Chapter 1: The Last Gentleman in London
From BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR, Witch Weekly, the issue of the second of March:
And what of Theodore Nott, dear reader? What of the last gentleman in London? Your correspondent observed him at the Zabini wine evening last Thursday, where he did what he always does: fetched coats, refilled glasses, listened to Mrs Zabini describe her fourth husband's funeral for forty minutes without visibly dying, and left at eleven sharp, alone. He has never been seen drunk. He has never been seen in a temper. He has never, so far as this column can determine, been improper in his life. One almost longs for a scandal. One suspects one will be waiting a very long time.
You wrote that on a Tuesday, in your flat above an apothecary in Diagon Alley, with a cup of cold tea and a cat asleep on your notes. It took you twenty minutes. You were quite pleased with longs for a scandal. You sent it to your editor, who paid you six Galleons a column and had no idea what you looked like, and you forgot about it.
On Saturday, at Pansy Parkinson's twenty-sixth birthday party, Theodore Nott quoted it back to you word for word.
Pansy's house in Chelsea was a narrow white stucco thing with black railings and a door the exact green of a Slytherin scarf, which nobody was allowed to mention, least of all you, since it was where your column had got its name. You'd known Pansy since you were both eighteen and working the same miserable summer in Madam Malkin's back room, pinning hems for women who called you dear in a tone that meant staff. She'd taken to you instantly, the way she took to anyone who was rude about the right people. You'd been in her orbit ever since, which meant you'd been in the orbit of all of them: Draco, sulky and beautiful, back from a year in Paris with a French accent he pretended not to have. Blaise, who owned three restaurants and was rumoured to own the man who reviewed them. Daphne Greengrass, who'd married a Ministry heir and divorced him in under a year and come out of it with a house in Cornwall and a very good lawyer.
And Theo.
Theo was the quiet one. Everyone said so. He was a fixture at every party and noticeable at none of them. He was tall and dark-haired and slightly stooped, as if he'd spent too long reading at a desk built for a shorter man, which he probably had, since he worked in the Department of Mysteries and couldn't tell anyone what he did there. He dressed in grey. He wore a plain silver watch and no rings. He was unfailingly, almost aggressively polite. Pansy called him the family solicitor. Blaise called him Father Nott. He fetched coats.
You'd watched him all evening without meaning to, in the idle way you watched everyone, filing things for later. He'd brought Pansy a first edition of some French poet she'd mentioned once, months ago, and then gone pink when she shrieked. He'd steered a drunk Ministry clerk away from Daphne without seeming to touch him. Twice you'd looked up from your glass and found him already looking at you, unhurried, unembarrassed, and both times he'd simply raised his glass half an inch and looked away first. You'd put it down to manners. You'd thought, with the small professional contempt you kept for nice men, that there was nothing under the grey suit but more grey suit.
Tonight, he fetched yours.
The party had been going for four hours. Draco and Blaise were arguing on the stairs about whether it was possible to be in love with a restaurant. Daphne was asleep in an armchair with her shoes on the mantelpiece. Pansy was in the kitchen, crying cheerfully about turning twenty-six, while somebody's date held her hair and her champagne. You'd decided to slip out before the singing started, and you were in the cloakroom under the stairs, a narrow cupboard full of fur and velvet and the faint smell of mothballs, digging through a heap of coats for yours, when the door opened behind you and closed again.
"Green velvet," said Theo. "With the frogging. It's under Blaise's. He always puts his on top. He thinks it's the most important coat in any room."
You turned. He was holding your coat out to you. He'd found it without looking.
"Thank you," you said. "You're a gentleman."
Something passed over his face. It was very small. If you hadn't been a professional noticer, you'd have missed it.
"So I'm told," said Theo, and didn't let go of the coat.
The cloakroom was very small. The light came from a single enchanted candle in a sconce, and it threw his face into angles: the long nose, the narrow mouth, the eyes so dark a brown they looked black in this light. He had a scar through his left eyebrow you'd never noticed before. It gave him a faint, permanent air of asking a question.
"He has never been seen drunk," Theo said quietly. "He has never been seen in a temper. He has never, so far as this column can determine, been improper in his life."
Your stomach dropped through the floor.
"I don't," you said, "know what you're..."
"One almost longs for a scandal," Theo went on, in the same mild, even voice, as if reading aloud from a menu. "One suspects one will be waiting a very long time." He tilted his head. "It's good. The rhythm's lovely. You always do that, end on a sentence that sounds like it's winking. Two years ago you wrote that Blaise's new restaurant had a wine list like a widow's will, long and full of grudges. Draco still quotes it."
"How do you know it's me?"
"Because you're the only person who's at every party you write about and has never once been written about yourself." He held your eyes. "And because you use the word dear in exactly the way you wrote it. Dear reader. I've heard you say it to Pansy in that voice for years."
There was nowhere to go. There was a wall of coats at your back and a very polite man at your front and a candle hissing quietly over both of you. You found, to your horror, that your face was hot.
"Are you going to tell them?"
"No," said Theo.
"Then what do you want?"
He was quiet for a moment. Then he folded your green velvet coat over his arm, carefully, the way he did everything, and took one step closer. Not close enough to touch. Close enough that you had to tilt your chin up to keep looking at him. You could smell him now: clean cotton, cedar soap and, under it, something darker and warmer that you couldn't name.
"I want to correct the record," he said.
"The record."
"You've written about me eleven times in two years. I've counted. Last gentleman in London. Most reliable man in the room. Father Nott, which was Blaise's line, not yours, and you should have credited him." His voice didn't rise. It went lower. "You got the facts right, mostly. I don't drink much. I don't lose my temper. I do fetch coats. But you got me wrong."
"Did I?"
"Mm." His eyes moved over your face, slowly, the way you'd seen him read a page: everything, all the way to the end. "Do you want to know how?"
Your heart was going like a Snitch in a jar. You should have laughed. You should have said something cutting and taken your coat and gone. You had a reputation, privately, as the sharpest tongue in the set. You opened your mouth to use it.
"Yes," you said instead.
Theo smiled. It wasn't the polite smile he gave Mrs Zabini. It was slower and more private, and it changed his whole face into somebody you'd never met.
He lifted his hand. He stopped it in the air an inch from your cheek, and waited, and looked at you, and when you didn't move away he laid two fingers very lightly under your chin and tipped your face up another fraction. That was all. Two fingers. He wasn't holding you there. You could have stepped back. But the touch went through you like a dropped stitch, and your knees, to your enormous annoyance, wobbled.
"You've been watching all of us for two years," he said softly. "Taking notes. Deciding who we are. You're very good at it. But you've never once wondered what anyone does when the door's shut." His thumb moved, barely, along the line of your jaw. "You wrote that I've never been improper in my life. I'd like you to know that's not true. I'm just careful about who I'm improper with."
"And who," you managed, "is that?"
"People who ask nicely." His fingers left your chin. He held up your coat, open, so you could turn and slip into it, a perfectly gentlemanly gesture. When you did, he settled it on your shoulders and his mouth came close to your ear, and he said, in that same quiet, unremarkable voice: "My flat. Saturday, eight o'clock. Bring your quill if you like, though I don't think you'll be doing much writing. And if you don't come, I'll fetch your coat at the next party and never mention this again. Your choice. It's always going to be your choice. That's rather the point."
He stepped back. He opened the cloakroom door. The noise of the party flooded in: Draco shouting about a restaurant, somebody starting Happy Birthday in the wrong key.
"Goodnight," said Theodore Nott, the last gentleman in London, and held the door for you.