The days leading to the seventh of January crawled by, with both Tom and I skittishly going about our routines with a minimum of conversation. The boy seemed to be mortified that his craving for reassurance had not gone unnoticed by me after the meeting with Ollivander. I was angry at my loss of composure which Tom had registered and sought to soothe by singing that absurd nursery rhyme about Old Man William and his son.
I remained conflicted as I tried to seek answers. Was Tom trying to exploit my soft corner? What else had Malfoy indoctrinated the boy in? What had happened in the Department of Mysteries? What were Castle Albus’s motives? Had Aberforth been sent directly to Azkaban or was he being held in the Ministry’s holding cells? Yet more than all of these, that which truly haunted me was what Castle Albus might have seen in the boy’s mind.
Speculations and worry had frayed my nerves so raw that I knew attempting a conversation with Tom while I was in this state would do neither of us any good. I did keep an eye on him. He had taken to avoiding stepping out into the backyard ever since our return. Most of the time, he could be found lying on the rug before the hearth in the living room, engrossed in either his copy of Riemann’s Mathematics or my tattered copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Often in the evenings, once I had taken off myself for a bath, he would coax simple, pastoral tunes from the piano. I wondered if he was adhering to my unstated desire for silence in the house. It was a fine arrangement. I would let the music soothe me as I lay in the bath, and he would continue playing for nigh on an hour. It was rather difficult to not realise that this was the closest to domestic I had known since my mother’s death.
Castle Albus had dropped in once, no doubt to emphasise that he was watching us, and Tom had been his customary self, greeting our visitor politely, before retreating to the attic with Huckleberry Finn. That the boy preferred my company even when I was in this morose temper while he would rather be quit of Castle Albus’s loquacious merriness flattered me more than it should have.
I lay awake on the night of the sixth of January, my mind troubled and mired in speculations regarding the future. Tossing and turning restlessly, I gave up sleep as a lost cause after midnight had struck, and heaved myself out of the bed. Tea, I decided. The Englishman, be he Wizard or Muggle, swore by tea, and I was no different. I slipped into the kitchen quietly and started going about the familiar routine of making tea.
It was just as I put the kettle on that I noticed movement in the backyard. Frowning, I made my way to the door and unlocked it silently, thanking Aberforth for having had the foresight to oil the hinges. I inhaled sharply, and a thousand suspicions battled for prominence in my mind as I saw Tom standing by the sundial and delicately swishing what was unmistakeably a wand. Ollivander’s wand, I registered absently. It must have been dropped in the melee of last week.
He turned swiftly to face me. My suspicions turned manifold shades darker when I saw him automatically moving the wand behind him to hide it from my notice.
The half-moon light shone dully on his worried yet determined features.
“I can make bad things happen to those who try to hurt me. I can order animals to do what I want.”
Tom Riddle. My mind pummelled me with memories of countless bereaved families who had fallen prey to his dark ambitions.
So dark, and so powerful, Ollivander had warned me. Castle Albus had said the same. I could not pretend that I had not seen it myself. Only Aberforth had cautioned patience. Just a boy, he had said implacably each time Tom’s nature had come up in conversation. Aberforth had been right about Gellert, whom he had never trusted from the beginning. Aberforth had been right about Severus, whom he had asked me to take under my wing from the time when Eileen Prince had requested me to meet her in Hog’s Head to speak about a waiver of tuition fees for her son. Could Aberforth be right about Tom? Or would Tom be the one time my brother had misjudged a person’s nature? Tom Riddle did always have a way of overturning everyone’s calculations. Benefit of doubt. I had promised Aberforth to give the boy benefit of doubt.
Gathering the paltry remains of my confidence, I asked the boy, “Do you have one good reason to be standing out here at midnight with a stolen wand?”
He remained silent though he held my gaze. His knuckles were clenched white about the brown wood of the wand.
“Answer me, Tom,” I said quietly. “Is there a single reason which can justify why you are doing this, risking Aberforth being sent to prison once again for taking in a budding psychopath?”
He flinched near imperceptibly and I immediately regretted the psychopath insinuation.
“I did not steal the wand,” he muttered then. “I found it abandoned in this very yard.”
Abandoned? After the Aurors had swept the place through with a fine-toothed comb? Not likely. Planted? Perhaps. For what purpose? To ensure that Tom’s curiosity would lead to further mischief? How had Tom felt it would be a good idea to sneak off into the backyard with this wand instead of telling me that he had found it?
“You are warping the truth to lend you credence,” I said, trying to quell the rising wave of rage.
It was then that he destroyed my tower of judgement again and brought it down like a pack of cards. With a curse that he had to have learnt from wandering the alleys of London, he threw the wand away, slumped against the sundial and dropped his gaze furious to the ivory gnomon Aberforth had whittled for him. Then he said in a soft, stricken voice, “I was only trying to find my fa-” he gulped and his knees buckled as he spoke the words “- my father.”
The father. Why? To kill the man? To beg him to take the bastard son and give him home and love? Why? Hate and anger, possessiveness and suspicions, fear and helplessness all soared high in my heart. I wanted to drag the boy inside and bundle him into a cosy blanket and teach him Irish. I wanted to shake him until he gave me all the answers I wanted. I wanted Aberforth here so that he could intervene before I could do any of these things.
Tom was standing still, with his fingers clutching the sundial’s plinth to support himself and his eyes warily watching my features for reaction. Later, I would wonder why my voice had sounded half-choked and wretched when I asked him, “Why?”
A lonely, wretched eight-year-old boy mumbled, “Mr. Bode said that I could only have been born into a strong wizarding family. He said I must have been one of those wild oats sown by a spoilt Wizarding heir to some old-as-anything family. Mrs. Cole always said that he got my mother in the family way and threw her out. That was why she had me in the orphanage parlour and died on New Year Eve. So she couldn’t have been magic, would she? She was weak and crying, Mrs. Cole said, and she had no one. She had no money. It had to be him. I wanted to know. I wanted to see for myself. I wanted-” he broke off and glared at me.
“You wanted to see if that man would feel remorse if he saw you now,” I finished for him. He had probably tried to copy some tracking charm that he had seen used by one of the Aurors or the Department of Ministry employees or perhaps even Castle Albus or Hyperion Malfoy.
This time, I gave up self-control as a lost cause and strode across the yard to his side. Then I dragged his protesting form to me and snuggled him in between my body and the cloak I had thrown over myself before descending to the kitchen to make that cup of tea. A scowling face looked up at me. I ruffled his hair.
“You didn’t ask me why I needed a wand for that,” he muttered.
“Why did you need a wand?” I humoured him.
He looked mighty suspicious by the sudden twist in my temper. What a proper pair we made, I mused.
“That is how the Caterpillar says it works when Alice wonders how to grow smaller or taller. Isn’t that magic? To do magic, you need to know that you want it. That is what the Caterpillar tries to tell Alice. So I tried to ask the sundial to point towards him. It didn’t. I tried with twigs. With my textbooks. With my shoes. None worked well. Then I tried with this wand,” he said.
“You thought that the Caterpillar’s advice might work in our world?” I asked, trying my best to refrain from laughing. “My dear boy, wands have special properties. They aren’t made from just any piece of wood.”
“It worked,” he said, sounding quite put out by my lack of enthusiasm.
“Did it now?” I wondered, ruffling his hair again. “Why don’t you get to your bed now and tell me all about it in the morning?”
He looked at me crossly before snatching my wand from my loose grip and muttering, “Show me Mr. Dumbledore.”
It veered right to the east, then abruptly turned to point in my direction and veered east again. Tom cursed.
“Tom, my boy, no cursing. And no snatching of wands, too,” I said patiently. “I will set you lines for that tomorrow. From that Latin textbook you so hate. Now, off to bed with you.”
“Show me my Mr. Dumbledore!” Tom spat at the wand, and it veered towards me before staying put.
My father had come to see me off at the station before my first year at Hogwarts. Many pure-blood Wizards had asked him, half-sympathetically and half-mockingly, if his son did have the potential to be a true Wizard, since the line had been tainted by Muggle blood from my mother’s side. Then my father had said, emphatically, “He is my son. He can’t not be a true Wizard.”
Now here Tom stood, a smug sprite of childish glee in the pale moonlight, offering my wand to me and looking up at me with a mixture of victory and nervousness in those dark eyes.
There remained a hundred matters unaddressed “ the stolen wand, sneaking out in the middle of the night, Ollivander, Tom’s misconceptions regarding his father’s heritage, the dockyard cursing and many, many other things. I felt so weary, so very weary, and all of a sudden, I understood why Faustus, poor, tempted Faustus, had been snared so by the devil’s words. Words, wielded craftily as Tom had - Show me my Dumbledore, Tom had said, and he had meant it too, because the wand had obeyed “ such words could lay siege to a man’s will until he surrendered reason and professed himself vanquished.
“Sir?”
“You had best call me Percival,” I murmured, striving to affect nonchalance. “You call my brother Abe, after all.”
“I would rather not,” he said, quietly, intently, holding my gaze in a calculating fashion. What was going on in that twisted, dear, beautiful mind of his?
“Go to bed, Tom,” I said.
Disappointment flashed across his features before he bid me a curt goodnight and trudged to the house. After the door had closed behind him, I walked to the wand he had discarded and picked it up. A moment’s irresolution stalled me. Then I chided myself for this deplorable dillydallying and cast a spell to determine what magic Tom had done using Ollivander’s wand.
I stood torn between admiration, wry amusement and relief as I observed that Tom had only asked the wand to show him where the bastard who fathered him was.
Flamel’s house in France had been a homing beacon for dozens of bohemian researchers in the fields of Alchemy and Ancient Magic. It had been there that I had met the wand-maker, Gregorovitch, who was then studying the properties of Thestral hair. He had claimed during a heated debate with other scholars in Flamel’s parlour that magic could be channelled by intent into living things. It was this brute channelling of magic by force, he believed, which eventually the Magical world came to know as the Imperius Curse. Long before the Curse was developed, men and women had experimented with controlling objects and animals. The most popular topic of discussion whenever he had been in the room was the subject of the Deathstick. Gregorovitch was one of a group of scholars whose entire research was devoted to the making, the history, the trail and the properties of the Elder Wand. He had often said that the Elder Wand could only have been made by willing it into existence. From what little I knew of Grindelwald’s research, he agreed with Gregorovitch that the Elder Wand had not been conceived by spell or potion, but had been crafted by the power of a hungry, yearning mind.
Now, as I inspected Ollivander’s wand, I realised the intensity of Tom’s yearning that had shaken the wand’s core. He had wanted to find his father. His intense desire to do so had channelled into Ollivander’s wand and it had obeyed him.
When I had been fifteen, Erasmus Crouch had challenged me to a duel. With my reputation as a Defense Against the Dark Arts prodigy, it had caused something of an uproar in the school. Erasmus was the Crouch heir, Head Boy, and reputed to be the most brilliant student Ravenclaw had seen. The whole school had turned up to watch the duel. He had whittled away my energy, tiring me slowly by letting me attack while he took the defensive and had finally stepped in for the kill when I had been left panting and furious. He had been smirking and everyone except the Gryffindors had been cheering him on while taunting me, for I had been something of a snob to students from other Houses. It was then that I knew hatred and anger so hot and I wanted nothing more than to see Erasmus’s wand break. I had wanted so furiously, so clearly, so terribly that his wand became dust in his hands. The crowds stopped cheering and Albus Dumbledore had smiled his usual beaming smile before solicitously offering a hand to his vanquished opponent. No one did ever find out what had happened to Erasmus’s wand since the consensus was that he had neglected wand maintenance. I learnt two lessons from the episode: to win over people from other Houses into my circle and to never, ever underestimate the power of want.
Had Tom known what he was doing came under unusual, powerful magic which the Ministry might certainly label as dark because it went beyond wand and word? If he had not realised it, should I enlighten him? I wished that I could shy away from making a decision and practise the policy of avoidance which I usually adopted with those I could not understand. But I could not do that here. Even if I avoided the matter, Tom with his endless curiosity might ask Hyperion Malfoy or Castle Albus. I could not have them know, not when I trusted neither of them; Ollivander’s wand had been left here to be found. Besides, a part of me that sounded eerily like Aberforth pointed out that the boy trusted me. He had trusted me enough to take him home.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Albus, you lazy goat, open the door, will you?”
I had never in my life been more relieved to hear Aberforth insulting me. I rushed to the door and opened it. There he stood before me, grumbling and scowling, seeming no worse for the wear, and then he looked up at me with a faint frown between his brows.
“Don’t tell me you blew up the kitchen,” he muttered, shoving a plain parcel into my hands before striding past me into the house.
“What is it?” I asked, my mind still slowed by sleep and the relief that he was safe and sound at home once more.
“Christmas,” he said laconically. “Now, have you put the kettle on?”
I did not answer him, for I was busy ripping the plain brown wrapping. In lay a new copy of The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus.
“Always reminded me of him,” Aberforth was muttering, sounding quite put out to admit that he had a passing knowledge of literature. Pretending to be illiterate was one of the greatest joys in his life, after all. “What with your fancy Alchemy and atheism and the whole mess with him.”
Between Aberforth and I, him would always imply Gellert. Dear Gellert, now re-labelled Grindelwald in my mind though Gellert he remained in my heart; my Mephistophilis, who had beguiled me into powerful nets of dark sorcery with his razor-sharp intellect, easy smile and charming ways. Light is not half as fair as you, Mephistophilis had told poor, damned Faustus; Magic is might had said Grindelwald. O gentle Faustus, this damned magic will charm your soul to hell had warned the angels; Aberforth had broken my nose and called me pathetic.
“Thank you,” I said quietly, overcome by regret and guilt. “I have nothing for you, Abe.”
“You put the kettle on!” Aberforth’s voice came from the kitchen. “You can’t give me anything more precious than tea after that terrible week I had.”
I let my fingers flutter wistfully over the binding of the book before sighing and placing it by my usual chair. Then I joined Aberforth in the kitchen.
“How is our imp?” Aberforth asked, as he bustled about, starting breakfast, pouring out two mugs of tea, wrinkling his nose at the dirty dishes of yesterday and prodding a finger at the lump of solidified batter which was the sorry result of my attempt at baking a cake.
I looked up at him, willing him to understand my turmoil: suspicion, protectiveness, unwillingness to give the benefit of doubt, pride and possessiveness.
“Oh, dear, that bad, eh?” Aberforth muttered, setting a mug of tea before me. “I know I will regret asking. What happened?”
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tom had greeted Aberforth effusively and even surrendered with unusual grace to one of Aberforth’s bear-hugs. His eyes had lit up at the book Aberforth had got for him: the children’s classic, Little Lord Fauntleroy. I had read it and it was not one of my favourites. As far as I remembered, Aberforth had not liked it too. So I did wonder why my brother felt it appropriate for Tom now.
“Oh! Thank you, Abe,” Tom said breathlessly, excitement and surprise at the gift bleeding into his voice. “It is new!”
His fingers fluttered over the binding and the front of the book with reverence that another might have accorded a deity. An absurd desire to promise him every new book in the world overcame me for a moment. Aberforth pinched my arm. He had never needed Legilimency or any abstruse art to read my mind from my face.
“You have to promise me something, though,” Aberforth was telling Tom.
The boy’s eyes narrowed in suspicion and he slowly placed the book on the table. Aberforth chuckled and said, “I want you to let Albus read the book to you every night, before you go to bed. Can you do that, hmm?”
My heart did a squiggly leap which seemed to be a mixture of both protest and glee. Aberforth was suppressing a smirk at our expense, I could tell.
“Why?” Tom asked, clearly befuddled. “I can read faster by myself.”
“I know you can, Tom,” Aberforth said. He shot me a pointed look. “It is just that Albus said he would like to read to you.”
“Yes,” I said and I realised that I meant it with utmost sincerity.
Tom’s eyes were dark with calculations and suspicions again. Aberforth pinched his nose and said, “No, I didn’t get the book so that he could read to you at nights, Tom. If you like, you can read by yourself. It was just a suggestion.”
“I don’t have to agree to it?” Tom asked cautiously.
“No, no, you don’t,” Aberforth replied. “No hidden motives, Tom. Do you want me to swear on Billy?”
Tom grinned at that and shook his head.
“So?” I prompted.
“If you wish, perhaps you could read to me tonight, Sir,” Tom said slowly, mulling the situation over and over in his mind. “Just once.”
“Just once,” I promised.
Tom flashed us a charming smile and dashed out into the yard.
“Dear God, Albus,” Aberforth murmured. “Why must I always do your dirty work?”
“Thank you, Abe,” I said sincerely. “I hadn’t thought of it but-”
“But you like the idea very much,” Aberforth said teasingly. “I know. You were always jealous whenever you saw me reading to Ariana. You never knew that I would have let you read to her had you only asked.”
I stared at him. How had he known?
“Oh, nonsense, Albus! You are not as good an actor as you like to think you are,” he proclaimed, with an unnerving twinkle in his eyes.
I glared at him. Then I remembered that I had been carrying on my person something precious of his. I took the rosary from a pocket of my robe and offered it to him on my outstretched palm.
“Ah! I had wondered!” he said, evidently relieved. “I feared it might have been trampled on in the ruckus of that night, you see.”
“Take it,” I told him.
He shook his head and said, “Amelia Bones brought me another while I was in prison, Albus. You can keep it.”
The rosary had been comforting, though I had not prayed with it or considered it sacred. It had simply been something of my brother’s and therefore precious to me while he had been away.
“Take it, Abe,” I said firmly.
He took it from my outstretched palm.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tom looked uncomfortable by my intrusion into his attic that night. He did assent with barely contained paranoia to let me sit on the edge of his bed. His damp-from-bath, dark brown curls had a burnished sheen to them in the candle-light and I had the urge to towel them drier. With his eyes burning suspiciously and his posture tense, he reminded me eerily of Argus Filch’s cat. I decided not to risk even patting his shoulder. It would do us no good if he clawed my eyes out with his nails as Mrs. Norris had once done with poor Pettigrew who had tried to pet her. He had needed a week at St. Mungo’s. Pulling my thoughts away from the past, I began reading to the boy.
“Cedric himself knew nothing whatever about it. It had never been even mentioned to him. He knew that his papa had been an Englishman, because his mamma had told him so.”
“Sir, my father had no magic, did he?”
“No, Tom,” I said quietly. “It was your mother who came of Wizarding lineage.”
“Why did she die then?” Huddled in the blankets, only his too pale face and dark eyes left exposed, he looked miserable. I rested Little Lord Fauntleroy on my knee and ran my fingers through the damp curls of his hair. He twitched once before lying quietly. I picked up the book and started reading again.
“Dearest," said Cedric (his papa had called her that always, and so the little boy had learned to say it),”"dearest, is my papa better?”
Tom murmured, “He didn’t want my mother, did he? He used her and he threw her into the streets when she told him about me.”
“You shouldn’t speak so harshly,” I tried to berate him, albeit half-heartedly. “We don’t know what might have happened.”
I knew what had happened. I knew of the love potion, the confrontation and the consequences.
Tom’s eyes were fixed on my face as he said, “You know something.”
Lord Voldemort always knows when you lie.
I took a deep breath and answered, “I know that your father was unpleasantly surprised by your mother’s magic. He had not known of it earlier, you see. They were in love. They married. Then you came along. She thought that it was time to tell your father about the magic. It did not pan out well. They had a fight. He returned to his father’s house and she came back to our world. They were both grieving and not thinking properly. It was then that your mother had you. Your father might have searched for her, Tom, in all the places they used to visit. He had no means to enter our world and, perhaps, he lives in the illusion that she took you away and raised you in our world. Who knows what he feels each time he sees children playing or mothers with prams on the country-streets?”
“Country-streets?” Tom breathed. “He is in the country, then? Mrs. Cole thought that he was one of those toffs from Pall Mall.”
“I wouldn’t know, Tom,” I hedged. His eyes narrowed. I hastily added, “Your grandfather’s house, where your mother grew up, is in the country. He is dead now. I have heard that he was the protective sort. He did not encourage his children to travel to the city. So I assumed that your mother met your father in her village.”
Tom looked fit to burst with questions. I decided that I had indulged him enough. Also, I had to prepare a convincing tale and take Aberforth into my confidence before telling him anymore. So I shook my head sternly and returned to the reading.
“Then, little as he was, Cedric understood that his big, handsome young papa would not come back any more.”
I read until I saw his eyes drooping shut. I could not resist pressing a quick kiss to his forehead.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Good morning!” greeted an overly effusive Hyperion Malfoy, as he stood in our doorway with his hat in his hands and a younger, bonnier version of himself tugging on his robes.
“Malfoy,” I said flatly.
“My son, Abraxas. Abraxas, greet Mr. Dumbledore, please.”
Malfoy nudged the boy forward. Abraxas scowled at me and took one look at our home before saying, “How can you live here?”
It was just then that Aberforth and Tom ventured up the path with three goats in tow. My brother had taken Tom to Hog’s Head to visit Billy. He had asked me to accompany them but I had told him that I would be happy enough to let Tom convey my regards to the goat.
Abraxas wrinkled his nose as he caught the rather strong scent of goat. I did not blame him. It had taken me ages to get used to that smell.
“Mr. Malfoy!” Tom greeted the balding man who had invited himself over and deemed it fit to bring his young miniature along.
“Abraxas, this is Tom. Tom, I have told you about my son, haven’t I?”
Malfoy was eyeing Tom with the fond indulgence one usually reserves for favourite nephews. I glared at him. Aberforth was trying to keep the goats from getting closer to the younger Malfoy who looked quite green in the face.
“Abraxas is too long a name,” Tom said. His eyes were shining in mischief. I wondered what the imp was planning. “May I call you Rax? We used to shorten names at the orphanage. It was easier and quicker.”
“Rax?” Abraxas asked faintly, disdain and entitlement wiped off his face to be replaced by sheer horror. “Orphanage? Isn’t it the name of one of those Greek caves where she-monsters freeze people into stones?”
“I am afraid that you have his nanny to blame for that,” Hyperion Malfoy explained.
“I have such places to take you to, Rax,” Tom promised solemnly. Abraxas’s eyes widened and he clung to his father’s robes a tad tighter. Aberforth’s lips were twitching as he fought laughter.
My anger at finding the Malfoys on our doorstep vanished leaving behind vexed amusement as Tom offered his hand to Abraxas and asked softly, “You aren’t afraid to come with me, are you, Rax?”
Abraxas bit his lips and said stubbornly, “I am not afraid of orphanages!”
Tom’s eyes shone in mirth as he said, “That is quite brave of you, Rax. I am quite afraid of orphanages myself.”
There was a note of wistfulness in his words. Was he envying Abraxas’s ignorance of what orphanages stood for?
Tom’s altered tone must have been evident to Abraxas too, for his eyes faded from frightened blue to confident azure and he said solemnly, “I won’t let the she-monsters catch you, Tom.”
Tom’s eyes widened in and the mirth fled away from them leaving behind suspicions and disbelief. The hand he had been offering to Abraxas fell limp against his side.
“Come on,” Abraxas said then, and walked right past a goat without noticing the smell, and offered a plump hand to Tom. “I’ll kill the she-monster for you. Nanny told me that it will die if you throw sand into its eyes. You mustn’t make eye-contact with the monster though, Nanny says.”
On and on he nattered, while Tom stood still and measured every word that left Abraxas’s lips and every gesture the young Malfoy made, before inhaling sharply as he realised that the other boy was sincere.
“We will start with the snails in the backyard and then eventually advance to slaying monsters,” Tom offered, cutting into Abraxas’s impromptu lecture on how to effectively kill she-monsters.
“You know a lot of big words,” Abraxas noted. “Why did you shorten my name then?”
“Would you rather be called Abraxas?” Tom asked politely.
“No, you may call me Rax.” The little Malfoy miniature then glared up at the rest of us. “Nobody else is allowed to call me Rax.”
“I will make sure of that,” Tom promised, with a smile lurking on his lips.
“Good!” Abraxas said happily, and looked expectantly at Tom while bouncing impatiently on the balls of his feet.
Tom chuckled before leading an enthusiastic Abraxas to the backyard with such self-assurance that I couldn’t help recalling tales of Arthur and Lancelot. Abraxas had been one of Tom Riddle’s earliest supporters in the timeline I had left. They had met at Hogwarts then. I had scarcely begun thinking of time and inevitability and paradoxes when Aberforth broke in saying, “Such a vivacious boy!”
“Takes after his mother,” Malfoy commented absently with his eyes still on Tom’s receding figure. “Very opinionated. Very headstrong. Very loyal.”
“French blood, eh?” Aberforth asked amusedly. “The French goats are finicky creatures. Very difficult to make them happy in our pens here. Your wife was a Lestrange?”
“No, she was from the Montaigne family. Michelle de Montaigne,” Malfoy said, looking properly horrified by the expression of bliss on my brother’s features. It was one of the rare times where I found myself in accord with a Malfoy. That reminded me of why I was usually at loggerheads with their family.
“What brings you here?” I asked him.
What was his game? Was he trying to get Tom to build a rapport with Abraxas to ensure that the Malfoys would be placed in a position of favour once the puppet-masters behind Hyperion Malfoy achieved their goal?
Malfoy’s eyes flicked to the boys once more before he said, “The boy, Percival. I may call you by your given name, may I not? It would be tedious to address both your cousin,” he nodded at Aberforth, “and you as Mr. Dumbledore.”
Aberforth did not dislike the Malfoys as intensely as I did. He had not been exposed to their views on blood purity and wealth accumulation since he did not move in their circles. So he chuckled at Hyperion Malfoy’s words and said good-humouredly, “Of course you may, Mr. Malfoy.”
“However, since there is only one of you, Mr. Malfoy,” I interjected, “we would rather continue to address you formally.”
“’Tis quite your prerogative, of course,” Malfoy said easily. “I came here to give my boy the chance to meet our delightful Tom.”
Our delightful Tom? I frowned. I did not like his increasing interest in the boy. Tom, on the other hand, had not looked upon the foppishly dressed Malfoy in suspicion. Was this because Hyperion Malfoy had brought a measure of succour while Tom had been in the Department of Mysteries? It was most unlike Tom to not actively mistrust others.
“Would you like to come in for a cup of tea?” Aberforth asked politely, though I could well tell that he was equally suspicious regarding Malfoy’s motives.
“No, no, that wouldn’t do at all,” Malfoy said apologetically. “I have some business to see to. Would you-?” here he hesitated as if right on cue.
Resisting the urge to roll my eyes, I said, “Let the boy play with Tom. You may fetch him once you have finished your business.”
Malfoy thanked us both charmingly before taking his leave.
“Not your type?” Aberforth teased me. “I am surprised. He has quite a way with words, he is dressed to the nines and he has something of a reputation for being involved in shady activities.”
I scowled at him for the presumption. The only emotion that Malfoy stoked in me was irritability.
“Ah, I forgot that you prefer Continental cuisine.”
With that parting shot, he left, goats in tow. The picture they made disturbingly reminded me of that nursery rhyme about Mary and her devoted lamb.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
After supper that day, Tom was pacing before the fire, with his hands tucked in his pockets and a faint frown on his forehead.
“Abraxas isn’t as snooty as most rich children are, is he?” Aberforth asked rhetorically.
Tom glanced at him uncertainly before giving a cautious nod. He did not cease his pacing. Abraxas Malfoy’s behaviour was confusing Tom. I could well understand why, though I had no personal experience. I had been a popular boy in my childhood years. Aberforth had been the shy one and had often faced difficulties mingling with the crowd because of being labelled as Albus Dumbledore’s mediocre brother.
“He said he wanted me to attend his birthday party next week,” Tom murmured. “I wonder why.”
A dark expression settled on his features. Did he fear that it would be a repeat of the cruel taunts by the orphanage children?
I was torn between stating my disapprobation of being friendly with a Malfoy child and wanting Tom to trust the evident sincerity of the other’s boy’s friendship. Hyperion Malfoy’s motives remained obscure and that worried me. The Malfoy miniature, however, held no ulterior motives and truly desired Tom’s friendship. How would this play out? Had Hyperion Malfoy expected things to unfurl in this manner? If so, why? Would it be wiser to forbid Tom from a friendship with Abraxas? No, forbidding a curious child like Tom would not work in my favour. Tom would not have the chance to meet children his age before going to Hogwarts. Tom needed friends. Surely, a chance to form a rapport with a child who had grown up in the Wizarding world would help him fit in at school? Yet, it was the Malfoy child and Hyperion Malfoy’s ties to Grindelwald bore closer scrutiny. How would I keep an eye on the situation then? With a sigh, I decided to let Aberforth manage this, for now.
“Tom, he isn’t the nasty type,” Aberforth said with unusual gentleness. Tom gave that cautious nod again. “And Albus will be with you.” I frowned at Aberforth. That declaration seemed to set the boy at ease though, for he stopped pacing and turned to face Aberforth. “You can call him Rax before all his guests if he says anything remotely rude about you,” my brother suggested with a twinkle in his eyes.
Tom grinned at that. Aberforth took advantage of the boy’s mellowness and asked if he would mind me reading to him before bedtime again. Tom’s eyes met mine for a moment before his gaze skittered away and he made a soft hum of assent.
Aberforth shot me a triumphant look as soon as Tom had left the room. Dear me, my brother had been the one to inherit my mother’s skills at manipulation. How had he hidden it from me all these years?
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External Source Text - Little Lord Fauntleroy by F. H. Burnett and The Tragic History of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe.
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Eldritch by eldritcher
Chapter Notes: Thank-you to Heart of Spells for the excellent beta-work she has been doing for the story.