Chapter 2: Future Wife (Provisional)
Dear future wife (provisional),
Friday, seven o'clock. Apparate to the lay-by on the A470 north of Dolwyddelan. Boots, not shoes. Bring a coat. Bring the scarf with the singe marks; I suspect it's lucky. Do not bring a wand holster that clinks, because where we're going, clinking is impolite.
Yours in reluctant contractual obligation, T. Nott
P.S. I'm told by a reliable source (your mother; we've had tea; she's lovely and terrifying) that you don't like fish. Noted. Struck from the menu.
You read the letter three times at your mother's kitchen table in Devon, while the ghoul in the attic banged on the pipes and your mother pretended not to watch you from behind the Prophet.
"You had tea with him," you said.
"He wrote and asked," your mother said. "Very nice handwriting. Brought a Victoria sponge. Fixed the hinge on the pantry door without being asked, and then apologised for presuming." She turned a page. "He asked what you were like before you went to Romania. I told him about the time you tried to hatch a Fwooper egg in the airing cupboard."
"Mum."
"He laughed for quite a long time. He has a nice laugh, when he finally gets round to it. It's like watching a rusty gate open." She lowered the paper. "He asked what you'd want, if you got to choose. Not what you'd put up with. What you'd want. I didn't have an answer. I've been thinking about it ever since."
The lay-by on the A470 was a muddy strip of gravel with a view of a great deal of Welsh hillside and a great deal of Welsh rain. Theo was waiting in a waxed jacket and walking boots, holding two flasks.
"Tea," he said, handing you one. "Proper tea. I asked your mother how you take it, and then I asked a second time because I didn't believe her."
"Three sugars is a perfectly normal amount."
"It's a crime against the leaf. But it's your crime." He nodded up the hillside. "It's about an hour's walk. Uphill. Mostly bog."
"Romantic."
"Wait," he said.
It was a long hour. He walked fast for a man who looked like he lived in a library, and he knew the path, which was barely a path, more a sheep's opinion about where a path should be. The rain stopped halfway up. By the time you reached the ridge it was dusk and the sky had cleared to a deep watery violet, and Theo crouched down behind an outcrop of slate and motioned for you to do the same.
"Look," he whispered. "Down there. In the cwm."
In the valley below, in a hollow of heather and rock beside a black tarn, something enormous and green was curled like a cat in front of a fire. As you watched, it lifted its head. A long, low sound rolled up the hillside, half song, half rumble, and three smaller shapes came tumbling out of the rocks towards it, wings flapping clumsily, tripping over their own feet.
A Common Welsh Green. And her clutch. Three hatchlings, maybe four weeks old, practising flight in the dusk.
You forgot to breathe. You forgot the contract, and Ragnok, and the farmhouse, and the fact that you were sitting in a bog next to a man you'd known for five days. You just watched. The mother dragon sang. One of the hatchlings got airborne for nearly three seconds before landing face-first in the heather, and you made a noise that was mostly a laugh and partly something else, something tight in your throat.
"The reserve here doesn't let visitors in," Theo said softly, beside you. "But the warden's daughter wanted a copy of the 1702 Welsh bestiary for her wedding, and I happened to have one. You said you had a dragon halfway through a difficult pregnancy. I thought you might be missing her."
You turned your head. He was very close. In the violet light his glasses had fogged a little at the edges and he hadn't noticed.
"How long did you plan this?"
"Since Gringotts." He paused. "Well. Since about two minutes after Gringotts. I went straight to the Welsh Ministry liaison office. They thought I was mad."
"You are mad."
"Possibly," said Theo. "Is it working?"
You looked back down at the dragons, so you wouldn't have to answer, and felt him smile beside you in the dark.
It went on like that.
He took you to the Cecil Court bookshop and introduced you to the bookseller who thought he was an accountant, and the bookseller showed you photographs of his allotment marrows for forty minutes while Theo stood behind him mouthing sorry. He took you to a tiny Greek restaurant in Camden run by a Squib whose moussaka was, he said, the single best argument for the Statute of Secrecy, because if the rest of the world found out about it they'd never leave. He took you to the Ashmolean after hours, by way of an arrangement with a night watchman that you didn't ask about, and let you sit in front of the Alfred Jewel for as long as you liked.
He listened. That was the thing. He asked questions about dragons and listened to the answers, all the way to the end, even the bits about digestion. He remembered things. He turned up at the farmhouse one Tuesday with a Gringotts curse-breaker's manual on attic ghouls and spent three hours negotiating with your great-uncle-who-was-not-your-great-uncle, and came down covered in dust with the ghoul's written agreement to stop banging the pipes after ten at night.
"How?" you demanded.
"I promised to read to him," Theo said. "Wednesdays. He likes Lockhart. I'm told it's the hair."
You started keeping a second list. You didn't write it down. You didn't need to.
On a Friday in May he finally took you to Nott Manor.
It was in the Yorkshire Dales, at the end of a long drive lined with dead elms, and it was as draughty as he'd promised: grey stone, mullioned windows, half the chimneys cold. The portrait of his father in the entrance hall glared at you and said, "Is this the one? She looks underfed," and Theo said, "Good evening, Father," and threw a dust sheet over him without breaking stride.
But the library was something else.
It took up the whole of the west wing. Three floors of books, joined by spiral iron staircases, with a reading gallery running around the top and a stained-glass window at the far end that turned the last of the evening sun to blue and amber on the floor. It smelled of old paper and leather and beeswax. There were armchairs everywhere, all different, all worn.
"I spend most of my time here," Theo said, unnecessarily. "When my father was taken, the house was meant to be sold for reparations. I bought it back. Most of the money went on the roof. The rest went on books." He took his glasses off, put them on again. You'd learned that he did it when he was nervous. "This is the first time I've brought anyone in here."
"Really?"
"Draco came once. He sneezed for an hour and said it was like being buried alive in a nice cardigan."
You walked along the shelves while he lit the lamps. Herbology. Arithmancy. A whole wall of dragons, and you stopped there, because halfway along it, between Scamander and a very rare Hungarian treatise, was a thin row of bound journals, and their spines had your name on them.
Your papers. Every article you'd published in the Dragonology Quarterly in four years, even the short one on Horntail claw rot that you were still embarrassed about. Bound in green leather. You pulled one out and opened it, and the margins were full of his handwriting: small, slanting, careful. Questions. Notes. Here she's right and Gulliver is wrong. Check this against the 1880 survey. And once, beside a paragraph about how you'd sat up for three nights with a sick Opaleye: Of course she did.
You turned round. He was standing in the middle of the library with a lit taper in his hand, looking as if he'd been caught stealing.
"How long have you been reading these?"
"Since the first one," Theo said. "I wanted to know who I was going to have to marry. And then I just wanted to know what you'd say next."
You didn't know what to do with that. So you sat down in the nearest armchair, the one by the stained-glass window, and after a long moment he sat on the arm of it, and then, because there was room, in it, beside you. He read to you. Something in Old Welsh, about a drowned city, translating as he went. His voice was low and even. His shoulder was warm against yours. The lamps burned down and you didn't ask him to light them.
You must have fallen asleep. You woke much later with your head on his shoulder and his jacket over your knees and his cheek resting on your hair. The clock in the gallery said a quarter to midnight. He was still awake, still holding the book, not reading it.
"You stopped," you murmured.
"I didn't want to wake you."
You lifted your head. He was very close. His glasses had slid down his nose and his eyes, without them, were softer, hazel, gold at the centre. He looked at your mouth, then back at your eyes, and didn't move. Waiting. He was always waiting for you.
You leaned in.
And something in the Manor went BANG.
You both leapt about a foot. Somewhere below, a door slammed, and a house-elf's voice shrieked, "Master Theo! Master Theo! Owl from the goblins! Urgent owl!"
The owl came in through the gallery window like a thrown brick and dropped a Gringotts envelope in Theo's lap. He tore it open. You watched his face change as he read.
"What?" you said. "What is it?"
Without a word he turned the letter so you could see it. It was in Ragnok's cramped, furious hand.
Mr Nott. Madam. The silver binding on the Nott marriage contract extinguished itself at precisely eleven forty-two this evening. This has never happened in the history of this office. You will both present yourselves in chambers at nine tomorrow morning and explain what you have done.