returning students are the nastiest
August 12th is the beginning of grouse season in England. Both Baring and Shaw have pointed out that once Victorian clothes had given way to Edwardian, people were more likely to stay in London for a large part of the summer. London gets hot in August, but it's much more bearable when you're not wearing a corset or spats and a shirt that's stiff with starch. Nothing, though, could touch the beginning of grouse season, at least in Tom Riddle's day. Shops closed. Parliament shut down. The fashionable parts of the city became practically deserted.
This meant, in turn, that the countryside near where the Boys' Home that Tom lived until he was eleven and in the summers after that -- that meant that just as London closed down and went to sleep, the countryside around there would come alive with the crack of guns, the sounds of motorcars and the bark of dogs at something like four or five in the morning, at fist country light. A few parties, but not too many, because this wasn't exactly a rich area of the country. Just rich enough to support a few of the last generation of squires and maybe a few merchants or bought nobility who had developed a taste for dense woods and expensive birds but not the credentials to get into the Scottish clubs.
A good deal of the land in that part of England was made out of old, abandoned country seats; the Boys Home was, in fact, was a particularly large and grimlooking one that had been donated for tax purposes, though the land around it was a nice mix of cleared fields dotted up with woods that had been growing just long enough to be dense and dark, but not old. A few streams, too, and golden fields, so that you could take a break and get a bit of sun and warmth. It was prime grouse country, and so, when the heirs of the old estate came into the place, they donated the house, retained the land, and built a new house, with all the modern conveniences, for the grouse season.
It was out of sight of the Boys House, and during the year, when the owners weren't there, there was a gamekeeper to keep people from poaching and to keep the boys off the private property. Tom remembers the day that some six year olds were brought in, bleeding and screaming because they had gone to try and sneak some fish out of the stream, and the gamekeeper had caught them. The boys had tried to run, and the gameskeeper had set the dogs on them.
The boys weren't too badly injured. The dogs had bit them, but only around the hands and the arms. A little on the face, but not at the throat, and not in a way where their injuries were anything more than mildly painful; the boys were mostly frightened out of their wits, and the gameskeeper had driven them through the big iron gates at the front of the house. Them running and stumbling and screaming with fear from the dogs, which were half-a-step behind and snapping at the boys, and the gameskeeper coming up the road at a jog with, horror of horrors, the owner of the land. The son of the man who had last owned the house. The man who had donated the house. His grousing party had been spoilt by the boys running from the dogs, and he wasn't going to have any grouse because the boys had scared them all off with their screaming and running through the woods.
All of the boys at the Home had been drilled on the importance of not leaving the yard. Besides the fact that you could get lost, you might also startle some grouse or damage grouse-property; boys who were caught out of the yard were giving a sound beating, and there were also signs posted all around the private property. "Warning. Private property. Trespassers will be shot on sight." So, once the gameskeeper had called off his dogs and the Head had made the appropriate grovelling apologies, he pulled the boys up off the cobblestone yard and gave them a thrashing with the rod.
The boys had been six. Tom had been eight. He shared a room with three other boys on the third floor; it was bitterly cold in the winter and almost sordidly hot at night because they weren't allowed to open windows for fear of escape, not that you could, anyway, since they were on the third floor. August and during the day was, in fact, the only time that the place was bearable, especially since the room was entirely too small for that many boys.
During the day, though, people cleared off. Went to different parts of the Home, and Tom could open the window and hang his elbows out and get a breath of fresh air. He was up in his room the day the boys were driven in, with the dogs and the gameskeeper and the owner all at their heels. As he watched and listened to the noise from his room, Tom wondered what was more terrible -- the dogs, baying and tearing at the end of their ropes, or the owner, who was screaming himself into a rage over the prostrate body of the Head.
In the end, the boys actually got two beatings. One, first, from the onwer, who was worked up into such a rage by then that he wasn't able to give them much, and a second, more thorough one from the Head, who laid into each of them in the courtyard with a long, thin rod. Tom had gotten switchings from that rod once or twice, and he listened to the boys scream as the Head put welts on top of welts on top of open cuts.
Eventually, Tom turned away from the scene, though he didn't close the window or go bakc to his book. Instead, he picked up a thin sort of stick that he had found on his own meanderings outside the prescribed courtyard. It wasn't very long -- only a little more than foot. He would have liked a longer one, but he had had to smuggle it underneath his coat, and Tom doubted his ability to smuggle in a full-grown switch like the one the Head was using on the boys down in the courtyard. So he held it in his hand and gave the air a few experimental swishes with it.
The only other boy in the room was lying on his bed and sort of leafing through a three-year old magazine that some kind old philanthropist woman had donated after she was done clipping all the interesting pictures out of it. The pages were also stained from mildew, just like the entirety of the house, and he watched Tom poke and stab at the air over the edge of it.
"Give it a rest, will you?" the boy said eventually, and turned the page.
Later, both he and Tom would be sent to Hogwarts together. The two of them sat, knee to knee and ankle to ankle next to each other on the Hogsmeade Express, and they also were in the same boat going across the lake. When it came to be Sorting time, though, one of them was put in Hufflepuff, and the other was put in Slytherin. Tom went into Slytherin; the other into Hufflepuff, and they didn't see too much of each other until Tom was made a prefect in his sixth year, and he caught the boy on an unauthorized trip back up from the kitchens. The house-elves were always more than eager to feed you if you should go down to them, but it was not permitted outside of meal hours because you were supposed to eat enough at meals to last you until the next one.
Tom caught the boy with his pockets full of apples and his arms full of bread. He had cake in his mouth, and Tom looked at him for a moment, but said nothing just yet.
The boy's mouth was too full of cake to say anything immediately either. He had gotten entirely fat and chubby since he started going to Hogwarts; the unlimited and good-quality food gave him the cheeks and facial features of a pig. Great big stomach and eyes that were disappearing into his face, though Tom stayed skinny, and the boy lost ten, fifteen pounds every summer that he had gone back.
While he was a prefect, Tom made a reputation for himself by never beating another student yet maintaining the strength of his authority. Instead, his punishments were always magical or ones that involved nothing more than the sheer strength of his personality bearing down on you and crushing a soul-deep acknowledgement that you had erred out of you like oil out of a seed, and Tom could see the little flicker of fear across his orphanage mate's eyes. "Come on, Tom," the boy said, wheedling. "Let me go. It's your old mate Neil, from the Boys Home. Remember me? I shared a room with you for years; we shared a room summer before last, too." He reached forward to take Tom's hand, perhaps pleadingly, but this was not a wise move as a cake tumbled out of his pocket at that moment.
Tom looked as the cake rolled across the floor, hit his shoe, and flipped over and stopped moving. Then he looked up at Neil and raised his wand with something very much like real hatred in his eyes, although his voice was steady. "I'm sorry. Rules are rules. Identidem.."
The fat piggish little boy lurched down to his knees, then, with a sob as his hands dug themselves into his pockets and started pulling out all the fruit and biscuits and candies that te elves had given him. He was crying -- fat globs of tears of that rolled down his cheeks and mixed with the crumbs, and he started to stuff the food into his mouth, repeating what his last action had been before he had met Tom. It was eating, and so he ate and ate and ate, repeating his act under the compulsion of Tom's charm.
"Give it a rest, will you?" he said, in the middle, while the boy was tearing into a miniature meat pie that smeared his fingers and face with fat that the tears just sort of slipped off.
After he said that, though, Tom didn't say anything -- just smiled and watched. He didn't like to be may have done their hunting with dogs and with guns and with gamekeepers, but he didn't need that. He didn't even need the open fields of Yorkshire to do it as long as he had the halls of Hogwarts; in fact, all that he, Tom Riddle, needed was a wand. The rest all came from inside.