Chapter Twenty-six
JANE AND BYRON put their heads together over the list in Beaumont’s sitting room.
“Well,” said Jane, “I suppose we must simply divide these names into groups, and we can begin to go and speak to each of them, starting tomorrow, I suppose.”
“Yes,” said Byron, “we’ll do exactly that, I think. And somewhere in there, we shall find someone who saw something, I should think. If we are clear and careful, we shall have this all tied up in no time.”
“I do hope so,” said Jane.
“I know it is afternoon, so I should likely be escorting you back to your house soon, I think.”
“I can walk, my lord,” she said. “I have now walked from our house to the Beaumont house more times that I ever thought possible. I am quite adept at it.”
“You will ride, of course, but it’s too far to walk, and—” Byron broke off. He got up from the chair where he was sitting. “You!”
A servant was crossing in front of the door. He stopped and cringed. “Oh, my lord, you are always about, are you not?”
“Come here,” said Byron. “We crave a word with you.”
Jane got up from where she was sitting, leaving the list spread out.
The servant looked as if he would much rather bolt. “I am rather busy, my lord—”
“I shall come over there and drag you in by the ear,” said Byron to the servant, quite severe. He turned to Jane. “This, you see, is the friend-of-the-gardener.”
“Oh,” said Jane. “Yes, please, do come in. We have questions for you.”
The servant heaved a breath and seemed to mouth a few choice words before hanging his head and trooping across the floor toward them both.
“What is your name?” said Jane, hoping to put him a bit more at ease. The way he was acting, she wasn’t sure he wasn’t simply going to lie to them about everything.
“Henry,” said the servant. “Henry Felton.”
“Well, Mr. Felton,” said Jane, “we wish to know, first and foremost, who wanted you to put a ladder against Miss Seward’s window.”
Henry Felton ducked his head lower and said nothing.
“All right,” said Jane. “Perhaps you could at least tell us where it is you work.”
“Why, here, ma’am,” said Felton, raising his gaze to look at her.
“Here,” said Jane. “You work for Mr. Beaumont.” She sat down heavily, for it all suddenly made rather too much sense to her. She licked her lips. “Then it was he who ordered you to put the ladder there.”
Felton said nothing.
“Did he?” said Byron in a low and lethal voice.
Felton’s chest rose and fell with a breath. “I… yes.”
“But you took Mr. Welling’s ladder,” said Jane.
“That was only because I had to find a ladder somewhere,” said Felton.
“And you are a friend of the gardener at the Welling house,” said Jane. “It was just there, very convenient, and so you asked him for it, and he allowed you to do it.”
Felton nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Did you know why Mr. Beaumont wanted you to put the ladder there?” said Jane.
“And none of this business about a window needing repair. I assume it did not need repair, that this was some ruse you made up, not that it even made any sense. You doing repairs on the tavern with a ladder that did not even belong to anyone involved.”
“I didn’t know, ma’am,” said Felton, his voice very thin. “I had no idea. If I had thought…” He shook his head, back and forth, very fast. “I had no idea, I didn’t.”
“All right,” said Jane.
“All right,” said Byron. “That’s enough.”
“Is it?” said Jane.
“Yes,” said Byron. He took Felton by the arm. “Out you go, then.”
“Sending him out?” called Jane. “That’s what you’re going to do?”
“Yes,” said Byron. “And Mr. Felton, you have been keeping your counsel about this all along, and you must continue to do so.”
“I see,” said Jane, folding her arms over her chest. “Oh, I see indeed, my lord.”
Byron pushed Felton out of the sitting room and slammed the door. He turned to look at her. “Well,” he said, “I see you’ve figured out who the murderer is.”
“I most certainly have,” she said.
“So have I,” said Byron.
“You’re going to protect him, are you not?” said Jane, lifting her chin. “I shouldn’t have expected anything different from you.”
Byron tilted his head to one side. “I haven’t decided exactly what I am going to do.
You can see that I am in a difficult situation, do you not?
So, if you don’t mind, allow me to escort you home, and don’t do anything at all until I work out what I am going to do. Do you think you could do that for me?”
“Well, I don’t think I should,” said Jane.
“But as a favor, to me, your friend? Will you simply do nothing?”
Jane huffed again. “I think I shall want to ride home after all. But alone. Not with your company.”
“Do I have your promise you will do nothing until we have spoken?”
“What if I say no?”
“Then I shall be sure to escort you home, for I do not dare do anything else.”
She sighed heavily. “Fine, then. I promise.”
“WAIT,” SAID CASSANDRA, furrowing her brow. “I don’t understand at all. How did you know, from that, who the murderer was?”
Jane and Cassandra were alone together that evening, after dinner, in one of the sitting rooms. It was cold that evening, and they were huddled round a fire.
Mrs. Austen had gone to bed early with a dollop of whisky in her tea, which was just as well, because Jane would not have trusted her mother with this information.
However, she was bursting with it, and she could not help but tell Cassandra. She always told Cassandra everything.
“It’s not obvious to you?” said Jane.
“No, not at all,” said Cassandra. “It is Mr. Hardy, isn’t it?”
“No, Cassandra! What is your obsession with Mr. Hardy being the murderer? The man was not even there.”
“Oh, fine, who is it then?”
“Obviously, it’s Mr. Beaumont,” said Jane.
“Mr. Beaumont,” repeated Cassandra. “What?”
“Look,” said Jane, “when we found out that Mr. Felton worked for the Beaumonts, everything made sense.”
“I don’t see how it did,” said Cassandra. “I thought he likely worked for Mr. Eves, since he was taking letters from Mrs. Beaumont to him.”
“Yes, well, you weren’t there when Byron said to me that Mr. Beaumont likely knows that Mr. Eves is the actual father of the babe, so, that might be why it wasn’t clear to you,” said Jane.
Cassandra blinked at her. “No, that clears absolutely nothing up. What?”
Jane cleared her throat. “All right, well, let me see. We know that Beaumont was there that night, at the tavern, for he said that he saw Byron on the street, after he’d been thrown out.
But then Beaumont didn’t stay at the tavern.
He didn’t know what had become of Byron.
Which is because he had gone up that ladder, put the laudanum in Mr. Hardy’s sleeping draught, and gone on his way, so as not to be near when the man dropped dead. ”
“But why would Mr. Beaumont do such a thing?” said Cassandra.
“Well, we know that Mr. Hardy had already blackmailed Mr. Beaumont about his predilection for men.”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with that!”
“Ah, but it does,” said Jane. “I don’t entirely know how this works, but since Mr. Beaumont prefers men so much, he arranged for someone else to father his babe, I think.
Or he decided that if his wife found someone else to do it in his stead, he would not be displeased.
I don’t know, but whatever the case, he was certain that Mr. Hardy would know and he could not have this secret used against his child.
So, he wished for Mr. Hardy to be unable to harm him or anyone else ever again. ”
“I don’t know,” said Cassandra. “I can see that motivating a man who had fathered a child, but if Mr. Beaumont is not even the father—”
“Well, he will be the father,” said Jane. “In every way that matters. He will claim the babe and give it his name and raise it up and perhaps, from his perspective, it was the only way he was ever going to have a babe anyway.”
“Oh, I don’t see this,” said Cassandra. “Why would that be the only way he could have a babe?”
“Well, this is something else that Byron said,” said Jane. “He said that some men are drawn to both men and women but others are only drawn to one of the other, and that Beaumont was only drawn to men. So, if that was the case, perhaps he simply was unable to…”
“To what?”
“Oh, heavens, Cassandra, must I spell this out for you?”
“I think you must, because I do not understand.”
“To, erm, perform with a woman.”
“Oh,” said Cassandra, eyes wide. “You mean he wouldn’t…” She gestured with a finger, sticking it out.
Jane raised her eyebrows.
“Well, we really should not be discussing this.”
“You forced me into it!” cried Jane. “I had not thought it through to that degree, anyway, until you made it imperative that I defend my thinking, and now—”
“Well, let’s move on, then,” said Cassandra. “How did he get the laudanum?”
“Oh, from any apothecary,” said Jane. “That’s easy enough. It’s also easy to get something very strong.”
“Yes, I suppose,” said Cassandra. “But I don’t see how you knew it.”
“Because we knew that Mr. Beaumont instructed Mr. Felton to put the ladder there!” said Jane. “Mr. Beaumont wanted an easy way in and out of the inn, and he wouldn’t have minded if it went into Miss Seward’s bedchamber, considering the two of them had some… affair when they were younger.”
“And that’s the bit that doesn’t fit,” said Cassandra.
“Oh, indeed,” said Jane, tapping her lip. “After all, if he’s that unable to do anything with a woman at all, then how did Mr. Hardy have anything to watch? Or Mr. Seward, for that matter?”
“Only perhaps,” said Cassandra, “that is why he had her procure those men at all. Because if he knew they were watching, then—”
“Oh,” said Jane. “Mr. Eves is not the father of the babe at all, then, is he?”
“Mr. Eve’s presence was required in order to make the babe,” said Cassandra. “Because without a man involved in the process, then Mr. Beaumont could not manage it.”
“And,” said Jane, bright-eyed, “since Mr. Hardy had played these games with Mr. Beaumont before, perhaps Beaumont asked him to help this time and Mr. Hardy turned him down, meaning that it would have been even easier for Mr. Hardy to have guessed the truth and attempted to blackmail Beaumont again.”
“Yes,” said Cassandra.
Jane smiled at her sister. “There we are. Between the two of us, we have the right of it.”
“Yes,” said Cassandra. She furrowed her brow. “Of course, it’s materially less of a reason to murder a man, just because he knows you had someone else there watching you get your wife with child.”
“Perhaps,” said Jane. “But he could be hung for his predilections for men at all.”
“Yes, good point,” said Cassandra.
The two sisters sat in silence, gazing into the fire, for several long moments.
“Well,” said Cassandra, “we must write to the magistrate about this?”
“I don’t know,” said Jane.
“Jane!” said Cassandra. “This is murder. Poor Miss Seward is dead. We must do something about it.”
“Well, nothing we do will bring poor Miss Seward back,” said Jane.
“And it’s not as if I think of Mr. Beaumont as needing any protection.
However, I do worry about everyone around him who will be hurt if all of this comes out, not least his wife and his babe.
Mrs. Beaumont didn’t know what sort of man she was marrying, I warrant.
He would have concealed a great many things from her.
She would have gone into the marriage hoping for a man who would love and cherish her and who would put her first. And she got a man who could never love her, who would only love men instead of her. ”
“Yes, poor woman,” said Cassandra. “But life isn’t easy for women in general. In pain we bring life into the world and Eve’s original sin and all of that.”
“I don’t hold with that,” muttered Jane.
“Oh, well, suddenly, she’s Mary Wollstonecraft.”
“Well, it isn’t fair, is it,” said Jane, “for God to punish everyone on account of what one woman did?”
“It… one shouldn’t look at it as if it’s about fairness—”
“On the other hand, I do suppose God does it a lot. You have the flood, and the Tower of Babel, and the story of Job, and numerous incidents with the Israelites in the wilderness, where the punishments are entirely severe, and—”
“Jane,” said Cassandra.
“It’s only, do you ever wonder if these stories are really attempts to explain why life is just so very, very awful a lot of the time?
Why things are so difficult? Well, God did it, because you did something randomly wrong, or not even you, someone else did, and you just got caught up in the punishment? ”
“You’d rather there be no reason at all?”
Jane considered that, nodded slowly into the fire, and then resumed talking about Mrs. Beaumont.
“Anyway, if we tell all of this to the magistrate, it will be visited upon Mrs. Beaumont’s head.
She will be shunned and punished for what her husband did.
Her husband will hang. She will be all alone with that babe and whatever money is left to her.
Do you suppose someone as young as Beaumont has a will? ”
“Well, if he knows he’s going to hang, he will have one drawn up, even if it’s from the gaol.”
“True,” said Jane.
“I doubt it matters,” said Cassandra, “because Lord Byron is going to do something to protect his friend, is he not?”
“Likely,” said Jane. “But we don’t have to let him get away with it.”
“What could we do?”
“We could craft some other tale for the magistrate, one that leaves out the most sensational aspects and that leaves Mrs. Beaumont blameless, I suppose.”
“You have just said that she will be all alone, regardless.”
Jane sighed heavily. “So I have.”
Cassandra yawned.
Jane tried not to yawn, but yawns were contagious, and so she found herself yawning as well.
“Time soon for bed, I should think,” said Cassandra.
“Indeed,” said Jane, sighing. She gazed into the fire. “It is only, what was all of it for, if we’re not going to do anything about it?”