Mordant

Chapter Seven: Mutually Beneficial Propositions

Linus stirred his drink absently and looked around the Grindylow Grill. It was the most popular restaurant in Diagon Alley, crowded on a Friday evening with young couples and parties of Ministry workers, but he wondered if it would be too flashy for Celia’s tastes. A miniature river snaked around the bar and meandered through the tables, carrying small boats loaded with drinks and plates of food. You had to move quickly to snatch your order away from the restaurant owner’s pet Grindylows, which swam about in the river and flexed their long fingers.

Celia was going to show up, wasn’t she? Surely she wouldn’t have accepted his invitation to dinner out of sheer reluctance to give offense, if she didn’t intend to keep their appointment.

He tried to shake off a general impression that the Lupins would probably do a lot of things out of sheer reluctance to give offense.

And then there she was, dropping into the seat opposite him before he had time to get up and pull out her chair. “Sorry I’m late. Lecture at the Muggle Studies Institute, and the question-and-answer session went on forever. They always do when you’ve got somewhere important to go.”

So dinner with him counted as important. He liked that.

“What are you having?”

“What? Oh. I was thinking about the wild boar with mushrooms. Or maybe it’s more like regular boar with wild mushrooms. I can’t remember which, but anyway, it’s very good.” He realized that he was babbling, and forced himself to stop.

“That sounds nice. I’ll have the same.”

Linus scribbled 2 Boar with Mushrooms (Wild) on one of the order pads and dropped it onto one of the boats that was winding its way downstream.

“How have you been feeling?” Celia asked after a moment’s silence.

“Better. More or less normal, these last few days. It hasn’t been nearly so bad as the first month was.”

She nodded. “That’s how it with Remus, I remember. We were terribly afraid that he was always going to be as ill as he was right after he was bitten, but once we were finally able to take him home, he was running around and playing within days. It helps to be in familiar surroundings, of course. Madam Pomfrey told us that the first few months after he started school were quite rough.”

Linus was startled; he’d vaguely supposed that his new acquaintance must have become a werewolf some time after his school years, as he was patently a qualified wizard and an educated man. “Just how old was Remus when he was bitten, anyway?”

“Six,” said Celia casually.

“Six? Good God. It must have been awful for you.”

She sat expressionless for a moment, then nodded. “You can’t explain to a child that age why he has to go through that sort of agony, much less why people are going to blame him and hate him for something he can’t help ... And, well – everything was harder in those days. There wasn’t any Wolfsbane Potion, then. My husband did most of the preliminary research, actually, and just about everybody thought he was mad. Pity he didn’t live to see himself vindicated.”

“How did you – handle full moons?”

“Restraint spells. Imperturbable Charms on the cellar. Hope. One way or another, we got through.” She twined her fingers together and looked at the floor. “And a lot of Healing spells, afterward. Werewolves attack themselves when there’s no other prey, you know. There’s just enough humanity left in them that they can sense it, and it maddens them.”

Her tone was so matter-of-fact that it took a moment for the full horror of her meaning to sink in. “My God, Celia, I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry.”

“He was such a brave little thing. Never once cried or complained when we were restraining him, and he must have been in terrible pain.” Suddenly, her reserve broke down. “I used to be so afraid he’d bleed to death one night ... and there would be nothing we could do, we couldn’t go to him because he’d kill us. Our own son! My husband and I used to keep vigil outside the cellar door with a candle ... listening to all those inhuman noises, the snapping and howling and flesh being scratched raw ... and being afraid all the while that they’d stop.” She blinked the tears out of her eyes and looked up at him with a weak smile. “I’m sorry, Linus. As first-date conversations go, I think this one leaves a little to be desired.”

“It’s all right. It’s absolutely all right.” He reached for both of her hands and squeezed, hard. (Good, at least she knows this is a date, said some traitorous part of his mind, but he immediately dismissed the thought as unworthy under the circumstances.)

“I don’t usually talk about this very much. It’s just that, you know, one rarely has the chance to talk to someone who has any idea what it’s like.”

He shook his head. “Honestly, I couldn’t begin to imagine what it was like. When I think about my daughter at that age...”

Celia looked up sharply. “I didn’t know you had a daughter.”

Linus retrieved their two plates of boar and mushrooms from the grip of a Grindylow, and explained about his brief and fairly regrettable marriage – which also left something to be desired as first date conversation, in his opinion, but at least she didn’t run away screaming.

By the time they found their way to a Muggle jazz club that was a fifteen-minute walk and a thousand worlds away from Diagon Alley, the conversation had taken a lighter turn, toward Linus’ plans for Martin Miggs and his attempts to create a working sketch of the Legendary Toenail of Icklibõgg. At the end of the evening, he Apparated to her front door and saw her in, and asked her if he’d be seeing more of her. He was not surprised at all that the answer was yes.

 

                                                            *          *          *

It was five-thirty in the afternoon, nearly the end of the workday at Auror Headquarters. Tonks was just packing up her things when a rocket-shaped memo soared over the top of her cubicle wall and glided in for a landing on her desk. I’ve been looking up our cartoonist’s friends. See me after Dawlish and Scrimgeour go home. K.

Kingsley, she thought in amazement, had to be either superhuman or equipped with a Time-Turner. Everybody else had their hands full checking out reported sightings of the escaped Death Eaters, and here he was with enough time left over for a side investigation.

She waited until their older colleagues had left the building, and then popped round to Kingsley’s cubicle and sat on the edge of his desk. “What’ve you found?”

“First of all, here’s Martin Lovegood.” Kingsley removed a sheaf of parchment from the top drawer of his desk. “Forty years old, lives near Ottery St. Catchpole. Arthur and Molly know him slightly, and they seem to think he’s a good sort, but the Ministry has a file on him six inches thick. I made copies of everything that looked pertinent, but here’s the gist of it. He’s been publishing the Quibbler since 1972. Before that, he worked for the Daily Prophet. He was one of the first people to see You-Know-Who for what he was, apparently, and he was fired from the Prophet for predicting another war when nobody wanted to hear it. So he went off and started his own magazine – all conspiracy theories, all the time. Just about everybody thought it was a joke, but Bartemius Crouch, Senior took it seriously enough to start this file. He thought the more off-the-wall stories were a blind, and Lovegood touched on real scandals in the Ministry too often for it to be a coincidence. Lovegood, incidentally, reported in 1984 that Crouch’s son’s ghost was haunting his house in Northumbria, and that he’d vowed revenge for the way his father let him die in Azkaban.”

“Haunting – Ohh!” said Tonks. “So Lovegood might not be a complete loony, at all.”

“Actually, he probably is. At least nowadays. By all accounts, his wife kept him semi-grounded while she was alive, and after she died he went off the deep end. Even if he started off making up some of the nuttier stuff as a clever dodge, he apparently believes in it now.”

“How long has she been dead?”

Kingsley flipped through the parchment. “Five years in March.”

“Any kids?”

“One daughter. She’s fourteen and a fourth-year at Hogwarts. Takes after Martin quite a bit, according to her school reports. Bright but dotty.”

Tonks frowned. “D’you think Umbridge might have been threatening her? He doesn’t sound like the sort of person who’d pass information to her under normal circumstances, but if his daughter’s well-being was at stake, she might have talked him into it.”

“Good thinking. I wouldn’t put it past her, that’s for sure.” Kingsley made a note on one of the sheets of parchment and took out a second, much thinner, file. “Next, Katherine Hudgins, fifty-two years old, publisher of Madam. Never married, no children. Friends describe her as the driven type – not much time left over for anything except the magazine. She seems clean, from all I can tell. Well-known businesswoman, donates a lot of money to Muggle-born rights. And Amelia likes her. It’s hard to argue with Amelia.”

“Did you know her magazine endorsed Dolores Umbridge?”

Kingsley looked startled. “No, I didn’t! Well, that would explain why the Ministry hasn’t been digging up any dirt on her. Are you sure?”

“Positive. I almost canceled my subscription over it.”

“Almost?”

“She printed a retraction.”

“Hmm. She could have noticed she was losing readers over it, and done the pragmatic thing. Still, it doesn’t fit with everything else I’ve heard about her politics. She’s solidly anti-Fudge and anti-discrimination.” Kingsley turned to the third file, which was also fairly thick. “Thersites Mason,” he said. “Thirty-one, single, has worked for the Quibbler for about three years, fired from several previous positions. His old Head of House described him as having ‘difficulties with authority’.”

“And his Head of House was...?”

“Filius Flitwick.”

Tonks looked at the ceiling and whistled. “How do you go about having ‘difficulties with authority’ with Flitwick? That’s like not getting along with Father Christmas.”

“I don’t know, but Flitwick doesn’t seem to have been the only one, going by his record with employers. He’s also had a few minor brushes with the law. Drunk and disorderly, illegal animation of Muggle pornography, a few brawls at Quidditch matches – in which he came off the worse, by the way. Walks with a limp since the last one. Anyway, he didn’t contest any of the charges and paid his fines like a good boy. Everybody who knows him seems to agree about his character: He doesn’t like anybody, but he likes the Ministry least of all. And most people describe him as all mouth and no action.”

“Has he got a motive?”

“None that I can see. What can you say about a man who doesn’t give a damn about his reputation, doesn’t believe in causes, and doesn’t seem to be really close to anybody, not so that he’d care if Umbridge was holding them hostage?”

“I’d say he sounds like he could be a very dangerous man, under certain circumstances.”

“Touché,” Kingsley admitted.

“What about the landlord – Booker, wasn’t it?”

“He seems to be out of the running. He was tidying up the pub with two of the bar staff until well after Berowne was bitten, and he was in someone else’s company the whole evening.”

“Still – he is their boss, so couldn’t they be covering for him?”

“It’s just possible. You might want to follow up on that if you’ve got any free time – you’re young and unknown, they’ll talk to you. But again, there’s the problem of motive. Unless Umbridge had some hold over him that we don’t know about, he hasn’t got one.”

“Do you think Berowne’s idea that ... that You-Know-Who was behind the attack is worth pursuing?”

“Not much chance of that,” said Kingsley. “It’s in You-Know-Who’s best interests to keep a low profile, and it would be much harder for him to seduce one of Berowne’s friends than it would be for a Ministry official.”

“Unless Berowne is right, and he’s got his own pet Ministry official to do the negotiating for him.”

Kingsley shook his head. “I looked up the Umbridge family at the British Archives of Magic. You might be interested to learn that they were all killed by Death Eaters seventeen years ago. Except for our Dolores, who was on holiday in Jamaica at the time.”

Tonks snorted. “Might have been a conveniently arranged holiday, if you get my drift.”

“It could have been. But I don’t believe it was. For one thing, there’s no evidence for it, and for another, I think her behavior shows exactly the opposite. The way she’s been treating Harry and anybody who believes Harry – well, it isn’t normal denial, it’s hysteria. This is a woman who’s so terrified of You-Know-Who that she has to lash out at the messenger. She can’t acknowledge for a minute, even to herself, that he might be back.”

For the first time since she started work at the Ministry, Tonks felt a faint stirring of empathy for Dolores Umbridge, but she pushed it firmly aside. The woman didn’t deserve it, not after everything she’d done, but Kingsley was right. She wasn’t a Death Eater.

 

                                                            *          *          *

Throwing caution to the wind, Linus took Celia to the Quill and Quirk on their second date and introduced her to most of the crowd. Fortunately, Thersites wasn’t around to scare her off, and she seemed to get along well enough with Kathy Hudgins and the two Quibbler staff writers who were present. Martin Lovegood regaled her with his own theory of Magical Ethics, which was very detailed and involved a lot of metaphors drawn from Zen and the art of broomstick maintenance. Celia listened politely and drank a great deal of blackberry wine.

“Martin’s not really as mad as he seems,” Linus explained, after Lovegood had finally run off to buttonhole a self-proclaimed Seer he was hoping to interview. “Most of the time there’s a grain of truth in his ideas. Well, some of his ideas, anyway.”

Kathy snorted. “What about the time he said he’d had a vision of God, and She was a blonde Muggle woman waiting for a delayed train?”

“Maybe not that one so much.”

Celia laughed and refilled her glass. The Quill and Quirk’s homemade wine was potent stuff, and the Lupin reserve, apparently, was no match for it. Before the evening was over, she was kissing him in the back room of the pub, in front of Kathy at that. Linus decided at once that he enjoyed this state of affairs, and resolved to buy her more wine, more often.

He wasn’t sure afterwards whether he invited her over for coffee or she invited herself, but either way, he arrived home with Celia clinging to his arm and chattering away about their school days in a considerably less polished accent than her usual precise academic diction.

A letter was waiting for him in the front hall. Linus’ name and address were written on the outside of the envelope in a precise, unfamiliar handwriting. The seal was also unfamiliar: a circle of green wax with the impression of a serpent eating its tail. A pair of owl feathers lay on the table next to the letter. They were pure white.

He opened the envelope.

Dear Mr Berowne:

You may not remember me, but I was a year or two ahead of you at school. Recently, your unfortunate situation has been brought to my attention. I hope you will not think I am presuming if I say that the plight of people with your condition in our society has been of great interest to me for some time. I should like to offer you a proposition that I believe will prove mutually beneficial. Please send a return owl informing me when you will be available to meet with one of my representatives.

Sincerely yours,

T. M. Riddle

Linus read the letter, frowned a little, and passed it to Celia. “Do you remember him at all? Head Boy one year, wasn’t he?”

“Ooh yes, Tom Riddle.” For a philosopher, Celia had gone remarkably giggly. “He was two years behind me, and all the girls had mad crushes on him. Minerva walked in on him in his underwear in the prefect’s bathroom once, and we were all too jealous for words ... not that anything ever came of it, bit of an ice prince he was, I don’t remember him seeming really interested in anybody. Flat out turned down Julia Madigan when she asked him to the Yule Ball. I never had a try myself, but then I hadn’t found out how much fun chasing after younger men could be.” She kissed him again. “I do believe you’re jealous. You needn’t be. I think I’m becoming a bit fond of you, you know.”

“I’m not jealous,” said Linus, feeling slightly put out. “It’s just that I’d like to know what’s going on. Do you have any idea what happened to him after school? I mean, it’s been fifty years since I’ve so much as heard of him, and here he is practically ordering me to meet with one of his representatives, and I think it’s a bit odd, to say the least.”

Celia shook her head. “I don’t know what became of him. Just about disappeared off the face of the earth, he did, as far I can remember. He might’ve gone back to the Muggle world – some people do – but it’s funny, ‘cos I don’t think he was very happy about being Muggle-born. Wouldn’t talk about his home life at all.” She fingered the letter, looking puzzled. “To tell you the truth, I’ve always had an idea he was dead, but obviously he isn’t.”

“What House was he in?”

“Slytherin. That might be why he didn’t talk much about being Muggle-born.”

“You’re sure he was Muggle-born, then?”

“Where else would he have come from?” Celia said vaguely, and Linus, who had no idea where Tom Riddle had come from, didn’t offer any other suggestions.

She put the letter down and took him by the hand. “Do you mind if I stay for a while?”

“Not at all,” said Linus, and forgot about T. M. Riddle for the time being.