James Potter and the Crimson Thread

12. MIDNIGHT RENDEZVOUS

The answer to James' early, idle question—would he and Millie, while visiting her family, be more or less supervised than they were at school—was answered over the course of the following hours and days. Every moment was scheduled, it seemed, and there were always people around. It was less like being supervised, exactly, and more like attending a sort of school for aristocrats, where the lessons were tea time, formal receptions, incomprehensibly dull party games, and long-winded introductions to this visiting family or that impressive dignitary or the other guest foreign ambassador whom James had only ever seen in photographs in the Daily Prophet but whose knee Millie remembered sitting on when she was five years old, and whose children she asked after with sincere fondness. It took James awhile to realize that many of the people that appeared in the paintings decking the manor house walls were real, living people, albeit much older, who frequented the home over the holidays.

Every meal was a nearly three-hour affair for which everyone changed into their best clothes and went through a sort of multi-room procession, beginning in the drawing room for aperitifs (expertly presided over by Topham the butler), then moving to the long, regal dining room for the actual courses (with carefully assigned seating that Millie had to coach James through) whereupon more Muggle servants in tailcoats and white ties served the food and poured the drinks, and ending eventually in the parlor

(for the ladies) and the library (for the gentlemen).

After dinner on the second night, James joined the men as they gathered around the enormous library hearth, which was large enough to park a car in, drinking a brownish-ruby liquor called cognac (James himself received a glass of warmed butterbeer with a sprig of holly on the rim), and talked loftily of weighty matters of which James had little understanding: upcoming changes of justices at the Wizengamot; revised regulations about magical flight in Muggle places; breaches of international magical secrecy in places like Tibet and Istanbul. At first James felt awkward and out-of- place, but soon enough he realized that not only was he interested in the topics, he was welcomed into the discussion by Mr. Vandergriff himself, who always stood in his dinner jacket with his back to the fire, swirling his cognac in a round bowl-like glass.

"Your father was on the scene when the wizarding monks of Lijiang City threw open their doors for their Muggle counterparts, if I am not mistaken," he prodded James with a nod. "I envy the conversations your family must have of an evening!"

"We don't talk about it much as a family, actually," James admitted. "But Dad and I did talk about it in his study. He said that the monks of Lijiang had wished for centuries to combine the methods of their magical lifestyle with their non-magical neighbors. They believe that even the Muggle monks are secretly magical, but that theirs is a magic of the inner- world of the mind. They call it the in-scape."

One of the evening's dinner guests, a fat Ministry official with huge pork-chop sideburns, grey as iron, and a mottled red nose, now redder from cognac, snorted into his glass. "Everyone knows the wizarding cannot merely teach magic to the Muggles. Well-intentioned codswollop."

"Dad says the wizard monks don't intend to teach magic to the Muggle monks. They want to be taught by them, about their own more subtle disciplines of inner magic. The only reason they waited until the magical boundaries were weakening was because it felt selfish to them to want to know both."

The Ministry official harrumphed at this, but Mr. Vandergriff (whose actual title was Lord William of Blackbrier) smiled and raised his glass in a toast. "To the wise wizarding monks of Lijiang, and all the rest of us who will hopefully make the best of this brave new world we find ourselves on the cusp of."

James raised his own glass, enjoying the grown-up feeling of taking part in such a proper-sounding toast, but the effect was marred shortly by the late arrival of another wing of the family, accompanied by a gaggle of three small children. The children had heard of James Potter (or, more accurately, of his famous father) and were immediately enthralled. The two boys and one girl, all under six years old and immaculately dressed in miniature versions of the adult formal wear, immediately claimed James as their own and circled him like happy butterflies, demanding he play with them, acting out the stories they'd been told and retold about his legendary father.