After the Ball

Narcissa

My sister, oh! my sister, there's the cause on't.

Whether we fall to ambition, blood, or lust,

Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust.

Bellatrix was crying. It was awful. She had come home from Christiania, laden down with suitcases full of books, Norwegian chocolate and new robes, and walked through the front door into a house so full of unspoken tension it seemed incredible that the roof was still on. Their mother had concealed it well at first, taken her eldest daughter up to her room for a wash and brush up, arranged a late lunch on the old Queen Anne table the girls had been forbidden to touch until they were ten years old, and called the family together for Andromeda to make her announcement. So Andromeda had made it, and Bellatrix burst into tears. She didn't scream or shriek, or leap up from the table shattering glass across the floor in glittering shards. She simply put up her hands to a horrified face, began to cry, and did not stop. After twenty minutes their father, who had at first been inclined to sympathy, lost his patience and sent her up to her room with orders not to re-appear until she could control herself. Two hours later he gave her a sleeping draft and washed her face and hands with a flannel as she lay motionless on the bed, but when she woke, she wept again.

Narcissa said nothing, but stood and watched, and fetched her parents a sherry before dinner. Bellatrix did not come down, and the toast that Mother sent upstairs returned to the kitchen untouched.

'It's not my fault,' Andromeda protested, as Mother turned to her with an expression of utter shock. Oh God, Narcissa thought, oh God, she really doesn't think it is.

Two days later, little had improved. Bellatrix had emerged from her bedroom the morning after her return, a book in her hand, all the colour gone from her cheeks, the old robes buttoned back up to her neck, and drawn up a seat on the terrace. Narcissa switched places with Andromeda at the dining table to that Bella didn't have to speak to her. But Bella was hardly speaking at all. Narcissa stood and sat and walked around the house and listened. In the garden, Andromeda spoke to their mother.

'Mummy, do you think we should put off the wedding?'

Mrs Black looked up from the roses she liked to prune herself. 'Why, dear?'

'To give Bella a bit of time to ... to accept it.'

'How long?'

'What?' Andromeda frowned.

'How long will you give her? A year, five, ten? Or were you thinking of a couple of weeks? What if she never accepts it?'

'That's ridiculous!'

'Is it?' Mother's voice was cool.

'Why won't you say anything to her? Tell her she's being stupid!'

'Oh my dear girl,' Mummy said, 'but she doesn't think she is. And nor do you. But I shall think what I like of the pair of you.' The dead heads of the roses fell on the grass.

Sometimes Narcissa couldn't believe either of her sisters. Andromeda had been lucky, and had no idea. She could hardly think that her parents were pleased about the whole affair - Andromeda's shocked expression when Mummy asked if she were pregnant had been a rare bright spot in some difficult days - but they'd been far more decent than convention demand. Yes, the wedding breakfast could be held from Ted's home so that his whole family could attend. Yes, she could wear her grandmother's veil. Two mornings after Andromeda had made her announcement, with Bella still in Christiania, Narcissa had been told to put on some decent robes and make sure she was around at eleven, because Ted's parents were coming to discuss the settlement. That was when Narcissa knew that it was final, that nothing would be pulled out of the hat to save them all. The Blacks might not like their daughter's choice of husband, but damn it they would see things through.

The car that drew up outside was an angular black monster; quite different from the Ministry cars with which Narcissa was familiar.

'It's a vintage Daimler' said Andromeda, in the tones of one who didn't know much, but still a lot more than those around her. 'They wouldn't let me have a go at driving it.'

Mr Black gave a wry smile, 'I should think not.' He turned towards the mirror and flicked a finger over one bushy eyebrow. 'Best foot forward now.'

Narcissa stood at the back of the hall and listened. Ted's mother wore trousers and purple shoes.

'Mummy, this Professor Sir Thomas Tonks.' Ted's father had thick silver hair that allowed him to look distinguished with no further effort. He was an economist, which, Andromeda told their uncomprehending aunt, was a person who studied how money worked.

'And this is Narcissa. Our eldest daughter is abroad at present.' Narcissa held out her hand and Sylvia Tonks smiled.

'Andromeda told us about you. My daughter Elizabeth was very impressed your letter in Arithmancy Today.'

Mummy looked puzzled.

'I didn't realize your daughter was a witch as well,' she said, and Sylvia Tonks laughed.

'Oh no, not at all! She's a nuclear physicist, but she coached Ted through his Arithmancy O.W.L. examination - it's not his strongest subject - and kept it up as something of a hobby.'

The two sets of parents and Andromeda made their way into the library and shut the door behind them. Narcissa went to sit on the terrace, and listened at the open window.

It was silly for her not to have realized that their parents must long ago have considered what to settle on their daughters. Avernus Caughtler had come up from London with a document already half drawn up, although Andromeda's marrying a Mudblood made for some interesting alterations. She lost all the jewellery for a start, her mother pointing out that as almost all of it was cursed against Muggle-borns it was probably not a wise thing to have around, and as she certainly couldn't hand it on to her daughter the collection ought not to be broken up. Occasionally Narcissa risked a glance through the window, noting with amusement the scarlet faces of the happy couple every time Caughtler's rumbling voice rolled out a clause about any issue of the union. They broke for lunch and Narcissa came in to eat.

'You'll want your own firm to look at it, of course,' Caughtler was saying to Ted's parents. 'If you send the name to my office, I'll have a copy sent over.'

'But we haven't - ' Ted began before his father broke in.

'Oh for goodness sake, Edmund, sometimes I think that magic rots the brain! Do you really think we'd have sent you off to Hogwarts without going through every single word of that parent contract?' He nodded at the thick-set solicitor. 'Send it over to Standish Pridicte.' Avernus Caughtler raised his eyes at the name of the old firm with its Muggle-born head and nodded towards Mr Black.

'I think there might be some unanticipated revisions before we reach a conclusion,' he smiled.

Narcissa Black, clad in her old Hogwarts Quidditch robes, which had seen rather better days, but which she had seen no point in replacing as she wasn't foolhardy enough to continue with the sport in even the most amateur adult leagues, hovered on her broomstick outside Lucius Malfoy's bedroom window. It was a fine summer night, and the window was easily wide open enough for her to climb through, but a childhood spent visiting a string of elderly pure-blood relations in elderly buildings around Great Britain had taught Narcissa that an open window in the middle of the night was seldom an invitation to anything more pleasant that a cracked skull. She fell back on the old standby,

'Lucius!' The blond head, half-buried in unseasonably heavy covers, did not stir. 'Lucius! Oh hell, Lumos!' The bedroom flooded with brilliant light and Lucius shot bolt upright in his bed.

'You've got five seconds to declare yourself. Five, four,'

'Oh, for God's sake, Lucius, will you let me in?'

If Lucius Malfoy was surprised at the appearance of a pretty young woman on his bedroom windowsill in the middle of the night, he did a commendable job of concealing it.

'Oh, right, hang on a sec.' He crossed to the window and jerked up the sash before bolting it in place and holding out a hand. 'Come in.' He was wearing a modern nightshirt that came up to his knees, highly fashionable, and, Narcissa thought, rather silly. 'To what do I owe this pleasure?'

Lucius had always known the right way to react. That was why they had always got on so well, which was why they would surely end up married when they finally got round to talking about it. Their minds worked in the same way. He plucked a dressing gown from the back of the door and covered the offending nightclothes.

'D'you want a cloak or anything?' Narcissa shook her head and sat down on the sofa, kicking off her shoes and kicking her feet up beneath her. Lucius crossed back to the bed and sat down.

'I like Andromeda,' he said, 'but I think she's made a bad decision.'

'Yes. And our parents aren't saying a single thing against it.'

Lucius shrugged. 'Would it stop her if they did? They probably think it's better to keep things civil. She must know they don't like it. At least this way when it all ends in divorce no one's said anything insurmountably offensive.'

'But that's just it!' Narcissa heard her voice leap in pitch. 'I don't think she does know. I don't think she's thought for a second about what it really means to people. Lucius,' her voice fell again, 'Bella's still in Norway; she doesn't know.'

His face went chalk white. 'Oh, fuck!'

When she had been six years old, their parents had taken a house up in the Western Isles for a holiday. During a miraculously sunny and midge-free Scottish summer, a series of friends and family had come up to stay and the Black girls had played with them on the pink and white sand. Narcissa remembered that one morning they had built an assault course with the Lestrange brothers, Lucius, and Laurie Nott, who was sixteen years old but absolutely adamant that there was no way he was joining the Patils' expedition climbing Muggle-style up the local Munro. Instead he had stayed and acted sheep-dog for the younger children on the beach, insisting that Lucius keep his sun-hat on and tying his handkerchief tightly round Andromeda's grazed knee once she had licked off the blood. They had dug trenches that filled with water, made a hopscotch course out of sand, and the piece de resistance was a couple of jellyfish the size of dinner plates to be bounced on in the hop, skip and jump. All they needed was a wand to inflate them, and a wand was not to be had, Laurie's mother having confiscated his that morning for duelling with Olympias Malfoy over the breakfast table.

It was Narcissa who solved the problem, staying behind with the grown-ups after lunch as the other children raced down to the rock pools, saying she was tired and drawing pictures in the sand with the tip of Mummy's wand. She set seashells in stripes on a lumpy outline of a cat, waiting for that moment when Mummy said,

'Are you sure you don't want to go and play?' in a tone of voice that indicated all too plainly that Narcissa's presence was impeding discussion of Grown-Up Things.

'I don't know.' A razor shell scored the hard lines of whiskers in the sand, and the picture was finished. She reached out to trace another, heard her mother sigh and then said brightly, 'May I take your wand?'

They were over-enthusiastic inflating the first jellyfish, so that it exploded, but there were lots around and the blue ones weren't poisonous and could be safely picked up and soon there was a thick carpet of tough and springy jelly, and Narcissa, in tribute to her success, took the first run at the obstacle course.

Later, when they all lay exhausted back with their parents, sand sticking to their legs, Lucius looked up at Johanna Malfoy.

'Shall I take Andromeda and Narcissa to buy some ice-creams,' he asked, and as Johanna rummaged in her purse for some Muggle money, Lucius grinned at Narcissa and winked. Yes, the two of them had always known how things worked.

Lucius drew his feet up onto the bed.

'What on earth are you going to do?'

'I don't know,' Narcissa confessed. 'I don't think there's anything I can do. She doesn't talk to me, you know. It's not like sisters in books. But I thought ...'

Lucius looked up, 'What?'

'I thought she might talk to you. I know you're both in the Death Eaters - I mean, the real thing, I'm not stupid, do you have any idea how blatant some of them can be - and sometimes she seems to consider you sort of an elder brother. I thought if she talked to you, you could try and stop her doing anything stupid.'

'I'll certainly try. God knows, I don't want Bella doing anything stupid - oh I know she's not stupid, but still - hurting herself.' He smiled. 'Fuck. Still, at least you're going to marry a pure-blood.'

Narcissa shrugged. 'Oh, I don't yet. I've got to consider my options.'

It was rather gratifying to see that he looked suddenly and unmistakably worried.

'Silly,' she said, and dashed across to kiss him on the cheek before seizing her broom and swinging onto it and out of the window.

Bellatrix did not go to see Lucius. She stayed for her month's holiday as planned, and went back to Norway a fortnight before Andromeda's wedding, returning again for the ceremony and reception, the latter under her parents' threat of the Imperius Curse if she didn't keep herself in hand. Back home, Narcissa announced her own engagement, as upstairs Bellatrix folded her dress robes into her case in silence.

*

A couple of carrier bags laden with Christmas presents bobbing in her wake, Andromeda made her way through the hall in her sister's house into the drawing room. She loved the old place in December; it reminded her of Christmas in their parents' home. She had missed that in the first years after Bella's incarceration, before she and Narcissa had come to their tacit agreement to ignore their smaller differences in favour of their united fury at the Ministry. She found Narcissa sitting at a small table in front of the fire, surrounded by several large piles of paper and examining a small clay tablet through a magnifying glass.

'Am I allowed to look?' The bags disgorged their contents under an impressive Christmas tree.

'Of course. You'll never guess any of them. Draco's needs batteries, by the way, so I've brought you a protected set. It should work fine outside the house.'

Narcissa shook a sturdy rectangular parcel carefully. 'Not a book. Not a jigsaw. Not a clue. D'you fancy a mince pie?'

'Definitely.'

A house-elf brought in the tarts, piping hot and dusted with icing sugar. Andromeda bit into hers too quickly and had to spit it out.

'Sorry!' Outside, the afternoon sky darkened, and Narcissa waved her wand to turn on the gas lamps. They hissed gently under the crackle of the fire.

'Did you hear that Tamar Waldegrave's dead?' Andromeda said.

'No! When?'

'Last week. The news just came through from Argentina. Of course she'd been ill for years.'

'Cancer, wasn't it?'

'Something like that.'

'Poor Tamar. She used to be such fun. Actually, she rather intimidated me. Did you know she used to go out with Lucius when they were in the fourth year at Hogwarts?'

'Never! Golly. Well, she was very pretty.'

'Gorgeous, much more striking than Wilkes, really. Half Slytherin had a crush on her.'

'And remind me what she was doing in Argentina?' said Andromeda.

'Sank a Muggle fishing boat in the Channel. As well you know. Got finger-printed by the Muggle police, of all the stupid things, and had to flee to South America. Now remind me, that old Scholomance tutor of yours who left you that lovely brooch you're wearing,' Narcissa smiled, 'how did he die?'

'Lynched by Russian peasants.'

'After he?'

'Yes, all right, point taken. And I did like Tamar, really. She had a sense of humour.'

Andromeda took another mince pie.

'Will Lucius be back soon? I can't stay too much longer - Ted and I are going to the pictures.'

'He ought to be, but then he always did dawdle over shopping. Do you remember that list he gave Bellatrix to take to Norway?'

'Chocolate and dictionaries, wasn't it?'

'Something like that.' Narcissa hesitated. 'Actually, speaking of Bella, I wondered whether you might consider, well -'

'Whether I'd what?'

'Whether you'd have another go at getting in to Azkaban. They can't bar you forever.'

'Can't they?' Andromeda smiled tightly. 'I think they can and have. I burnt that fleet long ago. Besides, I've just submitted a paper to Neuromancer - a nice little case study of organic damage caused by the combined use of Cheering and Memory charms in the aftermath of the Cruciatus curse, anonymised medical records supplied by one Augusta Longbottom. There's no way on earth they're letting me onto the prison visitors' list now - which is a pity, because I've got an absolutely brilliant proposal, and I'll have to fix it up with that place in Sakhalin instead.'

'Andromeda!' Narcissa grinned, and then her face fell. 'It doesn't mean anything, though, does it?' she said quietly. 'It's the use of the curse that matters, not the complications.'

'No - though it is fun to annoy Sophronisba Hallow. That whole era's a scandal waiting to happen in terms of inadequate treatment. Anyway, if still they won't let you in, you can't really have thought they'd accept me.'

'But they do let me in. That's what politics does for one. I'm on the approved list; two visits a year.'

'But I thought -' Andromeda frowned. 'So why do you need me to go?'

'They turned me down the first two years, and then I kept failing the health test. Now it's, well,'

'What?'

'It's Bella. She won't see me.'

'What!' The mince pie tumbled unheeded from Andromeda's hand. 'She won't see you?'

'They take them - if they can - to a visiting cell, you know. Only Bellatrix refuses to go. They tell her it's me - one of the Aurors, Shacklebolt, the arrogant but honest type, he went down himself last time to try and persuade her - but she won't, she won't let me, says she doesn't want to distress ...' Narcissa finished dully. 'Oh, you've dropped ...' She rang the bell for a house-elf, which scurried in with a dustpan and brush.

Andromeda was looking closely at her hands, the soft light glinting off her fingernails. 'It's really true, Cissy? It's not that she can't see you? She won't?'

'Definitely. She doesn't want to.'

'But don't you see,' Andromeda said slowly, 'that it's good?'

Narcissa looked up. 'What do you mean?'

'She doesn't want to see you. She doesn't want to distress you. I did go there once - back when I'd just started at the Ministry, before it all - anyway, they took me to see one of the prisoners, right inside, and I tell you, a day in there and I'd have begged ... I'd have said anything ... But eight years in Azkaban, Narcissa, and Bellatrix is still strong enough to think of you. To say that she's thinking of you, and to say it every time. How many witches and wizards do you think could do that? How much power do you think it takes?'

Narcissa leant forward and threw a log onto the fire.

'I think,' she said. 'I think one day she'll show us.'

'Yes,' agreed Andromeda. 'I think so too.'