Up by the path, he quickly dried himself with his shirt and tugged on his trousers, then collected her corset and stockings and uniform and all the white garments he could find, and carried them down to the surf. She hesitated, crouched with the water up to her neck.
“Come, you,” he said.
She didn’t. “Turn away. Please.”
He gave his back to her and held out to his side an arm draped with the rather surprising weight of her attire, but he couldn’t ignore how it rankled, this shyness from her. They’d been flesh to flesh tonight. And . . .
And plenty of other men had seen her out of her clothes. That rankled, too, and not least because it made him a cur to think of it. He stood looking at the dark path to the road, unable to dismiss the ugly sensation that this modesty in Betsey was something false. She was no maiden, she’d reminded him tonight. She was already ruined, God damn him for thinking it.
He turned. She had put on all her petticoats and had her hand inside her corset, adjusting her breasts, which were nothing like balls of yarn or any other such workaday article. She felt him watching her and looked up with her brows aslant, a shy and wary hellion whose sweet loveliness would never cease taking him by surprise.
He dragged the backs of his fingers along her forehead and cheek. He wanted to say something, apologize, maybe, for slandering her in his thoughts, or ask, Did I break my vow this night? Somehow is it still intact?
He pulled her to him for a deep kiss. Briefly, she leaned into him but then pushed away, taking her boots from him and going to the edge of the surf again. All night, this pushing and pulling.
Her petticoats gathered in her arms, she tried to finagle washing the sand from her foot and then getting foot to stocking minus sand and water. She came close to pitching herself into the surf.
“You’ll have your boots full of water.” He went and scooped her up in his arms, throwing her over his shoulder.
She struggled. “I don’t need—”
“Hush, you.” He tapped her behind.
He carried her to the rocks near the path and set her down. He fumbled with her stocking—his fingers were full of nerves, touching the thing—and she told him to never mind, she would just have her boots, and she could put them on herself.
John lifted her leg anyway, as certain he could right things as he was they’d gone wrong somewhere along. Her petticoat slipped back past her knee, exposing a long, long length of white flesh. He swallowed and held her boot for her.
“All that cycling,” he said as she wiggled her foot into it. “’Elisabeth’s firm flesh’ was an apt expression.”
“One true thing in that poem, I suppose.”
His hand drifted over the laces, making him think of her sitting on Sarah Elliot’s step, making every crisscross a flat, straight X. Rather than try to imitate such precision, he bypassed the laces altogether and let his fingers graze the skin of her calf, then over her knee and to the inside of her thigh. Betsey’s face turned up to the sky, eyes shut, bottom lip between her teeth. She was lithe and lovely, and he hadn’t touched her nearly enough before.
“I want to take you to my bed. You in my bed, girl, the night entire.”
“And in the morning?”
He felt her quiver under his touch. It turned his brain like a top, that twitch of her muscles, that hitch in her breathing. “Fine as well. Betsey in my bed, morning, noon, and night.”
“You know that isn’t what I mean.” She moved his hand away and leaned over to lace her boots. “I suppose it oughtn’t happen again, anyway.”
He said nothing while she tidied each X. The task took quite a while.
“Why tonight, then?”
“I wanted it.”
“But you don’t now.”
“No.” Standing, she reached for her skirt and tossed it over her head. She adjusted it and fastened the tapes, sure and hard, like a sailor securing the mainsail. “You should be glad.”
“No doubt you’re right, girl. Just tell me for what I’m glad so I get it right in my thanksgiving prayers.”
“You don’t have to worry about me wanting too much. Falling in love and all that.”
He stared as she slipped on the little waistcoat to her uniform. Her fingers sprinted down the column of buttons.
She shrugged. “That’s why you stopped.”
“Stopped . . .”
“No longer does she lock away the payment owed to love—isn’t that the rest of it? You didn’t answer me because you didn’t want to say it.”
Poetry was the undoing of it all? She wanted to throw him over because he’d stumbled over a line of poetry?
But no, it was because of where he’d stumbled. He couldn’t think why he’d hesitated, it was so trivial, except it had surprised him, had come sneaking onto his tongue almost before he could do anything about it.
“A trifling verse is all it is.”
“Yes, just a trifling verse, and you might have finished with no consequence. I’m not so far gone for you that I’d have thought you meant a promise by it.”
“Thanks, there,” he muttered. Not so far gone for him. You gave yourself to me tonight.
“John. You’re kind. You meant to keep from hurting me, I know, but you didn’t have to. We had it settled, didn’t we? I knew what we were about. Still, I—” Her direct gaze, her direct words faltered. She toyed with the lower buttons on her vest. “I believed you’d come to care for me, in some way, and that would make it different. But it . . . it was rather . . . worse, so . . . I think we’d just best forget it, all right?”
That word—worse—lifted the lid on John’s overboiling brain, cooled his protests and questions. Worse. This, he understood as perfectly as anything he’d ever understood in his life, was his cue to agree, right, just forget it, to part, quickly, and to bury this moment, this night, in a deep, anonymous, worm-riddled grave.
There was something he wanted more, however, which was for a moment like this to never happen to him again, and so in a voice nearly as low as his pride, he said, “Explain different.”
She shrugged, as though it had cost him nothing to ask this, as though she were about to enlighten him on nothing more interesting or urgent than balls of yarn. “I don’t know. Like with Thomas, I suppose is what I mean.”
Thomas. Thomas Dellaforde. John almost spat, remembering the name, the only one she’d spoken with longing that night on the pleasure railway. He grabbed up his boots, the gesture so impatient that Betsey could not fail to notice his disdain.
“He loved me,” she said evenly. “He showed it when—when we were together.” She cleared her throat, but her voice was still husky as she added, “I want it again.”
Betsey Dobson, in tears. For Thomas Goddamned Dellaforde. She’d told him, one of those late evenings at Sarah’s, about Goddamned Dellaforde. Begun, at least. The conversation lost its way, ran over a cliff, and died an ugly death when he’d discovered she’d been a fourteen-year-old maid in the Dellaforde household and Thomas Goddamned Dellaforde the master’s son, five years older than she.
“I know you—I know it isn’t the same,” she rushed to add, her voice clearer. “We aren’t in love, but I’d believed—I’d thought it was not just to get a poke in.”
“Bless the bleeding Christ!” His voice was a crushing implosion, restraining his impulse to shake the filth from her lips. “What do you think your Thomas was doing? He couldn’t have loved you! Not how you believe! Bless the bleeding Christ, Elisabeth, you were scarce more than a child, and he—he was using you, he took advantage. He thought it the privilege of his position and he took advantage—don’t you see it after all this time?”
“His position? Over me, you must mean.”
He was not a hypocrite. In the pause that followed her comment, he worked on some way to articulate why not, but finally said, “Out on the street you were put, nothing to your name, and he let it happen!”
“Such things happen every day, don’t you know it?”
“Not to you!”
He’d shouted. It startled her, and he was gratified to see that infuriating cool of hers disturbed, how she stepped back in alarm. Because he was mad. He could feel it; he didn’t blame her for thinking it. Standing barefoot on a midnight shore, in a rage over events ten years past, having just coupled in the dirt with a woman not his wife, John was well aware that somewhere along the way he’d left his sanity behind like an umbrella or the morning paper. He threw his boots to the ground, then dropped down beside them to put them on.
Betsey spoke carefully, as one should to a madman. “You understand . . . what I meant?”
It all depended on to what she referred. He supposed he’d grasped the key point, that apparently—and it took him a few long moments to wrestle with this, to confront it in his mind—apparently, he was a damn poor lover. Or at least inferior to Thomas G. Dellaforde, and he held that complete stranger in such contempt he could hardly bear to be second to him.
And was he even second? He searched his memory for the names of the other men, trying to determine where exactly he might rank. There was Nash, of course, but surely he was no competition. Surely? And the others . . .
But it didn’t matter. He didn’t care if he was second, third, or thirtieth. It only mattered that he wasn’t first.
And that Betsey thought him a poor lover.
What sort of woman told a man that?
He stood, put on his coat and cap, avoided her eyes, muttered “I do” as he moved past her and started up the path. He heard her behind him, struggling with the uneven, uphill way, and turned back to offer a begrudging hand. The one she held out to him clutched her stockings. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her over the roughest patch, up to where he stood, not bothering with a jot of the solicitude he’d employed in helping her down. They shared the same scrap of earth and air for a moment, and John wanted—suddenly and very much—to press one or two of his fingers to her lips.
The next moment, he understood why.
“And you won’t hold me to two more times?” she asked.
Moral: Do not let paper scrapings get into the machine. But if they do, brush them out carefully.
—How to Become Expert in Type-writing
He let loose her wrist so fast she nearly stumbled backward. She reached out for a sapling, dropping her stockings on the ground.
In his best business voice, he answered, “I assure you, Miss Dobson, you are released from your contract.”
He left her to manage how she might. She was good at that, managing.
Once on his bicycle, he forced himself to pedal away at a rate that would not leave her too far behind. Still, she had to have pedaled rather madly to catch up with him as quickly as she did. She matched his speed for a long stretch of the road, a rather impressive show of strength considering she was calling to him all the way, ordering him to stop in a quashed voice that obviously longed to be riding a wave of air, screaming to rouse the residents of every cottage they passed. John kept pedaling.
“John, you stop now, or—”
And then she hushed. Because she was putting all her energy into passing him, he realized, as she began to edge ahead. And though who held the lead was only a childish difference, though it mattered only that he got her to Sarah Elliot’s as quickly as possible, he sped up, too. But not for nothing was that firm flesh he’d noted tonight. She moved ahead, and just as John was preparing for another hard push, she veered in front of him.
John swerved hard to the left and thought he’d missed her, but in the next instant, his rear wheel clipped hers. He heard her go down with a grunt and the rattle of the bicycle.
He let his cycle fall to the road as he turned to see how Betsey had fared. She was crawling out from under the bicycle with all the grace of a sheep escaping its shearer, but appeared otherwise intact.
“Easy mad, you. What’s in your head, to do that?”
“You—” Sitting in the road, she started to put her hands up to her eyes, then stopped suddenly, examining her left hand.
“Put out your hands, did you? I warned you not to.”
“It happened too fast.”
He came and crouched beside her. “You did it on purpose, you ought’ve been ready.”
“I meant you to stop, not run me down!”
“I kept from running you down!” He held her hand, tilting it to catch the glow of her bicycle’s lamp. Bright blood oozed from a small cut on her dust-covered palm. He pulled out his pocket handkerchief.
She jerked her hand away. “It is your mother’s. The blood will spoil it.”
He glanced up, surprised she remembered some reference he’d made to the handkerchiefs his mother had sent him every season. “Hand, now,” he commanded.
She held her wrist stiffly as he tied the handkerchief. He asked if she could bend it.
She tried, tentatively at first, then with more vigor, though she grimaced at it. “Just tender, a bit.”
One part of her, at least. “The other.”
“It’s fine.”
“See it, I shall.”
She shook her right hand to prove its soundness but then let him inspect it. “I’ve never taken a spill before,” she said.
John thought what she had done more akin to murder and suicide than a simple spill. “Be careful, girl,” he said with a sigh.
She looked depleted, drained, a soldier resigned to survival by way of defeat, and the sight stabbed painfully within him. He couldn’t name this loss, or even say which of them had suffered it, but he stroked his thumb in the hollow of his palm with a wish for restoration.
“Be you careful,” he repeated, and sandwiched her hand between his, sealing the wish.
• • •
“Iefan,” Betsey said, but too low and too late; his movement to stand and help her to her feet scattered the sounds to the night. And what would have followed those bereft syllables? Afraid to know, she felt glad he apparently wanted to accomplish the ride to Sarah’s as quickly as possible.
At the gate to Sarah’s garden, she paused. “I need to ask . . . you wouldn’t try to—”
She stopped, shame heating her as she realized she did not need to ask; she knew better. She knew him better.
But he said, “You’re safe.” His voice was stark: He’d guessed. “I’ll not get you sacked for letting me get a poke in. Nor not letting me.”
She wouldn’t have said it like that. Oh, something like that, perhaps, but room remained for a denial. “I wasn’t accusing—”
“Not that? Want to remind me I’m lucky to be so callous a man as to keep you from being in love? How I made so poor a job of fucking you don’t care to repeat it?”
Misquoted, but in no way misunderstood, Betsey clamped down on her lip.
“See you how well I listen?” he said in that winter-stark voice. “Helps me feign kindness to snare a convenient fuck. Since I was seventeen, no convenient fuck, so I do what I must when one comes my way. Blessed you, to be so clever to see through it.”
She wanted to tell him to stop saying fuck, that it sounded ridiculous and heartbreaking on his lips. Instead, she turned from him and wheeled her cycle through the gate, and noticed with something she would label relief that he did not follow, but pedaled away.
On the stairs to her room, she focused on avoiding squeaks and kept to the outermost parts of the treads. At her door, she reminded herself to open it slowly, silently.
Her fingers poised on the latch, she blinked.
Since I was seventeen, no convenient fuck.
Since I was seventeen . . .
No. She’d misunderstood. She hadn’t heard him right. No. Her care for silence forgotten, she fumbled with the latch, thinking it was impossible, and she hadn’t heard what she’d heard.
The open door spilled light into the corridor, redoubling her bewilderment. How could she have left a lamp burning?
Charlie, sitting in the rocker near the window.
Her relief did not last long. How
ever much she enjoyed indulging his request to go onto the roof, she should never have let him cross the threshold to her room.
“You nearly parted me from my wits,” she whispered, the accusation harsher for the other ways she’d failed to observe boundaries tonight. “What are you doing?”
Charlie stood, his thin arms at his sides, the candlelight making dark hollows of his eyes. Betsey tucked the hand holding her stockings behind her back.
“I saw John bringin’ you home,” he said. “I could have, I tell him every week—”
She softened. “I know. I am sorry. It is just so late, you know, and your mother . . .” She crossed to the chest of drawers to hide away her stockings, catching a glimpse of her wretched reflection in the looking glass that hung above it, her hair half wet and loose, her clothes soiled and not quite in place. “Your mum would rather have you home early.” She hung her straw hat on the hook beside the looking glass and picked up her hairbrush, checking Charlie with an indirect glance in the glass. “I’m so very tired. You’d best go—we both of us need to get to sleep.”
Grains of sand fell onto the sleeves and bodice of her jacket as she brushed out her hair.
“Were you glad it was him? Him and not me?”
Betsey closed her eyes, hurting for him. “I’ve told you, I think it’s absurd, anyone seeing me home at all. For pity’s sake, in London—”
“Where’ve you been? You look—” His face contorted suddenly. He knew. Had some idea, at least.
Ignoring his question would confirm his guess but would also, she hoped, show him the topic was not for them to discuss. She went to the door and opened it for him. “Good night, Charlie,” she said, as kindly as she could and still convey her meaning.
His head lowered, he took the few steps to the door and stopped. Betsey barely heard him as he said, “Mum won’t favor it.”
When she didn’t ask what he meant, he glanced up at her, his eyes no longer hollows but catching the lamplight with a sharp glint. “Mum won’t favor it, a whore under her roof.”
The Typewriter Girl Page 25