An Interesting Little Legal Problem

Chapter One: In Which Harry Potter is Asked for His Opinion of a Model of St. Brutus's

The drawing room had a high ceiling and olive-green walls. Heavy green curtains kept out most of the light, and the place was crammed with old-fashioned furniture set at odd angles. Three people stood around the room: a middle-aged man and woman, both red-haired, and a much younger woman with spiked electric blue hair. They wore an odd assortment of clothing: the girl was dressed in slightly faded jeans and a black T-shirt, the older woman in flowing robes, and the man in a green checked suit jacket, blue and white pinstriped trousers, and a tie with a pattern of Christmas trees and snowmen.

All three people were staring at a gaping hole in the wall whose edges bore the tooth marks of some large animal. A square of plaster fringed with matching tooth marks stood beside it. An ancient, faded tapestry was attached to the missing chunk of wall.

The man whistled softly. "Beautiful job. How long did it take him?" He straightened his tie, which began to play "Jingle Bells."

"Nice tie, Arthur," said the blue-haired girl with a grin.

"Shhh!" whispered the red-headed woman, gesturing toward a sofa where a thin, white-faced figure was lying doubled over in an unmistakable attitude of pain.

"Oh, sorry, Molly, didn't realize he was still here," Arthur said in a much lower voice. "How is he?"

"Not very well, poor man. Plaster gives him stomach pains. Are you absolutely sure this was necessary?"

"Well, Evans did say we should bring as many of the original documents as possible. He was quite clear about that."

The man on the sofa opened his eyes. "I don't mind," he said. "It's for a good cause, and it's not often that I find a practical use for my peculiar talent." He fell asleep again, smiling a little.

The girl's eyes didn't stray from the sofa. "He seems all right," she murmured at last. "I don't mean physically, but - "

"He did his grieving fifteen years ago, dear," whispered Molly. "It's the rest of us who are all wrong."

There was a short silence. "We'd better be going," said Arthur briskly. He picked up one end of the tapestry, and the girl picked up the other.

* * *

Jack Evans' receptionist didn't bat an eye as she ushered Arthur and his companion into the solicitor's office. She was used to oddly dressed clients, and some of them carried stranger things than enormous chunks of plaster with tapestries attached.

At a glance, the room seemed no different from the other offices in the building. It contained a new computer, a few photos of Evans' wife and young son, and a shelf of law books that stretched from floor to ceiling. It usually took visitors a while to notice that some of the legal documents that covered his desk were written on parchment instead of paper, and that many of the books had very strange titles indeed.

"Morning, Arthur, good to see you again," said Evans, a plump, cheerful-looking man of about thirty. He turned to the girl. "So you're the cousin, I take it? If you don't mind my asking, how do you pronounce your Christian names?"

"Nymphadora Diaphanta," said the girl with a shudder, "but don't call me that. It's Tonks." She tried to offer Evans her hand, but dropped her end of the tapestry on the floor with a crash. "Blast!"

"Pleased to meet you, Miss Tonks," said Evans. He picked up the tapestry and leaned it against the bookcase. "What on earth is this?"

Arthur looked up from the laser printer he was exploring and explained matter-of-factly, "That's the Black family tree, the original document. It was attached to the wall with a Permanent Sticking Charm, so we had to wait for the next full moon and get our resident werewolf to gnaw it off, but I think he made a pretty neat job of it. No damage to the tapestry."

For a moment, Evans seemed at a loss for words. "You got a ... werewolf to ... Never mind, I guess it doesn't matter." He sat down at his desk, which was almost entirely covered with a sheet of official-looking parchment. "I've just been looking at the will. Mr. Black seems to have been entirely unaware of the restrictions on his estate. A very interesting little legal problem, and I must thank you for bringing it my way, Arthur. Now, I didn't expect Mr. Potter to be able to join you, but where is the third heir? His new guardian?"

"He's - ill at the moment, I'm sorry to say." Arthur didn't bother to mention that this was because he happened to be the resident werewolf and had been up all night eating holes in the wall. Evans seemed to have enough to take in already.

"Right then, let's have a look at the family tree." Evans bent over the tapestry and examined it for several minutes. "Where, exactly, is the late Mr. Black?"

"He isn't," Tonks said angrily. "He got blasted off."

"Blasted ...?"

"Like that." She snapped her fingers at a small burn mark on the tapestry.

"Oh," said Evans sympathetically. "I quite understand. I'm sure my sort-of-sister wouldn't mind doing that to me."

"Your sort-of-sister?" asked Arthur. "I thought one either was a sister, or wasn't. Is it different with Muggles?"

"Not usually, but in my case it's a long, complicated story," said Evans with a sigh. "And where are you on this tapestry, Miss Tonks?"

"I've never been on it. My mum was blasted off before I was born."

"Right, I'm starting to sense a pattern here. Suppose you draw your family tree on this sheet of paper - blasted-off members and all."

"I guess the original document won't be all that useful, then." Arthur sounded crestfallen. "Pity about that. He went to a great deal of trouble getting it off the wall."

"Do werewolves understand English?" asked Evans, inspecting the chunk of wall.

"It depends," said Arthur. "The British ones do."

"The ... oh, right, of course, that makes sense. Well, tell him his trouble is much appreciated. And - I don't want to say more just now, but I think I like the way his mind works already."

"Here's the family tree," announced Tonks. "I've used red ink for the family members who actually have money and influence, by the way. You will notice that they are the ones who haven't been blasted off the tapestry. Just to make things interesting, most of them also happen to be evil incarnate."

Evans took the paper from her and looked it over. "Oh dear. That seems fairly clear, unfortunately. One bright spot is - forgive me - the fact that they can't actually produce a corpse."

"They can produce witnesses," she said, "a few of whom have actually wriggled out of life in Azkaban. Do you know what Azkaban is?"

"Yes," Evans answered.

"Their official story," Tonks added contemptuously, "is that they are seers. They had visions of young people in danger which drew them to the Department of Mysteries, where they were brutally attacked by me and my colleagues." She gestured toward a name on the family tree she had just drawn. "Dear Uncle Lucius, right there, is one of them, and if he's ever shown the slightest trace of the Sight before, I'm a hippogriff."

"Very regrettable," commented Evans, "but luckily that isn't our only angle of approach. I'd like some time to review the legal history surrounding the Primogenitrus charm - and I do have one or two ideas that are better not discussed in this office. If you could meet me at my home in Surrey a week from Sunday, I should have some advice for you. And bring the other two heirs. I'm looking forward to meeting Mr. Potter. I'd like to get his opinion about my model of St. Brutus's." He winked.

"Will he understand what that means?" Arthur sounded confused.

"Yes," said Evans. "I think he will."

* * *

Just over a week later, Harry Potter lay on the front lawn of Number Four, Privet Drive, reading a badly written paperback spy novel that belonged to Uncle Vernon. By most people's standards, Harry's own life was a great deal more interesting than the book, but that didn't matter to him just now. He wanted to lose himself in a story that had nothing to do with his life, to forget about everything for a while. It wasn't working. His mind kept drifting back to the Department of Mysteries and to Sirius' death, but the pain he remembered from a month ago had gone. Now he felt dazed and a little stupid, and the words on the page made almost no sense.

Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia, and Dudley had been steadfastly ignoring him all summer, which contributed to his feeling of unreality. Their encounter with Mad-Eye Moody at the train station had left them too frightened to mistreat him, so they pretended he didn't exist at all. Harry was unable to make up his mind whether this was an improvement.

"Hello, Harry," said a familiar voice.

Harry looked up from the page he had been staring at for the last five minutes without taking in a word. Arthur Weasley and Remus Lupin were standing on the pavement in Muggle clothes. Lupin looked almost normal, though scruffy, in faded jeans; Harry noticed that he seemed even thinner and more tired than usual. Mr. Weasley was wearing a very Christmasy-looking tie, which didn't go with his tie-dyed T-shirt at all. Harry realized that he was staring. Although he'd last seen them only a couple of weeks before, they seemed to belong to another world. "What are you doing here?"

"Order of the Phoenix business," said Lupin, "but we thought we'd stop by and see how you were getting on with your aunt and uncle, and whether you wanted to come along."

"Order of the Phoenix? In Little Whinging? But- " Harry thought back to his hearing at the Ministry of Magic a year earlier - "But there are no witches or wizards here."

"Right," said Mr. Weasley, "or almost right, anyway. The person we're going to see is a Muggle. A solicitor."

Harry was baffled. Why would the Order of the Phoenix need a Muggle solicitor? And would Mr. Weasley - who was usually both enthusiastic and incompetent in his contacts with Muggles - know how to go about arranging a meeting with one? "I don't know very much about solicitors," he said, "but I don't think they usually work on Sundays."

"They don't," said Mr. Weasley, "but this one invited us to visit him at home after Tonks and I spoke to him in his office. And as Remus said, we were wondering if you'd like to come along. It'll probably be a bit dull - of course, Molly would never have let you come if it weren't - but it does concern you in a way, and besides, he invited you specially. He wants to meet you."

Dull or not, Harry had never been invited along on an Order of the Phoenix mission before, and he would have jumped at any chance to get away from the Dursleys'. "Of course I want to come!" he said, throwing the book aside and jumping to his feet. "But why does he want to meet me?"

"He said..." Mr. Weasley paused as if trying to remember the solicitor's exact words, "that he wanted to get your opinion of his model of St. Brutus's. Does that mean anything to you?"

"Not very much," said Harry. The Dursleys had explained Harry's long absences by telling the neighbors he was attending St. Brutus's Secure Centre for Incurably Criminal Boys, but it had never occurred to him that such an institution actually existed. But of course it must: Uncle Vernon probably didn't have enough imagination to invent it. He wondered if the solicitor would turn out to be a former student, and whether he would have to pretend to be familiar with the place.

"Why does the Order need a solicitor?" Harry asked as they walked down Privet Drive and turned onto Magnolia Crescent.

"There seems to be some trouble ahead about Sirius' will," said Lupin with a slight catch in his voice. "Muggles are better at law than we are - there's a lot to be said for their university system in some fields - so Arthur has a number of contacts with their solicitors through the ministry. This man is supposed to be very well versed in wizarding law, but it's not the sort of thing he can talk about in front of his colleagues, so he asked us to meet him today at his house in Surrey. What did you say his name was, Arthur?"

"I didn't," said Mr. Weasley as they turned up the front walk of a large, white house with its front lawn not quite as neatly manicured as the others in the neighborhood. "But it's Evans. Jack Evans."

Harry looked up, startled. Evans had been his mother's maiden name.

They approached the house. Mr. Weasley took his wand out of his pocket. Before Harry had a chance to mention that it was customary in his neighborhood to knock on doors and wait for a reply, he had already tapped on the door and caused it to unbolt itself and swing open. Harry thought for a moment that the owners would kill them, but the youngish, fair-haired man who appeared in the front hall seemed friendly and unperturbed. "Come in! Hello, Arthur. Hello, Harry - I've seen you around the neighborhood, but Petunia and her husband won't give me the time of day, so we've never been introduced. I'm Jack Evans, and this is my wife Harriet." He indicated a woman in a violently orange dress and green gardening gloves. "And you're Mr. Lupin? Pleased to meet you. Couldn't Miss Tonks make it?"

"She had a bit of an emergency at work," said Mr. Weasley. Aurors, Harry knew, often worked odd hours.

"It's a beautiful day," said Jack Evans, "so I think we'll talk outside. I have something in the garden that I expect will interest you."

Mr. Evans led the way into the back garden, which looked nothing like any garden Harry had ever seen in Little Whinging. A half-dozen mismatched lawn chairs were scattered around the back door, and beyond them - "How's that for St. Brutus's Secure Centre for Incurably Criminal Boys? Took me three years to build it. Is it much like the place, Harry?"

Harry stared. Almost the entire garden was taken up by an intricately built scale model of Hogwarts and the surrounding area - the castle and its crenellated towers, the Quidditch pitch, even a miniature lake with the dim outline of a giant squid under the water. Harry caught a glimpse of the Gryffindor common room in one of the towers.

"This is wonderful," exclaimed Mr. Weasley, bending closer to inspect the castle, which was lit from the inside. "How did you do it? Does it run on elekl - eclecticry? But where are the plugs, do they run underground?" Harry thought to himself that Ron's father had finally found a kindred spirit: Mr. Evans was clearly as enraptured by the wizarding world as Mr. Weasley was by the Muggle one.

He noticed only a few small mistakes. The Whomping Willow was about one-third of the size it ought to be, for instance, and there was no sign of Sybill Trelawney's collection of armchairs and poufs in the North Tower. Instead, the Divination classroom had bare floors and walls hung with tapestries covered in mysterious symbols.

"But how could you build that?" asked Harry. "I thought Hogwarts was invisible to everyone who wasn't a wizard. Are you..." He broke off, unable to think of a tactful way to ask whether Mr. Evans was a Squib.

"I'm all Muggle," said Mr. Evans, and Harry realized it was the first time he had ever heard a Muggle refer to himself as a Muggle, "but I had a very good first-hand description of the castle to work from. You see - "

"BOO!" shouted a small, blond boy Harry recognized as Mark Evans, popping his head out of the castle courtyard. At eleven, he was still small enough to fit inside the mini-Hogwarts. He had drawn a red line around his neck with magic marker, and he drooped his head to one side. "Hi, Harry! Guess who I am? I'm Nearly Headless Nick!"

"How do you know about Nearly Headless Nick?" gasped Harry.

"Dad told me," Mark said simply.

Harry looked at Mr. Evans, who laughed. "Has your guardian explained the family connections yet?"

"Guardian?" said Harry blankly. Did he mean Sirius? But Sirius wasn't going to explain anything - now.

"Nobody has explained the family connections to me," said Lupin, "but I think I can guess. And yes, Harry, one of the few straightforward provisions in Sirius' will - and the only pleasant thing about this whole business, as far as I'm concerned - is that he named me your legal guardian until you come of age." He looked guarded, as if unsure how Harry would take this. Harry realized that he wasn't sure how he felt about it either. He liked Lupin, possibly more than he liked anyone else in his life right now, but Lupin wasn't Sirius. "That said, I realize that you're almost sixteen," Lupin spoke quickly and a little breathlessly, "and I think you should decide for yourself exactly how much guardianship you want. My flat's a little cramped, but there's room for you, and I'd like it if you could come to stay for at least part of the summer. Of course, if you'd rather go to the Burrow, you'd be welcome there as well, and I know the Weasleys are better company than I am..."

But all at once Harry knew that he didn't want to go to the Burrow this year. As much as he cared for the Weasley family, he didn't feel like being surrounded by nine boisterous, redheaded people. He wanted to go somewhere calm and private. He glanced at Mr. Weasley, who was much too absorbed in the workings of a miniature drawbridge to be offended by anything Harry might say, and said, "Thanks. I'd like to stay with you."

Lupin smiled and then looked away, as if he were afraid to seem too eager.

"I didn't know you had a place of your own," said Harry. "I thought you were staying at Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place."

"Well," Mr. Evans put in, "that brings us to the reason why we're here. Now that I've had a chance to review the legal precedents, I'd like to go over the situation again. This will take a while, so we'd better have some refreshments first." He pulled on a cord hanging from the eaves of the house and the castle's front door fell open. A garden gnome on wheels, painted to look like a house-elf, rolled out of the door and down the drawbridge, and coasted to a stop next to the lawn chairs. It bore a tray of sandwiches and cake on its head. ("All done without magic!" Mr. Weasley enthused.) Mrs. Evans emerged from the house with a pot of tea, and all six of them settled into lawn chairs, Mark occasionally practicing his Nearly Headless Nick impression between bites of cake.

"The phrasing of the will suggests that Sirius Black had every intention of leaving the bulk of his estate to the secret society known as the Order of the Phoenix," explained Mr. Evans. "His property at the time of his death consisted of a small sum in gold - which he left in equal shares to Remus John Lupin, Harry James Potter, and Nymphadora Diaphanta Tonks; that part is simple enough. It won't be very much divided three ways."

"Especially after the legal fees," said Lupin.

Evans' gaze flickered over his visitors, taking in the clothing that ranged from eccentric to merely shabby, and was clearly all well-worn. "There won't be any," he said. Harry thought both of the other men looked slightly uncomfortable, but neither protested. "To return to where we were, Mr. Black also possessed personal property of a considerably greater value, including the ancestral home at Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, currently the headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix; various heirlooms that had been passed down through generations of Blacks; and a few personal items that Mr. Black had bought or acquired during his lifetime. His will states that all of his nonmonetary assets are to be left to the Order of the Phoenix, to be sold or used in any manner to which all the members of the Order agree."

"Is that the problem, that the Order can't agree on what to do with them?" Harry imagined Professor Snape, Mrs. Weasley, and Mundungus Fletcher trying to reach a consensus on anything.

"No - although that may well be a problem in the future, if we ever get our hands on the property at all," said Lupin, nibbling at a sandwich without real appetite. "Right now it's something much worse."

"What Sirius Black had evidently forgotten, or never knew," continued Mr. Evans, "was that most of the Black family property, including the house itself, was protected generations ago by a Primogenitrus charm, which is similar to what we Muggles would call an entailment. This charm left the Blacks' descendants unable to dispose of the property outside of the family; it must be passed down to the nearest male relative, or the nearest female relative in the absence of any remaining male heirs, until the Black line is extinct."

"But Sirius was the last of the Blacks, wasn't he?"

"The last of that name, but unfortunately not the last of the family," said Lupin. "If you think back to that tapestry you saw, there is still one male heir living..."

Harry felt as if he'd just swallowed a lead weight. "Draco Malfoy," he said.