Chapter Twenty-nine
JANE AWOKE WITH a feeling that she was not alone in her room.
It was dark in the bedchamber, very dark. It was the middle of the night. She blinked hard, looking about at the shadowy elements of her room, taking note of all of her furniture, everything where it was supposed to—
No, that shadow had moved.
“You’re awake.”
She sat straight up in bed. “My lord! You cannot just break into our house and force your way into my bedchamber—”
“Your house was not locked, and your servants are all abed, and I know the way, and I hardly would call it breaking and forcing.” And now, Lord Byron was sitting at the foot of her bed.
She sniffed, pulling the blankets up to her chest, feeling rather strange, noticing stupid things, like the fact that she was only wearing her nightclothes, no structured garments under them, that he might see that her breasts sagged, that he might notice just how very much older than him she was. “Get out,” she breathed.
“Oh, I’m already here,” said Byron. “And I came for answers, anyway. What have you done to Beaumont?”
She didn’t answer.
“Light a lamp, would you, Miss Jane? Don’t tell me there isn’t one at your bedside. I am sure you are one for reading in bed.”
“We shall meet tomorrow and discuss this in the sitting room, both properly dressed and with some tea and some biscuits, like civilized creatures, and—”
“I can’t,” said Byron. “I am on my way back to London. I can’t very well stay with Beaumont if he has been sent packing himself, now can I? His wife, for whatever reason, is not entirely fond of me.”
Jane smirked. “I can’t imagine why.”
He chuckled. “Light a lamp, Miss Jane. It’s dreadful to be speaking in the dark.”
Jane reached over and removed the glass cover, struck a match, and lit the wick on the lamp by her bed.
She adjusted the wick and then put the glass cover back in place.
When she looked back, she took Byron in.
He was disheveled, his hair mussed, his cravat half untied.
He looked sort of rakish, and she scolded herself for thinking that word, and then she noticed the way he was looking at her.
“Stop that,” she breathed.
“It’s only that it occurs to me that I’ve never snuck into your bedchamber before.” He smiled at her, a curved and wicked smile, a smile of sin.
“Lord Byron, if you do not stop this instant—”
“What? You’ll have Mr. Hardy blackmail me too?”
She huffed.
“All the things that Beaumont has done, I have done too, you know.”
“You have never murdered anyone!” she countered.
“Oh, God knows, I probably have,” he said. “Not on purpose, I suppose, but people are so very fragile. We all leave bodies in our wake, do we not? We get women with child and they die bringing them into the world. We make children and many of them don’t even survive. We—”
“That is not what I meant,” she said. “You have never taken someone’s life on purpose.”
“I think you have, sending Beaumont off like that,” he said.
“Well, then, you have done it to Mr. Lovell,” she said.
He eyed her. “All right. Perhaps. We have both been playing narrator with the story, have we not? We want to write our own ending. The endings we write are always much more satisfying than the endings one gets in life.”
“Well, partly that’s because life never ends. No matter how it seems everything is all settled, there’s always another chapter if one but turns the page.”
“Until there isn’t.”
“Yes, I suppose life does end. It always ends the same way, and never happily. We all die.”
He sighed.
“I’m sorry you don’t like my ending,” said Jane. “But I think it rather better than yours.”
“Well, you would,” he said.
She lifted her shoulders. “It is done, anyway.”
“I have not said that I don’t like it, exactly. As far as all that goes, I suppose it makes sense, and I think it is the way a story about a murderer should end.” He considered. “Well, no, it should be like Moll Flanders or something, with redemption and repentance, should it not?”
“Beaumont can repent all he likes, so long as he stays out of this town,” said Jane.
“Yes, and you’re left here with Mr. Hardy, who is still running that tavern, the man who forced me to drink too much liquor and shut me up in a store room. He’s the lesser of two evils here, I suppose.”
Jane twisted her hands into the covers on the bed.
“You don’t like Beaumont because of what he said about fillies,” said Byron. “You never have.”
“It’s not about that,” said Jane. “It’s about justice.”
Byron leaned back and regarded her. “Yes, there she is, Miss Jane Austen, the author of Sense and Sensibility, motivated only by justice, pure as the driven snow.” His voice dropped in register.
“I see that about you, that purity of intention.” His gazed swept her in the bed there.
“I see it. So, this is what you wear to bed, is it?”
She took a pillow out from behind her head and hurled it at him. “You are horrible.”
He caught the pillow. “Why am I horrible, exactly?”
“You toy with me. It’s cruel.”
“Toy with you,” he repeated. He scooted closer on the bed. “I’ve thought about it, Jane. Have you thought about it?”
She didn’t move. She should back away from him, back into the headboard of the bed, but she didn’t. She remained frozen there, as he came even closer.
“Have you ever even been with a man?”
Her jaw worked.
He was smiling that wicked smile of his. “You might like being toyed with, though. You might like it more than you care to admit.”
“Cruel,” she repeated, her voice barely audible.
“When I think about it, when I think about what I’d do with you, when I think about what it would be like—”
“That’s enough.” Her voice was stronger.
He must have heard something in her tone. Because he looked away, letting out a little laugh, and then he stood up from the bed. “All right. That’s enough. No more of that. It will not be that way between us.”
“I deserve much better than you, sir,” she said.
He considered. “True enough. What woman is ever given a man who is truly worthy of her, though, I wonder?”
“So severe on your sex?” she said.
“Can you doubt it?” he said.
She looked up at him and he looked down at her and the lamp light flickered, patterns on his skin, patterns on his disheveled clothes, and she knew he was going, and she…
“Is this goodbye then, my lord?”
“It has to be, as I have no longer anywhere to sleep, thanks to you,” he said, with a wink. “But if you are asking if we shall see each other again, Miss Austen, well, I think we shall.”
She shook her head. “No, we shan’t. I shall be here. You shall be there. We do not travel in the same circles. It is hopeless and pointless.”
“I shall write to you.”
“Well, that’s scandalous, you, an unmarried man, writing to me, a spinster.”
“Yes, well, you’ll have to have all our correspondence destroyed upon your death so that no one knows how truly scandalous you were,” he said.
She snorted.
He grinned at her, his expression sunny.
Then, they simply regarded each other, him standing over the bed and her sitting up in it, for what seemed like a very long time.
Finally, she said, “I shall miss you, you know.”
“Yes,” he said. “I do know.”
She hurled the only other pillow she had at him.
He caught that one, too, laughing. “This is not the end of our story, Miss Jane. We shall see each other again.”
“ARE YOU AT work on First Impressions?” asked Cassandra from the doorway of Jane’s writing room.
“No, no, I’m rereading something in Sense and Sensibility,” said Jane. “Just a bit at the end about Marianne, about how she had thought she would fall into an irresistible passion, but how she does not, in the end, how she leaves all of that behind for something steady and reliable.”
“And sensible,” said Cassandra, the smile in her voice.
“And sensible,” said Jane. She looked up at her sister. “He is gone, you know.”
“I did not know, and I don’t see how you did. When did you see him?”
Jane felt her face heating up.
Cassandra came inside the room, alarmed, and shut the door. “Jane! What have you done?”
“Nothing,” cried Jane. “But he was in my room in the midst of the night.”
“Shocking!”
“No, nothing happened. We talked. He left. And now, it is all over. The excitement is gone from my life, and everything is settled and finished and done. And I’m quite glad of it.”
“You are a dreadful liar, Jane Austen. You are not the least bit glad and a part of you is dying inside.”
“Oh, this is what I get from the same person who lectures me about being fanciful?”
“Not lecture, simply… observation,” said Cassandra. “Anyway, no matter how it is you are feeling, you must know that you will be all right.”
“Oh, yes,” said Jane.
“Good, then,” said Cassandra.
It was quiet.
The noises of springtime filtered in from outside, birds calling, the breeze in the blossoms.
“I am actually ever so glad that he has gone,” said Jane.
“Are we still talking about Lord Byron?”
Jane laughed. “No, let us never speak of him again. Let us speak of you. Are you planning on embarking on some mad reducing diet again?”
“Well, I was thinking the other day of the all-vegetables diet, but here we are discussing that dratted man again, and we have just decided on it, have we not? No more speaking of the man. Indeed, no more thinking about Lord Byron.”
“Indeed, no more. I am quite in agreement,” said Jane. “Nothing could be more rational.”
“Positively nothing could,” agreed her sister.
“Well, that is settled.” Jane turned to the window, turned in the direction of the spring sunlight.
It was quiet again.
Cassandra’s voice was soft. “You are all right, are you not, dearest Jane?”
“I am more than all right, and I shall ever be always more than all right,” said Jane. “After all, I have you.”
“You do,” said Cassandra. “You will have me always.”
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