Fewer cared for the mad Squire who'd eloped with the local tramp in Greater Hangleton than did in its littler counterpart, for Greater's elite were more plenty and certainly sinful enough to have the locals tutting and gossiping constantly. So there he was again, strolling down streets that glowed gold in air laden with eucalyptus, avoiding with ease the eyes of passing peddlers, drunks, and prostitutes.
Darker and grimier the streets became as Tom traversed them, the rotting wood and spidering, cracked windows as familiar now as the intricate carpets and gilded frames of home. Rats skittered in heaps of trash while vague outlines of roaches crawled on stained walls, Tom's hand never straying from the dagger veiled within his coat.
A faint light emerged and at last, a faded red door, its knocker discoloured but polished from the many hands that had touched it.
It had been three years ago when Tom had first stepped through this door, on the night of his twenty-sixth birthday. At Mother's behest, the lovely daughter of a famed Count had attended the celebration — Tom remembered distinctly her periwinkle dress and simpering smile, her flushed skin whenever they brushed arms, edging ever closer until her cloying perfume could have permeated the inside of his skull; a dainty hand, fingers twining in his, thumbnail tapping the face of the wristwatch he still wore.
Tick, tick, tick.
He'd sent her tumbling, shell-shocked amid the tulips and begonias of the garden while he sped off in his car, sparing not a glance over his shoulder.
Mary had hissed and spat and sobbed when Tom returned a day later, wringing hands before him on bent knee and silk skirt, while he looked on without feeling. The guests had talked and the villagers sneered his way, yet Mary had screamed loud enough for all to hear anyway. Though afterwards she never spoke a word when he vanished, Tom knew her to be crying her eyes dry in the tearoom, as the maids had reprovingly informed him many times.
He'd thought she had surrendered then — how wrong he had been!
Curious eyes trailed him as he approached the patron, a burly woman known simply as Gia, her disdainful stare never flinching. She distrusted Tom even after six past sojourns, always charging him a larger price than before, always annoyed when he returned. Following a minute of their usual routine and with much lighter pockets, he stood in the dark, musty corridor outside the door to her room. Hesitating, Tom knocked.
"Who?"
"It's Tom."
Silence. Then, the scuffling of feet before the door swung ajar.
"Tom." Lydia, too, was always slightly surprised to see him, but she stepped aside gladly. "Come in."
Tom did. Silk scarves, shimmery cloth, and worn night gowns hung from a rusted coat rack at the end of an equally rusted bed, upon which lay a much repaired blanket and an open book. The air was tinged with vanilla and beeswax, stubs of candles on the splintering windowsill, a cracked mirror hanging by the cupboard. She spread the blanket over the bed and gestured for him to sit, then left to fetch tea.
When she returned, Tom lay stiff and cold, thumbing his wristwatch which sang,
Tick, tick, tick.
The tray was set down, blackened silver with a dented sugar bowl, his companion perching on the moth-eaten armchair by the window, twirling a teaspoon around two sugar-cubes. Lydia, almost ethereal in the moonlight despite drab, threadbare clothes. Tom glanced her way every few moments, pondering on how a whore could seem such an angel, and if redemption were a thing, might it resemble this.
"Are... are you well?"
Through a block of moonlight, earnest, hazel eyes, studied him, the lines of bony shoulders stark under thick beige shawl, embroidered with little red roses.
Breezy air swept his cheek. Blue shadows played on the ceiling, a spider web shining silver on a stained candelabra.
After a minute, Tom answered, "No."
Lydia's brow creased when he did not elaborate, wide eyes roaming over his form as they tended to but, as always, she did not pursue the matter, he breathing a sigh when she mentioned something she'd read, sipping cold tea and chewing on stale biscuits, silently accepting his curt replies. With the chipped china in hand, she looked to him almost like Cecilia, supping chamomile and catching his eye at her mother's side over luncheon, winking with the teacup to her rosy lips. He remembered her heeled boots, sooty black leather, clicking joyfully at every step, declaring with reverence her arrival.
Yet she was not Cecilia — Cecilia's cheek had not been marred so smilingly, her eyes had never glared steel in broad daylight, flashing full of contempt.
"... Lex Flint and his lot ... Lord forbid they ever —"
"Who?" Tom asked disinterestedly, for the name rang a muffled bell in his memory.
Lydia frowned.
"Alexander Flint." A sharp roll of the eyes, something else the girls his mother fetched would never do, even with a reputation so black as his own. "You know him, the papers made quite a fuss about it all ..."
Tom hummed in acknowledgment, asking her to fetch the papers in question. Though she clearly didn't want to — notorious as he was, Flint must've been old news, but old news was wont to rear its head afterward in the most unexpected places — Lydia obeyed.
"You're welcome to take your time." A huff, from her retreating figure in the dreary hallway.
Hours seemed to pass. Tom drifted in and out of empty sleep, on Lydia's bed with its rough, discoloured sheets and lumpy pillow, growing thirstier by the second while the tea grew colder. An owl hooted somewhere in the night and he nearly jumped out of his skin, ripped from visions of a clock and a brick wall, a pint of buttery sweet ale in hand, tinted gold by candlelight.
At half past two, Lydia returned.
"Look who's here ..." She spoke in that rare pitch of blunt affection. Sitting up on his elbows, Tom searched for the supposed visitor without success.
"Not up here, silly," she admonished, opening a can of sardines and bending down, skirt swaying by her calves. A purr sounded from by the foot of the bed, where a furry orange kitten sat lapping up the contents of the can, tail flicking about. "I've named him Rango. Isn't he sweet?"
To Tom, who'd been raised with purebred horses in the stables and dark and regal dogs in the yard, the cat looked nothing more than a mangy, emaciated imp with large ears.
"Sure," he replied, as Lydia coaxed bony fingers through Rango's scraggly fur.
"He was nearly frozen when I found him, the poor thing. There was no mother or other kittens ... oh, here's the paper. I could only find one ..."
And she placed it before him on the bed. It was an oil-stained The Mail on Sunday of last November. Alex Flint Returns to England! proclaimed the headline, the article speaking somewhat obscurely of his affairs in America, his obnoxious wealth, and lastly, donations on his behalf to orphanages, shelters, and hospitals across the south, a series of bright photographs below it, all with similar captions: Head Doctor Raymond Colin (R) and Mr. Flint (L) outside King Edward's Hospital in Banbury; Mr. Flint has tea with Sir Matthew Gerber, veteran of the Great War, in his room at St. Ives Home for the Blind; Mr. Flint and the residents of Wool's Orphanage, London, stand in front of its newly renovated structure. It was the last picture that held his eye: handsome sunny-haired Flint between a cluster of reedy children, all smiling glassy grins in the winter light, his hand resting on the shoulder of a dark haired, dark eyed boy ...
Tom stared at the picture for a long while, into the grave eyes of the boy next to Flint — unbelievably the boy he'd just run from, who'd worn the same flare of betrayal he'd seen in her when he'd left ... who also wore Tom's face, would now be living in Tom's house, because Mother had not given up ...
Oh, to think that even the papers refused to spare him.
"Tom? You're leaving already?"
The window creaked, the sky outside mirror to an ocean. Lydia peered tentatively at him from the floor, the kitten chewing on a strand of her tawny hair. She looked almost like a child.
"You seem tired," she said, making to get up, but already Tom was stepping away. "Stay the night."
When he said nothing, she crept closer, reaching for his arm with a ghost-like hand, adorned with wiry rings and glass bangles.
"Don't touch me," he snapped. Irritation flashed on her face.
"You paid for two nights but won't even stay one?"
"Yes." Tom sneered. Who did she think he was? Certainly not an heir to an old and vast fortune, if she thought herself a luxury beyond the reaches of his wealth. But of course, that which gilded his life would tarnish it too: first his face, which had enchanted the hideous witch, and now his legacy, which required an ascendant to claim it.
"Farewell then, Squire."
Tom wondered vaguely when she'd begun to care for him (for certainly she did) the stiff, blank aristocrat and his absurd tales but Lydia had always been of that salient, unusually kind sort, and Rango was one of many who could testify so. He could almost spit on her for it — almost.
"I promised Mother I'd be at dinner tomorrow," he lied, "I'm sorry."
She picked Rango off the floor, let him lick her finger, scratched behind his fuzzy ears. Tom imagined her torn between scorn for the rich and their dinners and sympathy for his mother, waiting through the night on her heedless son.
"Happy New Year, Tom."
*
The night Tom spent in a rickety room above the Dim Lantern, a melancholy inn on the edges of the forest. The sheets were smelly and scruffy, scratching his sweat-slicked skin (the Tom Riddle of nine years ago would never have tolerated this) as he stared at the ceiling, faint chatter and the occasional slurred song echoing from downstairs. Morning had seeped already on the horizon, tattered curtains doing little to block the sun, and sleep was as far now as it had been hours ago when he'd retched in the sink, her cross-eyed, lantern-jawed face churning in his head until it swirled into the boy's handsome one, a face like his own in every way, father and son — wretched fiend of a son ...
Father.
Much against his will, he had become a father. The baby hadn't been a false and frantic bid to keep him chained to her, after all. Yet for all her deceit, the witch couldn't have chosen a worse truth to tell.
Tom turned on his side. A relentless pain had engulfed his body, clawing at his lungs, his legs, and he could not muster even the thought of crawling out of the bed and the abyss of the past, of the bright, twisting alley whose shoppers had been so close, yet never enough ...
He studied the wooden beams below the ceiling, thick and sturdy despite their weathered surface, thinking with certainty that they could endure the weight of a grown man ...
The Riddles were quarrelling.
After he'd been sat, sluggish with shock, in his new bedroom — downy bed, mahogany furniture, wool rug (Tom had never thought he'd choose room twenty-seven over this) — a panicked Mrs. Riddle had crept to her own room to break the news to her husband of their son's flight from Tom. The man, whom Tom suspected to be an incipient alcoholic, had exploded with rage, shouting all sorts of curses at his wife.
"I never thought he'd react this poorly." Mary cried, soft and shaky, a hand clenched in her intricate hair, through the sliver of the room Tom could see. "I'd thought he still wanted children, if not a wife. I — I should've —"
"He made away with the daughter of that scullion. That bitch ruined him." Thomas's voice was a venomous hiss, fist slamming on the bedside table, eyes red and bulging. "He's lost his mind because of her!"
"You will not insult Tom like that!"
Tom had considered, for a moment, stepping in, between Mrs. Riddle's tear-stained, cold face and her husband's blotchy, furious one, but ultimately decided against it seeing as he was the reason their beloved son had run away in the first place. So he stayed, in the dreary, carpeted hallway, stomach twisting at the way his newfound family spoke of his dead mother, very much the scorned orphan he'd been born.
Was this why the Riddles had left him to rot in the cracks of London? Because he was a bastard borne of their son's affair with a lout's daughter, unworthy of touching even the dirt beneath their shoes?
"— he will come back, Thomas. He must ..."
But then they'd taken him in, presumably because they'd been refused a proper heir, yet what good was Tom when his existence so repulsed their only son? They'd no doubt throw him back into the streets if necessary, not caring that he might end up as dead as the mother they'd spurned ...
Footsteps snatched Tom's attention from his musings to the staircase. A girl appeared by the polished banisters, dressed in the plain clothes of a maid, eyes widening when she spotted Tom. Clearly, she'd come to listen in.
"You're Tom, are you?" she said softly, during an ephemeral lapse in the Riddles' row.
Hesitantly, Tom nodded. Never had he been more reluctant to claim his name: Tom Riddle, the freakish boy everyone disparaged; Tom Riddle, whose rich, selfish father could not have wanted him any less —
— could not have been more afraid of his unnatural son.
The maid studied him a moment longer. She was pretty, had sleek hair the colour of milk chocolate, pinned up neatly.
"You should be in bed," she declared, and without further ado began to steer him back to the quaint bedroom. Tom did not bother convincing her otherwise. He dropped into the chair by the desk — the bed was still far too neat to disturb — heavy with the memory of his father's horrified face, the distant, dream-like sight of Wool's vanishing behind the street corner. This was not the glorious escape he'd imagined on long, cold nights at Wool's, not the vindictive joy of leaving behind the grot of London or the relief of finally having a home ... with the cool wood of the desk glazing his cheek and an emptiness in his chest, Tom fell into a clingy, shallow sleep.
*
"Tom?"
He blinked, squinting in the dark at an unfamiliar room, neck aching and sweaty.
"Dear, why aren't you in bed?"
Mrs. Riddle, eyes glassy and pink, standing over him in a robe and slippers — both the Tyrian purple she seemed to favour. "The desk is no place to sleep," she said, leading his groggy self into the bed, which was cool and soft and still too tidy.
"This coat's too big for you ..." as it was shrugged off his shoulders. "We must buy you a new one."
"I'd rather keep it," Tom managed, now feeling more awake, not to mention more confused.
"Alright, then," she acquiesced, in a tone that promised him a new coat regardless, her smile weak. "Good night, Tom."
And she left.
For several moments, Tom simply sat, confounded, in the dark. She hadn't mentioned his father once, something Tom found simultaneously comforting and irritating. She had acted as if this were any normal day and he, any normal boy, a grandson who was neither a devil nor a bastard, and Tom did not know what to make of it. The only thing of certainty was that his mother was not to be mentioned, which cast even more doubt upon his theory that his father was, like him, a possessor of strange powers — for why would a man flee when faced with a boy if he could do all the things Tom could?