The Seeing

Chapter Twelve

In the next years, Jessica lived and grew at Easter Hill in tune with the wheel of the seasons — long, green summers with white caps rolling like lace across the rocks of Connemara’s shores, and gulls wheeling against blue-gray skies; and winters that gripped the land in icy hands, with seas dark and heavy and Windkin’s hooves like hammers on the frozen meadows. The wave of spring and autumn marked these extremes of weather, bridging them with greening colors and carpets of turning leaves.

Glossy ivy covered the cross Capability Brown had made for the spirited terrier Holly. Another dog had taken her place, a sable collie named Fluter who raced with Windkin and Jessica through the hills above Easter Hill and over the measured runs at Charity Bostwick’s small farm.

When it rained in the bitter weather, lightning storms brilliant above the cliffs, Jessica played chess inside with Andrew, Scrabble alone for practice in her private tower, or games of hide-and-seek with Fluter and the Irish maids — giddy times when they’d take turns hiding in attics or down in the secret priest-hole, which had been cleverly constructed a century ago in a camouflaged alcove off the main dining room. Brocade and panels concealed its entrance. Andrew had explained to her the history of these hiding places for the hunted Catholic clergy, in times when the priests and their vestments and Eucharists had to be spirited quickly to safety when the soldiers of the British Crown were seen in the neighborhood or on the highways. These concealed places were designed so skillfully there were hardly any master builders or architects with tappings and measuring rods who could detect their existence behind seemingly innocent walls of brick and plaster.

Easter Hill’s old priest-hole was snug and dark, the air dry with age. Rush matting covered the floor and beneath this a trap door led to cellars. Air filtered in through six small circles which penetrated the walls into corded vines that covered this wing of Easter Hill.

This was a time of growth for Jessica. She was tall and slim and wiry, her eyes a deeper blue, her dark hair hanging to her shoulders. She would be thirteen on her next birthday, and Andrew Dalworth had resigned himself to the fact that she would be going away in the next year or so to a school in England or perhaps Switzerland.

This spring, as a birthday treat since he would be in New York, Andrew Dalworth had agreed to let Charity Bostwick take Jessica on a vacation tour up the coast and into the upper counties of Ireland. At first he had not been sanguine about the idea, which had been Charity’s suggestion, but she had eased his misgivings in her frank, direct way one evening over brandy in the library.

At forty-three, Charity Bostwick was still a handsome woman with prematurely white hair, a deeply tanned complexion and startlingly lively gray eyes.

“We don’t understand her gifts, perhaps, Andrew, but we know such things are almost normal in this part of the world. So does Jessica. She doesn’t live in London or in a block of flats in New York. She’s part of the old countryside of Ireland where the people pay as much attention to stones and earth, to the legends and headstones in the cemeteries as they do to the blathering idiots making time-and-motion studies in factories in the rest of this modern, sterile world. It’s still a land of myths and dreams, Andrew, and I think you’d be wrong to try to shield Jessica from it.”

“That’s certainly not my intention.”

“Then let her come with me. Her own father came from up north. There might be some of his people there yet...”

“I rather doubt that, Charity. We’ve made extensive checks. The only family of Jessica’s we’ve ever pinned down are an aunt and uncle somewhere in Pennsylvania, and they made it quite clear they wanted nothing to do with the child.”

Julian Homewood checked his watch. Eight-thirty of a brilliant spring morning, the first promising softness of summer on the air. He stood at the windows of the Orchard Suite, sipping tea that Rose had brought him earlier. He saw Jessica riding up the rocky promontory, giving Windkin his head, the big hunter and the slim rider blurring as they went through a stand of breeze-bent trees on the way to the summit of the hill.

Jessica had been silent and reserved at dinner the night before, declining politely to make a fourth at bridge, excusing herself and withdrawing to her own room. Yet only yesterday morning she had been in one of her buoyant, tomboy moods, riding with him in the morning, enjoying the excitement of racing him from the top of Skyhead down to the stables. And when Julian had gone up to the Orchard Suite to change for lunch at Miss Bostwick’s, there had been a poem from Jessica waiting for him in her dramatic, back-slanted handwriting on Easter Hill’s creamy stationery, the folded paper propped up on his dressing table.

Sipping the last of his tea, he looked at the poem again, puzzled by the sharp contrast between its transparent exuberance and Jessica’s present subdued mood.

After breakfast, Julian pulled on a tweed hacking-jacket and rode up the meadow to Skyhead. He tethered the chestnut mare young O’Dell had tacked up for him to a stunted tree near a patch of grass where Windkin was grazing free, held in place as he’d been trained by the weight of his hanging reins.

The day was brilliant. The sun climbed up bright, white skies. Breezes off the sea smelled warmly of kelp. And new spring gorse grew over the Connemara cliffs.

Walking along the bluff, Julian saw Jessica sitting below him on a ledge of rock that gave her a lee from the wind, her yellow scarf and black hair stirred by occasional, erratic breezes. He walked down the narrow trail, finding a perch of rock to sit on. Dr. Homewood took out his pipe and looked appraisingly at her. She was squinting slightly, her long, dark eyelashes lowered to screen out the blinding track of the sun on the water.

“All right, Jess. What’s the matter?”

“What makes you think anything’s wrong?”

“Well, because I’m extremely clever about things like that. I see a cheerful young girl, happy as a sandboy, writing poems that sound like a flock of larks at play...” He filled and tamped his pipe with a mixture of rough-grain tobacco. “...and the next minute she’s frowning like a thundercloud.”

“Julian, I am not frowning.”

“Technically, you may have a point. But you’ve hardly spoken a word since last night at dinner.”

With a little shrug, she said, “What’s wrong with that? Does everybody have to chatter away all the time like Miss Charity’s cousins? I should think they gave you enough talk yesterday to last a week, Dr. Julian, especially the red-headed one.”

“Aha!” Julian said.

“Oh, please don’t use that silly tone!”

“I can’t believe this, Jessica. I think you’re jealous.”

“I am not jealous,” she said, a mutinous flash of anger in her eyes. “But you promised to go riding with me after lunch at Miss Charity’s. Instead, you took her cousins to the Hannibal Arms where I’m too young to go. So I had the great fun of playing checkers for three hours with Father Malachy.”

Dr. Julian puffed on his pipe, hands cupped around the spurting match-flame. When the pipe was going well, he said casually, “Supposing you tell me what’s really bothering you, Jessica.”

“I know you’re going away for a long time, Julian.” She looked away and fingered a loose thread on the cuff of her twill trousers. “That’s why I wanted to spend as much time with you as I could this weekend.”

“I’m sorry. Did Andrew tell you?”

“No, I just knew, Julian.”

“I planned to tell you myself today. I’m going to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, for a year of special seminars and studies. How did that information come to you this time?”

“That you were going? I’m not sure, Julian. I woke up Friday morning knowing it was true.” She turned and looked at him directly. “Why are you going away?”

“It’s too important an opportunity to turn down, Jessica. It’s a chance to work with the top people in the field, a chance to learn more about the work I’ve been doing — the areas that you and I have been looking into together for quite a few years.”

“But we still don’t understand all of my feelings.”

“Perhaps there aren’t any hard and fast answers.”

His pipe was drawing well and the strong smoke, streaking blue in the air, eddied about the natural enclosure of the rock. He looked at her and said, “But we do know at least that psychic functioning is much more common than we’d been led to believe. We’ve learned it’s a difficult aptitude to use, or even understand, because it’s been allowed to atrophy for centuries. All through history, clairvoyance, precognitive manifestations, were people’s perceptual tools, but these tools have been suppressed too often since then, often out of sheer ignorance and superstition. These psychic implements — psychokinesis, remote viewings, out-of-body experiences — have been known to us for ages, of course, but the field of parapsychology is still in its infancy.”

Caught up in the subject, Dr. Julian almost forgot where he was. The cliffs of Skyhead and the seas beyond them were suddenly less real than his own thoughts. It was a factor in his personality that made him such an excellent teacher — this mesmerized, and hence mesmerizing, response to the heady reaches of philosophy and science.

“If we imagine our Creator, Jessica — whether we call him (or her) God or Jehovah, the Supreme Force or the Universe itself — if we imagine that ultimate source of power as the ground of all being, the support of all matter and life, it follows that our conscious and unconscious minds, our finite capacities, are inevitably linked to that infinite base.”

Jessica had always liked the way he talked to her. It was as if they were both the same age. He never bothered to explain difficult words to her, simply assuming she would understand what he meant to say.

“When a person plumbs the depths of unconscious mind, which you can do so effortlessly, Jessica — the word ‘depth’ being only a spatial allusion, since I could as easily have said ‘height’ or ‘breadth’ — those limits are the approach to the ultimate ground of being. And at that point we can see and know with infinitely more perception than we can with our senses.”

His beard wasn’t really brown, she decided, watching his animated face and eyes. It was more like dully burnished copper and nearly red where the sunlight touched it.

Jessica picked a small white flower from a crack in the rocks and said, “But, Julian, Charity Bostwick isn’t all that impressed with people who can see things. She told me that half the people in Ireland have some kind of second sight.”

“That’s just a touch of pardonable chauvinism in the old girl,” Julian said.

Jessica studied the small white flower that rested in the palm of her hand, the wind stirring its fragile petals. She sighed and said, “Julian, can I ask you about something else?”

“Of course, Jess. What is it?”

“I’ve been almost seeing something I don’t quite understand. I was wondering — should I try harder to see it? Should I force myself?”

“Is it something you’re afraid of?”

“I’m not sure. It’s not that clear...”

“Then — no. If you force yourself, you’ll distort Whatever images are coming to you. Because what is seeing? Our eyes are only cameras. The brain interprets the picture. And that interpretation is a reflexive, instinctive process, the sum of what we are, what we’ve been told, the incidence of amino acids in our brains, our response to the external stimuli beating on our nerve endings, waking or sleeping.”

He lit another match but went on talking as it burned out in his fingertips. “And in your case, Jessica, there is also a strong input of psychic perceptions. So to force that process would just throw it off balance.”

On the occasions that Jessica had attended Dr. Homewood’s lectures at Trinity, she had envied the other students — lanky girls and bearded young men concentrating with almost comical severity on Julian’s measured word.

When he bent to light his pipe, she watched his hands, clean and brown in the sun, a flex of muscles as he cupped the flame.

She said, “Julian, lately I see a whiteness that alarms me, and touches of other colors.”

“Well, then — let’s talk about it,” he said, and appraising her somber expression and darkening eyes, Julian wondered, as he had so often in the past, at the awesome nature of the burdens they had both assumed. In the years that she had first come to him in Dublin, they had examined the phenomenon and significance of the range of colors that manifested themselves to her inner vision, studying their images as other students and teachers might examine the meanings of words and the symbols of mathematics.

Even her poetry reflected in many instances her awareness of sheen and radiance. The poem she had left in his room this morning was an example of this. He remembered phrases. “—scales of flint-fire, a silver tail,” and “a glitter in the sunlight, bright on bright—”

The world of colors, accessible to mystics and psychics, must be one of the reasons, Julian had often thought, why gold and jewels had always been so precious to humanity, symbolizing as they did the world of visions, the infinite beauty of celestial fire. Light over darkness had always been humanity’s preference, its need...

One winter when they had been window-shopping together through the streets of Dublin during the Christmas season, they had been impressed by the lights decorating the shops and strung between the lamp posts, and it had occurred to Julian then that these lights, duplicated by the billions throughout the world, were only a simple metaphor for the visions represented in the Star above Bethlehem.

Yet, for all these moments of revelation and excitement and of awareness that they were making progress through difficult, uncharted seas of the unconscious, there was always the element of danger, because Jessica’s links to the collective unconscious were so formidably persistent — she was linked not only to vague memories of distant ancestors but to their secret fears and compulsions, which Dr. Julian knew could be a perilous and sensitive connection.

“I’ve seen this distinctly three times, Julian,” Jessica interrupted his thoughts.

“At any particular time of day?”

She nodded and said quietly, “Yes, it was always when I awakened in the morning, just as if it were waiting for me.”

“What is the first thing you see?”

“There’s a tunnel of whiteness, but this time it’s flecked with red. And sometimes I see a memory there.”

“Do you know what it is?”

“I think so. It’s like when I knew something terrible was going to happen to Holly.” She drew a deep breath and watched the wind blow the petals from the flower in her hand, catching them softly and spinning them out above the rocks. “When my mother and father died, there was a lady who looked out for me for a while. Her name was Miss Scobey...”

Julian studied her pale face and shadowed eyes intently. “Why do you think you’re remembering this lady now?”

“I’m not sure. There’s a sadness about her, Julian, but I don’t know why.”

“And is that all?”

“I see nothing else. Only the sadness.”

A chilling premonition gripped her then and she could feel the wind cold on her sudden tears.

Later that morning, Andrew Dalworth stood at the bay window of his library and watched Jessica ride down from Skyhead. He felt a surge of affection at the sight of that slender figure, hair and scarf flying, guiding the big hunter expertly over the rolling meadows.

In their years together in Ireland, she had turned his empty life around. In his daydreams he often talked to his late wife, Anna, about Jessica, telling her of the child’s love and companionship, a tonic that had strengthened and refurbished every fiber of his being. He would have dearly loved to have shown Anna the poem Jessica had written for him last Christmas, neatly printed and tucked with other gifts at the base of the tree in the great hall.

The poem was titled “For Andrew.”

Under the same tree that Christmas morning had been an honorary life membership granted him by the stewards at the Jockey Club in Maryland, a pair of antique dueling pistols from Stanley Holcomb, and dozens of other objects in leather and bronze and silver, all stamped with the unmistakable patina of costly workmanship. But Andrew Dalworth would have traded any or all of those gifts for Jessica’s poem, which he always kept with him in his wallet.

As he watched her canter across the courtyard where Kevin O’Dell was waiting for her, he realized how much he disliked having to be away for her birthday, but he also realized that his reaction was to some extent that of an indulgent, possessive father who wanted Jessica close to him constantly, because she brought a flash of laughter into his life, a gleam of quicksilver through the echoing halls of Easter Hill.

Turning from the window, he picked up the phone and put in a call to his New York office to confirm all appointments and travel arrangements for the ten days at the end of this month that he would be in the United States.

In his room that night, moonlight shadowing the old tapestried walls, Dr. Julian wrote a summary report of his conversations that weekend with Jessica. His mood was somber, stirred by forebodings, as he dated a page in his notebook and identified it again as CASE FILE 111.

Dr. Julian put his notes into his briefcase, locked it, and placed it on the bed beside his other luggage. Then he went to the window and pulled back the tapestries to look out over the cliffs and onto the sea. A fine rain had begun to fall. It was a wet and windless night, more gray than dark, the moon screened in by clouds. Dr. Julian felt a stroke of uneasiness; a sudden chill went through him. For a quick moment, he had not been sure if the fearful thoughts belonged to Jessica or to him.