The Typewriter Girl Read Online Free PDF

owned, and she felt especially cold at the moment.
    “My, Avery, not ready yet, are you?”
    She could scarcely make out his handsome face in the room’s darkness, and she sensed rather than witnessed his displeasure at this remark. A brief stillness about him, but a stroke of her hand had him moaning again. “My God, Lizzie. Lizzie, God, there you are, good Liz—”
    His voice broke with a screeching breath in, his eyes widening as her grip tightened. “Damn it—what—”
    “I’ve said to you half one thousand times not to call me Lizzie.”
    “Are you mad— damn — damn it all, stop —”
    “And I swear to God, if you put this bit near me again tonight I shall twist till it snaps and throw it down the steps for Mrs. Bainwelter’s terrier to have for a gnaw.”
    She let him go. He shoved off of her, cursing her, and she sprang out of the bed, grabbed her cloak from the floor, and took the two steps to what had been Grace’s side of the room. The quilt that had divided the space was gone now, but the bed remained, stripped and awaiting the next renter. She lay down on it and huddled under her cloak, her back to Avery.
    He was coughing, and it didn’t stop. Betsey heard him pulling on his clothes, coughing all the while, and she was glad he’d thought better of trying to sleep without any cover. But then she heard his shoes, the faint squeak of leather as he pulled on his boots.
    “Don’t be ridiculous,” she told him. “We each have a bed, and I shall be going in the morning. Is it worth making yourself ill?”
    Her answer, after the coughing subsided, was the creak of the bed as he lay down. What else? He had nowhere else to go, same as when she’d brought him here more than two months ago. Such a shock, seeing him after so much time, though not enough to account for the drastic change in his appearance. Once, he would have clearly been a stranger on this street, but that day, he had the hard-worn look of its residents.
    Indeed, at that particular moment, his aspiration had been to become one of the residents. He was foolishly attempting to negotiate a lower rent, and all but stumbled into her arms when the slumlord pushed him off the threshold in order to shut the door in his face. Took up with another of your students, did you? she asked him when he admitted he’d been dismissed from the Institute not long after she herself had left, and he swore to her, No . Likely he would have sworn a good many other things to her, too, except, weak with fever, he nearly collapsed on her, right there in the street. She’d taken him home.
    She could tell from his breathing now he didn’t fall asleep directly. They lay, parted by a few steps, by darkness, by mutual refusal to speak a few softer words. By her decision to go.
    It’s good for you, Caroline had told her tonight. We will miss you, but a new start—and you’ll be good, I know it, won’t you, Elisabeth? You’ll be . . .
    She hadn’t finished, but Betsey knew what her sister meant. In all the world, who but Caroline worried for Betsey’s soul? Where others condemned, Caroline grieved and hoped for better.
    Betsey hoped, too. With the fervor of a saint or a gambler, she hoped.
    These tears! If Avery heard her, he would think they were for him, and they weren’t, not really. They were because this day had been dreadful and because this night was long, and with sleep eluding her, she had nothing to do but contemplate .
    Richard could well be right: She could make a great wreck of it all. Again.
    Eventually, she slept. In the morning, the only thing she took from Avery’s coat pocket was the pasty he’d bought her. The less than a shilling’s worth of coins, she left behind.
    •   •   •
    Which meant she only had money enough for a ticket that would barely see her out of London, to Woking. She pretended her terror was Thief, a bird in a cage, and threw a dark cloth over it as she turned over all but a few pennies to the ticket