A Gypsy's Tale

She cut her hair and cut her bloodline and moved out of the caravan. She wouldn’t listen when anyone could have told her how it would be. When the dead come back, however, even the gaujos have the sense to get a priest to chase them away with prayers and candles.

That’s what the Gypsies said about Old Marvolo’s daughter, whose beauty was a curse. She was pretty in a way the townspeople could understand: thick Gypsy-black hair curling to her waist, but milk white skin and as pert a little nose as any country lass.

When she began to keep company with the young gent from up at the Manor, she hacked off her magnificent hair at the shoulder and twisted it into a prim knot at the nape of her neck. She took to wearing low-heeled shoes and formless suits of grey and brown. She got herself a job in a shop and a flat in town. The flat, however, modest though it may have been, was patently and scandalously beyond the means of a common shopgirl.

Auntie Delafina looked at her sadly. "Oh, babe, I hurt for you, I do, but there’s reasons we do things like we do them. When you left us, we cried for you like you died and now here you come back like a ghost from the grave.

"How can we take you back, and you with a little gaujo growing in you? You understand, don’t you, why it’s gotta be like it’s gotta be? Nothing I can do, babe. I’m sorry…

His father was cool, courteous and matter-of-fact. She would understand his position, he said. Unfortunate business… choose your own doctor, but we’ve a fellow, very discreet… your expenses, of course, something to get you back on your feet…

Her head began to throb. Old Mr. Riddle’s words and Auntie Delafina’s words and the words of songs the Gypsy mothers sang to the babies swirled around her like dark water, she like a stone in the midst of it. She couldn’t see, she couldn’t hear, she couldn’t breathe.

But then she smiled brightly and tossed her head. "Ah, well, Mr. Riddle, you’re that generous, I’m sure, but I’m thinking it would be easiest – I’ve got folk in Ireland, and, well, it’d be a bit more money up front, but that’d be an end to it…" She tilted her head and peeked coyly at Mr. Riddle from under her lashes. Mr. Riddle smiled back kindly and pulled out his billfold. Done, and done.

And so she went away; spurned by her lover and rejected by her family for her shame, she spent the months of her pregnancy as a vagrant, stealing food and muttering angrily under her breath. Then one day, when her time had just about come, the residents of a prosperous little village reported that a wild Gypsy was prowling the neighborhood, stealing from their gardens and terrorizing their children by pointing at them and screaming curses, and staring at them with her mad dark eyes. When she was dragged to the station house, however, the police matron took one look at her at insisted she be taken to hospital immediately.

Dr. Evans dreaded the journey to Little Hangleton. The Riddles were difficult under the best of circumstances, but how they would react to what he had to tell them, he didn’t like to think. Inordinately proud of their descent from the greatest of the Founders, yet extremely sensitive about their utter lack of magical ability, they were noisily ambivalent members of the loosely organized association of pureblood squibs. "None of us has wielded a wand in generations, the Ministry treats us like Muggles, but we’re not forgetting who we are!" Those ringing speeches that always threatened to spoil perfectly decent balls and parties -- the Riddles took that nonsense far too much to heart, in Dr, Evans’ opinion. Nothing wrong with keeping to one’s own kind, but was it only coincidence that only Salazar’s line considered it worthwhile to preserve its purity even in its squibs?

"Just a drop, then, Mr. Riddle. Ah, yes, excellent. Well, then, I suppose you’ve guessed why I’ve come…"

Mrs. Riddle’s eyes narrowed. "We gave her money. She went to Ireland." Dr. Evans sighed. "I don’t know what she told you, but she did no such thing. She gave birth in a charity hospital and the child was taken to an orphanage."

"Unfortunate, surely, but…"

"The boy is a wizard."

There was silence, until young Mr. Riddle, who had been slumped, ashen-faced, in a chair at the periphery of the conversation, spoke in a timid whisper. "It’s from her. She’s a witch, she said so."

"Don’t be a fool, Thomas!" snapped his mother. "We’d know if she were a witch. A common Gypsy whore is all she is, and mad as a hatter into the bargain!" The elder Mr. Riddle jumped, startled by his wife’s intemperate language. "No, really, my dear! Not but what -- I’m sure she -- Dr. Evans, my wife is not herself…"

"How dare you, Andrew Riddle! How dare you! I, not myself? She’s a whore, a filthy Gypsy whore, do you hear me? And if her bastard is a wizard, let the Ministry take it and welcome, as they’ve kept us outcast all these centuries!" She stormed out of the room, her son in her wake pleading with her in a reedy whine.

"Ah. I’ll just show myself out then, shall I?" said Dr. Evans, slipping out the door, leaving the elder Mr. Riddle clutching his head in shaking hands.

They had told her the baby was a fine, healthy boy, before they bound her in restraints and took her away to the lunatic asylum. The nurse had waited for a lucid moment to ask her if she wanted to name him. She’d given them an envelope containing a long rambling letter she had spent nine months composing. It was addressed, in a scratchy, spiky, barely legible hand, to Mr. Tom Riddle, Junior.

No one ever inquired about her. Apparently no police reports ever referenced a missing person fitting her description. And now all the staff and inmates who had known her were long dead, so that no living person knew how old she was, just that she was ancient. She was blind and deaf, of course, and had no teeth, so nobody understood the song she kept singing over and over again.