Chapter Text
1940
Returning to London, thought Tom, is even more miserable this time around.
The grey skies were greyer than ever. The general mood on the street was solemn and harried. The people were an archetypal tableau of urban life: the somber, monochromatic crowds of English yeomanry, with their chins up, upper lips stiff, and their backs straight—but Tom could see where their eyes were just the slightest touch colder, their belts a notch or two tighter. He'd also observed that there weren't as many motor vehicles and young children on the streets, nor as much open gaiety in greetings and conversation, and the few spots of colour that peppered the dismal landscape were limited to recruiting posters placed in the front windows of shops and offices.
Some part of him was darkly exultant that all of Britain had been made familiar with a standard of life that had once been the sole dominion of a wretched minority.
Another part of him was seething because that standard of life had been what his useless mother had condemned him to, when she'd stumbled through the gates of Wool's in her ninth month of corporal purgatory. But Tom Riddle, unlike the rest of the creatures who called that place their home, had found a means of escape. Yet now, slowly and inexorably, he was being drawn back to it like a sinner led to his eternal reward. Perhaps he was being melodramatic about it (Hermione had begun calling him 'dramatic' ever since he'd decided that she was meant to be his Foil), but that sense of gloomy finality was much the same.
"If you can suggest anything that will make the summer the least bit bearable, now would be the best time to mention it," said Tom, glaring out of the window at the families waiting at the platform for the arrival of the train. Screaming younger siblings, arms up in the air and waving when the train hadn't even arrived, colourful animated signs reading 'WELCOME BACK!' in glittering letters; it was all rather gauche in Tom's eyes and made him glad he hadn't anyone to embarrass him like this.
The Hogwarts Express slowly chugged into King's Cross. The white billowing steam from its chimneys left the windows on the first two carriages warm to the touch. The doors opened, and students pushed out of their compartments, clogging the aisles with their bags and birdcages and brooms and school trunks. The First Years were at the forefront of the rush, pouring out the moment the doors were flung open, eager to see their families after a long and arduous year battling the symptoms of homesickness.
"I asked my parents if you could visit our house," said Hermione, standing up and stretching her stiff limbs. "Petrol is still under ration, but Dad gets extra fuel tickets because of his job."
Tom brought his bag down from the overhead rack. "He's still using a civilian ration book, isn't he? The extra ones are for medical emergencies, and using them to drive friends around seems... a bit dodgy."
"Yes, well," Hermione said, as they lingered in the aisle between compartments, waiting for the crowd to thin, "the whole city is on ration books, but that doesn't stop the rich getting around it by having their cream tea and steaks at a restaurant. If we only use the motor to pick you up once or twice a week, no one will notice."
"Oh, I wasn't objecting to it, of course," said Tom, helping himself to a handful of partially unwrapped chocolate frogs abandoned on the bench of a vacated compartment. It looked as if the person who'd bought them had taken the cards out and left the chocolate untouched. It was wasteful, as opening the box broke the stasis enchantment and the frog soon lost its charmed animation. Most wizards didn't find the inert frogs appealing, the same way they didn't like Muggle chessboards, even though the chocolate was the same flavour, and Muggle chess played by the same rules as wizarding chess.
The casual way wizards used and wasted things was something he had trouble accustoming himself to; on the other hand, the wizarding perspective on physical injuries, as had so appalled Hermione, was nothing he worried himself about. He knew that wizards could conjure matter out of thin air, but his classmates couldn't, and while they might learn to conjure handkerchiefs, floral bouquets, and singing doves by their N.E.W.T. examinations, he doubted that any of them would ever be able to create unicorn hoof shavings or mandrake leaves in their lifetimes.
He'd seen the volume of waste in Potions practicals: when one of his classmates had waited too long to stir, or stirred in the wrong direction, they'd ask the professor to Vanish their work and start again with fresh ingredients—that is, if they didn't just go ahead and double down on their mistake, then hand in a subpar sample phial at the end of the lesson. They could have saved both time and ingredients on their Seasickness Serum if they'd known to stir in alternate directions every twelve seconds while adding crushed rowan berries on low heat. It would reverse the effect of over-simmering and produce a richer pearly green colour in the finished potion.
Wizards.
There were few instances in life where Tom had difficulty thinking up a suitable response, but he found this one in particular to be all-encompassing and always appropriate.
"If you want to drag your entire family into a life of wickedness and degeneracy, by all means, go ahead. I wouldn't dare stand in your way. But," Tom added in a low voice, "I still say that it would've been simpler to borrow from the school broom shed. No one would have noticed if I'd taken one for the summer. It's not like the Quidditch teams would miss a single old Cleansweep, anyway."
"I'm sure you'll be singing a different tune after some overeager reservist in the Home Guard catches you at the end of his fowling piece." Hermione shook her head. "Not to mention, you'd be breaking half a dozen rules on wizarding secrecy."
"You're right," said Tom. "I'll have to learn the Disillusionment Charm first."
"Sometimes I wonder how you manage to show up for breakfast in the mornings," Hermione sighed. "One of these days you'll catch your head on the door from how swollen it's gotten."
By this time they'd collected their belongings from the luggage compartment, and were headed for the entrance of the Muggle side of King's Cross. Students of wizarding family were Apparated directly to their homes by their parents, or used the public Floo fireplaces. Everyone else had to wait their turn to exit through the pillar—it would not be very inconspicuous for twenty people to suddenly appear out of nowhere on the Muggle platform.
Being British, they automatically formed into an orderly queue.
When it was their turn to cross over, Tom turned to her. "You'll write to me again, won't you, Hermione?"
Hermione blinked. "Oh! Of course I will! I was going to ask if you'd like to come to dinner with my family tonight. Mum was going to pick us up in the motor, and then pop in to ask Mrs. Cole's permission for you to visit during the summer, since you live only a few miles from the station. It wouldn't do for one of her charges to disappear for hours on end."
"She doesn't have to do that," said Tom. "Mrs. Cole wouldn't notice a thing."
"It's the proper thing to do," Hermione said, "and she insists. Like saying 'Please' or 'Thank you' and leaving a card if you call on someone who's out, or pouring the tea before the milk. If we went about it differently, society would be on the verge of collapse. Besides," she gestured at his battered brass-bound trunk, "don't you need to drop your luggage off?"
"The less I see of that place, the better," Tom muttered, and then they passed through the brick pillar and into the Muggle world.
Gone were the colourful hats and the spangled robes of the magical crowd; the hooting and cawing of caged birds had fallen silent, the crackle of Apparition halted mid-step. On this side of the barrier, Tom felt as if his life had run to the end of its Technicolor reel, and a sadistic projectionist had swapped in the rest of it in black-and-white celluloid. The contrast was jarring: Muggles wore grey, black, and navy blue in hard-wearing wool and heavy fustian, jacket and trousers and hats with very little variation from one man's silhouette to another. He noticed that there was an occasional spattering of olive drab worn by soldiers disembarking a train two platforms over.
They smelled of tobacco ash and engine grease and too many unwashed human bodies in too small a space. They carried newspapers and briefcases, and they pushed past Tom and Hermione only thinking about getting where they needed to be. None of them realised, or even noticed, the existence of another world on the other side of the pillar.
If Tom had been a lesser wizard and a weaker person, he might have considered throwing himself off the platform and onto an oncoming train at the sudden, shocking loss of everything magical. But he wasn't a little match girl, nor a reveller waking up the morning after midsummer night to discover that it had just been a dream. His wand had remained in his pocket, the bright, polished yew wood warm to the touch, just as it had all through the coldest winter days in the lowest dungeons beneath Hogwarts.
He couldn't use it now, but it was a reminder that his magic was inside him. It could never be taken from him; he had been born with it; it was his birthright, as he could call very little else in his life but his name—his plebeian Muggle-ish name.
(As much as he disparaged the name 'Tom' for being so common, three-lettered names were not inherently bad. 'Leo' had been the name of a dozen Popes, and the first Pope Leo had been known as Leo the Great. And people so revered the name of the Creator that in many books Tom had read, the authors hadn't dared to use all three letters of His name. They called him G—d.
That made him contemplate the potential of 'T—m the Great'. It sounded so deliciously blasphemous.)
He shoved his way through, the trunk in front of him parting the crowd, with Hermione tagging along in his wake, her empty owl cage rattling against her own trunk. Gilles had been sent on by himself from the wizarding side of Platform Nine and Three Quarters.
They encountered Mrs. Granger at the side entrance of King's Cross, standing by the Grangers' shiny blue motor car. She was dressed in a long wizarding-style coat of deep violet gabardine, with sharp lapels and a line of pearl buttons down each cuff. While Tom had read in the London papers lent him by Hermione that they hadn't started rationing fabric, it was assured they would do so in the next year or two, so long as they needed the fabric for soldiers' uniforms. It made the wealthier families with the banknotes to spare stockpile fabric and clothing so they would not have to go without a seasonal wardrobe even in the leanest days of a war economy. From this, Tom predicted that donations to the orphanage would not be so generous in the coming years.
"Tom," said Mrs. Granger, nodding to him. Her eyes fell on Hermione behind him, and instantly the frostiness of her demeanour melted away. "Hermione, oh, Hermione!" she cried.
Mrs. Granger encircled Hermione in her arms, and Hermione mumbled something to her, and soon both of them were whispering to one another, Mrs. Granger's cheek pressed against her daughter's, her gloved hand smoothing down the tumbling curls in vain. Hermione's eyes closed, as if the motion was calming. Tom was reminded of animals being gentled, of the rabbit's ears drooping down if its spine was stroked just so; he thought of Peanut and how pinching the scruff of fur at the back of its neck made it shut its eyes and drop the collected coins into Tom's waiting hand.
Watching Mrs. Granger embrace Hermione filled him with an itchy sensation, as if he was one of the many Muggles at the station, unknowing and ignorant of another world hidden within their own. It was less than a yard's distance away, but the distance was in its own way immeasurable. Impenetrable. And even if they had known of it, it would have been nothing but incomprehensible.
But it wasn't the same for Tom, was it?
He knew what it felt like to have Hermione's cheek flush against his own, to feel the whisper of her breath stir the hair at the nape of his neck. It wasn't anything incomprehensible. And yet... he had never associated her touch with one of the many steps of obedience training, as he had used on animals, as had been used on him at the orphanage until he was eight years old and learned how to deflect culpability onto a child who was younger or stupider than he.
It was...
He struggled to articulate his thoughts.
...Well, whatever it may have been, it was soon over.
Mrs. Granger unlocked the boot and helped them load their trunks inside. The interior of boot, Tom observed, was larger than its exterior suggested.
"I had an Extension Charm placed on it," Mrs. Granger explained, lifting up a false bottom to show the extra space beneath. "We keep the spare tyres in here—we're only allowed one spare per family now. They'd have taken them otherwise, and it would have been a unconscionable waste as we'd paid full price for a whole set last year. Here, Hermione, put the cage here, and move your trunk to the side for Tom's..."
Luggage stowed, Tom and Hermione sat side-by-side in the back, with Mrs. Granger driving. Riding in a motor car was a luxury for Tom. He didn't know any other family but the Grangers who owned their own. Everyone else he knew took the trolley or the Underground if they needed to get around London; outside London they traveled on the railway, which the residents of Wool's used on their annual seaside trip. They never bought first class tickets, but by now the Hogwarts Express had set Tom's standard for posh transport. It was one of the rare experiences in his life, meant to be savoured, much like watching a newsreel at the cinema, or being waited on in a restaurant.
The drive to the orphanage was short, and when they arrived, Tom noticed that the building was a little worse-for-wear. There were no children playing in the yard, no shouting to be heard from the other side of the gate. Hermione sent him a guarded look, but she pushed the door open on her side and got out without a word.
Mrs. Granger entered first, her heels rapping on the tile. The halls were empty, the floors swept clean and spotless, an unusual sight in a building that normally housed dozens of grubby children. They didn't pass anyone else on their way to the administration office, which seemed to be the only occupied room in the place. Inside the office, Mrs. Cole was reading a magazine, her shoes propped up on a chair and a glass of something clear at her elbow. It smelled like medicine mixed with turpentine.
"Sorry, we're not taking any new placements," said Mrs. Cole, not looking up. "Any enquiries should be sent to the children's home in Whitechapel."
"Good afternoon, Mrs. Cole," said Mrs. Granger. She reached for the door handle. "Hermione, go back to the motor. Tom, get anything you need out of your room and bring them out to the motor, then wait for me."
She moved to shut the office door.
"Mum!" Hermione dug into her jacket pocket and retrieved a sheet of paper, which she pushed at her mother. "Can you get the matron to sign this before we leave?"
Mrs. Granger took the paper and skimmed its contents. "Very well. I'll be out in a few minutes, darling."
The door shut with a firm click.
Hermione gave Tom a pleased smile. "See? Now your summer won't be so bad after all."
"Bad?" said Tom. "I'll reserve my judgement until I know I won't be sleeping on your sitting room settee."
"Don't be so disagreeable, Tom. We have a guest room," said Hermione, patting him on the shoulder. "And you owe me your Hogsmeade permission slip, since I just gave mine away."
The Grangers, Tom confirmed, were the epitome of the English middle class.
Their house was built of brick, semi-detached, and had two storeys, with an attic above and a cellar below. The interiors were clean and new, the walls painted in shades of eggshell and cream, without any of the lumpy layered overpainting Tom saw in older buildings in the areas around central London—where if you took a pocket knife, you could scratch down to the original arsenic-based paint laid down over a century ago. This house had none of that, and he could bet that none of their windows were painted shut, and all of their toilets were indoors and flushing.
They also had no pretensions of aping the upper classes: he didn't see any darkly stained antique-replica furniture, heavy crystal chandeliers, uninspiring nineteenth century oils set in gilt frames (bought for a song at auction!), or God forbid, stuffed antelope heads and tiger rugs with those awful, staring glass eyes. Instead, their living areas were functional and modern; Mrs. Granger had too much taste to think that lace doilies and dried flowers were the height of home decorating.
As for the preponderance of linoleum on the first floor—well, Tom could take it or leave it.
Upon joining the family for dinner, Tom and Hermione's father shared more than a brief passing greeting, for the first time. Dr. Granger was a thin man who wore spectacles when he was reading, and kept them on a string about his neck when he wasn't. His hair was brown and curly, though it was combed down with pomade in the back, and thinning on the top. He was clean-shaven, and dressed neatly in a thick jumper over his necktie and shirtsleeves when he came to the table, in lieu of wearing his suit jacket, so apparently the Grangers didn't care to make a big to-do about dining formality. And since he didn't say any prayers before carving up the roast, it looked like the Grangers didn't care about G—d either.
If Tom still cared about having a father of his own, he supposed that Dr. Granger wouldn't do too bad of a job at it. The man wasn't as much of a useless Muggle as the rest; he was educated and a bit awkward, but that just meant he was light-handed when it came to parenting, which was a good thing as far as Tom was concerned. Tom would never be able to tolerate the authority of a strict disciplinarian. But if having a father resulted in Mrs. Granger being his mother...
Or, even worse: Hermione Granger as his older sister.
No. Definitely not.
He was rather grateful to be an orphan now, thank you very much. He preferred being plain old Tom Riddle if the alternative was Tom Granger.
After dinner, Tom was shown to his room on the second floor of the house. It was comfortable but impersonal: a metal bedstead with brass posts and legs in the centre of the room, an armchair and desk, a radiator and a bookshelf in the corner. The bedclothes were done up in a pale and sterile shade of blue, and to his relief, there weren't any framed needlepoint samplers on the wall with Bible passages or that 'Home Sweet Home' nonsense. His high expectations on Mrs. Granger's taste in décor had not been misplaced.
"My room is down the hall," said Hermione, showing him into the room. She set a pitcher of water and a glass on the nightstand. "The loo is right across. Mum and Dad have a bathroom connected to their room, so you only have to share with me. Laundry goes in the basket, and there's extra soap and toothpaste in the cupboard under the sink."
"I suppose this isn't all bad," Tom conceded, unlatching the clasps on his school trunk. "You live thirty miles from central London, so we can't visit Diagon Alley all the time like we did last summer, can we? I could have walked there from Wool's, but you'd have to take a bus or the motor."
"I'll ask Mum if we can go with her when she does our grocery shopping," said Hermione. "But there's something better than sneaking around Diagon Alley and hoping no one catches us levitating books. We can practise magic in the cellar now!"
"Really?" asked Tom, perking up. "Have you tried it yet?"
"No." Hermione's nose scrunched up in the faintest trace of a scowl. "Not yet. Mum wouldn't let me. She said to make sure until Mr. Pacek came by to check on the wards." And then her expression brightened in anticipation. "He's coming tomorrow. I can't wait to meet him, I've got so many questions! I've never met a foreign wizard before; I've always wondered how the Ministries in other countries do things. I mean, what kind of licenses do they have on magical transport? And they don't keep up with modern politics, so how do you think the Ministries on the Continent decided on their geographic borders? Wizarding Britain still includes Ireland, and the Holy Roman Empire would have been around when they set up the Statute, wouldn't it..."
She babbled on, while Tom nodded along as he unpacked his clothes and books. Hermione, although he didn't know the extent of her career aspirations, he couldn't picture as a cut-throat politician, a true Prince of the political landscape as ascribed by Machiavelli. No, not a politician—but she was a born bureaucrat. She ate books and breathed rules; she read heavy legal codices for entertainment. Tom had only picked them up to skim the relevant sections—his own priorities had been placed on figuring out what he could get away with according to the letter of the law.
They shared some of the same opinions on Wizarding jurisprudence (How many wizards knew that it was illegal to charm goats inside a house? Why and how had that even been passed?) but in the end, it was Hermione who admired the institution of the law. The ideal of it, if not the reality.
Tom set his wand on the nightstand by the water glass before he got into the bed. He missed the Slytherin dormitory, and it was hard to believe he'd been sleeping in his regular bed—he thought of that bed as his 'regular bed'—just that morning. It was strange not to have the deep green velvet canopy curtains cocooning his bed at night, cutting off the low conversations of his dorm mates, or the view of Nott in the next bed over trimming his fingernails with a quill knife. He'd already caught himself reaching for a nonexistent curtain in an act of muscle memory.
The next morning, Tom was surprised by an extra place setting at the dining table. It wasn't the plate and chair set aside for him opposite Hermione's. It was a fifth seat. He hadn't been able to deduce the precise nature of Mrs. Granger's social origins, but he'd been confident that she was aware of the etiquette around receiving house-guests. She knew how to count places, so what was this?
The mystery was solved with the arrival of a breakfast guest: the wardmaster.
Mr. Sigismund Pacek was a young man, somewhere between twenty to thirty years of age, who looked like he wanted to appear older and more serious than he was. His whiskers were trimmed into a neat moustache and goatee, and his catalogue-bought shoes had that precise toe-tip shine often seen when a firm's junior clerks wanted to mimic its senior partners. The cut of his coat was longer than fashionable, and his collar was rounded instead of starched into sharp arrow-like points; he would have been unremarkable on a London street thirty years ago, but in the here and now, he looked distinctly out of place. It didn't help that the lapels of his waistcoat were embroidered with a striking pattern of red flowers and intersecting geometric shapes.
"Good morning, Doctor! Good morning, Madam!" he said, hanging up his hat in the vestibule. "You do not know how difficult it is to get a good meal in London. The restaurants only want to serve their old patrons, or they do not want to serve foreigners, and the only place I can engage in some good conversation with my fellow magical expatriates is a dingy tavern where they only serve blood! I will never order their Jägerschnitzel in brown sauce again, that is for certain."
He sat down at the Grangers' dining table and tucked a napkin into his collar, muttering to himself, "I do not like Knockturn Alley, not at all; the ambience is terrible."
"Mr. Pacek?" said Hermione. "I'm Hermione Granger. How do you do?"
"Very well, thank you. Might you pass the bacon?" Mr. Pacek replied, emptying the toast rack onto his plate. He glanced up, just now noticing that there were other occupants at the table than Dr. and Mrs. Granger. "Ah, the little ones are back from school?"
"Yes, we're on summer holidays from Hogwarts," said Hermione, who didn't seem bothered at being called little by a man who was hardly older than she was. "Are the holidays much different at Durmstrang?"
"The summers, I believe, are a few weeks shorter, and the winter holidays longer than the British way of doing things." Mr. Pacek loaded bacon onto his plate with the tongs. "And in the dining hall, they served the smoked bacon with pickles and raw onion, so all students were taught the Breath Freshening Charm from the first day."
Tom felt it was his turn to interrogate the man. Hermione couldn't have all of his attention. "Is it true they teach Dark Arts at Durmstrang?"
Mr. Pacek stopped mid-chew, fork hovering halfway to his mouth. He studied Tom for a few seconds, his gaze penetrative, and his eyes narrowed. "The theory is taught as an elective in the senior years, to those who pass the academic pre-requisites. And it is not a subject one lightly discusses at the table, young Mr. Granger. I thought your lovely mother would have taught you better manners."
"I'm not—" Tom spluttered.
"He's not—" Hermione spoke at the same time.
"Mr. Pacek," said Mrs. Granger calmly, observing the conversation with a bemused detachment shared by Dr. Granger, "this young man is Tom Riddle, Hermione's friend from school. He's staying with us for the summer."
"A fosterling? Madam, you are as beautiful as you are generous; Doctor, you are truly blessed." Mr. Pacek nodded at Hermione's father, before turning to Tom. "Mr. Riddle, then, if you prefer that name: what Britons call Dark Arts has less of an association with darkness and evil and more of an association with tradition at the Durmstrang Institute. There is a class they teach for senior students, traditional Divination, where one can foretell a glimpse of the future by casting the haruspex. The future can be read in this way, the ancient Roman way, in the entrails of anointed sheep and sacrificial bulls.
"They do not teach this in all but a handful of schools now, because everyone has moved onto crystal balls or decks of cards these days. The old way is considered messy and barbaric in comparison, as it is known that the best readings come from the wizard whose hand also held the knife." Mr. Pacek took a sip of his tea and continued in a solemn voice, "But there is an even older way, demanding the knife of a wizard and the flesh of a man—and that is barbaric, and that is what we, even us onion-eating foreigners, call Dark Arts."
"Sir," said Hermione timidly, "surely they didn't teach that at Durmstrang?"
"The general theory only," Mr. Pacek assured her. "But it is enough to give the school a certain reputation."
"Does it work, though?" Tom asked, who wasn't at all disgusted about the discussion of human sacrifice at mealtime. By 'flesh of a man', he surmised that Mr. Pacek meant a Muggle, and had avoided using the word at the table in order not to offend the sensibilities of his hosts. "If people today are using crystal balls, it seems to imply that they work better. Like choosing a motor engine over a horse: the motor has twenty-five horsepower, while the horse has, well, just one. The less efficient one is quickly made obsolete."
"In theory, human flesh should not work any better or worse than with a good bullock," Mr. Pacek said. "But in my opinion, it is worse. The bullock is raised its entire life by a wizarding gamekeeper, anointed with oils and fed fresh magical herbs during certain times of the year, enhancing its magical properties. Then when the divination is finished, it is served to the students at dinner. You are correct, Mr. Riddle, in that there is indeed a difference in efficiency between one and the other."
"What about the bullock to the crystal ball? How do they compare?" Tom knew one couldn't be scientific about magic, because magic was an art beyond science, but it didn't hurt to try.
"That," said Mr. Pacek, looking a bit put-out at the sight of his cooling bacon and untouched toast, "rather comes down to the skill of the Seer. A true Seer can divine the future from the light of the stars, the fall of wheat in the wake of a scythe, or the flight formation of geese in the autumn. Only laymen need tools. But I imagine that as tools go, crystals are the cheapest out of the lot."
"Are you a Seer, sir?"
"Tom!" Hermione hissed at him, nudging Tom under the table with her toes. "Let him eat!"
"No, I am not," said Mr. Pacek firmly. "If I were one, they would not have let me leave the country."
That shut the conversation down for the next five minutes.
It was after breakfast that Tom saw the Grangers' cellar for the first time.
A set of sturdy wooden stairs led down to the cellar, whose design matched the look of the house proper. It was clean, with a plaster ceiling and walls built of clay brick, the mortar still a fresh white without a hint of dampness or moss, laid only a decade or so ago. There were support pillars spaced every few yards across the floor, pipes running across the ceiling, and three empty outlets where lightbulbs could be screwed in.
But there was one very obvious sign of magic: the floor space of the cellar in square feet was more than twice the area of the house above. It echoed like a factory floor with all the machines removed, the ceilings soaring twenty feet above his head. If Tom hadn't known any better, he would have assumed that the cellar encroached onto the neighbours' land. But because he did know better, he was silently marveling at the power of an Undetectable Extension Charm. An illegal one, at that. Knowing that it was forbidden made the display of magic more impressive; it made Mr. Pacek's skills as a wizard—his knowledge on Dark Arts having proven anticlimactic—worthy of respect.
"As you will be using this space as a bunker, then it shall be furnished as such," said Mr. Pacek, drawing his wand and waving it.
Lights flew out from the tip of his wand to glass hurricane lamps hung on hooks from the walls. He swept his wand to one side, and a folding screen flew back from a corner of the room. Behind it was a brass bedstead, identical to the one in Tom's room, but this one had bedding in soft pink and purple. Mr. Pacek duplicated the bed frame and mattress, laying the second bed right next to the other, and started on the blankets and pillows.
"Do you want the same colours, young Mr. Riddle?" he asked, looking over his shoulder.
"Can you do them in green?" said Tom.
A swish of Mr. Pacek's wand, and the bed covers became a mint pastel green. "Like so?"
"Darker, perhaps?"
"Would you like to try it yourself, young sir?" asked Mr. Pacek, stepping back from the bed. "'Colovaria', I believe—it has been some time since I have needed the words for such a simple spell."
"What about the Ministry?" Tom pointed out. "Won't they know if I'm doing magic underage?"
Mr. Pacek winked and tapped his wand against his nose. "I have set the wards: this room has the full line of privacy wards to conceal sight and sound and magical residue. On top of that, a mail ward to redirect those troublesome official owls, and a bit of tricky magic with a layered variation of Henderson's Thermobaric Pylon because Madam Granger worries so desperately about the dangers of Muggle artillery. You could breed dragons in here, and the neighbours will never know, though I do not recommend opening the door once the sire has caught scent of the dam, hmm?"
Hermione had promised that they could do magic this summer. And this was her house, so if any owls did come from the Ministry, any warnings would go to her name. Hermione was the only witch registered to this neighbourhood; according to the official paperwork, Tom was still living at the orphanage, thirty miles away.
"Colovaria!" he incanted, and one half of the mint green faded into the deep emerald of the Slytherin dormitory blankets.
"It is not just the final result one must envisage, but the process of change itself. Think of the green darkening to the colour you want; think of the shadow of dusk as it draws over the late afternoon, or the soft spring buds unveiling their summer glory," suggested Mr. Pacek, raising his hands and spreading his fingers out like the petals of a flower.
"These elementary transfigurations are all about one's acceptance of change and transition, and harnessing that power. If you want to practice more, you might try different patterns. Indian paisleys and the Moorish zellige always gave me such trouble when I was not much older than you. I remember," he said wistfully, "that the edges lost their crispness by the third day, and had faded away completely before the week had passed."
Tom frowned and tried again. The blanket darkened, though it wasn't as rich a tone as he really wanted. "Sir, if you're a wardmaster, why are you bothering with... interior decorating? I would have thought warding would be more profitable."
Mr. Pacek had taken up the task of duplicating nightstands and transfiguring the extras into chairs and tables. "It is a long story," he said, growing out the legs of a chair and extending the back in a lattice of carved tulips. "My family has produced many a wardmaster, those who built the walls of the wizarding ghettos and old towns south of the Oder." He clarified by adding, "Like your Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade, I think. The places open for only those of wizarding blood, though I do not recall hearing Britons use the word 'ghetto' themselves.
"But," he continued, settling himself down onto the chair and smoothing out the tails of his coat, "with the situation in Europe as it is, a man cannot depend on employment when, these days, it is not considered acceptable for a wizard to want to hide his magic from Muggles. So I arrived to Britain, where I have found that most households have no need for powerful defensive wards, but many want their front parlours renovated, or their wardrobes protected from doxies."
"You sound like you don't much care for Grindelwald, sir," said Tom as innocently as he could.
He had some idea of Pacek's allegiances already. The man had had no issue with sitting at a Muggle family's table, eating their Muggle food. From speaking to students outside Slytherin, he knew that many of the wizarding families of his classmates, though they believed themselves to be of a liberal slant, rarely ventured into the Muggle world, let alone dined with or spoke to Muggles as actual people.
(There were very few of any designation who counted as actual people in Tom's eyes, so they might have a legitimate point with that line of thinking.)
These wizards might go for sightseeing and window shopping in the area around Charing Cross where the Leaky Cauldron was located, but they fumbled their way around shillings and pence converted from galleons by the Gringotts goblins. If they didn't get swindled in the Muggle shops, it was only due to the honesty of the merchants.
"I do not care for politics," said Mr. Pacek, brushing a non-existent speck of dust from his pressed trousers. "I was born in the Kingdom of Bohemia, and the Bohemian life is the life I choose to live. This Lord Grindelwald—" he snorted in derision, "—does not value the idea of laissez-faire as I do. If I had my way, I would be enchanting the stained glass windows in the cathedrals of Prague's Old Town; if he had his way, I would be setting the wards to the doors and windows of his magnum opus, his 'Nurmengard'.
"I have never met the man himself," Mr. Pacek went on, twirling his wand in one hand in what appeared to be a nervous tic, "but I have read his writings about 'freedom for wizardkind'. I do not think he understands the meaning of the word 'freedom'."
"I've never read his writings myself," said Tom, sitting down on the green blankets of his new bed, fingering the soft fabric and the perfectly spaced stitches that had once come from an industrial sewing machine, and had now been replicated by magic. "And I've only heard about his policies from second hand sources—and not the most reliable ones—but I believe his idea of 'freedom' is not so much 'freedom for' as it is 'freedom from'. Freedom from persecution, from living in hiding, and from dedicating so much of our time and resources to protecting ourselves and our communities. The Ministry of Magic has dozens of wizards and witches working to clean up accidents and modify memories, when those same people could be inventing new potions and authoring books, or even, for instance, enchanting cathedral windows. But society has decided that they're needed more for Obliviating witnesses to preserve magical secrecy."
"You have a very clever mouth, Mr. Riddle," remarked Mr. Pacek. "I have heard it said that the young Herr Grindelwald spoke with that same kind of fire when he was sixteen. If you choose to join his crusade when you are grown, I hope that clever mouth will serve you well when the time comes for you to explain to your little Miss Granger why all children like her must be raised as fosterlings in the name of Grindelwald's greater good."
"What do you mean by that, sir?" said Tom. "Fosterlings?"
"Wizards born of Muggles." Mr. Pacek's eyebrows lifted up, and his grey eyes glowed in the light of the dozen lamps. He met Tom's gaze straight on, and unlike most people who tried to stare him down, Mr. Pacek didn't look away. He made no silent, instinctive signs of accepting Tom's power, as others yielded to Tom's natural place in the pecking order with the lowering of their heads or the slouch of their shoulders. Tom was slightly taken aback; he was so used to dealing with the endless flocks of starlings that it was shocking to encounter someone who wasn't one, although he had made no display of his talons.
"You do not think," said Mr. Pacek, "that in Grindelwald's great vision, the future of wizardkind would be left in the hands of slaves and animals, do you?"
Tom's mind raced for a response that wouldn't incriminate him in any way. Mr. Pacek seemed close to the Grangers, close enough to be invited to share their meals. Hermione respected him, and it wasn't hard to see why: she'd made a habit of it whenever she encountered adults who showed themselves to be well-read and intellectual. These kinds of people were rare relative to the overall population of wizards, but at the same time were too common for Tom's comfort.
He thought it was incredibly undignified for Hermione to fawn over them in admiration. They were years older—of course they'd read more books than she had. Yes, it was a rare occurrence considering Hermione's insatiable appetite for books, but it wasn't anything to make a fuss about. Red was the rarest of naturally occurring hair colours but no one saw Tom Riddle worshiping the likes of Albus Dumbledore. Tom had reasoned that it was the same way people treated Christmas, when he personally didn't care a whit about 'seasonal cheer'.
"I wouldn't say that having magic is the sole decider of a person's worth," said Tom, trying to sound diplomatic. "But if we must throw around terms like 'superior' and 'inferior', and if there must be a designator of superiority, a base requirement before one is allowed to participate in magical society, then it should be magical blood, not magic."
In his first year at Hogwarts, Tom had been told magic ran in families, and from that he concluded he and Hermione must have got their magic from somewhere. He found it easy to accept that—the idea that Hermione's parents were of a separate class than the dregs of South London like the misbegotten children of Wool's and their useless progenitors. In terms of social class, that was true, for all the Grangers' idealistic egalitarian opinions and open denial. If there was an inborn, physical difference between one group and the other... Well, Tom's disdain for his inferiors would be fully justified, wouldn't it?
He'd read of the case of 'Typhoid Mary', a woman who had the disease, could spread the disease to others, but showed no symptoms of the disease herself. Why couldn't magic work the same way?
He had seen no evidence to disprove such a theory, but then again, he doubted there had been much work done in the field of magical heredity. He had looked in the library for information on his own talents and had found very little worth his time. Of course it was interesting to know that wizards could produce magical offspring with humanoid species such as goblins and veelas, but it wasn't very useful, was it?
(Some part of him wished he hadn't known, because now he would never be able to read about centaurs without wondering where they came from.)
"In Britain," he spoke in a confident voice, "control of the national currency supply is granted by treaty to the goblins, so it wouldn't make sense to limit worthiness to only wizards and witches, while designating everyone else as beasts or slaves. Not unless wizards want to understand the true meaning of what Muggles call a Depression. Besides, I wouldn't ever fight for Grindelwald's cause," Tom continued with utter certainty. He would never fight, not at the risk of his own life, for anyone's cause but his own. "His platform is the 'future of wizardkind'. Something like the 'future of magic' would come across as much less divisive, and would alienate fewer potential followers."
At this point, Mr. Pacek did the unexpected. He laughed. "God in Heaven, boy! You are not thinking of becoming a politician in a few years, are you?"
"You'd support me, if I did?" asked Tom.
"In ten or twenty years?" said Mr. Pacek. "I would not oppose you. I do not believe that I could, were I even to try."
Tom was very pleased upon hearing that. It seemed the wizard knew his place, after all.
"Why wait twenty years?" said Tom. "Why not now? Surely you plan on returning to your home some day soon, and not in a decade's time?"
Mr. Pacek shook his head, letting out a small chuckle. "You are not even halfway through your education. Though you may dream of politics, as of now you are a schoolboy, not a politician."
"Not everyone needs a school education to do great things," Tom argued, thinking of the whispered discussions in the Slytherin boys' dormitory where Nott told them what he knew about the Dark Lord's expulsion, and all of them had thrown their guesses in for what exactly he had to have done to earn his marching orders. "Some people are the exceptions to the rule. They are exceptional—"
"—You think you are exceptional, boy?"
"I know I am," said Tom, his eyes glittering, his face alight with hunger. "I can prove it."
It was a moment later that Hermione clattered down the stairs with a large, shapeless sack dragging behind her.
"Look what I have!" she cried.
"It's not a body, is it?" said Tom, blank-faced.
"It's a magic tent!" she said, flinging the sack at him.
Tom spent a few seconds drowning in fabric before it gave a loud WHOOSH! and smoothed itself out, the walls climbing up around his head, stiffening into rigid lines and expanding outwards until he found himself sitting on the floor of a small carpeted room, unfurnished and rather plain looking.
A flap on the side opened, admitting Hermione and Mr. Pacek.
"Mum and Dad got a magic tent for the cellar," said Hermione excitedly, dashing around the room and uncovering several other flaps on the walls that turned out to be doors. "For the wards to work, we had to disconnect the electricity and plumbing. If we're to spend any length of time in here, we need a bathroom—Dad says he can't count how many times someone soiled themselves during a drill in the public shelters. It's even got a magical cistern with running water in the kitchen. Did I mention there's a kitchen?"
"Interesting," Tom said in a flat voice. "Do you know what this means?"
"What?"
"Your cellar is officially a better place to live than your actual house," said Tom, getting to his feet and circling the interior of the tent. When he poked the walls with a finger, they flexed and buckled but quickly snapped back into shape. "I already have a bed here. So what are the chances of talking your parents into letting me move down here for the rest of the summer?"
"What about sunlight and fresh air?" Hermione asked, chewing on her lip in thought. Tom could tell she was considering putting forth an argument on her own account. "We have only the lamps for light. They might be magical, but it's not the same as going outside."
"I live in an underground dungeon for ten months of the year; I don't mind it at all," said Tom.
Mr. Pacek cleared his throat. "I could offer a magical solution for this—a window that replicates the view from your bedroom window. It is similar to those in the imperial palaces of Vienna, created when one of the old archduchesses wanted a view of the gardens outside her summer lodge in Bolzano. It is not a true window that will open and close, only a pretty picture that moves. But it does give you that natural sunlight."
"Can you create more than one?" said Hermione eagerly. "Is it difficult? Does the distance between windows affect the spell's stability?"
Tom sighed. This was going to take a while.
Bearable was a good way to describe Tom's summer.
Throughout the summers of his past, he had been able to go without speaking anything but basic pleasantries for days at a time. He'd had his own room at Wool's, his own corner table in the communal dining hall, and he didn't have to go to school during the holidays, so talking to the other children was an option, not a requirement. He and the other orphans had come to a silent agreement years ago that if they didn't bother him, he wouldn't be forced to return the favour.
But this summer, Tom found he had no choice but to put in effort to maintain relationships with other people—to think of things to say beyond commentary on the weather or the war, the two topics that had in recent times become the centrepiece of casual smalltalk.
It was endurable, because this time around, Tom had magic.
He considered it a test of fortitude to survive middle class suburban life and come out sane and unscathed. If Hermione could do it for ten years, then he could do it for ten weeks.
Some things were more of a test than others.
Mealtimes were one of these. Tom preferred to spend as much time as he could in the cellar, reading and practising spells from his Third Year textbooks. But eating was, to his great annoyance, unavoidable, so three times a day he'd have to drag himself upstairs, sit at the table, and tear his thoughts away from magical subjects to follow the conversation. News reports from the wireless were a common topic at the table. Shortages, National Service, evacuations, Luftwaffe raids in Scotland and Wales. It was Muggle news that Tom would have deemed irrelevant to his own interests just last year, but was now uncomfortably familiar.
Life had been so much easier at Hogwarts, where his Housemates knew Quidditch held no interest for him, and being at the top of their year, he had no need to exchange class notes. Since they were at school, it was acceptable to bring a book to the table; many of his dorm mates did their homework during breakfast, scrambling to finish the last few inches of their essays only minutes before the deadline.
At Hogwarts, he knew he was different. He shared meals, a dormitory, a Common Room, and seven classes with the students in his House, but he maintained a certain distance, a polite but impersonal demeanour. He was helpful and sympathetic, but not particularly friendly. No one used his first name. No one touched him, or touched his things without permission. To be fair, this was considered basic courtesy by most Slytherins, who'd been raised in traditional, conservative households where the standards of social conduct had been frozen in place from the early nineteenth century. He wouldn't be the least bit surprised if Edmond Lestrange's mother addressed his father as 'Mr. Lestrange' instead of his actual given name.
At the Grangers' home, his differences—and his self-imposed distance—were ignored in the name of hospitality. Dr. and Mrs. Granger wanted him to feel welcome in their home, with their family, and it was one of the most disconcerting experiences in Tom's life. It wasn't like his first time at the opera, where he had immediately settled himself in as if he had belonged there, feeling no awkwardness at being treated with deference by adults two or three times his age, who took his coat and poured him drinks and called him 'Sir'.
This was the opposite. It was awkward for the Grangers to pretend that he was part of their family; they had to be aware of it, how artificial the additional member of the 'family' was. Tom studied their faces when they smiled and passed him the marmalade in the mornings, looking for the signs of strain in their eyes and the lines of their mouths, the tells of insincerity in their affected greetings. One of these days he'd catch them as they slipped; he would prove to them that their ideas about altruism were nothing but lies they told themselves to feel like better people.
Until then, he took them up on their hospitality. There was no reason why he couldn't make the best of his current situation. For now, he lacked the options to go around turning his nose up at the prospect of a bed and three square meals a day.
And it helped that Mr. Pacek joined them for dinner on the weekends. He was an adult, treated as an intellectual equal by Dr. and Mrs. Granger, acknowledged as an expert in his field—but he was nevertheless an outsider to the family. He was born and raised amongst wizards, and he was astounded by electrical contraptions like the telephone, the doorbell, and Mrs. Granger's electric toaster, which he had got into the habit of timing with his pocket watch. It turned itself off after ninety seconds every single time, to the man's vocal admiration.
He was also European, which meant hearing news of the British front from the wireless didn't affect him.
It was only natural that Mr. Pacek didn't react to the news that the Germans had dropped a bomb in London, a week before the start of the school term. It had landed in an area of central London that was three miles from Wool's Orphanage.
Tom didn't react either, book propped open on his lap from an armchair in the Grangers' sitting room, but he could feel the weight of Mrs. Granger's pointed looks; she was the first one out of the family to have calculated the distance in her head. No one said anything for a few minutes while the wireless announcer urged all residents of Greater London to proceed to their nearest emergency shelter. Dr. Granger got to his feet and turned the wireless off.
"Shall we retire to the cellar?" said Dr. Granger, folding his newspaper.
"I'm so glad we had everything finished in time," Mrs. Granger murmured to her husband, picking up her sewing basket and following him to the cellar door.
For the rest of the evening, Tom didn't make a single complaint about the Grangers, not even in his private thoughts.