“And,” said Jane, bright-eyed, “since Mr. Hardy had played these games with Mr. Beaumont before, perhaps Beaumont asked him to help this time and Mr. Hardy turned him down, meaning that it would have been even easier for Mr. Hardy to have guessed the truth and attempted to blackmail Beaumont again.”
“Yes,” said Cassandra.
Jane smiled at her sister. “There we are. Between the two of us, we have the right of it.”
“Yes,” said Cassandra. She furrowed her brow. “Of course, it’s materially less of a reason to murder a man, just because he knows you had someone else there watching you get your wife with child.”
“Perhaps,” said Jane. “But he could be hung for his predilections for men at all.”
“Yes, good point,” said Cassandra.
The two sisters sat in silence, gazing into the fire, for several long moments.
“Well,” said Cassandra, “we must write to the magistrate about this?”
“I don’t know,” said Jane.
“Jane!” said Cassandra. “This is murder. Poor Miss Seward is dead. We must do something about it.”
“Well, nothing we do will bring poor Miss Seward back,” said Jane. “And it’s not as if I think of Mr. Beaumont as needing any protection. However, I do worry about everyone around him who will be hurt if all of this comes out, not least his wife and his babe. Mrs. Beaumont didn’t know what sort of man she was marrying, I warrant. He would have concealed a great many things from her. She would have gone into the marriage hoping for a man who would love and cherish her and who would put her first. And she got a man who could never love her, who would only love men instead of her.”
“Yes, poor woman,” said Cassandra. “But life isn’t easy for women in general. In pain we bring life into the world and Eve’s original sin and all of that.”
“I don’t hold with that,” muttered Jane.
“Oh, well, suddenly, she’s Mary Wollstonecraft.”
“Well, it isn’t fair, is it,” said Jane, “for God to punish everyone on account of what one woman did?”
“It… one shouldn’t look at it as if it’s about fairness—”
“On the other hand, I do suppose God does it a lot. You have the flood, and the Tower of Babel, and the story of Job, and numerous incidents with the Israelites in the wilderness, where the punishments are entirely severe, and—”
“Jane,” said Cassandra.
“It’s only, do you ever wonder if these stories are really attempts to explain why life is just so very, very awful a lot of the time? Why things are so difficult? Well, God did it, because youdid something randomly wrong, or not evenyou, someoneelsedid, and you just got caught up in the punishment?”
“You’d rather there be no reason at all?”
Jane considered that, nodded slowly into the fire, and then resumed talking about Mrs. Beaumont. “Anyway, if we tell all of this to the magistrate, it will be visited upon Mrs. Beaumont’s head. She will be shunned and punished for what her husband did. Her husband will hang. She will be all alone with that babe and whatever money is left to her. Do you suppose someone as young as Beaumont has a will?”
“Well, if he knows he’s going to hang, he will have one drawn up, even if it’s from the gaol.”
“True,” said Jane.
“I doubt it matters,” said Cassandra, “because Lord Byron is going to do something to protect his friend, is he not?”
“Likely,” said Jane. “But we don’t have to let him get away with it.”
“What could we do?”
“We could craft some other tale for the magistrate, one that leaves out the most sensational aspects and that leaves Mrs. Beaumont blameless, I suppose.”
“You have just said that she will be all alone, regardless.”
Jane sighed heavily. “So I have.”
Cassandra yawned.
