Chapter Text
Upwards of seventy years ago, in a fine old castle called Naughtsden, lived Cantankerus Nott. He was even then elderly-to-prehistoric. He had mammoth bones and long, gruesome-seeming fingers with long nails; his hair was thick and white, his features thin, and his pale skin sagged all around his small lips and dripped down with patrician age from his high brow.
He strode through life as an aging dragon or dinosaur, too forceful for every room, too domineering for any conversation, upsetting nearly everyone around him. But this was permitted, this was quite alright. He was to receive no comeuppance for sacking sniveling Abbott who married a Muggleborn, for ousting round little Longbottom and his tall fierce wife from their offices, for discrediting weak-wristed Professor Turpin’s work on the complete irrelevance of blood. Nott could do all this and more and suffer no consequences, for he was a pillar of society. He upheld the old ways. He believed fiercely in the superiority of the magical world. So his age was believed to confer wisdom, his blood seen as spotless, his imperious frame called regal, his stretched skin considered classic, his harsh lip a sign of impeccable breeding.
He had a godson and protege, one Geoffrey Shacklebolt.
How handsome and powerful Shacklebolt was! Young, with quick duelist’s wrists and clear dark skin and a talent for the most difficult Dark spells, to boot. The son of the son of the son of a slave, it was true, but then the slave had been magical, and had descended (it was proven by testing the blood, a messy and painful process using spider-pincers that we outlaw today) from very very great chieftains of a properly magical variety. And this showed. Shacklebolt had stunning promise and ability, though he was perhaps, thought Nott, a touch too easygoing, a touch too genial, a touch too kind to his inferiors — a perfect mooncalf, really. Nott adored and indulged him as one would a son, for Nott had only nephews himself, and each more dull and weak than the last. But he still took a firm hand when he had to, for Shacklebolt was prone to verse and alcohol and theater and clever dancing women with laughter like bells, and Shacklebolt did not care if the verse was Muggle poetry, the alcohol goblin-made, the theater subversive and sick, or the women werewolves.
Silly boy!
He gave Nott such frights, but loved him true, until—
Until Miss Jenny Jinks. Oh, how dreadful she was. A Muggleborn girl. And not a Hogwarts girl. From some newfangled school out in the United States, some charity place built on pureblood money, Cantakerus was sure, for her sort didn’t have money of their own. But built for very muddy sorts. She claimed it was worth forty Hogwartses. She would. She was the ignorant daughter of some uneducated yokel, after all, and so wicked, so plotting! She stuffed Shacklebolt’s head with nonsense.
He would say, “Don’t you care about magical society, though, Jenny? My Uncle Nott is awfully concerned with keeping it safe and pure, you know.”
And she would pour him another drink, and wink, and say, “This tiny corner of the universe? Not one bit.”
And he would say, “Now, we’ve got a lot here. We’ve got the Ministry and some fine Quidditch teams and there’s Hogwarts—”
And she would say, dismissively, “And that’s all you care about. But the world’s bigger than that.”
For how could a creature so impure care about preserving their world? She could not. So of course she very carelessly upset the match Nott was carefully orchestrating between godson Shacklebolt and dear goddaughter Walburga Black (then ten, but quite ready for engagement, Nott thought). Yes, Jenny Jinks was unheeding, selfish. And for this? Nott believed she deserved an upset.
It was common and legal, in those days, to mix Amortentia with the little Western flower magical maidens call love-in-idleness. In this fashion, any young and foolish wizard, caught by some tempting bit of filth, might see their eye directed gently elsewhere. A godfatherly Puck might save a foolish boy from making a grave mistake. Might.
Nine times out of ten.
Alas, this proved to be the one time such a formula could not succeed. True Love! Amortentia’s obsession is no replacement for that. And in fact every dose seemed only to remind Shacklebolt of his Muggleborn, for in it he smelled not proper pumpkin tea but clove cigarettes, not bewitchingly girlish tadpole powder but Mitsouko perfume. So Shacklebolt snuffed out the plot, uncovered the whole scheme. Such a scheme, to a foolish young man, is high treason: a betrayal by his well-meaning elders. The worst, more appalling betrayal. So, pained and heartsick, Shacklebolt cast Nott off. For his dark-skinned, black-eyed Muggleborn, he rebuffed Nott. Nott who was so dear to him, who he’d loved not because of blood, but by a faithful appointment of the soul.
For his part, Nott believed the union would not last (“I’ll keep you in the Twenty-eight for when the marriage goes sour, my boy!”), but it did. The separation lasted as well, and with it came many a sleepless night for Shacklebolt, much heartache, for by choosing truest love he had lost a father. He longed to be happy, but he could not be, not quite, and though within the year he’d sired a son, a very strong one, within two or three he had died.
Wizards and witches can be beautiful and powerful and pure, with duelist’s wrists and strong frames and flashing eyes. But know this: they find it hard to cast off a broken heart. This is the trade-off. This is the price of being born so regal and well-bred. There is a silly, foolish propensity for sickness in them. The more superstitious say that when nonsense magic has been trapped too long inside the blood, it needs an outlet, and it begins to bubble up in odd quirks and fits of overpowering heartache.
So Geoffrey died.
Now, Jenny did not believe this was right. She had to watch her husband struggle and die. And then she also saw, by contrast, Cantankerus Nott regally striding about, shoving aside goblin in Diagon and spitting on Muggleborn in the Ministry, perfectly content in spite of all the evils he committed, never punished, no comeuppance in sight.
Oh, but a very clever, very angry witch can make a comeuppance, if there is none to be found.
So she did. None are sure of exactly how she did it. Nott would come to believe it a unique Comeuppance Potion, something she’d somehow managed to magic into his tea, with a smattering, here, of bat’s wings, and there some blood gathered by blood pincer, and a drop of her blasted Muggle perfume, and — oh, surely — some love-in-idleness to cap it off. But she never confirmed this. She only appeared at his Ministry office one day, in short skirts with a beaded hat and a Muggle coat, and she said, “Someday, Sir,” though Ms. Jenny Shacklebolt had no reason to call him Sir, excepting that she believed politeness made a curse all the sweeter, for she was a bit of a Southern belle like that, “Someday, through love and in spite of wickedness, your name will mean nothing, and your heirs will be quite as good as mine.”
Do you know? She said it so kindly that one might have thought she was conveying a blessing, not a curse. Nott spat out, “What are you saying? You shameless creature! Parading yourself in here, casting aspersions on my heirs and blood—”
"I don’t care about your heirs and blood," said Jenny. "I don’t care one little bit. I care about a world a bit grander and greater than that. So I bless you, you stupid old fossil. I bless you. May your work someday culminate in something greater than you, greater than your blood, greater than your stupid little world."
And this was the cruelest curse she could have laid on a creature like Cantankerus Nott.