The Typewriter Girl (18 page)

The stones of the tower were so ragged that the broken circle looked like a wreck hauled from the sea, covered in barnacles, frayed scraps of sky showing through vaguely arch-shaped openings in the walls. Out from the tower, foundations and walls breached the ground cover of daisies and grasses, but irregularly, and not by more than a few feet. As they passed one of the taller remnants, Mr. Jones put his hand to it, making such purposeful contact that she felt compelled to do the same. The initial warmth was deceptive; beneath it, inside, the chill and damp of springtime held.

He reached into his coat pocket. The folded paper he held out to her read “Betsey Dobson” in Avery’s handwriting. “This came to the Swan this morning. Meant to give it to you at services . . .”

But she’d made certain there was no good time for that. “He’ll be wanting money,” she predicted, managing to sound careless, though her hand rolled into a fist as she took the note. She hurried ahead, lifting her skirts as she climbed the sharp rise where the tower ruins sat. Mr. Jones didn’t try to catch up with her. She wandered alone amongst the ruins—which, thanks to Ethan Noonan, she’d glimpsed only from a distance until now—found a seat on a stone that had once been something grander, and unfolded Avery’s note.

Twenty-one shillings. He suggested an advance on her wages,
or surely she knew someone who would make her a loan. He’d sacrificed everything to follow her to this damned carnival; if she could leave him to rot in a ten-day sentence when it had all been a mistake, an accident anyway, then she was a witch, an icy, vengeful Morgan le Fay.

So be it. She tore the note in half, then again. She sensed his desperation; she knew that with some alterations to her careful budget, her modest plans, she could, in marked contrast to her situation a fortnight ago, help him. But paper squares collected on her lap in a heap.

Two children raced past her, chattering of pirates; a third tripped and would have fallen headfirst into stone if not for Betsey sitting there. The tiny girl bounced off Betsy’s skirts; paper flurries swirled into the breeze.

“Oh, ma’am, won’t you fix it?”

“It” meant a rapier fashioned from two sticks the child held, along with a bedraggled white hair ribbon intended to hold them together. Betsey took the articles and made a neat job of it, with the child at her knee, breathing heavily.

“That’s got it,” she said, presenting her handiwork. “Now take care for pirates.”

“Me, I’m the pirate, ma’am,” she was informed.

“Oh! Good luck to you, then.”

The girl ran away. Bits of white paper trailed over grass and stone, rolled over the tips of Mr. Jones’s shoes. She hadn’t noticed him till now, standing a few steps away, framed in a broken arch.

“Have you brothers or sisters?” he asked as she stood and joined him. They walked out from the ruins, to the grass where a few holidaymakers were lingering over the remains of afternoon picnics.

“A sister in London. A brother somewhere. Alive, we hope, possibly at sea, but it’s been years and years. You?”

“Seven sisters,” he said, smiling. “A brother, Owen, to be four soon, and two others passed, though I knew but one: Davey—Daffyd—in heaven since I was twelve.”

Before she had a chance to express her sympathy, he added, “I am starved! Do you think Sarah will put by some of tea for me, to have before my lesson?”

His music lesson, he meant, the piece he was learning for Miss Gilbey’s party. Betsey often listened from her third-floor window or climbed out and sat on the roof, especially when he rehearsed the lyrics. His voice, low, lush, and serrated, betrayed no effort of concentration, unlike his playing. But he’d been tenacious these past weeks, apparently determined Miss Gilbey must not suspect what trouble he was taking to please her.

Betsey could have told him,
You’re all wrong about that
. All those evenings, listening to him doggedly correct each mistake, hearing him trying to erase the evidence of effort—ah, she could have told him: Had Miss Gilbey been there on the roof, too, each mistaken note could only have made him more and more dear to her.

“I’m certain Sarah will see to it you have whatever you wish,” she said.

“And there Dora Pink will be to take back half of it.”

“Not while you keep leaving a few coins behind. She blesses you frequently for that.”

“Not before Sarah, I hope.” He settled into the grass, stretching out on a hip and looking down to the harbor. “Someday, I’ll be rich, and I will go to my house, in the middle of Wednesday, to a grand spread of a tea—three, four sorts of jam, and a tower of sandwiches, and boys and dogs tussling on the rugs for the last biscuits.”

“Boys and dogs,” Betsey repeated, and laughed to chase back a sigh. “Having sisters ruined you for daughters, did it?”

“Ah, the daughters. They are on my knees with all the sweets they can hold.” He looked up at her, blocking the sun with his arm. “Well you would do to take you a rest, Dobs,” he said, and when she hesitated in joining him on the grass, he added, “You needn’t worry for your frock. The sort that hides the dirt, it is.”

“A gracious invitation.”

“Pardons. Thought that was what you must be thinking of.”

Betsey sat down beside him, and—because a small bit of torture seemed only fair—instead of smoothing out her sensible and perfectly clean brown tweed skirt, she left it rumpled and stretched out her legs, putting her ankles within his view.

He rolled onto his back. Pulled his cap down to cover his eyes. Betsey counted it on her side of the tally.

“My mam used to fret over it,” he said. “’Twas how she picked all the fabric for the clothes we had, and my poor sisters despaired of it, always wanting something prettier.” With a soft chuckle, he tucked his hands behind his head. “One Christmas after I’d gone away—I left home young—money enough I had to send back a present or two, and I found a bolt of cloth—only muslin, you know, but pretty. Blue, but the sort that’s in snow of a morning, see?”

Betsey didn’t think she’d ever seen snow like that. But far below her, the sea was winking white and yellow and lavender at her, so she answered, “Yes.”

“Thinking of my mother in a new dress, I buy it and send it off to her. In the years after, I go back, and what do you think I find?”

“She’d used it to make curtains.”

He jerked, turning on his stomach to look up at her. “Right, you witch. Snow-blue curtains, everywhere in that little house.”

Betsey laughed. “I’m certain she enjoyed them as much as she would have a new dress. Perhaps more, since they were in constant use.”

“No, you’re not understanding. All over, they were. Even windows not there had curtains. I paid a call to our reverend and I saw blue curtains. I went to collect the eggs in the henhouse . . . snow-blue curtains.”

“You exaggerate!” Betsey said, laughing hard now.

“Do I! No woman in the village had blue thread for six months! ‘Mam,’ I said to her, ‘a dress I was meaning for you, not curtains here to the Bristol Channel.’”

“And what did she say?”

“She looked like I’d gone soft. ‘Think how the dirt would show, Iefan-my-boy! Think of the dirt!’” He rolled to his back again, and Betsey watched as one hand, resting on his stomach, moved up and down with the rhythm of his laughter.

“Bless God!” The rhythm slowed, ending in a deep exhalation. “Bless God, my mother,” he said, in an undertone.

She plucked a long blade of grass and wove it between her fingers, distracting herself from the impulse she felt to comb them through the black hair touching the grass beside her, shining like silk against the green blades.

“Did you send her brown tweed next time, then?” she asked, though she believed she knew that answer already, too.

“No, never any cloth then, but a frock ready-made, for her to wear for my sister Mair’s wedding, and yellow it was, but only a touch, not even as much as is butter.”

“And did she wear it?”

“I think so, once and again. I know she had her picture made in it, her and my dad and the little ones. And they buried her in it, just this March that has gone.”

Betsey started, letting the blade of grass fall into her lap. She pulled her feet up under her skirts. “Oh, I am sorry. I didn’t know.”

“They, my sisters, told me what they’d done when I came for the funeral, and I just laughed, and good and furious they grew, but I was laughing because all I could hear was my mother railing from her grave, ‘Think how the dirt will show, Iefan-my-boy!’ Then I wept hard, for no one else had thought of it, and I’d come too late.”

He made a sound as though he would continue, but he didn’t. Again, she resisted the desire to touch his hair, though it sprang from a different source now. If she touched him, it would be for his need, not her own. Only along his temples, only to smooth, simply to say,
I understand your loss
.

Voices fluttered from the ruins. A train knocked along in the distance. Over the grass a bee buzzed, rested, and buzzed again.

“I expect your mother felt like a duchess, the day she had her picture made in that dress.”

The train continued on, became too faint to hear.

“Do you think so, girl?”

“Oh, yes.”

After a moment, he turned over again, propping himself on his elbow to look up at her. An expansive craving destroyed her moment of altruism, laid it flat under a greediness to answer every wondering question in his eyes. Men looked at her, they looked in all sorts of ways, but this sensation of being
seen
 . . .

She wanted more. She wanted to be known by this man, this one. She couldn’t help biting her lip, but otherwise, she held still and let him see.

“Thanks. For the bicycle. The lesson.”

“Most need more than a single lesson.”

“I like it.”

“I know. Good, I mean. I mean, I knew you would. Believed so, whatever.”

Yes, he’d said that during the lesson:
I knew you would.
And last night:
I knew what you would be for.
The downy, tickling joy in her chest threatened to carry her away.

“Iefan is your Welsh name?”

“Iefan Rhys-Jones. Iefan’s John in Welsh.”

“Iefan.” She hugged her knees and rested her cheek on them, feeling the slubs of tweed against her skin, something like the roughness of his cheek last night. “Iefan?”

“What is it?” he answered, but really, she had nothing she’d intended to say to him. She only wished to say his name. And kiss him. That was all. Say his name, kiss him, and touch his hair again, that was all.

She reached out. Her fingers tugged gently at a piece of black hair kicking out from under his cap.

“Grass,” she explained, and flicked her fingers as if returning some dried blades to the ground.

He didn’t move. But he asked, “Any more?” and she lied, “Mm-hmm,” and touched his hair again, and then his shoulder, brushing away imaginary bits of grass.

“You’ve some,” he said, and Betsey didn’t remind him that she’d not been lolling in the grass. He sat up, captured a fallen lock of her hair, tossed away whatever he’d pretended was there, and tucked the lock behind her ear. It fell, and he did it again, taking more time, tucking more firmly.

“Any more?”

He seemed to need to think about it. She had never had a man take so long to decide whether he would kiss her, to make such a to-do over the business, and it felt like a loss. Maybe it was an insult, this indecision, but all she felt was that she had been cheated before now; all she wanted to say was the same foolishness she’d whispered last night:
I think you’re rather wonderful.

“How is your—” His finger hovered over her lip.

“Better.”

“A bit of sun you’ve got. Here.” He touched her then, his finger grazing the bridge of her nose. She held her breath, she held herself still as he said, “And here,” and pressed each apple of her cheek.

“Come without my hat, haven’t I?”

He was not for her. He’d said so. But maybe he was. It seemed they both were thinking maybe he was, and so she took his cap from his head and set it on her own. It promptly slipped down to her eyes. Laughing, she peeked out from underneath, idling her fingers along the brim.

To her horror, this ounce of flirtation crashed the scales. Mr. Jones turned from her, back to the sea. For some time, he said nothing, only studied his laced fingers while she wilted under his cap.

“Sir Alton is a composer, did you know?”

Betsey supposed this to be some effort to rub out the past few minutes, put the scales to rights. It showed him a fast learner, since it was a better tack than telling her to get a dancing frock.

“No.”

“Well, no more, but he was. ’Twas how he came into his title, his music.”

“And he gave it up to open a hotel?”

“Not because he wanted to become a man of business. Hates that part of it, from what I can tell. No, he was bankrupt, or close to it. The Idensea estate he had, and that was all. Lady Dunning’s his second wife—she was the one with the money.”

“Always an answer to a prayer, the rich wife.”

Probably he glanced at her during the following beat of silence. She was watching her fingers comb the grass, her face still shielded by his cap.

“Sir Alton’s, sure,” he admitted evenly. “But not only because of her money. Lady Dunning has sense, all sorts of it. All the best touches in the hotel, the ones that delight people and make them want to come again—Lady Dunning, that is. ’Twas she who saw what Idensea could be, convinced him it was worth the risk. He dreads it, risk. And that’s what I’m saying to you, Betsey.”

The sound of her name lifted her head with the sense that she should’ve been paying better attention, that this accounting of Sir Alton’s history had not been mere distraction.

Mr. Jones pushed the bill of the cap up off her face. “I learned quick his decisions come from fear, and that he portions out his trust the way Dora Pink does her lamb stew. Lady Dunning he trusts, and Tobias, and certain of the board members. Me, too.”

So she would be foolish to go to Sir Alton alone. That’s what he was saying. Without calling her foolish, without forbidding her to do it, that’s what he was saying.