I caught Janet's hands and more or less dragged her inside. She drew a breath to speak, but I gathered her against me and held her in a crushing embrace. I had no idea whether she'd come to speak to me, or to say good-bye, or to talk over old times, but for that instant I needed her as she was, needed her to take me to the past where I'd been, for a brief moment, happy.
Janet raised her face from my shoulder. Her hair was mussed and her cheeks were flushed, but she still smiled. "That happy to see me, are you?"
I said hoarsely, "Yes."
She straightened the lapels of my coat. "Then I am glad I asked Mrs. Brandon for your direction. She was very gracious."
I smoothed Janet's hair. I had no right at all to hold her like this, to touch her, but I somehow could not let go. "Mrs. Brandon is always gracious."
"She told me about your injury. It hurts you, does it not?"
"The break never healed properly, but if I take care, it doesn't pain me too much."
Janet slid from my grasp and took a step back, looking at me with a critical eye. "I don't mean that. I was remembering the night I took ill and nothing would comfort me but coffee. You searched all over camp for some, and it was raining so hard I thought the sky would come down. You sprinted through the rain, holding that packet of coffee under your coat as though it were the most precious gold. I've never seen a man run so fast in all my life. But you did it, and you laughed. Someone took that liveliness away from you." She touched the hair at my temple. "Nor was this gray here when we parted."
"I was not an old man then."
Janet sat down on one of my straight-backed chairs, lacing her fingers. "You'd had better start telling me that story, if it's so long."
I sat in the chair facing hers. I stared at the flames on my hearth for a few moments, while I decided what to tell her.
In the end, most of it came out of me. I told her of the cold morning that Brandon and I had met one another with pistols drawn, until Louisa and several other officers from our regiment had persuaded us to settle our differences and shake hands. I'd thought the matter finished with, even if the topic of our falling out remained uncomfortable, and then had come Brandon's betrayal. I told her of the mission he'd sent me on, never meaning for me to return, glossing over our decision to leave the army behind to avoid disgracing ourselves, Louisa, or the regiment.
When I'd finished, I sat silently, as bereft as I'd been the day I'd left Spain to return to England. I made to smooth my damp hair and saw that my fingers trembled.
Janet reached across the space between us and caught my hand. "And what do you do now?"
I smiled. "Very little."
"Colonel Brandon ought to help you. He ought to find you a proper job."
I shrugged. "He tries hard to pretend nothing ever happened."
Her eyes glowed with anger. "You always told me how he was like a father to you, or a brother. Your years together should count for something."
"It is difficult for some to acknowledge a mistake."
Her face softened. "Oh, Gabriel. And you love him enough to let him do it."
She was wrong. I hated him. He had taken things from me, and I would not easily forgive him.
My anger must have shown on my face, because Janet squeezed my hand. "I'll not press you. You were always one for not knowing your own heart."
"You don't think so?"
Her brown eyes twinkled. "No, my lad, I do not. You have honor and duty and love all mixed up in that head of yours. That's why I'm so fond of you."
I leaned forward and touched her face. "And I am fond of you, because you are not afraid of the truth."
"I am sometimes. Everyone is."
We shared a look. A thump sounded upstairs, as though Marianne had dropped something to the floor. A few flakes of plaster wisped down and settled on Janet's hair.
"You have not told me your story," I said. "What happened to you after I sent you off with my smitten lieutenant?"
She smiled. "Your smitten lieutenant was a perfect gentleman. He only made three or four propositions and took it well when I turned him down."
"Poor fellow."
"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."
"I will do anything to bring Charlotte back," he said. "She belongs here."
His wife nodded.
"There was no question of her returning to Somerset?" Grenville asked.
"Why should she return to Somerset?" Beauchamp demanded. "This is her home now."
"She might have taken a whim to go there, visit her old friends," Grenville said.
"I tell you, she would have told us, not walked away," Beauchamp said. "Why do you question her character? Someone took her from us and that is that."
Grenville lifted his hands. "I beg your pardon. I did not mean to upset you. I am trying to establish possibilities. If you assure me that Charlotte would not have left of her own accord, I will believe you."
I was not as sanguine, but I said nothing.
Mrs. Beauchamp looked pensive. "There was something odd."
Her husband scowled. "Odd? What do you mean? I know of nothing odd."
"A week or two before, she-well, she seemed to fade a little. I cannot be more forthcoming than that, because I did not notice it at the time. But several times she started to tell me something, something she was worried about, but she would stop herself and change the subject."
"It probably had nothing to do with her disappearance," Beauchamp said. "Nothing at all." His face was red, his eyes glittering.
"She missed Somerset, though," Mrs. Beauchamp said. "She loved it. Her letters to us before she came here were filled with the delights of it."
"She would not have gone there without telling us."
His wife subsided. "No."
Grenville broke in. "We do need to prepare you. The other girl we are looking for was abducted, we believe, by a man called Horne."
"Or Denis," I put in.
Grenville shot me a warning look.
Both Beauchamps remained blank. "I have not heard either name," Beauchamp said. "But we are not much in London. Who are these gentlemen?"
"Mr. Horne lived in Hanover Square," Grenville said. "He had our young lady in his keeping for a time, and we are trying to discover what became of her. Miss Morrison's fate might be similar."
Mrs. Beauchamp bowed her head. "I thought of that-that she might be ruined. But I only want her back. I only want her safe."
Beauchamp regarded his wife a moment, his face unreadable. "My wife and I were never blessed with children. We quite looked upon Charlotte as our daughter. No man could be prouder of his own offspring."
"Or woman."
Tears stood in Mrs. Beauchamp's eyes. I felt like a fraud. I had no help to give.
"The letters she wrote," I said. "Would you permit me to read them?"
Mrs. Beauchamp looked up, hope lighting her face. "Indeed, yes, Captain. She wrote beautiful letters. She was a dear, sweet girl."
Beauchamp wasn't as happy. "What good will it do to read her letters? She made no indication in them that she wanted to leave us."
"She might have met someone that she wrote about, might have known someone in Somerset, someone she might have gone away with."
"I tell you, there was no one."
Mrs. Beauchamp rose. "No, I want him to read the letters. So he'll understand what she was like. And he might see something we missed. We don't know that."
She passed me in a swish of skirts and a waft of old-fashioned soap as Grenville and I got politely to our feet. Mr. Beauchamp also rose, but he crossed to the window and stood with his back to us. Beyond him, the rain dripped down the gray windows.
I said, "I will do everything in my power to discover what happened to Miss Morrison."
Beauchamp turned, his stance dejected. "I will not lie to you, Captain. Writing to you was my wife's idea. She holds out too much hope. She will not even voice the possibility that Charlotte is lost to us forever, as I believe her to be."
"Dead, do you mean?" I asked gently.
"Yes. Because she would have written to us, otherwise. We are her only family. Why would she go away? She would have explained."
Tears hovered in his eyes. I wondered very much what he had truly felt for Charlotte-the love of a father? Or something else? And did he even realize it himself?
Mrs. Beauchamp fluttered into the room and thrust a lacquered wooden box at me. "I've kept all the letters she'd written me in the year before she came to us. She also copied out a few that she sent to a friend in Somerset since then. Read them, Captain. You will come to know her through them."
I took the box. "I will return them to you as soon as I can."
"Take all the time you like. I ask only that you do not lose them. They are dear to me."
"I will take very good care of them," I promised.
They hovered, but I knew that the interview was over. "Thank you for seeing us," I said, then Grenville and I bowed and took our leave.
As we rode away in Grenville's carriage, the box tucked beside me, I looked back. Mr. and Mrs. Beauchamp stood at the wide ground-floor window, watching us depart.
We spent the night in Hampstead. While we'd talked with the Beauchamps, the rain had increased, until black water fell around us and cold rose from the Heath. It was Grenville's idea to find a public house to stay the rest of the evening and drive leisurely back to London the next day.
I'd thought the public house would be too rustic for the wealthy Lucius Grenville, but he laughed and said that he'd slept in some places in the wilds of Canada that made Hampstead positively palatial.
He obtained private rooms at the top of the public house that proved snug. A sitting room in the middle opened to a bedroom at either side, luxurious accommodations by my standards. The publican's wife, a cheerful, thin woman, trundled us a supper of roasted chicken, thick soup, greens, cream, and bread. After the penetrating damp outside, we both fell upon it heartily.
The publican's wife lingered, inclined to talk. "I'm afraid it's only the leavings and the soup from yesterday's beef and vegetables, but it will fill the stomach. I know gentlemen are used to much finer, but you won't get better in Hampstead."
"Madam, it is admirable," Grenville said around a mouthful of chicken.
She gave him a modest look. "You'll have fresh eggs in the morning. I suppose you gentlemen are from London, then?"
We replied in the affirmative.
"Journalists, are you?" she asked. "Have you come about our murder?"