Ghosts, ghosts, everyone had ghosts – all the best families, the oldest families, the purest f

Ghosts, ghosts, everyone had ghosts – all the best families, the oldest families, the purestfamilies; they all had ghosts. Unhappiness in life, terror in death and all the wealth and status they could ever have almost inevitably went hand in hand. And so there were hallways, always, with ghosts drifting down them. Corridors and passages and wings that no one visited because that was where the ghosts of Christmas past lived, waiting to remind families of their sins and their unhappy pasts.

Those raised in these grand old houses learnt one simple lesson: the ghosts were part of the woodwork, the ghosts were invisible, the ghosts were nothing more than whispers and inconveniences to be endured.

But sometimes those large houses grew empty and cold and lonely. Sometimes in the lone hours of the morning, it was easy to go wandering and hope for something – anykind of contact, as long as it exceeded the politely traded words and delicate manners of their society’s parlours and soirees. Sometimes children’s eyes went prying. Sometimes they asked questions and sometimes, they talked with closeted skeletons and family ghosts. Sometimes when children find they have no one they can confess their fears, hopes and desires to they turn to ghosts.

Ghosts, after all, were just like the heavy wood-paneling on their doors.

Rodolphus Lestrange’s ghost was an old familiar face from his childhood. When he was thirteen, there had been a fire and she had died. No one mentioned the locked doors, or the screaming or the threats. No one mentioned the night Antinous Lestrange dragged her up the stairs to the attic by her hair, in a foul and drunken rage – how when the cool light of morning should have calmed him to reason, he had found himself unable to swallow his pride and had left her there. Rodolphus remembered it all very vaguely, happier memories from school supplanted it and then later, the endless dreariness of Azkaban was all that he could remember.

He found Dido Lestrange one day, nevertheless, and thirty-one years a ghost had not dimmed her fury or her memory though she could not match the proud young boy she knew as her nephew to the wild unkempt man on the stairway in front of her. Despite it, she alone understood the hatred he bore his father – how could she not? She had felt the weight of his pride and his wrath and if she, his sister, had died so that Antinous’ pride could be fulfilled, how much more his son?

“I am alive,” her nephew would repeat, but he was just as much a ghost as she was; broken and humbled for Antinous’ ambitions and pride.

“How I should like to kill him,” he would tell her and those were the times when Dido Lestrange could see something of the young boy she remembered from thirty-one years ago then.  

What they were not told, by their mothers and fathers, was that sometimes, the ghosts talk back.

“Kill him,” Dido would rasp one day, “For your sake. Save yourself before all you are is nothing more than yet another drop in the vast ocean of Antinous Lestrange’s ambitions.”

“Live,” she would say, “Live for both of us, my child.”

That last he could not do and he could not even kill his father though he was tempted, many times.

They did not tell you that you could fail ghosts either.

Theodore Nott’s ghost was not his mother as one might have supposed. His mother had died with the satisfaction that her son would be well-protected – had died contented and gentle, even on her deathbed.

He had been old enough to understand it. Death. Not old enough to understand her last words.

“They will come for you,” she said, “Your father will say no. Youmust say no.”

But then he begins to understand when he meets his ghost – a young man, no more than eighteen or nineteen, who tells him his name is Edward Tarquin Nott. Theodore is struck by the ghost’s likeness to the portrait of his father that hangs over the fireplace in their private dining room. He finds that mentioning this man’s name makes his father’s glass of wine slip from his hand to the floor – and his father turns white, as though he is in unspeakable pain.

His father flees the dinner table and Theodore Nott, age nine, wonders what on earth could have moved his father so.

Edward Tarquin Nott, he finds, was once the heir to the Noble and Most Ancient House of Nott. In 1943 the first summons had come from continental Europe – send help, any help you can find, we need every wand to fight the tyrant who styles himself Grindelwald – and Edward Tarquin Nott, like many others of his cohort, had answered. Very few of them had returned alive. Edward’s body was never found, but his spirit found its way back home to his birthplace somehow.

Theodore understands his mother’s words, a little, when he tells Edward of the mark on his father’s arm and he sees the pain in the ghost’s eyes.

“We died saving Europe from a madman,” his dead uncle tells him when he is fifteen and he tells him that the Dark Lord has returned, “I did not think that his madness would return and infect my country.”

Theodore wants to ask him how he could think it was madness when great-uncle Cantankerus was the one who wrote the Pureblood Directory, but before he can ask, the words start tumbling from Edward’s mouth and he tells Theodore of all the horrors he saw on his marches through Europe - the horror of his own death, drowned in the English channel as they helped muggles flee from Grindelwald’s approaching army.

“Whatever we may believe about the purity of our blood and all it engenders,” he tells Theodore, “War and death and a people ruined and broken is not worth it.”

And Theodore understands his mother’s words then. He could be a soldier, like his father and uncle, and lose his life to The Cause. Or he could choose peace and gain his life, instead.

Theodore Nott always did have a strong sense of self-preservation.

There is no ghost left behind when his father dies and that, at least, comforts Theodore through the silent burial he and the ghost of Edward Tarquin Nott hold for Charles Hadrian Nott in the autumn of 1997.

Draco Malfoy found his ghost when he was sixteen. Not at home, because Malfoy Manor had no ghosts, because Malfoy Manor was always warm and welcoming, to him at least, because no Malfoy had ever lived a truly unhappy life or died in fear.  Not even in Slytherin, because Slytherin was not a place for sharing secrets or for weaknesses to be acknowledged. Someone was always watching in Slytherin; always watching and reporting. There was no room to slip, to be anything other than perfect and to execute every step of the intricate little dances they did perfectly.

No, Draco Malfoy found his ghost in a bathroom and for the first time, he found he could admit that he, the silver prince, was lost, terrified and hurting.

For the first time, Draco thought he might have a friend. A realfriend, that is, and not a Slytherin friend. One could not relax with a Slytherin friend. One could not tell them if one was afraid, or how close one was to disgrace. Oh he trusted them well enough – loved them in his own peculiar way, even – but trust and love were fickle things where his fellow Slytherins were concerned; not enough for him to confess the burden he bore and stay safe in the knowledge that his confessor would keep it for him and not use it against him later.

Myrtle was a mudblood and a Ravenclaw. Maybe, he thought, that was why she was simple. Simple and uncomplicated, honest and gentle. For the first time, Draco found he had someone he could almost call a real friend. His secrets spilled out, one after the other, after so many months pretending they were a badge of pride and not a brand of near dishonor. It was strange, then, to see that there was no judgement in her eyes as there almost certainly would have been in Nott’s or Zabini’s if he had told them all of this, when she promised to keep his secrets for him - only sadness and understanding. They were friends, she told him, and this was what friends did: they shared their burdens and tried to soften the edges of this world for each other.

Slytherin was all hard edges and under the softening influence of Myrtle’s friendship, Draco began to wonder if he was the mask he had worn all these years.

(Not quite, no.)

(Maybe, maybe Myrtle, who understood him best despite the circumstances of her death and his own allegiance to the very man who murdered her, had the right of it.)

“We will find a way,” she would promise him one day and if the feeling blossoming in his chest was not hope, but a deepening sense of fragility and longing, then none but Draco needed to know that.

They did not find a way, but Draco could not banish her memory from his mind and when he raised Scorpius, he raised him to understand that it was who people were and not the circumstances of their birth or their lineage which mattered most – though that was what they had once been taught.

“Kindness,” he would tell Scorpius, “Love and compassion – they were what saved me all those years ago and made me a better man than I was.”

“I could have been sent to Azkaban,” he would tell Scorpius, “If a muggleborn ghost hadn’t been kind to me all those years ago and if I hadn’t realized, then, that I was right in suspecting that everything we had built our lives on back then was wrong in some way. Don’t underestimate anyone.”

Myrtle would conclude, when she met Scorpius years later, that Draco’s efforts were not in vain.