Arcanum

Andromeda - the Queen no longer

~~~~~~

I told my mother I would never come back.

I told her I would never return to Grimmauld. How ironic, isn't it? It's hardly even our own estate, and yet it's so often represented the Black hierarchy altogether that it's perhaps the only place I could ever associate with our family as a whole. To say I had been intimidated by it as a child was to do me an undeserved kindness and a great compliment, because unlike my two sisters who were fascinated by the perspective of a Victorian palace, I had greeted the mansion with a few reservations. Too large, too cold, too unruly. It was an opulent sight, no doubt, but a hell for the organized mind and with little possibilities to be kept without at least four or five elves, which I found a complete waste for something as trivial as a house.

A house was a meaningless Arithmancy equation with too many solutions. My sister Bellatrix thought me perfectly insipid, and she even said as much, although of the three I'd always been the one more inclined to drama.

"Are we there yet?" Nymphadora couldn't possibly understand. Standing at my side, clutching me with her small and cold hand, hand out of its glove again, hand that at least bore a sensible colour this time. Hand that I had kissed in the train as she'd slept, attracting the affectionate glances of helplessly romantic Muggles.

Her hair looked uncombed and unkept and - oh Merlin- was it pink again? "Don't do that anymore, it's unthinkable in a young lady."

At times she would do it solely to amuse, at others in vain attempts to raise my temper. She was so unlike me, such a glowing, glittering mirror of that dark side of that family, so much like my sisters and my aunt and so malicious for a five-year old. She was doing this to spite me, doing this just because she could tell how much I needed her - everything- to incorporate in what these damned Muggles deemed "normality". She had the Black look and the Black wit to her, but I had hoped she would never have the Black furies, as they called them, the demons that had driven Narcissa into her many fits of hysteria and pushed Bellatrix into the duelling rings.

An impractically constructed house implied the presence of either a number of appliances or a distinguished personnel to cater for needs that would have otherwise been naturally seen to. Had, for instance, the rooms been designed accordingly, there should never have been more than two main entrances. As it was there were three as well as two more for the elves and one for several other purposes that I was vaguely aware could only involve sneaking out certain female companions whenever Aunt Medeea locked the fireplaces.

Aunt Medeea was a feisty woman and horribly jealous; she was also part of the dark side of the family, that side I could never understand. Jealousy was another matter that escaped me. It was completely unreasonable and it meant relying solely on instinct, and wasn't that such idiocy?

"Mummy, it's snowing again." Nymphadora snuggled up against me, and I pushed her away as softly as I could. She was too dependent of me. I hadn't been as dependent of Mama and had survived the dreadful experience of my childhood tolerably well, but then I'd also had Narcissa and Bellatrix to share her attentions with. Perhaps I had been too hasty in denying Ted another child, no matter how unbearable the ordeal of giving birth a second time had presented itself. I loved him dearly, and I had my own fondness for Nymphadora, but I had never got along with children and had conceded Ted the girl only because I had known he would be miserable if he never heard the proverbial "little feet" and their "patter".

"Don't call me that, I don't call you Dora, do I?" The only way to stop her from using these shortenings of her given name was to convince her they were hideous. Ted loved them, all of them: Nymph, Dora, Nymmie, Dodo. But they weren't her name.

It was snowing again, though; the long alleys were filled with living-silver.

"I'm sorry..." she managed, in a last attempt to an overdue courtesy, though her hair kept to its pink and her hands had still not slid back into her gloves and she still looked towards the mansion and its dark fence as if Andersen's castles had graced her with a dazzling appearance. She was such a precocious child, and a witch -- but she still couldn't see the shadow that had diminished in shape and only grown in venom. This was not a house, this was the Christian hell, a notion we'd been told was so unreal just because we would have otherwise recognized it as a distinct part of our everyday circumstances.

I wanted to scream: you don't understand! But I didn't. Couldn't.

This was my girl, my little Black girl.

And this was her haven.

~~~~~~

Aunt Medeea was first to see us in. My father had only been a cousin of hers, but Mama was her youngest and only sister, and so she too was in mourning. (In all truth, I was also grimly aware that her own husband had passed away recently enough and that Mama had owled how Sirius and I had been the only ones of the immediate family to have not been in attendance at the funeral).

Her voice was as sharp and thin as I remembered it. "How can you bring her-"

"Witches' oath, madam, forged through witches' blood." I wouldn't let her. This mightn't have been my house here and now, but the Blacks had married among themselves and that other side of the family they'd so "wisely" styled "Nigellus" for so long that it belonged to us, all of us. And I knew how the place had earned its name, I knew of the price that had been paid so many centuries before so that magic would be accepted so far away from the heart of the civilized English wizardry - and this reason was not one I would let her forget all too soon. "Black blood, my blood, her blood. She is safe in her own house." As the first of her kind never was.

"Very well, then. Have you no love for your devoted Aunt?" She offered her smooth cheek to be kissed, and as I did what etiquette more or less demanded of a devoted niece, the rich fragrance of magnolia came to my greeting as it had so many times in the lost youth of our sins.

Nymphadora was far more reluctant, and I thought her pretentious wavering intolerable. I had taught her better. I had told her time and time again that the moment would come when she would have her tête-à-tête in the vipers' nest and that she would have to be immaculately prepared. She mustn't fail, or at least she would have to carry the pretence of being ultimately successful in her every pursuit. This was the game in the family; these were the unwritten rules.

"Kiss Aunt Medeea, Nymphadora."

"Must I really?" Aunt Medeea had never been the gentlest of creatures, and Nymphadora was very susceptible to frowns.

"Yes."

She pouted but was obliging enough so for Aunt to declare herself satisfied and excuse herself. "I'll tell your dearest Mama you've arrived." She's weak, said her eyes as she left the chamber, and though I had yet to master Legilimency - an art which had sadly never sat well with the family's general skill tree- I could see how she had reached this conclusion. If one could not mask their feelings, then one was weak.

"Stay here, Nymphadora." I followed Aunt Medeea through the corridors. "My sympathies, madam."

She was less than kind. "Say nothing you don't mean."

"Oh good." I had always admired her frankness and found she inspired my own quite often. "Because I hated him."

"So did I. But it's not the done thing to speak such words to his widow. Do you have your wand were your words lie?"

Of course I did. I had not worked my hexes for years, but I assumed they wouldn't take too long to recall. "I would never hex you in your own house."

She smiled languidly. "How proper. Teach your daughter that, she might have need of it."

"Why? She'll never require such lessons, shall never put them in practice." We exchanged a long look. "She's mine."

When Aunt had first touched my face as a child it had been to remark on how ghastly blue my eyes were and how sickly they made me look; she had cold hands and her touch had made me shiver. Years later, now, her spidery fingers could still burn my face with a sore frost that annulled whatever gentleness in her caress. "Oh no, Andromeda dear, make no mistake. She's a Black girl before anything else."

~~~~~~

"Andromeda's come to see you, Arabella."

They were all in the living room, all four of them.

"I told you to stay where I put you." Nymphadora merely gave me the oddest of glances. My mother's face was drenched in tears - yet another helpless romantic- but she tried desperately to look as vivacious a Mater Domina as possible.

"I brought her in." Bellatrix was occupying one of the chairs with the sort of indolent grace that would have made any a feline's pride. I remembered the girl who had cried on my knees in frustration as to how her cousin could leave this family so easily and she could not - and she had wanted to leave us so badly, she had sworn to such, she had tried to--

She was one of us now.

"It's snowing again." I had never noticed how alike their voices were, their entire demeanour. Nymphadora may have looked more like Bellatrix and myself, but she followed after Narcissa in most every other respect. My elder sister was ravishing in her white, her pale hair and pale eyes adding to it. I wondered briefly whether she would please wear her black at least for the funeral, but then Narcissa always wore white, had worn it as a child and then as a debutante and even as a grown woman. She'd only let it slip off once in the favour of a tinted grey that had marked her bride's gown.

"But it's so unfitting!" Mother had said indignantly, though no one could have stopped her, no one could have understood. Most certainly not Lucius, far too enamoured with her as he was, all sensibility crushed out of him by the Black charm and glory.

My eyes fell on the glass in their hands, the sweet tinge of cognac.

My mother drank only seldom, while Bellatrix was partial to the habit. But Narcissa never touched anything, it was scandalous that she did now, unless--

Her white shawl revealed a small roundness to her body.

"Andromeda?" It must have showed, I'm never usually pale. She laughed. "Won't you congratulate me?"

Why? It'd take the path of all the other, the other children she'd had and yet not quite, the children she always lost through some accident or the other. No accidents, these, though Lucius would be manoeuvred into other such thoughts, some idle concern.

I had been asked at her side the first time. "All shall be well," I had told her uncertainly as she had collapsed on the snow - winter then, too--and all the blood had come to taint the fine white of it. "Silly, silly Andromeda, don't cry, silly Andromeda. Better yet... won't you congratulate me?" And even as the hellebore potion had dug itself in the snow, and drowned in the blood, she had laughed and laughed and laughed.

"It's good you've come," said Bellatrix smoothly. "And it's good you've left him where he belonged."

"Ted is my concern and not your own, Bella."

Narcissa took a delicate sip. "But what of our niece?"

And with the emphasis of all late speakers, Mama gave way to her greeting. "Oh yes, it's good that you've come, Andromeda. To bring Nymphadora where she belongs, if nothing else."