Chapter 1: The Visit

The smell of carbolic soap clung to the bannisters like a warning. It was a July afternoon, the kind that made the iron railings too hot to grip for long and turned the orphanage corridors into narrow ovens. The city’s noise drifted in through the open windows, thin and far-off, as if London itself had dozed in the heat.

Tom sat on the third stair from the top, his shoulders pressed into the angle of the wall where a boy could be overlooked. This was his place—had been since he was seven, when he had discovered that the angle made him invisible to anyone coming up or down, but gave him a clear view of the shadows on the wall that told him who was moving where.

He had learned to read the building like a book. The creak of the third floorboard meant Mrs Cole going to the linen cupboard. The rattle of the back door meant the cook, who was kind when she was sober and forgot you existed when she wasn't. The particular shuffle-and-drag of Mr Hendricks, the night watchman, meant it was time to be in bed and breathing evenly, because Mr Hendricks liked to check that boys were sleeping and had a way of standing over your cot in the dark that made your skin crawl.

Last winter, Mr Hendricks had caught Billy Stubbs out of bed after lights-out. Billy had been looking for his rabbit—the same rabbit that would later hang from the rafters, though Tom would never admit to knowing how that happened. Mr Hendricks had taken Billy to the cellar and left him there until morning. When Billy came back up, his lips were blue and he wouldn't speak for three days. Mrs Cole had called it a lesson. The other boys had called it nothing at all, because calling it anything meant admitting it could happen to them.

Tom had watched Billy's face when he came up from the cellar. He filed the shape of that fear away with the other useful things: which floorboards squeaked, which matrons could be flattered, which boys would tell.

He had never been sent to the cellar himself. He had made certain of that. The one time Mrs Cole had threatened it—after the incident with Amy Benson and Dennis Bishop, when they had come back from the cave changed and silent—he had looked at her with something in his eyes that made her hand stop halfway to his collar. She had never threatened it again. She had, in fact, stopped touching him entirely after that day. She told the other staff he was "an odd one" and "better left to himself," and they had taken her advice.

He did not know what he had shown her in that moment. He only knew that it had worked.

The landing gave a poor view of the front door; he had learnt to piece the rest together from sound. When the bell was rung by a timid hand the tone was light; this was the flat clang of a man who expected to be heard. It carried up the stairwell to the attic-level dormitories, and though no one called his name he drew his feet beneath him and waited.

Below, the heavy shuffle of Mrs Cole’s shoes crossed the tiles. He pictured the way she always paused before the glass to pat at her hair and wipe her nose, a habit as involuntary as breathing. The front door opened with a draught that tickled the dust on the skirting board. Tom held still and listened.

“Good afternoon, madam,” a man said. His voice was unhurried and clear, carrying strangely well. “My name is Dumbledore. I’ve come from a school.”

There was a clink of glass from inside; Mrs Cole never entertained the idea of a caller without offering something from the cupboard in the hall. She disliked men with the polite voices; they tended not to leave anything behind. Tom slid nearer the banister and looked through the gap between rail and wall.

The man stood with his hat held lightly at his side. He was tall and thin and wore a suit that had been made for a person who did not mind being noticed. It was a rich plum colour, not fashionable—that was certain—and he had a watch chain that glinted when he moved. His hair was auburn, threaded with a little silver, and his beard was neat. What struck Tom more than any of that were the man’s eyes: bright, too bright, as though they were lit from within.

“And what would you be wanting with us?” Mrs Cole said. Her tone tried for brisk and landed near flustered. The glass clinked again. “We’ve no vacancies. If it’s a donation—”

“I should like to speak with one of your children,” the man said. “Thomas Riddle.”

Tom’s fingers curled on the banister. He had the sense of a string drawn taut inside his chest. He did not move. The voice did not have the wheedling tone of the church people, or the dry official rasp of the men from the Board. There was, instead, a calmness that put his teeth on edge.

“Oh,” Mrs Cole said. Less brisk now. “Oh. Oh, indeed.” She coughed, as if to unsay the last few seconds. “We’ve had—well, I don’t know what you’ve heard. There are always little boys who make mischief, but—”

“I have heard very little,” the man said. “I prefer to hear from the boy himself.”

Tom’s knee knocked softly against the step. He breathed out once, slowly, and ran his thumb over the head of a nail that someone had hammered in askew. The wood was splintered there. It bit his skin; the faint, useful pain of it steadied him. He saw Mrs Cole’s profile tilt up to the stranger, the way she did when she thought she ought to be in charge and did not feel it.

“I suppose you’d better come in,” she said. The tell-tale hush of the front room door opening followed. The stranger disappeared from Tom’s narrowed view. “Sit down, won’t you? It’s very warm. I’ll fetch the boy.”

Tom pushed himself upright and went, not to the front room, but back along the landing and into the small washroom with the cracked basin. He closed himself in and stared at his reflection in the dull, speckled mirror. His face looked pale in the dim light, his dark hair lying flat like varnish, his eyes turned large and dark by the poor glass. He smoothed his fringe with damp fingers and watched the water dry. He pressed the collar of his shirt, rubbed from too many scrubbings, between finger and thumb until it folded in the sharp line he preferred.

He stepped out as the rapid footfalls of one of the older girls came up the stairs.

“Tom,” she panted, appearing on the landing with strands of hair stuck to her forehead. “Mrs Cole says to come down. Now.”

He did not bother to answer. He passed her and went down without touching the side. Once he reached the lower landing he slowed. When he reached the open door of the front room he stopped altogether.

The room had been meant to be grand. There was a fireplace that looked like it had been bought second-hand and never properly cleaned, a grand mirror too high to be useful, and curtains that might have been red once; the sun had turned them the colour of faded meat. The ring of chairs around the centre table had been arranged to suggest a proper sitting. On the table sat Mrs Cole’s bottle with her ordinary glass beside it. She stood hovering by one of the chairs, holding a handkerchief twisted into a hard white rope.

The stranger—Dumbledore—had not sat down. He was looking at a painting that hung crookedly on the wall; someone had put effort into a gilt frame over a landscape that could have been anywhere. He turned at the sound of Tom’s steps.

“You’re Thomas,” he said.

Tom met his gaze. “I prefer Tom.”

“Do you.” Dumbledore’s eyes glanced over him, not in the way people looked when they meant to catalogue, but as if to confirm one thing only. “Tom, then.”

Mrs Cole cleared her throat twice. “He’s—he’s been with us since he was a baby,” she said. “I’m sure you were told. We do our best. He’s a clever boy, very—very handy. Top of his form, Mr Dumbledore. Reads a great deal.”

Tom waited. He had learnt that silence put other people off balance. Mrs Cole was always glad to fill empty space with words.

“Mind he’s got a temper,” she blurted. “You’ll see. The other children—well, you know what they are. They tease. He doesn’t like it. He—He can be nasty.”

Dumbledore did not look at her. “Thank you, Mrs Cole,” he said. “Might we have the room for a few minutes?”

Mrs Cole’s eyes darted to Tom. It was not fear, not exactly. Worry sat there, and something else. Until this moment she had liked to think a boy like Tom could be terrified into goodness by strictness and chores and the right sort of reading. She had not liked to be alone with him when the afternoons went dead and hot and the hallways were empty. Tom knew that. The way she twisted the handkerchief said she knew that he knew it.

“You’ll behave,” she said to him, and the edge in her voice could have scratched glass. “Do you hear me, Tom? No nonsense. You be—You mind yourself.”

Tom kept his face smooth. “Yes, Mrs Cole.”

She did not move. Dumbledore waited without speaking. In the end she folded the handkerchief and placed it on the side table as if that had been the reason she was lingering. “I’ll be just outside,” she said, but she did not leave at once. She stood another moment, looking from one to the other, and then, reluctantly, withdrew, the door clicking behind her with prim politeness.

Dumbledore’s attention returned to Tom. He took the chair nearest the fireplace and indicated that Tom should sit opposite. Tom chose a chair to the side instead, where the light from the window fell over the table. He placed his hands lightly on his knees. He decided to watch the man’s hands, not his eyes.

“You have been here since you were a baby,” Dumbledore said, as if they had agreed on that and could fold it up and set it aside. “You do well at your school, Mrs Cole says. You read.”

The temptation to ask how the man knew any of that presented itself briefly and was dismissed. “Books are useful,” Tom said.

“They are,” Dumbledore said. “Some of them can teach us to see. Some help us decide what we would rather not see.” He glanced at the bottle and then at the clock on the mantel. “And some are only good for pressing flowers.”

Tom watched the watch chain catch the light again, each link as precise as a row of teeth. The man’s hands were long, and there was a wand in one of them. It was not laying openly on the table; Tom caught the glimpse of polished wood when Dumbledore moved. Some part of Tom’s thoughts shifted, clicked into a new alignment, like the turning of a puzzle box.

“You said you were from a school,” he said.

“I am,” Dumbledore said. “I teach there. And I am here to invite you to join us.”

Tom let a moment of blankness pass deliberately. “It’s not time to change schools until Michaelmas,” he said. “And we don’t pay fees.” It was a statement. Let the man do the work to contradict it.

Dumbledore’s mouth quirked as if he, too, found empty space useful. “Our school is rather different,” he said. “It is called Hogwarts.”

The word fell into the air with a weight that was not in its syllables. Tom did not let it show on his face. He placed the new thing on a shelf in his mind next to the polished wood, the odd suit, the bright eyes.

“We teach—what you can already do,” Dumbledore said.

The word can hung there, better than a question.

Tom said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

Something like the subtlest disappointment touched Dumbledore’s expression, or perhaps it was only a shift in the light. “No,” he said. “No, I should not expect you to know the word for it.” He took out the wand fully then, as one might take out a pocket watch to check the time, and looked down into the fireplace’s empty grate. “But I think you know the thing.” He flicked the wand, a precise movement, and said in a low voice, “Incendio.”

Blue flame rose in a small circle in the grate. It did not spread. It danced where it was, cheerful and contained, and painted Dumbledore’s hands with its colour. The heat stroked Tom’s face. He did not flinch.

The demonstration was not for usefulness. It was, in its way, better than what other men did when they wished to show importance—the raised voices, the heavy hands on shoulders. This was quieter, and the quietness of it was meant to press on him like a thumb.

Tom's mouth tightened.

“We are very careful,” Dumbledore said pleasantly. With a reverse flick the flames died, leaving the smell of warmed iron and old coal. “About when we do that, and when we do not.”

“Did she see?” Tom inclined his head to the door. Mrs Cole’s shadow hovered in the frosted pane like a smudge.

“She did not,” Dumbledore said. “I am not here to alarm her.”

“Then you are here to alarm me,” Tom said.

The man’s eyes steadied on him. “To inform you,” he said. “And to take you to a place where you will not need to hide what you are, or be afraid of it.”

The word afraid was tossed in as if it were nothing. Tom sat back a fraction, as though the chair had grown uncomfortable, and allowed the corners of his mouth to lift a little in disdain. “I am not afraid.”

“No,” Dumbledore said softly. “No, I do not believe you are.”

There was a lightness to the man’s voice that did not reach his eyes. Tom shifted his hands so that they overlapped. The small scars on his knuckles showed white, little moons where the skin had split and healed again.

“What you have,” Dumbledore said, “is rare, and it is real. It is called magic. It has rules and cost and—” He paused, as if words were being weighed on a set of scales. “—and power. You are a wizard.”

Tom held the man’s gaze. There was no need to speak. He had always known, without words, that something in him did not fit the place he had been slotted into. The rush of it—the thin joy, the confirmation—rose up into his throat like laughter and he did not let it out. His fingers tightened once on the bone of his wrist and he said, deliberately flat, “Prove it again.”

Dumbledore did not smile. He reached out a hand towards the bottle without touching it. The bottle slid neatly along the table into his palm. He poured another finger of gin into the glass and then raised the glass towards the door without looking. “Mrs Cole,” he said in his ordinary voice. “It is very hot. Would you care for another drink?”

Mrs Cole made a muffled sound and decided, audibly, not to pretend she had not been listening. She opened the door an inch. “That’s very kind,” she said, as if she had not downed two already. She reached in, took the glass awkwardly, and withdrew, closing the door again.

Tom’s eyes had moved not to the bottle but to Dumbledore’s sleeve. He had seen the minute movement of the wand beneath the cuff. A small neat trick, again. A trick meant to say: I can do this. A trick meant to say: I could do more.

“I can make things happen,” Tom said, and watched Dumbledore as he said it. “When people are—unkind. Or when I want them to stop. Sometimes when I want…other things.”

“Yes,” Dumbledore said. He did not ask what other things. “You have been making things happen for some time.”

Tom tucked his chin down a little, as if he were listening hard. The flood of relief at hearing another voice say it—you are not mad, you have not imagined it—had left him high and wary. “I knew I was different,” he said. He let the word special sit between them, unsaid but as loud as if he had knocked it on the table. “I can—make them hurt.” He said it casually, the way one might say I can reach the high shelf. “Or—make them do what I want.”

“You must not,” Dumbledore said at once, with a mildness that felt colder than anger. “You must not use it to hurt. That is not what we teach.”

Tom looked back, blank as chalk. “If someone deserves it—why shouldn’t I?”

“Because you will be formed by what you do,” Dumbledore said. He did not look away. “You are very young. You do not need to decide the shape of yourself by using your gifts to harm.”

Tom's jaw set. "The establishment," he said, with an adult's scorn on a child's mouth, "likes to say that."

"Consider this, Tom. Power is not a simple matter of getting what you want. Magic is not an answer to injustice if the magic becomes the injustice."

"I don't care about justice," Tom said. "I care about—" He stopped.

The bright eyes watched him. "About," Dumbledore said gently.

There was no need to supply the word yet. He straightened. "Tell me about the school," he said.

“It is old,” Dumbledore said. He had either decided to let the other go or had marked it down like a debt. “It is in Scotland. There are four Houses, one of which will be yours; we shall see which. There are subjects: Transfiguration, Charms, Potions, Defence Against the Dark Arts, and more besides. You will learn to control what you can do. You will be trained not merely to perform tricks, but to understand how and when and why. You will be safe.”

There it was again. Safe. Tom smoothed his hair back. “Do you take anyone who says they can do tricks?” he asked. “Or do you only come for some of us.”

“We invite those who can do magic,” Dumbledore said.

“And how did you know?” Tom said. He did not put surprise into it. “No one here has written to you. They don’t know what I can do.” The swallow of triumph threatened again, a dangerous warmth. He kept it down. “I was careful.”

“There is a way for us to know,” Dumbledore said. “The school keeps watch for children like you.”

Tom thought of eyes, hidden, watching from the corners of rooms, and felt his lip curl. The idea of being seen without permission made him want to lash out. “Then you know what happened to Billy Stubbs’s rabbit,” he said.

“I have heard,” Dumbledore said, and the lightness was not in his voice now. “As I have heard that two of your schoolfellows returned from a trip to the seaside last summer very changed.”

“They were not hurt,” Tom said. He looked at the pattern on the carpet as if it fascinated him. It was a poor pattern, the colour of old soup. “They came back.”

“Terrified,” Dumbledore said.

Tom’s hand twitched once on his knee. “They bullied me,” he said. “They are cruel. They—” He cut it off. He did not like the way the last word had sounded.

“The cruelty of others does not give you licence to be cruel,” Dumbledore said. “You are clever enough to know that. And you are clever enough to know that I am not a man to be persuaded by excuses.”

Tom’s head came up, and he met those bright eyes again. It was a challenge, but it was not shouted. His mouth had dried. He wished suddenly for a glass of water and hated the wish.

“There is another matter,” Dumbledore said. He tapped his wand once, lightly, on the arm of the chair. “Do you know what I mean.”

Tom’s fingers wanted to curl into fists. He kept them soft. “No,” he said.

“Lying will not help you with me,” Dumbledore said, and the words were so even it was almost as if they were kinder than any other tone might have been. “You enjoy collecting trophies, Tom.”

He had thought about this possibility. He had not, he realised with a flare of annoyance at himself, thought enough of it. He said nothing.

“Bring them,” Dumbledore said.

For a second Tom did not move. It was not merely disobedience. The sense of a string drawn taut inside him had turned, suddenly, into the unpleasant sensation of someone else’s hand taking hold of it. He rose slowly.

The corridor outside was grey and hot. Mrs Cole edged back a step as Tom came out, as if her body did not know what her mouth had promised. Tom went up the stairs without haste. The soles of his shoes made the barest squeak on the wood.

The dormitory was a long room with three little windows and two rows of iron beds. The mattresses were thin and the blankets rough. Each bed had a trunk at the foot; boys kept their meagre possessions there, the little hoards of whistles and marbles and buttons. Tom did not keep his in the trunk. He had a place behind the third bed from the left, second row, near the wall where the plaster bubbled. The bedframe was bolted to the floor; he had once worked at the bolts with an old knife blade for an hour just to see if he could loosen them. He could not. He slid his hand between the bedframe and the skirting board and drew out a tin.

Inside were the trophies. A silver thimble with a dent. A yo-yo, painted red, its string wound so precisely it might have been a machine that did it. A harmonica with one sticky note that squealed beautifully—he had liked the way Billy’s face had gone blotchy when he had realised where it had gone. A railroad token. A badge from the church group, cross-shaped. A cheap ring with a glass stone. A picture from a book, carefully torn. A folded paper with hair inside—someone’s fair hair, cut and kept. He did not take all of it everywhere. Some were better left buried. He lifted the tin and held it like it was not worth anything at all.

When he came back down, Dumbledore’s eyes went at once to the tin. Mrs Cole pretended to fuss with the vase on the sideboard. Tom set the tin on the table and removed the lid one-handed.

“Return them,” Dumbledore said.

“To whom,” Tom said.

“You know,” Dumbledore said.

Tom glanced at Mrs Cole. Her mouth had gone into a thin line. She knew. She had counted and recounted and demanded and not been able to force enough ordinary rules to make anything change. Now there was the stranger in the plum suit, and the stranger said a thing and it was to be done. The humiliation of it sat like acid in Tom’s throat.

“Now,” Dumbledore said.

Mrs Cole made a noise of protest. “Oh, now—I don’t think—”

“Now,” Dumbledore said, not moving his gaze from Tom. “I will accompany you.”

Tom lifted the tin. He did not slam the lid on it. He did not show haste. He went back into the corridor with Dumbledore behind him and Mrs Cole following at a distance like a smaller shadow.

The first was easy. The harmonica went back to Eric, who snatched it without words and clutched it in both hands as if Tom might change his mind. Tom watched Eric’s eyes drop to Tom’s hands, not his face, and felt the particular thickness of shame that was not his own, and it was not satisfying. He wanted it to be. He wanted them all to be afraid. This was not that. This was being made to walk, and to give, and to be watched while he did it. That belonged to the man behind him; the man who could say a word like now and have it go through a room like a nail.

He returned the yo-yo to Martin. The boy stared and did not say thank you. The badge went to Andrew. The thimble to a girl downstairs who took it with a squeak of “Oh, my mum’s” and ran, not to Tom, but to Mrs Cole to hold it up in victory.

Upstairs again. The ring to the girl with the plait and the nasty little smirk who wore it at once with triumph on her grubby finger. The picture to the boy who cried so easily that Tom had never even had to push him; the boy reached out as if to take it and then drew back his hand as if the paper had grown teeth. Tom placed it on the cot. The boy stared at it and did not touch it in Tom’s presence.

At the end of the line stood Billy Stubbs. He was not tall, but he squared his shoulders as if he believed himself to be. His rabbit was gone; he had cried until he had made himself sick and he had entirely failed to prove that Tom had done anything at all. He looked from Tom to the tin and back again, as if his eyes could force something into being.

The last item in Tom’s neat arrangement was a small blue marble with a white swirl at the centre. It had not caught the light for days. He rolled it between forefinger and thumb, the feeling of the glass cool and round comforting and infuriating. He did not look at Dumbledore. He held out the marble to Billy.

Billy did not move to take it. Tom did not quite sigh. He placed it on the end of the iron bed and turned away. He could feel the boy’s eyes on his back. He could feel the stranger’s eyes too.

They returned to the front room without speaking. Mrs Cole was flushed and had taken the handkerchief back out of her pocket only to knead it. Tom placed the tin on the table. The light coming in at an angle made the dust float visible.

“You will not keep trophies like that,” Dumbledore said. “Do you understand.”

“I understand,” Tom said. The words were neutral. He wondered, briefly, if he could set the tin alight with will alone. Of course he could not. He did not know how to aim for the tin without lighting the table.

“Hogwarts will take you in September,” Dumbledore said. “There are terms to your attendance. You will not break school rules. You will not steal. You will not use magic to hurt others. Your wand, when you have one, will be used only for your lessons and with direction until you have learnt control.”

Tom did not look at the wand. The idea of it—of a tool built for this—felt like finding a word that had been waiting behind his teeth all along. He could have smiled. He did not.

“How do I get to this school,” he said. “If you don’t want the others to know.”

“We send a letter,” Dumbledore said. “I have brought yours.” He drew, from the inner pocket of his coat, a heavy envelope addressed in green ink. Tom did not reach for it immediately. Dumbledore held it back a moment longer. “There is money for school things,” he said. “The school will assist. Mrs Cole will be told. We have done this often.”

“I do not want charity,” Tom said. The word school things made a corner of him ache with yearning. Books that were meant for him. Cloaks not patched with other boys’ names stitched inside. He shut the feeling into the tin with the thefts and replaced the lid.

“It is not charity,” Dumbledore said. “It is the ordinary business of our school to see that those who need help to attend receive it. We are very old. You will not be the first.” He paused, and this time the pause had something heavier in it. “You might be the first to do what you could do, Tom.”

Tom’s jaw tightened. The compliment was a hook. He tried not to show he felt it catch. He held out his hand. Dumbledore gave him the envelope. The green ink spelled out:

Thomas Riddle Second Floor, Boys’ Dormitory Wool’s Orphanage London

Tom slid his thumb under the flap. Inside was a sheet of thick parchment and a list that read like a catalogue for a life he had not imagined: robes, hats, a wand, books with titles that twisted like vines. He traced the letter’s opening line with a finger, not because he needed it, but because the roughness of the parchment told him it was real.

“You will come with me to purchase your things,” Dumbledore said. “Mrs Cole will sign the forms. We will arrange the fee.”

Mrs Cole made a noise at that, half relief and half battle-cry. “Well,” she said. “Well, indeed. You hear that, Tom. You will go to your room and you will think about what we have said. And you will be—better.”

Tom rose. “Am I to tell the others,” he said.

“That is your choice,” Dumbledore said. “You may tell them you are going to a different school. Some of them will be curious. Some of them will not care.”

Tom inclined his head. He held the envelope in both hands. He had the brief idiotic thought that if he let it out of his grip it would float away. He tightened his fingers and the parchment creaked. “When do we go,” he said.

“In a week,” Dumbledore said. “I am writing to make arrangements. I will return.”

Mrs Cole’s tight mouth relaxed enough to let her normal voice in. “You will thank the gentleman,” she said sharply.

Tom looked at Dumbledore. “Thank you,” he said. He made it as polite as he could without making it a lie.

Dumbledore’s eyes crinkled; the expression made him look for a moment like a very old man humoured by a child and, at once, entirely the reverse. “Until next week, then,” he said. He stood. “Mrs Cole.” He inclined his head to her. “Tom.”

He paused with his hand on the doorknob and glanced back at the fireplace. For a heartbeat Tom thought he would set it alight again, and the thought came with the absurd spike of wanting: do it, do it where she can see. Instead Dumbledore merely said, “We shall speak again of rules when we are at school.”

He opened the door and stepped out into the heat and the hard light. The front door closed behind him. The corridor let out the breath it had been holding.

Mrs Cole fussed at the curtain and then at the bottle and then at her own sleeves. “You will behave,” she said, back to that familiar trench, the one where she imagined success lay at the end of the right sentence. “You will be good. You will not show off. You will—Tom, do not glower at me like that.”

Tom’s face smoothed at once.

“Go up,” she said. “Wash. You can think about your opportunities. You ought to be grateful.” She said it flat, because she did not want to have to mean it.

Tom climbed the stairs without a sound. On the landing he paused. From the window he could see a slice of the street and the shape of the man in the plum suit as he walked away. He did not walk like the men from the Board; he walked as if the street belonged to him and he could have taken any turn and come out where he wanted.

Tom did not watch him long. He went on up into the heat and the quiet and the ordinary stink of boys and summer. In the washroom he stood and let the tap run until the water went from warm to less warm. He cupped it in his hand and pressed it into his eyes until the brightness there moved away.

The dormitory at this hour was empty but for the boy with the runny nose asleep on his belly, snoring wetly. Tom sat on his bed and slid the tin back into its place. It did not fit as snugly as it had before. He reached and pushed it more firmly into the gap until the wall itself protested with a small groan. That did not satisfy. He pulled it out again, looked inside at nothing, and put it in the trunk instead. He snapped the trunk shut. The sound was boringly loud.

The envelope lay on his knees. He took the parchment back out. He read the words again, willing them to be the same, to remain the same each time, in case that constancy could be broken with overuse. Hogwarts. He moved his mouth around the unfamiliar shapes silently. The word felt like a piece of hard-boiled sweet under his tongue, something to roll and hoard and return to.

He lay down and balanced the envelope on his chest so that he could see his name there, though the letters blurred when he breathed. He did not think about being grateful. The thing that moved in him was not gratitude. It was something like cold air entering a room that had been shut up too long. If it washed over the acid of humiliation the two did not extinguish each other; they hissed where they met and sent up a thin, not unpleasant smoke.

Billy Stubbs’s bed was two along. Tom glanced at it. Billy was not there; he was downstairs, telling anyone who would listen that the marble had come back to him out of the blue, as if the sky had opened and rained the things he liked best. Billy would crow before dinner, and someone would smack him for making noise, and he would cry again because he did not know how to pace himself.

Tom folded the parchment and slid it back into the envelope and tucked it under the thin mattress. He put his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. A crack ran from one corner above the window to the centre, a thin brown river without tributaries. He had always imagined that if it ran a little deeper, and the plaster came down, it would make a noise like fat on a griddle.

He did not think of the cave in particular, or of the two who had not told anything worth telling. He thought of the marble's cool weight. He thought of the ring of blue flame, and the man's voice saying now and not having to say it loud.

Billy would do better to be taught gently. Not yet. Not tonight. He pressed his tongue to his teeth as if testing the shape of a word.

The breath in the room slowed. Outside, somewhere in the street, a hawker called something that did not carry up in sense, only rhythm. The other boys’ voices drifted in, not sharp enough to form words, a hum of life that Tom did not feel part of, not in the way they were. He imagined a corridor that led out of the building and did not turn into the alley but opened onto a green space he had never seen. He imagined a lake. He imagined walls that were not begrimed, large enough that one could be lost in them on purpose.

He closed his eyes and saw, behind them, the wand. It had sat easy in that long hand; it had behaved. He thought of the exactness of the movement and of what it would be like to have a tool that understood him.

He would decide. A man could come in with his bright eyes and try to put strings on him, but strings could slip. He would go, and he would learn, and he would look for the places where the rules were only lines on paper.

He turned his head on the thin pillow. The fabric smelt of sun and dust and the faint sourness of boys who had slept here before him. Cautious hope crept up on him, prickly and inexorable, like ivy finding the cracks in a wall. He did not banish it. He monitored it, white-faced, as one might watch a small fire to see whether it would catch the wrong thing.

Downstairs a bell rang for tea. Dishes clattered. The room filled one by one with the other boys, all elbows and noise. Billy Stubbs came in late and plopped onto his bed in a sprawl that was too deliberate, and he glanced at Tom as if he hoped to see something he could not name. Tom looked away as if Billy had ceased to exist between one blink and the next. Billy did not know how to use being looked away from. It unsettled him. He fidgeted. That was enough for the moment.

Tom slid the envelope down deeper under the mattress and stood. He smoothed the line of his shirt again, out of habit, and the old cotton rasped under his fingers. As he moved towards the door, the tin in the trunk felt like a wrongness across the room. It would stay there. It was nothing, now. There were better things to collect than silver thimbles and boy’s marbles. There were larger prizes. He felt them somewhere ahead of him like the cool air of the hall when one opened the door out of a hot room.

He went down to tea. Mrs Cole was at the head of the table with a ladle. She looked at him and then at the place where his pocket would have bulged if he had been less careful about the shape of stolen things. She said nothing. He took his bowl and moved along. He took a piece of bread and didn’t reach for another. He sat where he had always sat. The noise of the room grew and wove around him without touching him.

He dipped the bread in the soup and did not taste it. He was measuring. The day had put a weight into him, a small dense thing that made him steadier rather than more tired. It was not the kind of weight that pulled a person under. He sat with it as with a coin.

Afterwards, when the light had gone from yellow to grey on the walls and the air indoors cooled at last, he returned to the dormitory and lay down again. The crack in the ceiling looked less like a river in that light and more like writing in a language he would one day read. Tom lay so still the bedframe did not creak. Somewhere far away in the city a train went by; the sound of it came to him as a vibration through the bones of the building.

He closed his eyes. He planned nothing he could not keep. He allowed the hope to remain, cautious as a hand around a match. He let the resentment sit beside it, sharp and clear. He did not try to make them reconcile. He could hold both. He was accustomed to holding more than one thing tightly at once.

He fell asleep with the envelope under the mattress and his hands closed on the thin blanket at his sides, as if at any moment he might be called to get up and go, and he would be ready.