“James is right,” Millie announced, standing and draping the dress in her hands against Ariadne, testing the fit. “This will do until tomorrow. For now, we should all get ready for the real play. We leave in less than an hour.”
The rest of the evening was occupied entirely with the trip to the famed and ancient Theatre D’Extraordinaire in central London, and the play itself, which was nearly three hours long, including a half-hour intermission. James had seen wizarding plays on occasion, though never a fully magical production of the Triumvirate, and never in a theatre of the sheer size and grandeur as the one he now entered. Decked with gilded scrollwork, arched pillars, and flying buttresses that lined both side aisles, the theatre appeared capable of seating approximately half the population of London itself. The many balconies overlaid each other like drawers in a baroque dresser, opened into terraces. None were fixed in place, but floated, rising and lowering from the main floor like parade balloons, studded with purple velvet seats and crowded with richly dressed patrons. James watched as they drifted overhead, swapping places for loading and unloading, their undersides decorated with massive frescoes of ancient fictional scenes.
The one thing that detracted from James’ experience was the woefully old-fashioned and hopelessly wrinkled dress robes he wore.
Putting them on in his upstairs bedroom, he had briefly mourned their bedraggled state. Now, sidling into his seat in the grandest of the lower balconies with the Vandergriff family, he understood just how exquisitely ridiculous he looked amongst the coiffed finery that surrounded him. As James passed, a fat man with a monocle flinched back from him, blinking rapidly, as if James had flicked water into his face. The woman next to him, resplendent in a stiff jeweled dress, her grey-pink hair piled into a knotty beehive large enough for storks to nest in, frowned elaborately at him, looking him unabashedly up and down.
James sighed and shook his head to himself, feeling the too-short sleeves slap at his wrists, the moth-eaten fringe of lace flopping limply, embarrassingly ratty. The high burgundy collar and broad lapels had likely last been in fashion when Grandmother Weasley had been in school. Even worse than this, however, was the sadly wrinkled state of the entire garment, the result of spending the last several months crushed and damp in the bottom of James’ trunk. He emitted an odor of old bananas and mould as he walked, trying as hard as he could to shrink, to become as small as possible, to blend right into the crushed purple velvet of the seat as he sank into it.
“I could have let you borrow one of Bent’s old dress robes,”
Millie whispered aside at him as the huge chandeliers dimmed. “Or at least used an ironing charm to smooth that travesty out a bit.”
“A little late for that, now, isn’t it,” James whispered back, trying to make it sound as if he was merely bemused, rather than completely mortified. He thought back to the look on Countess Blackbrier’s face when he’d first come clumping down the stairs, his hair still damp from a severe, desperate combing, without a minute to spare before loading into the vehicles gathered along the front of the house. She hadn’t said a thing—she was far too diplomatic for that—but her wrinkled eyes had widened slightly, her brow raised, and her chin dipped a tick. James understood that he had lost several points with her, and regretted it more than he might have expected. The children, however, had been far less discreet, collapsing into nearly hysterical laughter at the sight of James’ trailing lace frill and the gown that stopped a full five inches short, showing his trainers and incongruous argyle socks.
As the lights dimmed over the theatre, James finally relaxed and sighed, sinking low in his seat. The stage shone like an illuminated jewel, surrounded by waves and terraces of shadowed balconies, and the play launched to life with a fanfare of horns, a trill of flutes, and a boom of timpani. The orchestra in the pit below the stage was nearly sixty members strong, according to the program in James’ hand, and it sounded like it. Music filled the theatre like warm spring air, with barely any echo to dull its effect. On the stage itself, actors sprang into motion: dozens of peasants moved among a life-sized and perfectly captured medieval square. A line of soldiers marched into view. And there, entering from the right, was the King, and Donovan his royal advisor, and finally the regally beautiful princess Astra.
James remembered the scene well from his second year at Hogwarts, when he himself had been on stage in the guise of Treus, the Captain of the Guard. But this was different in nearly every way. The king was not young Tom Squallus with a pillow stuffed into his tunic.
He was an actual large man, more stocky than fat, with a true beard and a stately demeanor and robes and crown that looked as if they’d come directly from a museum. Donovan was a tall, beardless man with sharp, angular features, so cunning in the very lines of his face and squint of his eyes that James had to remind himself that this was an actor, not an actual villain scheming against the jovial king and the young princess that followed them.
Astra, James saw, was barely older than himself. She was ginger-haired and stunningly beautiful, the pale pillar of her neck adorned with a glittering necklace of silver and deep blue gems, flashing in the brilliant stage lights.
Despite having been in a version of the play himself, James had never fully grasped the story of Astra, Treus, and Donovan. He’d been far too preoccupied with the extraneous details of production—the costume shop and props crew, the glowing painted markers on the stage floor, and the constant, droning repetition of rehearsals. Now, as he watched the full production in all of its theatrical glory, he began to see why it was the ultimate classic story of the golden age of wizard literature.
This was, of course, helped immensely by the grandeur of the deeply enchanted production.
When Donovan manipulated the king into granting Astra as his bride, the villain used an actual spell, conjuring a terrifyingly realistic (if somewhat over-wrought) hex of entrancement that illuminated the entire stage with vicious purple light and left the first few rows of patrons nodding and woozy in their seats. When the villain sent Treus and his crew on the ruse of a completely invented sea mission, the oily coolness of his lies was simultaneously compelling and disturbing.
Around the theatre, several voices gasped, or cried out warnings, or angry insults at the oblivious, conniving villain.