1943
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.
After Major Tindall's shocking news, the rest of Tom's evening passed in a confusing welter of emotions.
He was asked to dance a few times by other guests, which he refused. He was asked to pose for the photographer, and since it was Hermione who had asked him, he couldn't refuse without reneging on their deal. Later, Tom tagged along as Hermione engaged several academics in an animated discussion about the newest medical breakthrough, some anti-infective treatment called 'Penicillin'. Apparently it was extracted from fermented fungus, which to him was just as off-putting as milking Murtlaps for their tentacle secretions. Murtlap Essence, the magical world's equivalent of Penicillin, had been invented by wizards several centuries ago, so Tom found the Muggle invention not as much of an achievement as all the doctors and scientists thought it to be.
He listened with only half an ear, his thoughts churning from one idea to another; there were so many things he wanted to do, courses of action he could take instead of standing around and sipping seltzer water while hearing old men reminisce about the days when laudanum was considered the Magic Bullet of modern medical science.
The options that he'd come up with were to:
Go back to his room at the Leaky Cauldron, throw up a Silencing Charm, then toss the furniture at the walls until nothing was left but broken wood and scraps of bedsheet. (That was equivalent to saying farewell to his room deposit, unless he repaired everything before the day maid arrived to deliver the paper and change the towels.)
Go back with the Grangers and set fires in their cellar. Incendio, Confringo, Bombarda, Reducto, some of the more destructive spells in his répertoire, but had never had a place to cast at the magnitude that he knew he was capable of, over and over until he was wrung out and trembling with exhaustion.
Go to the Office of Military Records in Westminster, less than two miles away from the hotel, which would be closed from tonight until Monday morning. He could sneak around the back and try to pick the locks with magic—wandless magic if he could manage it—and at this moment, Tom missed Peanut more than ever. He could use his wand if he had to; Travers, whose father worked at the Ministry, had said that underage wizards got two or three strikes unless it was a serious offense, and anything not serious could be appealed by knowing the right person.
Go to King's Cross Station, less than a mile away. Hop on the next train out to Leeds or York, then look for his family. There could only be so many Riddles, and he knew where to start—Major Tindall had told him that Lieutenant Thomas Riddle was a few years younger than he, born in or around 1880. A prominent family in the area, the Riddles were, one that sent their sons to expensive public schools. There would be records in the archives of the civil authorities.
And then what? Hermione would ask. He could already hear her voice in his head, reciting facts and figures from her encyclopaedic brain. York is two hundred miles from London. The train goes fifty miles an hour and stops at every other major station in the Midlands. If you leave now, what are you going to do when you get there, assuming you aren't forced to wait for transfers?
Knock on their door at four in the morning? Shout, "Lo and behold, the prodigal son has returned!" while they're standing at the door in their dressing gowns?
Laying out his options like this showed him that, while he could think of many amusing things he could do to people for whom he had no reason to like, there was no clear objective to his actions. It was an emotional response, which he would have enjoyed—just as he would have enjoyed seeing Lestrange permanently crippled, Hastings made a laughingstock for life, or Nott brain-damaged beyond repair—but there was no tangible gain beyond his own amusement. A few years ago, he might have deemed it worth it, and to be truthful about it, some part of him still did.
However...
Wasn't it wasteful?
What if they could be useful?
He'd never know, not if he incapacitated them first and realised later that he had questions he wanted to ask.
("When you've purged your senators," Hermione had once asked him, "who will collect your taxes?")
There were things he wanted to know, questions missing their answers.
He wanted to hear them answered.
(Another part of him wanted to hear them plead.)
Were you so confident to think that no one would ever know?
Was it but a momentary lapse of judgement to you?
What did you think would happen?
Why were you so weak—
How could you—
How dare you—
And in that instant, all of his emotions narrowed into a sharp point, a single focused bead of rage. A wave of righteous anger blazed through him, a sensation that smarted in his throat like his first taste of brandy, setting his skin afire; it was burning heat from his eyes to his veins to the very tips of his fingers, and his right hand—his wand hand—curled around something that should have been there and found nothing.
In his chest there grew a blistering cold, unfurling itself in the crucible of his wrath, itching, stinging, aching—
Numbing him from the inside out, immune to the raw burn on the surface of his skin, freezing his limbs where he stood; it held him breathless and speechless and motionless, held him like a fist clenching around his heart.
How dare he?
They would see how he dared.
They would see it at four in the morning, in their dressing gowns and nightshirts and carpet slippers.
Why should it matter to Tom what they wore? What he wore, what he ate, where he slept—none of that had ever mattered to Thomas Riddle.
His hand slipped into his jacket, feeling for the narrow pocket along the breast that the Diagon Alley tailor had added to a Muggle-made pattern for a few extra sickles.
"Tom?" came Hermione's voice from behind him, the heels of her slippers clicking over the floor, "are you alright? I told Mum, and she said she would start making enquiries tonight, and ringing people up tomorrow if they might know something and aren't here now. You must be excited; I know how you've always wondered who your family were."
He blinked. Intention drifted from thought; thought dispersed from the vague stirrings of action; the connections between What-Could-Be and What-Will-Be began to dim and dwindle, pulling apart like a length of fraying rope, half-formed threads vanishing before they reached an irreversible point of convergence.
His hand stilled from where it pressed over his heart, over the carved yew handle warmed by his skin, a layer of worsted wool between it and him.
Tom stared down at the picked-through selection of things-on-crackers laid out on the canapé table. The hours had drawn toward midnight, and the families who'd brought young children were long gone. The remaining guests were the old men nursing their brandies, and the younger couples who wanted to enjoy the festive ambience and live music for as long as they could, before they had to go back to their war-fraught lives. A life where casualty lists were announced on the wireless each evening, and newspaper headlines each morning warned of enemy saboteurs behind every corner, or some new directive by the government meant to safeguard the populace, but only served to curtail personal freedoms.
He had wandered off to a corner of the ballroom, far from the dance floor, and out of range of the tobacco smoke drifting from the veterans' section.
Cigarettes. He had never liked them, even as a child who had seen tobacco use as a near-universal habit among the adults of South London. Nowadays, he considered it a vice shared by the stupidest and weakest-willed members of society, much like addiction to drink, gambling, or solicitation of the flesh.
Street proselytisers called them Social Evils.
Tom saw them for what they were: filthy Muggle habits.
Their existence had, a few years ago, inspired Tom's childbearing license system, which Hermione had rejected out of hand within minutes of his pitching the idea to her.
"My father is a M—" Tom stopped before he finished the word, then continued in a hoarse voice, "a You-Know-What. No wizard would volunteer himself in a war against farmers and tribesmen."
Hermione blinked at him in disbelief. "Does it matter? My dad's not a wizard either. He went to war; he's a veteran just like yours. You should be proud that your father served Britain—and he did it as an officer, too."
"I assumed for so long that he was the source of my... unusual gifts," said Tom. "That not having given me anything else in my life, at least he'd given me a legacy of some worth."
"Why is a legacy even important?" said Hermione, pursing her lips in as she always did when she was clearly frustrated with him, but still trying to follow his thoughts to their logical conclusion. "I don't have one, and it doesn't bother me. I've never cared if other people had one or not, since nothing about it changes who they are as people—not their achievements, or their potential. With or without a legacy, you're still Tom to me. The Tom I've always known, who likes the colour green, reading about Roman history, chocolate without nuts, or the smell of new books.
"The people who read your articles don't care a whit about legacies—they don't even know the real person behind the pen name. Yet they still like what you've written, they listen to what you say, and you've won their recognition on your own merits. If anything, having your gifts be a result of another person's legacy diminishes your own efforts, as if someone else is to be given credit for the work you've done. And I don't like that, not in the least, because nothing about that is fair!"
Tom was silent for a half minute, contemplating the merits of her argument.
Avery and Travers: they were two boys who had grown up shouldering their respective family legacies. Avery bore the weight of a dusty old name that struggled to remain relevant in a society where those old names were becoming an ever smaller minority, due to the influx of Muggleborns and war-displaced émigrés. To stay afloat in his academics, Avery took remedial tutoring with magical newcomers Riddle and Granger, all while hoping his noble parents never found out what their once proud son had reduced himself to.
Travers, on the other hand, lived his entire life in the shadow of his father's career—Auror by twenty, fast-tracked to Head Auror, then head of one the largest Ministry departments, the DMLE, which was only rivalled in importance by the DIMC, International Magical Co-operation. Travers got private summer lessons, but had never once ranked among the top five in Hogwarts' Duelling Club. Lacking the most basic of Auror instincts, he was physically unco-ordinated and fumbled his wand draw during their speed duelling sessions.
Tom had very rarely examined the lives of the people he interacted with, beyond what it took to manipulate their thoughts and actions into a more convenient direction. Other people were like starlings to him, their lives irrelevant to his own. If he was a star, then they were bits of orbiting asteroid; if he was the steak sirloin—and he was really scraping the bottom here for these analogies, but he did what he had to do to make a point—they were the parsley garnish. When they weren't making themselves useful to him, their ground state of existence revolved around proving him to be superior in every possible way.
"The Roman Republic had a concept they called the Novus homo," said Tom in a conversational tone, while Hermione looked puzzled at his apparent non-sequitur. "It means 'New Man', and it referred to someone who was elected to Rome's highest public office, someone who couldn't trace his ancestry up the line to a family member who had served before."
"I'm sorry, but... what?" said Hermione, perplexed by this shift in their conversation. He'd observed years ago that Hermione thought in straight lines, making logical connections between Points A and B, through to Point Z at the end with no deviations along the way. It was useful at times: for example, when he wanted her to check that his recipes and spell diagrams were written with the right sequence of instructions. At other times it was self-limiting, or so Tom believed; his personal thought patterns could be described in terms of intuitive leaps. Illogical to Hermione, who complained about it when she read over his notes and the first drafts of his articles, but it wasn't nonsensical to him.
It was brilliance.
"You've always been clear about how much you dislike the Ministry of Magic, the whole idea of working your way through the ranks for a run at the Minister's office." She paused. "Unless you've changed your mind about that?"
"I'm not interested in being Minister—"
"But you said that there's never been a Muggleborn Minister before!"
"I never said I wanted to be the one," Tom interjected. "I was going to say that the New Men of Rome earned their right to rule; through their achievements, they elevated their entire lineage to the rank of nobility, and forged their own legacies."
"So," said Hermione, tilting her head, "you were going to say that my argument was valid?"
"Possibly..." Tom gritted out.
"And that I'm right?"
"Not in so many words, no."
"Oh, Tom," Hermione sighed. "You can lie through your teeth all you want, but no one can lie through a hug."
And having said that, she flung her arms around his chest and squeezed him in a tight hug.
He was struck by a bizarre clash of familiar and alien sensations: Hermione smelled the same as she always did, sweet and floral; it was a scent that clung to her skin and clothes so that when she shed her outer robe during duelling practice, he always knew which robe out of the pile of shapeless black uniforms was hers. Her skin was soft, her body a warm and solid weight, her hair a gentle tickle against his own skin.
But some things were so completely different that his memory stuttered halfway through dissecting the differences between Then and Now, where Then was a fond recollection that he'd analysed from all possible angles during late night meditation sessions in his four-poster, and Now was Hermione Granger in a ribbon-trimmed evening gown pressed against his chest. This version of Hermione was inordinately small compared to the one of his memories: this time, her arms didn't reach all the way around, and the top of her head stopped right under his nose, leaving her fluffy hair to whisk against his lips.
She lifted up her face to look at him, and said, "I think I'd have been devastated if someone else had been made Prefect instead of me. No, not 'think', I know would be. And every time I saw someone with a Prefect badge—it doesn't matter what House—I'd look at it and ask myself why I didn't have one. I'd be crushed if I got my O.W.L. results and saw an Acceptable where I'd expected Outstanding. I'd spend weeks questioning myself, wondering what went wrong. Was it me? Did I not study enough? Did I finish the test without noticing that the back of the page had questions I never even saw? Did the professor teach the subject poorly, or was it the examiner and the textbook author?"
She gave him a wry smile and pressed her cheek to his starched white shirtfront. "I bet all of that sounds stupid to you. And honestly, it is remarkably silly, only I'd never know it unless I'd stopped stewing in my own misery. Because the truth of it is that it doesn't matter. So what if I never got to sit in the Prefect compartment? So what if I got an A, or even all A's? None of that would ever change the truly important things: that Mum and Dad love me, and will always love me no matter what. That if I had to run away right now and live in a tent for the next three months, you'd come with me. And that I'm a witch who can do the impossible with a wave of my wand. Nothing could ever take magic away from me. Not even a Troll mark."
In a much softer voice, she added, "There are things you'll always have, too. You're a wizard. You're brilliant. You're good at teaching and writing. You have ridiculously perfect penmanship. You have magic—and nothing else can ever compare to that."
His arms rose up, wrapping tightly around Hermione's waist. She was scarcely more than an armful—at what point had she become so small? He couldn't remember, as he had never gotten into the custom of returning her hugs; it was always Hermione who designated the location and duration of each hug, while he stood stiffly and allowed her to do so. He did enjoy it while they lasted, something he wouldn't have admitted a year and a half ago, but until now he'd always refused to participate, believing that there was something undignified about the whole concept of extemporaneous physical contact.
Tom rested his chin on the top of her head. "I also have you."
("Why on Earth do I need friends like them?" a twelve-year-old Tom had once asked. "I have you.")
"Don't be silly," said Hermione. "We have each other."
A minute of reflective silence came and went.
"I read in a book," Hermione began, starting her sentence in the same fashion as she had a hundred times before, "that in Ancient Rome, many Romans chose their own families. They used to adopt children left and right back then. And not just children, but grown adults, too."
"They also chose their own ancestors," Tom said. "Every other Emperor, once he got himself crowned, claimed descent from the gods."
"I don't think that's the same thing, Tom."
"Of course it is, Hermione. Which of us is the designated fact interpreter here?"
.
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For the next several days, Tom joined Hermione at the Grangers' house after breakfast at The Leaky Cauldron.
Ostensibly, they'd decided on this arrangement for practical reasons.
Hermione wanted to practice driving while her magic use was restricted during the summer, a skill she deemed useful in the event she decided to stay in London after leaving Hogwarts, or if she was faced with an emergency. In the meantime, it would be useful to get around Muggle London when they lacked access to the Floo Network. (The lack of a Floo Connection was acknowledged by the Granger family as a terrible inconvenience, but Hermione couldn't lodge the registration forms until her seventeenth birthday, which was less than three months away.)
So she drove the family motorcar thirty miles from Crawley to Charing Cross to pick him up, since she knew the roads well from being chauffeured by her parents over the previous summers. Her father had attached a Medical Corps sign to the rear window, civilian motorists having become rare to non-existent due to the constriction on petrol rations.
Tom used their time together to work on various projects: for Tom, it was writing articles for his advice column, which the Editor-in-Chief had wanted published fortnightly if possible; for Hermione, it was enchanting the motorcar to ensure her parents could still use it when she was away at Hogwarts for the school term. She had considered using the Refilling Charm on a dozen jerry cans for her father to top up the tank when it was empty, but the idea of leaving that much petrol laying around when an aerial bomb could fall at any moment made it a more dangerous idea than it was worth.
"Every time I get in, I feel like I'm boarding a metal death machine," remarked Tom, gingerly closing the passenger side door from where he sat inside the Grangers' motorcar. "How do Muggles even trust these things?"
"I trust them," said Hermione primly. She tugged on her driving gloves and started the motor into neutral. "This 'metal death machine' was built on an assembly line. Every part is identical to a part used in thousands of other motorcars, and if they combusted spontaneously on contact, I'm sure someone would have noticed." Looking both ways, she peeled the motorcar out into the thin flow of traffic, adding, "I don't see how it's any different from trusting the Hogwarts Express, which was built by Muggles—stolen from them without payment, I'll have you know—but everyone gets on it every year, even the purebloods, and no one complains about it... Well, they do about the trolley's snack selection, or the lack of it. But that's a separate issue."
"The reason why they don't complain is because the Express has the Minister for Magic's seal of approval on it," Tom pointed out, leaning back into the leather upholstery of the front bench seat, one eye watching Hermione work the foot pedals with her plimsolled driving shoes.
Driving a motorcar was less intuitive than a wizarding broomstick, where one merely had to shout Up! at it to get it started, then lean to change directions or altitude. Simple enough for an eleven year old to operate, although some specialty skills weren't taught in Flying Class—he'd heard Rosier and Lestrange debate a technique called 'countersteering' from their Quidditch magazines, which involved turning the broom in the opposite direction than the way you wanted to go; apparently it was something the professionals had come up with to turn fast corners on the brand new Comet 180's.
"Even though it was a major breach of the Statute to steal the train, the Minister back then signed off on it, and made the Obliviators hush it up," Tom continued. "Purebloods complaining about the Minister being a Muggle-lover for using their contraptions wouldn't have a leg to stand on because everyone saw how she robbed them blind. Platform Nine and Three Quarters used to be a part of King's Cross, and she took that too—not only can't the Muggles see it, but they've forgotten that it exists."
Hermione's eyes darkened; her hands gripped the steering wheel, leather gloves creaking at the seams. "Don't they realise how contradictory it is? Muggles produce inventions that are worth the effort of taking, but not worth compensating them for? The whole thing must have happened last century, based on the design of the Express, but somehow I doubt that anyone since then has ever thought about giving it back. I know the average wizard doesn't think much of Muggles—"
Not just the average wizard, thought Tom, but he kept that comment to himself.
"—But even if they overlook who the victims were, they can't deny that theft is a criminal act!" Hermione scowled, shoulders hunched inwards. "It's wholly indefensible. It's unconscionable!"
"Wouldn't things be different if you were in charge?" asked Tom in an innocent voice.
"I, for one, wouldn't sign off on institutional thievery," Hermione bit out.
"What would you sign off on?"
"Heaps of things!"
"Hmm," said Tom, his eyes half-lidded in the bright sunlight streaming in through the windshield. "You'd never sign anything if you stayed in Muggle London."
Hermione shook her head in bemusement. "I know what you're doing, Tom."
"It's called 'helping'," Tom replied, folding his arms behind his head. "Or, to be more precise, helping you to help yourself help other people."
"Sometimes I wonder if you ever listen to yourself talk," said Hermione, her lips pressed together where she was suppressing a smile.
"All the time," Tom answered, "and I never tire of it."
"Sometimes I wonder if we'd be friends now if we hadn't been limited to sending letters to each other back then." Hermione looked aside, her left hand reaching for the gearshift as they entered the Grangers' neighbourhood of Argyll Street. "If I had to listen to you speak at length—without knowing you—I can't say I'd have been won over."
"But I managed it in the end, didn't I?" asked Tom, in a distracted tone, fiddling with the handles on the inside of the passenger door. Why did the passenger even need a side mirror? "With the help of my ridiculously perfect penmanship, naturally."
Hermione flushed. "You're never going to forget that, are you?"
"I'll always remember such a heartfelt speech; I'm not afraid to say that it won me over." Tom, who had been gazing out of the window, suddenly straightened up in the bench seat, cocking his head. "Someone else's motor is blocking your drive. You'll have to park in the street."
"Right," said Hermione firmly, knuckles tightening over the steering wheel. "Hold on to something—I haven't quite got the knack of parking parallel."
They made it into the house twenty-five minutes later, after Tom had discovered the purpose of the passenger's side mirror. With the mirror, he could see where Hermione had drawn up to the kerb at an angle instead of being level with it. Hermione had had to reverse the motor, then inch back in until she'd gotten it straight; Tom had almost begun to regret pointing out Hermione's mistakes, as he hadn't expected she'd take the Drivers' Road Regulations Handbook so seriously.
"You'll have to move the motor once whoever parked in your drive leaves," Tom was saying. "The third time was almost straight enough; no one would have noticed that you were off by ten degrees." His shoes had only touched the footpath outside the Leaky Cauldron before he'd slid into the motorcar, but he wiped them on the doormat anyway, as it was both the hygienic and polite thing to do.
Hermione unbuttoned her driving coat in the vestibule, hanging it up on the coat stand inside the door. She hesitated, one arm raised over a hook, eyeing the row of coats occupying the other spaces.
"That's funny." Hermione's voice came out soft and subdued, as if she was speaking to herself, "I can't remember Mum ever having a mink in this colour. She usually keeps her furs boxed away until September."
"Maybe she bought a new coat?" Tom suggested, willing to humour her, but nevertheless impatient to dive into his magical projects. There was an article he'd written on vanity charms that he wanted to show Hermione; she'd always had a good sense about what things best appealed to the average witch.
"Mum hasn't bought any new furs since before the war," said Hermione. "And she wouldn't buy any now—with the rationing on, she's been careful with what we get from Diagon Alley. I don't think this is her coat."
Upon saying that, she stuffed her driving gloves into the pocket of the matching coat, leaving them hanging in the vestibule. She ventured cautiously into the house proper, looking both ways, one hand pressed to the pocket of her skirt. Tom followed her, reaching for his own wand.
Hermione's soft-soled shoes padded quietly over the linoleum floor tiles of the entrance-way, passing an umbrella stand in the corner, Wellington boots on a floor rack, and a series of framed botanical illustrations on the walls, depicting the various stages of a mushroom's life cycle. Tom didn't understand why anyone had chosen them for home decorating, but he supposed that to the scientific sort, mushrooms were a natural curiosity, being something in between animal and vegetable without falling into either category. For some reason, people liked collecting curiosities. He himself enjoyed rare spells, particularly the more gruesome medical ones: one of his recent favourites was the Debridement Spell, which the Healing textbooks recommended for removing warts or cleaning wounds before applying potions, but could be cast at a greater power to pare off flaps of skin as easily as peeling a potato.
The dining room, when they peeked in, was empty. So was the family sitting room, where a basket of yarn balls occupied the squashy armchair closest to the currently silent wireless set.
The Grangers' formal parlour, however, was not empty.
There was a stranger sitting in the parlour, looking mildly distressed by such a vivid representation of the middle class lifestyle. She clutched her handbag in her lap as if she was afraid that someone would jump up from behind the settee and snatch it out of her hands. The way her lips were pursed was familiar to Tom; he'd seen it on many a Slytherin girl when they passed the latest victim of one of Peeves' pranks in the corridors, or the unlucky girl they'd unanimously decided to shun for the week. (As Tom limited his contact with the girls in his House, he didn't know how the winner was chosen. Not that he particularly cared; they were interchangeable to him for the most part, being as that they rarely said anything interesting or did anything useful.)
The stranger—she was a woman—hadn't glanced their way when Hermione entered the parlour, hand to her pocket. She sat stiff, with her posture straight and her legs crossed demurely at the ankle, dressed in a matched jacket and skirt in a handsome hacking tweed with a line of pearls peeking out at the throat, a heavy gold filigree brooch pinned over her breast, and shiny heeled shoes on her feet that bridged the gap between sensible and fashionable. While her clothes were an indication of her station, her hair was an indicator of her age: it was a rich brown streaked with grey and tightly pinned up at the back of her head, showing that she was much older than either of Hermione's parents. Its severity suited the tight lines around her eyes and mouth, which was pinched together as if she was in the midst of doing something she regretted, and was halfway to changing her mind and taking her leave at once.
"Excuse me?" Hermione stepped away from the door and into the parlour. "I'm sorry, but who are you?" she asked, but the sharpness in her tone gave the impression that her real question was, 'And what are you doing in my house?'
The woman's eyes flicked over her, noting Hermione's fluffy hair and her casual summer clothing—white blouse with a girlish round collar, pleated skirt, knitted stockings—all of which were unremarkable for a school student during the holidays.
"Mrs. Mary Riddle of Hangleton," the woman said, not rising from her seat. "Pleasure to make your acquaintance." Her manner of speech was precise and crisp to the point of frostiness, with not a single extended vowel or dropped consonant that one would expect of a Yorkshire native; in fact, it had very little to distinguish it from the urbane public school dialect spoken by Roger Tindall and his set.
"Pleasure," came Hermione's automatic response, manners taking over in lieu of the tactful affront that Tom could tell she'd been prepared to deliver. "I'm Hermione Granger, daughter of Doctor and Mrs. Granger of Crawley. You must be Tom's—"
Mrs. Mary Riddle's attention was suddenly diverted from Hermione, having noticed the figure standing behind her at the doorway.
Hermione glanced over her shoulder, then at Mrs. Riddle sitting before her in an itchy, horsehair-stuffed formal armchair. The woman stared at Tom, eyes scanning him from top to toe and lingering on his face; her expression morphed from one of shock, to a kind of misplaced familiarity, then to a queer delight, her eyes brightening up and the lines around her eyes not quite as cold and severe as they had been.
Tom stared back.
"You look just like your father," she breathed.
Those two words, Your Father, had never in Tom's life represented anything good. When he was a child, it was something that other children had but which he had never known, and all his tricks and talents could never seize it from them to bestow it upon himself, to cleanse himself of the ignorance that they flaunted in his face. When he was old enough for school, they were words that fell from the mouth of Reverend Rivers, spoken in tones of solemn disapproval, describing a majestic yet remote figure who was more discipline than guidance, more symbol than man. Your Father was Everyone's Father, omnipresent and universal, and hearing the Reverend read his sacred words to the orphanage flock had only made the six-year-old Tom feel smaller and more insignificant than he already felt.
And in his most recent memories, Your Father was a character known second-hand, talked about in muttered voices among the people who knew of him. A disgrace who had fallen from social esteem; a gentleman in only the economic sense of the word, lacking the true gentility of his rank due to the public airing of his misbehaviours.
Tom's hand dropped down to his trouser pocket, groping for the yew handle that stuck out past the edge. As his fingers closed around it, he felt the tight clasp of another set of fingers closing around his wrist.
He'd taken a step forward without conscious thought.
"Tom!" Hermione hissed. "What are you doing!"
She pushed his arm down where he was fighting her to lift it up, raise his wand—point it—aim it—
"Hermione? Tom?" called Mrs. Granger from behind them. "I've just put on some tea. There's butter cake, too—I know you've never been partial to the ones shortened with margarine."
Mrs. Granger bustled past them, burdened by a loaded tea tray, unaware that Tom had almost drawn his wand on a Muggle. On a houseguest.
But Hermione knew it, and she took hold of his right hand, fingers twining through his, pulling him away from his wand and over to a settee.
"This is my house, not Diagon!" Hermione's voice was a harsh whisper. "You can't do that here! You'll get me expelled!"
She didn't let go of his hand as Mrs. Granger set the tray on the coffee table and began passing out cups and teaspoons. In addition to the teapot, there was a platter containing a sugar-dusted Victoria sponge, and several small pots on the side with sugar cubes for the tea, and beaten cream and lemon curd to go with the cake.
Mrs. Granger, as the hostess, poured the tea without spilling a drop, and after the circulation of the sugar tongs and the cream, brushed off her hands and took a seat at the sofa opposite Tom and Hermione.
"I suppose the introductions ought to come first," Mrs. Granger spoke, smoothing down the folds of her apron. "Mrs. Riddle—?" she nodded in the direction of the other woman, "my daughter, Hermione, and her friend from school, Tom Riddle. Tom, this is Mrs. Riddle, your grandmother and your new guardian."
Hermione coughed over her tea. The serving knife in Tom's hand skidded over the platter, splattering cake crumbs and globs of cream over the coffee table.
"Guardian—?"
"Grandmother?!"
They spoke at once, both of them utterly flabbergasted. Hermione's face was pink where she'd kept herself from spraying tea over the sofa; Tom himself had paled, his eyes wide in shock, clutching onto the knife when he couldn't go for his wand, which had, for the last few years, been the solution for the vast majority of his life's problems.
(When Gordian's knot had been brought before Alexander the Great, the Emperor had taken his sword and solved the puzzle with one swing. Tom's yew wand was the same thing—a single wave could obliterate most obstacles from existence.)
"I should explain," began Mrs. Riddle, setting her spoon by the side of her saucer with a definitive clink. "A week ago, a vicious rumour which began circulating around London was brought to my attention by a group of concerned souls, including Mrs. Granger and Mrs. Blanche Tindall of Weybridge. This rumour cast aspersions upon my husband's character, made insinuations upon myself that I could not indulge, and thus I sought to redress them. And to my surprise, I found that this rumour had its root in something that could not be brushed aside for being unworthy of my—my family's—consideration."
Mrs. Riddle undid the clasp of her handbag and drew out a small square of paper, which she turned the right way around and placed on the coffee table, clear of the spilled cream and cake crumbs.
A photograph, a few inches per side, black and white.
Hermione's face smiled up at him, and at her side stood Tom in his tailcoat and evening whites, his expression stony and cold. His brows were set stubbornly on his pale face, his eyes shadowed in contrast to the fairness of his skin; his dark hair fell over one side of his forehead in an elegant wave. In the photograph, he made a striking sight, even in the static image produced by a Muggle camera.
"I've come to London to rectify a great disservice," Mrs. Riddle continued, and her gaze fell once again on Tom, as if she was attempting to devour him with her eyes. "My son Tom—he shares your name—in some flight of youthful fancy, took up with the daughter of the village tramp and married her near twenty years ago. He and the girl moved to London, living in dissolution, until he ran out of the banknotes he'd brought with him; then, coming to his senses, he left her—your mother—and returned to Yorkshire."
Mrs. Riddle held up her hand as to forestall Tom when his mouth opened to comment. "I make no excuse for his deplorable behaviour; neither myself nor my husband look very well on it. I consider it a stain upon our family, one that has only grown with the recent rumours. But you must understand that he is our son, our one and only child, and as his son, you are our family. And after the name of that girl, a Merope Gaunt Riddle, was traced to a marriage registrar in York, the connection is unquestionable. As such, I've had arrangements made with the matron of the—" her nostrils flared in pique, "—the orphanage, to have your guardianship transferred, and your adoption papers processed. Your belongings have been collected for our return to Yorkshire with the morning train, which will be departing King's Cross at half-past ten tomorrow—"
"I'm not going," Tom interrupted her.
A chilly silence descended upon the Grangers' formal parlour.
"Tom," murmured Hermione, nudging Tom with the sharp point of her elbow. "She's your family!"
"I don't need one," Tom said, lifting his eyes to meet Mrs. Riddle's. "I've gone without one my entire life, so I don't see why I should need one now."
Mrs. Riddle had blue eyes, and within those eyes, Tom sensed first and foremost a sour streak of forcefully repressed mortification, then a weighty and palpable tension induced by the constraints of her current situation, a public scandal that she had had hopes of quashing, only to find her hopes quashed, and now, all the options presented to her were unequivocally unappealing, and yet she knew she had no choice but to take one of them.
A series of vague impressions stood out to him: a letter in the morning post, a black and white photograph sliding out onto the breakfast table, then a burst of fearful apprehension at the violent flight of tableware, glass and porcelain crossing the room in a blink of an eye and sparkling in pieces on a Turkey carpet, hot tea and wheat porridge soaking down to the floorboards. Arguments, bitter and cutting, slammed doors; arguments, sharp and imperious, slammed telephone receivers; arguments, displeasure and vexation, papers and banknotes swapping hands.
"Family is not a business of need or want," said Mrs. Riddle. "You have one, and that is that."
"Then I choose to un-have it," Tom replied in a cool voice, his chin lifted in challenge. "If a child can be disowned, then so too can a parent. I'm a year and a half from eighteen—hardly a child at all. If a child was what you wanted, then you should have picked one up at Wool's. The place has plenty of orphans who would be more grateful for a family than I am."
"Indeed, any orphan should be grateful," Mrs. Riddle said, "but you're not an orphan, Tom."
But I could be, thought Tom. It would be so easy; they're only Muggles.
"No," she went on, as the tea went cold and undrunk in her cup, "you're the beneficiary of my husband's estate. A thousand hectares and a country house—they'll be yours one day. As of now, if our solicitor has earned his retainer, it's your new home. The matron at that ghastly orphanage won't have you back; your room there has already been cleared out."
"I already have a place to stay," said Tom. "I've hired a room in Charing Cross. It's paid up for the rest of the summer."
"Before you go to Professor Dumberton's charity school, is that right?" Mrs. Riddle sniffed. "I'm told that you do well in academics; I hope he's been preparing you properly for Oxford or Cambridge when you finish."
Tom pushed his tea and cake away, his appetite gone. "Excuse me."
He stood up from the settee and stalked out of the room, taking the very familiar path down the hall to the entrance of the Grangers' warded cellar.
The door flew open with a jerk of his wrist, and then his feet were pounding down the stairs, his wand flown up into his hand, lighting the lamps on the walls and illuminating the vast space with magical fire that began as the soft blue-white of the standard spell configuration, to the warm yellow colouration used in the corridors of Hogwarts, then to an eye-searing red.
Black shadows wavered over the walls and under Tom's feet; his skin took on a red cast, the pale wood of his wand coloured red in his red hands; he imagined that this must have been the boggart's view from the inside of the burning wardrobe—what Old Ab's goats, Laurel and Curly, saw when the blood vessels of their eyes burst under Tom's wand—what the spider's compound vision perceived when Tom went down the list of Unforgivable Curses and found the one whose power manifested itself in a scarlet jet of light.
The book said these Curses were among the most difficult spells to cast, and the Aurors' handbook had provided no pronunciation guide, no wand movement diagram. Only intent was described, and that had been enough for Tom, who had found it laughably simple to focus his mind on generating the right emotions, visualising the right images. Intent and willpower; he had more than plenty of each, enough that the tip of his wand was crackling with red light before he'd even spoken a syllable of the incantation.
"Tom!" cried Hermione from the top of the stairs.
She shut the door behind her, her own wand held aloft, a bobbing point of white in the shifting shadows of red and black as she scrambled down and made her way over to him.
"Tom," she said, lowering her arm, wandlight dimming but not extinguished.
Tom took a deep breath and turned around, a deep scowl on his face. "Who does that old hag think she is?"
"She's your grandmother," said Hermione. "Your family."
"I don't want her."
"That doesn't change the facts."
"We're wizards—the facts can be whatever we want! Lure her down here, alter her memories, then send her away. She'll never know what happened; she's just a Muggle—"
"I'll know the truth! So will my Mum."
"But you'll keep it quiet, and your mother will too, or I, I—"
"Shut up, Tom!" shouted Hermione. "Accio wand!"
Tom's wand flew into her hand, and then Hermione was clutching his wand and her own close to her chest, her eyes wet and glittering in the red light of the flickering lamps.
"You should think before you speak, or before you do something stupid," she snapped. "Mum went out of her way to find Mary Riddle—"
"For all the good that's been!"
"She's done nothing but good for you, Tom." Hermione spoke hoarsely, wisps of hair flying out of the neat pins she'd been wearing earlier than morning. "You wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Mum. I'd never have met you that day at the orphanage, if it wasn't for her. You'd never have stayed here over the summer if Mum had said no. Mum allowed it because of me—because I wanted it—because that's what families do when they care about each other. Question Mary Riddle's incentives all you want, but at least she's doing something instead of hiding away in her country house and pretending you don't exist. She came all the way here for you; you could at the very least show her some respect, and—and give her a chance."
"A chance to replace her worthless son with the next best thing, you mean," Tom interjected sourly. "You must have noticed how she kept looking at me."
Hermione sniffled, then she fell silent for a few seconds. "She's not perfect, but that's the thing about families—none of them are." She swallowed, and when she continued, Tom could hear that she was trying to hide a quaver in her voice. "Another thing about families is that they keep trying anyway. The decent ones, at least."
Tom's eyes narrowed. "You want me to go with her."
"I don't want you to throw this away! This is how you'll never have to worry about money again. You can get any job you want in the Muggle world; attend any university, with or without the entrance exams, and on top of that, your family connections will see you out of conscription if the government ever comes around with your papers." Then Hermione added in a forceful voice, "In one swoop, you've been offered everything that people like my Dad have worked years to have!"
"There's an issue with your logic," Tom pointed out, "in that none of it applies to a wizard."
"Only if you don't want it to," Hermione retorted. "But I know that Llewelyn Caldwell had the sense of mind to take advantage of it."
Tom's face went blank. "Who's Llewelyn Caldwell?"
Hermione huffed, crossing her arms over her chest. "Gryffindor Prefect, three years ahead of us. Muggleborn—but his mother's father was an earl. Honestly, Tom, don't you pay attention?"
"Was he that poncy one? The one who wore knickerbockers and gaiters every Sunday?"
Tom vaguely recalled one upper year Gryffindor who'd stayed at Hogwarts during all the holidays, and because there were no classes, had showed up to each meal in Muggle clothing. Not knitted jumpers sent from home that a few Muggleborn students—including Hermione—wore over their white uniform blouses, but entire curated ensembles that made him look as if he was minutes away from popping off to the greens for a round of golf. The Slytherin girls had whispered to each other about Caldwell's taste, or his lack of it, which was an affront to the name of wizard... but Tom wondered if they whispered about other things as well, since Caldwell made no pains to hide the signet ring on his finger, which was as heavy and ornate as any pureblood heir's.
"I'm sure he'd be pleased to be remembered by his clothing choices," said Hermione, sniffing. "Yes, that one. He's now studying marine magizoology, and plans to convert one of his family estates in Wales into a reserve for selkies and other magical creatures, where the money made from collecting parts will go into his personal research. The Ministry's Department of Magical Education would never have given him research funding due to his lack of connections, but that didn't matter, because his family supported him!
"Mr. Pacek told me," she continued, gesturing with her hands, Tom's wand in no danger of slipping out of her grasp, "that they've restored the crumbling old family castle with magic at a fraction of the cost it would have taken with Muggle labour. And now that the land is registered as a wizarding residence, the Caldwells can bypass the new estate taxes that the British government put on the Peers to pay for the war. So, you see, there are advantages to keeping a foot on both sides—and you'd throw it away when it's offered to you, because you're too proud to take it?"
Hermione made a frustrated harrumph, rather similar to the sound a cat made when someone sat down in the Common Room without first checking the sofas. "It never seemed to bother you before."
"You're trying to use logic on me," Tom said accusingly.
"Is it working?"
"It won't change my mind about Mary Riddle," said Tom. "I've a good mind to believe that she's a pretentious shrew who thinks that 'all boys need a good thrashing to become men', and only regrets that her own son wasn't thrashed enough. And that she complains about every penny the greengrocer charges, even though she's the richest old harridan in town. I know her kind; she's the worst sort of cheek-pinching Granny God-botherer. And to top it all off, she's my granny."
"And your guardian, too."
A sullen silence descended between the two of them. The red light cast eerie, jaundiced shadows over their faces, until Hermione flicked her wand at the walls, the shadows shifting and the lights brightening up to yellow-white, resembling natural sunlight rather than the electric bulbs used upstairs or the enchanted candlelight of the Hogwarts classrooms.
"You'll be seventeen in December," said Hermione. "And I'll be seventeen in September. If you have to live in Yorkshire, you can visit every day once we open a two-way Floo Connection. And we'll have Apparition licenses by summer of next year, too."
"I'll be eighteen when I finish Hogwarts," added Tom. "She won't have a hold on me by then."
"Are you going to tell her you're a wizard?"
Tom's laugh was brittle and humourless. "Forget Oxford or Cambridge; she'd try to talk up sending me to a seminary."
"Well, if you need to get away from her, I'll always have a tent you can borrow," Hermione offered, jerking her chin in the direction of her family's magical tent, which had the dimensions of a portable changing stall he'd seen on the annual seaside trips taken with the rest of the orphans.
"Once we've gotten rid of her, I'll have a mansion," Tom said, a flicker of a smile on his face.
Hermione's nose scrunched up. "Tom!"
"Hermione!"
Hermione heaved a great sigh of exasperation, then tossed his wand at him. "Come on, we should go back up. They'll be wondering what happened to us."
When they climbed the flight of stairs back up to ground level, they came upon a very unwelcome sight: in the parlour, Mrs. Granger and Mrs. Riddle were sharing a pot of tea, their heads bent over a large book, the pages of which were pasted with a neverending series of family photographs.
"This one was taken when we went to the opera; a Puccini, I think—that was for Christmas of Thirty-Seven. Look at how small Tom used to be!" said Mrs. Granger, turning over the page. "This one's from the summer of Thirty-Nine. We got Hermione a pet owl that year, and here's Tom feeding him. You'd think it'd be a messy business to turn owls into pets, but the place that sold them trained their birds like homing pigeons."
"Oh, this one is darling," murmured Mrs. Riddle, pointing at a photograph on the new page. "He looks like his father at that age. He must be thirteen here?"
"Fourteen," said Mrs. Granger, "taken in the summer of Forty-One. Tom shot up like a weed that year; he'd have eaten any other family out of house and home. If you're amenable to it, Mary, I can have a set of copies made for your own family album."
Tom and Hermione exchanged glances, their expressions exact mirrors of one another: complete and utter horror.