The Seeing

Chapter Eight

It was after this experience that Andrew Dalworth decided to get professional advice to define and evaluate Jessica’s psychic capacities. Prior to this, and seemingly independent of her prophetic gifts, Jessica had begun to write poetry, simple poems printed in round, babyish letters which she brought proudly to Dalworth for his consideration and approval. Many of these expressed the wonder and surprise of any small child beginning to examine the world of her feelings, although some were informed with an oblique gravity.

One read:

And later in the same month:

Using contacts at the universities of Duke and Stanford, Dalworth had been put in touch with Julian Homewood, a young Dubliner who conducted advanced seminars in psychic research and experimentation at Trinity College. Dr. Home-wood — or Dr. Julian, as Jessica and Dalworth soon came to call him — had taken a degree in medicine at the age of twenty-two at Cambridge in England, doing graduate work later at Trinity in parapsychology and extrasensory perception.

Dr. Julian was the son and grandson of medical doctors who had been interested in what Julian had once described to Dalworth as “the facilities and powers of the mind that you can’t measure with stethoscopes, calipers, or least of all, with what passes for common sense.”

A bachelor, Dr. Julian Homewood lived in the Ballsbridge section of Dublin in a Georgian townhouse with a fan of windows over the door. In the last two years he had interviewed and tested Jessica Mallory on a dozen or more occasions. It had been his intention from the start (a point of view which Dalworth shared wholeheartedly) to assist her to accept her psychic abilities with serenity and confidence. Never to let them become a burden — the baggage of a laboratory guinea pig or a drawing room freak...

Dalworth, Jessica and Dr. Julian had become good friends, a close knit unit, over the years, and they had enjoyed each other’s company, not only during professional sessions, but at the theatre and often at race meets and on long weekends at Easter Hill.

But it was after one of her very first meetings with Dr. Julian that Jessica had written a poem which had startled Dalworth with its bitter-sweet mystery and maturity.

Andrew Dalworth glanced at the grandfather clock that stood in a niche between the bookshelves and decided that Jessica wasn’t planning to join him, unusual because as a rule she seemed to enjoy spending this time of day with him.

Putting aside his sherry glass, Dalworth walked through the great hall that gave on the shadowed dining room and through other rooms in to a salon used only when guests gathered for a hunt tea or when Charity Bostwick or Father Malachy stopped by for Sunday supper.

The light from the chandeliers and the fading sun was soft now, gilding the old furniture he had bought in France and England and Belfast, sideboards and highboys and antique fruitwood chests. Jessica had accompanied him on several of his trips to the continent and had shown a precocious and healthy interest in his choice of tapestries and jades. She had been equally fascinated by the silver vaults in London and the narrow streets twisting crookedly from the Seine near the Quai D’Orsay, where they had discovered unique collections of candelabra and clouded mirrors with hand-crafted frames.

Dalworth crossed the dark dining room with its panelled walls and medieval concert loft and went into one of the kitchens where Mrs. Kiernan was stirring soup at the stove and Flynn was decanting the dinner wines.

Flynn turned to him with a smile and said, “May I get you something, Mr. Dalworth?”

“No, thank s. I was looking for Jessica. I heard her come in the front door a few minutes ago...”

But no, Jessica hadn’t gone to the kitchens.

In the second-floor corridors which ran the width of the huge home, Dalworth met Rose and Lily coming out of a suite which, because of its view, was called the Orchard Rooms. Rose and Lily looked enough alike to be sisters; fair, sturdy village girls with chapped red cheeks and hair tied with dark ribbon at the napes of their necks. The maids had changed into their dinner uniforms — black silk skirts and white blouses with flat, round collars.

They had not seen Jessica either, so Mr. Dalworth walked along the corridor to her room. It was empty, the bed neatly made, her books and playthings in orderly rows on the table before the fireplace.

Then a worried thought occurred to him. There was a cushioned seat under the bay window on the third floor, the highest view from Easter Hill across the meadows and past Skyhead to the sea, which Jessica called her private tower. And what was worrying Dalworth as he started up the stairs was that Jessica retreated to the tower only when she was in a lonely, withdrawn mood, when she felt a need to wrote poetry, when her normally exuberant spirits were weighed down by a gravity which Dalworth could not completely understand and was helpless to relieve.

The wide, deep embrasure of the bay window formed the shadowed refuge of Jessica’s “tower.” Its leaded windows gave her a world view, an exclusive solitude that complemented and reflected the insights and probings of her own powerful mental visions. It was here that she could see everything, as she could sometimes “see everything” in her mind. Here she watched the lightning, knowing where it would strike. Here she could see the trains enter the valley and wind their way into Ballytone... see unborn foals in her mind-span, foals that would one day charge up Skyhead... see eagles’ nests that would fill the skies with wings in the coming spring. This was her place of strength, as familiar as a chapel to a priest, as beads to a nun. She felt comfortable here with the muted tapestries, the beige cushions, the deep carpetings. They were as familiar as old friends. Jessica’s tower was a place where she felt both the pain and the strength of her gifts most keenly.

Now Jessica was seated there, staring out to the distant sea. Dalworth joined her, put a hand on her shoulder. When she turned, he saw the stain of tears on her cheeks.

“What’s the matter, Jess?”

“It’s Holly, Andrew.”

“What’s the little rascal been up to now?”

“Nothing, Andrew.” He heard the catch in her breath. “She’s dead.”

“Let’s hope you’re wrong this time. You know, that’s a possibility.”

“I’ve been praying I’m wrong, but it’s something more than Holly...”

Dalworth patted her shoulder gently and said, “What do you mean, Jessica?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and shook her head helplessly.

“Holly will cheer you up,” Dalworth said. “I’ll take Flynn and young O’Dell.”

“I’ll wait here for you,” Jessica said.

Parking his Land Rover on the southern slope of Skyhead, Dalworth followed a rough foot-trail down to the beach, his torch cutting an arc of brilliant light through the gathering darkness and the opaque, misting spray churned up by the surging waves.

Flynn had gone on foot to the meadows behind the stables, and Kevin O’Dell had ridden Dalworth’s hunter up to the rim of the woods.

Dalworth followed the shoreline for several hundred yards, picking his way carefully through beds of slippery kelp and feeling the battering force of the winds against his sheep-lined jacket.

Possibly the little terrier had found her way to Angel’s Cove, he was thinking, a favorite spot where they had picnicked on quiet summer afternoons. Perhaps she’d buried chicken bones or some cheese there and was foraging for it when the tides cut her off.

Wrong, he thought, after covering another fifty yards and stopping, the waves foaming around his boots. He knew he wouldn’t make the long hike to Angel’s Cove after all, because in the glare of his flashlight, at the water’s edge, he saw Holly’s furry brown and white body wedged in a natural vise of stone, battered by the waves, blood gleaming bright on her skull and muzzle.

The dog’s body was wet and cold, pathetically small in Dalworth’s hands. As he cradled it in his arms and started back toward Easter Hill, he concluded that the fierce little terrier had probably braved the waves after gulls and been struck by a piece of driftwood spinning about in the powerful currents.

And that’s what Jessica had known, he realized — that the dog was dead. But in his suddenly worried heart, he knew that the child had seen something else.