Alone and Palely Loitering | Harry Potter for Grown-Ups

Alone and Palely Loitering

The first time he considered killing her was in 1536.

It seemed the fashionable thing, and if the Muggle king could do it, why not him?

Not a nice, professional beheading, of course; it would need to be subtler. And it would be nice if it were more painful.

No, no, he thought. Henry had the right of it. The woman has shared my bed for 186 years. He tried not to add, and snored for 175 of them.

Immortality had seemed a grand idea at the time. He only wished he'd discovered the Stone a little sooner. While he never got any older, he didn't get any younger, either, and quite frankly, 150 years, give or take, of gout and piles had made him think more than once of chucking the bloody thing into the Thames.

But then some entrancing young thing would catch his eye, and he'd swallow the Elixir, trim his beard, straighten his doublet and waistcoat, and pursue her as if she were an alchemical riddle to be teased out of hiding. Invariably, though, his fancy of the day became an old slag, and in the end, there was Perenelle.

Always.

~oOo~

For the first hundred years or so, he'd loved her. Or as much as one could love a wife he'd only met for the first time when she was six and for the second time on their wedding day. But they'd got on well enough after the initial period of adjustment, and when he'd needed someone to test the Elixir, he'd naturally turned to her. Testing an untried immortality draught on an apprentice would have been very bad form, and frankly, people would have noticed if a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy never grew taller or sprouted his man's beard.

So it had been Perenelle. Not that she'd known, of course. But after ten years of slipping her the Elixir with no ill effects, he'd started taking it himself, and that's when he'd told her about it, although not about his little test period. There were some things that must be kept to oneself if one is to enjoy a harmonious home life. He'd learnt that over four decades of marriage.

She'd demanded that he share the Elixir with her—the Stone made enough for two, but only just—and he'd acquiesced. It would be nice, he'd thought, to share eternity with someone.

Even if it was his wife.

~oOo~

Thoughts of murder cropped up a few times over the next centuries—of course they did! What husband did not occasionally dream of ridding himself of his wife? Especially one who snored and never once in three hundred years missed an occasion to mention the fact that he'd been unable to perform on their wedding night.

When they moved back to Paris in 1649—London had become altogether too depressing to tolerate, what with the theatres closed—he became terribly taken with an actress of Molière's.

Her voice was so much more melodious and her bosom so much whiter than Perenelle's, and she never snorted when she laughed or yawned when he was speaking about something important.

She was perfection.

"Come away with me, my Rosebud," he'd say to her and mean it. Visions of eating grapes from her delightfully rounded belly on some sun-drenched Mediterranean isle danced through his head at disturbing intervals.

But she'd laugh, tossing her pretty golden curls, asking, "And what would you tell your wife, monsieur? And I my husband?"

He began slipping her tiny amounts of the Elixir, watering Perenelle's monthly dose, but not so much that she'd notice. Eventually, his wife would succumb to the inevitable, and his Rosebud would tire of the life of the stage, and when that happened, he wanted to ensure she would remain as dewy-skinned and golden-ringletted as she'd been when he first set eyes on her at the Comédie Française.