The Typewriter Girl (25 page)

The suggestion blossomed immediately into a vision: the Duke, his Duchess, and whatever number of children they had, all the hangers-on those types invariably trailed with them—an entire railway car, perhaps two, crammed full of aristos having a grand time, documented in London’s society pages.

“There is brilliant you are, Betsey,” he said, grinning, and she pinked with pleasure, though her mouth remained set. “There’s brilliant, girl. You’ll do it?”

This compliment pinched her cheeks, but she decided he was in jest. “Yes, if Ethan Noonan’s not too drunk that day, we’ll meet the Duke when he arrives and drive him right over.”

“I expect His Grace will have his own carriage for the tour, but Walbrook over there will have details of his itinerary.” As she glanced at Sir Alton’s secretary, he added, “And the ability to contact the Duke’s secretary, supposing any of those details needed adjustment.”

She sucked her bottom lip into her mouth.

“That’s your specialty, Dobs. Everyone in the proper place at the proper time, feeling merry and not noticing any of the work that’s gone into it. My hands are full with the Kursaal, but the Sultan’s Road needs this.”

“I’ll try,” she said, her doubt evident. “You should introduce me to Mr. Walbrook, I suppose.”

He stayed her with a touch. “I will, but—”

She waited.

“I was curious,” he began, but he’d spoken in too much haste this time and did not know how to finish his sentence.

“Curious? As to . . . ?”

As to all your other fellows, Betsey Dobson. Why you chose them.

She would tease,
Why should you wish to know that?

And he would have to answer,
Because I want—

The unspoken thoughts stuck, just as they would if he tried to say them. She stood waiting for him to finish, and the dawning realization that he had no confidence in how he might proceed, how to express what he wanted, was as alien as anything he’d ever experienced
in his life. He thought of himself at twelve, alone and lost in Swansea, which had seemed such a great city to him then, unable to find work, hungry and homesick, out of plans and hope and prospects. That was something akin to how he felt now, discovering that when it came to Elisabeth Dobson, he had no instincts.

Bless God, that was a lie. He did indeed have instincts, or rather a single instinct driving him like a whip snapping smart and fierce on some dumb beast’s back.

He was the dumb beast. The whip struck, and he strained, wanting to move forward but too stupid to know how to extricate his load from the muck that held it. Before he knew it, he was blurting, “What—what if we dance, Miss Dobson?”

Which proved the desertion of his finer instincts. His dancing, as Lillian had once informed him, put him to no advantage. But the bandmaster was calling for a country dance, and though it had been years, he expected he could playact his way through it well enough, rather as he’d practiced pretending to read the sheet music for Lillian’s party.

Betsey’s gaze swept over him, and he remembered, again, his appearance, that he wasn’t fit to be seen in public, that his dirty clothes and rudimentary dancing could serve only to embarrass her. He undoubtedly stank, too, of sweat and oil, earth and rain. But that sweeping, knowing gaze of hers spoke nothing of distaste or embarrassment. It was, in fact, very much like the one she’d given him on the tram last week, when he’d been wearing his very best evening dress. It restored a portion of his confidence, that sweep of Betsey’s brown eyes.

“What if we dance?” she repeated. “If we dance, Mr. Jones, then a dance is all. Nothing else.”

“Of course, Miss Dobson,” he said, and he offered his arm to her.

He was filthy. Filthier than his clothes were his thoughts, filled up with the blistering desire to
have this girl,
and a sudden, cool determination to reckon out what he must do to be one of the fellows she chose.

They took their places amongst the dancers. John kept an eye
to the other men dancing, watching for cues, and believed himself to be making a fair act of competence. Betsey avoided his eyes, so perhaps she didn’t notice when he was a half step or more behind. Each time they clasped hands, the sensation of soiling her with his dirt-roughed hand pained him. They moved through the figures, and he was at a loss, trying to match steps and find what to say.

It had been more straightforward with Lillian and the other girls like her. The flirtation, the courtship—they had marriage as their object. With Betsey—

It was different. To say to himself exactly how was not presently convenient.

“You came downstairs last night,” he said into her ear as they turned in a chaste embrace, because it seemed she had forgotten this fact, and it was a fact worth keeping in mind, not least because the memory of the front door opening still made him happy. Seeing her climb inside the window, he had thought she meant to stay inside.

“You bade me to,” she answered, which rather spoiled the memory.

“Didn’t,” he managed to retort before the turn was completed. He released her and promptly smashed into a couple who had strayed into his path.

“What is the matter with you?” Betsey hissed, yanking him from what was, apparently,
not
his path.

“I’d forgot that step, I suppose.”

He fumbled his way back into the dance, watching, counting. When he felt reasonably secure, he said, “You came down, whatever.”

“What is the difference? Nothing.”

“Not nothing.”

They parted. John turned in a circle with someone else. It might have been another man, for all the notice he paid.

Together again: “Here it is. Before you refused, you came.”

She stepped on his toes. They were in the wrong place.

“And—you think me rather wonderful.”

Another turn with another partner. Betsey smashed into him and it was his fault.

“No more,” she said, and she stepped back and left him holding out hands to empty air. By the time he removed himself from the dancers, she was extending her hand to Sir Alton’s secretary, an introduction from John evidently unnecessary.

•   •   •

He thought about the word
ruined
. How, in one bad season, a man’s crops could be ruined; in a succession of them, his wealth. A fever, a fall, an excess of drink or rich food, and he met the ruin of his health. A secret uncovered, an arrival delayed, a lamp knocked down, and there might be the ruin of reputation, opportunity, property. In the wrong passion lay the potential for ruin, both instantaneous and so gradual that a man mightn’t realize until he found himself revolving over the flame that all along he’d been impaling himself on the devil’s spit.

Back at the hotel, he cut through the kitchen that served the staff dining hall, where all the sounds came from empty pots, the whisk of brooms and scrubbing brushes, and the scullery girls being loud and easy with one another. The one who saw him first was surely a new hire for the season; John didn’t know her name, and her laugh froze on her lips when she spotted him.

“That’s Mr. Jones, Iva. Give ’im whatever he wants, time a’ day don’t matter,” called Meggie Wright with a wink for John, and Iva filled a dish for him to take to his rooms.
Are you ruined, little Iva?
he thought as he took it.
You, Meggie Wright?

For it had struck him as a curious fact: In all the ways a man could meet ruin, there was one way in which he could not, one especial way reserved only for women.

When Betsey said,
You cannot ruin me, Mr. Jones,
it was in that sense reserved for women. But in the other way, the way men spoke of ruin, not something they
were
but something they
met,
she certainly thought it was possible.

He bathed, then took his cold supper. His oafishness at the pavilion clung to him, not his poor dancing but his clumsy arguing. Hungry as he was, he chewed slowly, thinking he could change
her mind, make her see he was not the risk to her livelihood that she believed him to be. He could do that. There was enough trust between them to engender more. At least there had been, before he cycled to Sarah’s house in the middle of the night.

He could change her mind. And then what? This time next year, he would be gone from Idensea, working somewhere else, some greater project, God willing, that would grow his reputation as a contractor, bring him nearer his own company. Marriage he could put off, but not that. He could not end up managing Sir Alton’s interests for him.

Change her mind. And then . . .

It would have to be a secret.

He set his dish away on the small table beside him, though the food was but half-finished. He sank back in his chair, stared at the empty grate of the fireplace. Out of sight, out of reach, up on the mantelshelf sat the brass button he’d stolen, but he thought about it all the same.

A secret. Because he could ruin her. To offer her anything but courtship was to ask her to take a risk she’d already refused, and he did not want to court Miss Dobson. He wanted to bed her. Every desire he’d ever thwarted or stalled was straining toward Elisabeth Dobson, ferocious, slavering, and intolerant.

In his bed, he put his hand under the sheet as though he were no better than a boy. Then, for a long while, he lay in the dark.

You cannot ruin me.

Because she was already ruined. No one would dispute it. And what was that like, to be ruined, to live
in
ruin rather than
with
it? To know it couldn’t be overcome because forever it was part of you?

So she believed of herself. And though it was fact, there in the dark, John felt he would like to change her mind about that. There in the dark, his need and his lust unsated, it felt like the noblest thing he could attempt, to show Elisabeth Dobson that ruined was not what she
was
.

Learn how to make wide or narrow space between lines.

—How to Become Expert in Type-writing

S
o Mr. Jones was a maddening, uncomprehending block. As Betsey had told him on the pavilion,
No more.

And yet.

Monday morning found the hotel office full of sweaty men heaving furniture and grunting. Even Arland Hamble, the bookkeeper, was flushed. John’s suggestion, Mr. Seiler informed her, showing her a drawing of the new furniture arrangement, rendered with neat precision and labeled with wretched scrawling. Things would be a sight more fit and tidy this way, everyone seemed to agree.

“And here is a pleasant change for you.” Mr. Seiler pointed to a rectangle within which was scribbled, “Miss D.” “No more of your desk being abused by the door when anyone comes into the office.”

It was not the shabbiest gesture a man had ever extended toward her. Mr. Jones had even positioned her as far from Mr. Hamble as the space allowed.

Same for the small card of buttons she found in the desk drawer later, exact matches for her uniform.

Not the shabbiest gesture at all.

•   •   •

Avery vanished. She’d kept track of the days of his sentence, expecting him to turn up once it was done. He didn’t. She would have felt relieved if she could have known he was truly gone.

She suspected Mr. Jones in the matter.

“I asked if he wanted to go again to London,” he admitted when she interrogated him one afternoon in the staff dining hall at the Swan Park. He was only passing through and had greeted her in the same manner he had the rest of the employees, but she had pulled him aside.

“He said of course, so I arranged for him to ride with Noel Dunning.”

“I can imagine how you
arranged
things.”

“It was not how you are thinking, girl. Civil, every bit of it, and nothing to pity him for.”

She believed him. She always would, it seemed. He was a maddening, uncomprehending block, and probably he had helped Avery in order to serve his own selfish designs; probably he thought her a silly, duped female. But somehow he seemed to know what she felt, learning Avery was gone for good now, and it was not the pure relief she’d anticipated. She was biting the inside of her lip to keep her face from breaking, but somehow he knew, and he put aside his own opinions.

“He’s not allowed at the hotel,” he said. “Perhaps that is why he didn’t give you a proper farewell.”

•   •   •

If nothing else, Avery Nash had left her with the skill to compose a graceful business letter. Sir Alton’s secretary complimented her style when he read the request to photograph the Duke of Winchester on the Sultan’s Road. Though Mr. Walbrook seemed reasonable and even kind, since he worked for Sir Alton, Betsey held private doubts as to whether he would actually forward the request to the Duke’s secretary. However, a reply soon arrived:
His Grace would be pleased to oblige, provided his grandchildren might be included.

As for Sir Alton’s suspension on new bookings, Betsey did not violate it, but neither did she deny the confirmations which arrived after his decree, and so she was able to fill a number of Saturdays despite the moratorium. It could only help her case when she addressed the board. For the same reason, she kept a record of the other inquiries that reached her desk. But how to respond to the inquirers so they would not think the entire scheme was defunct? She finally hit upon saying the requested dates were not available; should something come open, she would write. Two true statements that would buy her time until the board meeting.