Chapter 2: Good Faith
They were married on a Thursday in the Ministry registry office, which was on Level Seven between the Ludicrous Patents Office and a broom cupboard, and the whole thing took eleven minutes.
Harry stood up for her, and Ginny came straight from Harpies training with grass stains on her knees and hugged Hermione hard enough to crack something. Draco brought Theodore Nott, who shook Hermione's hand, said "My condolences, to both of you, sincerely," and then spent the ceremony reading a folded copy of the Quibbler. Narcissa Malfoy did not come from France. She sent white peonies, an enormous armful of them, with a card in a fine looped hand that said, in French, Be kind to each other. One of you will have to start.
Draco read the card, went slightly pink across the cheekbones, and put it in his inside pocket before Hermione could ask to see it again.
The registrar was an elderly wizard with ear trumpets for both ears who kept getting her name wrong. When he asked if she took this wizard, she said "Yes," in the same voice she used to second motions. When he asked Draco, there was a pause long enough that Harry shifted his weight, and then Draco said, "I do," quite clearly, looking at her and not at the registrar at all.
Their rings were plain Ministry silver and slightly too big. Hers spun round her finger all afternoon. She kept catching it with her thumb.
He moved in on Friday with two trunks, a crate of potion ingredients that clinked ominously, and a framed print of a sailing ship that he hung in the spare room without asking. Her flat was on the top floor of a converted warehouse in Camden, all exposed brick and enormous windows and a radiator that clanked through the night like a ghost in chains. She had chosen it because it was the furthest thing from a castle she could find.
He stood in the middle of the living room, looking at the bookshelves, which went floor to ceiling on three walls.
"You've shelved them by subject," he said.
"Yes."
"Not by author."
"Subject is how people actually look for things."
"It's how you look for things." He pulled out a volume of Muggle poetry wedged between two treatises on goblin contract law. "This is under 'Law.'"
"It's about the law of the heart. It's a joke. Put it back."
He put it back, a quarter inch to the left of where it had been, and she watched him do it and knew that he knew she would notice.
Crookshanks came out from under the sofa, regarded Draco for a long, flat-faced moment, and then walked over and sat on his foot.
"Oh, for heaven's sake," said Hermione.
"He has excellent judgement," Draco said, and crouched to scratch behind the ragged ears with a surprising lack of hesitation. "Bonjour, monsieur. Tu es très vieux, hein? Et très laid."
"Did you just call my cat ugly?"
"In French. It doesn't count in French."
It should have been unbearable. She had braced for unbearable. She had a whole list of contingencies written in the back of her diary under the heading IF HE IS INSUFFERABLE, ranging from Silencing Charms to calling Harry.
Instead, he turned out to be quiet.
He got up at six and left for his workshop at seven. He came home at seven in the evening smelling of copper and smoke and something sharp she eventually identified as powdered moonstone. He did his washing up the moment he'd finished eating, which was more than Ron had ever managed in two years. He did not touch her books again. He did not come into her bedroom, or her study, or the little window seat where she read on Sunday mornings. He kept to the spare room and the left half of the bathroom shelf with an almost military precision, as if he had learned a long time ago, in a much larger house, exactly which rooms he was allowed to stand in.
On the fourth evening she came home late from a committee session, starving and furious, and found that he had cooked.
"You can cook," she said blankly, from the doorway.
"I lived in Lyon for two years after the trials. You either learn to cook in Lyon or the neighbours report you." He slid an omelette onto a plate, folded and glossy, with herbs she didn't own. "Sit down, Granger. You look like you've been arguing with Wellbelove's committee about the definition of the word 'shall.'"
She had been arguing about the definition of the word "shall." She sat down.
He did not sit with her. He leaned against the counter with his own plate and ate standing up, and asked her questions about the elf bill, and listened to the answers. Actually listened, which she noticed because she was so used to the other thing: the nodding, the waiting for her to finish. He asked what the enforcement provisions were. He asked whether the Goblin Liaison Office would oppose it on principle. He told her that his family's elves had been freed, all six, the week after the trials, and that two of them had refused to leave and were now paid a wage he described as "appalling, they set it themselves, I've tried to raise it twice and been threatened with a ladle."
"That's in my bill," she said. "Elves setting their own wages. That's the whole second part."
"I know," he said. "I read it."
She looked at him over the omelette, and he looked back with an expression she could not read at all, and the radiator clanked like something trying to get out of the walls.
She woke at two in the morning on the ninth night because the flat was too quiet.
The radiator had stopped clanking. That was the first wrong thing. The second was the line of light under the kitchen door, and the third, when she pushed the door open with her wand already in her hand, was Draco Malfoy sitting at her kitchen table with his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow and a silver hand mirror lying face down on a square of black cloth in front of him.
The mirror was humming. It was a low sound, almost below hearing, and every hair on her arms rose to meet it.
"Don't come any closer," he said, without looking up. "Sorry. I thought you'd sleep through. It's quieter than it looks."
"What is that?"
"A Selwyn wedding gift to my great-great-grandmother. If you look into it for longer than three seconds, it shows you your own death, and then it tries to arrange it." He turned it a careful inch with a pair of dragon-bone tongs. "It's been in the east drawing room since 1871. I brought it home tonight. I'm almost through the outer enchantment."
She didn't come closer. She sat down very slowly on the other side of the table.
His left forearm was bare on the cloth. She had known, of course, that it would be there; everybody knew. She had not expected it to look like it did. The Mark had faded after the Dark Lord died, the way all of them had, but it had not gone. It was a grey ghost of a thing now, like a bruise seen through water, and over the top of it, like frost on a window, spread a fine silver webbing of scar tissue: the kind curse-breakers got from wards that bit back.
He saw her looking. He did not roll his sleeve down. She would think about that, later.
"How many of those are there?" she asked. "In the Manor."
"Things like this?" He considered. "Four hundred and twelve, when I started. I've done one a week, more or less, for six years. There are a hundred and six left. The worst ones are in the cellars." He said the word lightly. He said it the way people say the names of streets where something happened to them.
The cellars. She had been in the drawing room above them, once, for what had felt like a very long time.
"The wards on the house answer to blood," he said quietly. "To Malfoy blood. While I own it, I can walk in and out and bring these home one at a time and nobody gets hurt. If the Manor's forfeited, the Reparations Fund sends in a team of surveyors to inventory the contents for auction. The wards won't know them. And the house will treat them the way it treats every stranger who comes through the door without one of us." He set the tongs down. "I don't want the money, Granger. The Fund can have every Galleon. I'd have signed the vaults over in March if anyone had asked me. It's the house that needs me. For about two more years."
She sat very still.
"I didn't know," she said.
"No."
"I wrote a law that could have got people killed and I didn't know."
"You wrote a law that should have worked." He finally looked up at her. His eyes were bloodshot and ringed with tiredness, and the kitchen light made his hair look almost white. "Nobody knew because nobody asked me. Nobody asks Malfoys anything, these days, except whether we'd like to say a few words before sentencing."
She thought about that. She thought about Clause Nine, which she had read aloud at two in the morning with real satisfaction, and about her own neat drafting notes in the margin: no carve-outs, no appeals, let them feel it.
"What's the counter-curse?" she said.
He blinked. "What?"
"For the mirror. You said you're through the outer enchantment. What's left?"
"A binding," he said slowly. "Nineteenth-century, probably Scandinavian. I've tried four standard dissolutions. It keeps reknitting."
"Then it's not Scandinavian, it's Baltic. Selwyns intermarried with a Latvian family in the 1840s, it's in Nature's Nobility, appendix three." She was already standing up. "There's a reknitting binding in Lettish folk magic that only breaks if you unpick it in reverse order. I've got a book."
"Of course you have a book," said Draco Malfoy, to her retreating back, in a voice that sounded almost like laughter.
They broke it at twenty past four. The humming stopped as if someone had put a hand over its mouth, and the mirror was just a mirror, tarnished and rather beautiful, with a crack running through its lower edge. They both sat back at the same moment. Her hand was on the cloth, six inches from his, and neither of them moved it.
"Go to bed, Granger," he said eventually, very low.
"You go to bed."
"I will." He didn't move. "Thank you."
She went, because one of them had to.
In the morning he had already gone to the workshop. There was a pot of tea on the counter under a Warming Charm, the good loose-leaf Assam she always pretended not to like because it was expensive, and a list stuck to the door of the fridge with a magnet shaped like a pineapple.
He had worked out the fridge, at least. She felt an absurd small flare of pride about that.
Eggs, the list said. Lemons. Chives (she owns NO herbs). Ask Granger about the radiator. Her tea, the good one, she's nearly out.
She was smiling when she read it. She stopped smiling halfway down.
It was the hand. The slant of it, the long tail on the g, the way the capital letters were very slightly too large, as if the writer had been taught by a governess who thought capitals ought to announce themselves.
She left without her tea. She took the Floo to the Ministry, crossed the Atrium at a pace that made a junior wizard from Magical Games and Sports flatten himself against the fountain, rode the lift to Level Two, and stood in her own office in front of the corkboard.
Miss Granger, the letter said. The Prophet says the Wizengamot wants Clause Nine struck from your Act. Don't let them. It is the only honest line in the whole thing. Families like mine have bought our way out of everything for nine hundred years. Make us pay for something.
There was no signature.
She had read it every morning for eight months. She had known that hand before she knew she knew it. And she had been looking at it, every single time she came into this room, from the wrong side of the desk.