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      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