Dalworth recalled vividly that instant of time, the blank eyes of the Virgin glinting in the flame from the votive light, the sound of voices murmuring in unison from a nearby classroom, the old nun’s sceptically pursed lips and the tension visibly straining Jessica’s expression.
“Could you tell me that, child?”
The mood of the room dissolved into something unreal as Jessica said quietly, “The grade is an 87, Mother Agnes, and the test paper in your desk belongs to Chalice O’Reilly.”
The silence that had followed had been broken at last by the Mother Superior’s startled gasp as she blessed herself with a large brass crucifix which hung around her throat and exclaimed, “Praise be to God, the child spoke the truth.”
It was at this period of her life that Jessica began to experience a profound curiosity about her powers. Her speculations and intuitions amounted to a certitude that seemed to come to her from somewhere beyond the realm of her physical senses. She knew in some fashion that she occasionally was better informed about what was going to happen in and around Easter Hill than Mrs. Kiernan, the cook, and Lily and Rose, and even, on occasion, than Kevin in the stables. This made Jessica feel triumphant because Kevin knew so much about horses and foaling, and tides and weather, that he was always quick to forecast sailing conditions to Andrew or to predict the exact day a foal would be dropped.
In many small and personal ways, Jessica liked to test her powers to herself. Most of these experiments were innocent and blameless. Often in the early morning she would go down to the hatching house, count the eggs in the brooder and make a mental guess about the color of chicks that might emerge, scoring herself in predicting accurately the nests that had chicks in black, beige or shades of creamy yellow.
Seated in her tower refuge, she sometimes watched the sky during thunderstorms, anticpating what distant crag or tree might attract the next jagged thunderbolt.
Dalworth was aware of her powers, although at that time he still preferred to think of them as “gifts,” the natural intuitions of a perceptive, sensitive growing child. But he began to realize that Jessica’s gifts were not wholly unremarkable and innocent, as on the occasion of his trip to Dublin. It was a curious business. The train had been due in Ballytone at nine. Jessica told him it would be an hour early, but he hadn’t listened to her. When he got to the station, he found that she had been right. Schedules had been changed because of track repairs, and the train was already on its way to Dublin. Dalworth’s point of contention with Jessica was admittedly weak.
“You should have insisted I call the station,” he told her.
She had looked evasive then, and he had let the matter drop, knowing it was as much his fault as hers that he had missed his train. After all, Jessica had got what she wanted — his continued presence at Easter Hill for the weekend.
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.