The Typewriter Girl (40 page)

No John amongst them.

With a last look about, smoke stinging her eyes and throat, Betsey turned toward the steps that would take her down to the foreshore. No idle spectators here clogging the way, just the dark, writhing confusion of activity as boats brought the rescued to shore. “Here, luv, get these out to the poor things,” a voice said, and Betsey found her arms filled with a tangle of the hotel’s linens.

Offering the dry wrappings, she felt a bit of relief. The people were shaken, yes, and soaked, many of them, but they were all right. As long as they’d been found by one of the boats, they were all right.

“It’s going now!” came a call from the dark, and Betsey and everyone else looked out to the water in time to see the roof of the pavilion cave in, collapsing like a child’s blanket fort. Bright debris sprayed the air, the water lit and hissed, and waves lifted the flaming timber.

Betsey swallowed back a surge of tears and offered the last towel in her hand to Deborah Walton, the vicar’s daughter. She’d been with Judith, her sister—had anyone seen her, Deborah wanted to know, her gasping so harsh and deep Betsey could scarce make out the words. But when she did understand, Betsey was able to answer yes, to say that she remembered passing Judith as she’d come down to the surf; someone had been carrying her. Saying this, Betsey felt the same relief she saw in Deborah’s face. It confirmed, again, that all would be well again soon. Deborah and Judith safe, reunited. So, too, everyone else. So, too, Charlie and his mother. Perhaps already.

But when Betsey found Sarah, she waited yet. Betsey slipped an arm around her waist, and they stood, eyes fixed on each approaching vessel. A cutter brought a handful of rescues, a rowboat two more. And then, not far from where they stood, another small fishing boat headed in.

“It’s John,” Betsey said as soon as she recognized the figure leaping from the boat. She hugged Sarah’s waist. “He’ll be able to tell us something.”

She called his name, and he seemed to hear her over the roar of surf and fire. Sarah put up a hand to wave, but he was already bending back down to the boat. When he faced them again, it was with Charlie in his arms.

With a sob, Sarah broke into a run to meet John as he strode from the surf. John’s coat was gone, and his white shirt clung to his shoulders, soaked. His black hair framed a stony expression. It offered Betsey no clues to the condition of Charlie, whose face was turned up to the night sky. He’d lost his shoes. John glanced down at him, then shifted the boy closer into his chest.

“Dr. Nally,” she heard him say to Sarah as they met, and immediately, Sarah ran for the seawall, where the doctor was tending those who needed care.

Betsey matched John’s relentless strides. “Charlie,” she whispered when she saw the dark spot in the boy’s light hair, how it was blurring brightly, wetly into John’s sleeve. Tears in her eyes, she looked at John, searching his face again.

“I don’t know,” he said, and looked away, and increased his pace.

•   •   •

“I could be of some use here,” Betsey said, though her survey of the foreshore was a doubtful one. John understood her conflict, one instinct urging her to help here on the shore, another to remain at Sarah’s side.

Charlie, if you spoke loudly enough, would respond. He’d rolled unfocused eyes to his mother, said something with the word
penny
in it, but it was as though he were under the water still, sluggish and vague. Dr. Nally said the cut on his head would be best stitched, but it was minor, however frightening the bleeding had seemed. He recommended the boy be moved home to rest, and he, Dr. Nally, would see him there soon. Lady Dunning, who had ordered the hotel linens brought to the foreshore and had spoken comfort to every person rescued from the pier, had volunteered
her coach so that Charlie and Sarah might be transferred more comfortably.

“Be with Sarah,” John said to Betsey. Reason told him she was in no danger and would have the makeshift clinic and information point that had sprung up here organized in a flash, but something very unreasonable needed her safely home and close to Charlie.

Betsey nodded. Then, impulsively, she reached her hand to the back of his head and pulled him to her cheek. “Don’t go out there again,” she whispered, and he knew something more powerful than worry, fiercer than fear, had insisted on that impossible request. How desperately he wanted to honor it.

“I will take care.”

He helped her into the coach. Charlie looked a giant and a babe at once, sprawling over his mother’s lap, a white bandage scarring the portrait of peaceful sleep.
I had a concussion,
John reminded himself. He’d been not so much older than Charlie; it had been severe; it had taken part of his sight for a time. And now he was fine. He was fine. Charlie, too.

The coach pulled away. John turned to look at the line of raging light that had been the pier. When had the pavilion fallen? Perhaps when he’d been under the water searching for Charlie. He didn’t know. His lungs burned still. He filled them up and headed out to the surf again.

•   •   •

Hours later, he ran fresh water from the pump at Sarah’s carriage house over his arms, an effort to rid himself of salt and sand and smoke, though he knew they had dried in his clothes, just like the blood crusted on his sleeve. He put his head under the pump, then shook out his hair like a dog, and when he stilled, there was Betsey with a towel. As he sat on the pump platform, she dried his face, pressed each of his arms inside the towel, then rubbed his hair and neck.

“How is he?”

“Not conscious. He was restless in the coach—jerking his arms about—but he’s not roused since.”

“I didn’t see Nally’s carriage.”

“He’s been round twice. I expect him in another hour or so. Miss Everson’s sitting with Sarah.”

Betsey’s fingers combed his hair. John pulled her closer.

“The fire’s done? There’s still so much smoke.”

His face moved against her bodice, some sort of gesture to answer her, but he couldn’t speak. The fire done? It would smolder for hours yet, but the promenade was destroyed, so there was no more danger to the Esplanade. No more people were stranded by the flames. The rescuable had been rescued.

But three bodies had been brought to shore and covered with sheets. There was a list, too long, of missing. And when John had left, black wreckage was already littering the shore, and there stood the vicar with elderly Mr. Fowler, still trying to convince him no more boats were coming.

John pulled Betsey into his lap. Holding her did not banish the terror, it didn’t drown the fear or the heartbreak, but it did make bearing those things seem possible.

In Charlie’s room, Miss Everson was certainly asleep, and John thought Sarah must be, too, for she lay beside Charlie on his bed, as still as her unconscious son. The door creaked as he let himself in, but several moments passed before she said, “Who is it?”

She did not respond when John answered. He came to the foot of the bed for whatever visual appraisal of Charlie’s condition he could make, but the lamp was low and Sarah huddled next to him, her hand at rest on his cheek. Had he roused? Opened his eyes? What had the doctor said? None of his whispered questions were answered.

He waited.

The room wasn’t silent. Miss Everson breathed gutturally, Sarah in staccato sobs. And Charlie—

Suddenly, John’s heart was pounding in his ears.

He almost overturned the lamp in his haste to reach it and turn
it up. Sarah braced her arm like iron against him when he tried to move her hand from Charlie’s face, grunted and resisted his increasing force, and over the boy’s body, a fierce and quiet war ensued. Finally, John ordered, “Let loose, Sarah, Christ, let loose,” and used honest strength to push her back. She wilted into the mattress, shaking with sobs.

“Charlie!”

He shouted an inch from Charlie’s face, where the warmest place was where Sarah’s hand had rested. He remembered how Charlie’s eyes had opened when he’d done that on the shore, so he shouted for a long time. He remembered holding Charlie in the boat, the difficulty of finding that slow, dim pulse, and so for a long time he searched. And then he shouted again.

Again. How many times?

Sarah was begging him to stop.

He sank to his knees beside the bed, Charlie’s wrist circled in his hand. “Sarah.” The word scratched his raw throat. He didn’t understand how she had lain there. He didn’t understand how Charlie had gone, his mother at his side, how there could have been no warning to make her call for help, no time to do anything.

He felt tension in Charlie’s arm. His mother, pulling his body to her. John let go. He pressed his face into the bedclothes as Sarah’s long, low keen twisted through the room, pulling tight as a rope around his chest.
Stop it,
he wanted to tell her,
stop it,
because the sound was killing him, it was worse than a rope, it was burrowing inside him, eating him alive.

And yet, when the sound did stop, he knew he’d been wrong. What was more fitting, more righteous, than that moan from Sarah’s soul? Not the quiet that came after it, white as a frozen field, a deadness in it that belied the throbbing, twisting growth of this pain.

Sarah’s voice came, flat, empty, the opposite of her cry. “Was he afraid?”

Of course. They all were. John had known nothing as sickening as that moment he’d spotted Charlie up there on the pier.

“He was brave,” he answered. “Prepared to dive off that pier.” John had taught him to dive the year Dr. Elliot had passed. He’d nearly upset the boat, jumping up to get Charlie’s attention and wave him off the dive.

“I did not ask whether he was brave.”

John made a fist. He wanted to cover Charlie’s head with his hand once more, but he would have felt like a trespasser, the way Sarah held him.

“I want to know whether my child was afraid. I want to know why didn’t you—” A sob plowed through her voice, crumpling her words. “You could have—no one else—I was standing there, waiting, and I saw—there was no one else hurt as he was! No one else! Why didn’t you make sure?”

His head buzzed as he tried to sort out the answer to her question, reviewing flashes of memory as he realized Sarah must be right. He’d been in the water, waiting for Charlie’s jump. He’d swum where Charlie landed; he’d known when it was taking too long for him to resurface. How many times had he gone under to search? Someone had speculated the boy had hit the underside of one of the craft on his way up. Why had John not anticipated that, made certain there was more clearance?

He left the room because Sarah was telling him to get out. Screaming for him to get out. He didn’t know how many times she had said it.

Every member of the household huddled in the corridor outside Charlie’s room. Someone brushed past him to tend to Sarah. Weeping, questions. Assurances: The doctor had been sent for; Mrs. Elliot didn’t know what she was saying. He squeezed past, summoning up the responses they needed.

Betsey slipped her hand into his and did not make him stop until they came to the door.

“I’ll send the wires to her daughters,” he said.

“Let someone else. She will want you.”

He smeared the tears on one of Betsey’s cheeks as he kissed the other. “Send to me if anything’s needed.”

•   •   •

Mr. Fowler still waited on the foreshore, and the vicar with him. John joined them after he sent the telegrams, and the three men sat in the sand, passing barely a dozen words amongst them, moving only as the tide dictated.

Sunrise bleached the sky.

The pier looked like a wasp.

John saw some of his men and, on the spot, hired them to supervise clearing the washed-up wreckage from the foreshore. The act was the initial pebble of responsibility that came landsliding toward him the moment he reached his office.

He spoke with witnesses and survivors, compiling information for the Baumston & Smythe agent who would arrive soon, as well as for Sir Alton, who anticipated an inquest. All agreed on the source of the fire, a flare-up in the kitchen of the refreshment stand, decorative bunting hanging too near, easy fuel. Precious minutes were lost as the staff attempted to put it out. One man wept, describing how the flames turned from manageable to monstrous between blinks of his eyes.

Four of the missing were located, safe and sound. The body of Mrs. Fowler was recovered. Her name was added to the list of the dead, along with that of Charles Simon Elliot, who had almost reached his fourteenth birthday.

•   •   •

That afternoon, the Duke presided over a subdued official opening of the Kursaal. John attended because Sir Alton insisted, and found himself swaying in place as the various officials had their say, the exhaustion of three sleepless, pressure-loaded days finally collapsing over him.

No gala ball, no fireworks, no Spanish soprano. A band played a hymn, and the vicar remembered the victims and their families in his prayer. The afternoon sun bore down on the crowd, which had stretched itself rather lethargically across the lawn, more
interested in shade and breezes than in being able to hear and see the program.

The Kursaal testified to the town’s inspiring growth, and now it also stood for Idensea’s hope and resilience; all of the Duke’s remarks were appropriate. Sir Alton’s followed a similar vein, but they left John cold and unsettled.

After the ribbon cutting, Sir Alton and the company architect approached him. They’d been discussing the pier. The new one.

They appeared puzzled when John could only stare. Finally, he shook his head. “I am not speaking of this now, there’s no reason. I am—” He paused, saw their puzzlement grow, felt his own thoughts fray.

“Done” was all he could think to say.

Sir Alton followed him beyond the thick of the crowd. “
Done?
You mean you’re not staying?”

“I do.”

“For the opening?”

Sir Alton’s request for clarification made John halt. “
I
am your worry?”

“A great many things worry me just now, Jones,” he snapped in an uncharacteristic display of irritation, no doubt allowed by his own weariness. It was suppressed immediately. “And, yes, you are amongst them, considering your recent efforts to discover what leaving Idensea might gain you.”