Carlotta

Carlotta had gone missing.
"How long has she been absent?"
The sisters looked at their fingers. They weren't counting; they were admiring their delicate skin.
Vella finally looked at Sabine. "Two days?"
"I don't know. I was distracted by father's ball which he insists on holding in spite of my birthday and I want to go to the seashore..."

The sisters were not much help in a crisis. Carlotta could count on them for a few things, but not an overabundance of concern for things outside their sphere. Vella's sphere extended as far as her reach, and Sabine's was smaller than that. They had their generous moments, let it be said. This wasn't one of them. Not yet. After Carlotta had been gone say, a week, they would begin to worry. As it was, the task of worrying fell to their governess, Miss Hengepen.
Miss Hengepen stood at the front of the long school room before the sisters. She pushed at her forehead and her freckles sank into pasty skin ridges. She kneaded with two fingers, her fine eyes closed in consternation. When she lowered her hand, two oval smudges remained, the ink signature of her prints riding prominently above the rest of her features. Carlotta had watched her do this more than five times in the past month. She had provided a cloth dampened with rubbing alcohol for the young governess, placing it in plain view beside the inkwell on her walnut desk. Alas, to no avail. Miss Hengepen, offended by the sanitary smell, threw it away. She seemed confused as to why it was there in the first place. Carlotta's gifts were often missed by those who needed them most.
"Has anyone notified your father?" Miss Hengepen asked.
Sabine shrugged.
Vella said, "I didn't."
A sigh from Miss Hengepen. "Continue to study. I will speak with him and return here shortly."
"No hurry," said Vella.
Sabine was already taking out her pictograph, which was not part of their curriculum.
Miss Hengepen opened her mouth, but closed it after only one consonant. Better not to waste time scolding the girl who was here when the girl who was not may be in trouble--or worse yet, down in the kitchen with the dregs. 
Carlotta's father (and Sabine and Vella's) was the Pomeroy of Posh. Carlotta was constantly embarrassed to admit her citizenship of this place to ordinary ladies and gents. Who named their burgh Posh? It was a ghastly pretension. She would never understand.
Her father and Miss Hengepen (and the rest of the Poshites) didn't seem to mind it.
The school room was in the east wing of the Pomeroy's great house. His study was in the west wing. There was a moment, when Hengepen was crossing the sunroom that joined east to west, and noticed the door to the kitchen, that she considered first checking there. But "there" had dregs, those mannerless cooks and cleaning staff. They spent this part of the morning, between brunch and luncheon, sitting around the long plank table, jawing away about things of rumor and vice. If Carlotta wasn't there, Hengepen would be alone with them. She spurned the idea of this experience and continued to the west side of the sunroom. She went through open double doors as high as the ceiling, then through the gallery to the study.
The Pomeroy of Posh, who called himself Admiral before he was made Pomeroy and overseer of the burgh, was hard at work painting a model of a Vicarys steamship. Carlotta had found it at the bazaar put on by Ladies of Posh last month and presented it to her father by way of parcel post. He enjoyed gifts most when he didn't know who sent them.
"No way to offend by thanking one family in front of another if I don't know which to thank in the first place," he would say, pulling on one side of his mustache as if it were a foxtail. If he ever snipped it off and bound the fat end, he could probably sell it as just that. Carlotta could not think of a way to convince him to cut off his mustache and make a profit from the novelty, but she was confident that one day the opportunity would arise. There was always a right time for something...