The Typewriter Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    Waterloo Station boiled with Londoners eager to quit the city for the Whitsun holiday, tight clusters of families keeping count of one another, wide snaking lines of excursionists bound by their common itineraries, companions oblivious to anything beyond their own circles of laughter. Betsey, smothering under the weight of her winter cloak, navigated the din in deep concentration: Don’t let Thief’s cage be knocked. Mind the valise grip, it’s delicate. Platform Four. No turning round. Most of all, no turning round.
    The third-class carriage smelled of smoke and straw and something pickled. Betsey felt lucky to find an empty place until she realized that seat was Hadrian’s Wall between two warring elderly sisters, and she spent the journey half-listening to two different accounts of a convoluted story involving a potted mignonette, a sticky door, and a headstone inscription. By the time a conductor called, “Woking!” Betsey was being prevailed upon to judge the logic of dividing a set of shirt studs.
    The train stopped and waited— and waited —at the platform, but Betsey remained in the compartment, suggesting the studs be sold, the money divided.
    Finally, movement.
    She’d done it. Fare-dodging could now be added to her life’s transgressions.
    She wondered whether she’d get away with it. Stomach knotted, she felt the miles she hadn’t paid for adding up, rumbling beneath the carriage. The sisters reconciled, or at least began speaking again, and though their conversation over Betsey’s bosom felt awkward, she suspected it saved her, disguised her as their companion. In any case, no conductor checked her ticket again.
    She had to change at Southampton. By the time she maneuvered the crowds there and found the train, the guard’s last whistle was sounding. She hoped to board in this final scuttle, but a conductor spied her and waved her toward him.
    “On your own, miss? A good carriage for you here.”
    Betsey braced herself for the end of this escapade. Already, the conductor was shaking his head.
    “Didn’t they tell you, miss? The bag’s of a size for the parcel rack, but there’s no animals in the carriages.” He nodded toward the birdcage.
    “Ohh”—she held that vowel, thinking, revising—“ dear! What shall I do?”
    She sounded dismayed. She sounded helpless. She widened her eyes and put herself into his care. Perhaps he liked that. Perhaps it was the whistle, the slamming doors, the shouts and the escalatingrush passing them by. But the result was he waved her toward the carriage door, and Betsey and Thief boarded.
    The carriage was a “good” one for her because women and children populated it. A great many children, perhaps double the carriage’s intended capacity. Had she been in the position to hold preferences, Betsey might have preferred the supposed indignity of traveling alongside unknown men.
    The boys and girls showed instant interest in the birdcage, though it waned when they learned Thief would not sing and, no, Betsey would not let the canary out to fly about the compartment and come to their outstretched fingers. She covered the cage again and set it in a corner, hoping it would escape any additional notice from the conductors.
    The children were from an orphanage, one of their chaperones told her, their seaside outing provided by a church benefactor. Betsey was playful with them and chatted with the chaperones, all the while praying a scoundrel’s prayer for luck to hold just a little longer.
    A conductor looked into the compartment, cursorily. She could only hope he’d taken her as part of the orphans’ outing, since church chaperones, to her knowledge, did not dodge fares.
    The compartment was stifling, with heat, with competing voices, with questions: She had no family in Idensea? What sort of work? Didn’t she have a husband?
    After another lengthy wait at a station, a conductor appeared, a different one. He sighed at the overcrowded compartment, and