The Adept (12 page)

This time, however, Peregrine was instructed to disregard
all
the psychic resonances he might detect—either from their former lives or from their present psychic disturbances—in order to focus on external appearances only. The task proved less difficult than he had expected.

Instead of fighting to blot out the now-familiar overlay of ghost pictures, he found himself merely looking beyond them, focusing his artistic acuity by means of the deep breathing technique that Adam had taught him. In almost notice at all, the warring images seemed to dissipate before his very eyes, leaving him free to concentrate on the purely physical aspects of his subjects in consequence, the portraits he produced on this occasion had all the sharp clarity of feature and expression that Adam had so admired in earlier Lovat portraits. At the same time, the drawings were unclouded by the unsettling spiritual elements that had dominated his study of Lady Laura.

“Excellent!” exclaimed Adam, when he reviewed the portraits that night. “You see, you
can
shut it down, when you want to; and you don’t have to let it take control of you.

I believe you’re well on your way to taking command of this talent of yours.”

The real test of Peregrine’s new-found control, however, came on Friday afternoon, when he accompanied Adam up to Kintoul to attend Lady Laura’s funeral. The service was held in the Episcopal church in the village. Though Humphrey got them there early, Adam and Peregrine arrived to find the pews filled to capacity with mourners come to pay their final respects. Fortunately, places had been reserved for them near the front of the nave, in one of the pews directly behind the family’s private prayer stall. An usher escorted them down the center aisle and to the left, while the organist improvised vaguely melancholy sounding background accompaniment.

Because Adam knelt after slipping into their assigned place, bowing his head in brief prayer, Peregrine did too, though he was not accustomed to kneeling in the church of his childhood. It was not that which made him ill at ease, however. The very air was heavy with undercharged emotion, and the church seemed all at once far too small to hold all the people present. Though it was well-heated, he suddenly felt clammy and cold.

Nervously Peregrine fingered the formal line of his starched collar, conscious of a growing tightness in his throat. When Adam finally slid back onto his seat, quietly opening the service leaflet the usher had given him, Peregrine followed his example. Sitting did not seem to help much. Trying another tack, the artist forced himself to inspect the high ceiling beams and rafters of the old church, hoping that artistic distraction might help him avoid acknowledging the reason they had come here today.

He had not expected it to work, and it did not. Inexorably his gaze was drawn toward the chancel area, just inside the communion rail. Lady Laura’s coffin lay before the altar, within the protection of six tall candlesticks, looking very small under its blanket of red and white chrysanthemums.

The sight unnerved him, but he would not allow himself to look away. To his infinite relief, no ghostly apparition manifested itself before his shrinking gaze.

Wondering why he should have been so afraid, Peregrine closed his eyes and took several long, deep breaths to relax, as Adam had taught him. Gradually the tightness in his throat abated. He was still searching his memory for a prayer appropriate for the moment when the organ up in the choir loft segued into a prelude by Palestrina, signaling the beginning of the service. Toward its conclusion, the clergy entered in procession: cross-bearer and candle-bearers and white-surpliced vicar.

The familiar pattern and repetition of the music had drawn and held Peregrine’s attention. His emotional turmoil began to recede. The Handel introit which followed was performed by an accomplished contralto. All at once, Peregrine seemed to hear Lady Laura’s voice with that of the singer, speaking comfort to him through the lilting strains of what had been one of her favorite arias:
“An thou troubled? Music will calm thee.
...”

He stopped trying to pray in words and let his spirit rest.

The theme of comfort continued with the opening hymn, this one based on a fifteenth-century poem by Bianco da Siena and set to a melody by Vaughan Williams:
“Come down, O Love divine, Seek thou this soul of mine, And visit it with thine own ardor glowing
. . .”

Anchored by the stability of the familiar hymn, Peregrine found himself able to join in with the rest of the congregation. Beside him, Adam’s resonant bass lent added support, full of depth and latent passion. The mingled pride and reverence in the other man’s upright stance reminded Peregrine of the statue of a Crusader-knight he had seen once in a chapel in Provence. The deep eyes held a faraway glow, as though they were reflecting back some measure of the brightness of his own inner vision. Abruptly Peregrine remembered that first sketch he had made of Adam—had it really been less than a week ago?

The hymn ended, and the moment passed, but to Peregrine’s unmitigated relief, all the prayers and readings that followed spoke eloquently of light and transcendence.

“Behold, I show you a mystery,” the vicar declared in the words of St. Paul. “We shall not all die, but we shall all be changed . . .”

Adam had told him on the way here that the readings were Lady Laura’s own choice. She had known she was going to die—had time to prepare for it—and she had selected the words of comfort with the same care with which she had lived her life, sensitive to the end of the feelings of those she had loved and was leaving behind. Adam had been one of the few to know she was dying. How much of his own knowledge had Adam shared with her, in those days before her passing, Peregrine wondered?

Lady Laura’s eldest son came forward then, speaking “ briefly but emotionally of his mother’s life and the causes she had loved, bidding her farewell on behalf of all the family. Then, to Peregrine’s surprise, Adam Sinclair went forward, mounting the lectern and withdrawing a single piece of paper from an inside pocket.

“It was my privilege to enjoy Lady Laura’s confidence and affection for many years,” he said simply. “Lord Kintoul has asked that I share with you this short reading, which was one of her favorites. It comes from the final paragraph of a novel by Thomas Wolfe, entitled
You Can’t Go Home Again.”

He glanced down at the paper and slowly began to read, but it immediately became clear to Peregrine that the words needed no prompting from any written text.

Something has spoken to me in the night,

burning the tapers of the waning year;

something has spoken in the night and told me I shall die,

I know not where.

Saying:

“To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing;

to lose the life you have, for greater life;

to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving,

to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth,

whereon the pillars of this world are founded,

toward which the conscience of the world is tending–

a wind is rising, and the rivers flow.

“We shall miss you, Laura,” Adam finished quietly, in the hush of the crowded church, “but we bid you Godspeed and send you on your way with all our love and blessings.”

The words had moved Peregrine profoundly, and he knew that he was not the only one to blink back tears. But as Adam made his way back to his seat, Peregrine found that his pain had gone, and with it any lingering guilt that he might have contributed to Lady Laura’s death. On the
contrary—and he knew this was a certainty tinged neither with pride nor with false modesty—his regular appearances to work on her portrait had given her much pleasure and comfort in those last weeks and months.

That acknowledged, he found that he could bid her an affectionate farewell from the depths of his heart, as serene now as he had been anxious earlier. He would miss her, but he knew that any lingering sadness must be for himself and not for her.

Still, as the vicar bade them kneel for the benediction, Peregrine reflected that he was glad there would be no graveside farewell. He knew it made no difference to Lady Laura, but he still shrank from the idea of anyone he loved being buried beneath the earth. Once the congregation had left, she would be laid to rest in the medieval vaults underneath the nave, to sleep with Kintouls and Kintoul wives of many another generation. She had been proud of her heritage; she would have liked that.

The prayer finished. The congregation stood. The tune of the closing hymn was by Michael Praetorius, the lyrics a translation from St. Ambrose:

O Splendor of God’s glory bright,

O thou that bringest light from light,

O Light of Light, light’s living spring,

O Day, all days illuminating . . .

Freed now from all the guilt and confusion attending his vision of Lady Laura’s passing, Peregrine let the words of the fourth-century bishop speak for him as well, now also free to let his newly biddable vision quest out as it would.

At the same time, he again found himself hearing other voices, distinct from the general congregation. Almost without thinking, he allowed his eyes to be drawn to the singers in turn. Deeper impressions followed.

The reedy tenor coming from somewhere in front of him belonged, he discovered, to a sleek young man with a fox’s clever face. Peregrine had met him once. He was a distant nephew of Lady Laura’s, only present because he was hopeful of gaining something material from her will. By contrast, the gruff, tuneless baritone from one of the back rows advertised the presence of Lady Laura’s elderly chauffeur, stoically accepting what he had no power to change.

Then, for Peregrine, all the other voices fell silent before a single, silver-bright soprano, soaring heavenward like the song of a lark. It was a woman’s voice, but thin and pure as a young boy’s, poignantly mingling piercing clarity with aching sorrow. The singer herself was somewhere off to Peregrine’s left and ahead, in the direction of the family stall. Eagerly he scanned the people standing there. A moment later he found her, far to the left, almost against the north wall.

She was standing in a pool of colored light cast down through the stained glass window immediately above her left shoulder. The hair that she wore swept back off her slender neck was a pale bright shade between copper and gold. Her averted profile was as delicate as that of a Botticelli madonna, traces of tears glistening beneath her lowered eyelashes.

Peregrine’s heart went out to her in that instant, his perceptions quickened by compassion. Though he did not think she was any blood relation to Lady Laura, her grief was as strong as any daughter’s. Drawn by her beauty, he studied her more deeply—and was touched to discern a gracious gentleness of spirit.

Who is she?
he wondered.

The recessional hymn ended on a harmonic Amen. After a moment’s respectful delay, the mourners began gathering themselves to leave the church. The family made their departure by a side door, and the girl with the face of a grieving madonna made her way with them, though unaccompanied. Peregrine followed her slender figure with his eyes until she had disappeared, only coming to his senses when Adam nudged his elbow.

“Her name is Julia Barrett,” Adam murmured in his ear, as he urged the younger man into the center aisle. “She’s Lady Laura’s god-daughter.”

Peregrine half-turned, long past being surprised that Adam Sinclair should be able to read him so clearly.
“Is she?” he wondered aloud. “I can’t think why we never met before,”

“Her father was Sir Albert Barrett,” Adam said softly.

“He had holdings down south, in Buckinghamshire.”

Peregrine glanced at Adam, noting the two uses of the past tense.

“Her father’s dead?” he whispered.

Adam inclined his head in discreet confirmation, keeping his voice low as they made their way along with the crowd.

“A few years ago, he was involved in a financial scheme that went badly awry. When the company he had helped to found went bankrupt, he sold off his own properties in order to make good the losses to the shareholders. It was an honorable thing to do, and no word was ever spoken against him personally, but rumors hinted increasingly that his business partners might have been involved in professional improprieties. It took the heart out of him. A few months after the bankruptcy, he was found dead. The official verdict was death by natural causes, but there were some who said he had taken his own life. Needless to say, the affair put an enormous strain on his family. I think things might have gone very ill with Julia and her mother if Lady Laura hadn’t stood by them.”

They reached the door of the church in time for Peregrine to catch a disappointing glimpse of Julia Barrett stepping into a waiting car. He looked for her again at the reception back at Kintoul House, but without success. He was distracted from any further thoughts on the subject when the Earl of Kintoul called him courteously aside to inquire about the completion of his mother’s unfinished portrait. To his own private surprise and relief, Peregrine discovered that the thought of coming back to the painting no longer filled him with shrinking alarm.

“I can resume work any time you wish, my lord,” he assured the earl. “I’m doing some work for Sir Adam Sinclair at the moment, but I know he’s also eager to see the portrait finished.”