1942
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On Tom's return to London that summer, he saw Wool's for the first time in two years.
He was immediately assaulted by a wave of nostalgia.
It wasn't a pleasant reminiscence of the good old days—Wool's had done nothing to produce good memories—but he held a certain sentimentality for the place, for as humble as it was, he'd been born there. It had given him reason to better himself, the motivation to push as far as he could against the limitations under which everyone else lived their humdrum little lives, because every step he took was one more step away from where he'd come. He told himself that it wasn't shameful to have such humble origins. After all, one could not forget how many millions of people dedicated their lives (and afterlives) to a man who'd been born in a stable.
From first glance, Wool's Orphanage looked the same as it always had: dreary and worn, with only regular scrubbing and a bare minimum of maintenance keeping it from falling into a state of total disrepair. (Guess who did the scrubbing and repairs? Not Tom, that's who.)
But as he looked closer, he noticed where changes had been made, so small that he caught himself wondering if it had always been that way. The crumbling asphalt on the road leading up, that dangling second 'A' in ORPHANAGE swinging in the wind was just as he remembered, but the dirty windows had been boarded up with rough planks layered over oilcloth, and that pervading grimness he felt upon walking through the gates...
He used to think nothing of it, passing through the gates twice a day on his way to primary school, but now it really did feel like Hell on Earth, a place where hopes and dreams were put out of their misery by a parental substitute assigned by the government, they who moulded the leftover bits and pieces of children's souls into the much more acceptable values of duty and conformity.
Due to the evacuations, there were fewer children than there had been when he'd left, and many of them were faces he didn't recognise. It wasn't as if he put the effort into memorising the names of every orphan who, by chance or misadventure, found themselves sentenced to life in Mrs. Cole's loving care, but he did assess each new inhabitant for their usefulness upon arrival. These children were new, thin and grubby and shabbily clothed, and made him realise that out of all the people he'd seen walking through the familiar tiled halls, he himself had been one of the oldest.
Mrs. Cole was in her office counting out little slips of paper into small piles.
Like the rest of the orphanage, she looked just as she always had: clean, well-kept uniform, sensible shoes and lumpy, flesh-coloured stockings. But the uniform hung loose on her frame, just as her skin hung loose on her face, the edges sagging where she'd lost weight, folds and wrinkles gathering in the corners. He hadn't seen her in years; the aging came as no surprise. Some part of Tom was quietly delighted to see her in such a state, when he himself was the very picture of youthful health and vigour; he had grown broader and put on flesh since he'd last stood in front of her office door at the end of his second year at Hogwarts. He took it as visible proof that he was better than the other orphans—that he came of superior stock compared to the common Muggle.
In other circumstances, Tom wouldn't have been surprised to see Mrs. Cole dealing out a hand of cards accompanied by a half-glass of white spirits, as there were only so many diversions to be had when one's company was limited to the residents of Wool's. But, as he applied his subtle upside-down reading skills, which he had kept in practice during all those teatime conversations with Dumbledore over the years, he saw that they were ration tickets.
Men were given more tickets than women, who were in turn given more than children, the category which comprised the majority of the local population. However, children were afforded extra milk rations, as well as extra clothing tickets for how quickly they grew. Not that it did much, as a customer had to hand over the tickets on top of cash for new clothes, and wartime prices had made everything in the shops much dearer.
(He had once accompanied Hermione to Hogsmeade, where she'd spent an hour at the clothiers' browsing the selection of stockings and socks. Wizarding shops were cheaper than the Muggle equivalent now, and no one there even knew what ration booklets were. Hermione had marvelled at how wizards could knit so well with magic instead of machines, and how the fabrics were so thin and light without a stitch of nylon, which was expensive and rationed in the Muggle world. Tom could have lectured her on the technical aspects of reiterative charmwork, as used in household spells such as cleaning charms for multiple windows or dirty dishes... but he was self-aware enough to know that normal boys were ignorant of such things, even the good ones who liked helping around the house out of devotion to their beloved mothers.)
She looked up from her desk, lips pinched. "Tom Riddle?"
"Good day, Mrs. Cole," said Tom, slipping one hand into his pocket and feeling the embroidered edge of a cloth napkin he'd borrowed from his last breakfast at Hogwarts that morning.
"You're back then, Tom? Staying with us for good?" Her eyes flicked down to the stack of ration tickets. "Not going away with that family in Crawley again?"
"No," said Tom, "I'm not staying with them. But I shan't be staying here either."
Mrs. Cole's lips pinched even further. "You're entitled to your month's tickets to take with you, but we've already used the ones from when you were away at school."
"I don't want them," Tom answered, quite truthfully. He didn't want rubbery cheese or milk powder flavoured with ground vitamins; he didn't think he could stomach it after months of proper food at Hogwarts. "I'm happy for you to keep collecting them in my name—each small contribution helps in these hard times, doesn't it?"
"You're leaving, then," Mrs. Cole said. "For good, or just the summer? Where are you going?"
"I've found myself a job for the summer. I'll go straight to school afterwards, and you won't see me back until next year."
Tom drew the napkin out of his pocket. If all goes well, you won't see me back at all.
"Here." Tom slipped an envelope out of the napkin and slid it onto Mrs. Cole's desk.
Mrs. Cole inspected the envelope, which was of wizarding make: thick parchment, mottled yellow-cream instead of the chemically treated white paper used in Muggle offices. There was a heavy red blob of wax on the flap, un-stamped with a crest or personal insignia. It would have looked suspicious to any wizard, but to the average working Muggle who was served with practical alternatives in lieu of any opportunities for luxury—their stationery came with factory applied self-adhesive! They put their mouths on it!—this would appear elegant and expensive.
Tom kept his hands behind his back and his posture relaxed. He watched as the matron picked up the envelope, turning it around to see her name written on the front; she then flipped it to the side with the wax seal.
She stuck her thumb under the wax, and it crumbled into sharp little shards of red. They dug into the tender flesh of her nailbed.
"Ouch!" she hissed, and popped her thumb into her mouth. With her other hand, she flicked open the envelope and scanned the contents of the letter within.
Tom heaved a mental sigh. He was counting on the Muggle lack of familiarity with sealing wax—the proper stuff flexed and bent but remained solid in order to endure hours of transit flapping about on an owl's leg. It didn't crumble into bits at a touch, but peeled off into a single piece with the design intact, which encouraged wealthy wizards to keep buying custom seals.
This wax crumbled, because it wasn't just wax. It contained concentrated Confusion Concoction, his own altered recipe for it, brewed in a solvent base of dandelion sap mixed with flobberworm mucus, which cooled down to a thick paste at room temperature. He'd introduced finely diced goosegrass stems in the cooling stage to both dye the potion red and allow it to be absorbed through the skin, a tip that he'd picked up from a borrowed Healing textbook; it was used as a treatment when a patient was incapable of swallowing a conventional potion, but being stored in jars and pots meant for multiple uses halved its shelf life in comparison to single-use potions in Stasis Charm stoppered bottles.
"'Tom Riddle...'" read Mrs. Cole in a slow, slurring voice. "'Has... secured a job for the summer.'"
"That's correct, Mrs. Cole," said Tom, nodding along. "It was an opportunity I couldn't pass up."
"'The job... provides food and board. Tom will not need his room. His room will remain... untouched... until Tom's next return.'"
"Thank you, Mrs. Cole," said Tom, smiling graciously. "I know things might be crowded with new occupants, but you know how much I like to keep my things in order."
"'A sum of five pounds is given in Tom's name... in thanks for Mrs. Cole's cooperation.'"
"An advance of my pay," said Tom. "It'd please me if you wrote a receipt and made a copy for your records. Something to remember me by, when I'm gone."
With all the Muggleborns staying at Hogwarts for the Christmas holidays due to the war, most of them had received care packages from their parents, which included Muggle pounds sterling for some reason. It wasn't hard to trade them galleons for their pounds at a favourable rate. Their parents, being Muggles, and themselves, being underage, couldn't open accounts at Gringotts. With no account, they couldn't write to the goblins to conduct banking transactions by owl mail. And whilst at school, they couldn't go and exchange currencies with a teller.
Tom had amassed over two hundred galleons from a whole year's writing, which would have made his trunk quite heavy if the money pouches hadn't been enchanted with a Feather-Light Charm. Collectively, they'd taken up a good deal of space in his trunk and jingled about unless he renewed the Silencing Charms on a regular basis. He'd been somewhat relieved to have changed much of his gold for Muggle banknotes, and was planning to open a Muggle bank account. He'd decided to keep his extra money in a Muggle bank until he was seventeen, and collect the interest on it. The goblins didn't offer interest, or very much in the way of investment options at all.
Mrs. Cole smeared drool over her chin as she wrote out a receipt in duplicate. She placed Tom's copy of the receipt back in the envelope and handed it back to Tom, who took it with a hand covered by the napkin.
"It seems... everything is in order, Tom," said Mrs. Cole.
"I'm much obliged, Mrs. Cole," Tom beamed. "I'll see you next year, I suppose. I might send a postcard while I'm away and have the time, but don't look for it."
"Goodbye... Tom..."
Tom shut the door behind him and allowed Mrs. Cole to return to her ration ticket counting.
It had worked.
Of course it had.
He had known it would work when he'd convinced Rosier to rub some of his Confusion Concoction paste on the door handles of the Gryffindor Quidditch team's changing room the evening before the last game of the year, on the final weekend of May. Ravenclaw had beaten Gryffindor, though neither team had scored enough points to top Slytherin House's cumulative point total.
Slytherin had taken the Inter-House Quidditch Cup, and Tom had secured Rosier's esteem, which the other boy had been dawdling about ever since joining Tom's unofficial 'Homework Club' after Christmas. It had been convenient to Tom, who had until that point rated Sebastian Rosier as interesting and as useful as furniture.
Rosier's sly mentions of the Gryffindors' humiliating defeat at dinner that night had convinced Abraxas Malfoy to be less aggressive in Duelling Club, because as a member of the Slytherin Quidditch team, he cared more about winning than about good sportsmanship. And if Malfoy couldn't win at Duelling, he satisfied himself with winning Quidditch matches for the House, because it would bring him one step closer to the Captainship in the following school year.
(No one but Rosier had known how exactly Tom had done it, and even Rosier didn't know what he'd put on the door handle—only that he should wear his Herbology gloves while performing his assigned task.)
That left Tom to drag his trunk two miles to Charing Cross. And he couldn't even charm it lighter, the same as he couldn't have Confunded and Obliviated Mrs. Cole, and saved himself two hours dicing ingredients to a powder on top of the three hours brewing and cooling, because whole potions ingredients didn't dissolve in a paste base as they did in a liquid. At least potions had the benefit of not being traceable by the same wand test that Professor Merrythought had used on him after the Wardrobe Incident, which he'd found out later was standard procedure for Aurors and hit wizards when interviewing potential lawbreakers. It would take a Potions Master to figure out what Tom had done, and he'd taken with him the only evidence.
For all the preparations he'd put into escaping the Muggle world for the summer, his plans for what to do after that remained... tenuous.
His main goal was to stay out of the orphanage and ensure himself a situation that provided clean sheets and proper meals, without ending up on the Grangers' doorstep like a stray puppy, cap in one hand and suitcase in the other. It wasn't that the Grangers had been cruel or abusive, as other people were when they took in a parent-less child with no intention of making it a member of their family—maiden aunts looking for a carer in their old age, or large families wanting a maid-of-all-work came to mind—but living with them would have been a constant distraction.
They had certain expectations.
They wanted him sociable, agreeable, and convivial.
He could do that; he could meet their expectations if he wanted to; Tom Riddle could do anything if he put his will to it.
But he knew that it would be an illusion, to shine away the rough edges of his character so that everyone who saw him would be blinded by his light and see nothing else. Like the glaze of a china cup, the outer layer of himself would grow brittle over time; constant contact would chip away at him, and reveal hints of the true colour beneath.
And the true colour was nothing to be proud of, nothing he wanted other people to see—Tom himself was personally reluctant to address it—because he, in a manner of speaking, was more like a tamed stray than he ever wanted to admit, at least when it came to how he felt about Hermione Granger.
It was a combination of the way she smelled and the way she felt—strange and soft and fleshy, which in theory should have been as appealing as sticking his hand into the barrel of pickled toads in the potions supply cupboard, but wasn't. He wanted her friendly pats on the shoulder and upper arm to last for longer than they did; when he saw her absent-mindedly running her fingers over her owl's feathers at the breakfast table, he imagined himself as the object of her attention; his memory lingered on the hug she had given him at the platform that very morning, before they'd gone their separate ways—
Of course he knew what this was.
It had gotten to the point where he couldn't ignore its existence, but he was not so far gone that he couldn't attempt to govern his thoughts and his impulses. During the school year he had Duelling Club and the members of his unofficial homework study group on which to bleed off his frustrations; there was nothing that satisfied an itch within him like knocking people off a duelling platform like skittles. During the summer, he hadn't the luxury of volunteers willing to face him at wandpoint, so he'd decided to remove himself from the Distraction in order to get on with his life. He had better things to do than lose himself to idle thoughts while real, profitable opportunities passed within his grasp.
That was his reasoning for avoiding the Grangers this summer, as contemptible as it was.
With these thoughts in mind, he found himself beneath the dim, smoke-stained rafters of the Leaky Cauldron, lugging his trunk up to the counter.
In the late afternoon, somewhere between lunch and dinner, the pub was relatively empty. Most of the tables and booths were unoccupied. There was the bartender behind the counter, the one who Dumbledore had told him, to Tom's great disgust, shared his given name. There was a barmaid with an apron tied around her waist wiping down the scarred wooden trestle table in the centre of the room, cleaning away the wax drips fallen from the chandelier attached to the ceiling beams by black iron chains.
In a corner booth, a handful of be-hatted witches dawdled over a late tea, and not dissimilar to the pubs of the Muggle world, there were also a few grizzled old men nursing single pints for hours on end at the local watering spot because they had nowhere else to be.
"Excuse me," Tom said, approaching the barmaid, who was levitating fresh candles into the iron sconces of the chandelier, "how much does a room cost?"
"We're booked up," said the barmaid, not even looking at Tom. "Only room left is a double with facilities."
"How much is it?"
"Fifteen sickles a night, comes with a breakfast tray. Five galleons and five if you pay for the week. Cheaper if you split the hire and find someone to take the other bed."
Tom did the calculations. Ten weeks away from Hogwarts would cost him over fifty-two galleons, an absolute fortune, unless he sacrificed his privacy to share with a stranger, which was worse than enduring the awkward politeness of the Granger family. For that kind of money he could stay in a four star hotel in London, or a five star in Leeds or Liverpool. For that money, he could buy himself a tiny flat of his own in London—a wreck of a place with no electricity, working plumbing, or a roof, in a bombed-out borough, but it could be his.
(But all of these places would be in the Muggle world, and that would defeat the purpose of avoiding Wool's this summer.)
"Do you charge for your Floo?" asked Tom.
"Two knuts for Floo powder. Free with any order."
Tom hadn't eaten anything since the last Hogwarts breakfast before getting on the train. He went through his options as he dug into his pie in gravy with a side of minted peas and buttered parsnips.
The Leaky Cauldron, as the gateway to the magical world, was the most popular pub in Wizarding London. There were other inns and taverns in London, but they catered to niche customers. He knew there was that one pub in Knockturn Alley that served a suspicious "veal" schnitzel with "brown sauce". But he'd never been there before, and the idea of spending a night there by himself wasn't the least bit enticing, for all that the proprietors would turn a blind eye to his practising "obscure magics" in his room, from pages copied from his classmates' heirloom books.
He couldn't imagine spending a whole summer in Knockturn Alley, unless he covered every door and window with strings of garlic bulbs, and kept his shoes on in bed and his wand under his pillow.
But what about outside of London?
Tom knew there were wizarding settlements all over Britain, small magical villages in Lancashire and Devon and Wales. Just as in the Muggle world, prices outside the big city had to be more reasonable, and with magical transportation, distances meant nothing to wizards. But he couldn't just travel there; to use the Floo would require knowing the exact name of his destination, and he couldn't see anything good coming out of jumping into the Leaky Cauldron's fireplace shouting "Devon Wizard Village!" With that, he was liable to end up in a random family's sitting room, setting off the burglar jinxes and having Ministry hit wizards summoned for a case of attempted robbery.
Tom wasn't well-travelled outside of the streets of central London. In London, he always knew where he was by looking at the height of the buildings, the shape of their roofs and windows, the design of the street lamps, and the colour and markings of the pillar-shaped Royal Mail post boxes: the ones in his borough bore the names and arms of Victoria Regina, but the ones in Hermione's newer suburban neighbourhood were marked with George Rex.
The only other town he was familiar with was Hogsmeade, in Scotland. Not that there was much to memorise. The town was tiny, with one central village green and road; most of the businesses and houses were placed around it, so visitors could shop from door to door in the snowiest winter without leaving the shelter of the overhanging eaves.
The largest building off the main road had been The Hog's Head, the dingy tavern whose appurtenances must have been installed before the Statute and hadn't been updated since, had rooms to let for the partaking of "private business transactions". Tom, who had seen the benefit of living in Knockturn Alley despite the character of the clientèle, couldn't help but recognise the opportunity in this.
This was guaranteed privacy. No questions asked. And no need to stock up on garlic bulbs, or sprinkle powdered garlic over his bedsheets.
Tom personally didn't mind the taste of garlic in small amounts—mixed with crumbs of day-old bread and pressed into the egg-washed surface of a side of chicken, it elevated a meal and pleased the pickiest children of his readers—but he couldn't imagine being surrounded by the sharp aroma of garlic for weeks on end. That kind of thing would drive the most composed man into a homicidal fit.
He'd made up his mind by the time he'd finished his meal.
Hogsmeade it was.
Salazar Slytherin himself had lived in Hogsmeade during the construction of the Hogwarts castle, along with the three other Founders. According to a book Tom had found in the Ravenclaw Common Room two Christmases ago, Rowena Ravenclaw, a native Scot, had recommended the area around the lake as the perfect, private location to build a magical school. The Founders' families had lived in the village year-round; the book said that Rowena had taken a local man as her own, and had given him a daughter who'd been raised in the village.
To Tom, there was no place that was as magical as Hogwarts. But when the school was closed and the gates barred for the summer, Hogsmeade was the closest he could get.
Too bad that it's still so rustic, thought Tom, having paid for his food at the Leaky, taken a scoop of Floo powder from the jar, and entered Hogsmeade via the Floo at The Three Broomsticks.
The fireplaces at The Broomsticks were built wide, with a high mantel, so wizards and witches could pass through without having their hats knocked off. It was well-maintained, with enchanted magical fires, so there weren't any logs and cast iron grates to trip over. It looked like it could hold a spitted hog and a brace of ducks and still have room for commuters.
The fireplaces at The Hog's Head, when he pushed open the creaking door, dragging his school trunk after him, weren't even lit. It prompted Tom to ponder on what would have happened had he tried to come directly from The Leaky Cauldron. What was that blurry green space he saw when travelling between Floo connections?
The Hog's Head was empty apart from one customer hunched in a corner. It was daytime on a weekday, so Tom wasn't surprised—he had only ever been inside the pub once, and it had been on a weekend. Even then, it hadn't been the most popular place. Wizards didn't look down on drinking during the day, as it wasn't unusual to have a glass of ale or cider with lunch, but this wasn't an "ale and cider with a ploughman's lunch" type of establishment.
The barman was behind the bar, spreading dirt on the counter with a stained tea towel.
Tom approached, luggage at his heels.
"How much is a room for the week?" Tom asked. It was better to be direct, wasn't it? In his experience, he'd always thought that salt-of-the-earth folk felt threatened by what they considered intellectual types, which included anyone who spoke in words over five syllables without dropping a single one due to the influence of a regional dialect.
The barman regarded him with a flat stare. "Ten galleons."
"The Three Broomsticks charges four and eight per week."
"This isn't the Broomsticks, lad."
"No, it's not," Tom agreed. "The Broomsticks has a day maid and breakfast options."
"You won't find any such fancies here," the barman grunted. His hands stilled, and he set aside his dirty rag of a towel.
"I wasn't expecting to," said Tom, reaching into his pocket for his wand. "I can manage on my own. In fact—" he pointed his wand at a stack of smudged and dusty glasses behind the counter, "—I happen to be an expert in household charms."
Tom cast a non-verbal Levitation Charm. Three glasses—short and squat, and based on what he'd seen in the Common Room after hours, were what people used for serving whiskey—rose in the air and bobbed over to him, hovering a foot above the counter. A slight adjustment to the charm and a swirl of his wrist caused the glasses to rotate in mid-air.
Tom followed it with a wordless jet of steam, pouring out of his wand like the chimney stack of a factory, billowing white clouds that split into three masses that he directed around and inside the glasses. He chewed the inside of his cheek in concentration; he had gotten used to generating mass amounts of fog in Duelling Club which felt not much different than what he could get from a dorm room shower. Heated steam with enough water content to give the glasses a perfunctory rinse was another thing, which he'd practised for an article on the seven uses of the Super Steamer Spell.
(One of the twelve uses of dragon's blood, according to Albus Dumbledore's celebrated essay on it, had been in wart removal potions. If anyone should be judged, it was the Transfiguration professor. Dumbledore was the father of inane inventions, as the shelf in his office full of magical doodads proved, and proud of it.)
The glasses rotated in a white cloud, the surfaces dripping with beads of water which evaporated before a single drop hit the top of the bar.
It didn't look that impressive, but Tom was wordlessly performing two altered spells at once (two!) on three distinct subjects (three!). To the more discerning eye, this was N.E.W.T. extra credit level charm work, the same way casting a Patronus Charm earned extra points in the Defence practical examination, or successfully brewing a full-efficacy Mandrake Restorative Draught under the eyes of the instructor won one a recommendation to an apprenticeship program.
Anyone who knew anything about magical theory had to recognise Tom's brilliance—or at the very least, his efficiency.
The rotation slowed. Tom flicked his wand one final time, and the stream of fog broke off the tip, dissolving into the air.
When the clouds wisped away, three shiny crystal tumblers were left, not a trace of dirt or a smudged fingerprint in sight. There were a few scratches on the bottom of the glasses that Tom couldn't have done anything about—he assumed they'd come as a result of the barman not providing coasters for his tables.
The glasses, unlike every other vessel and container in The Hog's Head, sparkled.
Tom floated them back to the stack behind the bar, gracing the barman with a pleasant smile. "I'm also quite decent at Transfiguration, too."
The dirty tea towel rippled, thickening from the centre outwards, fresh fibres growing out like hair, the colour changing from a dull grey to a clean, crisp white. Another application of the steam spell followed by an anchored Scouring Charm turned the old rag into a temporary self-cleaning towel, which began buffing away at the layers of dirt crusted into the bar.
(One could always cast the Scouring Charm on the bar itself, but the spell worked best on smaller discrete objects. It wouldn't work if you cast it on a house you wanted to clean, but would if you cast it on a sinkful of dishes. Tom thought it was more efficient to anchor the spell on a single cleaning implement, instead of having to cast it several times on the bar, and on each table and glass.)
"As you see," spoke Tom, returning his wand to his pocket, "I'm capable of keeping a place tidy if I want. In fact, I'd leave the place looking better than it was when I got it. I'll pay a galleon a week for a room."
The barman glared at him, his beard twitching. The transfigured towel scrubbed energetically at a crusty black stain. "Three galleons and five."
"I'm not paying any more than two galleons a week," said Tom firmly. "You don't have running water and plumbing installed in this place, do you?"
"Got water in the kitchen up the back. No plumbing upstairs," the barman said. "Want a bath, use the tub in the room. But you'll conjure and heat your own water."
"And what about meals?"
"What about them?"
"I'll give you one galleon, two sickles for a week," said Tom, who was hoping that he wouldn't regret choosing this backwater establishment for the sake of the privacy. A pocketful of garlic and pale-faced European men with a flair for silk-lined capes couldn't be so bad in comparison, could it?
"How long are you staying?"
"Ten weeks." Tom reached into his trouser pocket, feeling for the string of his coin bag. "I can pay a month up front."
The barman eyed him, his eyes glinting in the light of a few lonely guttering candles set at intervals on the back wall.
"Ten weeks?" he growled. "How old are you, lad?"
"Seventeen," Tom replied, not batting an eye. He clinked the coins in his pocket for emphasis and kept his expression neutral. He hadn't been to The Hog's Head since that visit last year, when he'd been wearing his Slytherin robes and his school uniform, which he'd removed and stowed in his trunk back on the Hogwarts Express. Surely the bartender wouldn't remember him? He'd grown taller and filled out a bit since then—and his voice had deepened. He also wasn't making inquiries about goat milk.
(He sincerely hoped that the barman didn't remember him as "The Goat Milk Boy".)
The barman peered at him. Tom peered back, sucking in a slow breath between his clenched teeth and willing the other man to obey his natural inclinations: to take money without asking questions, to respect the power of a competent wizard, to think about the other tasks he ought to be taking care of, such as checking on the state of the goats out back.
The books he'd read on mental magic had said that obedience by dint of magical force took more power and was more noticeable than convincing people to lean towards their own beliefs. The Obliviation spell, for example, was easier to cast on someone who had suffered a traumatic event, who wanted to forget a certain aspect of their past. To cast it on someone unwilling led to having to subdue them and work as a quickly as possible, which often produced unreliable results in the form of impaired short-term memory and loss of personality traits. If he was attempting to remove the memories of the unwilling, of course they weren't people he cared about, so the prospect of permanent amnesia didn't make him feel guilty in any way. But he didn't want others to judge him guilty either, not in the context of a criminal conviction, so it was better to hide the evidence—or anything that could be recognised by someone who'd read a textbook on Healing.
"What's your name?" the barman asked.
"Bertram." Tom's response was automatic. He was a bit put-out at first for having so generic a pseudonym, but when he needed to be unmemorable, it had its uses.
"If the Aurors come here looking for you, you'll go with them and won't make a scene."
"I wouldn't give the Aurors any reason to," said Tom, sounding offended.
"You best keep your word," the barman grunted. He fumbled around under the counter and slapped a rusty iron key onto the bar. "Room Four, second floor. The stairs creak, so I'll know if you try to sneak up any 'guests' at night. I won't have 'em in my rooms unless you'll be paying me for two."
What an imbecile, thought Tom. We're wizards. Don't you know how to use a Silencing Charm?
Suppressing his eye-roll, Tom counted out his coins and stacked them onto the counter. A month's rent, for less than the cost of a week at the Leaky Cauldron. The bathing situation with having to fill his own tub didn't bother him, as he'd had to clean himself with a washcloth and a bucket back in the old days at Wool's when a frozen pipe had burst in the winter and the matron hadn't gotten around to putting in for repairs.
However, he knew he had to do something about the toilet situation.
But he was a wizard, and if he couldn't transfigure a working plumbed toilet, he could experiment with anchored self-scouring spells and automatic water-filling charms, which could be useful for home and garden purposes. Refilling watering cans, pet drinking bowls, tea kettles, bird baths, and so on.
It looked like he could squeeze an article or two out of this.
It would begin to make up for the deplorable state of his current accommodations.
If worst came to worst, he could always blow his savings on a magical tent and camp out on the edge of the Forbidden Forest.
.
.
Dear Hermione,
You should be glad to know that I've found a room in Hogsmeade for the summer. The landlord is thoroughly unlikeable, but he has the good manners to leave me alone most days—though I won't hesitate to declare him the second most irksome wizard I've ever met. I know that he keeps track of my mail, so from now on, please address your letters to 'Bertram'. If you plan on sending parcels or sweets, I've opened a post box at the Hogsmeade owl mail office. The landlord is an uninspired cook and eats anything I've made or stored away in the pantry, which he calls a "business surcharge" for letting me use his kitchen.
Yes, I am making my own food, because the sole alternative is eating at The Three Broomsticks every day, and the barmaids there have become very intrusive as of late. I should think that any man would dislike being interrupted six times during his meal by waitresses wondering if he needs a refill on his drink; in that vein, my next published piece shall be on the technical aspects of the Refilling Charm.
If you've managed to locate some more Muggle cookery books, I ask you to send them my way.
.
Languishing in obscurity,
Tom
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A month into his summer holiday, Tom had learned a few things about the landlord.
His name was "Old Ab", according to a drunken wizard who'd yelled for a fresh round of pints late one Saturday evening.
Ab hadn't renovated his rooms for a reason. The rooms were kept uninviting so visitors would conduct their business transactions as quickly as possible, then leave. If they wanted to stay longer to conduct "funny business", there were places in Knockturn Alley for that sort of thing.
The goats were Ab's pride and joy. Each one had a name and a personality and a custom bell collar. Some of the milk was sold to a local witch who made herbal soap. Ab himself made a sharp white cheese out of the rest, logs of which filled the cellar next to the barrels of ale. Selling the cheese to the local grocery, and the bezoars to the local apothecary, made around half of the man's cash income.
Ab also had political leanings. Tom had been reading his copied Grindelwald pamphlets while waiting on his altered Refilling Charm to finish cleaning the pub's dirty glassware—he'd been working on a variant that produced piping hot water instead of the standard lukewarm water conjuration used in conjunction with multiple heating charms. The barman had stomped into the kitchen looking for where the glasses had gone, and spotted Tom thumbing through the well-worn pages of On the Preservation of the Magical Race.
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'I preface this treatise with the disclosure that there is no precise definition of what magic is—perhaps a force, a phenomenon of nature, or a gift of a greater entity—but it is known that magic is not only the stuff of the spirit, but a matter of the flesh. Magic is a trait borne in the blood, carried from one generation to the next. We, as magical beings, have the privilege of bearing this sacred blood; beyond that, we each of us bear a solemn duty to safeguard its very existence against all prospective threats...'
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Without a single word, he'd ripped the booklet out of Tom's hands, torn it in half, then chucked it out of the window where it was eaten by a wandering goat.
"Excuse me," Tom said, who recognised this as the perfect moment to call for a wizard's duel—he would have done it if it hadn't meant he'd be tossed out of his room with nothing but his wand and the clothes on his back. Pragmatism was truly the nemesis of satisfaction. "That was my book."
The old man glowered at him. "Don't bring any of that rubbish in here again. I won't tolerate it."
"It's just a book," said Tom, blinking innocently at the man. "I find the Ministry of Magic to be as clumsy and incompetent as any wizard does who has a working brain in his skull, but it doesn't mean I was going to roll them over and pledge myself to a foreign cause."
Ab's mouth was twisted into a scowl of disapproval. "Then why were you reading it, boy?"
He always called Tom 'boy' when he was in a mood, never mind that Tom had told him he was a legal adult. To be fair about it, Tom called him 'old man' in his head.
"Why shouldn't I be able to read what I want?" asked Tom. "I get Witch Weekly and you've never said anything about it. And believe me, there's nothing more rubbish than 'Twelve Ways to Envigorate Your Marriage'—as if lighting up a candle centrepiece at dinner is going to cure a man's wandering eye."
"Read whatever you like," snarled Ab. "So long as it's not that German trash."
He grabbed an armful of clean glasses and stomped out of the kitchen, slamming the door behind him. The dirty glasses on the shelves rattled.
Tom sighed and turned back to the sink, full of soap bubbles and hot water and clinking glassware.
Some people just couldn't help being so dramatic.
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Tom and his landlord didn't exactly get along. Their compromise was to not in get one another's way.
Over the next few weeks, Tom fixed up his room, from repairing and waterproofing the cracked windows, to blasting off the mouldy wallpaper, and Transfiguring the bed from a lumpy sack full of dried rushes and dead cockroaches into something he could actually bear to sleep in.
During the nights, he practised magic from his borrowed textbooks and brushed up on his O.W.L. level spells: he'd be starting his Fifth Year in September, an exam year, and he wanted to be able to cast a full Stunner and long-range Summoning Charms in the first Duelling Club session.
He practised the Disillusionment Charm too—it was N.E.W.T. level, but it was useful for sneaking around The Hog's Head and avoiding conversations with its owner. He also used it to avoid other people; the regular patrons had seen Tom going in and out of the kitchen so often that they thought he worked there, and assumed that the sandwiches he made for himself were dishes from the pub's regular dinner menu.
They were misinformed: The Hog's Head didn't have a dinner menu. Actual service was the domain of The Three Broomsticks. The Hog's Head was the place where hard liquor was sold in a pint glass, so one could go home and tell his wife he only had one drink; it was the place where a drunkard could get drunk without anyone judging him for having a "problem".
During the day, Tom wrote articles with borrowed Muggle recipes and his own charm variations. When he was tired of making and eating sandwiches, he tried his hand at cooking; he didn't like the thought of all those random housewives being able to do things that he couldn't. It was partly a test to see if he could, as much as it was a way to tempt his pet rat Peanut into eating more.
Peanut was over five years old now, grey-whiskered with balding patches behind the ears and a wrinkly tail that resembled a shrivelled up worm. A regular rat had a lifespan of two to three years, and as magic tended to double an organism's lifespan—wizards living past one hundred and fifty years wasn't uncommon—Tom had estimated that Peanut's six years were almost up. It wasn't as if Tom would mourn for Peanut when its time came to move on to the next great "adventure", for a rat was a rat, but he could regret the loss of such a well-trained minion.
(Tom had no one else who would dig through the girls' laundry hampers to find things to dump into the upper year boys' dorm and cause dissent in Slytherin, when the House had heretofore valued unity. It was so easy to create hilarious misunderstandings, since it was tradition for the children of wealthy families to have their initials embroidered on their smallclothes. There was no Friday night entertainment quite like seeing well-born purebloods slap one another, causing other purebloods to jump into the defence; the performance was in a way very Shakespearean with how it involved a bunch of family members squabbling over affairs of love and honour. And as the master orchestrator, Tom supposed, it made him the villain.)
It was Tom's belief that skills in cooking and cleaning couldn't be considered "womanly" when everything was done by magic. The requisite precision and control meant that anyone who could produce a three course meal in under half an hour was an expert in charmwork. As Tom saw it, such proficiency was not a sign of a superior homemaker, but a superior witch or wizard.
And he didn't have to touch a single potato when his altered Trimming Charm did the peeling for him. The eggs whisked themselves, the flour was self-sifting; magical cookery, like everything about magic, distinguished itself from its common Muggle equivalent in that Tom was never obliged to get his hands dirty, just the way he liked it.
Around the middle of his second month at The Hog's Head, Old Ab allowed him to prepare the morning mash for the goats.
Tom didn't particularly like the goats—no one did, apart from the idiosyncratic landlord—but he found them useful for his magical experiments.
The goats were known around the village to be vicious beasts, so no one went around the back of The Hog's Head unless they wanted a bite taken out of the back of their robes. They were animals who made loud bleating noises all the time, which everyone ignored when they heard it, and Silenced their walls if it was louder than usual. But the most useful thing was that goats couldn't call the Aurors, so no one knew or cared that Tom was trying to control their minds and alter their memories afterwards.
"Hello, Laurel," said Tom, levitating a fresh trough of grain mash to the shed in the inn's stable yard. "Good morning, Curly. How do you do, Moe? Did you sleep well last night?
The goats bleated and gathered around, but not too close—he'd put them under intensive "training" the last time they butted too hard at his legs and almost knocked him over.
Tom tossed a few apples into the trough and swished his wand back and forth to slice them up with a Severing Charm, then stepped back to allow the goats to eat.
"Filthy beasts," he muttered under his breath. He watched the goats' square, yellow teeth crunch at the apples. "There is no better place to find 'disposable animals' than a farm, is there? I bet I could test potions on you lot all day; the bezoars will keep you going even if I'm feeding you Essence of Nightshade."
He'd thought about experimenting more with potions since his Confusion Concoction had gone over so well with Mrs. Cole, but he didn't want to risk Ab finding out about it. Potions, even if they wouldn't kill the old man's goats, would change the flavour of the milk and make it unsellable. And if Ab had to choose between his goats and "Bertram" the temporary tenant, it would always be those stupid goats.
Oh well. He was sure that the pub regulars would serve as a decent substitute; most of them didn't care about what they were drinking if it came in a pint glass.
And when he got back to school, there were his Housemates' cats, and the members of other Houses. Tom thought that any student who was willing to eat what appeared to be a buttered scone sitting on the banister of a staircase deserved what they got.
Perhaps Tom's attitude toward animal welfare was rather blasé, but it wasn't any better than how Napoleon's armies treated their horses. And even now, as was written in the London papers Hermione sent him, Russian armies trained their dogs to carry mines under the treads of German tanks. The Soviets put time and effort into moulding their animals into suicide bombers, and to Tom, that seemed so wasteful as to be offensive.
Disposable test subjects were one thing; putting in the effort to create a loyal servant and then destroying it was like setting fire to a stack of banknotes. Although Tom's interpretation of personal ethics was aberrant in comparison to that of the average fifteen year old boy, even he had his limits to what constituted acceptable behaviour. It took a great level of concentration to impose his will on a single goat; he'd found it easier with eye contact, but goats, like most herbivorous species, had one eye on either side of their heads. Wasn't it better to have and keep a beast trained to do what you wanted, without having to get into an undignified squat in order to stare it down and forcibly coerce it?
Tom mulled over the possibilities of animal armies as he Vanished the manure and refilled the water trough. He'd read the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and whether or not the man had been a wizard, he'd proven that the combination of animals and mind control could be successfully used as a means of extortion.
He returned to the inn, washed up in the kitchen, and made himself a Welsh rarebit with the ends of yesterday's bread loaf and a wedge of goat cheese.
When he pushed open the kitchen door, he saw Ab sitting at one of the tables, pouring a dish of water for a delivery owl. There was an envelope on the table before him, the directions face-up. From where he stood, Tom could see the address written out in emerald green ink.
His address.
"Your name's not 'Bertram'," said Old Ab, stroking the owl and regarding him with narrowed eyes. "And you're not seventeen."
"I could be," said Tom, setting his plate on the nearest table. His hand slipped into his robe pocket.
"You're lying to me, boy. My brother wrote me over a year ago that there was a Mr. Tom Riddle, a talented student of his, who might come to me asking for help. You can't be more than sixteen."
"Your brother?"
"His friends call him 'Albus'. His family, if there were any around to speak to him, call him 'High-Handed Bastard'."
Tom's mind made the connections. Old Ab, tall and thin and blue-eyed and irritating, was a Dumbledore. A scruffy vagrant in homespun in contrast to the colourful hats and spangled robes worn by the Professor Dumbledore of Hogwarts, but both of them had that air of eccentricity, and a certain disregard for authority whenever it suited them, which was a very Gryffindor-ish trait.
"You two don't sound very close," Tom remarked.
"Don't try to change the sub—"
Under the table, Tom flicked his wand. A rack of pint glasses behind the bar slid down and smashed onto the flagstone floor.
The owl squawked; Ab jerked and turned to look over his shoulder.
Tom cast a second silent spell with a twitch of his wand.
Stupefy!
Ab's forehead thudded onto the table, overturning the dish of water. The delivery owl flapped its wings, gave a reproachful hoot, and flew out of the open window.
Tom got to work.
The first thing he did was pull Ab off the chair and dump him on the floor. The second was to fill the water dish with beer from the pump behind the counter; Tom slopped that on the floor too, then sent the empty dish floating into the kitchen. He pocketed the letter from Hogwarts, which in coming from the school a mile away, had been delivered early in the morning. When he'd lived with the Grangers, their supply lists had arrived in the mid-afternoon. He noticed that the envelope was thicker than usual and contained something solid within that didn't feel like paper, but he put that thought away for later.
Tom knelt down and placed the tip of his wand to Ab's temple.
Should I try to unearth his secrets? I have more of the Confusion Concoction in my room upstairs, thought Tom, who had never heard anyone speak an unkind word about Professor Dumbledore, and was curious as to what had passed between Old Ab and his brother. Dumbledore is a powerful wizard; the Stunner won't keep him down for long. Best take care of him as quickly as I can.
He Obliviated the last ten minutes of Ab's memory, and cast a Memory Charm to create a false replacement to fill the gap. He'd never done it on a person, only the goats—they'd begun to avoid him after the first few "training sessions", so he'd made them forget their fear and confusion. A person was different, but human memory relied on sight and sound, something that Tom understood and could replicate with a verisimilitude he couldn't recreate in the scent signal and instinct-driven mind of a beast.
He concentrated on the scene he wanted Ab to remember:
Entering the tavern commons, checking the till, the first thing he did in the morning. Making sure there weren't any patrons sleeping in the corner, kicking them out if there were, but not before charging them for the overnight stay. Straightening the tables, picking up empty glasses. Walking back to the counter, then—
—A slip on a puddle of spilled drink, a fall, a blow to the head from the edge of a table, then—
—Darkness.
Tom repaired the broken glasses behind the bar and set them back on the rack. Then he returned to Ab, fixing a concerned expression on his face.
"Hello? Ab? Ab! Merlin's whiskers, are you alright?"
Ab's eyes fluttered, and he gave a low groan. "Argh... My head... What happened?"
"I heard something crash and ran downstairs—you were on the floor," Tom spoke in worried tones, his brows furrowed in distress. "Do you need to go to St. Mungo's? Should I start a fire and connect the Floo?"
Ab pushed himself upright, scrubbing a hand over his face and wincing in pain. "I think I'll be alright. Knock to the head won't kill me."
"As long as you're sure," said Tom. "If you need it, I can send out to the apothecary for a pot of bruise paste. It looks like half your head will be blue by tomorrow."
"Got some in my room; don't bother," Ab grunted, who had settled back into his natural personality without a hitch. No signs of permanent personality alteration here, alas. "If I can remember where I put it..."
Ab stumbled out of the room, and Tom quietened the pounding of his heart. What he'd done wasn't strictly illegal, as the Ministry's Obliviators did this to Muggles all the time, but it was the kind of thing that went against Hogwarts' code of student discipline, even though Tom hadn't done it on school grounds.
I won't be caught, he reminded himself. And no one will catch me for performing underage magic inside a registered wizarding residence.
He was further reassured when he opened the envelope from Hogwarts. Underneath the standard book list for the new school year, he saw another sheet of parchment emblazoned with the serpent emblem of his House.
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Tom, my boy, I have the greatest joy in presenting you with the badge of Slytherin's newest Fifth Year Prefect. I expect to see you join me in my compartment for lunch on the Express—I do hope you like venison, went stalking with a dear friend at his estate in Norfolk this summer, though I'll tell you more later—after your Prefect meeting in the Heads' compartment, of course!
Congratulations on a fine achievement, Tom. You'll do the House proud, I am entirely sure of it.
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Horace Eugene Flacchus Slughorn,
Potions Master, cert. 1924.
Slytherin Head of House.
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Tom couldn't keep himself from smiling.
Being a Prefect meant that he was in charge of enforcing student discipline. And if ever there was a case of setting a fox to guard the henhouse, it was giving Tom Riddle a Prefect badge.