The Typewriter Girl Page 11

  “Not this night.”

  She sought hope in this, found little.

  He nodded toward the door of his office. “I must clean up. Wait, you, and we’ll walk together.”

  Once inside, he turned on a lamp for her, then went alone into his private rooms. Betsey surveyed the desk and bookcases from where she stood until she noted, with some dismay, that he had tacked a number of diagrams to the wall, right into the pretty wallpaper. One depicted a railroad track, peculiar because all the hills and curves it followed were not those of the land but of a sinuous trestle. The pleasure railway, she decided, but stripped of its tunnels and scenery. She had moved closer and was tracing a fingertip along the track when she heard Mr. Jones return.

  She turned from the diagram. His hair was damp and neat now, his bottom lip cleaned of most of the clotted blood. In empathy, she rolled her own bottom lip in and out of her mouth, waiting for him to speak.

  He did not. She perceived his interest in her, fresh and keen and tangible, needles of sleet and ribbons of wind.

  “Sir Alton is very angry?” she asked, too softly, for it seemed he did not hear her at first. “What did he mean, ‘the conclusion of that experiment’?”

  His expression cleared; this was a simple question. “He’s fearful.”

  “Is that what you call it, how he was back there?”

  “Trust me. The board forced him to accept the excursions scheme to begin with. Now, with what happened tonight, he sees a good reason to call it off.”

  Her hope shrank, hearing this, picturing that ruthless embrace Sir Alton had given his son, while he smiled and singsonged his scorn.

  “You’ve got to show him we cannot do without it.”

  She hadn’t the least idea in hell how she was to do that. She had the sense not to say so.

  “Get you your books together, girl. Do the figures on those bookings you’ve made. Show what those higher rates you’re asking will do by summer’s end, and come Monday, tea at Iden Hall we will have, you and I and Sir Alton Dunning.”

  It struck her as a bad, bad idea. While she could do the figures he asked for, surely he or Mr. Seiler should be the one to speak to Sir Alton. Why did he think she could? But he did, so she answered, “Very well, damn it.”

  A grin broke his face, halted as he winced and put his knuckles to his mouth. Above his fist, his eyes still laughed, enjoying her nominal bravado. “I knew what you would be for, Betsey Dobson. That day at Baumston and Smythe, I knew it. I’m not wrong.”

  Her cheeks burned with pleasure. She could not have said the last time a compliment had made that happen.

  If you keep your hands in the proper place over the keyboard, you will find it easier to finger correctly. . . .

  —How to Become Expert in Type-writing

  Both Mr. Jones and Betsey were eager to speak with the excursionists and prove no real harm had been done, but the pavilion was hushed when they reached it, Mr. Pollit delivering a speech to close the day’s festivities. Sensing Mr. Jones’s frustration with the delay, she told him she didn’t need him to play diplomat. He’d promised Sir Alton, he said in hushed reply.

  With another staffer, she distributed the pipes and paper frames as everyone left the pavilion. Amazing how far a simple gift went toward restoring goodwill and cheer. The tram, when she squeezed aboard, was loud with happy chatter. Near the rear of the car, she caught sight of Mr. Jones in conversation with Mr. Pollit, and hoped it was going well.

  The car emptied at the stop for the Compass Walk to the rail station. When she saw Mr. Jones preparing to reboard after bidding Mr. Pollit and the others good night, she called, “It’s the last run—you’d best not ride to the end.”

  He hopped on anyway and joined her, though he remained standing. He tugged at his tie and braced himself as the car lurched forward.

  “I am sure Sir Alton did not order you to see me home.”

  “Someone must.”

  “I made my way about London quite alone as a regular event.”

  “No doubt, if that jack Nash was what you depended upon.”

  She bowed her head to hide a smile. More amusing than the idea of depending on Avery was Mr. Jones’s peevish tone. She knew she had shocked him, admitting how it had been with Avery. How extraordinary that he did not condemn her for it.

  A streetlamp threw light into the car as they passed. The high polish of Mr. Jones’s boots caught her eye, as well a heel that betrayed he’d worn these shoes for more seasons than a gentleman’s magazine would approve. No one would notice but she, hiding a smile at his feet, tender as a marshmallow over this incongruity.

  “You’re dressed awfully smart tonight.”

  “I was in a dinner party. The Brues family, and some others.”

  That explained his earlier impatience. He would be in the private smoking room by now if not for the trouble on the pavilion. “Mr. Brues is very rich, isn’t he?”

  “Like a sultan. Western Car Company—streetcars, for the greatest part, but it’s become the custom in America for streetcar companies to have a pleasure park at the end of the line to keep up business on Saturdays and Sundays, and he’s begun developing amusements for them.”

  “Like the Sultan’s Road?”

  “Some. Rolly Brues’s cars run up and down streets from Chicago to San Francisco.”

  Betsey assumed this an impressive distance. “And he invited you to dine with him.”

  Her mock awe made him smile. “And but a dozen or so places from his right-hand side, too.”

  “I’ve seen his daughters. Perhaps he’ll invite you to be his son-in-law after another week.”

  “Spare you some pity for me, Dobs. Girls like that, shopping for titles, and there I sit with Sir Alton’s Cambridge-educated heir.”

  But no mention of Miss Gilbey. “You could persuade them round, if you wished.”

  Another streetlamp. Their gazes touched in the pool of light. Betsey made a prim cross of her hands over her lap, holding her gloves, but indulged in a slow, raking account of his person, back down to the heels of his boots.

  Mr. Jones spoke not one more word the remainder of the journey.

  At the stop, she tried to dissuade him from walking her all the way to The Bows, reminding him it would only delay his return to the hotel.

  “You oughtn’t walk back alone, and it so late.”

  “You intend to see me home each week? Provided I’m not sacked?”

  “Hush of getting sacked. I will see you home, I or someone. Tobias, perhaps. He’ll see to you.”

  “Mr. Seiler, leave the hotel on a Saturday night?”

  “Charlie, then.”

  Charlie Elliot was starting as a page at the hotel this summer. “Charlie! Won’t his mother like that!”

  “It won’t be often, whatever.”

  “Saturday comes every week. You ought to have given me a room in the staff quarters, as I said in the first place.”

  “Girl!”

  She could not help laughing at his exasperation, which evaporated the moment he heard her.

  “Needling, is it?” he said good-naturedly. “I’m thinking you wouldn’t take one of those staff beds now if you could.”

  “No—too far from The Bows.”

  A half step ahead of her, he looked back to grin and offer his hand. When she took it, he tugged her into a run, and she knew it was highly questionable, if not out-and-out mad, to run and feel such banking joy after this botch of a day, when she teetered on the edge of losing it all, but run she did, Mr. Jones’s kite on a string, bobbing, dancing, about to soar.

  An alley of stone steps provided a shortcut to the roads over the cliffs, if one had the stamina for it. One of the oldest constructions in Idensea, the passage was too narrow, the steps too ragged and steep to take in bounds. Breathless, they slowed, Mr. Jones leading her up the steps by the hand.

  “I sent Mr. Noonan three shillings.”

  He stopped to look down at her. A high window spilled feeble ligh
t into the alley and made dark pools beneath his brows. How fine the night breeze felt here, funneled into the space, cooling the back of her neck, whipping a lock of hair against her cheek.

  “There’s generous.”

  She shook her head. He was the generous one, the one thinking of Ethan Noonan all this time after the accident during the pier construction. She had not even noticed Noonan’s limp.

  “What a kind man you are.” She stroked the hard pillow where her thumb rested against his hand, remembering his swollen knuckles. “Your hand all right? You should have had ice, too.”

  “Bee sting, that.”

  She laughed, softly, briefly, saying ohh, considering for the first time that perhaps Mr. Jones’s day had been as trying as her own. A step up, another—he made room for her on his step so readily.

  She splayed her hand beneath his, stroked the swollen sting with a brush of her fingertips. “Poor Mr. Jones.” She bent over his hand and pressed a kiss onto his knuckles.

  The contact stung, just enough to recall her warped reflection in the convex glass and make her laugh again, a bit spoony. “Ouch.” She looked up, touching her lip. “Still hurts.”

  “Dobs.” His friendly name for her, but his voice was a husk that revealed him, encouraged her to carry on.

  “What about yours?” She turned her fingers over on her lips, offering him a testing place, her hand or any other nearby spot.

  She was Mr. Jones’s kite on a string, a taut and pulling string.

  Her breath snapped in surprise when he grasped her hand; it was so sudden, his hold so firm, his thumb filling the hollow of her palm, stroking her there. She went slack against the wall behind her, knees slushy, and he came with her, keeping their hands by their mouths, nothing but a feather of vibrant air twisting between them.

  “See if it hurts.” A gnat at his ear would have been louder.

  At last, he chose, moved his thumb, set the kiss in her palm. Everything alive in her rushed to that hollow, making her fingers tremble against the yielding cushion of his eyelid, the protective ridges beyond. “It does,” he whispered. “It hurts.”

  • • •

  But John pressed his mouth to the heel of her palm again anyway, pressed hard so the tender soreness would strike him deeper. He pressed until his wound broke and his blood changed the taste of her flesh, and when he finally heeded the fresh pinch of pain, he crumpled her hand inside his and rested against her, tilted and slipping.

  Brass buttons prodded his chest. Wool tickled his lips. He clenched the gritty, pocked stone of the wall while against her neck, his ear filled with a tidal roar of blood and want.

  Distant, sweet, a whisper: “I think you’re rather wonderful, Mr. Jones.”

  She thought him rather wonderful. Lie down with me, he thought. Here, anywhere—now.

  “Betsey.” His whisper was caught by the wool of her collar and the skin at her jawline; it returned to him, hot and damp. “I am not for you.”

  For a long space, there was nothing but breathing.

  “Miss Gilbey?”

  “It is.” Or is not, he meant to say. Right: “Not. That is—”

  “You are engaged then?”

  “What I mean. She isn’t—”

  “Mrs. Elliot mentioned—”

  “We’re not. Not engaged, whatever.”

  “You weren’t—”

  “Not yet.”

  “Yet.”

  “But if not her . . .”

  They both fell silent.

  “Someone like her,” she finished, and he was relieved, though it felt like the devil to hurt her. But he couldn’t see how it might have been avoided. She having been the one to start it all.

  “Perhaps you’d best step back, then.”

  Amusement touched her voice. John pulled away, the swiftness of the action betraying his embarrassment. But she didn’t look as if she were trying not to laugh at him, at how he was lost and floundering and goddamn couldn’t breathe. He released her hand, and she left it crumpled and aloft as she remained shrugged up against the wall. She didn’t look amused; she looked weak, she looked sated, but—but not, not either of those things, certainly not with her cheek wearing the weals of his collar and her buttons straining to keep their places on every breath.

  He imagined the whole lot of them skittering down the steps, ripped from their tidy long row and showering down in clattering, bouncing pops of light.

  Up. Climb. He moved, each step an act of will, his fingers digging into the stone on either side of him.

  He reached the top and realized she wasn’t behind him, but still propped against the wall more than halfway down, making her top button wink in the dim light as she twisted it. With a sigh, she pushed herself off the wall and started up the steps.

  “You—you should have a different frock,” he said, a sort of friendly suggestion.

  She halted. Passed a hand down her jacket. “I’d thought—What is the matter with the uniform?”

  Besides reducing him to a hard-cocked gawpus, “Nothing. For the evenings, I mean. For the dancing, you should have a gown and be on the pavilion with the guests.”

  Her eyes winked up at him like the buttons had done, only softer, the gloss of water, not metal.

  “You’ll be asked to dance. And perhaps find a good husband that way.”

  Ass-handed, mud-headed stupidity. He’d intended consolation, some way to move them forward, but the words now out, it sank into him what stupidity he’d spoken, albeit at a slower rate than it took Betsey herself to puzzle over it, apprehend it, and discard it for the rubbish it was. And somehow, despite her location a number of steps below him, the look she gave him seemed quite level. John had to fight an urge to step back, retreat.

  “I see, Mr. Jones. That way we’d both marry up, wouldn’t we?”

  On the higher ground, he should have had the advantage, but to see Betsey Dobson ascend the dark steps with her hellion eyebrows, in her blue uniform and its winking buttons, was to feel woefully outnumbered. She reached the top step and stood before him, just his height. Another rush of blood swelled his temples, made his cock plain hurt.

  “My, Mr. Jones,” she said. “I little expected you to be as great a snob as Sir Alton. Certainly not whilst a stander like that’s on you.”

  She brushed past him, left him speechless, demolished, razed and burned, not a thing intact except bless God, his stander, all the prouder from Betsey Dobson’s notice, pointing him to the back view of Betsey Dobson’s swaying skirts.

  “It’s ridiculous, you walking me,” she said when she realized he was following her. “You’d best go after your cigar.”

  Cigar?

  He didn’t even smoke, not unless—not unless—some rich man offered it.

  Brues, all the rest, back at the hotel, growing very chummy, no doubt, while he cindered away the chance to be with them, dallying with the excursions manager.

  “Tell Charlie I will return his cycle tomorrow,” he said at Sarah’s house, the first and only words either of them spoke during the remainder of the walk.

  His urgency to get back to the hotel was such that he didn’t even trouble to adjust Charlie’s bicycle; thus, a few minutes out from Sarah’s house, with his legs already cramping and no tools with which to make the adjustments, he left the bicycle inside a neighbor’s gate and began walking.

  It didn’t matter; it was already too late for cigars and conversation. He’d find a piano, then, rehearse the tune for Lillian’s party, rehearse until either he got it right or his fingers crumbled over the keys. But he could think only of the pianos in the Swan Park’s music room and ballroom, certain to be still in service this time on a Saturday night.

  The Esplanade, however, was largely deserted, suspended in a state of eerie peace in which the roar of wind and water dwarfed the structures that seemed so solid and significant when people filled them. Except for the Sultan’s Road. As he stood before it, having to sway his back to view the top of the main arch and the
domes, the Sultan’s Road felt significant to John. He’d risked his position to bring the proposal for the pleasure railway to a board member after Sir Alton had rejected the idea outright. It was something for Blackpool or Southend, Sir Alton had told him, a tawdry working-class amusement that didn’t belong in Idensea.

  Here it was nonetheless, flanked by stone leopards and palms transplanted from the Isles of Scilly. A week, that canvas curtain would fall and reveal the ziggurat of hanging gardens, and the pleasure railway would be open to the public. John walked the arcade, pausing to pass his hand over one of the mosaics. Not so long ago, he’d never seen anything like the intricacies and colors of the arabesques the designer had shown him, and now the tiles warmed under his touch.

  He crossed the Esplanade and walked backward for a distance, scrutinizing the approach to the pleasure railway. Then he about-turned, earnest about reaching the hotel now.

  Why hadn’t he said something to Lillian? They’d stood here along this railing, and he’d felt grateful for the distraction of the children and their picnic, glad to dash after the rock vendor rather than have that moment with her.

  The wife mattered. She didn’t have to; he knew it was possible, provided she were a certain sort of female, to keep her under glass and do little more than tend her. But she could matter, and it was better when she did. He’d learned that much in his life from his mentors, even from Sir Alton and his own father.

  One week to the opening of the Sultan’s Road. It would be ready. A day shy of that week, he would see Lillian. He would practice; he would go to Lillian’s party and not embarrass either of them; he would speak to her and not change his mind about what he needed to say.

  • • •

  In her room at The Bows, Betsey cut the buttons off her vest, letting each one fall to the floor. They landed with tawdry-sounding clicks, lacking the weight of real brass, and she went to bed, leaving them where they had scattered.

  A little later, she was on the floor, gathering them up, not crying. She put them with her mending notions, in a dented biscuit tin that featured an image of the house where supposedly the biscuits had been made with care by a Mrs. Knight of Derbyshire. She pushed the lid shut, then lingered over it, tracing the embossed details of the house. She used a single fingertip, the way she had ventured to touch the furnishings in Miss Elizabeth Dellaforde’s doll’s house when she first went to work—almost twelve years old, and tall enough for her and Caroline to safely lie about her age. That toy had looked so true Betsey had imagined it something like a seed: Planted streetside, it would sprout a real-sized house occupied by a complete family a few weeks later.