“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 likeMoll Flandersor 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 ofSense 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.
