Chapter Fourteen
Lucius Malfoy
In my mind, I was only ill for a short stint in time, perhaps a month or so, but there was a dark, expansive blank space in my memory. The disease, in conjunction with the bitter, acrid taste of opium plied to me more generously than necessary, transported me from late summer to spring before I was well enough to leave my bed. I spent much of it in a kind of reclusive state, ingesting the novels that gave me comfort and refusing to take in any news. People were blurry edges and transitory. Visitors came from afar; I knew there were hushed whispers regarding my funeral arrangements, but my parents—mother, especially—was adamant I would recover.
Slowly, the way frost melts from the hedgerows in the garden and bright crimson rose petals push from the hardened surface, I did recover. Still, everything felt like a dream. Like Alice thrown into Wonderland and back home again, I had returned to reality with these notions: that my body sulked, craving the droplets of laudanum in my bedside drawer with increasing reverence, and that no one had seen Narcissa Black for months.
It was not that her family was explicitly allowed or invited in our society. My mother, staunchly loyal, of course, rearranged her schedule to allow Mrs. Black's company into our house. In my bedridden state, I passed a great deal of time with the two of them, both of whom gathered chairs in my room, reading aloud their favourite passages of female poets and giggling over Jane Austen's Persuasion.
One such afternoon, the rain was lashing against the windows and the sky was a tumult of passive grey. I slept much of the morning through breakfast, but my mother would not let me go without nourishment and so she and Mrs. Black brought a tray up to me. As I ate from the bed, they sat in comfortable chairs brought from another part of the house which blocked the balcony doors.
"I've an old collection of letters from Austen, you know," Mrs. Black commented, "Mostly discussing her stitching—such a talent, that girl."
"Just how did you procure such things?" My mother replied, almost shrilly, "Letters from an author! I've no such things. The Moonflowers hardly have the pull for such resources."
"I've no idea," she admitted, with a shrug, "It was my birthday two years prior and Bella gifted them to me. I wish my daughters took up embroidery. Such a lost art, so delicate and delightful…of course, the one with the supreme artful talent has absconded."
My mother nodded, her lips firms in a flat line, "Our children rely on magic for everything—there is something to the quality of one's own hand, after all!"
I scraped the spoon to the bottom dredges of a wild mushroom and thyme soup made for me, no doubt, by magic, which my mother chastised to readily. It was amusing to hear the complaints of the generation before me, sometimes so stark and bewildering I wondered if they came from another realm or existence entirely. The things they found important were profoundly unimportant to me and those my age. It wounded me to think my own values and ethics would one day become sepia-toned.
"Was embroidery a requirement?" I asked.
I startled them from their personal conversation. Perhaps they thought, merely because of my gender, I would not listen to them at all. It was one thing all women in our society did have in common, that united them despite their differences: they all thought men did not listen to them. Perhaps because, for the most part, they did not.
"Yes," Mrs. Black answered, "Among many other talents, almost all young women knew the basics of needlework and stitches. Others were artists with it, these neat, perfect rows of stitches. Oh, my French knot was fiercely beautiful once, when I was in practice!"
"C'est vrai," my mother said, nodding her head, "I wove tapestries with my mother when I was just a girl. Rich scenes of boar hunting and seasonal changes. They were lost in a house fire years ago before I was married."
"You see, Lucius," Mrs. Black explained, angling her body toward me, "This is magic done without a wand. Few things can be accomplished without one, but needlework—you transpose a bit of yourself into every stitch."
I dabbed politely at the edges of my lips with the cloth napkin provided and cast my eyes away from the two women. In a literal sense, no magic transported into the object one sewed, I was sure. Still, the idea was present in many other mediums and forms. Botany, oil painting. Writing. The idea that one imparted some piece of themselves into what they nourished was a beautiful sentiment and a kind of immortality.
What the state of my life provided me was a slowed clock. My father was in no rush to see me in an occupation or wed. In that time, I had hours in between heavy bouts of slumber to consider and evaluate. The conclusions I came to were rather simple. I preferred the slowness, the measured blocks of time I spent listening to my mother in convivial conversation with her dearest friend. Even the soft hush of my father's voice reading to me late in the night when he thought I was asleep was a comfort.
"Shall you two teach me?" I asked brazenly.
They each exchanged nervous glances.
"Well," I said, "I have little else to do."
And so, through the winter months, I learned it thus. The techniques of slipping the tiny floss of thread through the eye of the needle. Stretching the linen taught through metal hoops and the exactness of the stitches. My fingers felt overlarge and clumsy compared to my mother's small, supple fingers. Mrs. Black fell back into practice before the two of us, her lithe pictures of tulip fields and cliffside villages coming to life in bursts of coloured thread. However, I had the advantage of precision in drawing, and soon I designed our intricate patterns and scenes to embroidery. We turned to looms and tapestries made of thick carpet and onward to such large projects even my father joined and was taught the basics of a backstitch.
The tapestry I designed was a scene from memory. A small forest clearing clustered with pearlescent white flowers lighted by a heavy full moon. A silvery stone in the centre of the clearing, backed by flanks of shadowed trees, and a merry fire dancing with threads of sparks sailing up into the cloudless air. We finished in spring, and it was hung in the ballroom on display for the entire society, an open secret of the Moonflower's existence.
It was an early morning in March. My father stood on a raised scaffolding with a brush. My parents were inspired by much of our artistic endeavours in the ballroom and had the wild idea to paint an elaborate forest scene scaling the entire wall in the foyer, and with the help of my drawing, my parents were painting along the lines. Mrs. Black and I oversaw mixing the paint below them while my mother stood beneath my father and pointed out when he made errors.
"Is Narcissa well?" I asked, feigning a casual tone, though I had only just plucked up the courage to finally ask after weeks of not hearing from or seeing her.
Mrs. Black glanced up from the white paint she was mixing with dark green to create an array of lighter hues for the leaves. "She has been writing a good deal," she commented.
"Excellent," I remarked, "So she is in high spirits?"
"Ah," she replied, "Not quite. You see, she really only writes about the things that make her angry or sad."
My expression faltered so much she must have wished to make me feel better.
"There was…an incident," she explained, grimacing, "I know very little about the details, but what I could glean from her journal—yes, I read it while she was in the bath—a gentleman was quite unkind to her."
I winced. That gentleman, I realized, was me.
"I suspect it was Mr. Selwyn who harmed her," Mrs. Black continued in a low voice, "He has a reputation for such things and she used to see him frequently at St. Mungo's for her research. I knew she should not have gone without a chaperone, but he at work, so I imagined there would be little harm..."
Mr. Selwyn was my Healer. He had been diligent in his research and remedies. Though I suspected his realization of my disease had little to do with him, I had no source for his discovery. Compounded with Narcissa's seeming clairvoyance, I connected what I could not beforehand.
"Did he assault her?" I asked, idly running my thumb over each of my subsequent nails on my hand, an unconscious movement equivalent to a cat's tail swishing before it pounced.
Mrs. Black grew uncomfortable. I knew I should not have been direct, but I wanted the answer. Needed it, unfathomable that it was that someone like Narcissa could be hurt. She felt so far above everyone in my mind. Even now, even after I begged her for normalcy. And she, as she always did, twisted my words and then did not allow me the chance to explain.
"Lucius you know her," she answered, "Whatever he has done, she will never tell. And it's just the same—her reputation is ruined, this would only make it worse. I just told my husband last night…"
Before I could respond, my mother swept over to us and interjected.
"Ah, ah, Drue, Abraxas has just told me he made plans for a holiday at Windermere Lake," she said, "You and your family must come."
"Windermere?" I asked.
She turned her attention toward me with a perplexed laugh. "Windemere Lake is where all of the Moonflowers have their initiation, Lucius."
Of course, I had no notion of this location's significance. My recollection of my initiation was fraught with terror and uncertainty, even at the very end. It had never occurred to me to ask what lake I had tried to walk across. I grimaced, but my mother hardly noticed. Plans were struck—Mrs. Black insisted on bringing her entire family. This meant, I realized with a thrum of nervousness, that Narcissa would be there too.
A secondary set of motions were in plan for me too, though they could not be executed in the daytime. My parents were unrelentingly doting and cautious. I rarely walked down a corridor without seeing a flash of a servant or perhaps one of their nervous faces watching me. Both were quick to offer assistance if I might need to lean against them to walk, despite my frequent explanations that I was fully recovered.
The very next night, I remained awake until I knew they would be asleep. I dressed quietly and opened my balcony doors. The bravest woman I knew climbed up the wooden trellises scaling the wall down the side of my house. It was my turn to try.
I swung my legs over the ledge of the balcony and forced myself not to look down. Timidly, I pressed the rounded cap of my boot into the space of wood, splintering some of the vines of ivy. Taking a deep breath, I lifted myself from the safety of the railing onto the wooden structure. Fear throbbed through me and I realized with horror that I was positively terrified of heights. It was not enough to not look down—every sway and the cry of the wind sent me into a spiraling panic, my breathing wild and reckless and chest heaving. I was paralyzed and unable to move my foot down to the next rung.
The sheer amount of moxy, or perhaps madness, that possessed Narcissa to shimmy her way up and down as she pleased was not in my possession. I was solidly logical, quite understanding of the fact that if the wood had rotted or could not support my weight that I would tumble backward to the stone path below—or insidiously, the hedgerow covered in thick spikes of thorns.
I plied the night air with a generous amount of obscene phrases, cursing against the wind as I made my way in agonizing slowness to the very bottom, where I tossed my ragged body away from the hedge and sprawled myself out onto the grass. Once more, I was made aware that Narcissa Black was capable of greater feats than I and at much greater ease. I could not extract that specific level of confidence or fearlessness. I was convinced the name Malfoy translated to 'Bad Faith' because we were all bloody cowards.
When I rolled from my back to my feet, my heart was beating at regular intervals again, and the bile rising in the bad of my throat had subsided. I crossed the garden to the north side of the house, climbed a low part of the fence to the outer stretch of our property, and Apparated to the Selwyn manor.
Something was on fire. I arrived just down the street, but plumes of smoke billowed over the copse of trees blocking my view from the house. Sensing something amiss, I broke through the trees and crept through thick brambles as quietly as I could, finally ghosting my way up to the edge of the property line. The entire manor was ablaze, starting in the uppermost peak of the house. The attic, I presumed.
Three figures emerged from the house and I ducked to not be seen but peered from the bush. I recognized them with sheepish disbelief. Mr. Selwyn was dumped across the front steps by a lumbering, strong figure I identified as Rodolphus Lestrange. Sidling next to him was none other than his wife, twisting a slender knife through her fingers that cut moonlight over her shadowed face. The last one to come from the house was Cygnus Black.
I knew without that in the morning, the papers would report Mr. Selwyn's unfortunate and sudden death. The least I could do was be horrified for surmising the assassination, yet I could not produce such feeling. After all, I thought, what had I intended to do there that night?
If witches imbued bits of their magic into their stitching, I shuddered to wonder what that trio of murders had done. His body was entirely still and lifeless, face down on the ground. He had a daughter, I thought. I hoped she was spared. Bellatrix Lestrange skipped down the lane leading from the manor to the road, laughing into the wind, free-spirited and weightless until her father hissed at her to be quiet. The group made it to the end of the driveway and Apparated, and I was left alone to watch the manor spark and fade.
A bloody coward I was indeed, for I had never seen a dead body and was not about to tonight. As soon as I was sure there would be no one on the road, I left the forest and Apparated back home.
When I returned home, I found my mother in the entryway painting on the wall under candlelight. She turned when the door opened, appraising me for a long moment. My appearance was not surprising to her; she must have come around my room and found me missing, only I was too old to be reprimanded to the degree she might have wanted to.
"Most climb back up the way they snuck out, you know," she advised, "Though you were never really good at breaking rules."
Her words were oddly reminiscent, but I could not place them.
"I'm afraid my efforts were in vain," I commented, taking a seat on a bench by our door to watch her stain the tops of pines with dark green.
"Oh?" she asked, looking over her shoulder at me, "Narcissa would not open her window tonight?"
The honest confusion on my face took her aback. She put the paint and brush down and climbed down the scaffolding to the floor. I had not considered what my mother did and did not know and I presumed, from Mrs. Black pilfering through Narcissa's private thoughts, that she would have relayed each incident to my mother. That my mother suspected we were secret lovers was perplexing.
"Young men take lovers often," she mentioned, "I only thought—"
I interrupted her with an embarrassed, painful groan and pressed my head to my palms in agony.
"I was young once too, you know!" she protested, folding her arms across her chest primly, "It's not like I do not remember…"
"I'm not," I snapped, "Not with her or anyone."
She bit her lip for a moment, deliberating. I wondered if my mum thought in multiple languages if she slipped up and had to translate her thoughts into the two languages I understood in order for me to comprehend her. I also wondered if perhaps there were languages where her thoughts were described more accurately and if she struggled to say them with a foreign tongue. She had insisted on speaking French for most of my childhood, but my father refused to bridge his own learning, and so she was mostly diverted to speaking English.
"She has many admirable qualities," she finally said, "Intelligence is more valuable than beauty, though she possesses both well enough."
"I am very well acquainted with all of her attributes, Mum," I replied.
"There are no blights on our name," she admitted, tugging lightly at her robe sleeve, "Our reputation could survive if you chose her."
I sighed. A pragmatist to a fault, I had weighed and balanced the scales more than once. I knew the risks of marrying Narcissa and the benefits too.
"I asked," I admitted.
My mother's eyebrows disappeared into her hairline. Her vague nudging was nothing compared to the reality that I concluded what she meant me to do long before she had chosen to speak to me about it.
"She said no," I continued, "Mrs. Black talked to me and suggested it, though I was not entirely against the idea in the first place. She is a close friend. The marriage would not be a match made poorly, given her family's background. Her sisters are not her, I would see beyond the grievances they placed on the family—"
"Druella talked to you?" she interrupted, "About you marrying her daughter?"
My mother had gone cold and rigid, her fingers wrapped tightly around each of her shoulders as she held herself.
"Yes," I replied, "And you cannot be angry with her, for here you are in the middle of the night suggesting the same. It's just you're too late. Narcissa will have nothing to do with me."
She paused, attempting to digest the information I had given her and not react to it. No doubt she had the urge to shout at her friend for going behind her back, a sentiment I might have understood were it not the desperation of a mother wishing to save her youngest daughter, who was too stubborn to ever accept it in the first place.
"Why will she not have you?" she finally asked instead of the myriad of other, harsher questions she no doubt had.
"Because she does not wish to be married," I said, "And because, the last time she visited, I asked her for normalcy. She misunderstood me—I never meant to sever our friendship, only that I needed fewer midnight adventures in the forest and more time to heal."
"What woman does not want to be married?" My mother implored, and waving such a thought off with her hand, she said, "Is this because of this writing business? She wants to be the next Austen? Let me tell you, Austen had a lover or two in her time, mark me. She might not have married…and anyway, it will not do. She will have to mature eventually and see the error in her ways. Then she will realize she could have married you instead of a low-ranking family like her sister."
I tried not to laugh at the absurdity of imagining Narcissa marrying anyone at all.
"This is the folly of the Moonflowers," she ranted, growing impatient, "In my generation, we were already married and settled. It made sense this way. Now, we've a bunch of girls getting notions in their heads that they can be independent without a husband. Perhaps that will become so with their children, but it is not so now. Even the authoresses who never married or died too young to do so wrote about love as the greatest experience a character could undergo."
"Yes," I argued, though my voice was even and somewhat low, "but there is a difference between love and marriage."
"Love doesn't always happen at once," she reminded me, as she had many times throughout the course of my adolescence and into adulthood, "Often times it is a slow-waking thing that hits you when you least expect it."
I knew despite my indignation toward my mother's ideals, she was still more rebellious and independent than many women her age or others like her. Perhaps that was the job of each new generation, to take such values beyond what his or her parents could. The downside meant there was this garish, distinguishable gap between parent and child that could not be mended despite all efforts, and so both groups felt awash on an island by themselves.
"Well," I said, standing up from the bench, "I don't know how one mitigates a rejected marriage proposal into a proclamation of true love, Mum, but if I manage, I'll let you know."
I briefly touched her shoulder as I went by her on my way up the stairs to bed. Did I love Narcissa Black? Revered her, remained constantly in awe of her, sure. I was even intelligent enough to fear her a bit. Love seemed like something much more than those things, though. My feelings did not quite feel like they were…enough, somehow.