1944
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From the window of the train, the view of the countryside moved too quickly for Hermione to see more than an indistinct blur.
But after stopping at Sheffield and York, and from there the minor stations of Easingwold, Thirsk, and Great Hangleton, a picture of Yorkshire in full summer was revealed to her in full: tidy villages surrounded by an idyllic landscape of rolling hills, lush pasture, and rambling hedgerows in a hundred different shades of green. The effect, however, was ruined by the sky being a single flat shade of grey, which produced a constant shower of rain somewhere in between a mist and a fine drizzle.
The weather, though unpleasant, wasn't anything new to her. Scotland was rainy for half the year, cloudy the other half, and thus most students were incentivised to study the Impervius Charm without the looming urgency of their impending exams. But there were some differences to Scotland that Hermione could perceive. The grounds around Hogwarts consisted of rocky cliffs and wild forest—wonderfully scenic, but a harsh environment even to those who possessed the conveniences provided by magic or technology.
Yorkshire, on the other hand, showed clear signs of habitation with every glance: the railroad, an iron course slicing through hill and spanning valley, with well-maintained fields on either side, stiles and neat copses of trees separating each property from the next. And all along the way, the railway platforms abutted local coaching inns, whose windows and swinging signs were hung with flags. The Union Jack, Saint George's Cross, and the white rose banner unique to Yorkshire—they were symbols of alignment, of identity, that she hardly saw in the wizarding world outside of Quidditch matches and the family crests worn by the children of wealthy families.
This was the scale of Muggle Britain when compared to that of Magical Britain. Even with the loss of Ireland, the number of Muggles in Britain vastly outnumbered the wizards, several thousands to one. Little Hangleton was a village so tiny and insignificant that it and Great Hangleton were merged and marked on maps under a single name. And yet, it was still larger than Hogsmeade, the largest purely wizarding settlement in Britain. (There were others: Tutshill, Ilkley, Godric's Hollow, and Chudleigh—the hometown of the infamous Chudley Cannons Quidditch team—but they were subsections, satellites of larger Muggle towns. Once connected, after the passing of the Statute, they had been hidden in a manner similar to Diagon Alley's wand-activated doorway, and all proof of their existence removed from Muggle record and memory.)
It was a fact that the Riddles' tenants numbered greater than the entire population of Hogsmeade.
Tom seemed to be aware of it, too, judging by the way he swiped his hand against the foggy side window of the Sunbeam after Mr. Bryce had come to collect them from the station at Great Hangleton. As the green acres flashed past the misted glass, Tom surveyed the village, his dark eyes fixed on the rows of slate roofs and handsome crofts with the stone steeple at their centre, then the village green and adjoining cemetery.
As the motorcar crunched up the drive and into the shadow of the great house, he turned to Hermione and said, "We'll be watched from the moment we step foot through the door."
"Attentiveness, according to your grandmother, is a mark of good service," Hermione answered. "You've been going on for weeks about your servants."
She knew this from dining with the Riddle family during the Christmas holidays. Mrs. Riddle's favourite mealtime conversation topics had included personal anecdotes illustrating how everything in the past was better than the state of things in the present. Not only had good servants been easier to find and cheaper to hire, but in her day, there was none of that nonsense with young ladies donning trousers and going out to till fields or drive ambulances. And one could actually find proper eau de vie for the cherries jubilee after supper, because the lack of grocery options was surely the worst thing about the war. No, no, it was caught in a tie with the suspension of formal court presentations, due to a lack of eligible young men.
(After saying these things, Mrs. Riddle would send surreptitious looks at Tom, who'd been paying more attention to the crystal bowl of cherries jubilee that was going around the table than the conversation. Hermione had reason to doubt that Tom cared much about the cherries not being properly flambéed with German brandy, that the social Season was a pale shade of what it had been thirty years ago, or that he himself qualified for the labels of young, male, and eligible.)
"I have," Tom replied. "But as I said it then, I say it now: it's a good thing."
"Oh, I suppose I have to hear this one, then."
"We can use them for practice," said Tom.
Hermione gaped at him. "Sorry?"
"If we're to present ourselves as..." Tom made a face, then spoke the next word with distaste, "'together', then we ought to act like it, shouldn't we? At Hogwarts—that's where it really matters—we not only need the teachers to swallow it, but the rest of the Prefects, too. If we're to pull it off, then we have to practice for it. And who'd make a better audience than the servants? My grandmother's always going on about how they do nothing but stand around and gossip, so they've got that in common with the students at Hogwarts."
"I can't see it being that difficult, here or at Hogwarts," said Hermione. "Can't we just tell them? You didn't have a problem telling my Mum."
"It's not that simple," said Tom.
"Why not?"
"Just because someone is told something, doesn't mean it'll be believed," said Tom. "I know that it wouldn't work on me."
"So you're saying that we have to act the part," said Hermione slowly. "I see."
"I knew you'd understand, Hermione," said Tom approvingly. "The unfortunate truth is that for all your talents, talking isn't one of them, and you've not been happy the last few instances where I've spoken for you. This is the most logical solution. A compromise." He leaned forward in his seat. "Years ago, didn't you say that the ability to make compromises was a sign of emotional growth? Well, count me grown."
"It's not the same thing," said Hermione, sending a glare in his direction. "That was a different set of circumstances. I seem to remember that we'd been talking about the management of civic infrastructure under different political regimes—"
"Shh," said Tom. He held a finger to her mouth, then lifted it slightly and twitched it to the left.
She threw a quick glance over her shoulder, realising in that the motor had come to a stop, and was now parked at the foot of the steps leading up to the house. And there, standing on her side of the passenger window, was the Riddles' driver, Mr. Bryce, the rain spattering on his oilcloth mackintosh as he fiddled with the catch on a gold-handled umbrella.
"We'll save this conversation for later, won't we?" Tom whispered, leaning even closer, so close that she felt his lips tickle her ear.
The door opened, and Mr. Bryce proffered the umbrella.
"Sir? Miss? If you'll take this up to the door, I'll be followin' along with your luggage."
Mr. Bryce spoke with hesitance, his eyes drawn to where Tom was tucking a curl of Hermione's hair behind her ear; it had escaped the ribbon she'd tied it with that morning, the damp of the summer rain having puffed her hair up to twice its usual size.
"Thank you, Bryce," said Tom, reaching past Hermione and taking the umbrella. "It looks like there's only one, Hermione, so we should be alright if you stay close to me."
Tom escorted her up the stairs, one arm around her shoulders, and the other holding the umbrella aloft over the two of them. It was an unexpected reversal of their position in January: Hermione had helped Tom down the steps of the Riddle House, the darkness of early morning and the slick, ice-covered stone inciting concern over his recently-healed injury. Now Tom was helping her up, and with a subtle flick of his wand, he cast a Shield Charm to keep the blowing rain from hitting them in the face.
A maid held the door open, taking the dripping umbrella, their coats, and ushering them into the house. Mrs. Riddle greeted them in the foyer, giving a polite acknowledgement to Hermione, and a more enthusiastic welcome to Tom. She clasped his hands in hers, smoothing down his wind-blown hair, fluttering around them both and demanding hot tea and warmed blankets delivered to the drawing room so that the 'exhausted children' could finally have a chance to sit down.
It seems that Mrs. Riddle hasn't a head for logic, Hermione thought, girding herself for the socialising to come. We've been sitting down all day.
She didn't vocalise that thought. Instead, she allowed herself to be fussed over, biting her tongue when Mrs. Riddle sneaked her well-meaning opinions into the conversation. (On Tom's weight—whatever Professor Dumberton was feeding them at his school, it wasn't enough for a growing boy. Or Hermione's clothes—if she wanted to become the lady she was meant to be, instead of dressing like a little girl, she needed the proper garments, and luckily, Mrs. Riddle knew a seamstress who still had access to steel boning.) It was condescending in the most benevolent way, and listening to Mrs. Riddle remark to an impassive Tom that someday he was going to be as tall as his papa, Hermione was reminded of Nott and his suggestions on the subject of 'personal refinement'.
Hermione wondered what Nott was doing right now. She'd last seen him at King's Cross yesterday evening, and all through the train journey, they hadn't spoken of the book he'd stolen from the library, the Chamber of Secrets, or what they were going to do with it once the school term resumed in September. He'd wanted to say something; Hermione could not have ignored his wriggling eyebrows and his meaningful glances at the compartment door, but Tom hadn't let her out of his sight for the whole trip. Even when she'd excused herself to visit the loo and change out of her uniform, Tom had volunteered to accompany her, leaving Nott fuming in the compartment with the other boys.
("I didn't know that you cared about gentlemanly conduct," Hermione had remarked to Tom when he'd followed her out into the aisle between compartments. She was the only girl to a group of seven boys, so it was the most sensible choice for her to change in the bathroom instead of making all of them stand outside the compartment so she could change alone.
"I care more than Nott," had been Tom's reply. "You saw what he did to that Ravenclaw girl. Miranda—"
"—Myrtle."
"Yes, whatever her name was," said Tom. "It's a clear sign that he's not to be trusted. You shouldn't speak to him unless you have someone else there with you, Hermione."
"But it's perfectly fine if I'm alone with you?"
"Of course," Tom said, manoeuvring students out of their path with a few prods and polite nudges here and there. "I am a gentleman.")
And the designation wasn't inaccurate: Tom was a gentleman. He had the title by virtue of birth—the Riddles had no peerage, but they were landed, to such an extent that their estate incomes could support the family without requiring any member to work. And these days, their income made the Riddles wealthier than many genuine peers who had had no option but to support themselves in trade. Though most of them, according to Mrs. Riddle, had the grace to take only respectable positions in law, governance, civil administration, or academia.
At dinner, Tom made every attempt to look considerate, drawing out Hermione's chair, rising from the table whenever she stood and pardoned herself for the bathroom, and offering her the choicest morsels of the veal medallion that was their main course. He was so attentive that she felt he had gone far, far past the mark. His conduct wasn't a gentleman's brand of chivalry, but the doting of an enamoured young swain.
The queer thing was that Mrs. Riddle, for all her solicitousness over Tom, her darling grandson, gave no indication of disapproval to this behaviour, and Mr. Riddle gave no indication that he'd even noticed. Tom hadn't crossed the line into looking unseemly—he hadn't suggested she try a bite of food from his fork, let alone his plate, and there was no mention of their more colourful Hogwarts adventures—but the way he comported himself around her was inconsistent to not only what it had been last Christmas, but what it had been the previous summer, when Tom had been ill-tempered about his no longer being a Ward of the Crown. Back then, Mrs. Riddle had sent them invitation after invitation to dine at her hotel, and Tom had instead spent most of the meal glaring at his grandmother, his new guardian, rather than pay attention to Hermione.
During the dessert course of lemon sorbet garnished with candied rose petals, Hermione decided that she would confront Tom after dinner. He was the one who'd decided that announcing their "news" wasn't good enough, and that it would be more effective to act it out. Well, his acting was bordering on farcical, and if this continued, Mrs. Riddle would form certain expectations that could not be made good.
This pretense of Tom's was only meant to last a year, their last year of Hogwarts, their sole window of opportunity to explore whatever it was that lay in the Second Floor girls' loo. After that, there would be no more teachers to mislead, no more fellow students to distract. But Mrs. Riddle, a member of Tom's family, was not a teacher or a student. She wasn't one who could so easily be forgotten once they had no more shared classes or scheduled patrols together. In fact, being forgotten after Tom and Hermione reached their majority in the Muggle world (and this was only a few months away, as Mum had pointed out) was the opposite of what Mrs. Riddle hoped to achieve, as indicated by the suggestions she'd made to Hermione throughout dinner and dessert.
"Hermione, as you're to be summering here with us," said Mrs. Riddle, while Hermione looked down at her plate to keep herself from snorting. It was a rare type of person to use 'summer' as a verb in casual conversation. "You should take this opportunity to make enquiries of the local institutions. Mrs. Swindon, I believe, sent her daughter on to the Armoured Division's office in Helmsley. She joined through the Girls' Training Corps, but I'm sure if I made arrangements for your character references, you needn't waste your time with military drills if all you wanted was an office position."
"That's very kind of you, Mrs. Riddle," said Hermione, watching as the maid went around with a platter of round, sugar-dusted almond biscuits to go with the tea and brandy.
"I had my reservations, if you must know," said Mrs. Riddle graciously; she allowed the maid to drop two biscuits on the side of her plate with a pair of small silver tongs. "But soon I recognised that whilst it is quite a bold undertaking for a young girl, the situation, in essence, is temporary. And I've heard from Mrs. Swindon that it's respectable enough—there will be plenty of young officers of good family coming and going, and I don't doubt that Miss Caroline Swindon knows that her best prospects lie in the uniformed services; her father, of course, is Chief Constable of the North Riding Constabulary."
She sipped her tea, regarding with Hermione with a cool expression. "Not that you would find yourself inclined to follow her example in that respect, Hermione. But perhaps you might enjoy the company of girls your own age. I certainly did, and saw its merits when I was settled and had good friends whose children were the same age as my own. It is truly disheartening when your time comes, and you have no one else to keep you company in your fragile state but the nursemaid."
"If I was in such a fragile state, wouldn't there be a second party responsible for it?" Hermione asked, glancing at Tom from the corner of her eye. "Is it too much to expect that their responsibilities would include keeping me company?"
"One would surely wish it to be," said Mrs. Riddle easily, "but there is good reason why the whole ordeal is known as 'going into seclusion'."
"Tom?" said Hermione, nudging him under the table with her foot.
"Hermione?" said Tom, tearing his eyes away from the clock on the sideboard. "What is it?"
"My dear," said Mrs. Riddle in a kind voice. "Articles of this nature are, and shall always be, a woman's burden."
Although she knew it was unworthy of her, Hermione couldn't stop herself from feeling cross all through dessert. Mrs. Riddle was older than her Mum, and would have considered women marching for their right to vote as alien a notion as women voting in the first place. She could not have helped her sheltered upbringing, just like Nott could not have helped his; they had both been informed from childhood that certain things fell into a natural order, by blood or sex or station, and had encountered few people over the course of their lives who could convince them to reassess their opinions.
Nott, she thought, was less vocal about his beliefs than he'd been a year ago—perhaps his closer association with her and Tom had softened his stance on blood supremacy—but Mrs. Riddle had had decades to corroborate her beliefs on the fragility of the 'fairer sex'. Within her circles, women were delicate doves who started out as maidens, and must be shepherded, as gently as possible, into the rôle of matron, with nothing in between. There was no nuance, no room for exception; one had to be one or the other, or one was not a woman at all.
It was here, more than ever, that Hermione was tempted to say, "Oh, dash it all!" and follow Tom's example: escape to the wizarding world as he'd planned to at the age of eleven, and never look back. Be a witch first, and relegate everything else to the periphery. The fact, as repeated many times over by Tom, was that Hermione was no Muggle, nor would she ever be; she would have twice the lifespan of a Muggle, and as such, there was little chance she would end up, as they called it, 'on the shelf', by age thirty. Witches had borne healthy children at fifty or sixty years old—there were potions and Mediwitches to make it possible—so the conventions of high society (or even Muggle society, for that matter) need not apply to her.
It was here that Hermione wondered if Nott had a point in scoffing at Muggle sensibilities. He did it less than he once had, but he'd also been oddly fascinated by the idea of millions of Muggles dying of famine overseas, and even more fascinated when he'd learned that it had been caused by the British Muggle government.
("Where would they put all the bodies?" Nott had asked. "They can't Vanish them. Did they eat them? Of course it sounds barbaric, but you can never tell what those Muggles will do next—and it would solve their problem."
To prevent the Japanese from gaining access to supply lines in British India, the wartime government had blocked the transport lanes, to the result of millions of Bengal natives going hungry. It was a crisis covered in the London press, but yet again, it was something that no other student at Hogwarts cared about. She'd mentioned it to Tom, but his response had been to inform her that the most interesting war-related news would be hearing that the Germans had blown up Wool's Orphanage.)
Ultimately, she tried her best to be polite. Hermione was a guest, and Mrs. Riddle was the hostess. She was fortunate enough to have a choice in taking those rôles that other women had thrust upon them; even other witches, Lucretia Black for instance, were not immune to it all. Hadn't Clarence Fitzpatrick said that Lucretia would be married next year, to a man ten years her senior? And on top of that, Mrs. Riddle wasn't even her mother, so Hermione had no obligation to accede to her suggestions. Not that a blood relation had swayed Tom either; he gleefully denied Mrs. Riddle at every turn, and she was his legal guardian.
She had wanted to speak to Tom about his acting skills, but the dinner was so exhausting that she went straight to bed after washing up and changing into her nightclothes. She would correct Tom in the morning, when she was well-rested enough to counter any of Tom's arguments as to why he thought it necessary to act out gestures of affection in such an exaggerated fashion. It was far from subtle, especially for a self-described 'Master of Subtlety'—how on Earth could he expect anyone to think him sincere, and their... 'involvement' genuine?
With the rain pattering at the windows, Hermione cast a quick Warming Charm on her bed, setting her wand on the nightstand before climbing under the blankets. Thirty minutes later, she had fallen into a light drowse when the latch on her door gave a click, then a shaft of light from the hall lamps cut across the carpet, and a dark figure crept into her room on slippered feet.
"What—" she groaned, rolling over and pushing herself up on her elbows.
A heavy weight fell over her body, a warm hand pressing over her mouth, then a voice whispered in her ear.
"Shh, Hermione, it's me."
"Tom! Why are y—"
"Hush!"
The weight fell off her, and the shaft of light from the hall disappeared as the door swung silently shut.
"Right," said the voice, "I've cast a few charms, so we can talk now. There's a Tripping Jinx on the hall carpet so if any of the servants comes sneaking along this wing of the house, I'll know about it."
"Tom," Hermione said with a note of reproach, "you could have cast an Intruder Charm to sound an alarm if someone entered the hall."
"Well, yes, I could have," Tom admitted, rolling over to one side of the bed with a squeak of steel springs. "But alarm charms only set off a noise when they're triggered; they don't do anything to delay an intruder. Hmm. I didn't think Yorkshire would be that much colder than London—could you move over, please, Hermione?"
Hermione obliged, wriggling closer to the window.
The blankets rustled, and Hermione felt Tom slide in next to her. It was too dark to see what Tom was doing until he murmured "Lumos", and the tip of his wand glowed with a faint yellow light, illuminating the space between their pillows, and Tom's pale face.
"You may be wondering," Tom began, "why I wanted to speak to you so urgently."
"Actually," said Hermione, "I'm wondering why you're here at all. Here. In my bed."
"This is my house," said Tom. "So it stands to reason that this is my room, and my bed. But I'm generous enough to share it with you, so here you are. You're welcome, Hermione. No, I wanted to tell you that my plan worked, and my grandmother bought it. I overheard her tell the maids to keep an eye on us—she doesn't want either of us to tarnish our reputations until there's an official confirmation of intent. From now on, expect to be interrupted whenever we hold revisions in the library. She can't outright order us to stay under a chaperone's supervision without looking overly presumptuous, but she's jolly well going to try."
"She can't mean any harm by it," Hermione said slowly. "I mean, if assigning a chaperone could prevent things like this from happening, I'd understand why she cares."
"There's nothing for her to care about," said Tom. "Did she think that I was going to, hah, compromise your virtue?"
"My virtue is none of her business," said Hermione. "If, by any chance, it needs protecting, I'm sure I can do it myself."
"Do you think it needs protecting?" asked Tom.
"I think that's a question I should be asking you," Hermione answered, tugging back some of the blanket that Tom had, inch by inch, stolen away to the side of the bed he was presently occupying.
"Mmm," said Tom. "You don't need to be protective, no. If I ever made an attempt to compromise your virtue, I'm quite certain that you'd know it."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means that it would be insulting to your intelligence, not to mention mine, to pretend that 'virtue' means anything," said Tom, very smoothly. "It's obvious that clergymen invented it to trick people into tithing."
"Oh, yes, obviously," said Hermione, sniffing. "What isn't obvious to me is what you're doing here. Couldn't you wait until morning to tell me this?"
He gave a soft laugh, then rolled closer to her, dimming his wandlight. "As much as I enjoy a good debate, there's something more important to discuss when we have an opportunity for privacy. The Chamber, of course. Have you come up with any theories for what's down there?"
"Slytherin lived before there was a Ministry of Magic, or a Department for the Regulation of Magical Creatures. A thousand years ago, there weren't international laws back then to control what animals could be exported, sold across national borders, protected from hunters, or raised in captivity," said Hermione. "The legends imply that it's a creature capable of killing wizards, so there are some things it can't be. Not a puffskein, a jobberknoll, or a snidget. Perhaps a runespoor... no, they live decades, not centuries... a hydra, then? That would certainly fit Slytherin's image."
"Not a dragon?" said Tom. "I've always wanted to see one with my own eyes. It's a shame that Care of Magical Creatures has such a dull curriculum—last year, we spent a month learning how to sex owl chicks."
"Er," said Hermione after taking a few seconds to digest this information. "I suppose that might be useful one day..."
"When that day comes, it will be too soon," Tom muttered. "What do you think is the best way to fight a dragon? They have that spell-resistant hide; it can't be so simple to defeat one with standard duelling strategy."
"I can't imagine that fighting a dragon would ever be simple," said Hermione. "You can out-strategise an opponent in a duel, but is it even possible to apply that to a dragon? Dragons don't have strategies—they have instinct."
"Instinct or strategy, could either best a Killing Curse?" Tom mused, not quite meeting her eye. "Can anything beat a Killing Curse? In all the books that I've read, I've never seen mention of anything but a physical barrier blocking a Killing Curse, and most dragons on the ground are too large and clumsy to hide themselves well. Not that they'd want to—by instinct, they'd fight an enemy the size of a human wizard. They'd only turn tail on another dragon, and only if it was bigger. And that's the same for most magical creatures. Rather simple minds, if I'm to be the judge of it."
"I don't know..." said Hermione hesitantly.
As much as she disparaged this discussion of Unforgivable Curses, she knew that they weren't illegal to discuss, or even illegal to use on animals. And there was plenty of precedent of using the Killing Curse on animals in the past: those who harvested creature parts wanted to preserve the body as perfectly as they could—organs, flesh, bones, and hide. The utility of a Killing Curse lay in how quick and painless it was, without causing an animal undue stress, or damaging the skin as a Muggle hunting rifle would have done in a game shoot; this was of vital importance in the harvest of Demiguises, an animal raised solely for the magical qualities of their skin and fur. She could admit that it was more humane than how pigs and oxen were butchered for the average Muggle family's table, but it was nonetheless frightening how the speed and convenience of the Killing Curse had resulted in its use by wizard murderers.
The wartime government, Hermione reminded herself, had caused the deaths of millions of rural Indian farmers. This spell is a tool, and not the cruellest tool in existence, not by far.
A land mine, unlike a spell, was not directed by its operator. It was indiscriminate; each instance of its use was not limited by an individual's conscious intent. It could maim a person, kill them, or do everything in between, but its main purpose was to deny access to terrain through the threat of unexpected violence. That particular spell, unlike a land mine, was clean and exact in comparison.
"Professor Merrythought said that the adult dragons in creature reserves took several wizards to Stun," Hermione said. "It must be because of their inherent magical nature, or their magic-resistant skin. Whatever it is, you'd likely only disable part of it if you hit it in the wing or the leg."
If there was a creature capable of killing wizards hidden under Hogwarts, wasn't it best to keep it from escaping into the school? If that were the case, then Tom using a Killing Curse on a dangerous animal was better than risking the lives of unwary students. She might not like it, but with reluctance, she ceded that it was tolerable, morally and legally—unlike Nott's use of the Imperius Curse. She still hadn't forgiven Nott for it, and was unsure of how to go about rebuking him for it, because she couldn't let it stand between them unaddressed.
She had wondered, changing out of her uniform in the tiny train bathroom with Tom standing guard outside the door, if Nott had ever thought about turning his wand against her when she was being short with him. He'd cursed Myrtle Warren because she was an inconvenience; Hermione, in retrospect, had been as much of an obstacle, and for a stretch of months, not minutes.
But...
No.
Tom would have noticed if Hermione had demonstrated any strange behaviours. He would have taken her to the Hospital Wing the moment he saw her eyes glazed and vacant; he, after exchanging letters for years, would have noticed if she spoke words that sounded as if they'd come out of anyone's mouth but her own.
Nott wouldn't have dared, not with the possibility of having Tom's anger descend upon him.
(On the other hand, if she and Tom had never known one another, Nott would never have had anything to do with her in the first place.)
"I'd need to aim at the head, then," said Tom thoughtfully. "If a dragon's skin is that resistant to spells, then the best way to get it would be through its mouth or its eyes. A Reducto couldn't blast through dragonhide, but what would it do if aimed at a dragon's open mouth?"
"That's only if there is a dragon," Hermione pointed out. "It's traditional to use a dragon to guard treasure, but if you haven't noticed, most people these days just go to the bank. Dragons are good at protecting gold, but it's hard to get the gold back if you decide you want to spend it. With the Chamber, the legend doesn't say that it was meant to be hidden forever, but that Slytherin intended it to be used."
"Perhaps it's a Sphinx," Tom suggested. "They're not as aggressive as dragons, and can be communicated with. Slytherin's agenda was to 'cleanse the unworthy', and with something so vague, the monster—whatever it is—needs to be able to take orders and differentiate its victims."
"How charming," remarked Hermione. "But a Sphinx? It would offer any potential victim a puzzle first, and if answered successfully, that victim would be allowed to walk free. They're too clever and difficult to simply order around like a... an executioner." Hermione made a face. "Would Slytherin even use a lion to complete his so-called 'great work'? The whole idea of hiding a secret chamber is very dramatic, but I've seen no sign that he valued dramatic irony."
"Then..." Tom trailed off, rolling onto his back, before whispering, "it's got to be a Cerberus! Dangerous, but obedient if trained right after weaning. Tradition also makes them out to be guard creatures, though they're not as common in Britain as in other parts of Europe. And—here's the greatest clue—they're comfortable in dark spaces and underground. Dragons are creatures of the air; they'd be better used to guard a tower than a hole in the ground."
"Slytherin's legendary monster," Hermione whispered back, "is a dog?"
"A giant dog," said Tom. "With three giant heads."
"Oh," said Hermione. "Well, I suppose it could be..."
"Do you fancy a flutter?" asked Tom in a casual tone of voice.
"What I fancy is a good night's sleep."
"So do I," said Tom, and saying that, he extinguished his light.
Hermione heard the bedsprings creak as he leaned over to the side, then there was a soft click as he placed his wand on the nightstand next to hers. She waited for him to roll out of the bed and make a departure back to his own room, but to her surprise, he didn't. Instead, he wormed his way deeper under the blankets—her blankets—with a rustle of sheets and the thump of a pillow being plumped. She could feel him very close to her, the dip in the mattress where his weight, several stone greater than hers, pressed down on the springs. She could feel the heat of his body, warmer than the hot water bottles the maids had prepared her bed with during her visit last Christmas.
"Tom?"
"Mm?"
"What are you doing?"
"Trying to sleep. Do you mind?"
"Yes, I do!"
"Don't worry, once you fall asleep, you'll forget I'm here."
Hermione let out a tired sigh. "Good night, Tom."
"Good night, Hermione."
It was an even greater surprise that Tom's presence didn't bother her all that much. He'd spent much of the day by her side, and the day before as well. To have him at her side now, despite being rather unexpected at first, didn't feel wrong. Yes, it could be argued that it was 'wrong' in the sense that it was completely inappropriate by conventional standards of decency and propriety, but Hermione didn't feel that it was a moral transgression.
Tom disdained common distinctions of right and wrong, especially in attempts to apply them to his person. And although she was the one who, most of the time, had been the one making those attempts, Hermione was reluctant to apply them to Tom right now—out of favouritism, out of fondness, and out of mutual friendship.
It was also due, in part, to Tom's being a quiet sleeper. He didn't snore, kick, or talk in his sleep, and Hermione found herself falling asleep before she could properly articulate a list of reasons why Tom should return to his own room, which was larger and better-appointed than hers.
She didn't wake up until the next morning, when a maid set off the Tripping Jinx with a shrill cry and a crash of shattering porcelain.
Tom, who had somehow draped himself over her during the night, didn't budge an inch at the noise.
.
.
Over the next few days, Hermione scarcely got a minute to herself.
During daylight hours, Mrs. Riddle monopolised her time, inviting her to tea in her private sitting room every afternoon, sometimes with a guest or two from the village. This had included the local parson, a balding man of mild disposition who deferred to Mrs. Riddle whenever he was asked to give his opinion on anything, which was rare, as Mrs. Riddle had taken a firm hand with the conversation from the very start. The mornings were occupied by Mrs. Riddle squiring Hermione around the Riddle House, the gardens, outbuildings, and orchards, making broad insinuations about what changes could be made in future, if Hermione were to find herself in charge of the estate.
"English primroses were the done thing when I was a girl," Mrs. Riddle had said, leading her out into the conservatory behind the house, where the hothouse flowers were grown. "Of course, they'll still suit most occasions, but I expect that you'll want something with a bit more spirit. Zinnias, perhaps. Or anemones. My dear, you're young enough to get away with a daring choice or two—but not too daring." She gave a silvery little laugh. "We've an image to maintain."
The evenings, after Mr. and Mrs. Riddle had retired to their rooms when the last remove had been cleared from the dining table, were spent with Tom. He was still fixated on the subject of Slytherin's monster, and was determined that he would not only discover it, but defeat it in single combat.
They met in Hermione's guest bedroom, because over the last week, Tom had developed an unfortunate habit of coming and going whenever he liked, half the time waiting a mere second between knocking on her door and opening it up. The room was larger than her bedroom at home, and the bed could easily fit two without trouble, so it wasn't as if his presence made the space too close and stifling. But it was a nuisance that Hermione couldn't even change her clothes in her own room. She'd started to change into her nightgown in the bathroom down the hall, after too many close runs where Tom had barged in with an armful of Care of Magical Creatures textbooks.
Hermione had just returned to her room with a bundle of laundry to see Tom lounging on her bed, twirling his wand between his fingers, a selection of books scattered over the bedcovers.
"This might be your house, but it would be nice if you had the courtesy to ask before you came in," said Hermione reprovingly. "You lived at my house for two summers and my Mum always knocked when she came in to change the sheets."
"Are you afraid that I'll see something I'm not supposed to?" asked Tom. "Because there's no reason to be afraid—you know I'd never laugh at you, Hermione." His eyes darted to Hermione's laundry. Underneath the smart blouse and woollen skirt she'd worn to dinner was a small sliver of cream satin trimmed with lace.
Hermione quickly dumped her slip into the laundry basket and closed the lid. "I know you wouldn't laugh at me; that was never the problem."
"So what is the problem, then?"
"The fact that you're so certain that the Killing Curse will solve everything," said Hermione. "Yes, it's neat and tidy, but people will know what spell you used, based on just how neat it is. That could put paid to your idea of making yourself out to be a fearsome dragonslayer. No noble dragonslayer would cultivate a reputation of being handy with illegal curses—yes, I know it's legal in that context, but you don't want the wrong people asking the wrong questions."
"What else do you suggest?" said Tom. "Assuming it's a carnivore, we could brew a Sleeping Draught, baste it on a side of beef, then feed it to the creature... but that would take too long."
"Assuming it's a Cerberus, you wouldn't even need a Sleeping Draught," said Hermione. "Orpheus made one fall asleep by playing music. You could sing it to sleep, you know."
Hermione had learned more than a few interesting facts this summer. The latest one was that Tom had a fine singing voice, which she'd found out on Sunday, when the Little Hangleton congregation had gotten up to sing a hymn before the end of the service. The Riddles sat at the front, in their family's reserved seat, and Tom, within direct sight of his grandparents and the parson, had had to sing rather than mouth the words. His voice was untrained: Hermione didn't think that Wool's could have provided tutoring, and when she'd taught him to dance, she'd been stymied by the fact that he was unfamiliar with formal musical terminology. But he didn't crack on the higher notes, and he could carry a tune better than she could.
(Hermione's Muggle primary school had had a class for music, where she'd learned to sight-read sheet music and play a whistle, very poorly. It had also been her first introduction to the existence of natural aptitudes. She memorised the composition better than her classmates, but the teacher had admitted that while her recitations were accurate, she lacked 'joy'. Hermione had scoured musical encyclopaedias for weeks to understand the meaning of that comment, and to this day, she still didn't know.)
"I can't very well speak spell incantations and sing at the same time," said Tom. "And not to be rude about it, but you can't sing either. Can you play an instrument?"
"The only instrument I play decently is the piano," she replied, "since playing one is just a matter of hitting the keys in the right order. But we can't just Transfigure one unless we study how they're made—there are eighty-eight strings in different lengths that we'd have to get right to make a working piano. The alternative is borrowing one, but the only person I know who has a piano is your grandmother... And she'd notice if the one in her sitting room disappeared for a few weeks."
Hermione paused for a moment, frowning. "I'm not certain we could fit a piano down that hole in the girls' bathroom."
Tom rolled onto his stomach, tapping his wand against his chin. In a low voice, he said, "Nott can play the harp."
Hermione couldn't imagine Tom and Nott casually discussing their hobbies and recreational diversions. Nott certainly hadn't discussed anything of that vein with her.
"Did he tell you that?"
"We live in the same dormitory," said Tom. "One tends to know things about the person who has slept ten feet away for the last six years."
"He has to be wondering what we're doing," Hermione said. "Should we write to him?"
Tom was silent, the wand falling still in his hand. "He'll want to meet us."
"Is that such a bad thing?"
Another silence. Tom gave Hermione a curious look, the slightest lift to his brows.
"He's a parasite," said Tom bluntly.
Hermione sighed. "So are your grandparents. Or did you forget that all their money comes from compound interest and collecting other people's rent?"
"It would be a blow to their pride for my grandparents to take even a single shilling from you," said Tom. "Nott, on the other hand, would bleed you dry if he could get away with it."
"He wouldn't do that..."
"No," Tom agreed. "Because he knows he can't."
"What about you?" asked Hermione. "You don't appear to have any qualms about bleeding him."
"Someone who boasts about the purity of his blood should never hesitate to prove it," said Tom. He gave a sniff of disdain. "Write him, then. Arrange a meeting. And tell him to mind his manners."
That evening after dinner, Hermione rang her Mum from the telephone in Mr. Riddle's office. Gilles was despatched from the Grangers' house in London an hour later, bearing a book and a few extra changes of socks and undergarments that Hermione had asked for. When Gilles arrived at midnight, Hermione stroked the feathery tufts on the top of his head, before tying a fresh letter to his leg.
"Broxtowe Abbey, Nottinghamshire. Go to the mews, not the main house," Hermione whispered. "Wait for the elf to clean the roosts in the morning, then give her the letter."
Gilles took one last owl treat from her hand, nudging her palm with the side of his hooked beak. Then he shook out his feathers, gliding out of the window on silent wings and disappearing into the night.
Hermione slid the sash down and closed the curtains, turning back to her bedroom. "I've sent the letter. He should get it before noon tomorrow—unless he sleeps in during the summer holidays."
"You should have ordered the owl to peck him awake," said Tom. "Owls will do that if you tell them to."
"They're the only the ones, it seems, who will do what they're told," said Hermione, folding her arms. "Heavens, Tom, don't you like your own room? Mrs. Riddle went through a lot of trouble of furnishing it for you!"
Tom's bedroom not only had an adjoined bathroom, a larger bed, but all the books that Tom had collected over the last ten years, shipped in from Wool's. His room also had a vast armoire for the clothes Mrs. Riddle had bought him. On the shelves were vases of fresh blooms cut from Mrs. Riddle's garden, and the walls were papered in a pattern of Tom's own choosing. His room felt like a proper bedroom. Hermione's, in comparison, was clearly a guest room, complete with dried flowers on the mantel and framed watercolours of the Yorkshire valleys on the walls. A rather sterile choice, but safe and inoffensive.
"I do," Tom replied, "but my bed isn't as comfortable as yours." He patted the pillow. "Here, I can fall asleep in a matter of minutes."
"As comfortable as it is for you," said Hermione, "it certainly isn't for the maids who trip over the carpet every morning."
"I'll stop casting Tripping Jinxes if you ward our doors with a Muggle Repelling Charm," said Tom. "If anyone could formulate a conditional enchantment that operates between the hours of sunset and dawn, it'd be you."
"There's no reason why you couldn't do it."
"No," said Tom, drawing back the bedcovers and slipping into the bed, "but I'm not the one who gets upset when the maids have to pick the china out of the carpet on their hands and knees."
"It would do you well to demonstrate some fellow feeling now and then," said Hermione, with a deep sigh. She got into the bed, taking care to not make contact with Tom, who hadn't given any indication that he was going to vacate her room.
Servants, though paid for their service, were still human beings, and deserved to be treated humanely. If there was one thing for which she couldn't fault Mrs. Riddle, it was the woman's belief in noblesse oblige. Of course, Mrs. Riddle approached it from a position of privilege, and even if her intentions were questionable, her actions—giving alms to the poor and patronage to the arts—still had merit.
"Well, if you insist," said Tom, slithering over to her side of the bed and giving her a strange, backwards hug. His arms held her so tight that her ribs creaked, and a few seconds later, his grip softened, and one hand lifted up to stroke her hair.
"How's this for fellow feeling?" he murmured.
"It's a decent attempt," said Hermione, closing her eyes.
.
.
It rained on the day they'd arranged to meet Nott.
From the breakfast table, Tom watched the gloomy sky with an equally gloomy expression, while his grandparents tucked obliviously into their breakfast. Mr. Riddle had his usual bacon and brown sauce butty, browsing through the financial pages of the Yorkshire Post, making the occasional comment to Mrs. Riddle about Parliament's new taxes or the rebuilding of Hull, a port city in the East Riding that had been bombed by the Germans several times over the last few years, resulting in hundreds killed and tens of thousands displaced to temporary shelters across the county.
"Mary, Parliament's raising the Purchase Tax," Mr. Riddle grumbled. "'For the necessity of the war, and the transforming of our home economy, Britons have reduced demand for essential goods; we are heretofore obliged to reduce our consumption of inessential luxuries.' Utter rubbish." Mr. Riddle slapped the newspaper onto the table. "This luxury tax is to include plate fees for civilian motorcars—hah, as if a man can find enough petrol to drive anywhere these days."
"I'm sure you can find some if you ask the right people," Mrs. Riddle assured him. "I do hope that tax won't be on the auction houses. I've asked Mr. Steadman to keep watch for any good jewels going at decent prices. They'll make a fine gift—and you know how I can't abide an empty trousseau."
Tom made his excuses as soon as he could, and Hermione followed, buttoning up her coat and ensuring her wand was within reach in the front pocket. Together, they crunched down the drive, side-stepping puddles of cloudy brown water, until they'd reached the gates at the foot of the hill. They ducked behind the stone pilings, green with moss, out of sight of the house, then reached for their wands.
The Disillusionment Charm was difficult to master until one had a proper grasp of the visualisation. It wouldn't work when one directed their intent to achieving complete invisibility; rather, one had to will themselves into being unnoticed—to fading into the shadows wherever they existed, and twisting the light to create shadows where there were none. Half of it was a re-direction of bystander attention, encouraging them to continue with their business, not stopping to remark on a peculiar shimmer in the air, or darkening of a well-lit room. The other half was the re-distribution of light: muting colours, blurring edges, refracting light so one's shape and silhouette became jumbled with one's surroundings.
Hermione had practised it often over the past year, but she still hadn't gotten used to the sensation of a successful casting, which felt like a cold tube of nit cream being squeezed over her head, a memory from her childhood that she didn't regard with much fondness. (There'd been a head lice epidemic going around her school when she was in Grade Three, and Hermione, having very thick hair, had had a worse time of it than her classmates. The treatment involved the application of a smelly scalp lotion and fine-combing each strand of hair for louse eggs, which had tested Mum's patience as much as it had Hermione's.)
She was still thinking about it when they reached the Little Hangleton graveyard at the bottom of the hill, off one side of the road that led down to the village.
It wouldn't have been a dreary, morbid place on any other day; as graveyards went, the Little Hangleton cemetery was neat and well-maintained, and by the fresh flower clippings on a few graves, it had seen recent visitors. The gravestones were laid in square clusters broken by shade trees dripping rain over stone benches, and in the centre of the cemetery was a stone-lined path that divided the simple granite markers on one side from the elaborate carved statues and mausoleum vaults on the other.
She drew her wand and reversed the Disillusionment Charm, casting a quick Warming Charm over her coat—it was difficult to maintain two spells at once. Scanning a row of stone markers, Hermione deduced that the markers bore villagers' names, so the other half of the graveyard had to be the Riddles'.
She was proven right when Tom suddenly veered off the path, passed under the wing of an angel in serene repose, and stopped at the front of a mausoleum, its gold-leafed double doors gleaming even in the dim light of a cloudy day. Built in a classical style, it had a pair of white marble nymphs on either side of the door, the left carrying a jug of water, and the right hefting a bundle of ripened grain. What had caught Tom's attention were the letters carved atop the lintel and foiled in gold: R-I-D-D-L-E.
"'Thomas John Edward Riddle'," read Tom, his voice tight. "The angel over there is for another Thomas Riddle."
"What a bunch of unimaginative stiffs, eh?"
Before Hermione could speak a word, Tom had already drawn his wand.
A jet of scarlet streaked through the air, red light reflecting off the gilded doors, skimming off a nymph's bare white shoulder, before it was abruptly halted in mid-air by a dome of pale blue. Crackling with red sparks, the shield glowed for one, two, three seconds before it began to lose its radiance, then slowly, it faded away, just as a large chunk of stone dropped from the statue's side.
Crack!
White marble hit the floor of the mausoleum's stone portico, shattering into several pieces and a cloud of white dust.
A cloaked figure stepped out from behind the disfigured nymph, one gloved hand moving to push back a rain-dampened hood. Nott's face was revealed thus, a scowl on his face, and a mean-spirited comment already on his tongue.
"Now that was excessive." Nott paused, then added, "But I suppose it would be foolish to expect anything else from you, Riddle."
"Nott," said Tom in way of a greeting. His eyes darted to Nott's hands. "What's that you've got?"
In Nott's hand was his wand, the handle carved with budding branches; tucked under the other arm, partly concealed by the drape of his cloak, was a sealed glass apothecary jar, the type that Slughorn had lining the shelves of his classroom. Where Professor Slughorn's jars contained bits of dried tree bark or Billywig stingers, Nott's jar contained what looked like a severed human hand, an end of white bone peeking through the desiccated flesh and mottled grey skin at its truncated wrist. The yellowing nails of its fingers were curled around a stump of candle wax.
"A Hand of Glory!" said Tom, eagerly reaching for it. "Where did you find something like that?"
Nott jerked it out of Tom's reach. "Get your own!"
Hermione cleared her throat. "Can we get on with it, please? Tom and I have a good idea of what the creature in the Chamber is."
"Well?" said Nott, clutching the jar tightly to his chest and keeping a wary eye on Tom.
"It's a Cerberus, of course," said Tom.
Nott looked at him blankly. "Are... are you joshing me?"
Hermione rattled off a list of the evidence: "It has to be a creature capable of taking orders from a human master. As the story goes, Slytherin left the school and passed the information on opening the Chamber to his apprentices..."
When she finished, Nott had turned his blank stare not just to Tom, but to Hermione as well.
"It's hard to believe that there are people who have so many O.W.L.s between them, but not a lick of sense," said Nott.
"Excuse me!" Hermione protested. "What do you mean by that?"
"Exactly what I said," said Nott. "It's a snake. Slytherin's monster is a snake. Of course it's a bloody snake!"
"But that's so obvious," Tom interjected. "Isn't Slytherin supposed to be the most cunning of the four founders? What better way than this to make people think it's a snake, so they'd search for centuries, looking for a snake when there was never one in the first place."
Nott flicked a quick glance at Hermione. "Slytherin was also enormously grandiose."
"Here," said Nott, waving his wand over their feet and mumbling a few words; the wet stone hissed and a curtain of steam rose from the floor, leaving it warm and dry, if a little dusty from the broken shards of marble. Nott dropped to his knees, setting the hand-in-a-jar to the side, before spreading his cloak over the paving stones. He unbuckled the flap of the satchel he'd been wearing beneath his cloak, drawing out a leather folio; within it was a thick ream of parchment, which he laid out over the cloth, sheet by sheet.
A pall of uncertainty came upon her quickly, but just as quickly, it passed away, and Hermione was kneeling on the floor of the portico, casting Lumos so she could read the pages of hand-transcribed notes copied from the reference book Nott had stolen from the Hogwarts library.
She recognised his handwriting—she'd remarked on it the day he'd drafted a legal letter almost a year ago—on a summarised biography of Salazar Slytherin.
.
.
Slytherin was a noted master of wandlore. The first trees planted on the Hogwarts grounds, which later became the Forbidden Forest, were a selection of native British wand woods: stout oak, hardy highland pine, supple willow, enduring yew, delicate beech, and resonant spruce. But Slytherin, who had carved wands for his newest students, those in possession of the qualities he espoused, would not make his own wand out of common wood. Being well-travelled, Slytherin carved his wand from a stave of Indian snakewood, a timber famed for its intricate and colourful endgrain, resembling the scale patterns of snake and lizard. His core, too, was also said to be unique. Not unicorn, of which one can purchase a spray of matched hairs from any huntmaster, but the forehorn of an enormous serpent that Slytherin encountered on his travels in the East...
.
.
"See?" said Nott, pointing out the relevant paragraph. "The fellow was obsessed with snakes. They were his heraldic symbol, and he was proud of it. His pride was what got him banished from Hogwarts by the other founders—he wouldn't renounce his beliefs, not even when Gryffindor, his beloved friend, asked him to, a condition for staying on as a teacher."
"What's that?" Tom suddenly asked, picking one sheet from the bottom of the stack. The edges were curled, but Tom flattened them out to reveal a sketched image of a bald, bearded man clad in thickly embroidered robes, his flowing sleeves so long that their ends were cut off by the bottom of the paper.
Tom lit the tip of his wand, casting a soft yellow light over the finer details. The sketch was done in lead pencil, shaded in the manner of an engraving, with neat crosshatches to convey shadow and depth. As Hermione watched, the drawing shifted—it had been charmed into animation—and the bearded man blinked, his eyes dark and piercing under a pair of heavy grey brows. On his chest was a pendant hung from a chain, the pencil shadows wriggling and shifting to produce bright highlights on the inset jewels, a row of them curved in the shape of an S.
"That's Slytherin," said Nott. "If Slytherin built that hole in the girls' bathroom, then there might be a tapestry of him down there. It'll be sure proof that it's the Chamber of legend."
"The necklace he's wearing," Tom said. "What happened to it?"
"Necklace? That's Slytherin's locket," corrected Nott, lifting his nose. "Slytherin passed it down to his descendants, probably. I've made a few enquiries over the past week, while waiting for someone to write to me—" he sent a glare in Hermione's direction, "—and it went to auction years ago. It's now in the hands of a private collector."
"I want to see it in person," said Tom, raising his wand, the light glowing brighter as he held it to the page in his hands. In the picture, Slytherin winced and turned away, shading his eyes from the glare.
"Well, you're out of luck there," Nott replied, shrugging. "The collector doesn't offer public showings. Father's been asked to authenticate a few of her things over the years—he's an expert in wizarding heraldry, you see—but even he's never been shown the most valuable pieces in the collection, not with his own eyes. Just pictures. He's asked about buying them, and the old hag is only willing to trade them for artefacts of equal historical value."
"Equal value?" said Hermione. "What does that mean? Something from another founder, or something else that belonged to Slytherin?"
"The former, I'd imagine," said Nott. "Slytherin didn't own many famous artefacts. The Chamber, obviously, but it's not an artefact. The locket in the sketch. And his snakewood wand, which was lost in Ireland centuries ago. If the collector limited herself to things of Slytherin's, she'd never find out what treasures her rival collectors had hidden in their own collections."
"There are founders' artefacts at Hogwarts," Tom said, immersed in his own thoughts; he looked like he'd only vaguely followed the conversation between Nott and Hermione. "Dumbledore said that the Sorting Hat was Gryffindor's before he enchanted it. And the address quill—"
"The Quill of Acceptance," said Hermione.
"—Was enchanted by Rowena Ravenclaw," Tom finished.
"Merlin's staff, Riddle, are you really going there?" said Nott, his mouth gaping open in disbelief. "Every wizard and witch in Britain went to Hogwarts. I'll give you points for the audacity, but everyone and their mother will know where the Hat and the Quill came from if you nicked them. And don't forget that the Hat can talk."
"It was worth considering," Tom said stubbornly.
"And now that we've considered it and moved on," Hermione put in, "there's still the monster in the Chamber, and how we're going to get down there, fight it—or Stun it, preferably—then bring everything back up."
"I've a solution for that," Nott began, but the words died in his throat as a cone of harsh white light cut through the mist and hit him right in the face.
There was a crunch, crunch, scrape from the gravel path beyond the mausoleum, then a figure dragged itself out of the drizzle and roared at them.
"Damn children! This here's out of bounds for you damned little rascals! The constable will be told of this trespassin', you hear me, and so will the Riddles—let's see how much you like that!"
Frank Bryce, flatcap pulled low over his ears, brandished his walking stick at them. He had an electric torch in his free hand, and the blazing white beam swept past Nott's face, to Hermione's, then Tom's.
"Miss Hermione! Master Tom!" Mr. Bryce sputtered, recognising their faces. "What're you lot doin' here, of all places?"
Nott nudged his Hand of Glory out of sight while Mr. Bryce was distracted.
"W-we were just going to," said Hermione, forcing herself not to look at the shrivelled hand in a jar, "um..."
"We're here to pay our respects to the dead," said Tom. "Did you know, Bryce, that my mother passed away giving birth to me? I'd wondered if it would be too bold of me to ask my grandmama about dedicating a plaque, a monument—something of that sort—to my mother. I'm told she was given a pauper's grave in London, and that no one around here liked her much... but wasn't she born here, in this village?"
Mr. Bryce lowered the torch, shifting uncomfortably on his walking stick. "She were a local girl indeed, sir."
"She was a northern girl," said Tom, nodding. "Grandpapa told me that northern blood ran thicker. And for all her faults, she was my mother and a Riddle."
"Right you are, sir," said Mr. Bryce. He scratched his jaw. "Er. When you're done here, Cook's got tea waitin' for you two up in the big house." He gave Nott a curious glance, eyes lingering on the fine wool of Nott's jumper, the starched collar of his shirt fastened with mother-of-pearl buttons, and the polish on the toes of his leather boots, which were, unlike Hermione's shoes, unfilmed by the white marble dust that had settled all over the floor. "I'll go up and tell Mrs. Riddle to set an extra place at table for your little friend 'ere."
Nott blanched at that, while Tom held back a well-pleased smile, thanking Mr. Bryce for his hard work, taking such good care of the estate and so on, until Mr. Bryce ducked his head, his weathered cheeks flushed from the praise.
Together, they made short work of collecting the papers and returning them to the folio. Then Tom made to steer a clearly reluctant Nott past the gravestones and up the path to the top of the hill.
"What are you playing at, Riddle?" Nott snapped, jumping as Tom prodded him in the back with the point of his wand.
"I'm inviting you to luncheon," said Tom. "Muggles may be a barbaric lot, but some of them know a thing or two about cookery."
"Well, I respectfully decline your invitation," Nott replied, slipping his hand into his satchel.
"If you're looking for your wand, I've taken it," said Tom, lifting up the hem of his jumper. Sticking out of his trouser pocket was a carved handle of a medium brown wood, distinct from Tom's wand of white yew. Tom lowered his jumper back over it, smoothing out the wrinkles with the flat of his hand. "Now you'll be on equal terms with the Muggles."
"Granger, do something!" Nott hissed at Hermione, giving her a look of extreme alarm.
"The Riddles are... gracious hosts," said Hermione. "Don't worry, it won't be that bad."
Nott groaned and kicked the ground, causing pellets of gravel to fly out over the path. He groaned again as a chunk of gravel fell into a puddle and splashed his legs with muddy water.
Tom laughed. "An invitation to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Riddle is a great honour. If we're to be associates, Nott, then I suggest you adjust yourself to the idea."