Abraxas stared at the people in front of him and sighed. He really hadn't expected Esmeralda to act this fast. For once, he had thought he had time, probably until the new year, but he had severely underestimated just how resolute this daughter of his, once her mind was made up. It was, it seemed, entirely on brand for Esmeralda's personality — something Abraxas was still learning. After all, he had not raised this child. Clarisse has done well keeping her away. Abraxas had to admit that, given Esme's penchant for chasing down her own curiosity, she would have made a fine Ravenclaw had she ever been enrolled at Hogwarts.
"You didn't waste any time. I'd have thought you could wait until after Yule." He commented.
Esme crossed her arms at her father. "I prefer my bad news served cold and immediate. I'm not going to let it hang over my head until la nouvelle année. I would have hoped all the bad news be heard so I can cleanse myself for the new year."
"You expected bad news?"
"Is it not bad news?"
Abraxas frowned. It was bad news. He knew it. Esme knew it despite not knowing what it was. Lucius and Pandora, on the other hand, don't know and are still puzzled.
Lucius did not understand why his father had called for a family meeting. It wasn't a formal one — hard for it to be, in the presence of a sick man confined to his sickroom, dressed in something far too informal for proper company. His father had made the effort to look as presentable as circumstances allowed, but there was only so much dignity a sickroom permitted however careful one tried to preserve it.
He was even more surprised that Pandora was here at all. Ever since his sister had run away from the family and eloped with Xenophilius Lovegood, his father had forbidden everyone from even saying her name. The scandal had struck the Malfoy name a considerable blow, and restitution had been owed to the Lestranges because of it. Whatever this matter was, it was serious enough that even Pandora had been summoned.
As for Pandora, she had been utterly baffled by the invitation. When the letter from the Malfoys first arrived, she had assumed it a poor jest and had fully intended to scrap it — until a second letter followed, this one from her sister, Esmeralda, asking her, with unexpected courtesy, to be present. That, more than the first, had shocked her. Never had she thought to hear from her sister at all — a sister she had not laid eyes on since she was a toddler, and of whom she retained scarcely any memory, nor of the mother they had, for that brief span, shared.
At first, she had wondered what could possibly have happened that the stubborn mule of a man that was Abraxas Malfoy would be willing to lower himself so far as to invite her back to Malfoy Manor that even her own sister, whom she never talked to, has requested her presence. Was he ill? Well — he was. Dragonpox. A horrible way to go, in her opinion. But she had this nagging feeling that this was not all there was to it.
Pandora glanced at Lucius. He wore the same look she did — clearly, he did not know what was happening either. Lucius and Pandora had grown up together under Abraxas Malfoy's roof. They were not close in the way most siblings were, but there existed between them a kind of quiet understanding — the unspoken solidarity of two people who knew exactly what it cost to please a father like theirs. Their relationship was so unremarkable, so entirely lacking in the visible closeness expected of Malfoy heirs, that by the time Pandora arrived at Hogwarts, most had all but forgotten she was a Malfoy at all.
But concerning Esmeralda, Pandora had barely interacted with her at all. When she had been sent to France with their mother, Pandora had never once been permitted to visit. Her father had forbidden it. Her brother, by contrast, was allowed to visit once a month, and later in the summers when he was away at school. When their mother died, Pandora had scarcely registered any emotion — she had never known a relationship with a mother who had ignored her for the whole of her life, and the coldness of it still stung, even now. She had never understood why, of the two of them, only Esmeralda was taken by their mother. Even after their mother's death, she had heard nothing from Esmeralda and from what she gathered through Lucius, her sister had kept just as much distance from him as she had from her.
She does look beautiful, Pandora thought as she glanced at her sister. Like Lucius and Abraxas, Esmeralda bore the Malfoy's straight, ice-blonde hair and pale blue eyes. Pandora's own hair fell in loose waves, and hair is more sunnier in color.
"So, are you going to start anytime soon, or must we sit here all day? You promised to tell us once everyone had arrived, Abraxas. Alors?" Esmeralda said, with the crisp, unhurried impatience of someone entirely unafraid of the man she was addressing.
Pandora stared. Even estranged as she was, even with every reason for resentment, she had never once managed to call her father anything but "Father" — some old, stubborn instinct toward respect that outlasted the anger itself. Hearing Esmeralda address him so plainly, by name alone, as though he were no more than an acquaintance who owed her something, was still shocking for her. She looked toward Lucius, half expecting him to reprimand their sister for it.
He only sighed and pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose like this was a normal occurrence.
Abraxas sighed. "Fine."
He was quiet for a long moment, as though gathering the words from some place he had kept them locked away for years.
"Your mother did not want this marriage," he said. "Not to me. Not to anyone, perhaps, but certainly not to me." He paused. "It was a contract, made before either of us had any say in the matter. Her family pushed her into it as much as mine pushed me. She had no more choice in the arrangement than I did." Another pause, heavier this time. "It is also why she had so little to do with her own family afterward. There was very little love lost between Clarisse and her parents that it explains why you never met that side of the family."
None of it was news, not really. Arranged marriages were the currency of families like theirs — a fact of life so ordinary that none of the three of them had ever thought to question it, and unhappiness within one was hardly a novelty either. It was, if anything, the more common outcome than not. It explained well enough why Clarisse had spent so many of her years keeping her distance from Malfoy Manor, and from the man now sitting before them.
As for Esmeralda, she knew that their mother's parents had died before Clarisse Malfoy moved back to France, and that she had cut off contact with whatever relatives remained afterward. Coming from a branch family, Clarisse had never been significant enough for her absence to draw much notice — no one of consequence stood to lose anything by her silence, and so no one troubled themselves to break it.
"Forgive me, Father, but what does this have to do with why you summoned us here?" Lucius asked. The unhappiness of their marriage was hardly a secret — everyone knew it, and he was no exception — so none of this was news to him.
"Because I wanted you to understand," Abraxas said, "that despite her unhappiness here, she sacrificed a great deal — and did a great deal — to maintain the House of Malfoy. She was cold to me but has brought heirs to the House of Malfoy. She did the duties expected of the lady of the house without issue and has not done anything warranted that would ruin the House of Malfoy despite the many opportunities to do so."
Abraxas fell silent. For a long moment, he said nothing at all, his gaze fixed somewhere past his children, on some point in the room none of them could see. The silence stretched long enough that Lucius nearly spoke, if only to fill it.
"I cannot say the same of myself."
The words came quietly; without the weight one might have expected from a man like him. Almost too quietly, as though he had needed to test them once, privately, before he could risk saying them aloud to a full room.
Lucius frowned. "What do you mean by that, Father?"
Abraxas did not answer at once. When he finally did, he looked at none of them directly.
"I had an affair."
For a moment, no one in the room said anything at all.
"You did what?" Lucius's voice cracked through the composure he had spent his whole life perfecting — the least controlled anyone in that room had ever heard him.
Pandora's hands flew to her mouth, pressed there as though to hold back whatever sound wanted to escape.
Esme alone did not move, her expression giving away nothing — the same composed stillness she had worn since she first walked into the room.
Abraxas was quiet again, longer this time. When he spoke, his voice had lost the careful control it had carried throughout the evening.
"There was a woman," he said. "In Italy. A chambermaid, at the hotel where I stayed whenever business took me there." He paused. "Your mother never cared for travel. She refused to accompany me, and so I went alone, more often than not." Another pause, heavier than the last. "It was not meant to be anything lasting. I told myself that, at the time. But it did last."
The silence that followed was different from the one before — sharper, with an edge to it that had not been there a moment ago.
"You're telling us," Lucius said slowly, each word measured as though he did not trust himself to speak faster, "that for years, you lectured me on the sanctity of our bloodline. On duty. On what it means to bear the Malfoy name with honor." His hands had curled, at some point, into fists at his sides. "And all the while you are running around with a chambermaid —"
He did not finish the sentence. He did not need to.
Pandora said nothing, but something in her face had gone very still, very white — the stillness of someone doing sums she did not want to do. She had spent her whole childhood being measured against a standard of perfect, dutiful womanhood — a standard, she now understood, her own father had never once held himself to.
Esme alone seemed genuinely caught off guard, her composure slipping for the first time since she had entered the room. Whatever she had braced herself to hear tonight, it had not been this.
"But what does this have to do with the estrangement?" Esmeralda asked.
Lucius turned to her. "What do you mean, what does it have to do with it? It's because our father could not keep his trousers to himself. I'm frankly surprised our mother did not leave him sooner."
"Infidelity is hardly new among nobility." Lucius looked scandalized and wanted to argue further, but Esme continued before he could. "Abraxas is head of the House of Malfoy. He could simply have forced her to remain regardless of what he did. She would have had no choice in the matter. She was the lady of this house, bound to it by contract, not by his fidelity to her. Whatever he did in Italy would not have freed her of that." She paused. "So, no. This alone does not explain why she stayed away from us for years rather than merely tolerating a husband who strayed, as so many wives of our standing do."
"No, you are right. Even if your mother had learned that I was unfaithful, she would have stayed regardless." Abraxas said. Lucius glared at him. Whatever detachment he had managed a moment before had gone; this was, after all, still his mother being spoken of.
"Honestly, your mother would never have found out about the affair at all, if not for the fact that the woman I was involved with fell pregnant."
That caught their attention. "What?" The word came from more than one of them at once, overlapping, none of them quite waiting for the others to finish.
"She never told me about the pregnancy," Abraxas said. "Not while she carried the child, and not after. I did not know any of it until her closest friend came looking for me herself — with the child in her arms — to tell me what had happened. She had died. In childbirth." He paused, and for once his voice did not sound entirely steady. "The woman was not quiet about it, either. She stood at the gates of this manor and said so to anyone who would listen. That is how your mother learned of it. And your grandparents."
For a long moment, none of them spoke. Whatever anger had filled the room before had shifted into something quieter, heavier. The silence of people trying to absorb too much at once and finding there was no good order in which to do it.
It was Pandora who finally broke it. "What happened next?" Her voice was barely above a whisper.
Abraxas did not answer that. Not yet.
"My parents were furious," he said instead. "Understand, this was not simply a matter of my own disgrace. A public scandal of that size could have cost this family everything, and they were not about to allow that to happen, whatever it required." He drew a slow breath. "They handled it themselves. Quietly, and completely. They silenced everyone who needed silencing. And the woman's friend — the one who had come to the gates, who had said far too much to far too many people — they had her Obliviated. Thoroughly. By the time they were finished with her, she did not remember she had ever had a best friend at all."
He looked at each of his children in turn.
"They were very thorough," he said again, quieter this time. "It was as though none of it had ever happened."
"Except that it had!" Lucius snapped. "What happened to the child? Is there some bastard running about the world sharing our blood, and I am only hearing of it now?" His jaw tightened. "I am head of this house. Secrets of this nature should have come to me the moment I took the title — not years later, in a sickroom, because you finally decided you were dying and wished to unburden yourself. How am I meant to protect this family from a scandal I did not even know existed?"
"Because your grandparents were very thorough," Abraxas said. "They knew precisely what would happen should such information ever reach the public, and they were not willing to leave it to chance." He paused, and when he continued, something in his voice had gone unsteady in a way it had not before. "They forced your mother to take the child in. Not simply to raise her as a ward or foster her quietly under some other name. They made her blood-adopt the child as her own."
He did not look at any of them as he said it.
"Clarisse did not want to. She refused, at first — as much as anyone in her position could refuse my parents anything. But they were... very convincing. She had no real choice in the end, any more than she had a choice in marrying me." His hands, folded before him, tightened almost imperceptibly. "It nearly broke her. She had only just given birth herself, months before — and then she was made to take her husband's mistress's child into her body, into her blood, and call it her own."
For a moment, no one said anything at all.
Then Lucius turned. So did Esme — both, at once, their eyes finding the same person. The person that made the most sense. The one person that Abraxas said he would not say until she is here. The sibling standing between them, still and pale, wearing an expression that could not seem to settle on any one thing.
Pandora was staring at the floor. Realization had already taken hold of her by the time she spoke.
"Me." she said quietly. "I'm that child, aren't I?"