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Esther ought to have quit smoking, but well, isn’t it just a perfectly horrid day, with the air so dense with curses and the fog of her thoughts swirling up under her scalp like blooming flowers, ripping through the skin. The blood will dye her hair that lovely shade of auburn, like Cadma Mulciber’s hair, all striking and sharp like a Muggle starlet. But then, she supposes, it’ll dry an awful colour and flake right off, and being wispy-haired and going grey is rather better than that.
She had quit once, had almost managed it, off the strength of duty and Hufflepuff loyalty, when Barty was small enough to need her by his side every minute of every day, hanging off her, bright red and screaming his little lungs out, just the way the inside of her feels now. Raw and helpless. But now he’s gone off to school, the friendless little thing he is, and she’s sitting on the back steps staring down the vegetable patch and the towering trees and the birdsong choking the branches. It’s a pity. He looks like her, talks like her, and in a few years, all her rage will be swirling in his chest, and it’ll have to burst out of him. Not the way she presses it out through her fingers and knits in bright canary yellows and deep rusty oranges, all inwards and focused. He’ll explode outwards, somehow, controlled in careful bursts, or in one bright conflagration against the red-brick walls of this house.
The smoke tastes like Muggle London. Like automobiles and gleaming streetlights and the constant, dreadful yelling. It'll all swirl through her lungs, come back up in spirals of perfectly vile grey smoke. At the very least, there’s no bitterness of curse smoke hanging to it, not like the smell that’s always hanging off every thread of every wizard’s robes nowadays. Heaviness in the air, choking the corridors like rust. She exhales.
She’s going to die early.
Serves her husband right, she thinks, taking another breath. He’s still not home enough to notice there’s smoke clinging to her robes. Comes home at the crack of dawn and crashes into their bed still in his shoes. It’d serve him right, if he worked away their lives and came home to find her dead in her early forties. She’d die in the armchair in the sitting room, she thinks, with the blanket she’d spent hours crocheting by wandlight over her lap. Like an old cat, and the thought makes her grin, all wry and sour. She’d return, pale and ghostly, in her wedding dress with wine spilled down the front, burgundy stains on creamy lace, and wail with wonderful fury. Shriek in the attic during thunderstorms and shatter the lights with the force of it.
But then, to die in the chair, she’d have to die under the foul lamp in the sitting room, tassels and spindly silver and family history, and well, doesn’t that just ruin the image, shatter the gothic melodrama of it all, for one can’t imagine such a perfectly dramatic death if one’s wispy, thin hair is going to tangle in the legs of a foul, ugly lamp that clashes with the clutter of the sitting room.
She ought to throw it out. Unfortunately, her mother-in-law would most certainly notice, and that would be another test of endurance, how long can she stand in her own sitting room, being lectured at by a diminutive little woman draped head to toe in black lace and silk buttons.
Esther supposes she’s not entirely alone. There’s Winky, who bustles about the house balancing platters and feather dusters while Esther gets her robes filthy in the yard. This would have enraged her, in her teens, and she can imagine herself, a slip of a thing in a lavender blouse and Muggle tights and bakelite bracelets rattling on her wrists, clattering about her sitting room. Little Essie Fawley, yellow silk scarf, parchment and quill and ink all over her fingers, scribbling away at the walls in languages that aren’t her own.
She remembers the taste of them. Mermish, full of popping and clicking, on the tip of her tongue. Cave Troll, deep in the back of her throat and rasping. Elvish, she has forgotten the shape of, though it comes to her, on occasion, in the way words trip over Winky’s sentences and catch on the edges of her voice.
But it would be terribly lonely without anyone else around. She thinks she’d go mad without Winky, who smiles because her mother smiled before her, and serves because she must, and well, she hasn’t ever known anything different, has she? How is she to know what she wants when she’s simply never had it? It’s all awfully selfish. And though her younger self is exploding with rage at the injustice of it all, nothing had ever come of that, had it? She’ll keep all her tongues to herself and dull them on smoke and endless bouts of knitting, bury the wooden furniture in intricate explosions of wool, send Essie Fawley off to the grave, smother her in floral fabrics and teagowns. The Ministry still runs on old money and handshakes and oh my, Cadma, what lovely curtains, I must say, the scones are wonderful, wherever did you find the recipe? to make up for her shrivelled womb and the only oddity it ever produced, out somewhere in the garden getting his knees scraped up being shoved right out of a tree by a thirteen-year-old with a temper.
There are her husband’s sisters, too, although they’re both so very young, and newly wed, or most recently, rounded and glowing with pregnancy. This never fails to send her pursing her lips and standing to pace the garden in restless circles for hours afterwards, furiously weeding the radishes, spattering dirt all over her robes, as if she’d have even wanted another childbirth, as if it even matters at all.
She thinks of somewhere off in Scotland, with a castle on a cliff and the cold black lake. The bricks are beginning to dig into her, the sun dipping below the horizon somewhere among the tangled branches, so that the only light that is growing steadily brighter is the lit end of the cigarette between her fingers. If she’d known then, where she’d end up, she supposes she might’ve done something differently. Gone off to France for a few years, perhaps, gone and lived as a Muggle in the Americas. Something exciting, something that tasted bitter and savoury, not the sugar of endless ices and tea.
Not that it would’ve made a difference, in the end. She’d have come back to England and fallen for the same man, because where else was she going to have found anyone who could debate the finer points of ancient Mermish grammar?
She can see the wedding photos through the window. Faceless and smiling and all-too clean. It had rained, afterwards. There’d been mud up and down her train, in all the crevices of the lace, when they’d bundled the two of them out of the church, and look at that, there she is, clutching her bouquet, and there he is, with his cloak stretched over their heads, ever the gentleman. The smoke from her lungs drifts across her vision and the little moving figures blur into one tasteless grey mass that sits atop her chest. She’ll take another rattling breath, stare into the wilderness of the empty home, tamed with blankets and picture frames.
And that’s all very well until he’s off to law enforcement for the higher salary, instead of international relations, and you’ve got to beg him with your head in your hands not to become an Auror at the dawn of an international war. Yelling about becoming a widow, with tears raging down your face, and the baby kicking up at your insides all night, as if widowhood would be the worst thing that’d ever happen to her.
If Death knocked on the door to take him now, she’d probably spit in its face. Her husband has always, after all, been her burden to rage at in the silence of the evening when the house is empty of his presence, and her burden to smooth the covers over, watch his sleeping form, crouched like a hawk in their bed against the deafening rustle of the night air, and no one will decide when this vigil ends except her.
At least, she tells herself this.
When hunger begins to gnaw at her, she’ll go back inside, click the door shut. Eat her dinner cold, knock back the potions she neglects to take every few days, sit in her husband’s empty study and write a reply to the letter that will be dropped off by the owl at the window while she eats. It’ll mention nothing but schoolwork and mealtimes, and in return, she will mention nothing but gardening and housework and the weather down here, isn’t it lovely, when there’s rain lashing against the window and I’m thinking of planting tulips in mid-May and your father sends his love when he’s done nothing of the sort.
Very little will ever make up for the lies they tell each other. They will simply avoid looking at them altogether, and when he comes home for the holidays, she will believe him, and he will believe her, and they will choose not to speak of anything meaningful at all.
But for now, she is alone on the steps outside the house, and the sun has set, there’s a breeze rattling the trees and smoke is curling through her lungs. She’s going to die early on some misty morning less than a decade off, but she supposes that does not matter so much as the discovery that if she closes her eyes, the breeze can begin to send her wispy hair slipping from its confines, blonde and thin and wild. The decades and the florals can fall away from her shoulders until she is young and light and made of smoke, as if, still living, she has already become a ghost.