you doubt my word?’ he said with pretended pique. ‘Shame on you, Belle, for having such little faith! Have I ever lied to you?’

‘You once told me you’d kill me if I tried to escape,’ she retorted. ‘And you later admitted that wasn’t true.’

‘That’s the trouble with women,’ he smiled. ‘They always remember the little, inconsequential things.’ He reached out and touched a pink feathered hat on a stand, marvelling that her determination and talent had paid off. ‘It’s your turn to tell the truth now. Is your marriage all you hoped for?’

‘Much more,’ she said, just a little too quickly. ‘We are very happy. Jimmy is just the very best of husbands.’

‘Then I am happy for you,’ he said and gave a little bow.

Belle giggled again. ‘And you? Do you have a lady in your life?’ she asked.

‘No one special enough to settle down with,’ he said.

She raised her eyebrows questioningly.

He smiled. ‘Don’t look like that, not everyone wants marriage and stability. Especially now with war coming.’

‘Surely it will be averted?’ she said hopefully.

‘No, Belle. There is no chance of that. It is only weeks away.’

‘That’s all men talk about these days,’ she sighed. ‘I get so weary of it. But look, why don’t you come home with me now and meet Jimmy, Garth and Mog? They’ll be so excited to meet you after all this time.’

‘I don’t think that would be appropriate,’ Etienne said.

Belle pouted. ‘Why ever not? You saved my life in Paris, and they’ll be very disappointed and puzzled that you called here but wouldn’t come and meet them.’

He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment. ‘When you moved here you also left the past behind.’

Belle opened her mouth to protest but shut it again, realizing he was quite right. From the day she married Jimmy she had firmly closed the door on her time in America and Paris. Etienne may have opened it again by coming to see her, and she was glad he had, but Jimmy might not see it that way.

‘What about Noah?’ she asked. ‘Will you see him? You became such good friends when you were searching for me, and I’m sure you’ll remember Lisette who took care of me in the convent before you took me to America. Noah fell in love with her, and they are married now with a baby on the way. They have a lovely home in St John’s Wood.’

‘I have kept in touch with Noah,’ Etienne said. ‘Not perhaps as well as I should have, but then he’s a journalist and writing comes much easier to him than it does to me. But he is such a well-known columnist now that I can even read his work in France. In fact I’m having lunch with him tomorrow, near his office. We will always be friends, but I won’t call at his home. We both feel Lisette needs no reminders of the past, especially now with a baby coming.’

Belle gave a rueful smile, understanding exactly what he meant. Lisette had also been forced into prostitution when she was a young girl, which was why she had been so kind to Belle. ‘Respectability comes at a high price. I like Noah and Lisette very much, but although we keep in touch, and visit each other now and then, we are always careful to avoid talking about how and why we met. I know that is the right thing to do now both Lisette and I are married, but it does prevent us from being really close friends.’

‘Does the past affect your relationship with Jimmy?’ Etienne asked, his eyes boring into her, daring her to lie to him.

‘Sometimes it does,’ she admitted. ‘It’s like having a splinter in your finger which you can’t get out, yet you can’t help but prod it.’

Etienne nodded. He thought her description very apt. ‘For me too. But in time a splinter works its way out and the hole it left will become filled with new memories.’

Belle laughed suddenly. ‘Why are we being so gloomy? For all of us – you, me, Jimmy, Mog, and Lisette too – despite all the troubles we had, good came out of it. So why are humans so perverse that they choose to dwell on the bad times?’

‘Is it the bad times we dwell on, or the beautiful moments that lifted us up during the bad times?’ he asked, raising one eyebrow quizzically.

Belle blushed, and he knew she remembered only too well the moments they’d shared.

Despite being taken against her will to America, Belle cared for him when he was seasick on the voyage. Long before they reached New Orleans they had become very close, and on the night of her sixteenth birthday she had offered herself to him. He didn’t know how he restrained himself that night; he wanted her despite his wife and two young sons at home. The memory of her firm young body in his arms, the sweetness of her kisses, had inflamed him so often over the years. Yet he was very glad he hadn’t succumbed to her charms that night – he carried enough guilt about her without that too.

‘Whenever I read anything about New York I think of you showing me all the sights,’ she said. ‘I have to take care I never mention that I’ve been there, or I might have to explain when and who I was with. I never asked you if you enjoyed those two days too. Did you?’

‘It was the most fun I’d had in a long time,’ he admitted. ‘You were so wide-eyed, so eager to see everything. I felt so bad when we had to continue the journey to New Orleans, knowing I’d got to leave you there.’

‘It wasn’t so bad at Martha’s,’ she said, putting one hand on his arm as if to reassure him. ‘I never blamed you, I always understood that you had to do it. And anyway, when two years later in Paris you came bursting through the door to save me from Pascal, you more than made up for everything.’

She involuntarily shuddered as she always did when she remembered the horror Pascal put her through. That madman had imprisoned her at the top of his house, and if Etienne hadn’t managed to find her she had no doubt Pascal would’ve killed her.

And Etienne hadn’t only rescued her, he’d healed her by sitting beside her bed at the hospital, letting her cry, talking to her and giving her hope for the future. She remembered too the day Noah told her that Etienne’s wife and two sons had died in a fire at their home. To her shame her first reaction had been that Etienne was now free, not horror that his loved ones should die in such a barbarous way.

Etienne noticed her shudder, and aware that his unexpected visit and their shared past were troubling her, he felt he must bring them both back to the present.

‘I’m going to enlist in the army when I get back to France,’ he said.

‘Oh no, surely not,’ she gasped.

Etienne chuckled. ‘That’s always the female reaction, but it’s my duty, Belle. And once again my past will catch up with me because I evaded the compulsory national service as a lad by coming to England.’

‘Will they punish you for that?’ she asked.

He grinned. ‘I’m hoping they’ll just be glad to put a gun in my hands,’ he said. ‘I won’t be welcoming all the drill and having to take orders, and I’m not naive enough to think it’s the path to glory, but I love France, and I’ll be damned if I’ll stand by and see it fall into the hands of Germans.’

She looked at him speculatively. ‘You are resourceful and brave, Etienne, you’ll make a good soldier. But I’d much rather you were safe on your farm growing lemons and feeding chickens.’

He shrugged. ‘In this life we can’t always choose the safe and pleasant road. I have a violent past, I know the worst man can do to man. I thought I’d never have to put that to use ever again, but it seems that is exactly what my country needs me for now.’

‘You are a good and honourable man,’ she sighed. ‘Please keep safe. But if you’re sure you really don’t wish to come and meet Jimmy, I ought to close the shop and go home. We always like to have a meal together before he opens the bar for the evening.’

‘Yes, of course, I mustn’t delay you,’ he said, but made no move to pick up his hat and coat. He wanted to tell her that he had always loved her, he wanted to take her in his arms and kiss her. But he knew it was too late. He had had his chance back in Paris and he hadn’t taken it. Now she belonged to another man.

‘You’d better leave first. I don’t want anyone remarking that I was seen walking down the street with a stranger,’ she said bluntly.

At that Etienne put on his coat. ‘I found what I was looking for,’ he said quietly. ‘That you are happy and secure. Stay happy, love Jimmy with all your heart, and I hope one day I will hear through Noah that you have a whole brood of children.’

He took her hand and kissed it, then turned quickly and walked out.

‘Au revoir,’ Belle murmured as the door closed behind him, tears prickling her eyes for there was so much more she would have liked to say to him. So much more she wanted to know about his life.

At sixteen she had thought she loved him. It still made her blush to remember how she’d stripped off her clothes and got into his bunk and invited him to share it with her. He had been such a gentleman; he’d held her and kissed her, but took it no further.

As an adult looking back on the horrors she’d experienced before meeting Etienne, being snatched from the street by her home, then taken to Paris to be sold to a brothel and raped by five men, she supposed that she might have felt she loved anyone who was kind to her after such an ordeal.

Yet it couldn’t have been just because Etienne was kind to her, or that he was strong, sensitive and affectionate, because those girlish dreams about him had stayed with her throughout her time in New Orleans and the voyage back to France.

When he reappeared to save her life, her innocence was long gone and she knew more about men than any woman should. But he must have felt something for her too: why else would he come rushing to Paris two years later when it was reported to him that she’d disappeared?

Throughout her convalescence after the rescue, she waited and hoped for an admission of love. She sensed he did love her from the way he looked at her, and the tenderness he showed her. Yet he didn’t take her in his arms and admit he wanted her, not even when they parted at the Gare du Nord and she was crying and making her own feelings very clear.

She’d done her very best to erase their parting from her mind, and the yearning she felt for him for so long after, even when she was safely home with Mog, and Jimmy was talking of marriage. So why did he have to come here today to drive that particular splinter back into her heart?

She had told him the truth. She and Jimmy were very happy. He was her best friend, lover, brother and husband all rolled into one. They had the same goals, they laughed at the same things, he was everything any girl could want or need. He had healed the horrors of the past; in his arms she had encountered exquisite tenderness, and deep satisfaction too, for he was a caring and sensitive lover.

Jimmy was her world; she loved the life she had with him. Yet all the same she wished she could have told Etienne how wonderful it was to see him again; that he’d been in her thoughts so often over the last two years and that she owed him so much.

But a married woman could not say such things, and neither could she encourage him to stay in her shop any longer. Blackheath was a village, people were small-minded and nosy, and there would be plenty of them glad to gossip about seeing a handsome man talking to her in her shop.

She began to tidy up, dusting off the counter and picking up some stray tissue paper from the floor.

Yet she couldn’t help but ask herself why, if everything was so good for her, she felt there was something missing in her life. Why did she read about suffragettes in the newspaper and feel envy that they had the guts to stand up for rights for women in the face of hostility? Why did she feel a little stifled by respectability? But above all, why was it that Etienne’s voice, his looks and the touch of his lips on her hand, still had the power to make her shiver?

She shook herself, opened the drawer where she kept the day’s takings and emptied them into a cloth bag which she pushed into her reticule. She secured her straw hat to her hair with a long hat pin, flung her cloak over her shoulders and took her umbrella from the stand by the door.

She paused at the door before turning off the lights, and reminded herself of the day she opened her shop. It had been a cold November day, just two months after Mog and Garth’s wedding, and she and Jimmy were due to be married just before Christmas. Everything had been new and shiny that day. Jimmy had indulged her by buying the small but expensive French chandeliers and the glass-topped counter. Mog had found the two button-backed Regency chairs and had them re-upholstered in pink velvet, and Garth’s present to her was paying the two decorators who had done such a fine job of turning the dingy little shop into a pink and cream feminine heaven.