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It was spring, and they were holding a reception. Carriages arrived from all over the county. Ladies in white dresses reclined under parasols, golf balls rolled, fur wraps and peacock feathers flickered in and out of view. Hermione moved from window to window and felt something catch in her chest — whether the fresh April wind racing through the old manor like a troublesome child, or the half-childish delight that had made Miss Stevenson, arms full of linens, say, "Really, Lady Hermione, do stop dashing about, you'll ruin your hair entirely" — though she'd said it with a quiet smile, eyes bright. The house smelled of wood and cinnamon and oranges and flowers — the ones brought in as arrangements, and the ones scattered across the lawns outside like spilled pearls.
Maxine had arrived even earlier, and they were already eating cream puffs in the larder off the kitchen. She sat on the counter with her legs swinging open, turning at every noise from the kitchen and licking her fingers as she told the story of how her father had decided to betroth her to Sir Collins: he was only five years older and bred thoroughbred horses, and the last time they'd visited his estate he had mentioned that his father had owned a shop in Kent, and they might ship in tobacco, pipes, glass figurines and sundry curiosities, and sell them right there, because he knew her spirit was active, restless, and that sitting home all day would bore her three thousand times over. Hermione looked at her and thought: how grown-up she is. How settled in herself. How brave. She herself had spent five years at home since her debut, and her parents had made no particular effort to place her anywhere — theirs was that sort of relaxed household; sometimes it seemed as though her father simply wanted her to stay and work her way through all his medical books. The one complication was that they had very little money. If she married some man of means, the whole situation might be resolved at once.
She and Maxine stole a dish of jelly and, spoons in mouths, watched from behind the curtains. Hermione spotted a young man her own age in an officer's uniform, with hair so pale it seemed bleached to some unnatural shade, exposing what lay beneath as flatly as a fact.
Maxine said "oh" and said that word had it the Malfoys were attending, and that Sir Malfoy had only come because Mr. Granger had fixed his tooth. Her father was a fine doctor for the whole district, she had to give him that. Because he read. And she was entirely his daughter in that respect — so well-read that people occasionally asked her to leave and stop bothering them, particularly in the kitchen. "We don't have time for your manifestos", they would say. "We have to work, to survive. It's all very well for ladies, all that thinking. God willing, the world will change."
She was introduced to Draco Malfoy at the very moment she was coming in from the yard, hands dusty, and she'd thought immediately that he wouldn't have kissed her hand regardless — he had that sort of face, sharp as a knife blade, and an expression to match: like someone who had just, for the first time, witnessed a chicken being dressed, and was registering not so much aristocratic revulsion at a process that ought to remain behind closed doors, but something more fundamental — a weary disgust at all processes, as such.
"Well", Hermione thought, "perhaps he's a young revolutionary. Perhaps we'll find some common ground."
But then Lady Abbott — who was also present — remarked, with a small sparkling pride on behalf of all womankind, that Hermione published in a journal.
"Ah," he said. "In a journal." She would think back to that phrase afterward — the particular strangled surprise of it. He then asked what she wrote.
She said she criticised various structures she found objectionable.
He said: "Lampoons, then."
And although she tried to explain, she had the sense that the word had lodged itself in his mind like a dropped anchor — "lampoons" — as though her case were already decided.
Before dinner there was the incident with the cat: she saw him crouching to stroke it and felt, briefly, something soften in her — the young man wasn't so insufferable after all — and had barely turned away before she heard the commotion, looked back, and found him standing there clutching his hand, speaking in a sharp elevated register, practically crying out that the cat was ill, that it had rabies.
Garnier came over, asked to see the hand, and said there was nothing wrong with that cat, it had simply got overexcited — it was a playful creature by nature, not vicious, it just sometimes, in play, got carried away — and Malfoy went on gripping his hand in a handkerchief and said: "This cat should be shot immediately, before it bites someone else," and walked off.
Hermione exhaled, laughing, and made a mental note to find Maxine at the earliest opportunity and report that the Malfoy heir was the most insufferable peacock she had ever encountered.
When they met up later — through the charming Lady Abbott, who was already chatting with Maxine, who was examining first her bracelet, then her rings with the unselfconscious absorption of a child, because Lady Abbott was like that, a grown woman who was entirely a girl inside — and when she and Maxine made their way through the manor, they noticed the door to her father's study standing open. Mr. Granger was at his desk. Mr. Malfoy senior stood beside him. And his son was pacing the room with his cane, with an expression suggesting, as always, that he was being held there against his will.
Hermione's skin prickled, and she asked Maxine what she thought they were discussing in there.
"Don't worry, it's not what you think," Maxine said. "Everyone knows your father is going to ask him for a large loan."
Malfoy paced — she could see him from behind the gilded back of a sofa. He turned; she ducked behind the corner of the corridor, where Maxine was leaning against the wall with a conspiratorial expression.
"I would never marry him, anyway," Hermione said. "I'd sooner marry that redheaded dimwit who can't remember where they had lunch yesterday."
"Weasley? Oh, please. At least this one is handsome — when have you ever seen cheekbones like that in this part of the country?"
"He's an insufferable peacock."
"Not everything is about inner depth, Hermione. Spend a few years married to a hook-nosed old codger and you'll start envying everyone. Who wants that? A rotten character can be worked on, reshaped — but a face, you can't. A face is what it is."
There was a poetry reading that evening, which Hermione had privately categorised as nonsense — who recites their own verse at a party? — but she noticed that Malfoy had gone in, and so she decided to look in as well. It wasn't long before he stood up and read something about sublime mountains, beautiful and remote, that moved him to contemplate the nature of existence, our fundamental solitude in the universe, every stone of it, every fledgling already condemned to death with its first cry. After the reading she caught up to him, clasped her hands behind her back, and said:
"How did you write that?"
He answered without haste. "It requires feeling. A sense of the elevated."
She thought: "he's remembering the lampoons". Aloud, walking alongside him, she said: "And do you often experience this sense of the elevated?"
He said: whenever there appeared an object capable of producing the appropriate feeling. She said: "so you're a poet". He said: "I'm simply a man with a wider range of thinking than most". She asked: what was poetic about the doom he'd so poetically described? He said: you've misunderstood. The doom isn't a bad thing — it's the doom inherent in life; some creatures live without knowing they're doomed, and there's a beauty in that.
This produced in her either a chill or the urge to laugh — she wasn't entirely sure which — but the conversation continued. He was intelligent, well-read — though seemingly entirely unaware of his own pretension. They played golf with Maxine, who spent the entire time nudging Hermione to seduce this heir, and whenever he wasn't looking would wink at her with her entire face, flushed and mischievous as a little devil.
She called him up to the hill to see the view. They got onto the subject of writing, and she began to speak about the vices of society and how much she enjoyed writing about them. He said:
"My wife would never concern herself with such nonsense."
She said: "And what would she concern herself with, your wife?"
He chewed his lip, looking into the distance. "She would receive my guests. She would organise receptions."
"And if she were bored?"
"Why would she be bored? Ladies of good breeding are not bored. That is the very point of good breeding."
"Ah," she said. "You know very little about women."
"And you apparently know a great deal. You're not like any of them, I'll say that."
She laughed. "Good lord — what am I, then? Some creature from the bog?"
He said: "You're laughing."
She said: "Not at you."
They walked in silence. His cane touched the grass. Each of them was thinking something. Then he said, apparently after consideration: "I think a contented wife sees no reason to criticise any structures, because she is happy and has nothing to complain of."
"And her husband, presumably, has eliminated all evil from the world?" she asked.
He considered this seriously.
Later, she noticed him going up to that hill, and one afternoon she crept along the shallow side to see what he was doing. He was sitting there, the wind moving through his pale hair, and she came up from below and saw that he was drawing in a small sketchbook — something that was recognisably her portrait, rendered in pencil, done well, and strangely sad.
She laughed; he turned; he went an immediate, complete crimson.
"It's rude to creep up on people like that," he said. "Evidently no one taught you otherwise."
"You're sitting here drawing my portrait. Surely I have some claim to be present."
"No," he said, "you don't" — his face taking on that cool, controlled expression. She couldn't read it: was he embarrassed, or disapproving? And how could he disapprove of her when he had been sitting here, drawing her face?
He paused, then told her — with his habitual air of melancholy superiority — what moved him about her: that she was a doomed soul, a wretched one, unaware of her own cage.
She laughed again, tucking her hair back from the wind — this man produced in her a particular, irrepressible energy — and said: "Here I am laughing. Where is this wretchedness?"
He said: "Unfortunately, owing to the poverty of your family, you don't understand this. You were not given the upbringing a lady ought to have. I pity you. This entire reception has the air of charity."
She stopped laughing and nodded. She didn't take it seriously — she pitied him, more than anything — but she didn't know what to say to that, either. That evening she found herself returning, several times, to the fact that he had drawn her portrait. It felt like something unprecedented — as though she were standing at the crossroads of something unwitnessed, or had become, without noticing, a different person.
After midnight, when the fireworks had been displayed and the guests had dispersed — here and there, into the dark — and Maxine had disappeared somewhere, Hermione fell asleep on a chaise longue, still in her dress, shoes propped on the armrest. She woke to the sound of someone entering, opened one eye, and saw him leaning over the back of the chaise.
She said: "Do you want to kiss me?"
He said: "No." Then: "Come with me."
They moved through the manor quietly, soundlessly, like two ghosts — and it seemed like a secret, particularly given that everyone had gone outside and scattered across lawns dense with the night smell of lily of the valley. The air felt thick; it thickened further in the corners of rooms, making them seem strange, unfamiliar. He silently drew her to a door and they looked through the crack, holding their breath, watching old Mr. Griffiths dance alone, holding a candle, murmuring something to himself.
"My God," Hermione said. "His wife died seven years ago."
"Yes," said Malfoy.
He danced and danced, and they stood there watching, like children, until they heard the footsteps of a housemaid, and they ran — both of them, feet thundering down the corridor as though the whole district might hear — and burst outside, stunned, into the open night, into the stars. They walked across the hills and talked, about something, then apparently about nothing, and time ran like a fox. The night opened itself out; somewhere in the copse a wild bird cried; everything shimmered; small leaves looked like drops of ink, and others were in flower — a dense blossom, thick as brine — fine branch-threads everywhere, and toward morning, along the horizon behind the weave of branches and hills, there appeared the loveliness of early light: beige, tender as the thinnest peach.
She said: "How beautiful."
He agreed.
They walked on, and she felt his wordless resistance beside her — thought: "he resists the same way I do, he pushes back through the very fact of pushing back". She sensed, suddenly, how small and exposed his soul was. They walked, and she — in the humming blueness of it, in the tidal wave of cool, fragrant, singing air — felt the full weight of everything still ahead: opium-room walls to be described, tea drunk in the most improbable places, and everything he had yet to learn and discover, those future moments when he would sit with that pretentious set of his mouth and look up at someone from below, the way she'd caught him on the hill with his sketchbook, drawing her face, not knowing what to say, puffing himself up, sulking, bristling — a boy, really — his pale lashes trembling.
And everything, it seemed, was only just beginning.