The Typewriter Girl (6 page)

She glanced over at him, then away. Brown eyes. Brown, brown. Teary, too, and the tip of her nose red. John crouched beside the birdcage she clasped before her and turned up the cloth to find its occupant, a yellow canary shifting in response to the burst of daylight. Its willow-twig cage had been mended with string and newspaper.

“There’s pretty.” The words came out laden with his Welsh accent. It happened sometimes, now because he intended some comfort. “What’s his name?”

“Thief.” Her voice was thick; she’d not recovered herself yet.

“Thief! Poor creature there, such a name to overcome.”

“I didn’t choose it.”

“Will he sing?”

“Female. That’s why she was given to me. A neighbor of mine. Didn’t want her.”

She sounded steadier now. John thought it safe to rise. Finding her swiping an eye with the hood of her cloak, he offered his handkerchief. She took it the way she’d accepted the job he’d offered her: warily, like Jack’s mother regarding the magic beans just before she chucked them out the window.

What would he do with her? And why wouldn’t the tram come? John tapped his thumb against the twine-wrapped handle of Miss Dobson’s valise and tried to estimate the size of the crowds strolling along the Esplanade and the pier. Certainly greater than at last year’s Whitsun holiday, but it pained him to think what they might have been if only the Sultan’s Road had been ready to open. He’d pushed as much as he could, but Sir Alton’s initial opposition to the construction of the pleasure railway had troubled the project throughout.

“Am I sacked, then?” he heard her ask.

Trepidation filled her voice. John reminded himself that, yes, she was entirely justified in her fear of being dismissed, but still, he struggled to reconcile this timid, teary girl with the one he’d met
in London. Where was she? That girl had moved like a lissome general, Joan of Arc in a shirtwaist. That girl had quirked up a curious eye to see who else had caught Gerald Baumston’s offhand reference to a deleted rider and furtively slid Cornelius Fuller’s inkhorn out of range a full minute before he began flailing. That girl permitted herself to share—or begin to share—an across-the-room smile with John, seeing he knew what she had done.

That’s what I need,
John had known that day, and so there had been nothing for it but to follow after her when she was dismissed from the meeting and see if he could get her.

She’d wanted nothing to do with him. When he observed she’d actually been enjoying that meeting, she only replied (in better English than he’d expected, a touch of Lancashire in it) that she supposed it was something different from the usual, that’s-all-if-you-please-sir, and tried to mince away, a docile little type-writer girl.

She hadn’t been able to keep that sham up. “You’re right, of course,” she’d said, when he continued to follow her, suggesting type-writing must be dull work for someone like her. “It is dull, and it will be years before the pay is enough to keep me under a decent roof. But did you know it is almost the best job in London a girl could hope for? No, why should you? So you can’t understand how grateful I am to have it, at least until the day I get a fine suit”—her eyes had swept from his shoes to his face with that—“and sprout a prick between my legs”—another, more pointed glance—“at which time I’m certain I can secure any sort of work I wish.”

It was then John realized he could look her in the eye straight. Which was more wicked, her tongue or those eyes? He’d not witnessed such coarseness in a woman since his days working on the Severn Tunnel, and the women who followed the navvies were much rougher sorts than Miss Dobson. It had made him grin and blush, bless God, and know that if he wished Betsey Dobson as the pier company’s excursions manager, he ought to speak straight, and of money.

How certain he’d been of her that day.
That’s what I need.

He wouldn’t dismiss her, not when he’d persuaded her to leave the best job in London a girl could hope for, but he was experiencing an unfamiliar mistrust of his instincts.

“You’re not sacked,” he said. “I don’t know that you will be the excursions manager, but we will find a place for you.”

“Oh.” Then, “What—what sort of place?”

“I’m not certain.” He didn’t have time to think of it now. He would take her to the hotel and pass her off to someone who could show her about, and then speak about her to Tobias Seiler, the hotel manager, after Lillian and her family left this evening.

“Hotel laundress?” she said. “Taking toll at the pier? Or does your company permit a woman to have such an exalted position as that?”

The bitterness in her voice took him aback. He asked, “What about window washing? Is that what you had in mind back in the stationmaster’s?”

Her fist flew to her lips, and she cursed into it. “I know. I haven’t any right! It is only—I’d begun to believe I could do this job. I thought you were mad, offering it to me, but then . . . I began to think I could do it, that is all. I do still.”

“Girl,” he began. She turned wary at the familiarity, and probably the Welsh brogue rolling in the word. John checked it, as well as the question he’d been about to ask about why she had refused the money he’d offered for her travel. A few shillings, they could have avoided this. She wanted the position; she
thought
she could do it. John had
known
she could, during that brief meeting in London. He wanted that certainty back.

The tram was drawing up.

“Miss Dobson, you brought your character letter?” he asked.

Her eyes darted to the tram. John gestured, waving ahead those waiting to board. He pulled Miss Dobson aside, and her eyes came back to him, a hard shine to them. He wanted, suddenly and very much, to press one or two of his fingers to her lips.

“Don’t lie,” he advised instead.

There is no excuse for a misdirected envelope.

—How to Become Expert in Type-writing

B
etsey Dobson bit her bottom lip. The curls at each corner of her mouth tightened. Titus Rew, the tram conductor, called John’s name.

John waved Rew on. He pushed back his hat. He and Miss Dobson stood waiting to hear what she would say. She didn’t have the letter any more than she’d had a ticket for the train. He knew it. Would a good reference have reassured him? He’d told her to bring it for the benefit of Tobias Seiler more than for his own, but Tobias would trust his recommendation, character letter or none.

“I haven’t got it.”

“Because?”
Don’t lie.

“I—I left on bad terms, at the very end. My supervisor refused to write a fair reference—the reference I deserved—and . . . it was a bad scene, rather.”

“Why should he refuse?”

“He is a pri— He didn’t like me.” Her eyes dropped. “Or perhaps he did. So to speak. In either case, it was bad.”

Again, John recalled that meeting at Baumston & Smythe, this time how every eye in the room had followed Miss Dobson’s entrance and her exit. A great beauty she was not. On the street,
in an emporium or church services, she mightn’t get such notice (though with her height, and her . . .
something
 . . . she could scarce be overlooked), but in that room of men at their business, Betsey Dobson was a wrapped package, novelty and mystery and possibility.

What was it for her to work in that building each day? No wonder she’d aborted their exchange of smiles, or that she recoiled when she had discovered him following her.

“That is why I hadn’t all the fare for the train,” she was saying. “I didn’t get any of my wages. I hadn’t enough money, either to stay or to come, so I came, because I had nowhere else to go. And I wanted to.”

The breeze blew wisps of hair across her mouth, where they stuck. She used her little finger to try to remove them, discovering in the process the rest of the fallen locks. With a puff, she set down her birdcage, took off her gloves, and went to the task of pushing the hair back under her hat.

She removed her cloak when she finished and draped it over her arm. She wriggled her shoulders, put them back, then faced him as though to re-present herself, her chin tucked slightly down, giving the effect that she was looking up at him. A disarming ruse there.

“You know Baumston and Smythe has a company outing here in a few months?” he asked, and she nodded. “How will that be for you, meeting up with them, that supervisor, again?”

Miss Dobson’s demonic brows rose. “If I am a manager, Mr. Jones, I imagine it will be very sweet.”

John turned to smile broadly at the seafront. It would be raining in ten minutes. He’d start with the hotel tour, then, when he rejoined the Gilbeys. He said, “Here it is, Miss Dobson. Sir Alton, who owns much of the land you’ll walk upon in Idensea and who sits in the director’s place at the company board meetings, doesn’t want this excursions scheme. He wants to keep Idensea very posh, and day-trippers don’t suit his idea of it, especially company outings such as you would be managing. He’ll be seeking any reason
to persuade the board of directors to call it off. So we need it to go well, you see. So well it’s irresistible, to the board if not to Sir Alton himself.”

“I see.”

Perhaps she did. No doubt she understood there would be no need for an excursions manager if there were no excursions scheme. Here came a tram in the opposite, wrong direction. John considered it. He and Miss Dobson could cross the Esplanade and take it, and he could see her to Sarah Elliot’s, where he had arranged a room for her. That would take longer than to drop her at the hotel, but he could still make his half-hour deadline with Lillian. He’d told her thirty minutes so he could easily exceed her expectations.

Taking this tram would be a decision, however. A manager could afford room and board at Sarah Elliot’s. A hotel laundress, say, much less so.

“Did you try the lock?” he said. “Back there in the stationmaster’s, on the window?”

“Did I . . . ?” Miss Dobson lifted her chin a touch, insulted. “Just what do you take me for?”

Eye to eye, they both made grabs for their hats in defense against a sudden, violent gust from the sea. John was laughing. He touched Miss Dobson’s back, urging her to hurry across the Esplanade. They needed to catch this tram.

•   •   •

Such a sky. The widest she’d ever seen. Even more than the long bow of the shoreline and the eternal spread of the sea, it was the sky Betsey could not fold into her understanding, the cliffs and hillocks of the land overturned, sculpted into the stony clouds and softened with the promise of light. She almost laughed with the exhilaration of it, how something so unfamiliar could feel like a part of her, call to her from a place deep inside. Had it been like this at Blackpool, all those years ago? If she couldn’t recall that, no wonder she’d conflated her father’s hazy figure with that stranger’s.

Her gawking caused a gap in the tram queue; Mr. Jones touched her arm to move her forward.

Thief’s cage got her dubious inspection from the tram conductor, but with Mr. Jones at her side, nothing came of it but a mild directive to “take it up top.” Resigned to Mr. Jones’s guardianship for now, she added the fare he paid to the list of debts she would settle this summer, provided she had a job. Despite his burst of good humor, she wasn’t taking that for granted, especially since she believed she’d glimpsed the Swan Park Hotel opposite the tram’s current direction.

She felt like a pebble under a pillow, a hair in an iced cake, her worry a bit of nastiness at odds with all the holiday-making around her, day-trippers debating whether the German band played rain or shine, a young couple with their heads together, shuffling through a set of postcards. Mr. Jones beside her, in his Norfolk, impatient to return to his sweetheart.

Through music-laden wind, the tram broke the sea of promenaders. Betsey folded back the cage cover. Could Thief smell the change, the absence of London’s dense and practical air, sense the wideness of the sky? She fingered the latch of the cage, tempted.

She, Thief, and Mr. Jones rode with the sea at their backs. Below, along the Esplanade, a row of shops and eateries nestled against the cliffs, and terraced above was Idensea itself, the weathered brick of the original village a frayed strand amongst furrows of dark gables and fresh, deep reds. Mr. Jones pointed ahead. “The Sultan’s Road is there. Open next month.”

Betsey squinted. The Sultan’s Road was plain and clear, being enormous, but she could not make sense of it immediately, a Sphinx of a structure, part fanciful palace and stage-scenery mountain range, part utilitarian tracks—impossible to follow, given the peculiar fashion in which it emerged and disappeared.

“A switchback?” But she knew the guess was wrong.

“Pleasure railway. Not a thing its like in Britain.”

As they passed, everyone on the tram turned to look at the
facade, where colorful arabesques embellished an arcade between two towers with tops like sugar kisses.

“You built this?”

“Not alone,” he replied with a smile, but she sensed his pride, how he enjoyed the stir of excitement and speculation amongst the passengers. She begrudged him none of it. A mountain range rising up from the English sand, that dainty pier holding against the sea—she would have called it magic if the word did not seem to discount the work.