Penny Dreadful

Narcissa Malfoy was looking in her vanity mirror, twirling herself on her chair to examine her profiles from side -- to front -- to side again. She vaguely heard the sounds of her new family clinking teacups with elegance, pinkies sticking out like weedy pink mushrooms.

Soon her new husband, Lucius, would be coming upstairs to their bridal suite. Narcissa remembered what her mother used to do in the evenings in their not-too-shabby house -- bring him cups of steaming tea and stacks of toast with their wafting aroma. Presented, as with everything she gave to her husband, with both hands. This was supposedly some sign of deference: look, I can’t do anything with just one hand, I’m such a worthless bitch, please take this weight off me. Something like that. Narcissa wasn’t really sure.

Later on in her life, sixteen-year-old Narcissa would lean against the door of her parents’ bedroom and listen to her mother trying, with a certain air of giggly embarrassment, to seduce her father. With both hands. After a while the laughter would subside into terse silence and heavy breathing, like an axe murderer panting down the collar of a victim. Narcissa hauled herself off to bed before the gasp of orgasm from either parties could come -- she knew what climaxing was, but somehow the hidden moment that she’d read about in poetry and literature, the sensual delicacy of sex was undermined by the loud, animal moaning of her parents.

Orgasms, she thought primly to herself, were only to be shared between two exclusive parties who were very much in love with each other and looked as though they were Renaissance marble statues. Then she looked at herself in the mirror, at her porcelain skin, and smiled. She combed her flaxen hair and waited for love.

Some nights her younger-by-a-year-or-so brothers, tanned and brown from running amok in the house, would slip into her bed and rub up against her body, taunting her about everything while their hands travelled up and down her body in urgency, trying to find some hidden spot that could render her moaning, into their willing sex slave. But Narcissa lay in her bed like a statue and thought about porcelain fingers and shared a very private smile to herself. Love would come and find her, because she was beautiful and was entitled to her share of it.

She never told her mother about it, because they were boys, and were valued above shit-daughters who didn’t deserve to eat anything at meals because she couldn’t boil the tea properly. According to her mother, anyway. The boys of the family were always cosseted and spoiled beyond imagination, the girl (Narcissa, in this case) always treated as faux jewellry -- valueless unless you could find some fool whose eye was taken in by fake glitter.

This fool would come in the form of the Malfoys. Narcissa’s mother used to sigh unhappily, twist Narcissa’s ear and say in grudging admiration, “You had better take good care of yourself. We’re not well-off, we’re not well-educated, you’re so pretty, sure we can find some bloody moron to marry you.”

Narcissa smiled again in dutiful daughterly affection, but the smile inside her was bright and sharp like a knife -- soon my prince will come and we’ll leave this stupid house in flames.

After her mother had announced her arranged marriage to Lucius Malfoy, Narcissa did the full spectrum of indignance -- emotional tantrums, tragic posturings, loudly screamed accusations of neglect and misunderstanding. Narcissa, for the following days, could always be counted on to let loose a fierce glower at anybody who came within a metre of her alabaster body.

But the wedding had continued as planned -- Narcissa had been mildly nonplussed to discover that Lucius was quite good-looking, almost as good-looking as her. If Lucius had been an ugly, bow-legged midget, dramatics would have been fully justified; some of the relatives who quite liked Narcissa would have raised some objections and showered sympathy on the wronged bride.

Lucius placed the wedding ring on her finger with as much passion or love as a mechanic hammering a nail into plywood. Lucius had lifted her wedding veil as if he was peeling a banana that had gone slightly mouldy.

Tonight, Narcissa smiled grimly to herself in the vanity mirror, recognizing the smile. It graced the face of her mother on countless occasions, the quiet defiance of a subjugated wife. Narcissa was feeling the quiet desperation that had characterized her mother’s marriage, her grandmother’s marriage, and all the pre-arranged marriages before that. She had to calm herself by taking deep breaths, feeling as if she was giving birth, expelling the fairy-tale prince with his snow-white steed and his heavenly fingers from between her legs. She took off her silk nightgown.

When Lucius crept into the bedroom, smelling of alcohol that the Malfoys had broken out after the supply of tea had been exhausted, he found his wife dressed in pungent rags and glaring at him with hostile animal eyes. She smelled of horse defecation -- this was no surprise, because she’d dragged the rags out from the Malfoy family stables.

When he got into the marriage bed, his new wife scrabbled off like a rat and crouched on the floor, glowering. He knelt next to her, hands reaching out tentatively, she scrambled back onto the bed, curled up in a corner, fiercely watching. He climbed back into the bed, but then she rolled off it. He followed, but then she leapt back onto the bed, nails digging into the clean white sheets.

They did this several times, Lucius with his bewildered eyes and Narcissa with her defiant ones. Lucius finally gave up and slept on the bed while Narcissa huddled in a corner of the room, willing herself not to fall asleep for fear of Lucius pouncing on her in a sexual frenzy.

The same thing happened the next night, and Narcissa’s smile became more indulgent in its victory. Absurd caricatures of a wife’s unwillingness to sleep with her husband were acted out for a month or so, and just as the white prince began to emerge once again in Narcissa’s mind, Lucius complained quietly to her father.

Narcissa’s entire family was summoned to watch Narcissa’s punishment. Lucius was nervously watching on as Narcissa’s father produced a long stretch of a snappy willow branch and told Narcissa to remove her blouse.

Narcissa glowered and was gathering enough air in her lungs to scream defiance when her father kicked her in the torso, forcing her to double over and crouch on the floor. He kicked again, in her lungs, and Narcissa’s air was expelled, as if it had been vomited out.

He handed the willow over to Lucius without a word. Lucius did what was expected of him, really, Narcissa said, in later years. He removed her blouse with trembling fingers. His first two strokes on her back were loose and hesitant, but as her family (especially her brothers, Narcissa noted bitterly) hooted and waved fists as if they were watching some barbaric wrestling match, the lashes increased in regularity and strength.

Lucius lashed and struck and slashed at his wife’s back until it looked like sieve made of red wire, dripping with blood, until Narcissa was sobbing and bleeding, broken and quiet, amazed that she could still stand up and crawl into bed with Lucius, too tired to object as he pushed himself inside her with long strokes and out, and again, as rhythmic as his beatings had been, panting over her face, like an axe murderer.

In the morning, Narcissa woke up to Lucius’ cold grey eyes telling her that she was just a shit of a wife, and how that night was just to produce a heir, and she was just a trophy, a Renaissance statue trophy to cart around at Ministry balls and her white prince had gone up in flames, like the house she wanted to destroy.

Narcissa joined the ranks of her predecessors -- women struggling against their husbands, only to succumb to the inevitability of disillusionment and defeat.

But somewhere within her there was the sharp-knife smile that came out as she placed a hand on her swollen stomach, and the same smile was produced as a male heir to the Malfoy throne was placed in her hands, dripping with amniotic fluid and blood and screaming out all his defiance at the world.

Male heirs were important. They carried the glory of the Malfoy name on their shoulders, were expected to find beautiful wives to impregnate with beautiful male children to carry on the Malfoy name. It went on and on, like a carousel, going nowhere, but the music seeping everywhere at the same time.

When Draco slept in his cradle, she willed him to disappoint, to be a disappointment to the Malfoy family -- disappoint Lucius, disappoint the Malfoys, where she could not. Draco was her substitute, and since he was a male, he could have all the alabaster-skinned princes and princesses he wanted, when all Narcissa had was an imaginary white prince on an imaginary white horse.

She wasn’t resentful -- this was her chance. Through Draco she could live vicariously, the way a trophy wife couldn’t. So when Draco quietly padded back into Malfoy Manor with a black-haired boy she recognized as the one Lucius had been plotting to kill with his bedamned employer for several years, she didn’t say anything.

With a smile as sharp as a knife cutting into deep-rooted family traditions, she secretly slipped a tube of lubricant into Draco’s trouser pocket. At night she leaned against his door and listened to her son pleasure her husband’s enemy. With both hands.

And she thought to herself: Nothing really changes.