Chapter 3: The House by the Sea
The honeymoon clause, it turned out, was on the back of page nine of the entail, where nobody had thought to look because the front of page nine was a list of approved peacock breeders.
"Seven nights," Bogrod read on Monday, with the satisfaction of a goblin who has found an extra Knut down the side of a sofa. "The wedded pair shall withdraw from the world to the house of Malfoy by the sea, and there keep company, and return in amity. Should either party depart before the seventh dawn, the union is deemed a sham and the entail reverts." He looked up. "Monsieur Octave's solicitors have requested that the Wizengamot appoint an observer."
"An observer," said Harry.
"To confirm amity." Bogrod's spectacles flashed. "Not inside the house, of course. That would be indelicate. The observer will monitor the wards from the village. If either of you crosses the boundary before Monday next, the observer will know."
"And who," asked Draconia, "is the observer?"
Bogrod consulted his document. "A Mr Cassius Selwyn."
The house of Malfoy by the sea was a grey stone cottage on the Breton coast with nine bedrooms, which was the Malfoy definition of a cottage. It stood on a headland above the village of Locmaria, close enough to the cliff edge that in winter the spray reached the upstairs windows. Draconia had spent every August of her childhood there, being forbidden to go in the water.
She had not been back since the war. The furniture was under dust sheets and the rooms smelled of salt and lavender and shut-up years. Harry walked through it pulling the sheets off things and saying, "Oh, that's a nice chair," as if he had never seen furniture, and she followed behind him feeling oddly naked, as if he were pulling the sheets off her.
On the first night they ate bread and cheese at opposite ends of a table built for twenty and talked about work, because work was safe. On the second night it rained, and they lit the fire in the small sitting room and played Exploding Snap, and he beat her three times and gloated so badly that she Vanished his eyebrows, and he laughed so hard he slid off the sofa onto the rug. On the third night she found him on the cliff path at sunset, standing just inside the boundary stones with his hands in his pockets, looking at the sea.
"You can see the observer," he said, and pointed. Down in the village, on the harbour wall, a small figure in a bowler hat was sitting very upright on a folding chair. "He's been there since six. He's got a flask."
"Poor Cassius."
"He waved at me this morning. I waved back. I think we're friends now."
Draconia came and stood beside him. The wind off the water was cold and smelled of weed and iron. Down on the rocks, a cormorant held its wings out to dry like a vampire in a cheap play.
"Why did you really do it?" she asked.
He didn't pretend not to understand. He was quiet long enough that she thought he wouldn't answer, and the sun slid down into the water and turned it the colour of a struck match.
"After the war," he said at last, "everyone wanted something from me. They wanted me to be the Chosen One, or to be an Auror, or to marry Ginny, or to not marry Ginny. I said yes to all of it because I didn't know what I wanted, and saying yes felt like the right thing." He glanced at her. "You were the only person who never wanted anything. You just hated me in a very straightforward way. It was restful."
"I'm so glad I could help."
"And then I read that article, and you looked..." He stopped. "You looked like I felt. In that photo. Like you were standing in a house that was about to fall on you and you were going to hold the roof up with your bare hands because it was yours." He shrugged, but it wasn't a careless shrug. "I wanted to help hold the roof up. That's all."
Draconia looked at the sea. She was aware of a feeling in her chest she had no name for, something large and terrifying climbing up her ribs one at a time.
"That's not all," she said.
"No," Harry agreed. "Probably not."
The storm came in on the fifth night.
It hit around eleven, all at once, a howling wall of rain off the Atlantic that rattled the old windows in their frames and put out the lamps in the corridor. Draconia, who had been lying awake in the big bedroom on the seaward side, listening to Harry not sleep in the room next door through a wall she had never before considered thin, got up and went to check the shutters, and found him in the hall in a T-shirt and pyjama bottoms with his wand lit.
"The kitchen door's blown open," he said. "There's water coming in. I was going to..."
"Leave it. The elves will..."
"There aren't any elves, Malfoy. You sent them back to Wiltshire. Page ten."
She had. She had written page ten specifically so there would be no witnesses to whatever she was afraid of. They went down to the kitchen together, and the back door was banging on its hinges and there was rain sheeting across the flagstones, and the wind tore the door out of Harry's hand twice before they got it shut. By the time she'd sealed it with a Colloportus that would have held back a Hungarian Horntail, they were both soaked to the skin and laughing in the dark, and he was standing very close.
She could see him by the blue light of his wand. Water ran off his hair and down his neck and his glasses were spotted with rain. He took them off to wipe them on his shirt, which was useless, because his shirt was wetter than they were, and without them he looked younger and more tired and so achingly like himself that she couldn't stand it.
"I lied to Kingsley's sister," she said.
He looked up, glasses still in his hand.
"She asked me if I loved you. I said no." The words were coming now and she couldn't stop them, which was very unlike her and which she would be furious about in the morning. "I'm not good at this, Potter. I was raised to be good at other things. Seating plans. Which fork. How to tell someone they're beneath you without using any words that would get you uninvited. Nobody ever taught me what to do if a man you spent half your life hating turned up on your doorstep with your wand and offered to save your house, and then spent five days pulling dust sheets off chairs and being kind to your mortal enemy's son in a bowler hat, and made you laugh so much your face hurt, and..."
"Draconia," said Harry.
He had never said her name before. Not once, not in ten years. It stopped her like a hand on her chest.
"I'm not faking either," he said. "I haven't been since the gate. I'm not sure I was before it." He put his glasses back on, carefully, as if he wanted to see her properly for this. "I don't need you to be good at it. I'm rubbish at it. We can be rubbish at it together."
The wind threw itself against the windows. Somewhere upstairs, a shutter banged. Draconia took one step forward, which was all the space there was, and put her cold hands on either side of his face, and kissed him.
It was nothing like the gate. That had been a performance, even if neither of them had performed it very well. This was clumsy and soaked and she missed the first time and got the corner of his mouth, and he laughed against her lips and then stopped laughing, and his arms came round her and pulled her in until there was no space at all, and the kitchen was dark and the storm was loud and he tasted of rain and the terrible instant coffee he'd insisted on bringing from London. She kissed him until she forgot where she was. She kissed him until his wand went out because he'd forgotten to hold it up, and then she kept kissing him in the dark.
When they finally came apart, she rested her forehead against his chin. His heart was going very fast under her palm.
"Page seven," she said, unsteadily, "is hereby revoked."
"Thank Merlin," said Harry. "I hated page seven."
They were on the sofa in the small sitting room at dawn, under a blanket, the fire down to embers, her head on his shoulder and his fingers absently combing the knots out of her hair, when the owl hit the window.
It was a big brown Ministry barn owl, and it looked as tired as they felt. Harry got up to let it in, and it dropped a letter in his lap and flew straight to the top of the bookcase and went to sleep.
The envelope bore the Wizengamot seal. Harry broke it, read it, and went very still.
"What?" Draconia sat up, pulling the blanket round her shoulders. "What is it? Is it Octave? Has he filed again?"
"No." Harry turned the letter round so she could see it. "It's Cassius."
The letter was in a careful, clerkish hand, and it said:
To the Chief Warlock. I have observed the wards of the house at Locmaria for five nights as instructed. I must report that the couple have not left the boundary. I must further report that at approximately half past eleven last night, during the storm, every window of the house lit up at once and the wards changed colour from silver to gold, which I am told by the local Ministry liaison has not happened at a Malfoy property since 1749. I am not an expert. But I would say amity has been confirmed. I would also say, respectfully, that I should like to go home now, as I have caught a cold. Yours, C. Selwyn.
Below that, in a different hand, someone had added a postscript in green ink.
Harry read it out loud, and his voice did something strange halfway through.
"P.S. from the Chief Warlock. Octave Malfoy has withdrawn his claim, on the grounds that he does not want a house that will lock him in the cellar the moment he crosses the threshold. However. It has come to the attention of this office that the 1693 entail contains a further provision regarding the first anniversary. The goblins are very excited. I advise you both to read page twelve."
Draconia stared at him. "There isn't a page twelve."
Harry flipped the letter over. Pinned to the back, in faded brown ink on a scrap of vellum so old it had gone the colour of tea, was a single line of cramped seventeenth-century handwriting.
He read it. Then he looked up at her, and slowly, helplessly, began to grin.
"Potter," said Draconia, "what does it say?"