Chapter 1: Goblin Silver
Knockturn Alley in March smelt of coal smoke and wet stone and something underneath, sweet and rotten, that you'd never been able to name. You walked it the way your great-aunt had taught you to walk it when you were small enough to hold her hand: chin up, purse closed, eyes on the cobbles two yards ahead and never on the windows. The windows on Knockturn looked back.
Borgin and Burkes had not changed. A shrunken head in the window, grinning. A bloodstained pack of cards. A glass eye that turned to follow you as you passed. The bell over the door was cracked and made a sound like a cough.
Inside, the shop was dim and close and crowded with things that wanted something from you. A Hand of Glory under a bell jar. A great black cabinet in the corner, taller than a man. An opal necklace on a cushion with a little card propped against it that said DO NOT TOUCH, CURSED, HAS CLAIMED THE LIVES OF NINETEEN MUGGLE OWNERS TO DATE, which struck you, as it always had, as an extremely odd way to advertise.
There was a young man behind the counter, writing in a ledger.
You'd known he would be. You'd been told. You'd spent nine years not coming in here, and four weeks deciding to, and twenty minutes standing in the doorway of an apothecary across the alley watching him through the glass, and none of that had prepared you for the moment he looked up.
He was beautiful. That was the problem with him; it had always been the problem, according to everyone who'd ever told you about him. Your great-aunt's friends at bridge. The women from the Wizengamot widows' circle. Hepzibah herself, in the last letter she ever wrote you, in March of nineteen forty-six, in violet ink with the i's dotted in little hearts: Such a charming boy from Borgin's has been calling, darling, so attentive, you must meet him when you're home. Tall. Dark hair worn a little long and swept off a pale forehead. A face that looked as though someone had designed it carefully and then removed all the warmth from it, just slightly, the way you'd sand the edges off a piece of furniture. His eyes were dark. When he saw you, his whole face moved into a smile, slow and delighted, as if you were the one person he'd been waiting all morning to see.
You'd seen that smile described in eleven separate letters. You'd never imagined it would be so good.
"Good morning," said Tom Riddle. His voice was low and very pleasant. "How may I help you?"
You set your case on the counter. Dragon-hide, brass corners, older than both of you. "I have something to sell."
"How lovely." He closed the ledger. His hands were long-fingered and clean. On the right one, he wore a heavy gold ring with a black stone, which didn't quite go with the rest of him. "Mr Borgin is in the back. I'm afraid you'll have to make do with me."
"I'm sure I'll manage."
You unlatched the case and lifted out what was inside: a gauntlet, left-handed, in goblin silver that never tarnished and never would, worked all over with a pattern of interlocking thorns. It caught the dim light of the shop and threw it back brighter. Riddle's face didn't change, exactly. Something behind it did.
"Goblin-wrought," he said softly. "Fourteenth century. Ragnuk's workshop, if I'm not mistaken. There's a mark…" He reached out and turned it with one finger, not asking, and found the little sigil inside the cuff. "Yes. Where did you get this?"
"It belonged to my great-aunt. She had the whole suit, at one time. That's the only piece I've got left."
"Your great-aunt."
"Hepzibah Smith," you said, and watched him.
You'd expected nothing. A man who'd done what you believed he'd done would have practised this a hundred times. And he gave you nothing, almost. His smile stayed exactly where it was. His hand on the gauntlet didn't stop moving. Only his eyes, for a fraction of a second, went flat and quick and very attentive, like a cat's when it hears something in the skirting.
"I knew Madam Smith," he said. "A little. She was a client of the shop. A remarkable collector. I was so sorry about what happened." He looked up at you through his lashes. "I didn't know she had family."
"She had me. I was abroad, at the time. Cairo. I came back for the funeral."
"Then you have my condolences, years late. It was a terrible thing. Her house-elf, wasn't it? Poisoned her cocoa by mistake. They said the elf was confused. Very old."
"Hokey was very old," you agreed. "She couldn't add up. She couldn't remember what day it was. She couldn't, the Ministry said, tell rat poison from sugar." You smiled at him. "She'd been making my aunt's cocoa for sixty years. Every night. Without once mistaking rat poison for sugar. And then, two days after a charming young man from Borgin's came to call, she did."
The shop went very quiet. Even the things in the cases seemed to hold still.
Riddle looked at you for a long moment. Then, astonishingly, he laughed. It was a soft, warm, entirely convincing laugh, and he shook his head at you as if you'd made a very good joke at a dinner party.
"You think I'm a murderer," he said.
"I think you've a good eye for goblin silver."
"I have an exceptional eye for goblin silver. I've been in this shop ten years. I'd be a poor shopman if I didn't." He picked up the gauntlet and turned it in the light, admiring. "I'll give you two hundred Galleons for it."
"It's worth six."
"It's worth four, to anyone in this alley, and you know it, or you'd have gone to a respectable dealer in Diagon Alley who'd give you five. You came here." He set it down on the velvet between you, very gently. "You came here because you wanted to look at me."
He was very good. You'd give him that. Most people in your position, you thought, would already have forgotten what they came for. The voice did it, and the eyes, and the way he leaned on the counter so you were the only thing in the room he could possibly be looking at. You could feel it working on you, the way you can feel the sun on the back of your neck.
You'd grown up in a house full of things that wanted something from you. You'd learned young which ones to touch.
"I wanted to look at you," you agreed. "I've looked. Six hundred, or I take it to Diagon Alley and get five and the satisfaction."
He smiled again, and this one was different. Smaller. Real, possibly, or a better forgery. "Four hundred and fifty," he said, "and dinner."
"No."
"No to the price, or no to dinner?"
"No to dinner. Five hundred and fifty for the price."
"Five hundred, and you'll think about dinner."
"Five hundred," you said, "and I'll think about whether to tell you what I've got in my aunt's cabinets that would make your Mr Borgin weep. That's the only thinking you'll get."
He counted the Galleons out of a locked drawer, one by one, without looking down, his eyes on yours the whole time. When he slid the bag across the counter, his fingers brushed the back of your hand. It was cool, and dry, and very brief, and every inch of your skin noticed.
"It's been a pleasure," Tom Riddle said. "I hope you'll come back."
"I won't," you said, and went out into the alley, and walked all the way to the end of Knockturn before you let yourself breathe.
There was a fake in the window on the way out, by the way. A Babylonian scrying bowl, supposedly, priced at three hundred Galleons, and you'd noticed the glaze on the inside rim was English, nineteenth century at the earliest. You wrote that down on a card that evening and posted it to the shop, addressed to Mr T. M. Riddle, with no signature. You told yourself it was spite. It was partly spite.
Two days later, a parcel arrived at your house.
You knew the handwriting on the label at once. You'd been looking at it in your aunt's guest book for nine years: a neat, upright, beautiful hand in black ink, five visits in the spring of nineteen forty-six, the last one two days before she died.
Inside the parcel, wrapped in black silk, was a gauntlet. Goblin silver, never tarnishing, worked all over in interlocking thorns.
Right-handed.
You sat down very slowly on the floor of your aunt's front hall, among the umbrella stands and the stuffed Jarvey and the forty years of her clutter that you hadn't had the heart to clear, and you held it in your lap. You knew this gauntlet. You'd last seen it in the glass case on the second floor of this house, the night before you'd sailed for Egypt. It had been in that case the night your aunt died. It had vanished from that case the same night, along with a little gold cup with a badger on it, and a heavy gold locket with a serpentine S, and nothing else.
There was a card tucked inside the silk.
I believe these belong together, it said. I'm free on Friday. T.