Chapter Text
When Ginny Weasley was eleven years old, a boy ripped her heart out and ate it, laughing deliciously all the while. She watched him, pretending to be asleep.
It was very dark, the shine of the marble like an oil slick. The sconces were cold with fire, making curving white reflections on his gleaming dark hair like light on water. She had never been so cold before. Everywhere around her, there was a place to hurt someone- the floors of cold stone, the steps steep, the edges sharp, undulled by the centennial plaster of muck and scum and grime. She wanted to hurt him, she wanted him. All that wanting choked her throat up, made her silent.
“I will take this from you,” The boy said, eyes glittering, “And it will make me strong.”
She understood this. There was nothing particularly difficult about the concept. The strong took from the weak and became stronger. The weak became weaker and died. And yet Ginny Weasley had never been confronted with such indubitable proof of her own lack before. There was something so absolute about it, like rearing up to see all the way up a sheer cliff face. There was nothing you could do, there was no sense in even struggling.
Some part of her hated Harry, because she had been resigned to death. She had made her bed, prepared it, in a way anticipated it: to be rid of all the grand effort and disorder of life, the prerequisite force and motion, the infinite disappointments and heartbreaks in every ordinary day. A year with Tom had made everything into blurred white lines and wavering figures, everything far away as thought seen through steamed glass; how pretty to die before pubescence, supine, pale, eyes closed as though sleeping. She would not mind it terribly, would not mind it all.
Afterwards she shivered, mind caught with scenes of the battle - the basilisk’s massive jaws, the keen flashing glint of the Sword, Tom’s high laughter sailing through the chamber, his voice almost like a girl’s. Occupied with restless images, she saw Tom reaching into her breast, again and again. That pale incorporeal hand, skeletal and distinct, the freezing pressure pushing into her, passing skin, the strange heaviness in her body. The points his fingers interposed on her body. Vaporous with cold, her knees pinned still, white fingers starred on black marble.
He laughed as he stood, fingers lingering. He tarried by her skull, slipping a scarlet lock behind her ear, stroking the curve of her nose with a solid thumb, smiling at her while she burned up at him, all smoke. All of her fire belonged to him, now. His lips reddened; his eyes brightened. She coughed and then stopped, she could not breathe.
For three weeks afterwards she did not speak. Molly took it seriously, fretting and arranging transparent visits with Mind Healers; Arthur took to coddling her, bringing her funny stories and trinkets from the Ministry, placating Molly when she was too harsh.
None of it helped. Ginny did not speak because she did not want to. Her voice hadn’t helped her in the Chamber, Tom had only laughed when she screamed. She did not sleep either, spending her nights on the old filched brooms from the shed, flying into the cold clear dark and straight upwards, into the wide and staring harvest moon, stars radiating outwards like drops of spilled milk or little white birds. During the day her eyes were sore, aching; she always felt half exhausted and half glaringly awake, little sounds slamming into her temples like bricks. She took herself to Luna, who did not seem at all bothered by her silence. She chattered gaily about Nargles and Erumpents; Ginny smiled a rusty old grin.
“You might need to talk eventually,” Luna remarked one day, skipping stones across the river. In the summer sun she was almost translucent, the shape of her skull like a peeled white pear under her nimbus of shining hair. “Of course, Nargles are nonverbal creatures. They use a combination of wing movements and scents. It’s quite fascinating. Daddy and I think that they might even use their jabbering shrouts.”
“Jabbering shrouts?” Ginny echoed at last, roughly. Luna’s eyes were fixed on the sky, her hands pronated on the grass, and that made it easier.
“They’re an organ specific to Nargle biology,” Luna said, knowledgeably. “Daddy sketched out a diagram for me, here…” Moving closer, a cold hand outstretched, drawing figures in the dirt, her raggedy translucent hair brushing Ginny’s cheek.
Ginny turned her face into Luna’s striped shoulder. She smelled like moths and fragile things, smoky, unwashed, all the romance and the reality of loneliness. There was dirt on her face, and her cheekbones stood out like turrets. Dream-blurred frail lily spun under the spell of a father’s negligence and grief, she smelled like what she was.
Ginny smelled like pressed and laundered wool, good cooking, a mother’s brisk and stinging hand raking a brush through her hair. Making it hurt, making it shine.
Halfway through the summer Arthur lunged through the doorway, hat in his fingertips. “Molly,” He said, dazed, and then, spotting Ginny at the corner: “Gin.”
“What is it, Arthur?” Molly said, bustling out. She was drying her hands on her apron, worried. At the sight of her Arthur’s face smoothed out, creases unfolding; he seemed somehow more than himself. He said: “We’ve won, I think.”
“Won?” Molly echoed.
From his pocket he procured a dazzling slip of paper, which Molly took silently in both hands. Ginny moved further behind the wall; her father’s evident happiness seemed a private thing, she was uncomfortable watching. The paper threw out dancing little sunrays, and Molly’s eyes ran over the text, absorbing it. “Arthur,” Molly said, unsteadily. “This is- a thousand Galleons.”
“That it is, Moll,” Arthur said, grinning an old-new grin. He set down his things, briefcase clattering to the floor, coat slumping free of his elbow, hat landing by the chipped tile. “A thousand Galleons, Moll- what do you say? What should we do with it? How about that trip to Cairo, eh?”
Molly’s laughing shriek; Arthur’s hands around her waist, lifting her as though she were weightless, spinning her. Ginny shrank down, pressed her eyes to her knees. She felt hot and strange. A thousand Galleons. A thousand Galleons. Her mind spun sums like golden thread: a new set of robes cost only sixteen Sickles, less than a single Galleon; wands were seven Galleons. Ron could get a new wand, finally replace that hideously broken thing he had used last year. Maybe, maybe.
Egypt was sunny and shrouded in the shadow of old pyramids. Ginny sidled around crumbling limestone corners and played with her hair, biting at the ends when no one was looking. She didn’t like it, something about all that ancient magic in the air, heavier than dust, threatening to break loose. No one else seemed to notice; the twins acted fools as per usual, silly grins on their freckled, feckless faces.
Bill, of course, was nonchalant, rakish, in his element. Famous tombs were his area of expertise. He put a hand on her head, absently, when she went near him, and petted at the part of her hair. “Stop that,” Ginny said involuntarily, and only realized when he looked down at her that it was the first thing she had said to her family all summer.
The silence was cloying; she lowered her eyes and then raised them again, sweeping them over the various magical artifacts with false insouciance. In the sudden hush she became aware of the darkness in the tomb, the chatter dying away, the luminous golden things behind magical barriers gleaming secretively in the dark and the smell of dust that ought not be disturbed.
What bothered her about the Pyramid, she understood then, was that it reminded her of the Chamber. The essence of it was the same. And she thought she saw, glittering in the dark there, the motion of some sinuous scaled thing, the mossy teeth of slumbering serpent…
“What?” Ron said, looking confused, wheeling around. “Why’re you being so quiet?”
George whacked him in the ribs.
The first thing Ginny said to her mother after a summer of silence was: “Pass the butter dish.” The second, through a bulging mouth: “I’m not going back to Hogwarts.”
“Don’t be silly,” Molly said distractedly. She had been almost unbearably motherish today, fierce in all actions, rubbing a thumb roughly across Ginny’s cheekbone, abrading dirt from skin, stain from fabric, love from heart. No, that was unfair.
“I am not,” Ginny repeated. They were at the Muggle hotel, the whole brood tucked into a corner booth. All the frippery of wealth was the same, Ginny had thought when walking in, be it mundane or magical. The crystal chandeliers and sinuous harps standing on velvety carpets, the pressed sheets crisply turned over to expose their white undersides. Ron was shoveling food into his mouth; hearing the tone of her voice, he shoveled faster. Arthur coughed and edged out of his seat, mumbling something about the loo.
“Sweetheart,” Molly said, setting her fork down. Her voice was a hiss, obviously aiming for discretion. “Of course you’re going back to Hogwarts.”
“No,” Ginny said, raising her voice. Several diners - a young couple in expensive clothing, obviously rich, a grand lady in salmon pink with elbow-length gloves of spotless white, a distinguished man in full dress, his hair steely and his napkin tucked showily at the collar - glanced over. Molly’s face went tight.
“Ginevra Weasley-”
“I am not going back to Hogwarts,” Ginny said, deliberately cracking her voice across the last syllable as if she could not help it, as if she was in pain. Maybe she was; it was hard to tell, even for her. Often the things she did were opaque, carried out entirely on impulse; she herself was a mere observer, impassively receiving the various effects and consequences of her own actions. She did not remember if this had always been this way, if it had been Tom or simply the natural consequence of a lifetime with more brothers than fingers on one hand. Again she saw the echoing chamber, her scream, the flowering, frightening light, Tom. Her mind fractured into bare images and sounds, briefly. Tom blooming, her color in his cheeks, his shadow on the walls, moving.
The effect of her words on Molly’s face was that of a door slammed shut. Her ruddy face grayed, her mouth pursed, her eyes lowered. Checkmate, Ginny thought, and then her thoughts curdled decadently with loathing for herself, made newly sly, freshly deceptive.
“I’ll write to Albus when we’re back home,” Molly said grudgingly, not looking at Ginny. She reached out without looking for her glass of water, downing it as if it were hard liquor: one solid, decisive gulp.
They Flooed home, Molly clutching the suitcases in one hand and Ginny’s forearm in the other. Tumbling in a heap at the fireplace, Ottery St. Catchpole blooming to life around them like the set of a play: here the flowered dish-towel flung haphazardly on the shelf; there the sun warming familiar windowpanes, setting over familiar sights; here the thump of and groan of the ghoul in the attic; there the old curving rattan made out of the same material used for baskets,
Molly wrote a letter to the Headmaster sitting in that straw chair, her mouth corded stiffly, her quill moving in fast, hard lines across the parchment. Ginny listened. The scratchy flourish of the signature at the end, the sealing wax, Molly calling for Errol to come and fetch the post. There was no responding flurry of feathers; Errol was asleep, probably, dozing in some sunny nook like a cat.
This gave Molly time to hesitate, turn to Ginny with a helpless expression, almost as though she were the child and Ginny the mother. “Are you sure this is what you want?”
“Yes,” Ginny said, flexing her hands by her sides. Her voice sounded wrong to her own ears, too stretched out, too thin, too soon. “This is what I want.”
Dumbledore perched on her mother’s good armchair, a teacup looking wrong in his wizened hands. Molly had offered him a tea cozy while Ginny seated herself, stiffly, on one of the puffy stools in the corner; he had refused quaintly, politely: “I welcome the warmth.”
Some animal feeling made her yearn for open doors when visitors came. The wet green wilds of Ottery St. Catchpole, shadowy clouds nearly flush against the hilly land, thick grass underfoot, scattered with a persistence of stemmy heather. Places to hide, places to settle.
Crunching a biscuit, part of which crumbled into his beard, Dumbledore said: “Miss Weasley. How delightful to meet you again, and in marginally better circumstances than the previous.”
“Pleasure,” Ginny said through dry lips. Molly had not offered her tea. She was assailed by the sudden vengeful urge for a biscuit.
“I hear you do not want to return to Hogwarts,” Dumbledore said, gravely. “Is this true, Miss Weasley?”
“Yes,” Ginny said, after an extended silence. She imagined herself as partially fluent in the various silences possible in the moted space between two people; this was a foreign brand, beyond her previous experience. She felt severely uncomfortable and was aware that the feeling was not reciprocated.
“That is saddening to hear,” Dumbledore sighed, and with an idle bat of his fingers signaled Molly with the tea tray; back came the platter of biscuits. Ginny fixed her eyes on them.
“Of course,” He continued, “Many things in life are saddening. For an example, what happened to you,” His eyes sharpened, “In the winter of last year. And of course I - and my staff - are understanding.”
“Understanding,” Ginny echoed, and moved her eyes from the biscuits to the minute inconsistencies in the surface of the window-pane, the rippled thickness and corner bulge of the glass. The room smelled strongly and unpleasantly of ancient sherbert dust, and milk.
“You cannot go without schooling,” Albus Dumbledore said. The image narrowed, recentered, became less comical: the old man with biscuit in his beard, a teacup in hand, staring at her with pale, calm eyes. She became aware that she was very cold, almost frozen in fact. She was wearing an old skirt and a shirt that had once been Ron’s, with a hole in the left sleeve.
“A child without an education is wasted potential,” Dumbledore said, quietly. “Going without school is dangerous, Miss Weasley, as dangerous as anything that could happen within her walls.”
“Sir,” Ginny said back, just as quietly. It was her habit to answer unimpeachable authority with withering deference; her ingratiation was the reverse side of contempt, her obsequity conversely scorn. Did he know, did he notice? She was twisting her hands together, increasingly nervy, with an eye for the window and all its temptations. Her throat was dry - and where had her mother gone, with the tray, with the tea? - and her hands were cold; both were problems that could be solved with the advent of a hot teacup. She wanted.
“Hogwarts is- is meant to be a haven,” Dumbledore murmured. “A sanctuary. A place of comfort, and of learning. We do not want you to feel afraid within her walls, Miss Weasley.”
“Yes, sir.” Ginny said, lowering her eyes with a certain force. Inside some hot fleshy muscle of fury clenched, tightly; she registered the thudding of her heartbeat, felt everywhere in her body. Once, a different girl, she might have lost herself as she always had when it came to temper. In this case she had herself securely in hand, some fresh agility or poise keeping her face in a simulacrum of cool, contriving her voice even, her mouth relaxed. The light darkened through the window, wedded damply with shade. The shape of the clouds was like a face, a whirling chiaroscuro dervish of light and dark. She could feel the prickle of grass under her palms, and cold against her cheek, and she was sitting with her legs crossed on a pouf in her mother’s shabby sitting room, fraying embroidery irritating her bare legs, listening emptily to Albus Dumbledore speak. Phrases sailed through the room unaccompanied by understanding:
“Under the circumstances.”
“If, of course, the estimable Mrs. Weasley would be obliged…”
“There is no question.”
“What do you say, Miss Weasley?”
At this she startled and nearly upset the tray, which had somehow migrated to her elbow. Dumbledore reached to steady it - his fingers were long and frail and knobby at the knuckles; they reminded her of a wand - and she moved hastily back. “Could you repeat…”
His smile was empty of genuine emotion, a placid upward curve of his mouth seen vaguely beneath the great frothy beard; the eyes twinkled on. “The Beauxbatons term has already started,” Dumbledore said, regretfully, “But somehow I do not think you will have much trouble catching up. If, of course, your mother agrees, I see no reason why you should not attend the illustrious academy of our Gallic cousins…” He gave another smile untinged by feeling. “It has been some time since I have visited, but I do believe the clematis are in bloom.”
“She doesn’t even speak French,” Molly wept. “Albus must be out of his mind.” Her face was purple in the lively dusk, her expressions conveying anger, reluctance, tragedy. “Yes, dear,” Arthur said. Back to work for him, the rest of the Galleons socketed away in the echoey family vault. He never knew when to stop working. Exhausted he was a caricature of himself, nodding sleepily over a bowl of soup, wetting his whiskers in cream-of-mushroom. Ginny knocked her head against the stairwell, but quietly, just to feel it. The solid shock of pain, and the smell of wood polish. These were concrete things.
It was not actually true that she did not speak French; her great-auntie Muriel, a horrid crumpled old woman socketed away in a grim chateau like a bat nestled in her cave, had once arranged her lessons. This was before Hogwarts, of course; she’d been at that misty yearning age between eight and eleven, confined to Ottery St. Catchpole with a fervent imagination and an eager temper, pining horribly for wayward glimmers. The tale of a boy with a lightning scar, a brown paper package of Zonko’s sent from the twins, a copy of The Quibbler and a crown of bent holly found on the windowsill in the morning, left in the night by an insomnolent Luna. Brief glimpses seized through various avenues, serving only to whet her hunger.
Ginny before Hogwarts had been a raucous, fiery slip of a thing, a nightmare, a tyrant. Frantic, brawling, all elbows and hair; tangled bright hair that withstood combs with the strength of a tiger. “A torment to your mother,” Aunt Muriel said in her creaking, rough-hewn voice, although the canny gleam in her eye indicated she somewhat approved. “Your character wants occupation.” And so once a week on Wednesdays she had been Flooed over to Aunt Muriel’s, where a demure French woman waited in the parlor.
She remembered those Wednesdays vaguely. She had been reluctant and unreceptive, watching the watery shadows dance their silvered dances as the rain beat the windows outside and the French woman - Madame Anouilh, provenance unknown, relation to Muriel equally obscure - smiled with thin, forceful patience. French had been a babble to her, a clatter of syllables and raspy consonants, elocutive and difficult. Comment tu t’appelle? C’est une pomme. C'est un plaisir de vous rencontrer. The lessons had petered out, Ginny remembered, after Madame Anouilh had eloped with the gardener, a story snatched clean from one of Molly’s sleazy rags, the kind with shirtless centaurs on the cover. Ginny had been summarily tipped back into Ottery St. Catchpole to torment as she wished. The fire of old days looked to have guttered by now, but how well she remembered it. Impetuous, endlessly questing, full of insensate fury, throwing herself at brick walls in case they gave way to Hogwarts.
She did not know how to get that old lion self back and could not find it, anyhow. Although sometimes she wondered if people noticed the change, and what they thought of it, if they missed the old Ginny or were glad to be rid of her. Where had the stream of clear and endless fury gone, anyway?
Ginny, pondering, concluded it had not gone anywhere, it had simply frozen inside of her. Her rages these days were not any different in their frequency or precipitation; she was angered for stupid inconsequential reasons: Fred stealing the last slice of bacon, Ron throwing his filthy shoes where her robes hung from the little upturned wooden peg by the door and spattering the worn black bengaline with droplets of muck, Molly forcing her inside to do the washing, passing her endless plates sheened over with the drool and clumped viscera of last night’s supper. It was her reactions that had changed. The old careless Ginny would have whirled her spangled hair and thunked Fred solidly on the head, or screamed at Ron for a good five minutes. Before she would have raised her voice.
Now, she kept her face still and smiled coolly- yes, the cool smile, that was her new self in a single expression, frosty with buried spite. All the anger staved off, crammed inside. Occasionally she was aware of its migration from limb to limb, throat to fingertips, the sluggish motion of an ancient glacial body.
Arguments. Doors slamming. Ginny was shuttled from parent to parent as a piece in their ongoing game, of which only they understood. She knew that most people saw Arthur as pitiable, personable, pathetic, the approachable and absentminded hobbyist with thinning hair and a sweatered, affable body. Molly was the force, the action. In this view.
That was not true, or it was not the only version of the truth there was. There was a kind of game that Molly and Arthur played, a game of opposites, a matching game. Ginny did not understand it but was capable of observing it. They played coy with perspectives, paradox. Screens moving in and out of sight.
Molly was the wild, the brilliance, the driving force and yet she stayed at home and cluttered the nest with children, growing plumper in appearance and laxer in doctrine as the years went by. Arthur was the weaker of the two, the henpecked husband stagnating in Ministry waters- and yet, he made the money, it was his regular appearance and disappearance that made their life possible. His vacancies propelled their livelihoods, while Molly moved on and on in fast, frenetic circles, never leaving her little hive, building more and more intricate structures, honeycomb feats of connectivity and care.
They argued. About Beauxbatons, about Ginny. What was to be done with her. What was safest. Using ideas, associations, and people like props: “well, Albus Dumbledore said” and “but the French?” To an outsider Molly was the dominating player. Arthur inserted his commentary and opinions passively, cleverly, always spinning it like a suggestion, always ostensibly pacifist. These insertions worked in Molly’s mind like pins in fabric, oil in a machine.
At last it was decided, in a great rush. They had argued away the weeks. Ginny was to go to Beauxbatons for the year, and if she did not like it she could always transfer. She was to write twice a week, promptly. She was to review her French rigorously. The Beauxbatons school year had started already, but they would not take her until the Hogwarts year began, because it was easier to do the shopping all at once.
She had dreaded, for some time, the extended shopping trip that always preceded a new school year. School supplies, that endless rotational expense. The skimping for days beforehand, the dreadful little expressions that appeared on Molly’s face when they passed a particularly bewitching window display, the fussing way she herded them away, towards the secondhand shops, the charity stores. Running her fingers over frayed stitching, blunt threads worn to gauzy fluff, escaping seams, impossible to overlook.
Molly, seeing these things, was comforted rather than averse, thought of how to repair, how to make “like new”, thought of running discreet seams in close quarters, laying ironed cloth in neat pleats and pinning them close together. Her thoughts were like little particular birds, intent on neatening, trimming, arranging in her exact way.
The thoughts of people looking at her, Ginny knew, were exactly inverse. They looked at too-short hems exposing white ankles and blocky flannel patches sewn on old, tweedy fabric and felt aversion, pity. There was an instinct, an impulse that propelled them away from her. Whereas Molly looking saw a blank slate, an open white road that led into boundless pastures, fathomless legerdemain. All the endless opportunities for transmogrification. A collar could become a shirt-cuff if ironed stiffly enough, the lacy ruffled hem of a nightgown shifting into the trimming for a sundress. After so many years Ginny could predict these changes almost before they occurred, her eye following not the feats performed but the performer, the performer’s hands.
The Beauxbatons letter had come in the post a few days ago. The owl was a barn-owl with a white, heart-shaped face and deep dark eyes like almonds. There was something elegant about the shape of its wings, the figure it made in the air as it flew, wind whistling through its tawny feathers. Of course there were barn owls in Britain, but this one had come from France. The slow languorous blink and the freakish swivel of its head - all familiar things - seemed fresh, even alien in the light of that knowledge.
Ginny received it alone; Molly was in the kitchen, Arthur at the Ministry slumped over his desk. The boys were playing a Quidditch game in the orchard with neighbors; she had not been invited to join. For the first few minutes she had watched them, cold anger melting in her breastbone, puddling, drowning. Then she had snatched up her skirts and turned to the hillsides. Now she watched the owl coming towards her, her alone, a wind-whipped figure on a backdrop of green. The owl had in its beak a letter which was addressed to Ginevra Weasley of the Burrow. She felt an indescribable gladness welling in her throat, behind her chest.
The paper was cream-colored and thick, so plush that her fingernail made a lunar indent when she crimped it. The ink smelled strong and deep, like the perfume of a rich and confident woman who bought things for herself unapologetically; the words spilled across the page in lavish, swirling penmanship.
Dear Ginevra Weasley,
We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted to Beauxbatons Academy of Magic. We have been informed as to the special situation regarding your late arrival. Due to the circumstances, you will be placed with a roommate rather than in the dormitory as is customary. You will be expected to keep up with the coursework, perform rigorously, and meet or exceed our standards. On the next page, please find a list of required supplies for the school year ahead.
Cordially,
Olympe Maxime
Directrice
Beauxbatons Academy of Magic
Below that the same message had been written in French. This version looked realer, the ink more fresh, the penmanship more impatient. Someone had actually written this, touched this.
Chère Ginevra Weasley,
Nous avons le plaisir de vous informer que vous avez été acceptée à l'Académie de magie de Beauxbatons. Nous avons été informés de la situation spéciale concernant votre arrivée tardive. En raison des circonstances, vous serez placée avec un colocataire plutôt que dans le dortoir comme c'est la coutume. On attendra de vous que vous suiviez les cours, que vous soyez rigoureux et que vous atteigniez ou dépassiez nos normes comme l'ont fait vos camarades. Sur la page suivante, vous trouverez une liste des fournitures nécessaires pour l'année scolaire à venir.
Cordialement,
Olympe Maxime
Directrice
Académie de magie de Beauxbatons
Ginny pored over the French version. She understood words, individual words. Some phrases. Nous avons. Sur la page suivante. Cordialement. The next page, the supply list, was written in French, no English translation, but that was alright, she could understand a list. But she did not think that the supplies could be found in Diagon Alley. There were no Beauxbatons robes to be found in secondhand shops. She did not think even Madame Malkin’s made them. The potions ingredients could be found, yes, but the French textbooks?
The solution was found later. Molly, infuriated, on the verge of forbidding Ginny from going at all, owled Dumbledore for help, her standard solution for these types of problems; Dumbledore wrote back about owling Madame Maxime for assistance; Madame Maxime offered use of one of her junior professors, a woman who was used to going to the houses of the Muggleborn and leading them through the magical shops of the Boulevard Voltaire in Place Cachée, where the wizarding quarter was located.
Still, Ginny was to accompany her family to Diagon Alley. Later, she would be Flooed to France, and the professor - Mademoiselle Boutin - would take her to Boulevard Voltaire, where she would purchase her supplies before being escorted to Beauxbatons. She had packed her suitcase days ago with all the things she could bring, which was not a lot. It all fit in one battered and thin suitcase, although Molly had insisted she pack it in her Hogwarts trunk so she would have room for all her things bought later. Her favorite books, a box of good British tea (in case, Molly sniffed, they don’t know how to make it properly in France), thick woolen socks, her hair things and soap. A scarf Molly had knitted her years ago, before the chamber and the cold. Before Houses, before striped red-and-gold. It was a deep burgundy, a color Ginny loved although it clashed terribly with her hair.
They met Harry Potter on their first day, and Ginny watched in mortified silence as Ron and Hermione pounced on him joyfully. His green eyes, crinkling at the sight of them. The texture of his black hair, wild, shocking. The setting of his eyes, the golden color of his skin. His hands, which were calloused and looked as though they would be very warm. She was not besotted with him as she had been a summer ago, but watching him left a strange, sick feeling in her stomach. Experimentally, she moved out of the shadows. His eyes did not stray from Ron and Hermione; he did not see her.
She wondered if he felt the way she did about snakes now, about echoes and hissing and writing in black ink on white paper. Sometimes she felt a cold breath on the nape of her neck, the shadow of a shadow flitting over her natal sun. She had not actually slept the night through for months.
She wondered if he felt the same, if he had ever been afraid. The shape of him with his arms upraised, the Sword glinting in his hands, shining through the black, watery dim, a whistling noise in her stricken head, her vision narrowing around him.
He had not looked afraid.
The final goodbyes, the long row of solemn freckled faces, so like her own. Molly pressing a lunch box in her hands, which - Ginny would later discover - contained a sandwich made from thick-cut bacon, thin salty wedges of parmesan, frills of lacy arugula and juicy red tomatoes with crinkly skin. The bread was Molly’s Sunday loaf, with a thick rib of browned crust and unbelievable flavor. There was a baked potato, and a boiled brown egg with a jammy yolk of clear orange, and a slice of apple cake. Ginny thought about that lunch for some time after she had eaten it (on a French train with plush and sticky seats, looking out the clear window at the thick forest as she ate, the upright figure of Madame Boutin seated primly next to her).
She Flooed alone. “Remember to enunciate,” Molly said, as if Ginny hadn’t been Flooing independently since the age of six. But then again, the French pronunciation…
“Boulevard Voltaire!” Ginny called, and the world melted away in drips of open-mouthed color. The white familial faces warped as though smeared away with the pad of a thumb, the rusty grate and heaps of gray cinder around her, in her nostrils, the smell of The Burrow rising out from underneath the smoky hearth smell- impossible to describe, equally impossible to replicate: sun-dried laundry, hill grass, salt and cooking and the black lye soap that Molly made once a month, rich with lavender and sharp with catmint. She loved it really- treasured images flashed through her mind: her midnight flights, Luna’s hand in hers as they ran fleetly through the orchard, the light dappled and sparsely intermittent, making ginger-snaps under Molly’s stringent eye, using star-shaped cookie cutters; wandering through the garden with with a floppy brimmed hat and a pair of rusted scissors, cutting flowers for the dinner table. Lilacs in a cool clay bowl, flowering out lavishly.
Then she was tumbling, hand tightening around the leather grip of her trunk, into a gleaming dark fireplace, away, away, eyes open, seeing nothing. She blinked. She had landed on her knees, painfully. All around her the gleam of dark olive tiles, the cinderous fragrance rising like smoke, a thousand voices speaking at once. Ginny made her way upwards, clambering to her feet.
Her name was pronounced with great doubt behind her. Ginny whirled around to see a woman dressed comprehensively and conservatively in black, her lips outlined in discordant burgundy lipstick. She had black eyes and short, thick eyelashes.
“Yes,” Ginny said. Then: “Oui.”
The woman swept her with a look of scorn richly deserved, and extended a strong hand. Ginny shook it, and let go when she felt it was appropriate. The woman’s hand was dry, cool, callused. Her nails had been filed smooth and painted cream. Ginny surreptitiously ran a thumb over the nail of her index finger; it was ragged, and no doubt clotted with dirt.
“Enchantée,” The woman said contemptuously. “Je m’appelle Madame Boutin. Vous êtes Ginny Weasley, oui?”
“Oui,” Ginny repeated.
“Très bien. Nous avons beaucoup à faire aujourd'hui - marchez rapidement. Venez maintenant! Par ici…” She moved like a badger, the crisp black jacquard of her clothing and the unfestooned dark of her hair separated by the thin white stripe of her bare neck, hips moving casually from side to side. She wore no jewelry. Ginny noted the way she spoke, issuing commands with such nonchalance; she was a woman accustomed to being obeyed. Ginny’s throat felt very dry; the hand she had shaken with was still warm.
They moved rapidly across voluminous rooms, around fountains spitting translucent tongues of water and popping fireplaces brocaded with stiff curtains of shining mesh. Always with Madame Boutin’s voice, a rasp, a refrain: par ici, par ici. Ginny, deducing hesitantly, inferred that Madame Boutin was under a great deal of stress, and that any commentary would not be appreciated. She kept herself quiet.
They came out in broad sunlight; Madame Boutin swung up a pair of shaded sunglasses and then snapped her fingers abruptly. “Merde.”
Ginny kept quiet.
Madame Boutin swung around. “Do you have a uniform?” She said in perfect English. “The shop is on the other side of the boulevard.”
Ginny shook her head. Madame Boutin eyed her and ran a hand through her hair, beseechingly. “Merde,” She repeated, and then firmed into action. “Donc. Allons-y, alors. Il n'y a pas de temps à perdre.”
“Yes, alright.” Ginny said, hitching her trunk up. Her arms were beginning to ache, but she would rather be flayed alive then present so obvious a weakness.
They flew through shops and boulevards at breakneck speed. There was much to do, Madame Boutin kept repeating, and little time. They bought books at Magillard’s (Madame Boutin directed the tow-headed shop boy snappishly), potion ingredients at Branchiflore’s. She remembered none of it later, all of it morphing into an endless melange of bags, parcels, rapid-fire French. Shopping with Madame Boutin was entirely different from what Ginny was accustomed to. Mme Boutin treated all with a kind of condensed and removed politesse, utterly confident. No part of her ingratiated; the intermittent merci’s and s'il vous plaît’s were simply part of her patina. And yet she was somehow not arrogant.
The afternoon condensed into a series of blazing moments, each separated by an insignificant period of time, only distinguishable by the variance of the sky.
Clouded, thickly. The thunderous grays and fringey touches of purpling color. Mme Boutin’s sigh, barely audible, her dark lips parted ever so slightly.
Lightening, the sun peeking through like yolk through a cracked eggshell. The smell of perfume sharp in her nose, her hands cramped with the twine grips of various shopping bags.
Mostly she recalled the fitting. Sunny, clouds tossing the sky, crossing the street - Madame Boutin reached out without looking and grasped Ginny’s forearm tightly - to Maison Capenoir, the robe-shop. The window display in her wide eyes: plaster mannequins moved with slow, beguiling fluidity, smiling blank and enticing smiles, rotating slender limbs encased in silken fabrics or stripes. The sun slanting through the window-glass, lighting rings on plaster hands, necklaces laid on plaster collarbones, beads sewn into swaying camisoles. Atelier girls in loose striped blouses, their mouths painted ponceau. Mme Boutin dropping her hand and the parting rasp of her calluses against Ginny’s own, sending minute shivers all through her body. The shop flowers, which shocked her. She had touched, smelled, felt, tasted flowers before- her flowers, English flowers, Burrow flowers, wild and blooming, hot colored against cool green grass, some petals browning at the edges, freckled with dirt or insect perforations. These flowers were a different beast entirely. Beautiful, yes, but austere. Long-stemmed roses plaited into a nodding wreath, each bloom heavy and perfectly portioned, each petal velvet. A sheaf of white lilies, angular with languorous yellow stamen, the stems long and green, the petals pure and spotless white. A single iris with a promiscuous catlike tongue, casual and resplendent in a slim glass of water.
They passed under the lintel - the clarion sound of a bell - and a profuse tide of warm rosy perfume washed forth. Curled cucumber-colored chaises spotlit white in the hot sun, dust motes turning slowly, vividly, rustling curtains, all the trimmings and details done up in shades of pistachio, mint, sea-foam. The tea-colored lamp-shade; the basil wallpaper. Ginny was directed to a stub-legged stool, where she was surveyed critically by three sets of eyes: Mme Boutin’s (inscrutable; she had not removed her sunglasses), Mme Capenoir’s (blue, opinionated) and those of Mme Capenoir’s assistant, Mlle Chastain (a slight girl, dressed sensibly, with immaculate hot-pink lipstick). She felt a strange, leaching nervousness, beginning at the palms of her hands and radiating upwards queasily.
“Elle a une belle taille fine... gardez la coupe serrée là.” Mme Capenoir said, opening the floor for debate.
Mme Boutin’s interjection was swift and unforgiving: “C'est une écolière, Céline. Ne la fais pas passer pour une pute.”
“Tu enlèves le fun de tout. Ne t'inquiète pas!” Mme Capenoir called gaily, and turned to Mlle Chastain. “Alors? Qu'en pensez-vous, Béatrice?”
“Elle n'est pas trop grande,” Mlle Chastain said, decidedly. “Elle ne peut pas porter une jupe plus courte, mais la jupe ne peut pas non plus être trop longue, sinon ses jambes ressembleront à des bouts de bois.”
Ginny flushed a brilliant and enduring shade of crimson. They spoke on, unbothered, perhaps not even noticing her. Their talk grew more and more animated. Mme Capenoir gestured wildly and with great verve. Mlle Chastain offered her opinions intermittently, tapping a pink fingernail. Mme Boutin spoke louder, with a frigid curl of her mouth.
Finally a bolt of pale blue challis was laid against her body. Ginny thrust her chin upwards and attempted to freeze all motion. “Alors,” Mme Capenoir said with unexpected brevity and burst into motion. The fabric was cut and draped, Ginny a mere mannequin, stiff, unmoving, eyes uplifted. Sewing spells went to work, the hum familiar but the incantations strange. Mme Boutin looked at her with black eyes that were a little bit like olives and said in wry English: “This will not seem unnecessary to you soon enough, I believe.”
Ginny flushed at being talked to and shrugged her shoulders; Mlle Chastain hissed and slapped her lightly on the bicep, chastising. “I’m not used to clothes,” She said without thinking, and then went violently red. Mme Boutin was smiling, a thin and genuine smile, close-lipped. “Ah, oui?” This said without malice, softly. Prickles ran up Ginny’s arms. “Vous trouverez l'académie très agréable, alors.”
Ginny turned her head to the side and exhaled through her nose. “Peut-être.”
Mme Boutin’s eyes were not so black in the light. More a deep and rich brown, with darker and lighter patches. “You’re learning,” She said in English, as though mildly and unpleasantly surprised. She turned away soon after, perhaps bored.
The final result was pretty, unnecessarily so. Hogwarts uniforms had been plain black, the skirt lengths regulated and the robes distinguishable from their neighbors only by House ties or trimmings. The Beauxbatons uniform was swishy and enviable. The skirt was darker than the blouse, gray-blue and deep, unexpected. It was high, long, smooth-waisted; in it, she looked slim-hipped and slender. There were deep pockets, which Ginny immediately put her hands into. The blouse was light, a vanishing blue, tucking smoothly into her skirt; there was a strange and fussy capelet of the same color that had to be put over it and tied in a flopping and fashionable bow. “Un miracle,” Mme Capenoir sighed, in ecstasies. “Vous voyez? Elle est magnifique.”
“Elle a besoin de quelque chose sur ses jambes.” Mme Boutin said, not glancing over. In English: “There is nothing on her legs. She looks bare.”
Stockings had to be found, but when they were proffered, Ginny flushed. Hardly the thick woolens she was accustomed to, opaque and necessary for British winters. These were sheer, translucent; when slid over her legs the only visible difference was a faint tinge, a shimmer. In desperation Ginny looked at Mme Boutin, but all she said - sliding her purse into the crook of her elbow - was a terse: “Bien.” To Mme Capenoir: “Merci, Céline. Bon travail, comme toujours.” To Ginny: “Alors. Let’s go.”
They traversed cobblestones and swinging awnings. The buildings were all cream-colored, with black filigree signs and fantastical displays. Ginny kept her eyes on Mme Boutin, that hurrying upright figure in black. They swept through street after street, the sun blanketed by now with a thick rime of cloud-cover, Mme Boutin’s heels clicking precisely on the stones. Ginny was cold again, rubbing her arms with clammy fingers.
“Do you have a lunch? Something to eat?” Mme Boutin said suddenly. Her English was faintly accented with something that Ginny did not think was French. “We will be taking the train to Beauxbatons.” To herself: “La nourriture du train est une abomination.”
“I have lunch,” Ginny said. With effort: “J'ai un déjeuner.”
“Bien,” Mme Boutin said crisply, and then seized her arm. “Well, there is no use walking the rest of the way to the station, is there?” Her quick aubergine mouth gave a wicked smile and then the world sucked inward.
They reassembled in a roaring train station, her atoms forcing themselves into shape through clear, thin air. Mme Boutin looked unaffected next to her, adjusting her sunglasses, pursing her dark mouth. Her voice was clearly audible, cutting through the station chatter like a hot knife.
“Alors… nous sommes à la Gare d'Austerlitz,” She said in a way that was almost companionable. And then: “Our train leaves in ten minutes. Allons-y.”
Their platform was Platform 3 ½. Mme Boutin strode through the wall casually, a dark hand lingering before vanishing with the rest of her. Ginny followed silently, a drab shadow. The train was yellow and small; Mme Boutin settled into her seat with a sigh of contentment.
After some time, the train began to move, and Ginny opened her lunch. Mme Boutin was not looking at her; Mme Boutin was looking intently out the window. The lunch was delicious but Ginny did not register it as such; although physically she was almost faint with hunger, the food seemed unappetizing, or perhaps she simply had no appetite. Something about the sticky plush seats, the wobbling fold-out table, the rattling lighting, Mme Boutin’s dark lipstick. She put the slice of apple cake back in the lunchbox and closed her eyes, feigning rest. Shortly she did actually fall asleep, smelling the strong cypress fragrance of Mme Boutin’s perfume.
She woke in a darkened train compartment. Mme Boutin was not there anymore; she was alone, completely alone, although the air still contained the phantom of her perfume, full-bodied and powerful. The only light came from the wide-paneled windows; pale, vivid, ghostly light, cold and illusory. Ginny sat up properly, noticed a deep and enduring ache knotted in between her shoulder and her neck, and pressed her face near the window. The glass was freezing cold and of such clarity that it might as well not have existed. The train was threading through the Pyrenees; endless dark pines and waterfalls whipped to white foaming fury went past her at breakneck speed, rendered into vague and arresting blurs, smeared color and light.
She undid the latch of her trunk and put the contents of the many shopping bags - the uniform in brown tissue paper, so thin it was weightless, her new textbooks in a crisp bookshop bag, the potions things tidily parceled - inside of it. All filled up, it looked better, more like a real school trunk. The fabric paneling inside her trunk was old, champagne colored, embroidered by other, unfamiliar hands with flowery vines and birds. Second-hand, of course. There was an inkstain on one of its sewn panels; she reached out and traced it with one fingertip, slowly.
There was nothing alarming about an inkstain, nothing whatsoever. Perhaps it was not even her ink. The trunk had passed through Charlie’s hands, and Bill’s before him. One of them could have easily tipped a bottle over the trunk, she could picture it distinctly. Charlie knocking his inkwell over carelessly, a muttered curse, summoning a flannel and bending down, blotting at it to little effect. All harmless - even amusing - images. Consequently she could not understand why she was trembling, a full-body tremor beginning in the core of her stomach and extending to her still-outstretched hand, which shook like a tree in the wind.
She drew her shivering hands back into her pockets and folded into herself like an origami bird, resting her head on her knees, warming her hands against the heat of her stomach.
The ink-blot was blooming behind her eyelids, darkening, spreading, seeping. Thick ink, the sharp tip of a quill dimpling its surface briefly, returning to the page, a pale hand guiding its path, setting it against the paper. Words spilling forth. Dear Tom, the hand wrote, animated by life of its own, something strange happened today. I woke up and I couldn’t remember anything from the night before. Has that ever happened to you?
She shook her head against her stockinged knees, moved it from side to side, knocked it against her kneecaps experimentally. To no result; the ink would not relent. The hand paused, turned a new page, dipped the quill again, and set it to the page. A new entry: Dear Tom, I found blood on my cuffs today. I told Katie Bell but she just laughed and said that all girls have to become women eventually. I don’t think she understood what I was trying to say. She doesn’t understand anything. Not like you.
Not like you. Her breath caught in her chest at the memory of it. Gray eyes, infatuation, immersion. Alone in her dormitory, the wind ghosting through flung-open windows, no sound but her quick breaths, her hand flipping through page after page, running her fingers over the fine filigree of his handwriting. The phantom touch of his hands on her bare shoulders, her skin prickling. His laugh, his endless laugh.
Someone was shaking her very hard. Someone was saying her name very urgently.
Holding his book to her chest, alone on the banks of the Great Lake, staring out at the water, a feeling rising in her chest, a feeling she could not name, a feeling she did not even have words for.
“Ginevra Weasley.”
Taking his hand eagerly, easily. Running after him on moonlight sojourns through areas of the castle no one knew but him - and her now, he said, smiling - heart thrilling at the closeness, the secrecy, just being near him in the dark. Her beautiful and perfect companion. Endlessly thoughtful, infinitely caring. He remembered the things she told him; he brought them up later in conversation. He made her laugh. He made her flush hot and cold.
“Réveille-toi, petite idiote. Nous sommes presque arrivés.”
The time she spent without him seemed false and lacking; she was always reaching for him, her quill in her hands without a thought, biting her lip, putting pen to paper, even when she had written so much her hand cramped, even when she hardly knew what she could tell him that she had not told him already. And she told him everything, everything.
Someone slapped her across the face. The pain was brilliant. She opened her eyes, uncurled herself, and looked straight up, dazed.
Madame Boutin was staring at her, black eyes narrowed. Her lipstick was a little smudged, as though she had been biting at it. She straightened, moving away, turning. With one hand against the wall, she sank to her seat opposite and said, crisply: “Nous y sommes presque. We are almost there. I would ready myself if I were you.”
The yellow train ground to a halt; Mme Boutin, clutching Ginny’s arm tensely, maneuvered them and the trunk through the narrow exit doors. There was no train station, nothing waiting. No structure made out of metal and scaffolding, no signs or carriages or boats waiting for them. They were standing at the top of rocky hill, patchy here and there with grass so green it looked as if it would bleed through layers of clothing to stain skin.
There was nothing there but her and Mme Boutin, each with their traveling things. And the train. But after a few moments the train shuddered to life again and whistled off into the distance, teetering on the thread-like tracks. Mme Boutin said nothing, but opened her purse and reached for something inside.
There was a wind whipping through the mountainside, beautifully clear, curling through clouds and parting them with all the assured languor of a lady reaching up and parting the odalisque curtains of her boudoir, letting light peek through the wild dimness. Ginny was not cold exactly - she had her traveling cloak, her good heavy shoes, a fluffy scarf wound around her neck - but shivered anyway, the wind and freshness working strange spells on her. After so long on the train, the feel of cold air reddening her cheeks, uneven crumbling ground under her feet, the smell of sharp grass and soil and mineral was bewildering, another dream. She wavered on her feet before sinking down to sit. The grass was wet. The sun was clear and shining, warming the cool soft masses of ripe grass, the yellow hay-flowers bobbing on vestal stalks. Ginny had the notion that the rise and fall of the hills around her, the sloping vales and grassy knolls, made some sort of master pattern, and that if she could only fly above it all with a broomstick she would be able to decipher and read it clearly.
Mme Boutin was fiddling with something still. After some time - Ginny was lying on her back now, grass-stains spreading on her cloak, sun-dazed - she put whatever it was back into her purse and said, scathingly: “Lève-toi, ce n'est pas le moment de faire une sieste. Nous sommes en retard.”
“We’re late?” Ginny said, scrambling to her feet. She clutched her cloak around her and hefted her trunk.
Mme Boutin inclined her head and set off in - what seemed to Ginny - an arbitrary direction. Ginny followed her silently. They walked for some time in the middle of a sloping valley, in a straight line. There were little shrubs on either side.
What she knew about Beauxbatons was scarce. She knew it was in the Pyrenees mountains, and that the climate was mild; she knew that it was set in the large shallow basin formed by a semicircle of precipitous cliffs, a geographical feature called a cirque. (She had found this charming.) All else was mystery and murk.
After an indeterminate period of time - the sky had darkened - they came to the edge of an enormous lake, placid and dark blue with the faintest skim of wind rippling across its surface. It looked like a jewel, secretive, smiling up at her. “Après vous,” Mme Boutin said, and her voice seemed somehow more animated, louder, higher. Ginny glanced back at her and did not think of objecting. She looked back at the water.
“Qu'est-ce que vous attendez?” Mme Boutin said, her voice low. “What are you waiting for?”
Somehow Ginny understood what she was meant to do, and did it without turning her head. She walked down the sloping bank, not skidding over the crumbling soil and barbarous pebbly rock; when she came to the darkening edge of the water she did not pause, she continued downward. It was freezing cold - she sucked in a startled breath, touched to the quick - but her feet went on moving, her fingers clenched numbingly tight around the handle of her trunk, which knocked against her knees as she moved, lower and lower, until the waters closed over her head. Underwater - she opened her eyes - the light was unpredictable, lustrous, shimmying through eons of murk and dark and disturbed silt. The weight of the water was green. She opened her mouth.
Ginny came to sprawled on a very warm and soft surface. Without opening her eyes she deduced that she was by a fire; she could smell the smoke, as well as a haze of flowery fragrance, purer and fresher than a distilled perfume. Clematis? She thought, dizzily. The clematis are in bloom…
Voices, lapping in and out of her perception like water mouthing at a girl’s long skirts. They were speaking French, which Ginny’s mind helpfully translated for her to the best of its ability.
“Dear God,” a smoky and very rich voice drawled, “Not again, Boutin. What did you do? Not [a word she could not understand], surely?”
Then there was a voice she could not place although she recognized it; the sound of it sent sparks of confused feeling tearing through her. “She [another incomprehensible word] on the way in. Under.”
“And did you-”
“I told her to go in.”
An explosive sigh. “Albus Dumbledore will have my [blank] for this. You do realize?”
“I realize nothing.” The second voice said, sardonic, sly with some dark amusement. “I am at your [blank].”
“All the same, if I had known the girl was so damned fragile I would not have [blank]. She just fainted?”
“No prelude. I found her choking on her own [blank] and several tonnes of lake water.”
An aghast sound. “She nearly drowned?”
“I never said that.”
Motion. Agitation. “Dumbledore himself wrote to me and asked me to [blank] her. Do you understand, Boutin? God help me, I do not think you do. If she comes to any harm - if she so much as [blank] a [blank], we will be held [blank]. That is what [blank] means.”
“You could have [blank] him.”
Bitter laugh. “[blank] Albus Dumbledore, Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot, slayer of the [blank] Grindelwald, tamer of the last phoenix, Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards? I would sooner [blank]. But we must walk carefully - walk as if we are treading on [blank]. Tell me you understand.”
“She is not so fragile,” The second voice said instead of answering. “I would not be so afraid of breaking her if I were you.”
“Perhaps we might-”
The second voice hissed suddenly, an unexpectedly sharp sound. The hairs on Ginny’s arms stood on end. “She’s waking up. She’s woken already.”
Ginny could not stand it any longer; she opened her eyes and sat up. The first thing she noticed was the enormous sheaf of spiraling syringa lilac in a vase near her (she had been laid out onto a long, curled chaise with moving embroidery of vines and insects). The second thing she noticed was that Madame Boutin was leaning darkly against a shelf full of mysterious spiraling things, one leg crossed over the other. She was wearing different clothes: pressed black pants, a coat that buttoned up to her chin, sharply tailored.
Ginny was in an office of some sort, walls of bluish glass and the aforementioned lilacs; an enormous round window (made from thinner, clearer glass) displayed the deepening blue of a summer evening. The overall effect was of care and lavish expenditure. There was a fireplace at one wall of the room and in it pale blue flames were leaping, dancing their cold and coruscant dance.
An enormous and unfamiliar woman was sitting behind an old-fashioned desk, her hands still. She possessed a geometrically impressive nose and an arresting, full mouth, painted darkly. Her eyes were large, long-lashed, the color of root beer. She looked like someone who had reached her peak potency: powerful, lazy, ranging, a ripe old lioness to whom time had been an aider and abettor rather than a curse. There were fine lines radiating outwards from her mouth and eyes, but these were barely noticeable. Ginny, observing, thought of fine wine. (Although in truth she knew very little about wine.)
“Ah, bien.” The woman said. “You have risen. It is a miracle.” Her eyes flicked to Mme Boutin in the corner; Mme Boutin smiled darkly and pushed off the shelf, sliding her hands in the pockets of her coat.
Ginny rotated to look at her. Her eyes were like soil, like rich and crumbling earth. Madame Boutin said, in English: “Poor thing, shaken so roughly into this cold world … perhaps you ought to fall asleep again. We shall club you over the head with a brick.” She looked fleetingly at the large woman, who was purpling furiously. “Ah. Perhaps not.”
“Pay no mind to her,” The large woman said in her smoky voice. “Je m’appelle Madame Maxime… Vous êtes Ginevra Weasley, oui?”
“Oui,” Ginny said.
“Bien, très bien…” Madame Maxime trailed off magnificently and shook out a folded paper from her desk, examining it with great care.
“That leaves it up to me now, I suppose,” Mme Boutin said, again in that darkly amused tone of voice, and strode close to Ginny. She seemed more alive, more humorous, more animated than ever before; perhaps something about being at Beauxbatons again relieved her. Mme Boutin deposited a brief businesslike kiss on each of Ginny’s (flushing) cheeks. “Try not to drown again, Ginevra Weasley. Au revoir.” She was gone in a whirl of black and cypress; Ginny pressed her hands to her hot cheeks and looked silently to Madame Maxime, who had set the paper down and was looking at Ginny with her magnificent, glistening eyes.
“We have heard tell of your plight,” Madame said, sorrowfully. “We have…” At this point she broke into a speech of such fervor, rapidity, and eloquence that Ginny momentarily lost her elementary grasp of French and could only sit there, dumb, mute, the endless florid tide of syllables sweeping against her ears.
Nous souffrons beaucoup pour vous. Nous sommes compréhensifs. Nous sommes prêts à faire des compromis - en effet, vous ne trouverez nulle part ailleurs plus accommodant que Beauxbatons! - mais vous devrez également faire des efforts. Albus Dumbledore lui-même me dit que vous êtes un excellent élève. Quel honneur! Nous attendons des choses de vous, Ginevra Weasley. Nous attendons de grandes choses. Tiens, tu veux de l'eau? Du vin? Non? Rien à boire du tout? Tu es bien sûr? Je suppose que tu as eu ta dose d'eau pour l'instant. Et ne mangerez-vous pas quelque chose? J'ai des bonbons dans ce tiroir, vous voyez? Non? Pas de bonbons, comme c'est étrange, je n'ai jamais rencontré une fille qui n'aimait pas les bonbons… Eh bien, nous devons parler logement. Nous vous plaçons avec un colocataire, c'est dans votre lettre. Vous la trouverez très agréable, j'en suis sûr. Elle est un peu brute sur les bords, mais je suis sûr que cela ne vous dérangera pas. N'est-ce pas?
Ginny nodded along and attempted to look attentive. At last Madame reached a sort of stopping point; she rested her hands, laced, along the curve of her stomach and fixed Ginny with her sensitive eyes. Ginny said: “Please, I…” A wisp of French came to her. “Je me sens fatiguée,” She said. “Pouvez-vous me montrer où je vais rester?”
“Mais bien sûr,” Madame said, looking stricken. “Je n'ai pas pensé.” She rose - skirts rustled - and twitched her shawl over her shoulders, pursing her deep mouth. “Par ici.”
Ginny was becoming accustomed to following woman of vastly greater presence, going dumbly along in the wake they left behind them (lowered eyes, dazed tongues). She went along with the Madame as silently and meekly as she had gone with Madame Boutin- out the door (impressive, heavy, with a silver knocker on the other side shaped like a butterfly poised to take flight) with her head slightly bent.
They stood at the top of a winding stair made out of some opaque glassy material. Madame Maxime began a leisurely walk down the spiraling stair. As she walked, she spoke. Ginny became aware that she was very hungry; the hunger was a pure and empty fist at her core, a concentrated implosion of her body compressing feeling into medium; she could feel it rising to her throat. The hunger did not detract but rather added to the experience, rendering the sensations rising from her body into sharp, sweet reverberations; she was extraordinarily sensitive.
The staircase petered to a stop, leading to a glassy door that opened like a present onto the incoherent but nonetheless ravishing nightscape. It was cool; she could smell the cool leaves and insect excretions of nighttime, some faraway crickets singing in the blue dark. Shadows swayed and rustled, moonlight stroked white gleams onto glass, the air was full of sound and wind and smell, and darkness. She could vaguely see through the blackness that Beauxbatons was made up of interpolating extrusions of slim glass rather than the traditional structure of a school. The towers had slender trunks and wide sloping tops, like trees. They were lit from within like lamposts, and she could - squinting - make out hushed backlit motion, uplifted arms, scapulae, waving hair, all illuminated with some cherished secretive gleam.
The Madame offered Ginny an arm - draped in some silken fabric, sloped like the bough of a chestnut tree - which she took delicately, wary of her own weight. “Your trunk has been transferred already,” The Madame said in French. “Your roommate awaits. I am sure you will find her agreeable.”
“Yes, I’m sure,” Ginny replied, in French as well. “I’m sure I will.” She paused and said: “Merci beaucoup, Madame.”
“De rien…”
They kept on, the heat of the Madame’s arm blazing through Ginny, warming her. They wound around tower after tower, Madame occasionally pointing out notable landmarks. “Ah, voici la fontaine…” She said of something that Ginny could not see properly, although she heard the rush and sighing plash of water. Night had truly fallen, it was pitch black, but Madame walked on with the serene confidence of one who knew no harm could possibly come.
As they walked onwards - the grounds seemed endless in the dark - a tower rose from the ground. It was larger than the others by a significant amount, more of an obelisk in structure than a tower. And the glass - lucid, purer than the rest, so transparent one could see clearly to the other side - was nearly invisible in the black; only the wet gleam of moonlight against its surface made it visible.
“Madame, c'est quoi ça?” Ginny asked, and Madame’s arm tightened under hers, the muscles flexing. She said: “C’est la tour Delacour,” and stopped speaking abruptly. They walked on, Ginny aware of the flexed tension in the Madame’s forearm, the sudden blunder of her steps. The silence was opaque and uncomfortable, a type of silence Ginny was familiar with.
At last Madame stopped. They were standing near another tower, a typical one with a slender stem and wide top like a wineglass; the starlight illumed a rambling patch of proud purple-blue lupines clustered around its base. She said, in English (her English was flawless, although there was a strange richness to her voice like double cream): “My dear, I apologize. You are confused. Flustered.”
“Madame?” Ginny said, politely.
“We do not like to speak of it,” Madame said, in her low creamy voice. “But I cannot leave such confusion to fester, where it would likely propagate further… curiosity.”
Ginny watched her with upturned eyes.
“Yes,” Madame said, to herself, “Yes. Ah well. You will not speak of this to any of your peers?”
Ginny nodded. Madame did not say anything, and after a few seconds Ginny said: “Of course not. Non, jamais.”
“Jamais?” Madame repeated, low and amused. “Very well.” She drew Ginny into her warm and shadowy body with one elbow; she smelled of living incense, heavy musk-rose. “Years ago, at the location we have just passed, la tour Delacour, there was a tragedy.” She paused again. “A girl died. Not one of our students, of course. She was too young for that.”
Ginny inhaled quickly. The musk of the Madame’s perfume was overpowering; she could hardly stand it, the coaxing heat of Madame’s ripe body and her soft, rustling voice, knowing and gravelly, the same voice that had said but we must walk carefully, the same voice that had said if I had known the girl was so damned fragile… Unsettling. She was unsettled. She swallowed.
“The tower fell,” Madame said, calmly, darkly. “A tragedy, as I have said… for some time we thought to cut off that area of the grounds entirely. But the Delacour family, so generous, as they have always been, especially given…” She trailed off. “The Delacours offered to pay for the expense of rebuilding it.” Another pause. “C’est tout.”
They were silent for some time, Ginny shivering imperceptibly. At last the Madame said: “Donc, maintenant vous savez, et vous ne poserez pas de questions, hmm?” She released Ginny, who stumbled away from her, unsteady in the sudden cold.
“Your room,” Madame said, voice glittering; she gestured with a single arm to the tower they had stopped by. Ginny glanced at it and back to the Madame. “Je vais vous escorter à l'intérieur, si vous insistez.” Madame said, suddenly impatient. She took Ginny’s arm again.
The door opened with a single snap of the Madame’s fingers (“They all open for the directrice,” she explained, “And the correct students, of course.”) and Ginny was ushered inside. The staircase was the same as the other staircase they had gone down, perhaps a little less grand, lacking the heavy richness and saturated perfume of Madame’s office, but Ginny staring up at it felt the same nervousness in her belly. She would live here for the next six years. She would walk up these stairs at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen; she would leave her things strewn around in the upstairs apartments, Errol would fly to her windows here, carrying in his claws snowy white envelopes. This tower, this spiraling stair and all of its contents, would be her home, her true home, a home made purer by virtue of the fact that it was “away from home”. Her home in the way Hogwarts could not be, ever, her home uncontaminated by the slow wily seepage of black ink, her home separated from her family by a whole country. Molly would never touch these glassy railings, Arthur would never bumble up this stair and give her a bemused smile, Fred and George would never put sparklers under her pillow in this tower, Ron would never sulk at her on these grounds, nor would Percy tell her to keep her nose out of his business. She was totally free, removed from everything, anything. She would build a life here, the life of the girl she wanted to be, needed to be, carefree and brave, lovely and loved, unshadowed. She would sleep soundly in this tower, there would be no nightmares.
“Well?” Madame said, irritated. To herself, she murmured: “Bon Dieu, cette fille n'a pas de tête.”
Ginny stiffened and trotted up the first few steps, spine straightened. Madame followed her, and in silence they wound up the endless stairs. The door at the top was made of thick opaque glass. Madame knocked.
There was a brief pause, and then the door swung open. Inside, the room was large and lit by a fire in the center; rosy flames leapt from an curling metal cage, making the light in the room shiver and flicker. The room was split evenly down the center, with a discrete door to one side that contained, presumably, a washroom and a toilet. One side was untouched, containing a high bed (simply constructed, with a pale blue coverlet and a chaste, looping headboard), a spotlessly clean, pale desk with stark lines and a slender lamp. Ginny saw her trunk sitting to the side of the bed, her battered trunk with its rusty latch, bound shut with one of her father’s old belts. It looked apologetic, out of place.
The other side of the room was rife with books and old biscuits tins, filthy with all the effluvia of an untidy human life: hairbrushes matted with dark hair, half-written letters trifolded for the envelope, blankets sprawled lewdly, clothes (not just the crisp blue uniform but all sorts of clothes: striped socks and thick mohair coats and wrinkled blouses) and boxes of crumpled tissue-paper sitting awkwardly, handsome quills and velvet hair-ribbons and beaded rings and bracelets strewn every which way, littering the raggedy plush rug. A heavy curtain made of pale blue velvet could be drawn between each side; currently it was rucked up in loose folds, kept at bay with a golden ribbon.
The undeniable queen of this territory lounged on a palatially low bed, her long muscled legs sprawled out, her greasy black hair entangled in two thin plaits which hung childishly on either side of her ovaline head. She wore thin crew socks, displaying freely the fine bones of her ankles, and a long ruffled Victorian nightdress rucked up to her knees. She had rather strong, brutishly attractive features: she was straight-nosed, thin-lipped, wide-jawed, with transfixing eyes. They were large and slanted; the pupil was enormous, nearly large enough to blot out the color of her irises, which were a deep russet brown. Her skin was dark. She was eating from a box of chocolates; when they walked in, she turned to eye them, sucking caramel from her fingers.
“Magalie!” Madame Maxime said with strong disapproval. “Reprenez-vous immédiatement. Petite effrontée.”
“Et qu'est-ce que c'est?” Magalie said, sitting up slightly. She licked the last of the caramel from her fingers and pushed the box of chocolates aside. As she did so, the long draping sleeve of her nightdress fell to her elbow, and Ginny caught a glimpse of long, reddened scars raking across the other girl’s inner forearm. Something spasmed inside her chest. “Madame,” Magalie added, eyes narrowing.
Madame Maxime’s eyes scorched, fever-hot. She said: “Je ne me laisserai pas parler comme ça par vous. Vous me comprenez?” From her sleeve she drew her wand. It was enormous, a good twenty-four inches, made of some dark, richly carved wood. She twitched it sharply; the bedclothes snapped to life, closing Magalie’s legs, propping her up, whisking morsels of chocolate off the sheets, which instantly flattened to ironed crispness.
“D’accord, d’accord,” Magalie said nastily, crossing her legs. She turned her eerie gaze on Ginny. In French: “Who is she?”
“She is your new roommate,” Madame said, crisply. “Which you would know if you were vigilant about your correspondence as you ought to be.”
“She looks like a little elf,” Magalie said, smiling in a way that was not at all nice. “With her red hair and her white little face. And her big eyes, looking at me. Stop looking at me, little elf. I’m not nice to look at.”
“Magalie,” Madame Maxime warned. She had a perfectly controlled voice, fine-tuned, capable of exquisite degrees of moderation. Right now it was low, suppressed threateningly. “Gardez vous.”
“Oh, I will, I am,” Magalie said with sudden viciousness. She tossed her head and said in sudden, rapid French: “A roommate, Madame? A roommate for me? You are giving me a roommate?”
“You have lived alone for three years on our campus,” Madame Maxime said severely. “Since your first year. I am afraid you have gotten spoiled on your solitude. We have humored you, but no longer. Accommodations have to be made, Magalie. Circumstances become difficult.”
“You have humored me,” Magalie repeated, a sudden dreadful expression on her face. The fire guttered; the room was suddenly dark. The thing about glass buildings, Ginny saw, was that they were extraordinarily sensitive to the resonances of color, light. In the evening, the blue darkness came through the walls unsuppressed and unfettered; fire and light could not keep it at bay. “You have humored me. Madame, do you not realize-”
“There is not much I have not realized,” Madame said swiftly and bitingly. “Believe me, I have spent much time thinking over this, perhaps more than you merit. The decisions I make will not be altered by the brattish prattle of a girl far too accustomed to eating chocolates at midnight.”
Magalie did not say anything; the expression on her face was still and repudiated. Finally she said: “But she will-”
“She will suit you perfectly,” Madame Maxime said, briskly. She turned to Ginny, who shrank back from her attention like a plant from scalding light. “Come, girl. Introduce yourself. This is Magalie Diouf.”
Ginny met the other girl’s eyes. She said, in her best French: “Pleased to meet you. My name is Ginny Weasley.”
“Enchantée,” Magalie said, her voice so heavy with scorn it was almost limp under the weight. To Madame Maxime, she said: “Is she foreign? Her accent…”
“Ginevra is English,” Madame said, frigidly. The tone of her voice suggested that this was an unfortunate defect they must all try to politely ignore. “A former Hogwarts student.”
“Ah, Hogwarts,” Magalie said, and gave another wide, unpleasant smile. “In your language that means- ah, pig pimple, did you know?”
Madame Maxime smiled tolerantly. “The eccentricities of our English cousins are indeed much cause for amusement.”
“Hmm,” Ginny said. Her tongue felt heavy in her mouth. She shifted from one foot to the other.
“Ah, I will leave you now,” Madame Maxime said, bringing her hands together. “Get to know each other, hmm? Talk, enjoy, and Ginevra, unpack your trunk and put it away. But do get to bed at some point,” She added, turning back, suddenly stern. “Especially you, Magalie. I know you are a nocturnal creature, but you are expected to function in the daylight, yes?” She narrowed her olive eyes, and Magalie issued a reluctant, narrow-eyed assent. The Madame gave a benign glittering smile and laid a manicured hand on the door, which she swung open. There came a final, smoky croon: “Bonne nuit, mes filles…” and the door swung shut, leaving Ginny and Magalie alone.
As soon as the door shut, Magalie was climbing off the bed, her long legs scything through fabric. Gone was the languor, the insolence, the play. Her face looked sharp and wolfish in the flickering light. Ginny did not move. Her hearing had gone sharp and tinny, her vision narrowing. Danger. Her body knew how to deal with that.
“How old are you?” Magalie said, sharply. “You look infantile.”
“I will be thirteen in December,” Ginny said. “I’m a second-year.” She stumbled over the last part, blinking fiercely. Her French was sloppy, she knew that. She had not exactly been a dedicated student.
“Not so much younger than me, then,” Magalie said, pursing her thin mouth. “Just… underdeveloped.”
Her face went crimson; she kept herself still, did not twitch. At last Magalie turned away; darkness fell across her body, shrouding her face. She said: “I will keep this simple. I do not want a roommate. I am not equipped, we might say, to handle one. It is simply improbable and more than that, inconceivable that Madame Maxime should have, ah, thrown us together like this.” She paused, and folded her hands to rest by her belly. The silhouette of her, gowned in loose throwy white, the striking narrowness and length of her body, all thrown into cool ivory relief by the moonlight coming in through the glass. There were the wisps of black hair coming out of her braids; there were her calves, muscled and brown, her thin ankles.
“I don’t mind a roommate,” Ginny found herself saying, her voice casual as if speaking to a distant friend, a nominal acquaintance. “I slept in a dormitory in Hogwarts, I don’t mind it.”
“How nice for you,” Magalie said, turning her face back into the firelight and smiling insincerely. Distinctly: “I don’t care.”
“What I am trying to say is that if you are not equipped to handle a roommate, that is not my problem,” Ginny heard herself say, fast and cool. “I don’t mind. I won’t bother you if you don’t bother me.” She paused, out of breath, feeling as though she might faint. She was so hungry the world washed clear. Magalie, watching her, seemed more phantom than human. “Are we clear?” Ginny said, loudly.
“Are we-”
“Are we clear,” Ginny repeated, louder, swaying slightly on her feet.
Magalie regarded her with distant fascination; she was an insect to be inspected, some rare and mildly repulsive organism from an exotic locale. Ginny knew that look, Ginny had been there before, prone on cold black marble. Magalie said without any self-consciousness: “No one likes me. And I don’t like anyone. If you’re looking to make a friend, you won’t find it in me.”
“I don’t want to be your friend,” Ginny said listlessly. It could have been a truth and it could have been a lie. The transparence of the world around her, all the glass, all the emptiness flickering. She could not tell anything about herself, she was vacant, she had gone away. “I don’t want anything from you.”
“Then we understand each other perfectly,” Magalie said, and turned away totally, the shadows enrobing her. The velvet curtain yanked shut, and there was the sound of rustling blankets. She called out: “À demain matin, petit lutin.” And was quiet.
Ginny stood in silence for a moment and then made her way to the high, cold bed. She took off her shoes, and then her clothes, all of them. She undid the belt that kept her trunk shut and found her pyjamas, long warm pants and an old nightshirt that had once belonged to Charlie. It smelled like him still, the sharp, rough smell of animal and woodsmoke.
She thought about her family - climbing into the bed, which was even colder than she had imagined - whose faces she suddenly could not picture, could not bring to her mind. Only the distant knowledge of similarity, ginger hair, bright eyes, freckles, rude hands jostling her, yanking at her hair, elbowing her in the ribs for the last slice of ginger cake, last piece of bacon, last morsel of roast. They were doing other things now, far away from her; perhaps Ron was saying something sleepily to Harry, perhaps Bill was out with one of his girlfriends (blonde, slender, big-eyed), fingering that earring which Ginny knew was rather stupid-looking but also impossibly, undeniably cool. As she lay in that frozen bed, hands curled up by her sides, hair still in the tight braids of earlier, her imaginations took on life of their own, less fantasy and more another projected reality.
Arthur was asleep; Molly wouldn’t be, Molly would be pacing back and forth in front of the fire, watching the night sky anxiously as she always did the first night after the children went to school. Ginny knew, she had watched since before she could remember. She remembered now. Fred and George would be awake as well, speaking in low voices, their heads bent over some paper illustrating some foolish and fantastic scheme, or else creeping through the school, laughing silently like jackals.
Percy wouldn’t be sleeping either. Not Percival, not Perce. His spectacles all smoggy before his drooping eyes, pausing to dip his quill, smudging his ink accidentally and getting all bothered. His dorm-mates hissing at him to go to bed, throwing pillows, knocking his unflinching head. A few more minutes, he would say distractedly. He was like Arthur in that way, although of course he would deny it heatedly. Neither of them were capable of putting work away. She hated it and understood it too.
After some time, she shifted, turned on her side. The moonlight in narrow blue swells of light, the glass, the night, the glittering cold. She could not imagine…
She slept.
Her dreams were inchoate, surreal, all blur and emotion. Syncopated runs of kaleidoscopic imagery, leaves running into each other like feathers, petals like the scales of a fish, set to off-beat crescendoes of unexplained emotion, sadness, longing, a strange mist of enveloping feeling, and the slow-motion synecdoche of dream-matter engulfing her. She was sucked dryly into the undertow, with color streaking her eyelids, with her heart spattering all over her sleeve. As always there were traces of him in everything she saw. The wavering light off water and the smell of oleander. She had always smelled things in her dreams, fragrances and heavy perfumes that seemed to linger on the white cotton of her pillow when she woke.
Ginny opened her eyes to a blinding morning, the glitter of glass, the sky high and palely visible. Magalie was seated cross-legged on her low bed; the velvet curtain had been rucked aside again. She was filing her toenails with something that Ginny assumed was an emery board. She was wearing the blue Beauxbatons uniform, wrinkled and scrunched, the skirt and stockings obscene over her muscled legs; the capelet was nowhere to be seen. When Ginny sat up she threw a contemptuous glance and said: “Tu ferais mieux de te lever, petit lutin. Tu vas être en retard pour le petit-déjeuner.”
It took several moments for Ginny to register her words, and then to translate in her mind. Belatedly, she said: “I don’t know where to go. Je ne sais pas où aller.”
Magalie looked supremely scornful. She said: “Put your clothes on.”
Ginny looked at her steadily, and then slid out of her bed. Methodically she went to her trunk, her bare feet cold on the glass, and found the uniform, still pressed in brown tissue paper, still carrying the faint cucumber perfume of the Capenoir shop. She shook it out and then looked blushingly, involuntarily, at the curtain. Magalie lifted her eyes and smiled with her teeth.
Ginny breathed in deeply and then turned away. All at once - how she hated this part - she took off her nightshirt, the long warm pants, shivering in the cold morning air. Her flesh seemed impossibly white and tender, freckled and goosed and trembling. On went the blouse, on went the skirt, and on - she had to sit against the bed, rolling them painstakingly up her legs - went the stockings. The capelet was the last thing, and here she was uncertain. Magalie was not wearing hers. But surely Magalie was not the best example to follow?
At last Ginny knotted it around her neck- loosely, rather as Mme Capenoir had done. That was alright. She undid the tight braids creasing her scalp, ran her fingers through her crimped hair, and raked it all into a bun at the nape of her neck. She had nothing else to put on. There were no mirrors in the room, but the walls were made of glass. With some resourceful tilting, Ginny was able to catch a glimpse of herself. She was a cold girl, a thin and uninteresting girl, all raw-boned wrists and knees. Her hair looked darker, duller, more brown than red. In the morning light her freckles stood out like seeds in an unripe strawberry.
“Vous avez fini?” Magalie drawled, and Ginny turned slowly. She was still cold, but somehow it did not seem right to put her heavy woollen cloak over the crisp challis of the Beauxbatons uniform. Magalie nodded slightly and sprang from her bed in a single, powerful leap. “Come along, then. This way.”
They walked down the spiraling glass stair and out the door - Magalie pushed it open with a careless jut of her elbow - onto grass that was cold and wet and very green. All around the base of their tower, lupines nodded their violet heads, bristling with dew and inflorescence, the leaves sharp. The sun was breaking; the pale sky was streaked with color like a bitten peach, golds and blurring reds and a flush of pink. The landscape spread around them without pretension, opening up to her new eyes: here and there, in the far distance, she saw other towers. Some slender-stemmed like their rooms and others far grander, rising many chambered from the raw earth with the dark shapes of windows like the scales of a fish.
But those were far out, indistinct shapes, made small and insignificant by distance. She paid them only a glance. Beauxbatons was nestled in the Pyrenees, amid all the uneven sloping ground, the varying hills and dales and rockfalls; no attempt had been made to level ground. She saw now the reason for the towers, interspersed, intermittent, sparsely set. This allowed the grounds to bloom on as they would, the little valleys thick with clinging yellow globeflower and the rocks showered with pink saxifraga, the hills reminding her inexorably of home, ragged and soft with heather, wild madder, fragrant sumac.
Blue gentians freckling wild grass, cowslips with their drooping green caps and soft yellow mouths. The long flowering spines of burnt-tip orchids, soft and snow-white but for their wine-colored heads. Patches of forceful blue delphinium, assertive, proud, with centers striped purple and white like butter mints. The inviolable aestivation of unopened roses, narrowing finely at the tip, wide and dense at the base. Huge bushes of hydrangea plated lavishly with flowers, aggregate, explosive, unfurling, blanketing the grounds in enormous swaths of pale bunchy blue.
To their right there were woods. Huge dark woods, with slender and densely-leaved trees: silver fir, beech. She perceived it as an entity rather than a feature of the landscape, a massive and bewildering body radiating some kind of energy, although whether malignant or benevolent she could not decide. A ramage of pale spidering branches was visible from where they walked, webbed by the undersides of leaves or bushy needles, a pelt of foliage. Magalie offered no commentary. Ginny was beginning to be warmer, the sun heating her nicely throughout.
As they walked, bordered by wildflower and wood, the towers grew closer and closer together, the woods receding. She began to see other students in Beauxbatons blue, some with books at their hips, some arm in arm. They were leaving the wild behind- but not entirely, Ginny noticed, not quite. The promised clematis were in bloom; the hydrangea raged unadulterated. And the grass crept over everything.
Magalie had been undergoing a curious transformation as they walked. First - walking down the stair, pushing open the door, the fresh air blowing in their faces and the sun over the fierce insoluble wild - her face had been relaxed, calm and open and utterly without expression, a pure and closed sort of look like an unshelled almond. As they walked on, her expression had begun to knot, her brow furrowing slowly and inexorably.
At last, rounding the last hill and walking down the rolling slope to what Ginny assumed was the heart of Beauxbatons, Magalie’s face was all ire, her brow heavy and tensed; infinitely compressible and infinitely lightless, her mood blackened to the point of implosion. Ginny was not overly bothered by this, but she could not say the same for the student population of Beauxbatons entire. Girls with shining hair and messy buns veered away from them, their skirts twitching back and forth; so too did the loud boys with louder friends, their necks strung loosely with battered neckties. An inexplicable consensus.
It was not, Ginny thought, that they were afraid of Magalie exactly - their confidence and, more significantly, their innocence would not allow for it - but more that they had collectively decided it was not worthwhile to engage with her, or perhaps that engaging with her would reap no positive outcome. It was true then, what she had told Ginny last night: No one likes me. And I don’t like anyone. It had seemed to Ginny at the time like the kind of defiantly self-effacing thing someone her age might say; resolutely misunderstood, wandering blindly through the incomprehensible and increasingly abstruse wilderness of the self and grasping vainly at sudden truths. But it was true after all.
The heart of Beauxbatons had been skimpily cobbled, grass peeking fearlessly out from between cobblestones. The luminous towers all faced inward, creating a square of sorts; curling iron tables littered this space, populated by careless and for the most part good-looking people, all wearing the blue uniform, the girls casual and pretty in their beribboned capelets, the boys with their feet knocked up on the tables. There was also food on the tables. Not a lot, and Ginny could not quite see where they had gotten it from. Only scattered plates and many, many mugs of some dark substance that she suspected was coffee.
In the center of the square was a massive fountain. It spewed water of astonishing clarity, not just in arcs but in loops and figure-eights and wild, ebullient spirals. The fountain itself was made of pale stone, staggering tall, with a placid marble statue of a washerwoman in the center. She moved gradually, casually, arms upraised, some inward mystery possessing her face, giving her that serene undisturbed smile, her mouth a gentle and guessed-at curve. She was washing some unknown garment, holding it aloft in the spouting spray. The skill of the sculptor was evident in the drape of the cloth, the dimpling of her elbow.
“That fountain used to be somewhere else,” Magalie said suddenly, breaking the silence. “It was not always here. They moved it.” She paused, her face contorting, and then said nothing else.
On her first morning at Beauxbatons, Ginny sat alone. There were no House tables here, no designated space for her to sit habitually. Instead there were those iron tables in varying sizes: some were only big enough for two (these were generally held by upper-years, mostly smiling couples regurgitating sloppy affection into each other’s crevices), while other larger tables were held by crowds, usually of a specific type. Everyone seemed to be familiar with each other. Ginny found an empty table and sank down in silence. There was nobody to sit with, but this was a foregone conclusion. When she had asked, Magalie had given her a look of abject scorn so potent that something inside of her had shriveled and died: “I thought we were clear, petit lutin. We are not friends, I do not like you, I do not want to sit with you. I eat alone.”
After she had been sitting for a few minutes, a tray of food appeared on the table, along with a mug of strong black coffee, which she pushed aside disgustedly. None of the richness or excess she had expected from the French: a quarter of a baguette, sliced down the middle and toasted; a ramekin of salted butter and another of quince jam. There was also a single boiled egg in a ceramic egg cup. The eggshell was a pale blue.
Ginny peeled the egg first, and placed the broken swath of shell to the side in a curl of cracked blue. She ate it with her fingers. She spread the butter on the bread, and then the jam, and then stuffed it into her mouth. Looking around, she saw that some people were dipping the bread into their coffee; she rejected the idea. Her tray was empty. She was still hungry.
She spent the rest of breakfast fiddling with her wand. She had not used it at all the long onerous summer- of course, they were expected not to, but no Weasley child actually obeyed that rule. Before Hogwarts she had imagined it blissfully. But now touching it gave her a strange prickly feeling, a shudder of aversion. All attempts at basic charms - levitating the eggshell, turning the coffee mug a different color - came to naught. Not even a spark. A steady tide of dull panic rose.
A woman wearing a pencil skirt came near the end of breakfast - a bell, tolling - and after performing the usual confirmation - vous êtes Ginevra Weasley, oui? - offered her a sheaf of blue paper; this was her schedule for the week. This woman lacked the intensity of Madame Boutin and the sheer presence of Madame Maxime; she was polite, brisk, strained. “You have been placed in the lowest levels for each class,” The woman - her name was Madame Marie - said, speaking rapidly. “If you demonstrate a higher level capability, you will be resituated. Is this amenable?”
“Yes, that’s fine,” Ginny said. Speaking was a struggle. Oui, c’est bien. The students were clearing out of the square now, filing away in droves of dove-blue, off to their classes. Soon she would be alone; she was already alone. Madame Marie produced a map of Beauxbatons - strictly confidential, not to be shared with family - which had a convenient pulsing dot in the area labeled VOUS ÊTES ICI. You are here.
Her first class was in the Pleiades cluster of towers, which was about seven minutes at “a brisk walk”, Madame Marie assured her. She was given some instructions in French which she promptly forgot, and then released.
She was lost on the way to her first class, and then lost on her way to the second. The first class, Spells, was some hybrid of Charms and Transfig in a warm classroom lit by an intricately stained lamp hanging from the high, vaulted ceiling. The lamp threw breathing vagaries of colored light onto the glass walls, flickering butterfly shapes and arabesques of rich red, candle yellow, forest green. The professor wore cider-colored slacks belted sharply at the waist; she was called Madame Lavigne and straightaway it was clear that she did not like Ginny very much, or at all. “Classe,” She called, bringing her hands together. “Voici votre nouveau camarade de classe. Ginevra Weasley. Elle vient de Hogwarts. Faites de votre mieux pour qu'elle se sente la bienvenue, hmm?”
And then she had turned her relentless eyes on Ginny. In French: After class, you will tell me why you were late, yes?
Ginny disliked authority; this had always been one of her difficulties. She got into pointless fights with Molly and Aunt Muriel; she had hated Snape and held Dumbledore in varying proportions of scorn and conditioned reverence. The animal’s involuntary reaction. Once, early on, Snape had taken her out of class to speak to her about her “curious vacuousness, even when handling materials of utmost toxicity”. She remembered it very vividly. The smell of him: unwashed wool, pungent herbs, lanolin, black tea. The darkness of the hallway, the dungeon gloom, drawing back. He was talking to her harshly, about how empty-headed she was, about how she was wasting his time. He did not speak to her any differently than usual- it was the manner in which he spoke to hundreds of other students every day, that strange and contemptible mingling of snobbery and genuine vitriol, but somehow alone - in the dim - her eyes began to moisten, her mouth began to crimp. Crying. Even as spite rose in her throat, even as, looking up at his sneering face, she had hated him. He had seen the startled sheen, the tears, and something in his oily black eyes had gone out; in his silken voice he had directed her to wash her hands in the lavatory and not return until she was ready to absorb his teaching. Perhaps that was kindness, coming from him. And yet she had never stopped despising him; even the memory of him now made her cold with anger. She degraded him in her mind for days afterwards, viciously, mercilessly. Imagining him hung by his black socks in front of everyone in the Great Hall. Imagining a vat of soapy water upended over his head.
Even McGonagall - so competent! So reassuringly tweed! - had grated on her occasionally. Miss Weasley, in that tone of voice. It rankled her no matter the source. And Mademoiselle Weasley ran into the same problem as Miss Weasley had, of course, but tenfold.
Mademoiselle Weasley did not understand the class assignment, Mademoiselle Weasley did not seem to comprehend the directive. Mademoiselle Weasley would be best remembering that this was a classroom, not a nursery; if she wanted to take a nap, she could do it in England.
Somewhere in the back of her mind Ginny was aware that the setup and culture of the Beauxbatons classroom was somewhat different from the Hogwarts one, and that this was vaguely exciting- the students were put in little groups and given free time to pursue the course matter independently, with frequent collaboration. They all had little pouf chairs to sit on, and little tables. The charm they were learning was one for folding paper flowers. The girls and boys were rewarded for creativity, artistry. Who had the most beautiful flower, or intricate pattern on their paper; who could go beyond the standard rose and figure out how to create a ranunculus, or an oxlip, or jasmine. Gardens of brilliant flowers unfolded to life with sounds of rustling and soft incantations: orchids, hyacinths, and the challenging and effervescent peony.
Ginny said nothing and did nothing; she was frozen, she was ice. She sat on a pouf towards the back of the classroom and avoided all eyes whether curious or indifferent. In her mind she saw herself raising her wand over and over again and producing nothing, not even a spark. What would they say then? Mademoiselle Weasley would be best remembering that this was a school for witches and wizards; if she could not perform magic, she would be best off with the Muggles.
Mademoiselle Weasley does not hear you, she thought, gripping her wand very tightly. Mademoiselle Weasley is busy right now, Mademoiselle Weasley does not have time for this.
After class Madame Lavigne pulled her aside. Her hair was a pale, colorless brown, pulled sleekly away from her face, which was sunless and strangely stretched out, her skin too thin over her prominent bones. Ginny stared up at her. Her mouth was dry.
She did not listen to the following speech but grasped the gist of it anyway; she was ungrateful, she was stupid, she did not comprehend the honor which had been bestowed upon her. An English girl, with a perfectly serviceable education waiting for her in her own country, coming to Beauxbatons? It was unheard of. And here she was, unwilling to even try.
Ginny bent her head so her hair fell around her, screening her face. Her eyes were prickling helplessly despite all efforts. And her throat was aching, knotted up. There was a period of silence, Mme Lavigne saying nothing, and then Ginny - blinking hard - looked up. Madame Lavigne’s eyes were watery and blue.
“Je suis désolée,” She said at last, in her mashed-up, desperately regurgitated French. Her voice came out colorless, tight. “Je vais faire mieux.”
“Oui,” Mme Lavigne said at last. “On l'espère.” She batted a hand to indicate the interview was over. Ginny left. Somewhere bells were ringing, indicating that the time for passage was over and the second period had begun; she was late to her second class.
Her second class was better (the Potions instructor was lanky and likable; she made no mention of Ginny’s tardiness but merely handed her a pestle), but her third class, History of Magic, was incomprehensible. She had not paid attention to Binns, so there was no foundation of knowledge; moreover, the French History of Magic was worlds away from Bathilda Bagshot. No mention of the Goblin Wars. Instead, they appeared to be midway into a unit on fairy queens and the ancient forest of Broceliande, after which their own wood was named. All unfamiliar. And half of what the professor said she did not understand. By the end of the class, her parchment was still blank, but for an abstract drawing on the left corner of a fairy queen, dripping jewels and floss, her smile luminescent and features oblique. Her hair was a pale cloud, delineated by a single wavering pass of a quill; her mouth was the most distinct thing about her: heart-shaped, dark, inked in so thoroughly that one could see an imprint on the other side of the parchment.
The rest of the day was a blur: she was cold, she was warm, she was uncomfortable, she was half-asleep. Lunch was held in the same square; this time, all of the empty tables were occupied. There only available seats were located at larger tables, already frothing with blue capelets and shining heads.
Ginny slunk silently away and sat down behind a hydrangea bush, on the wet grass, her hands folded in her lap. It was deserted here, a bit cold. She was tucked up against a slope, the outrageous hydrangea hiding her from view. She sat there for an eternity, hands lying numb and unoccupied, staring straight ahead, waiting for the sound of bells. Whatever enchantment had been placed on the tables did not apply here; no plate of food came thudding down next to her. Hunger deepened the experience. She picked off a petal from a hydrangea bloom and put it in her mouth.
At last, dinner. She was hustled along with a ripening tide of blue. It was dark, very dark. Into a long ark-shaped hall, built of clearest glass, dripping with long languorous chandeliers and candelabras, lit with bits of quivering blue-white flame. There was music in the air, pan-pipes and various unnatural instruments. Sweet, poignant. The music made it hard to keep her face still; she kept wanting to cry or dance or curl up very small and fall asleep and could do none of those things.
There were platters of food laid out along long tables. Here at last was the excess she had been promised. Endless tureens of soup: rich onion lidded with caramelized Gruyere, bouillabaisse piquant with saffron and fennel, beef bourguignon so lush and winey she could not stand more than a few sips. Some things she was familiar with (roasted potatoes, cassoulet) and some were alien (tête de veau, pâté en croûte). The dessert course was brought out after what seemed to her like hours of eating: dense custards in little ramekins, lidded with burnt sugar; tarte tatin gleaming with syrupy slices of apple; rich clafoutis studded with baked cherry; poached pears drowning in cream. Although hungry she ate very little; before her sickened eyes passed the plates and platters, trays and tureens, endless dancing visions, somehow false, somehow malignant. She saw them from behind thick walls of glass which both magnified and disconnected; the food before her was disarticulated from the feeling of hunger. Her perception did not allow for the possibility of gratification or satiation; her hunger and the food available were isolated and dissociated concepts which logic did not follow.
When dinner ended and the desserts were banished, there was singing. Just like Hogwarts, she thought dizzily, a joke. It was nothing like Hogwarts. Pretty girls in periwinkle tilted their fine-boned faces and sang throatily. Harps strummed, reverberating. She swayed a little, and then shook herself. The tables were sliding to either side of the long hall, the lights were dimming, and people were moving in some predetermined direction. The chandeliers glowed, the pan-pipes and fiddles took up again, and scores of girls in blue took to the now-emptied floor. A dance. Their swishing skirts and poised feet, the roses in their cheeks. She did not see Magalie anywhere.
When they had been dancing for some time, she snuck away. It was dark outside; night had well fallen. She moved in the direction she thought meant away. Things rustled; shadows moved. The smell of flowers overwhelmed her, buoyed her. She moved like she was dancing, no one to see her, no one to hear her, the dark very alive and concentrated. One-step-two-step. Wind, sighing leaves to her left, rustling with vespertine music. She was alone, she was free, she remembered. A ghost of cold along her neck, a hand palming her nape. She broke into a run.
She was breathless by the time she found her way to her tower, recognizing somehow the particular configurations of lupines around its base. Breathless but no longer cold, her heart thudding warmly in her breast. She walked up the stairs, opened the door. Inside the fire was unlit; the room in darkness was ghostly and strange. Magalie was nowhere to be seen.
Ginny lit a candle; the wax was hard and hot in her hands. With a wary eye for the empty bed she made her way to her own, setting the candle down. Far out, beyond her careful eye - she was unknotting the bow, slipping the capelet off her shoulders, fingers flitting up to work at the collar of her blouse - darkness flirted with the flickering flame in the way a cat might bat a mouse to and fro, skirting misadventure. She had gotten her blouse off, was bending down, awkward, half-poised, stepping out of her stockings. The wavering firelight stroked at her freckled back; where it ventured, darkness followed. Bent over herself, her weight balanced on one foot, then the other. Moving darkly.
Unzipping the skirt and making an attempt to fold it all up the way Molly would have. Your lovely new clothes, she would have fussed. We don’t want them to wrinkle now do we. And Ginny didn’t, but she’d never been a dab hand at laundry; the blouse and skirt and stockings ended up bundled in her trunk; the capelet she left flung over a chair, one of its long ribbons trailing. She could still hear the music. She - barelegged, nightshirt clad, her hair still in the tightly pinned braids of the day - flung the covers of her bed back and climbed in, leaning over to blow out the candle. It would not go at her first exhale; it wavered, resistant. Ginny felt the tenacity of the little flame, its deep stubbornness in the face of the enormous dark.
She inhaled deeply and breathed out again, with purpose. Her air gusted forth. The candle went out, the light died a sudden death. She leaned back against the pillow and closed her eyes and thought that it would not be so bad if she was not so afraid. The problem had never been that she could not do the things that needed to be done. She could be unfaltering, she could make the difficult decisions. The problem was- but she was falling asleep now, her consciousness spinning out.
She dreamed of the Chamber. This dream was different, not a reiteration of tired old tragedies. The plot diverged. Tom was sitting on Salazar Slytherin’s nose and kicking his legs idly, smiling at her when she looked at him. The light was dim and sorrowing, poignant, tinged with the wild deep green of sphagnum moss. In her dream she was brave.
You’re not real, she said. You were a book, just a book. And not a particularly good one either.
What’s the use of being good, Tom said. I like being myself. Myself and nasty.
That’s not what I meant, she said. She didn’t know what she meant.
Why’re you all the way over there? Tom asked. She looked down at herself: she wasn’t tied up, she could move. She was wearing her old Hogwarts uniform, the red-and-gold of her tie gleaming. She stood up and walked over, tilting her head up to look at him and inadvertently getting a look up Salazar Slytherin’s nostrils. She began to laugh.
What are you laughing at? Tom asked, a quick smile on his lovely mouth, ready to join in once he knew what the joke was. Tell me.
Nothing, she said. She looked up at him again, met his eyes. Moving casually, he slid down Slytherin’s nose and dropped lightly in front of her. The sound of rushing water and old, thunderous pipes. She was suddenly and incandescently afraid. I said, Tom repeated, what’re you laughing at?
She turned and ran, but she was slow, she was slower than him. His hands around her wrists, his breath on her neck.
I’m not gone, he said into her neck. I’m not gone. His voice was shaking. She was shaking, too. The light was dripping away, someone’s fingers wiping the canvas clean. Don’t, he said, too fast. She shut her eyes.
Ginny woke up already standing. It was dark and quiet. Someone else’s breathing filled the empty space. Her feet were bare. She looked at a sheet of blue velvet, distended by a long oscillating ripple. She looked at the window, at the open-faced moon crossed by sleek battling shadows: owls, night herons.
Wrapped in a cloak she stole down the glass stairs, holding her wand uselessly in one hand. The grass was cool and lush under her feet; she plucked a few stalks of lupine and brought them to her nose, inhaling the crush of plant and petal. She felt alive for the first time in a year.
To her right the woods beckoned. There was no fear, or perhaps there was; diagnosis had never been one of her particular talents. The whole feeling seemed to be centered on a single point, the fulcrum. The driving force, the vastness and mystery of what lay before her. She ran into the woods like she wanted to grab it by the neck.
She was in another dream, she knew. She was not barefoot in the woods, those were not white feet on the black earth, she was not spinning around in great circles, arms stretched out, fingers straining to touch everything. She was not reaching up and pulling the pins from her hair dropping them one by one, leaving them on the forest floor; she would not be so careless. Nor was it her hair that came tumbling down, loose and red around her shoulders. She had been pushed clear out of her body; it belonged to someone else now. Breathless, liking it, she watched the new girl move from tree to tree, wandering deeper into the pale branches like lady’s arms, the webbed darkness spun between them. Leaf from leaf the smell of old aromatics, veins working sap under breathing bark rough with age and weather. And the primeval severe compact between soil and earth and night, honored, inviolate.
So this was the nocturne everyone spoke of. Her eyes opened up to the dark, pupils expanding. She sank to sit in the lap of an old tree, moss spilling over it like velvet, and told it that she was lonely and she was scared and she was only a little girl after all. She lay her head against the papery bark and listened to its response, which was slow in coming: thoughtful, perhaps a little bemused. She swung her legs and observed the clouds press their shadowed selves against the face of the moon. The schematics of beauty were available to anyone, suitable for all attempts at recreation. She was simply incapable of it. She sat on the pale lady’s arm and watched midnight spend itself in one violent rush; she looked at colors, saw them come and go and marry. Violet mainly, although pitch black featured strongly; as did blue, a cool dark nighttime blue. All through the rustling shapes and shadows and curving white prominences, the shapes and shadows and prominences they made or evaded in turn. She felt wise sitting there indeed, the knowledge of the night filling her up.
She did not know how long she had been in the tree when she heard voices, laughter. A girl’s voice, all blue dusk and exhilaration, a little husky. It was, she thought, a voice that was not afraid of its own sound in the silence, not even in the dark. She had company; there were tripping footsteps following. Ginny curled herself up tighter on the branch and peered down.
A girl came into view just as a cloud broke away from the moon, sending light soaring all over her sleek shoulders, her slender shape, her pale shining head. She was wearing the better half of a Beauxbatons uniform: the cape was unknotted over her white throat, the blouse untucked. She was not wearing the stockings.
Her companion was less interesting: a tall boy, with brown curls and a rough voice. Pas ici, he said doubtfully. She turned to him, flashing her eyes, and he corrected himself, saying more hesitantly: tu es sûr?
Oui, bien sûr, the girl said calmly, reaching up to unbutton her blouse. Ginny, watching, felt phantom fingers brushing her throat. Her mouth was wet; she shifted on the branch, taking care not to make any noise.
The girl under the blue was pale, slim as a poplar tree. From her angle Ginny could not see anything but her golden head and her white, moving shoulders. She shut her eyes and then opened them again, unwillingly. The boy was making whimpering noises, and she was running her fingers through his dark hair, laughing a little. Ginny had the overwhelming impression of some great power, a hidden aspect or layer to the dynamic that she - and perhaps he as well - was unaware of, some shadow coupling taking place under her wide eyes. She did not want to look anymore, all the curiosity had vanished, leaving behind other, riskier feelings.
The girl was moving faster now; he was slumping, groaning low. A fever dream in the dead of summer. Ginny closed her eyes and did not open them. Somehow - dozens of feet up, hitched up in a birch tree like a lunatic - she could smell the girl’s perfume: strong, intoxicating. She moved her hands up to cover her ears and did not know when they left; by the time she opened her eyes they were long gone. She fell asleep with the ghost of the girl’s perfume in her nostrils, the smell of sex and wild violets.
Dear Mum,
I’m at Beauxbatons now. It’s very pretty. There are lots of flowers and a great dark wood. Although I can’t tell you much about the grounds, apparently it’s top secret.
History of Magic is boring as ever, even without Binns teaching. I have a roommate. Her name’s Magalie. She’s a very nice. Overall I would say everyone has been very welcoming, I’ve made a few friends already.
The Pyrenees is a bit far for Errol to fly for one letter. You don’t have to write back right away.
Miss you,
Ginny