The Typewriter Girl

by Atlee, Alison

  She felt Charlie watching as she tied a knot and readied another button, but he didn’t take her hint about going inside. “Ain’t those the same buttons from before? And you’re sewin’ ’em all over again?”

  “They are. I—” Having to recount her own foolishness, she sighed. “I cut them off.”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know. They were too extravagant. I thought to sell them, perhaps, and put on plainer ones, and put the money to a gown of some sort, because Mr. Jones thought I should have one.”

  “What’s John care?”

  “He doesn’t.” Wishes he didn’t, anyway. “Just ordering me about is all. Likes that, doesn’t he, ordering people about?”

  She spoke teasingly, but Charlie was too loyal to admit Mr. Jones short of perfect. “On the job, I s’pose.”

  “In any case, I decided he was wrong. No gown. So back go the buttons, and there they will stay until I need to sell them for bread. And perhaps, when that day comes, I shall eat them instead.”

  Charlie laughed, but she didn’t. The notion of having to sell her buttons seemed all too possible since the meeting at Iden Hall. She shifted carefully, trying to catch more of the lamplight spilling from the window. Hardly ideal conditions for sewing. The moon was little more than a bright slit that would succumb to shadow in a few nights’ time, and whenever the breeze stirred itself into a proper wind, she thought perhaps she oughtn’t be barefoot.

  She was about to suggest they go inside when Charlie said, “Someone’s coming.” His face was turned to the road, watching a single bead of light joggle toward the house. “John, I bet.”

  Betsey frowned at the light. “He’s in London, at Miss Gilbey’s party.” And it was far beyond a reasonable hour for a call, even if he weren’t. But something in Betsey surged anyway, and she knew then why Charlie’s light kiss had stung her eyes with tears. To know Charlie’s hopeless hopes was to know her own.

  The light was certainly a bicycle lamp. It stilled, and remained still, for quite some time. Betsey imagined the cyclist—imagined Mr. Jones—pausing there, looking at the windows where light still glowed. Looking at her windows? Was that what he was doing?

  “Why doesn’t he come on then?” Charlie put his fingers in his mouth and whistled.

  “Oh, Charlie. Miss Everson always has her window open.”

  “He’d’ve stood there all night. See? It is him, just as I told you.”

  So it was. At the front gate, Mr. Jones dismounted, looking up at them. Then, a gesture—a beckoning one, she believed.

  “He wants me to come down, I think,” she said, rising with less caution than she ought have. The remaining loose buttons she’d been holding in her lap clattered down the slope of the roof and bounced into the night, toy stars lit by the sliver of moonlight.

  “Oh, hell.” She eased down with a guilty glance at Charlie. “That is . . .” She looked again at the black garden where the buttons had disappeared, more provoked by her eagerness to answer Mr. Jones’s gesture than the loss of the buttons. “Hell. Hell and hell.” With Charlie snickering, she tossed her vest back through the window, a single boot and stocking, too. Charlie had knocked their mates off the roof when he’d come out the window.

  She climbed inside, then heard Charlie say, “I’m coming down with you.”

  “No.” She turned round to the window, where he sat with one leg over the sill, halted by her refusal. “It’s too late, and your mum thinks you’re in bed already. Besides”—I want to be alone with him, she thought with a sweep of shame—“I’m certain it’s just some business to do with the excursionists. You’d best just go to bed, then, please?”

  He nodded, and she felt like a Judas.

  “But I’m seeing you home tomorrow night, ain’t I? John asked, and Mum said I might.”

  It was ridiculous that she must have anyone see her home at all, but she agreed as she put out the light. She tugged off her apron and smoothed a hand over her hair. She’d already fixed it into the two very short plaits she wore to bed and considered taking the time to put it up properly.

  “Betsey,” Charlie said from the window, “was it . . . was it any good?”

  She stilled, her hand falling. Her heart, it flooded. “Oh, Charlie. I suppose it was the dearest sort of kiss there is.”

  He looked back out at the night. The pale glow of his hair drew her, and she went to him and stroked his head, just once. Save it for someone who deserves it, she wanted to tell him.

  It came out like this: “And you know, you try any such thing again, I shall be obliged to push you off the roof, don’t you?”

  • • •

  Mr. Jones offered her boot to her when she slipped out the front door.

  “Didn’t find the stocking, I suppose?” she asked.

  “Inside your shoe, there.”

  How bashful he sounded, and over having touched her stocking? She didn’t understand.

  “Here.” He opened his hand. Her buttons seemed small, piled in his palm, and she couldn’t help but think how light and cheap they must feel to him. He himself was dressed in his best suit, and even though he’d cuffed his trousers for cycling, and his hair was blown nine ways from riding hatless, Betsey felt the plainness of her own appearance—sleeves of her shirtwaist rolled to her elbows, her skirt the same faded print she’d been wearing when she’d been turned out from the Dellaforde house more than seven years ago, a contrasting border of fabric at the hem to lengthen it. She had been overzealous with the egg whites for the sugar kisses this evening, and only now felt the sticky results on her arms and face.

  “Hold them, won’t you,” she said of the buttons. “My feet are cold.” She sat down on the porch step and began to pull on her stocking. “Late for a call, isn’t it?”

  He didn’t answer. She felt for her suspenders and asked him why he was not in London, but he didn’t answer that question, either. Too engrossed in watching her sort her stocking, she realized when she glanced up at him, though there was little for him to see besides the shift of her skirts as her hands moved beneath them, attaching the stocking to her suspenders. She made a better show of the second stocking: a hint of naked knee, syrup in her wrists. She could have embarrassed him, forced eye contact, coughed the merest ahem. But she was careful to make it seem the task absorbed her as it did him.

  They’d barely spoken since Monday. Betsey had tucked away her tangle of feelings for him the way she’d stored her buttons in that tin. At least the buttons had some purpose, and fastened to her vest or strewn in the grass, they wouldn’t cost her anything more than she’d already given.

  One beckoning gesture, and it was done, she was flying to him. One gesture that could have been a trick of the night shadows would have her lifting her skirts as though she believed lighting his lust could give her the warmth she yearned for.

  She pressed her knees together and tucked her skirt around her ankles. To flirt, to tease him because he occasionally noticed she was a woman with all the parts and he found the parts good—that was one thing. To hope he would act on his attraction was to wish for her own destruction.

  “Your performance went well, I trust,” she said, because they both needed to be reminded of Miss Gilbey. “Sarah will want to hear all about it. But . . . she’s long abed, you know.” She glanced up.

  “Right. I wasn’t coming to see her.”

  “I . . . I sent Charlie to bed.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  Betsey picked up one of her boots and put it her lap. She worked at the laces, fingering them into tidy, evenly crisscrossed lines. Go in, go back upstairs, she warned herself, and herself promised she would, as soon as her bootlaces were tidied.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “You said it didn’t matter, Charlie not coming down.” Hearing, fine. Comprehension, lacking. Hope, damn it, living. She used her skirt hem to polish off the toe of her boot, then took up the other boot to tend to it.

  “I was cycling. Thinking of
the Sultan’s Road. It opens tomorrow.”

  “I know.” Everyone knew; it was the greatest event Idensea would see until the Duke of Winchester came to open the Kursaal in August.

  She heard him laugh softly above her. “Of course you do, girl. Of course.”

  And then he crouched beside her, so abruptly it startled her, so close she could see how his smile sat on his face like a drop of clear water, blurring the surface beneath it.

  “You’d come with me to see it, wouldn’t you, Betsey? Right now?”

  She tried to make out the blurry thing beneath his smile. Whatever it was, it made her answer, “Of course.”

  Remember that taking a type-writer apart is a dangerous experiment and that any meddling with the screws generally makes a machine worse instead of better.

  —How to Become Expert in Type-writing

  Of course. As though no other option existed and no other questions needed to be asked. She readied herself while he fetched her bicycle, and she went with him.

  Tomorrow night, the pleasure railway’s loading pavilion would be dazzling with light and full of people eager to ride. Tonight, with the pier closed and the Esplanade empty, the wind ruled, bumping the canvas curtain in the archway and filling the air with the snap of pennant flags and the rustle of palm leaves. Mr. Jones cycled past the arcade and its sentinel pair of leopards to the high board fence that hid the less attractive but more necessary parts of the railway from public view. He had keys for the padlocks, and they wheeled their cycles through the gate and leaned them against the fence.

  He took a moment to detach his bicycle lamp, then offered a hand to her. Taking no lesson at all from that other walk in the dark with Mr. Jones, she abandoned herself to the hard shelter of his hand, at once and with kite-like joy.

  They walked between the trestle of the track and the cliff that overlooked the bay, a deeply shadowed passage not even as wide as the lane in front of The Bows. The highest ascension of the undulating track she’d traced with her fingertip now towered over her.

  She held the lamp while he found the key to a door built into the trestle. Inside, he passed the light over a monstrous configuration of pipes and other hunks of metal she had no names for.

  “Engine and boiler,” he stated simply, but Betsey suspected that with the least encouragement, he’d be pleased to lecture on every part and its function. She suppressed her minimal curiosity and asked what the passenger carriages were like instead.

  Was there another thing in the world he knew better than this railway? He had the lamp, but it was not the reason for the confidence with which he led her. A maze of metal stairs and narrow black passages smelling of paint and fresh lumber and oil, and then she heard a thumping sound, the wind hitting the canvas curtain. And then . . .

  A garden. The bicycle lamp was sorely inadequate for the cavernous space where they had emerged, but there was a garden, flowers and greenery rising, rising, even as they draped the balconies of a tall, terraced palace. Any expectations she’d held were forgotten as she tried to reconcile this marvel with something familiar.

  “Is it—it’s like the theater, isn’t it?” Avery had taken her to the Empire once; this was the sensation of being onstage, in a tableau vivant of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. “I didn’t guess—I hardly know what to say, it’s so astonishing.”

  “Wait until the waterfalls run, and when you see it by day from the Esplanade. Or at night, with the lighting.” He gestured toward the expansive wall opposite the garden palace. But that was no wall, of course, but the curtain in the wide Moorish arch, hiding the scenery until show time.

  She laughed. “Waterfalls.” One wasn’t fantastic enough? “And the panorama tunnels are similar?”

  “Adventurous and exotic scenes of the East,” he said, his voice the embodiment of the bloated lettering on the street side of the curtain. “Though not so elaborate, as there’s quick you pass through it.”

  “And you have my six pennies by then, too.”

  “Come, you cynic. Sit in the carriage.”

  The lamp directed her to the loading deck, between the arch and the palace, where boarding passengers would create an enticing spectacle for passersby. The conveyances lined up on the track were nothing like carriages she associated with railways; they had no tops, were hardly more than park benches, church pews on a platform. Or small golden thrones, she thought, drawing a single fingertip over the tiny flaming suns carved into the wood.

  She sat on the first bench, and though there was room for two, Mr. Jones took the one behind. The track lay ahead, just invisible in the thorough darkness beyond the lamp’s weak glow. The wind moaning past the curtain gave her a shiver, amplified the vastness of the space and Mr. Jones’s silent presence at her back.

  “One final look. Is that it?”

  “I suppose.” A moment later, he added, “None too fine of me to drag you along.”

  “You wanted company.” Mine. But he did not say so, nor did she admit how little she minded being dragged along. She just told him, “It’s wonderful, you know. You don’t doubt that, I hope.”

  “You’d like a ride?”

  “Oh, yes. I’m bringing my excursionists—”

  “What about now?”

  “This minute?” She didn’t see how it was possible without the operators.

  She felt him stirring, leaning forward with his arms on her backrest.

  “A fellow at Lillian’s party, he hadn’t any neck, and he was singing something without any English in it, so a moment it gave me to think, and I thought, why not gather up the whole party and bring it on a train to Idensea? Ride the Sultan’s Road a dozen times over, sing and play in the hotel’s music room till dawn, and there a tale they’d have for their old age, to prove the passion of their youth.”

  Betsey smiled. “It sounds like the sort of whimsy the rich enjoy. Why didn’t you do it?”

  A moment passed before he answered. “Lils—Miss Gilbey—wouldn’t hear of it.”

  He sat back then, and Betsey was glad, for it meant she could look ahead, keep her face concealed from him as she sorted out the meaning of this revelation. It didn’t take long.

  “Bless God, but there’s a stubborn girl!” he muttered, and again, it was good he couldn’t see her face, or he would have seen how she wanted to laugh at him, laugh at the both of them sitting here, so disappointed in their hopes when they both should have known better.

  “You couldn’t have expected her to upend her party,” she said. “Disrupt everything to come to Idensea upon the spur of the moment?”

  “You did.”

  “I live here.”

  “’Tis London I mean. London you left of a sudden to come here.”

  “It isn’t the same. Miss Gilbey has more to think about, more to lose, than someone like me.”

  He grunted. “One topsy-turvy party in a life crammed with them? While you . . . if I’d left you to the mercy of the stationmaster, say. What would you have left if that had happened?”

  Left her to the mercy of the stationmaster. She nearly scoffed, reminded him who he was. But that day at the rail station she hadn’t been so sure, had she? That day, she’d been prepared to drop out of a window and see where her wits landed her.

  And now look. It pealed through her brain. Look how you’ve come to rely on him.

  He awaited an answer. “Nothing but a tale for my old age,” she admitted, and swiped at her arms, pushing her rolled-up sleeves to her wrists. Time to go. She had achieved some kind of distance and dignity after the meeting with Sir Alton, but now she’d mucked it up all over again, coming out here with him, unwittingly volunteering to be Miss Gilbey’s substitute. Not even a substitute. An alternative. A last resort.

  This seesaw would never balance. Time to go.

  “I wanted her to say, ‘Of course.’ Like you, girl.”

  No doubt. She fastened her cuffs and thought of her uniform buttons, warm in his pocket. She must remember to get them before they parted
ways. “I can’t think what you hope to gain from comparing us. Miss Gilbey disliked the spontaneity, that’s all. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t care. I came with you—it doesn’t mean . . . anything in particular but that I was awake and restless.”

  And now I’m tired and ready to go, she was about to add as she turned round in her seat. She found him sitting with his elbows on his knees, his black hair windblown, falling over his forehead. A dot of white flashed between his fingers, and for a moment, she mistook it for one of her buttons.

  “Iefan,” she whispered when she saw what it was. “You were going to ask her to marry you tonight?”

  “I don’t know. I only—I’m not where I meant to be when I married, is the trouble of it.” He glanced up, his brows rueful and crooked. “Is there such a thing as a save-my-place ring?”

  “Very convenient for you men if there were.”

  “I don’t imagine she’d wait, whatever. A schedule she has, so her young sister tells me.”

  “What, with a wedding slated in for this time next year, will you or nil you?”

  He laughed. “Something like that.”

  Betsey shook her head in disbelief. But she remembered what it was like to have such confidence in the future. Perhaps for Miss Gilbey, it was not so outlandish an attitude. Lizzie, the housemaid in love with the master’s son, ought’ve known better.

  She reached over the backrest of her seat and plucked the ring from between his fingers. Within a lacy band of gold filigree sat a dark stone, a ruby perhaps, although the low light kept her from being certain.

  “Was it your mother’s?” she asked.

  “My mother’s! A silver locket she had from her girlhood, and that was all her jewelry that I know of. No, in London I found it.”

  “I had a locket once.” From Thomas Dellaforde. She’d sold her hair and all the clothing she could spare before she’d finally parted with it. She tilted the ring forward and back, watching the facets appear and vanish, then squinted inside the band. “Faery’s child” had been the engraving on her locket, Keats being Thomas’s favorite, and Betsey had liked it well enough until she’d looked up the poem and read it for herself. La Belle Dame sans Merci hath thee in thrall, indeed. She’d come back to the bookcases multiple times to reread the poem to make certain she had understood it, and finally decided to pretend the inscription wasn’t there.