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.
It is far more than concern and fear for that figure from her distant childhood, Miss Scobey. On one level, these memories should be reassuring ones. But Jessica’s preceptions here are on a level I cannot reach. The danger, if indeed it does exist, and her intuitions about it seem to employ Miss Scobey as a triggering agent (cf. notes on Holly). I’ve given Jessica my address in Stanford, where she’s promised to write me, and my phone number in case of emergency. What concerns me most gravely is this: Jessica’s psychic capacities expand enormously under stress. She is frightened now, which leads me to one tentative conclusion. The dangers she perceives extend beyond the Miss Scobey “agent” to areas that are immediate and personal, which — of course — embrace her present ambiance, Easter Hill and Ballytone, and everyone here.
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.