The Typewriter Girl (36 page)

Write every exercise as though it were to be put on exhibition.

—How to Become Expert in Type-writing

I
shan’t.”

It was so loud, the rain drumming down on the shelter, slapping the stone at the threshold. John’s shoulders were drenched, his hair sopped down to his brows. He held an umbrella, quite closed, at his side, and she—well, she could not remember what had driven her into the rain.

“Come into my bed with me, Elisabeth,” he said. “Soft as a whisper, those sheets, and you are the loveliest sight my eyes have seen, and I want to make love to you.”

Betsey moved out of the tangle of cycles and went to him. She touched his face, the scrawl of his lips and the scar in the corner of them, the bristle of his lashes as his eyelids fell shut.

“Why?” she whispered. “After so long, and—me?”

Ah, her hope. She couldn’t keep it from spilling from her heart any more than she could keep the rain in the clouds.
Because I’ve fallen in love with you, Elisabeth Dobson.
It was so foolish, but out it spilled, and she couldn’t help it.

“Elisabeth,” he said, “you give me a pain in my side. That is why.”

Her hand flew to her mouth, making a cup. She laughed her surprise and disappointment into it. “That is the worst poem I’ve ever heard.” Even Keats and his
belle dame
were better.

The umbrella fell to the ground as he grabbed her arms. She gasped as he swung her round to the wall of the shelter, where the rain was like a curtain over the doorway beside her. He pinned her, one rough hand splayed over her neck and cheek, the other on the wall.

“There’s plain it is. There’s true. Me taken like a rabbit in a trap by you, and no will to scratch my way out, more than half-wanting you to come fast as you can to break my neck and skin me for your roasting pot.”

“Oh my God,” she breathed, filled with disgust, or something that made her shiver and melt.

“I know. I don’t speak fair to you. But true. ”

“Lust is all that is. More than ten years of it.”

“Yes, it is, through me like blood poison, you think I don’t know, that I’ve never had it before? In my eye when I look at you, on my hands, how I’ve touched you, you think I don’t know it? But that stab—”

His grip on her gentled; he leaned into her and put his lips on her neck, pressed her hand flat to his left side, where she could feel his heart fast at work. “Here’s that pain in my side, girl. How sore and tender it is with you, I wish I could finer say.”

She crumpled the fabric of his suit in her hand. “You are so hard to believe.”

“You think I lie.”

“No, I mean like the size of the ocean, or a job that pays a woman commission with her wages. Or magic beans. That sort of hard to believe.”

He squeezed her hand. He found her hat pin, and once her hat was gone, his fingers loosened her hair as he kissed all the fragile places of her face and neck. Into her ear he whispered, “Tell me how to please you—I want to,” and she said, “Iefan,” tears threatening because she’d made him so unsure. They kissed, and she told
him it didn’t matter.
No, you tell me. You tell me what he did to make you weep for him still.

She wrapped her arms about him; she burrowed her face against his chin, into his shoulder as he held her, and she believed. She believed his affection as she believed his ambition, his instinct to compete. She believed in the impulse that had made her leave him at the table and the one that had made him come after her. All of it she would take into her hands, a complication of spun glass.

“You call me ’girl’ sometimes, Iefan,” she said as he held her. “I don’t mind, you see. I like it. But when you touch me . . .”

She hesitated, and he guessed, “Lady.” He nuzzled into her hair. “I know it. I have been too rough with you.”

She smiled at his guess. It was very dear.

Part of the shelter was reserved for repair space. There she led him, her finger hooked into a buttonhole on his coat. She shut the lid on a chest of tools and bicycle parts and sat him there.

“Woman, Iefan,” she said softly as she stood before him. With his gaze touching her mouth, she added, “Yours.”

His lips parted in silent response. He met her eyes again, firmly fastening their gazes together. The force of his attention penetrated the gloom of the shelter and brushed every feminine part of her, from the curves of her flesh to the bends of her instincts, into peaked, expectant awareness.

Over her hips, her fingers rippled, lifting her skirts an inch at a time. “Touch me like you know that.”

She gathered her skirts to a point just above her knee. Just past that boundary, he claimed her, pulling her between his thighs as his other hand caught the back of her head and brought her even closer, into a kiss. The hand on her head moved lower, down her back to join its mate beneath her skirts. As she kissed him, letting go of her skirts and wrapping her arms around him, he explored her. He pressed beneath the edge of her corset, he crumpled the fabric of her drawers, kneading her buttocks and the backs of her thighs.

He found a tear in her stocking. There, a single finger ventured
onto her skin, worked itself under the cotton. Betsey broke their kiss with a gasp, shocked by a spasm of anticipation as his fingertip roughed the baby skin at the back of her knee.

“Oh God, your hands,” she whispered. She closed her eyes and surrendered to the sensation. “I love them, did you know? How high the heels of your thumbs rise. Your fingers, they’re wide and hard, and I . . . oh, I think about them, John, I do.”

This made him laugh. Betsey took a step back, pushing his arms away. Hiking up her skirts, she put a foot up beside him on the chest, and insisted, “I do. I think about them here, doing this.”

His amusement evaporated. He watched her hand disappear into the slit of her drawers. When he reached for her, she untied the tapes and guided him. He touched her, and both of them made some animal sound, wordless and telling.

She came on his palm, her knees shaking until he had to brace her from falling.

John had spoken of his bed, the soft sheets, but they didn’t go to it. Down in the dust of the shelter floor, behind a curtain of rain, she rode him, her skirts billowed over him, his blunt nail bearing into the crevice of her bended knee.

Then a stillness, beyond the one stealing over them. The rain had stopped—how long ago? They’d not even shut the door. Somewhere, deep and away, this knowledge and all it meant sat, a heavy thing in a covered box.

Betsey was shuddering still; she would be raw deep into her dreams tonight, but now they had to rush. Clothes put to rights, dust pounded away, a simple plan formulated: She would leave first; he would wait until she was well clear. For they had to be cautious.

They paused before they parted. John seemed to study her, the shadow in his face the result of something more than the shelter’s gloom. Perhaps he regretted coming after her, or wondered why he was willing to take this gamble. It even seemed possible he wondered on her behalf, why
she
would do it, which would be a first in her experience with men.

In the end, however, the shadow in his face remained a mystery. So before she pushed her bicycle out the door, she said, “We could consider this the first of three.”

His brows crooked.

“Not count last night,” she explained.

Didn’t it assure him of her willingness? Didn’t it offer him options, from calling it off entirely to making a grand gesture on bended knee? He could even negotiate, as bloodlessly as he no doubt believed she could.

He touched her cheek and murmured, “There’s grace.” Then, while she stared at him, he motioned for her to go. “Before someone comes.”

•   •   •

“A dozen hankies for each eye your mother will need when she sees you, Charlie,” John said. They stood together before a looking glass inside Reede’s of London, Charlie looking taller and very smart indeed in his first man’s suit.

Mr. Sommerson, the clerk, flicked a clothes brush over the garments. Charlie pretended to dislike the fuss.

“The hat department ought to be our next venture,” John said. “We will find something to replace that cap.”

“Nonsense, sir,” said Mr. Sommerson. “It will be my pleasure to bring some samples to you—have you a particular style in mind?”

John feigned a moment of indecision. “We’re to go to the American baseball exhibition this afternoon, so . . . a boater, perhaps?”

Charlie’s eyes, formerly fixed on his own reflection, now darted with interest. Mr. Sommerson snapped his tape measure around Charlie’s head and vanished.

“Mum won’t like me in a boater much.”

“I expect she won’t.”

“She’ll say I’m too young.” Charlie put his hands into his pockets and studied the effect in the mirror.

“I expect she will. Fortunate we left her in Idensea, is it?”

Mr. Sommerson returned with an armful of hats, but his first choice was perfect. He stood before the boy to make certain all was properly aligned, subtly signaled to John a bit of a hair trimming might be in order, then stepped aside to re-present Charlie to his reflection.

Charlie’s mouth twisted with his effort to suppress his grin, but it finally triumphed, his first real smile all day. “Mum will most certainly hate this.”

John nodded. “Best brace yourself for a smothering of kisses.”

Charlie ran his fingers along the brim. “Thanks, John.”

The expression of gratitude relieved John. Charlie hadn’t been precisely uncivil today, but neither had the outing been the joyful thing he’d envisioned when he and Charlie had planned it months ago.

“Happy birthday, Charlie.”

“A month, yet.”

“Close enough.”

The two of them were headed toward the underground station when Charlie asked if he could see Betsey home when they returned to Idensea. “Fine,” John answered, though he wondered over the wisdom of it, whether it needlessly encouraged Charlie. But he didn’t want to upset the careful, peaceful balance of the day.

For the same reason, he had dashed to the pawnbroker’s while Charlie was having his fitting with the tailor rather than explain he was getting a gift for Betsey. He’d traded Lillian’s ring for a necklace, and the brass birdcage, too, since it had been there still. The birdcage was to be sent, but the necklace was nestled in his pocket.

After a moment, he suggested, with some care, perhaps they both might see Betsey home.

Charlie looked much the child, despite the new boater. “Never mind. She wouldn’t want me, anyway, not after—” He paused. “She went and told you, didn’t she—I said some wicked things to her a while ago.”

“She’s told me nothing of it.”

“She hates me now, I suppose. Doesn’t matter.” He strode ahead and clipped down the steps to the underground station.

John didn’t try to continue the conversation until he’d bought their tickets and they were waiting on the platform. “Apologize, then, if it troubles you so. But whatever you said, she doesn’t hate you, Charlie. You know it, same as I.”

Charlie stared at the rails below the platform. John searched for a new way to tell him the truth he wasn’t ready to hear, though he suspected it was a thing Charlie must sort for himself. A lonely passage for Charlie, though. Nor was waiting John’s best thing. He wanted Charlie back.

The black tunnel began to roar. John touched Charlie’s shoulder, reminding him to step back from the platform’s edge. Charlie shrugged off the touch. “You oughtn’t see her home anymore, either, you know,” he said. “Everyone talks of you and her. You don’t hear it, but they do.”

And with the platform vibrating with the train’s approach, Charlie took off his boater and tossed it down to the grimy tracks.

The desire to collar the boy out of the station and all the way to Idensea flashed down John’s back, but Charlie hopped on the train ahead of him and looked so fearful and defiant when John found him that John only said, “There is ungrateful, that act just now.”

Which made them both miserable. They chewed through the rest of the outing, polite guests of an incompetent cook. Eventually the game diluted the tension, and that night, when they arrived back in Idensea, John said he needed to check on the Kursaal, that Charlie should meet Betsey at the pavilion.

That demolished the fragile peace. He wasn’t doing it, Charlie growled; he didn’t want to ever again, and he stalked away, sure to ruin his mother’s evening, too, arriving home alone and in such a foul temper. The entire day felt like a failure to John, so far from what he’d intended.

In the end, he sent word for one of the night watchmen to tend to Betsey, and he went to the Kursaal, where he ignored the fact it was too dark to inspect anything. He kept thinking of the boater,
smashed beneath the train, how Charlie had said,
Everyone
; how Betsey had told him,
I’ll not look jilted when it’s all done
.

But Monday night found him at Sarah’s front door again. When Dora Pink drew him inside with a playful scolding for his having missed supper, when she showed him into Dr. Elliot’s old office and there was Elisabeth’s straight and slender back to him as she stood on an ottoman, Sarah fitting her for the dress she would wear to the opening of the Kursaal—when Elisabeth looked over her shoulder to see who had come in and her face changed, lit, and glowed because she saw it was him—

Few men would not understand his helpless, shameful weakness.

They made a resolution that someone other than he would see her home on Saturday nights. He failed to stop showing up, however. She failed to ever send him away. Crossing the grounds from the pavilion to the bicycle shelter one night, she said, “Mr. Seiler mentioned the Gilbeys would be arriving soon.”

John said he supposed this correct.

“I think he is very set on you marrying her.”

“My friend, Tobias. Not my father.”

With a laugh, she ran for the shelter, tagging the wall, and then—in a gesture that left him scarcely able to walk, let alone run—she lifted her skirts and waited.