"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."