The Typewriter Girl (31 page)

Alphabet sentence: Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.

—How to Become Expert in Type-writing

O
utside the camera, in the violence of the sunlight, he felt like something just ladled out of a boiling pot. Betsey herself appeared rather unfocused, and after a moment of gazing at him, during which her lips were parted in the most dizzying way, she made for the railing and leaned into the wind, as a seasick steamer passenger might have done.

She was not ill. She shook her head to his inquiry.

“It is only—”

The wind whipped the tendrils of hair about her face into a froth.

“Well, I won’t forget it, that’s all.”

Then she told him to put on his hat. He supposed she thought his grin smug.

They bought lemon water ices and he made her laugh when he insisted they make proper gifts of the treat and trade with each other. One of the shelters built into the railing shielded them from the wind, and Betsey admitted the view of Idensea from the pier head was worth paying for at least once.

The ice and the bite of lemon reddened her lips. Fresh and tart, that was how she would taste now.

“You still want me to go to bed with you.”

John stabbed at his ice, gulped down a mouthful that stung his teeth. “No.”

“You have never lied to me before.”

“I meant . . .” It confounded him, her directness in such matters. “A vow I made, not to press you.”

“A vow?” Now she was confounded. “To—?”

He shrugged. “Either one of us.”

“And if you didn’t have to press?”

You mean if you chose me.

“You’d still want me.”

He shoveled the remaining spoonfuls of ice into his mouth. He turned up the dish and drained the melted portion.

“How much?”

Bless God.

“Enough to marry me?”

Bless—

She laughed. “Don’t look so worried, Mr. Jones. Both of us know that answer. Sir Alton, however, does not.”

“
Sir Alton?
”

“Do you know how anxious he is to see you settled in Idensea?”

“The Kursaal finished, I’ll be seeking a new position, and he knows that.”

“You might be persuaded to stay, he believes, and . . . he has enlisted my aid. I seduce you well enough, you’ll be quite satisfied here in Idensea with your little wife and pier company job and bit of property.”

John tried to imagine the circumstances of this tactical meeting between Betsey and Sir Alton and, wildly, pictured the two of them at opposite ends of the long dining table at Iden Hall. He wondered if Sir Alton could have possibly been as blunt with Betsey as she was being right now. And Sir Alton knowing: Miss Dobson. An uneasy cushion to settle upon there.

Another detail niggled at him. “Property. Out on Hawkshaw Road?”

At last something in this conversation embarrassed her. “That’s not why I was there.”

“There was something to do with it.”

“Only curiosity. I wanted to see the house again. I was curious why it—”

He watched her struggle with her embarrassment, recognized that rare shyness as it nearly overcame her.

“Why it wouldn’t be enough for someone. For you.”

She thought it should be enough. So did Sir Alton. No doubt many would, perhaps even most, even his mother, whose pride had always been tinged with sorrow for his distance from home, and his father, who tolerated his son’s ambitions first as a passing phase, then from a decided, if respectful, distance.

He threw out an arm to frighten a gull perched on the railing nearby, felt grimly satisfied when it flew away.

Betsey had lifted her eyes. He met them.

“I’m only letting you know what he’s about,” she said.

“Kissed me, you did.”

“Tell me what you think that means.”

He studied the deck planks at their feet. Of course he did not believe her in league with Sir Alton.

A boy with a tray approached them. “Drink up what is left,” John told her when he saw she’d let the water ice melt, little more than half-finished. She hesitated but then took her dish back from the tray and drank from it. She caught a drip on her chin with the back of her wrist. She might as well have put her hand between his thighs.

It seemed she read his dark thoughts. It seemed she kept similar ones.

“You haven’t much longer in Idensea,” she said. “By my reckoning, neither have I.”

With alarm, he realized she was near tears. As though she were alarmed herself, she stood and hurried from the shelter, her agitation matched with her wind-tangled skirts.

She assumed Sir Alton would dismiss her once it was clear
she’d failed in her charge to keep him in Idensea. A credible assumption, John thought. Even if the board eventually decided to carry on with the excursion scheme next summer, Sir Alton could still force Tobias to hire someone else to manage it. Perhaps Tobias could put her in some other position, but still, Sir Alton had the final authority. He could dismiss Betsey from the pier company altogether.

“I ought’ve held on to that penny for the fountain,” she said when he caught up with her, and made a point of showing her face to him: She had
not
cried, nor would she.

“Bless God, Elisabeth, this job is not your last chance.”

He could have raised a hand to her and not received such an expression of disbelieving shock. He could have been Brutus with the dagger and been more fondly regarded.

He’d said nothing wrong. He felt certain she needed to hear it. “It isn’t. It isn’t even the best you can hope for. Of type-writing, you said that, and it wasn’t true, nor is it true now.”

“It seemed a good occupation until I inherit my title and fortune.”

“Don’t mock.”

“Please do forgive me, Mr. Jones. I meant no offense, I’m sure.”

She curtsied. An unholy urge to hurl her over the railing into the sea lit through him.

“Yourself, girl. I meant do not mock yourself.”

She stared. He watched her turn both fierce and small, holding on while something cracked.

“I
wanted
it. You—of everyone—you should understand.”

•   •   •

He didn’t protest that he did understand, which suited Betsey. She only would have argued, despite her suspicion that she’d be wrong. Instead, as they parted ways at the photographer’s studio, he said he wanted to take her someplace Saturday night—after her dinner dance had concluded, naturally.

She agreed first, asked “Where?” second. He still hadn’t told
her by the time they cycled away from the hotel Saturday night. They went in the direction opposite The Bows to a seaside tavern whose sign read “Sundial Public House & Pleasure Garden.” Inside, he was greeted—
Jones
with and without the
Mister,
a female voice or two amongst them, a mere wary nod here and there. The place was crowded, marked by cheer rather than rowdiness.

All who spoke to John seemed to note her presence with him, and her uniform made her even more conspicuous. Too late to worry, she told herself, and relished this brief surrender, the feel of her hand swallowed up in his, her way eased by the path he cut from the entrance to a rear door that led to a garden lit by torches and oil lamps, where night-blooming flowers and damp grass thickened the scent of ale. The music she’d heard as they approached on their cycles was coming from here, a fiddler and flutist under a vine-covered pergola, dancers turning on a floor of simple flagstone.

A woman wearing a bright-striped apron and a matching cap called to John, directing him to an available place at one of the long tables in the garden, promising someone named Katie would be there soon. They shared the same rustic bench, which on another night of the week might have been for one rather than two.

Katie was a girl less than Charlie’s age, and she narrowed her eyes at John after she had taken their order. “This cannot be your London lady,” she accused, because even little Katie knew this was no place for a girl like Lillian Gilbey.

“You must be a regular,” Betsey observed wryly upon Katie’s departure.

But John shook his head. “Not so often. Some of my laborers, those men.”

Which explained the wary nods, though not Katie’s knowledge of his personal affairs.

“What were you thinking, bringing me here?”

“That you ought to see it.”

The answer carried some gravity with it, but she didn’t understand why. She rested her elbows on the table and looked about. The name “Pleasure Garden” was perhaps more an aspiration than actuality, for it was less than an acre in size, and aside from the dancing area, a quoits pitch, and a bowling green, it had none of the diversions or meandering paths one expected in a pleasure garden. A hedge bounded the far line of the property, striking not only for its height but also because it had been trimmed to mimic a crenellated castle wall, casements and doorways sculpted into the front. She spotted the namesake sundial on a pedestal nearby, in danger of losing its prominence amongst the clutter of long tables and benches.

In all, it was a more modest and less formal version of the dinner dance she’d just closed at the Swan’s pavilion. The thought made her smile, and she resisted the temptation to lean back into John’s chest. She felt him all along the left side of her body, and with her chin in her hand, she turned her face to him.

He was already looking at her. “What think you, Dobs?”

“I feel like—”

Like one of my excursionists,
she was about to say, but the thought halted her. She straightened up from the table, her mind grasping at a butterfly of an idea. Now she knew why John had brought her here.

“I should find a new place for the excursionists,” she said.

The woman in the striped apron brought their pints. Mrs. Gomery, John said—“the Sundial’s proprietor, Katie’s mum, and Ethan Noonan’s sister. ’Twas Ethan what did all the hedges you see here.”

Knowing the fanciful hedge-trimming was the work of the drunken char-à-banc driver made it all the more remarkable to Betsey. “Ah, you know my brother,” Mrs. Gomery said, as if she understood this fact to be a stumbling block to any relationship she and Betsey might have otherwise cultivated following this introduction.

“Miss Dobson manages the excursions scheme for the Swan Park,” John explained.

“And is he doing any good for you, Miss Dobson? You can say the story blunt, now.”

“He’s never failed to bring the char-à-banc,” she replied. “And has been sober enough to drive it on perhaps more than half the occasions.”

Mrs. Gomery seemed pleased enough with this report. She ordered John to the dancing area, but both he and Betsey shook their heads at each other the moment her back turned.

Betsey took a sip of her ale. “What about the Kursaal? The ballroom there once it is finished, or is there some other space suitable for the dinner dances? Perhaps if everything was off hotel property—”

But John was shaking his head. “A part of the pier company, the Kursaal.”

“But here? It looks as if Mrs. Gomery and her husband wouldn’t—”

“Mrs. Gomery’s the sole proprietor. A widow she’s been since Katie was a babe, I think.”

“Well, she has plenty of business on a Saturday. She’d have to close to the public to host excursions. Why would she want to?”

He shrugged. “She wouldn’t, perhaps, unless more money could be made. But the Sundial is not the only place in Idensea.” He watched her over the rim of his pint as he took a swallow. “And Idensea is not the only place in the world.”

Just the only place she wanted to stay. Idensea was the first place since her mother’s house that she hadn’t struggled to leave, hoping for something better.

Still, John’s idea merited some consideration. Did he realize it meant she would be on her own, out from under Sir Alton’s thumb, to be sure, but also without the hotel’s considerable resources? He must, but did he truly believe she was up to such a challenge?

“Pang in my side,” he murmured as she stared at him, thinking,
He did
.

“What’s that?”

“In my dad’s pub I used to hear it. An old Welsh poem.
Girl who struck this pang in my side, the girl I want and wanted always—
”

He broke off to take a hasty quaff. Betsey reached up and put her hands around the glass, and he let her pull it from his mouth and set it aside.

“Why don’t we . . . ?” she suggested.

He nodded. They quit the pub like its thatched roof was ablaze. As John shut the door behind him, his other arm pulled her to him, and, mouths together, they stumbled around the corner of the pub, into the shadows of shrubbery and thick curtains of ivy. The leaves tickled her ears and neck as she moved her mouth with his, following, luring, a dance of endless discovery. Every time his tongue stroked her, she felt it deep and low, and she pushed her head farther into the ivy, against the wall, opened her mouth wider, so she could have him deeper, more of him inside her.

A labored, suppressed groan escaped him. He moved his lips from hers only far enough to allow speech, half-formed words upon her skin. “The sky’s clear and bright as jewels tonight.”

“Mm-mm.” Her tongue toyed with his bottom lip. She couldn’t remember what the sky looked like. She could open her eyes right now and probably not be able to find it.

“There is magic to bathe under the moon. Have you ever?”

“I don’t know.” What did he mean? What was the moon? She pressed kisses under his jaw. “I don’t know how to swim.”

“Made for it, girl.” In one slow, insistent caress, he passed his hand over her thigh, and up and up until he’d splayed the length of her arm and each finger against the wall behind them. “Mind and body.” He matched the spread of her fingers with his and started a path of kisses at the bend of her elbow. “Will you come?”

Her daze took a giddy turn as she watched him, anticipating his arrival at her earlobe. Would she go swimming with him? He kissed her neck and she giggled, the delight of sensation, the delight in his effort. Creating excuses to get her out of her clothes.
He didn’t know. He didn’t know she’d decided, that she’d known on Hawkshaw Road.