Chapter 3: Behind the Green Door
There are eighty-four steps between the pavement and Theodore Nott's front door. You counted them on Monday morning, taking them two at a time, with Witch Weekly crushed in your fist and your heart trying to climb out through your mouth.
All the way up you rehearsed. I didn't write it. I'd never write it. Somebody's using my name. You'd tried to compose it properly on the walk from Diagon Alley and it had come out sounding exactly like what a gossip columnist would say if she'd just sold a man out for six Galleons and wanted to keep sleeping with him.
He opened the door before you got to the top. Wards. Of course.
He was dressed for work: grey suit, plain tie, the silver watch. Every inch the gentleman. He looked at the crumpled magazine in your hand and then at your face, and you braced for it, for the cold polite version of him you'd watched him use on drunk Ministry clerks.
"I know you didn't write it," Theo said.
You stopped dead on the top step. "What?"
"It's badly written." He held the door wider. "You'd never use admitting in a sentence and then let her out again in the same sentence. It's clumsy. And you'd have done something cruel and funny with the Bloomsbury square, and they just called it a square." He took the magazine gently out of your hand and smoothed it flat. "Also, I read your column the way some people read scripture. Whoever wrote this has read four of them, at most, and never past the first paragraph."
You sat down on his top step, because your knees had given up.
"I thought you'd think," you said, and couldn't finish it.
Theo crouched in front of you on the landing, in his good suit, so that your eyes were level.
"You told me on Saturday that you wanted to see what was under the polite," he said quietly. "You saw. And you didn't run. Do you really think I'd believe you'd turn round and sell that for page four?" He touched your cheek, very lightly. "Someone was watching the house. My wards logged a Disillusionment Charm on the pavement at seven fifty and again at ten past ten on Sunday. Somebody stood outside in the rain for fourteen hours. Who knows you're the columnist?"
"Nobody," you said. "My editor knows my handwriting and my Gringotts account. That's all."
"Then we'll start with your editor," said Theo, and stood up, and offered you his hand.
You didn't get to your editor first. Pansy got to you.
She was waiting in your flat when you got home to change, sitting on your sofa with her feet on your coffee table and your cat on her lap, eating your biscuits, wearing enormous dark glasses that meant she'd been crying at her own party until four in the morning on Saturday and was only now emotionally recovered.
"Darling," she said. "Sit down. You look like death."
"How did you get in?"
"You gave me a key two years ago. You've forgotten. You forget everything you didn't write down." She lowered the glasses. "I know you're the columnist."
You stared at her.
"I've known since the first one," said Pansy. "Who do you think tipped you off about Blaise and the restaurant critic? Who told you Daphne's husband had a second household in Tunbridge Wells? Me, darling. I've been feeding you for two years. Someone in this set has to keep it interesting, and it was never going to be Theo." She took off the glasses altogether. Her eyes were very sharp. "Which is why I'm furious. Because that column today wasn't you. And the only other person who's read every single one of your columns as closely as I have is Mortimer Fawley, your editor, who has been trying to sell Behind the Green Door to the Prophet for three months, and who needs a scandal to bump up the price."
"How do you know that?"
"Because the Prophet's features editor is my cousin, and she owes me money," said Pansy. "Now. Go and put on something terrifying. We're going to Fleet Street."
Witch Weekly's offices were on the top floor of a crooked building behind the Daily Prophet, reachable only by a lift that stopped where it felt like stopping. Mortimer Fawley's office had a frosted glass door with his name on it in gold. He was a round, damp man with a moustache that looked like it had been knitted. You'd never met him in person. He looked up as Pansy kicked the door open, and saw her, and saw you, and saw, standing quietly behind both of you with his hands in his pockets, Theodore Nott.
Nobody shouted. That was the thing about it. Pansy, who could make waiters cry by asking for the bill, said nothing at all. You'd come prepared to be magnificent and found you didn't have to be.
Theo stepped forward and sat down in the chair opposite Fawley's desk. He crossed one leg over the other. He laid his hands, long and pale, on his knee.
"Mr Fawley," he said, in his politest voice. "I work in the Department of Mysteries. I imagine you've heard that we don't talk about what we do. That's true. But I can tell you that we have a section that deals with memory and records, and another that deals with what you might call surveillance. And I'm the sort of person, Mr Fawley, who reads everything. Including, last night, the full sales records of Witch Weekly for the last three years, and a series of letters between you and the Daily Prophet about the price of a column that doesn't belong to you." He smiled pleasantly. "I'd like a retraction on Thursday. I'd like this lady's pen name returned to her, with her back pay at a fair rate. And I'd like you never to stand outside my house again. The pavement's very uneven. Someone could get hurt."
Mortimer Fawley's moustache trembled.
"Yes," he said faintly. "Of course. Yes."
In the lift, on the way down, Pansy said, "Theo, that was the most frightening thing I've ever seen, and I grew up with Draco."
"I was perfectly polite."
"That's what made it frightening." She looked between the two of you and her mouth curled. "Oh, Merlin. Oh, it's real. Look at your faces. Fine. Fine. I'm going to the Leaky. Don't come. Have a lovely afternoon." The lift stopped on the second floor for no reason, and she stepped out of it and blew you a kiss as the doors closed.
Theo looked at you. You looked at Theo.
"I'm handing in my notice," you said. "I don't want the column back. I'll write one more, so it ends properly. Then I'm done."
"Are you sure?"
"I spent two years writing about people with the door shut," you said. "I'd rather be on the other side of it."
Your last column ran the following Thursday, under the retraction. It was short.
Your correspondent has been asked, many times, whether she was right about the last gentleman in London. She regrets to inform you, dear reader, that she was not. He is not reliable. He is not proper. He is not, in any meaningful sense, quiet. She will be saying nothing further on the matter, having discovered that some things are better kept behind the green door. Goodnight, and do fetch your own coats.
Pansy threw a party that Saturday to celebrate the end of the column. She called it a wake. Everyone came in black. Draco gave a eulogy. Blaise cried at it, or pretended to.
Halfway through the evening, in the middle of an argument about whether Draco's French accent was real, a hand closed lightly round your wrist, and Theo said, in your ear, "Cloakroom."
The cupboard under the stairs was as small as you remembered, and smelled as strongly of mothballs, and the single candle in its sconce hissed exactly the same way. Theo closed the door. He cast a silencing charm on it without looking, wandlessly, a flick of his fingers that you'd never seen him do before and that you were going to think about for days.
"Last time we were in here," he said, "I asked if you wanted to know how you'd got me wrong."
"I remember."
"I've been wanting to do this in here ever since." He backed you into the wall of coats, slowly, his hands on your hips. "Say yes."
"Yes," you breathed. "Yes, Theo. Please."
He kissed you hard, his hand sliding up into your hair, and you pulled at his tie until it came loose. It was quick and urgent and nothing like the slow devastation of his flat. He lifted your black dress, found you already wet, and told you, low and pleased against your throat, exactly how much he liked that. You fumbled at his belt. He let you. When he lifted you against the wall of furs and pushed inside you, you both made the same sound, and he laughed breathlessly into your neck.
"Quiet," he murmured, though the charm was holding. "You'll have to be very quiet. Can you do that for me?"
You couldn't. He knew you couldn't. That was the point. He fucked you slow and deep up against Blaise's ridiculous coat, with Happy Birthday being sung for no reason at all on the other side of the door, his hand over your mouth when you got loud, his eyes on yours over the top of it, dark and wicked and full of something else, something enormous he hadn't said yet. When you came, you bit his palm. He groaned your name and followed you, shaking, his forehead pressed against yours.
For a while neither of you moved. The candle hissed. Somebody outside dropped a glass.
"I've been in love with you for two years," Theo said, very quietly, into the dark between you. "Since the column about the widow's will. I read it at my desk in the Department of Mysteries and laughed out loud, and three Unspeakables came to see if I'd been cursed. I've been fetching your coat at every party since, hoping you'd look at me long enough to notice."
You put your hand on his cheek. You could feel his pulse going in his jaw.
"I noticed," you said. "I just wrote it down wrong."
He smiled, that slow private smile, and kissed you again, gently this time.
When you finally came out of the cloakroom, straightening your dress, his tie in your pocket, the hall was full. Draco, Blaise, Daphne, half the party, all standing in a loose semicircle on the stairs with drinks in their hands, staring at you.
At the front of them stood Pansy, holding a quill and a notebook. She licked the tip of the quill.
"Darling," she said sweetly. "Someone has to take over the column. Now. From the beginning. How long, exactly, has the quiet one been like this?"