MIRROR MIRROR

PART II: ADRIFT

Knowledge is a burden.

Stephen watched his wife closely, and suffered. It seemed as if he had developed a kind of second sight – or rather, an ability to look through surfaces. He began to notice things he had never noticed before.

He saw smirks behind the smiles he had once found so alluring. He detected a metallic quality in her laughter, and dissonance in her voice, and he thought he could see serpents stir in the black depths of her eyes. Her touch, too, suddenly seemed false; it made him shiver, he could no longer support it. When he looked at her from the corners of his eyes, she appeared a scavenger bird, a predatory woman with her long, powerful fingers like claws to rip his life apart. She was – she must be – she could be - a cunning sorceress, a shrewd mistress of the wiles of womankind, a very Vivian who had trapped him in her enchanted cave of lies. When he looked at her, it was hard not to feel revulsion and - fear.

The glamour she had cast finally began to wane – or did it? Stephen knew that the human mind is very susceptible to suggestion and easily led astray. He had little imagination, but enough of it to run riot. The Hit Wizard in him said he needed proof. He had a hunch as to where he might find it.

One afternoon, unable to focus on his cataloguing, he had returned home earlier than usual. The house was empty; his wife had gone to fetch their boy from the neighbourhood playground. For a while he had sat at the kitchen table, meditating on whether he had the right to do what he was about to do. The arms of the kitchen clock moved on; she was probably having a chat with the other mothers coming to collect their children. He had hesitated. He had always respected her privacy.

Then, quite suddenly, he had got up and climbed the stairs to the small attic room she used as a study and went to have a look inside (the door was unlocked, as if there was nothing to hide). He had never entered it before; it felt like a disrespectful intrusion but he could not stop himself. The room, as it presented itself to him, was cluttered from top to bottom with innumerable books, scrolls of parchment, ink, quills, diagrams and various magical artefacts. There were three cauldrons, in copper, pewter and silver; a crystal distilling apparatus and a silver Essentometer; Transfigurines in several shapes and sizes; and something that looked more or less like an antique clock with a small golden globe orbiting it. On shelves fixed to the wall stood a number of bottles and jars containing bits and pieces of organic material and liquids of different colours, and near the window was a cage holding white mice. In other circumstances, the unspeakable disarray would have driven him over the edge. Now it was left to the book titles to do so. As he randomly picked up tomes and read the gold-embossed titles on their spines, he realised for the first time that his wife really spent her days practising Dark Arts in his house.

Oh, he had been shamefully betrayed. She was not the woman he had agreed to marry, not in name and not in character. He had never loved Septimia DeQuincey; he had loved someone who had never existed.

What had it been, that led him to wed a woman he scarcely knew? What had he seen that pleased him about her? Whatever it was, it could not have been very deep, for as soon as he had discovered that she dealt in Dark things, his tender feelings vanished into thin air. He lost patience with her, grew increasingly irritable and began to find fault with everything she did. He was especially suspicious of her cooking; he had come across a heavily annotated copy of Ye Niuewe Poifones Almanacke in her study. He knew of wives poisoning their husbands so gradually that it did not look like murder at all; the men became listless and morose and slowly went out like candles. He regularly refused to eat what she served.

She had never been very tidy, and he had learned to live with that; but now that he knew she neglected the cleaning in favour of her Dark hobbies, he found it unacceptable. He scolded her mercilessly and accused her of inadequacy and laziness.

It was true that he had wanted her to stay at home rather than take a job; but now he realised he had unwittingly furnished her with the time, means and occasion to practise reprehensible magic, and thought she should have something to do, a task that kept her away from her study. He told her to go and find paid work.

He had agreed that she would educate their son at home, as was the tradition in her family; but now, worried about her less than exemplary interests, he insisted that the boy go to a Muggle primary school, as had been the custom in his own family. He wanted his son to respect Muggles and understand them, and he had reason to believe his wife would only induce the child with a misplaced feeling of superiority.

Septimia declared herself mystified by what she called his sudden whims. She did not initially fight them, though, probably in the conviction that they would pass, or that she would be able to sway him, as she had done before on countless occasions, he saw now. She accused him of acting gruffly and starting rows for no reason at all. He replied that her being a Dark witch and hiding it from him was a reason if ever there was any, at which she argued that Dark Arts were not Evil Arts. He could not believe she had the brazenness to defend Dark magic to him. If she could not see the corruption inherent in it, she was dangerously immoral and must be corrected. If she meant to try and convert him into accepting this vileness as legitimate, she was even more perverted than he had guessed.
It infuriated him that she kept acting innocent, for some time at least: she would put on a miserable face when receiving one of his scathing remarks, or, which was worse, occasionally dissolve in tears when he shouted at her. She would cringe and hold up her hands, soliciting compassion she did not deserve, making him angrier still, and the boy, seeing her in that hypocritical position of supplication, would start to cry with her because he did not understand. He was a little fool, but he was very young and therefore should be excused; he could not be expected to see what it had taken Stephen so long to realise.

Stephen did not have a heart of stone. It gave him no pleasure to act as he did; he felt no satisfaction to see his wife wail and cower, much less his innocent boy. He fervently wished that things could be different, but knew that they could not. To ignore what had been happening would be cowardly, and he was brave; to condone what was wrong would be unjust, and he was fair. He was raised to do what he had to do, even if it was painful. The world was, after all, perfectible, and he had a responsibility in its making.

Septimia, moreover, soon crushed every doubt he might still have entertained. When she realised her false pleas and crocodile tears had no effect on him, she cast her snivelling and submissive mask aside and revealed her true self. She proved hard and cold and ready to argue; she snarled and snapped and spat venom, and was no longer above drawing her wand against him. She excelled at vile curses, proving his suspicions grounded.

Family dinners grew increasingly torturous for the three of them. Whenever the spouses addressed each other, they did so through the boy: ‘Tell your mother I will be coming home late tonight’, ‘Tell your father he should do so more often.’ The best meals were those that passed in complete silence. When their son’s magical power finally became manifest (Septimia had already expressed worries about it taking so long), it was through his exploding their plates at the dinner table during a particularly loud fight, in an attempt to turn his parents’ attention from each other. He was successful for about five minutes, and then they carried on arguing.

Following Stephen’s orders, Septimia had found herself a job. He was not sure he liked the sound of it much: she worked as an assistant librarian in the National Library’s restricted Wizarding Wing. It made him fear his sealing her attic room with the most powerful charm he could muster in order to prevent her from consulting her damnable books had been slightly superfluous. But the good thing was she got to spend less time with their child, which meant her influence was more or less under his control. The boy had moped a bit, initially, but he had eventually accepted the fact his mother would not be at home when he returned from school.

By the time young Stephen had reached the age of seven, they all led more or less separate lives. Mother and father had their own jobs and their own bedrooms (Septimia had magically enlarged the first floor broom cupboard for herself; there was no other option in their modest house), and avoided each other as much as possible. Their son spent his days at school; during the holidays he was mostly home alone, but he quickly learned to take care of himself.

If Stephen’s marriage had become a failure, at least he could take pride in his son. The boy was eager to learn, thorough and attentive, and he excelled at most subjects, one notable exception being gym. His teachers praised his compositions, the ease he displayed in mathematics, and the quality of his memory, which seemed to absorb facts and dates and names like a sponge. On the other hand, they thought it necessary to warn Stephen that the child was little inclined to socialising and seemed unpopular with the majority of its classmates. The complaint was not unfamiliar, and it did not worry him overmuch: magical children will stand apart from others, and it was a good thing to learn and cope with it. And soon enough there would be Hogwarts, where the boy would be able to come to his own among his peers in Gryffindor or Ravenclaw (– the child was decidedly not Hufflepuff material).

Stephen doted on his son, but that did not stop him from being strict. Children were small wild things that had to be cultivated, their little claws trimmed, their jogtrot rigorously trained into an amble. They were like great gardens in which weeds pushed up with vigour, threatening to smother nobler crops, and it was their parents’ responsibility to do the landscaping. You did them a disservice by being lax and indulgent; they would not wax into decent adults when not kept in leading strings. Unfortunately, Stephen had his wife to contend with. Septimia actively set herself to undermining his educational project by waging a war for the boy’s affections. She cooed in the child’s ear whenever his father chided or punished him (though he never did so without a reason), consoling him with soft-spoken words and caresses. Stephen had little talent for pronounced shows of affection, and it angered him to see that the boy was sensitive to them. It was at these times of frustration that he noticed exactly how much his son looked like her, with his pale skin, long black hair and eyes like coal.

Stephen had a habit of making himself perfectly clear. For rules and orders to be effective, they must be unambiguous, so he took care to make them so. It logically followed that his son had no excuse not to obey, and that disobedience led to disciplining. The boy had always accepted this with equanimity. He knew that if he was bad, he would have to make up for it somehow. But his mother’s nefarious influence gradually began to surface: when, on occasion, an order of Stephen’s contradicted one of Septimia’s, the boy said no rule had been breached, and challenged the punishment his father meted out. Stephen had to patiently explain that any command only has the value of the person who pronounces it. The boy had looked at him in bewilderment, saying that he could not obey both his parents at the same time if they expected different things from him. Stephen told him that in their case, Papa’s authority overruled Mama’s, for reasons he would one day understand and for now just had to accept. When it looked as if his son was about to pursue the point, he had lost patience and told the child, rather louder than was necessary, that he was becoming just like his mother and that this was extremely irksome. The boy, shocked at the sudden outburst, was pushed to the verge of tears by this verdict. Before he went to hide under the weeping willow in the small back garden, as he was wont to do when told off, he informed his father in an oddly bitter voice that whenever Mama was angry with him (Stephen was relieved to hear that happened, too), she accused him of being a smaller version of Papa.

It was at that moment that he should have realised how much their quarrels weighed on their son, but he failed to do so. His battle for the child’s soul demanded his full attention. His adversary was redoubtable.

***

Next: Stephen stumbles upon several secrets; ‘young Stephen’ is sorted; and a strange wizard comes to the rescue.