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Tom hunched over in the passenger’s seat of the milk truck, shivering in the early-morning November cold. He drew his hands all the way inside the sleeves of the too-large, threadbare sweater he’d nicked from the laundry room at Wool’s and wrapped his arms around himself, his teeth chattering from both the chill and the vehicle’s rattling suspension as it bumped along the pavement.
…Too bad none of the clacking was loud enough to drown out the driver’s inane prattle.
“Alright there, Tommy? Didn’t stay up too late last night, I hope.”
Mr. Creevey, the milkman, was almost comical in his pathetic inability to take a hint. Tom normally avoided such people like the Black Death, but in this unique case it played to his advantage; the man’s cheerful obliviousness meant that when he’d started his new route delivering to Wool’s last summer, he’d looked at Tom—sitting on the stoop with a book as usual, hoping to swipe a bottle or two for himself before the matrons watered it down like the cheapskates they were—and not seen the oddly still, suspicious, and unsettling six-year-old that everyone else pegged him for at first sight. Instead, he’d been delighted to meet a child with, as he put it, “the full trifecta—reading skills, early-riser habits, and a passion for dairy products”.
And so, after little more than a fortnight of greeting Mr. Creevey each morning and feigning interest in his menial job, Tom had been offered the opportunity to ride along with him on deliveries as an assistant, in exchange for a few coins in earnings and “a head start in the trade” (as if he’d ever aspire to such ignominious work as an adult). More importantly, the man almost always gave him a small bottle of his own to enjoy on the journey, telling him jovially that it would “promote strong teeth”. And all Tom had to do was a little minor navigation, some not-very-heavy lifting, and a near endless amount of smiling and nodding to stories about the Creeveys’ new baby.
”…I’ve just gotten some new photographs of him developed, Tommy, I’ll have to show you when we next stop. Millie says I need to slow down with the camera but I can’t help it, little Colin’s cuter than a button. Although we’ve taken to calling him ‘Colic’ lately instead—my goodness, talking of sleepless nights…”
Tom gritted his strong teeth and widened his eyes in an approximation of interest. Honestly, what the devil had given this man even the faintest impression that he would enjoy hearing about babies? He already heard directly from the awful creatures all day and night in the orphanage, where they cried incessantly about the miseries of soiled nappies and watered-down milk and, probably, the instinctual knowledge that they’d been abandoned.
He had not been abandoned, Tom reminded himself, as he always did when such thoughts arose. His mother had died, not left him, and while that may be proof of weakness on her part, it was not the same as dumping him and running straight off for the nearest pub, like Billy’s or Archie’s pathetic mums. And his father…
His father must not know about him, he’d reasoned, otherwise he wouldn’t have left him alone. But that could, would change. Tom had been named after his absent sire, after all, and any day now word of his existence might reach the man and he’d be whisked away to his proper place at last.
“Here we are, Tommy—Privet Drive, Little Whinging. You don’t mind taking the left side of the street while I do the right, do you?”
Happy to find that both the truck and Mr. Creevey’s nattering had come to a stop while he was lost in thought, Tom shook his head and hopped down onto the curb, heading round to the back where the milk bottles were kept naturally chilled in the frigid air. He hefted a caddy in each hand and made his way up the street, chin tucked into his collar against the wind.
The pavement was littered with rubbish from last night’s Halloween festivities: sweets wrappers, abandoned masks, a lost sheet or two from someone’s ghost costume. The waste of it infuriated him; that someone would deliberately cut holes in perfectly good, barely-used bedding when he had to sleep on motheaten rags every night, just for a stupid holiday where people pretended to be things they weren’t. Why would anyone pretend to be a ghost or a skeleton, something dead?
But then again, Little Whinging was clearly a nice neighborhood, home to middle-class families not battered too hard by the Depression. The houses were neat and square and evenly spaced as teeth, all in near-identical shades of white; the lawns were green and well-kept, sometimes bordered by even more white in the form of a wood picket fence. What did someone like him know about the predilections of people who lived in a place like this?
He bunched up one of the fallen ghost “costumes” and stuffed it under his jumper, planning to use it to upgrade his bedding situation back at Wool’s. The others would be jealous if they found out, much like they were of his free milk and his chance to see places outside the East End; but it wasn’t as if they could ostracize him any more than they had since before he could remember. And Mrs. Cole wouldn’t take away this job, she was too happy to have him out of the building for a few hours a day.
Approaching the next house—Number Four—Tom spotted what looked like yet another bundle of rags, this one discarded right on the doorstep. Some sort of prank, maybe? It looked sort of like a small mummy (more death), all wrapped up tight. He nudged it aside with his foot to make space for the bottles.
...It whimpered.
Nearly dropping his precious cargo in shock at the sound piercing the grey dawn quiet, he knelt down to take a better look, grabbing the bundle and pulling it towards him. It wasn’t just some tatty sheets, he realized; whatever had made the noise was wrapped in a good wool blanket, somehow still retaining warmth even after a night out in the elements. It was heavy, too, and wriggling slightly.
When he turned it over, he found himself staring into the sleeping face of a black-haired, pink-cheeked, perhaps one-year-old baby.
“…Bloody hell,” he said aloud, and for a horrifying moment he thought it might be dead.
Then it let out another whimper that turned into a yawn, squirmed again like a tiny grub, and opened its eyes.
They were green. Tom had never seen such a color; not just on a person but in nature too, not even on the perfect postage-stamp lawns of neighborhoods like this before the frosts had come. These eyes seemed almost lit from within like the cats-eye marbles that he’d always coveted, and they were staring straight into his own, making him feel pinned right through his soul. He couldn’t look away. None of the babies warehoused at Wool’s had ever possessed this aura of awareness, of intelligence and wisdom far beyond their years. Was this what Mr. Creevey meant when he said his life changed the first time Colin looked at him? Tom had always assumed it was just more of the milkman’s sentimental nonsense.
”Babaaa,” the baby squawked up at him, breaking the spell and reminding him where they were: outside, in November, in weather cold enough to easily keep milk from spoiling. With a sense of urgency he’d never once felt for any living creature other than himself, Tom scooped the child up in his arms, somehow intuitively knowing to support its downy head, and began pounding on the door.
”Hey! Hello! Is anyone in there? Wake up, we need help!” he shouted, standing on tiptoe to try and see through the small window set in the wood. The house’s insides were obscured by frosted glass and blue shadows. Alarmed by the noise and jostling, the baby started to fuss and wiggle more insistently. Tom held it tighter and redoubled his knocking; a wave of relief washed over him when he heard a separate pounding of footsteps on the stairs inside, and then the door swung open to reveal a tall, skinny blonde woman with her hair set in curlers, clutching a fuzzy pink bathrobe around herself.
”What on earth is all this racket!? Do you have any idea what time it is, boy? What kind of horrible urchins are the dairy company employing these days?”
Normally being called an urchin would be enough to send Tom into a snarling rage, but with the rapidly cooling bundle against his chest it barely even registered. “Please, Ma’am,” he said, summoning every bit of the charm and false innocence he’d applied when prospective parents came by the orphanage (before Mrs. Cole pronounced him ‘bad for business’ and banished him to the dorms during visits), “I’m terribly sorry to wake you but there’s this baby, I found it on your stoop and I don’t know how long it’s been out in the cold—“
”Bababa!”
The woman recoiled, as if he’d presented her with a teeming ball of snakes instead of a small human. Huh, it seemed the rot the nuns talked about women being naturally maternal was just as big a load of tosh as he’d always suspected. “What? How did it get here? Whose is it?” she screeched. “It isn’t mine, Dudders is safe in his crib upstairs and he’s nowhere near that scrawny—“
”I don’t know,” Tom burst out, his frustration bubbling over at her utter uselessness. “I only just”—the baby shifted against him just then, and he felt something hard poke him through his jumper and the folds of the blanket. He looked down and saw the corner of a thick, cream-colored envelope, made of quality paper and addressed with elegant handwriting, peeking out under the baby’s chin. “There’s a letter,” he informed the rude woman, carefully sliding it out without exposing the child’s bare skin. “It’s made out to this address—“
”Give it here, then.” It was quite plain that she was referring to the paper only, not the human being that had been left on her doorstep. Pulling the whimpering babe protectively closer to him, Tom thrust the envelope into her outstretched, talonlike hand. She tore it open and began to read, not making even a cursory move to invite them in out of the cold; her beady eyes had only scanned back and forth along a line or two before she threw back her head and began to laugh hysterically.
”So my whore of a sister finally got what she asked for running about with freaks and drunkards, and now she wants me to raise her bastard spawn?” she spat, throwing the letter to the ground and grinding it with a slippered foot. “When pigs fly! I’ll thank you to keep that thing on your side of the door and away from my family, if you please. Take it to the workhouse, why don’t you—isn’t that where you came from?”
This time, it was only the fragile bundle in his arms that held Tom back from lunging at her like she was a rival for the last bowl of soup back at Wool’s—and even that, only barely. He seethed with rage at her unequivocal rejection of her own flesh and blood, while she sat there in her nice white house with everything. As if to put an even finer point on it, a different baby—far louder, more discordant, more aggravating than the one now burrowing against his neck for warmth and comfort—cried out from somewhere within the house. The woman turned her back and called to it, in a sweet voice that could’ve belonged to a different person entirely from the vicious harpy she’d shown to Tom.
”Hush now, Diddidums, mummy’s coming. Are the bad people outside scaring you?”
Any thoughts that flashed through Tom’s mind then—possibly involving one of the glass bottles at his feet and the pale, exposed flesh at the back of the woman’s neck, above the frilly collar of her robe—were interrupted by Mr. Creevey thundering up the front walk, drawn away from his work on the opposite side of the street by all the shouting.
”Tommy! What in the world is going on, you know you’re not to knock on the doors—cor blimey, is that a baby?”
*
Twenty minutes later, Tom was back in the milk truck, cradling the baby (Harry, that was his name; it said so in the letter he’d rescued from the threshold of Number Four before that harridan slammed the door in their faces) that he’d now wrapped up in the spare sheet he’d found to supplement the heat from the blanket. Mr. Creevey was tramping up and down the block, trying mightily to find a single person on Privet Drive willing to let him into their house in his dirty work boots to ring the police.
”Shhh,” he murmured into Harry’s thick black curls. His head smelt good, he noticed, like warm milk and the vanilla that occasionally wafted out of the bakery down the street from Wool’s. People were always saying babies’ heads smelled lovely, but Tom had never noticed it himself before now. “You’re alright. Don’t cry.” Harry hiccuped.
”You were not abandoned,” he continued soothingly, remembering the story of a hasty flight from dangerous enemies and a young couple violently murdered that he’d also read in the letter. “Your parents loved you very, very much. And now I’ve got you, and I will never let you go.” He knew it was true, even if he couldn’t quite articulate how or why; Harry was his.
Tiny pink hands patted at Tom’s chest, having finally wrestled free of the swaddling. The older boy frowned, vaguely recognizing the behavior.
”You’re hungry,” he declared with a nod of his head. “Don’t worry, I have something for that.” Shifting Harry into the crook of his shoulder, he made his way once more into the back of the truck and retrieved his customary free bottle of milk. “Sorry it’s cold”—he stuck it down the front of his shirt, wincing at the icy shock, trying to warm it a bit with his own body heat—“but it should do for a while at least…”
He proceeded to dip his fingers into the white liquid and drip it into Harry’s mouth a few drops at a time, like he’d once seen Billy Stubbs do with a mangy kitten he found in a back alley. At the time he’d cursed and shoved the other boy for wasting food, but now he only watched, fascinated, as the rosebud lips opened eagerly, the small hands moving to grip tightly at his scratchy wool jumper.
*
Harry was moved into Wool’s later that very same day, after the bobbies had come and gone and ascertained that yes, his parents were dead, and no, the despicable people residing at Number Four wanted nothing to do with him. Tom stood vigil over his bassinet until Martha dragged him out by his ear and told him to go to bed, but it wasn’t long before everyone learned that the new resident would scream for hours and wake all the others if left alone in the dark. After only two sleepless nights for the staff, Mrs. Cole reluctantly agreed to let Tom move the crib into his own room.
“Someone may as well make use of the space,” she huffed, throwing her hands up in surrender, “since the children your own age would apparently rather sleep on the stoop themselves than in a cot next to you.”
And so, for the first time since he’d smeared bacon grease on Dennis Bishop’s chest in the middle of the night and the other boy woke up screaming with rats scrabbling against his skin, Tom Riddle had a roommate; one that he couldn’t be more pleased to spend time with. He quickly learned to tend to as many of Harry’s needs as possible by himself; feeding him milk from proper bottles heated up on the stove, changing his nappies when he cried out in discomfort, and reciting to him near-constantly from whatever book he happened to be reading at the moment, encouraging him when he repeated the syllables. They fell into a steady and pleasant routine; he—and the inhabitants of Wool’s as a whole—could scarcely remember a more tranquil time.
“Imagine you having a way with babies,” Mrs. Cole marveled, watching Tom tote Harry around the house on his hip like a fifth limb. “Maybe I should put you on nursery duty, once this one’s moved on.”
Tom stiffened, causing Harry to notice the change in his bearing and start whining plaintively. “Moved on? What do you mean? Is Harry going somewhere!?”
“Not at the moment, but it’s only a matter of time before he’s adopted by a nice couple. The young, healthy ones always are, and with those big green eyes too…” the matron gave a one-shouldered shrug. “He won’t be stuck here with us rabble for too long, mark my words; he’s destined for better things. Hopefully his new parents will give him a name better than Harry while they’re at it; rather common, it is.” She turned and went back to the laundry, not catching the look of complete panic and devastation on the older boy’s face.
“You’re mine, Harry,” he muttered once he’d run upstairs and locked them inside their shared room, holding the boy so tightly he started to kick and fuss. “Nobody else’s. I promised I would never abandon you and I always keep my promises. We’re both destined for better things—together. I’ll get them myself, and then give them all to you.”
”Tomom!” the little boy babbled, pulling at Tom’s hair.
That weekend, when the couples arrived from the better part of town to look at the babies available for adoption, Tom (banished to his room as always, though not without a fierce fight this time) pressed his whole body against the door, listening with his breath held for any indication of what might be going on downstairs, and prayed with all his might—not to any member of the Holy Trinity, but to the innate, burning core of specialness that he’d always sensed inside himself, and the equally inviolable bond that had existed from the start between him and Harry.
When Martha tromped up the stairs with a squalling Harry in her arms, he snatched him from her immediately, finally letting his lungs fully inflate again with the sweet scent of milk and vanilla. The baby calmed slightly in the presence of his favorite person, but continued to writhe and cry.
”He was like a different child down there, he was,” the hired girl shook her head wearily. “Shrieking like a demon, wouldn’t settle down or smile for anything in this world; scared away anyone who might’ve brought him home, and all the others besides. He’s as bad for business as yourself, Tom.”
”I’ll take him now,” Tom snapped, crowding her out of the threshold so he could shut the door. “I know what he needs, how to keep him happy.”
”You won’t hear me complaining about being well shot of his racket,” she said equably, heading back down the hall.
Once they were alone again, he rushed to lay Harry down on the floor and opened his nappy; the wails immediately decreased in volume again as his chubby legs kicked free.
“Shh, shh, I’m sorry,” Tom soothed, carding his hands through his most precious possession’s wild nest of hair. “I know it’s horrid but it couldn’t be helped, with luck we’ll only have to do this a time or two more...”
Gently, so gently, he unwound the still-clean cloth of the nappy and plucked out the open safety pin he’d tucked there earlier, just before Harry was brought down to see the prospective parents. He flinched with guilt at the angry red mark on his darling’s leg where the sharp point must have pricked and poked all afternoon, keeping him from getting any relief and settling down like a good, desirable orphan child.
Tom soothed the spot with a cotton swab he’d stolen from beneath the sink in the staff bathroom, continuing to croon tender apologies for what he’d done out of necessity. Hurting Harry felt like wounding a part of himself, but there was no other way; he’d promised never to abandon his emerald-eyed treasure, but he wasn’t yet strong enough to prevent others from taking him away, from separating them. And until Harry grew old enough to understand—to know exactly who he belonged to, and to act on his own volition to stay forever by his side—Tom would have to do all in his power to keep himself from being abandoned as well.