The Typewriter Girl (14 page)

But Betsey Dobson, her eyes still covered, razed his story with a shake of her head. She dropped her hand, picked up her skirts, and strode away toward the rear terrace of the hotel.

John didn’t know what to make of it; it was like being informed he’d been looking at a building plan upside down. He was inclined to let her go. But a glance at the terrace told him more trouble waited ahead.

He ran to catch up with her. He thought how long her legs must be under those rustling skirts, to have taken her so far so quickly. He touched her back to slow her down and said into her ear, “You are about to meet Sir Alton Dunning.”

Her tension, already palpable in the tips of his fingers, ratcheted like an overwound music box.

“I am with you,” he said.

Sir Alton stood on the terrace, his bland smile masking his intent examination of the grounds. He put his glass of port to his lips upon catching sight of John and Betsey emerging from the shadows, then made his way down the steps. No matter how leisurely he took them, John did not miss the fact Sir Alton was too agitated to wait for John to reach him. Noel Dunning straggled behind his father, nothing about his indifference contrived.

“Well, well, well! Such excitement, and now we reach the conclusion of that little experiment, don’t we!”

Sir Alton’s tone rarely varied. He could have been reciting “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” he might have been delivering a death sentence to a condemned man; it all swung to the same serene, cheery inflection, relentless as that metronome Sarah kept telling John to mind during his piano lessons.

“Who should have guessed my hypothesis to be confirmed in such a stirring fashion?” Sir Alton said. “Excepting myself, I admit. I trust you’ll pardon some gloating on my part—I cannot seem to help myself.”

He settled his gaze on Betsey. No one would have described his smile as anything but pleasant and civil.

John wished he had prepared her. “You’ve not met Miss Dobson,” he said. “She is the young lady we hired to oversee the excursions scheme. Miss Dobson, Sir Alton Dunning. And,” he added, noting Noel Dunning’s languid arrival at his father’s side, “you’ve met his son, Mr. Dunning, already.”

Sir Alton’s bow was courteous, if subtle. If Betsey offered her hand, she’d be required to reach out an awkward distance. Sir Alton generally made limited efforts in that regard. Dunning had once said he remembered his father being one of the most effusive conductors he’d ever watched, but John could only ever imagine him directing his orchestra with shifting gazes and nose twitches.

Betsey didn’t so much as nod.

“Miss Dobson,” Sir Alton said. “Delighted. Though I regret a young lady has been forced to witness such boorish behavior from our—heavens, I was about to say
guests,
but that isn’t quite accurate, is it? How dismaying for you, finding yourself supposedly in charge of such a frightful group of ruffians.”

The first strike. John checked Betsey in a sidelong glance to see how it landed. Pale as a cloud she’d gone, her fine straight back as rigid as Sir Alton’s, though with terror rather than self-restraint. Picturing the demon-soldier he’d seen this afternoon, John thought it a sorry comedown for her. Their moments alone would have been better used to bolster her confidence rather than crosshackling her about Avery Nash.

“Noel.” Sir Alton addressed his son without turning to him. “How sly you’ve been, keeping your good fortune in meeting Miss Dobson all to yourself.”

Dunning fumbled with his cigarette case. “I suppose—well—it slipped my mind, Father, I suppose. It didn’t seem terribly relevant, so I suppose—”

“No, no, it doesn’t matter at all.” Sir Alton reached back to draw his son beside him, giving him a clap on his back. “My asking
you to pay attention whilst your stepmother and I were away was mere habit. I hardly expected you in fact to do so.”

Another clap on the back, and cigarettes rained to the ground. Dunning jerked awkwardly, as though he would stoop to pick them up, but then did not and instead curled the case into his hand, his face brilliant with heat, his eyes fixed to the darkness beyond the terrace. Betsey Dobson made a tiny sound in her throat. Her hand clutched the placket of her vest, half those brave brass buttons of hers crumpled up in her palm.

John touched her elbow. “Miss Dobson, you ought to go on to the kitchen, get some ice on that wound so you can finish your duties for the night.”

She gave him her wary, magic-beans look. She would be only too happy to escape this confrontation, John could see, but she didn’t trust what might happen once she was gone. His smile made his injured lip smart, and he received naught but a scowl in return. He squeezed her elbow. “Yes, Mr. Jones,” she muttered, and took a wide path around Sir Alton on her way to the terrace.

“She came from Baumston and Smythe, sir,” John said as he stooped, picking up the cigarettes and passing them in one smooth motion to Dunning. “You know they take on the top people.”

“Indeed I do. If you don’t mind, what duties, precisely, did she perform at Baumston and Smythe?”

“She . . . she was a type-writer girl, as it happens.”

If the paper does not run in straight but one side feeds faster than the other, one of the rubber bands may have slipped off one of the pulleys. . . . This is generally the cause of the paper’s feeding crooked.

—How to Become Expert in Type-writing

I
t was not that Sir Alton’s face went untouched by whatever he thought or felt. All of it showed, all of it—but fleetingly, palely, the fluid meeting of warm and cool.

After a moment, Sir Alton said, “My ignorance of typewriting must be profound indeed, to be unable to imagine—but of course, the girl’s character must have detailed a great many qualifications.”

“Mr. Seiler and I have been pleased,” John answered, hoping to skirt the issue of Betsey’s character letter. If Sir Alton pressed it, he’d not be able to explain, far less justify, his recommendation to hire Miss Dobson.
I saw her, and I just knew,
he couldn’t say. Neither:
She came with a perfectly fine character, except for stealing rail rides and living with a man not her husband.

“Never think I meant to question you, Jones. Whatever is in the girl’s reference, whether she is a type-writer or a chair caner or Thomas Cook’s own twin, as long as she’s capable of canceling the remainder of these day-tripper bookings, it satisfies me.”

Having seen Betsey Dobson’s accounts this afternoon, John felt nothing less than ill—and goddamned furious—at the thought of all that revenue lost, money turned away as if it weren’t just as good as any other money, and when the hotel had yet to make a profit.

John grinned at Sir Alton, grinned though it sent pain streaking from his smashed lip. “Monday, perhaps, we can discuss how to present that to the board? As soon as we have their approval, we will put an end to the entire scheme.”

Sir Alton, who was never pleased to be reminded he had a board of directors to whom he must answer, said, “Excellent, then. Come to Iden Hall. By Monday, I should have a good sampling of newspapers—we’ll read all the accounts of what went on here tonight over a pot of tea. Won’t it be fascinating to see Idensea’s reputation transform right before our eyes?”

You’d better learn to give Father’s sarcasm back to him,
Noel Dunning had advised John soon after he’d arrived in Idensea.
Otherwise, he’ll think you a stupe.

John had altered certain things about himself over the years for the sake of inspiring confidence in the Englishmen for whom he’d worked, chipping away for any advantage because everything about his background seemed to work against him. He’d learned to speak with hardly a trace of his Welsh accent. He’d changed his name, for God’s sake. Dunning’s advice, however, he’d rejected outright, so contrary it felt to his soul.

Dunning had been wrong, as it turned out. Sir Alton didn’t think him a stupe; Sir Alton had come to rely on him. So when John simply replied, “Monday afternoon, then,” Sir Alton put his port glass to his lips and, over the rim, considered John with respectful suspicion.

“Very well,” he said. “Noel and I shall go to the smoking room and talk the entire debacle down to a minor inconvenience. Noel, it’s a task to suit you, shrugging it all away as though it were of no consequence. And you—”

“Smooth things out amongst the excursionists,” John guessed.

“Precisely.” For a moment, Sir Alton’s smirking mask seemed wistful. He glanced at his son, but though Dunning stood beside his father with the steadiness of a sculpture, he was otherwise quite gone. “But don’t be long about it. Brues asked particularly after you, and wants you to rejoin us as soon as you might.”

Rolly Brues! There might be some salvaging of the night, after all.

“And”—with a gesture of his eyes, Sir Alton indicated John’s bloodied mouth—“you’d better do something with that.”

•   •   •

Betsey obtained ice from the restaurant kitchen, where the hectic atmosphere forestalled most curiosity, then fled to the offices and used a small looking glass on the wall to check her appearance. The convex mirror was a comfort; the injury to her mouth could not be nearly as grotesque as reflected there. She snatched some hairpins from her desk drawer and left the office, trying to put her hair to rights.

She expected and dreaded Mr. Seiler at any moment. This was a mistake uncorrectable; this was a failure; this was her disaster, and she did not expect to survive it.

But it was Mr. Jones, not Mr. Seiler, she encountered in the empty corridor. They both stopped dead. In the shadows, his hair appeared like a cut-paper silhouette of fire, wildly mussed from the fight. The sight filled her with caution and anticipation, held her in place with her hands in her hair as she pictured him driving Avery to the floor.

She fixed the last pin, lowered her arms, and braced herself for immediate dismissal. But at the base of her spine, she felt, too, the press of his hand, how he’d spoken strength and alliance through the tips of his fingers.

She liked him to a terrible degree. A staffer had told her Ethan Noonan suffered a crippling injury during the construction of the pier, and all her frustration over Mr. Jones’s obstinacy in the matter dissolved upon the discovery—dissolved, and wore another tender place for him inside her.

“I was about to return to the pavilion,” she said. “If I’m not sacked?”

“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.