The Typewriter Girl (38 page)

A band played across from the station, and the massing crowd made it difficult for the carriage to find a place amongst the retinue of vehicles that would accompany the Duke and his family on the tour of Idensea. The architect directed the coachman to let them disembark and walk the rest of the way. At the station steps, John noticed a sunny yellow parasol imperiling the eyes of other spectators as it bobbed about.

Lillian Gilbey. She and her family had been due to arrive the day before yesterday, but John had not seen them until now. Lillian beamed at him; John felt as if she’d willed him to look in her direction.

She stretched out an arm as she pressed to the front of the crowd. “I knew you’d rescue me from this crush. It’s all right,” she added, perhaps noticing his uncertainty as she grabbed his hand. “Mama said I might go with you—see her there with Aunt Constance and the girls? Papa’s in town still, but he’ll be here in time for the gala. Help me over the rope, won’t you?”

John glanced down at the narrow rope marking off the Duke’s path. “Lils, I’m helping with the tour. I’m not free to squire you about. You’ll have your introduction tonight, just as I promised.”

“Oh, you needn’t worry a bit about introducing me to the
Duke
now
—truly, I only need some relief from the heat and noise. I won’t be a smidge of bother.”

She was irrepressible. He’d been fond of that quality, he remembered, along with her smile, always at its most beguiling when she wanted something. The brilliance of it pleased him. Lillian nursed grudges, and he probably deserved a cooler greeting, leaving early after he’d tried to upset her music party.

“Take my shoulders,” he said. He lifted her over the rope, and she thanked him and reached up to pat his tie and said he looked very dapper, even if he had been exceedingly naughty in not showing his face since she’d arrived, but then he’d been very busy, she was certain, and she promised again not to be a bother, but did he know, “I’ve never yet met Lady Dunning and Sir Alton. Perhaps, while we’re waiting for the train . . . ?”

Inside the station, coming to the platform where the Duke and his party would disembark, John realized his job-seeking efforts had been lacking of late. Besides the pier company board members, the platform held at least a dozen other men he should have been speaking to. But with the Kursaal opening tumbling at him like a boulder off a mountainside, when had he last had the time to lounge in the smoking room?

Saturday nights, he chided himself. Sunday afternoons. Pearse Leland (of Leland Steel) noted John’s arrival with a cordial lift of his chin, and John would have joined that circle of conversation if not for Lillian tugging at his arm and telling him she saw Lady Dunning and Sir Alton, wasn’t it lucky to find them together, but where were the children, Mr. Dunning and his sister?

Surprised she didn’t already know, John started to tell her Dunning was in Vienna, but glancing in the direction Lillian indicated, he caught the eye of Walbrook, Sir Alton’s secretary, and knew at once something was the matter.

“Horace Gilbey’s daughter? Darling, Horace Gilbey’s daughter,” Lady Dunning said upon the introduction. The repetition was for Sir Alton’s benefit. John could see him arriving at the connection—
the carpet maker
—though whether he recalled that the
carpet maker’s daughter had been one of the reasons for Noel’s frequent absences from Idensea, John couldn’t say.

In any case, he was more concerned with what news Walbrook possessed. He left Lillian to the chitchat and turned toward Walbrook, who opened his portfolio and presented a printed paper to John.

“Mr. Jones, you’ll want a copy of the new itinerary.”

Only that innocuous statement. Still, even as he pulled out his spectacles, John had a fair idea of the alteration he would find.

“When was this decided?” he murmured.

“Quite recently. Or I can only assume so, as I myself had to wake the printer last night to order the copies.”

Walbrook was too discreet to exchange even a knowing glance, but surely he joined John’s suspicion that the new schedule had existed a good long time before making its appearance today.

John found Sir Alton watching him with an expression indicative of sympathy. “You’ll be disappointed. But it was the only thing.”

“I’m not disappointed. However . . .” John folded his spectacles and put them away into his pocket. Disappointment figured little to nothing in his feelings at the moment. “It just won’t do, Sir Alton.”

“John, dear!” Lady Dunning gasped. She had not often witnessed John directly opposing Sir Alton, but time was too short for the oblique strategies he usually employed.

“We need that photograph,” John said, not to Lady Dunning.

“Good heavens,” she replied nevertheless, “a photographer will be along all day. There will be ample opportunity—”

John had been intending to mind his manners and let her finish, no matter how impatient he felt, but she suddenly stopped, smiled, and drew herself and Lillian to the side, speaking of Vienna.

“We need that photograph of the Duke and his family on the Sultan’s Road,” John repeated.

“You’re making too much of it, Jones. The schedule was tight; I provided some breathing space. We’ll be glad we have it, you’ll see.”

“Everything is in place for it. Every party involved is expecting it. Miss Dobson is there to oversee and make it as clean a process as possible.”

“Oh!” Sir Alton exclaimed. “If someone had mentioned the type-writer girl was at the helm of it all, I should have had no qualms whatever. However, as it’s done . . .”

He shrugged. John rubbed his thumbs along the sides of his forefingers. Across the way, the architect’s daughter was leaning into her husband, playfully poking a finger into his chest.

“You see Mr. and Mrs. Croyer there?” he asked Sir Alton. “They just returned from holiday.”

“So I’ve heard. The French Riviera, no less.”

“Right, the French Riviera. They aren’t nobility. Wealthy enough, I suppose, but not extraordinarily so. And they traveled to the Continent for their seaside holiday, and in that, they are not so extraordinary, either.”

“Oh, goodness . . .” Sir Alton put a finger on his bemused, indulgent smile. “You think to educate me on my own business.”

“Idensea cannot depend—”

“How obliging. How—”

“—on people—”

“—
novel
. How—”

“—like the Croyers—”

“—superfluous—”

“—to make—”

But then John gave up trying to talk through Sir Alton’s relentless lilt. Like everything else about his person, it was a wall. Sir Alton continued until assured John had yielded and finished: “It simply is not dignified, a duke on that garish, vulgar
entertainment
we were forced to build.”

He paused, perhaps to see if John would offer further argument. John didn’t.

Sir Alton patted John’s elbow. “You’ve not forgotten I’m willing to pass over my own son to give you the opportunity to head
this company? But you understand I need to know you care for Idensea’s future.”

John did not reassure him that he cared for Idensea. Walbrook mouthed an apology as he followed Lady Dunning and Sir Alton to join another group on the platform.

John told Lillian, “I’ve got to go make a bosom friend of a coach driver. And get a message to Elisabeth. Shall I deliver you to your mother, or would you like to stay here on your own?”

“I don’t care.”

Despite his preoccupation, John felt a mild alarm hearing Lillian Gilbey claiming apathy on . . . any subject, really, but especially one with direct bearing on her. She seemed to mean it, too, her gaze as distant as her voice had been. But then she realized he had noticed, and her face transformed, taking on that beatific smile of hers.

“Mama, if you please, and then I’ll release you to enigmatic errands. These messages you’re sending to ladies are not familiar ones, I trust?”

If screwed too tightly against the iron frame, [the stopcollar] may interfere with the proper working of the machine.

—How to Become Expert in Type-writing

T
hat photographs carried no sound was a fact Betsey had never given any particular thought until this moment, when it seemed their finest quality. The Duke’s youngest grandson was in a red rage, yowling and twisting in the arms of his nurse, but however miserable the poor babe (and his nurse), the final image would show nothing but silent cheer.

And everyone else did seem in good spirits, for the most part. John’s message, warning her to have the photographer and all the other details in readiness earlier than planned, had been something of a surprise, but no great trouble. After closing the Sultan’s Road to the public, she and the photographer had even been able to plan the arrangement in front of the hanging gardens in the main arch. Willing bystanders had substituted for the Duke and the others of the party, and so when the true subjects arrived, Betsey could assist rather ably in getting everyone into place. Although—

Had she truly ordered His Grace to stand rather than sit, and to make a three-quarter turn toward the camera? Despite Mr. Seiler’s tutoring on addressing nobility, she feared it was true.

But the Duke had not seemed to mind. For an aristo, in fact, he seemed quite affable, his sole request in the process being to keep a particular grandchild in his arms.

The culmination of hours of preparation came suddenly in an acrid plume of smoke. One more, and then the arrangement broke like an ice floe, the babe’s mama being the first to drop her pose and hurry to her son.

From her place beside the photographer, Betsey noticed some uncertainty, a hesitation amongst those remaining, and went to see if she might be of assistance. The Duke wondered whether there was to be a demonstration of the pleasure railway—why, the youngsters were counting on it.

John flashed her a grin as he took aside the brakeman who had posed for the photograph. Soon the passengers were settled in, and the cars disappeared into the first tunnel. The automatically tripped organ sent music drifting out to the platform.

Sir Alton elected not to ride, though he had taken his place for the photograph. He had departed his carriage with a curse, but since then, he’d held his mask. “As you wish, Miss Dobson,” he’d answered when she had directed him into place, his smile never slipping.

He spoke now with one of the men who had arrived with the touring party. Sir Alton’s side of the conversation was too low to hear, naturally, but Betsey heard the word
contractor
from the other man and soon realized they spoke of John. “I visited the Kursaal the day I arrived,” the man said. “No humble endeavor, that, nor the Swan. He seems well able . . .”

Then: “And the delay?”

And: “Of course, London is a different animal altogether.”

Betsey frowned, frowned more as she continued to eavesdrop. The man in the black suit was someone both Mr. Seiler and John had pointed out to her at the hotel. Pearse Leland, some man of business from London.

Mr. Walbrook, ever a convenient distance from Sir Alton, approached her. “Well done, Miss Dobson,” he said in an undertone,
and put out a hand, not in the way a gentleman took a lady’s proffered fingers but as though he would shake her hand.

And so he did, with more vigor than she would have predicted. “Thank you, Mr. Walbrook, but your cooperation made it all much easier. I gather there was some sort of snag earlier?”

Mr. Walbrook pulled a thin stack of papers from his portfolio. “Would you mind disposing of these for me? They’re rather useless since Mr. Jones apparently commandeered the Duke’s coach.”

The papers were copies of the tour itinerary. She read it over, and when she glanced up, Sir Alton was approaching.

“His Grace did not appear terribly put out, if I may say so, sir,” Mr. Walbrook ventured as Betsey folded away the itineraries into her pocket.

“Indeed not,” Sir Alton agreed cheerfully. “I daresay he’ll return from the little expedition even more enthused than when he boarded. Who should have guessed a duke to have such common tastes?” His own enthusiasm had a vicious edge to it. “Our Mr. Jones, I suppose,” he added, in answer to his own question. “He’s clever about a number of things, and a decided expert on common ones. And how
are
you coming along with your assignment, Miss Dobson?”

Floundering in the wake of his insult, Betsey at first thought he meant the photograph. But no, the only assignment Sir Alton had entrusted to her was to keep John in Idensea. Her confusion multiplied: Less than a minute ago, he’d been listing John’s shortcomings to Pearse Leland. If he thought so poorly of John, why—

But she hardly needed more than that to sort it through. Even with just half the conversation, she’d known Sir Alton had fed Leland lies, or at least exaggerations, and not because he didn’t respect John. Because he wanted John here in Idensea.

As did she. Her stomach turned. She and Sir Alton, allies.

Betsey tugged at her fingers, girlish and shy. “You may find Tinfell Cottage out of your hands sooner than you expected, sir.”