Chapter 14: The Decision

The room they put him in had been a broom cupboard once. You could tell by the way the skirting board narrowed at the back, the way the air kept a taste of soap and something damp, though the soap had been replaced by polish and the damp by heat from a small iron kettle that sat on a trivet and did not quite boil. There was a chair for him, and a chair no one else used, and a little table with cups set mouth-down on their saucers. Somewhere beyond the thin partition, a nib rasped steadily on paper with the cheery, thoughtless rhythm of someone who had never worried where the money would come from.

Tom sat with his hands folded and his shoes in a neat line beneath the chair. He had scrubbed the week’s ink off the side of his thumb with a nailbrush until his skin went pink and tight, and he had done the Slytherin tie with the knot a fraction lower than regulation, because it made him look taller. The kettle breathed damp warmth at the cuffs of his robe, blurring the starch. He kept his face turned away from it. Steam had a way of making the skin soften, and he didn’t want that today.

The castle’s stone carried last night like a memory it didn’t care to share. The suits of armour had not rattled—he would have noticed it if they had—but the corridors had a held quality, as if sound did not want to lay itself down and be done with it. He had not slept. He did not show it. His eyes were very clear.

The scratch of the nib on the other side of the wall caught and skipped. A man’s soft cough. Tom turned his head just enough to see the dark strip under the door, the uneven light of the staffroom beyond it. He could smell paraffin, old paper, the faint iron of the kettle. He counted the scratches of the pen until the number bored him and stopped.

The door opened without a knock—because there was nothing in this room worthy of knocking for—and Slughorn came in sideways with his stomach first, as if the door had offended him by being itself. He saw Tom and brightened, a hand fluttering to his moustache.

“Ah—there you are, my boy,” said Slughorn, as if Tom had been lost. “Intimidating rooms, these little ones. No air. No need to be nervous.”

“I’m not,” said Tom, and made the word sit flat.

Slughorn hesitated, looking about for somewhere to put something down and finding nothing. He had a paper folded into four in his hand that had been creased and uncreased so often the top edge had acquired a soft, furry nap. He smoothed it now against his own belly, as if his waistcoat were the proper place to iron anything.

“Between ourselves,” said Slughorn, lower, “a formality. Some concern about—ahem—all quite ridiculous. Professor Dippet is terrified of the Governors when they arrive in a pack. I’ve never seen such rabbits. Honestly the man would apologise to a hatstand if it had a rosette on.”

There was a short ring of china from beyond the partition. Slughorn stopped, cocked his head as if in fear of being overheard by the furniture, and then, with all the delicacy of a man attempting stealth in a chandelier, went on, “You did the right thing, last night. Whatever anyone says. I have said so. Dumbledore—well, Dumbledore thinks everyone is a collection of fragile instincts. He will want to ask you how you felt. Ignore him.”

Tom let his eyes rest a moment on Slughorn’s face until the man became aware that he was being looked at. Slughorn’s smile grew protective.

“You’ll have your O.W.L.s to think of, too,” he said, seizing again on cheerfulness. “Most precocious group I’ve had in years. Abraxas is very keen to show off his Charms—ghastly little thing with swizzle sticks, you’ll hate it—no, no, don’t look like that, you’ll wipe the floor with them all. I’ve said as much. And if there’s any question of your bursary, well. I’ve known patrons to step into a good cause. A pity I haven’t—well. There are formalities. But if it came to it, my boy, if they—if the worst happens—”

“What formalities?” said Tom.

Slughorn’s mouth opened, shut, opened. The paper on his belly creased again. “Oh, old rules. No Governor may sponsor in his turn a pupil he has taught. Something like that. Something to do with probity, you know, as if any of them know what the word means. A letter from the Ministry only this morning—confounded timing. Nothing to do with you, of course. Pure coincidence. A little accident—”

“What accident?” said Tom, and the question came out too quickly.

Slughorn’s eyes did a small, unhappy dance. “A little accident with the clerk who oversees the fund at the Ministry. Poor man. Fell—fell from a carriage step, I think. Slippery. They say he’s bruised everything he has. They say—well, you know how they say things. In any case the Governors are all nervous as cats about public money being associated with—well—anything. Ignore me. I’m babbling like a tap.”

Tom flattened his hands on the paper-thin varnish of the table. His breath had gone momentarily thin and fast and he made himself lower it. A hinge squealed outside somewhere in the corridor. He swallowed.

“Don’t look like that,” said Slughorn, swinging, alarmed, towards compassion. “It’s not your fault if a Ministry clerk falls off his own conveyance. For heaven’s—oh. Forgive me.” He lifted a hand as if to pat Tom’s shoulder and thought better of it. His fingers hovered and then returned to the paper, which suffered another smoothing.

The door opened again, properly this time, with a mustard-coloured witch in a starched collar pressing through. She had a mouth like a purse someone had pulled tight and forgotten. Madam Bletchley. Tom knew her because she knew everyone, and because her way of knowing looked always like suspicion. Her hair sat in a grey roll. She did not look at Tom immediately. She did not need to.

“Mr Riddle,” she said, when she allowed her gaze at last to take him in. “Do come along.”

“Madam Bletchley,” said Slughorn, with a little bow over his belly. “Timely as ever.”

She gave Slughorn a look that dismissed him from usefulness. “We are assembled,” she said to Tom, as if he had arranged it.

The staffroom had been dressed for the occasion. Cups had been set out, none matching. The kettle clicked near the hearth.

Professor Dippet was at the head of the table, blinking at a parchment. Dumbledore stood behind him, arms folded. When he saw Tom, he inclined his head.

The Board's clerk, a narrow man with flattened hair, scratched at his page with proprietary pleasure.

Tom stood where Madam Bletchley put him, which was a little to the left of the hearth, not yet at the table, as if he were a boy who had been called to recite and might be sent back. He put his weight through his heels. He did not look out of the window because there was no window. Slughorn had found a chair and was sitting with his hands on his knees, leaning forward, as if he might fling his body between Tom and a blow that was not coming and would not suit him if it did.

“Mr Riddle,” said Dippet, and at the same time coughed into his hand. “You will understand why we must—why we must note certain things. Last night—”

“Last night has nothing to do with the scholarship,” said Madam Bletchley in the tone of someone who believed things always had to do with only one thing, which, coincidentally, was the thing she said.

“It has to do with his conduct,” said a man on Dippet’s left, one of those pale Governors whose faces looked unfinished, like wet plaster that had dried before the sculptor was ready. “The scholarship is, ah—there is public money involved. There are optics.”

“Forgive me,” said Dumbledore, and though he spoke softly it moved around the room with ease, “I should have thought that optics would be an argument for leaving the boy out of association with last night entirely. Perhaps we might set out what we are here to do. Mr Riddle, we are only—”

“We are here,” said Madam Bletchley, “to review whether the school’s discretionary bursary remains appropriate in the light of certain—incidents. A question of conduct, Mr Riddle. No more, no less.” She let the words lie down in a row like cutlery.

The clerk coughed without meaning to and made a little blot. He blotted the blot and wrote something that satisfied him. Tom found he wanted to see the word. He did not lean. He could feel Madam Bletchley’s attention the way one felt the cold on the back of the neck.

“Mr Riddle,” said Dippet again, and felt for a phrase as a man feels for his spectacles in his pockets. “There has been a communication from the Ministry. It appears that the officer who—who signs off the bursary accounts met with a little misadventure this morning. He is injured. There will be delays.”

“Poor old Simmonds,” said Slughorn, before anyone could prevent him. “Could never keep his feet on a wet Wednesday. They’ll mend him. We will muddle through.”

“Professor Slughorn,” said Madam Bletchley coldly, not turning her head to look at him, as if what he had said might evaporate if she gave it no vantage. “There is also a note appended from someone in that office—”

“—which,” put in the pale Governor, pleased to contribute something exact, “raises a flag—”

“—which raises a flag,” said Madam Bletchley, accepting it not because she had to but because she collected these things, “as to the propriety of continuing to pay out the bursary in cases where conduct has been called—if only for a moment—into scrutiny. No one is accusing you, Mr Riddle,” she said, and somehow made the act of not-accusing feel like the presentation of a noose, “we are simply—”

“Protecting him,” said Slughorn. “Protecting him from rumour.”

Dumbledore’s mouth did something minute. Tom did not look at Dumbledore because he was not looking anywhere that could be read. He kept his face angled to the side, the way one did when one listened to a snake under the floorboards.

“You will appreciate,” said the pale Governor, “that the fund relies upon the Ministry’s...um...confidence. If Mr—if the clerk, Simmonds—if the office has been—if there has been an incident, it would be—” He looked towards Madam Bletchley for a word and received none. “—unfortunate if we did not behave with the utmost probity.”

"Probity," said Madam Bletchley. "Exactly."

Tom kept perfectly still. If he asked about the rules in their own language, Madam Bletchley would write a new word on her list and it would not be courtesy.

"Mr Riddle," said Dippet in a rush, "no one questions your ability—your teachers speak very highly. It is only—we propose to suspend the stipend—mind you, not your place. Room, board—of course. It is only the pocket allowance for books and so on—until the Ministry clarifies—"

The word until hung between them, and Tom disliked it at once. It was not a word. It was a little gate everyone walked through without looking up.

“Books,” said Slughorn, sitting up as if books had personally called his name. “I will see to that. I—well—” He glanced at Madam Bletchley’s mouth and recalculated. “I will, that is, ensure, within the—within the confines—” He hooked his fingers into his waistcoat as if the garment might supply a better clause. “In fact—” He turned, flustered, to Tom. “In fact, my boy, I insist you take my Grubbly-Plank notes. Or—well—well, that won’t help with Potions. We’ll find a way.”

“Professor,” murmured Dumbledore, and his tone was so mild it drew all the attention in the room and folded it up neatly. “You will choke yourself on your own helpfulness if you aren’t careful.”

A light rap came at the far door, the one that led not to the corridor but to the passage behind the portrait. Before anyone could say come in, the portrait swung without moving its painted mouth and a boy put his head in. He wore the blue band of a runner and had breathless apology had he needed to use it.

“Note from the Ministry,” he said, and the clerk’s head jerked in a way that suggested this was what he had been waiting for all along. The boy came in, placed the envelope with its cheap red seal beside Madam Bletchley’s hand, and fled as if he had been born to run messages and couldn’t bear to be held up from his purpose.

Madam Bletchley broke the seal with a fingernail and read. The muscles at her jaw bunched, then released. The pale Governor peered without success, and Dippet leaned a little in that direction without realising he had moved. The kettle clicked, once, sharply, as if the last bubble had decided to give up.

“Mr Simmonds is expected to recover,” said Madam Bletchley. “The office reminds us that in the event of rumours touching upon a recipient’s conduct, disbursements may prudently be delayed until the facts are established. It is unsigned except for the title. That sort of letter. I have seen a hundred.”

“And what rumours,” said Dumbledore harmlessly, “are we intended to be protected from? There have been no charges. There has been no official comment. There has, in fact, been only the knowledge that something frightened children. For which Mr Riddle bears no responsibility. He did not frighten them. Events did.” He kept his eyes on Madam Bletchley’s face and did not look at Tom. “I am curious what facts the Ministry proposes to wait upon that Hogwarts has not already reported.”

Madam Bletchley looked back and allowed herself the smallest lift of one shoulder. “Dumbledore,” she said, not unkindly, “no one is accusing your pet.”

Dumbledore did not appear to find the word pet interesting. “No,” he said. “Nor are we supporting him if we remove his means to act in his own interest a month before he sits the most significant examinations of his school life to date.”

“If he is excellent, he will be excellent without a shilling in his pocket,” said Madame Bletchley. “Many boys are.”

“Not in my subject,” Slughorn said, with heat. “Ingredients do not give themselves to the deserving.”

“Professor,” said the pale Governor, and managed to look as if he had introduced an improvement merely by speaking, “perhaps we might compromise. Suspend the stipend for this term. Revisit once Simmonds—ah—once the office is content. The books—can be issued on trust. A chit system.”

“We are not a grocer,” said Madam Bletchley.

“We might,” suggested Dippet desperately, seeing a shape in compromise he might sit down on, “we might allow a sum for—spare quills, and—ah—scales—if—if Mr Riddle requires—”

“I have scales,” said Tom, and for the first time the words had not been weighed beforehand. “Sir.”

They looked at him, all at once. It was the wrong thing to say—he felt the wrongness before they had time to supply it. Boys with nothing said that they had nothing. Boys who did not want charity told you where they could do without. He had intended to show that he understood how to manage, that he did not need them. Madam Bletchley’s chin lifted a fraction in the way of a woman who had got a bead on a bead.

“Very independent,” she said. “Very good. We like to see that.”

Tom forced his fingers to uncurl from where they had set themselves against his own palm. The mark of his nail took a moment to subside. If Slughorn had not already broken three times into clucking pity, Tom might have liked him better. As it was, he was useful; it was the only category he worried about.

“We will minute,” announced the clerk, happier now that there was something to set down which included verbs, “that the bursary stipend is suspended for the summer term, pending Ministry confirmation, and that the pupil’s place is unaffected. The Board will request that textbooks be issued under Headmaster’s discretion. We will minute,” he went on, the nib scratching with relish, “that the Board notes with satisfaction Mr Riddle’s—ah—spirit.”

“Spirit,” repeated Madam Bletchley. She enjoyed the word. “Precisely.”

Tom looked down at the blotter on the table nearest him. It had been used by a careless hand and wore a dark rosette that would not give itself up, no matter how the paper was turned. It had the quality of things that had been decided elsewhere and only reported here out of politeness.

“The thing is,” said Slughorn into the silence, “his situation is not like other boys’.”

“I know that,” said Dumbledore, and though he said it softly, the room had already decided to be finished with talking, and his acknowledgement rolled down the table like a coin.

“We are obliged to consider not what we feel but what we must do,” said Madam Bletchley. “Mr Riddle, you will sign for your meals as usual. Report to Mr Filch—where is Mr Filch?—you will report to Mr Filch if you require—” She glanced at the clerk. “—replacements for essential items.”

“Very well,” said Tom politely. He made the shape of a nod that paid everyone their respect without giving any. “May I go?”

“You may,” said Dippet, who looked unhappy in a way that would be no use to anyone, then rallied, “and Mr Riddle—do keep—and work—ah—we shall all—” He ran out of sentence. Dumbledore, behind his chair, sighed through his nose and said nothing.

Tom stepped back. The kettle, which had not quite boiled and would never boil, clicked again in a small refusal. He took his leave with the careful gait of someone who knew that sound carried strangely in these rooms and made the wrong impression if you let it. He was out and shutting the door behind him before Slughorn’s hand, already pushing back his chair to follow, could catch his sleeve and make it a scene.

He went into the corridor with his face neatly arranged, and only when he had taken six steps did his jaw harden so that the muscle ached and then let go again. The flagstones underfoot had had hundreds of boys’ shoes over them and had never taken an impression. It would be something to be the person who left a mark.

“Mr Riddle,” said a voice that did not clear its throat first.

Dumbledore stood in the small cut in the wall where the little stair went down towards the Transfiguration classroom. The light from the high, rain-dim window fell in the edges of his hair and made it look like something that had happened to him rather than something he had done. He held a thin strap of leather in his hand, and when Tom came near he extended it in the way of someone returning a thing without commentary.

“This was under my desk,” he said. “Yours, I think. You’ve a habit of folding it under when you’re thinking.”

Tom recognised it at once and hated that he did. It was the strap he used to tie his book-roll when he had too many to carry comfortably; he had meant to replace it with a better one and had not yet done so. One end had stretched into a useless length over years of use. He made his hand unhurried and took it.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Very careful, this morning,” said Dumbledore conversationally. “And then you weren’t, for a moment.”

Tom looked at him with the kind of blank courtesy that other boys only managed when they practised. “I have scales,” he said again, and it sounded stupid even with the shape different. He allowed himself to meet Dumbledore’s eye for a breath. “Sir.”

Dumbledore’s face there, in that narrow pocket of light, did not arrange itself into sympathy because sympathy would have lowered the value of what little dignity had just been left to Tom in that room. He stroked his thumb once across the strap as if checking its temper.

“The school can find you a new one,” he said. “But you will likely keep this old thing until it fails you at an inconvenient moment and forces you to improvise while you’re thinking of something else. That is the usual way with leather.” He nodded as if this were an agreement between them. “Do you have ink?”

“Yes,” said Tom.

“Pencils?”

Tom hesitated. “No.”

Dumbledore’s eyes made a small soundless joke at himself and he reached in the pocket of his robe, surprised by his own collection. He produced a pencil, blunt at one end in the way of teachers’ pencils. He put it in Tom’s hand with the strap. “Transfiguration requires a lot of drawing if you’re doing it properly,” he said, and then, as if he felt he had said enough, stepped aside to let Tom pass.

Tom made himself not move too quickly. He slid the strap into the inside of his robe, where the leather lay for a moment against his ribs and took the chill of him. The pencil was a poor thing. He turned it in his hand, touched the flat side of the wood with his thumb until the skin lifted a burr of wax.

“I won’t need it,” he said.

Dumbledore’s face did not alter. “You will. You do not need to ask me for anything you already have.” He nodded, again as if an agreement had been reached. “Good day, Mr Riddle.”

Tom went down the stairs without answering. There were students between classes on the landing; they parted around him as water parts around a stone that has sat a long time in it. He kept his eyes just above their heads and they thought he was not seeing them. It was a useful trick.

In the common room the green light could not be bright however the lake tried. The lamps were lit in the mid-afternoon as if it were evening. A pair of fourth years near the fire laughed in a sucked-in way over a copy of a magazine one of them wasn’t supposed to have; a younger boy was knotting a piece of string in a way that suggested it would never be undone. Abraxas Malfoy was in the corner with his knees crossed, his hair sitting very beautifully on his head. He looked up when Tom entered and put his heel down on the floor at once, so that his leg untwined from itself and he could stand.

“Riddle,” said Malfoy, coming over with the easy courtesy of a boy who thinks everyone is there to be pleased by him. “There’s talk you frightened the Governors this morning. How thrilling. You’ll cause old Bletchley to have an attack, you know, then where will we be?”

“Without someone to tighten our purse-strings,” said Tom. He placed his satchel under the table without a sound, set the pencil Dumbledore had given him on the wood, and turned his chair so that its back rested lightly against the stone. He sat. “Sit down.”

Malfoy sat as if he had intended to anyway. He filled the space and liked it. “Abbot claims he saw you in Dippet’s room. Claims you were the colour of the table. You do go that colour when you’re enjoying yourself.”

“Abbot misreads most things,” said Tom. He bent to the satchel as if to take out a book and did not. “Do you still have that letter your father wrote to his cousin at the Ministry—the one about the summer clerkships?”

Malfoy’s eyebrows lifted, and he did not look pleased. “Cousin Nott is not my father’s cousin,” he said, in a way that suggested there were complicated internal rules about who could claim whom. “Why?”

“Because I require the name,” said Tom. “Not for you.”

“I did not suppose you were looking to place me,” said Malfoy, half amused, half something else. “Riddle, you never ask for something. You always allow people the pleasure of thinking they had offered it. It’s rather bracing to be told directly for once.”

Tom tilted his head, not enough to be coy. “Name,” he said.

Malfoy looked at his mouth as if the shape of it might tell him something. Then he leaned back and put his own mouth into a considering line. “You’ll be awful in the Regulation of Magical Creatures office,” he said, after a moment. “They will hate you. It will delight me. Nott is called Septimus. He takes tea in the second-floor room at the Ministry because he believes the first-floor waits are beneath him. He has a fear of stains.” He smiled, neat as a napkin, at Tom’s expression. “You see, you make a habit of knowing things about people. Other people do, too.”

The pencil under Tom’s fingers turned once. The wood was smooth where Dumbledore’s hand had warmed it. “I do not want Nott,” he said. “I want the cousin he wrote to.”

“Who is dead,” said Malfoy, and then was satisfied to see Tom’s face change the smallest amount. “Ah. You didn’t know that. He died last year. A boating thing. Or he fell down a well. I can never keep the picturesque misfortunes straight.” He tilted his head in the direction of the lake. “What are you after?”

“A clerkship,” said Tom. The word sat strangely in his mouth, as if it had not been made for it and would only visit. “Or the name of someone who can approve the bursary without Mr Simmonds.”

Malfoy’s interest deepened in the way of boys who have just realised they are at the beginning of a story, which is the only part they really enjoy. “There are people in my father’s circle,” he said. “I can ask him. He likes you. He thinks your manners are charmingly—” He searched for a word, hands making a shape in the air. “—not ours.”

“I’ll write my own letter,” said Tom. He pulled the satchel open, took out the old quill he kept more from habit than because it was any use, and set it down. He took a sheet of paper—proper paper, not parchment—from the bottom of the satchel. Paper had a way of receiving things that parchment did not; it drank differently. “You can give me a name.”

Malfoy’s mouth turned once, not quite a smile. “Abraxas,” he said, and his own name sounded to him like a key, “you will be careful.”

Tom did not look up. “Do you think I won’t be?”

“I think you will be clever,” said Malfoy. “It is not always the same thing. Nott is disagreeable. The rest are dull. Dull men can be very dangerous when they are embarrassed. You will embarrass them without meaning to. It is in your nature.” He leaned a fraction closer. “You may use my name,” he added, as if he had decided to be generous and his day had improved because of it. “It buys more than it should.”

“I know,” said Tom. It softened something in Malfoy’s face and hardened something in his own. He dipped the quill, tested it against a scrap to be sure it would obey him today, and began.

He wrote with the same control with which he had stood in that little room. He lifted his head now and again to see how the words lay down on the paper and whether they gave him back the thing he wanted. He wrote three versions of the first sentence and let the first one stand. He did not mention the bursary directly. He did not mention the Board. He mentioned that he had been invited to consider the way in which the Ministry supported excellence at Hogwarts and that he was very interested in seeing such processes for himself. He mentioned Abraxas Malfoy’s kindness in recommending a gentleman whose judgement he trusted. He did not lay it on. He did not beg. Boys with nothing begged. He asked as if a conversation were already underway of which this letter was an inevitable part.

“Who is it to?” said Malfoy, craning without daring to move the paper.

“Bagnold,” said Tom. He remembered a little man in gloves at Christmas next to Malfoy’s father, very careful even with the punch, and made the name behave. “Or Travers’s uncle. Or both. It is easier to be turned down by two people who do not want to say no.”

Malfoy laughed aloud, quick and pleased. “You are wicked,” he said, admiring, as if wickedness were a new thing he had just discovered existed and that he might like to possess. “I will tell my father you are writing. He likes to be forewarned when he is about to be delighted.”

“He will not be delighted,” said Tom, and folded the paper and held it a moment so that his body heat would set the crease. “He will be useful.”

He stood, and the strap Dumbledore had given him fell against his ribs and reminded him that people sometimes put things into your hand and then expected you to carry them around. He looked at it under the edge of his robe and, without thinking, tore the stretched end off neatly with his fingers. The tear was clean. He made a new hole in the leather with the end of the pencil and threaded it through. He pulled it tight. The strap shortened and flexed and sat differently in his palm. He felt the change as one feels a tooth that has ceased to ache.

“Going to post it?” said Malfoy, watching him with the interest of someone who wastes nothing because wasting would be an error in a different category than the usual ones. “Shall I send an owl?”

“I’ll take it,” said Tom. “Abbot will tell his friends I tremble if he sees me use the school owl. It will please him.”

He tucked the letter inside his robe, where it lay beside the strap, then reached back for the pencil he had been given and slipped it behind his ear. It was a ridiculous place to keep a pencil; it announced itself. He kept it there deliberately.

On his way out he passed Slughorn by the hearth, who had been waiting in a way he thought subtle, his whole body arranged around the opening of a moment. He half lifted himself from the chair.

“My boy,” said Slughorn, “I can—about the summer—why not—my sister has a place in Cornwall—fresh air—nothing expensive—no obligation—only for a week if you like—”

“Thank you, Professor,” said Tom, and his face did nothing and his voice did nothing, and he went past without making Slughorn carry the offered thing any further. It was not a good idea to be inside other people’s houses if you wanted to own the moment you decided to leave.

In the corridor the cold came up off the stone and made his thoughts sharper where soft heat had not. He went past the statue that concealed the staircase and did not use it; he went the long way because the long way took him past the little window where the owls came down to the lower landing when the weather badgered them and because there was a glove someone had dropped there last week and Tom had seen Filch pick it up and put it in the lost-property cupboard near the heavy door with the iron hinges. He did not go to the cupboard. He did not need a glove. He took the long way because on the long way he would have time to decide whether Bagnold should have the only letter or whether Travers’s uncle should have a different one, and because when you carried two letters with two different marks in your robe, you had the choice of who you would be to whom.

At the top of the stairs to the Owlery, he stopped, because a first-year, round and red about the eyes with crying he had finished with and would not admit to, had his arm lengthened to the shoulder in front of him and was trying to judge how far up he could reach to tie his message to a bird that did not want him. The owl shifted, affronted, and clicked its beak. The boy looked around, hunted the ceiling and the floor for help, and then set his mouth and tried again.

Tom did not go down to him. He watched for the moment when the boy made the right choice of knot and—after a little crack in his confidence which he mended himself—made the knot sit tight under the bird’s leg. It would hold. The bird thought better of murdering him. The boy stayed alive. He turned, wiping his hand on the back of his robe, and saw Tom, and straightened at once, as boys did when they realised they were observed by someone who did not scramble. His ears were still swollen with the wet. He looked like someone who would not matter for a very long time and then would matter suddenly, once, when no one wanted him to. Tom moved his eyes away, which was an act of kindness.

He tied the ribbon around his own letter with the strap he had shortened—leather yielding now, manageable, a thing that would not betray him—and picked one of the school owls with particular unremarkable feathers, the sort that did their work without anyone remembering what their face had looked like. He lifted his hand. The bird came down. He tied the letter. He did the knot once, twice. He thought of Madam Bletchley’s mouth like a drawstring and pulled his own knot tighter.

“Bagnold,” he said softly, and the owl flicked its great flat head like a coin finding a groove.

He watched it go and was surprised when he did not feel worse. The bursary had been a shape in the air with a number attached to it and the number had made his days easy in one way that had allowed him to be hard in all the others. Now the number had been taken away. It altered the air. He would alter something else. It was a balance. He had been very good at balances since he was small.

He stood a moment with the cold on his cheeks and the owl-smell in his nose and the pencil behind his ear. The after-image of the Board room lay over the owl loft in his mind like the negative of a photograph and then it did not. He dropped the second letter into his pocket without sealing it; he would write a different one to Travers’s uncle tonight. He would include one sentence that did nothing except make the man uncomfortable and grateful at the same time. It was a small art. Slughorn thought he had taught him it. Slughorn liked to think he taught useful things.

On his way back he passed the classroom where Dumbledore had been and saw that the door was open. A tape measure lay across the desk, one end dangling stupidly to the floor as if it had been caught mid-thought and abandoned. Tom paused without stepping into the room. He could hear the thin, quick tap of Dumbledore’s heels somewhere further along the passage as he went about whatever business Dumbledore always looked like he was thinking about when he was thinking about nothing.

Tom stepped in and picked up the tape measure, coiled it, and set it on the corner of the desk. He did not need to. He did not like things that dangled. He looked, a bare moment, at the chalkboard where someone had drawn the outline of a wand and written the measurements in—dragon heartstring, ten and a quarter inches. He put his forefinger on the chalk line and then took it away without leaving a mark. He despised chalk. He turned and left, the tape measure very tidy in its new circle upon the desk, the strap of leather warm against his side as if it had decided to belong.

On the stair to the dungeons he saw one of the younger boys from Slytherin—Avery—half crouched over his shoe with his fingers worrying at a broken lace and the knot refusing to untie. Avery looked up, startled, and then put his head down at once as if he had been caught doing something shameful by a person he didn’t yet owe enough to fear and wanted to remedy that. Tom stopped. He looked at the lace. He put the pencil in his hand under Avery’s eye and said, without edge, “Prise it there, not there. You’ll save the leather.”

Avery obeyed at once. The knot came free. He stared as if Tom had made it. “Thank you,” he said, too fast.

Tom made a motion that was not a nod and went down. He did not smile. The dungeon air came up to him the way it always did, cool and a little mineral, as if the very walls were thinking at a slow rate. He breathed it and let it make his shoulders set. He had a piece of string now where he had not had one and he knew what he would do with it. The knot he had made upstairs would hold.

He went to his bed, which did not show that it had ever had him in it because he had learned not to leave those signs, and took out the little wooden box he kept in the trunk under the folded shirts that would do him for the rest of the term if he was careful. He put the strap inside. He put the pencil beside it. He took out a sheet of good creamy parchment, not paper, because there are some people for whom the weight of the medium is a kind of courtesy, and took up the quill that would not splutter because he had mended it properly last night with a penknife and an angle like a secret.

He began: Sir—

The first line always mattered. It did not have to be brilliant. It had to be clean.

By the time the others trailed in, their voices caught in the arch of the door, he had written three letters. Two were ready to go and one he put aside to be copied differently for a different man in a different mood on a different day. It pleased him—the way a lock pleased when it turned—that he could do that without hurrying. He sanded the ink, sealed the ones that needed it, and set them so that the wax would set without sticking to one another.

He looked a long time at the strap in the box, at the bit he had torn off, clean as a decision. It would have been nothing to keep it, nothing to throw it away. He kept it. He closed the lid.

Down the hall someone was playing with a wireless they were not supposed to have brought from home, a whispering of static and a half-song that went in and out with the thick stone. Someone laughed; someone else said, hush. Tom stood, slid the letters inside his robe where they lay thin and controlled beside the strap, and went out.

In the doorway his shoulder brushed the rough stone. He stopped, put his palm flat against it, and then took it away. He left nothing behind. He went on, calm, with the kind of calm that is a practiced thing, and in his pocket the sharp end of the pencil nudged the skin of his wrist so that he would not forget, and he did not.

The decision was a small one pressed among many. He would replace what was taken with something better, and he would not tell the person who had taken it that he had done so. He would go on as if the shape of the world matched his measure. If it did not, he would bring it in by a notch. There was a narrow satisfaction in that.

He climbed the last steps to the Owlery and put his hand out once more to the unremarkable owl. It came, without fuss. He tied the second letter on. He did not need to watch it fly to know it would go where it had to go. He stood instead with his head turned towards the lake he could not see from here, listening to the ordinary thrum of a castle pretending to be calm.

When he turned, his face looked as it always did when he had decided something: smooth as the inside of a cup. He went back the long way, because there is never any point in arriving quickly if you mean to arrive in control. He touched the strap at his ribs once to feel its new length. It sat there as if it had always belonged.