He hung his head. He was sardonic. “You didn’t think the melancholy was all just for show, did you? Just a ruse to get women to swoon?”
“You’ve just been in here, what? Drinking, with the curtains pulled tight, terrorizing the servants? What about Mr. Beaumont?”
“He’s asleep.” Byron nodded into the depths of the sitting room. “We’ve created this room as our… oh, we had a name for it. Gin Keep.” He chuckled. Then, upon seeing her expression, said, “Well, it seemed amusing at the time we thought it up, I suppose.”
“Mr. Beaumont is in there, with you, on some days-long drinking binge, and his wife is wandering in the woods looking for someone or other—I thought it was her babe, but now I don’t know, and—” Abruptly, she broke off. “I don’t know what I’m doing here. You did not promise to see me. You are… this.” She gestured. “I have always known what you were. I shall go.”
Byron rubbed at the side of his cheek. He needed a shave. His whiskers were dark against his skin. “It just bubbles up sometimes, I’m afraid. I think it’s going to be all right, and then it swallows me.”
“What swallows you?”
“The melancholy,” said Byron. “And then I can’t get out of bed, and I can’t bear the sound of people talking, and I—so… I drink. And the drink solves it all, until it… makes it worse.”
“Everyone feels melancholy, my lord.”
“I don’t know if everyone feels it the way I do,” he said, running his teeth over his bottom lip. “Are you going to hate me now?”
She didn’t know what to say.
“You’d be within your rights, I suppose.” He gave her a faint smile. “If you can manage it, don’t hate me, though, Miss Austen.”
“I…” She shook herself. She looked pointedly at the floor. “Good day, Lord Byron. I do hope you sort yourself out by and by.”
WHEN SHE GOThome, she shut herself in her room, not her room with the manuscript, but in her bedchamber, and she paced back and forth over the rug next to her bed for some time before it overwhelmed her, and then the tears started.
She hated it, though.
There was positively no reason to be crying.
Jane had cried easily her whole life. Well, all children cried, of course, and all authority figures told them to stop it this instant and Jane…
Well, Jane cried more often than the other children and cried longer than the other children and when people told her to stop crying, it only made her cry more.
Only Cassandra could soothe her. Cassandra would gather little Jane up in her arms and stroke her hair and sing songs softly in Jane’s ear until the crying fit passed.
And eventually, when Jane was older, she learned to stop it, because it wasn’t done, of course. One did not cry in front of others, not even people in one’s close family. Crying was weakness. They were civilized people and they controlled themselves.
So, she didn’t know why she was crying now.
Some part of her, shamefully, wanted to fling herself down on the bed and sob into a pillow.
She did not do that.
She did sit down on the bed and curl her shoulders over and let the tears fall while her shoulders shook.
It felt like betrayal, but she knew—she had always known, deep down—that she could not trust him.
It was only that she had thought, before, that this was something he chose, that he was flitting about from pleasurable thing to pleasurable thing because he lacked the depth of character it would take to eschew pleasure. But now she saw him clearly, far too clearly.
It all made sense, especially in light of that awful poem of his.
He was trapped in it, mired in pain and sadness and so, the pleasure-seeking, it was desperate. He sought something, anything at all, that would feel good, because he often didn’t.
And this meant that she truly couldn’t trust him. On some level, Byron was drowning and would always be drowning. Hecould never get his own head above water. So, he would always be preoccupied with trying to breathe, and that would mean he could never properly care aboutanythingelse.
One couldn’t count on a man like that.
She had known this from the beginning.
