Chapter 2: Rare Atlases
His better clue is very good. You hate it immediately.
Upstairs neighbour's crush, ushering in, demands quiet (5)
It takes you nearly ten minutes on your kitchen floor with the paper, and when you get it you laugh out loud, alone in your flat, at seven in the morning. SHUSH, hidden in crush ushering. It's a neat little clue, and it's about you, and the word crush is doing something extremely suspicious in the surface, and nobody's written you a clue in years.
So you write him one back.
Glad mine's wrecked, oddly? Slandered! (8)
You fold it in half and push it under the shop door. It comes back that afternoon, pinned to yours, solved in fountain pen in a perfect hand: MALIGNED. Then, underneath: Rude. Anagram's elegant, though. Also, have you eaten? You've been typing since six. I can hear the typewriter through the floor. Silencing Charms only work one way.
You stare at that one for a long time.
It goes on like that through October. Clues under doors. Clues pinned to the brass plate. Clues tucked into the spine of a book, a battered copy of Hairy Snout, Human Heart, left on your doormat one morning with a slip of paper inside the cover that just says this one's good, you'll like it, don't tell anyone I own it. You read it in a night. It's a love story about a werewolf. You cry at the end, and the next morning you write him a clue so vicious about his taste in literature that he comes up and knocks on your door to argue about it in person.
That's how it starts, the knocking. He never comes in. He stands on the landing in his shirtsleeves, ink on his fingers, and argues about grammar and fair wordplay and whether you can clue a word using its own etymology, and you stand in your doorway in your socks and argue back. Sometimes it goes on an hour. Sometimes you realise, halfway through, that you're both smiling.
You learn things. That the shop was bought with what was left of the Malfoy money after the reparations, and the Manor, and the lawyers. That he takes his tea with lemon and no sugar and hates people who put the milk in first. That he spends most of his days buying cursed and Dark libraries from old pure-blood families who don't want them in the house anymore, and most of his nights making them safe, page by howling page, before he sells them on or gives them to the Ministry or, for the worst of them, burns them in a Fiendfyre circle in the cellar with his wand held so steady you've seen his whole arm shake for an hour afterwards.
You do not learn what that hand-painted card above the low shelf by the window says. You haven't been in the shop. Not once. It feels like a line, somehow. His side of the building and yours.
Then, in early November, you fall asleep in the bath.
It's not your fault. Not completely. You'd been up since five finishing the Christmas special, which has a double grid and a theme and has been haunting you for a month, and you'd run the bath at midnight with a book and a glass of Gillywater, and the bath taps in the flat are old and enchanted and run forever if you let them. You'd closed your eyes for one second.
You wake up to cold water lapping at your chin, the bathroom floor two inches deep, and somebody hammering on your front door.
You know who it is before you've got the door open. You're in a towel. He's soaked from the shoulders down and holding a leather-bound atlas that is dripping steadily on the carpet.
"Your bath," says Draco Malfoy, very calmly, "is in my Rare Atlases section."
"Oh, Merlin. Oh no." You clutch the towel. "Oh, no, no, no. I fell asleep. How bad?"
"Come and see," he says, and turns and walks down the stairs.
You put on the first clothes you can find, the dressing gown again and a pair of wellingtons, and you follow him down, and for the first time, you go into the shop.
It's worse than you'd feared. The water has come through the ceiling in three places, and the old plaster has given way over the back corner, and there are books everywhere, open on the floor, open across the counter, propped on chairs, their pages swollen and wet. The candles have mostly gone out. A few still float near the ceiling, guttering, throwing long gold light over the wreck of it.
"I'm so sorry," you say. Your voice comes out very small. "I'll pay. Every one. I'll… I don't know how, but I'll pay."
He's picking his way across the floor in the dark, lifting books out of the puddles. He doesn't answer for a moment.
"Drying charm," he says eventually. "You know it?"
"Yes."
"Then take that end. Low heat. Not too fast, or the bindings crack." He hands you a book without looking at you. "And stop apologising. It's distracting."
So you work. For four hours, in the dark, side by side, you dry books. He shows you how to do it properly, a long slow sweep of warm air that you have to hold steady, page by page, for the old ones with the gilded edges. He's very good at it. Very patient. You'd never have guessed he had it in him. Around three in the morning, Kreacher, who apparently delivers for half of Diagon Alley now, pops in at the back door with two mugs of hot chocolate and a disapproving glare at you, and Draco thanks him with real courtesy, and you try not to stare.
Around four, you finally see the card above the shelf by the window.
It's in his handwriting. Free. Take what you need. You don't have to bring it back.
The shelf underneath is full of spellbooks. Battered copies of the Standard Book of Spells and A History of Magic and One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi. The kind of books you'd needed, when your letter came, and your parents hadn't known where to buy them, and had paid full price at Flourish and Blotts for every single one, out of savings that should have gone on a holiday.
"Muggle-born families," Draco says behind you. He's standing in the dark with a dripping atlas in his hands, not looking at you. "They don't know there's a secondhand trade. Nobody tells them. So they pay new prices for books they could get for a few Sickles. Flourish and Blotts sells new books to people who already have them." He shrugs, one shoulder. "It seemed like the least I could do. Given the things I used to say."
You don't know what to say. So you don't say anything. You just look at him, at the stoop of his shoulders and the ink on his face and the hand-painted card he'd clearly done himself, carefully, with a ruler.
That's when the window breaks.
It's a stone. A big one, a lump of paving, and it comes through the glass by the front door in a burst of shards and skids across the wet floorboards and fetches up against the free shelf. Outside, in the dark, somebody's laughing. Someone shouts something. You only catch one word of it, but it's the right word. It's the word the Prophet used for him, all those years ago, the one somebody keeps painting in red over his sign.
Draco doesn't move. He just stands there with the atlas in his arms, looking at the stone. It's clear from his face that this isn't the first.
You don't remember deciding. You're just out the door, down the step, into the alley in your dad's dressing gown and your wellingtons with your wand up, and there's a figure running for the corner of Knockturn Alley, and you put a Leg-Locker Curse on him from forty feet so cleanly that he goes down like a felled tree. You stand over him with your wand pointing at his nose. He's a big, stupid-looking wizard in his thirties with a Puddlemere scarf. He looks up at you, astonished.
"There's a man in there," you say, "drying books."
The wizard says something unpleasant. You Silence him. Then you Stupefy him, which is perhaps more than strictly necessary, and you're standing there breathing hard in the wet when you realise Draco has followed you, and is standing a few feet away in the alley in the drizzle, staring at you.
"You," he says, "are wearing wellingtons."
"He threw a rock at your shop."
"Yes. They do that. About once a month." He's looking at you strangely. "Nobody's ever chased one before."
The Magical Law Enforcement Patrol takes the wizard away at dawn. Draco won't press charges. You argue with him about it until the sun comes up, standing in the ruins of the Rare Atlases, and he refuses, quietly and completely, and you give up.
The next morning, a builder arrives to fix your bath and his ceiling. He's a cheerful, round wizard called Mr Plunkett with a toolbag that's bigger on the inside, and he fixes the taps in ten minutes and spends the rest of the morning on the plaster downstairs. You make him tea. He drinks it in your kitchen and admires your crosswords on the wall.
"Generous chap, your landlord," he says, through a biscuit. "Told me to spare no expense on the flat. Anything you want, he says, put it on his account. Most landlords I work for, you can't get them to fix a dripping tap."
You smile politely. "The Gringotts agent's been very good."
Mr Plunkett gives you an odd look. "Gringotts? No, love, Gringotts just collect the rent. The building's Mr Malfoy's. Owns the whole thing, top to bottom." He gestures with the biscuit at the floor. "Bought it outright, four year back."
You put your teacup down.
You go downstairs at noon, when you know he's out at an auction in Hogsmeade, and let yourself into the back of the shop with the key he gave you the night of the flood, in case of emergencies. You know exactly where to look. You've seen him go to the third drawer of the big oak desk behind the counter for his papers a dozen times.
It's there, filed under the address. Your tenancy application. The one you sent to Gringotts back in August, after the fourth refusal. It's got your name and your job and your parents' names, and the box where it asked for blood status, which they're not supposed to ask anymore and still do, where you'd written Muggle-born in very firm capital letters because you'd been sick of it.
And across the bottom, in narrow, slanted, expensive handwriting, in green ink, a note to the Gringotts agent.
She's been turned down by four landlords this month, and I'd bet my wand we both know why. Give her the flat. Halve the rent. Under no circumstances tell her it's me.
Underneath it, a single initial. D.
And underneath that, in a different ink, smaller, as if added later, after some thought: She sets the Prophet crossword. I'd know her clues anywhere.