An Interesting Little Legal Problem

Chapter Seven: In Which Draco Attends a Tea Party, and Everybody Behaves Badly

The flat seemed full to bursting, although the guest of honor had not yet arrived. Mark was begging Ron and Harry to tell him the story of the time they had attended Nearly Headless Nick's deathday party. Harriet Evans, dressed in even brighter shades of orange than usual, had engaged Hermione and Ginny in an intent conversation about Hogwarts professors in one corner of the living room. In another, Mundungus Fletcher and Mad-Eye Moody were discussing how to dispose of some "rubbish," which Harry understood to mean the Black family silver. Bill Weasley and Jack Evans conversed in an undertone about the impending legal case, while Fleur Delacour, the newest member of the Order of the Phoenix, looked on with a vaguely bored and discontented expression. "Eet eez vairee small, zees place," she said. "And I do not like zee neighborhood. Some Muggle men were vairee rude to me as I was walking here. Could you not do bettair?"

Felicity, who had not taken to Fleur, hissed.

"It has its points," said Lupin. "You get a wonderful view of the sunset most evenings and, well, the landlord doesn't seem to mind renting to a werewolf. I expect he sees much worse from most of his other tenants."

His voice was mild, but he gave Fleur a sharp look, and Harry suspected that she was being strongly encouraged to apologize. She didn't.

Tonks walked in the door with a scowling Draco Malfoy. Harry and Ron both tried to look very absorbed in the story they were telling Mark.

"Hi, Draco," said Lupin with an air of determined good cheer. "Can I get you anything to drink? How's next year's Quidditch team looking?"

Draco turned rather pale at the approach of his host and gave a furtive glance around the room as if he were plotting escape routes. He looked away hastily when Ginny caught his eye, and he seemed to shrink visibly when he caught sight of Mad-Eye Moody.

Mark, always interested in newcomers, bounced up to Draco before Ron and Harry could distract him. "Hi! I'm Mark, Harry's cousin. Are you a student at Hogwarts? I'm going to start this year. Do you plan on turning into a ghost after you're dead? I will, if I can figure out how to do it properly. Of course I don't want to die for a long time, but since everybody has to, I think beheading is the best way to go, don't you?"

Draco, taken aback by this line of conversation, merely stared at him. Mark seemed to decide that the new arrival was an uninteresting person and wandered off.

Draco turned to Harry, who appeared to be almost the only person present who didn't frighten him. "Is this where you live now, Potty?" he said with a smirk. "Bit of a dump, isn't it, but I guess your guardian can't afford better. Do you think he'll ever get new clothes?"

Harry struggled to think of a polite reply. "Er, would you like a biscuit?"

"Not if they come from a secondhand shop - OW!"

Felicity, her tail as bristly as a bottlebrush, had sunk her claws into Draco's leg. She seemed determined to take full advantage of her status as the only individual in the room who was not under orders to be nice to him. (Hedwig, who had never forgiven Tonks for dropping her, was sulking on the roof of the building.)

"I agree that eet eez a dump," said Fleur, wrinkling up her exquisite little nose. "And I do not like zat alley cat. Our cat in France eez much nicer. Her fur eez like zee finest silk and she plays zee piano beautifully."

"Our cat plays the harp," said Draco, "and he is descended from the sacred cats of ancient Egypt and sleeps on a bed of solid silver, just like the rest of the family."

"Ah! Our beds are gold with platinum headboards, and everee bedroom has eets own private dressing room weeth full-length talking mirrors ..."

Ginny snickered. "I think we've finally found a use for Fleur," she muttered.

Bill, on the other hand, seemed to be growing less enamored with his girlfriend by the minute. Tonks, who seemed to think her own responsibility toward Draco ended with delivering him, plunked herself down in an armchair next to Bill and began chatting animatedly about the latest Weird Sisters concert. Although Lupin scarcely even glanced in their direction, Harry had a vague impression that his guardian was not altogether pleased about this.

"This isn't going well," he whispered to Harry and Ron after half an hour. "I know it's an uphill battle, but could you please do your best to get Draco talking about anything else?"

He drew Fleur aside and started talking very animatedly in French, while Harry and Ron obediently approached Draco. Harry's mind raced through a list of possible conversation topics. Classes? Most of the ones he had in common with Draco involved too much history and bad blood. Quidditch? Same problem. Politics? Definitely not. "Er, nice weather we've been having lately," he said lamely.

"We have much better weather up at the manor," Draco answered, "but I suppose this is good enough for you."

Harry tried to wrap his head around this. Did the Malfoys special-order their own sky or something?

"Have you been having a good summer?" Ron tried.

"What do you think?" asked Draco contemptuously. "Father's in Azkaban, I was in bed for a week after your sister hit me with a Bat-Bogey hex, and my mother says the Muggle-lovers and riffraff my cousin used to hang out with are trying to cheat me out of my inheritance."

"Oh, sorry to hear that," said Ron in his most innocent voice. "What did you inherit?"

"My mother's family's estate," said Draco, in a tone that suggested he was trying to sound impressive but succeeded only in sounding vague. Harry wondered if he had any idea where the estate was or what it consisted of. "It's an extremely valuable one. My cousin was quite a wealthy man. Not that you'd know anything about that, Weasley."

Mad-Eye Moody stumped over to where they were standing. "Care for some tea, Malfoy?"

"N-no," said Draco, flattening himself against the wall.

"You've got the right idea, laddie. Never drink anything except from my flask, myself. You never know who might have it in for you. CONSTANT VIGILANCE!"

Draco fled in the general direction of the bathroom.

"What's he got against me?" Mad-Eye asked. "I thought I was being nice to him."

"You transfigured him into an amazing bouncing ferret once," Ron explained. "Well, I guess it was technically Barty Crouch, Junior, not you, but I'm not sure he cares about these fine points."

Moody took a swig from his flask. "You know, the more I hear about Barty Crouch, Junior, the more I'm beginning to like him. Too bad he was on the wrong side."

Mundungus Fletcher staggered up to them with a bottle of Scotch in one hand. "Great party, innit? Care for a little nip, 'Arry? Ron? Put a little color in your cheeks, it will."

"Yeah!" said Ron, holding out his empty teacup. Harry was not as eager to try his first drink of hard liquor as his best friend seemed to be, but he felt like he had to follow suit. "Cheers, mate," said Ron, knocking his cup against Harry's.

"Cheers," said Harry, trying to sound enthusiastic. He sniffed, took an experimental sip, and nearly choked on the burning liquid. He wondered why anybody would voluntarily drink Scotch.

Five minutes later, he was beginning to understand. It left a nice mellow taste in his mouth and brought a warm glow to his face, and he felt like the whole party was a little less awful than it had seemed ...

There was a loud scream from the bathroom. Everybody rushed to the hallway, where Draco was standing with a shocked expression on his face. His hands and wrists were dripping with blood.

"Good Lord! Are you all right? What happened?" asked Harriet Evans. Suddenly the color drained from her face and she grabbed Draco by the collar. She had the look of an enraged tigress. "WHERE'S MARK?"

Harry looked around wildly. His cousin had vanished.

"I - I don't know!" Draco squeaked. "I didn't do anything to him, I swear! It just - happened!"

After a moment of collective panic, Mark zoomed in through the open window on Harry's broom. "That was brilliant!" he said. "I fell off twice, but not very far, and you should've seen the look on the policeman's face when I flew by! Hope you didn't mind my borrowing your broom, Harry! Wow, what happened to his hands?"

Harriet embraced her son and released Draco, who was still having a hard time finding the words to explain himself. "I ... I was just washing my hands, when ..."

The Scotch had begun to go to Harry's head and the hall seemed to be going fuzzy. A thought struck him which was at once awful and funny. "Um," he asked, "was the soap you were using pink with purple thistles on it?"

"Yes. Why?"

"Because that was the Lady Macbeth soap. Fred and George made it." Suddenly he could not suppress a snicker, and then he and Ron were both looking at each other and giggling helplessly.

"I don't believe this," said Lupin. He spoke quietly, but there was an edge to his voice and something icy about his blue eyes that betrayed the fact that he was furious. "I would never have thought - of either one of you - that you were foolish enough to risk so much for a childish prank. Leaving aside the fact that this is a shameful way to treat any guest, do you have any concept of how important it is not to alienate Draco? Do you realize that he holds all of our futures in his hands?" Abruptly, he fell silent, remembering that Draco was supposed to think he had been invited for nothing more significant than afternoon tea.

"Ron didn't have anything to do with it," Harry said quickly. He cared less about excusing himself and Ron than distracting attention from what his guardian had just said. "And I didn't do it on purpose - Fred and George gave it to me as a sample and didn't even tell me what it did, and I left it in the bathroom and forgot - "

"So that's what this is all about," Draco interrupted, with a look of comprehension that had been dawning ever since Lupin finished speaking. He stamped his foot and glared at Tonks. "That's why you invited me to a house full of mudbloods, common criminals, half-breeds, dangerous part-humans - " (he glanced at Lupin, who actually looked dangerous for almost the first time in Harry's experience) "- and TOTAL PSYCHOTICS" (he stared pointedly at Mad-Eye Moody). "You want to get your hands on my inheritance. Well, bad luck you're a girl, Nymphadora, but it's mine and I'm going to claim it right now. Come along, Evans!" he added in a tone normally reserved for dogs. He snapped his fingers at the solicitor, sending a few drops of blood flying across the room. "You know what my rights are!"

Draco stormed out of the flat, leaving the door wide open. After a long moment of silence, Jack Evans followed with his wife and son. None of the remaining guests seemed to know what to do or say.

"Well," Harry remarked, "at least now we know what he's like when he thinks for himself."

He still felt lightheaded from the liquor, and he spoke much louder than he intended to. He wondered, in an abstracted way, whether he was about to be murdered by his guardian, but Lupin merely stared blankly at him for a second and said, "Do me a favor, will you? Next time you think I've gone out of my mind - tell me so louder and more often, and don't stop until I listen to you."

He inspected the bloodstains on the carpet and added, "Expanded list of problems that can't be solved with tea. Decapitation, being an insufferable, prejudiced brat with the manners of a troglodyte - and carpet cleaning."

Tonks gave a slightly hysterical laugh, took the bottle of Scotch from Mundungus, poured a generous amount into a teacup, and handed it to him. "Here. Drink. You need it."

"All right," he said, taking a sip and pulling himself together with a visible effort, "I royally screwed that up, and we'd better send word to headquarters so they know he's coming. Thank Merlin he's not old enough to Apparate, so Jack ought to be able to hold him off for a while. Has anyone got a spare owl I could borrow?"

As if on cue, an owl carrying a red envelope zoomed in through the front door and did a quick U-turn. Harry, with his Quidditch player's reflexes, caught the bird before it could fly out of the door again. It was a small owl with brown and white streaks, a dark border around its face, and yellow eyes.

"Is that a Howler?" asked Ron nervously.

Harry glanced at the envelope. "Yes. It's addressed to Draco."

"Oh, zees ought to be good!" said Fleur, snatching the envelope out of Harry's hands before he grasped what she was about to do.

"NO! Fleur! I don't care if he is a bigoted little git, you can't just open somebody else's mail!" Lupin set his cup of Scotch down on the table with a bang. "Give me that!" Harry had just enough time to take in the fact that his guardian was dangerously angry for the second time that day, this time explosively so. He ducked out of the way as Lupin made a grab for the Howler.

Fleur didn't let go. Ron covered his ears as the envelope ripped open, but it didn't yell. The hoarse growl that filled the room sounded oddly familiar.

"I'll have you know that the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated, so you'd better keep your filthy little hands off my inheritance, Malfoy. It's not yours and it never will be for as long as I'm around - which is, unfortunately, likely to be a long time indeed in my present condition. You know the consequences of violating the Primogenitrus charm, and I know you're too much of a coward to disobey them. I am the only rightful heir of the House of Black, and I'm on my way home."

"S-Sirius?" asked Hermione.

Harry's heart had leapt at the first few words, but he had to shake his head. "No. That's not his voice."

Lupin and Tonks were both staring at the envelope as though they'd seen a ghost. Tonks found her voice first. "Not Sirius. It sounded just like Reg."

Lupin nodded. "I'm sure of it. That was Regulus Black."

The stunned silence that followed this announcement was broken by a few bars of "Magical Mystery Tour." Jack Evans' mobile phone, which he'd left on the coffee table, was ringing. No one dared answer it; they all looked uneasily at Lupin, who slowly picked it up. "Hermione? What am I supposed to do?"

"Press the green button - the one that says TALK. No, you're holding it upside down. Turn it over."

"Er, hello? ... No, this isn't Evans, but I could give him a message if you like ... Who? ... Oh, Mr. Malfoy's solicitor? I'm sorry, but he's just stepped out and I don't think he'll be back any time soon ... Yes, I'm aware of what happened to your client. It's very regrettable, but I don't see how it's anybody's fault but his own ... Yes, well, perhaps next time he goes visiting this will teach him not to choose the most effeminate-looking soap in the house. Good day, Mr. Robinson."

He set the phone down on the table. His customary good humor seemed completely restored as he turned to Harry and Ron. "Sorry I jumped to conclusions about the soap. It wasn't fair to either of you, and I hope you can forgive me."

Harry nodded, still feeling a little dazed.

"Now, let me see if I can do anything about that carpet - because I am certainly not going to give Severus the satisfaction of seeing those bloodstains. Out, damned spot!"

He pointed his wand at the bloodstains, which immediately vanished. Ron stared at him, astonished. "That's the countercharm - Fred and George told me when I started work - but how did you know?"

"Call it a lucky guess," said Lupin, his mouth twitching slightly. "You should both try reading some Shakespeare so you'll be able to tell what Fred and George are giving you next time." He rummaged through a drawer and came up with a roll of Spellotape and a tangle of string. "I apologize for losing my temper with you too, Fleur, but I do think we've interfered enough with Draco's mail." He was whistling as he taped the red envelope back together and tied it to the owl's leg.

"Wait. Why didn't that Howler explode?" asked Ron.

"He didn't sound angry enough," explained Bill. "You have to work up a certain - force to make it go up in smoke, and if you don't, the Howler will go on playing every time someone reopens the envelope. It's rare, but it happens."

"Don't you think it's a little strange that Regulus would send a Howler if he didn't intend to howl?" said Hermione.

"You didn't know Reg," said Lupin. "Everything he did was a little strange."

He and Tonks glanced at each other and grinned as if they were sharing a private joke. Harry was baffled by the way they were acting. Surely it was much, much worse for the heir to Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place to be a known Death Eater than a boy of sixteen, however unpleasant the boy might be.

The owl flew out the window and soared higher and higher over the roofs of the grim little slum, bearing Draco the news of his lost inheritance.