He would have kissed her. She touched his lips to slow him, saying, “Let’s decide.”
“Very well. Tell me what needs deciding.”
“How many times. From tonight until you leave for your new position, how many times shall we—” She hesitated as all her usual terminology failed her. “How many times shall we lie together?”
He continued to hold her but didn’t answer, either scandalized or calculating.
“Only this once?” she said, and smiled at his malcontented grunt. “Thank you for that compliment. Your suggestion, then.”
Another grunt. “I haven’t a job yet, even. Why must a number be put to it?”
She huddled against him, chilled standing here in the water as it beat against her thighs. “We’ll know when it’s done.” It wouldn’t become blurred, like with Avery, or blindside her, as with Thomas. Knowing the end was to let him go would hack the head off Sir Alton’s bribe; it would pierce that terrible inflation of hope she’d felt standing outside Tinfell Cottage.
“And we have to take care,” she added. “I’ll not look jilted when it’s all done.”
Suddenly, he released her and ducked into the waves. Betsey’s fear was intense and instant, no matter that only a moment passed before she felt his hands take hers. He let go to push his hair off his face, then took them again and urged her farther into the sea.
“Deeper now, will you?”
She stiffened. “I want to be able to walk. Touch bottom, I mean.”
“I will show you what to do in the deep water,” he promised, causing another surge of fear in her as a wave crashed into her shoulder and lifted her off the seafloor. “Tread the water when you can’t reach. Like on your bicycle, pedaling, firm about it. Arms, too, back and forth.”
She tried it, found it worked, though not to the degree that she had any real faith in it to keep her from drowning. And the waves never stopped—what sort of defense would she have when one finally crashed on top of her?
John praised her, but her courage was failing. “Tell me more of that poem from the pub,” she said, with hopes he didn’t notice her fear. “The thought of being a pain in your side is so terribly romantic.”
He laughed. “Can’t remember, not much, so long has it been. And mostly in Welsh I heard it, you know. Take hold.” He reached for her and towed her shoreward before an incoming wave hit them. “I remember he speaks to a girl, says for her to meet him on a hillside. Make a bed under the trees. By the ferns.” He indicated the water with a nod. “Doesn’t suit, does it?”
“No.”
“Sweet things he tells her about how she looks.”
“Naturally. What does he say?”
“All the Welsh songs I know praise fair girls, golden-haired, rosy-cheeked girls. Not girls like Betsey Dobson.” He cocked his head as he regarded her. “I remember he says her breasts are like balls of yarn. Does that suit?”
She thought returning the smile that touched the corners of his mouth would be invitation enough, but after a moment, she guided his hand inside her chemise. His touch was almost studious, as though he searched for the proper poetic description of her breasts, which were nothing like balls of yarn, but then he pulled her close. He boosted her up, and Betsey shuddered and dug her fingers into the base of his neck as his hot tongue chased the numbing chill of the water.
He let her slip down against him. “Dy gorph hael a’m dug o’r ffydd.”
“Poetry? Tell me.”
“Her flesh makes me stray from God.”
That suited too well, Betsey thought, spoke too close to the risk and the longing of this fleeting thing.
“When she greets me, I will sing psalms of her kisses.”
A wave nearly pitched them over, and Betsey realized with alarm they’d drifted out again. “I am with you,” he promised before she could say anything. “The next one, we will go under with it. A deep breath, and under, and I am with you.”
“I’m afraid.”
“Still, you will try it.” Not an order, that, only something in which he had confidence. He took her hand. “I will sing psalms of her kisses, seven kisses from the maiden—”
“I’m not a maiden,” she murmured, though here, in the moonlight and relentless sea, her fingers tangled in his, their bodies close and nearly naked, there was something new and untried welling within her.
“Shh,” he lulled, and began to chant, “Seven kisses from the maiden, seven birch trees at the grave, seven prayers for evening, seven the songs from the boughs.”
The wave hit. Betsey had tried to prepare herself, say it would be like ducking her head in the tub to wash soap from her hair, but once underneath, she knew the naïveté of that. Caught in the power of the wave, suddenly, sharply aware of the openness of the water, she wanted control again. The wave pushed her toward the seafloor and she pushed back with all her might, trying to tear loose from John so she would break the surface more quickly.
She burst to the air choking and gasping for breath, as though she’d been under for minutes rather than moments. Her hair fell in tangles over her face, stinging her eyes. Between blinks, she saw John.
“There is good, girl.” He cleared the soaking net of hair from her face. “There’s brave. Will you try it again?”
“Yes,” she told him, and meant it, but she was trembling when he took her in his arms again, and he didn’t make her prove it.
“Seven stories for a gift, seven pearls and rings,” he crooned beneath the water’s roar.
Her teeth chattered. “Why seven?”
“Don’t know. Seven’s magic. Odd and even, the boy and the girl. Seven verses writ in grass, seven times to sigh. Seven hymns for—” He hesitated. “Her name he says here.”
“Little chance it’s Elisabeth.”
“No matter.” Her head was resting on his shoulder, and he kissed her cheek. “Seven hymns to Elisabeth’s firm flesh, seven twenty times. No longer does she lock away the payment owed—”
Nothing else suddenly. “Owed? To whom?”
He didn’t answer, and like a finger snap before her face, she realized he didn’t mean to. A wave broke high against his back. He swayed, and water splashed her face. She lifted her head to get her bearing.
“Too far. Too deep,” she said, not sure if she wanted to cling to him as a safety or push away again, somehow get herself closer to the shore.
“There’s safe. I have you, Elisabeth.”
“Please. Go back.”
“I’m taking you.” He caught her up in his arms and moved them closer to the shore. “Stretch out, now.”
She clung more tightly to his shoulders. “What?”
“Rest on the water. I have you.”
Rest on the water. Hell. Still, she tried, tried to shove down the fear, tried cautious movements toward straightening her knees. But whenever his hold loosened, she jerked up, tense and uncertain about the gathering waves.
“I have you,” he said. “Look you up, the stars and moon.”
His hands worked beneath her, encouraging her back and knees to relax. She felt his support, but when water lapped around her face, splashing in her ears and under her chin, she started again.
“Betsey, be easy with me. The simple part this is, nothing for you but to lie back and feel the water, see the stars. Do it, now.”
Again and again she tried, each time breaking the pose he wanted her to make, aware of the rising tension in his voice but certain he was misjudging the height and strength of the waves rolling in. Finally, she shoved hard against him and broke free, only to be caught in a swell that filled her mouth with salt water.
John caught her, and she fought against him, coughing, her feet scrambling for a bit of sand, rock, anything. She heard him saying something, shouting perhaps—probably—because she felt herself panicking, and why should she not, for she was drowning now, going under for good, shore and shallows in her sight.
Then, air. She was vaulting through air, and it took her breath as s
urely as the water had. She hit the water, terrified and insensible, grasping and kicking for purchase until she realized her knuckles scraped the pebbly sand. Knees, too, and she crawled, gasping, to the water’s edge.
“You damned idiot!” she swore to the ground. He’d pitched her. Still on her hands and knees, she turned back to the water, half-expecting to see him grinning, pleased with himself.
He was too far out yet for her to make out his expression by the moonlight. But he was moving closer, thrashing through the water, his stride creating a white wake.
Betsey leapt up. She bent over and filled her fists and fingernails with the coarse sand—as much pebble and tiny shells as sand—and flung it out to the water. Most of it broke apart and went wildly off course, but some of it struck him, leaving dark splotches on his shoulder and jaw. A pebble glanced off his cheek, and it halted him for a fraction of a moment as he flinched. She could see his face then, terrible and furious, and he came pounding out of the surf at a stride to match.
Betsey ran. She turned, she ran, heading for the path that led up the hill, but losing her footing on the dry ground and falling. John grabbed her ankle, tried to rake her back down toward him. She shook her foot, strained her arms in the opposite direction, but he held her ankle fast, then crawled up over her, breathing hard.
“Bless the bleeding Christ! I want you to be easy with me.”
“What?”
“I want you to be easy with me, not forever looking at me like—like I’m handing you magic beans, or trying to keep you from getting a good breath. I want—I want you to rest with me, girl, that’s all.”
“You ought have thrown me a little farther, then, or into the deeper water. I’d be as easy as a corpse just now.”
“I know—I frightened you—”
“Get back from me.” She elbowed him, and he rolled onto his back with a sigh. Betsey sat up and drew her knees to her chest, shivering in the warm air as she brushed sandy hands across her knees in a vain attempt to remove the dirt on her drawers.
“John, my God,” she said after a moment, “here I am in the middle of the night wearing nothing but my underclothes. I don’t know that I could be easier.”
He made a noise that advanced from sigh to wheeze to full laughter. He stirred beside her, and she felt his head, cold and wet, at her elbow. Like a contrite puppy, he nudged his way beneath her arm to nuzzle against her stomach and breasts. Well, and who could resist a contrite puppy, she thought, and leaned back again.
She closed her eyes as he pushed up her chemise, surrendering to the warm relief of his face against her damp skin. He lay there with his cheek on her belly.
“I pushed you too much.”
“The water—it’s so . . . big,” she said, and laughed a little, for she sounded like a child.
“Not just the water you feared.”
She watched the stars, as John had wanted her to do in the water, heard the waves thrashing at the shore, and liked the weight of his head on her stomach, how it grounded her, made her conscious of each breath she drew in and released.
“How many times, then? Let’s decide.”
His thumb, broad and crusted with sand, stroked up and down her ribs. “Seven twenty times. Seven seventy times.”
She smiled, thinking they’d be horizontal for months with figures like that. Even seven times, like that poem of his, was too many. How many times could she afford to multiply her heartbreak?
“Three,” she said. “Three.”
A sigh crossed her skin. “Do you always negotiate like this?”
“No.” She answered promptly, before she noticed how that word always had stung her. Always because of that list, that catalogue of her lovers she’d supplied him the night on the Sultan’s Road, and she hated herself for doing it, hated John for being human enough to remember it.
I’ve never been so wise before. The comment was curling on her tongue, infused with all the cynical venom at her disposal.
But he spoke first. “Have ever you seen someone in a fever, a fever that takes them away? And they keep asking for things that can’t be—people long dead they want, or places far off, no longer there, or secrets out of their dreams nobody understands. They ask and they ask, but nothing none can do for them but pray for the fever to break.” He lifted his head. “Bless God, that’s what it’s like, Elisabeth, wanting you, how I wake up sometimes—”
“You’re mad,” she said, and drew down his head to her neck, sighing softly as he kissed her there, in all her hollows. “I’m not some aristocrat’s daughter, you know, not any lady or heiress. I’m just a girl, and you invited her for a tryst, and she came.”
He stopped kissing her and looked her full in the eye. For a long time. She grew self-conscious.
“Elisabeth Dobson you are,” he said at last.
“That’s right. That’s all. So come on and fuck me, John.”
It was that or weep, weep for what she thought she heard in his voice, the thing beyond his lust. But he didn’t like it. He didn’t like her saying what they’d come here to do. He continued to stare down at her, something hard in his face now. She’d never seen it before, and her hard words had put it there, which made her want to weep more.
She reached up to stroke his cheek, soften it again. He caught her hand.
She was afraid to say, I know you care more than that. She pushed herself up so she could kiss him, pulled him down with her, kissing his mouth and jaw, sand grating between his skin and hers.
Her kisses came back to her, magnified, hungry. His underclothes were sopping and cold, but the fever of his body still reached her. They grappled together with her drawers, and his hand ground sand and tiny pebbles against her skin as it touched her thigh and hip. He was sorry, he said, sorry about this place, all the dirt, he hadn’t thought . . .
He left off without finishing the apology, positioning himself between her legs. He leaned down and kissed her cheek. “Are you sure I cannot make a babe in you, girl?”
Lizzie, are you quite certain you’re barren? That was what Avery Nash had asked her the first few times they had coupled. Perhaps he would have continued to ask if she hadn’t tossed his brandy in his face the third time. As John went on in awkward, distracted half sentences, she thought of Avery’s question, and was so disconcerted she could only mumble, “I’m sure.” So disconcerted, she didn’t realize until too late that John was shoving his drawers out of the way, that he intended to enter her right now.
“John,” she said. She needed him to slow down.
He didn’t seem to hear. She gasped in pain as he thrust inside her. She lifted her hips, hoping at first to signal him with a gentler rhythm, but he took no heed. She tried to match him, desperate to salvage what was going awry. She tried to see his face to confirm this was John, kind and good, but his neck was bent, his face obscured by a wet curtain of hair.
He drove against her, frantic, oblivious, and Betsey didn’t have to wait until he was finished to know: She’d been well and truly fucked.
Do not attempt erasures. Except in rare instances erasures are not allowable.
—How to Become Expert in Type-writing
She wanted to wash.
“Turn away,” she told a still-panting John, and when he had, she stood and started to tie her drawers together so she wouldn’t have to walk to the water half-naked. They were cold and sticky and filthy with sand, however, and in disgust, she finally stripped them off again, muttering, “Hell.” She wrapped the garment around her hips as best she could, the skin on the back of her shoulders and arms burning with every movement.
The dark water felt doubly cold now, the waves seemed more violent, but she ventured to water that came to her waist and kept her back to the shore. She unfurled her drawers, trying to clean them, then removed her chemise and rinsed it out as well. Both were ruined, she feared, streaked with dirt she’d never scrub away. The loss made her furious.
Her hair was knotted and filled with grit, and though she
hated the thought of being underwater again, she took a deep breath and sank, clutching her clothes in her fist. And somehow the fear was less now, the pull of the waves not so terrifying. She surfaced and slipped down again to hang in the dark muffle of peace.
No longer does she lock away the payment owed—
The payment owed to—
Love. That was the word in the poem John hadn’t forgotten, only hadn’t wanted to say.
The realization shot her up above the surface.
Or almost. She’d drifted, and now found she could barely scrape the seafloor with her toes. Afraid, she pumped her legs and arms the way John had taught her, pumped and pumped as air fought to get out and come in at once through her throat.
“John.” The word limped out pitifully in the wrong direction, out to the wide dark sea.
Nevertheless, he heard her. He was there already, right behind her, sweeping her toward him, towing her back to safety. Her arms and legs wrapped around him, relieved for his solid strength.
“I didn’t like it, you out here alone.”
She slackened her hold, gritting through a sudden fall of pain on her shoulders. She must have a thousand tiny cuts from the coarse sand, every one of them filled with salt water now. “I was managing.”
“Were you? Perhaps you’d best paddle out and fetch your underthings, then.”
“Oh!” She twitched around in dismay, catching sight of the ghostly puddle of white that had already drifted far from them. Her best things, and the loan from her brother-in-law that had paid for them still over her head. “Hell and hell. Can’t you get them?”
“Half to America they will be by the time I see you safe and then swim out again. But here—” He gripped her in one arm, while the other disappeared under the water. In a moment, he produced his own drawers and tossed them in the direction of hers.
“Wasteful,” she chided, but couldn’t help smiling at the sight of their underclothes floating off to America together.
• • •
John tried not to notice his disappointment when Betsey asked him to bring her clothes to her. He told himself the cold had become too much for her, and left her in the surf while he returned to their piles of clothing.
The Typewriter Girl Page 24