Harley springs onto the plinth, and Crispin scrambles after him. The slab of granite is carved to represent a stony outcrop, as if the bronze marines stand atop a battle-blasted hill. Among those sculpted rocks is a place where a boy and a dog can nestle.
They are less than half concealed. Even without the spotlights that used to wash the statues, the boy and the dog should be visible to anyone passing by, for the moon is full.
Yet Crispin is confident that they are safe. They are safe in the company of these bronze heroes.
The woman in white, black strings dangling, rushes into the plaza. Moonglow powders her marionette face, and her blood-red lips look black.
While the woman surveys her surroundings, the boy half believes that he can hear her doll eyes click-click-clicking as she blinks, as if she is in fact an animated puppet.
Her gaze passes over him from right to left, then slowly left to right.…
She doesn’t hesitate or come closer. She turns and moves away toward another part of the plaza.
Proximity to certain symbols and images can make boy and dog invisible to this woman’s kind, as surely as does swift-moving water. Statues honoring acts of courage and valor. Certain religious figures carved or cast life-size or larger. The immense mural of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on the front wall of the Russian-American Community Center. The huge cast medallion of America’s sixteenth president embedded above the main entrance of Lincoln Bank on Main Street.
A cross or a serviceman’s medal worn around the neck will not provide invisibility. The symbol needs to be of substantial size to be effective, as if the noble efforts and the determination of those who created and erected it are as important as the symbol or image itself.
The dog-bitten man in the white suit appears, limping. Soon there are five of them, though the others are not costumed, prowling the plaza and its immediate surroundings.
Although it is ancient, the silver moon looks newly minted.
On a nearby street, a drunken reveler howls like a werewolf.
The moon is without menace. It neither favors evil nor calls to those who do.
This is what Crispin believes at the age of twelve: By the light of the moon, truth can be seen as easily as by any other light. Year by year, he will refine that perception into a greater wisdom that will sustain him.
To see the truth, however, you must have an honest eye.
Across the plaza, the marionettes and their allies, who love lies, search for the boy and his dog, unaware that they are incapable of seeing that for which they seek.
July 26, three years and three months earlier …
Having been healed by the power of his nanny’s kiss or having been healed in spite of it, nine-year-old Crispin falls again into the cozy rhythms of Theron Hall. The world outside seems less real than the kingdom within these walls.
For some reason, Mirabell is excused from the day’s lessons. The three-year age difference between Crispin and his sister ensures that he is less interested in what she’s engaged upon than he would be if she were only a year younger or were his twin.
Besides, girls are girls, and boys are most like boys when girls aren’t around. Therefore, Mr. Mordred is even more interesting and entertaining when he is able to focus his attention on Crispin and Harley, with no need to tailor part of his lesson to a girl so small that her brothers sometimes call her Pip, short for pipsqueak.
Lessons begin at nine and are finished by noon. After lunch, Crispin and Harley intend to play together, but somehow they go their separate ways.
Most likely, Brother Harley is on a cat hunt. Recently, he has claimed to have seen three white cats slinking along hallways, across rooms, ascending or descending one staircase or another.
Nanny Sayo says there are no cats. Both the chief butler, Minos, and the head housekeeper, the formidable Mrs. Frigg, agree that no felines live in Theron Hall.
No cats are fed here and in this immaculate residence, no mice exist on which the cats might feed themselves. No disagreeable evidence of toileting cats has been found.
The more the staff dismisses the very idea of cats, the more that Harley is determined to prove they exist. He has become quite like a cat, creeping stealthily through the immense mansion, trying to sniff them out.
He claims to have nearly captured one on a couple of occasions. These elusive specimens are even faster than the average cat.
He says their coats are as pure-white as snow. Their eyes are purple but glow silver in the shadows.
Considering that Theron Hall offers over forty-four thousand square feet in its three floors and basement, Crispin figures that his brother might be engaged in a search for the phantom cats that will last weeks if not months before he tires of his fantasy.
At four o’clock on the afternoon of July 26, Crispin is in the miniature room. This magical chamber is on the third floor, across the main hallway from the suite in which the matriarch, Jardena, withers in reclusion.
The space measures fifty feet in length, thirty-five feet in width. Clearance from floor to ceiling is twenty-six feet.
In the center of this room stands a one-quarter scale model of Theron Hall. The word miniature seems inadequately descriptive, because each linear foot of the great house is reduced only to three inches in this representation. Whereas Theron Hall is 140 feet from end to end, the miniature is thirty-five feet. The real house is eighty feet wide, and the reduced version is twenty. The fifteen-foot-high likeness stands on a four-foot-high presentation table with solid sides rather than legs.
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