“You had best beware your neck.”
It was the most shocking liberty ever taken with Lillian’s person, excepting, of course, that one. Rather as with that one, it was done before she realized she’d submitted to it.
And now, with Miss Dobson striding away with her favorite hat pin, Lillian was all alone again, in full view of the veranda. Her parasol was up there; retrieving it was bound to be awkward.
She remained on the bench, holding her hat against the breeze, delaying the lonely, humiliating walk into the hotel.
Well, she’d gained two useful tidbits of information for Aunt Constance. John was in London. And Miss Dobson had given him up.
She touched her neck.
A long shadow fell over the bench.
“And I want my handkerchief back,” Miss Dobson said.
For every change of a subject there must be a new paragraph.
—How to Become Expert in Type-writing
Mr. Seiler intercepted Betsey’s dash into the hotel, speaking her name so firmly that she was certain she had missed a subtler signal to conduct herself more decorously.
She couldn’t speak. It was all there, an apology, an assurance she was returning to her desk, but her throat would not allow passage.
“My office, if you please?” he murmured, and she feared she was in for some of that demented coffee he preferred or, worse, a sympathetic ear.
Instead, he gave her a stack of correspondence to answer. It was thick; it would require hours to complete. Betsey would spend the remainder of the afternoon at the type-writing machine, too busy to think or even to make eye contact, too close to the rhythmic din of the keys to hear the whispers that had followed her ever since Mr. Jones had announced his resignation.
“Thank you,” she said to Mr. Seiler.
His lips pursed thoughtfully. “Congratulations once more upon your success at Bradford. The board will be pleased, I am certain.”
“I hope so.” She had traveled to Bradford yesterday to meet a mill owner who had tried to cancel his employee outing after the fire—an effort well worth her time since it would increase her profit report to the board.
She appreciated Mr. Seiler’s attempts to turn her thoughts, but whether the excursion scheme would continue past this summer was a separate question from her personal employment and whether Sir Alton would allow that to continue. If he had ever truly believed he needed her, the reason for it had vanished the moment John submitted his resignation.
Betsey turned to the door, having Mr. Seiler’s implied permission to leave, letters clutched to her bosom.
“He may marry her,” she said quietly to the doorframe.
“Ma chérie, he may.”
Her throat shut again. She thought she might die with the agonizing pressure of it.
Mr. Seiler said, “We had expected so, before—”
He hesitated, the way Miss Gilbey had done. Everyone understood Betsey Dobson as an intermission in John Jones’s life. Everyone, even Betsey, and except for John.
Very well, damn it, damn it. But she had been attempting to protect John from his own foolish, fevered self, not deliver him to Miss Gilbey.
She made a brisk trip of the walk to the company offices, trying to outpace her worry, remembering Charlie’s funeral, haunted by the sound of John’s thumb rubbing alongside his finger.
She wished she had slipped her fingers between his to hush that anguished rasp. She wished she had said yes to any mad plan he made, any upheaval he needed to create, just so he would know he was not alone.
All eyes noted her return to the office. She sat down at the type-writing machine and discovered John’s pocket handkerchief inside her hand, wound and crumpled around Miss Gilbey’s hat pin. She tucked the handkerchief inside her cuff, the pin into her hair, and prepared the machine with sure, familiar actions. Then she skimmed the letter on the top of the pile and proceeded to smash onto the page the heading and the salutation to one Mr. Jerome Worth. She began the response.
Thank you
Her fingers held over the keys, immobilized. She could not see the words—the machine was a model that required the operator to lift the carriage in order to view the work. Such a detail mattered only to insecure type-writers, not someone with Betsey’s experience, but suddenly those words hidden inside the carriage filled her with sorrow.
Was her strength for his sake, or hers? Why hadn’t she taken his hand? Said, I can’t come with you, but I love you . . . ?
Or, You’ve taken leave of your senses, and I love you . . . ?
Or simply . . .
Miss Slott would not have approved. Mr. Wofford would have accused her of stealing. But when Betsey’s hands stirred again, the letter was hers and hers alone.
When he comes back, I will tell him “Thank you.” Regarding the following:
1, Idensea.
2, Sarah, Charlie. My chair at their table.
3, A needless vow. As though you were some saint and I was too.
4, Rail fare.
5, The widest sky I’ve ever seen and that typewriting is not the best job a girl can hope for afterall. Mr. Seiler, bicycle, how to ride it, how to swim, every thing I try because I thik you might thinkI could do it.
I will tell you my thanks, and by the by thankyou also means I lvoe you..
I love you.
• • •
John had told Betsey, I know how it needs to be, and yet here he stood in an empty parlor, stalled, unable to imagine such an extravagance of space furnished. Wouldn’t he like to see the other rooms, the house agent suggested, and John said yes, and then he said no. The place was fine, perfect, he would come round the agent’s office this afternoon to arrange the lease.
Well, why not? The agent had obviously heeded John’s stated requirements, and John had things to do. See Pearse Leland, hire a nurse for Owen, acquire furniture, catch a train to Wales. He’d made plans.
Outside, in the little square park across the lane, a Salvation Army band in full uniform played, and John stood watching the musicians and the singers, two women with good strong voices singing “A Mighty Fortress.” Feeling in his coat for some coins, he started to cross the street when he heard his name.
He looked about, then spied the elegant curve of a hat brim poking out from a hansom cab waiting just down the street. Lillian Gilbey?
“How are you, John?” she said, smiling, when he came to the cab.
“I am surprised,” he admitted. “Back in London already?”
“Oh, we—Aunt Constance and I—decided to return early. You remember my aunt, Mrs. Middleton.”
John nodded at the woman as she leaned forward to look out at him.
“Aunt Constance has a visit to pay nearby here. She says I may sit in the square with you whilst she goes there.”
With no chaperone? Thoroughly bemused now, John opened the half door of the hansom and helped Lillian out. The cab moved on, and he offered his arm.
“How did you find me?”
“Oh—” She waved her hand as though it had been no great task. “Your hotel, and then the house agent’s office.”
He tried to imagine Lillian Gilbey inquiring after a man at a hotel. Could not. He stopped and turned her around to get a good look under the hat brim. “You are mystifying me, Miss Gilbey.”
She tolerated his scrutiny briefly, then glanced away with a scowl, holding her hands up to her ears. “Oh, that racket!” she said of the Salvation Army band a few feet away. “Can’t we come away from it? It’s too horrible—I can’t think over it!”
John started to lead her to the other side of the square, handing some coins to one of the uniformed singers as they passed. The singer broke off from her verses of “Onward, Christian Soldiers” to say “God bless ye, sir” to him, and John hesitated there in front of her before he felt Lillian urging him on. He swiped a few dead leaves from a bench for her, then sat watching the band.
“You have taken a house?” Lillian finally said.
&n
bsp; “Just rooms.”
“It’s not terribly smart here.”
“Safe and respectable will have to do till I have more cash.”
“Oh, certainly. I didn’t mean to offend you.”
John frowned. When the world had been normal, Lillian always scolded him if he mentioned money in any specific way. “You didn’t offend me, Miss Gilbey.”
She took a moment to draw off her gloves, fold them, unfold them, then pull them back on. A tense laugh. “My dear papa—do you know what he has promised each of his daughters?”
“Everything from a mockingbird to another day?”
He feared, with no little shock, the gentle jest would send her to tears, but she manufactured more laughter instead. “You think me spoilt. I shall never dissuade you of the notion if I tell you Papa’s promise. A house, you see. One for each daughter, isn’t it funny?” Her eyes darted to his. “A house as a wedding present?”
If he’d been walking, he would have stumbled; eating, he would have choked. Sitting here, John found he could not hold her gaze, pretty and blue and entirely too hopeful. He glanced back to the band in the middle of the square.
Bless God, had Lillian Gilbey truly tracked him down in order to propose to him?
“You have, I am fairly certain, thought of marrying me before.”
She had.
It was as topsy-turvy a scene as ever imagined in Wonderland, but here it was in this perfectly rational square in staid old London on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon. With a Salvation Army band booming “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” no less.
“Lillian, I don’t—”
“I know you have changed your mind, John. I know. But if you could see any way to . . . that is, if you still had any inclination toward it . . . I’d like you to think of it again, and know I’d accept.”
So she was asking him to propose. This made a touch more sense, he supposed.
“There is the house,” she went on, “but I have a dowry, too, naturally. And my father would find a place for you in his company, or you could stay on with this new position of yours if you prefer. Or study architecture. You mentioned that once, didn’t you? You could do it, now. And I would be a good wife for you. I shall be better than I have been, more pliable, and pleasant—”
She had wrenched off her gloves again; John caught one of her hands to hush her. “Lils. You never considered yourself a parcel in a shipment of goods before, not so I could tell. So what is this?”
“I want you to understand—there would be benefits, should you choose me. Enough benefits, perhaps, to make it worthwhile.”
“Lillian Gilbey, I know you’ve read too much poetry to believe you must settle for a man who marries your fortune.”
Well, and that made her cry. John handed over his handkerchief like an automaton. He was so damn exhausted, every emotion he’d kept at bay these past weeks pressing upon him—his grief for Charlie, yes, and Betsey, too, for he had no other name for how he missed her, what that cold panic was when he remembered he was without her. The disaster of the fire; Sarah’s accusations, which she didn’t mean but were somehow true; leaving Idensea and all the uncertainty of starting this new life in London—the only thing that felt right and true was that soon, he would be in Wales to bring back Owen and give the boy a new life, one with promise and goodness.
“It—my fortune—is all I have,” she said. John started to scoff, but she shook her head vehemently. “It is. I’m ruined, John. I am ruined, and . . . and with . . . and with child, and I . . .”
John stood, not hearing the rest. John stood, not to walk away, but because his body seemed to demand some confirmation that it was awake and in the world, the real one, not one conjured from dreams.
It was something he would remember the rest of his life, this moment when he realized that, for all his instincts, he really didn’t know a damn thing.
Oh, there was one thing of which he was fairly certain right now. “Noel Dunning,” he said.
Lillian looked up, surprise suspending the flood of tears. But then all John could see was the top of her hat, which seemed to be outfitted with enough netting to capture every cod in the North Sea. A long, fluid feather waved to the rhythm of her heaving shoulders.
He let her weep. A hansom cab made a pass around the square, then exited to a side street for another slow tour of the neighborhood. It would return twice more before John managed to extract all the necessary details from Lillian, whose discomfort with plain speech about the topic hampered communication as much as her fear and embarrassment. But it seemed Dunning had stopped calling on her after it—“it ” being the closest she came to naming the act of intercourse—except for once, a few weeks before her family had left for Idensea.
“Lillian, did he know about the babe?” John asked.
“Of course he knew!” Fresh sobs welled up from her. A bright berry fell loose from her hat and rolled into the swaths of netting. “But he only told me he was so sorry for it, for everything, and I was cold to him—I hadn’t any choice about that—but I—”
“Why not?” John interrupted.
“Why not?” His ignorance apparently bewildered her. “How would it look for me to forgive him, just like that? Didn’t you hear me say he didn’t call for weeks after—after it?”
“Bless the bleeding Christ! You meant to punish him.”
“Only that day! Only until I came to Idensea. Except I went, and—and he wasn’t there! He wasn’t there at all!”
Because he is bloody in Vienna, John thought. He wondered if Dunning had paid that last call before or after he’d known his father was sending him away. In any case, he’d left a pregnant Lillian for his many months of piano lessons. A dark monster dug into John’s gut as he watched Lillian’s feather wave, there to reside until he next set his eyes on Noel Dunning.
He sat back down beside Lillian and allowed her to cry over what she called her foolish, evil choices, the self-evident fact that she was unlovable and easily forgotten, the general faithlessness of all men, and a great many other things he couldn’t quite make out. The brim of her hat swiped his eye as she lifted her face to his to ask him again to consider marriage to her.
“Lillian . . .” The hansom cab was entering the square again. “It is a great thing you ask, a secret like that. To have it with us all the rest of our lives.”
It was one misgiving amongst many. He bowed his head to his fist as Lillian’s tearful noises started up again. “Please stop that,” he said, failing to quash the impatient note in his voice. He heard her gulp, trying to regain control of herself. Trying to be tractable, do just as he asked.
His life was on fire, and here he scrambled on his hands and knees, trying to brush back together the grains of his admiration for Lillian Gilbey, collect them all and see what they amounted to, burning walls all around. He could remember sitting with Tobias and Marta the night after Lillian’s Whitsun visit to Idensea, laying out all the reasons Lillian would make a good wife for him, seeing if they agreed, having met her. They had, and all those reasons, all those grains, were they not still there?
Plus, now, this: “If we marry,” he said, “you will be a mother even earlier than you imagine.”
Halfway through his explanation of Owen, she began nodding as though her head were on a spring. Of course they should take him in, she would love him as her own, it would be perfect, and oh, wouldn’t she welcome the chance to show how grateful she felt?
A pliable, grateful little wife, his for the taking.
His hand lifted, a gesture of refusal, not taking. It was involuntary, something from his animal brain, and as soon as he noticed it, he distrusted it and folded it away. He had to close his eyes and force himself to remember where he was, how he had come here.
London, his job, forward, upward. There was a path, and it was marked, and it seemed possible he would sleep again after a few irreversible steps.
And Elisabeth.
She had refused him. His life on fire, him know
ing what to do, how it needed to be, and she refused him.
“Please,” Lillian begged in a whisper that seemed the echo of his own misery. For all he knew, parallel miseries made a fine enough marital bond.
“If you intend to say no, do it now.”
He didn’t say no. Lillian didn’t cry again, not until she was out of sight and almost out of earshot inside the hansom cab with her aunt. He gave her credit for the effort; it was nearly as much as he himself was able to manage.
• • •
The curtains were gone.
The absence of the snow-blue fabric John had sent his mother so long ago, along with the general stillness inside the cottage, disoriented him briefly, made him wonder if he’d ducked into the wrong house. And at the oak table dominating the space that was kitchen, dining room, and parlor together sat a stranger, peeling potatoes with a dull knife.
His dad’s new wife since June, three months after the first one had passed.
Dilys, his sister of fifteen, apologized for no one having written him. Nearly everything John knew of his family since he’d left home had come from his mother’s twice-monthly letters. He’d made excuses for no one else taking up the practice yet since her death, but this . . .
“I know it is quick,” Dilys whispered to him later while his stepmother—not a stranger, quite, but a girl he’d known in school—tended the pot in the hearth, and John cleaned and sharpened all the knives of the household. He drew blades over the steel in resolute strokes and listened to Dilys explain it was for the best, as she would be marrying Emrys Morgan as soon as she passed her sixteenth birthday in October. There were still three young ones at home; someone had to see to the housekeeping and child rearing she herself had been doing since their mother had fallen ill. As for the new Mrs. Rhys-Jones, she was the daughter of Gavin Pritchard, explanation enough for why she’d be happy to leave home to be second wife to a man more than twice her years.
The degree of her happiness seemed to John a difficult reckoning. He apologized as he distributed the gifts he’d brought, telling her he would have brought a wedding gift had he known. She shrank back, a picture of herself in school days long past, Mared Pritchard, a year or so behind him, venturing a tap on his brother Davey’s shoulder, then looking like a washed-out sheet when Davey turned round to her. “Generous you’ve been already,” she said, and John supposed she meant the portion of his wages he sent each month.
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