ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF THE market a yogi sat heels on thighs, silently contemplating a tall bronze vase. A small crowd had gathered. Naked but for a loincloth, face half-hidden by his long black hair and flowing beard, he sat unmoving as a temple idol, scarcely seeming to breathe. Sophie and Jeannie were about to walk past, when a dull thudding came from the vase as though something was trapped inside.
“He’s going to do some magic,” said Alex, catching her mother’s hand. “Mummy, please let’s stay and watch.”
The vase had begun to tilt on its base, first one way, then the other: almost imperceptibly at first, then faster and farther as the thudding grew louder, until finally the vase overbalanced and toppled to the ground. The watchers murmured among themselves, and losing interest, wandered off — all but Alex, who was clearly fascinated.
“Did you see, Sophie? He never touched the vase, not for a moment. How do you think he made it fall? Was there something inside, trying to get out?”
“Perhaps,” said Sophie, as curious as Alex, and at a loss for an answer.
“It was magic,” declared Alex.
“More likely a clever trick,” said Jeannie. “Do please let’s move on, Alex, I have to finish my shopping list.” And Alex, quick to sense her mother’s impatience, turned reluctantly away from the yogi and his mysterious vase.
But when Alex had gone to bed and Sophie was sitting with Jeannie by the fire, Sophie asked the question that had been in her mind all day. “Jeannie, the yogi we saw in the market, was that really just a conjuring trick?”
Jeannie put down her tea cup, set aside her newspaper. Though in recent weeks she had often seemed preoccupied, at this moment Sophie sensed she had her full attention.
Jeannie said, “It may well have been. I’ve seen far stranger things in India that were nothing but clever illusions.” She paused as though waiting for Sophie’s response, and when none came, she said, “You don’t believe it was trickery.”
“I might have once,” said Sophie. “Now I know there are things that can’t be so easily explained. I know that the human mind has powers we don’t understand.”
“Like the power to topple a vase . . . ” Jeannie gave Sophie a long, considering look, and said quietly, “or topple a boulder from a mountainside.”
Sophie drew in her breath. Those were the words that had waited unspoken in the awkward silence.
“Sophie, you knew, didn’t you?”
Sophie met Jeannie’s piercing green gaze. Did I know? Coincidences surely happen. It could have been a tremour of the earth that rocked the boulder from its base. What had she seen in Jeannie’s face that night that could explain the inexplicable? She said, “I suppose in a way I must have. I sensed that some extraordinary thing had happened. But so much else was happening too, and afterwards — it was easier to think I had imagined your part in it. Yet all this time I’ve wondered . . . ”
Jeannie reached across the tea table to clasp Sophie’s hand in both of hers. It was an odd gesture for Jeannie, who was not usually so demonstrative. “But you didn’t dare ask. Nor is it easy for me to talk about it.”
“Does Tom know?”
“Of course. I’ve tried hard to keep it from Alex, but she has a way of working things out.”
“And Alexandra knows.” It was not a question.
“Alexandra has known since we first met. It was Alexandra who helped me to understand this peculiar ability of mine . . . this affliction.”
“An affliction — is that how you see it, Jeannie?”
“For me it has been like a taint in the blood — a disease that you couldn’t cure, that you could only try to hide from others, that you strove somehow to control.”
Sophie thought how rarely Jeannie spoke of her past — of the years before she had married Tom. She had kept that part of her life as private as Sophie’s life, in the aftermath of the Titanic disaster, had been made public. Now, as Jeannie began to talk of that time, Sophie saw in her eyes, in the deepening lines around her mouth, a remembered anguish.
“Imagine,” Jeannie said, “that you were a girl of sixteen, and when you were angry or afraid, dishes leaped off the table and pots or pitchforks flew through the air of their own accord. In my village they thought me a witch. In Alexandra’s books there are tales of sorcerers who can move objects with their minds, who battle one another in the mountains, and bury their enemies with landslides. And so I believed this strangeness, this power I had, must be a kind of sorcery. It made me ashamed, and it terrified me.”
Sophie thought of Alexandra in her mountain eyrie, resplendent in her red lamina’s robe and gold silk bonnet. You must not fear your gift, chérie. You must explore it. “Alexandra told me that any talent, not properly understood, is a torment to its owner.”
Jeannie said, “There’s a strangeness in Alexandra too, of a different sort than mine; perhaps that strangeness was what drew us together. For Alexandra the secrets of the human mind — and the secrets of the universe — are a source of endless fascination. But I wanted not to know what I might be capable of doing.”
And you are capable of — what?
As though in answer to that unspoken question, Jeannie said, “Once when I was quite young — younger than you — I thought I had killed someone because I was afraid of what he meant to do to me. I hadn’t killed him as it eventually turned out, but all the same, I might have done, and I tried never to use that power on human beings ever again. But more than once I’ve broken that promise to myself — and now, heaven help me, I may actually have killed someone.”
“You can’t be sure of that,” Sophie said.
“I felt in my heart that I had.”
“Only to save Will. You used it for good, not evil.”
“Still, think how often bad results can spring from good intentions.” Jeannie added with the ghost of a smile, “If you doubt that, ask Will about the war.” She pushed aside her cooling, half-finished tea and got up from the table. “So, there it is, my dear. You have your answer.”
One answer, Sophie thought. One piece in the puzzle that was Jeannie Grenville-Smith. But she sensed that there was still a great deal more to learn.