Belinda by Bryan Caine Page B

were all tired and sore as the stagecoach bounced along the next morning, but none of the young Bostonians had any regrets about the evening’s entertainment, and such enthusiasm as they could muster was used to praise Belinda, to her great embarrassment, for the education she had given them. However, that was all behind her now and she had an exciting future awaiting in Boston. She felt she could now look forward to a life free of sexual taint, until the right man took her for his wife.
    â€˜I can’t wait to get to Boston and start working in a decent job,’ she said with her girlish excitement, but was concerned to find that they replied with less enthusiasm. In fact it was received with a certain uneasiness.
    â€˜Yes… that might, ah, prove a little awkward,’ said Oliver without looking at her.
    Belinda felt a sickening lurch in her stomach.
    â€˜We were talking it over last night…’ continued Oliver, and then he hesitated.
    â€˜You see, Boston is a funny sort of town,’ said Timothy. ‘Everyone has their place in the social order.’
    Belinda’s biggest shock came from Marie. ‘You’re just not our class, darling. You’d never be allowed to mix with us you know.’ And she said it as if she fully supported that system!
    â€˜You wouldn’t like it,’ chipped in Jane with a hint of sympathy. ‘You’d only be able to work in a very low position.’
    â€˜Like letting people whack your arse for money,’ sniffed Oliver sarcastically and somewhat hypocritically.
    â€˜It just wouldn’t work,’ added Timothy, his hands giving a wide-open gesture of ‘hard luck but that’s life’.
    The tears that sprung into Belinda’s eyes at this genuinely heartless and shallowly snobbish rejection prevented her from speaking further, but a minute later she was saved from further embarrassment by the stagecoach slowing down and the driver shouting, ‘St Joseph’s railroad!’
    As Belinda wandered away from the coach in a daze she was further mortified to hear beautiful friendly little Jane saying to the others, ‘Goodness; just imagine us going back home with that in tow!’

Chapter Three
    Exhausted, heartbroken and in a state of great moral confusion as she was, Belinda’s spirits initially soared when she arrived at St Joseph in Missouri, on the border with Kentucky. For there on the banks of the mighty river that gave the state its name, were gathered a dozen giant steamships and covered wagons galore amidst such a scene of lively commotion far in excess of anything she had ever beheld in the Liverpool docks.
    It was three days after she had left the stagecoach and had climbed onto the empty cattle train as it slowed for a sharp curve close to where her former ‘friends’ had dropped her off. It had been a miserable journey due to the lack of food and only the occasional chance to grab a drink of water by jumping off and back on each time the train started to move away from its watering points. And when the locomotive finally came to a shuddering screeching halt north of the tiny township called Kansas City she still had a whole night’s weary walk to undergo before she reached St Joseph.
    She mingled with the crowds, the swirling dust and smell of human and horse flesh almost suffocating, but the overwhelming impression was in the way the atmosphere was electrified by the constant cracking of whips; whips being cracked in the air out of high spirits or as demonstrations of skill. Whips were cracking over the backs of horses and oxen. A gigantic black man was being whipped on his back at one place, whilst further on Belinda passed a bare-breasted adolescent blonde who was also being lashed on her back by a man who might have been her father. In each of the latter cases an amused crowd stood around watching and cheering.
    Belinda wondered if she had died and woken up in hell as she plodded on,