The Moonlit Mind: A Novella

She says, “Nanny knows best.”

In her eyes, he sees twin reflections of himself.

“Doesn’t Nanny know best?” she asks.

“I guess so. Sure.”

He sees the moon in her eyes. Then he realizes it is only a reflection of his bedside lamp.

“Trust Nanny,” she says, “and you’ll get well. Do you trust Nanny?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Eat your dinner before you go to sleep.”

“I will.”

“All your dinner.”

“Yes.”

Leaning forward, she kisses his brow.

She meets his eyes again. Her face is very close to his.

“Trust Nanny.”

On her breath is the scent of lemons as she kisses one corner of his mouth. Her lips are so soft against the corner of his mouth.

Nanny Sayo is almost to the door before Crispin realizes that she has risen from the edge of his bed.

Before stepping into the hallway, she looks back at him. And smiles.

Alone, watching TV but comprehending none of what he sees, Crispin eats the Jell-O. He eats the buttered toast and drinks the hot chocolate.

He isn’t delirious anymore, but he’s not himself, either. He feels … adrift, as though his bed is floating on a placid sea.

The chicken noodle soup will be too much. He will eat it later. Nanny Sayo has said that he must.

After returning the tray to the cart and after visiting the bathroom—he has one of his own—Crispin settles in bed once more.

He turns off the TV but not the bedside lamp. Night waits at the windows.

Tired, so tired, he closes his eyes.

In spite of having eaten the toast and drunk the hot chocolate, he can still vaguely taste her lemony kiss.

He dreams. He would not be surprised if he dreamed of Nanny Sayo, but he dreams instead of Mr. Mordred, their teacher.

Crispin, Harley, and Mirabell are sitting at a reading table in the library. Mr. Mordred strides back and forth in front of a row of bookshelves, holding forth on some subject, delighting them with his stories. In the dream, Mr. Mordred doesn’t have a horsefly birthmark on his left temple. His entire head is that of a giant horsefly.

Dream leads to dream, to dream, until he is awakened by a sound. A swishing-scraping noise.

The clock reads 12:01 A.M.

So weary that he can’t fully sit up, Crispin lifts his head from the pillow just far enough to survey the room for the source of the noise.

The bed tray stands on the cart, where he last put it. On the tray, the thermos of chicken soup wobbles around and around on its base, as if something inside is turning, spinning, impatient for Crispin to unscrew the cap and pour it out.

He must be delirious again.

Lowering his head to the pillow, closing his eyes, he thinks of her slender hand upon his chest, and soon he sleeps.

In the morning when he wakes, the cart is gone and the tray with it. He hopes that a maid removed it and that Nanny Sayo will not have to know that he failed to eat her soup.

He never wants to disappoint her.

Crispin loves his nanny.

In two days, he regains his health.

When he is well again, after showering, he stands naked in the bathroom, studying himself in a full-length mirror, searching for the detailed silhouette of a horsefly. He can’t find one.

For reasons he is unable to put into words, he believes that he has narrowly escaped something worse than a birthmark.

His embarrassment and worry do not last. Soon he lapses back into the relaxed and carefree rhythms of Theron Hall.

Crispin, Harley, and Mirabell eat only what they like. Chef Faunus and Cook Merripen cater to their every desire.

They go to bed only when they wish.

Each rises to his or her own clock.

Mr. Mordred entertains. Nanny Sayo attends the children’s needs.

The world beyond the great house has been fading from Crispin’s mind. Sometimes, passing a window, he is surprised to see the city, the Pendleton looming across the street.

Shortly before midnight on July 25, having been in bed less than two hours, Crispin swims up from a troubled sleep. Half awake, he sees two shadowy figures in his room, the place brightened only by the hallway light that seeps in through the door, which is ajar no more than two inches.

The visitors are talking softly to each other. One voice is that of Giles, whom the children now call Father. The other belongs to Jardena, Giles’s mother.

Jardena looks old enough to be her son’s great-grandmother. She keeps almost entirely to her suite of rooms on the third floor. She is withered, her face as drawn as a sun-dried apple, but her eyes as lustrous and purple as wet grapes. She’s seldom seen, almost always at a distance, at the farther junction of hallways, floating by in one of her long dark dresses.

Crispin hears little of what they say, though it seems that tomorrow is some kind of memorial or feast day. Before he slides away into sleep once more, the boy hears the names Saint Anne and Saint Joachim.

When he wakes in the morning, Crispin is not sure that the visitors to his room were real. More likely, they were part of his otherwise unremembered dream.

In the coming night, something happens to Mirabell.