Family Album: The Photographs

The photograph albums stood behind the glass front of the bookcases in the Malfoy's drawing room. Great leather bound volumes that no one ever opened standing up, never opened without ceremony. No, these were the sacred text, laid flat upon a table or a knee and opened with freshly-washed fingers and hungry eyes. Draco sat upon the sofa next to his mother, the album stretched across both their laps, looking and listening intently as her slender fingers put names to smiling faces and waving hands, Daddy and Mummy, the Black and Malfoy grandparents, all once little boys and girls proudly holding their first broomsticks, their first wands. There was Draco learning to fly on an old Comet. There stood Draco's father on the battlements of a magnificent sandcastle wearing nothing but a floppy white sun-hat, brandishing a stick at the little tin soldiers enchanted to march round and round. There was his mother with her pet kneazle on her knee, and there another photograph, three little girls in a bluebell wood, the sun shining on white dresses and long hair, two heads black, and one blonde. They were his mother and his aunts; Andromeda, whom he had hardly ever seen, and Bellatrix, who they thought he could not remember.

As parents often are about their children, they were wrong. Draco did remember Bellatrix Lestrange. The photographs had helped, of course, had reminded him when he might have wanted to forget, but it was she whom he remembered, her face, her hands, her voice. They weren't clear memories, but they were there, soft-edged pictures of inchoate events, as if seen through grease-coated glass, the dim recollections of a little boy. Draco had been three years old. She had been a tall, glamorous woman; even for his family, Bellatrix had seemed glamorous. He supposed now that it was the dark hair that he wasn't used to, and those dark eyes set deep under the sharp lines of her brows. As a little girl, he had thought her not so pretty as the ever-smiling Andromeda, but as a woman she was lovely. In the photographs, her carriage was upright and elegant like his mother's, and in his mind's eye she rose tall above him and always in motion. She had swept through a room, Draco's delighted gaze trailing in her wake, she had risen on tip-toes and swung around, long hair flying, she had fallen to lie back in an armchair looking flushed and pretty and very, very young. He remembered her voice, too, no words, just the sound, low and raw. Now when he thought of it, he imagined smoke-blackened silver.

There had been his uncle, too, Rodolphus. Draco could not remember Rodolphus very well. He had been kind enough, throwing him up to the ceiling, sitting on the floor to play with his trains, but it was Bellatrix who cared. It was Bellatrix who had held him on the rocking horse, who had let him sit on her bed as she dressed for dinner and watch as she brushed her long dark hair in front of the mirror, who had rolled him tight like a mummy in some old robes until he couldn't breathe for laughing. Rodolphus had been there, but it was Bellatrix who lived in Draco's nightmares when he learned why she didn't come to stay anymore, why his mother cried at her name and his father's face went grey and his hands shook. Draco dreamed of her in Azkaban. He thought that they did, too.

Of course, they had not spoken of it to him directly, but things had been said and he remembered, not what was said, but how. Later he had understood. Later, when his mother did not weep, but only smiled sadly, and his father lifted a glass of whisky to his mouth and set it down untouched, and they had looked at the photographs together as Narcissa pointed to the little girls, look, that is Andromeda and that is Bellatrix, and the little girls waved back, and disappeared. His mother thought that was how he knew her, through the photographs of the three of them, Bellatrix, Rodolphus and Draco together in the old Lestrange house. Looking at them, Draco was always amazed how fast he had grown. He had never known any infants well, and it astonished him afresh each time he looked to see how he had grown in the few bare months he had lived with his uncle and aunt, his hair growing thicker and longer, his own features emerging from a nondescript baby face. He sat on his aunt's lap and she held up his hand to the camera, his baby self waving and gurgling at him out of the picture. Bellatrix looked so young, far younger even than Draco could remember her, as she wheeled his pram in the grounds, watched as Rodolphus tossed him up to the ceiling, held Draco's cup in her hands as she taught him to drink. All those photographs of a time that he couldn't remember after the Dark Lord's fall, when his parents had been held before their trial. They hadn't been in Azkaban; they had come forward voluntarily, confessing their sudden, terrible knowledge of what they had been forced to do under the Imperius Curse, asking for the chance to clear their names. His uncle and aunt had taken Draco into their home and then taken all those photographs so that his mother and father need never miss a day of their little boy's life. His mother sat at the table in the drawing room, looking through them, touching a finger to her sister's smiling face. She had been lovely.

There was another photograph, the strangest one of all, and it was not kept with the others. Draco had found it in the library in a box of his mother's bits and pieces that of course he should not meddle with, and of course, like every boy, he did. He lay on his bed, lifting everything out in turn so that he could put it back where it had been. A bit of white ribbon tying together invitations to three sisters' weddings, the knot pinned with a Slytherin prefect's badge. A Hogwart's letter in an envelope addressed to Miss N. Black, a Muggle coin shaped like a hexagon, a hole bored through the centre to hang it from a bit of cord, notes, marbles, a china cat, the debris of girlhood, and underneath it all, a flat white folder and some other photographs, these not for public view. A baby in her cradle, sucking her thumb, and on the nursery wall behind, a framed embroidered N. The baby had black hair; it was Narcissa, before she was changed, before Bellatrix had changed her in that fit of pique that had been her first, incomprehending assay in the Dark Arts. And there Draco was again, another baby in a little white gown and socks. The gown was a Malfoy heirloom; he had seen a portrait of his father wearing it. Draco was tiny, so tiny he had still that first shock of hair, and he was sleeping, he could see the rise of his shoulders as he breathed. His aunt was sitting in a high-backed chair and she held him against her as he slept, bending over and smiling at him. Behind the two of them, a third figure stood, a man who was neither his father nor his uncle, nor even Rabastan Lestrange, but a tall thin man in voluminous black robes, with red eyes set in his strange, flat face; the Dark Lord himself. The photograph lay in its white paper slip amongst his mother's things. Draco was sleeping in Bellatrix's arms, and the Dark Lord did not move, but his aunt turned in her seat as Draco watched, tilting her face up to Him and she smiled. She looked so lovely, and so young. She would never have any children of her own, not now, not after Azkaban, but she held the baby and looked out at Draco from the photograph, so young, so devoted, so trusting. They thought that he could not remember her, but they were wrong. Draco had dreamed of her in Azkaban, dreamed of the silver threads invading her dark hair, her voice turned harsh and bloody in a throat torn and scarred through years and years of screaming. His father and mother had been accused, but no one had even mentioned her name. She had been safe, happy, looking after him, she might have had her own children to hold in photographs and throw up to the ceiling, but she had thrown it all away for the sake of Him, and ended up in Azkaban. She had been so innocent, in her way. She couldn't see that nothing was worth Azkaban, which made his mother cry and his father turn grey, nothing he could understand. But then, Draco was very young.