Spider Light(9)
There was a framed charcoal portrait on the wall near the spinet, with a neatly printed card underneath explaining that this was Thomasina Forrester in whose memory Twygrist’s clock had been installed (see the display in the drawing room and please ask for help if you need it). There was a photograph of the clock which Antonia thought very ugly, but she studied the sketch of Thomasina with interest. She was firm featured, dark browed and quite large boned. But there’s something slightly unpleasant about the eyes, thought Antonia. A squint? Almost a leer? She certainly wasn’t a lady you would have cared to cross. But probably the artist was an amateur, and the eyes hadn’t quite worked out or had been smudged.
She turned back to examine the spinet, and glanced at the music on the stand. The quiet room and the gentle scents of Quire House whirled crazily into a sick distortion and Antonia thought for a moment she was going to faint. She managed to reach a low window ledge and sit down, feeling deeply grateful that no one else was looking round Quire this afternoon, because if she was going to pass out with such dramatic suddenness, she would prefer to do so without witnesses.
The music on the spinet was a piece Antonia knew very well indeed. It was one of Paganini’s Caprice Suites: the series of twenty-four complex violin solos composed in the early 1800s, and adapted and transcribed for the piano since then by more than one eminent composer.
It was the music Richard had been playing on the night he died–the night that Don Robards had finally tipped over the edge of sanity. The sight of it plunged Antonia straight back into the five-year-old nightmare.
If she had arrived home at her normal time on that never-to-be-forgotten evening, she might have been able to save Richard, but she had stayed late at the hospital to help Jonathan Saxon with some reports for a budget meeting, and he had suggested a drink at the nearby wine bar afterwards.
‘If you feel like giving Richard some excuse, we could even have dinner at my flat. I’m a very good cook. I’d impress you.’
‘You do impress me,’ said Antonia. ‘But not in the way you want. And no, I don’t feel like giving Richard some excuse and having dinner at your flat. But a drink on the way home will be very nice.’
And so they had the drink, and when Antonia left the wine bar she had been light-hearted from the wine. Jonathan might flirt extravagantly, but it was never offensive or sexist, and he was very good company.
It had been a few minutes after nine when she got home, and discovered that the glass in the front door had been smashed and the lock broken.
Richard was lying on the floor of the big sitting room in a muddle of overturned furniture, his bloodied fingerprints all over the piano keyboard where he had tried to clutch onto it. The sheet music of the Caprice suite–which had occupied most of his concentration for the past fortnight–had lain on the piano. It was unreadable because Richard had been stabbed several times and the final thrust had gone into the caratoid artery so that blood had sprayed everywhere.
He had bled to death while Antonia was drinking wine and laughing with Jonathan, and Antonia had hated Paganini’s music ever since.
CHAPTER FOUR
Thomasina Forrester did not much care for music. A lot of time-wasting and flummery. But the thing was that Maud liked music. In fact music played quite a big part in Maud’s life–piano lessons and practise, to say nothing of unutterably tedious musical evenings at Maud’s house when guests had perforce to listen to recitals and solos–and so it looked as if music would have to play a big part in Thomasina’s life as well. But she would accept that and cope with it. She would accept and cope with anything if it meant getting Maud in her bed.
It was remarkable that after all these years of love ’em and leave ’em Thomasina should find herself bowled over, knocked for a loop by a pretty face and a sweet smile, but so it was. Maud Lincoln. Utter perfection. Quantities of fair fluffy hair, a china-doll complexion and a bed-post waist. And just seventeen. A delightful age for a girl, seventeen. Fresh, unspoiled. Ripe…The smile that very few people saw curved Thomasina’s lips as she considered Maud Lincoln’s unspoiled freshness. Rather a pity about the name, however. Gardens and black-bat nights, and a green sound to the surname. With a face like that she should be called something more lyrical: Imogen or Daphnis or Heloise. Still, what was in a name? And once the bedroom lights were out and you were in bed together with your clothes off, who cared? More importantly, how should she go about this latest seduction?
Gentlemen, when engaged in the pursuit of a lady, often plied the object of their desire with wine. In fact Thomasina’s cousin Simon had once told her that there was nothing like a judicious drop of wine to get rid of inhibitions. Thomasina had merely smiled and not commented, but she had thought to herself: I must remember that one, and had indeed remembered it to very good purpose on more than one occasion.
But she did not think Maud Lincoln was one who could be coaxed or tricked into bed by the use of alcohol. Maud would have to be seduced very gradually, almost without her realizing what was happening. That could mean a vastly frustrating few weeks for Thomasina, but if it went on for too long she could always make one of her discreet trips to London. There was that cat-faced child in Seven Dials, all of fifteen years old, who did not appear to differentiate overmuch between getting into the beds of gentlemen or ladies, and whose fingers and tongue were quite amazingly adept…