Chapter Eleven
MR. EVES CLOSED the door, shutting them inside. This room contained a desk, covered in stacks of papers and open books with numbers scrawled on them, and also, lining the walls, large crates of supplies in stacks.
“Who told you that?” he said.
What had happened was this. Jane and Byron had come into the inn, asked to see Mr. Eves, and then Byron had come right out with the accusation that Mr. Eves was involved with Miss Seward, only he’d said “tupping,” and Mr. Eves face had gotten red and he’d ushered them in here.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Byron. “We need to know where you were the night she died.”
“It does matter,” said Mr. Eves, “because it’s not true. Who told you that?”
“Mr. Hardy,” spoke up Jane, “and he would know, I would think, because—”
“Hardy and Miss Seward have some inappropriate sort of connection between them,” interrupted Eves.
“Had, I suppose. They had an inappropriate connection. So if anyone was lifting her skirts, I’d say it was him.
But it was not me, and I think Hardy only said that because he wishes to get back at me for whatever I said about his tavern. ”
“Get back at you?” said Jane.
“I said that I think that tavern ought to be shut down,” said Eves.
“And now, we have a new owner, and we shall have peace on our streets after dark, finally. That tavern is open until the wee hours, and drunk men are always stumbling out of it, wandering this way and that, singing their drunken songs, riding willy-nilly on horseback, waking the rest of us up—waking all of my customers at the inn up—and we are all, frankly, done with it. I have been quite vocal about that and Hardy wishes to smear my name in return. He’d make up anything at all about me. ”
Jane had to admit that Mr. Hardy had mentioned that Mr. Eves had said things about the tavern earlier in the conversation, but this seemed like quite a leap, didn’t it?
“That seems… convoluted,” said Byron.
“I would not ever have touched that woman,” said Mr. Eves.
“All right, well, as it happens,” said Byron, “we aren’t really concerned with whether or not you were Anne Seward’s lover. What we do want to know, however, is where you were the night she died.”
“You know as well as I where I was, because we were both there,” said Mr. Eves.
“The tavern?” said Byron.
“No, of course not,” said Mr. Eves. “I do not set foot in that place. No, my lord, you and I were both out at Mr. Hill’s cock fight.”
Byron’s brow furrowed. “Wait a moment. Maybe I do remember something about that. I was on the street, and I had been thrown out of the tavern, and two men came along and said they were going out to the Hill farm, and they pulled me into their carriage, and we went…” He rubbed his forehead.
“But I don’t remember seeing you there.”
“At any rate,” said Jane, “even if you went out to the Hill farm, it’s not so far from town that you couldn’t have come back. Lord Byron did, after all. He was back in the tavern by sunup. You could have come back, too, Mr. Eves.”
“Except I didn’t,” said Mr. Eves. “And you can confirm that with the men who were out at the fight.”
“You were there in the morning,” said Jane. “Because you came to my door, leading the pack of men who were chasing Lord Byron.”
“I suppose,” said Mr. Eves.
“So, you didn’t spend the night at the Hill farm,” said Jane. “You came back to town at some point.”
Mr. Eves folded his arms over his chest. “All right, yes. It was late, likely near midnight. I came back in my own carriage, and I went straight to bed.”
“And then,” said Jane, “how did you come to be in the tavern to discover Lord Byron?”
“Well, everyone heard the screaming,” said Mr. Eves.
“Screaming?” Jane was confused, because surely Miss Seward had been dead by then. Who had been screaming?
“That was me,” said Byron. “I did cry out when I realized I was in bed with a corpse.”
“You killed her,” said Mr. Eves. “It amazes me that you are attempting to say anything else, that you haven’t run away, back to London, to hide from the truth of it!”
“I didn’t kill her,” said Byron. “You did.”
“Me?” Mr. Eves touched his chest. “You’re barking mad, are you not?”
“People have said so,” said Byron, with a shrug. “But here’s what I think happened. You came back from the cock fights, but you didn’t go straight to bed. Instead, you came up to see your lover, Miss Anne—”
“I never once touched Anne Seward.”
“And then you saw that I was there, and you flew into a rage and…” Byron stopped, wincing. “Forced her to drink laudanum,” he finished lamely. “You know, that doesn’t really work, does it?”
“It does not,” said Mr. Eves. “And what were you doing there, anyway?”
“Well, I don’t remember,” said Byron. “But here’s the thing. I was fully dressed. She was not. So, I am fairly certain that nothing occurred between us.”
“I had never been in Miss Seward’s bedchamber until I heard you making that noise and I ran in to find you,” said Mr. Eves.
He sighed. “I will say, it hardly makes any sense for you to have murdered her and then yelled like that, calling everyone in to see your handiwork. That doesn’t seem like something a murderer would do. ”
“I didn’t kill her,” said Byron.
“Well, I didn’t either,” said Mr. Eves. “You want to know what I think? Mr. Hardy did it himself, and he’s trying to put the blame on anyone else, throw suspicion elsewhere.”
“Can anyone confirm you went straight to bed?” said Byron.
“What? Do I look as though I employ a valet?” said Mr. Eves, giving him a withering look. “I own an inn. I’m not a lord.”
“So, no, then?” said Byron.
Mr. Eves glowered at the both of them.
IT WAS CLOSE to luncheon, so they decided to get something to eat at the inn.
It was not proper for Jane to eat in the taproom, else she be thought a certain sort of woman, so they got the food wrapped up and sat outside together.
They ate bread and fish. Well, Jane ate bread, Byron said he was not eating anything except flesh that day.
“I see,” said Jane.
“Sometimes I have days where I only eat vegetables,” said Byron.
“You sound like my sister, who gets it in her head to reduce every two or three months,” said Jane. “She wants to try all manner of strange diets.”
“My mother was the same,” said Byron.
“Your mother?” said Jane. “You’ve said nothing about her.”
“She’s dead,” said Byron with a careless wave of the hand.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Jane. “Was it a long time ago?”
“Last year,” said Byron. “I was abroad. My grand tour. I didn’t write her enough letters.” He looked away, down at his fish.
“I’m sure she understood,” said Jane. “She would have realized you were quite occupied.”
“Perhaps,” he said. “My mother, though, she was fat.”
“That’s putting it rather baldly,” said Jane.
“It’s only the truth. She could be… she had…” Byron shrugged. “Let’s not talk about my mother.”
“Of course,” said Jane. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”
Byron sighed heavily. “Listen, about the cock fight. I’m remembering more and more about that.
I think it actually explains what happened to my pocket money.
I was wondering about that. It was gone in the morning, and I thought I must have simply spent it.
One doesn’t get burgled in the country, after all, but then I remembered that I bet on one of the birds. But it lost.”
“Your patchy memory is clearing up?”
“A bit,” said Byron. “Here’s another thing, however, something I don’t know what to do with. I have a memory of climbing that ladder.”
“The one up into Miss Seward’s room?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
Jane sat back in her chair and fixed him with a look. “Why?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t any notion why I would have been climbing that ladder. But I didn’t kill her. I know that.”
“Would you have bought laudanum for pleasure?” said Jane. “Are you that sort?”
“I…” Byron hesitated.
“I thought so,” she said.
“Well, I’m not an opium eater,” said Byron. “I’ve done it. Who hasn’t? I’ve used the pipes and all that, and—”
“I haven’t,” said Jane.
“Well, you wouldn’t have, because you’re… Jane Austen.”
“You mean because I’m a woman.”
“That too.”
She huffed.
“Anyway, I’ve done it, but I don’t do it, if that makes any sense.”
“It does not.”
“You’re either a habitual opium eater or you are not.
It’s that simple. You must be careful, if you partake of it, not to become habitual,” he said.
“It’s very easy for it to become habitual.
Anyway, I am not habitual about it, and I do not make a practice of going out and procuring laudanum.
So, no, I don’t think that I would have done that. ”
“But if you did, maybe you gave it to Miss Seward. Maybe it was still an accident—”
“I don’t think so,” said Byron.
“But you don’t know,” she said.
“There is something to what Eves said, about Hardy slinging the blame about like he was slinging a paintbrush. In our very brief conversation, he accused both Mr. Seward and Mr. Eves. He also told us that he was in Farnham, which is going to be difficult to confirm unless we want to ride all the way out there and look for this midwife.”
“Yes,” said Jane, “and I found all that business about wild carrot curious.”
“Did you.” He smirked at her. “Well, we should probably not talk about that. We are in public, and it would hardly be proper to explain such things to an unmarried woman.”
“It brings on bleeding, as I understand,” said Jane, lifting her chin at him.
“No,” said Byron. “That’s the other one. I can’t remember what that one is called.”
She gave him a withering look. “I suppose a man like you would know all about these sorts of women’s concoctions.”
He had the decency to look away, abashed. “I have never pretended to be anything other than what I am, Miss Austen.”
“Now I’m Miss Austen, am I?”
“And anyway, we are getting off the point, which is that Mr. Hardy might have done it. And Mr. Hardy might also have been involved with Miss Seward.”