Chapter Text
The trunk had been packed since teatime, and James had unpacked it and packed it again twice since, which was how he knew he wasn't nervous. Nervous people left things where they lay. He was only making sure.
He knelt on the floorboards with the list his mother had copied out in her small, looping hand and went down it for the fourth time. One cauldron, pewter, standard size two — ticked. One set of glass phials — ticked. Dragon-hide gloves that had come stiff as boards and smelled of something he could not put a name to. A telescope. Brass scales. The books, a whole leaning stack of them, spines uncracked and titles picked out in gold. He shut the lid and sat back on his heels and looked at the trunk, sitting square in the middle of the floor with the lamplight catching its brass corners, and it looked exactly like a thing that meant to carry him off somewhere in the morning.
The wand lay on the desk in its long thin box with the lid off. He had taken it out perhaps forty times that week and he took it out again now, because it did not seem right to leave it shut up in the dark on the last night. Mahogany, eleven inches, pliable, the old man in the shop had murmured, turning it over in his fingers as though the wand were doing the choosing and not James. Good for Transfiguration. James had not entirely known what that meant, but he had liked the sound of it — the way you like the sound of a thing said about you by a stranger who seems to know more than you do. He held the wand and pointed it at the curtains and did not say anything, because he was not allowed to, and because he had a strong and secret suspicion that if he tried a spell now, on the last night, and nothing at all happened, he would not sleep for a week.
He put the wand back in the box and put the lid on. Then he took the lid off again.
Down the corridor a door had shut some while ago and the house had gone quiet in the particular way it went quiet when his mother had at last gone up to bed. She had fussed over the packing the whole evening, folding and refolding his new robes, pressing her hand flat over the black cloth as though she could smooth the newness out of it, asking him twice whether he had everything and whether he was sure he didn't want the extra jumper, the green one, in case the castle was draughty — and he had said no to the jumper, because it was hideous, and yes to having everything, and she had gone up at last looking as though she meant to come straight back down and had not. He was rather glad she had gone. She had a way of looking at him this last week that made his chest feel tight and peculiar, and he had no name for it and did not want to find one.
It was no good. He was wide awake, and the house was full of that low, settled dark it got in September, and the clock out on the landing said something past eleven in its soft complaining voice, and — he decided, all at once — he was thirsty. That was the whole of it. A boy could go down for a glass of water in his own house on the last night before he left it, and there was nothing whatever the matter with a boy for doing so.
The landing was cold under his bare feet and the stairs colder, and he went down them by feel with one hand on the banister, the wood worn smooth under his palm. Halfway down he stopped. There was light coming from the back of the house — not the soft yellow of a lamp left burning, but a low, shifting blue, the colour of a flame turned right down under a pot, spilling out from beneath the workshop door and lying in a thin bright line along the flags of the passage.
His father was still up.
James stood on the stair with his hand on the banister and thought about going back to bed, and then thought about lying up there in the dark with the trunk squatting in the middle of the floor like a thing that was only waiting for morning, and he went down the rest of the stairs and along the cold passage towards the light.
The workshop was the warmest room in the house and always had been, and the smell of it reached him before he had the door properly open — the bitter green smell of the herbs that hung drying in bunches from the beams, and beneath it, tonight, something else, something oily and faintly sweet that caught at the back of the throat. His father stood at the long bench with his sleeves turned up past the elbow and his back to the door, stirring a cauldron over a low blue flame, and the light of it moved and shifted along rows of little glass bottles set out down the bench, dozens of them, none bigger than James's thumb.
"I heard a noise," James said, from the doorway.
His father did not turn round. "That will have been me," he said, "making the fearful noise a man makes when he stirs a pot. Come in and shut the door, you're letting the cold all along the passage."
James came in and shut the door. The flags were warmer here, and he stood at the end of the bench with his arms folded, partly against the last of the chill and partly so that it should not look as though he had come down for the company of anybody. He looked into the cauldron. Whatever was in it was pale and thick and pearly, and it turned slowly over on itself as it cooled, and it did not look like anything a person would want to drink.
"What is it?"
"Hair potion." His father lifted one of the little bottles and held it up to the flame and turned it, checking it for something James could not see. "At this very moment, James, the vain and the balding of two continents are sitting at their dressing-tables wishing they had a bottle of what's cooling in that pot, and would pay a good deal to get one, and do. Try not to look at it as though I were boiling up socks."
"It smells all right," James said, which was a concession, because privately he had always thought there was something not quite serious about a man who had made his name — and the family's money — out of persuading other people's hair to lie down flat. It was not the kind of thing you announced at school that your father did. He would far sooner have had a father who tamed dragons, or broke curses in a pyramid somewhere, or did anything at all that a boy could say straight out without having to explain that it was actually very difficult and very well paid.
"It bought the broom in the shed," said his father mildly, as though he had overheard the thought, which he had an unnerving habit of appearing to do. "And the trunk you've been packing and unpacking all evening over my head. And the better part of the roof over both our heads. Here — hold this."
He put a small brass funnel into James's hand, drew the cauldron off the flame with a cloth wrapped round the handle, and began, with tremendous care, to fill the little bottles one at a time; and James found himself holding the funnel steady at the neck of each and lifting it clear as each was filled, the two of them working away at it without either of them having agreed to anything. The pale stuff ran into the glass and sat there gleaming. His father corked each bottle with a plug of wax and a touch of his wand, and the wax hardened and sealed with a small sound, like a held breath let quietly go.
"Don't drop one," his father said. "That's a Galleon a bottle to the sort of person who buys it, and they take it very ill indeed if it turns up in pieces."
James did not drop one. It was, he found, oddly satisfying — the pale gleam sliding into the glass, the small hard sound of the seal, the row of finished bottles creeping along the bench like something he had made himself. His feet had gone warm. The clock chimed the half hour somewhere far off through the ceiling, and neither of them said anything about it.
"I'll make the House team," James said, into the quiet. "First year."
His father held a bottle up to the light. "They don't take first-years."
"I'll be the exception."
"And you'd want your own broom to try for it, which first-years aren't allowed to bring." He set the bottle down and reached for the next. "It's very nearly as though the rules had been written with you in particular in mind."
"I'll change their minds," said James. "About all of it. They'll see me fly and then they'll have to." And he had the picture of it there ready, very bright and very clear — himself high up over the pitch in scarlet, the whole school tipped back and looking up at him — and he held on to it, because it was a great deal easier to look at than the other pictures, the ones that came at night, of not being able to find the right room, or of being the only boy in the whole place who did not already know some enormous thing that everybody else seemed to have been born knowing.
"Gryffindor," he said. "That's where I'll go. Obviously."
His father filled another bottle without hurry. "Your grandfather went in the doors swearing he'd sooner leave the school for good than be put anywhere else, and the Hat took about as long over him as it takes a man to sneeze. There's been a Potter or two go into Gryffindor, yes."
"It won't even touch my head," said James. "It'll take one look."
"That was very much my own view of the business, at your age." His father's mouth did something at one corner that was not altogether a smile. "I informed the entire household that I should be Head Boy by the end of my second year and that they had all best start getting used to the idea. My mother wrote it down somewhere, I believe, so as to be able to read it back to me afterwards."
James grinned before he could help it. "Were you? Head Boy?"
"By my seventh year, and a good deal later than I'd promised, and I'd long since given up mentioning it, for reasons that will be plain enough to you one day." He corked the bottle. "The Hat's a great deal cleverer than people give it the credit for. It's been at the work a very long time and it doesn't care two Knuts what you've announced beforehand. I shouldn't lie awake over where it means to put you. It isn't worth the sleep."
Which was, James thought, a strange thing for his father to have said, since he had not once said he was lying awake over anything at all, and the funnel was perfectly steady in his hand, and he had, in point of fact, only come down for a glass of water.
"I'm not lying awake," he said. "I told you. I came down for water."
"Then you'd better have some," said his father, and nodded at the jug at the far end of the bench, and went on filling his bottles, and did not look round at him; and James found he no longer wanted the water now that it had been offered to him, and did not take any.
He corked three more bottles. The row had nearly reached the end of the bench.
"I'll have loads of mates," he said. It came out too fast, the words running into one another, and he had not altogether meant to say it. "By the first week. Everyone does, don't they, the first week — everyone's got a whole — you just do. There'll be loads of us."
His father did not say anything for a moment. He held a bottle up and looked through the pale gleam of it as though there were something written there to be read, and then he lowered it and set it down, and there was something so careful in the way he set it down that James wished, all of a sudden and very hotly, that he had bitten the words back, because he could hear it in them himself now — the thing underneath — the plain fact that a boy who is quite sure of a thing does not generally go on about it at quite such length.
James had never, as it happened, had a single mate in his life. There had been the Fawley children from two valleys over, who came at Christmas and were dull; and there had been cousins, who did not count; and there had been a great many long afternoons spent flying by himself over the paddock against an entire opposing team that he had made up out of his own head. He had never once had to walk straight up to a person his own age who was under no obligation whatever to like him, and find out whether or not they would. It had simply never come up before.
"There's going to be hundreds of them," he said. He was looking down at the bottle in his hands, at the wax going hard round the lip of it, and not at his father at all. "Hundreds. And they'll all be —" He stopped. He turned the bottle round in his fingers. "I don't know. They'll all already know how it —" He shrugged, hard, the way you shrug at a thing that is annoying you, and stared at the glass, and felt his ears go hot.
"What if I get there," he said, very fast and very low, "and I'm just —"
And there it went again, sliding off out of reach the instant he went for it, and he shut his mouth on the half of the sentence he had left, and the workshop was quiet but for the small ticking of the cooling cauldron, and he did not look up. Because if he looked up and found his father wearing that tight, careful look — the one his mother had had on all week — he thought he might genuinely not be able to stand it.
His father was not wearing it, as it turned out. His father went on quietly corking bottles.
"I was sick over the side of the boat," he said, "on the way in."
James looked up.
"The first-years cross the lake by boat, in the dark, that first night — I don't suppose that's altered, they're very fond of their traditions up there." He wrapped the cloth round the cauldron handle and tipped a careful measure into the next bottle. "I'd worked myself into such a state over the whole business, the castle and the Sorting and the lot of it, that I was ill over the side before we'd made so much as half the crossing, in front of a boatful of children I had never set eyes on and was going to have to live cheek by jowl with for seven years. It is very difficult to imagine a worse beginning than that. I had meant to make rather a fine impression. I made a different one."
"You never," said James.
"I did. And I decided, sitting there dripping and disgraced with the entire boat looking hard at anything that was not me, that the thing was ruined beyond all mending, and that I should keep myself strictly to myself for the whole seven years and speak to nobody, on the grounds that nobody would ever wish to speak to me." He pressed a cork home. "That resolution lasted, I should think, the better part of a day."
"What happened?"
"Nothing very much at all. That's rather the whole of it." He reached for another bottle but did not fill it, only held it in his hand. "I lay awake that first night, in a strange bed at the top of a strange tower, quite certain that I was the only boy in the entire castle lying there wishing with all his heart that he was at home in his own room; and quite certain, too, that all the others were fast asleep and untroubled and thoroughly pleased with themselves, because that was exactly how they had all looked to me at supper." He turned the empty bottle slowly between his fingers. "And then, somewhere off across the dark of the room, I heard that I had got that wrong. One of them was awake, and wishing precisely the same thing, and making a very poor job of keeping it to himself. That was all it was. I couldn't even tell you now which of them it was. But I do remember thinking — well. That the rest of them had all looked pleased with themselves too."
He set the bottle down.
"Not one of them will walk in tomorrow knowing how it's done," he said, "whatever they may look like they're doing. Every last one of them will be doing exactly what you'll be doing, which is walking in through the doors and hoping very hard that it doesn't show." He picked the ladle up again and gave the cooling potion in the pot a slow turn, and seemed then to feel that he had said a good deal more than he was generally in the way of saying, for he put the ladle down rather briskly and looked along the rows of bottles as though he would be very glad of a change of subject. "Corks. You've done the near end. Start along the far."
James started along the far end. His hands, he found, were steadier than they had been. And he found, too, that he wanted now to say something back — not about any of it, he could not for his life have said any of it back — but something, and could not find that either; and so what he said was, "Bet you were sick again on the way home at Christmas, then."
"I was not," said his father, with dignity. "I had grown considerably by Christmas. I was sick on the way back after Christmas, but that is quite another matter — there was ice on the lake and we were all of us thrown about, and it was in no way my fault." James laughed, and his father let him, and reached across and pressed home a cork into a bottle James had left standing; and as he drew his hand back he looked, for a moment, at the top of James's head.
"There's one thing I can tell you for a dead certainty about your first year," he said.
"What?"
"That in seven years of school, and in all the years of study and expense that went into producing the pot on that bench, and in a very great deal of correspondence with the cleverest heads in the field" — he reached over and pushed at James's hair with one finger, where it stuck straight up at the crown, as it had stuck up every single morning of James's life, and it sprang directly back the instant he lifted his hand away — "I have never once, in all of it, come upon the thing that will persuade that to lie flat. There's a fortune in that pot for every head in Britain save the one, and it had to go and be yours. It's a very humbling business, being somebody's father."
"Good," said James, ducking out from under his hand and grinning and clapping his own palm down over the spot, which did no good in the least. "I don't want it flat. It looks better up."
"It looks," said his father, "like something's gone and built a nest in it." But he said it the way he said most things to James — as though it were the finest head of hair in all England and he merely happened to be describing it with accuracy — and James had long since learnt to tell the difference, and grinned, and corked the last of the bottles.
And then the bench was full of them, rows on rows of little pale gleaming bottles, every one sealed and shining in the blue light, and there was nothing left over for the funnel to do. James yawned, hugely and with no warning at all, the yawn coming up out of him from somewhere down near the trunk in his bedroom, and he tried to shut his mouth on it and could not, and his father saw.
"Bed," his father said. "You've a train to be sick on in the morning, and I'll not have it put about that I was the one who kept you up the night before."
"I won't be sick," said James.
"No," his father agreed. "I don't suppose you will. You always were the better traveller of the two of us." He said it lightly, only filling the gap; but James caught it all the same — that his father had gone and put himself the lower of the two of them on purpose — and had no earthly idea what a person was meant to do with a thing like that, and so did what he generally did, which was nothing, and turned for the door.
At the door he stopped, with his hand on the latch and the cold of the passage waiting on the far side of it. He wanted to say something and had not the smallest notion what, and by now the not-knowing had a shape to it that was almost a comfortable one.
"Night, then," he said.
"Good night," said his father, already turning back to his bench and his bottles and the long careful business of the last of the batch. "Sleep. Your mother will have the whole house up at a shocking hour to get you to the platform, and she'll cry on it, and you're not to mind that. It's allowed."
James went out and up the cold stairs by feel, one hand on the banister, and behind him the low blue light lay along the flags of the passage and then dimmed as the workshop door swung slowly to. Up in his room the trunk was sitting waiting in the middle of the floor exactly where he had left it. He got into bed.
He did not, in the end, lie awake very long. In the morning there would be a scarlet engine, and a crowded platform, and a whole castle he had never once set eyes on, full to the rafters with people who did not yet know a single thing about him — and every last one of them, his father had said, walking in and hoping it didn't show. James rather thought he could manage that. He thought, on the whole, that he might turn out to be remarkably good at it.