Chapter 1: Shelved by Temperament
The peacocks were still there. That was the first thing.
Hermione had prepared herself for most of it on the train down from London: the long gravel drive, the black yew hedges, the wrought-iron gates with their elaborate M, which she had last seen from the wrong side, at night, with Fenrir Greyback's hand in her hair. She had prepared for the house. She had even, in a small cold part of her mind that she kept for these things, prepared for the floor of the drawing room. What she had not prepared for was the peacocks: three of them, white as frost, picking their way across the lawn in the late August sun as if nothing had ever happened anywhere, and the sudden, absurd sting behind her eyes at the sight of something so beautiful being so stupidly indifferent.
She stood at the gates with her case in one hand and her Ministry order in the other and waited for them to open.
They didn't. After a minute, a figure came down the drive. He walked without hurry, hands in the pockets of a dark green jumper with a hole at one elbow, and he stopped on the other side of the bars and looked at her.
Nine years had sharpened him. That was the only way she could think of it. The softness had gone out of his face entirely, leaving the bones: the long jaw, the cheekbones, the faintly hooked line of the nose. His hair was cut short and plain. He looked like a man who slept badly and walked a great deal.
"Granger," he said.
"Malfoy." She held up the order. "Two weeks. The Ministry's Restricted Collections Panel requires a full inventory of the library before the property transfers on the first of September. I'm sure you've been notified."
"Several times. In triplicate." He looked at the parchment, not at her. "They sent you."
"I volunteered."
That made him look at her. It was a long look, grey and level and unreadable, and she held it, because she had decided on the train that she would hold every look in this house and not flinch from a single one.
"Of course you did," he said at last, and touched the gate, and it swung open.
He walked her up to the house and through the front door, and she did not stop in the hall. She told herself that afterwards, with a certain grim pride. She saw the long corridor to the left that led to the drawing room, and she looked at it and kept walking. It was only later, in the library, that she realised what had been wrong with it. The corridor had been shorter than she remembered. Much shorter. It ended in a wall that hadn't been there before, with a window in it, and through the window there had been light.
The library was on the first floor, at the end of the east wing, and it was the most beautiful room she had ever been in.
She hadn't expected that either. She'd expected something gothic, all black oak and gargoyles. Instead it was long and high and full of air, the ceiling a shallow vault painted the pale greenish blue of a duck's egg and scattered with small gold stars. Galleries ran round three walls, reached by iron spiral stairs. The fourth wall was all windows, looking south over the lawns to a lake she hadn't known was there. There were books from the floor to the vault. Thousands. Tens of thousands. The air smelled of leather and beeswax and very faintly of smoke.
"The restricted collection is the north gallery," Malfoy said, behind her. "And the cases at the far end. The rest is ordinary. Novels, herbals, a great deal of very boring family correspondence. The Panel's welcome to it, but I imagine they'll want to start with the things that bite."
"I'll be starting with a survey of the whole room."
"Naturally."
She set her case down on the long central table, opened it, and began to take out her equipment: her inventory ledgers, her charmed tape, her quills, the Ministry's standard Restricted Classification Schedule, which ran to four hundred pages and which she had annotated in three colours. When she turned round, he was sitting in a leather armchair by the empty fireplace with a book open on his knee, one long leg crossed over the other.
"You don't need to stay," she said.
"It's my library."
"It's the Ministry's library in a fortnight."
"Then until the first, it's mine." He turned a page. "Don't mind me, Granger. I'll be very quiet."
He was not very quiet.
He was perfectly silent, which was worse, because it meant that she could hear him not saying things. She started on the north gallery that afternoon, and the first time she took a book down, a squat black quarto with no title on the spine, she felt his attention land on her like a hand on the back of her neck. She opened it carefully, read the frontispiece, wrote it into her ledger under Schedule C, Hexes and Malefic Charms, and put it in the crate she'd brought for the C books.
"No," said Malfoy, from below.
She looked down over the gallery rail. He hadn't looked up from his own book.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Don't put it next to the grey one. The one with the clasp. Le Livre des Larmes. They hate each other." He turned a page. "The black one's a hexer and the grey one's a weeper, and if you put a hexer beside a weeper they'll keep each other up all night, and in the morning the grey one will have soaked through your crate and the black one will have eaten the corner of your ledger. My great-grandfather lost a thumb that way."
Hermione looked at the crate. The grey book had, she now saw, begun very slightly to bead with moisture along its spine.
"The Ministry Schedule classifies by subject," she said.
"The Ministry Schedule was written by people who've never had to live with these books." He finally looked up. "This library's shelved by temperament. It always has been. If you want to get through it in two weeks with all your fingers, you'll shelve it the way it wants to be shelved."
She held his gaze. Then she took the black book out of the crate and put it in an empty one on its own.
"Thank you," she said stiffly.
"Don't mention it." He went back to his reading.
The tea started on the second day.
She hadn't asked for it. She'd brought a flask. At eleven, an elf appeared in the doorway with a tray, a small, elderly elf in a clean blue tunic with a brass name badge that read TIPPY, and set it down at Malfoy's elbow and vanished, and Malfoy poured two cups and carried one up the spiral stairs to the north gallery and put it down on the shelf beside her without a word.
It was Earl Grey with milk and one sugar. She drank it because it would have been churlish not to, and because it was good, and because the north gallery was cold. Strangely cold, for August; she'd noticed it the day before and assumed it was a preservation charm.
On the third day, it was Assam, strong, with a dash of milk and no sugar. Which was how she actually took it.
She looked down at him over the rail. He was in his armchair with his book.
"How did you know?"
"You drank the first one like it was medicine. You made a face at the sugar." He didn't look up. "Also, you've got a flask, Granger. I can smell it from here."
The tea came every day at eleven and every day at four. The cups were very thin bone china with a pattern of small blue birds. She asked about the badge on the elf's tunic, and Malfoy said, without inflection, "She's paid. Two Galleons a week and Sundays off. She negotiated. She's very hard-nosed," and Hermione, who had spent seven years fighting for that law, looked into her tea and said nothing for a long time.
He corrected her shelving four more times. He was right every time, which she found unbearable. On the third afternoon, she argued with him about the provenance of a medieval grimoire for forty minutes and won, and he conceded with a short, startled laugh, the first time she'd heard him laugh in nine years. It was a better laugh than she'd expected. Low, a little rusty, as if he didn't get it out often.
He never left the room. She noticed that by the fourth day. When she arrived at nine he was already there, in the armchair, with a book. When she left at six he was still there. He ate lunch there, off a tray, while she ate her sandwiches at the table. Once, when she went down to the far end of the room to look at the cases, he got up and drifted after her with his book, and sat down on the window seat nearest to where she was working.
"You don't trust me," she said, without turning round.
"I trust you completely. You're the most honest person in Britain. It's exhausting."
"Then why are you watching me?"
There was a pause.
"I'm not watching you," he said. "I'm reading."
"You haven't turned a page in twenty minutes."
Another pause, longer.
"It's a very dense book," said Malfoy.
On the fourth afternoon, the Floo in the hall downstairs chimed, three times, the long double chime that meant the Ministry. He looked up sharply.
"I'll be two minutes," he said. He'd stood. He was looking at her, and then at the room, with an expression she couldn't place. "Don't touch anything in the cases while I'm gone. Stay in the gallery. Two minutes."
"I've managed worse libraries than this, Malfoy."
"I know you can," he said, oddly gently. "Two minutes."
He went out. The door swung shut behind him with a soft click.
The cold came in almost at once. It rose from the floor like water filling a bath, and she watched her breath turn white in front of her face. The candles in their brackets along the gallery bent sideways, all in the same direction, toward her, and went out. Along the shelf at her elbow the books began to move. Not fall. Move. They shifted on their shelves, spines rustling, leaning out, inch by inch, as if a great many people were turning their heads to look at her.
Somewhere at the far end of the room, a door she couldn't see slammed hard enough to shake the gallery rail.
"Malfoy," Hermione said, very quietly, and then, as the first book slid off its shelf and hit the floor at her feet and lay open there, its pages riffling in a wind she couldn't feel, "Malfoy!"
The library door crashed open.
He came through it at a run and stopped dead in the middle of the room, breathing hard, and put his palm flat against the nearest bookcase as if steadying a frightened horse, and said one word, low and furious, in a language she didn't know.
The cold stopped. The candles relit themselves. The books, with a soft collective sigh, settled back into their places. The one on the floor at her feet shut its covers with a snap.
Malfoy looked up at her in the gallery. His face was white.
"It doesn't like you," he said. "The house. It never has." He let his hand fall from the shelf. "That's why I don't leave the room."