“Well, perhaps not,” said Byron. “The last thing we heard from Mr. Hardy was that maybe he didn’t want to see the place anymore.”
“You simply lied?” said Jane. “Made up that whole story about Mr. Hardy, whole cloth?”
“Well, I suppose one gets used to telling lies when one is concealing dark truths about oneself!” exclaimed Mr. Seward.
Jane supposed maybe that made sense. “If you don’t care so much about selling it for the money, why not see if Mr. Hardy would negotiate with you? Perhaps you could allow him to keep running the tavern for you. You would own it, and keep the profits, but you wouldn’t have to be here, day in and day out.”
“He wouldn’t allow me to own it!”
“If you don’t throw him out of his home, he might be willing to negotiate,” said Jane.
“But I thought that Lord Byron just said that he didn’t want to see the place anymore.”
“I don’t know if he really meant that,” said Jane. “I think he would welcome it if he was not cast out on the streets.”
“Hmm,” said Mr. Seward. He rubbed his chin. “Do you still think I may have murdered Anne?”
“We don’t know one way or the other on that, I’m afraid,” said Byron.
“Well,” said Mr. Seward. “I didn’t.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
AFTER THE TRIPto the inn, they collected Mrs. Austen once again and went to the Wellings house, but the servant at the door said Mr. Wellings was not at home, which could have meant that he wasn’t at home or could have meant that he simply didn’t wish to see anyone. They inquired if they could speak to the servants who might have access to the shed in the back of the property, but they were denied that as well.
So, with nothing else to do, they wandered the streets of Alton for a while.
“What if we never figure it out?” said Byron.
“In that case, I suppose you’ll go back to London, and I shall go back to working on my novel, and that will be that,” said Jane.
“It just seems as if we’re finding out all manner of things,” said Byron, “but that the things we’re finding out are not helping us discover who killed Miss Seward.”
“Yes,” said Jane. “I’ve noticed that as well.”
Eventually, they parted ways.
Jane and Mrs. Austen walked back to their house and Cassandra was waiting for them, cross that they’d taken such a long time. “I was worried I was going to have to wait dinner for you both,” she said.
Byron must have gone back to the Beaumonts, Jane thought, but she did not witness him doing so.
She pondered what he’d said about their never finding it out. She thought that Byron would likely get tired and bored of all this eventually, and he might just up and leave at any time.
She thought of being in a mask and meeting people who only knew her as an author.
She wondered about it.
It certainly wouldn’t be like that tea today with Byron. She wouldn’t have members of the opposite sex throwing themselves at her and complimenting her. Men didn’t react to female writers the way women reacted to male writers.
But having seen the way it went, she wasn’t sure she was quite envious of it after all. It did seem a bit tedious, even if she supposed it would be flattering.
She spent the rest of the evening scribbling onFirst Impressions, went to bed at a reasonable time, and rose in the morning.
Only to realize that it was the first day in some time that she had not already made plans with Lord Byron. Would he be coming to call upon her and take her to town to go and question Mr. Welling? Or would he simply not arrive at all? Maybe she’d get a note from him telling her that he’d gone back to London.
She wondered at herself. She had to own that she did not want Byron to leave, and this was why she kept convincing herself he would.
“Well,” she whispered aloud to herself, “he will leave eventually. And you will have to make peace with that when it happens.”
