She drowned the fifth glass of whisky this night and shivered by the burning fire. That boy. The Riddle boy.
She remembered how she had to prise the little baby out his mother's stone cold body. And his mother…
The woman was at the brink of death when she tottered to Wool's Orphanage and pounded the doors, begging to be let in. The Orphanage was unusually cheerful, celebrating New Year Eve with a party of sorts, when the stranger's arrival reminded them how cruel and unjust the world really was.
She was hardly older than Mrs. Cole herself at the time but her sorrowful grey looked like they had seen a thousand deaths. White fluid dripped down her bare thighs, onto her worn shoes as she clutched her rounded belly in agony.
Please help me, she gasped, my baby is coming!
Mrs. Cole had seen too much of this already among the underclass of London - desperate women selling their bodies and giving birth to unwanted children was endemic in the city's inner slums.
Come in, Mrs. Cole replied. The stranger staggered inside.
The young woman went almost immediately into labour. Curious onlookers emerged from the party and screamed with alarm when they caught sight of her lying on the floor, rivulets of blood running down her thin legs. The brown faded blood stains were still on the carpet years later, a cruel reminder of her death.
I'll get the doctor, cried one of the onlookers
There's no time: she's in labour already and the doctor is on holiday anyway, responded Mrs. Cole...
The woman dropped dead as soon as the baby was born, as though she had lost all the will to live.
Another abandoned child, another mouth for us to feed, Mrs. Cole had thought, feeling a sense of deep sadness.
Just a few hundred meters away, she had heard crowds of celebrators cheer on the New Year. Fireworks streamed through the sky and erupted into beads of colourful light. Flowers against the darkness. A new year, a new life. At that moment, she felt not all was lost. Life was precious.
The sleeping babe in her arms looked so at odds with the last traumatic moments of his mother's existence. Thick curly lashes framed his smooth pale skin and a down of rich chocolate brown hair crowned his head; Mrs. Cole was grateful that he did not resemble with his mother at all, whose face seemed misshapen and distorted, like a circus freak's.
Tom... Tom Marvolo Riddle. I want to name him after his papa and my own father.
Her last dying wish.
Yet nobody called Tom Riddle or Marvolo came looking for the child.
Whilst the last of the fires died out, Mrs. Cole emptied the whisky bottle in one slug. Tomorrow she had to sort out the latest ' accident', one no doubt involving that Riddle boy again. What an odd child he was. There was something... unsettling about the way he looked at you and his eyes were so cold and dark that looking into them was like peering into the depths of a bottomless well.