1943
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Over the next few days, Thomas and Mary Riddle did their utmost to pretend that everything at the Riddle House was perfectly normal.
It was a valiant effort, but in the end, a failure.
At meals, Tom's grandparents spoke of the Christmas pageant being put on by the villagers, and the church service they expected him and Hermione to attend, as a way of introducing the newest additions of the family to the curious local residents. When they used the word family, he caught them glancing at an empty seat at the dining table, but the subject of Tom's father never entered the conversation.
Tom Riddle, Senior—and how fiercely that name rankled, as much as it did for the title he bore, of father—had, since that first breakfast, refused to appear for meals. For all they knew, the man had locked himself in his apartments until Tom returned to school in January.
That didn't stop Tom from trying to find out more about him, however he could; Tom had little else to entertain himself with, as he didn't turn seventeen until New Year's Eve, and until then, he was as feeble and helpless without his magic as every single one of the Muggles that shared his grandfather's house. He hadn't had to live this closely among them since 1939, but the last few months, to his disgust, had involved more Muggle posturing than he'd been forced to perform for the last few years.
Adjusting to the Riddles' version of a Muggle lifestyle didn't involve lard sandwiches or turnip soup, which would've convinced him to pack his trunk and leave, whether Dumbledore liked it or not. But there were plenty of other inconveniences that made him wish for his comfortable room at The Leaky Cauldron. The bathrooms there never ran out of hot water, and the blackened iron sconces, despite being ancient and ugly, were charmed to keep the corridors warm and the draughts out. The simplest of enchantments would have saved him the nuisance of dealing with the maids, who had every morning found some excuse or another to loiter in his room while ostensibly tasked with cleaning the fireplace grates or changing the linens.
The Riddles had a somewhat traditional view on what they called Service: they expected the help to be neither seen nor heard, invisible but available, anticipating their employers' needs before their employers had come to the realisation that they were in need of anything at all. It would have been a trying task for a full complement of household staff in the heyday of great houses: for the Riddle House of the previous century, there had been twenty-two indoor staff and nine outdoor. In the present decade, the upkeep of the house was stretched between a skeleton crew of five, and even with modern electrical appliances to help with the housework, the maids rotated between the kitchen and scullery, chambers, laundry, dining, and parlour duty. The most senior of the maids, Miss Frances Crewe, was also assigned to Mrs. Riddle's toilette, which would have been unthinkable in the years past, when Mrs. Riddle had been known to Society as Miss Mary Fenstanton-Coates.
(Tom had discovered this from an afternoon spent in the family portrait gallery. There, he'd learned that his grandfather's middle name was Reginald, that his great-grandfather's middle name had been Thomas... and that there had been at least one boy named Tom or Thomas every generation for the last century and a half. Tom, who had always found the results of his investigative abilities entertaining—having cut his teeth in Mrs. Cole's office from the age of five—was not pleased by this discovery.)
That Tom, unlike his grandparents, was willing to acknowledge the maids' existence and, on top of that, help them lift the heavy mattress when they laid the fresh sheets (which he did to get them out of his room faster rather than out of kindness or charity) put him in their good books. A few polite smiles, greetings in the morning and evening, and they were ready to answer his questions. Ready to uncover the old skeletons, too, information he knew that servants hoarded, especially if they were overlooked by employers who spoke too loud and drank too much for their own good.
Tom wanted questions about his father answered.
It was a good thing that when it came to digging up the family dirt, the subject of his father was the motherlode.
"Mister Tom's been the village's most eligible man for nigh on twenty years," said the second housemaid, Becky Murray, as she vacuumed the carpet around the fireplace. To Tom's relief, she wasn't as annoying as the first housemaid, Frances; most days, Becky finished her work as efficiently as possible so she could go back downstairs and drink tea and eat the Riddles' luncheon leftovers with the cook.
(From what Hermione had told him after a few days of dining with Mary and Thomas, the Riddles' leftovers made better eating than what a servant could prepare for themselves, on their own time, with whatever ingredients they could acquire from the government ration booklets. Tom had come to the conclusion that the cook deliberately made the portions too large, even after accounting for the inclusion of two guests.)
"There were a few years early on, after he run off with your ma, that the title went to Vicar Elton—but then he up and left for the parish at Stokesley, so it went back to Mister Tom. Everyone says your pa is the finest man in the dales, but he's never looked at any woman twice since comin' back from London. He don't even like us girls comin' in to clean his room, makes such a fuss about it, like tha'd never believe—Oh! I s'pose you saw him at breakfast the other mornin'—he does that now'n again. He had his better days when there were a valet in the house to wait on him, back before the war, but then his man enlisted and that were that. We have Frank now, but he en't the same; he can't make it up the stairs so easy, so he has to keep himself to the grounds."
She cast him a speculative glance, eyes narrowed in thought. "In a few years, all the girls in the village'll be lookin' to you, sir, if tha'll pardon me for sayin' so. Mister Tom, as fine as he is, won't be gettin' any younger. But I can't expect tha' will be eligible for much longer, eh? The girls'll be disappointed by it, o' course, but it en't the first time it's happened."
"Sorry," said Tom. "But what exactly do you mean by that? 'Eligible'?"
The maid tapped her nose. "I'm sure you know what's meant by that, sir!"
Tom could only give her an expectant look.
"Miss Hermione," Becky said. "She's got to be your steady girl, hasn't she? Your grandmama surely thinks so!"
Steady girl, thought Tom, what an awful colloquialism.
If there was anything he thought worse than Quidditch-related jargon (blagging, blatching, blurting, and so on) it would be the slang terms of Muggle vernacular. He had grown up amongst people who spoke in nothing but local idioms, and it was somewhat disturbing how most of the terminology (nobbling, feaguing, scrumping) revolved around acts of varying illegality. Not that he had an issue with skirting laws if he felt like it—he thought them relevant to everyone but himself. But Tom had no need of criminal accomplices, being able to take care of most things in life on his own, and thus saw no sense in perverting the English language in the creation of an impenetrable gutter dialect.
"...She has a picture of you and the little Miss framed in her dressin' room, next to Mister Tom's school portraits," continued the maid with a heartfelt sigh. "It's the sweetest thing I've ever seen; we all o' us thought she'd given up hope of having another lady in the house, ever since Miss Cecilia stopped callin' on Mister Tom all those years ago—though I shouldn't be sayin' any more on that; that's confidential business, that is—"
Tom interrupted her. "My grandmother thinks Hermione and I are... courting?"
"Well, sir, what else is she to call it when you're holdin' hands under the table?"
He coughed and turned away, biting the inside of his cheek.
They weren't holding hands!
Hermione was just overly insistent on reassuring herself that he wasn't going to draw his wand on the Riddles in the middle of one of their dull mealtime conversations. These conversations always revolved around something that neither he nor Hermione cared about: Mr. Riddle drew up plans for a shooting party with some old chums of his who lived in Thirsk, and Mrs. Riddle discussed the possibility of the family driving to York for a day of shopping and entertainment as a special treat for Tom's birthday. 'Treat' was what she called it; but in reality, he could already tell he'd be expected to sit for tea at a fancy teahouse and be introduced around to the wealthy patrons, friends and associates of the Riddles. Because apparently everyone in Yorkshire who made above a certain income per year shared the same, limited circle of acquaintance.
Tom's fine manners and splendid conformation would be displayed as if he were an entrant in a kennel show—cue the repeated exclamations of "He looks just like You-Know-Who!", because almost twenty years later, Tom's father still hadn't been forgiven for marrying so shamefully beneath himself. (If the upper crust could count anything worse than being convicted for sodomy, then having been caught consorting intimately with their social inferiors would do it; marrying them was near inconceivable.) And whilst all this happened, Tom would be dreaming of practising magic from his spellbooks, as a freshly-minted legal adult by wizarding standards, but still bound by the Muggle laws which counted him a child and dependent until eighteen.
The only person in the house who understood how tiring it was to be among the Muggles was Hermione, and instead of listening to him complain about it, she'd gone off to explore the estate and village by herself. She could use magic, so of course it wasn't hard for her to find other things to do than go through the Riddles' drawers and cabinets for anything interesting—and since Warming and Drying Charms were only a wand-wave away, it was no trouble for her to venture outdoors in the freezing cold.
"Hermione is my friend..." Tom began, but stopped himself.
That wasn't accurate; Hermione wasn't his friend.
She was more than that, more than what could be put into simple words. For years, they'd never needed words to define what they had—what they were—as if words could ever encompass the depth of what it meant to be Tom Riddle's counterpart. It frustrated him that people needed to define their connection; they needed words, denotation and delineation, for a concept that was beyond the breadth of their comprehension. He had encountered this more and more often in the passing years, as he and Hermione grew older and they faced censure from people who believed that men and women weren't, couldn't be, equals.
"She's my—" said Tom. "Mine."
He ignored the maid's knowing look.
"Who's Cecilia?" he asked quickly, changing the subject. "And my father doesn't like his room cleaned? Why not?
"Oh, Miss Cecilia is no one important—never you mind," said the maid. "Last I heard, she'd married a businessman down in Sheffield, and the Riddles won't hear her spoken about—not by the likes o' us, I daresay. As for your pa, Cook—who knew him as a boy—says he's a queer one; it all happened before my time, y'see, but I heard tell that he never was the same as before he left for London. But that en't my place to say; your grandmama would have me sacked in a jiffy if she knew I was tellin' stories about him."
Becky dusted off the mantel, rolled up the electrical cord to the vacuum, and began to load them onto the trolley. She bobbed a short curtsy, then proceeded to Hermione's room, which was just across the hall from his own.
Tom shut the door to his room and leaned his weight against it.
They thought his father was strange.
When he was a young boy at Wool's, the other children and the matron had thought him strange, though not for any discernible reason. (Tom knew he was brighter than everyone else at the orphanage, adults included, and they knew it as well, but they didn't speak of it, because that was tantamount to admitting that they were stupid.) Instead, they'd called him a 'funny boy', a phrase that had nothing to do with his sense of humour. It wasn't ever used in his presence, but he'd overheard them discussing it in low voices during Adoption Days, when young couples and sharp-featured housewives came shopping around for the perfect child to fulfill their household needs.
He hadn't let it bother him; he'd known all along that he was different to the rest, and Hermione and Professor Dumbledore had confirmed it.
That day at breakfast, the first and last time he'd seen his father face-to-face, Tom hadn't gotten any indication that the man was different—not the good type of different, which in Tom's internal dictionary was a less brow-raising way of saying Special, when he wanted to bring the concept out in public to educate the ignorant. Tom had come to accept that the Riddles were ordinary Muggles through and through, which was a disappointment... But at the same time, it made his own magical abilities unique, when everything else he had came from someone else—his name, his appearance, even the expression of cold disdain he used when one of his dorm mates asked him a particularly nonsensical question was one he'd seen on an oil-and-canvas portrait hanging up in one of the corridors.
The more he found out about his father, there more things didn't add up, no matter how hard Tom tried to fit two and two together. He had been told—he had been under the impression—that his father was nothing more than just another Muggle, as ordinary as his Muggle grandparents. Wealthier than most, but Tom had seen wealth from the outside all his life, both Muggle wealth and Wizarding wealth; he already knew that wealth couldn't change the qualities inherent to a person's character. It couldn't bestow a mediocre person with brilliance, or the unexceptional, talent.
Wealth was nothing; there were other things in life that Tom cared more about than mere money. Magic was one of them. It had been one of the greatest mysteries in the early years of his orphan life. Now that he'd left that unpleasant era behind, it was en route to becoming his greatest secret.
What if his father had a secret too? The way everyone in the house spoke of him, how they spoke around him, seemed to imply that something was off with the whole affair of Tom's father eloping with a village girl. Had he thrown off another, more suitable prospect, this Miss Cecilia, to marry Tom's mother? Why had he done that, when all Tom had seen of the Riddles so far was how they flaunted their superiority in name and affluence?
Tom didn't know what they were hiding; it had to be more than an unfavourable match, or a romance gone sour. There were other things he did know, however.
His father's first impression of Tom had been one of recognition.
His father's second impression of Tom had been fear.
Why?
Tom resolved to find an explanation before the end of the Christmas holidays.
It wasn't as if he had better things to do with his time.
.
.
It didn't take Tom long to decide that the company of the servants was preferable over that of his own family members.
The maids were annoying, but his grandparents were even worse. Grandpapa and Grandmama, as they'd asked him to call them—although in his head, he thought of them as "Thomas the toffy" and "Mary the meddler"—did not heed the standard of formality that the servants observed, one which kept them from prying past the point of politeness; they understood the rule of 'Speak Only When Spoken To', and so were more useful for Tom to ask questions of them than the other way around.
Mary Riddle, however, was the opposite: she used her familiarity and her age as an excuse to cross-examine him, laughing off his chilly reticence with an affectionate pat on his hand and a kindly encouragement to indulge his loving Nana, who had not long left on this Earth... which meant that he should spend as much time with her as was humanly possible. Tom had no experience with grandmothers, but from what he'd overheard of his dorm mates' complaining when they returned from school holidays, it was not unusual for guilt to be a tool that old witches weaponised against their grandsons. Tom was dismayed to find that it wasn't something only witches knew how to use, but universal to all women.
(At least Mary Riddle had the dignity to refrain from pinching his cheeks and ruffling his hair at every opportunity.)
So Tom chose the servants. It was the lesser of two evils.
The servants turned out to be very useful indeed: they knew the schedules and personal habits of the Riddles, and once Tom learned them himself, it made avoiding his grandparents even easier.
Mr. Riddle, for instance, spent much of his time in his study, making inquiries of the estate agent, a man who lived in Great Hangleton and negotiated tenancy contracts with the local farmers and business owners; other regular contacts were his Fund manager, the steward, the family lawyer, and various parish notables who petitioned for the Riddles' sponsorship in a children's choir or new leading for the leaking roof of the village hall. In the evenings, Mr. Riddle confined himself in his workshop, where he assembled, painted, and rigged model sailing ships—the dullest pastime of which Tom had ever heard.
Mrs. Riddle's mornings were spent catching up with her correspondence through telephone or letter-writing, and in the afternoons had Frank Bryce drive her around to call on the vicar or take tea with other ladies of local significance, who had indubitably earned their position in the community by marrying a wealthy and significant man. Her hobby was "gardening", or rather, the well-bred form of gardening that took place within the Riddle House's conservatory, and involved more flower clipping and floral arrangement in tasteful vases than grubbing about in common dirt.
Tom Riddle, that is, the other Tom Riddle—thinking of him like this, as an alternative to calling him Father, was going to give Tom an aneurysm some day—went riding in clear weather, or walked his horse around the courtyard when it was murky. He owned a hunting hound, a collection of firearms, and enjoyed the typical country pursuits of a man of leisure. This meant that he was a professional loafer, or in other words, a complete wastrel. In the evenings, whenever Thomas and Mary went out to dine at a restaurant or watch a stage show in Great Hangleton, Tom Riddle (the elder; the Riddles' lack of creativity when it came to christening their children really was tiresome) would raid the cellar or his father's liquor cabinet, proceed to his rooms, then souse himself until morning.
(Working folk like Mrs. Cole overindulged on cheap gin that reeked of paint thinner, and this was seen as a Social Evil amongst the morally righteous of South London. But, somehow, it was considered acceptable for the likes of Mr. Tom Riddle to pickle himself on aged wines and imported cognac. Such a distinction came from the same sort of people who looked at him and Hermione and drew their own conclusions. Tom didn't understand it. To him, it was equally contemptible behaviour in two equally contemptible people; one useless Muggle was no different from any other.)
All this he learned from the senior housemaid, Miss Frances Crewe, who was an insatiable gossip on top of her other unpleasant qualities, one of which was her shameless staring; if her eyeballs had hands, then Tom would have felt extremely violated. He'd learned to discourage her attentions after a few days: when she'd brought over his laundered clothes, he'd asked her which combinations of shirt and trousers Hermione might like best as he'd gone about putting them away into the bureau.
The maid had flushed and stuttered, but it had stopped her from trying to invite him downstairs if he was ever in need of a "midnight snack".
It had led Tom to the conclusion that when he inherited the Riddle House, Miss Crewe would be the first to go, and her seniority could go hang. Her seniority was too much, anyway—she was around ten years older than him; why would she think that he'd even look at her, let alone consider her a suitable prospect for the sort of vulgar activity for which she seemed so keen?
Becky Murray could stay, and so could the cook, Mrs. Willrow, whose hard-boiled eggs were never boiled so hard that the outside of the yolks turned green—something Tom had always hated about the food at Wool's Orphanage, where the meals also included watery porridge bobbing with chunks of burnt brown crust that had been peeled off the side of the pot. This Christmas holiday had earned some credit toward its redemption through the quality of its meals, which equalled the ones served at Hogwarts, even if the rest of the Riddle House was far inferior to the Slytherin dormitories.
It was after an excellent luncheon meal of brandy-braised squab with creamed garlic potatoes, a recipe worthy of being published in Witch Weekly, that Tom continued with his "investigations". It was a more complimentary way to describe his sneaking about the house in an effort to learn the more intimate details of the residents' lives.
First he learned everyone's daily routines; the next thing he did was create a plan of the house itself, made easier when he knew that the architect had been a devout classicist who admired symmetrical perfection, placing the front door and portico in the centre with two identical wings curving around to the sides and back. Each wing contained within it the same hallway layout, and from the outside, Tom had counted the number of windows, chimneys, and gables. To his lack of surprise, he found that the numbers matched.
The Riddle family bedrooms were in the South Wing.
The corridor was decorated with sombre oil paintings of horses with glossy coats and pricked up ears. The plaques on the gilded frames were engraved with the year of each horse's birth and death, and under that, their names and awards. (If Tom had been asked, he'd call their names grandiloquent to an obnoxious degree—"Prince Selim", "Desdemona", "Coronation", "The Cypriot", "Dominance", really? In private, however, he could admire their uniqueness; had he been given a choice about the matter of naming his pet, he'd have picked something in that vein, instead of Hermione's mundane choice of "Peanut".) The hall carpet, unlike in the North Wing, showed signs of wear and constant traffic, the pile pressed and faded around two doors, a double-door at the end of the hall and another single door halfway down. Tom guessed them to be the master suite owned by his grandparents, and a standard residential apartment, similar to his own, which belonged to his father.
The doors, to his disappointment, were locked. The handles were stiff under his hands, and refused to turn when he jiggled them.
Looking both ways down the hall, Tom pressed his palm flat against the keyhole, brows furrowed in concentration.
He hadn't practised magic like this in years. Once he'd gotten his wand, the day after Dumbledore had delivered his letter, he used it whenever he could, and carried it everywhere. It was in his trouser pocket at the moment, the pointed end tucked under the hem of his jumper; even if he was banned from using it by the Decree Against Underage Sorcery, it was strange not to have it on his person, just in case. Where his dorm mates left their wands on their nightstands, or in the pocket of yesterday's robes—which sometimes meant having to dig through a mound of dirty laundry in the morning before classes—Tom slept with his wand next to his pillow.
Magic could be cast without his wand, he knew. He'd moved things without touching them, in his early youth: coins, fruit from the piled baskets at the market, bits of chalk, the end of Jimmy Thurgood's shoelace, and as the boy had been standing at the top of the landing, it had caused him to tumble down half a flight of stairs. Every time Tom had looked into the eyes of a classmate who spoke to him or offered him invitations to their study group or the Hogsmeade teahouse, he was capable of discerning their true intentions without ever drawing his wand.
At Hogwarts, Tom liked having his wand to hand at all times. When he studied in the Library, he had his wand in one hand and a book in the other. When he worked on his essays in the Slytherin Common Room or the homework club's classroom, he dictated his drafts to his enchanted quill while mindlessly running his fingers over the bumps and ridges of his yew wand. This habit of his had made his dorm mates nervous; it wasn't until several years into his magical education that Tom realised having one's wand out, when not in the process or preparation of casting a spell, was considered unmannerly. It was equated to carrying an unsheathed dagger while going about on casual business: not a gesture of direct threat, but still enough to make passersby approach with caution.
So he put his wand away in public spaces, and he'd gotten into the habit of not holding his wand when viewing the thoughts of his peers. If they were anxious, then he'd often catch them thinking about him, and although it was nice to be acknowledged like this, it didn't give him any information that he didn't already know.
Magic doesn't need wands, Tom thought to himself, drawing on his newly learned Occlumentic techniques. He cleared away the memories of his orphanage days, and the unconscious muscle memory that curled his fingers around a wand that wasn't there, ready to shape the circle-and-swipe movement that he'd memorised back in First Year.
Magic doesn't need words or gestures.
He had never cast real spells without a wand, only nudged things here and there, outside of the rare bouts of accidental magic where his anger had lashed out and instilled pain—discipline—on his fellow orphans. But what was the difference between that kind of magic and spellbook magic? Was there any difference at all?
Magic was magic.
Intent, imagination, and visualisation were all that mattered in manifesting his will into physical reality.
He pictured tumblers shifting, the click-click-clicking of each pin as it lifted and settled and was held in place by the force of his thoughts; it would be followed by the next, and the next, until they'd all reached alignment, and so the mechanism would begin to rotate, the latch retracting, and then—finally!—the door handle moved under Tom's questing fingers.
Alohomora, thought Tom, his eyes closed, lips pinched together.
He breathed shallowly, feeling a sharp throbbing in his temple, as if he'd just suffered his way through an entire hour of Dumbledore's eccentric teatime rambling.
Snick, the door replied.
He tried the door. It opened.
The door swung open into a dark room. A man's kind of room, which Tom perceived upon the first whiff. His nose wrinkled; living in the Slytherin dormitories ought to have desensitised him against the smells produced by so many active young men in close quarters. Magic helped quite a lot there: the curtains on the four-posters were charmed so any unusual smells generated by someone who'd over-indulged in the ham hock and beans at dinner wouldn't spread over the whole room.
This room had no magic. Or much light. He waited for his eyes to adjust before he stepped gingerly inside, leaving the door open to a narrow crack behind him.
His first impression was to observe that it was the same size as his bedroom, but visually, it appeared smaller. It had more furniture, more clutter, and it looked lived-in where his room was sparse and bare. The style of décor, however, was much the same: it followed the same aesthetic of the Slytherin quarters, sumptuous and rich, thick with age—not old, but historic. Heavy curtains in burgundy damask closed off the high windows, lined with gold braid and tassels. Furniture in dark hardwood, upholstered in gleaming leather and tufted velvet. Light fixtures overhead in crystal with cream silk shades, the carpets underfoot woven in lavish Oriental brocade.
He took a step further inside, and the floorboards beneath the carpet creaked under his feet.
Tom winced. He would have cast a Silencing Charm at his feet, perhaps even a Disillusionment, if he had wanted his investigations to be discreet—if his birthday had already been and gone. It was days away; perhaps he should come back later, when he had the full use of his wand.
But a quick look wouldn't do any harm, would it?
The longer he looked, the more his nose wrinkled in distaste. The end table by the wall was piled with dirty dishes on a tray, two uncorked wine bottles emitting the odour of mouldering fruit into the room's general miasma. The bed was unmade, white sheets tangled up on the floor, pillows scattered over the rumpled covers. By the foot of the bed was a large cushion covered in short, wiry fur.
Figuring that the desk by the window would be the best place to turn up something interesting, Tom made his way over, feeling the floorboards shift under his weight. Not every step caused creaking, but it really was damaging his overall efforts to be sneaky.
Empty glasses cluttered the top of the desk, white rings left on the wooden surface, which was faintly greasy under his touch. A few tins of dubbin and a flask of whale oil mechanical lubricant sitting on a pile of grimy rags further demonstrated the lack of hygiene; Tom was faintly disgusted by the idea of someone putting their dirty boots on the same table where they ate and drank.
Looking inside the desk drawers, he saw that they were filled with odd bits of paper—betting slips, pocket-sized yardage books containing the scores of old golf games, the sheet music for a Bach minuet, and at the bottom, a linen-bound notebook with a fraying cover and wrinkly, warped pages from something that had been spilled across it and dried off.
Once he peeled open the cover and found what appeared to be a series of poems and doodled illustrations, he couldn't help feeling disappointed.
So his father fancied himself a poet, then? It was too bad that his poems were of the modern variety, all irregular lines, short stanzas, and intermittent punctuation, with none of the rhyme or structure of traditional poetry—the type Tom would have preferred, had he any preferences for poetry at all. (He didn't.) Even the Sorting Hat, an eldritch amortal creation whose sole purpose was to plunder the minds of young children, could do better than this sentimental tripe.
.
.
Love is like bread
It rises, it swells and grows
It is kneaded
It grows stale and cracks apart
It is consumed
And you are told
It is your duty to provide it
Each and every day.
.
.
The drawing on the opposite page was of a woman's décolletage, which made Tom scoff. The lines were shaky and hesitant, which matched the lines of wobbling text in the attached poem. Tom was sure that whichever woman to whom his father had dedicated the poem—his mother? Cecilia?—wouldn't have appreciated the way her bosoms were depicted like lopsided sandbags. Like two potatoes in a burlap sack, with a pendant on an ugly chain necklace sitting in between.
Well, if it had been his mother, it was a good thing that she was too dead to see it. Tom was no expert in womanly thinking, but he was sure that most women would not like being serenaded with passive-aggressive poetry.
The following page was similar, and the next, and the next.
He shoved the notebook back where he'd found it, sliding open the next drawer, when he heard the clink and rattle of the housemaid's trolley rumbling down the hallway.
Time to leg it.
He slipped out of the room, closing the door, pressing his palm against the lock and willing the pins and tumblers to slide back into place with the force of his urgency, until he felt them catch and fall into position. The door locked, Tom put some distance between it and him, narrowly evading the maid who had been assigned to clean the bedrooms while the occupants were elsewhere.
So. It was almost certainly confirmed that his father, like his grandparents, was a Muggle. There were no signs of magic or magical items in his father's possession. His doodles were static, stiff and lifeless without the Animation Charms that were imbued into most magical media, from novelty trading cards to the classified advertisements posted on the Slytherin Common Room signboard. And what competent wizard would live in such slovenly surroundings, when simple magic could make cleaning a task of minimal effort? It was true that a Scouring Spell wasn't as effective by itself as it was in combination with a proper wash in hot water and soap—and it was advised against using Scourgify on delicate enchanted dinnerware—but most people could manage a Vanishing Charm on their empty bottles.
Unless they were Muggles, of course.
Tom had been half-expecting it; still, the disappointment came as a blow... but the more he considered it, the more he was happy to be the only wizard in his family. Magic was an advantage, a secret skill that only he knew about. It was legally permissible to tell them, as Dumbledore and the Hogwarts authorities had acknowledged the Riddles as Tom's guardians, but why would he?
He had power, power over them, in keeping his magic a secret. An ace hidden up his sleeve. A rabbit in his hat.
It suited him well to think of it this way, and gauge himself exceptional; to know that he had risen above such lowly origins, such common stock, like man had risen above ape. Although he traced his blood to the Riddles, he didn't call them inferior. No, their blood, their lineage, had produced him, so they weren't inferior beings. They were merely... undeveloped.
In an unusual analogy, it was like the primitive Celtic wizards of millennia past, who carried staves. When they encountered Roman wizards for the first time, with their cored wands and Latin incantations, they were met with a disadvantage, for the Roman wizards had hidden their wands in their tunics, and were indistinguishable from ordinary Muggle traders and craftsmen, gathering information and passing it along to the tribunes of the invasion force. They kept themselves a secret until the day of the first battle, where the Celtic wizards had had no time to prepare their elaborate rituals to summon great storms or prophesy the best path for the tribal leaders to take.
(That day, years ago, when Hermione had mentioned the possibility of wizards being drafted into Muggle armies, Tom had looked it up himself in the dusty, untouched section of the library where the History of Magic books were shelved. He'd never told her what he'd found; she'd be insufferable about it, in knowing that she was right all along.)
British wizards of the modern age had Celtic blood and were taught magic in the Latin style. And none of them—not a single one of the purebloods he knew—considered themselves the lesser for being descended from a conquered people.
He kept these thoughts in the forefront of his mind during the Riddles' Christmas festivities, where the house was decorated, the tinsel hung and the Christmas tree put up, and Mrs. Riddle ensuring that there was at least one photograph of him and Hermione posed in front of it, acting like they were in the middle of putting up the glass baubles.
"This is your first family Christmas," said Hermione, looping a strand of tinsel around his neck like a feather boa. "You should look like you're enjoying it more."
"I would—if there was anything to enjoy."
"Good food? Mrs. Willrow makes excellent eggnog."
"Hogwarts has better," said Tom.
"How about the presents?" Hermione suggested. "You'll have two sets this year, one for Christmas, and one for your birthday. I don't think you've ever had a proper birthday party before."
"A Muggle birthday party," Tom pointed out. "Where they'll still consider me a child for the entire year after that."
Hermione let out a huff of exasperation. "I don't see why you're making this so difficult. This time of year, most people would be happy to be spending time with the people who care about them. If you haven't noticed, there's a war on."
"They don't care about me," he replied, picking a thread of tinsel out of his mouth. "It's all just a show. They like the idea of having someone to inherit the family estate, instead of it going to a distant cousin who'll auction it off when they see how much the government has raised the succession tax."
Hermione shot him a look of disbelief. "That's such a cynical way to look at things."
"Sixty-five percent to the Crown!" Tom cried. "It's pure thievery."
"You looked it up?"
"This is going to be my house one day," said Tom, with a haughty lift of his chin. "Of course I'm going to make sure no one takes it from me, not even the government."
There was a quote, often bandied about at cocktail parties by people who thought they were witty, that went something like: "Nothing in this world can be said to be certain, except for death and taxes."
It was a Muggle saying, so Tom had quite naturally assumed it must only be applicable to Muggles. He was certain that auditors, as fearsome as they were reputed to be, could not be immune to magic—hadn't Llewelyn Caldwell's family dodged the Muggle tax collectors? And he knew there were ways to cheat death, if only by technicality. Libatius Borage's Draught of the Living Death, for example, put one in a stasis that would keep them from dying; in the right hands, it could buy the time to produce an antidote for someone who had ingested a lethal poison.
(Gamp's Law said there was no way to undo death with magic—that it was impossible to bring back a life that had already passed from the mortal plane. Tom had spotted the loophole immediately: undoing death was not the same thing as cheating death—never shuffling off the mortal plane in the first place.)
"They'll make a Tory of you yet," Hermione remarked. "You must have read enough on military campaigns to know that armies don't feed and equip themselves. That's where everyone's inheritance taxes are going to, these days."
"Yes, I know," Tom insisted, "but I don't see why it should come out of my inheritance."
It wasn't his, not exactly, since the estate legally belonged to Thomas Riddle. But the man had only a few years left to live, so it was perfectly acceptable for Tom to start counting his unhatched chickens. The only obstacle to collecting his proper dues was Tom's father, who would be equal inheritor of the less-than-half left by the Crown auditors.
To his irritation, Hermione just laughed and dropped a paper Christmas cracker crown on his head.
"Sometimes I don't know why you complain," she said. "You don't care about them either—but you like the idea of being heir to a family estate. You have more in common with them than you realise."
"If you care about them so much, why don't you stay here and deal with them for me?" Tom asked, pushing up the paper crown from where it had flattened his hair down over his eyes.
Hermione's laughter trailed off nervously at that. "Your grandmother offered. She seems to be under the impression that I plan to stay here for good."
Tom's expression took on a quizzical cast. "Don't you? You have your own house in London, but when I get my fireplace connected to the Floo Network, you could come and visit as long as you like. There's more space here in the country—you wouldn't have to stay in that stuffy cellar all day."
"I don't think she intended it to be casual weekend calling," said Hermione, shaking her head. She chewed her lip and continued, "Mrs. Riddle seems to think I was going to move in and... and—"
"And?"
"And give her great-grandchildren," Hermione blurted, turning away from him, her cheeks flushed a bright and feverish red.
Tom could only stare. "Great... grandchildren?"
"You know—babies—"
"Yes," said Tom quickly, before she could elaborate any further, "I know what they are. I just can't fathom why she wants them."
Hermione pursed her lips. "I think... I think your grandmother regrets not having found you when you were younger. And by the way you've treated her and everyone else here—yes, Tom, I can tell—she knows that you don't think of her and Mr. Riddle as family, not truly. And that's what she's always wanted, a loving family, a real family that celebrates all the milestones—birthdays, Christmas, Easter, Bonfire Night—properly. One that looks good for the photos, and doesn't fall apart when the cameras are put away."
"How does a baby fix that?"
Tom's limited knowledge of young children came from living at the orphanage. As he recalled, his first experience with resentment had been when he'd seen how the babies were allocated the limited quantity of fresh milk, while he and the other children had to make do with the tasteless powdered stuff, artificially enriched with vitamins which, when mixed with water, collected at the bottom of his cup in the form of a grey sludge. (He'd learned later that it was bone meal, processed from the carcasses of slaughtered cattle.)
The babies gave off a foul odour, lying in their cribs and crying all day; this confirmed to Tom how useless they were, and why their mothers hadn't wanted them. Five-year-old Tom didn't see his own mother as having given him away. She'd died, which was a more dignified fate than leaving him in a basket on the doorstep. Back then, he'd had hope that his father, a grand and important man, would find him and bring him to the home he deserved to have.
In Tom's mind, loving families and babies were two separate concepts with no overlap.
"It's the, you know, the implication!" said Hermione, who would normally have a lot to say about everything, but in this moment seemed like she was having difficulty finding her words. "That you and I would... w-would make that family for her, just like that!"
"Oh, is that all?" Tom prompted, trying to keep hold of the fraying ends of his patience.
"She also wants me to marry you and live here forever!" Hermione burst out.
"How ridiculous," said Tom.
"That's what I told her!"
"As if I would live in a tiny farming village for the rest of my life," Tom continued. "Having an estate of my own is nice, but I'd still want to keep a flat or townhouse in Diagon for the weekdays; it'd save hours and hours of waiting for the owls to deliver notes from the editor."
Hermione gaped at him, her hair frizzing out of her pins like a poked porcupine. "Did you hear what I said?"
"Obviously."
"But," said Hermione with a deep frown, "I thought you didn't care for marriage."
"I don't," said Tom. "But after Hogwarts, we won't be living in the same castle anymore. If you know of any other ways where we could live in the same house—see each other every day—without counter-productive damage to our reputations as Hogwarts' best students this century, then by all means, suggest an alternative."
Hermione was at a loss for words after that, sputtering out, "What? Is that what I think it is—"
"It's sensible. Not to mention, convenient!"
"It's the least romantic thing I've ever heard—and I've read Darcy's speech a dozen times over!"
As Tom was about to form the first words of his rebuttal, Mrs. Riddle came in with the camera, having installed a fresh roll of film. She pressed them into posing for more photographs, twee Christmas scenes with Hermione hanging up the felted stockings—still at a loss for words—and Tom wearing his paper crown, Mrs. Riddle motioning them to stand closer and closer together and put on a smile.
Up close, Tom observed that Hermione's smile was as forced as his own, but only half as convincing.
.
.
It was only after the impromptu portrait session with Mrs. Riddle and her camera that the implications of what he'd said to Hermione began to dawn.
"I thought you didn't care for marriage."
He didn't.
It wasn't something that had crossed his mind, even if the boys in his year had begun to stress over who their parents were considering for their future wives. Quentin Travers' father prioritised political influence over other considerations like money or a Sacred name. Lestrange's parents cared about maintaining their pureblood status, but preferred a girl with a family history of producing multiple, healthy children. Orion Black was heir to his name, and with so many cousins of close age, his parents thought to consolidate the family fortune instead of letting it fritter off through dowries; the Blacks had in recent decades lost a number of noteworthy heirlooms upon the marriages of the honourable Mrs. Harfang Longbottom and Mrs. Caspar Crouch, who had both been girls born to the Black family.
These things were irrelevant to Tom, who had never for an instant imagined venturing out on the marriage market himself.
Tom had also never put much thought into contemplating Hermione's femininity, or her lack of it.
He knew she was a girl, a matter of physical biology that grew more undeniable with every passing day, but in behaviour she was more laddish than ladylike. Hermione wore skirts with her school uniform and tied her hair back with a ribbon for Herbology lessons or Defence practice, but she didn't fuss about with powder or lipstick or aesthetic charms, unlike the infuriating Sidonie Hipworth who stopped and made him wait outside the girls' loo every time they went on joint patrols together.
Hermione didn't exactly heed the expectations set for those of her sex, but in terms of social convention for a person of her birth and class, she didn't deviate too far from the norm. Her beliefs in what was right and what was wrong fell in agreement, most of the time, with whatever the law permitted. Her values fell into a similar state of conformity: she didn't like the suffering and misery of others; she felt concern on others' behalf when it came to the living and working conditions for the urban poor and the citizens of the British colonial territories; she felt a responsibility to improve the situation wherever she could; she genuinely, earnestly believed in being good.
He supposed that someone like Hermione thought of one day being married and having children, because that was what was expected for people to do once they'd reached a certain age: have a house and a family with the statistical average of three children and a pet. Tom felt a bit nauseous at the prospect of there being another girl out there with Hermione's soft brown eyes that lit up whenever she found the book she wanted in the library returns pile, or her curly hair that ate combs and spat teeth, and her smooth, freckled skin that smelled like soap and flowers.
(It was preferable that any children Hermione had in future got her husband's looks.)
Hermione's husband.
In Tom's mind, the Imaginary Mr. Hermione Granger had been a faceless stranger who grew more and more detailed the longer Tom brooded over it.
If Hermione got married, then it was assumed it'd have to be someone whom Tom approved of, someone who met Tom's exacting standards. This husband would have to ensure that Hermione was properly taken care of, so he couldn't be a useless lump.
Perhaps it would have been Mr. Roger Tindall, who knew how to calculate an exponential function and was otherwise competent in his own way. He didn't have dirty grey rings under his nails, nor did he have gin or cigarettes on his breath, which would have immediately classed him as unsuitable. It was difficult for Tom to think of and apply positive attributes to other people, so he settled for checking them off against a mental list of negative traits.
(For some reason, he found it easier to envision Roger as Mr. Lieutenant Hermione Granger than Hermione as Mrs. Tindall.)
Any husband of Hermione's had to be biddable, of course. A Muggle, though hard to stomach as a match to a witch of Hermione's calibre, would be easiest to steer around, not having any native defences against magic, especially Tom's particular brand of mental control.
A malleable Muggle husband would be a man who wouldn't make a peep about Tom's having a key to their house or Tom calling on his wife every other day. Someone meek and retiring, who'd watch over the hypothetical children without complaint when Tom took Hermione out to an evening at the opera, or a weekend visit to the seaside where they'd take walks around the scenic cliffs and Tom would show her the cave with odd carvings on the interior walls he'd found when he was eight years old, a few months prior to their first meeting.
The voice of common sense spoke up most inconveniently at that moment.
Hermione is a Good Girl who cares about other people's feelings, it said. Loyalty is one of her most invaluable traits. Do you think that Hermione would ever allow her husband—Muggle or wizard—to be treated like that, even by you?
The voice of righteous anger retorted, She would pick someone else over me?
The Spirit of Christmas Past, that part of Tom which would never outgrow his origins as the penniless orphan boy, chose to speak then. Why wouldn't she pick me?
Because marriage is a scam, thought Tom.
He didn't want a wife and family; after his formative years spent among dozens of grubby young children, everything about them repulsed him. He didn't even want a woman, not in that way—yes, he wouldn't deny that he'd imagined it once or twice, what boy his age didn't—but the realities of the act itself were, to put it lightly, undignified. The mechanics of it were vulgar and unseemly; everything about it appeared so incredibly... unsanitary.
When he thought of the act, that act, his first association was with the women of indeterminate age who lingered on the docks and in the alleys. They, these so-called "fallen" women, addressed every man they met with terms of endearment, because in their line of business, no one used their proper Christian names.
When he was a young boy, he'd asked the orphanage minders about them, and been told off for asking, because he was too young to know such things, and anyway, it wasn't anything a person of any age should want to know about. Being a curious and intelligent child, he'd gone off on his own and read about them in the books he could scavenge at the Saturday market peddler booths and the local church's book collection. In the books, he'd discovered that those women were the cause of the "Dissolution of Moral Society" and a symptom of the "Decay of Modern Values". Further reading on what these symptoms were had educated him on the existence of what public health posters quite mildly called "V.D.".
Young Tom Riddle, who hadn't wanted to touch the orphanage's milch goat, wanted even less to do with that.
Older Tom Riddle, who was better educated about these things, with a greater perspective than he'd had as a boy of six or seven who had never ventured past the city limits of London, found himself conflicted.
Hermione wasn't that kind of girl. The words and labels other people used didn't apply to her.
He'd held Hermione's hand, he'd touched her knees, wound her hair between his fingers, and afterwards, the experience hadn't left him feeling tainted and unclean.
(It had left him... unsatisfied.)
Hermione was a part of his life, but a separate part; she was different—Special—and from their many years of knowing one another, he'd kept her distinct from all the other bits and pieces of his life experience. There were hundreds of witches and wizards at school with him, and of those he had his group of "friends", his circle of admirers and minions. And then he had Hermione, who was neither. He had his past Muggle life, the ignominious upbringing that he never talked about when he was at Hogwarts, that he made himself forget when he entered the Magical world—and he had Hermione, who was connected to it, but independent of it.
Why wouldn't she be different in every other aspect? He called her Friend in public, but she wasn't his friend the way everyone else used the word, not really. Why couldn't he call her Wife, say that word for the ears of other people, but signify the traditional definition of what a marriage meant?
Helpmeet.
If God Himself had decided that Man's life was incomplete without worthy companionship, then who was Tom Riddle to deny Him?
(To be perfectly truthful, Tom denied Him whenever it was convenient to do so. The commandment of Honour Thy Mother and Father couldn't very well be applied to orphans who'd never spoken to one parent, and only exchanged a sentence or two with the other, could it? Anyway, it was God who was responsible for Tom's unfortunate separation from mother and father, so it was ultimately His fault that Tom didn't care enough to respect them.)
Yes, he could permit that possibility. And wouldn't that solve all his problems, if he allowed the formation of that kind of relationship?
Once past a certain age, when boys and girls became men and women, society couldn't accept their being friends without assuming that there was something more between them. It was already happening; his meddling grandmother wasn't the last of it. His classmates and professors had made assumptions, Professor Slughorn the most obvious among them. Where once no one had thought anything of Tom sitting beside Hermione in their shared classes, now they did. They cared, they gossiped, and they forgot the fact that Tom and Hermione's shared desk had been reserved from the first term of First Year, outside of the few weeks in the beginning with that awkward disagreement they'd eventually resolved.
Tom, in First Year, had recognised that he'd been bestowed a Foil of his own, and he'd taken it in stride, a consequence of being Special. It was a sign, wasn't it?
Slowly, Tom began to countenance the prospect of a Mr. Hermione Granger whose presence he could tolerate on a daily basis.
He wouldn't be named Mr. Hermione Granger, obviously. That was a stupid name, a conceptual placeholder who now had no reason to exist.
She would be Hermione Riddle.
Now all he had to do was convince her that she wanted it too.
.
.
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
.
Behold, the gold medallist of mental gymnastics: Tom Marvolo Riddle.
"V.D." is an period-accurate acronym for "Venereal Disease", or STI/STD's, as it was impolite to use the word "sex" back then. Before the introduction of penicillin and modern antibiotics, these diseases (along with others like tuberculosis, polio, and measles) were common and very dangerous to public health, resulting in wartime governments running shame campaigns to increase awareness. Look them up, they're very interesting.
This kind of upbringing is why I think Tom would consider most people around him to be dirty and inferior to him, reinforcing his distance from them, as well as his disdain for humanity. For this reason, I can't imagine Tom to be a bedhopping playboy, not to the extent that he is portrayed in fanfiction. This interpretation of Tom Riddle portrays him as aromantic; even when he feels attachment to another person, it's far from romantic, but founded on emotional dependence and entitlement. Feel free to discuss or debate this characterisation.
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Genesis 2:18 (King James Version)
And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.
"Helpmeet" or "help meet" is the old-fashioned Biblical term for a partner, spouse, and companion.
In this fic, I write Tom as an atheist who is raised in a time period when people are culturally Christian, and it's the norm to say prayers at school, at the dinner table, and before bed. Tom doesn't do these things himself, but was forced to do it when he was younger, so he's familiar with Christian ideas and customs. Part of his motivation to study up on them was to debate adults who tried to make him go to church.
It should be said that if you want wholesome Christian values in your fanfiction, you won't find them in stories about baby Voldemort.