The heat radiated up through the floorboards into the July attic, drying out the dust and making metal doorknobs hot to touch. I lay on the floor in my underwear, half in and half out of the robes I didn't want to put on, feeling the sun that slanted through the windows warm my stomach and forearms.
The wood of the floor was hard against my back. Downstairs, I heard the clock in the hallway chime that it was two in the afternoon. I rolled over onto my shoulder to look over at the trapdoor that led to the house below. There were sounds coming from the hall: probably Sirius getting his breakfast, or Mother going to check on him. I reached over, barely thinking, and pressed my hand to the door's handle. It was still shut with the locking spell, I knew, but the noises made me nervous, and I don't think much when I'm nervous. I turned onto my stomach, crouched on my knees on the grainy floor, and scrabbled with my fingers against the edge of a trunk until I managed to get my balance and rise to my feet. I took a last glance at the window and the mealy hot city below the fierce blue sky, and turned to get dressed.
My feet ached. I'd spent the last few hours before dawn walking around the city as the sun came up in high button-up heeled boots taken from my great-aunt's old room. Nobody ever went in there any more since she'd died, but when the house elves went in to clean up all the cat hair, Kreacher brought me back the shoes. He knew I'd want them. They went really well with the skirt I had, and the shirt that didn't quite cover my navel. Dressed in all of them at once, sometimes people believed me when I told them I was eighteen, and I liked catching sight of myself in the mirror-windows that lined the Muggle tube stations. My hair was longer than it had been last summer, and it felt good brushing against my shoulders. As I braided it up again against the nape of my neck, the way Mother liked it, I thought of the boy who had asked for my name last night, and wondered if I should have answered him.
There had been light spilling in bright blue ripples across the trunks and ancient portraits and heirlooms that crowded the vaulted brown wooden attic. The top of the ancient building was almost as hot as the blue chalky sky and the withering glare of the glass and steel in central London. Now, as I pulled on my socks and opened the trap door, I descended into a space of just absolute darkness. It was like a rabbit warren, a subterranean cave. If I hadn't heard the clock chime, I wouldn't have known what day it was, so tightly were the curtains pulled around the windows. The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black was shuttered against the heat, from the basement kitchen windows to the tall drawing room French doors.
All morning Mother had been casting cold spells along the halls and around corners. Now she huddled with a fan in the rocking chair in her bedroom in her under-robes. Her face looked wilted and pale like a flower kept too long in the dark, stretching up. Her hair frizzed in the heat, like mine, and sweat cascaded down the back of her neck. Kreacher had told me that she had been asking for cold tea with mint about twice an hour. He shrugged with resignation, even though it was a hassle to keep mint in supply in the hellish heat.
I went in to her, to say good afternoon. She raised her eyebrows.
"Are you just getting up, Regulus?"
"I've been up for a while," I said, trying to smile. "I've just been hiding in my room. It's so hot."
"It is," she sighed, looking at me with a glance which spoke to the sympathy she thought we shared. I felt my heart jump the way it always did when she gave me that look. "It's absolutely beastly out there, and the Muggles milling about in naked droves, I expect. I can't bear to crack a window."
"Absolutely." I licked the corners of my mouth because they were chapped and abruptly wondered if there was any lipstick from the last night clinging there. I wiped my mouth with the corner of my sleeve. "What have you been doing all morning?"
"I'm just catching up on some reading," she told me. "It's improving, and far healthier than being outside in this temperature."
"I'll probably have to go out in it, after I eat some lunch," I said, as if the prospect was so unspeakably horrible that I couldn't bear to think of it. "I have to do shopping for study guides for OWLS."
"I couldn't even think of eating lunch with this temperature," Mother said, pursing her thin lips. Knife to the gut. As the words came out of her mouth I felt the familiar shivery sense in my hands and legs, the empty bubble in my throat.
"Maybe I won't either," I said.
"No, dear, you ought to. You're a growing boy. Go right on down to the kitchens and get that old elf to fix you something nice and not too hot. It's nearly two in the afternoon."
I tried to smile through the bubble, the shaking. "Right."
"I'm drinking simply gallons of tea. I've asked that old house elf to get me more, but I don't know what's keeping her. Could you get me some more while you're down there?"
"Of course, Mother."
As I walked down the burgundy carpeted stairs to the kitchen, I thought about her sitting all day, reading, curled like a spider at the middle of a branching network of silk. She had already been through everything in the library twice, and she avoided bookstores because of the people there, so I wasn't sure what she was reading. It kept her out of the way, I thought, and that was good. At least until she decided to tug the silk. I thought of the lines which creased her forehead and thought of the way my forehead would crease in the same way, in time.
Down in the kitchens Kreacher's mother, Toes, was pacing because the mint plant was dying and the leaves black and brown, and she had been told not to use magic without express permission of Mother, and so couldn't revive it. She thought Mother had ways of sensing it when she used magic without permission, and even though I was sure that wasn't true, it wasn't totally unreasonable to be paranoid.
"I can't ask her direct for permission, Master Regulus," she said in an exasperated whisper, using the first person because nobody else was around, "because she goes into fits. But somehow I have to get the plant all right, because she notices when the leaves are black, the Mistress."
"Yes," I agreed. "She has a way of doing that. I understand why you're worried." I didn't want to see Toes have to go through a punishment today. She was weathered-looking already, and I was worried that another one of Mother's punishments on a hot day would kill her. Mother was already in a bad mood.
"Is there anything Master Regulus can do?" She looked really just like anyone's grandmother, standing there looking worried with her arms folded.
I ran up to my room to get my Herbology book from third year. It was sitting under a stack of other old books, and I had to steady the whole thing to get it out. My feet in stockings skidded on the wooden floors. On the way back, bouncing into the walls, I nearly ran into Father in the back passageway. He was on his way from his study to the toilet, and still in his pyjamas.
"Good Merlin, Regulus, do you have to crash about like that?"
"Sorry."
"I almost thought you were Sirius for a second, you made such a noise upstairs. The heat gone to your head, boy?"
"No, sir. I was just looking something up. The mint's dying in the heat."
"Crashing about," he repeated, vaguely scratching his nose.
"Sorry," I muttered at him again, before hurrying back down the long staircase and crashing back into the kitchen. Toes was sitting in the sink, wringing her long hands and squinting at the little nook near the thin window where the herbs were set to get sun.
"We can fix it," I told her.
"You can try," she said, and shrugged. "I suppose I could always just make the Mistress peach lemonade and say that you suggested it."
"Oh, come on," I said. "I've got the book down now."
"Peach lemonade," she repeated mildly. "I'll start on a pitcher now."
I had never done well in Herbology, but the nervous energy that was filling me up was bubbling into my magic, and somehow I managed to do exactly what the book said to do. The mint even grew eight new leaves. We made the tea and I took it upstairs to my mother. She raised her eyebrows but said nothing but a murmured thank-you.
I realized I was going to skip lunch again. It wasn't such a great realization, but sometimes that's the way it is. I felt stuck, trapped.
I decided that I needed to go find Kreacher and find some excuse to take him out with me into the city to look for books. I looked into the drawing room and the cupboard and the boiler room before I found him watering the sturdy plants that were still out on the balcony in the roasting sun. He was obviously enjoying himself. Since my pale, maggotlike family was huddled indoors away from the sun like vampires, he could take his time gardening.
"Kreacher, I'm going shopping. Go with me?"
"If you'll wait a minute," he said. He said you around me now, instead of "Master Regulus", at least when my mother wasn't around. I think it was nice for both of us. We had an understanding about names. He knew my real name, and I knew his.
Kreacher and I left the house by Floo powder. We emerged into a hot hearth in the little bookstore at the top of Diagon Alley. I liked it better than Flourish & Blotts, because you could look out from there over Muggle London. The sun beat down hard on the tin and steel roofs and the slate-colored streets and heat waves stretched up hot to the sky.
Kreacher's name—in case it wasn't obvious- wasn't really Kreacher. Somehow that had never occurred to me, all through my childhood. You grow up with things, I guess, and you never really think to ask. I don't think I would have ever found out that elves have their own names if we hadn't started talking. He'd told me about his other name when I was twelve. It had been the third time we'd really talked to one another, a few months after we discovered that my mother never paid attention to me when she thought I was studying. Kreacher had brought me tea late one night when I was dutifully purusing the spells Father gave me to look over during the Easter holidays. Mother had told him to bring me tea, and I felt sorry for him having to get up in the middle of the night, and we talked. About halfway through I told him about me. He was the first person I told that I was a girl. Kreacher sat so silent through the whole thing. Somehow I knew he wouldn't tell Mother anything about what I said, and at the end of twenty minutes of me running my twelve-year-old mouth off, I told him I didn't want to be called Regulus, when I grew up. My name wasn't me. That was before I came up with a name, and everything was still a nagging worry in the back of my head, less an articulated thought than a wish.
I said something about his name, and asked how he got it. Kreacher told me that I was—pardon him, sir—being silly, because my mother had given him that name, and he had another one which was his real name. I remember laughing in shock.
Of course, it makes sense that elves would have other names, considering the kind of names wizards give elves. Kreacher told me his real name, then, with the whole house asleep. The room shook with the magic of the word. The lamp on my table shuddered and nearly fell onto the floor. I remember that most, thinking that I had never realized names, once revealed, could hold so much power.
Even when you're twelve, it's pretty easy to figure out that if elves have names for one another that they don't tell wizards, they must have a lot of things they don't tell wizards, a whole culture, and that makes you wonder why we treat them like they're less than us. That was my first big revelation. I was really interested, because of course you're never told that elves have lives outside of wizards and service, when you're a kid. At school, nobody batted an eye at the elves that worked in the kitchens or asked what they talked about. People made jokes about elves all the time, of course, but it was all about what we knew about them, and that didn't amount to much. Kreacher told me never to tell anyone about his real name. I don't know why he trusted me. I'd like to say it was the same reason I trusted him, but I think that would be arrogant.
When I came up with my name, finally, at thirteen, I told him and him only. I held the secret in for months until I got home on summer holidays and spilled it all out the first chance I got, one afternoon when Mother was visiting our cousins. We sat across from one another on the chairs in the sitting room, equals until my parents returned. "Regina" had a good ring to it, he said. That was really the kind of blessing I needed. It was the kind I knew I would never get in any other place.
We still called one another by our false names, but with the secret stitched underneath, comforting like cold tile against your bare back, or like a blanket. The secrets we kept for one another were the basis of our trust. I liked to think that my secret name could make the earth shake in the same way that his could.