Chapter 1: Yours in Pedantry
Daily Prophet, Wednesday edition, July 2005. From "Fair Hearing" by Hermione Granger.
…and so, when the Ministry tells you that house-elf wages are "a matter for individual households," ask yourself which households they mean. Ask yourself whose comfort that sentence is protecting. I have a suspicion, and so, I think, do you.
Daily Prophet, Friday edition, July 2005. From "Against the Grain" by Draco Malfoy.
…Miss Granger asks whose comfort is being protected. A fair question, from a woman who has been comfortably right about everything since roughly the cradle. I would gently suggest that if she wants house-elves paid, she might begin by asking one. I asked ours. She threw a saucepan at me. I took this as a no.
Miss Granger,
I don't make a habit of writing to my colleagues, but I feel obliged to point out that in Wednesday's column you wrote "ipso facto" where you clearly meant "ex post facto," and I couldn't sleep.
Yours in pedantry, D. Malfoy
Malfoy,
I meant exactly what I wrote. Read it again, slowly, moving your lips if it helps.
Also, your house-elf did not throw a saucepan at you. Your house-elf, Tilly, has been receiving a wage of two Sickles a week since 2003 and a pension contribution since last spring, which I know because I wrote the legislation and you were the first employer in Wiltshire to register. You lied in print to make yourself look worse. I would like to know why.
H. Granger
Granger,
Because nobody reads a column called "Against the Grain" to hear that I agree with you. Do try to keep up.
I did read it again. You're right about "ipso facto." I'm still not sleeping. I'm choosing to blame you for that on general principle.
D.M.
Daily Prophet, Wednesday edition, September 2005. From "Fair Hearing."
…a man who writes about the Wizengamot as though it were a gentleman's club he has been asked to leave, and still, after all these years, cannot spell "accountability."
Granger,
Low blow. I can spell it perfectly well. I simply think it's a very ugly word and refuse to use it more than once a month.
Your new photograph at the top of the column is a crime. They've flattened your hair. It looks like it's been ironed. Complain.
D.M.
P.S. You were wrong about the Goblin Liaison budget, but you were wrong beautifully, which is irritating, so I've written a rebuttal that's much longer than it needs to be. It runs Friday. Brace.
Malfoy,
I read your rebuttal. All three thousand words of it. Barnabas had to cut the crossword.
You're wrong about the budget, wrong about the goblins, and wrong about my hair, which was not ironed, it was charmed by a junior photographer who was frightened of it. I've complained.
Since we're apparently doing this now: your column photograph makes you look like you're about to ask someone to step outside. Is that deliberate?
H.
Granger,
Entirely deliberate. I practised in a mirror for an hour.
You've stopped signing your full name. I noticed. I'm pretending I didn't.
D.
Daily Prophet, Friday edition, November 2005. From "Against the Grain."
…Miss Granger's argument, which I will summarise fairly because I am a fair man (she will tell you otherwise; she is wrong), is that the Ministry owes an apology to every Muggle-born witch and wizard who was hauled before the Registration Commission. She is right. There. I've said it in print. Somebody fetch a Healer, I appear to have a fever.
Draco,
I read Friday's column four times on the stairs outside my flat because I couldn't make my legs go up them.
You didn't have to do that.
Hermione
Hermione,
Yes, I did.
Don't make a fuss about it. I'll be back to calling you insufferable by Wednesday. It's a living.
Also, that's the first time you've used my name. I've read your letter rather more than four times. Draco
Draco,
It's three in the morning and I've just finished a column about the Floo Network and I hate it, and the person I want to read it is you, which is a deeply alarming development in my life and I've decided to address it the way I address everything, which is by writing to you about it at length.
Do you ever think about how strange this is? I spent years thinking you were the worst person I knew. I sat across a courtroom from you once, at your trial, and I could not make myself look at your face. And now I write to you more than I write to anyone. Harry thinks I've taken up correspondence chess. Ginny thinks I have a secret lover in France.
I don't know what to call this. I don't think it has a name.
H.
P.S. I'm sending the Floo column anyway. Be cruel. I need it.
Hermione,
Your Floo column is very good. It's also too long by about two hundred words, and you've used the word "fundamentally" three times, which is three times more than anyone should. I've marked the cuts. Ignore every one of them and it'll still be the best thing in Wednesday's paper.
As for what to call it, I don't know either. I've tried. "Correspondence" is wrong. "Feud" was right last July and isn't any more. "Friendship" is a word I'm told I'm allowed to use about you now, apparently, by some sort of statute, but it isn't quite right either, is it.
I read your letters in the bath. I'm telling you that so you can feel suitably superior.
D.
Draco,
You can't tell me that. You can't tell me you read my letters in the bath and then just sign your name like it's nothing.
H.
Hermione,
Watch me.
D.
Daily Prophet, Wednesday edition, March 2006. From "Fair Hearing."
…and to the reader from Ottery St Catchpole who writes to ask whether Mr Malfoy and I "actually hate each other or is it a bit": I cannot speak for Mr Malfoy, who rarely speaks for himself without a thesaurus. Speaking for myself, I would say that it began as hatred, and has since matured into a professional disagreement conducted with considerable mutual respect and occasional stationery.
Hermione,
"Occasional stationery." I've cut it out and pinned it above my desk. My assistant thinks it's a threat.
My mother asked me at dinner last night who I'm always writing to. I said "the opposition." She said, "Darling, you're smiling," in a tone of genuine alarm, as though I'd come out in spots.
D.
Draco,
Fine.
Since you insist on starting it, and since it's two in the morning and I've had most of a bottle of elf-made wine, and since I'll never be brave enough to say this to your face: sometimes when you're being impossible in print I imagine shutting you up. Not with a hex. I imagine walking into your office with Friday's column rolled up in my fist and putting it down on your desk and then putting my hand over your mouth, and then not my hand. I imagine what you'd taste like when you were finally, for once in your life, out of things to say. I imagine you letting me.
I'm going to send this before I lose my nerve. Then I'm going to put my head in the oven.
H.
Hermione,
Don't you dare put your head in the oven. Then who would I argue with?
I've read your letter more times than I'm prepared to admit in writing. I'm not going to tell you what I imagine, because I'm a gentleman, and because if I start I don't think I'll stop, and I'd like to do this properly. In person. With you looking at me.
I'll say one thing. You're wrong. I wouldn't run out of things to say. I'd just stop wanting to say any of them out loud.
D.
The Daily Prophet requests the pleasure of your company at its Summer Party, to mark one hundred and fifty years of the paper. Saturday, the first of July, 2006. The Grand Ballroom of the Leaky Cauldron. Dress: formal. Bring your sharpest opinions and your thickest skin. — B. Cuffe, Editor.
Draco,
Are you going?
H.
Hermione,
I haven't decided. I'm told Barnabas wants a photograph of the two of us shaking hands for the front of the anniversary issue. "Granger and Malfoy: A Truce." He's very pleased with himself.
Are you?
D.
Draco,
Obviously not. I loathe parties. I'll be at home with a book, being right about things.
H.
Hermione,
Same. I'll be at the Manor with my cat, being wrong about things.
D.
She bought the dress the next morning at Madam Malkin's. Dark green silk, which she told herself was a coincidence, and which Madam Malkin assured her, approvingly, was not a coincidence at all.
Three doors down, in the back room of Twilfitt and Tatting's, which had been dressing Malfoys for two hundred years, Draco stood very still while a tailor pinned the hem of a set of black dress robes. He read her last letter again, for no reason he could have defended in print, and did not trust himself to speak.