Chapter Text
"You are being an idiot," Rowan Marlow remarked kindly to her sister.
Ten-year-old Nicola would have glared at her and stumped tearlessly off. Thirteen-year-old Nicola would have minded desperately but been petrified that someone might notice her minding. Sixteen-year-old Nicola would have flung herself off out of the house and not come back until dusk, and thank heaven that phase was over and that Nicola, unlike Ginty, had never been prone to exorcising her muddled feelings by tiring out some poor horse.
Nineteen-year-old Nicola continued unpacking clothes, briskly and neatly, from the big suitcase that lay on the padded window-seat. The light poured in, uninterruptedly grey-silver all the way from the sea. Rowan reflected that she and Nicola were the only members of the family who actually bothered to pack things with some consideration of the time it would save at the other end.
"It's all very well for you. You're not wandering around with Lawrie's face on," Nicola eventually said in a bruised voice.
"I might as well be," said Rowan caustically. "Does it not occur to you, my little one, that none of the rest of us ended up with chestnut hair, green eyes or any other noticeable departure from the family norm either? Because it occurs to me. Frequently. And considering the amount of time Father dearest spent steaming off to foreign ports and the way Kay's man somehow never managed to dredge up a bit of the farm log saying This day ane owle did arrive bearing messages for mine elder son Geoffry, but we did wring the neck of the buggre... well, it's made me give every blond wizard I've ever met a long considering glance, I can tell you."
"Chestnut hair and brown eyes, and anyway, that was Gin," said Nicola, not remarking on the fact that even eighteen months after his death Edwin Dodd still only got mentioned as Kay's man. "And what price Harry Marlow, sitting on the roof of the Shippen conversing with the Devil?"
"Is that what he did? Accio decanter," said Rowan, put her hand out to catch it and poured Nicola a glass. "Drink it. I know you don't like it. Drink it anyway. And consider that this isn't the first time the family face has been an inconvenience and it certainly won't be the last, and you may as well get used to it."
Nicola shook her head. The ends of her yellow hair wagged to and fro where they escaped from the knot at the nape of her neck. "How isn't it the first time?"
"Don't you remember that nasty business back at Hogwarts when those idiots Bole and Derrick started spreading rumours about Ginty? Perhaps it was before your time, at that,"
"What?" said Nicola, intrigued despite herself. "Oh, go on, Ro. It's been years. You must have got over the school-was-a-tiresome-interlude-in-my-wonderful-life pose by now."
Rowan blinked, and reminded herself that she never thought much of elder-to-younger haughtiness when she ran into it from Giles or Kay. Besides, there was always the chance that when Nicola said wonderful life she wasn't actually being sarcastic. Perhaps the wretched child thought that running Trennels, with everything that entailed in both the mundane and the wizarding worlds, actually was something more than tedium spiked with uncomfortably frantic activity.
It was more the sort of thing one expected of Lawrie, but one never knew; particularly as Nicola had chosen to make a living in the Navy, which was rather an example of punctuated equilibrium itself. Rowan drank the glass of Firewhiskey. She had a feeling that by the end of the conversation she would need it.
"Oh, they got the idea that Ginty was part Veela and she was silly enough to encourage it. Unfortunately they also had a grasp of the principles of heredity that I suppose I shouldn't have found so surprising, considering how closely they both resemble the Slytherin ancestral ape, and Peter in particular had an unpleasant time of it before I thought to track them down and be very particularly squashing." Rowan gave a brief, fierce smile like sunlight lancing down through grey clouds.
Nicola unfolded some dire-looking slacks and stared at them as if she couldn't think how she'd come to own them in the first place. "That isn't the same thing at all."
"Isn't it?" asked Rowan lightly, leaning back against the window-frame and crossing her arms across her thin chest. She was too thin altogether, and the mist-coloured sweater and tatty jeans she was wearing did nothing to disguise it. Just gone back to running a farm, proper occupation for a Muggleborn after all, I keep up the quotas and don't you bother me was what it said to any passing Knight of Walpurgis, just like the worn clasp on the string of pearls around her neck said breeding but no money to the local hunting gentry.
The other hunting gentry. The ones who turned up in the daytime to bore her about the Countryside Alliance, as opposed to the ones who arrived after dark and whispered 'Alohomora' at the door.
"No. It isn't," said Nick finally.
"I suppose it's not. Ginty was a little idiot, but it's not as if she was... oh, pretending to be a Veela to make a point about only humans being allowed wands, or something."
Nicola blinked at her, eyelashes spiky. It might just have been clear mascara, though Rowan had never pinned any of her sisters for the clear mascara type. "If you mean that society for liberating the house-elves, Gin only joined it for half a term and that was only because she was friends with Unity..."
Nicola stopped, and carried on in a constrained voice. "With Unity Logan. She's in the Daily Snitch as well, though she doesn't get as many pages as Lawrie. There's a photo of her - it's been badly touched up to make her look like she's got a neck - and an interview on the Womens' Page. All about what a confidential job she has as secretary to that git Avery and what a confidential job he has as secretary to the Wizengamot and how he's working himself into an early grave." She scowled. "Someone else's, I should imagine."
Rowan shook her head. "Never mind Unity Logan, or the house-elves either. Haven't you considered that this kind of thing just might have happened once or twice before in theatrical circles?"
"Don't swank, Ro," said Nicola crossly. "What d'you mean, theatrical circles?"
Footsteps sounded on the stairs. Several sets of footsteps, all of them entirely too cautious to be Mrs Bertie dusting or Rose Dodd popping in to show off her latest tarty purchase in the way of clothes or eye-makeup and complain about her stepmother.
Rowan put a hand up to Nicola for silence. She slid her wand along the bookcase to where it could be easily reached but didn't look suspicious. She took a small breath, and opened the door.
She found herself looking up into the face of her younger brother Peter. It always took her a moment to adjust to Peter's face being all the way up there. She still vaguely expected it to be bobbing around at elbow-height. Peter had grown from a stocky child to a gangling adolescent to a tall, solid twenty-year-old. Rowan was more than half convinced he'd done it to avoid being the right shape for Giles's castoffs, ever.
She hadn't been expecting Peter. She certainly hadn't been expecting Peter looking grimy and rueful, with two exhausted witches and a wizard with a baby on his hip following him up the stairs. She opened her mouth to say something, shut it again, and beckoned them in.
Nicola was not so restrained. "Peter! What are you doing here?"
"Exactly what I'd like to ask," said Rowan fiercely. "Nick - make yourself useful, pass the Firewhiskey, it looks like everyone needs one. Peter, what possessed you to bring them here in broad daylight?"
Nicola poured Firewhiskey and offered it round. The elder of the two witches shook her head and waved it away. She looked white and tense, as if meeting new people was the final thing she couldn't cope with on top of whatever had happened to her already. The younger witch nodded, took two glasses and started saying "Mum... come on, Mum, it'll do you good," in a voice Nicola was startled to find herself recognising. "Hannah Abbott?"
"Oh... Nicola," said Hannah tiredly. "This is my Mum, and this is Mr Perkins who used to work at the Ministry. Before."
"Take them down to the kitchen and give them some food," said Rowan briskly. "Peter - again - why -"
Peter squared his shoulders under his guernsey. "Because the alternative was leaving them on top of Rum Beacon where we Apparated in, with a fog coming down and no one to keep an eye on them but Fob. Or else sending a message here by Fob and staying myself, which you wouldn't have liked either."
"Too right I wouldn't. Fob is eleven!"
"Fob," said Peter grimly, "was the one who came to tell me that we couldn't hide out in Bacca Cave like usual, because her sister Rose had ever-so-helpfully chosen that precise point to spread a blanket with her new bloke the Death Eater,"
Mrs Abbott squeezed her daughter's hand, hard. Hannah looked, if possible, even more exhausted. The baby started crying. Nicola hastily ushered them downstairs towards the kitchens, feeling equal parts of embarrassment and being glad to have something to do, even if it was acting as head-cook-and-bottlewasher.
She tried to make cheerful conversation at the same time as making omelettes, but it was obvious none of them were having it. Mr Perkins clasped his hands in the lap of his robe and answered with distant brightness as if it was a job interview. Mrs Abbott sounded as if talking to a stranger was the equivalent of having her soul wound out very slowly onto a spindle, and Hannah joggled the baby expertly over one arm, stared out of the window and said nothing. Nicola relapsed into silence too and eventually served omelettes. "There's some fruitcake as well - I'll go and get it - "
When she returned from the pantry Mr Perkins had spread out a Daily Snitch on the table. It was the twin of the one Nicola had binned upstairs, except that instead of being crumpled it was slightly charred round the edges. Nicola turned her back under the pretence of bolting the door. Just in case of Mrs Colthard popping in from the village for a cup of sugar, she told herself, or any similar disasters. "I'll make you thermoses of tea as well, and there's a cauldron down in the cellar you can cook on - it's not bad down there, really - have you still got your wands?"
Mr Perkins had. "Auror training," he explained with a fractional smile. The Abbotts hadn't.
Hannah gave Nicola a dour, confrontational look, and then looked down at the tiled red floor as if she found it infinitely preferable. "I'll need nappies for Grace."
Nicola wondered for a flurried moment whether nappies came into it and whether it would help to say Honestly, no one but Ann ever bothered and then realised Hannah meant the baby.
Strewth, she thought, taken aback. She had assumed it was a baby Perkins. Of course, people her age did have babies, but she'd always dimly associated that with Muggles with bleached hair in high ponytails standing around with pushchairs outside shops, not with the likes of Hannah. "I... um, I'll see what I can do. Kay might..."
"I heard you've been off on a Muggle boat," said Hannah flatly. "Not many Men from the Ministry out on the North Sea, I don't suppose. Three square meals a day and nothing to do but watch the seagulls. All right for some."
Nicola considered saying things like Rowan thought it would be suspicious if all of us hung around here and Well, it's not as if I could follow in Giles' footsteps like I always meant to, what with things the way they are and found them all, frankly, pretty pointless. She reached to the back of the cupboard and found some of the baby formula Rowan used for orphaned lambs instead. "Can you use this?"
And remembered, unbidden, Professor McGonagall saying 'Undoubtedly you can; the question is whether you may,' and Hannah withdrawing the hand she had been waving in the air and looking deflated. They'd been about fourteen at the time. Hannah looked twice that now.
She got them settled in the cellar and went back upstairs. She didn't much want to be with Rowan and Peter, but she didn't much want to be alone with her thoughts in hawkhouse or owlery or stables, either. Rowan and Peter were still arguing when she got back.
Peter was hunched in a chair, head down between his shoulders like a burly vulture. "Evil never sleeps, so they tell me, but if evil ever does get a bit of shut-eye I'd say 3.40pm was the time."
"What a shame that doesn't apply to everyone out queueing for their shopping or off to fetch their children home from the Colebridge Grammars," said Rowan bitingly.
An owl tapped at the window. Nicola resignedly opened it and let it in. It looked like Ginty's owl. "It's for you, Ro."
Peter went to read over his sister's shoulder. "Honestly are you sure it's not Nick in the Snitch everyone says it looks like her... Rowan, what is this about?"
"This," said Nicola coldly, retrieving the paper from the bin and spreading it out on top of the table with the flat of her hand. The headline read BELOVED IDOL TO WED CENTAUR and the smaller paragraph headings were Prima Donna, Permits and Polyjuice???!!!.
Under the headline was a photograph of Lawrie, her short, spiky, expensively cut hair studded with small flowers. She was alternately beaming, looking up mistily into the camera, and turning to kiss her fiance's cheek.
"Blow me down," said Peter cheerfully. "It does look like Nick."
"It - does - not!"
"It does," said Rowan, studying the picture. "And if you had half the sense you were born with you'd see that that was a good thing. That's not Lawrie in love with Patroklos, that's Lawrie doing an impression of you being in love with Patroklos."
Nicola crimsoned and sat down. She felt the blood thump in her ears. She wondered whether she was having a heart attack, and thought probably not; she couldn't be that lucky.
"Am not," she said in a small distant voice. Distant as the North Sea, where she really wished she still was at the moment. At the very bottom, for preference, fathoms deep and smothered in silt. "I... We're just not. That's all."
"Well, I'll bet you he and Lawrie just aren't either, because, and I can't believe you've never noticed this, our sister Lawrie is as bent as a relief map of Knockturn Alley and as far as I can tell always has been,"
Nicola stared at her, bereft of speech.
"I don't know what she's up to this time," Rowan continued, "but I suspect it's got a lot to do with securing a certain centaur a place in the limelight where the Ministry can't off him without Questions being Asked, and a lot more to do with covering up her real tracks, whatever they are. And before you ask, I don't know, and don't much want to. Having the house occasionally cluttered up with Peter's taste in women is bad enough." She paused, looked at Peter, and said in an altogether different tone of voice, "Binks, you're bleeding."
"It's quite all right, the guernsey soaks it up," he said with a bad attempt at insouciance.
"It is not quite all right!" said Rowan, sounding for once in her life a lot like her sister Karen. "Here, take that off - you'd better put a potion on it, you must be too old to pull the but it's purple and stings line by now..."
Nicola took the opportunity to escape at least as far as the window and to stare out at the drive. "There's someone coming," she said detachedly. "In a carriage. I think it must be Men from the Ministry."
Rowan swore. "Oh, damn, the milk quotas..."
"Milk quotas?" said Nicola, thinking it had to be a mistake. It was bad enough that she could feel a great clotted tangle of feelings squatting bezoar-like in her stomach, worse that Peter was wounded. Things would turn to farce if Rowan added milk quotas.
"Things the Ministry are good at, spreading faceless terror. Things that the Ministry are really very bad at, running a country by proxy," said Rowan crisply. "You haven't been told only registered customers yet in a shop?"
"I didn't know things had got that bad,"
"Well, they have. Peter, you can't be here, you'd better Floo out, and go somewhere you can get that looked at. Nick, come with me, they'll want to check your papers..."
Nicola thought about saying that she'd really much rather stay here, even with the Daily Snitch mocking her from the wastebasket, and then realised that Rowan wanted moral support. This alone was surprising enough to propel her meekly towards the front door.
Lawrie... Well, she had to admit it made sense, from Margaret Jessop onwards. She couldn't bring herself to feel much about it. She couldn't really see that it was any of her business. It was Lawrie, that was all.
Nicola clenched one hand in her pocket. Lawrie and Patroklos, though...
She shouldn't have. She's older than Ginty was when... She knew. Or then again, being Lawrie, maybe she didn't. Nicola couldn't decide whether either possibility offered any comfort. She thought about composing a Howler, but the idea of Lawrie and Patroklos opening it together was in the blank realms of the unfaceable.
She would just have to go to London, that was all, and sort it out. Rowan looked back over her shoulder at her with wry exasperation. "Oh, take that look off your face, you look like an Ancient Briton who's just trodden in her last pot of woad. It's hugely unlikely that Lois Sanger's traipsing about the countryside inspecting milk quotas. And if she is it serves her right, the depressing female."
"Do I really look like an Ancient Briton?" asked Nicola, making an effort to be distracted.
"No. Saxon all the way. Chalk up another curse to the family face," said Rowan, and opened the door to the Men from the Ministry.