The Typewriter Girl (22 page)

“Right. I wasn’t coming to see her.”

“I . . . I sent Charlie to bed.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

Betsey picked up one of her boots and put it her lap. She worked at the laces, fingering them into tidy, evenly crisscrossed lines.
Go in, go back upstairs,
she warned herself, and herself promised she would, as soon as her bootlaces were tidied.

“Did you hear me?”

“You said it didn’t matter, Charlie not coming down.” Hearing, fine. Comprehension, lacking. Hope, damn it, living. She used her skirt hem to polish off the toe of her boot, then took up the other boot to tend to it.

“I was cycling. Thinking of the Sultan’s Road. It opens tomorrow.”

“I know.” Everyone knew; it was the greatest event Idensea
would see until the Duke of Winchester came to open the Kursaal in August.

She heard him laugh softly above her. “Of course you do, girl. Of course.”

And then he crouched beside her, so abruptly it startled her, so close she could see how his smile sat on his face like a drop of clear water, blurring the surface beneath it.

“You’d come with me to see it, wouldn’t you, Betsey? Right now?”

She tried to make out the blurry thing beneath his smile. Whatever it was, it made her answer, “Of course.”

Remember that taking a type-writer apart is a dangerous experiment and that any meddling with the screws generally makes a machine worse instead of better.

—How to Become Expert in Type-writing

O
f course.
As though no other option existed and no other questions needed to be asked. She readied herself while he fetched her bicycle, and she went with him.

Tomorrow night, the pleasure railway’s loading pavilion would be dazzling with light and full of people eager to ride. Tonight, with the pier closed and the Esplanade empty, the wind ruled, bumping the canvas curtain in the archway and filling the air with the snap of pennant flags and the rustle of palm leaves. Mr. Jones cycled past the arcade and its sentinel pair of leopards to the high board fence that hid the less attractive but more necessary parts of the railway from public view. He had keys for the padlocks, and they wheeled their cycles through the gate and leaned them against the fence.

He took a moment to detach his bicycle lamp, then offered a hand to her. Taking no lesson at all from that other walk in the dark with Mr. Jones, she abandoned herself to the hard shelter of his hand, at once and with kite-like joy.

They walked between the trestle of the track and the cliff that overlooked the bay, a deeply shadowed passage not even as wide as
the lane in front of The Bows. The highest ascension of the undulating track she’d traced with her fingertip now towered over her.

She held the lamp while he found the key to a door built into the trestle. Inside, he passed the light over a monstrous configuration of pipes and other hunks of metal she had no names for.

“Engine and boiler,” he stated simply, but Betsey suspected that with the least encouragement, he’d be pleased to lecture on every part and its function. She suppressed her minimal curiosity and asked what the passenger carriages were like instead.

Was there another thing in the world he knew better than this railway? He had the lamp, but it was not the reason for the confidence with which he led her. A maze of metal stairs and narrow black passages smelling of paint and fresh lumber and oil, and then she heard a thumping sound, the wind hitting the canvas curtain. And then . . .

A garden. The bicycle lamp was sorely inadequate for the cavernous space where they had emerged, but there was a garden, flowers and greenery rising, rising, even as they draped the balconies of a tall, terraced palace. Any expectations she’d held were forgotten as she tried to reconcile this marvel with something familiar.

“Is it—it’s like the theater, isn’t it?” Avery had taken her to the Empire once; this was the sensation of being onstage, in a tableau vivant of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. “I didn’t guess—I hardly know what to say, it’s so astonishing.”

“Wait until the waterfalls run, and when you see it by day from the Esplanade. Or at night, with the lighting.” He gestured toward the expansive wall opposite the garden palace. But that was no wall, of course, but the curtain in the wide Moorish arch, hiding the scenery until show time.

She laughed. “Waterfalls.” One wasn’t fantastic enough? “And the panorama tunnels are similar?”

“
Adventurous and exotic scenes of the East,
” he said, his voice the embodiment of the bloated lettering on the street side of the curtain. “Though not so elaborate, as there’s quick you pass through it.”

“And you have my six pennies by then, too.”

“Come, you cynic. Sit in the carriage.”

The lamp directed her to the loading deck, between the arch and the palace, where boarding passengers would create an enticing spectacle for passersby. The conveyances lined up on the track were nothing like carriages she associated with railways; they had no tops, were hardly more than park benches, church pews on a platform. Or small golden thrones, she thought, drawing a single fingertip over the tiny flaming suns carved into the wood.

She sat on the first bench, and though there was room for two, Mr. Jones took the one behind. The track lay ahead, just invisible in the thorough darkness beyond the lamp’s weak glow. The wind moaning past the curtain gave her a shiver, amplified the vastness of the space and Mr. Jones’s silent presence at her back.

“One final look. Is that it?”

“I suppose.” A moment later, he added, “None too fine of me to drag you along.”

“You wanted company.”
Mine.
But he did not say so, nor did she admit how little she minded being dragged along. She just told him, “It’s wonderful, you know. You don’t doubt that, I hope.”

“You’d like a ride?”

“Oh, yes. I’m bringing my excursionists—”

“What about now?”

“This minute?” She didn’t see how it was possible without the operators.

She felt him stirring, leaning forward with his arms on her backrest.

“A fellow at Lillian’s party, he hadn’t any neck, and he was singing something without any English in it, so a moment it gave me to think, and I thought, why not gather up the whole party and bring it on a train to Idensea? Ride the Sultan’s Road a dozen times over, sing and play in the hotel’s music room till dawn, and there a tale they’d have for their old age, to prove the passion of their youth.”

Betsey smiled. “It sounds like the sort of whimsy the rich enjoy. Why didn’t you do it?”

A moment passed before he answered. “Lils—Miss Gilbey—wouldn’t hear of it.”

He sat back then, and Betsey was glad, for it meant she could look ahead, keep her face concealed from him as she sorted out the meaning of this revelation. It didn’t take long.

“Bless God, but there’s a stubborn girl!” he muttered, and again, it was good he couldn’t see her face, or he would have seen how she wanted to laugh at him, laugh at the both of them sitting here, so disappointed in their hopes when they both should have known better.

“You couldn’t have expected her to upend her party,” she said. “Disrupt everything to come to Idensea upon the spur of the moment?”

“You did.”

“I live here.”

“’Tis London I mean. London you left of a sudden to come here.”

“It isn’t the same. Miss Gilbey has more to think about, more to lose, than someone like me.”

He grunted. “One topsy-turvy party in a life crammed with them? While you . . . if I’d left you to the mercy of the stationmaster, say. What would you have left if that had happened?”

Left her to the mercy of the stationmaster. She nearly scoffed, reminded him who he was. But that day at the rail station she hadn’t been so sure, had she? That day, she’d been prepared to drop out of a window and see where her wits landed her.

And now look.
It pealed through her brain.
Look how you’ve come to rely on him.

He awaited an answer. “Nothing but a tale for my old age,” she admitted, and swiped at her arms, pushing her rolled-up sleeves to her wrists. Time to go. She had achieved some kind of distance and dignity after the meeting with Sir Alton, but now she’d mucked it up all over again, coming out here with him, unwittingly volunteering to be Miss Gilbey’s substitute. Not even a substitute. An alternative. A last resort.

This seesaw would never balance. Time to go.

“I wanted her to say, ‘Of course.’ Like you, girl.”

No doubt.
She fastened her cuffs and thought of her uniform buttons, warm in his pocket. She must remember to get them before they parted ways. “I can’t think what you hope to gain from comparing us. Miss Gilbey disliked the spontaneity, that’s all. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t care. I came with you—it doesn’t mean . . . anything in particular but that I was awake and restless.”

And now I’m tired and ready to go,
she was about to add as she turned round in her seat. She found him sitting with his elbows on his knees, his black hair windblown, falling over his forehead. A dot of white flashed between his fingers, and for a moment, she mistook it for one of her buttons.

“Iefan,” she whispered when she saw what it was. “You were going to ask her to marry you tonight?”

“I don’t know. I only—I’m not where I meant to be when I married, is the trouble of it.” He glanced up, his brows rueful and crooked. “Is there such a thing as a save-my-place ring?”

“Very convenient for you men if there were.”

“I don’t imagine she’d wait, whatever. A schedule she has, so her young sister tells me.”

“What, with a wedding slated in for this time next year, will you or nil you?”

He laughed. “Something like that.”

Betsey shook her head in disbelief. But she remembered what it was like to have such confidence in the future. Perhaps for Miss Gilbey, it was not so outlandish an attitude. Lizzie, the housemaid in love with the master’s son, ought’ve known better.

She reached over the backrest of her seat and plucked the ring from between his fingers. Within a lacy band of gold filigree sat a dark stone, a ruby perhaps, although the low light kept her from being certain.

“Was it your mother’s?” she asked.

“My mother’s! A silver locket she had from her girlhood, and that was all her jewelry that I know of. No, in London I found it.”

“I had a locket once.” From Thomas Dellaforde. She’d sold her hair and all the clothing she could spare before she’d finally parted with it. She tilted the ring forward and back, watching the facets appear and vanish, then squinted inside the band. “Faery’s child” had been the engraving on her locket, Keats being Thomas’s favorite, and Betsey had liked it well enough until she’d looked up the poem and read it for herself.
La Belle Dame sans Merci hath thee in thrall, indeed. She’d come back to the bookcases multiple times to reread the poem to make certain she had understood it, and finally decided to pretend the inscription wasn’t there.

“What is it you’re looking for?” Mr. Jones asked.

“The inscription—it’s too dark, though.”

“Inscription?”

“Isn’t there one?”

“Ought there be?”

Betsey pressed back a smile at his alarm.

He shook his head. “For all I know, some other girl’s name there is on it. Bless God, I haggled it from a pawnbroker this afternoon, then took ten steps and realized she’d expect some wrapping, like a proper jeweler would have. Where my head was, there’s no saying.”

“It’s beautiful, wherever it came from. You oughtn’t let that keep you from giving it to her.” She held out the ring to him.

He didn’t reach for it. His gaze funneled into the yellow circle as though it were a far-off porthole or a gap in the boards of a fence.

“What ought, then?”

His voice was low, the question flat. Betsey let her thumb and finger relax, and the ring sank into her palm, but the hard focus of his gaze did not alter.

“What if I am sick to the death, girl?” he asked, and his address to her, that he tagged
girl
on the end of the question, surprised her. He’d seemed to be speaking to himself. Even now, he bowed his head as though in private prayer. “Picking out my words before I
say them, thinking a worn place on my lapel settles my fate? And goddamned music lessons.”

What else had happened at that party? It seemed impossible that he could have bungled his performance; at his final rehearsal at Sarah’s house, he had flown through the piece perfectly a half dozen times, working up to such a wild tempo that everyone in the parlor was laughing by the end.

She was about to ask, but he spoke, added something else to his list.

“And not kissing you.”

Pardon,
she wanted to say in response, but it would have been disingenuous. She’d heard him; each hair on her arm and at the back of her neck now brushed the fabric of her shirtwaist.

And not kissing you.

Pardon?

He lifted his head. “Ought that keep me from giving her the ring, that I’m sick to the death of not kissing you?”