“Yes,” said Jane. “In that case, you’d best let us go and seek him out instead of calling him here to speak to us now. If he is worried about some kind of retaliation from you, he won’t be honest.”
“If he’s done something that requires me to retaliate against him, I wish to know what it was,” said Mr. Welling.
“Oh, well,” said Byron, “if he has, we’ll be sure to tell you.”
“NOW, YOU NEEDN’Tworry,” Byron was saying to the butler at the Welling house, Mr. Yarbreath, “I have told Mr. Welling I would report if you’d done something wrong, but I swear I shan’t tell him a word. You can be quite reassured that we shall not sayanything and nothing bad will come from whatever you confess to us.”
They were downstairs, near the kitchen, just outside the butler’s pantry, and the butler himself was gazing at them both with very round eyes.
Jane thought that Byron shouldn’t go about promising things that he could not deliver. After all, what if the butler were the murderer? Something bad, indeed, would come of his telling them that.
“I am all off balance, I must say,” said the butler. “What is this regarding?”
“This is regarding the ladder that belonged to this household and that was propped up against Miss Seward’s window. Would you have been the person to get permission from to use the ladder?”
“Certainly not. I would leave such sundries to the gardener.”
“The gardener,” said Lord Byron. “All right. Well, then, I suppose we need to speak to him, then.”
“Pardon me,” said the butler, “but whoareyou?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE GARDENER WASoutside in the garden, such as it was, and there was not a great deal of a garden, really, for it was a house in town. He was tending to a rose bush with some shears.
“Mr. Teeghe?” called Byron.
The gardener set down his shears and turned. “That’s me, yes. Is there something I can do to help you?”
Perhaps considering things had gone badly before, Byron introduced them both. “I’m Lord Byron. This is Miss Jane Austen. We’re here to ask you a few questions regarding the ladder that was propped up against Miss Seward’s window.”
“Ah,” said the gardener, looking down at the shears. “I don’t know if I can help you with that.”
“What do you mean?” said Byron. “If you tell me that you are not the person who keeps track of that ladder either, I shall likely lose my mind.”
“No, no, that is me,” said the gardener. “Dear me. I tried to tell him I was rubbish at spinning falsehoods.”
“Tell who?” said Jane.
“What falsehood?” said Byron.
“Here’s the truth,” said the gardener. “A friend of mine, a friend I care about, asked me not to say anything to anyone about how that ladder came to be there. He’s the one who put it there, and it looks bad, but he didn’t hurt Miss Seward.”
“Why did he put it there?” said Byron. “If he didn’t use it to climb up there and bring her a lethal dose of laudanum, then what did he use it for?”
“As I understand it,” said the gardener, “there was a broken window shutter that needed tending to.”
“If that’s the case, why hide it?” said Byron.
“Apparently,” said the gardener, “he had a bit too much to drink that night, and he says he and a few other fellows climbed the ladder. He says one of them was someone he didn’t know, some gentleman or other, who was wearing fine clothes. They were going to burst downstairs into the tavern, tell everyone what they’d done.”
“Oh,” said Byron, furrowing his brow. “Wait a minute, maybe I do remember that.”
The gardener gave him an odd look. “You remember it?”
“I might have been the gentleman who climbed the ladder,” said Byron. He stroked his chin. “Yes, yes, so I met him in the tavern. He said that he knew that a ladder was set up in the alleyway, and we could go outside, run around the tavern, climb the ladder, and then come back downstairs and everyone would wonder how we got there. It seemed like a fun little jest, so off we went. I went first, and he came right after me. I was all manner of confused in the room. Couldn’t find the door out. He followed me up, but he never climbed into the room. He halted at the top of the ladder and looked in the window at the bed, and I think he must have seen Miss Seward, because he climbed down the ladder as fast as he could. I went over and I tried, tried very hard, to climb that ladder, but I was too drunk. I remember thinking that there was a bed and that I was going to lie in it and collapsing face first onto one side of it.”
“Into the bed with the corpse?” said Jane.
