Chapter 2: Saffron and Cipher
Of course I read it.
I want it on record that I stood there for nearly a minute first. I want it on record that I thought about privacy and professional ethics and the Belby Fellowship's code of conduct, which I had read in full, twice, and which said nothing whatsoever about rivals leaving their notebooks out on purpose. Then I crossed the lab, opened the green leather cover and found that I couldn't read a word.
It was in cipher. Not a charm; I'd have felt a charm. Just a cipher, dense and elegant, the letters of the Latin alphabet doing something unspeakable in rows of tidy green ink, with the occasional alchemical symbol dropped in like a raisin in a scone. On the inside of the front cover, in plain English, she had written:
*Good luck, Granger.*
I took it home. I'm not proud of it. I left a note on her bench in its place that said *Research*, and I sat up until four in the morning with three books on classical cryptography and a pot of coffee, and at four I went to bed beaten, and at nine I came back into the lab to find Malfoy at her bench, eating my lunch.
My *Monday* lunch. I hadn't even put it on the shelf yet. She must have taken it out of my bag while I was hanging up my coat.
"You've got pickle," I said, "on your lab robe."
"I'll send you the bill for cleaning." She didn't look up. "How's the reading?"
"I've barely looked at it."
"You've got ink on your fingers in the shape of the substitution table from Trithemius," she said, "and you look like you've been sleeping in a hedge. It's not Trithemius, by the way. Don't waste your time."
So I stole her lunch.
It was a reflex. I'd like to call it strategy, but it was a reflex, the same one that once made me punch her in the face, a long time ago, and I regretted it in the same way, which is to say not for at least an hour. She kept hers in a small wicker hamper with the same crest on the lid, and on Tuesday, while she was at the apothecary on the ground floor arguing with a supplier, I opened it.
There was a tart in it. A small one, the size of my palm, with a pastry so short it crumbled when I looked at it, filled with something golden and set and smelling of saffron and orange. There was a little pot of crème fraîche with a silver spoon. There were three perfect figs. There was a linen napkin folded into the shape of a swan.
I ate all of it, standing up, at my own bench, with the swan on my head.
When she came back, she stopped dead in the doorway. She looked at the empty hamper. She looked at me. She looked at the napkin.
"That," she said, "was made by an elf who's been with my family for ninety years. She'd weep to see it eaten off a lab bench. She'd weep to see *you*."
"Is she paid?"
There was a short, dangerous pause.
"Yes," Malfoy said, through her teeth. "Since the war. Generously. She has a pension, Granger, and Sundays off, and she spends them at the races. Is that all right with you, or would you like to see her contract?"
"I'd like very much to see her contract," I said, and she looked at me for a long moment, and then, astonishingly, she laughed. It was short and surprised and she bit it off almost at once, but I heard it.
"You've got saffron on your chin," she said, and went back to her bench, and hummed.
After that it became a sort of war.
I wouldn't call it a cold one. We went on working, both of us, harder than I think either of us had worked in our lives. My restorative was holding now. That was down to her, and I'd told her so in a stiff note left on her scales, which she had pinned to the wall above her bench like a trophy. But holding wasn't enough; it had to do something. Her own work, as far as I could tell from the glimpses I got across the room, involved a moonlit tincture of silver and asphodel that seemed to calm overactive nerves, but which, every time she tried to deliver it in a form a patient could take, broke down into sludge.
We stole each other's notes. She left hers out in cipher, and I took them home and tried to break them, and she read mine openly at my bench while I was in the archive, and left more notes in the margin. *Too much dittany. You're drowning it.* Or *This is lovely. Do it again.* Or once, on a page where I'd lost my temper and written ARRGH, in capitals, in the middle of a calculation: *Same.*
We stole each other's lunches. Not every day, which would have been predictable, and both of us would rather have died than be predictable. Twice a week, perhaps. My cheese and pickle sandwiches would disappear and her hamper would be found at my bench, and once I came back from the archive to find, in place of my lunch, a covered plate of the saffron tart, still warm, and no note at all. I ate it slowly. I didn't mention it. Neither did she.
And at night, after the porters had gone and the corridors upstairs had gone quiet, we worked side by side in the lamplight with a whole basement of space between us, and I learned what she sounded like when something was going well (humming, higher) and when it was going badly (silence, and then a short sharp word in what I eventually realised was French).
The explosion happened in the fifth week.
I don't know, to this day, whose fault it was. I'd been working at her end of the room because her ventilation hood was better, and she'd allowed it, after a brief negotiation, in exchange for my second-best stirring rod. I had my restorative on a low flame. She had her silver tincture on the next burner. We were reaching for the same flask of powdered asphodel at the same time, and she said "Mine," and I said "I had it first," and our fingers knocked, and a pinch of it went into the wrong cauldron.
I saw her face change. She was faster than me. She always was. She had her wand up and a Shield Charm thrown over both of us before the cauldron had finished deciding to go up, and then it went, with a noise like a dragon sneezing, and a column of silver-gold flame went up to the ceiling and hit the high window and blew it clean out into the herb garden.
When I could see again, we were both on the floor, under her bench. She was on top of me. Her shield had held, mostly. There was a burn across the back of her hand where it hadn't.
"Are you hurt?" she said, very fast. Her face was an inch from mine and she was looking at me with an expression I'd never seen on her before, a sort of fierce white fright. "Granger. *Hermione.* Are you hurt?"
It was the first time she had ever used my first name. I said, stupidly, "Your hand."
"Is fine."
"Your hand is *burnt*, Draconia."
That was the first time I used hers. We stayed where we were, under the bench, for slightly too long. Then the alarm upstairs began to wail and Healer Pye came down the stairs in his nightshirt, and that was the end of whatever it was.
I dressed her hand myself, with dittany from my own supply and a bandage I tied far too neatly, and she let me, and neither of us said a single word.
That night I cracked the cipher.
It wasn't Trithemius. It was an old Malfoy family shorthand layered over Latin. I only got it because she'd made a mistake. On one page, in a hurry, she'd written the word *Thursday* plainly before going back into code, and from that one word, I got the rest.
It was mostly potion work, page after page of it, brilliant and strange. But at the bottom of some pages there were short personal notes, dated, like a diary she'd forgotten she was keeping.
*A.L. tracked my hand today.*
*A.L. said a word. I think it was "dark". Pye says it doesn't count.*
*Thursday. She gave me another. That's nine.*
I knew who A.L. was. Anyone would. Alice Longbottom had been on the Janus Thickey Ward, the long-term spell-damage ward on the fourth floor, for more than twenty-five years. Bellatrix Lestrange had done that to her, and to her husband, and Bellatrix Lestrange had been Draconia Malfoy's aunt.
It was Thursday the next day.
At four o'clock, Draconia took off her lab robe, hung it on its peg, put on her coat, and said, "I'll be an hour," without looking at me.
I gave her two minutes. Then I followed.
She didn't take the lift. She took the stairs, all the way up to the fourth floor, and she walked down the corridor to the double doors with the little brass plaque that said *Janus Thickey Ward*, and went through them. I stood in the corridor outside, in front of a portrait of a medieval Healer who glared at me as though I were contagious, and looked through the little glass window in the door.
She was sitting at a bedside, at the far end of the ward. Opposite her, in a chair by the window, in a pale dressing gown, sat a thin, white-haired woman with a face like a faded photograph.
Draconia was talking to her. I couldn't hear what she said. She was talking quietly, and with her bandaged hand, she was turning the pages of a book on her knee, and the woman in the chair was watching her hand.
Then Alice Longbottom reached into the pocket of her dressing gown, took out a gum wrapper, a Drooble's Best Blowing Gum wrapper, and held it out across the gap between them.
Draconia took it as though it were made of glass.
She folded it once, very carefully, along its old creases, and put it into the inside pocket of her coat, over her heart, and I watched her put her bandaged hand over the place for a second afterwards and close her eyes.