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There was value in gossip, useful bits of information that were often discarded as frivolous and passed around like a cheap, shiny trinket everyone wanted to look at but nobody cared enough to hold onto. Even the youngest child raised in good society understood that.
Despite this, somehow, many people preferred to speak more than they listened. Few understood that there was strategy required to gather information in such a manner. Instead, they engaged casually in the gossip like it was meant for entertainment, and if a few words surpassed being merely interesting and were actually useful, then it was nothing more than a fancy bit of luck to them, an accident with a pleasant result.
Aldon understood strategy. He was fascinated by motivations, by logic and how it might bend under the weight of human emotions. From a young age, he’d carefully cultivated his own strategy and style, discovering how best to listen and learn.
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There were different kinds of gossip. There was the kind people spread because they wanted the world to know—saucy scandals, usually; the kind of thing that made a good story for society to whisper and giggle about. That was the most common type, and the type Aldon didn’t care to seek out. That sort of gossip was passed around so quickly and thoroughly, it would only take a matter of days before it was public knowledge and he’d know all about it anyway, so he didn’t think trying to catch it early on was a productive use of his time and energy. He wasn’t a scandal seeker, and everyone knew that.
There was also the kind of gossip people spread only to people they trusted, the kind they would never want the general public to learn. The kind of secrets that ought to stay hidden, yet had a way of sneaking beyond the trusted few and into the ears of others such as Aldon. These were quieter affairs, more solemn: a relative dying slowly, bruises concealed under a lady’s diamond choker that matched her husband’s hands, a servant caught stealing candlesticks to buy her daughter medicine—those rarely had pretty ends.
A third type of gossip wasn’t entirely gossip at all. It was rather mundane, but often the most valuable. Anything from who visited whom when and which family had recently had a new foal born in their herd of Abraxans and how expensive the champagne at so-and-so’s soiree had been. This was Aldon’s favourite form of gossip. The littlest pieces often told the biggest stories, if one learned how to piece them together like shards of shattered ceramic.
Aldon had realised early on that people shared certain kinds of information with certain kinds of people; that, to get the certain information you wanted, you had to be perceived in a certain way.
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Everyone knew that Aldon Rosier liked to listen in on others’ conversations. That was merely a statement of fact, nothing unseemly about it, since everyone was so used to it by now. He had been that way since he was five years old, manoeuvring himself near a talkative group and silently observing them. He didn’t often push himself into the conversation with unwanted interjections, advice, or arguments, and had yet to use the information he learned against the speakers (so far as they knew, at least. Aldon understood subtlety as thoroughly as he did strategy, after all). This allowed him to fade easily into the wallpaper, his gleaming, golden eyes little more than a decoration that could be easily forgotten by the speakers in favour of continuing their story.
Yes, everyone knew perfectly well that Aldon eavesdropped more often than not, and because it was such common knowledge, it wasn’t something one often bothered to think about.
His perpetual presence on the outskirts of an interesting conversation meant that when he spoke up and joined the midst of it, everybody felt as though he’d been there from the start (he had, after all), not as though he was suddenly intruding. It was easy for others to forget they hadn’t invited him into their discussion.
Aldon was both always there and always not quite there, existing in a misty, blurred section of reality. He liked it that way; it kept him exactly where he needed to be when other people were gossiping. In his half-existent state, he could listen to things people might not tell him otherwise, as well as prompt further exploration of topics he thought deserved to be spoken of more, nudging the discussion where he pleased, and nobody thought anything of it because that was simply who Aldon Rosier was to them.
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Information was useless out of context.
Context had to be created, formed through estimates and theories, then chiseled back down as more information and evidence was gathered and proved many of those theories wrong and the occasional one correct.
Aldon’s mind was full of tangled bits of string that constantly wound and wove between each other, lacing concepts with knowledge and connecting the words of half-a-dozen people into something resembling a possible truth. He doubted he could silence the ramblings of his mind if he tried, and he couldn’t see the point of attempting it in the first place. The strings allowed him to view the world in a different light than most people, working at rapid speed to take in information and make sense of it.
While others might dismiss something as inconsequential, all Aldon could see were the possible consequences it held in the story it told.
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It was Pansy who started his greatest revelation of all, surprisingly. Aldon held great respect for his young friend, of course, and he knew that she had cultivated her own style and strategy when it came to information, but their individual strengths certainly differed. Pansy did best at rooting out scandals and calming tensions when a discussion threatened to grow too rough and teeter off topic, drawing it back to a more suitable level and directing it towards a direction that better aided her. It wasn’t like Pansy to tell him pieces of information without realising how important that piece was to the puzzle.
Pansy had met Heiress Potter and asked after Rigel. She’d been answered with a question about a qilin.
How interesting.
…Aldon didn’t have the slightest clue what it meant.
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He did know that he’d heard people talking about a qilin before Pansy mentioned it.
The black markets were another form of gossip, in a way. Secrets were bought and sold, new artifacts came to light before disappearing into someone’s possession, and information on customers and sales could be pieced together into a story that just might be true.
Aldon didn’t peruse the black markets for sales, but rather, to look and listen, to know what items had appeared and where they’d disappeared to and when.
Customers’ names were often kept secret, giving him no clear string to lace between Heiress Potter and the qilin that had been there one day and gone the next. But it was enough to start with.
He was reasonably confident that Heiress Potter didn’t frequent the black markets. He saw little cause for a witch from a Light family, a witch under a great deal of scrutiny from both the law and curious gossipers, to visit such a place. If the girl’s connection to the qilin wasn’t direct, there had to be another party involved.
Rigel Black, perhaps.
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Ed was his first suspect.
Not as the Rigel Black Child, of course, as Aldon liked to think he knew his best friend at least a little better than that, and there was of course the most obvious little bit about how Ed and Rigel had been in the same place many, many times before. Aldon knew his theories could be rather a stretch at times, but never delusional.
No, he didn’t believe Edmund Rookwood could possibly be Rigel Black, but a connection between the mysterious boy and the Black and Potter families, a go-between for communication during this troublesome time?
It was possible.
And who else would buy a qilin? Aldon had declined Ed’s offers to accompany him to the black markets, and it had far less to do with any possible interference another’s presence might cause in his quest for information, and far more to do with the fact that Ed would likely buy every creature and animal in the place.
Ed would certainly have bought the sad, pathetic qilin after seeing the nasty conditions of its cage and the glimmer in its eyes.
But a few days after Aldon began following the strings of this theory, Ed bought a new summer villa in Spain for him and Alice, and Aldon’s strings snapped, his theory falling limp. No one could afford a qilin and a villa in a singular summer, and Ed was good enough with financials to not be fool enough to try.
Aldon shook with relief, grateful that that theory was false, that his best friend wasn’t hiding things from him.
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According to the latest gossip, the Lestrange household was in complete disarray. Their house elf had been given clothes by the young master, who rehired the elf for himself after moving out of Dartmoor Castle and into a flat somewhere off Diagon, where Caelum had been seen with dark circles under his eyes and a split lip. Rudolpho and Bellatrix had found themselves suddenly bankrupt.
Aldon smiled as he listened to his parents’ guests prattle on about the scandal and what might have caused the devastating situation in the first place.
He knew Caelum Lestrange and Heiress Potter were well-acquainted. He knew he had seen the boy at the black markets when the qilin was still there.
He knew the Lestranges had forced their son to attend Durmstrang, and he knew from old gossip back when he was a little boy that Caelum had thrown a tantrum at the news, begging to be allowed at Hogwarts, to no avail.
He knew Bellatrix wasn’t known for fidelity. He knew that, despite her scorn for those with lesser blood, once she was drunk enough, she might throw herself at any man to piss off her husband.
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Aldon had to consider that Caelum and Rigel had both been seen together at various galas. However, gossip had gone around from several sources that the real Heir Black and the fake one had often switched back and forth at such events, to the point where no one was certain which person they had been dealing with at any given time. It might not have been Caelum and Rigel that Aldon had seen with his own two eyes at his parents’ New Year’s Eve Gala, but an undisguised Rigel and Arcturus Black, arguing like they weren’t in alliance all along.
“Well met at last, Cousin,” Lestrange had said with obvious sarcasm. Aldon had thought the derision was meant for “well”, as the meeting was certainly not a pleasant one, but it was obvious now that it was “at last” that made Lestrange flash a smirk drenched in irony. They weren’t meeting just then; Lestrange had been pretending to be his cousin for almost two years by that point.
It was almost laughable, now that Aldon knew. It was so obvious.
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Aldon knew Caelum Lestrange was Rigel Black.
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