The Typewriter Girl

by Atlee, Alison

  “What is it you’re looking for?” Mr. Jones asked.

  “The inscription—it’s too dark, though.”

  “Inscription?”

  “Isn’t there one?”

  “Ought there be?”

  Betsey pressed back a smile at his alarm.

  He shook his head. “For all I know, some other girl’s name there is on it. Bless God, I haggled it from a pawnbroker this afternoon, then took ten steps and realized she’d expect some wrapping, like a proper jeweler would have. Where my head was, there’s no saying.”

  “It’s beautiful, wherever it came from. You oughtn’t let that keep you from giving it to her.” She held out the ring to him.

  He didn’t reach for it. His gaze funneled into the yellow circle as though it were a far-off porthole or a gap in the boards of a fence.

  “What ought, then?”

  His voice was low, the question flat. Betsey let her thumb and finger relax, and the ring sank into her palm, but the hard focus of his gaze did not alter.

  “What if I am sick to the death, girl?” he asked, and his address to her, that he tagged girl on the end of the question, surprised her. He’d seemed to be speaking to himself. Even now, he bowed his head as though in private prayer. “Picking out my words before I say them, thinking a worn place on my lapel settles my fate? And goddamned music lessons.”

  What else had happened at that party? It seemed impossible that he could have bungled his performance; at his final rehearsal at Sarah’s house, he had flown through the piece perfectly a half dozen times, working up to such a wild tempo that everyone in the parlor was laughing by the end.

  She was about to ask, but he spoke, added something else to his list.

  “And not kissing you.”

  Pardon, she wanted to say in response, but it would have been disingenuous. She’d heard him; each hair on her arm and at the back of her neck now brushed the fabric of her shirtwaist.

  And not kissing you.

  Pardon?

  He lifted his head. “Ought that keep me from giving her the ring, that I’m sick to the death of not kissing you?”

  And so. It came to her then, something in how he’d raised his head. He’d brought her here to fuck her. She wondered if he realized it. That she herself, up to this moment, had not, that she’d believed he’d wanted comfort, company, her company—that she could have been so wide-eyed—that kind, honorable Mr. Jones could be less than so—

  His regard of her wavered only in that the flame in the bicycle lamp did. It was heavy; it held her; it pressed upon her, and she imagined herself in bed, taking his weight. Deep, low, her body approved. But where was the bed? And what new burden would be waiting to be taken up once Mr. Jones had relieved both her and the bed of his weight?

  “Perhaps not,” she answered, and shrugged. One-shouldered, halfhearted, but she carried it off. No matter, no consequence. Nothing between them lost or changed at all. “Life can be rather a shit in that regard.”

  At last, his deep concentration broke. His fingers and thumb stretching his eyelids, he massaged his temples and laughed.

  “Right. Don’t go a-wandering from the path, is that it?”

  She could take him wandering. His eyes would permanently cross, she could turn him in another direction so fast. A good lesson if he discovered what a fine leading string his cock made, if he learned his very fine railway couldn’t be used to lure one girl to the altar and to fuck another.

  “Here.”

  The light had fallen noticeably, and the ring caught barely a glint as it passed between them. He fit the tip of his finger into it and smoothed his thumb over the band a few times before dropping it into his pocket.

  “Let’s go,” she said. For God’s sake, before I strangle you . . .

  “Do you want me to send for Mil Chester to come give us a ride?”

  . . . or fuck you and then strangle you . . .

  “Do I want you to rouse from bed a man who has a full day’s work coming so that he can indulge a passing fancy of mine? No thank y—”

  He touched her head. The firm pillow at the base of his thumb pressed her cheek, his fingers braced against her skull, extending nearly to her crown. On the back of her neck, just at her hairline, she felt the pad of his little finger, rough, like raw lumber or dried-out leather. She was not as safe as she felt, and neither was he, she knew this. But her eyelids fell closed as his hand slid down and took hold of the short braid behind her ear. A gentle, gentle tug.

  His lips brushed her jaw. “Sweet. Like sugar you smell.”

  Before I do something that leaves me with nothing but a tale for my old age, for God’s sake, let us go.

  The ways she could yield. In trust, her tomorrows swaddled and waiting on some stranger’s doorstep. This, she had done before. Or on pretense, weapons hidden but ready. Or under contract—negotiation, give and take, tit for tat. These, too, she had done.

  The ways she could yield. None of them so difficult, any of them offering the thing she wanted, some version of it, like the strands of glazed clay pearls the vendors hawked down on the shore, or those dipped buttons of hers, still in his pockets. How bright and real it would feel.

  “Elisabeth.”

  Their lips were touching. Not a kiss, not yet. Just a toy top, poised between finger and floor, string wound and taut. His whisper rushed over her mouth, and his Welsh accent made the s softly precise, though he couldn’t have known it was the spelling her mother had put to the name. Virtually no one since her mother had called her Elisabeth, and now he whispered it like he uttered a secret, urgent prayer to a saint. Betsey for those times he pretended they were equals, Dobs when he found her amusing or frustrating, Miss Dobson for orders and reprimands. Now Elisabeth because—

  Just persuasion. She felt his breath warm her skin, the give of everything inside her, and she remembered. She remembered the very place they sat existed because of his talent for persuasion, and that he’d had to employ precious little of it to get her out here. She remembered that only the most malicious of children made a seesaw into a game with a winner and loser.

  She didn’t have to be malicious, not with him. “You wouldn’t use me like this,” she reminded him. She pulled away, turned, shielded her lips. She opened her eyes to darkness and thought something terribly significant had happened to her. But no, it was only the bicycle lamp; the fuel had run out while they hadn’t kissed.

  Cavernous as the space was, their breathing seemed to fill it up, louder than the wind-battered curtain.

  “I know what it is,” she said. “Using, being used. Kiss me because she hurt you. Kiss me, think of her.” She remembered his hand on her back as they’d approached Sir Alton the night of Avery’s brawl. “You wouldn’t.”

  There was no light for her eyes to adjust to. She waited in vain, then stretched her arms, feeling her way to the edge of the seat cushion.

  “I wouldn’t,” Mr. Jones said, as though he’d spent all his past silence formulating this response. “I wasn’t.”

  She wanted to argue. However, for a change, she wanted something else more than to be right, so she agreed, “Well then.” Rising, holding the sides of the carriage, she thrust out a foot and pointed her toe until it found the platform.

  And then she went blind all over again. She squinted and brought her hand to her eyes, her foot back inside the car. Through her fingers she saw his face, golden and shadowed above a flame.

  “Wait, you, and you’ll not have to harm yourself getting out.”

  But he made no move to lead, nor to find the lamp. He was letting the flame burn to his fingers. She hated the waste of a match. She worried for the tips of his fingers.

  “You told me once you’d never marry.” The match died. “Did you mean it?”

  “Light the lamp. I want to go.”

  “Did you?”

  In the darkness, she floundered, not even certain why she didn’t want to answer him. She fell back on her standard response to prying que
stions: “Why should you wish to know that?” Uttered with puzzled cheer, it was a magic spell against any inquisitor.

  Except him. “I cannot help my curiosity about you, girl.”

  “No,” she agreed. “Not since Avery.”

  The words took on a presence, growing with the silence, spreading between them, thick and combustible. Well, he wasn’t the first. Plenty of others had expressed the same curiosity: whether, as she’d slept with some fellow they knew, she’d sleep with them, too. To his credit, he didn’t claim not to understand.

  “I’m not going to bed with you, Mr. Jones,” she said softly, in case he wondered still.

  Beginners sometimes throw the carriage back so violently as to bend the rack down upon the dogs and thus throw the machine out of order.

  —How to Become Expert in Type-writing

  He muttered, “Bless God,” and she heard in it how he didn’t like it, her barefaced words, even though she’d cleaned them up from what they might have been. And then, more honestly, he asked, “Why not?”

  “I want more than a tale. That’s all. Don’t— You wouldn’t punish me for it.”

  The cars moved suddenly, jarred by the force with which he stood. As though he’d memorized her stance while the match had burned, he found her forearm without a fumble and latched on.

  “Punish you?”

  “Whether I did, or whether I didn’t, you could make things . . . difficult for me.”

  “Bless the bleeding Christ. Elisabeth.”

  He could be offended if he wished. Such a long fall probably hurt. But surely he knew it needed saying.

  “I choose, you see,” she said. “I need to choose. That’s what I learned after Thomas.”

  “Thomas.”

  “The Dellafordes’ eldest. The house where I was in service. He chose me, but what did I know of the difference? I thought it was more important to work on my accent so I’d sound like a Mrs. Dellaforde ought to sound when the day came.”

  Mr. Jones, who had done the same with his own speech for a not-so-dissimilar reason, loosened his hold on her arm. He let her go.

  “Ah,” she said. “You’d assumed Avery the first. The only. No. First there was Thomas, and then I learned to choose.”

  The darkness offered nothing. She imagined his lip curling toward his nose, his brows coming together, and she hated him sneering at her, even if she’d only imagined it, and couldn’t stop herself: “Marbie. Elias. Ned. John—a different John. Even Avery I chose, and you think you know what made that a damn poor choice, but you don’t. I lost my chance to finish at the Institute—that’s what made it idiotic. Not again, do you see? Not here. I’ve chosen, and it’s not you.”

  Once more, with grace and accuracy, he found her in the blackness. The tender swipe of his thumb over the back of her hand made her eyes burn wetly.

  “Don’t imagine me as a woman without consequences, Mr. Jones. Just because you cannot ruin me, just because I’ll never get with child and demand that you marry me—”

  She felt him react to that. Of course, he hadn’t known she couldn’t bear children. She felt the change in the pressure of his touch on her hand, she felt the words of sympathy about to fall, and she drew away her hand.

  “You want to imagine me as a woman without consequences, speak to Avery Nash. When they let him out of gaol, ask him where he was a year ago.”

  • • •

  “I suppose I shall need my buttons?” Betsey asked as John locked the gate on the Esplanade. He recognized the question as a meandering way to determine whether there would be consequences to her refusal.

  She’d said Lillian had hurt him. But Lillian’s neglect of his pride was like sad old news from an unseen country compared with this question from Betsey. Here was a hurt new and near.

  He poured the buttons into her hands. She had no pocket. He opened his handkerchief, and she made a bundle and dropped it into the basket on her cycle.

  “Oh, no,” she said when she saw he intended to see her back to The Bows, and he yielded because she sounded so certain. She’d sounded sure of everything, sure of all those names she’d listed, sure he’d brought her here to—to lay with her. Sure he would not.

  Was it so? Had he brought her to the railway for that?

  He wanted to forget the whole episode, of that he was sure. But in his rooms at the hotel, he found one more button in his pocket. Only a moment it would take to place it on her desk in the offices.

  His fingers rolled it like a coin. He put it on the mantelshelf. In bed, he turned his face from it and tried to think of tomorrow, when his railway would open.

  • • •

  For six and three-quarter hours, Idensea’s newest amusement measured up to its fanfare. Day-trippers and Idensea residents alike formed eager but proper British queues to pay their six pennies and board the cars of the Sultan’s Road pleasure railway. For six and three-quarter hours, they agreed the dreary weather did not spoil the views of the Esplanade and sea, nor dampen the excitement of the downhill coasts. They stole kisses when the tunnels were dark, and exclaimed when those tunnels suddenly, mysteriously lit to reveal some grotesque or panorama. Where the journey was exotic, they marveled, and where it was thrilling, they shrieked.

  For six and three-quarter hours, the Sultan’s Road was a triumph. And then the cable system failed.

  A group of John’s day laborers at the Kursaal alerted him to the fact the carriages were no longer running. This implied the fellows were spending more time gazing off into the distance than an employer might have liked, but John’s concern for the railway took precedence. He left instructions with his foremen, then cycled to the railway, where he found a damn mess.

  Two sets of passenger carriages sat out on the tracks, one halted early in the ride, presumably in response to the warning whistle issued by the brakeman on the other set. Those carriages sat a dozen or so feet above the ground near the bottom of the final ascent—near the bottom rather than at the bottom because the brakeman had seen fit to enlist the male passengers in pushing the carriages up the hill. At the crest, the brakeman would give them the all clear to hop aboard, and the coast would continue from there, whether everyone made it safely aboard or not.

  That was the brakeman’s plan. He’d voiced it multiple times in protest of the proper procedures the operators had practiced during training.

  “Bless the bleeding Christ,” he muttered. A damn heartbreak was what it was, to see so much work come to this. Another damn, baffling, out-of-the-blue heartbreak.

  “Stop!” John bellowed up to the brakeman with all his strength. “Ease it back! Vernon Crabbe, I’m ordering you! Ease that carriage down immediately! Get those passengers boarded!”

  “Told ’im he’d best not,” said the mechanic at John’s side.

  “Is it the carriage grip?”

  The mechanic looked skeptical. “Could be. But it weren’t having no trouble on the other hill. Second time it’s happened here.”

  John covered his mouth, looking up at the track. A faulty carriage was the simpler fix, and it wouldn’t force the railway to close entirely. “We’ve got to get those passengers down. Tell them down front to hold off the ticket selling, then Eady and yourself come up. The service steps at the market tunnel, we’ll lead them down two at a time, then go to Chester’s carriages.”

  The mechanic nodded and jogged off to carry out the orders. Vernon Crabbe was recalcitrant, however, when John made his way up onto the track.

  “All this fuss,” he told John. “My way had ’em all back to the loading deck now. Already done so once today. Change your mind, you would, if you’d been round then to see it.”

  John wanted to rage, wanted to throttle Crabbe right here on the track. However, he needed the man calm and cooperative, so he offered him terse congratulations and bit back the news that Crabbe was less than an hour from collecting his last wages from the pier company.

  John explained to the passengers that they’d be led along the tra
ck back to the panorama tunnel they’d just exited, down the service steps just inside, and be right back on the Esplanade shortly afterward. Several expressed dismay upon learning they wouldn’t all go at once; they’d be sitting in the rain in a matter of minutes. Better that than to lose toes under a runaway carriage, noted one of the fellows who’d been pushing when John arrived.

  Within half an hour, all had been safely, if damply, delivered to the Esplanade, their fares refunded. Sir Alton’s coach had been waiting for at least ten minutes. John signaled that he was done, and Sir Alton exited the carriage, a footman with an umbrella at the ready.

  “Bit of a setback, Jones? Most unexpected.”

  Today the mockery took its cut. John shoved his sopping hair off his forehead—his hat had been knocked over the trestle by a woman who’d been terrified to walk the mechanic’s gallery on the side of the track—and caught sight of Rolly Brues, the American, stepping down from Sir Alton’s carriage. Perfect. It was a stranger claiming the seat of his soul, this feeling that he wanted to say damn to Sir Alton and damn to Brues and damn to every damned thing in Idensea, and sit down in the mud until somebody brought his damn hat back to him.

  Sick to the death, as he’d told Betsey last night. Did it matter? Perhaps not. Life can be rather a shit in that regard.

  Her words didn’t rally his humor as they had last night. He told Sir Alton, “That’s all the passengers now, safely out. I’m sending them on to Pimlott’s for an ice cream.”

  “An excellent gesture. I do hope you told them it was all at the pier company’s expense.”

  “I knew that was exactly what you’d have me do,” John said. Sir Alton’s mouth twisted at this sarcasm, not necessarily in disapproval. John felt rather . . . gritty for having said it. He looked away to bid good afternoon to Mr. Brues, who had joined them.

  Brues cut his ebullient greeting short when he realized he was treading over whatever Sir Alton was murmuring to John. Sir Alton denied he spoke of anything of consequence; they both insisted the other continue; each did, at once. A pause. They both looked at John, weariness about their eyes.