[tw: corporal punishment]

(1952, summer)

Cygnus


In the summer of 1952, Cygnus proposed that it was time to consider a second child. Druella was rather put out with the idea, but when he made the argument that they had agreed to try for at least two, and that it would be best if they were relatively near each other in age, so as to minimize the years during which the children would be underfoot, she gracefully acquiesced.

After all, every year she put it off was another year of having at least one pre-Hogwarts child in the house.

Cygnus' reasons for the proposal were a bit more complex. Arcturus had never re-married after the loss of his first wife and their two children in an attack by the so-called Lord Saladin while the family was on holiday in 1925. Saladin had been destroyed three years later, not least because of Arcturus' efforts, but that would hardly bring back his beloved family. It probably, Cygnus thought, had not seemed necessary to betray Aunt Melania's memory by taking a new wife, with two cousins adopted as brothers and three nephews. But all of Uncle Castor's children were girls, and two of the three were already married out of the family. After nearly ten years of trying, it was becoming more and more likely that either his twin brother or his sister-in-law was infertile, and Alphard, his (homosexual) elder brother, had voluntarily removed himself from the line of succession rather than marry another witch, after his first wife died in childbirth. All of which meant that there was a very real chance the fate of the next generation of Blacks (at least for their line of the family) might be entirely in Cygnus' hands. One child simply was not enough.

Secondly, while it was all very well and good to claim a daughter as every bit as useful as a son, the Black Name must be maintained, and it was unfortunately true that it was far more difficult to find good matches with wizards who were willing to give up their names and their families, even for such a title as Lord Black, than it was to find a suitable witch. It was very risky to allow a female heir to take a different name, even with the codicil in her marriage contract that her second child would take her maiden name and inheritance. After all, there might not be a second child (or, Powers forbid, children at all). Bearing bastards was more acceptable in the eyes of the Blacks (though such children were often scorned by the poncy, strictly-patrilineal elitists throughout society at large). All in all, it would be best to try again, and this time, to hope for a boy.

The (unspoken) third reason was that Cygnus was beginning to feel his first child left something rather to be desired.

Bellatrix was a precocious infant. She was speaking in full, if limited, sentences by one year (in English and Elvish), and could toddle out of the Nursery two months after her first birthday. She had her first bout of accidental magic at seven months, and more importantly, the often-delayed second bout of accidental magic less than a year later. At eighteen months, she was irrepressible and unruly, exploring her world with an enthusiasm which would not be curbed. Perhaps six months after that, near her second birthday, Cygnus finally noticed what Druella had been deliberately ignoring: their child was growing into a little hellion.

This would not have been, had he considered it before, entirely unexpected.

Blacks had a reputation for being impossible to handle. Mad. Histrionic. Compulsive risk-takers. They (secretly) took pride in the thought that they were nothing like the new-money, un-blooded, weak-willed aristos who had taken over society in the past few centuries, no matter how much they might adhere to the new customs in public. They could, if properly motivated, excel at telling their snobbish peers exactly what they wanted to hear – that they were still politically as well as magically powerful was proof enough of that. But it was true that there was something in the Black blood, or perhaps their family magic, that inclined them far more to the old mold of the warlord-prince than that of the polite and simpering ballroom gossip.

A certain degree of wild rebelliousness was permissible in boys, and even encouraged in heirs, but regardless of inclination, Noble witches in modern Magical Britain were expected to at least act demure and refined. Unfortunately for Bellatrix, there was only one tried and true method for teaching young Blacks to conform to their parents' (and society's) expectations: immediate, severe, physical consequences for the slightest of transgressions. As Cygnus cuffed the girl's ear and sent her falling to the floor, he assured himself that this was the right thing to do. He was not an especially kind man, but it did go against the grain to smack about a child no larger than an elf. Still, this was the way he and his brothers had been raised, and his father and uncles before him. She, like they, he thought resolutely, would have to learn what was permissible or face the consequences.

In the six months since he first attempted to correct his daughter's ill behavior, however, Cygnus had only grown more frustrated with the girl. She not even begun to take his lessons to heart. (How difficult was it, anyway, for an ostensibly intelligent human child to connect pain with her actions and avoid both in the future? Dogs learned more quickly!) The only things Bellatrix seemed to have learned were to avoid him when at all possible, and that crying only made things worse. And on top of that, the child seemed to be going out of her way to infuriate her mother, escaping the nursery to follow her around, chattering and making messes. (Druella was still hoping that if she ignored the brat long enough, she would go away.)

Uncle Castor had got lucky, so far as Cygnus was concerned: all of his cousins had been perfectly biddable and, if not little ladies by the age of two, at least easily trained to be neither seen nor heard.

He could only hope that their second attempt might go better than the first.