Betsey’s hand tightened around the door latch. Withholding what—comfort? A slap across his cheek? She hardly knew, but in either case, she held her grip with all her strength and let the comment settle on them both, a dusty layer of filth. Charlie looked down again.
“Good night,” she repeated, and this time, he fled.
• • •
The sounds of the usual bustle of Sunday mornings woke her, but Betsey remained in bed, and when Sarah came to check on her, she simply begged off from breakfast and church, no excuse nor lie. Sarah, with less than a quarter hour to services, an apron over her clothes and her hair still undone, had no time to press for reasons.
Betsey had been dreaming of the Sundial. With the room growing warm, she threw the covers off, a vague idea she’d had about riding into Idensea suddenly seeming urgent.
Bathed and dressed, she retrieved her cycle. One of Sarah’s boarders was reading in the back garden and asked where Betsey was off to, adding a warning about impending rain. “Just wandering,” Betsey answered, but this was dishonest, or at least inaccurate, for wandering implied no purpose. The better word would have been scouting.
Because what if John’s idea about her striking out on her own was not so absurd? It hadn’t seemed absurd at all last night, when she’d first considered it. The logistics and cost of beginning such an endeavor were daunting, but perhaps she could begin by looking about town, discovering whether there just might be some place to serve her purpose.
In many ways, the Sundial was ideal, though she did not know if Mrs. Gomery would be agreeable to such a business arrangement. Too, something handier to the rail station and Esplanade would be preferable. She took a circuitous, less familiar route from Sarah’s to the town center, considering every structure, including a barn or two, that appeared large enough to host a gathering of perhaps a hundred or so.
Somewhere in her exploration, the what-iffery firmed into a more substantial thing, and she itched to be making notes and numbering lists, getting a plan to paper. At Idensea’s town hall, a new building she’d never been inside but which she knew held an assembly room of some size, she realized the brief shower she’d waited out under a garden door was not the end of the rain, and decided to go to the hotel. She could eat there, and her little desk in the empty offices would provide a quiet place to make her notes.
She was refusing the bellman’s offer to take her umbrella when Mr. Seiler called her name. His voice carried the usual unruffled authority, but Betsey realized at once her mistake, using one of the main guest entrances, especially in her current state. Though she had her umbrella, the rain had begun before she had reached the bicycle shelter, no doubt leaving her somewhat bedraggled-looking in her decade-old printed skirt.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured as Mr. Seiler handed off her umbrella to the bellman and offered his arm as though she’d just been delivered from a gilded carriage.
“A singular occurrence, I’m certain.”
“The office entrance was locked,” she explained, letting him escort her into his own office. Inside, he opened a cabinet door to reveal a washstand and small mirror, and though Betsey knew he was not always at the hotel, he did give one the sense he was constantly available.
He offered a towel. “Because it is Sunday, Miss Dobson.”
In other words, why was she here? As she blotted the dampness from her shoulders, Betsey explained her errand, telling him in the process about John’s idea.
Mr. Seiler motioned her to a chair. “There remains every chance the board will renew the excursion scheme. You have not given up or grown so unhappy here that you are eager to leave the company?”
“Just the opposite, really. Only—” She hesitated, unwilling to reveal to him the bargain Sir Alton had tried to strike with her.
“You’ve seen for yourself how Sir Alton regards the excursion scheme,” she said. “Not to mention its manageress.”
“An alternate strategy is never a poor idea, true. You considered the Black Lion, I suppose?”
“Yes.” She had stood before it for some minutes today, wondering if it was too down-at-the-heels, imagining it alight with the warmth and bustle of Mrs. Gomery’s public house. The large inn had been Idensea’s best before the Swan Park had opened, though Betsey did not know if its shabby appearance was due to losing trade to the Swan or simply due to more than seventy years of use.
“Mr. Seiler, have you ever heard of a woman managing a hotel?”
“You aspire to take my position?” he asked, with humor, and then his blue eyes turned suddenly sharp on her. “When Mrs. Seiler and I first came to this country, you know, we traveled, we visited any number of inns and hotels. Both our families have been hoteliers for generations, but we wished to acquaint ourselves with the British ways, to know what the British traveler expects and desires. We learned a great deal, Marta and I, from these hotel managers, and manageresses.”
Betsey’s lips parted at this final word.
“This interests you, Miss Dobson?”
She suppressed a shrug as doubts reared up inside her, everything from her sporadic education to the time she’d bloodied the nose of one of her fellow laundresses for claiming Betsey’s basket of finished shirts. How could she, or Mr. Seiler, for that matter, imagine she could be fit for such a career?
“If so, perhaps at the end of the season, you can begin training in earnest, yes?”
Yes. Yes, though it all depended on how far past the season she lasted.
• • •
Mr. Seiler allowed her to use his private stairway to go down to the basement, where the afternoon service period in the staff dining hall was closing. The lentils were gone; she was lucky to get a pair of brown rolls and some cheese. She had no sooner squeezed into a place at the women’s tables than a bell rang, prompting a commotion of scraping benches and final jollities as the staff returned to duty and left her alone at the table.
Though not in the hall. At the men’s tables, deeper in the hall, sat Mr. Jones, tipping his bowl to get a few last bites into his spoon. It looked as if he had a dish of strawberries, too, which irked her, as they were a rare treat in the staff kitchen. His absorption in his meal provided her the chance to stare unstintingly, as a condemned man might suck down the scent of his last plate of chops. She recognized the suit he generally wore to services and wondered that he was here—often, he gave over his Sunday afternoons to Charlie.
She wondered if John, too, had become a target of Charlie’s petulance. Perhaps he had thought best to leave the boy alone.
She fastened her gaze to her plate. No doubt he thought best to let her alone. She ripped the end off a roll and pushed a bite of cheese inside before filling her mouth with it, as though she could stuff back all of last night’s disappointment, keep it from rising and choking her with the pain of it.
“Iva, let Miss Dobson have this, won’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
The dish of strawberries appeared at Betsey’s place, delivered by the scullery girl who’d been wiping the tables with a damp rag. Betsey tore another bite from her roll and drew her gaze in even closer, so the strawberries were excluded. I know you, that gift meant, but what else? She was afraid to guess.
How could he not have been with a woman since he was seventeen? Over the rows of tables, she said, “I find it hard to believe.” That he would give up his strawberries, that he’d been chaste till last night. Let him make what he would of the remark.
He grunted. “A thing men lie about, that.”
Amusement threaded the response, however grim his tone. Betsey swallowed, then touched her lips, remembering his kisses, her spongy knees and tunneling vision after that first one in the camera obscura.
A broom whisked over the stone floor, nearby, then moved off. John spoke again, also low. “Ignorance you’ve mistook for carelessness, girl.”
She pinched her lip, then took a strawberry. The brown knot that had caused it to be rejected from the restaurant supply d
id not affect its sweetness. She heard John’s bench scrape the stone and pushed the strawberry dish toward him when he paused at her table. He straddled the bench opposite hers and didn’t turn in to face her, though he did pop an entire berry into his mouth.
“Why so long since you bedded a woman?”
“Bless God, your mouth. Speaks of whatever it pleases.”
“That’s right. So tell me.”
He gave her a look: Here? But Iva, the little scullery girl, swept like the devil himself inhabited the crumbs; she’d not hear if they kept their voices soft. John tapped the tabletop with his thumb.
“Were you never taught God’s commandments? I know you didn’t have your mother and dad long, but no one else warned you how fornication would mar your soul for heaven?”
“I’ve been warned,” she replied, so flatly that he slipped a sideways glance at her.
Then he smiled down at the bench. “My mother—there was fierce she could be, telling her sons how God had a special anger for men what used children and women ill. That to take a girl’s purity from her was like robbing a beggar. That you married a girl before you had relations with her.” He softened his voice even more to add, “Or if she’d had your tongue, Dobs, she’d’ve said a man doesn’t fuck a woman.”
It sounded especially ugly, spoken here and by him, and so softly. Anger licked through her. She said, “You’re ashamed,” and made a movement toward leaving the table.
His hand flashed out. Elsewhere, he might have latched on to her hand, but now he stopped short of that and left a fraction of space between their fingertips.
Then he moved his arm off the table completely. “I only tell you what you asked to know. I left my home early, but with certain things branded into me. And when I was seventeen, and thought I didn’t need to bide them anymore, I had them put to me again, with a good, hot iron.”
“Put to you? What do you mean?”
“My scars—my mouth and eye—”
She had asked about them before and had received a brief, vague story about a navvy who made a vicious drunk.
“Tokens of my first time. First and last, till last night.”
“John! What happened, then? Who—who was she?”
“The navvy’s wife. ’Twas like I told you, when I was at work on the Severn Tunnel. And we were caught, and I got the beating I deserved. Thought it was more than I deserved at first, bones broke, bruises like pitch, head all soft with swelling. Blind in my eye for more than half a year. But a man’s wife.” He bowed his head.
Betsey asked, “What did he do to her?” and regretted it immediately, hearing his sigh. “Never mind. I oughtn’t ask.”
“I don’t know what happened to her. He didn’t touch her while he had me in his grip, I know that. I stayed out of sight for a good while. There was an engineer who liked me, took me in and made me study till I was fit for work again. Never saw her again, except in my mind when I woke nights sweating fear and weeping repentance. I understood what my mam meant, then, and it wasn’t just fear of hell anymore.” He paused. “I hope—I hope she told some lie of me, something to save herself.”
“I’m sorry.” She wished she had not made him recount the story, even as she wished she had known his guilt and confusion sooner. She wished poor Iva would stop sweeping in that same place, timidly awaiting her chance to clear the last dishes and clean the missed spots under the table where Betsey and John sat.
“All wrong, this, isn’t it?”
“That must be it,” she agreed, though she didn’t. She didn’t have a jealous husband. Thomas had not made her feel like a beggar robbed. John had made a vow, he’d told her on the pleasure pier, to respect her wishes and not pursue her, and she had released him from it.
Yet here he sat, tortured, bewildered, because he’d failed in something she’d never asked of him.
It occurred to Betsey that, possibly, he loved her. Possibly, John loved her. Well, she loved him, too, and as she could think of no better way to ease his anguish than to be gone, she rose from the table and took the first way out of the hotel she came upon, though the rain still was pouring and her umbrella was at the bell stand. She slogged across the grounds, only her straw hat for protection, and was in the bicycle shelter struggling to extract her cycle when she realized she ought to leave it overnight, take the tram.
She swiped her sleeve over her damp face and prepared to start home all over again.
John stood inside the wide doorway.
“Don’t ride to Sarah’s in this wet,” he said.
Write every exercise as though it were to be put on exhibition.
—How to Become Expert in Type-writing
I shan’t.”
It was so loud, the rain drumming down on the shelter, slapping the stone at the threshold. John’s shoulders were drenched, his hair sopped down to his brows. He held an umbrella, quite closed, at his side, and she—well, she could not remember what had driven her into the rain.
“Come into my bed with me, Elisabeth,” he said. “Soft as a whisper, those sheets, and you are the loveliest sight my eyes have seen, and I want to make love to you.”
Betsey moved out of the tangle of cycles and went to him. She touched his face, the scrawl of his lips and the scar in the corner of them, the bristle of his lashes as his eyelids fell shut.
“Why?” she whispered. “After so long, and—me?”
Ah, her hope. She couldn’t keep it from spilling from her heart any more than she could keep the rain in the clouds. Because I’ve fallen in love with you, Elisabeth Dobson. It was so foolish, but out it spilled, and she couldn’t help it.
“Elisabeth,” he said, “you give me a pain in my side. That is why.”
Her hand flew to her mouth, making a cup. She laughed her surprise and disappointment into it. “That is the worst poem I’ve ever heard.” Even Keats and his belle dame were better.
The umbrella fell to the ground as he grabbed her arms. She gasped as he swung her round to the wall of the shelter, where the rain was like a curtain over the doorway beside her. He pinned her, one rough hand splayed over her neck and cheek, the other on the wall.
“There’s plain it is. There’s true. Me taken like a rabbit in a trap by you, and no will to scratch my way out, more than half-wanting you to come fast as you can to break my neck and skin me for your roasting pot.”
“Oh my God,” she breathed, filled with disgust, or something that made her shiver and melt.
“I know. I don’t speak fair to you. But true. ”
“Lust is all that is. More than ten years of it.”
“Yes, it is, through me like blood poison, you think I don’t know, that I’ve never had it before? In my eye when I look at you, on my hands, how I’ve touched you, you think I don’t know it? But that stab—”
His grip on her gentled; he leaned into her and put his lips on her neck, pressed her hand flat to his left side, where she could feel his heart fast at work. “Here’s that pain in my side, girl. How sore and tender it is with you, I wish I could finer say.”
She crumpled the fabric of his suit in her hand. “You are so hard to believe.”
“You think I lie.”
“No, I mean like the size of the ocean, or a job that pays a woman commission with her wages. Or magic beans. That sort of hard to believe.”
He squeezed her hand. He found her hat pin, and once her hat was gone, his fingers loosened her hair as he kissed all the fragile places of her face and neck. Into her ear he whispered, “Tell me how to please you—I want to,” and she said, “Iefan,” tears threatening because she’d made him so unsure. They kissed, and she told him it didn’t matter. No, you tell me. You tell me what he did to make you weep for him still.
She wrapped her arms about him; she burrowed her face against his chin, into his shoulder as he held her, and she believed. She believed his affection as she believed his ambition, his instinct to compete. She believed in the impulse that had made her leave him at the table a
nd the one that had made him come after her. All of it she would take into her hands, a complication of spun glass.
“You call me ’girl’ sometimes, Iefan,” she said as he held her. “I don’t mind, you see. I like it. But when you touch me . . .”
She hesitated, and he guessed, “Lady.” He nuzzled into her hair. “I know it. I have been too rough with you.”
She smiled at his guess. It was very dear.
Part of the shelter was reserved for repair space. There she led him, her finger hooked into a buttonhole on his coat. She shut the lid on a chest of tools and bicycle parts and sat him there.
“Woman, Iefan,” she said softly as she stood before him. With his gaze touching her mouth, she added, “Yours.”
His lips parted in silent response. He met her eyes again, firmly fastening their gazes together. The force of his attention penetrated the gloom of the shelter and brushed every feminine part of her, from the curves of her flesh to the bends of her instincts, into peaked, expectant awareness.
Over her hips, her fingers rippled, lifting her skirts an inch at a time. “Touch me like you know that.”
She gathered her skirts to a point just above her knee. Just past that boundary, he claimed her, pulling her between his thighs as his other hand caught the back of her head and brought her even closer, into a kiss. The hand on her head moved lower, down her back to join its mate beneath her skirts. As she kissed him, letting go of her skirts and wrapping her arms around him, he explored her. He pressed beneath the edge of her corset, he crumpled the fabric of her drawers, kneading her buttocks and the backs of her thighs.
He found a tear in her stocking. There, a single finger ventured onto her skin, worked itself under the cotton. Betsey broke their kiss with a gasp, shocked by a spasm of anticipation as his fingertip roughed the baby skin at the back of her knee.
“Oh God, your hands,” she whispered. She closed her eyes and surrendered to the sensation. “I love them, did you know? How high the heels of your thumbs rise. Your fingers, they’re wide and hard, and I . . . oh, I think about them, John, I do.”
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