The Heiress

We were all trying not to fall asleep when a knock came at the door. A Mediwitch stuck her head in and said that someone named Owen Livesey had come as requested, but she needn't have bothered telling us anything. We could hear him yammering from halfway down the hall.

In two seconds, a tall bloke with dark curly hair and a little squint came rushing in. His shoulders were wide and square and strained against his robes. He didn't look like a solicitor to me. I thought he'd be right at home on a broomstick, catching Quaffles with his teeth.

He looked around and swore for a good minute when he saw Whetwistle slumped in a chair between me and Urdsmore.

"Gregory, have you completely lost your mind?"

"I had no choice! I simply wanted to find a way to communicate with Ms. Granger. Marie is getting worse. The situation has become desperate - you know that as well as any of us!"

"You won't do Marie or yourself or anyone any good tear-arsing about this way." He shook his blocky head and seemed to notice for the first time that there were other people in the room. When he caught sight of Harry, he made a sound low in his throat that made me think he was choking.

"Good Merlin, you're Harry Potter! It is an honour, sir!" he stuck his hand out and kept a stretched-out smile on his face even when Harry didn't take it. "I am so very sorry that you were inconvenienced. My client has been distraught. Family troubles, you know -"

"Owen, stop this nonsense; I've nearly been murdered tonight. It's no time to exchange pleasantries!" Whetwistle's jaw was tight. "Tell these gentlemen about my father's money and Ms Granger. Perhaps when they hear the whole story, they'll at least let me speak to the woman!"

"You were nearly killed? When? By whom?"

Whetwistle pointed at me. "I was dropping off my introductory note to Ms. Granger, and that man came tearing up, threatening my life. Now, considering that and the letters Katherine and I have received, I don't see why these Hours or whatever they are haven't immobilised him. I still can't move my legs!"

Livesey squinted at me for awhile and I saw something like recognition spark in his eyes. He looked back at Whetwistle, sneering.

"You truly are mad. You have no idea who any of these men are, do you? That is Harry Potter, the man who single-handedly sent the Dark Lord to his just desserts. And this man" - he wiggled his fingers at me - "Is Ronald Weasley. I would suppose that he would have been in Ms. Granger's room. He's her former fiancé, you dolt! You said you were reading Ms. Granger's book. I suppose you stopped at the table of contents!"

I couldn't get my mouth open fast enough to set Livesey straight about a few things, but Harry stuck his chin out at me, and I went back to glaring at Whetwistle. I thought Whetwistle didn't seem any more pleased by the idea that Hermione and I used to be engaged than he had been at the thought that I had been trying to kill him.

Livesey piped up again.

"Mr. Weasley, Mr. Potter, I can assure you that this was all a regrettable misunderstanding -"

"He says he's a Squib," said Harry. "If that's true, then where did he get the Portkey?"

"That's an excellent question." Livesey put his face so close to Whetwistle's that it looked like he was about to bite him. "Well, Greg?"

His eyes shifted from side to side. "Er, yes. The teacup, I suppose you mean. Well ... I bought it."

"Bought it? From whom?"

"A wizard, of course. I remembered a pub that Eddy said he and his ... associates used to meet in," said Whetwistle. "There was a old man there, graying red hair and wet, baggy eyes. Looked rather like a lost hound, to tell the truth. I didn't catch his name, but I heard the barkeep address him as 'Dung.' It made sense to me, because the man did not smell at all pleasant."

Harry and I looked at each other. Nothing had been heard of Mundungus Fletcher since he'd gotten out of Azkaban for selling fake phoenix feathers to potions shops about eight years ago. It made sense that he'd found a new place to set up shop, but I was a little suspicious about how a convicted criminal would have been able to get authorisation for a Portus spell. I could imagine, though, that he might have some "old friends" in the Ministry willing to do a few favors - for a price.

"Well, you're quite fortunate, sir." Urdsmore said to Whetwistle. "I don't think this 'Dung' person intended you to make a quick getaway - or any at all. The spell was never meant to hold up through more than one use. You're pretty lucky that the Portkey petered out where it did. Instead of a supply closet, you might've been dumped in the middle of the sea."

Whetwistle's face turned white. "Oh. Now I understand why he refused to take a cheque."

"All right, the Portkey aside for a second - what sort of message is it you wanted to get to Hermione?" asked Harry. "And why?"

Whetwistle leveled his gaze at Livesey, who straightened up with a cough. "Yes, well, that is rather a long story. But the short version of it is, my client's life and the lives of his wife and daughters have been threatened. One of his little girls has already been harmed, possibly irrevocably, and there's a promise of more to come."

He opened his robes and took a rolled scroll out of an inside pocket. "This is the latest of the threatening correspondence that has been received. This came directly to my office."

Harry smoothed out the parchment and I could see it was written in the same small, dark scrawl as the scroll Hermione had gotten.

Whetwistle:

She's here. You have run out of excuses.

"We received this last week," said Livesey. "And on the day it was received, my client's youngest child took a dreadful turn for the worse."

Harry aimed his wand at the parchment, and by the look on his face, I knew what he'd found. "Same tangle of redirect charms," he murmured. "And the handwriting looks the same ..."

"I'm sorry?" Livesey looked at Harry then at me. "The same as what?"

Harry gave a short explanation of the scroll Hermione had received and then gave his attention to Whetwistle. "Do you have any idea why your father did all this with his Galleons?"

"Well, I -"

"Mr Potter, I have an idea," Livesey cut in with a sudden burst of charm. "There are points that my client, not being magical himself, are a bit fuzzy on, and it might be to everyone's benefit, Ms. Granger's, especially, if we were to cut to the chase."

Harry just lifted his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. He didn't like this Livesey bloke, that much was clear, and I didn't think I did either, and not just because of the rubbish he'd spouted about Hermione's book.

"I want him to answer my question first," said Harry, turning away, but still frowning. "First, if your father tossed you out and you've lived life as a Muggle, then how did know out about this money?"

"Oh that. I've always known that my father had money - much of it was my mother's," said Whetwistle, "and some of it was from that business of his. Just how much it was, I didn't know until Owen and I found his papers."

"So you didn't have any contact at all with your father and brother?"

"Well ... I wouldn't say no contact," said Whetwistle. "Eddy popped round now and again, usually to borrow money and complain about how tight-fisted Father was. When Eddy went off to join that army of his, I saw Father a few times, usually at my shop. I sell clothing, you know. Ties, shirts, that sort of thing. I'm, er, having a bit of a sale ..." his eyes darted to Harry's trousers.

Harry looked down, too, but then remembered what he was about. "Army? You mean the Death-Eaters."

"Yes, whatever they were called. Led by that Dark Lord fellow. I don't know the particulars, and I forbid my wife to discuss it; I didn't want to frighten the girls. All I know about that is what I heard from Father later. Eddy chose to follow a rather unpopular side and he was killed later by a group of wizard vigilantes -"

I flinched, but managed to make it look like I was just dusting dirt off my jumper.

"- I saw Father once more before he died," Whetwistle went on. "I'd supposed he'd come round to try to make amends, and he did, in part. The last time I saw him alive, he said that he would restore me to his will if it proved that my eldest girl, Jania, who had just turned eleven years old in January of that year, was a witch. I wasn't sure how he expected proof of that."

"A Hogwarts letter would've done, if she hadn't exhibited anything ... odd before."

"Yes, my wife explained that to me later. But it didn't matter, as it turned out. Father died weeks later, and Jania never received such a letter. None of my girls have. Marie will be eleven next year, however ... that is, if she is still ..."

Whetwistle went quiet and took a handkerchief out his pocket to dab at his eyes with. "At any rate, Father died, but I suppose he had something of a change of heart before then - not a change for the better. The day before the funeral, I received one of the most disgusting letters I've ever received - well, before all this horrendous mess started with my daughter and Ms. Granger. It was from my father: written by him or, rather, written by someone else and dictated by him."

He stopped talking then, and stared at his hands long enough to make the rest of us fidgety.

"What makes you think he didn't write it himself?" asked Urdsmore. "If someone else wrote it, perhaps what you read weren't your father's words at all."

"Even if the handwriting wasn't his, the sentiment was." Whetwistle sounded angry now. "The last time I saw him, his hands were trembling so terribly that he couldn't hold a teacup. The letter was written in beautiful print. He went on and on about how horrid it was that he was going to die knowing that the only legacy he was leaving behind was a worthless son. He also said he'd changed his will and that every pound of his money was going to be placed in lovely hands, and that he'd fixed it so that I'd never be able to touch a shilling of it."

"Note the language, gentlemen," said Livesey, before any of could say anything. "Lovely hands - referring to Ms. Granger, of course, and that bit about Greg not being able to lay a finger on the money - quite true, of course, as Ms. Granger's accident proved. Of course, we couldn't have known all that at the time. It was only when my client found his late father's papers three years ago that we began to put it all together."

"It took you seven years to get round to reading through your dad's things?" Harry muttered. "Why even bother at that point?"

Here, Livesey took the lead again. "It wasn't quite our fault, Mr. Potter. Three years ago, I got word that the Whetwistle estate was going to be seized by the Ministry. I, er, persuaded a few friends to allow my client a look inside. He was disinherited, you see, so he had no claim to the property or most of the items inside the manor, but we thought that there might be other things ... pictures, letters, mementoes - specifically of Mrs. Agatha Renwick Whetwistle, my client's mother."

"My mum left us when I was eight," Whetwistle said. "I hated her quite a while for doing it, but as I grew up and learned just what a waste of flesh my father was, I grew to understand why she felt she needed to escape."

I thought about the Compendium's mysterious notation about Whetwistle's wife "disappearing" and I felt a little let down. It wasn't Voldemort after all, just a woman who didn't want to get on with her prat husband. I was becoming more and more sure that there was more to Whetwistle Sr. that met the eye - a lot more and a lot worse.

"We didn't find anything pertaining to Mrs. Whetwistle," said Livesey, "But in the attic, we found a chest locked with a simple locking charm. Inside were sheaves of parchment. Most of them detailed the terms of his will, which, interestingly enough, changed three times. The first draft left all his goods to Edward Whetwistle, Jr. After Eddy died, the will was changed again, making Greg the heir. And then three days before he died, my client's father created and filed a will leaving Ms. Granger his entire fortune."

Livesey looked around at all of us. "And in a separate set of documents, he admitted that he'd put an Iunctus hex on his money, and had divided his Galleons into two separate vaults - his own and one for Ms. Granger. I slept through much of DADA and my N.E.W.T. mark reflected that, so it took me a while to find out the particulars. As soon as I understood what the curse was about, however, Greg and I went straight to Gringotts. We were told to bugger ourselves, in so many words.

"I then tried to send word to Ms. Granger herself, but my owls were returned with the scrolls unopened. The only thing I could think to do to protect Ms. Granger from Edward Whetwistle's warped sense of 'security' was to bribe one of the goblins at Gringotts to tell me when and if that particular vault was ever accessed."

"You bribed a goblin?" I didn't know whether to feel angry that he'd been able to, or be oddly grateful that he hadn't just let the matter drop with Gringotts kicking him out the door. "What was the name?"

"I never asked. I ran into him at the front doors. He was a guard there, I believe."

I nodded. Grubkinder's friend. The one who hadn't exploded.

"Three days ago, that very goblin came to my office, trembling so hard I could barely make out a word he'd said," Livesey said, "but from what I was able to gather, the vault had been accessed with predictably horrendous results. I was relieved to read in the newspapers that Ms. Granger had been saved after all, thank Merlin! If she had died ... well, it would have been a tragedy for her sake, but also my client would have had no hope of saving his own family. His youngest daughter is in an awful state -"

Harry made a motion with his hand for Livesey to shut it and turned to Whetwistle. "What's wrong with your daughter?"

"I'm not certain. She came home one day after school and mentioned that a tall, handsome man had been round performing 'magic tricks.'" Whetwistle said. "Cards and such. She said he gave candies to her and all her friends and then disappeared in the blink of an eye. That night, she had horrible stomach pains and was in the loo all night. Days later, she was unable to keep anything down. A week after this 'mysterious man' had appeared, my darling girl had to be rushed to a hospital. She's now hooked up to machines that are supposed give her nutrients. Only they're not working!"

Tears streaked down Whetwistle's face, and he didn't bother with his handkerchief this time. "The doctors don't know why. They're doing everything they know how to do, yet she's getting sicker and sicker."

"We think it might be a Wasting Hex," Livesey said, patting Whetwistle awkwardly on the shoulder. "We're not entirely sure. Marie's friends were interviewed. They all say that a young man came and gave them candy, but none of them even got so much as a cavity. Marie seems to have been the only one affected."

"If you think it's a hex, why hasn't she been brought here?" I asked. "Muggle doctors aren't going to be able to do anything for her if she's got a magical sickness."

"But my daughter isn't a witch."

"That doesn't matter," Harry said. "If she's sick because she was hexed, she belongs here, not a Muggle hospital."

"Perhaps," said Livesey. "But I'm afraid it might be too dangerous to move the girl in her frail condition. Even if she were Apparated or Portkeyed or Flooed here directly, her immune system has been so compromised that it might do more harm than good. We were silly to wait so long, I suppose, but we were running in circles, you see. Marie has always been sickly, and we assumed for a time that her illness was one she'd had as a child. It was only when this monster who is writing these notes sent confirmation that he was behind the girl's ill health."

Harry paused and then walked the length of the room and back again.

"I'm sorry about your daughter." Harry was quiet, but I could hear the tension in his voice. He was an ace away from snapping, but he was trying to rein it in with both hands. "But it doesn't sound to me that you did as much in trying to help her as you did in trying to get into Hermione Granger's vault."

"But, you see, it's all related!" Whetwistle bent his head in Livesey's direction. "For god's sake, Owen, show them the other letters!"

"They're in my office," Livesey answered. "But he's right. This horrible person who may have poisoned young Marie Whetwistle has threatened my client for three years now. We believe that possibly the person to whom Edward Whetwistle dictated his last letter is the person we seek - no one else knew about the curse or the money except Edward Whetwistle and this other person."

"My wife swears she's being followed," Whetwistle said hoarsely. "She's a witch, yes, but her family is poor and she was not formally educated in magic. She doesn't even have a wand. Yet she says she can 'feel' Dark Magic surrounding her at times. Sarah, my second-youngest, has been getting odd gifts at school that often appear out of nowhere."

"Trinkets, books, that sort of thing," said Livesey. "They've been scanned for hexes. Nothing so far, but it is clear that whoever is sending these letters has no trouble getting to my client's family, and he wants my client to know that he has no problem getting access. The letter-writer has intimated that he has an antidote for Marie's condition, and will give it in exchange for Edward Whetwistle's money. Hermione Granger, therefore, is our only hope."

"But Hermione can't get the money even if she wanted to," I said. "Not before the collection's completed, and that won't happen for a few years yet."

Livesey made a move like I'd just shoved something cold down his shorts. "You know the particulars about Iunctus Finitem?"

"I've been briefed," I said, ignoring Harry's warning glare. "So it seems to me that whoever's been threatening him wants something bad to happen to Hermione, too."

"I don't think so, Mr Weasley. You see, whoever is threatening my client knows particulars that even we didn't know until we unearthed Edward Whetwistle's papers. He was ... quite taken with Hermione Granger, apparently."

Livesey rubbed his fingertips together, and there was something in his face that he was trying not to have there. He smoothed it out and went on. "And it seems that he had hoped she'd play quite an important role in the Whetwistle family ... even after he was gone."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Harry was ignoring me now and giving Livesey a look that might've turned him to stone if Harry had been that type of wizard. "He didn't even know Hermione that well."

"No, but he admired her. So much so, that he altered the hex somewhat," said Livesey. "It can be broken before the collection has been completed, but on one condition. She must marry into the family. Specifically, she must marry someone of Edward Whetwistle's blood."

"Yes," Whetwistle said before Harry and I could pick our mouths off the floor. "Since I'm the last Whetwistle left, it appears I am 'it.' That is the long and short of it - this person hurting my baby girl wants that money now. I can only get it now if I were to marry Ms. Granger and were she give it to me. If this does not happen, my daughter will lose her life. I will likely also lose my own, and so, I'm sure, will Ms. Granger."

Then came one of those silences that was awkward only when there wasn't a quick way out of the room. That wasn't the problem, in this case. I was almost out of the door before Whetwistle had stopped talking, but not necessarily because I wanted to leave. I'd seen a flash in the crack of the doorway and heard a scuffling sound and then a thump. I opened the door and heard a thin, watery voice coming from somewhere below me.

Hermione looked dazed and small sprawled on the floor. She was half-wrapped in Harry's Invisibility Cloak and I could only see her head and shoulders. I heard shouts from down the hall, but I got to her first. Hermione's head flopped on my chest and I could feel her eyelashes waving against my chest.

"M-marry?"