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It was with some trepidation that Lady Narcissa Malfoy let her son join the army, and, it was rumoured she shed tears upon the occasion of his voyage to the New World with his regiment. Sir Lucius, of course, bore this with the same calm pride that had accompanied him through all his son’s many achievements, and it was generally thought that young Mr. Malfoy would carry this off with the same effortless ease he exhibited in fencing and horse-riding and genteel flirtation—after all, many of the same talents would be required. Virginia was a colony at peace, and not haunted by the savages, who lived much further inland. And if, as was only expected, he got into certain of the scrapes no young man of good breeding and high spirit quite manages to avoid, surely Colonel Black would not leave his cousin in dire straits, when he could so easily assuage all problems. It would be, at any rate, better than service in Scotland, still seething with the Young Pretender’s last supporters.
It seemed, upon their return, that all their well-wishers had been correct, because Draco returned to England brown and golden and shining with happiness and good health. He had comported himself with all the grace that had been expected, and even those too careful householders who had closed their doors and drawing-rooms to him after his last escapade now joyously extended their hospitality. He had even forged a friendship with Mr. Potter, who, though they had been schooled together, he had never been more than distantly cordial with—Colonel Black, the one man who could possibly know the cause, smiled mysteriously when questioned by gossips.
But a week after his return, Mr. Malfoy visited London to collect a friend he had made in the colonies, and persuaded to accompany him back, inveigling him with tales of better prospects. The inheritor of a vast estate in Louisiana, it had taken Mr. Zabini some little time to arrange matters with his bankers in London, and relatives in Milan, and Mr. Malfoy, always impatient, had driven up to hasten the process. Mr. Potter, then established at the Inns of Court, had been persuaded to lend his weight, chiefly, as he later said, because he thought it would be great sport to see the reactions of Wiltshire society to Mr. Zabini, which he had been offered as reward.
His expectations were perhaps exceeded, for, expecting a dashing Italian, Sir and Lady Malfoy, and those of their friends and acquaintances gathered in their home—a good two dozen, the Malfoys being well-respected, and, besides, it not being the season—were understandably shocked at the appearance and visage of Draco Malfoy’s newest intimate. Blaise Zabini, heir to the largest estate in Louisiana, and connected to coroneted heads in Milan and Naples, and closely connected, on his mother’s side, to propertied families of the French possessions in the New World, was of African descent—in his land, he would be called a Creole.
***
“How could he possibly bring in an African into his house,” Mr. Greengrass ejaculated, later in the evening, “when he knew our daughters would be there?”
Mrs. Greengrass hummed placidly, attending to her needlework. “He is, however, a man of considerable wealth.”
“Yes?” said Mr. Greengrass, rapidly calculating the potential worth of Mr. Zabini’s estates. “Yes, I suppose he is.”
They shared a smile of absolute understanding.
***
“Where,” said Daphne Greengrass to Draco Malfoy, reining in her gelding and forcing him to match his mare’s paces to its, “did you find him? Asteria is sure it was all Colonel Black’s fault.”
“Asteria,” he said with some asperity, “romanticizes my cousin’s profession far too much. Despite whatever garbled stories you may have heard, he is a perfectly sober man.”
“It is nothing unusual,” said she, “for a girl of fifteen to somewhat idealize a man she rarely meets. You must admit, Colonel Black’s life sounds the sort of thing that begs to be romanticised.”
Colonel Black was properly Lord Black, but had at eighteen denounced his father, and renounced his family, and joined the Army as a common ranker, despite much outrage. His father and younger brother dying in rapid succession, he had reluctantly taken on at nineteen the responsibilities that he had set aside such a short time before, and become an officer in his regiment. He had not, however, taken his father’s title, nor had he married—it was rumoured he had loved a girl his family would not countenance as his bride, and, deserting them, had found her unwilling to wed a destitute man. It did make a good story, improbable enough to be easily romanticised.
“Nevertheless,” Draco said, acknowledging and dismissing the whole saga with the shake of his hand that brought his mare’s head around, “it embarrasses the man to be transformed into this strange hero.”
“Nevertheless,” Daphne said, following him closely, “it has not escaped me that you are avoiding answering my question.”
“As to that, it is easily answered, and nothing nearly as exciting as whatever you and Asteria must have concocted. Zabini had come to Virginia to arrange for new transport for the sugar produced on his estates. We ran into each other in the church.”
“So he’s Catholic.” A fault, to many minds, nearly as great as being African. But the Malfoys were Catholic, and the Blacks, and though it had kept them from deserved prominence, few of either family had ever converted.
“He’s an Italian.”
“He’s an African,” Daphne snapped, temper roused by a suspicion slowly forming in her mind.
“One of his great-grandmothers was one,” Draco said, and met her eyes guilelessly. “As one of yours was an Irish woman, Daphne, but I do not mock you for that.”
“You forget that I have seen you horsewhip your father’s groom for a minor delay in producing your horse, and am unlikely to be fooled into believing this sudden display of love for your fellow-man in any way genuine.”
“You must believe what you must,” Draco said, toneless, and turned his horse and urged her from her easy trot into a gallop over the open fields, carelessly taking a low fence in his haste.
“You,” panted Daphne, after having spent a good fifteen minutes over rough ground, and nearly twisting her horse’s ankle in the process, “are utterly and entirely absurd.” She reached out to snag his reins in one hand, her own twisted in the other.
“Am I so?”
“Yes, you are.” She looked around, unconscious of it. “If this is what I think it is, Draco…”
“It is what it is,” he said.