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“Lucius darling, there’s a letter for you.”
“Put it with the others, dearest,” he said, without looking away from his paper. Honestly, the state of the world, it would almost be funny if he didn’t have to bloody live here.
“It didn’t come by owl.”
Lucius lowered his newspaper half an inch. “Elf delivered? How quaint.”
“It didn’t come by elf either.”
Apparently his wife had decided it was time for tiresome word games. “Really Cissy, it’s not like you to be so coy. If there’s something noteworthy about the letter, just tell me.”
“It’s addressed to you, darling.”
“Narcissa, light of my life, I was not born yesterday. I am fully aware that you read all my correspondence. Please just tell me what it is about this letter that has upset you.” And stop playing silly buggers, he doesn’t add, because he quite enjoys still having all his internal organs in fully working order.
“It appears to be from muggles.”
“I beg your pardon?” Surely he had misheard.
“ Muggles , Lucius. Do not make me say it a third time.”
“Well, what do they want?”
“They appear to be asking for money.”
“A begging letter?”
“No, I’d say this his more of a demand. The law is mentioned. They seem to think it is on their side.”
Lucius blinked, trying to process the sheer ridiculousness of that statement, and failing. “What in the blue blazes... How did they find us, do you think?”
“I really haven’t the faintest idea. The house is still unplottable.” One of the few concessions they’d managed to wring out of the ministry, although a distressing number of people now knew its true location. “An error perhaps.”
“One can only hope.”
“Narcissa, light of my life, moon of my desires, there appears to be a letter in the toast rack.”
Narcissa went on buttering her crumpet without showing the slightest sign of concern. “Yes dear, I know.”
“And no toast.”
“The letter seemed rather more urgent.”
“Oh Christ, what’s Draco done now?”
Narcissa took a delicate bite of her crumpet, and Lucius’s stomach rumbled. “As far as I know, nothing. Which is not desirable but is probably better than the alternative. The letter does not concern our son.”
“Well then what could possibly be more urgent than breakfast?”
“It’s the Muggles again.”
“I thought you said the last one was an accident.”
“I seem to remember you said it was an accident, Lucius.”
He waved that away. “Semantics. What do they want this time?”
“Still money.”
“More than last time, or less?”
“The same, I believe.”
“Well they can sing for it.” With a flick of his wand, the paper was engulfed in flame. “Do you think we could have breakfast now?”
Narcissa set down her crumpet with the careful deliberation that hard won instinct told him meant he was in trouble. “You realise that they’ll just keep asking?”
He decided he didn’t care. He was still master of this house, damn it, no matter what she or the ministry said, and he was not going to be intimidated by muggles . “As long as they don’t interrupt my breakfast I really don’t care.”
“Don’t say it.”
“I’m not saying anything, Lucius.”
“No. I know. And yet somehow I can still hear you gloating.”
“No legilimency at the dining table darling, we’ve discussed this.”
“I don’t need legilimency to know what you’re thinking, dearest, we’ve been married for 30 years. I know what your smug face looks like.”
“How could I possibly be smug about Muggles knowing where we live? It’s a disaster.” Her voice was a full half-tone higher than usual, which was practically full blown histrionics for Narcissa.
“I know.”
“The risk!”
“I know .”
“If Layla Zabini finds out about this, it’ll be the war all over again. You can kiss goodbye to all the social standing Draco’s managed to win by…”
“Standing around looking decorative?”
“Standing around looking decorative while not saying anything offensive about the mudbloods, which is more than you ever managed.”
Lucius gritted his teeth. “ I didn’t need too.”
“Oh no, your method worked so well for us.”
“Are you going to bring that up in every single argument for the rest of our lives?”
“Yes. And you should have thought of that before you tied our good name to a radical fringe political group.”
“The Dark Lord was not a radical…”
“He was if you want anyone to invite us to any parties ever again. Which is not going to happen if you don’t do something about these letters!”
She stood by you through the war and everything that followed, he reminded himself. You love her. She’s the only one who knows how you like your tea. You would definitely regret it if you throttled her. “Well what do you suggest, oh light of my life?”
“You could start by actually reading one! Maybe there’ll be… Oh I don’t know, an address, or an explanation as to how they found us. Something!”
“You want me to read a letter… sent by Muggles ?!” It was the Black legacy finally kicking in, it had to be. His thrice damned wife had run mad.
“No I want you to eat it spread with pate. Of course I want you to bloody read it!”
Lucius blinked. Narcissa, in an effort to distance herself from the worst of the rumours about the Black family and the strain of madness that ran in their blood, had trained herself to never raise her voice unless strictly necessary, and never ever swear. Even a word as mild as ‘bloody’ was evidence of a fairly extreme emotional reaction on her part. “If it will set your mind at rest dear.”
Narcissa handed him a paper-knife point first, with an expression that suggested she was seriously considering stabbing him with it. It seemed to Lucius deeply unfair that he was being blamed for a situation totally outside his control, but you didn’t stay married for twenty five years without learning to bite your tongue sometimes, so he opened the letter in silence.
It was printed on flimsy paper, and set in type like a book rather than being handwritten. The words “Urgent: You risk breaking the law” in large angry letters at the top of the page caught his eye. The text had been aligned almost to the middle of the page, to make room for a red circle with “Amount Overdue: £154.50” in it. He had had enough dealings with businesses that straddled the line between muggle and magical that he at least recognised the £ symbol, though he hadn’t the faintest idea how much 154 pounds was. A small fortune presumably, since they seemed so desperate for him to pay it.
“Apparently if I don’t pay, I will lose my tee vee license,” he told Narcissa. “Do we have a tee vee licence?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. Is it something to do with your investments perhaps?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, we’re Malfoys. We’ve never needed a license for anything.”
“We were Malfoys, you mean. The name doesn’t carry the weight it once did, thanks to certain fringe political groups.”
“I don’t see what any of that could have to do with muggles! They say I need to take my debit card to a payment point or make the payment by text . This is meaningless! Clearly it is the works of a raving lunatic.”
“No dear, that would be the man you sacrificed our families good name to follow,” Narcissa said, with a smile like sugar laced with arsenic. “Lunatics do not generally take the time to pay a printer to produce their letters for them. Take it from a Black. If that was common practise, Aunt Walperga would have spent her entire life at the printers having them set her letters to the minister.”
“Well then how do you explain this?” Lucius demanded, waving the letter at his wife. “It can’t just be a mistake, they have my name and address.” And a lot of mysterious letters and numbers after it, which presumably meant something to the madman who sent it. Some sort of code, clearly, though what it purported Lucius really couldn’t guess.
“Perhaps it’s related to the minister. All those pro-Muggle laws she’s bringing in.”
“Anti-wizard, more like. You may have a point however. Damn it all, just when I thought I was going to get away without ever having to meet the bloody woman.”
“Well since Draco has decided his entire goal in life is to stand in the corner of important parties not speaking to anyone, I suppose it’s about time someone from the family met her. Just promise me you do anything to embarrass the family? Anything apart from dragging our good name through the political mud and nearly earning yourself a life sentence in Azkaban I mean.”
“It was good of you to see me, Minister,” Lucius said, through a clenched jaw. A secretary had had the gall to ask him to make an appointment. An appointment! Him! The world really was going to the dogs if the ministerial secretaries didn’t even recognise him! At least the minister, blood-traitor though she might be, realised the importance of keeping on his good side. Eventually.
“Well it seemed like you were just going to wait out there forever otherwise,” Granger said. “Miss Watson has sensitive nerves, I really don’t think she could have taken it. What can I do for you?”
“You can explain the meaning of this!” He produced the damned letter with a flourish, dropping it onto her desk.
Granger sighed, and pulled out a pair of spectacles from her pocket. To Lucius’s great annoyance, they rather suited her. “It appears to be a demand for an overdue television licence, Mr Malfoy.”
“I’m not blind, woman, I can see that!”
“Well then I really don’t know why you felt the need to come all this way and upset my secretary. If that will be all…”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I am here so that you can explain why you think it is appropriate for muggles to be demanding money, with menaces no less, from honest hard working wizards?! Your muggle-loving policies were bad enough, but to force tax-payers to shell out what is no doubt a small fortune in foreign currency is scandalous! I shall be writing to the Prophet about this!”
Granger sighed. “As you say, Mr Malfoy, you are a tax payer. I know this for a fact, because the head of the treasury came to speak to me about your tax return personally, and I have to say it was a true marvel of creative accounting. And as a tax payer, I will give your concerns all the attention I feel 3 knuts and a 500 yugoslavian dinar note (which as I’m sure you’re aware hasn’t been legal tender for more than a decade, and is quite literally not worth the paper it was printed on) deserves.
“I, and my government, had nothing to do with this matter. You can write to the prophet as often as you like, and I’m quite sure you will, but that will not change the fact that as minister of magic, I have no control whatsoever over the TV licence collections department. I’m not entirely sure anyone in the muggle government does either. In my experience, there are two things in life which are inevitable; death and the TV licence, and as a friend of Harry’s I’m not so sure about death. I suggest you pay it, and have done.”
Lucius was nearly vibrating with rage now. How dare this woman speak to him like that, how dare she! “Are you under the impression that I keep wads of muggle pounds just lying around the place? Perhaps the house elves have been hoarding it for their retirement? Oh I know, I’ll just ask my son shall I, after all, what sort of a man doesn’t keep muggle money on hand at all times in this day and age?! I’m sure that’s what you and your kind would like, Mrs Weasley, but I happen to respect our traditions!”
“You could just send them a galleon,” she suggested, damnably unruffled by his outburst.
“As you will know, since you apparently felt the need to check my tax return personally, I do not have 145 galleons spare. Narcissa and I barely have enough to feed ourselves, thanks to the taxed you have imposed in your campaign to destroy the few remaining pure bloodlines.”
“3 knuts, Mr Malfoy. And 500 dinar, of course. You know, Mr Grucock nearly wept when he read the part where you explained why paying your taxes in an obsolete foreign currency was completely legal. I had to get the poor man a cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit to calm his nerves. But I did not say 145 galleons, I said 1. Even someone in such dire financial straits as yourself, so very poor in cash and yet so mysteriously blessed in overseas business interests, could surely afford 1 galleon.”
“That is… 1? 1 galleon?”
“Rather less, probably, but I really can’t be bothered to work out the exact cost.”
“145 muggle pounds are worth… 1 galleon?!”
“As a straight currency exchange, no. But thanks to wizards never moving past the gold standard, a physical galleon is worth rather more than, well, than a galleon, at least in muggle terms. Of course if you were to have yourself declared legally blind, you could probably get away with only paying a sickle, but the logistics of that don’t bear thinking about.”
“And if I refuse to pay?”
“They will come to your house, Mr Malfoy. Of course, if you were to let them in they would see for themselves that you do not have a television, and they would leave you alone. So I suppose the real question is, how much is it worth to you, not to have a muggle in your home?”
The letter was written on heavy parchment, the kind people usually only used for wedding and christening invitations, and sealed with a real wax seal. Simon Pratt had never seen a wax seal in real life before. To be honest, living in a bedsit in Darlington and working for TV licensing, he’d never expected to, although he’d always secret wanted to.
It took a few tries to get it open. He was pretty sure you were supposed to have a letter knife, or a letter unsealer, or some bit of specialist kit for opening letters like this. He resorted to holding a teaspoon over the storage heater under Helen’s desk until it got hot, but it worked well enough.
The letter inside was written in a beautiful swooping copperplate, which perfectly matched his expectations and was a bugger to read.
“To whom it may concern,” he read aloud. “You fhould, no, should be ashamed of yourfelves. Selves. It is disgraceful the way you feek to intimidate honest tax paying citi… that has to be a z, it must be citizens.
“I enclofe herewith one coin of gold… Coin of gold?!” He tipped the envelope upside down and sure enough, out rolled a single gold coin, like something from Pirates of the Caribbean. Because it was something he’d seen people do in films, he bit it. It was hard, and tasted of metal. He wasn’t sure what that was supposed to tell him. He was starting to feel a little bit like this might all be a dream, which would be good, because that would mean the thing where he'd misheard Karen and laughed when she told him about her son being in hospital was also a dream. Although, weren’t you not supposed to be able to read things in dreams? He was sure he’d heard that somewhere. QI possibly, and if Sandi Toksvig said it, it must be true. He picked the letter up again, but it was definitely still readable. “I am told itf, no, its, value is greater than you require, thif additional if, is, for you clerk if, is, no, if this time, you can enfure I am not difturbed by fuch, that’s a funny word, fuch, demandf again. Yours fincerely, L Malfoy Esq.”
Simon put the letter down on his desk - ha, defk - and stared at it. He was pretty sure this was some kind of elaborate hoax, except that hoaxes didn’t usually involve people sending you several grams of gold. He picked up the coin, weighing it in his hand and trying to mentally compare it to the 22 gram packet of wotsits he’d had earlier, but his brain kept getting stuck on the fact that he was holding actual gold. Probably actual gold. He had no idea if it passed the bite test or not. It looked like real gold.
This was out of his pay grade. Nothing in orientation had prepared him for this. This… was a matter for Karen.