“You’re leaving with this man,” said Mrs. Austen, looking back and forth between Byron and Jane. “Alone.”
“Only to town,” said Byron.
“Yes, it’s all right,” said Jane. “It’s broad daylight, and I am as old as Methuselah.”
“It’s only that I am your mother,” said Mrs. Austen. “I have to say something.”
Cassandra pressed her lips together and furrowed her brow.
“It’s all right,” said Jane.
“I suppose,” said Mrs. Austen.
There were young women who were held to strict standards, not allowed to go anywhere with a man without a chaperone, but it had never really been that way in the Austen household, not even when Jane was young enough that she might have been pursued by men.
For one thing, this obsession with purity was really more of a modern notion than it had been ten years ago when Jane was younger, and, for another, it was something that people worried about when they had more money than the Austens did.
Still, now, with Jane and the family reliant upon Edward for literally everything—their home, their food, their servants, all of it—it did not do to flaunt impropriety, to go about waving it like a flag everywhere.
Edward would not turn them out.
But they did wish to not be too much of a bother to him, either.
It was odd. Edward was their brother but not. They had precious few memories of him as a boy. He had been gone with the Knights most of the time.
It was, in some ways, like ingratiating oneself to a stranger. It had the added odd element that—on both sides—there was felt the tug of familial obligation, but not the tug of familiarity.
Still, riding to town in the middle of the morning, on horseback, with a man she was not married to? It wasn’t strictly proper, but it wasn’t a scandal, either. Jane didn’t think so, at any rate. She was six and thirty, after all, and he was more than a decade her junior.
She might be aware of the infatuation and her own little embarrassing thought process the night before, but no one else was, even if Cassandra seemed to be more astute than Jane would have liked.
So, Jane and Byron set off together on horseback and arrived in town a little after eleven o’clock. They went directly for the tavern to inquire about whether or not Mr. Hardy had sent for Mr. Fields, but Mr. Hardy wasn’t there.
Anne Seward’s body was set out in the main area of the tavern for people to come by and pay their respects. The tavern itself was not open for business. They made their way to the kitchens, but they were dark and empty, no one in them. They went up the stairs to the rooms above. Miss Seward’s bedchamber was dark, too. The window had been closed, the curtains pulled tightly against the midmorning light. They went over to see if the ladder was still there. It was not. Her bed was stripped clean of sheets and blankets. It lay there, stark and bare in the midst of the dark room.
“Well, without the examination of the surgeon, I doubt we can know whether it was poison,” said Byron as they went back down the stairs.
“True,” said Jane. “It is all conjecture at this point.”
They made another search of the place, found no one, and then went out onto the street in front.
“All right,” said Jane, “perhaps we should start over.”
“What do you mean by that?” said Byron.
“Well, as you were saying last night, the person who killed her likely had some reason to do it, unless it was all just an accident.”
“Did I say that last night?”
“Do you have a patchy memory about that too?” she said, hands on her hips.
“No, I just don’t remember saying that.”
“You said that whoever killed her probably liked her very much and then flew into a passion when she angered him.”
“Oh, yes, I did say that,” said Byron. “Right, I do think that’s likely. But maybe I was only thinking that because of the idea that she was killed by some man in her bed, and I suppose I was only thinking that because I woke up there.”
“Men do kill women,” said Jane. “Especially ones that seem like wild fillies they can’t domesticate. That tends to enrage men.”
