Saturday afternoon, 12 September 1942, at Malfoy Manor in Tintagel...
Lucius Malfoy had enjoyed the wedding supper well enough, but as parties went, the dancing left much to be desired, even though he had gone around the floor at least once with Isabella (they were no longer engaged, but as Bella’s fiancé was at the front, she knew he at least wouldn’t step on her feet). Fiammetta Kyteler had also danced with him, but Kat wasn’t there and neither was Mercuria, and Dory and Silvia Vincenti didn’t know how, and the only way he was going to ask Jenny to dance was if his mother made him. Which, hopefully, she wouldn’t, not even to be Hospitable.
Fiammetta had wandered back to Dory and Silvia, and Lucius had followed her; he was not going to dance with Alastor in Dylan’s stead, even though he supposed it would be Hospitable and his mother probably would have-there was something about the idea that just bothered him. Dory was sitting in her chair, practically sitting on her hands, and Fiammetta and Silvia were trying to coax her into a game, but she kept shaking her head and insisting that she would get dirty.
“Dory,” said Lucius after a moment, “you know Fia’s right. Even if you do get dirty, Mrs Vincenti can clean everything up and besides, we’re inside.”
Dory looked down at a small mark on her dress left by a crumb of cake. “All right,” she said softly. She had known Fia and Silvia for most of their lives, but she barely knew Lucius and now she owed allegiance to him. Was he ‘Lucius’, or ‘Mr Malfoy’ or ‘sir’, she wondered? “Will Scourgify get this out, do you think?” she asked Fia. “I know it and…I don’t want to bother Mrs…Mamma Egeria.”
“She won’t mind-” Fia began, but she stopped when she noticed Lucius leaning over to peer at the stain. It was a little difficult to see.
“Scourgify?” Lucius looked at it sceptically. He had seen Isabella use Scourgify a few times, but never on fabric that delicate, and certainly not for a stain so small.
“Scourgify would be too harsh for that,” said Fia. “I can get that out, want me to show you the charm?”
“Thank you,” Dory said gratefully.
Fia demonstrated the charm carefully, exaggerating the gestures a little so that it would be easy for Dory to see how they went. The cake stain disappeared. Lucius also watched closely, because it had occurred to him that one wouldn’t get in trouble for wearing one’s best clothes outside if one got all the stains out before one’s mother saw one.
“I think I follow it,” Dory said, watching carefully. “I hope I won’t make another mark to test it with though!”
“Well, if you do, just get me to watch,” said Fia, and then she glanced at the tables. “If I were you I’d be concentrating on the fact that we have all this food, it doesn’t happen every day…”
Dory smiled. “It doesn’t,” she agreed. “Everything is very beautiful!” she added to Lucius, because she didn’t want to seem ungrateful.
“Thanks,” said Lucius, but then he thought about it. She was thanking him, and he hadn’t had anything to do with making it beautiful. He had spent most of the morning worrying about what his mother and Nico and Yvon and Alessio were locked up discussing, when he wasn’t listening to Alastor complain. “But you were the ones who made everything pretty,” he finally said, a little troubled by the fact that she was thanking him for work she’d done herself.
Dory blushed. “We had lots of fun doing the flowers,” she told him truthfully. “Your Mamma…La Donna…has such beautiful gardens.”
“She does,” said Lucius, smiling. “I’m glad it was fun.” He’d never thought about who set up the flowers and the tables and the chairs when his parents gave parties before, but he didn’t think he could have liked it so much any more if she hadn’t told him that it had been fun. It was very nice to be able to simply command that everything beautiful should appear, and on very short notice-but it rather implied that a lot of people would have to give up their ordinary work to make it happen, and it wasn’t as though the ordinary work would not still need doing.
Dory stood up carefully, and checked her skirt for any more marks. “I thought the wedding was very romantic. Miss Ducas is so lovely…I mean, Mrs Zabini,” she said to Lucius, and immediately reminded herself that that was girl stuff, and he probably wasn’t interested. “I would love to be able to make dresses like that,” she added to Silvia.
“I’m sure Isabella can teach you. If you’d like to help her, she has lots of work to do.” Lucius thought that it had been very romantic himself, and had been about to tell Dory how Marco and Melina had loved each other since they were children, but then she had changed the topic of discussion to dresses. Well, it was a useful skill, and he certainly appreciated Isabella’s facility with it when he tore the lace off his sleeves falling out of a tree or he needed a new frock coat.
Silvia nodded shyly. “I help Isabella sometimes.”
“I’ll be going back to school tomorrow,” Dory reminded him. Then she felt silly. “Oh, you mean in the holidays I suppose. Of course.”
Lucius nodded. Isabella would need a lot of help to get everyone ready for the Christmas Eve ball that his family usually put on.
“And over the summer,” said Silvia.
Dory smiled at her, although the summer seemed impossibly far away. The summer just passed they’d all been in Londinium, and she couldn’t help but wonder what else would change before the next one. “Over the summer,” she agreed aloud.
“I’ll miss you all,” said Fia. “I know I can visit, but it won’t be the same. No cinema!” she teased.
Silvia made a face. “They shot his mother.”
“I’ve never been to it,” said Lucius, wondering what Silvia was talking about.
“I went with…” Dory began and then stopped in horror and turned red. She’d been with her mother and father! “Um. Silvia and Fia snuck out to ‘Bambi’ in the summer.” It took all her willpower to force the memory of one of her few trips to the Muggle world with the Crockfords away before it made her cry. “They got the money and everything by themselves, I don’t know how!” she said and stopped and bit her lip.
“Found it,” said Fia serenely. “I’m good at ‘finding’ things.”
Lucius looked at Dory curiously and patted her arm. “If you want to go again, I’m sure we can arrange something. Alastor promised to take me some time.”
“Thanks,” Dory said, sniffed, and was immediately horrified by how loud it sounded. “I don’t know if you’d like Bambi though. Perhaps something new would be even better.” Bambi’s mother died at the end of the film, she knew, and she remembered that Lucius’ Mamma had been dead just like hers, for a little while. Except her mother hadn’t believed in queens, and would never come back as one. “Do you know of any new films?” she asked Fia quickly.
Fia shook her head. “We don’t hear about them much at school.” She glanced at Lucius. “I think you’d like the cinema. It’s brilliant. I’m going to take Jack sometime. He won’t cry,” she said, teasing Silvia, but only a little.
Silvia laughed at the very idea of Jack Oldman, crying.
“It’s very pretty,” Dory agreed. “I don’t know how it works. It’s like portraits, but with a story and it goes on for so long. A play, but without actors right there.”
“It sounds like magick,” said Lucius. “But of course I suppose it isn’t.”
“No,” Dory said. Hubert had sort of explained it to her. “You take a picture, like a painting, but see-through and you shine a light through it so it appears on a screen. Which is just a white wall. And if you string the pictures together they move. But it looks smooth, not like a lot of pictures. I don’t know how they do that. And you can hear it all.”
Lucius considered that. “Like when you draw pictures in a notebook and flip the pages fast to make them move,” he said, remembering when Alessio had taught him that trick long ago. He was a much better artist than Alessio was; Alessio could only draw stick figures, and always of people flying. But he didn’t have the patience to do the trick very often himself. “But I don’t know how they do the sound.”
“And so big,” Dory said. “I really don’t know about the sound though. You can’t draw sounds and flip them really fast!”
“No,” said Lucius, who thought he’d just said that. “So, Dory. How did everything go last night?” He was sure it had gone just fine, or people would have been talking about it, but it seemed to be the thing to ask.
“Oh,” Dory said. “Good, I think. Right, Silvia?” Everyone had seemed happy enough.
“It was wonderful,” Silvia exclaimed. “Signor Nicodemo came, he’s paterfamilias now, isn’t he?” Lucius nodded. Silvia glanced at Dory. “I told you it would be easy.”
“It was,” Dory agreed. She smiled shyly at Lucius. “I don’t really understand it all yet, but I’m sure it’s because my Italian is not as good as everyone else’s.”
“I don’t know that I would have understood everything either,” said Lucius, who couldn’t remember if he’d ever seen one of the Italian adoption ceremonies. “Religion…can be confusing.” He laughed. “We have so much of it around here!”
“Yes,” Dory said slowly. “I didn’t really have a religion before, I don’t think.”
“We have lots of them,” said Lucius. “It’s all right if you’re confused, I think we all are sometimes. There are Christians and streghe and whatever it is the family is…” He sighed, and then looked up.
There was a man looking down at him. A grizzled man, who was walking with a cane. Lucius wasn’t sure he’d been introduced to this man, but the roof served as an introduction in the case of a wedding like this one, didn’t it? “So you shrunk yourself! Or was it just the shock of believing you’d been jilted? I had no idea that getting jilted made faeries shrink, that’s one to tell Proctor! Well, don’t think it’ll get you out of work Monday morning, ‘Artisson’.”
Lucius frowned. At this point he was fairly sure that he was being teased, and he did not like being teased by perfect strangers, even if he’d met them before, and didn’t remember it. “How do you know I shrank? Maybe your head just swelled.” He snorted. “At any rate, I can’t leave the house until Tuesday. If you’ve got objections to that, talk to Mamma.”
“Now I’ll have to find out what you and Alessio did to get yourselves grounded.” The stranger laughed. “You look just like your father did when she…I mean he…was your age,” he said, and then he frowned. “I was in your father’s year at Slytherin.”
“Pappa went to the Università di Bologna,” Lucius informed the man gravely. “Perhaps you mean Mamma? She was in Slytherin.”
“I thought your mother was a Ravenclaw.” He frowned.
Lucius snorted. “Gabrielle Lestrange is not my mother,” he said in an arch tone, drawing himself all the way up to his full height.
“No wonder I mistook you for your brother at first,” the stranger grumbled, though clearly he hadn’t at all. “You wouldn’t happen to know where he is?”
doryatschool, drschadenfreude, fiammettapagana and luxserpentis