Work Text:
1972
The bell over the door at Pelham's had a thin, apologetic sound, as though it were sorry to have disturbed anyone, and Ted Tonks stood on the step for a good half-minute before he made it ring.
He had counted the money twice on the way down Diagon Alley. He counted it again now, through the cloth of his pocket — eleven Galleons and a scatter of Sickles, which was the whole of what a year of careful saving and a summer of unloading crates at a Muggle brewery in Ealing had come to. It had seemed a great deal of money in the tin under his bed. It seemed a good deal less, standing outside a jeweller's with his collar done up wrong and his hair refusing to lie flat.
A witch in plum-coloured robes swept past him into the street, and Ted stepped smartly out of her way and trod in a puddle. He looked down at his wet shoe. Then he squared his shoulders, the way a man might before going under cold water, and went in.
The shop was smaller than he had expected, and warmer, and it smelled of metal polish and old velvet. Glass cases ran along three of the walls, and the things inside them caught the little light that came through the front window and threw it back in small, bright pieces. A man sat behind the farthest case on a high stool, a jeweller's loupe screwed into one eye, turning something very small between finger and thumb.
He didn't look up.
"Be with you," he said. "Don't breathe on the cases."
Ted put his hands behind his back.
He had meant to look composed and unhurried, like a man who bought jewellery often and thought nothing of it. Instead he found himself bending over the nearest case with his nose a careful six inches from the glass, gazing down at rings set with stones the colour of claret and stones the colour of the sea, and one great cold diamond on a velvet stand all to itself, lit from somewhere underneath so that it seemed to burn.
He looked for a price on the diamond. There wasn't one. In Ted's experience, that was never a good sign.
"That one's spoken for," said the jeweller, who had come down off his stool without Ted hearing him. He was old, with a long sallow face and white eyebrows that grew every which way, and he looked at Ted with the patient, measuring expression of a man who had spent forty years guessing what was in other people's pockets and had not often been wrong. "Bride's a Selwyn. Wedding's in the spring. You're not a Selwyn."
"No," Ted agreed. "Tonks."
"Mm," said the jeweller, as though that settled something. "And what can Pelham's do for Mr Tonks?"
Ted took a breath.
"I'm getting married," he said. "Or — I'm going to ask. I need a ring. To ask with."
The old man's face did something that was not quite a smile but was in the neighbourhood of one. He moved off along the cases with his hands clasped behind his back, and Ted trailed after him like a boy after a schoolmaster.
"Engagement ring," said Pelham. "Yes. We do a great many of those. There's the question of the lady's taste, and there's the question — forgive me — of what the gentleman cares to spend. The two are not always on speaking terms." He stopped at a case nearer the back. "Let us be vulgar and get the second out of the way. How much have you got?"
Ted told him.
He did not dress it up, or pretend it was the first of several visits. He had decided, somewhere on the long walk from the Leaky Cauldron, that he would not stand in this shop and lie about money, because it seemed a poor way to begin a marriage. So he said the number plainly, eleven Galleons and the Sickles, and watched the old man's face while he said it.
Pelham did not laugh, which Ted had half expected, and he did not go cold, which Ted had expected rather more. He merely nodded, as if eleven Galleons were a fact about the weather.
"It can be done on eleven Galleons," he said. "It has been done on less. A ring is not the marriage, whatever the people who sell them tell you." He drew a small key from his waistcoat. "The lady. Do I know the family?"
And there it was — the question Ted had known would come, and had not worked out what to do with.
He could have said no. He could have let the old man think she was some quiet, ordinary girl, a shopkeeper's daughter or a clerk at the Ministry, and the whole thing would have stayed simple. But the name was true, and Ted had never been much good at the other thing.
"Black," he said. "Andromeda Black."
The key stopped halfway to the lock.
Pelham looked up, and for the first time since the bell had rung he looked at Ted properly, with a frank and open curiosity, the way a man looks at something he has not seen before and did not expect to.
"There was talk of that at the spring auctions," he said slowly. "One of the Black girls gone and married out — struck off the family tree, the whole performance. A scorch where her name used to be. Cygnus's middle girl, they said." He set the loupe down on the felt. "That'll be your Andromeda."
"That'll be her," said Ted. "Though we've the marrying still to do. I've the asking to get through first."
"They struck her off, then." Pelham turned the fact over the way he would turn a stone to the light, without heat. "You'll know what that means, coming from where she does. That family has a vault under Gringotts with rings in it older than this street. Emeralds the size of your thumbnail. A tiara the grandmother wore that's said to have come out of a goblin king's hoard, though I'll believe that when I'm shown it. She had her pick of the lot, once."
"She did."
"And now she's a Galleon or two and whatever a man like you can carry."
"That's about the whole of it," said Ted. "And she'd tell you herself she came off the better for it — and she'd not be joking when she said it. You'd think a person walking away from all that would go about mourning it. She hasn't mourned it an hour. She came out of that house lighter than I've ever seen her, like someone setting down a load they've carried so long they've stopped feeling the weight, and only know it was there by how they come up straight once it's gone." He stopped. He had not meant to say so much. "So I've not come in to make it up to her. There's no making up a thing she's glad to be shot of. I only want to give her something true. Something that's mine to give her, that nobody handed down and nobody's getting back. That's the whole of what I'm after."
For a moment the shop was very quiet. Somewhere behind a velvet curtain a clock ticked.
Then the old man set down his little key and went instead to a drawer at the very back, under the till, and brought out a flat tray lined in grey felt. The rings on it were plain things. No claret stones, no burning diamond. A band of rose gold gone soft at the edges. A small sapphire in a setting that had slipped a little out of fashion. And, at the end of the row, a ring set with a single pale stone, round and milky, that did not blaze when the light touched it but seemed instead to gather the light and keep it, the way water keeps the colour of the sky.
Ted's hand went to it before he had decided to pick it up.
"Moonstone," said Pelham. "Not worth a tenth of that diamond. Won't impress anybody at a dinner party." He turned it so the light moved inside the stone, slow and soft. "But it changes. See? Never quite the same stone twice. Some people find that wearisome. Some people find they can't stop looking."
Ted held it up. It was a small thing, light as nothing across his broad palm, and the pale fire shifted in it as he tilted his hand — grey, then a wash of blue, then something almost gold at the very heart of it, there and gone. He thought of Andromeda's face when she was working a thing out, the way it changed and changed and you could watch her think. He thought, though he tried not to be a fool about it, of the way she had looked at him the first time, in the corridor by the greenhouses, as though she had found something nobody had told her to want.
"How much?" he said.
"Nine Galleons."
"I'll take it."
"You haven't haggled," said Pelham, with the ghost of disapproval. "Your sort always haggle."
"My sort can't believe their luck," said Ted, "and don't like to push it."
That got a real smile out of the old man, brief and dry as a struck match, there and gone like the gold in the stone.
Pelham took the ring back to do something to the band — a quiet word over it, a touch of his wand, so that it would fit whatever finger it came to — and while he worked he talked, in the way of a man who has watched a great many people walk out of his shop and into the rest of their lives.
"She gave up a great deal more than emeralds," he said, not looking up. "You want to be worth it. Not the ring. You."
"I mean to be," said Ted. "Every day there is."
It was not quite true that she'd been left with nobody of her own. There was the boy — her cousin Sirius, thirteen, sorted into a House that wasn't Slytherin and writing home to say so, who sent Andi letters from Hogwarts in ink-blotted lines that said things about his mother Ted would never have put on paper. She kept every one in the drawer with the tea. It was, Ted thought, about the size of the family worth having.
The old man wrapped the ring in tissue and put it in a small box of dark blue card, and pressed the lid down, and slid it across the glass.
Ted counted out the nine Galleons. He had two over. He stood a moment with them in his hand — two whole Galleons, a fortune by the reckoning of an hour ago — and then he slid one of them back across the counter.
"For the fitting," he said. "The spell. You didn't charge me for it."
"I never charge for it," said Pelham.
"Then for the trouble of saying no," said Ted, and put the box very carefully into his inside pocket, over his heart, where it made a small square shape against the cloth.
He went out into Diagon Alley with one Galleon to his name and all the rest of it ahead of him. The afternoon had turned while he was inside; the light came long and gold down the crooked street, catching the gilded letters over the shopfronts and the steam off the cauldrons and the hundred ordinary witches and wizards going home to ordinary suppers, not one of whom knew or cared that a young man had just spent very nearly everything he had on nine Galleons' worth of moonstone.
He had not the first idea how he would ask her. He had practised it a dozen ways on the walk down and they were all terrible. He supposed he would simply look at her and the words would come, or they wouldn't, and either way she would laugh at him, and either way he would not have changed a single thing.
Ted put his hand flat against his chest, over the small blue box, and walked up the lane towards the place where she was waiting.