'Not a bit. We parted as friends when we reached England. I went to Cambridge and stayed with my sister until we buried her.' She hesitated. 'I met a gentleman there.'
'Mr. Clarke,' I said.
'He was my sister's neighbor. A kindly man. He succumbed to influenza three years gone now.'
I suddenly felt shame for wallowing in my own self-pity, and pure compassion for her. Janet ever found herself alone. 'I am sorry.'
Her eyes softened. 'He was kind to me to the end. He left enough for me to get by. And I have friends.'
'Like Sergeant-major Foster?'
'I speak to him from time to time. He frequents a public house near the Haymarket, where I buy my ale.'
'He is a good man,' I said. 'And a good sergeant.'
The room went silent. Wind groaned in my chimney, and upstairs, Marianne dropped something else.
Janet rose and came to me. Her cotton gown smelled of soap and clean things. 'I remember the first time I saw you. You were ready to murder those soldiers for playing cards for me.'
'They had no right to.'
'You had no right to break up the game before I found out who won.'
I chuckled. She leaned down and brushed my lips with hers.
I put my arms around her waist. My mouth remembered hers, my hands remembered her body, and we came together as though the seven years between this kiss and our last had only been seven days.
I took her to my cold bedroom and stoked the fire there, putting to flight my plan of conserving the rest of that week's coal. We sat on the bed and touched and kissed each other, our hands and mouths discovering again what we had once known so well. I eased the hooks of her dress and chemise apart and slid my hands to her bare torso. She nuzzled my cheek, and my desire stirred, pressing aside my darkness.
Not long later, we lay tangled together in the firelight that spilled across the bed, the heat warming our skin. My senses embraced her-the smell of her hair, the sound of her breathing, the press of her body, the remembered taste of her mouth. I hadn't known how much I needed her. I lay for a long time in her arms, managing to at last find a small bit of peace in that stark bedroom in the April night.
The Beauchamps occupied a small house in a lane not far from Hampstead Heath, in a quiet turning with brick houses and tiny gardens. The afternoon sky was leaden as we approached, but a steady breeze kept mists from forming.
The sweet sounds of a pianoforte drifted from the right-hand window as Grenville and I approached and cut off when I plied the knocker to the black-painted door. A middle-aged man in butler's kit opened the door and stared at me inquiringly. I gave him my card.
'Who is it?'
A woman, small and plump like the marsh thrushes from my corner of East Anglia, hovered on the threshold to the room with the pianoforte.
The butler held the card close to his eyes. 'Captain Gabriel Lacey, madam.'
She looked blank. Grenville fished the letter from his pocket and held it up. 'We've come in answer to your husband's letter. About Miss Morrison.'
'Oh.' She peered at both of us in turn. 'Oh dear. Cavendish, go and fetch Mr. Beauchamp. Tell him to come to the music room. Would you follow me, please, gentlemen?'
I limped after her to the music room, which was dominated by the pianoforte. A violin and bow lay on a sofa, and sheets of music littered the floor, the tables, the top of the pianoforte.
'Please sit. My husband will be here directly. I knew he'd written you, but I did not expect an answer so soon.'
I moved aside a handwritten sheet of musical notes, with 'Prelude in D; Johann Christian Bach,' scribbled across the top.
'We were anxious to speak with you,' Grenville said as he sat on a divan and smoothed his elegant trousers. 'So we thought it best to come right away.'
I eyed him askance but said nothing. Mrs. Beauchamp hastened to me and took away the violin and sheets of music. 'I beg your pardon. We are a very musical family, as you can see.'
'I heard you play as we arrived,' I said. 'You have much skill.'
She blushed. 'It does for us. Charlotte-Miss Morrison-plays a beautiful harp. Many's the night we had a trio here, with me on the pianoforte, Mr. Beauchamp on the violin, and Charlotte there.' She glanced at an upright harp covered with a dust cloth. Her face paled, and she bit her lip and turned away.
'Gentlemen.'
Mr. Beauchamp stood on the threshold. He was small and plump like his wife, putting me in mind of two partridges in their nest. He went to Mrs. Beauchamp and dropped a kiss on her raised cheek then held his hand out to me.
Both Beauchamps were past middle age, but beauty still lingered in the lines of Mrs. Beauchamp's face, and Mr. Beauchamp's eyes held the fire of a man not docile.
'You received my letter,' Beauchamp said without preliminary. He drew a chair halfway between me and the pianoforte and sat. 'I saw that you were looking for another young lady, and thought you could help us.'
Grenville folded his hands and took on the look of an examining magistrate. 'We are helping a family whose daughter has disappeared. She vanished in London under mysterious circumstances. Your letter hinted that your cousin, Miss Morrison, has also vanished mysteriously.'
'She has that,' Mrs. Beauchamp said. Her plump face held distress. 'She went off to the market, a basket on her arm, and never came back.'
'When was this?' I asked.
'Two months ago. On the twentieth of February. We made a search when she did not come home that night. We asked and asked. No one had seen her after she left our house. No one knew anything.' Her eyes filled with tears, and she blinked them away.
'There was no question of an accident? Or that she'd gone to meet someone?'
'What are you implying, sir?' Beauchamp growled.
'I imply nothing. She might have arranged to meet a friend, and perhaps something befell her when she went to that meeting.'
'She would have told me,' Mrs. Beauchamp said. 'She would have spoken of an appointment if she'd had one. No matter what.'
'She did not know many around Hampstead,' Beauchamp put in.
'She had been here a year, you said in your letter. She had no friends here?'
'She had us.'
I subsided. I'd angered them, and I did not know why.
Grenville broke in smoothly. 'She came from Somerset, correct?'
'Oh, yes.' Mrs. Beauchamp seemed eager to talk, though her husband relapsed into glowering silence.
Charlotte Morrison had lived in Somerset all her life. Two years before, her aging parents had both fallen ill, and she'd nursed them until they died. She'd corresponded with the Beauchamps regularly, and when Charlotte found herself alone, Mrs. Beauchamp proposed she travel to Hampstead and live with them.
Charlotte had complied and arrived shortly after. She had seemed content with life here. She wrote often to friends in Somerset and was a quiet girl with polite manners.
I digested this in silence and growing frustration. Charlotte had known no one, had met no one, and yet, one afternoon, she'd vanished into the mists. I did not even have a coachman to question, or a Mr. Horne to pursue. She had simply walked away.
'Did you advertise?' I asked.
'To be sure, we did,' Mrs. Beauchamp said. 'And offered a reward. We heard nothing.'
'Then why do you suppose we can help you?'
Beauchamp stirred. 'Because we both want the same thing. To find a missing young lady. Perhaps the two are connected, and if we find the one, we'll find the other.'
'Possibly.'
