Betsey smiled, but the child was distracted by a seatmate and didn’t wait for a reply. The train pulled into Idensea, a small station with just two platforms, though they were covered. In the lull between arrival and departure, the station was largely empty, and a shock went through Betsey when she realized Mr. Jones was there, waiting on the platform. The distance was significant, and his light-colored clothes were nothing like the serious black suit he’d worn at the Baumston & Smythe offices, but she recognized how he stood: a favored prince, or new angel, or—for heaven’s sake—a contented dog, solid and easy, confident of his master’s goodwill. A straw boater sat far back on his head, revealing a shock of his black hair.
Basic logic deserted her, and Betsey thought, He’s come to meet me. The very comfort in the notion was what made her distrust it, and in the next moment, she realized it was impossible. She’d arrived four days ahead of schedule, and he’d given her directions to make her own way to the Swan Park Hotel, where the pier company had its offices. Then, with the train reaching its full stop, she saw him adjust his hat to a more level and appropriate position. She noticed the flowers in his hand. She understood his tan-colored Norfolk jacket was for leisure, not business.
He headed toward the first-class carriages. Betsey remained in her seat as the children and their chaperones filed from the compartment, then followed the conductor. He bade her wait on a bench on the platform; he gave her Thief’s cage but kept her valise to make certain she wouldn’t run off. Run. Where? Mr. Jones, with whom she’d had a single ten-minute conversation, was her sole resource.
Now he greeted a group from the train, a mother and her daughters, Betsey guessed, all of them dressed as prettily as cakes in a baker’s window; the mother and the eldest, a young woman, wore high-crowned hats made higher with a profusion of trimmings. The two younger girls, somewhere between ten and fifteen, had yellow hair spilling down their backs, lit by the skylights over the platform. Mr. Jones crouched on his heels before the youngest, to all appearances in a most earnest conversation with the child before he presented a handful of posies and let her choose. He rose and let the middle daughter make her choice, then the mother, whose neck took on a girlish slant as she accepted the gift. His hands were empty when finally he turned to the young woman.
But no, a surprise, another flower, a white blossom distinct from the others, somehow produced a moment after the tease. The mother turned, stooping to help the girls affix their flowers to their sailor blouses. Mr. Jones and the young woman drew together. She tilted her head over her shoulder, and her hat hid Mr. Jones’s face as he stooped to pin the posy to her bodice. Briefly, he drew even closer. And then his laughter was ringing down the platform, and he stepped back just as the mother finished with the younger girls.
The young lady adjusted her posy, moving it from where Mr. Jones had pinned it and refastening it at her waist. The mother chatted with Mr. Jones as they waited, her hand slipping down her youngest daughter’s hair again and again. Betsey watched the absent gesture, hypnotized, until a pang of something like homesickness (silly!) struck so hard she had to look away, bending down to lift the cloth covering Thief’s cage.
She looked up when she heard the train lurching out of the station. Down the platform, the stationmaster spoke with Mr. Jones. All of them, Mr. Jones and his women, were looking at her. And Betsey could well imagine the course of the conversation: Mr. Jones, we’ve a fare-dodger, claims you promised to pay once she arrived in Idensea. Easy enough to write her a fine or turn her over to the constable if you don’t want her.
Mr. Jones seemed to squint in her direction. His eyes were green. Betsey couldn’t see them from here, of course, but she suddenly remembered his green eyes. She remembered he’d put on spectacles to read, and that his right eye drooped a touch because of a pink scar at its outside corner. Below that, another knot of scar tissue made his bottom lip puff slightly. The top lip? Only a brisk and graceful scrawl. Betsey remembered all that, so surely, surely he would recognize her, too, and claim her.
She stood.
Mr. Jones nodded at the stationmaster and turned away, ushering the mother and daughters from the platform.
Betsey needed a new plan.
If you form a careless habit in the beginning, you will probably always keep it.
—How to Become Expert in Type-writing
Lillian Gilbey was peeved when John told her he would meet them at the Swan in half an hour. John discerned this from how amiably she agreed to the delay and how she chastised her mother and sisters for expressing disappointment. “By all means,” she said as he handed her into the carriage he’d hired, “take all the time you like. We will find plenty of diversion and not suffer a bit for your delay.”
He pressed her hand before letting it go. “Thirty minutes or less, I swear it.”
“Thirty minutes or fewer, thirty minutes or more, you really needn’t swear over so trifling a thing, I’m sure!”
She smiled like the first dawn. Peeved, all right. John laughed to himself as the carriage pulled away. Well, what was he to do? He could hardly leave his new manager to the mercy of the stationmaster, and he knew he could persuade Lillian back round to a good humor later. If the weather held, he’d planned for a stroll down the pier and along the Esplanade, where he would be able to show off the building sites for the pleasure railway and the Kursaal, the indoor amusement pavilion due open by the time the Gilbeys returned for their August holiday. Then to the hotel for a tour and a specially ordered tea, with six kinds of sandwiches and at least as many desserts by the Swan Park’s new pastry chef.
At some interval in the midst of all that, he needed to get Lillian alone and Say Something. It had been niggling in his brain for months, though he’d kept putting it by since his mother’s death this spring past—Say Something. The sticky portion of it was that what he truly wished to say amounted to Save my place, Lillian.
Which wouldn’t do. Not for Miss Gilbey, who was buttercup-pretty, fresh and soft, for all her feints of sophistication; who was clever, even in the ways she played it down with her beaux; who had a father usefully connected, nearly as rich as John himself intended to become. Such a girl as that could be a man’s best asset, and she was not a common commodity for the likes of John Jones, born Iefan Rhys-Jones in a Pembrokeshire slate town. To such a girl as that, no man could say, Save my place, and I’ll come back for you.
That was the trouble with Lillian Gilbey. She’d come along too soon. He would be finishing his work here in Idensea in a few months; he couldn’t ask for Lillian’s hand until he had another job secured. A fine thing it would be if he could put her up for a season, the way his mother had done with the blackberry conserve each summer. Lillian would sweeten up that way, and one frost-bright Christmas morning, he’d take her down and lick her up with his toast.
He was hungry. He’d taken time only for a leftover apple tart this morning.
Back inside the railway station, he found the stationmaster’s office, where Stationmaster Carey had said he would have Miss Dobson wait. However, he discovered the door locked, and he thought the room empty until a shadow of movement caught the corner of his eye. He removed his hat and put his forehead to the door’s glass pane, turning his head so he could see the far end of the office. There, Miss Dobson was opening the window, engaged in effecting her escape.
Trying to, rather. Perhaps the thing had been painted shut. Perhaps she’d forgotten to unlock it. John could see she’d shoved Carey’s desk to the wall, and now she was in a wide-kneed squat atop it, apparently seeking better leverage. Her bum bobbed with each renewed heave against the stubborn sash.
Bless God. Bless the bleeding Christ, what did she think she was doing? He would have liked to see what would come of this caper, but instead, he knocked on the glass, two decorous taps.
She whirled about, tipping dangerously before she managed to stand. Her skirts sent a number of items on Carey’s desk flying. John saluted her with two fingers to his brow.
Then he ducked down to the keyhole.
“Warm, are you, Miss Dobson?” he called through it, then peeked at her over the wooden portion of the door. Still on the desk, hair falling, twin cherries for cheeks. Wildly, he wondered, was this the right girl, the one he’d promised to hire? Because she did not at the moment seem the same to him as she had in London.
Through the keyhole: “I’m going to see the stationmaster and fetch the key, you see. You ought come down from there. See if you can’t restore Stationmaster Carey’s belongings, and I’ll return shortly to collect you.”
He dashed off. He knew Carey because he’d come to be acquainted with nearly everyone in Idensea at least a little in the past four years he’d lived there. Carey was a stockholder in the Idensea Pier & Seaside Pleasure Building Company—a respectable few dozen shares, if he was not mistaken.
The man scolded John, said he ought to fine him and the girl both, and John expressed the proper regret and appreciation, pulling the price of Miss Dobson’s fare from his pocket as he did. He bit from his tongue a question about the necessity of locking the girl up and letting her think he wasn’t coming back. Instead, he suggested Mrs. Carey might well enjoy a dinner at the Swan this week: Why didn’t they stop by Thursday as special guests? All was forgiven by the time the lock unhitched.
“Wondrous convenient things, doors are,” John said in a low voice as Miss Dobson exited the office, a free woman. Her frown became more severe. She had brows like a demon’s, even when she wasn’t frowning, he remembered that.
She was also just his height. John had noted that the first time they’d spoken, at Baumston & Smythe, and he remembered it now as she kept an equal pace beside him on the walk from the rail station. This lane, known as the Compass Walk, shaded by pines and wending through tiny parks, was meant to offer the pedestrian from the station or town center a leisurely amble to the Esplanade, but John had a deadline, so they hurried until he saw they would be waiting for the tram anyway. Horse-drawn trams, alas—Sir Alton had convinced the county council an electric one would be an eyesore.
He watched Miss Dobson take in her first sight of Idensea’s seafront. Steam cranes and scaffolding still blocked much of the Kursaal, a three-acre site on the cliff above, but just west they had a good prospect of the pier, eight hundred and one feet toward the horizon, the concert pavilion a white jewel at its head, a paddle steamer now departing its landing stage. More than a thousand tons of iron and steel beneath the wooden promenade; seventy-two cast-iron screw piles, some of which took more than a week to secure into the seafloor. One man’s life lost before it was finished, another man maimed. The reason he’d come to Idensea four years ago, to build that pier.
Miss Dobson gave it a silent, restless glance which soon moved on, out, to the sea and sky, perhaps to discern the Needles parading away from the Isle of Wight, certainly to avoid meeting his eyes. Even in her cloak, too dark and heavy for May, and incongruous with her little straw hat, she was all angles and points. Every part of her profile threatened to make a straight line and then, at the last possible moment, tipped up. Her lips, for example: straight and pink until they thinned into tiny curled-up lines. The same sort of tilt for her pointed nose and chin, her demonic eyebrows, and a hint of it at the corners of her eyes (color?—he hadn’t a notion, even though at her height she could look him straight in the eye). Even the fringe across her forehead was severely straight but for a rebellious curve kicking out from the temple.
She glanced over at him, then away. Brown eyes. Brown, brown. Teary, too, and the tip of her nose red. John crouched beside the birdcage she clasped before her and turned up the cloth to find its occupant, a yellow canary shifting in response to the burst of daylight. Its willow-twig cage had been mended with string and newspaper.
“There’s pretty.” The words came out laden with his Welsh accent. It happened sometimes, now because he intended some comfort. “What’s his name?”
“Thief.” Her voice was thick; she’d not recovered herself yet.
“Thief! Poor creature there, such a name to overcome.”
“I didn’t choose it.”
“Will he sing?”
“Female. That’s why she was given to me. A neighbor of mine. Didn’t want her.”
She sounded steadier now. John thought it safe to rise. Finding her swiping an eye with the hood of her cloak, he offered his handkerchief. She took it the way she’d accepted the job he’d offered her: warily, like Jack’s mother regarding the magic beans just before she chucked them out the window.
What would he do with her? And why wouldn’t the tram come? John tapped his thumb against the twine-wrapped handle of Miss Dobson’s valise and tried to estimate the size of the crowds strolling along the Esplanade and the pier. Certainly greater than at last year’s Whitsun holiday, but it pained him to think what they might have been if only the Sultan’s Road had been ready to open. He’d pushed as much as he could, but Sir Alton’s initial opposition to the construction of the pleasure railway had troubled the project throughout.
“Am I sacked, then?” he heard her ask.
Trepidation filled her voice. John reminded himself that, yes, she was entirely justified in her fear of being dismissed, but still, he struggled to reconcile this timid, teary girl with the one he’d met in London. Where was she? That girl had moved like a lissome general, Joan of Arc in a shirtwaist. That girl had quirked up a curious eye to see who else had caught Gerald Baumston’s offhand reference to a deleted rider and furtively slid Cornelius Fuller’s inkhorn out of range a full minute before he began flailing. That girl permitted herself to share—or begin to share—an across-the-room smile with John, seeing he knew what she had done.
That’s what I need, John had known that day, and so there had been nothing for it but to follow after her when she was dismissed from the meeting and see if he could get her.
She’d wanted nothing to do with him. When he observed she’d actually been enjoying that meeting, she only replied (in better English than he’d expected, a touch of Lancashire in it) that she supposed it was something different from the usual, that’s-all-if-you-please-sir, and tried to mince away, a docile little type-writer girl.
She hadn’t been able to keep that sham up. “You’re right, of course,” she’d said, when he continued to follow her, suggesting type-writing must be dull work for someone like her. “It is dull, and it will be years before the pay is enough to keep me under a decent roof. But did you know it is almost the best job in London a girl could hope for? No, why should you? So you can’t understand how grateful I am to have it, at least until the day I get a fine suit”—her eyes had swept from his shoes to his face with that—“and sprout a prick between my legs”—another, more pointed glance—“at which time I’m certain I can secure any sort of work I wish.”
It was then John realized he could look her in the eye straight. Which was more wicked, her tongue or those eyes? He’d not witnessed such coarseness in a woman since his days working on the Severn Tunnel, and the women who followed the navvies were much rougher sorts than Miss Dobson. It had made him grin and blush, bless God, and know that if he wished Betsey Dobson as the pier company’s excursions manager, he ought to speak straight, and of money.
How certain he’d been of her that day. That’s what I need.
He wouldn’t dismiss her, not when he’d persuaded her to leave the best job in London a girl could hope for, but he was experiencing an unfamiliar mistrust of his instincts.
“You’re not sacked,” he said. “I don’t know that you will be the excursions manager, but we will find a place for you.”
“Oh.” Then, “What—what sort of place?”
“I’m not certain.” He didn’t have time to think of it now. He would take her to the hotel and pass her off to someone who could show her about, and then speak about her to Tobias Seiler, the hotel manager, after Lillian and her family left this evening.
“Hotel laundress?” she said. “Taking toll at the pi
er? Or does your company permit a woman to have such an exalted position as that?”
The bitterness in her voice took him aback. He asked, “What about window washing? Is that what you had in mind back in the stationmaster’s?”
Her fist flew to her lips, and she cursed into it. “I know. I haven’t any right! It is only—I’d begun to believe I could do this job. I thought you were mad, offering it to me, but then . . . I began to think I could do it, that is all. I do still.”
“Girl,” he began. She turned wary at the familiarity, and probably the Welsh brogue rolling in the word. John checked it, as well as the question he’d been about to ask about why she had refused the money he’d offered for her travel. A few shillings, they could have avoided this. She wanted the position; she thought she could do it. John had known she could, during that brief meeting in London. He wanted that certainty back.
The tram was drawing up.
“Miss Dobson, you brought your character letter?” he asked.
Her eyes darted to the tram. John gestured, waving ahead those waiting to board. He pulled Miss Dobson aside, and her eyes came back to him, a hard shine to them. He wanted, suddenly and very much, to press one or two of his fingers to her lips.
“Don’t lie,” he advised instead.
There is no excuse for a misdirected envelope.
—How to Become Expert in Type-writing
Betsey Dobson bit her bottom lip. The curls at each corner of her mouth tightened. Titus Rew, the tram conductor, called John’s name.
John waved Rew on. He pushed back his hat. He and Miss Dobson stood waiting to hear what she would say. She didn’t have the letter any more than she’d had a ticket for the train. He knew it. Would a good reference have reassured him? He’d told her to bring it for the benefit of Tobias Seiler more than for his own, but Tobias would trust his recommendation, character letter or none.
“I haven’t got it.”
The Typewriter Girl Page 4