Chapter Four

The Nott's were holding a late dinner party, the sort that ended up raucous and wild. They had retreated to their seaside mansion in Lyme, and with the sudden cold rain and partial sleet, it was not wise to take a carriage. Instead, everyone Apparated in front of the house and quickly rushed the small distance in through the front door. In my hurry, I had forgotten to pull my hair back and secure it with a ribbon, but it appeared that many other guests were dishevelled and less prepared given the circumstances, and I found I was not as ostracized by this infraction as I anticipated.

"Lucius," Theodore said, appearing at my side soon after I entered the foyer.

He handed me a goblet of something—as I placed it to my lips and drank, I realized it was a spicy, mulled wine.

"I have heard a rumour about you," he teased.

We turned into the ballroom, where there were buffet tables and floating trays of alcohol that refilled themselves. I had no doubt there would be dancing, but it was quite more likely that tonight would revel in the debauchery of drink and frivolity; it was, after all, a reprieve from the startling cold that had settled across the county so severely and all of a sudden.

"What is it now?" I asked, with a sigh, "Am I supposedly a Veela again? Because my mother will assure everyone who will listen, her great grandmother was one…"

Theodore laughed. "I hope that one has been laid to rest, it's quite overdone. No, this one is not one I have heard before. Apparently, you have become intimately acquainted with the Black family."

"Hardly," I said, "I have spoken to Miss Black twice, one of which you were privy to see. I do not think that counts, does it?"

"Perhaps to my sister, who has had a crush on you since she could but say a handful of words," he replied, smiling.

"Amelia?" I asked, quite shocked and repulsed, because she was eleven.

She was however the most attentive of me, always asking if I would read her stories or watch her draw pictures of her house and stick figures of her family.

"No, I doubt Amelia has any notion of such things," he replied, with a strangled sort of smile, "It is Marianne who fancies you."

Miss Marianne Nott was in her sixth year of Hogwarts, so there were but four years in between us. This was of very little concern in my society, as I knew age differences could reach huge disparities. My father was ten years older than my mother, and that was not significant enough to be noted by anyone.

"She's an excellent musician," I offered, as I had little else to say about her.

"No doubt," Theodore replied, "She is also excessively moody and whiny, and as of late has been so terribly sensitive. You cannot tease her in the slightest; she explodes in a rage, the likes of which I have never seen. This summer, she actually punched and kicked me."

"It is the year before her N.E.W.T.S.," I offered.

Theodore sighed heavily. "True enough, I suppose. But it's her last year, I imagine…that is if she's to be engaged this year. She will not need to worry about those exams."

The sly way he paused and added the rest to his sentence told me he anticipated it being me who proposed to his sister. It was not a terrible idea except for the fact that Theodore admitted she was prone to moodiness and rage. But the fact still stood that I had never had a single conversation with Miss Marianne Nott, and I was not about to agree to something when I had proof women were very different than I had originally assumed.

"She'll be home from Hogwarts in Christmas," Theodore pressed on, "Perhaps you would like to spend a few weeks with us. Your family can share Christmas at ours, if you would like. I doubt my parents would mind it so."

"I'll be sure to extend the invitation to them, but I will of course stay," I said.

Theodore dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand, "Nonsense, it was my mother's idea, and she intended to ask yours this evening anyway."

Inviting me was done out of politeness, I noted, but I was obliged to come anyway. In a strange way, our conversation mirrored the whole of my society. Everything was formal, nice, and respectful, but the undercurrent was very different.

Very little could provide sufficient enough excuse to get out of a social gathering, and I had tried them all in my twenty years.

"How did your sister hear of such notions?" I asked him, "If she is tucked away at Hogwarts?"

Theodore's cheeks went red and he stammered under his breath before he turned his face away, and I realized I had caught him in a lie.

Candra Zabini entered the ballroom (and became an excellent distraction) as we made another round back toward the tables to fetch another drink, and he joined our small party. It took only a few moments before the two of them were arguing over whether it was better to behold ancestral wealth or to make one's own.

It was a natural argument I suspected Theodore to have; his own family was only a generation removed from new money families. While their blood had always been pure, their wealth had been meagre, akin to that of the Weasleys or the Gaunts. Theodore's great grandfather procured a wine business that made him fashionably wealthy, and then his ancestors continued the business but they were self-made men who were not afraid of working hard.

Conversely, Candra came from family money and there had been generations of independently wealthy men, who might have added to their pool of funds, but had never done enough to make much of a difference. As far as I knew, they lived off of the interest of their investments and patents from several centuries ago and it was unlikely to ever run out.

I quickly grew bored with them both and excused myself to dance, which seemed less painful than listening to their stupid debates. Somehow, despite their constant arguing, they approved and enjoyed one another's company.

Anyone would do, I suppose, in terms of dance partner, but recognizing one nearest me, I approached and asked Miss Mara Parkinson. She wrote my name upon her dance card quickly, and with a shy nod, followed me to the dance floor.

We stood in a line toward the middle of the couples, waiting for the music and the dance to start. She was excessively quiet, and having nothing to say myself, we remained silent for the entire dance, which took nearly half an hour. And afterward, I regretted asking her entirely. I imagine she felt I called upon her solely because I had seen her at the society meeting, but in reality, she was just the first I noticed.

With awkward embarrassment and a flush to my cheeks, I drank several more glasses of mulled wine, so that by the time I wandered away from the party to find some peace and quiet outdoors, I was overwarm and clumsy. I stumbled outdoors into the courtyard and leaned against a stone rail for support. The cold was sobering and I was too drunk to right myself, so I remained half bent over the rail. My hair fell over into the sticky, sharp edged holly bushes below full of bright red berries.

"Merlin, you can't handle your spirits, can you, Malfoy?" a voice called from behind me.

At this, I turned slowly to see who was speaking to me. Mrs. Rodolphus Lestrange was leaning against a pillar several feet from me in a deep red dress and a black winter cloak lined with fur.

"Mrs. Rodolphus Lestrange," I murmured, with a slight groan as I became quite dizzy. "A pleasure."

"Call me Bellatrix," she replied, with a small grimace.

"I have met your sister," I said, with a pant, as I turned around and slid down the rail with my back until I was sitting on the ground.

"Which one?" she asked, smirking.

"Miss Narcissa Black," I offered.

"The respectable one then," she replied, raising her eyebrows, "Good."

"The other is," I thought for a moment, "Andromeda—she is missing?"

Mrs. Rodolphus Lestrange laughed and it reverberated around the courtyard. It was nearly as cold as the air around us, but it was an echoing bark that had a sufficient level of bitterness and anger laced within it.

"Did my sister tell you she is 'missing'?" she asked.

I nodded thickly.

"Yes, Cissy's always had a knack for euphemisms," she remarked, "Yes, I suppose our sister is missing. Though I am surprised you seem to not possess the true nature of her absence."

"I confess I do not," I said, leaning forward.

Mrs. Rodolphus Lestrange was about to speak again, when the door opened and Miss Black appeared with a wild, blazing look in her eyes, as if she knew what was about to happen and had come to stop it. Something passed between the siblings that I was unable to understand—a mere look had turned Mrs. Rodolphus Lestrange away from the pillar and she went inside, her shoulder brushing her sister's as she walked by her.

"Well," Miss Black said, with a sniff, "Everyone else is in a state similar to yours, and here I find I have arrived very late."

She came forward and sat beside me on the ground. Our shoulders were up against one another and I watched her fold her fingers together in her lap. The hem of her dress was covered in a thick coat of mud.

"You look quite different without that ugly little ribbon tying back your hair," she said.

"Ugly little ribbon?" I exclaimed, my jaw opening in shock.

My sentence ended with a blur of consonants and vowels, and in retrospect, I am not so sure I said anything coherent, though Miss Black seemed able to decipher it.

"You should procure better friends, Mr. Malfoy," Miss Black said, "They are liars if they tell you it looks nice."

"It is proper etiquette for a gentleman to secure his hair back," I reminded her.

She laughed. "Yes, and it makes you look stupid. So does this cravat—here."

Miss Black turned her body and pulled the wide brimmed knotted cravat from my throat. It was worn Regency style, with my collar pronounced and the tie wide and flounced at the neck. She pocketed it and left my throat bare.

"Much better," she admitted, smoothing the front of the vest I wore beneath my jacket and cloak. "There, now you appear to walk without a pole shoved right up your—"

"Miss Black!" I interrupted loudly, and my exclamation was quite slurred. My cheeks blushed pink and I realized suddenly that I wanted nothing more than to escape.

She stifled her laugh with her hand over her mouth, and when she was done giggling she said, "You clearly never had any siblings."

"What difference does that make?" I asked.

Miss Black smiled softly, "Well for one, you have never broken a rule in your entire life—ah, ah, no. Don't argue. You wear ribbons in your hair like your great-great grandfather. That negates any anecdotal evidence to the contrary."

She pressed her index finger to my lips as she spoke, as I had intended to argue vehemently with her.

"And two, you have never been criticized in your entire life," she remarked, and at this removed her finger from my lips and took up a selection of my hair and smoothed it through her fingers, "Perhaps that is also the result of your status."

I settled further against the thick width of the rail and frowned. I understood that I had good reason to be prideful, that my family name and history afforded me a status above the likes of others and my pure blood, intellect, and magic made me worthy of praise and superior. I had never thought to assume differently than how I was raised.

"You are not wrong," I finally admitted.

"Good of you to acknowledge it," she retorted, "I know that causes great anguish to your pride."

She ran her hands through the strands of my hair and began braiding them together. I turned my head, to draw my hand to her work and smooth my own hair straight again, but I paused when I saw her bright, shimmering sapphire eyes in the pale yellow light of the wall sconce by the door across from us. And they, with wild affliction, rendered me silent of all argument or protest.

As if she sensed a change in me, she relented. She folded herself away from me and stood up, her expression suddenly dark and withdrawn.

"Mr. Malfoy," she said, "I must confess something to you."

"Very well," I replied, holding every feeling swimming before me at the edge of my tongue and praying that I was strong enough not to let anything show.

She must be betrothed. It was perhaps the only explanation I had for why she had gone suddenly serious, convinced that she had to expose her truth to me so that I might know and not find myself in the depths of despair over her—she was saving me the embarrassment of a violence inside of myself.

Miss Black was sparing me the humiliation of falling in love with her.

"You should know that my sister, Andromeda," she said, "She's not…missing. She's married."

"To whom?" I asked quietly, folding my hands in my lap, "Our family did not receive any notice in the post, and we usually do if not in person at dinner parties."

Miss Black hesitated long enough to tuck an errant hair behind her ear. "You did not receive notice because they eloped."

"I see," I replied, "And who is her husband?"

Miss Black bit her lip. "You wouldn't know him, Mr. Malfoy."

"Is he from the lower families?" I asked, furrowing my eyebrows.

Even I knew most of the family names beyond the Sacred Twenty-Eight, though none of the Sacred would do to marry them. They would gain nothing, while the lower caste would gain everything. This was how the Parkinson line had creeped in a century or so ago.

"No, Mr. Malfoy," she said, inhaling slightly, "You see, he is Muggle-born."

I flinched when I heard the words. It was a dark blot on her family to be sure, and there were whispers enough of the Black family containing such sympathizers and blood traitors.

"His name?" I asked quietly.

"Tonks," she supplied.

I had never heard of such a name. For all my mother's lectures on linguistics, I likewise could not translate the etymology of such a name off the cuff, especially not as I was then, and so I resolved to discover its meaning and history at a later point in time.

"I do not know its history," I admitted, with a small shrug.

Miss Black folded her arms across her chest. "I doubt you will find much in your library regardless; his father is a Muggle, and thus the name comes from him."

"I suppose she met him at Hogwarts then?" I asked, "Such a shocking thing—I am sorry, Miss Black. Forgive my manners, I was taken by surprise. This was not what I anticipated you would reveal."

Miss Black curled her lips and tilted her head. "Precisely what were you expecting, Mr. Malfoy?"

I blinked. The folly of my inebriation was clearly a waterfall of words flowing from my mouth with ease when around her.

"Well, obviously," I said, "Your betrothal."

And these words seemed to shock Miss Black's sensibilities more than her reveal had mine, and so she stared at me incredulously for a long moment, until, with effort, she replied, "You will never hear such an announcement part from my lips, Mr. Malfoy."

"You do not intend to marry?" I asked her, and then with a small chuckle I said, "Perhaps that is for the best."

I only meant, in consideration to her eldest sister, if she chose not to marry, her sister's husband might be charitable enough to provide for her. She also possessed two cousins who could perhaps make an arrangement for her, and though she would not live grandly by herself, she would be able to live to with her books and her midnight society and the freedom of wandering along the road with no one else but her own mind.

"Do you find me so deficient as to think it wise I never marry, Mr. Malfoy?" she asked me, her tone effusing the approximate amount of coldness in a glacier.

"On the contrary," I replied, "I find myself believing marriage would hinder your spirit."

It was unlikely that someone like Miss Narcissa Black would not marry; she was too valuable of an asset to let go to waste. She came with prestige and reputation, she came with money, power, and influence—all things a husband would want to procure for himself. So, it seemed unlikely that she would remain single for all her life, regardless of whether or not her family was charitable enough to offer it to her. It was only a matter of time before someone selected her and her parents accepted.

The fear I found in her eyes seemed to suggest she was thinking the same thing. She unfolded herself from the ground and looked at me for a moment, pausing, and then she quickly turned and went back inside without another word. An ocean of apologies crept up my throat for more than the things that I had said, but I was too late to say them.

The next morning I woke with an appropriate searing pain to match the depth of my mistakes from last night, cleaving my brain in two, as the pale beams of light fell over my half-opened bed hangings across my face. I twisted and writhed around in agony until I stopped feeling sorry for myself and the condition I caused, and traced my hands down the side of my end table until I found a metal handle at the front of the table and pulled open the drawer. I procured the small red vial of potion I kept in the top left corner of the drawer, pulled the stopper from the bottle, and used the dropper to release two drops of bitter, clear liquid onto my tongue.

It was a mundane potion, mixed of laudanum and essence of willow bark. It was an invention of my mother's, who only brewed it twice a year, and doled it out in the tiniest of vials possible. She refused to reveal the true nature of her brewing methods, so no one could replicate it. However it worked, and it was almost instant. The splitting headache receded and relaxed my entire body until I almost thought I was floating, hovering just above my bed.

With nothing to occupy my time, I slipped out of bed with my mother's copy of Pride of Prejudice, and out into the corridor to the lavatory. I drew a hot bath to cleanse the sheen of sweat that had come over me in the night and drifted into the bathwater once it had filled with soaps and oils into a swirling midnight green tempest.

Once settled, I turned the thin pages of the clothbound book to the first chapter and began to read.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

I stared at the sentence and read it again and again in bewilderment. And this amused bewilderment continued, as I continued to read, and delved into a small world at the house called Longbourn, intrinsically trapped in good humour by this small Muggle woman called Jane Austen, who somehow managed to weave magic into every scene until I was bewitched and enamoured with her world.

The bath was charmed to keep the water warm, so the only knowledge I had that time had passed was the faded green of the oils and the iridescent film left across the top of the undisturbed surface of the water, as I had not moved but to change the page in so long that the water settled peacefully. Noticing this, I slid my back down the porcelain tub until I was submerged, wetting my hair, and then sat back up to read further.

I did not notice additional passage of time until I faintly heard footsteps outside in the hallway, and as I turned my head toward the door, I realized my hair was dry again.

There was a loud knock upon the door.

"Lucius!" my father cried, "It's nearly after three, have you been in here since this morning?"

I scrabbled in sudden fear, tossing the book beneath the small table stacked with fresh towels nearest me, and hid the novel in between two of them. My father waited only a moment before he unlocked the door with his wand and threw it open.

"What is the meaning of this?" he demanded, "Are you drunk in the day time?"

"No," I snapped, and hastily twisted around in the bath to obscure my body from him as well as I could, and draped my arms against the lip of the tub. "I fell asleep."

"You are too idle!" he cried, "This has gone on for too long. You shall not go another year like this, Lucius. It is time you found an occupation. It is time you found a wife."

The irony, I thought bitterly, is that I might have my choice of five daughters if only the Bennet family was real. My father turned sharply on his heel and slammed the door, and I heard him calling for my mother as he walked back down the corridor.

Shortly after my father left, I left the lavatory and dressed for the day—casually, with no ribbon in my hair or cravat at my neck, and found my parents in my father's study on the first floor. My father hardly ever left his door open, so I understood it to be an invitation to enter. So, I did, slipping through the threshold smoothly with my hands in my pockets, looking everywhere but at them.

My eyes automatically sought my father's bookshelves, and as I wandered along without speaking to either of them, I read the covers of the spine. I wondered if these books had inspired my father into the man he was now, if they transformed him into something deeply pragmatic and influential to his community. My father was an almost perfect gentleman, if one forgave his opinions on house décor; I am not sure why I was born something softer, a broken or cracked figure against the backdrop of perfection. Perfection in name, status, and austere, I was all but immaculately designed and yet, for the first time in my life, I was beginning to wonder what was wrong with me, and why I felt so different.

Perhaps I was the monster which Mary Shelley wrote about.

It took me several glances to find a very small and thin novel with a plain blue cover and gold lettering on the spine: The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald. I had it in my fingertips, pulling this hidden small thing from its hiding place, when my father called to me from across the room.

"Lucius, come and sit by your mother and I," he said.

I left it alone in its place and turned away from his shelf and went across the room to sit in the leather backed chairs by the low burning fireplace. Despite its lack of flames, the coals burned brightly, spreading warmth across my cheeks as I sat down near it. As soon as I sat, my father stood and went to the fireplace. He rested his arm along the mantel and stared pensively into the coals, preparing himself for what I imagined would be a rather long, drawling lecture.

I thought to myself, as he seemed to fill with momentum, to make certain never to do this to any son or daughter of mine. I would not—I could not—draw myself as he did, standing like a tiny God before his family.

"Your mother and I have been very patient," he finally said, "But it is time you found your way in society and decide for yourself what type of man you wish to be. You will take over this family one day, you will bear the brunt of my work, your grandfather's work, and so forth. You will become the man of this household. It is your duty to make the Malfoy legacy proud. I cannot stand by any longer, watching you drink yourself stupid and spending all day sleeping in a bathtub like a woman—it is not done, Lucius, not by any man under this roof. The portraits have told me you are reading at all hours of the night, that you traipse around this mansion in absurd states. That you pass rooms full of women soaked to the bone from the rain because you refuse to take your breakfast indoors like a gentleman. That you wander around the woods in the middle of the night—"

He drew himself up to full stature and force as he cried, "I will not have it! You will focus on busying yourself to the benefit of society and not yourself, and once you have secured yourself a purpose, you will take a wife."

And he went on and on like this, proclaiming I must find myself as a man while also deciding the sort of man I would be anyway in the same breath, and I wondered if he knew he was being contrary or if he was just stupid. I wondered, too, if perhaps this was merely a recycled lecture from his father, and if my grandfather had heard it from his and up the line to the first Malfoy, who made a fortune and demanded things out of fear.

"Very well," I relented, at last, when he at last exhausted either his throat or his brain and could say no more.

I stood up from my chair and left my father's study. Words were jammed in my throat and chest, fluttering out into my lungs. Tied to my ribcage forever, tiny inscriptions of words I held close to my heart, but would never be allowed to say out loud. And if I truly let them in, if they permeated, if I took the words of anger into my soul the way I wanted, I knew the rage would never settle itself. I would become another lost boy upset with his parents, forever bitter by the choices of a past generation, and I knew I was not strong enough to hold that inside myself and survive it.