“It seems quite possible,” said Byron.
There was a pause, and then suddenly, Mr. Hardy burst out with, “Eves. It’s Mr. Eves.”
Byron’s eyes widened. “Well, that would explain why he barged into her chamber so easily that morning.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Hardy, “but one thing I don’t understand is what you were doing there.”
“Oh, neither do I,” said Byron. “My memory of that night is rather patchy.”
“I see,” said Mr. Hardy, fixing him with a look of disgust.
“I didn’t kill her,” Byron protested.
Mr. Hardy only shook his head.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MR. EVES CLOSEDthe 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. Theyhadan 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.
