Free The Promise by Lesley Pearse Page B

mattered except the joy they found in lovemaking. Jimmy may have been a virgin on their wedding night, but in his arms she’d found even greater ecstasy than she’d experienced with Serge in New Orleans. Serge had been paid to teach her about the delights of lovemaking, and he’d been a master, but Jimmy taught her that true love and real heart-felt passion were a greater power.
    ‘It’s time you proved to him that you can be a real wife. Making and selling hats isn’t as important as that,’ she thought.
    Turning over towards him, she put her arm around him and held him tightly. With a baby on the way it was going to be another new beginning, only this time she would have to remember to take Jimmy’s feelings and ideas into account.

Chapter Five
     
    The tinkling of the shop-door bell made Belle put down the net veiling she was attaching to a hat and hurry out into the shop.
    ‘Jimmy!’ she exclaimed, surprised that it was him. He only ever came to the shop to walk her home when the weather was bad. But it was only three o’clock on a beautiful October day. ‘What brings you here?’
    ‘I came out to get some paint for the window frames,’ he said.
    Belle frowned. The hardware shop wasn’t up this way, and furthermore Jimmy looked a bit shaken. ‘Is something wrong?’ she asked.
    ‘Does there have to be something wrong for me to visit my wife?’ he retorted rather sharply.
    Belle went over to him. ‘There has to be something wrong for you to snap at me,’ she said reproachfully.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But a woman came up to me and gave me this.’ He reached in his pocket and pulled out a white feather.
    Belle gasped. She had read in the newspaper just a day or two ago that there were women going around giving white feathers to men. It was a suggestion they were cowards because they hadn’t enlisted. But she had imagined these were isolated cases, a few silly women with nothing better to do with their time than harass hard-working men.
    ‘Take no notice, she’ll just be a crank,’ she said.
    ‘No, there was a group of about ten of them,’ Jimmy said, looking very disturbed. ‘They were stopping all the men. I saw Willie the window cleaner get one, also the man who sells newspapers by the station, and another man just strolling along with his wife. I was so shocked I didn’t hang around to see who else got one and came straight up here.’
    ‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ Belle reassured him. ‘No one has to join up if they don’t want to.’ Yet even as she said this a chill ran down her spine, because only a couple of weeks earlier she’d seen a huge poster put up at the station showing Lord Kitchener in uniform pointing his finger. The poster read, ‘Your Country Needs You’. She had thought at the time it sent out a powerful message.
    ‘It might not be compulsory, but maybe it’s morally right to do my bit,’ Jimmy reflected.
    Belle was frightened then. She knew when Jimmy used words like ‘morally right’ that he was already convinced about what he had to do. ‘You can’t, not with the baby coming!’ she exclaimed.
    Jimmy moved to embrace her. ‘I wouldn’t want our son or daughter to think I was a coward,’ he said softly, his lips against her hair. ‘And it isn’t as if I’d be leaving you alone to fend for yourself, you’ll have Uncle Garth and Mog to take care of you.’
    Belle stepped back from him angrily. ‘But you could be killed! Our baby won’t want a dead hero for a father.’
    ‘It won’t come to that,’ he said, making a pleading gesture with his hands.
    ‘Just go.’ Belle pointed to the door. ‘And by the time I get home I hope you’ll have seen sense.’
    He left without another word and Belle returned to her workbench. She was so angry she accidentally tore the veiling she was working on, and picked up the hat and threw it on the ground.
    The shop bell tinkled again, and thinking it was Jimmy coming back to apologize, she ignored