For the second part of the Diagon Alley Fic Crawl Challenge - Florean Fortescue's Ice Cream Parlour - with the prompt "burgundy".
Warning - contains mention of miscarriage, abortion, stillbirth and infanticide. Please don't read if they will upset you.
Blood and Wine
"When I am grown up," Andromeda declared, "I shall have grey silken sheets on my bed and have the house elves change them every day."
"Hmmph!" Bellatrix snorted. "Grey is dull. I shall have burgundy sheets, and crimson bed hangings."
"That would be like sleeping in blood," Andromeda objected wide-eyed, and Bellatrix laughed.
"So?" she asked nastily. "Why should that be a problem?"
Narcissa was following the conversation with difficulty. "I like yellow better," she said quietly. "But I thought burgundy was a wine, not a colour, Bella."
Bellatrix laughed again. "It's the colour of the wine, you little goose," she said unkindly. "Blood red, like Andromeda said."
Narcissa shuddered. "I shouldn't like to sleep in that," she said. "Yellow would be nicer."
Bellatrix laughed again. "Who wants nice?" she demanded. "Nice is dull and boring. I want more than that from life."
"Even in your bed sheets?" Andromeda ventured, and Bellatrix glared at her.
"In all of my life!" she declared. "There's no room for grey or yellow in my life. None at all."
That had been years ago. Bellatrix had been barely thirteen. Now she was nineteen, and about to be married. A suitable match, sanctioned by her parents, to Rodolphus Lestrange. Now, two days before the wedding, she was showing off her new home to her sisters.
Andromeda stopped dead in the doorway of the master bedroom.
"So you got your crimson bed hangings and burgundy sheets then?" she asked.
Bellatrix grinned. "You remember that, do you? I wondered if you would. You should know by now Andromeda that I always get what I want." She crossed the room and pulled the curtains on the bed straighter. Then she turned and faced her sister. "And you need to be careful, Andromeda." She waved a hand around the large room. "None of this for you if you carry on with that Mudblood boy. Not even your grey silk sheets."
Andromeda opened her mouth to say something, but thought better of it. She turned and stalked out of the room. Bellatrix smiled and linked arms with Narcissa, who had been watching the exchange between her elder sisters with a smirk on her face.
"Let me show you the dining room, Cissy," Bellatrix said.
Bellatrix looked like a queen in ivory silk with crimson roses in her hair and in her bouquet. Her sisters, in green satin with crimson and cream carnations in their bouquets, were pretty enough but as nothing beside her. The guests toasted the match in rich burgundy wine, and that night Rodolphus and Bellatrix lay together in the crimson hung bed for the first time.
It had not been a love match, but it soon became one. Bellatrix' father had found her a husband whose lust for power and passion for life matched her own. Within three months of the Christmas wedding, Bellatrix was pregnant.
That pregnancy ended in pain and blood within two months, so did the next and the next. The dark red sheets hid the bloodstains, and if Bellatrix cried for her lost babies, no one knew of it.
Two years after the wedding, and the Dark Lord was in the ascendant. Rodolphus and Bellatrix were part of his inner circle, their days spent in scheming and in dreaming his second-hand dreams, their nights more often than not in murder and subterfuge. The Dark Lord was clever and subtle; they were gaining ground without the idiots in the magical establishment seeming to notice. There was little resistance as yet.
And Bellatrix found herself pregnant again. It was a trial, an inconvenience. She was sick and exhausted as she had not been in her previous pregnancies, and only the knowledge that her sister Andromeda, now married to the Mudblood Tonks, was also pregnant stopped her from taking the apothecary's potion that would rid her of the unwanted child. But if Andromeda had a child, she would too. She would not be outdone by her fool of a sister.
She carried this child further than any of the others, felt it move within her, and began to believe that she might yet bear a strong son to serve the Dark Lord. But she went into labour on the night of the full moon in her eighth month, a week after hearing the news that her sister's brat had been born, a thriving and healthy baby girl. The labour was long and difficult. Bellatrix clung to the crimson bed hangings and shrieked and groaned and screamed as she fought to bring forth her child. It was born at last, more than thirty hours after the labour began, sickly and silent, a tiny girl with facial features that branded her abnormal, retarded, not at all a suitable child for a Pureblood servant of the new Dark Lord.
The midwitch cut the cord rapidly and bid her assistant leave the babe to fend for itself as they worked to save the mother, whose life was ebbing with her blood into the burgundy sheets. By nightfall, Bellatrix' life was secure, although she would bear no more children, and the baby was dead.
A small notice in The Prophet announced that Ursula, the much loved daughter of Rodolphus and Bellatrix Lestrange had sadly been stillborn. The midwitch and her assistant did not contradict it. They knew their place, and the Lestranges would make powerful enemies. Andromeda sent a card expressing her sympathy at her sister's loss, which Bellatrix burned.
Now, Bellatrix was more centred than ever on the mission of her Dark Lord. Even her husband came second as her devotion to her master increased. She could not give him a son to serve him, but she could give him herself, body and heart and soul and mind.
As time went by, Rodolphus began to satisfy his needs with another, a Pureblood girl from a poor family who had dark hair like Bellatrix and a soft warm body that she gave willingly. Bellatrix knew, but cared little.
In name, and in devotion to the Dark Lord, she and Rodolphus remained as one, sleeping in the ornate bed with the crimson hangings and burgundy sheets.
There were no crimson curtains or burgundy sheets in Azkaban.