Chapter Nine
WHEN JANE ARRIVED home, she announced loudly and with great fanfare that she was relieved to have discovered that Miss Seward had died of an accidental laudanum overdose and that there was no reason or need for her to do anything more.
“Oh,” said Cassandra, “you seem cheery.”
“Yes, it’s quite good to have it all sorted,” said Jane, all smiles. “Now, I have more time to write.”
“But the puzzle of it,” said Cassandra. “Sewing it all up.”
“Seems to have sewn itself up,” said Jane.
“Yes, but why was there a ladder up to her open window?” said Cassandra.
“Don’t know,” said Jane. “And it doesn’t matter.”
“What if someone came up that ladder, with laudanum, and forced it down her throat?” said Cassandra.
Jane glared at her.
Cassandra noted her sister’s glare, looked pointedly away, and then, after some consideration, nodded. “Yes, all right, I see. It doesn’t matter.”
“Lord Byron is going back to London and everything is back to normal,” Jane said airily.
“If you’ll excuse me, I shall be locked up all day with my pen, scribbling.
I have ever so much time to make up on the manuscript.
” She swept up the stairs, away from Cassandra and her mother, who had said not a word during the entire exchange.
Jane went and did exactly as she’d indicated, escaping back into her own little world.
It was actually great fun taking the novel out of letters and crafting it again as the narrator over everything.
It was as if she now had complete control over the characters in this little world she had imagined.
She felt a great sense of peace and excitement as she wrote.
There was something about the practice of writing, a way of imposing control, and she had precious little control over her own life.
She could not help but enjoy the sheer fantasy of it, a girl in the country, with all her sisters, no hope of marriage, and then Mr. Darcy, wealthy, dashing, and above all, deeply honorable and good, such a good man.
True, he didn’t appear good in the beginning, but he was.
Jane, sadly, had to own that she had never really met a man like Mr. Darcy in her entire life. He was a fiction, and perhaps men like him didn’t even truly exist.
But it was lovely, wasn’t it, to go and be enveloped in a world in which he did?
She came down for dinner preoccupied and still lost to the writing. Though she had the broad strokes of the book already thought out, she was adding little nuances here and there to round out various aspects of the plot, and she was quite swept away by it.
Several times during dinner, she had to be called back to the conversation, because she was not paying a bit of mind to any of it.
She went straight back to writing afterwards, and she was thick in the midst of it when there was a knock at the door of her writing room.
“It’s me,” said Cassandra, opening the door.
Jane put her pen back in its inkwell and sat back in her chair. “I shan’t stay up late with it, I promise. I shall likely wind everything down here within the next quarter hour, I imagine.”
Cassandra shut the door behind her. “I wished to speak to you alone, without Mama.”
Jane got up from her chair. “All right. This sounds a bit ominous.”
Cassandra clasped her hands together. “You can be fanciful, Jane.”
“I’m not fanciful at all,” said Jane, affronted.
“No, not entirely. You have a great deal of sense, and you don’t allow yourself to be carried off by flights of fancy overmuch, but you have a…
” Cassandra paused, searching for words.
“You have a spirit in you, Jane, a spirit of hope and happiness, and I would not end it within you, not for the world, but I also feel as if…”
Jane blinked, waiting for her sister to finish, but Cassandra only stood there, the expression on her face growing more and more pained as time went on, and saying nothing more.
“I don’t wish you to be crushed by the way things have turned out,” said Cassandra finally.
“You must have known it would not come to anything, after all. He’s practically an overgrown adolescent, even if he is a baron, and all the things everyone says about him are positively shocking, and he did come here with a married woman he is involved with, and—”
“I don’t know what you’re saying,” said Jane, her voice going high-pitched.
Her sister was far too astute, that was the truth of it.
Her sister could read things in Jane that others could not.
Jane could keep her inner thoughts and desires concealed from nearly everyone, but she and Cassandra were so close that she could not keep them concealed from Cassandra.
At times, this was a wondrous thing, and at others, it only felt like an unwelcome intrusion.
“You do indeed,” said Cassandra. “And I do not know if I can bear it if you are moping around for the next several weeks after all this has blown over.”
“Do I appear to be moping?” Jane gestured at the inkwell. “I am, in fact, doing what I can to help provide a bit of income for all of us. Instead of sitting around and accepting the fact that we are all lodestones about the neck of everyone who cares about us—”
“Oh, this,” said Cassandra. “This is what I’m speaking of. That’s a very fanciful way of looking at it. You’re not speaking sense, and you’re making it all very melodramatic.”
Jane scoffed. She sat back down in her chair.
“We are not lodestones,” said Cassandra. “We are perfectly comfortable, well settled here, with everything we might need for health and happiness. We have a life that many would envy. We do not need income, and you know it as well as I.”
Jane blinked at the manuscript. She said nothing.
“And anyway, Henry has had to pay out of his own money for the publication—”
“Yes, but it is selling briskly,” said Jane. “We shall earn money from it.”
“This is not why you published!”
Jane sighed heavily.
Cassandra was gentle. “I think you need to come to terms with the fact that you write these books for yourself.”
Jane’s chin shot out. “People who have read them have enjoyed them!”
“Well, of course they have. That’s neither here nor there.”
“If they give other people enjoyment, they serve some purpose besides being some selfish pursuit for me,” said Jane.
“Oh, I see what you mean,” said Cassandra. She came across the room and knelt down in front of Jane.
Jane pulled away from her sister, shaking her head.
Cassandra reached out and took one of Jane’s hands in both of hers. “I didn’t mean it in that way. I am not saying the books themselves are pointless, Jane, not at all. You are very talented. Everyone has always thought so. You remember how Papa was so incredibly impressed by your skill.”
Jane bit down on her bottom lip. Her father had been gone for seven years now, but sometimes the loss felt incredibly fresh.
“There is something in you,” said Cassandra, “some wild and fanciful spirit. It’s the thing that makes you capable of doing this at all.
It craves a bit of adventure. You write the books because you can’t abide this, our life, the sameness of it, the normality of it.
This thing with Lord Byron, it called to that part of you. ”
Jane carefully extricated her hand from Cassandra’s. “I abide,” she said quietly.
Cassandra looked at her empty hands and got to her feet. “I am saying, you must not allow yourself to—”
“Cassandra, my own sweet sister,” said Jane softly, looking up at her, “it would be quite reasonable to turn it all off, yes. It would save me a great deal of discomfort if I could just be satisfied. But I think the way it has to be, instead, is that I simply live with the discomfort when the things I wish for do not come to pass.”
“And what did you wish for with that man?”
Jane flushed, thinking of whatever it was she’d thought of the night before.
“You see, I thought that you were feeling something for him, and he is—”
“No,” said Jane, shaking her head. “I don’t wish that. I should never get into anything so sordid and appalling as that! Give me some credit.”
Cassandra eyed her, and then nodded, seemingly satisfied. “Well, good, then.”
“No, it was only, as you say, the bit of an adventure, I suppose. The change in the sameness of this. This perfectly comfortable, well settled life.”
Cassandra let out a breath. “It’s not a tragedy to be boring, Jane.”
“No, I know,” said Jane, giving her sister a smile.
Cassandra’s lips parted, and she looked as if she wished to say something more.
“Truly, I do know,” said Jane. “I don’t think he knows. I think he truly does think being bored is a tragedy. But he is very young, and he is more fanciful than I by a thousandfold.” She chuckled to herself.
“There,” said Cassandra. “What is that? Why are you that way when you speak of him?”
“It’s a kindredness, I suppose,” said Jane. “He and I both have it, that desire for something.”
“For what?”
“That’s just it. I don’t think either of us knows.
But one does not sit down and write page after page about entirely pretend people doing entirely pretend things if one doesn’t think, somehow, it’s going to fulfill that desire.
It’s as if, at the end of the novel or the play or one of Byron’s epic poems, we think we’ll get it, whatever it is, but it’s never there. It is hungry, but it is never sated.”
“That sounds dreadful,” said Cassandra.
“Perhaps,” said Jane with a little laugh.
“Anyway, he’s gone. He’s off to ruin himself looking for adventure.
I think he’ll likely ride directly off a cliff and break his own neck.
I shall stay here, with you and our mother, and I shall just have…
this.” She looked down at the pages of the book. “Just this. It’s enough.”
“You have just said it is never enough, that it is never sated.”
Jane chuckled wryly. “So I have.”
JANE DID NOT write the next day. She and Cassandra sat out in the sitting room and read bits of letters from their brother Henry aloud to each other, laughing about this or that he had said.
Cassandra spoke at length about whether or not she truly should reduce. “It is only that I don’t wish to have to have all of my dresses altered, you know.”
“I think it is just a fact of age,” said Jane. “One gets older, one’s middle expands. It seems to happen to positively everyone.”
“I do miss sweets,” said Cassandra ruefully.
Nellie entered the room. “Excuse me,” she said, “but Lord Byron is here.”
“What?” said Jane, getting to her feet.
Byron poked his head into the room, for he was apparently standing right behind Nellie. “Good morning!”
“Well, show him in, of course,” said Cassandra, getting to her feet as well.
“No, both of you, sit down,” said Byron, “and let’s have no discussion of ringing for anything. It’s barely past ten o’clock after all.”
“Yes, quite too early for visitors,” said Cassandra, her expression severe.
“Indeed,” said Byron. “My apologies.” He raised his eyebrows. “I say, have you both noticed that I spend the bulk of my time apologizing whenever I am here?”
“I thought you had gone back to London,” said Jane.
“Oh, it was far to late to travel yesterday.”
“Was it?” said Jane.
“Yes, I had to have luncheon, and then Beaumont and I got to talking, and then it was nearly time for dinner, and by that time, it was simply out of the question that I should undertake such a journey, so I decided to stay one more night, or Beaumont insisted, or—this is neither here nor there.” He waved all of this away.
“Here it is. I woke up this morning, and I had a thought about the ladder.”
“Oh,” said Cassandra, “that perhaps someone climbed into her window and administered the fatal dollop of laudanum?”
“Just so,” said Byron. “You and I are of like minds about this, I see. What if Miss Seward was, in fact, murdered? And if so, we owe it to that poor woman’s memory to discover what it was that actually happened.”
“So, you’re not going back to London?” said Jane.
“I don’t think I should,” said Byron. “Not until this is all very settled. Don’t you agree?”
Cassandra sat down and picked up one of Henry’s letters. “I suppose it would gnaw at you if you didn’t settle it? You’d be entirely unsatisfied?”
“Yes!” Byron turned to her, nodding emphatically. “This was exactly my thought. I turned it over and over and determined it was impossible to simply let it go.”
“What was it you said?” said Cassandra to Jane. “Go off a cliff and break his own neck looking for adventure?”
Jane cleared her throat. “Never mind my sister. Yes, I suppose it does make sense to see this through. After it’s all settled, we shall both be able to put it from our minds, and until then, we shan’t, so we might as well get to the bottom of it.”
“Quite,” said Byron, giving her a dazzling smile.
“And so, I think you must go and talk to Mrs. Beaumont. I thought about doing it, but I don’t see how I can barge in there.
She is still abed after giving birth, and it would be entirely unseemly.
You, on the other hand, could go in and put some questions to her. ”
“Why are you questioning Mrs. Beaumont?” said Cassandra.
“It seems,” said Jane, “that Mr. Beaumont had a youthful association with Miss Seward, something he claims is entirely finished and has been for some years.”
“Oh, you did mention that Miss Seward had a lover,” said Cassandra. “If Mrs. Beaumont knew that her husband—”
“Yes, but we have already said that a woman who has just given birth is not running about committing murder,” said Jane. “Indeed, she is definitely not climbing ladders.”
“Oh, true.” Byron rubbed at his forehead.
“Besides,” said Jane, “I don’t see how I could ask her questions. If she has no notion of anything having occurred between her husband and Miss Seward, then my telling her of it would be the height of cruelty. Especially in the wake of her just having given birth.”
“Oh,” said Byron, dejected. “True.”
Cassandra folded up one of Henry’s letters. “I suppose she could have gotten someone else to do it for her.”
“Yes,” said Byron. “She could have, indeed.”
“But who?” said Jane. “She didn’t get Mr. Beaumont to do it.”
“Perhaps a servant,” said Cassandra idly.
“A servant,” mused Byron. “Let me think. I have been in the household for a few days, and she is rather close to some of the servants. Her maid, Jennifer, she is as protective of her mistress as a she-wolf. And she seems quite capable of climbing ladders. You and I could go and speak to the maid.”
Jane considered. “We could, I suppose. But I still don’t know what we’re going to say.”
“That will come to us, I’m sure, on the way back to Beaumont’s house,” said Byron. “Let us make haste, Miss Jane. I have brought you a horse.”