The Typewriter Girl Read online

  “Damn it all,” he said.

  “I wasn’t sleeping.”

  They moved closer, huddling rather than embracing. She thought he would speak.

  “You saw a show?”

  “Only the Alhambra,” he answered, the only because variety entertainment didn’t rate as true theater to Avery, regardless of the opulence of the venue.

  He added nothing else; perhaps he believed there was a chance in hell he’d be permitted to drift off to sleep. But the last time he’d seen her, she had been enduring Wofford’s jobation. If he didn’t wish to discuss that, he at least had to know she was leaving London on the morrow. They had plans to make, the two of them.

  “You do realize how I hated it this afternoon,” he whispered abruptly. “Having to . . . sit by.”

  He sounded as if he were accusing her of something. She thought of how she had waited, briefly, irrationally, in a doorway where she could see the Baumston & Smythe entrance. Just catching her breath after her run out of the building, that’s all that was, she told herself.

  “Both of us with no wages for the week would be a fine thing,” she said.

  “Still, I wish there had been another way. I felt like the lowest sort of cad, watching it all, and once you vanished, it only became worse. Lizzie, the sensation you caused, you cannot—”

  “Don’t call me ‘Lizzie.’”

  “You’re cross.”

  “I’m not. I’ve been waiting, is all.”

  “I needed respite tonight, you understand, after all that dreadfulness. I brought you a pasty. Shall I fetch it now?”

  She nearly said yes. Her stomach felt empty, and suddenly she yearned for the decadent comfort of eating in bed in the middle of the night. They’d done that, she remembered, in the beginning. Picnics in Avery’s bed, in that wonderful flat of his near the Institute. She wished he’d come in without a care for waking her and begun hand-feeding her.

  “I’d best save it,” she said. “Tomorrow’s apt to be long. I—I’ve packed, Avery. I decided to go on to Idensea tomorrow.”

  “Oh.” He sounded confused, caught out. “Well, it makes sense, doesn’t it, if you won’t be type-writing? And if Wofford’s determined to find you. . . . Damn him. But what if that Jones fellow won’t take you on without the letter?”

  She thought, I don’t know, and pressed her hand against the lurch in her gut. Avery, inclined to answer his own questions, didn’t this time.

  Instead, several moments later, he said, “You might let it go,” which she didn’t understand in the least.

  “A bit absurd, isn’t it,” he said, “going all that way only for a job. How long would it take for you to get another type-writing position?”

  “What, here in London?”

  “Certainly not more than a few days. Granted, without references, you would have to look a step or two down from Baumston, but if you answered some adverts . . . Or the switchboards. Openings there by the hour, it’s said, and your accent isn’t at all repulsive, you know. I’ve always said so.”

  So she might let it go. She might just stay in London. She might have just told Mr. Jones no and never asked Mr. Wofford for a character and thus never made herself a spectacle and a . . . an outlaw. She might still be a type-writer at Baumston & Smythe, Insurers with high hopes of still being a type-writer at Baumston & Smythe, Insurers in five years more, which was the length of time a female type-writer could expect to work before she earned a wage that granted true, livable independence. That had been the extent of her hopes until a few days ago.

  She tugged a fraction of her cloak back, blocking the draft on her backside. “You’ve changed your mind.”

  “I believed some days remained before I had to tell you.”

  Tell her what? That he would stay in London, certainly. That he wanted her to stay as well? Stay with him? He had been the one to suggest he come to Idensea with her—there was bound to be a school where he could find a position, he’d said, and doctors claimed sea air as a curative.

  Last week, he had shrugged, concluding why not? and Betsey had caught her breath in surprise, because men didn’t come after Betsey Dobson once they’d got what they wanted. To her credit, she never asked them to.

  And now she listened to him explain, wondering if she would hear stay but hearing mostly I: I need to be where I can take my opportunities when they arise. This clerking is dreadful, but now that I’m writing again, I need tolerate it only a few months more.

  “Good luck, then,” she interrupted.

  He fell silent and then coughed, but it didn’t go into a fit. “Good luck.”

  She rolled to her other side. Her cloak came with her. Avery’s presence in the bed seemed to expand, his elbow pressing her shoulder blade as he lay on his back and crossed his arms. He twitched, one hard contraction of his entire body.

  “Where is our blanket, pray tell?”

  “I gave it to Grace.”

  She supposed he realized his error in using the word our, for not even a grunt of displeasure escaped his lips. She added, “She moved to her new place tonight, she and Sammy.”

  “That explains the quiet.”

  He shivered again and coughed, and then, in a gesture so sudden and unlike him that it brought tears to her eyes, threw his arm over her waist and pulled her close to him. She had tied what remained of her hair into two sections, and she felt his breath on that bare space of her neck, warm, whispering, “I do believe I shall miss you.”

  Her eyes shut. She thought of Avery in the lecture hall at the Institute, Avery in his flat, Avery with all the answers and his own type-writing machine and a nymph-shaped lamp with a mother-of-pearl shade, and she wondered if she wanted the wrong thing, this job that could end with the turn of a season, this life in a place she’d never seen. She found his hand, thin yet from his illness, and nestled her fingers between his.

  “I haven’t enough for rail fare.” She whispered this confession even more softly than he had his, for she hadn’t intended to speak it at all. Richard would be the last man she would be beholden to, she had determined some time ago. And Avery—well, she had never given him the chance to offer, not really. But with his arm tight around her, the words slipped out.

  His chuckle vibrated against her neck. “Is that the going rate?”

  The question obliterated all the tenderness of the moment. Betsey curled her hand back inside her sleeve. As swiftly and surreptitiously as possible, she swiped all the dampness from her cheeks, removing the evidence of her weakness from herself as well as Avery.

  He massaged her hip. “It isn’t unreasonable, I suppose. And, as always, your practical nature beguiles me.”

  He nuzzled his face against the skin exposed above the neckline of her nightdress, suckled at the side of her neck. And all the while, he pressed her hip, urging her onto her back.

  “Be good to me, Lizzie,” he said when her resistance could no longer be mistaken for something else. It makes me feel so wicked, going to bed with a Lizzie, he had explained once after she had corrected him.

  He pushed her cloak off of her, onto the floor, and slipped a hand beneath her nightdress, between her thighs, promising to be good to her in return, promising, “Good Lizzie, every coin in my coat pocket for a wicked farewell.”

  They have no idea of the possibilities of their writing machine, of the beauty and variety of the work it is capable of doing. All they know is what they have ‘picked up’ in somebody’s office while working for practice with little or no pay.

  —How to Become Expert in Type-writing

  The going rate. Her desperation wasn’t so deep as that, no. She turned onto her back and let him settle between her thighs, keeping her face from his kiss. Her hands skimmed along his bare back, then slipped between the two of them, and Avery laughed and groaned as if he quite enjoyed the sensation of her chilled fingers curling round his cock. Admittedly, his warmth was better than any pair of mittens she’d ever owned, and she felt especially cold at the moment.


  “My, Avery, not ready yet, are you?”

  She could scarcely make out his handsome face in the room’s darkness, and she sensed rather than witnessed his displeasure at this remark. A brief stillness about him, but a stroke of her hand had him moaning again. “My God, Lizzie. Lizzie, God, there you are, good Liz—”

  His voice broke with a screeching breath in, his eyes widening as her grip tightened. “Damn it—what—”

  “I’ve said to you half one thousand times not to call me Lizzie.”

  “Are you mad— damn— damn it all, stop—”

  “And I swear to God, if you put this bit near me again tonight I shall twist till it snaps and throw it down the steps for Mrs. Bainwelter’s terrier to have for a gnaw.”

  She let him go. He shoved off of her, cursing her, and she sprang out of the bed, grabbed her cloak from the floor, and took the two steps to what had been Grace’s side of the room. The quilt that had divided the space was gone now, but the bed remained, stripped and awaiting the next renter. She lay down on it and huddled under her cloak, her back to Avery.

  He was coughing, and it didn’t stop. Betsey heard him pulling on his clothes, coughing all the while, and she was glad he’d thought better of trying to sleep without any cover. But then she heard his shoes, the faint squeak of leather as he pulled on his boots.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she told him. “We each have a bed, and I shall be going in the morning. Is it worth making yourself ill?”

  Her answer, after the coughing subsided, was the creak of the bed as he lay down. What else? He had nowhere else to go, same as when she’d brought him here more than two months ago. Such a shock, seeing him after so much time, though not enough to account for the drastic change in his appearance. Once, he would have clearly been a stranger on this street, but that day, he had the hard-worn look of its residents.

  Indeed, at that particular moment, his aspiration had been to become one of the residents. He was foolishly attempting to negotiate a lower rent, and all but stumbled into her arms when the slumlord pushed him off the threshold in order to shut the door in his face. Took up with another of your students, did you? she asked him when he admitted he’d been dismissed from the Institute not long after she herself had left, and he swore to her, No. Likely he would have sworn a good many other things to her, too, except, weak with fever, he nearly collapsed on her, right there in the street. She’d taken him home.

  She could tell from his breathing now he didn’t fall asleep directly. They lay, parted by a few steps, by darkness, by mutual refusal to speak a few softer words. By her decision to go.

  It’s good for you, Caroline had told her tonight. We will miss you, but a new start—and you’ll be good, I know it, won’t you, Elisabeth? You’ll be . . .

  She hadn’t finished, but Betsey knew what her sister meant. In all the world, who but Caroline worried for Betsey’s soul? Where others condemned, Caroline grieved and hoped for better.

  Betsey hoped, too. With the fervor of a saint or a gambler, she hoped.

  These tears! If Avery heard her, he would think they were for him, and they weren’t, not really. They were because this day had been dreadful and because this night was long, and with sleep eluding her, she had nothing to do but contemplate.

  Richard could well be right: She could make a great wreck of it all. Again.

  Eventually, she slept. In the morning, the only thing she took from Avery’s coat pocket was the pasty he’d bought her. The less than a shilling’s worth of coins, she left behind.

  • • •

  Which meant she only had money enough for a ticket that would barely see her out of London, to Woking. She pretended her terror was Thief, a bird in a cage, and threw a dark cloth over it as she turned over all but a few pennies to the ticket agent.

  Waterloo Station boiled with Londoners eager to quit the city for the Whitsun holiday, tight clusters of families keeping count of one another, wide snaking lines of excursionists bound by their common itineraries, companions oblivious to anything beyond their own circles of laughter. Betsey, smothering under the weight of her winter cloak, navigated the din in deep concentration: Don’t let Thief’s cage be knocked. Mind the valise grip, it’s delicate. Platform Four. No turning round. Most of all, no turning round.

  The third-class carriage smelled of smoke and straw and something pickled. Betsey felt lucky to find an empty place until she realized that seat was Hadrian’s Wall between two warring elderly sisters, and she spent the journey half-listening to two different accounts of a convoluted story involving a potted mignonette, a sticky door, and a headstone inscription. By the time a conductor called, “Woking!” Betsey was being prevailed upon to judge the logic of dividing a set of shirt studs.

  The train stopped and waited—and waited—at the platform, but Betsey remained in the compartment, suggesting the studs be sold, the money divided.

  Finally, movement.

  She’d done it. Fare-dodging could now be added to her life’s transgressions.

  She wondered whether she’d get away with it. Stomach knotted, she felt the miles she hadn’t paid for adding up, rumbling beneath the carriage. The sisters reconciled, or at least began speaking again, and though their conversation over Betsey’s bosom felt awkward, she suspected it saved her, disguised her as their companion. In any case, no conductor checked her ticket again.

  She had to change at Southampton. By the time she maneuvered the crowds there and found the train, the guard’s last whistle was sounding. She hoped to board in this final scuttle, but a conductor spied her and waved her toward him.

  “On your own, miss? A good carriage for you here.”

  Betsey braced herself for the end of this escapade. Already, the conductor was shaking his head.

  “Didn’t they tell you, miss? The bag’s of a size for the parcel rack, but there’s no animals in the carriages.” He nodded toward the birdcage.

  “Ohh”—she held that vowel, thinking, revising—“dear! What shall I do?”

  She sounded dismayed. She sounded helpless. She widened her eyes and put herself into his care. Perhaps he liked that. Perhaps it was the whistle, the slamming doors, the shouts and the escalating rush passing them by. But the result was he waved her toward the carriage door, and Betsey and Thief boarded.

  The carriage was a “good” one for her because women and children populated it. A great many children, perhaps double the carriage’s intended capacity. Had she been in the position to hold preferences, Betsey might have preferred the supposed indignity of traveling alongside unknown men.

  The boys and girls showed instant interest in the birdcage, though it waned when they learned Thief would not sing and, no, Betsey would not let the canary out to fly about the compartment and come to their outstretched fingers. She covered the cage again and set it in a corner, hoping it would escape any additional notice from the conductors.

  The children were from an orphanage, one of their chaperones told her, their seaside outing provided by a church benefactor. Betsey was playful with them and chatted with the chaperones, all the while praying a scoundrel’s prayer for luck to hold just a little longer.

  A conductor looked into the compartment, cursorily. She could only hope he’d taken her as part of the orphans’ outing, since church chaperones, to her knowledge, did not dodge fares.

  The compartment was stifling, with heat, with competing voices, with questions: She had no family in Idensea? What sort of work? Didn’t she have a husband?

  After another lengthy wait at a station, a conductor appeared, a different one. He sighed at the overcrowded compartment, and Betsey knew: He was resigned to inspecting every last ticket.

  She continued a cat’s cradle lesson with two girls, following the conductor’s reflection in the window, calculating the distance to the door. She felt ill already; that would not be a lie. She was ill, she needed air, that was true. She’d only need to play it a little bigger.

  With the begi
nning of a moan, she crumpled the yarn in her hand, but the sound caught in her throat as she saw one of the smallest boys take a tumble out of his seat. Betsey knew luck when she saw it. In an instant, she was kneeling on the floor beside the lad, cooing over him, checking his limbs, righting his clothes, offering cheerful encouragement and a moral about holding on. The boy’s own mother—that is, supposing he’d had one—could not have demonstrated more tender concern and devotion than did Betsey in those moments as the conductor finished his inspection.

  She instructed the children sitting on the bench with him to please have a care, and then she rose.

  The conductor stood in the compartment door, next to Thief’s cage. He touched his hat.

  “Miss, if you’re ready now, your ticket.”

  • • •

  No, church chaperones did not dodge fares, nor even think of it. That much was evident from the shock expressed as the conductor questioned her.

  Down to no options, she told him she had someone in Idensea who would vouch for her, and even pay the difference on the ticket.

  “And who’s that?”

  “Mr. Jones. Mr. John Jones.”

  “The Welshman with the pier company?” he asked, and Betsey nodded hard, because it was clear the conductor knew Mr. Jones, and because of that, she had a chance.

  He let her stay on the train, though he appeared at the door at every stop afterward, to make sure she didn’t go anywhere. The chaperones called the children to them, and in that crowded compartment, Betsey sat on the bench alone, her gaze again fixed upon the reflections on the glass, the pale motion of the children as they seemed to forget the whole scene and return to their play and prattling. She wished she and every other adult could move on so easily.

  Would Mr. Jones vouch for her? She didn’t know. However, she felt rather certain she’d reached her limit for public humiliation.

  The call for Idensea went out, and the children’s excitement swelled again. A child twisted in the bench ahead of Betsey to ask her, “Do you know what a pier is like? They say we will walk on one today.”