The Seeing

Chapter Twenty-Five

Seated on the curved cushions in her bay window, Jessica tried to isolate the emphemeral conviction that Dr. Julian was aware of her problems. But the effort was frustrated by stronger impressions, concepts of childhood, and the verbal metaphor of gemstone.

And her concentration was further splintered by the noises that she had been hearing that afternoon — heavy footsteps in the hallways and the sounds of furniture being lifted and carried down the stairs.

Standing close to her bedroom windows, she had seen the shining hood of a moving van parked at a side entrance.

She was distracted then by refractions from the curved panes, and when she stared down at the lawns and stables, Jessica saw yellow flecks glowing like fireflies in the velvet shadows. Jessica’s heartbeat quickened. She realized, as the lights spurted again from a boxwood hedge, that it was Kevin O’Dell in the shrubbery signalling to her with matches. Four flashes, the same code they had used as children.

Taking her flashlight from the closet, she swept the beam of her torch across the windows — four rapid slashes — but just as she flicked off the switch, a lock clicked, the door of her room swung open and Uncle Eric snapped on the overhead lights. “What the hell’s going on here?”

He was in a foul mood. The business arrangements with Ethelroyd had been abrasive, difficult and eventually a source of rancor and humiliation. Ethelroyd was gone now, on his way north to the border, objects of art from Easter Hill crated or wrapped snugly in thick quiltings in his vans. But the fat man had enraged Eric by referring to the things he had bought as “poor darling bastards — no baptismal certificates, no pedigrees, sent off into the world without bills of sale, proof of provenance, not even customs’ attestations.” And Ethelroyd had concluded this needling harangue with, “Ah, but the precious foundlings will find proper homes in England...”

“What’s that you’re hiding behind your back?” Eric demanded.

“A flashlight,” answered Jessica promptly. “The lamps were flickering.”

“Well, there’s nothing wrong with them now.” Eric hiccuped and felt an abrasive rasp of whiskey in his throat. “Did you do the work I told you to? Have you forgot what I said about that damned horse of yours?”

Jessica looked at him steadily and picked up the slim manila envelope from the bay window seat.

“I’ve done what you asked. I’ve seen the finish line.” She extended the envelope to him, still staring impassively into his eyes.

“We’ll just take a look.” Eric’s hands trembled as he opened the envelope and studied the entry sheets. If she were right, this was too bloody good to be true, he thought, hearing his quickening breathing as he studied her picks. The odds-on favorites, the newspaper picks, weren’t in it at all; Etoile Rouge, Daedalus and Kerry Dancer, the Muirhead entry, all out of the money.

The girl had picked Sterling Choice, currently at fifty-five to one, to win it, Overlord at fifty-to-one to place, and Primrose to show, at twenty-five- to thirty-to-one. Not one of these entries had been touted to so much as show by the handicappers Eric had studied in newspapers from Manchester, Liverpool, Dublin and London.

“How do you know this?” he demanded, staring across the form sheets at Jessica. His voice had become noticeably hoarse. “What exactly did you see, girl? And don’t lie to me. Everything I’ve got in the world depends on this. Are you sure, Jessica? Are you sure!?”

“I saw as much as I needed to know,” Jessica said evenly. “When the field takes the canal jump on the second lap of the course, Sterling Choice will be leading by three lengths under a hand ride. Overlord’s rider has gone to the bat but isn’t gaining. Primrose, the only mare who’ll finish the race, is the show horse. She’ll be trailing Overlord by seven lengths.”

Eric sat down slowly on the edge of the bed, feeling suddenly drained of strength. Yet he thought, with a touch of wonder, it was an exhilarating feeling, the sweet exhaustion of victory.

“There can’t be any mistake, Jessica,” he said softly. “This means so much to your Uncle Eric.”

“I saw them finish. There’s no mistake.”

And Eric Griffith believed her. But that very confidence and faith in the girl — in some sad fashion — curdled and dissolved his optimism, his anticipation of winning, replacing them with the familiar bewildering and angering self-pity. It didn’t have to be just one good afternoon at a track, he thought. It could be hundreds. And to think beyond tracks and horses, toward other contests even more profitable and fateful. It could be the start of something so heady he could feel it spurring the exultant stroke of his heart. If all of life, of knowledge, was so easy for her, why not ever for Boniface?

But again came the defeating realization that there were only starts for him, never finishes. College had been a time of mystery and initiation but where had it led? What had Ira Washburn’s false promises amounted to? The times of challenge always withered and dried away for him...

Eric felt a painful dryness in his throat. He needed a whiskey to exorcise this draining self-pity, this invasion of weakening memories that stemmed in equal parts from the fat man’s contempt and the conviction of being homeless and unwanted in a home that should have been his...

Stirred by resentment, he reminded himself that self-pity was the crutch, anger the club.

“By God, Jessica, you’ll regret it if you’ve lied to me!” he said, and walked from her room, closing the door and locking it with a click of finality.

When the sound of his footsteps faded, Jessica snapped out the overhead lights, switched on her torch and swung its beams in four quick slashes across the gleaming night-dark window panes.

Eric worked for twenty minutes in Dalworth’s study, the Tiffany desk lamp highlighting the figures scribbled rapidly on a paper. The same light found motes in the heavy air and shone in splintered patterns from the gun cabinet. A wind was rising and a rustling sound could be heard through the house, as stiff salt breezes came down the Connemara coast.

Calculations completed, Eric walked into the library where Tony Saxe and Benny Stiff were playing gin rummy at a chess table.

Eric placed sheets of paper in front of each man, then opened the envelope he had received from Ethelroyd and counted out three stacks of British currency, each totaling twelve thousand pounds.

“We will each wager ten thousand pounds in England this weekend,” Eric said, “with Betting Commissioners in three separate cities. Benny, you’ll take Liverpool, Tony, you’ll cover Manchester, Maud and I will be at the Cumberland in London.

“Should the worst occur, if little Miss Crystal’s predictions aren’t accurate, we’ll at least have two thousand pounds each to take us back to the States in luxury.”

“But there’s no parimutual betting in England,” Benny said.

“I’m aware of that. What’s your point?”

“An obvious one. They don’t cut up the pie according to the handle that’s bet. The odds you get from a Commissioner don’t change no matter how much action there is. So why go running around England like jack rabbits?”

“Simply this. The long shots we’re betting on aren’t touted by any of the top handicappers. And the amounts we’re betting could cause gossip.”

“Good thinking,” Tony Saxe said. “So that leaves just one other thing.”

Benny Stiff shook his head slowly. “No — two things.”

“Very well,” Eric said. “Let’s take them in order. Tony?”

Saxe glanced at the sheet of paper Eric had given him, checking the three names — Sterling Choice, Overlord, and Primrose. At last he said, “Supposing there’s a violation, a flag up after the first results? She only saw the finish, you say. We don’t know about a jock caught with phony weights, saliva tests, or some owner screaming foul to a judge.”

“I was coming to that. We’ll split our bets between the number one and number two horse, Sterling Choice and Overlord. If they foul each other, their position at the finish will simply be reversed. We’ll collect either way.” Eric looked appraisingly at Benny Stiff. “What’s on your mind?”

Benny stared at the backs of his hands. “I said it before, it’s like back in Camden. You’re thinking about the pay-off, not what you got to do to earn it.”

“I’m way ahead of you, Benny.”

“You better be, because it’s as plain as a fly in an ice-cube that just winning that loot doesn’t solve our problems. There’s still one left and you better know what one I’m talking about.”

“I told you, I’m ahead of you.” Eric paced the floor, hands clasped behind his back, his eyes gazing at the dark, inlaid ceiling. “In another context, I told you that we were fortunate to be operating in such a simple and credulous country.”

Turning, he smiled at them. “It seems there has been a recent curse on Easter Hill. The good people around here believe that in the depths of their souls. The death of the master, Andrew Dalworth, followed into that silent world by his faithful retainer, Mr. Brown. A distraught girl wandering the beaches like a demented thing. And when that same poor child goes riding at dawn, along the treacherous crags of that big cliff up there — well, if anything happens to her—” Eric shrugged and sat down at the chess table. “Well, her death will be laid to the damnable curse that’s settled on this house.”

He picked up a deck of cards, shuffled them, and dealt out three hands of gin rummy.

“Any other problems, Benny?”

“Not a one,” Benny Stiff said, taking up his cards.

A light thump sounded on the roof directly above Jessica’s head. As she unlatched the bay windows, thunder swelling around her, another thump sounded on her terrace. Hoisting himself over the sill into her room, Kevin O’Dell’s face was hard with anxiety.

Jessica pulled the draperies behind him and snapped on her bedside lamp. Kevin took her shoulders and stared into her face. “Jessica, what in the name of God’s going on here?”

“Kevin, keep your voice down. Please. There’s no time to explain.” She spoke in an urgent whisper. “Just listen to me. They murdered Mr. Brown. I saw it happen. You must go to Constable Riley and—”

“I could call him from the stables.”

“No, Kevin, no! Get away from Easter Hill. Go quickly, for God’s sake.”

Kevin gripped her hands. “I can’t leave you like this, Jessica. Come with me!”

“Go, I tell you! Please! I can’t reach the big oak from the roof. If you stay, we’re both lost.”

Kevin hesitated for an instant, a last tense appeal into her eyes, but seeing the unwavering determination in her expression, he nodded abruptly and touched his hand to her cheek before turning swiftly to the windows.

Jessica closed them behind him, hearing his boots in the heavy ivy, and then his footsteps running lightly above her on the mansard roof.

She murmured a prayer for him as a bolt of lightning struck the horizons beyond Skyhead, garish yellow flares illuminating the black clouds, heavy and roiling with the winds coming in from the sea.

The storms swept north of Ballytone, bending underbrush flat and raking the coarse grass with hail. Liam Mallory looked at the heavens and drew a cross in the air with his gnarled hand, a token of gratitude for this turbulent weather. He had prayed to the gods for it and they had answered him surely.

He was traveling in the county of Mayo with his wife, Corinne, in a four-wheeled pony trap down a rutted road toward the village of Ballytone. He clucked softly to the stout trotting pony who had begun to shy at the cracks of lightning and the thunder rolling down the hillsides.

“The child is in mortal peril,” Liam said to his wife, who huddled close to him. “I must stop and pray to the gods for her.”

“Why speak of gods? There is only one God, Liam,” Corinne Mallory said, and tightened her grip on the wooden rosary looped around her waist.

“Whichever god answers me is the god I’m praying to, woman.”

“But there are miles between us and the poor one.”

“Aye, I know that well. But the face of evil is clear in my mind, clear enough to thwart, if my gods will it.”

She knew he wanted only her silence now. “Aye,” she said and watched with resigned eyes as he reined the pony to a stop, climbed from the trap, and stamped across the mud-slick road, his tall, dark frame merging and disappearing into a grove of black aspens.

Liam Mallory knelt and struck the bole of a tree with his thorn-stick and turned his face to the torn skies, a man eight decades and five years beyond the warmth of the cradle hewn by his great-grandfather. The ancient Irishman knelt in the storming weather and prayed to his gods to succor and preserve an innocent child in mortal danger that night.

His prayers were long because his gods were many. A powerful tenet of his myriad faiths held that good and evil, light and darkness, forever waged an equal battle for the souls of man, a conflict undecided until that human prize expired and its soul went to the victor’s domicile — the darkness of hell or the lights of heaven.

And to fight and triumph against that always menacing darkness, a man needed all the gods he could summon. The one created in candlelight, incense, and the priest’s chalice at consecration — old Liam prayed first to that God, the dignified Lord who lived behind the Tabernacle’s golden doors in all the churches and cathedrals of Ireland. And he prayed to that God’s mother, and to all His saints.

But while praying to the traditional Deity and His company, old Liam also pleaded with older gods, the terrible and primitive minions and familiars of all the gods of life — the zephyrs and cooling winds, the raging fires, and clear, still waters, and he begged help and vengeance from other servants of light, the wise and holy Druids who permeated and protected all the valleys and forests of this great green island.

“Never for me, Hyperion and Caveran. Never for us, the Brothers of the Red Branch. It is not that I seek help for ourselves, for such as us have been blessed with your strength—”

His old woman called to him from the cart, her voice wavering in the winds. “Come, Liam. Your endurance is not endless.” She knew better than most the ordeal her husband was undergoing, knew that the powers he asked for taxed his human strength.

“Quiet, woman,” Liam cried and pounded his staff on the ground. “The girl and I,O Brothers, need your help, draw on your strength as a shield and rod against the evil that threatens her.”

The old man’s rugged face was coated by a flare of lightning, his next words lost in a drumbeat of thunder. “...her needs now, O Brothers, and the powers that I transfer to her...”

And with the next roll of thunder, the old man felt a surge of rushing energy within him and, knowing from whence it came, smiled in strained triumph and began a litany of prayers for Jessica Mallory.

When he gasped out the last of these entreaties, Mallory pointed his thorn-stick at the heavens, swinging it toward the jagged lightning above the far-distant mass of land called Skyhead.

He held that pose until his arm trembled with fatigue, then he cursed the evil threatening the girl, and called out her name, his voice ringing above the crash of the elements. Then he shuddered convulsively and fell forward, his body crashing like a tree to the floor of the forest.

Later, Corinne Mallory helped her husband to his feet and guided him back to the pony-trap. Taking the reins in her own hands, her husband’s head resting on her shoulder, she set the pony trotting once again along the road to Ballytone.