Dracaena’s Letter

Dracaena’s letter came on a Wednesday, at breakfast, when she was already in her riding things.

It came by the school owl, a tawny one, which dropped on to the table between the toast and the marmalade. Her father held out his hand for the letter, which Dracaena passed to him. He opened all her post. He read this one from top to bottom, turned it over to check that there was nothing on the back, and passed it down the table to her.

It was addressed in green ink to Miss D. Malfoy, The Blue Bedroom, Malfoy Manor, Wiltshire.

“On time,” said her mother. “That’s something.”

“It would hardly be late,” said her father.

Dracaena read it over twice. It wasn’t a surprise. She’d known since she was four that it would come; she only hadn’t known which day. Folded in with it was a list of books and robes and all the things a first-year would need, and at the bottom was a line to say that first-years were not allowed their own broomsticks.

She read that line three times.

“Father —”

“No,” said her father, and turned a page of the Prophet.

She took the letter riding with her. She read it again on the way down the main staircase, and went past the tapestry at the turn without looking at it. Dobby the house-elf had the pony waiting at the foot of the front steps, and she stopped on the last one to check the list.

The pony was a grey called Pewter, and he had been hers since she was six. There was a right way to go up to him — slowly, from the side, talking to him — and she went up to him that way now, and mounted without looking at the elf holding the stirrup either. Pewter wouldn’t stand still for anybody else in the house, and she counted that in his favour. She rode him up to the top of the long lawn, where the peacocks weren’t allowed, and let him put his head down and tear at the grass while she read the list a fourth time, the reins looped in one hand.

She was going to Hogwarts. It had never once occurred to her that she might not. The only question was whether she could get a broom in there with her, and on the whole she thought that she could.