Chapter 13: The Assassination Attempt

Mr Burke had the look of a man forever listening for coins dropping in another room. He shut the ledger with two nicotine-yellowed fingers and a soft slap, then brushed at the page edges as if some of Tom’s presence might cling to them and stain the figures.

“You want too dear a thing for the price you’ve offered,” Burke said. His voice had the rasp of old paper. “You’re after history, not hardware. History cost dearer.”

“I’m after accuracy,” Tom said. He kept his hands in his pockets. They looked smaller that way; adults made allowances for small hands. “You’re charging me, in any case, for your time.”

Burke’s mouth went sideways; it might have been a smile if it had reached anywhere but his lip. “Time’s what I sell. Time and other folk’s rubbish. Take a walk round Knockturn, Mr Riddle, and you’ll see more past than future in every shop. No one pays for air. They pay for what it’s touched.”

A rusty bell muttered as the door opened and some damp feathered thing flapped in, shook itself, and settled on the rack of parasols with the knowing air of having made a bad bargain and content to live with it. Burke glanced at it, then at Tom, and reached to smooth the lapel of his waistcoat. For a second his fingers paused over a small enamel badge stitched there—just a graze of contact, so light you would have missed it if you were not looking. The badge was a neat quartering of colours with a thin iron key set across it. It was the only new thing in the shop.

Tom filed the look away. He said, “You told me last week there was a book with blank pages. You told me you have had it in your hands.”

“I told you a man brought me one,” Burke said, running a finger down the side of the ledger, as if he could add a column that wasn’t there. “Years back. Black. A smell of smoke in it that wasn’t from fire. I told him I didn’t want it. I don’t keep things that hold on. Some books don’t want to be owned.”

“You told me you wrote in it,” Tom said. He refused to look at the feathered thing. It had taken on the look of the sort of man who smiles when he is lying. “You told me the writing answered.”

“Did I?” Burke asked. He gave the barest shrug. “I might have meant the price answered. That’s the usual conversation in here. A boy in my shop, hands in his pockets like he’s hiding sweets, that’ll be two galleons to start the talk. More if the boy thinks clever of himself.”

Tom’s jaw set. He let the silence sit. The longer he said nothing, the more adults put words in their own mouths.

Burke reached for a stub of pencil and began to make a neat, pointless column in the margin. He made tallies the way some men made prayers. “You’ve a scholarship,” he said, and Tom did not flinch. “That tells me two things. One, you’ve no father with deep vaults to bash my price down. Two, somebody else pays attention to you. That’s never cheap.”

“I pay attention to myself,” Tom said. He meant it to be light. It came out flat.

“Yes, well, that’s your age,” Burke said, pushing the pencil stub into the bowl and missing the bowl with a soft clatter that told Tom he had been meant to hear it. “I’m talking of other folk. People who mind the numbers. Keep the lights on in places like your school. Men with pins. I don’t like selling to customers who’ve caught their eye. I prefer not to have my stock assessed and my till counted for me by a committee.”

“You can say their name, if you like,” Tom said. “It isn’t a curse.”

Burke’s gaze flicked to the badge and away like a man avoiding a draught. “Names bind things,” he said shortly. He scratched his jaw, left a smudge. “You want that diary-news so bad? You’ll bring me something that makes it worth my neck. Not a letter. Not a story about a ring. Something that can be weighed without a man standing over my shoulder to mark it in his little book.”

“Men with pins don’t stand in Knockturn,” Tom said.

“They don’t need to stand anywhere,” Burke said, and there was a rough weariness under the words, genuine as the grime under his nails. “They send another man who wants two shillings for the time it took to walk and two more for the spit it took to say hello. Stock isn’t feelings, boy. It’s numbers. Numbers don’t get scared. But the men adding them do.”

Tom had already decided that pushing Burke would get him nothing else today. He slipped one hand out of his pocket, laid two coins with the neatness of a student handing up a well-worked exercise, and said, “Thank you for your time. You’ve told me what you can.”

“What I’ll,” Burke said. He took the coins without looking at them. “You take care which lanes get your feet. There’s folk who prefer a boy like you to be grateful. Grateful boys don’t ask clever questions, Mr Riddle.”

“I don’t ask,” Tom said. “I get answers.”

Burke looked at him for a long second as if he were measuring him against something only he could see. Then he looked away. “Get out,” he said, but not unkindly.

The bell complained again as the door gave; damp air folded itself into Tom’s lungs and he let it, counting without thinking: in, two, three, out, two. He looked as one looks when a swot remembers something from Potions and does not show it off: a bare lift of chin, a breath with a small pause in it.

Knockturn had that late afternoon colour that made everything seem as though seen through smoke. Ropes of drying something dangled in a butcher’s window; a cat sat on a sill and swore at a cart. People were always late here, or early; never on time. He stood just to the left of Borgin and Burkes’ door for a moment longer than necessary and let his eyes move the way his hands did when he rifled a drawer: quick, not greedy. Across the twisted street, a man leaned against a pillar with such careful casualness that it declared itself. He wore a hat with a small brim and a coat too well cut for the grime around him. The enamel pin on his lapel was quartered into the four school colours and bisected by a tiny key in iron. Tom had only seen its like once, fixed to a noticeboard over a Latin motto about duty and oversight: Custodes Scholae. He did not look at it too long.

To the right of the shopfront, almost pressed into its flank, a narrow passage ran between buildings where rain bled down mortar all the year. A rusted iron bracket jutted from the wall at a shoulder’s height, the ghost of a sign hanging from its broken chain; below it, a crate buckled into itself with rot. A drain sat a yard beyond, clogged with black leaves, its lip iron and slick. He let his gaze lay there and then slip off again as if by chance, the way he would let his hand slide past a lentil jar for the weight and the sound. He set the length of the passage in his bones. He always made himself a place to go before he needed it.

He walked. The man with the hat lit a cigarette without looking up. The air stank of damp wool and something sweet going off in paper. Tom’s fingers brushed the inside of his coat and touched the edge of the old quill he had made himself keep, not because he was a boy who needed luck but because some things sat in his hand and some did not. The quill was narrow and cracked along the shaft, but it wrote neutrally; it stayed quiet on the page. He would not be made to feel by a pen. He had promised himself that.

He took the passage because it was there. He kept to the wall; he did not step in the slick in the middle where old water lay. The crate gave under his shinned boot with a mush-soft sound; he set his weight differently without thinking, and that was what kept the rope from closing first at his throat.

It came blind over his shoulder with a snatch and a whisper. He had an instant for the dumb relief of seeing it, because it meant he was right about the watching, before it dragged tight across his chest and spiked him back. The rope’s fibres bit under his collarbone, rough as a scrubbing brush. It made a sound his skin answered to. His breath miscounted; he meant to draw to four and it stuttered at three, and the small failure ran swift and mean over his spine. He hated being touched. His hands were quicker than his head; he was already inside the loop with one arm, turning his shoulder to make himself small where the rope tried to make him broad. The movement took his wand out of his fingers. It knocked the wood against the brick with a dull clink, skittered a shallow distance, and went just under the edge of the crate with a scrape, then further, chasing the slope, until the iron lip of the drain turned it with a click and held it from falling in.

“Quiet,” said a voice behind him, very mild. It could have said, Mind the step. The rope hauled; Tom felt the web of it climb a rib. A hand brushed his shoulder, adjusting the drag, and he flinched hard without meaning to, a boy who had learned early the difference between a push and a stroke and had hated both.

He set his hand flat where the rope crossed over it and thought of parting. Not cutting, which was messy and made one think of blood and split meat; parting, which was what one did with hair, with cloth, with water. He had found by accident that thinking of neatness helped with spells that wanted aim. He drew his fingers along the rope and let his wrist give the tiniest slice. The wand was out of reach, but it was not always the wood that mattered. He had practised saying nothing in the dormitory, the bedding making a little sea around him, breath silent, mouth shut, and things had moved when he wanted them to if his wanting was small and exact. The rope fibres went to hair for a second. They changed under his palm like something trying to become another thing. A few brittle strands parted.

“Shh,” the mild voice said again, and Tom would have laughed if he could breathe properly. Hands, out of sight, bowed to tighten. The rope drew insistently over his breastbone; it hurt now, a long line of shout under his skin. He pushed himself back, not forward, into the hurt, to steal slack. The crate shrieked an inch over the flagstone under his heel. The bracket above him—he had noted it, he had measured the reach of it with his eye—rattled. He bent his head and then slammed it up, not into anything human, but into the slack link of chain that had no weight on it. The chain coughed powder. The bracket grated wetly as rust gave. He put his shoulder under it, arched once, and felt the deep grind of metal not yet ready to fall. The second time took a little piece of skin from him and gave him a peel of flake and then there was a sound like a large bone giving up. The bracket jolted once and came down in a clean arc.

It struck his attacker on the wrist. He knew it by the way the rope jerked and by the noise the man made, not pain so much as surprise at a bill that had arrived before he had ordered. The rope slackened half an inch. Tom turned sideways into it and let his weight go out of his knees, a drop that would have taken him to the ground if the crate had not caught him in the shin. He took the pain along the edge of his bone and used it. He slid, brought his fingers up hard and flat again along the rope, and did the neat little slice that wasn’t a word and wasn’t not a word. A foot of rope thinned; the next pull tore it like old cloth. He was free on the right. His shoulder screamed when he rolled, and he tasted iron; he had bitten his cheek. He got his hand on the floor; the stones were wet and cold and gave him grit under the nails. He saw his wand, black against black, with the thin shine of the iron at the drain keeping it clean of the filth below. He reached. The rope snapped tight across his left shoulder as the man, recovered, hauled again, angry now where he had been deliberate. The rope carved a shout into him he did not make aloud. He missed the wand by a finger-length.

“You’ll do,” the voice said. It wasn’t breathless. The hair on Tom’s arms went flat against his skin. “This’ll be tidy.”

Tom did not make the sound that came into his mouth. He hissed. It was not English. It was the sound of a match being struck in damp: sharp and soft at once. The damp seam at the base of the wall had been a darker black than the rest of the bricks, and he had seen the slow movement there not half a minute before, something living using the crease of the mortar as a path. It was small as a bracelet and the colour of gutter-water with a line of pale down its back.

Here, he said, and his mouth knew the word the way a hand knows a handle it has never held and yet cannot drop. Come.

The snake lifted its head and came. It slid in a line along the wall, navigated the angle of his arm as if it had been made for it, and coiled its cold little body along his sleeve. It tasted the air, little tongue flicking on his skin. The man hissed too, a human sibilant full of disgust; that helped like a small sweet after a long dull meal.

Up, Tom told it. The snake understood, or understanding wasn’t needed; the tone was the thing. It went up, quick and precise, to where the rope ran over Tom’s shoulder, and its head lay suddenly in the vee of the man’s hand and the line of the rope. The man jerked. The snake opened a neat pink mouth and put its teeth into the soft of the man’s wrist where the bracket had already raised the skin. The man swore this time, a word from the kind of school Tom had not been invited to attend. The rope gave Tom another inch. An inch is a great deal when a thing that wants to kill you needs a hand’s breadth. Tom threw himself forward onto his chest, skinned his throat on the rope, got his fingers on the wand. It was slick. His hand shook. He closed on it and remembered not to hold it like a boy afraid of losing something. He held it as if it belonged to him and was late. He rolled, hard.

The man was clean in a way that meant money and the absence of affection. His hat had not fallen. He had an ordinary face and a small tidy moustache and a lapel pin that had been shined. You could have passed him in Diagon Alley and thought him a clerk. He shook his bitten wrist in a tight, annoyed way, not like a man in agony, as if he was thinking of the stain the blood would make on his cuff. The snake held on with the seriousness of a thing that had only one idea and had found something to do with it.

“Call that off,” he said carefully, and let go of the rope. “We’ve a message to deliver. There’s no need for this to be less respectable than it has to.”

“Respectable,” Tom said. His voice was scratched raw by rope; he coughed and regretted it. He felt the heat of the hurt across his chest and the cold of the wet stone through his shirt. He got his feet under him. The wand in his hand steadied him as much as he steadied it. The old quill had jabbed his side in the fall; he felt the give of it under his ribs, sickening as knuckle-popping. He didn’t look down.

The man held his bitten wrist loosely away from his coat. Blood ticked off the cuff and pattered onto stone. He lifted his free hand very slightly, as if asking leave to reach into his inner pocket. Tom moved his wand and did not give him leave. The man’s mouth rounded a little in offence.

“I’m paid to give you a letter,” he said. His mildness had frayed. “That’s all. The Board of Governors aren’t going to tie a rope themselves, are they? Think of the papers. Think of the minutes. There’s men on that Board who’ve never been down a stair without a bannister. Use your brain.”

He said Board of Governors as if it meant something clean and inevitable. The pin on his lapel caught the dull light; the quartering was subtle, not gaudy, and the little iron key was exactly wrought. Tom did not look at it full, the way one does not look directly at a curse when one isn’t certain of the incantation.

“You tried to kill me,” Tom said. He said it like one reads the heading of an essay before making the neat Roman numeral. “That makes your letter unnecessary.”

“The rope,” the man said, his tone sliding into persuasion the way grease slides down. “The rope is—look—that’s so you don’t make a noise and bring every trader within three doors to their thresholds and me in their pocket-books next time I want a discount. You take this, I walk out, you burn it in whatever pretty way you want. The Board will have been seen to by me, you’ll have been told, and no more talk about your name in minutes. Everyone goes home.”

The snake tightened a fraction and the man’s nostrils flared. His eyes, which were the dust-grey of a corridor at dusk, flicked to the seam in the wall as if another snake might be coming. Tom raised his left hand, the unhurt side, and brushed the snake’s back with two fingers. It was slick and felt of cold slate. He said, Down, without moving his mouth. The snake eased. It hung in a loop from the man’s wrist, not letting go. It wasn’t with him or with the man. It was a snake. It had one idea.

“Say your message,” Tom said. “I’ll decide if I want any paper from you later.”

The man let him have that little piece of control like a teacher setting a misbehaving boy to carry a note to the Head and considering it punishment. He took a slow breath that tried to be superior and failed because he watched the wand the whole time.

“By Order of the Board of Governors of Hogwarts School,” he said, with a little roll on Governors as if it had too many letters in it to be comfortable in a mouth, “the Committee on Endowments advises that the scholarship awarded to Thomas Riddle, current Slytherin second-year, to wit his Board and maintenance, be suspended in part pending review. That means,” he added, kindly, “they’ve told the bursar to hold back your weekly for books and sweets. More may follow, depending on whether you continue to look in card catalogues where your name is not on the ticket.”

The rope-mark on Tom’s chest pulsed. He kept his face the way he kept it when the matron in the orphanage had struck another child and wanted him to flinch for it. The snake tasted the air, inquisitive. The drain gurgled.

“Additionally,” the man said, “by order of the same Board—different subcommittee, mind you; they write minutes separately—you are to present yourself to the Headmaster to answer questions regarding certain…curiosities raised about your recent reading. Access to restricted stacks is closed to you until that conversation reaches a satisfactory conclusion. That’s all the words they sent me. There’s more words on the paper. You want to read them? I like giving a man his paper. Makes what I do proper.”

He reached delicately into his inner pocket. Tom did not stop him. The envelope he drew out was thick, of the sort used for certificates, and smelt faintly of wax and starch. Its seal was scarlet, with the quartered crest and the tiny iron key. Custodes Scholae, the Latin around it said in tidy letters that looked like they had never been late to anything. For Order and Care, the translation on the English notices had been, because someone wanted everyone to understand.

The man extended it between finger and thumb the way one gives a biscuit to an ill-mannered dog. Tom took it. It was heavy for paper. The heat of his palm bled into it and left no mark.

“You are a boy,” the man said. He said it as if reminding someone of the weather. “Be one.”

Tom tilted his head. He let his eyes drop in the barest fraction, the way he did when Slughorn said well done, and he wanted to look touched without showing the teeth under it. “You were meant to kill me quietly,” he said. “And then you were meant to give me a letter. Or the letter was meant to be a kindness to your conscience. Either way. Tell me which subcommittee writes about rope, and I will send them my regards.”

The man’s mildness cracked like glaze over an earthen pot. “Don’t be clever.”

“I don’t have to be,” Tom said. He glanced at the man’s bitten wrist. “You bleed like other men.”

The man’s eyes tightened and then eased in a practised fashion as if someone had taught him, at some point, how to make his face unreadable. He looked down the alley to the street, and his gaze skated off and came back, and he thought of his hat felt and of the fact that his trousers would stain at the knee if he knelt. He shook his wounded hand once and the snake’s head bobbed. Its eyes were blank shiny coins. Everything that lived here had that look; the street put a film on you. Tom stroked it again, down, and this time he let it go. It slid off the man and away, vanishing into the seam as if it had never been. The wet stones took back their colourless shine.

“There’s your letter,” the man said, almost reasonable now, like a prefect who had discovered in the course of his duty that the first-year he was meant to admonish had a better hex than him. “There’s my blood, and look, not a soul at their windows because you were quiet, and good for you. Now you have something to read and I have somewhere else to be. Don’t go into that shop again. Don’t go into the other one with gloves in the window. Don’t be seen in Knockturn without an uncle. Next time it won’t be rope. Next time I make certain you don’t fetch down any brackets.”

Tom thought of Mr Burke’s badge, green and red and blue and yellow quartered into neatness, the key polite on it. He thought of the bursar’s little ledger and of the way he made boys stand and wait while he wrote out their name with a clay-coloured ink that took too long to dry. He thought of a diary with blank pages that waited to be filled with someone else’s soul. He looked at the man and looked through him and came back.

“You can tell your Board,” he said.

He took a breath that did not hurt until the end of it. He put his thumb under the seal and then above it, as if testing softness. His chest creaked where the rope had run. The old quill, tucked against his ribs, had snapped; he could feel the split along it like a thin bone broken. The knowledge made a sharp, stupid little flare low behind his diaphragm. He did not look down. He did not show it anywhere.

“Tell them what?” the man asked after a small moment. He had taken out a handkerchief and was touching it to his wrist delicately, as if treating a stain.

“Tell them that a committee will not stop me doing a thing I have already decided to do,” Tom said. The words were not loud. He did not need them to be. “Tell them their rope was too short. Tell them their letters come late. Tell them that if they close a door, I will take the wall down.” He paused. He let the tip of his wand touch, with perfect casualness, the little enamel pin. The wood made the lightest click against the iron key in its middle. The sound was a promise to himself.

“And tell them,” he said, softer, “that the next man they send me will not bring anything home.”

The man looked at Tom for a long moment, and Tom thought of the way boys look when they realise the game they have been playing all term had rules they were not told. It wasn’t fear in the man’s face. It was irritation, and a kind of interest without heat. He nodded once. The slightest things in him were neat: the tilt of his hat, the line of his mouth. He turned, then paused half a step later as though remembering the rest of his script.

“The bursar will hold your coins at the office,” he said, not turning back. “He’ll keep them neat until you explain yourself to Professor Dippet. Professor Slughorn may speak for you, if you go to him with your hair combed and your tie straight. You’ll choose your allies more carefully than your lanes, Mr Riddle. That’s what I’d do. I’m told you can learn.”

He walked out of the passage and into the street without looking back, passing under the bracket’s dark stain on the stones as if it weren’t there. The crowd took him. The pin on his lapel winked once and was gone.

Tom stood in the passage till the small tremble that arrives after rage had run out of things to sting eased off. He touched his throat and drew his fingers away. Rope had left a pink-grey mark. It would be gone by morning or turn yellow first. Either would do. He looked down at the envelope. The seal sat in the middle of it like a small clean mouth. He turned it over and considered the edge. There had been a time when being told to present himself to a Head had turned his stomach. He thought of Slughorn’s eyes going small and damp as he said my boy, my boy, and felt something patient settle behind his teeth. He put the envelope away.

He took out the quill. He did not know why he did it; perhaps because he had told himself he would not look and then went and did. He had slipped it into the lining with care that morning as one slips in a slender knife. It was dishonest to pretend he had not meant the feel of it to reassure him. The shaft had cracked along, neat as if done by intent with a clean blade, the nib still bright and useless at the end of a thing that could not hold it. He closed his fingers around it until the broken halves met and the illusion of wholeness hurt his palm and then gave it up. He left the two pieces on the top of the crate. They looked like a wishbone cleaned too well.

Back in the shop-front street a woman shouted and laughed; a cartwheel went crookedly over a rut; the cat swore again. Tom slid the wand back under his coat. He walked out into Knockturn with his back to the wall, and everyone looking at anyone looked at someone else. The man with the careful hat was gone. Mr Burke’s window threw back his face into his face again, pale and thin and twelve years old, and even to himself it looked like a face that would grow into something with edges.

He did not go back to Diagon straight away. He took a longer way out. In one lightless little run of lane where two gutter-pipes met like blunt swords, he bent and laid his hand along the stones where the seam had been. The snake had gone. The damp had returned to being merely damp. He did not speak. He did not thank anything. The trick of it—he did not put that word to it—was not something to prod. He had made a call and something had come. That was enough for today.

He reached the top of Knockturn and let the noise of Diagon, which was brighter and less honest, close over him. The day had pulled itself into the shape of evening; shopkeepers leaned in doorways and smiled fixedly; somewhere a boy with nothing more to him than the smell of bread on his hands ran with a paper bag and joy ate his unessential fear. Tom stood absolutely still in the cheerful lane with the Board’s letter against his chest and thought, very carefully, of Professor Dippet’s office with the leaded windows and the bowl of stale boiled sweets on the corner of his desk, and of the bursar’s office with its ink and its neat little list. He did not intend to present himself like a boy caught in some nonsense flummery in Transfiguration. He would choose the manner. He would choose the hour. He would choose who would be there.

At the gates up to the school they would make him put his name in the book one more time and check how it had been written last, as if a name written often enough became true. He ran the tip of his tongue along the place he had bitten in his cheek. It bled again, thin and bright and then gone, swallowed. He could live with a cut more easily than with a letter. Letters were not wounds; they did not scab. They sat in drawers and were pointed to later. He hated that thought enough that it settled him.

He climbed. The envelope rode his ribs like a second heartbeat, thick and measurable. He took the last turn before the hospital wing, where the old stone always smelt to him of boiled linen, and the first years coming the other way parted for him the way stream-water parts around a boat that does not notice it. He could have gone to Slughorn. Slughorn would have said my boy and got out a toffee, and then he would have turned the notion of the Board’s notice over in his soft mind and decided it was a nonsense to be smoothed, and in three weeks there would have been another envelope, thicker, with less patience in it. Tom had learned when to keep a thing small so as not to wake it up.

He did not go to Dippet either. Not yet. He went to the dormitory, where the air tasted of boys and ink and the draught under the window got inside your clothes if you let it. He knelt under the bed he had taken the first day he had walked into this room and put his ear to the stone to hear if anything whispered there. It was a habit. He had taken to listening for something that would tell him the castle had been occupied by people like him as well as people who were merely in it. He got to his knees and reached up and took down the box from the slat. He put the broken quill into it. He shut the lid. He set it back and lay on the bed in the way he lay when he wanted to feel the size of a thing. He put the Board’s letter on his chest and held it there flat with one hand. He could feel the seal under his palm, a dry hardness. He thought of the snake’s tongue tasting his skin. He thought of rope, which could be turned at need into a net or a leash or a noose. He thought of a key on a little enamel pin and of a wall.

When he slept, which he did only because a boy must sleep when a day has taken that much attention to get through, he did not dream of a rope. He dreamed of paper laid open and a pen that did not scratch and words that appeared when summoned in a hand that was not his and belonged to him anyway. He dreamed of the way metal sounds when it is asked to move and does, and under it all the soft, small, persistent sound of something living in the walls turning toward him.

When he woke, he had a tight line of colour over his chest where the rope had gone. He dressed carefully, tie straight, hair combed, shoes polished. He put the letter in the inside pocket of his jacket. He looked at himself in the glass and saw the boy the Board had written about. He could be that boy if it served. He could be any boy they wanted and still himself, because he had learned that being one thing to a man and another to yourself was not a lie, but a tool.

On his way out, he passed a notice pinned to the board by the stairs: a little announcement about the renovation of the east corridor’s bannisters, with the crest of the Board of Governors neat at the top. He reached out and touched the pin through the paper just once, with the same cool gesture with which he had touched the man’s badge. The iron key in the crest was raised. It felt like the piece of a lock someone had left lying about.

He walked toward Professor Dippet’s office because a letter had told him to. He walked the way a boy walks when he has been called to a Head and knows he will not be struck. He did not change his breath. He did not look away when prefects looked to see what he would do. At the turn, he met Slughorn, who called his name, unctuous as a pudding.

“Tom,” said Slughorn, eyes bright. “My boy.”

Tom stopped and smiled like a good pupil. He kept his hands still. “Professor,” he said, and the rope-mark under his shirt, which Slughorn could not see, went cool as if touched by stone. “I was just going to do the proper thing.”

“Capital,” Slughorn said, and patted his arm, and did not notice the way Tom’s skin went hard under the touch and then smoothed itself again, that quick flinch buried under politeness. “Just the fellow we can depend on to be sensible. These silly notices, eh? Old men with pens. You don’t let them trouble you. I’ll have a word.”

Tom inclined his head. He went on. He would let Slughorn talk himself into thinking he had done something. He would let Dippet speak in the round plummy English of a man born with a chair waiting under him and a hymnbook in his hand. He would answer what needed answering. He would keep his own counsel. He would collect his money when they forgot to hold it back because they had too many signatures to get and the bursar had a luncheon. He would go back to Burke and stand in the doorway and look at the ledger and at the way his fingers stroked his lapel, and Burke would remember how metal sounded when it fell, and he would say something he had not wanted to say before.

He did not have to hurry. The Board, with all its neat pins and ridiculous little Latin, had already told him everything he needed from them. He had their shape, and if he put his hands against the mortar in the right places, the wall would come away in big obedient blocks. He had learned that as a child, putting his ear to the orphanage’s stairs, and it was still true here, in a place that pretended at magic and believed it had invented secrets.

He lifted his hand and knocked, gently, at Professor Dippet’s door. His knuckles made a soft, clean sound against the wood, like a nail being tapped into place where it would hold. Behind the door there was a rustle and a cough and a voice telling him to come in. He did not look at the rope-mark, because he did not need to. He had seen it already, and it had said, next time, and he had said back, aloud in an alley: Tell them.

He opened the door. He carried the envelope into the warm office with its leaded window and its sweets in a bowl, as if it were a thing he wanted to eat and not a thing someone had meant to choke him with.

“Headmaster,” Tom said.

And the door shut behind him with the quiet, certain click of something entering its appointed place.