She was not ill. She shook her head to his inquiry.
“It is only—”
The wind whipped the tendrils of hair about her face into a froth.
“Well, I won’t forget it, that’s all.”
Then she told him to put on his hat. He supposed she thought his grin smug.
They bought lemon water ices and he made her laugh when he insisted they make proper gifts of the treat and trade with each other. One of the shelters built into the railing shielded them from the wind, and Betsey admitted the view of Idensea from the pier head was worth paying for at least once.
The ice and the bite of lemon reddened her lips. Fresh and tart, that was how she would taste now.
“You still want me to go to bed with you.”
John stabbed at his ice, gulped down a mouthful that stung his teeth. “No.”
“You have never lied to me before.”
“I meant . . .” It confounded him, her directness in such matters. “A vow I made, not to press you.”
“A vow?” Now she was confounded. “To—?”
He shrugged. “Either one of us.”
“And if you didn’t have to press?”
You mean if you chose me.
“You’d still want me.”
He shoveled the remaining spoonfuls of ice into his mouth. He turned up the dish and drained the melted portion.
“How much?”
Bless God.
“Enough to marry me?”
Bless—
She laughed. “Don’t look so worried, Mr. Jones. Both of us know that answer. Sir Alton, however, does not.”
“Sir Alton?”
“Do you know how anxious he is to see you settled in Idensea?”
“The Kursaal finished, I’ll be seeking a new position, and he knows that.”
“You might be persuaded to stay, he believes, and . . . he has enlisted my aid. I seduce you well enough, you’ll be quite satisfied here in Idensea with your little wife and pier company job and bit of property.”
John tried to imagine the circumstances of this tactical meeting between Betsey and Sir Alton and, wildly, pictured the two of them at opposite ends of the long dining table at Iden Hall. He wondered if Sir Alton could have possibly been as blunt with Betsey as she was being right now. And Sir Alton knowing: Miss Dobson. An uneasy cushion to settle upon there.
Another detail niggled at him. “Property. Out on Hawkshaw Road?”
At last something in this conversation embarrassed her. “That’s not why I was there.”
“There was something to do with it.”
“Only curiosity. I wanted to see the house again. I was curious why it—”
He watched her struggle with her embarrassment, recognized that rare shyness as it nearly overcame her.
“Why it wouldn’t be enough for someone. For you.”
She thought it should be enough. So did Sir Alton. No doubt many would, perhaps even most, even his mother, whose pride had always been tinged with sorrow for his distance from home, and his father, who tolerated his son’s ambitions first as a passing phase, then from a decided, if respectful, distance.
He threw out an arm to frighten a gull perched on the railing nearby, felt grimly satisfied when it flew away.
Betsey had lifted her eyes. He met them.
“I’m only letting you know what he’s about,” she said.
“Kissed me, you did.”
“Tell me what you think that means.”
He studied the deck planks at their feet. Of course he did not believe her in league with Sir Alton.
A boy with a tray approached them. “Drink up what is left,” John told her when he saw she’d let the water ice melt, little more than half-finished. She hesitated but then took her dish back from the tray and drank from it. She caught a drip on her chin with the back of her wrist. She might as well have put her hand between his thighs.
It seemed she read his dark thoughts. It seemed she kept similar ones.
“You haven’t much longer in Idensea,” she said. “By my reckoning, neither have I.”
With alarm, he realized she was near tears. As though she were alarmed herself, she stood and hurried from the shelter, her agitation matched with her wind-tangled skirts.
She assumed Sir Alton would dismiss her once it was clear she’d failed in her charge to keep him in Idensea. A credible assumption, John thought. Even if the board eventually decided to carry on with the excursion scheme next summer, Sir Alton could still force Tobias to hire someone else to manage it. Perhaps Tobias could put her in some other position, but still, Sir Alton had the final authority. He could dismiss Betsey from the pier company altogether.
“I ought’ve held on to that penny for the fountain,” she said when he caught up with her, and made a point of showing her face to him: She had not cried, nor would she.
“Bless God, Elisabeth, this job is not your last chance.”
He could have raised a hand to her and not received such an expression of disbelieving shock. He could have been Brutus with the dagger and been more fondly regarded.
He’d said nothing wrong. He felt certain she needed to hear it. “It isn’t. It isn’t even the best you can hope for. Of type-writing, you said that, and it wasn’t true, nor is it true now.”
“It seemed a good occupation until I inherit my title and fortune.”
“Don’t mock.”
“Please do forgive me, Mr. Jones. I meant no offense, I’m sure.”
She curtsied. An unholy urge to hurl her over the railing into the sea lit through him.
“Yourself, girl. I meant do not mock yourself.”
She stared. He watched her turn both fierce and small, holding on while something cracked.
“I wanted it. You—of everyone—you should understand.”
• • •
He didn’t protest that he did understand, which suited Betsey. She only would have argued, despite her suspicion that she’d be wrong. Instead, as they parted ways at the photographer’s studio, he said he wanted to take her someplace Saturday night—after her dinner dance had concluded, naturally.
She agreed first, asked “Where?” second. He still hadn’t told her by the time they cycled away from the hotel Saturday night. They went in the direction opposite The Bows to a seaside tavern whose sign read “Sundial Public House & Pleasure Garden.” Inside, he was greeted—Jones with and without the Mister, a female voice or two amongst them, a mere wary nod here and there. The place was crowded, marked by cheer rather than rowdiness.
All who spoke to John seemed to note her presence with him, and her uniform made her even more conspicuous. Too late to worry, she told herself, and relished this brief surrender, the feel of her hand swallowed up in his, her way eased by the path he cut from the entrance to a rear door that led to a garden lit by torches and oil lamps, where night-blooming flowers and damp grass thickened the scent of ale. The music she’d heard as they approached on their cycles was coming from here, a fiddler and flutist under a vine-covered pergola, dancers turning on a floor of simple flagstone.
A woman wearing a bright-striped apron and a matching cap called to John, directing him to an available place at one of the long tables in the garden, promising someone named Katie would be there soon. They shared the same rustic bench, which on another night of the week might have been for one rather than two.
Katie was a girl less than Charlie’s age, and she narrowed her eyes at John after she had taken their order. “This cannot be your London lady,” she accused, because even little Katie knew this was no place for a girl like Lillian Gilbey.
“You must be a regular,” Betsey observed wryly upon Katie’s departure.
But John shook his head. “Not so often. Some of my laborers, those men.”
Which explained the wary nods, though not Katie’s knowledge of his personal affairs.
“What were you thinking, bringing me here?”
“That you ought to see it.”
The answer carried some gravity with it, but she didn’t understand why. She rested her elbows on the table and looked about. The name “Pleasure Garden” was perhaps more an aspiration than actuality, for it was less than an acre in size, and aside from the dancing area, a quoits pitch, and a bowling green, it had none of the diversions or meandering paths one expected in a pleasure garden. A hedge bounded the far line of the property, striking not only for its height but also because it had been trimmed to mimic a crenellated castle wall, casements and doorways sculpted into the front. She spotted the namesake sundial on a pedestal nearby, in danger of losing its prominence amongst the clutter of long tables and benches.
In all, it was a more modest and less formal version of the dinner dance she’d just closed at the Swan’s pavilion. The thought made her smile, and she resisted the temptation to lean back into John’s chest. She felt him all along the left side of her body, and with her chin in her hand, she turned her face to him.
He was already looking at her. “What think you, Dobs?”
“I feel like—”
Like one of my excursionists, she was about to say, but the thought halted her. She straightened up from the table, her mind grasping at a butterfly of an idea. Now she knew why John had brought her here.
“I should find a new place for the excursionists,” she said.
The woman in the striped apron brought their pints. Mrs. Gomery, John said—“the Sundial’s proprietor, Katie’s mum, and Ethan Noonan’s sister. ’Twas Ethan what did all the hedges you see here.”
Knowing the fanciful hedge-trimming was the work of the drunken char-à-banc driver made it all the more remarkable to Betsey. “Ah, you know my brother,” Mrs. Gomery said, as if she understood this fact to be a stumbling block to any relationship she and Betsey might have otherwise cultivated following this introduction.
“Miss Dobson manages the excursions scheme for the Swan Park,” John explained.
“And is he doing any good for you, Miss Dobson? You can say the story blunt, now.”
“He’s never failed to bring the char-à-banc,” she replied. “And has been sober enough to drive it on perhaps more than half the occasions.”
Mrs. Gomery seemed pleased enough with this report. She ordered John to the dancing area, but both he and Betsey shook their heads at each other the moment her back turned.
Betsey took a sip of her ale. “What about the Kursaal? The ballroom there once it is finished, or is there some other space suitable for the dinner dances? Perhaps if everything was off hotel property—”
But John was shaking his head. “A part of the pier company, the Kursaal.”
“But here? It looks as if Mrs. Gomery and her husband wouldn’t—”
“Mrs. Gomery’s the sole proprietor. A widow she’s been since Katie was a babe, I think.”
“Well, she has plenty of business on a Saturday. She’d have to close to the public to host excursions. Why would she want to?”
He shrugged. “She wouldn’t, perhaps, unless more money could be made. But the Sundial is not the only place in Idensea.” He watched her over the rim of his pint as he took a swallow. “And Idensea is not the only place in the world.”
Just the only place she wanted to stay. Idensea was the first place since her mother’s house that she hadn’t struggled to leave, hoping for something better.
Still, John’s idea merited some consideration. Did he realize it meant she would be on her own, out from under Sir Alton’s thumb, to be sure, but also without the hotel’s considerable resources? He must, but did he truly believe she was up to such a challenge?
“Pang in my side,” he murmured as she stared at him, thinking, He did.
“What’s that?”
“In my dad’s pub I used to hear it. An old Welsh poem. Girl who struck this pang in my side, the girl I want and wanted always—”
He broke off to take a hasty quaff. Betsey reached up and put her hands around the glass, and he let her pull it from his mouth and set it aside.
“Why don’t we . . . ?” she suggested.
He nodded. They quit the pub like its thatched roof was ablaze. As John shut the door behind him, his other arm pulled her to him, and, mouths together, they stumbled around the corner of the pub, into the shadows of shrubbery and thick curtains of ivy. The leaves tickled her ears and neck as she moved her mouth with his, following, luring, a dance of endless discovery. Every time his tongue stroked her, she felt it deep and low, and she pushed her head farther into the ivy, against the wall, opened her mouth wider, so she could have him deeper, more of him inside her.
A labored, suppressed groan escaped him. He moved his lips from hers only far enough to allow speech, half-formed words upon her skin. “The sky’s clear and bright as jewels tonight.”
“Mm-mm.” Her tongue toyed with his bottom lip. She couldn’t remember what the sky looked like. She could open her eyes right now and probably not be able to find it.
“There is magic to bathe under the moon. Have you ever?”
“I don’t know.” What did he mean? What was the moon? She pressed kisses under his jaw. “I don’t know how to swim.”
“Made for it, girl.” In one slow, insistent caress, he passed his hand over her thigh, and up and up until he’d splayed the length of her arm and each finger against the wall behind them. “Mind and body.” He matched the spread of her fingers with his and started a path of kisses at the bend of her elbow. “Will you come?”
Her daze took a giddy turn as she watched him, anticipating his arrival at her earlobe. Would she go swimming with him? He kissed her neck and she giggled, the delight of sensation, the delight in his effort. Creating excuses to get her out of her clothes. He didn’t know. He didn’t know she’d decided, that she’d known on Hawkshaw Road.
There’d be no one like him again, not for her. He was going away, and she wouldn’t try to stop him. But before that happened, she would lie down with him. She would take what was here, what was now.
Nobody wants slovenly work, smutty pages, bad spelling, or sentences made senseless by the careless omission of words.
—How to Become Expert in Type-writing
They went along a little lane Betsey had never traveled before. John stowed their bicycles in the brush, then led her down a path, steep and narrow, but too well-defined to be abandoned.
“People come down this way,” Betsey said, picking her way down in the darkness, her hand in his.
“The locals know it. But this time of night, none will come.”
It was a cove, lit by the moonlight, secluded and loud with the sea’s roar. Betsey paused at the bottom of the path to take it in, this place John had chosen for them, perfect and wild this night. She wondered how well he knew it, if he’d brought other women here. She wondered who they might have been. Not the Miss Gilbeys he’d sought, of course, but others?
She followed his lead, pausing to remove her boots when he did. Then he surprised her, throwing off his cap and coat, undressing with no preamble, his back to her. It was a disappointing sort of surprise, but she unpinned her straw hat and cast it, along with the disappointment, into John’s growing pile of clothing.
He noticed it and turned to her, throwing away his shirt, then standing quite still. How beautifully the moonlight touched his shoulders. She went to him and ran a hand along the ripples of his bare arm, pressed a kiss above the neckline of his under-vest, pushed it up, and he removed it. A pause, then she turned her back to him.
Nothing for a moment, though she could hear him breathing. Not until she tilted her head over her shoulder did he touch her, helping her out of her fitted jacket. Another pause when she faced him again, but then his fingers touched the top button of her vest. She watched him work down the column, and something made her think of her nephew Francis, his quiet and solid concentration when he tried to manage his bootlaces on his own.
John kissed her mouth as he pushed her vest open and down from her shoulders. “Come t
o the water when you’ve finished,” he said, and then he headed in that direction himself, still in his drawers. He waded in, launched himself over a wave, and disappeared.
Betsey rushed down, her heart tight even though she knew he would be fine. He resurfaced what seemed a far distance away, his face a spot of light in the water. He disappeared again and bobbed up closer to the shore.
“You can’t come in like that,” he called.
Betsey looked down at her uniform, the pleats in the skirt catching the wind like a fan. “I believed the swimming lesson to be a ruse.”
“I’ve not got any of those. Undress and come, you. I want you to feel the sea.”
She looked again at the path they’d just come down.
“No one,” he said. “I’ll turn my back.”
And unbelievably, he did. It made her feel suddenly shy, and she rushed to remove her shirtwaist and loosen the tapes of her skirts. She was stepping out of a pillowy ring of fabric when she realized he was watching her.
“You cheat.”
“Bless God, like a colt you are, those legs.”
She looked down at herself and decided John intended a compliment. She held his gaze as she unbuttoned her corset cover, and then, because he was transfixed and she found that intoxicating, she drifted her fingers along the top and over the curves of her corset before she removed it.
“Your hair down, won’t you?”
“You know it is cut off.”
“I want to see it loose.”
Her hairpins were lost to the sand, without a care for the cost to replace them. Regarding her clothing, however, she was more practical: She placed everything safely away from the surf.
“Will you come, then?” John asked. He rose, the water falling down to his waist, the skin of his arms and shoulders like polished metal as he came toward her. Betsey took the hand he extended, and for the first time since she’d been a tiny girl, she entered the sea. Her underclothes seemed to disintegrate in the chill of the water, eaten up by the waves that bewildered her body, but John wrapped his arm around her waist, cupped her head in his hand, and she felt more secure.
The Typewriter Girl Page 23