Chapter 6: The Library's Secrets

The September rain had already settled into the grounds by the time the first years were shepherded to their tables, little streams trickling off their sleeves and pooling on the flagstones. Candles burned with a watery steadiness beneath the enchanted ceiling. The Slytherin table had thinned of laughter and filled with the quiet murmur of recollection, those remarks that were not meant to be loud, intended to be remembered by the right ears.

Tom slid into a space that opened for him; there was no elbowing him along this year, no second glances that measured whether he belonged. A boy named Nott had leaned in earlier at the train to ask after his summer, with the politest curiosity; a pale girl with an elegant profile had passed him a glossed apple when the trolley had rattled by and the last pumpkin pasty had gone. He accepted neither with more than a nod, but the offerings stayed in the air about him, as visible as candle smoke. Respect had a particular smell in these corridors, not frankincense but something like it—a mixture of expectation and envy.

The Headmaster’s voice rolled gently around the tables. Tom let it wash past. His eyes were on the staff dais; there was the glinting watch chain of Professor Slughorn as he laughed too loudly at a remark, his hand patting his stomach with the contentment of a man who knew exactly how many plum puddings the kitchen could produce, and there, farther along, the calm, pale gaze of the Transfiguration master who did not seem to miss much. A man to be cautious with, that one. Tom held his fork very carefully, the tines aligned with the knife.

The talk around him shifted from summer to timetables. A third-year with a neat braid leaned across the tureen of onion soup.

“You’ve not kept your hair, then,” she said, nodding at his short, dark crop. “Last term it fell in your eyes. You’ve smartened.”

“I found it impractical,” Tom said. The braid, he recalled, belonged to Eileen Prince. She had a way in the corridors, not of pushing, but of making space appear. Her hands were quick with books and slower with people; she said little and noticed much.

“Practical,” she said, and spooned up her soup. There was amusement in her mouth that did not reach her eyes.

He turned his attention to the fish. His knife slid under the skin in a single movement, scales glinting and then gone. He found himself waiting for a hiss from the draught in the stone, for a suggestion of a voice curled within it. There were snakes carved in the high rafters, heads tilted down as if listening. The ability had arrived without knocking; it had saved him from one petty blackmailer at the orphanage and had made every corner of the school feel as though it contained a door only he could open. Doors, he had learned, led to people who had been careless. He planned to be careful.

When the plates were cleared and the prefects called for attention, his side of the bench rose as one. His satchel sat against his hip with the comfortable weight of filled pockets and sharpened quills, and the strap did not bite his shoulder at all. That was an improvement on last year.

Slytherin’s common room smelled of riverwater and stone. Shadows burned gently in the greenish lamps. Tom paused at the arch, watching. There, by the fire, two older boys were setting out a chessboard of dark wood; further in, a girl with glossy hair was unwrapping a parcel of sugared violets and distributing them with cold generosity. There was a hum, a riverbed hum, and beneath it the question that interested him more than all the others: where do I put my hands to make it move?

He slept that night with his wand under his pillow and woke to rain. The timetable, pinned to his bedside curtain, told him Potions first on Monday. He found himself smoothing the parchment not because he feared wrinkles but because the motion made a neatness that pleased. Potions promised more than most lessons. It was a subject that could be done without fuss in front of others and improved later in private, and it happened in Slughorn’s domain.

By the week’s end he had measured out rat spleens with the calm precision of a boy drawing a map, adjusted a classmate’s flame in passing without seeming to, and returned to his place before Slughorn could complete his praise for Avery’s potion by himself pronouncing that Tom’s infusion had “the colour of a jewel”. Slughorn’s face had creased into his familiar pleased expression, his hand hovering over the candied pineapple on the desk.

“Marvellous eye, Riddle,” he said, his moustache twitching. “Marvellous. One cannot teach that sort of thing, you know, one can nourish it. You must come to one of my little evenings. Small group. Interesting people. You would like them.” He tapped the box with his ring and popped a yellowed slice into his mouth. “You and I will get along famously.”

Tom folded his clean, inkless hands on the desk and smiled the precise amount that pleased without promising anything. “You are kind, Professor.”

“Kind? Nonsense,” Slughorn said, though the word went through him comfortably. “Opportunity is never kindness. It is simply a matter of fitting the right lock to the right key. Friday week, after supper. Bring your best manners and your sharper wits.”

Tom inclined his head. He drew a fingernail against a scratch on the desk, a scratch in the shape of a careless mark someone had cut there with a penknife, and after class he ran a fingertip along the spine of the old ledger Slughorn kept in the cupboard. There were names there, he knew; names meant connections, and connections were good tools when used properly and claws when not.

Between lessons and subtle repositionings of affection, the library called to him with a dryness in his throat. He could sit in the echoing quiet and make the world larger. The librarian had a nose like an accusing quill and wore a chain at her waist for her keys. She did not yet trust him, which was in itself a kind of compliment.

“Reference only,” she said the first afternoon he asked for the genealogical registers. Her gaze travelled to the scuff on his shoe and back again. “No ink on your fingers.”

“Of course,” Tom said. He presented his hands as if for a spell inspection. Clean; the thin skin at the base of his right thumb bore a tiny nick where a knife had slipped that morning; it looked like a crescent moon. He tucked them away again neatly and followed her to a high shelf at the back. There was dust there that had not been disturbed all summer. The books came down one at a time with a sound like a cold breath.

“You’ll find most of what boys your age wish to brag about in there,” the librarian said, and left him to it.

He sat at a corner table with a view of the exit and set the first volume squarely in the centre. The covers were buckled with age. The parchment within had browned almost prettily. He wrote nothing at first; he moved through names and coats of arms, through marriages that had cemented fortunes and lines that had failed. The recorded voices of the recorders spoke in a tone he recognised: this mattered; this was how things held together. Ink swam occasionally where a hand had blotted in anger.

He did not say the word inside his head, not even to himself. Parseltongue. On another shelf, a younger boy had put his head down on a book and slept. It was a particular sort of power to say that word and have no-one else understand it. He would not throw it about. But names gathered around it as iron filings gathered to the magnet of his silence. The Peverells, the Blacks, the Notts, the Lestranges. At an afternoon’s end he found less in them than their owners would expect. They had built, yes, they had bought, they had done all the expected things, but there was a stiffness here that suggested the spine of a man braced for a blow. He was not interested in bracing.

He pushed the register away with the flat of his palm and drew the next towards him. The binding crackled. Halfway through, between a coat of arms that had been inked in such faded green that it seemed to have been washed with tears, and a page of births, a clerkly hand had written, a note too neat to be natural: see also: rural registers, Wiltshire and the north. The script had a curl to the tails of its g’s. Tom’s attention sharpened. Rural often meant forgotten. Forgotten meant interesting.

“You’re going to get dust in your hair,” Eileen Prince said. She had appeared across from him without ceremony, two books balanced on one hip, a quill tucked behind her ear. It had a bite-mark in the feather. She put the books down with the careful certainty of someone who knew exactly how many pages she would read before supper.

Tom sat back and smoothed a speck from his sleeve. “The price of scholarship.”

“Mm.” She reached for the index volume he had already finished and ran her finger down the entries without actually looking at the words. “I’ll wager you’re not writing Professor Binns’s essay.”

“Binns is easily appeased,” Tom said.

“Give him dates until he forgets why he asked for them,” Eileen said, and smiled, not at him, but in the direction of the librarian’s desk. “She has the rural registers under lock. Someone once smuggled one out and cut out the bit that made their uncle look as though he had married twice. I heard it squeaked like a mouse when the knife went through. The book, not the uncle.”

“How does one persuade her to part with them?” Tom said. He kept his tone light. It was a question, but not an admission. He did not, as a rule, ask girls to do things for him that he could do himself, but he had learned to notice when asking would be more efficient.

Eileen turned a page. “There are two ways. One is to arrive with Professor Slughorn’s smile and say ‘my dear’ a great deal. If you can’t manage that, the other is to look as though you are doing precisely what she expected you to be doing and then, when she is lulled, ask for what you actually want in the manner of someone who has not realised it is valuable.”

“Go on,” Tom said.

“She is less likely to trust a boy with clean fingernails,” Eileen said, sliding her glance to his hands and away again. “She prefers ink, in this case. Have you any ink under your nails, Riddle?”

“No,” Tom said. He turned his palm in and tapped it once, lightly, against the underside of the table. “But you do.”

Eileen considered her cuticle as if it had insulted her. “I suppose I do.”

“You could ask for them,” Tom said.

“I could,” Eileen said. “Why, though?”

“Curiosity,” Tom said. He let the word float, the way one left food beside a wary animal. “There are errors in the urban registers. I prefer primary sources. Rural families forget to correct the central records. There are older names, older… arrangements.”

Eileen’s mouth moved, not quite a smile. “You like corrections.”

“I like accuracies,” Tom said. “And omissions.”

“And where do omissions get you?” Eileen said.

“They get one to a point that is not on anyone’s map,” Tom said. He let his gaze rest on the librarian. The chain at her waist flashed once in the candlelight like a fish turning in a current. “Ask for them, Eileen. If she refuses, I will apply myself to the art of being untrustworthy and dirty my fingers.”

Eileen breathed out through her nose, amused despite herself. She rose with the fluidity of a cat and walked to the desk, where she leant in at the precise angle of a clever girl who had memorised the rules and did not mind gently stepping on them. Tom watched the exchange unfold without seeming to. Eileen gestured, pointed once to the book under his hand and then to the shelf where a row of rural registers sat with their spines to the wall like a line of punished schoolboys. The librarian opened her mouth to say no and, in the same breath, reached for her keys.

They came back with three volumes: Wiltshire; Derbyshire; A Survey of Ancient Occupancies, North & West. Eileen set them down in front of him without ceremony and did not faff about in that infuriating feminine way some girls had, standing between a boy and what he wanted until he said please.

“You’re not going to tell me why,” she said, not a question.

“On the contrary,” Tom said. “I am going to tell you that you should read page forty-three of the Survey. There is a brief section on tenant rights under the Abridged Enchantment Statutes that I think you will find irritating enough to occupy you until supper.”

Eileen sat, skeptical, and flipped to the page. “If this is a trick for my benefit, I shall put ink in your hair.”

“Then, at least, it will look as though I deserve the librarian’s trust,” Tom said, and opened Wiltshire.

The paper had thinned at the edges with handling, which spoke of more traffic than the dust had suggested. He turned carefully. The registers were not gorgeously made; they wanted to be used, not admired. Parishes, villages, hamlets barely larger than a handful of cottages. Alongside the lists of births and borough responsibilities, neatly recorded marriage consents. He moved with patience, not because patience was virtue but because it was a tool that most did not know how to use. His eyes caught on a name as one’s hands catch on rough bark.

Gaunt.

He looked at it without moving his head, as if it might know it had been seen. The entry was not fat with honourifics or indulgences; it crouched on the page. Little Hangleton, it said. A transfer of property recorded with the Ministry under special dispensation, owing to an indictment. The clerk’s hand here had amended a line with tiny, careful notations. The name came again, elsewhere, without any of the flourishes that he had seen round the Blacks and their cousins. It wore no fine clothes. It wore a snarl.

His thumb pressed down a fraction too hard on the page. He lifted it at once. The pulse in his neck had quickened and he smoothed it with a thought. He traced the line of ink without touching it.

“What is it?” Eileen said without looking up, as if she did not want to be thought to be the kind of girl who craned to see.

“Nothing yet,” Tom said. He set the Wiltshire register at an angle that made it look dull and nondescript, a trick as old as markets. “The survey?”

“Infuriating,” Eileen said serenely. “They say one must write to the proper office and wait three months for a reply if a landlord uses a jinx to move one’s fence. Imagine waiting three months to return one’s fence. There would be snow.”

“Imagine having a landlord,” Tom said.

Eileen’s eyes flicked to him, precisely once. She did not say anything. He had told no-one; he had learned to leave the orphanage on the other side of the door and step into the castle as if it were the only place he had ever been.

He turned the page. Gaunt again. Morfin Gaunt, he read, charged in a Muggle court with assault; later the Ministry had intervened and arranged matters by its own lights. The scrawl below, in a different hand, noted the presence of a ring—family ring, black stone, serpent-engraved. A third line recorded Marvolo Gaunt. His own heartbeat counted, once, twice, three times, and then fell into its proper rhythm. Marvolo. There. The name sat in the ink with a stubborn satisfaction. He had believed his middle name an oddity chosen by someone unmusical. He had turned it in his mouth, tasting the shape of it, and found nothing. Now, here, the lines of two lives that had not touched had the same tint. He held the thought at arm’s length and avoided the quick smiling joy that would have betrayed him.

Eileen’s quill whispered. The librarian coughed, the sort of cough that reminded boys that supervision existed. A shiver passed round the ceiling and the lamps shuddered. Tom slid a finger to the margin and followed a note across to a reference in the Derbyshire register, then to a clerk’s comment that the family had been in that county too for a time, perhaps, though the hand was not sure; perhaps they had been anywhere that was small and unwelcome and out of the way. The remarkable thing, he thought, coldly, was not that this line had thinned; it was that it had not utterly vanished. He pictured a man with cracked hands and a mouth like a knot, wearing something that once had been fine.

“You look,” Eileen said, and then broke off. Her voice had softened. “Not pleased.”

“This is not pleasant,” Tom said, and the word did not sound like usual in his mouth. “Useful, perhaps.”

Eileen blinked at him and then, as if noticing how his hand lay on the page, how still, she turned back to her text. “There’s a family named Flint who tried to charge rent on the same three acres twice in the same year,” she said crisply. “They must breed with accounting books.”

“Flint,” Tom repeated, and tucked it away. “Yes.”

They worked until the light on the tables turned the colour of tea left too long and the librarian relented to the growl of stomachs and shooed them out. In the corridor, Eileen wiped a streak of dust from her cheek with her sleeve and left a clean mark. Tom stopped by a window and watched the grey water on the lake bunch and let go in the rain.

“You have had your primary sources,” Eileen said. There was a question there, swimming under her tone of flippancy. He mirrored her casual stance, hands in pockets, head tilted.

“They confirm a thought,” he said carefully. “They do not feed it.”

“You eat your thoughts?” Eileen said dryly.

“I find them more nourishing than the sort of food one is offered here,” Tom said.

“You’ve not been to Professor Slughorn’s little evenings,” Eileen said. “He feeds you like a favourite pig.”

“I have been invited,” Tom said.

Eileen drew a small line of amusement in the fog of the window with her finger. “That did not take long. Try not to let him think he invented you.”

“If anyone thinks that,” Tom said, and the words came smoother than he had meant, almost a purr, “it will not be for long.”

She studied his reflection as if it were a list she could take away and look at later. “Careful, Riddle,” she said at last. “People who write their names too big end up with their names where they cannot reach to scratch them out.”

“I write neatly,” Tom said.

He went to Slughorn’s gathering with his hair combed, his tie straight, and his smile no wider than politeness required. The office had been aired to the point of ostentation. A charmed gramophone sang quietly in a corner, something stringed and bright that made the bottles on the shelves vibrate almost imperceptibly. Slughorn, rosy with pleasure, greeted him with both hands.

“Tom, my boy,” he said, as if speaking to a nephew knighted in the paper. “Come and meet Abraxas; clever fellow, father on the Board; and little Tilly Vane, who sings like a siren; and there, you see, that is Mulciber—very handy with hexes, though we hope to channel it into more respectable avenues.”

Abraxas Malfoy was as pale as ice and as insolent as a man who had never been struck. He took Tom’s hand and held it for a second too long.

“Riddle,” he said. “Interesting name.”

“It is,” Tom said. He flicked his eyes once to the man’s cufflinks—serpents’ heads, carefully wrought—and once to the way his fingers had been manicured. “Yours is very simple.”

Abraxas’s mouth tilted, amused; the tilt turned to something like interest. “We must talk,” he said. “I like to know things.”

“Knowledge makes one comfortable,” Tom said.

“It makes one powerful,” Abraxas said, and moved away to be impressive at someone else.

Slughorn circulated like a well-fed bee. He alighted on shoulders with compliments and left sticky little gifts behind—addresses, names, hints about positions that might be open in ten years’ time. He liked to be told that he had discovered people. Tom let his praise stick and then patted it down to a manageable shine.

“I make a list, you know,” Slughorn confided near the pineapple box, as though it were a holy secret. “Who you are, what you can do, what you want. Not everyone knows what they want. The ones who do—ah! There are my favourites.”

Tom turned his glass between fingers that did not sweat. “There is very little use in not knowing what one wants.”

“Some would call that certainty dangerous in a boy,” Slughorn said, but he said it in the delighted tone of a woman who had found a diamond ring in her Christmas pudding.

“Then I shall be sure to handle it with care,” Tom said.

He left with a stomach that had eaten too much and a notebook that had acquired three names he could use and two he could discard. The corridors were quieter after curfew; the rain had settled into a friendly hiss on the windows. He walked not to the common room but to the library, because the timing was too good to waste. The librarian had been known to be generous after large school gatherings, as if the students’ overeating had bloated her rules along with her temper.

He was right. She frowned and sighed and handed him the key to the side cabinet where a stack of Ministry rolls lay tied with tired-looking ribbon. “Half an hour,” she said. “No ink.”

“Of course,” Tom said, and took them to a table under a draught. He untied the ribbon and spread the parchment carefully. There were notices here of fines; unlicensed enchantments in farm parishes; neglect of magical beasts; testimony collected in crabbed writing. Names like stamps, like bruises. Gaunt. Marvolo Gaunt fined for improper concealment of artefact. Gaunt, Morfin: restricted wand use, complaint lodged by a Muggle. The words were not scandalous in themselves; plenty of families had a rash of such notes, especially those who did not enjoy being told what they might do with what their grandfathers’ grandfathers had done without permission. But here, between the lines of legal dryness, something else bled. Not pride, exactly; a kind of stubborn contempt that had been rewarded with the smallest punishments available to those on whom the law rested heavily just for living at the edge of it.

He was aware of the grain of the table under his fingers as another boy might be aware of the press of a hand. The wood had been scratched and smoothed and scratched again; it had absorbed the oils of generations of hands. He placed his own hand on it and let it be steady.

Abraxas drifted to the table like a man tested by expensive breezes. He did not bother to pretend he was there for anything else.

“You work hard,” he said. His gaze fell to the name on the roll. He smiled, slow and sly, and let a soft laugh escape. “Working up from the bottom, are we?”

Tom did not lift his eyes at once. When he did, they were warm and empty. “I didn’t realise you read.”

Abraxas tilted his head. “It’s always enchanting,” he said, “to see ambition dressed in borrowed clothes. What are you looking for, Riddle? A family? You can’t join one by blotting your fingers with the right ink.”

“The bookish never join anything,” Tom said. “They make lists.”

Abraxas sat, uninvited, and leant his expensive elbow on the table. “Those of us who have something to list do not generally have to write it out. We remember.”

Tom’s jaw made an angle and then settled; his smile widened a fraction. “That must be terribly convenient. The difficulty, of course, comes when one has to remember other things. People who are useful. Little debts. Names that have not yet mattered.”

Abraxas examined his nails. “I never forget a debt,” he said.

“No,” Tom said. “Neither do I.”

They looked at each other, two boys not yet men, their futures reflected in the shiny surface of a rolled decree about wand restriction. Abraxas’s eyes dropped once more to the name on the page. “Gaunt,” he said, as if tasting something sour. “You know about them?”

“I know I’m reading,” Tom said.

Abraxas chuckled. “Very old. Very shabby. Clung to something that made other people uncomfortable. Not quite respectable. Not quite anything, in the end.” He leant in until Tom could count the stitches in his cuff. “If you want a story, Riddle, take this one: sometimes a line thins to a thread and finally snaps. It’s almost compassionate, really. It puts them out of their misery.”

“Compassion is not in fashion this year,” Tom said. His voice was mild. “Nor, I believe, for you, any year.”

“Don’t snarl, Riddle,” Abraxas said, and stood, brushing a nonexistent fleck from his sleeve. “It doesn’t suit people who can’t afford to show their teeth.”

Tom lowered his gaze without lowering anything else and listened to Abraxas’s shoes walk him away. At the desk, the librarian looked up from her knitting and then down again. He resumed reading. He took in nothing for a page and then another page. The letters swam and settled. He found the mention of the ring again, the serpent cut into a black stone, noted without admiration by a man who had never worn a ring that meant anything. He lifted his hand and set it palm-down on the table to prevent it from tightening into a fist.

Eileen’s shadow darkened the paper long enough to make the words indistinct; then she set something down. A scrap of parchment. Her writing was small and tidy. Little Hangleton, near Great Hangleton. There is a road that runs between them lined with hedges. She did not look at him directly. “Binns,” she said blandly, as if she were reminding him of a ghost’s essay, and walked away.

He did not touch the scrap. He read another line about some other man, and then another; he breathed once and then let the breath go. After a minute he slid the scrap into the inner pocket of his robe. The librarian came to reclaim the key and did not look at his pocket at all.

The next week brought Latin verbs, a rain-lashed flying lesson cancelled on account of the state of the pitch, and an invitation dropped in his ink: a neat, folded card in which someone had smugly written: Do join us Tuesday next for chess in the corner by the fireplace. Abraxas. The handwriting made flourishes where none were needed. Tom tucked it into a book and forgot it there forever.

He had decided that if knowledge were to be found, it would be where the worst of it had been stored: with the Ministry’s shame and not the Ministry’s pride. A second look at the rolls yielded little more. There were names and notes and a sense of something especially small and bitter. He wanted more than that. He wanted the source. He traced the line again from Gaunts to Gaunts and from Gaunts to no-one. He let the word Parsel rest on the back of his teeth like a sweet he did not bite.

“You’ve gone very quiet,” Eileen said from across the table. Her hair had escaped its ribbon. There was ink on her cheek. “I’ll suppose, to keep myself from dying of curiosity, that you have merely discovered that someone had a baby at the wrong time of year.”

“It is always the wrong time of year for people like this,” Tom said. He had not meant to say people like this; the words had slipped, suddenly pleased to be out.

“People like what?” Eileen asked.

“People who are not thought of at all unless they do something disgusting,” Tom said.

Eileen’s mouth flattened. “There are a great many of those,” she said. “People, I mean.”

“Yes,” Tom said. He shifted the Wiltshire register a fraction to the left and let it cover the worst of the clerk’s sarcasm. “It appears the Gaunts were very old. Perhaps the oldest, if one counts that sort of thing.”

Eileen peered as far as she could without invading his space. “Slytherin,” she said softly. “Rumour. Everyone likes to be linked. But that name—one hears it when one is meant to be impressed.”

“And are you impressed?” Tom said.

Eileen shrugged. “Oldness impresses the sort of people who submit to it because they cannot manage to do anything new. They were said to have a symbol, weren’t they? A ring of some sort. Rings only mean what other people let them mean.”

“Mrs Prince,” Tom said lightly, “you are almost revolutionary.”

“Don’t call me Mrs Prince,” Eileen said, which made him think she had been called that by someone she did not like. “And don’t list me alongside the London lot waving placards. They spill their ink as if they might drown in it on purpose. I prefer to keep it and write neatly.” She wiped her cheek with the corner of her sleeve and left a ghost of a mark behind.

“You would not like Abraxas, then,” Tom said.

“I like him sufficiently to avoid him,” Eileen said. “Is this what you brought me here for? To give me free opinions about boys with too many hair oils.”

“I brought you here because you can persuade keys to open,” Tom said. “And because you do not chatter.”

“I chatter a little,” Eileen said. “But never about what I really want to know.”

“And what is that?” Tom said, though he could give a guess; he had filed her into the same mental drawer as the librarian and certain boys who read quietly and did not try to shake hands too often.

“How people become what they are,” Eileen said. “Not their bravado. The little things. The first lie they told. The first time they were pleased to be cruel.”

Tom blinked once, slowly. “You are pleasant company, Eileen Prince.”

“I am honest,” she said.

“And cruel?”

“Only when I am hungry,” she said, and shut her book.

The older boys laughed, suddenly, at the other end of the library. There was the sound of a chair scraping. “I’ve been thinking,” a voice said in a tone that meant the speaker had not, in fact, done anything like thinking. “Perhaps we ought to ask Riddle to tell us who our grandmother was. He has been licking the pages of those registers all week. You can smell it.” Another voice—the same drawl that had drifted across Slughorn’s room—said, “Don’t be vulgar, Avery. Riddle does not lick things. He doesn’t taste them at all. He only counts.”

Eileen looked down sharply; her fingers pinched the edge of her page. Tom’s jaw settled into stillness. His hand lay relaxed on the table, palms open. This, he thought, was what one did with a snake that hissed at one’s ankle. One did not leap. One watched it and learned how it moved.

“You are welcome to come and count with me,” Tom said, without raising his voice. “I am sure you could use the practise.”

There was a silence, brief and heavy; then a laugh cut it and the boys moved on. Eileen’s shoulders eased fractionally.

“You cannot charm everyone,” she said without any comfort in it. “Particularly if you show them your teeth.”

“I am smiling,” Tom said.

“Yes,” Eileen said. “It looks like teeth, still.”

After supper, he took out his scrap of paper. Little Hangleton, near Great Hangleton. A road lined with hedges. He drew a careful, tidy map that showed nothing but the line of a road and a village square and a churchyard that existed in the clerk’s hand alone. He took the name Marvolo and placed it where it would not cut him when he reached into his pocket. The word Parseltongue did not appear on the map; there was no need. It was the legend written in invisible ink.

On a morning when the clouds opened a little and the light, for the first time in more than a week, touched the water in the lake with a few small flames, Slughorn paused him at the end of class with a hand that rested for a second on Tom’s sleeve.

“My lad,” he said. “I have sent a little note to a man I know who is very interested in… unusual talents. Harmless, harmless,” he said quickly, seeing Tom’s attention focus. “He will write you. You must answer him with care. He has a way of making people promise more than they intended.” He tilted his head. “You’ll manage.”

Tom nodded. “I always answer with care.”

“I know you do,” Slughorn said, soft with pride, and released him.

Outside, under the courtyard clock, the rain had made a clean smell on the stone. A boy tripped on the steps and laughed; a girl shrieked at the coldness of a drop that had slipped down her neck. Tom stood with his book under his arm and thought of a cottage in a village that made no demands on the map, of an old ring in a cracked box, of a man who had given his name to an unwilling grandson by mistake and would never know it. He thought of Eileen’s handwriting, neat and cautious, and the way her curiosity had sharpened like a knife when she said the word cruel.

He returned to the library one more time that day, because he had learned that ideas cooled if one neglected them. He opened the rural register to the page with the Gaunts. He did not touch the ink. He let the name rest there like an animal sleeping. He did not wake it.

“You’re here again,” the librarian said, not unkindly. It was possible that she found neatness restful.

“I have not yet found what I am not looking for,” Tom said.

“And what is that?” she asked.

“A mistake,” Tom said.

“Ah,” she said. “We always think we know where to look for those.” She returned to her knitting.

By now, Eileen had become accustomed to the sound of him thinking. It made a quietness that filled the table. She gathered her books with her circumspect hands and paused.

“You haven’t,” she said, her chin angling towards the page, “written to your mother to ask her whether she’s ever heard that name.”

Tom’s gaze did not flicker. “My mother,” he said. “Is dead.”

Eileen’s fingers tightened and relaxed. She did not say sorry. She said, instead, “Then you will have to ask someone else, once you have decided who you will let know that you are asking.”

“Yes,” Tom said.

“You’ll tell me when you decide,” Eileen said. It sounded like a statement she did not expect him to contradict.

“When I decide,” Tom said, “you will probably know, because you will be the one I ask to fetch a key.”

Eileen made a motion that might have been half a curtsey or half a shrug and went away in her precise, self-contained way. He watched her go for a second longer than politeness required. He lowered his eyes to the page again.

The candles burnt lower. The afternoon reached the point where the school exhaled, the time when even the ghosts seemed to travel more slowly, when the corridors listened to what was being said in the rooms and kept it. Tom closed the register, because one did not encourage books to open to one again if one had not paid them with care. He slid the ribbon round the Ministry roll, neat, snug, as if he were binding a wound.

As he left, Abraxas glanced up from his chessboard, the angle of his chin showing a man who had been told all his life where to look and found that the view had not changed in a decade.

“Off to count again?” he said idly.

Tom did not bother to waste the smallest word on him. He smiled, very slightly, so that the smile was his alone, and went out into the corridor, where the floor had been polished to a mirror’s dullness. He touched his pocket once to ensure that the scrap of paper sat where he had left it. It did.

The lake lay dark. The rain had stopped. A ribbon of weak light lay along the hills and made a path. Tom considered the path and stored it. Threads, he had discovered, could be spun or cut. He felt the weight of a new one tugging, so slight as to be almost nothing, and he put his hand on it the way a man put his hand on the invisible string that controlled a kite. He would pull. Not now; not yet. He had a classroom to charm, a professor to please in such a way that the man believed he had done the charming, a few carefully chosen friends to acquire. He had a ring to find, somewhere. He had a name to make a key.

Back in the common room, by the green fire, the older boys laughed again. Tom watched the shapes their mouths made and memorised them. He sat at a desk in the corner, where the light struck just behind his right shoulder, and began his History of Magic essay with a sentence so polite that Binns would read it twice before he fell back into his accustomed fog. He thought in the spaces between words of a cottage that might be standing in a field where no fence had been moved in three months.

When he went to sleep, the name he did not yet own lay under his pillow with his wand. It was not proof; it was not any sort of comfort. It was a thread. He held it in the dark and did not tug, not tonight. He lay very still, the way one did when one listened for a snake beneath the skirting board, and when he closed his eyes, he saw a ring glint, once, in a stranger’s clumsy hand, and the candlelight ran like water over it and disappeared.