CHAPTER ONE
JESSICA heard the grandfather clock striking eleven. She lifted her head from her work, her concentration broken. The grandfather clock had been acquired through the ancient custom of exchange and barter still very definitely alive in this quiet part of the Avon countryside.
At first she had been very pleased with her ‘payment’ for one of her larger tapestries; she had even continued to be pleased when the thing had virtually had to be dismantled in order to be installed in the small hallway of her stone cottage, and had then required the services of an extremely expensive and highly individualistic clock mender.
In fact, it was only when she realised what the clock was going to mean in terms of interruptions to her concentration on her work that she began to doubt the wisdom of owning it.
Mind you, she allowed fair-mindedly, it did have its advantages. For instance today, if it had not interrupted her, she would doubtless have worked on until it was far too late to go to the post office. Today, Wednesday, was half-day closing, and she had a tapestry finished and ready to post to the exclusive shop in Bath which sold her work for her.
She had always loved embroidery from being quite small. She remembered how amused and then irritated her parents had been with her interest in it.
Her interest in tapestry had come later, when she knew more about her subject. She had spent a wonderful summer training at the Royal School of Needlework which had confirmed her conviction that her love of the craft meant that she wanted it to be far more than merely a hobby.
Now, five years after that fateful summer, she spent her time either working for the National Trust on the conservation and repair of their tapestries or designing and making tapestries of her own—some for sale through the shop in Bath, and others on direct commissions from people who had seen her work and fallen in love with it.
The tapestry she was working on today was one such commission. Her workroom at the top of her small cottage had a large window to let in the light she needed for her work. It overlooked the countryside to the rear of the small row of cottages of which hers was one. This view had inspired many of her designs; every day it changed, sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically, and she knew she would never tire of looking at it.
She loved this part of the country with its quiet peace—just as she loved the solitude of her work and life-style. Both made her feel secure…safe…And those were feelings she needed desperately.
She shivered a little. How long was it going to be before she succeeded in wiping her memory free of the past? How long was it going to be before she woke up in the morning without that clutching, panicky feeling of sick fear tensing her body?
She still had nightmares about it…Still remembered every vivid detail of that appalling day.
It had started so normally—getting up, leaving her parents’fashionable London house for work. Her father was the chairman of the élite merchant bank which had been founded one hundred and fifty years previously by his ancestor.
All her life, Jessica had been conscious of her parents’ disappointment that their only child should be a daughter. Nothing was ever said, but all the time she was at school, being encouraged to work hard, to get good results, she had known of her parents’ real feelings. She ought to have been a boy; a boy to follow in her father’s footsteps, to head the bank and follow tradition. But she wasn’t—she was a girl…
Every time she heard her father say that it made no difference, that these days women were equally as capable as men, that there was no reason at all why she should not eventually take his place, she had sensed his real feelings—had known that she must work doubly hard at school, that she must do everything she could to make up to her parents for the disappointment of her sex.
She had known from being quite young what fate held in store for her. She would go to university, get a degree and then join her father in the bank, where she would be trained for the important role that would one day be hers.
‘And, of course, it isn’t the end of the world,’ she had once heard her father saying to her mother. ‘One day she’ll marry, and then there’ll be grandsons…’
But by the time she left university with her degree, she had known that she didn’t want to make a career in banking.
Every time she’d walked into the imposing Victorian edifice that housed the bank she had felt as though a heavy weight descended on her shoulders, as though something inside her was slowly dying.
Her father’s plan was that she would follow in his footsteps, learning their business from the bottom rung, slowly making her way up the ladder, moving from department to department.
Everyone had been kind to her, but she had felt suffocated by the weight of her responsibility, by the bank itself and its solidity. Whenever she could she escaped to Avon to stay with her godmother, an old schoolfriend of her mother’s.
She knew that she was disappointing her parents—that they could not understand the malaise that affected her.
And then came the event that was to have such a cataclysmic effect on her life…
Warningly, the clock chimed the quarter hour. She mustn’t miss the post.
Sighing softly, she got up, a tall, almost too slender young woman, with a soft, full mouth and vulnerable grey eyes. Her hair was that shade somewhere between blonde and brown. The summer sun had lightened it in places, giving its smooth, straight length a fashionably highlighted effect.
As it swung forwards to obscure her profile she pushed it back off her face with a surprisingly strong and supple hand. Her wrists looked too fragile to support such strength, but her long hours spent working on her tapestries had strengthened the muscles.
This particular commission on which she was working was for a young couple who had recently moved into a large house just outside Bath. He was predictably something in the City. She was pleasant enough, but slightly pretentious. They had two children, both as yet under five, but both boys were down to attend prestigious boarding-schools.
The tapestry, a modern one, was to be the focal point of a large, rectangular, galleried hallway and was to be hung so that it was the first thing that caught the visitor’s eye upon entering the house. Jessica had given a good deal of thought to its subject matter.
Arabella Moore had said vaguely that she was quite happy to leave everything to her; she had apparently seen some of her work in the shop in Bath, and had additionally read the very good report that had appeared in a prestigious glossy magazine, praising Jessica’s innovative skills.
‘Something amusing and witty,’ was the only specification Arabella had made, and Jessica only hoped th
at her client would be happy with her design. As yet she had not started work on the tapestry itself. The design was still very much at the drawing-board stage, awaiting completion then approval from Arabella.
As always when she was engrossed in a project, Jessica resented anything that took her away from it.
As she went to open her workroom door she heard an indignant yowl from outside and grimaced to herself, wondering what trophy Cluny her cat had brought back for her to admire. Cluny had been a stray, rescued one stormy November night, when she had found him crouched, wet and shivering, in her back garden. Now fully grown, he was sleek and black, and full of his own importance.
She opened the door and looked outside, giving a faint sigh of relief at the lack of any small, furry corpse. Cluny was a hunter, and nothing she could say to him seemed to make any difference, so she had had to learn to live with his uncivilised habit of bringing her back gifts of small, pathetic, lifeless bodies.
Everyone had a right to life, she believed that most passionately and intensely, and always had, but her belief had grown stronger and fiercer ever since she herself had come face to face with the realisation that her own life could end between the taking of one breath and the next, and despite the security of her cottage and the sheltered life-style she now lived, seeing only a few close friends, admitting no one new to her circle until she felt completely secure with them, there was still that haunting fear which had never really left her.
It had been a good summer, but now they were into October, and the blue sky beyond her window held the clear pureness that warned of dropping temperatures. She was wearing jeans and a thick woollen sweater, because, despite the fact that the rest of the cottage was centrally heated, she preferred to keep her workroom free of anything that might damage the valuable antique tapestries she sometimes worked on at home.
The cottage had a sharp, narrow flight of stairs which she preferred to keep polished in the old-fashioned way, a central runner kept in place with stair-rods—both the rods and the runner had been lucky finds at an antique fair. The runner, once cleaned, had proved to have a strength of colour which went well with the cottage’s oak stairs and floors.
Only one or two of her prospective clients had ever remarked that surely modern fitted carpets would be both warmer and cleaner, and these clients had always proved to be the difficult ones—the ones to whom her work was something that had newly become fashionable and who really had no true appreciation of its history and art.
Downstairs she had a small, comfortable sitting-room with windows overlooking her tiny front garden and beyond it the main road that ran through the village, and a good-sized kitchen-cum-dining-room-cum-sitting-room which she had furnished mainly with antiques picked up here and there from various sales.
Only the kitchen cupboards were modern, and that was because the lack of space forced her to make the maximum use of every corner. Solid oak and limed, they had been built by a local craftsman and added a pleasing lightness to the low-beamed ceilinged room.
A scrubbed farmhouse table divided the kitchen area of the room from the sitting area. She had retained the open fireplace, and alongside it against the wall was a comfortable sofa draped with a soft woollen blanket and covered with tapestry cushions.
The stone floor was warmed by a collection of rugs, but the thing that struck strangers most forcibly about Jessica’s home was the startling amount of vibrant colour. Those who had only met her outside her home assumed that, because she chose to wear camouflage colours of beige, olive and taupe, her home would echo these subtle but sometimes dull shades. Instead, it was full of vibrant rich reds, blues, greens and golds put so harmoniously together that the surprised visitor came away with the sensation of having been exposed to something exceptionally alive and warming.
No one was more aware of dichotomy between her habitat and her personal mode of dress than Jessica herself. Once, as a child, she had pleaded with her mother to be allowed to have a rich ruby velvet dress. She could see it in her mind’s eye now, feel the delicious warmth of the supple fabric, smell its rich scent. Her mother had been aghast, controlling her own distaste for the dress by gently pointing her in the direction of another one in muted olive Viyella. And she had learned then that little girls who were going to grow up to run a merchant bank did not dress in rich ruby velvet.
Now out of habit rather than anything else she still wore those same colours gently dictated by her mother. Not that clothes interested her anyway—not in the way that fabrics, colours and textures did. Clothes were simply the means one used to protect one’s body from heat and cold…and, in her case, to provide her with the protection of anonymity.
No one would look twice at a slender young woman, unremarkable of face and figure, dressed in dull, practical clothes. No one would pick her out as a target…a victim…
Her parents had never understood her decision to come and live and work in Avon. They had pleaded with her to change her mind, but she had remained steadfast, and she had had the report of her doctor to back her up. Peace and tranquillity, relief from pressure, a need to recuperate and gather up her mental strength—that was what he had advised.
That had been five years ago. Now her parents accepted, albeit reluctantly, that she lived a different life from theirs.
Her mother had never given up trying to coax her back to London. Every few months she had a fresh attempt—still hoping, perhaps, for that all-important grandson—but Jessica shied away from the commitment that marriage involved. She was free for the first time in her life, and that was the way she intended to stay. Marriage meant responsibilities, duties, putting others’ feelings first…She didn’t want that.
In her hall she picked up her parcel and let herself out into the small front garden. The sun was warm, but the air cool once she stepped into the shadows. She paused to admire the dwarf Michaelmas daisies she had planted much earlier in the year. Their rich massing of purple, mauve and lilac pleased her and she bent to touch their petals gently. Gardening was her second love, and she planted her garden in much the same way as she worked on her tapestries, but with the artist’s fine eye for colour and form.
The post office was the only shop in the village; the nearest garage was ten miles away in the small market town, and the post office was very much the focus of village life. Mrs Gillingham, who ran it, knew all the local gossip and passed it on to her customers with genial impartiality. Jessica interested her. It was unusual for so young and pretty a woman to live so very much alone. Martha Gillingham put her single state down to a broken romance in her past, romantically assuming that it was this relationship which had led to her arrival in the village and to her single state.
She was quite wrong.
Jessica had never been in love. Initially because there had never been time. At university she had worked desperately hard for her degree, terrified of disappointing her parents’ hopes for her, and then when she joined the bank everyone had known exactly who she was—the daughter of the bank’s chairman—and that knowledge had isolated her from the other young people working there.
And then, after what had happened, the last thing on her mind had been falling in love. She liked her single state and was content with it, but something in the speculative way Mrs Gillingham always questioned her about her private life made her feel raw and hurt inside, as though the postmistress had uncovered a wound she hadn’t known was there.
Not that there was anything malicious in her questions. She was just inquisitive, and over the years Jessica had learned to parry them with tact and diplomacy.
Today she had the attention of the postmistress to herself. She was just waiting for her parcel to be weighed when she felt the cold rush of air behind her as the door opened.
The postmistress stopped what she was doing to smile warmly at the newcomer, exclaiming, ‘Good morning, Mr Hayward! Are you all settled in yet?’
‘Not yet, I’m afraid.’
The man had a deep, pleasant voice, and e
ven without looking at him Jessica knew that he was smiling. She had heard from the milkman about this newcomer who had moved into the once lovely, but now derelict Carolean house on the outskirts of the village, but so far she hadn’t actually met him.
‘In fact, I was wondering if you could help me,’ he was saying, and then added, ‘but please finish serving this young lady first.’
The faint touch of reproof in his voice startled Jessica, giving the words far more than the form of mere good manners.
She turned round instinctively and was confronted by a tall, almost overpoweringly male man, dressed in jeans similar to her own and a thick sweater over a woollen shirt, his dark hair flecked with what looked like spots of white paint, and a rather grim expression in his eyes.
There was something about him that suggested that he wasn’t the kind to suffer fools gladly. All Jessica knew about him was that he had bought the house at auction, and that he was planning to virtually camp out in it while the builders worked to make it habitable.
He had arrived in the village only that weekend, and had apparently been having most of his meals at the Bell, the local pub, because the kitchen up at the house was unusable.
She had heard that he worked in London, and that being the case Jessica would have thought it would be more sensible of him to stay there at least until such time as his house was habitable.
Mrs Gillingham had finished weighing the parcel, and, summing up the situation with a skilled and speedy eye, quickly performed introductions, giving Jessica no option but to take the hard brown hand extended to her and to respond to his quick ‘Please call me Daniel,’ with a similarly friendly gesture.
‘Jessica Collingwood…’ His eyebrows drew together briefly, as though somehow he was disconcerted, the pressure of his grip hardening slightly, and then he was relaxing, releasing her and saying evenly, ‘Jessica—it suits you.’
And yet Jessica had the impression that the flattery was an absent-minded means of deflecting her attention away from that momentary tense surprise that had leapt to his eyes as he’d repeated her name.