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The almost-spectral pearlescent figure moves slowly through the oppressive dark that is Malfoy Manor at night, lit only by the candelabra in one hand. White-blonde hair hanging loose, as pale and silky as her kimono-robe, both moving with the rhythm of her gliding gait: it is no wonder that the woman is easy to mistake as a ghost... especially here. Malfoy Manor has seen enough death and suffering to make it an obvious place for haunting, except for the fact that the dead would not choose to linger within its walls. There are more pleasant places to spend eternity...
Narcissa, the pale woman, is Lady of the House, so it is no wonder to see her head to the Lady's sitting rooms. But she stops outside the door suddenly, holding as still as a cat waiting to spring, listening for something in the silence of the night.
A soft sigh as, again, only the silence greets her.
The frown that ripples over her forehead briefly mars Narcissa's perfect features; long enough to express displeasure, but not nearly close to the time needed to begin to suggest wrinkles to come. One thing is certain: she is greatly unimpressed. Her husband isn't home, and it's long past ever-punctual Lucius' usual bedtime. It isn't so much that this now-frequent tardiness isn't like him... it's the fact that it is becoming like him that concerns her.
When Narcissa opens the doors to the sitting room, the golden light of the candles spills into the darkened room. She moves intently through the darkness, not even responding to the lusty greeting a satyr in one of the paintings offers her... calling her his 'enchanting little Circe'. He harrumphs at her silence and returns to chasing the giggling nymphs. Narcissa ignores them as she always has, not even absently titillated... She rises on her tiptoes and removes a carved wooden box from a bookshelf.
Her fluid movement continues into a small pirouette, until Narcissa is sitting on her heels before the low rosewood table. Her candelabra is set down in the centre of the table with the absent care of one used to being surrounded by delicate antique furniture, and the little wooden box is opened to reveal something wrapped carefully in black silk... something that is able to bring a smile to Narcissa's frown-clouded features.
The old pureblood families had taken to favouring a science of inferences, educated estimations based on knowledge gained from underhanded means, uncertain 'certainties' that came from assumptions and observations. Truly, she cannot understand it when the means to true certainty is so obvious, and so available. Narcissa tends to blame it on the chess-player mentality, rather than even beginning to entertain the naive notion of some half-hearted attempt at 'fair play'...
She has long found it amusing that the cunning, manipulative world that her family by blood, and the dynasty she has married into (a dynasty that will be continued through the child she can feel quickening in her womb), this world has not -for centuries- valued the gift that those like her possess. In their grandparents' days it was known and accepted that with the right medium, the ancient arts of divination were an indispensable, accurate means of gathering information. If Lucius had bothered to ask, he would have known of his wife's talent with the cards...
Narcissa pulls the black silk away and runs her hands lovingly over that which it had shrouded: her deck of tarot cards. If Lucius would not reveal his secrets willingly, well, the women of the Dellamorte family have their own ways of knowing...
*
Those delicate white hands carefully move over her now-swollen belly as Narcissa draws in a deep breath... before exhaling to a backward count of ten.
No.
Doesn't help.
Apparently that much-touted little technique still fails to calm her from the icy grip of a murderous rage. Her face is utterly blank, and her dark eyes are blank, but the hands that caress the bump of her unborn child quiver with fury.
The Queen of Cups, again, sits next to Lucius' card, the King of Swords... the little portrait on the card blissfully defiant and mocking Narcissa with her sweet, benign smile. She can hear Nonna's -her grandmother's- deceptively soft voice now, scolding her in Italian: "Only the weak and the fool fear what they see in the cards." Nonna Allegra had been speaking of those who superstitiously feared the Death of Devil cards; but never has any other card caused the same sick dread in Narcissa as, now, the Queen of Cups does.
*
It is about the sixth month of her pregnancy when The Lovers decides to join the Queen of Cups in mocking Narcissa, adding insult to injury. Men stray - she knows that from watching her father as a child - and yet when she first discovered Lucius had a mistress, her possessive nature railed against it. But this... this is worse.
The Lovers would not have come into her readings (no matter how jealous she felt) if The Queen of Cups was just some willing witch that Lucius was fucking... if she was merely the warm body that he took his pleasure in while her own body was swollen with his heir. Ungrateful bastard: The Lovers meant that the Queen of Cups was a genuine threat to her, and to her child's place as Malfoy Heir.
Should he speak of divorce, of marrying his whore and making her his wife, she will have to kill him. It will be unpleasant for her child to grow up fatherless, but the child would have a better life that way, than the child of a discarded wife. And Narcissa will not surrender her King... not for anything. He swore "until death", and she'll hold him to it, even if it necessitates her hands being the ones that bring about his death.
*
"If I find your Mistress, she will beg for her death," Narcissa tells her husband the next evening, smiling pleasantly at him over the poached salmon supper that sat on the table... steaming pleasantly on a bed of wild rice and fresh vegetables.
Lucius looks up from his glass of wine and newspaper, and arches an eyebrow at her. Mockingly. Bastard. He hasn't even the grace to look embarrassed that she knows of his adultery.
"At this point in your pregnancy, Narcissa, you are not capable of hexing a hog-tied, paraplegic muggle with the survival instincts of a glass of water," he points out in that ever-patient drawl. Yes, the very same bored tone that she entertains occasional, vividly detailed fantasies of silencing by ripping out his throat. Even though it would be an awful shame to savage such an elegant neck. A shame, but a pleasingly ironic one. After all, French aristocrats had been losing their heads over Madame Guillotine for centuries... this particular aristo would just be losing his over Madame La Regina Di Tazze...
"Not capable of it?" Narcissa echoes, her voice deceptively mild. "Mio marito, you have no idea what I'm capable of."
Point made, discussion concluded, so supper continues almost pleasantly. Baby names are discussed, as are the latest developments in their social and political circle - muggle massacres, new Death Eaters... Business as usual in Malfoy Manor.
*
The identity of the Queen of Cups is Narcissa's own Grail Quest; she seeks the other woman with the fervour that some seek immortality or enlightenment. Its a quest as cliché as any other: the woman scorned seeking to destroy her rival... but she doesn't do it just for herself. Narcissa will, in the name of her beloved son Draco and for the sake of her own pride, claim bloody vengeance upon the bitch that managed the one thing that she, Narcissa, tried her hand at and failed: claiming the heart and soul of Lucius Malfoy.
To her anger and disappointment, it truly seems that the arrogant, aloof bastard has indeed fallen in love with his Queen of Cups. The Cards and the evidence of her own eyes point to it plainly. Once upon a time she loved irony... but that was before she lived it. Through this farce, Narcissa has discovered, to her eternal shame, that she actually loves her husband.
Love - it's an absurdly fickle thing, isn't it?
Narcissa hasn't shared his bed since the Queen of Cups made her first appearance, and on lonely nights when the wind is howling through her windowpane, she truly misses him. Only her pillow knows of the silent tears shed; only little Draco hears his mother's whispered regrets at letting his father slip through her beautifully-manicured fingers...
She has become Penelope the faithful, weaving at her lonely Ithican loom and awaiting the return of her Odysseus... hoping that upon his return, he will have his appetite for adventure sated. Because she will wait for him. And the night that he comes to her again, Penelope will again be Circe, and he will wonder why he ever looked upon another.
Or she'll kill him.
But she'd rather not have to.
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