The Velvet Glove (14 page)

Pity stirred Kate to say gently,
‘Jon, I’m so sorry. So truly sorry; I’d do anything I could to help but—!’ Her voice faltered as she recognized with bewilderment the sudden hope spring into Jon’s eyes bringing youth back briefly to the handsome worn-out countenance.

‘
You would, Kate? Really?’ He got up, went towards her, and took both her hands in his. At first she did not resist. He was the Jon she remembered. ‘You always liked me, didn’t you?’ he said huskily, drawing her close. ‘We liked each other. You were always so – so bright and warm.’

She trembled, torn by a strange mixed sensation of fear, pity, and memories of the past. A hand sought the softness of a breast. She recalled Rick with shock.

‘Let me go,’ she said, feeling Jon’s hot breath against her cheek. ‘Jon – we mustn’t.’ She struggled to free herself. ‘I didn’t mean –
Jon
!’ He was pressing his mouth against her neck and lips, smothering her protests, while her body arched back under the weight of his, almost forcing her to the floor. Then suddenly there was the creaking of the door, a shadow of the light, and he freed her. But not before a woman’s high, light voice cried shrilly, ‘Don’t stop because of me.’

Both turned to see C
assie’s silhouetted figure standing rigidly at the entrance.

Kate couldn
’t speak for a moment; she was aware only of shock, of Jon’s figure standing like a block of frozen wood beside her, and as Cassandra swept in – of a blazing white face and contemptuous staring eyes. Then in a rush of words the power of speech returned, and with it movement. Kate rushed forward, ‘Cassie it’s not what you think – it’s nothing, you must believe it – Jon was just needing you, and I was here. It’s all a terrible muddle – a mistake – listen—’

‘
I don’t care if it was a mistake or not. I don’t care what you do, either of you. But-’ For the first time Cassandra appeared to notice the slashed and torn portrait on the floor. She knelt down and lifted up the pieces of canvas, examining each with a kind of numbed despair. Then she lifted her head and stared at Kate accusingly. ‘You did this.
You
– you’ve wilfully spoiled all I’ve worked for – all I cared about—’

‘
No
,’ Jon interrupted harshly. ‘
I
did it and good riddance. Now shut up, put on your cape and come back with me like a sane human being, or – or – God knows what’ll become of us.’ He turned away and stood leaning at the door, head down, his face covered by one hand, a forlorn, deflated figure. At that moment Kate didn’t know which was the most to be pitied – Jon or Cass.

She bent and touched the other girl
’s shoulder. ‘Cass try and forget all this. It was just – unhappiness. I know what it must look like to you – and I’m sorry about the painting. But—’

Cass gave her a fleeting glance. Her expression was bleak, controlled by an icy veneer covering inner despair and confusion
. ‘I’ve said it doesn’t matter – not you or him,’ Cass retorted. ‘So don’t – don’t talk. I’m going—’ Jon glanced up hopefully, ‘back to Beechlands,’ Cass concluded, ‘when I’ve collected all this.’ She started picking up the remaining bits of the painting, trying to piece them together. Then she placed them helplessly on a chair and reached for her cape. After she got to her feet Kate saw the blur of tears in her eyes.

‘
If you’re going now I’m coming with you. You’re not leaving in this state.’

In spite of her distress Cassandra managed an icy tight little smile, false but with a hint of triumph in it.
‘You’re not. I’ve got my bicycle. So, do you mind leaving, both of you? I don’t want people prying and poking round. I want the door properly shut.’

Knowing that only force could stop her they had to do as she said, and a few minutes later Kate and Jon parted to go their different ways.

‘I wish I’d never come today,’ Kate said bitterly before she took the path through the woods leading to Woodgate. ‘Oh, how I wish I hadn’t.’

Jon gave her a shrewd bitter glance and retorted.
‘But you did, didn’t you? I wonder why?’

Then he turned and walked away apparently recovered, with a jaunty air and swagger that she knew nevertheless was pretence.

A deep unhappiness flooded her. She sensed the day might have repercussions none of them as yet could envisage, and the awareness held an odd feeling of mounting apprehension that was almost fear.

*

Cassandra left for the forest early the next day, in spite of Emily’s protests.

‘
You look a bit “wisht” dear, tired,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you working too much at your painting these days? What about taking a little trip into Lynchester? We could do a bit of shopping and perhaps have a light meal at that nice place near the Market Place?’

Cassandra shook her head.
‘No, I’m sorry, I don’t feel like shops and crowds, and–’

‘
There won’t be crowds today. There’s no market on Wednesdays, we could—’

‘
No,
really
.’ Cass’s voice was stubborn. ‘I have things to do at the Studio. Tidying up, and finishing something. I thought I’d take sandwiches and come back later.
Please
. Don’t try and press me. There’s no shopping I want to do anyway. It would be a waste of time.’

Emily was forced to agree in the end, and shortly after their brief conversation Cass set off on her cycle with a packet of hastily
prepared food hanging in a bag from her handlebars.

There was no wind at all that morning, everything was very still, almost unnaturally so. A fa
int shroud of mist filmed undergrowth and trees, glistening at moments from shafts of pale sunlight silvering the spring green.

She
’ll be there today, Cass thought. She’s sure to be. And a deep spreading sense of contentment flooded through her, dispelling the distress and ugliness of the previous afternoon. Quite what she intended to do she didn’t know. The portrait was gone, and she’d no intention of trying to repeat it. All through the night hours when she’d hardly slept, her mind had been a jargon of unformed thoughts and depression that had affected her whole body making her rigid with pain – pain not caused primarily by Kate, but from Jon’s betrayal, and once more that dark risen thing from the past that was always waiting to assume its identity of terror.

The latter was worst of all.

As she unfastened the door of the Studio a deep menacing melancholy seemed to hover there from the shadowed walls, empty easel, and still a few scattered remains of the portrait.

I must have a glass of my tonic, she thought, then I
’ll feel better.

She went to the small cupboard where an odd m
ixture of articles were stored – a few paints, and a row of bottles on a shelf containing various potions mixed from herbs and other simple ingredients suggested in the old-fashioned book which contained as well, recipes for wines, and certain spells used in ancient times for stimulating love for the heart-sick.

Cassandra had bought it all, during the past year, from a roving pedlar who had discovered her one day in her forest
retreat. He was one on his own – a ‘mumper’, half-bred gypsy whom the true Romanies camping with the
vardos
and horses in Burnwood would have nothing to do with. But he had captivated Cassandra’s interest with his wily tongue and ways, and quite soon after his first visit she’d tried a sip of the golden liquid in one of the bottles. It had appeared to do her no harm; the taste savoured slightly of elderflower, although she had not recognized it, and after the first few sips a happy sense of elation had possessed her. It was tonic indeed, dispelling the fits of strange depression that had threatened her at times since childhood.

She
’d told no one, of course, and since her marriage to Jon had been more careful than ever to keep the medicine or ‘tonic’ as she called it hidden away. At the present time she had only three small bottles left, but soon, when the summer fairs were winding through the countryside, she knew the old ‘mumper’, in his long, black, flapping coat with wizened face and bedraggled hair under his squashed-down top-hat, would be around and call on her. She would be ready with money to pay him well, after which he’d mutter some sort of foreign blessing and be gone, fleet as a sly old fox disappearing through the trees.

He knew by keen watchfulness and an uncanny instinct when the Gorgio lady would be alone, and how to avoid detection from others.

The gypsies hated him and would have harmed him, if they hadn’t taken such care to cause no trouble with the police or with the natives, especially the gentry, and farming folk of the district.

So the understanding between the Gorgio lady and the despised and cunning mumper had co
ntinued and on that certain summer’s day following Cassandra’s upsetting encounter with Jon and Kate, she was more than ever grateful for the insidious help offered by his liquid concoction.

She took three good sips, and in no more than half a minute felt the familiar sense of well-being spread through her veins and nerves. Her intuitive sense t
hat told her the gentle figure – the wanderer of the forest who had been her model and secret companion for so many months – would be there that day, intensified to certainty.

The weather was already mild and dewy bright as she took off her cape, laid it over the chair and set off along the familiar thin path to the place that had become for her a sanctuary.

In a few minutes she had reached a point where the glitter of the ancient pool was visible. There was no stirring of air through the undergrowth, only the transient light of lifting sun and shade patterning the massed slender trunks of birch and oak.

Feeling the morning
’s sweetness on her face, Cassandra lifted her head, and shook her long pale hair free.

She stared intently through the tracery of
branches, and then she saw her – a static shape swathed in draperies with arms outstretched as though to embrace the iridescent sky.

Cass held her breath.

It was as though communion flowed between them. There was no darkness any more – no constant inner battle to forget –
forget
. Because the ‘thing’ she’d always had to live with unconsciously was no longer there. All was purified and clean.

Her whole body relaxed, and with it the form near the waiting pool moved slowly, gracefully, in an aura of strange peace, one hand extended as though in welcome.

In a second of time, the face looking towards Cassandra was sweetly smiling, beatific. Then the long robes became a mere shadow on the green surface of the pool before the water claimed it and it was gone.

In a daze, but still strangely elated, Cassandra pushed her way through the undergrowth. This was the end, she knew, and also the beginning. There would be no more Jon
– no more earthly presence claiming what she could not give.

Very deliberately she stepped over the bordering rocks and rough earth, and fell.

There was a splash as her body hit the water, a faint gurgling sound, followed by the flutter and crying of a lone bird.

Then silence.

It was not until late afternoon she was found, her long skirt caught on a jagged spike of rock which had prevented her completely sinking. Nothing of her body was visible except one small white hand reaching through the clear green like a waterlily opening to the sunlight.

*

One of the gypsies out gathering wood and on the watch probably for a rabbit, had first spotted an unusual reflected shape immersed in the pool. He’d returned to the camp immediately, untethered one of the horses and ridden to the nearest large house which happened to be Beechlands. It was already late afternoon, and Emily was getting worried as Cassandra had not returned from her day’s painting. She instantly called Walter from the study and he got in touch with the police. By the time they’d arrived dusk was falling, and the day’s faint mist turning to fog; so activity had had to be suspended until the following day. Meanwhile a message was got through to Jon who was present when the bedraggled corpse of his wife was eventually recovered.

‘
That’s her,’ he said to a police officer, ‘that’s Cassandra.’ His voice was hard, without emotion, his face bleak and expressionless.

‘
Your wife, sir?’

‘
Yes. You could call her that. We were married – in church – if that’s what you want to know.’

He walked away before the sheet was put over the dead face, got into the waiting
chaise and drove back to Charnbrook.

*

An autopsy revealed only a slight amount of alcohol in Cass’s stomach which could not have been responsible for her death and was possibly that of a certain amount of the herbal brew found by the police in the Studio. At the following inquest a verdict of Accidental Death from drowning was recorded. It was thought the girl had gone for a walk in the mist, wandered mistakenly from the footpath, lost her footing, and fallen into the ancient slate pit. The adjoining ground was common land, but directions were given to county authorities to have that certain patch of ground safely sealed off to prevent further accidents of a similar nature.