The Malfoy Project

𝟑𝟕 - 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐑𝐨𝐨𝐦 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐋𝐢𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐫𝐲

༻⚜༺

     Two months ago, Ainsley asked me where my favourite place was, and I brought her to the garden. If she were to ask me that same question again, I might have said it was her. Maybe. But for now, I would have to settle with the confines of the little reading room on the second floor of our library.

     It is a small place, this room; merely a capsule compared to the rest of the house. Climb the spiral stairs, turn right, past the biographies, then make another right and you will come to a wall of encyclopaedias in every language known to man, each as thick as a brick and twice as heavy. And, bending down, in the bottom-most right corner, you'll find a small section of Muggle works tucked away in that little nook: Brontë, Hugo, Poe, Shakespeare, and a few select more.

     And right next to this shelf is a door that opens to the reading room. It hadn't always been a reading room, it was only I who called it so. It is sparsely furnished, with a chest of drawers, a liquor cabinet, a tea table, and a long leather couch that matches those downstairs. Father had intended it to be a cigar lounge but changed his mind and moved the lounge to the other end of the hall.

     Now, it is rarely used, only by me on sleepless nights when I would come to revisit the farmhouse of Wuthering Heights, or throw myself into the thick of the French Revolution with  Les Misérables, or indulge in the exhilarating love affair of Romeo and Juliet.

     My parents do not know these books exist under our very own roof. The Malfoys never preserved such things and even if we did, Father would have thrown them out long ago. But over the years, I have been collecting them one by one, bought from obscure bookstores in Diagon Alley or Hogsmeade whenever I go alone. As of today, I have amassed a little collection of about fourteen Muggle books. My newest addition is The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, a hefty selection of about six hundred of his poems.

     It is the same one Ainsley had shown me in the Hogwarts library. Two weeks ago, I paid Madam Pince fifty Galleons to be able to take it home.

     I would spend hours in this room with it on my lap, particularly on sleepless nights. Something about the way Neruda writes, the words he weaves, the pictures he paints, draws me in like the biting chemicals of alcohol.

     Neruda worshipped the Woman in his poems: Her glorious flawed face and bumpy flesh and tangled hair. Carefully, gently, he takes Her apart, then draws Her back together; watercolours of beauty and love and desperation and aching. And every one I read, I am certain, beyond all doubt, that he is writing about Gabriella Rose Ainsley.

     Sometimes a wave of courage will hit me and I will find myself holding my quill and putting its nib to parchment to write something for Ainsley. But no matter how hard I try, I cannot write like Neruda. I cannot bottle the stars in her eyes or the honey on her tongue or the blackberries of her hair. And then I realise that — much like Longbottom's Remembrall, or the wand I had pointed at Dumbledore, or the Golden Snitch — those things were never mine to hold at all.

     But still I read him, because I don't think I would ever be able to express what I feel so profoundly and faultlessly. And that is exactly what I had been doing since I left Ainsley's side in the morning. I lay on the couch, reading every line of every poem over and over and over until my eyes began to sting and all the words blotted into watery black lines.

     Some time in the late afternoon, I heard people enter the library. The windows of the room overlook the atrium below, and I looked out to see Father and Ainsley strolling in. She hadn't gone back to Hogwarts immediately after waking up like I expected. Instead, there she was with my father, talking as if they were old friends who hadn't seen each other for a long time. He brought her to the sitting area, gave her a quill and paper, and I realised what they were about to do.