Blake’s a valet, along with the other bloke. I always forget their names.
There are two ladies’ maids and a footman or three. Of course all of them have to sign secrecy contracts and that sort of thing.” She sighed, glancing back toward the door where Topham stood respectfully at attention. “Mattie and Bent and I all grew up with house elves caring for us. It’s a little hard getting used to having actual humans around.
But time marches on, apparently.”
“I guess Piggen was right,” James muttered.
“Who?”
“Piggen. He’s the Gryffindor house elf. He says all the elves are worried that they’ll lose their jobs. I told him it wasn’t that bad a deal, since they were all basically slaves anyway, but they don’t see it that way.”
Millie nodded and shrugged. “Mummy says that hiring Muggles is a way to spread goodwill for when the Vow completely breaks down.
She says that keeping unpaid servants around is a relic from a darker age, anyway.”
James considered this, but his reply was drowned by Topham, who suddenly spoke to the room at large, announcing another arrival.
“The Countess Eunice Vandergriff of Blackbrier,” he proclaimed loftily.
James turned to see a woman so ancient and wrinkled that he wondered briefly if she was older than the manor itself. She walked imperiously in a sweeping burgundy dress, her back ramrod straight as she clacked a cane to the marble floor, seemingly more for effect than support.
“Mother,” Mr. Vandergriff said grandly, moving to kiss the old woman on the cheek. Millie and Benton followed suit. The Countess accepted this with stoic patience, eyeing the room severely. Her gaze alit upon James like a set of weights and he had to resist the urge to shrink back from her stare.
“Please introduce me to our guest,” she said, nodding once toward James. Her voice was high and tremulous, painstakingly genteel.
“Of course,” Mrs. Vandergriff said, stepping back and smiling aside at James. “This is Mr. James Sirius Potter, Millicent’s new friend from school.”
The Countess’ eyes crinkled slightly at the corners and she seemed to suppress a small, knowing smile. “Millicent’s new ‘friend’, indeed?”
James stepped forward, his mind racing as he wondered what was expected from him under the circumstances. “Nice to meet you, er, ma’am.”
“In this house, you may call me Lady Blackbrier, which is my less formal title,” the Countess said, extending her gloved hand, palm down. James shook it tentatively by the fingers. She seemed content with this. “And I shall call you James, rather than by your more formal title, I think.”
James blinked up at the woman, who regarded him with slightly raised brow.
“My more formal title, ma’am—I mean, erm, Lady Blackbrier?”
“Certainly yes,” she answered smoothly. “You are the firstborn heir to the master of the Black estate of Grimmauld, are you not?”
“Er…” James frowned, replaying her words in his head. Was it possible that she meant Grimmauld place? “I… guess so?” he answered.
“Then by law that makes you the future Earl of Black Downing, if I’m not mistaken. And I’m quite certain that I am not.” She cinched her left eyebrow a notch higher, giving James the impression of a regal wink. A moment later, she turned away and said in a louder voice, “What does a lady need to do to get a toddy to warm her poor bones from the cold?”
Topham bustled, and the conversation in the room gradually resumed.
James stood exactly where the Countess had left him, his eyes wide, completely flummoxed.
“Well,” Millie said brightly, half a smile cocked onto her lips.
“Does this mean I must start calling you ‘M’Lord’?”
12. – Midnight rendezvous
The answer to James’ early, idle question—would he and Millie, while visiting her family, be more or less supervised than they were at school—was answered over the course of the following hours and days.
Every moment was scheduled, it seemed, and there were always people around. It was less like being supervised, exactly, and more like attending a sort of school for aristocrats, where the lessons were tea time, formal receptions, incomprehensibly dull party games, and long-winded introductions to this visiting family or that impressive dignitary or the other guest foreign ambassador whom James had only ever seen in photographs in the Daily Prophet but whose knee Millie remembered sitting on when she was five years old, and whose children she asked after with sincere fondness. It took James awhile to realize that many of the people that appeared in the paintings decking the manor house walls were real, living people, albeit much older, who frequented the home over the holidays.
Every meal was a nearly three-hour affair for which everyone changed into their best clothes and went through a sort of multi-room procession, beginning in the drawing room for aperitifs (expertly presided over by Topham the butler), then moving to the long, regal dining room for the actual courses (with carefully assigned seating that Millie had to coach James through) whereupon more Muggle servants in tailcoats and white ties served the food and poured the drinks, and ending eventually in the parlor (for the ladies) and the library (for the gentlemen).
After dinner on the second night, James joined the men as they gathered around the enormous library hearth, which was large enough to park a car in, drinking a brownish-ruby liquor called cognac (James himself received a glass of warmed butterbeer with a sprig of holly on the rim), and talked loftily of weighty matters of which James had little understanding: upcoming changes of justices at the Wizengamot; revised regulations about magical flight in Muggle places; breaches of international magical secrecy in places like Tibet and Istanbul. At first James felt awkward and out-of-place, but soon enough he realized that not only was he interested in the topics, he was welcomed into the discussion by Mr. Vandergriff himself, who always stood in his dinner jacket with his back to the fire, swirling his cognac in a round bowl-like glass.
“Your father was on the scene when the wizarding monks of Lijiang City threw open their doors for their Muggle counterparts, if I am not mistaken,” he prodded James with a nod. “I envy the conversations your family must have of an evening!”
“We don’t talk about it much as a family, actually,” James admitted. “But Dad and I did talk about it in his study. He said that the monks of Lijiang had wished for centuries to combine the methods of their magical lifestyle with their non-magical neighbors. They believe that even the Muggle monks are secretly magical, but that theirs is a magic of the inner-world of the mind. They call it the inscape.”
One of the evening’s dinner guests, a fat Ministry official with huge pork-chop sideburns, grey as iron, and a mottled red nose, now redder from cognac, snorted into his glass. “Everyone knows the wizarding cannot merely teach magic to the Muggles. Well-intentioned codswollop.”
“Dad says the wizard monks don’t intend to teach magic to the Muggle monks. They want to be taught by them, about their own more subtle disciplines of inner magic. The only reason they waited until the magical boundaries were weakening was because it felt selfish to them to want to know both.”
The Ministry official harrumphed at this, but Mr. Vandergriff (whose actual title was Lord William of Blackbrier) smiled and raised his glass in a toast. “To the wise wizarding monks of Lijiang, and all the rest of us who will hopefully make the best of this brave new world we find ourselves on the cusp of.”
James raised his own glass, enjoying the grown-up feeling of taking part in such a proper-sounding toast, but the effect was marred shortly by the late arrival of another wing of the family, accompanied by a gaggle of three small children. The children had heard of James Potter (or, more accurately, of his famous father) and were immediately enthralled. The two boys and one girl, all under six years old and immaculately dressed in miniature versions of the adult formal wear, immediately claimed James as their own and circled him like happy butterflies, demanding he pla
y with them, acting out the stories they’d been told and retold about his legendary father.
James played along gamely, reluctantly giving in to their insistent rambunctiousness, until Millie emerged from the parlor and intervened on his behalf.
“You know,” she said, dipping her head secretively, “James is rather famous himself. He once played Treus in ‘the Triumvirate’.”
The two boys’ eyes widened in newfound amazement as they looked up at James. The girl, who was the eldest cocked her head dubiously. “No, he couldn’t have,” she protested with flinty-eyed certainty. “He’s too young.”
“It was a production at our school,” Millie explained. “Everyone in it was young. Even Donovan, the villain.”
“I want to be Donovan the villain!” the youngest boy, Nigel, suddenly shouted. “Edmund can be the king. The king doesn’t do anything. He’s just a fat old numpty.”
And with that, for better or worse, it was apparently decided that the children, with Millie’s and James’ help, would put on their own version of the Triumvirate, acting it out in the drawing room for the benefit of the adults and even the Muggle servants two nights hence, on Christmas Eve.
“What a charming idea,” Mrs. Vandergriff announced, giving James a warm, surprised smile. He started to protest that it hadn’t at all been his idea, but then he understood her expression: half grateful and half sympathetic. The Lady of the house was secretly relieved that someone would be occupying the children, who could, at times, be quite a handful. He glanced at Millie, who merely shrugged and nodded at him. The children cheered this development enthusiastically.
It was nearing eleven o’clock before the family and guests all began to trickle up to the second and third floors where the many bedrooms ranged down long hallways. James met Millie at the bottom of the grand staircase to say goodnight. She pecked him chastely on the cheek in the sight of her parents in the hall below and the painting of a stern-faced Vandergriff patriarch on the wall above.
“Meet me in the dining room in half-an-hour,” she whispered into his ear, so close that her breath tickled. A moment later, she turned and ran up the steps, her dress flouncing around her ankles. He watched her go, uncertain what to make of her suggestion. Did she want time alone with him? Somehow he expected that she had more in mind than a brief snog in the dark.
He waited in his room for twenty minutes with the door closed and the fireplace roaring, filling the room with golden light and warmth.
The four-poster bed was as high as a table and wide enough for his whole family to sleep on. The curtains bracketing the windows were twelve feet from floor to ceiling, held back by golden cords as thick as his wrist. A clock on the mantel stood square and upright, like a soldier at attention, its brass face gleaming, its soft tick cutting the minutes into precise, paper-thin slices. James waited and watched. When the clock struck eleven, it emitted a faint ratchet and whirr, stood higher on its wooden legs, and raised a pair of articulated brass arms. It struck its own bell with one arm and wound itself with the other, twisting a tiny key in what, for all intents and purposes, now looked like its bellybutton.
Just as it had the previous night, the fire diminished in the hearth as if someone had turned down a dimmer switch, shrinking from a flickering roar to a sleepy bed of red coals which danced with only a few tongues of flame. The cords of the curtains untied themselves and the curtains swept shut over the windows, closing like sleepy eyelids.
The effect made James himself blink with tiredness. Even without house elves (at least upstairs, he reminded himself) the manor was clearly deeply enchanted.
He shook himself before he could drift into a deeper doze, got up, instinctively grabbed his coat from the wardrobe by the door, and slipped silently out into the darkened hall.
The portrait of the stern-faced Vandergriff patriarch presided over the grand staircase, now dim in the glow of a few remaining candles. The figure was much larger than life, seated in a straight-backed wooden chair and wearing a red top-coat resplendent with medals and epaulettes and rows of brass buttons. Its mutton-chop bearded face was wide and somber, with regal eyes that seemed to own everything it gazed upon. A fat hand with hairy knuckles absently patted a huge St. Bernard dog that sat panting next to the chair, its tongue dangling like a carpet in need of rolling up.
“You’re not going to tell on us, are you?” James whispered up at the huge face as he slipped down the landing.
“You’re not up to something that needs telling on, are you?” the portrait replied consideringly, raising a patient, bushy eyebrow at James.
James shrugged and padded onward, down the carpeted stairs.
He honestly didn’t know what they were up to.
Millie was already waiting for him in the dining room, merely a girl-shaped shadow on the other side of the long, gleaming table. She had changed out of her poofy evening gown into a pair of jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt. Her coat was slung over her shoulder.
“Come on!” she whispered eagerly, and darted toward a rear door. James recognized it as the door Topham and the servants used during mealtimes. She pushed through into a narrow hall, turned toward an equally narrow stairwell, and flitted down, taking the steps two at a time. James followed, trying to match both her speed and her stealth, which was no easy task. She had apparently done this many, many times before, whatever this was.
The downstairs was clearly the domain of the house elves.
Everything was smaller and far more austere. James spied his first house elf as they passed a diminutive kitchen. The elf was scrubbing the top of a wooden butcher block but paused to look up as he and Millie darted past. James sensed more than saw other elves moving here and there throughout the warren of lower rooms. There was a laundry, a pantry, a sewing room complete with an ancient treadle-powered sewing machine, and a wine cellar decked with racks of dusty bottles.
Finally, Millie pulled open a door at the end of a short hall.
Cold air and flecks of snow rushed in with it. She glanced back for the first time, her eyes sparkling with mischief. “Oh good,” she said in a quick, low voice. “You remembered to bring your coat.”
“What are we—?” he began, but she was already gone, vanished into the darkness beyond the door. James darted to follow, tugging the door closed behind him with an impatient thunk.
Millie ran ahead again along a fieldstone path, neatly cleared of snow, which curved down the slope of the rear yard. He heard her laugh faintly on the cold wind and felt a moment of annoyance at her for not explaining what they were up to or where they were going. It occurred to James, and not for the first time, that Millicent Vandergriff enjoyed teasing and mysteriousness just a bit too much.
Like many of the smaller houses on the boulevard that led to Blackbrier Quoit, the manor’s back garden sloped away to a shingle of rocky beach and a boathouse. This one, however, was nestled snug among the boundary of trees, poking through them like a hedgehog through a shrubbery. The building was squat and grey, built of sturdy stone and adorned with deep-set, perfectly square windows. Millie reached the green-painted door and heaved it open onto pearly darkness.
James slowed to a trot as she turned her face back to smile at him. Her lips were very red in the darkness, and her cheeks glowed with color.
“Have you ever ridden a snowmobile before?”
James blinked at her as if she’d just spoken in a different language.
“It’s OK,” she went on, reading his expression. “I hadn’t either until a year ago. Blake showed me how. It’s easy, actually.”
She turned away again, nearly bursting with excitement, and her boots knocked on the wood of the boathouse floor.
“Wait!” James called hoarsely, following her with deepening trepidation. “Did you say a… a snowmobile?”
The interior of the boathouse was dim with the preternatural glow of the snowy world outside, bathing the old shelves and workbench and hanging anchors and coils of rope with a moony softness.
The opposite end of the space was a huge garage door, closed and locked tight. The floor was a wooden frame around a huge rectangular hole. A boat hung over the hole, floating by pure magic so that it bobbed slightly, as if haunted by the ghost of swells past. The hull was gleaming varnished wood, long and sleek, with brass portholes, its top wrapped in blue tarp and yellow rope, sealed for the winter, hiding its glory.
Millie ignored the boat, stopping at a railing and leaning over to peer into the dimness beneath the boathouse.
“Blake?” she whispered, her voice suddenly tentative.
“Vroom, vroom, M’Lady,” a voice called up.
“Ugh, I told you never to call me that outside of the house. It’s embarrassing.” As she spoke, she turned back to James, reached to take his hand, and led him to a ladder that ran from the ceiling down through the hole in the floor.
“Millie,” James said impatiently, tugging on her hand to get her attention. “What is this? What are we doing? We’re not going to get into loads of barney for this, are we?”
“Oh, don’t be silly, James,” Millie soothed, returning to him and nestling into his arms. She batted her eyes up at him. “You’ve seen what my life looks like here. A girl needs to escape sometimes. She needs to be reminded that life isn’t all white gloves and cucumber sandwiches. Why, you should hear the dickens my mother says she got up to when she was my age. A little sneaking out is to be expected.
Why, it’s nearly a tradition.”
“So that means if we get caught,” James ventured tentatively, “we won’t be in any sort of trouble?”
Millie’s eyes widened and twinkled with excitement. “Oh, it would be completely scandalous! My father would go absolutely through the roof! It would make the newspapers and everything! That’s what makes it so much fun!”
She tugged him again to the ladder and began to clamber down herself. James could see the dull grey expanse of ice beneath, skirled with tendrils of snow. Three black shapes huddled there, one distinctly man-shaped, the other two long and low, looking like motorbikes cross-bred with thestrals and fitted onto skis. The rear “legs” of the machines knelt on looped treads like miniature tanks. James had heard of snowmobiles and even seen a few photographs, but never imagined encountering one in real life.