Of Honor and Blood

Of Honor and Blood

I was christened Phineas Black, although if you have read my book on the origins of the Statute of Secrecy (and I certainly hope you have, as it is still the definitive work on the subject), you know me by another name. In my day one could hardly be a proper scholar without a Latin pseudonym, and so I became known as Nigellus, which means “the little Black.” It was a name chosen in part because I was small of stature in a family noted for tallness, but also because I eschewed the grimmer pastimes and more extreme views of my kindred, preferring to line my study with books rather than house-elf heads.

Contrary to popular belief, I did not entirely detest teaching. I detested paperwork, staff meetings, and the stupider classes of students (that is to say, the vast majority of them). However, I gave my heart and soul to those scholars who showed promise; and I had, and continue to have, an abiding respect for my subject, History of Magic. I taught it well to those who would listen, but there were few who listened. Young people for the most part are uninterested in the dead, caring only for the bloom on a girl’s cheeks or the promise of a fine spring day outside the castle walls.

But time, as always, has the last laugh on youth. Those spring days have vanished in the smoke of autumn, and the girls of those long-ago generations have vanished in the dust of the earth. So it shall always be. And even the names of my old students are long forgotten, for the young witches and wizards of today are not merely uninterested in the past, but appallingly, blindly ignorant of it.

As much as it pains me to do so, I must confess that this is entirely my fault. I was a proud man and a vain one. Oh, I admit that now. After death, when nothing can be changed or amended, one seldom has anything better to do than contemplate one’s own shortcomings. I knew well enough that I had never been popular with my students. I had waged a one-man war against their laziness, idleness of mind, and die-hard ignorance, and they took it – for the young have an infuriating habit of taking everything personally – as a war against themselves. But – good Slytherin that I am – I had a trick up my sleeve that would, I believed, ensure that they would at least think well of me after I had left the classroom. When I became Headmaster I did something that was, in retrospect, more cunning than prudent.

I appointed Harold Binns as my successor. He was a dull and pompous man, ignorant even of his own subject. I caught him holding forth on fourteenth-century witch burnings once. In front of visiting examiners from Oxford, too. But he was also an old man, even then, and far from well, and I thought his term as professor was bound to be a short one. How much harm could he do in ten or a dozen years?

How was I to know he was so afraid of death that he had arranged to become a ghost, and so stubborn that he would refuse to leave his teaching post even after it should have been perfectly obvious that he was dead?

And so it came to pass that generations of students slept through his classes, not knowing that their doings would be fodder for History of Magic someday, and that it would behoove them to live well and wisely, and to profit from the example of those who had lived unwisely in the past. They seldom made the connection on their own, and Binns was too busy describing the effects of the Goblin Wars on Gringotts’ interest rates to tell them. And Grindelwald stole upon them while they were sleeping and decimated one generation; and Voldemort devastated another, and is now poised on the brink of destroying a third.

Thou hast conquered, O pale Harold Binns; the world has gone grey with thy breath. And I alone am left to remember the lessons that these younger generations never learned, as I wear out the days and years in a house haunted by the past.

Even the dead are slaves to time in some degree. We sleep at night, for there is nothing else to do, and the sameness of our days induces most of us to fall into some sort of routine. I am accustomed to walk about the house, going from portrait to portrait, around eleven o’ clock in the morning. It amuses me to think of this as “taking the air,” although it has been many years since I have seen anything of the world outside Hogwarts and Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place.

The portraits in the library are Acrux and Becrux Black, my twin uncles. One always thinks of twins as inseparable, but those two detested each other so much that Acrux emigrated to Australia to get away from his brother, and Becrux followed him there for the sole purpose of needling him. They ended up murdering each other – one by a swift curse, the other by a slow poison – in the godforsaken red center of a faraway country, under alien stars.

This is Araminta Melliflua, a cousin of my great-grandson’s wife. I nod curtly at her as I pass through her portrait. She was fond of blood sports and rice pudding, both of which are tastes I consider utterly plebeian. She tried to push a Muggle-hunting bill through the Ministry, not in person but through her half-brother Rigel, who was rather well-placed on the Wizengamot and even had hopes of becoming the next minister. (His portrait is the next one over; but he has already sunk into a stupor after his midday bottle of firewhiskey, and does not greet me as I pass.) It was an unwise move, given the political climate of the time. If she had read my books, or had the benefit of my lectures, she would have known that these things go in cycles; but she was too impatient to wait for the pendulum to swing the other way, and in the ensuing backlash Rigel was forced to resign. He drank himself to death, unable to live with the disgrace.

On the whole I am not opposed to women’s liberation. It would have been better for Rigel if Araminta had been in a position to fight her own battles.

The girl in the portrait over the stairs – the one in a white dress with a face as pale and fragile as an aster at twilight – that is my cousin Lyra, who should have been my bride. She fell in love with the groom who looked after our Aethonians instead. They found her one morning with a vial of poison beside her bed, as if it had fallen from her still white hand.

I had nothing to do with it, but I have long suspected my father might. That is what we used to call “preserving the Black family honor.”

The self-appointed guardian of the Black family honor in this day and generation is my great-great-granddaughter Bella, who seems to have taken it upon herself to ensure that there will be no next generation of Blacks – at least, none of that name. Yes, she killed Regulus too. The house-elves who prepared his body for burial did not recognize the significance of the smears of blood on his temples, but I saw them as I watched over him on that long last night before the funeral. It was not his own blood, for there was no mark on the body; it was that of his killer, who sealed him with the sign of the tribe even as she took his life.

I must confess that I do not altogether understand the position that it is necessary to destroy the family in order to save it. But apparently it makes sense to Bella, as it once made sense to most of the others who have lived and died in this house.

“HALF-BLOODED ABOMINATION! SHAME OF THE FAMILY! STAIN UPON OUR BLOOD!”

Excuse me. Those would be the dulcet tones of my great-granddaughter-in-law Hydra. She died raving. And I presume, from her choice of invective and from the monumental crash that has just come from the front hallway, that my great-great-great-granddaughter is home early today.

Yes; those are her footsteps on the stairs. One of those modern girls with no grace and precious little refinement. However, if she were not my lineal descendant I would note that she has a nice pair of ankles. (And they are her own ankles, whatever you may say about the rest of her. She takes too little pride in her appearance to bother morphing them, unless she is on an undercover mission of some sort. Young ladies in my time were different. Lyra would not have thought of setting foot outside the house without – But I digress.)

“Wotcher, Uncle Phineas,” she says, in a voice so casual that I know she is making a conscious effort to keep it light. “Is anyone else about?”

“Don’t ‘Uncle Phineas’ me, girl. I happen to be your great-great-great-grandfather.”

“You’re also my great-great-great-great-uncle. I looked on the tapestry.”

I am pleased that she has taken an interest in her heritage, but I conceal my pride. It does not do to let the gods know you care too much. I have learned that the hard way.

“Funny sort of family tree, isn’t it?” she says. “The further back you go, the more it sort of collapses on itself.”

It collapses on itself when you go forward too, leaving my descendants mad and murdered amid the wreckage. But I do not tell her this.

“What’s that in your hand?” I ask. It looks like nothing more than a bit of parchment, but it must be an important bit of parchment, because she handles it as if it weighed as much as an anvil.

“Oh, nothing.” She hums a little and metamorphs some new streaks in her hair, which is frosty-blonde today, like her Aunt Narcissa’s.

“Well, let’s have a look at this nothing. And do stop going pink when I’m speaking to you. Have a little respect for your elders.”

“You won’t like it.”

No; the look on her face is sufficient to tell me I will not. “Show me anyway.”

Slowly, she unclenches her hand and shows me a little scroll with the Ministry seal carelessly torn open.

By Order of the Ministry for Magic

Auror Nymphadora Diaphanta Tonks

is hereby authorized to use all reasonable measures, up to and including the three Unforgivable Curses, in pursuit of the dangerous fugitive Bellatrix Black Lestrange

as of this 17^th day of July, 1996

in accordance with the War Powers Decree of 1979.

Signed:

Amelia Susan Bones

“I see.” In fact, I am beginning to see too much. “And whom were you seeking when you came here today?”

“What?”

“I am asking you what you are doing in this house, and why you are not out pursuing this dangerous fugitive. It can only be because you meant to show this scrap of parchment to somebody before you set out. Who was it?”

“I’m not sure who I was looking for. Does it matter?”

“Yes, it does matter, you little goose. I’ve been to all the Order meetings, you know. Have you ever noticed there’s sometimes a man in the landscape in that room, standing just beside the haystack in the background? That’s me.”

“I’m sure Dumbledore would be very interested to learn you’ve been eavesdropping,” she says, as if Dumbledore had the slightest power to prevent me from doing so, “but I don’t see what this has to do with how I do my job.”

“Just this. When you were talking about the possibility of being authorized to use the Unforgivables, Alastor Moody had one sort of look on his face and that Lupin boy had quite another. And if you aren’t sure which of them you came here to meet, that means you are uncertain what to do with this bit of waste paper in your hand, and you were hoping to meet someone who was sure, one way or the other. You were hoping fate would take the decision out of your hands. And that tells me you are afraid of yourself.”

“Don’t be silly, Uncle Phineas. Why would I be afraid of myself?” She tosses her hair back and rakes her fingers through it, as if she thinks imitating the mannerisms of a street urchin will lend a veneer of sincerity to her words.

But a daughter of this house cannot, by definition, be a street urchin; and having seen her take on a boggart once, I am sure she knows she is being disingenuous. The rest of the witnesses thought her worst fear was Bellatrix. She and I know better.

“I heard about the battle at the Department of Mysteries, you know. I’ve heard the others talking – and I made Dumbledore go over everything that happened, time and again, before I would believe that your cousin Sirius was dead. I know every move he made by heart – and every move you made, too. They say you gave them a good fight.”

She shakes her head. “Got myself knocked out halfway through and lay there unconscious while one of our own was dying. I don’t call that much of a fight.”

“You did well. You chose formidable opponents for yourself. I hear you went after Lucius Malfoy first thing, and then after Bellatrix. Tell me something, girl. That wasn’t an accident, was it?”

“Of course it wasn’t.” That ever-so-casual toss of the head again. “Take out the leaders first, and the rest will fall into line. That’s what they taught us in Auror training.”

“Is it?” I say. “Very convenient for you that the leaders happened to be your aunt and uncle, wasn’t it?”

Her face reddens, but she says nothing.

“No, child, I am telling you that you did what came by instinct, what a hundred generations of Blacks have done before you. You went after your own family because they were yours. When did they teach you to pursue personal vendettas in Auror training?”

She looks a little like my Lyra when she hangs her head like that.

“You went after them – you are going after Bellatrix again now – not because they are Death Eaters, nor even because they shed your cousin’s blood, but because in your eyes they have stained the family honor. And you wish to purge that stain from your own blood even at the price of your soul.”

“Suppose I do. Would you have done anything different when you were alive?”

“Perhaps not. It seems to be in our blood. But that is why there are so few of us left.”

And then I tell her everything I know of the other family portraits, all the stories Harold Binns left out of his bone-dry version of History of Magic, the endless cycle of honor-killing and madness and revenge and counter-revenge. I do not spare the family pride; this is no time for whitewashing. She sits on the stairway and listens in silence for half an hour or more.

I never did tell Sirius and Regulus those stories. They got the selectively edited version from their mother Hydra, puffed full of contumely and vainglory. Perhaps things would have been different if I had been the one to tell them. I shall never know.

“So that is why I must ask you to think before you go out,” I tell her at last. “We’ve destroyed ourselves and all that was ours. You’re the last of the family, my girl. The very last. You’re the only one who can break the chain.”

She shakes her head. “There’s always my cousin Draco. And my two charming aunts. I always thought they were the sort of relatives you preferred, to tell you the truth.”

“You foolish chit of a girl, if you still haven’t figured out which side of this war I’m on – well, God help the Auror Corps.”

She flushes. “Oh.”

“Listen to me. I want you to live and I want you to win. But not that way, and not with your kindred’s blood on your hands. Can you promise me that?”

She folds a corner of the parchment back and forth. “I worked hard to get this order through the Ministry. I’m committed to it now.”

“Sometimes there is more honor in breaking your commitments than keeping them.”

Still she hesitates, and I resort to another old Slytherin trick. It has been my experience that when one couples a reasonable request with a completely impossible one, the likelihood that the other party will accede to the reasonable one is greatly increased. “By the way, I don’t suppose there’s any chance you’ll marry that Snape boy, is there? He is, I should say, less of a masochist than most people who voluntarily spend time around the young, and in three more generations your great-grandchildren would be purebloods again.”

She stares at me so long that I worry, for fully half a minute, that she might have mistaken this for the reasonable request, and then she snorts. “No, Uncle Phineas, there is absolutely no chance I’ll marry Severus Snape.”

“But you will think about the other thing I have asked? Please?” If the taste of oil on canvas were not so revolting, I would be tempted to bite my tongue. Blacks do not plead, except under the most desperate of circumstances.

“I’ll think about it.”

She gets to her feet and goes down the stairs. I watch her as she studies the tapestry, with its mass of tangled lines and black-rimmed holes. And then she kneels by the grate for half a minute before she goes out, and the flames flare up as the bit of parchment burns and the Ministry seal becomes a formless trickle of red wax. She draws her cloak about her shoulders and goes out into the pounding rain of a summer storm without looking back.

I do not know what I have done. Perhaps I have sent her out unarmed against monsters to satisfy my own concept of honor. Only time will tell.

I watch the scroll crumple to ashes and continue on my morning constitutional, circling through the endless round of portrait-frames. The house is still, and I am left alone with time.