The Typewriter Girl (41 page)

“I’ve made no secret of it.”

“Nor have I blamed you, a young man making his way. Yet—” A calculated hesitation, then a smile. “Neither have I considered you too thick to recognize a bird in the hand when it lands there. Someone of your background—you ought to hold tight. And the company relies upon you.” He gestured toward the Esplanade. “Idensea herself relies upon you.”

Suddenly, John’s depleted spirit rallied. “You’ll not put that on me. That is not all mine, and you’ll not put it on me.”

“For God’s sake—”

“Did you know every one of the confirmed dead was a local?
Our neighbors—why could you not say something to
them
?” John pointed to the podium where the speeches had been delivered. “Up there, why not speak to our neighbors? They came, and only to hear how they will
thrive
—”

“Better to expound on failure and defeat?”

“They deserve to be acknowledged, their part in this! What this company owes them deserves to be said. Why couldn’t you say it, a lifeboat station, something besides a twenty-year-old manual pump for our fire brigade? Some help to the families who . . . Charlie Elliot—his father delivered your own daughter . . . bless the bleeding Christ, it needed to be said.”

“It was not. The occasion.” The words were heavy with warning, but then Sir Alton sighed lightly. “It will come, I daresay, and I hope you will be there, but for now—go rest, Jones. You look like hell itself, and you’ve done more than your duty today.”

I hope you will be there.
John distrusted the liberality of the statement, sensing Sir Alton was foisting everything to him, all but blackmailing him into staying if he wanted to see things done right. Or was that something he clutched all on his own?

He went to the hotel, intending to eat and wash and borrow a conveyance, because the notion of cycling out to Sarah’s house brought a roaring protest from his body.

In the end, his body toppled his will. When he woke, it was dark, and someone was stealing his boots. Between slit eyelids, he registered the glint of brass buttons and was no longer alarmed.

“I’m going to The Bows.”

“Sarah is sleeping. Her daughters are there. The doctor gave her something. There is nothing to do until tomorrow.”

It seemed unlikely. But it sounded true, grounded in the authority of this girl who loved him.

He slept. Later, he discovered her shoulder, tender and bare, near his own. “I’m sorry,” she said, because he was weeping into her neck. Things were so broken, and he still did not see the way to fix them.

“Iefan, I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry. You loved him, and I’m sorry.”

Her voice broke with a sob. She took him into her arms as he covered her with his body, kissing her, thanking God she had come to him, thinking,
God, what if she had not?
Her flesh stole him from despair. Against her cheek, he could leave his tears; beneath his touch, her body quivered and her pleasure was his refuge. Such goodness here. That she should come to him, that their brokenness should make something whole, it was good, and she had brought it.

He made love to her, whispering, “I love you, Elisabeth. Bless God, I love you so.”

IF THE CARRIAGE STOPS:

You may be at the end of your ribbon.

—How to Become Expert in Type-writing

T
he plash of water, the press of daylight woke Betsey. The door to John’s bathroom stood ajar; she could see his back, bare, braces hanging from the waistband of his trousers. She smelled his soap and let her eyes close again, permitting herself one more fleeting, indulgent dream of breakfast here in this room, she wearing John’s shirt. Sitting beside him in services. A walk afterward, hands clasped.

Her lashes were wet when she opened her eyes. She and John had never sat in church without the Seilers or Sarah and Charlie between them.

Across the room, John was doing up the buttons of his shirt, his black hair lopping over his brow, his shoulders bearing the light from the windows.

He reached for his necktie draped on the back of a chair, and paused when he realized she was awake. She wished she had said it last night, or even a moment ago.
How I love you, Iefan, how I love you.
She wished she did not think it too late to say now.

He draped the tie round his neck. “A fuss it will kick up, me bringing you to the house.”

“I gave up my room to the grandchildren. No one expected me home.” The few things she had brought with her were stowed under her desk in the company office.

“Then where were you to be last night?”

“Here.”

His jaw was damp, pinked from his shave, and the light caught a ripple of muscle. They’d needed each other last night, but this morning, her choice troubled him.

She added, “So you don’t have to worry about smuggling me back in place.”

“I was prepared for the fuss, Elisabeth.”

Lying on her side in his bed, she gave a one-shouldered shrug, a thoughtless acceptance that the deed was done. Only a few moments later did she grasp his meaning, understand for what he was prepared. To spare her the scandal. To make the sacrifice, complete the rescue.

He was—he had been—prepared to marry her.

Beneath the pillow, she opened her hand, felt on her cheek the pressure of her fingertips through the feathers. “You keep mistaking me for some protected virgin.”

“I see you.” He made a point of it, fixing her with a thorough gaze. “I
see
you. You are the one mistaking it.”

“I would never have demanded that of you.” She sat up in the bed as her voice rose, clutching the sheet to her chest. “I never counted on it. We had the contract—”

“Never you throw up that sham contract to me again—”

“—and last night finished it.”

“—do you hear? A matter of convenience it’s been for you, and you’ll not have it—”

“There are no obligations between us!”

Silence fell. The room seemed to breathe and blink, light fading and rising again as a cloud passed, a shift creaking somewhere in the floor. John came to the bed, and she drew up her knees to give him a place to sit.

“Well, I love you, girl. No lie nor passing fancy last night, that.”

Betsey rested her forehead on her knees. She believed him. She believed she’d known even before he did. In the cocoon of her arms and legs, she saw Tinfell Cottage, blurred by her mocking lie to Sir Alton, by a cynicism all her own and perhaps uglier than Sir Alton’s. Why—
what
—was she fighting? Why couldn’t she take what she wanted, however it had arrived?

John found her foot beneath the bedcovers and gave it a squeeze. “Pearse Leland leaves today,” he said, making her lift her head. “I am going to see him, do all I can to get him to hire me for that London job.”

“Be careful.” She repeated what she had overheard between Leland and Sir Alton at the pleasure railway. “I meant to tell you the night of the ball, but—”

The ball had never happened.

John did not show much surprise. “No telling what damage that man has been doing me ever since he decided I ought to be grateful to spend the rest of my life managing his company. But I have board members who will speak for me, enough to undo the slurs, perhaps.”

“Of course.” She did not doubt that if he wanted it, the job was his. He did want it, obviously; it was the sort of position he had been seeking,
before
. Now,
after
, the fire and Charlie . . .

It settled uncomfortably within her, that he seemed to want it still.

“So,” she began, “whilst you washed up, waited for me to wake, you—” She bit her lip, afraid how the words would balloon once she spoke them, become urgent and fragile. “You decided we’d marry and go to London.”

His mouth winced in apology. “You hate London.”

She shook her head. “I only swore to myself I’d never live there again.”

“Different, you’d find it, no longer all on your own.”

Every thought of London was paired with the bleak and often frightening struggle of feeding and housing herself. To imagine herself as a wife there, she had to summon up images of her sister,
and Mrs. Dellaforde in Manchester, even Lady Dunning. None of them quite took.

“Let me say the rest of it.” After a quick glance at her, John studied the carpet, his thumb tracing upon the covers an outline of her toes. “I am for Wales, soon as I can get away. I want to see my family. I mean to speak to my dad, and get Owen, to have him come live with me.”

Betsey straightened. “Your brother? John, you are going to raise him yourself?” She knew John thought much of the boy, but he’d seen the child only twice in his life. “And what of your father, what will he say?”

“Dad will see. I can give Owen a better life. That he will see, with this job with Leland.”

“But—”

She bit down on her words. John plainly did not want to hear
but
. Despite a full night of sleep, his bath and shave, he looked—

She thought of her months as a laundress. Mountains of used-up-ness that made you despair if you thought of them all at once.

Gently: “But you’re an idiot.”

He smiled. He leaned toward her, and she lay back into the pillows as the deep, deep well of his palm skimmed her body, as his weight came upon her. He kissed her, and she thought,
I need him,
and also,
Isn’t this my trick?

All done up in his Sunday best, John settled beside her in the spent, tangled sheets, pulling her to his chest, stroking her hair back from her face.

“Waking up, changing everything about your life?” She spoke softly. She hardly knew whether she wanted him to hear. “Bringing a little child into all that turmoil with you? Iefan.”

“No turmoil. Putting things back is what it is, I know how it needs be, it is all very clear. I had my plans before, and I have them still. I know how it needs to be.”

“I wasn’t what you planned.”

“No, girl. In no way that.”

She could take that low laugh of his for nothing but appreciation. It was his certitude that filled her with fear for him. “Tell me
how you felt this morning. You decided you would save whatever scrap of honor I still have by marrying me, you’d give up your chances for money and connections, and children—”

“Owen we’d have.”

“No. He isn’t part of it.” Somehow, it made it worse that John had broken in with that particular justification. “He isn’t—”

She sat up. His collar looked like a knife-edge cutting into his flesh as he lay on the pillow. She tried to adjust it, then skated her fingertip along the starched crease of his shirtsleeve. On the bureau across the room, a black pasteboard frame barely contained John’s large family, his mother in the center, Owen a babe on her lap. A stray, wild thought of Avery Nash popped into her mind, of that cozy flat he’d had when she first knew him, his type-writer and books.

“Owen isn’t what you’d be giving up.”

“Elisabeth.” He was exasperated.

“Just tell me. How did you feel?”

“What do you think? I felt glad, I felt . . . relieved, that’s what. . . . It was good, a good decision. It
is
.”

He turned his face to the ceiling when she didn’t agree. She couldn’t. She was at a loss, taken unaware by
relieved
, unsure what she had expected or hoped for in the first place.

“Do you think this morning was the first time I’d thought of marrying you? The Kursaal was finished, Elisabeth, the end of the season was coming. I was looking for a new position. Bless God, Pearse Leland had all but offered outright. Had I set to it, he would have, whatever Sir Alton was rigging behind my back. But—” He propped up on an elbow. “I was dragging my feet.”

He waited for her to draw the conclusion.
Because of you.

“Couldn’t think how to do it,” he added.

Leaving you.

“Too hard it felt, but this morning . . .”

Again, he waited.

She said: “You believed your choice had been taken away, and you felt relieved.”

Wrong conclusion. A shot of dismay, then a stone wall of challenge. Betsey turned her back on it, removing herself from the bed.

“That was not my meaning, don’t say it that way.”

Her clothes were waiting in the neat stack she’d folded last night. She began to dress, her hands trembling. “I know, it isn’t very nice. It isn’t anything you’d find in a poem. But neither of us is much for fine poetry, John.”

“God damn it, you’re twisting it, you’re making it—” In frustration, he bolted from the bed and came to her, putting his hand over the remaining garments in her stack of clothing. “Why are you making it into this?”

“Because it’s
you
! You, John, the one who trusts his instincts, who makes decisions without a backward glance, at least when it’s not to do with me. You were
glad
to have the decision taken away from you.”

“You don’t understand.”

“I can’t—it doesn’t make sense. Nothing you’re about now makes sense. I don’t understand how you can leave Idensea, and Sarah, just now. Someone else could, not you.”