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 inscape.”
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.
James played along gamely, reluctantly giving in to their insistent rambunctiousness, until Millie emerged from the parlor and intervened on his behalf.
“You know,” she said, dipping her head secretively, “James is rather famous himself. He once played Treus in ‘the Triumvirate’.”
The two boys’ eyes widened in newfound amazement as they looked up at James. The girl, who was the eldest cocked her head dubiously. “No, he couldn’t have,” she protested with flinty-eyed certainty. “He’s too young.”
“It was a production at our school,” Millie explained. “Everyone in it was young. Even Donovan, the villain.”
“I want to be Donovan the villain!” the youngest boy, Nigel, suddenly shouted. “Edmund can be the king. The king doesn’t do anything. He’s just a fat old numpty.”
And with that, for better or worse, it was apparently decided that the children, with Millie’s and James’ help, would put on their own version of the Triumvirate, acting it out in the drawing room for the benefit of the adults and even the Muggle servants two nights hence, on Christmas Eve.
“What a charming idea,” Mrs. Vandergriff announced, giving James a warm, surprised smile. He started to protest that it hadn’t at all been his idea, but then he understood her expression: half grateful and half sympathetic. The Lady of the house was secretly relieved that someone would be occupying the children, who could, at times, be quite a handful. He glanced at Millie, who merely shrugged and nodded at him. The children cheered this development enthusiastically.
It was nearing eleven o’clock before the family and guests all began to trickle up to the second and third floors where the many bedrooms ranged down long hallways. James met Millie at the bottom of the grand staircase to say goodnight. She pecked him chastely on the cheek in the sight of her parents in the hall below and the painting of a stern-faced Vandergriff patriarch on the wall above.
“Meet me in the dining room in half-an-hour,” she whispered into his ear, so close that her breath tickled. A moment later, she turned and ran up the steps, her dress flouncing around her ankles. He watched her go, uncertain what to make of her suggestion. Did she want time alone with him? Somehow he expected that she had more in mind than a brief snog in the dark.
He waited in his room for twenty minutes with the door closed and the fireplace roaring, filling the room with golden light and warmth.
The four-poster bed was as high as a table and wide enough for his whole family to sleep on. The curtains bracketing the windows were twelve feet from floor to ceiling, held back by golden cords as thick as his wrist. A clock on the mantel stood square and upright, like a soldier at attention, its brass face gleaming, its soft tick cutting the minutes into precise, paper-thin slices. James waited and watched. When the clock struck eleven, it emitted a faint ratchet and whirr, stood higher on its wooden legs, and raised a pair of articulated brass arms. It struck its own bell with one arm and wound itself with the other, twisting a tiny key in what, for all intents and purposes, now looked like its bellybutton.
Just as it had the previous night, the fire diminished in the hearth as if someone had turned down a dimmer switch, shrinking from a flickering roar to a sleepy bed of red coals which danced with only a few tongues of flame. The cords of the curtains untied themselves and the curtains swept shut over the windows, closing like sleepy eyelids.
The effect made James himself blink with tiredness. Even without house elves (at least upstairs, he reminded himself) the manor was clearly deeply enchanted.