Betsey caught Sarah’s anxious hand. “Splendid.” She had never seen Sarah in anything but black, so it was a revelation to behold her now in pink. She looked years younger, the effect heightened by the flush her haste had brought to her cheeks.
“Well, if I’m half as lovely as you, my dear, then John has two extraordinarily fetching companions tonight.”
“I’ve never seen his like for luck,” Betsey agreed with a laugh, though the word companions surely overstated the circumstances. Once John had driven Sarah and herself to the Kursaal, they would part. John had responsibilities tonight, and in any case, he and Betsey could not go about like a courting couple.
Whatever Dora Pink might have done to the clocks, John was late, and Betsey wondered at it. She drew aside a window curtain, but there was no sign of him.
Sarah said, “It would make a lovely wedding gown, you know.”
Betsey turned from the window, taken by surprise.
“That lace I showed you—I know you didn’t want to take it—but for a wedding—a bit here, and on each sleeve?” Sarah touched each of her own sleeves, where lace already adorned the cuffs. It was Betsey’s pale yellow gown she meant. “And the garden. My daughter Sophie had her wedding party there, why not do it again?” She went on, her voice tremulous with forced cheer, but details spilled from her lips readily, as though she’d been considering them a good while. “Why, everything could be arranged without the least trouble, almost as soon as you and John like.”
“As . . . soon as we like.”
“I’m not supposed to know yet, I realize that, but—”
“There is nothing to know. John and I aren’t—”
“Charlie, that imp!” Sarah interrupted in a burst. Her smile held—held and yet changed, the way freshness depart white linens once you unfold them and put them on the table or the bed. Still clean, bright, but something departed.
Betsey’s confusion departed, too, at the mention of Charlie’s name.
Sarah said, “Charlie gave me the notion that you—you’d be marrying soon,” and it was time for Betsey to say just almost anything, anything to usher the moment along, see it to a more comfortable place where Betsey’s knowledge of Sarah’s knowledge could wait, fidget in private until Betsey knew what to do with it.
Sarah’s distress drained the roses from her cheeks. A part of Betsey, aged fourteen and answering to Lizzie, rejoiced in it, felt brutally glad to have someone share her shame.
Sarah stammered, “It is . . . it’s August . . . I just couldn’t keep it, such happy news, to myself anymore, you know how it is.”
“Yes. Charlie told me, too,” Betsey agreed. “How you ’wouldn’t favor it,’ was how he put it. You wouldn’t favor having a whore under your roof.”
Sarah blinked, wobbled like someone whose step had landed on the edge of a carpet, and Betsey’s shame only swelled. With her next breath, she whispered, “I’m sorry,” but it did nothing to ease the pained shock in Sarah’s eyes. “This is your home, your livelihood, I’m—”
She rushed for the stairs.
At the first landing, she met Dora and could do no more than mumble at the maid’s exclaimed compliments.
By the second landing, she knew she was going to her room to pack, that wherever she ended up tonight, she had spent her final hours in Sarah’s home.
She was crushing one of her tweed suits into her valise, wondering how she had come from London with only this bag when she realized this upper room was stifling.
And she was unlatching a window, hungry for air, when she saw why John was so late.
She heard Sarah in the corridor, calling tentatively. “Betsey?”
Sarah’s eyes filled with tears the moment she noticed the valise on the bed. “Oh!” she cried softly, and paused, and the pause made Betsey think Sarah, too, had caught the scent. Betsey’s nostrils were filled with it already, her throat stinging.
But perhaps that was her imagination, triggered by what she’d seen, for Sarah’s concern remained with the overflowing valise. She was sorry, she hadn’t meant, she hadn’t thought, she—
Betsey interrupted her. “Sarah.”
No, that scent was not only her imagination. It reached Sarah and stilled her as though she’d come upon a snake, sunning itself in her path.
Betsey rushed to take her hand. “Sarah, the pier is burning.”
Make the head help the hands. . . . Then make the hands help the head.
—How to Become Expert in Type-writing
Betsey stayed on Sarah’s heels on her sprint down the steps, and was tempted to follow her out the door, but forced her better sense to overrule her fear.
Dora Pink stood in the foyer, gaping at her mistress’s flight.
“The pier’s burning, Dora.”
She knew Dora’s thoughts went the way her own had upon seeing the billows of smoke from her window: back to this morning’s breakfast, and Charlie’s delight with having earned some pocket money to spend at the night’s festivities. Charlie asking his mother’s permission to join his friends in watching the fireworks from the pier. Charlie’s grin when his mother gave him a few extra coins in addition to her permission.
Betsey had no experience with carriage-driving, but Dora proved deft in hitching the mare to Sarah’s small gig, and they soon caught up to a breathless, perspiring Sarah.
“It’s hours before the fireworks were to begin,” she gasped as she took Betsey’s hand and squeezed into the carriage. “He mayn’t have gone onto the pier yet.”
Betsey agreed, but the longer they drove with no view of the fire except the thick pillar of smoke scaling the sky, the more fervently she clung to that hope. Dora Pink alternated exclamations to the Lord above with reassurances that she was certain the boy was fine, just fine, likely caught up watching all the excitement with his schoolmates.
And if Dora felt free to call to the Lord, Betsey felt something like the opposite as they turned onto the Marine Road and the seafront came into view—the urge to cower, the sensation that she was shrinking to nothing, a bit of paper over a flame, curling into ash. She was simply too meager to take in the depth and breadth of the horror before them.
The blaze was concentrated at the concert pavilion near the head of the pier, but a line of flames, almost unnatural in the intensity of their orange, had begun to lick up the promenade as well. Smoke which might have looked black in the day billowed toward the shore, palely aglow against the colored threads of the summer twilight. Sparks sleeted prettily down from the pier promenade into the water like curtains of falling stars.
The Marine Road curved out in both directions where it met the Esplanade, and this broad place seemed to have become the gathering point for uninvolved spectators, sitting in their conveyances or standing in the road, shouting their conjectures and observations to one another. How casually they debated whether the buildings on the Esplanade would catch sparks and recounted how they had first noticed the smoke. One woman had her hand, her very hand, upon the turnstile to enter. But that was nothing. Others had been part of the panicked rush to get off the pier.
Did everyone get off, then?
Ain’t possible. Why, look at it!
Betsey hated them, their indifference, their interest, how, for them, the worst was over. She hoped Sarah was too distracted to notice, though for herself, it was somehow better to let that inanity reach her ears more closely than the monstrous mumble of the fire, the terrifying sounds of things splitting into nothingness.
The bitter smell of smoke made the horses restless. Dora’s bent for command proved an advantage here; their progress was slow, but her shouts and sure control of the reins kept them moving. As they crept forward, Sarah scanned the crowd for Charlie’s towhead on her side of the carriage, while Betsey did the same on hers. Above, on the cliff, the Kursaal wore her rosettes and garlands like a disappointed debutante. Reflections of the flames mottled the soft glow beneath the glass of the winter garden, and over the terraced lawn of fresh
flowerbeds stood groupings of guests dressed for a night amongst nobility, one of celebratory speeches and champagne and dancing.
With a wave of sadness for John, for Idensea itself, she swept one look up to the lantern room and the silhouetted figures on the balcony. She wanted to find him. All her worry was for Charlie; John she imagined in some sort of overseeing role, well-informed and ready with answers, including that to the question of Charlie’s whereabouts.
Finally, they turned onto the Esplanade, also clogged with vehicles, but the drivers here at least were driving, or trying to, and the pedestrian spectators had been forced off to the balustrade fronting the beach. Others rushed between the spectators and the traffic, shouting for someone or on some other urgent errand.
Betsey and Sarah stood in the carriage and added their voices to the din, calling Charlie’s name. He could be in that mass along the balustrade; he could be one of the dark figures dotting the beach. He could be on the pier.
The sea glowed as though flames blazed beneath the waves as well as above, all manner of small craft marking the water. Rescuers. People were trapped. They were dark specks against the fire’s glow, pressed against the railing at the head of the pier, or less distinct shadows, clinging to the girders below the platform. And some, surely, waited in the sea, treading or swimming to shore, fighting the water until help found them. She knew something of that fearful condition.
She knew, too, John wasn’t overseeing anything. He was out there.
The Esplanade had become all but impassable, the mare increasingly uneasy. Sarah and Betsey stood in the carriage and scanned the scene. “Charlie would be here,” Sarah said. “If he were not on the pier, he would be here; he wouldn’t miss this sight.”
Betsey followed Sarah down from the carriage, but kept her from tearing into the crowd. “Let me search the Esplanade. Dora can take you to the foreshore. Look there, and meet the boats. If Charlie is still on the pier, one of them will have to bring him ashore.”
Betsey pushed her way through the crowd, pausing to climb on benches and planters, whatever could offer her a wider view. She stopped anyone she recognized and every child who appeared close to Charlie’s age to ask if they’d seen him. When she caught sight of Idensea’s fire engine, her hope buoyed with the conviction Charlie would want to be as near as possible to it, but he was not to be found. Firemen were spraying down the pier tollhouse, attempting to protect it from stray sparks, but they did not appear to be advancing much past that.
When she wondered aloud at this, a bystander removed the handkerchief over his mouth and nose. “Not hose enough,” he said. “If they took it onto the pier, the pump would likely take up sand with the sea water and clog. That’s why the brigade captain called for axes.”
With his handkerchief, the man gestured farther down the pier, where more brigade members and other volunteers were tearing up the decking of the promenade. “Better that than to wait for the blaze to eat its way to the hose.”
So the pier had been given up. But hadn’t she known that the moment she’d looked out her window? The smoke had dwarfed everything.
Shouts, then the crowd made way for a wagon carrying Mr. Seiler. He called out, and men surrounded the vehicle immediately, taking axes and crowbars from it and heading onto the pier. Sir Alton and some of the board members, all of them dressed for the ball, approached the wagon to speak with Mr. Seiler.
No John amongst them.
With a last look about, smoke stinging her eyes and throat, Betsey turned toward the steps that would take her down to the foreshore. No idle spectators here clogging the way, just the dark, writhing confusion of activity as boats brought the rescued to shore. “Here, luv, get these out to the poor things,” a voice said, and Betsey found her arms filled with a tangle of the hotel’s linens.
Offering the dry wrappings, she felt a bit of relief. The people were shaken, yes, and soaked, many of them, but they were all right. As long as they’d been found by one of the boats, they were all right.
“It’s going now!” came a call from the dark, and Betsey and everyone else looked out to the water in time to see the roof of the pavilion cave in, collapsing like a child’s blanket fort. Bright debris sprayed the air, the water lit and hissed, and waves lifted the flaming timber.
Betsey swallowed back a surge of tears and offered the last towel in her hand to Deborah Walton, the vicar’s daughter. She’d been with Judith, her sister—had anyone seen her, Deborah wanted to know, her gasping so harsh and deep Betsey could scarce make out the words. But when she did understand, Betsey was able to answer yes, to say that she remembered passing Judith as she’d come down to the surf; someone had been carrying her. Saying this, Betsey felt the same relief she saw in Deborah’s face. It confirmed, again, that all would be well again soon. Deborah and Judith safe, reunited. So, too, everyone else. So, too, Charlie and his mother. Perhaps already.
But when Betsey found Sarah, she waited yet. Betsey slipped an arm around her waist, and they stood, eyes fixed on each approaching vessel. A cutter brought a handful of rescues, a rowboat two more. And then, not far from where they stood, another small fishing boat headed in.
“It’s John,” Betsey said as soon as she recognized the figure leaping from the boat. She hugged Sarah’s waist. “He’ll be able to tell us something.”
She called his name, and he seemed to hear her over the roar of surf and fire. Sarah put up a hand to wave, but he was already bending back down to the boat. When he faced them again, it was with Charlie in his arms.
With a sob, Sarah broke into a run to meet John as he strode from the surf. John’s coat was gone, and his white shirt clung to his shoulders, soaked. His black hair framed a stony expression. It offered Betsey no clues to the condition of Charlie, whose face was turned up to the night sky. He’d lost his shoes. John glanced down at him, then shifted the boy closer into his chest.
“Dr. Nally,” she heard him say to Sarah as they met, and immediately, Sarah ran for the seawall, where the doctor was tending those who needed care.
Betsey matched John’s relentless strides. “Charlie,” she whispered when she saw the dark spot in the boy’s light hair, how it was blurring brightly, wetly into John’s sleeve. Tears in her eyes, she looked at John, searching his face again.
“I don’t know,” he said, and looked away, and increased his pace.
• • •
“I could be of some use here,” Betsey said, though her survey of the foreshore was a doubtful one. John understood her conflict, one instinct urging her to help here on the shore, another to remain at Sarah’s side.
Charlie, if you spoke loudly enough, would respond. He’d rolled unfocused eyes to his mother, said something with the word penny in it, but it was as though he were under the water still, sluggish and vague. Dr. Nally said the cut on his head would be best stitched, but it was minor, however frightening the bleeding had seemed. He recommended the boy be moved home to rest, and he, Dr. Nally, would see him there soon. Lady Dunning, who had ordered the hotel linens brought to the foreshore and had spoken comfort to every person rescued from the pier, had volunteered her coach so that Charlie and Sarah might be transferred more comfortably.
“Be with Sarah,” John said to Betsey. Reason told him she was in no danger and would have the makeshift clinic and information point that had sprung up here organized in a flash, but something very unreasonable needed her safely home and close to Charlie.
Betsey nodded. Then, impulsively, she reached her hand to the back of his head and pulled him to her cheek. “Don’t go out there again,” she whispered, and he knew something more powerful than worry, fiercer than fear, had insisted on that impossible request. How desperately he wanted to honor it.
“I will take care.”
He helped her into the coach. Charlie looked a giant and a babe at once, sprawling over his mother’s lap, a white bandage scarring the portrait of peaceful sleep. I had a concussion, John reminded himself. He’d been not so much
older than Charlie; it had been severe; it had taken part of his sight for a time. And now he was fine. He was fine. Charlie, too.
The coach pulled away. John turned to look at the line of raging light that had been the pier. When had the pavilion fallen? Perhaps when he’d been under the water searching for Charlie. He didn’t know. His lungs burned still. He filled them up and headed out to the surf again.
• • •
Hours later, he ran fresh water from the pump at Sarah’s carriage house over his arms, an effort to rid himself of salt and sand and smoke, though he knew they had dried in his clothes, just like the blood crusted on his sleeve. He put his head under the pump, then shook out his hair like a dog, and when he stilled, there was Betsey with a towel. As he sat on the pump platform, she dried his face, pressed each of his arms inside the towel, then rubbed his hair and neck.
“How is he?”
“Not conscious. He was restless in the coach—jerking his arms about—but he’s not roused since.”
“I didn’t see Nally’s carriage.”
“He’s been round twice. I expect him in another hour or so. Miss Everson’s sitting with Sarah.”
Betsey’s fingers combed his hair. John pulled her closer.
“The fire’s done? There’s still so much smoke.”
His face moved against her bodice, some sort of gesture to answer her, but he couldn’t speak. The fire done? It would smolder for hours yet, but the promenade was destroyed, so there was no more danger to the Esplanade. No more people were stranded by the flames. The rescuable had been rescued.
But three bodies had been brought to shore and covered with sheets. There was a list, too long, of missing. And when John had left, black wreckage was already littering the shore, and there stood the vicar with elderly Mr. Fowler, still trying to convince him no more boats were coming.
John pulled Betsey into his lap. Holding her did not banish the terror, it didn’t drown the fear or the heartbreak, but it did make bearing those things seem possible.
In Charlie’s room, Miss Everson was certainly asleep, and John thought Sarah must be, too, for she lay beside Charlie on his bed, as still as her unconscious son. The door creaked as he let himself in, but several moments passed before she said, “Who is it?”
The Typewriter Girl Page 29