she was stung by a bee
but she still had to make them toast
with honey.
Bellatrix Black severs her first head when she is ten and one quarter. Rosey's noggin is much too small to look any good at all mounted there upon the wall is what she sings to herself while Auntie Burga and Auntie Ella wish-wash the blood off of her face, scrub-scrub like servants. Rosey's blood is on my nosey, she says, and Auntie Burga says get that smirk off your face and rubs her cheek extra-hard with her veiny knotted old-lady hands. Bellatrix's face is raw-red for a quarter of an hour after so she pretends to be a house-elf, all burned and blighted from irons and ovens and white-hot pokers, clang, sizzle, poke, thud; she sticks her nose up like a little piggy's snout and squeals and simpers, just as Rosey would have done.
She has learned many big words from big books that gave her a big brain just like Daddy's: Nature's Nobility: A Wizarding Genealogy, for instance. That one was full of tongue-trippers like unblighted and monarchial and consanguinity because it was a very very very old book, though Mummy still wrote in it because she was a terrible naughty little child—Bellatrix Belvina, 1951 and Andromeda Callidora, 1953 and Narcissa Lucretia, 1955. There were ones older still, though, yes, with and I kithe you, Mudbloods are swiking and unright and they cause unfrith. She likes to write down these words in Mummy's books when she isn't watching: unsportive, forefangen, glabrous and cruor and scathers and abstemiousness.
Uncle Orion is terribly glabrous and the Mudbloods down the lane are scathers and Andromeda is most unsportive.
"Dromeda, Dromeda," she sing-songs, like fairy-tale birdies, not like in Beedle's tales though because he was dirt-veined, or so Mummy says. She read a copy at that McTavish boy's house anyway and thought it all rather funny, goaties and flies and warty-faced Mudbloods; she had looked around and up and down the house for a hairy black heart beating thud-thud in a pretty box until Daddy swatted her around the face. She had bruised like a house-elf, nasty purple-yellow, and hoped she didn't have filthy blood like theirs blooming under her skin; she scrabble-scrabbled and skritch-scratched at the bruise for weeks until it went away.
"Dromeda, Dromeda, what say we make Rosey pie today?" she says, dipping her fingers into Rosey's wet red flesh, the perfect circular hole where all her meagre eatings used to drop like little rabbits down down down into their warrens. It's like a cooling toothless mouth eating her up, which is quite funny because it really ought to be the other way 'round, what with house-elf pies on Tuesday and house-elf with boiled potatoes on Sunday.
Waste not, want not.
Andromeda's eyes are wet and red (like Rosey) with tears, unsportive girl that she is. "Rosey was my friend," she says.
"We eat our own," Bellatrix says because it's something Daddy often says, he with his great hairy black heart beat-beat-beating away—maybe some day served up on a platter with parsley and lettuce. Rosey's children would toil away in the kitchen, chopping up Mummy and Daddy and Dromeda and maybe even Cissy; boil, grill, fry, bake.
Mummy pie on Tuesday, Daddy with boiled potatoes on Sunday.
Bellatrix licks the blood from her fingers.