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Dance

(Bellatrix Lestrange)

by

Sera dy Relandrant

Mist of evensong wreathed around tinsel-twined firs, turning even friend into foe. The chill fingers of the approaching night made girls’ eyes sting and women’s jewels sparkle more brightly. Only the children – and the house-elves trailing after them, to keep them from causing too much trouble – were brave enough to venture out of the warmed confines of Malfoy Manor and the enclosed arbors and gardens, and into the grounds proper.

There was a ball inside but what cared children, the bright, airy butterflies of tomorrow, of balls? There was food and warmth inside but when there was no amusement to be had inside, what mattered refreshments and the glow of firelight? Apple-bobbing, elf-dunking, pinning the tail on the pony… ah those were what really counted.

Light feet, shod in silk and pearl, pattered under the glitter of a thousand chandeliers inside, and bright eyes spoke as loudly as coy tongues as the young men and the girls, the lovely, lovely girls, danced. Outside, the children roamed wild.

She is not a child, but not yet a young woman. Ten-year-old Bella Black disdains to romp with the brats – particularly that cocky little upstart, eight-year-old Lucius ‘Lucy’ Malfoy – and nobody’s asked her to dance. She feels a little lonely because of it, lonely and embarrassed – they think I’m too young to dance. Too little.

Her grandmother’s pearls, shell-pink, against the creamy whiteness – a relic of her Rosier ancestry – of her throat, and the fairy folds of her gossamer robes fail to impart even a shadow of childhood’s sweet prettiness. Bella Black is beautiful, but not in the way her iris-frail mother had hoped to make her. She is as wild and feral as the wind whirling her sleek hair into crazy tangles, as the zig-zag bolt of lightening that makes the children scream. As the night.

A shadow of a man, tall and thin, unnaturally sober in his black hood and cloak (unnaturally in the surrounding gaiety of the ballroom), passes silently onto the balcony. He sees a little girl, only a little girl, tapping her fingers in time to the beat of the music on the stone ledge. And then she turns around and without even a shred of propriety demands in stentorian tones, “Who are you? Why did you come here? Who gave you permission to interrupt me?”

She can get away with it, she knows – her mother isn’t near. Because of course this man, this shadow of a man indeed, is of course inferior to her. Naturally. After all, she is a Black girl.

He realizes it too – realizes it from the contemptuous tilt of her patrician nose, the tone of her voice (so like Walburga’s!) but most of all from her attitude. Her scorn. Her complete and utter disdain. And he smiles, smiles at this haughty woman-child with her wild black hair slapping her paper-pale face. “I only came,” he says courteously, “Because I wished to find the fairest lady at the ball – and Miss Black, if I am not mistaken, that is you. Would you care to dance?”

Bella flushes and her eyes sparkle in eagerness. An answer, a yes – a yes, oh please – is on her lips but she remembers herself in time. “Why should I care to dance with a nobody like yourself?” she demands. “You forgot yourself in asking me.”

“A thousand apologies, Miss Black,” he says and barely refrains from chortles. “Rest assured, I never commit the same error twice.”

He doesn’t. Bellatrix’s beauty waxes into an upsurge of bold charcoal strokes on cream-white satin, waxes for a time before it begins to wane. She learns to stop calling Lucius Lucy and she learns how to romp again with the brats – when they’re all grown-up – at the Death Eaters’ revels. Of course she never quite learns how to answer a proposal with anything akin to grace, but perhaps that’s expecting too much of her.

All the same, whenever the Dark Lord dances – not a dance proper, not in a ballroom, but in the dueling fields he can be as graceful as any prima donna – he never chooses her as his partner.

She regrets that.