This made him laugh. Betsey took a step back, pushing his arms away. Hiking up her skirts, she put a foot up beside him on the chest, and insisted, “I do. I think about them here, doing this.”
His amusement evaporated. He watched her hand disappear into the slit of her drawers. When he reached for her, she untied the tapes and guided him. He touched her, and both of them made some animal sound, wordless and telling.
She came on his palm, her knees shaking until he had to brace her from falling.
John had spoken of his bed, the soft sheets, but they didn’t go to it. Down in the dust of the shelter floor, behind a curtain of rain, she rode him, her skirts billowed over him, his blunt nail bearing into the crevice of her bended knee.
Then a stillness, beyond the one stealing over them. The rain had stopped—how long ago? They’d not even shut the door. Somewhere, deep and away, this knowledge and all it meant sat, a heavy thing in a covered box.
Betsey was shuddering still; she would be raw deep into her dreams tonight, but now they had to rush. Clothes put to rights, dust pounded away, a simple plan formulated: She would leave first; he would wait until she was well clear. For they had to be cautious.
They paused before they parted. John seemed to study her, the shadow in his face the result of something more than the shelter’s gloom. Perhaps he regretted coming after her, or wondered why he was willing to take this gamble. It even seemed possible he wondered on her behalf, why she would do it, which would be a first in her experience with men.
In the end, however, the shadow in his face remained a mystery. So before she pushed her bicycle out the door, she said, “We could consider this the first of three.”
His brows crooked.
“Not count last night,” she explained.
Didn’t it assure him of her willingness? Didn’t it offer him options, from calling it off entirely to making a grand gesture on bended knee? He could even negotiate, as bloodlessly as he no doubt believed she could.
He touched her cheek and murmured, “There’s grace.” Then, while she stared at him, he motioned for her to go. “Before someone comes.”
• • •
“A dozen hankies for each eye your mother will need when she sees you, Charlie,” John said. They stood together before a looking glass inside Reede’s of London, Charlie looking taller and very smart indeed in his first man’s suit.
Mr. Sommerson, the clerk, flicked a clothes brush over the garments. Charlie pretended to dislike the fuss.
“The hat department ought to be our next venture,” John said. “We will find something to replace that cap.”
“Nonsense, sir,” said Mr. Sommerson. “It will be my pleasure to bring some samples to you—have you a particular style in mind?”
John feigned a moment of indecision. “We’re to go to the American baseball exhibition this afternoon, so . . . a boater, perhaps?”
Charlie’s eyes, formerly fixed on his own reflection, now darted with interest. Mr. Sommerson snapped his tape measure around Charlie’s head and vanished.
“Mum won’t like me in a boater much.”
“I expect she won’t.”
“She’ll say I’m too young.” Charlie put his hands into his pockets and studied the effect in the mirror.
“I expect she will. Fortunate we left her in Idensea, is it?”
Mr. Sommerson returned with an armful of hats, but his first choice was perfect. He stood before the boy to make certain all was properly aligned, subtly signaled to John a bit of a hair trimming might be in order, then stepped aside to re-present Charlie to his reflection.
Charlie’s mouth twisted with his effort to suppress his grin, but it finally triumphed, his first real smile all day. “Mum will most certainly hate this.”
John nodded. “Best brace yourself for a smothering of kisses.”
Charlie ran his fingers along the brim. “Thanks, John.”
The expression of gratitude relieved John. Charlie hadn’t been precisely uncivil today, but neither had the outing been the joyful thing he’d envisioned when he and Charlie had planned it months ago.
“Happy birthday, Charlie.”
“A month, yet.”
“Close enough.”
The two of them were headed toward the underground station when Charlie asked if he could see Betsey home when they returned to Idensea. “Fine,” John answered, though he wondered over the wisdom of it, whether it needlessly encouraged Charlie. But he didn’t want to upset the careful, peaceful balance of the day.
For the same reason, he had dashed to the pawnbroker’s while Charlie was having his fitting with the tailor rather than explain he was getting a gift for Betsey. He’d traded Lillian’s ring for a necklace, and the brass birdcage, too, since it had been there still. The birdcage was to be sent, but the necklace was nestled in his pocket.
After a moment, he suggested, with some care, perhaps they both might see Betsey home.
Charlie looked much the child, despite the new boater. “Never mind. She wouldn’t want me, anyway, not after—” He paused. “She went and told you, didn’t she—I said some wicked things to her a while ago.”
“She’s told me nothing of it.”
“She hates me now, I suppose. Doesn’t matter.” He strode ahead and clipped down the steps to the underground station.
John didn’t try to continue the conversation until he’d bought their tickets and they were waiting on the platform. “Apologize, then, if it troubles you so. But whatever you said, she doesn’t hate you, Charlie. You know it, same as I.”
Charlie stared at the rails below the platform. John searched for a new way to tell him the truth he wasn’t ready to hear, though he suspected it was a thing Charlie must sort for himself. A lonely passage for Charlie, though. Nor was waiting John’s best thing. He wanted Charlie back.
The black tunnel began to roar. John touched Charlie’s shoulder, reminding him to step back from the platform’s edge. Charlie shrugged off the touch. “You oughtn’t see her home anymore, either, you know,” he said. “Everyone talks of you and her. You don’t hear it, but they do.”
And with the platform vibrating with the train’s approach, Charlie took off his boater and tossed it down to the grimy tracks.
The desire to collar the boy out of the station and all the way to Idensea flashed down John’s back, but Charlie hopped on the train ahead of him and looked so fearful and defiant when John found him that John only said, “There is ungrateful, that act just now.”
Which made them both miserable. They chewed through the rest of the outing, polite guests of an incompetent cook. Eventually the game diluted the tension, and that night, when they arrived back in Idensea, John said he needed to check on the Kursaal, that Charlie should meet Betsey at the pavilion.
That demolished the fragile peace. He wasn’t doing it, Charlie growled; he didn’t want to ever again, and he stalked away, sure to ruin his mother’s evening, too, arriving home alone and in such a foul temper. The entire day felt like a failure to John, so far from what he’d intended.
In the end, he sent word for one of the night watchmen to tend to Betsey, and he went to the Kursaal, where he ignored the fact it was too dark to inspect anything. He kept thinking of the boater, smashed beneath the train, how Charlie had said, Everyone; how Betsey had told him, I’ll not look jilted when it’s all done.
But Monday night found him at Sarah’s front door again. When Dora Pink drew him inside with a playful scolding for his having missed supper, when she showed him into Dr. Elliot’s old office and there was Elisabeth’s straight and slender back to him as she stood on an ottoman, Sarah fitting her for the dress she would wear to the opening of the Kursaal—when Elisabeth looked over her shoulder to see who had come in and her face changed, lit, and glowed because she saw it was him—
Few men would not understand his helpless, shameful weakness.
They made a resolution that someone other than he would see her home on Saturday
nights. He failed to stop showing up, however. She failed to ever send him away. Crossing the grounds from the pavilion to the bicycle shelter one night, she said, “Mr. Seiler mentioned the Gilbeys would be arriving soon.”
John said he supposed this correct.
“I think he is very set on you marrying her.”
“My friend, Tobias. Not my father.”
With a laugh, she ran for the shelter, tagging the wall, and then—in a gesture that left him scarcely able to walk, let alone run—she lifted her skirts and waited.
John landed against her, greedy and famished. He knew something savage lurked in her play but could not care enough to watch his step, not even when she said, “The Kursaal is almost done. Miss Gilbey is coming. We’d best wind up our contract in a hurry, don’t you think?”
Betsey Dobson and how she used sex. It was her attack, it was her resignation.
His hand beneath her skirts, he reminded her, “It doesn’t matter when she comes. I gave her up.”
“You gave up on her.”
He would not argue over such a scrap of word as on, not with Betsey unfastening his trousers. “Mr. Jones,” she was sighing, “Mr. Jones. So fine a gentleman, he fucks me with all his clothes on.”
There. The spring of the trap, lethal and true.
Never mind he’d been wary, half-expecting it. Eagerly, the pain flared, and he seized her arm, wresting her hand from his trousers. “What if I do? Here, on this wall, what if I do—will it count second, or third? Because rather muddled you left it, didn’t you?”
Then, under an airless seal of sorrow, his anger died. In all his confusion, in all the ways he was ignorant and blinded and plain garden-stupid in this business with Betsey, he was clear-eyed regarding that limit she’d imposed. It carried more blame for what was wrong between them than did Lillian, present or not. He had never liked it, but only in this moment did he understand why she had imposed it.
“Didn’t you, Elisabeth?” he repeated.
Though she hadn’t been fighting his grip, he felt a give, a release, an expansion of the stillness within her. With the grating whisper of drapery, her skirts fell between them. John pressed his forehead to hers and felt the wings of her pulse as he curved his hand alongside her neck.
It’s no good for you, girl. Expecting nothing better, it’s no good for you.
What place did he have to say it?
She told him, “I’m sorry.”
The next afternoon, they rode their cycles far into the countryside and Betsey let him teach her to swim in the stiller waters of a woodland pool, where the boys who arrived for an afternoon of play were not particular regarding mixed bathing or appropriate swimming attire, though a couple of them did follow, with intense interest, Betsey’s progress when she removed herself from the water, her white underclothes stained with the pink of her skin. John took it as a sign of their health.
They dried off in a mottled patch of sunlight. The boys’ horseplay was so unrelentingly noisy that John and Betsey stopped noticing it. They talked. She told him a story about her niece that deepened the curls of her mouth. His speech—one good enough to deliver from the stage of the Kursaal’s recital hall opening night, not the wooden thing he’d written out for Tobias to appraise—had rolled out from his brain like a shiny apple as he’d lain with his head in her lap.
If they’d been alone, he would have made love to her there in the wood, surrounded by ferns and an awning of summer-laden branches. He would have kept no tally; he would have let the afternoon drift to infinity, if the choice had been his.
Do not strike the keys as it happens, but strike them systematically, intelligently, and in such a way as to save effort.
—How to Become Expert in Type-writing
Near dawn the day of the Kursaal opening, the last seat in the recital hall was fastened into place, ensuring the Duke of Winchester and all the other guests would not, as John had feared, be viewing tonight’s performance from milking stools.
Laughter and cheers went up when Corbin Ludd plopped down in that last chair and pretended to fall fast asleep to prove the soundness of the installation. John, on the stage reviewing a final few details with some of the workers, turned to the grand piano and struck the cheeriest chords he knew, from that American tune he’d prepared for Lillian Gilbey’s party.
But he’d not committed it to memory as fully as he’d thought. He stumbled through the opening, delighting the men with this opportunity to ridicule him. Laughing, he laid out the opening to “A Mighty Fortress,” the only song besides “God Save the Queen” he and his schoolmates had learned from the wife of the village’s preacher. Within a few measures, the hall was filled with a masculine chorus, and thus was the Kursaal christened with its first performance. The Spanish soprano entertaining the Duke tonight must settle for second.
According to John’s arrangements, the paymaster arrived. For most of the men, these hours through the night had been their last with the pier company, and another round of cheers sounded when John announced wages would be paid on the spot.
But the queue that formed before the paymaster’s table with such good-natured jostling turned sober as it shortened. John shook each man’s hand. He would see them together again—Lady Dunning and Sir Alton hosted a picnic on the grounds of Iden Hall each September for all the summer employees—but this moment marked a passage, and he wished to acknowledge it, simply, man by man.
“You won’t forget me, Mr. Jones, if it comes you need to hire?” asked Paul Higbee, who had been with John on every work site since he’d come to Idensea, as, indeed, had nearly all of the men remaining now. The ones who’d taken places in the rear of the queue, John realized, included some who’d come on as thin, green youths and now were men, former day laborers who’d become foremen—Mandy Wainwright, whose wedding John had attended, and Iesten Gwyn, who never failed to call him Mr. Iefan Rhys-Jones with a tang of a sneer but who had also turned up in March to deliver John to the rail station the day he left to attend his mother’s funeral. During the drive, Gwyn had sung “Suo Gân” in a voice like an unbroken thread of yellow honey and never once turned his eyes from the horse and the road to notice John’s tears.
“Sure not, Mr. Higbee,” John replied, a knot of emotion threatening to choke and embarrass him. He’d been so intent on getting the building finished, he’d forgotten to put himself here, to picture this moment and anticipate how it would feel: finished. Finished, one of those words that deceived, sounding so uncomplicated and absolute.
Higbee was local, and with no new construction by Idensea Pier planned for the near future, he would have to find some other employer. But the same was true for the others, like John himself, who’d come to Idensea for the work and intended to move on when the job was concluded.
From the portico, John saw everyone off into the colorless predawn, breathing in the scent of fresh-turned earth from the flowerbeds, lately made over to include yellow rosebushes. The groundskeeper had had to have his job threatened to be convinced to move and replant a dozen fully blooming bushes, but the Duchess was known to have a partiality to yellow roses, so as long as they were there for her to see Friday, they could die Saturday, as far as Sir Alton was concerned.
Back inside, John gathered his papers, tucked the bench back under the piano. Before he pulled the lid over the keys, he tried the parlor song once more and got through the place that had hung him up without a missed note. But the sound felt overpowering in the empty hall, and he left off at the refrain.
He swiped his coat sleeve across the lid to erase the fingerprints. For sheer luxury, this piano was likely the finest thing he’d ever put his hands on. If Betsey were here, she’d touch it with a single fingertip. The mystery of his confidence in this rolled restlessly in his heart, and he stood looking out into the hall as the Spanish soprano would tonight—as he himself would, too, when he delivered his speech. The newly installed seats would not resemble rows and rows of headstones once they were put to use, fill
ed up with ladies and gentlemen, alive with the stir of fans and flashes of jewels, ears cocking to lips to catch a whisper.
He’d be able to find her, wouldn’t he, when he took the podium?
He walked the aisles of seats, found a spanner and a small dented tin of tobacco. Two pennies, some unused bolts, a pocket comb he was certain belonged to Rafe Dixon, and a red kerchief. He was nearly to the rear of the hall when he heard voices. Expecting the staff who would be doing the final cleaning and decorating, John continued with his inspection of the aisles and was thus surprised when Lady Dunning appeared, her arms full of fresh flowers, the Kursaal manager at her side identically burdened. They both exclaimed over the transformation of the hall, seeing the seats in place and the chandeliers burning.
“Oh, darling boy,” she cried when she saw John. “You’ve been here all night! You and my husband, no sleep, and such a day ahead.” She allowed John to take the flowers from her, and though she was tsk-ing over him and Sir Alton, her eyes held evidence that she’d had little rest as well.
“It’s the speech that had him in such a state,” she continued. “The speech! He said he found it less vexing to direct a hundred-piece orchestra in a full symphony than to compose a little welcome speech, which! Which, months ago, from the time the Duke accepted the invitation, I tried in a most loving way to convince him to do precisely that, compose something for the occasion, conduct the performance. ’Idensea Idyll,’ wouldn’t that have been lovely? And if he and Noel could have collaborated in some way, even to the slightest degree, can you imagine the attention that might have attracted? But I never even suggested a title, far less a collaboration—the entire notion, well, he simply refuses.”
They’d come to the stage steps, and Lady Dunning paused, her shrug toward John communicating more sadness than resignation. “He won’t think of himself as a musician, not anymore.”
She refused his offer to stay and help, ordering him to at least a few hours’ sleep before the Duke arrived. He could hear her directing the manager in the stage decoration as he made his way out. Cycling toward the hotel, he threw a glance over his shoulder at the Kursaal, still waiting for the illumination of full daylight. He would have ridden past Sarah Elliot’s, but he thought the luck of finding Betsey on the roof, ready for a personal tour, was not likely to strike twice.
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