The only specific against it was money, Maudie thought — sunshine, clean winds, being taken care of. She had a fantasy of someplace high in Switzerland, a chalet on a lake, a place where there were saunas, health clubs, masseuses. Fur lap-robes and real old fashioned marvelous doctors, not the golf-playing creeps and their crowded waiting rooms here in the United States, but doctors who made house calls, chalet calls, she thought, arriving at any hour in business suits and purring brown Mercedes-Benzes, prepared to listen to you, to give you tests, to hold your hand, to stay as long as you wanted them to and to tell you at last, over a glass of champagne, that you were blooming fine, just fine.
She was jarred from the reverie by the slap of Eric’s fist on the steering wheel. She looked at him and saw that his jaw was set in a hard line, muscles bunching at the corners. The wind from a cracked rear window swirled furiously around her and the noise of the tires had grown louder. The speedometer needle was touching seventy.
“Hey, luv! Watch it.” She looked at him closely. “What’s got you so stirred up? Certainly not that eighteen dollars...”
“Here, look at this.” He took the issue of Town and Country from his pocket and shoved it onto her lap. “Just take a look at the pages I’ve turned down.” Perplexed, Maud hunched forward on the seat and opened the magazine to the thumbed-over pages, placing it below the faint light from the dashboard clock.
“Well, well,” she said, her eyes running across the pictures of the spectators at the Curragh and at Jessica Mallory surrounded by important-looking ladies and gentlemen. “Why, it’s your niece, Eric.” She smiled at the pictures but there was an expression of rueful envy in her expression. “She’s come up in the world, I’d say.”
“Yes, indeed. The Curragh, that’s one of the finest race courses in Ireland.”
“Now, who’s the chap with the nice brown beard?” She glanced down at the caption. “Dr. Julian Homewood. I could take him on toast, Eric. He’s sexy looking.”
“That’s my Maud. I was all eyes for the horse. Good-looking animal. Sixteen hands at the least.”
Maud read from a caption. “The Andrew Dalworth party, up from the Dalworth country home, Easter Hill, in Connemara, with the Dalworth stables entry, Yankee Drummer.”
Maud settled back in the seat and let her hands rest on the open magazine in her lap. She looked at Eric’s tense profile, eyebrows drawn together in a frown, the wind touching his fine, thinning hair.
“Listen, old pal,” she said, a stir of amused excitement in her voice.
He knew that tone. “What is it, Maudie?”
“I just had a thought.”
“The usual?”
She poked his arm and said, “A few variations occurred to me. I’ll light a fire in the bedroom and you bring up some drinks... You’ll think better when you’ve had a chance to relax.”
They drove on in silence until they turned onto the gravel surface of Black Velvet Lane. With the rasp of the tires on the tiny stones, Eric heard another sound, dry and whispering. When he glanced at Maud, he saw that she was carefully tearing the picture of Jessica Mallory and the Easter Hill crowd out of the magazine.
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.