'Who was she?'
'That was the funny thing, sir. They didn't know at first. Turns out she's kitchen maid up at Lord Sommerville's big house. She'd gone missing sometime back. Near two months.'
'They were certain she was the kitchen maid?' I asked.
She looked at me in surprise. 'Oh, yes, sir. Her brother came from London and said it was her.'
I sat back, wondering if we'd just discovered the whereabouts of Charlotte Morrison, even in spite of the brother's identification. If she'd been torn to bits, he might not have been able to recognize her.
The publican's wife chattered on, leaning on her hands until white ridges appeared on the sides of her palms. 'She'd been dead a long time, they said. I didn't go to the inquest, but my husband, he's always one for gossip. He went out of interest. Whole village did. Poor thing had lain there nigh on two months. Not much left of her.'
'Why did they think it was murder then?' Grenville asked. 'She might have taken ill, or fallen, or some such thing.'
The woman pointed at the nape of her own neck. 'The back of her head was bashed in. They said she died of that, then was torn up and dragged out there to the woods. I don't know how they know these things meself.'
'Lack of blood where they found her,' I said woodenly.
'Truly, sir? It's a bit gruesome, I say. But we had a few journalists come. Not very many.' She sounded disappointed.
'Did they discover who did the murder?' Grenville asked.
She shook her head. 'And it does give one a shiver of nights, knowing that went on not two miles from your own house. No, the girl's young man was in London when she ran away, and he can prove it. She'd probably run off with some other man what promised her money or jewels or such nonsense. Lured her away and killed her. We've been on the lookout for strange young men since then, but we've not seen a one.'
Grenville oozed sympathy. 'It must have been a frightening thing to happen.'
'It does make one think. Not much wrong with the poor girl but silliness. She didn't deserve to be killed. Now then, gentleman, I've kept you long enough with my talk. You enjoy your supper, as little as it is. I or Matthew will bring breakfast in the morning. We keep country hours here, so you gentlemen will want to be early to bed.'
Finished with her gossip, the publican's wife clattered a few dirty plates onto a tray and departed with a rustle and a bang of the door.
Grenville raised his brows. 'I was half afraid for a moment that our errand was for naught.'
I picked up my spoon. 'I wonder if the girl was another victim of Mr. Denis.'
'It is possible, of course. This soup, Lacey, is almost excellent. Remind me to tell our lively-tongued hostess. But remember, girls run away or are lured away all the time, though not all of them come to such a tragic fate. Either their families can give them nothing, or they're told they can't have a luxurious life, and they can't resist seeing whether there is something more in the world for them. James Denis cannot be responsible for them all.'
I didn't answer as I sopped up my soup with the heel of the loaf. Perhaps Grenville was right-the girl had gone away with a predator who had murdered her. The back of her head had been crushed, the publican's wife had said. I hoped she had not known death was coming.
My heart burned for her, as it did for Jane Thornton. I wondered savagely why civilized England was so much more dangerous for a young girl than the battlefields of the Peninsula had been for soldiers like me.
I took Charlotte Morrison's letters to my bedchamber with me, and lay under the cozy quilt with bricks to warm my feet, and read them. I laid them out chronologically, and read through the last two years of Charlotte's life.
It seemed she'd been happy in Somerset, content with domestic life and her small circle of friends. She described her journeys to the moorlands and to Wales in poetic terms, painting a picture of the wild lands that was both beautiful and stark. She had been worried for her ill parents and anxious to give them every comfort. She expressed concern for what would happen to her once they died, but without complaining. The curate, she said, had taken some interest in her, but a subsequent letter explained it had come to naught. The curate felt himself too poor to take a wife.
Charlotte wrote with sorrow of her parents' death, then with anticipation of moving to her new home in Hampstead. She spoke of closing up the house, selling the livestock, and preparing for her journey.
The letters ended in the April of the previous year. After that were copies of a half dozen letters to a Miss Geraldine Frazier in Somerset. Charlotte described her arrival in Hampstead, her gratitude to the Beauchamps. She seemed to like Hampstead, though she missed the remoteness of Somerset. 'It is never possible to be truly alone, here. Always there are carriages and horses in the streets, and families from London who come to picnic on the Heath of a Sunday. But the woods and hills are pretty, and my cousins and I take many walks. They are kind people.'
Two letters, one from November and one from January, interested me. In them, Charlotte said something curious:
Pray disregard the incident I wrote to you of before, and please do not write me of it! It may be all my fancy, and I do not wish to slander. They say that looking into the eyes bares the soul, but when I do so, I am only confused. I cannot tell what is what, and the difference between what I imagine and what is real.
I searched the previous letters again for any mention of a curious or sinister incident, but if she had described such a thing, she had not copied out the letter that contained it.
The next letter, dated January of that year, reintroduced the theme:
I wake in the night, afraid. Perhaps some step jars my sleep, or perhaps it is fancy, but my heart beats hard, and it is a long time before I drift off again. No, please do not worry, and do not write of it; my cousin would think it odd if I did not share your letters.
She said nothing more on the subject. The January letter was the last.
I read them through again, wondering whether I'd missed something, but I found nothing else. I folded the letters into the lacquer box and laid them on the bedside table.
I wondered what had frightened Charlotte and if it had anything to do with Jane Thornton. Had Charlotte met someone she suspected had sinister designs on her? Or was she simply unused to living so near London?
I wanted to speak to the friend she'd written the letters to. I'd write to her, though I did not like the prospect of a journey to Somerset. It would be long and expensive and my leg already ached from the short excursion to Hampstead. It would also take time from my searching for Jane Thornton, and I feared that every day might be her last.
I put out my candles, lay back, and tried to sleep. But the pain in my leg kept me awake, as did my thoughts. I went over the publican's wife's tale of the murder of the girl in the woods. Why had she been killed? A quarrel with a lover? Or had she seen something-the abduction of Charlotte Morrison perhaps?
Sleep would not come. I tried to still my thoughts by thinking of Janet and loving her. She had turned up exactly when I'd needed her, and I greatly looked forward to seeing her again.
But visions of her face flitted from me and I could only remember Horne in the pool of dried blood and Aimee locked inside the cupboard with dark bruises on her face.
The quiet of the room irritated me. I was used to city dwelling now, and even in the depths of Portugal and Spain, I had lived with the army, in noise and chaos and without privacy. I tossed for a time under the blankets, then I gave in to my restlessness.
I rose, took up my candle, and padded to the sitting room. The door to Grenville's bedchamber stood open. I crossed to close it, not wanting to wake him with my restlessness.
I stopped. Grenville's bed was empty. The sheets lay smooth and undisturbed, turned down for the night by the chambermaid who had scuttled in as we finished our repast. Grenville had not slept there, and he was nowhere in sight.
I returned to bed, and despite my disquiet about where Grenville had disappeared to and why, I slept again.
In the morning, he turned up for breakfast as though he had been there all along. I nearly asked him where he had gone, but decided I would not pry. I would pretend, as he did, that he had gone nowhere until he chose to tell me otherwise.
