Chapter 2: Milk Second
"Let me make sure I've got this," Harry said, on Thursday. "You're teaching me to keep a seat that'll be yours if I fail."
"Yes."
"And you're charging me fifty Galleons an hour to do it."
"Sixty when we waltz."
"Do you see the problem?"
"I see a client who has stopped holding his teacup like a pint glass, which is the first good news I've had all week." Draconia did not look up from the ledger. "Pour."
He poured. She had made him pour for a quarter of an hour, which was twelve and a half Galleons' worth of watching Harry Potter tip a silver teapot over a cup, and he was starting to understand that this was the method. She did not explain things. She made him do them until his body forgot it had ever done them another way, and then she explained, briefly, as if the explanation were a tip.
"The spout faces your guest," she said. "Never yourself. A spout pointed at your own chest means you'd like them to leave."
"What if I would like them to leave?"
"Then you point it at them and smile, and they'll spend the evening wondering whether you meant it. Milk second. Only Muggles and Weasleys put the milk in first."
"That's not true."
"It's true at the Wizengamot." She held out her cup. He filled it without spilling. She looked at the cup, then at him, with no expression at all, and made a small tick in the ledger that he suspected was the closest thing to a gold star he would ever receive.
Over the mantelpiece, Phineas Nigellus said, "The girl is quite right. In my day, a man who took milk first was not received at Grimmauld Place."
"In your day," Harry said, "you thought it was fine to put elf heads on the wall."
"And were they not decorative?"
Draconia hid her mouth behind her cup. He was learning that she did that when she wanted to laugh and had decided he hadn't earned it yet.
She told him the rest of it on the second Monday, standing in the library with a book the size of a paving slab open on the reading desk between them.
It was the Black charter, or a copy of one. Harry had not known the house had a charter. He had not known that it had a library, either, until Draconia walked past the door on her first visit, stopped, and said, "Oh, you absolute Philistine," in a tone of genuine grief. It had been sealed under a Disillusionment Charm since some time before he was born. Kreacher had wept with joy to see it opened.
"Here," she said, and put a fingertip on a line of crabbed, brownish script. "The seat passes by testament if the testament is accepted by the Council. That's you. If it's refused, or the heir is not received, it reverts to the eldest surviving Black by blood. Andromeda was disowned, so she's struck from the line. That leaves my mother."
"And she gave it to you."
"Last year. Formally. It was very touching. There was a lot of crying, all of it hers." Draconia turned a page. "She'd never take it up herself. She doesn't want to sit across a chamber from the people who used to dine at our house and now cross the street when they see her. She thought I might. She thought I'd *enjoy* it."
"Would you?"
She considered the question honestly, which surprised him. She didn't seem to do much of anything honestly in front of him; it was all ledger lines and posture.
"I'd be good at it," she said. "That isn't the same thing."
"So why help me?"
"Because you're paying me."
"Malfoy."
"Because you're paying me *very well*, Potter, and because the Selwyns would sooner see the seat go to a Malfoy than to you, and I would rather sell my own hair than be the thing the Selwyns would sooner." She closed the book on her finger. "Is that a good enough reason? It'll have to be. It's the only one on offer."
He didn't think it was the only one. He thought it was the one she'd decided to give him, the way she gave him cutlery: one piece at a time and only when she thought he'd use it properly.
"Fine," he said.
"Good. Bow to me."
He did the second bow.
She looked at him. Something happened at the corner of her mouth.
"Again," she said, "and this time don't look like you're about to be sick on my shoes."
The third week, she took him to Twilfitt and Tattings.
He had protested. He had a dress robe. It was green, it was perfectly good, and it had been bought for him by Hermione in a fit of exasperation about four years ago. Draconia had asked to see it, and he had brought it down, and she had looked at it the way she'd looked at the troll-leg umbrella stand.
"You'll be received by the Wizengamot in that," she said, "over my dead body, and I will make sure it's mine, so that it's a scandal and nobody looks at you."
So: Diagon Alley on a Wednesday, which meant crowds, which meant people stopping to stare at Harry Potter walking into the most expensive robe shop in London with Draconia Malfoy a half-step ahead of him, like a governess, or a minder, or something people in the queue for Fortescue's new ice-cream parlour were already inventing words for.
"They're looking," Harry muttered.
"They're always looking at you. Today, for once, they're also looking at me." She didn't turn her head. "Chin up. Don't hunch. You walk like you're expecting to be hexed from a doorway."
"I usually am."
"Not on Diagon Alley, not on a Wednesday, and not with me." The door chimed; a witch in lilac came gliding out from behind a counter, saw Draconia, and visibly reorganised her entire afternoon.
It took two hours. He stood on a footstool while three different tape measures crawled over him and Draconia sat in a velvet chair drinking something pale and fizzy and vetoing everything.
"Not that, it makes him look like a Hufflepuff Prefect who's been told off."
"Not *that*, Madam Twilfitt, he isn't attending a funeral, although by the end of the night several people may wish he were."
"Black," she decided at last. "Black, but warm. Not the Malfoy black, the cold one; he hasn't the face for it. There's a midnight wool you showed my mother three seasons ago, the one with the green in the weave when it moves. That."
Madam Twilfitt brought it. They draped it on him. He looked in the long mirror and for a strange second did not entirely recognise the man who looked back: taller, straighter, his shoulders where shoulders were meant to be, and something in the eyes that he could only describe as *not apologising*.
In the mirror, behind him, Draconia had gone still.
"Well?" he said.
She took a sip of her drink before she answered. "It'll do."
"That's it? Two hours and *it'll do*?"
"It's high praise, Potter. Ask anyone." She set the glass down and stood. "I'll be outside. Tell her silver buttons, not jet, and don't let her talk you into a cravat pin, you'll only stab yourself with it."
She went out. He told Madam Twilfitt silver buttons and no pin, and paid an amount of money that would have made the Dursleys faint, and when he came out of the fitting room with his old jumper back on, Draconia wasn't on the step.
He found her at the side of the shop, in the narrow passage that led round to Knockturn Alley, half-hidden by a stack of crates. She was not alone.
The man with her was tall and thin and elegant in the way of very old portraits, with a beard trimmed so precisely it looked painted on. Harry knew him from the *Prophet*: Aurelius Selwyn, senior Member of the Wizengamot, who had testified at Lucius Malfoy's trial that he had *never once* been to a dinner at the Manor and had then been photographed leaving one.
Harry stopped behind the crates. He was an Auror. Stopping behind things was most of the job.
"...a perfectly reasonable offer," Selwyn was saying, low and pleasant. "You've done the work. Everyone can see it. He's beginning to look like someone. That's to your credit, my dear, but you must see that it's also a pity."
"Must I?"
"A little nudge at the Ball. That's all it would take. A wrong form of address. A misstep in the first dance. Nobody would ever suspect you; they'd only say the boy wasn't bred to it, as everyone always knew. And then the seat comes home where it belongs, and you take it up, and the Selwyns are very happy to remember who supported you." A pause. "It's a better return than fifty Galleons an hour."
Harry waited for her to say something cutting. He was ready for it. He found that he'd been ready for it the whole three weeks; that somewhere between the cutlery and the bergamot and the laugh in the drawing room, he had started to take it for granted that whatever Draconia Malfoy thought of him, she was on his side.
"Sixty," Draconia said. "When we waltz."
Selwyn laughed softly.
She tilted her head. From where Harry stood, he couldn't see her face, only the line of her neck and the white-gold pins in her hair, and the third bow, the considering one, the one that meant *I have weighed you and you will do*.
"Of course," she said, "I'll think about it."