“Not yet.”
“When?”
“When the cards tell me it’s safe.”
“Have you consulted them recently?”
“No.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Everyone should be afraid.”
After a long silence, Amity says, “There’s a cool display in the toy department. You’ve got to see it.”
As Amity slides out of the booth, Crispin says, “You mean now?”
“I didn’t know you had a busy schedule tonight.”
He gets up to follow her, and she points to the wall of tall windows. “Look. Snow. So beautiful.”
With the dog between them, they cross the room and stand at the huge panes of glass.
The first flakes are as large as silver dollars and look as soft as little pillows. The heavens shed their bedding on a city seeking sleep, crystalline goosedown spiraling through darkness, through the million feeble night-lights of a civilization always one dawn away from obliteration.
12
Crispin is nine and under the influence of a malign spell following Mirabell’s flight to Paris.…
Only much later will he think of himself as spellbound, but whether that is the truth of his condition or not, he passes August and September that year in a curious state of detachment, with little energy for a boy his age.
He reads books that he enjoys, but days later he can barely remember the stories.
He plays board games and card games with Harley, but he doesn’t care — or recall — who wins.
He sleeps a lot, daydreams when he isn’t sleeping, and finds himself some nights and afternoons in Harley’s room, sitting bedside, watching his brother sleep.
Mr. Mordred still homeschools them, but he teaches with less diligence than ever and requires of them no homework. Sometimes Crispin feels as if the tutor does not intend to educate them, only to maintain a pretense of education, that there is nothing for which they will
For a while, Harley continues to search for the three white cats, but by mid-August, he loses interest in that quest.
Crispin sees little of his mother, less of his stepfather. Those infrequent encounters support the exceedingly bizarre perception he has that Theron Hall is much larger than its official square footage and that it is growing bigger all the time.
He sees much of Nanny Sayo, both waking and in dreams. In the waking world, she is always affectionate toward him and respects her role as a surrogate parent. In dreams, she is usually the same as in real life, though now and then a sudden wildness overcomes her and she springs on him, tearing at his clothes and nipping at his throat without breaking the skin, all in such a way that frightens Crispin but also strangely excites him.
Sometimes the dream nanny looks exactly like the real woman. But at other times she will have one different feature: this time, the yellow eyes of a lizard; the next time, reptilian teeth or scaly hands with beautiful pearly claws.
Mirabell telephones again from Paris, once in late August and once in mid-September. She speaks with her mother, with Harley, with Nanny Sayo, and even with Mr. Mordred. The first time that she calls, Crispin is sleeping late, and no one thinks to wake him. On the second occasion, he is in bed with the mysterious fever that never lasts more than a day but that comes upon him every few weeks.
When eventually he flees Theron Hall, he will marvel that so many clues to the truth of that place and its denizens were offered to him without triggering his suspicion, let alone his alarm. If he was spellcast, it must have been a spell disabling his ability to make even obvious connections, to reason from evidence, and to hold in memory proofs of the conspiracy in the web of which he was caught.
Two days after Mirabell disappears, Crispin comes out of the miniature room and sees the matriarch, Jardena, crossing from the elevator to the door of her suite. She seems to be unaware of him, but he is struck by two things about her.
First, although she still wears one of her long dark dresses, she moves quickly and gracefully. Gone is the hesitant shuffle of an arthritic old woman.
Second, if her face was a withered apple before, it looks now, in the glimpse of it that he has, like a fresher fruit, the face of a woman fifty years old instead of a hundred.
Weeks later, near the end of August, as Crispin is staring out a window, daydreaming, a limousine pulls up to the front door of the house. The chauffeur assists from the car a pretty woman of perhaps thirty-five, wearing a tailored dark suit that flatters her figure. She oversees the unloading of many shopping bags and parcels from the trunk of the vehicle.
The junior butler, Ned, appears and hurries down the front steps to help the overburdened driver. As the woman precedes them up the steps to the front door, Crispin is struck by her resemblance to the young Jardena, of whom framed photographs can be seen on the piano in the music room and elsewhere in the house.
If some grandchild or grandniece of Jardena’s has come to visit, Crispin is not told about her. And he never sees her again until a night in late September.
That he does not reach a disturbing conclusion about those two encounters is perhaps understandable. Less explicable, however, is how he could chance upon his mother kissing one of the housemaids, Proserpina, and fail to be thereafter deeply troubled by it or even to remember the incident except now and then just before falling asleep at night.
Wandering the house one afternoon, not seeking three white cats but in the grip of his peculiar conviction that Theron Hall has grown and is still growing, mentally vague and half inclined to lie down and take yet another nap, Crispin opens the door to the sewing room and finds them in a clinch. Proserpina stands with her back against a wall, and Clarette presses hard against her, grinding her hips, their mouths locked. They are breathing as if something has excited them, and their hair is disarranged. Clarette’s blouse hangs half unbuttoned, and the housemaid’s hand squirms inside, as if searching for something.
They are at once aware of the intrusion, but they are not in the least embarrassed to be discovered kissing. They smile at him, and his mother says, “Did you want something, Crispie?”
“No, nothing,” he says and at once retreats, closing the door behind him.
He hears a burst of laughter, both of them amused. Mortified, as if
“By the way,” his mother tells Proserpina, “the dates have been chosen. September twenty-ninth, the feast of the archangels, and then October fourth.”
“The feast of Saint Francis of Assisi,” Proserpina says. “Good. One close after the other. I’m tired of this city.”
“Who isn’t?” his mother says. “But I’m not tired of you.”
Crispin thinks they are kissing again, and he hurries away to the library. He spends some time wandering the stacks, looking for a book to read.
If he remembers what he interrupted in the sewing room, he has pressed it from his mind for the moment, as if between there and here he encountered a hypnotist who commanded him to avoid all thoughts of women kissing.
He believes that he is seeking an entertaining novel, one of high adventure, but the book he finds is in fact the one for which he is looking:
The feast of the archangels includes Saint Michael, Saint Gabriel, and Saint Raphael. The three are depicted in a painting and seem more fanciful than anything in a boy’s adventure story.
He pages forward to October 4, the feast of Saint Francis, who is shown feeding birds and adored by various
