Chapter Text
2027
Rose Weasley had read the advertisement four times on the walk from the Apparition point, and by the corner of Sorrel Lane she could have recited it. Charming top-floor conversion. Generous proportions. Original features. Floo-connected. Offers in the region of. The number on the end still did something behind her ribs every time she got to it, but she had done the sums twice and they came out, just, on the right side of possible, provided nothing went wrong and nobody was ill and they never once ate out.
Oliver had done no sums at all. He was walking beside her with his hands in his pockets and his collar turned up against the drizzle, looking along the row of tall brick houses as though someone had told him one of them held a birthday present with his name on it.
"That's it," he said. "Has to be. Look at the chimneys."
"There are chimneys on all of them, Oliver."
"Not like those." He'd stopped on the pavement, tipping his head back. "Those are the good ones. Twisted."
They were, in fact, rather good chimneys—the ornamental, barley-sugar sort that Victorian bricklayers had put up when someone was paying them to show off—and the house they belonged to was the tallest on the Lane, four storeys of dark red brick going grey at the mortar, with a bay window on the ground floor and, right up under the eaves, a little run of windows that had to be the top-floor flat. Flat Three. The one behind the number that made her chest tighten.
A short wizard in a checked cloak came bustling down the front steps before they'd reached the gate, one hand out to shake and the other clamped to a hat that the wind had taken a personal interest in.
"Mr Bones? Miss Weasley?" He got Oliver's hand first, then Rose's, pumping both like a man drawing water. "Digby. Marrow and Digby. You found it all right—no trouble with the Lane?"
"None," said Rose.
"Lovely spot, isn't it. Very sought-after, this end." He glanced up at the sky, which had begun, gently, to spit. "And you've gone and brought the weather with you. Come up, come up, before it sets in proper."
The stairs went up and up in a tight spiral round a well, wooden and worn to a shine in the middle of each tread, and by the second landing Mr Digby was talking without quite enough breath to do it comfortably. Original bannister, he told them. Original glass in the landing windows—see the little bubbles in it, that's how you knew. A very desirable stair. A stair a great many people would give their eye teeth for.
"It's a lot of stair," said Rose.
"It's exercise," said Mr Digby, "is what it is. Keeps you young." He paused on the third landing with a hand pressed to his own chest, looking briefly less young than he had at the bottom.
The door to Flat Three was up one more half-flight, painted a green that had once been smart, and Mr Digby had a ring of keys the size of a bludger to get through it. While he tried them one at a time, muttering, Rose stood on the threshold and did the thing she always did without meaning to, which was feel for the wards.
They were there. That was the most she could have said for them. Where a good ward should have sat across a doorway like a held breath—firm, close, whole—this one was thin as worn cloth, frayed at the edges, with a give in it that made the back of her neck prickle. She looked down. Set into the floor by the jamb was the ward-stone, a lump of grey granite the size of a fist, and running clean across the top of it was a crack you could have laid a hair in.
"When were the wards last renewed?" she asked.
Mr Digby found his key. The door swung in. "Ministry-approved," he said, "when they were set. All above board."
"Yes. When was that?"
"Some time ago now." He beamed at her and stood back. "In you go."
The hall inside was narrow and smelled of cold plaster and someone else's cooking gone long stale, and on the wall opposite the door hung a small portrait in a heavy frame: a Victorian woman in a bonnet, sitting very upright in a painted chair with her painted hands folded, fast asleep. She did not so much as twitch as they came in.
"That stops with the flat, does it," said Oliver, peering at her.
"The vendor's grandmother's," said Mr Digby. "Or the grandmother's companion, I forget which. Been up there donkey's years. She's no trouble."
"She's dead to the world," said Oliver.
At the word dead the woman in the bonnet opened one painted eye, looked at the pair of them without any great enthusiasm, said, "You'll want to keep the fire in," and closed it again.
"See?" said Mr Digby brightly. "Character."
The sitting room was where the whole business went wrong, or right, depending on how you looked at it—and Rose, who prided herself on looking at things one way only, felt it go both at once.
It was the bay. The whole of the far wall bowed out into that great three-sided window she'd seen from the street, and even now, with the light gone flat and grey and the rain coming down in earnest, it filled the room with a soft, pale, moving brightness that no lamp had ever managed. The ceiling had a proper cornice round it, egg-and-dart, chipped in one corner but there. There was a fireplace with a black iron surround and a grate full of old soot, and a picture rail, and floorboards that had gone the colour of dark honey with a hundred years of feet.
Oliver had stopped listening somewhere around ward-stone. He crossed straight to the window and stood in the middle of the bay with his hands spread flat on the sill, looking down at the wet street and out over the rooftops beyond it, and the light did something to him that made Rose's chest go inconvenient.
"Rose," he said. "Come here."
"I'm looking at the skirting."
"Come and look at the actual view, not the—Rose. You can see the whole of it. You can see the clock on the Apothecary from here."
She went, because there was no reasonable way not to, and stood beside him, and it was true: past the chimney pots and the wet slate you could see clear across to the little green clock face over the Apothecary in the next street, and beyond that the smudge of the city going about its business in the rain.
"You could have your morning tea here," said Oliver, quietly, in the voice he used when he'd stopped being funny. "Every day. Right here."
"The Floo," said Rose, to the window, because it was that or say something she'd regret. "Is it registered to the flat, Mr Digby, or to the occupant?"
Mr Digby's smile stayed exactly where it was, but something behind it moved. "Ah—now, that's the sort of question I like. Sharp. Very sharp." He did not answer it.
"Because if it's registered to the occupant," Rose went on, turning round, "we'd have to apply to the Floo Regulation Panel to transfer it, and that takes—"
"Six weeks," said Mr Digby. "On a good day, I'll give you that. But not to worry. These things sort themselves out."
"They don't, though," said Rose. "That's rather the whole point of them."
"Rose." Oliver hadn't turned from the window. "There's a window seat. Look, it lifts—you could keep things in it."
"What sort of things?"
"Things," said Oliver, with feeling. "Our things."
The kitchen was down a step at the back, and smaller than the advertisement had led anyone to hope. There was a stone sink, a run of cupboards with their paint gone yellowish, a scrubbed table someone had left behind, and a great black cast-iron range squatting in the chimney breast like a thing that had grown there.
Oliver went for the range immediately, in the manner of a man reaching for a strange dog.
"Don't," said Rose.
"I'm only seeing if it lights."
"Oliver—"
"You want to know if it lights, don't you? For the survey. Very sensible, that. Checking the appliances." He tapped the range with his wand and said, "Incendio," in the easy, confident way of a man who had never once been let down by a kitchen.
The range made a noise like a large animal clearing its throat. A sheet of blue flame leapt a good foot out into the room, there was a smell of singeing, and Oliver sat down very suddenly on the floor.
There was a silence, into which the fire settled back with a sulky sort of roar, then subsided to a low, sinister mutter.
"It lights," said Oliver, from the floor. One of his eyebrows had gone noticeably sparse on the inner end.
"So I saw," said Rose.
"Charmed, that range," said Mr Digby, helping him up with the air of someone who had done a good deal of this sort of thing. "Very old charmwork. They don't do it like that any more."
"No," said Oliver, patting at his eyebrow, "I don't expect they do."
Rose had already turned on the tap. It shuddered in her hand, coughed, brought up a gout of brown water with a noise like a drain being cleared, and then, after a moment's grudging thought, ran more or less clear.
"That'll be the pipes settling," said Mr Digby. "House stands empty a few weeks, the water goes off, and then—well. You know pipes."
"I'm getting to," said Rose.
She left the tap running and crossed to the far wall, where a paler rectangle on the wallpaper showed a dresser or a wardrobe had lately stood against it. Above the skirting the paper had bloomed. A soft brown cloud spread up from the floor, faintly furred at the edges, going darker toward the middle. She put two fingers to the centre of it. They came away damp.
"Mr Digby."
"Condensation," said Mr Digby, arriving at her shoulder with the speed of a man who had answered this one before. "These old houses breathe, you see. Bit of air through the window of a morning, wipe it down, and you'd never—"
"It's wet."
"It's fresh," said Mr Digby, "is what it is. Air like this, you feel the benefit."
Rose looked at her fingers for a moment, then wiped them on the side of the sink, which was as much comment as she intended to make in front of him. But she caught Oliver's eye as she did it, and Oliver, who could read her in most weathers, gave the very smallest of shrugs—I know, I saw—and did not say anything, which she loved him for.
The bedroom was better. It ran across the front of the flat under the eaves, so the ceiling came down at a slope on the window side, and there was room in it for a proper bed and a wardrobe and a person to walk round both, and the same soft grey light coming in that the sitting room had. Oliver stood in the doorway and did the thing he did, which was furnish it out loud.
"Bed there," he said, pointing. "Under the slope, so you don't crack your head every morning like at my mum's. Chest of drawers—there. Your books along that wall, all of them, alphabetical, whatever mad system you're on. And a chair by the window for you to sit and be cross in of an evening."
"I'm never cross."
"You're cross now."
"I'm thinking. There's a difference."
There was a smaller room off the bedroom, a box room really, with a sloped ceiling so low at the outer edge you couldn't have stood a broom up in it, one little dormer window, and a cold coming off it that had nothing to do with the day. Rose stepped in and stopped.
She could hear the rain. Not muffled the way it was in the rest of the flat, through slate and timber, but close—too close—a soft, busy patter that seemed to be coming from somewhere just above the plaster. In the corner where the slope met the outer wall, the ceiling carried a brown stain the shape of a country nobody had named yet, and the paper below it had lifted and curled away at one long edge.
"What's above this?" she asked.
"The roof," said Mr Digby.
"Yes. What's between us and it?"
"The, ah—the roof," said Mr Digby again, with slightly less brass. "Very sound, the roof. Slate. Original slate."
"There's a stain."
"Historic," said Mr Digby. "Old leak, long since seen to. You'll find it's bone dry."
Rose reached up and laid her palm flat against the stain. It was not bone dry. It was not, in fairness, streaming—but there was a cold, weeping softness to it, and a draught came round her wrist from the joint of the ceiling that carried the smell of wet outside straight into the room.
She took her hand down and turned round, and Oliver was watching her from the doorway with his singed eyebrow and his hopeful face, standing in the little cold room as though he already lived there, and something in her that had spent the last half hour saying no, no, absolutely not to every wall in the place lost the argument all at once and completely.
"Right," she said. "I've seen enough."
They stood on the pavement afterwards, in the drizzle, while Mr Digby wrestled the green door shut behind them and did battle with his ring of keys, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all.
"It's got damp," said Rose.
"I know."
"Rising damp, by the look of it, in the kitchen, which isn't condensation whatever he says, and there's water getting in over the box room, which is the roof, which is the expensive one. The wards are frayed to nothing and the ward-stone's cracked. The Floo's registered to someone who doesn't live there and getting it moved will take the best part of two months. And the range," she said, "tried to kill you."
"I know," said Oliver. "I love it."
Rose looked up at the bay window, gone glassy and grey now that the light had died out of it, at the ridiculous twisted chimneys and the run of little windows under the eaves.
"So do I," she said, as though owning up to a small crime.
Oliver's whole face changed. He didn't grab her, because he'd learned long ago that Rose did not care to be grabbed on a public pavement; he just stood there and grinned at her with the rain running off his nose, until she had to look at the drainpipe to keep her own face in order.
"Miss Weasley," said Mr Digby, materialising at her elbow, keys at last subdued, "if I might read the room, as it were—shall I take it there's an interest?"
"You might take it," said Rose, "that we'd like to make an offer."
Mr Digby's eyes went bright and his hands came together. "Splendid. Splendid. And a figure? In the region of the asking, I'd hope—there's a great deal of interest in this one, I don't mind telling you, a great deal—"
"Five hundred Galleons under," said Rose.
Mr Digby's face did something complicated.
"For the damp," said Rose. "And the roof, and the wards, and the range, and the six weeks of Floo Panel we'll be doing at our own expense while somebody else's grate is registered to a flat we're paying for. Five hundred under, and I'd call that generous, given we haven't had the survey yet."
"That's—" Mr Digby swallowed. "That's a robust position, if I may say."
"You may."
"I'll—" He got out a notebook of his own, considerably grubbier than the one Rose carried, and a self-inking quill that had begun to run. "I'll put it to the vendor this evening. No promises, mind. No promises. There's interest."
"So you keep saying," said Rose.
"You," said Oliver, when Mr Digby had gone bustling off up the Lane with his hat clamped down and his cloak flying, "are the single most romantic woman I have ever met in my life."
"Shut up," said Rose, already reaching for her notebook.
They did not go home. Neither of them said why; it was simply understood that going back to Oliver's cramped rented room, or to the house Rose still shared with two others from her year at the Ministry, would be admitting that the day was over and putting the whole thing at the mercy of the post. So instead they walked down off Sorrel Lane and round to the little chip shop on the corner of the next street—the Muggle one, the one that did proper vinegar—and bought a bag between them, and sat on the low wall by the Apothecary with the clock ticking above them and the rain easing off at last to a fine mist.
"We can't afford it," said Rose, around a chip.
"You just said we could."
"I said the sums came out. That's not the same thing. The sums came out on the asking price with nothing going wrong, and I've now personally counted four things that have already gone wrong, and we don't own the place yet."
Oliver looked out over the rooftops, chewing. "But we offered under."
"They won't take it."
"They might."
"They won't. He said there was interest."
"He says there's interest about the weather," said Oliver. "That's his job. He'd tell you there was interest in the fire that killed my eyebrow." He reached over and stole the last of the chips with the crispy bits on the end, which they both knew were hers by long treaty, and she let him, which told him more about her state of mind than anything she'd said all afternoon. "Rose."
"Mm."
"If they say no, we'll find another one."
"There isn't another one."
"There's loads of others. There's a whole world of flats."
"Not with that window," said Rose, before she could stop herself, and then went rather pink and looked hard at the empty chip bag.
Oliver didn't say anything for a bit. He put his arm along the top of the wall behind her, not quite round her, and they watched the little green clock, and somewhere off across the city a train they couldn't see went past with a sound like the sea.
They gave up, in the end, and went back to Oliver's, because you couldn't sit on a wall all night. Rose got a list going on the back of an envelope—survey, Floo Panel, wards, damp specialist, the roof, ask about the range—and Oliver made tea in his one good mug and his one chipped one and got a book down and pretended to read it, turning a page roughly every twenty minutes so that Rose wouldn't tell him to stop pretending to read.
It was gone eight when the owl came.
There was a tap at the window, sharp and impatient, and there on the sill sat a small brown owl with its feathers stuck up in wet points, holding out one leg with the whole of its manner suggesting it would greatly prefer to be somewhere dry and this was not its idea. Oliver got the window up. The owl stalked in, shook itself thoroughly over the entire table and both mugs of tea, and stuck the leg out again.
Rose had the note off before Oliver had finished apologising to it.
She read it once, standing there by the window with the owl dripping on the envelopes, without any expression on her face at all. Then she read it a second time, as though the first had been someone else's.
"Well?" said Oliver.
"They've accepted," said Rose.
The owl, its work done, helped itself to a chip that had migrated home in the bag, and departed through the window without a backward glance.
"They've—" Oliver was up out of his chair. "Under? They took it under?"
"They took it under." Rose was still looking at the note, at Mr Digby's running quill: Delighted to inform, vendor accepts, subject to survey and the usual, warmest congratulations to you both. "They took five hundred Galleons off for the damp. They didn't even haggle. He must have—" She stopped.
She had been going to say, he must have been more worried about that roof than he let on, and no one takes five hundred off without a reason, and why is the vendor so keen to be shot of it that they'd say yes to the first sensible offer inside an evening—all the sharp, sound, businesslike thoughts that had kept her upright through the whole afternoon and every afternoon before it. But Oliver had come round the table and taken hold of both her hands, and his face was doing something that made all of it feel like a very long way away, and for once—just this once—she let the note lie where it was on the wet table and did not chase the thought down.
"We got it," he said.
"We got it," said Rose, and heard her own voice go strange on it.
"Say it properly."
"Oliver—"
"Say it like you mean it. Go on. Once. Nobody's watching."
Rose looked at him, at the singed eyebrow and the two ruined mugs of tea and the man who had furnished every room of a falling-down flat with their whole life inside of half an hour, and she felt her mouth do the thing it almost never did without an argument first.
"We've got a flat," she said. "We've got our own flat."
"There she is," said Oliver, delighted, and this time she let him grab her.
It didn't last long, because it never did—already, over the top of his shoulder, she could feel the list re-forming, the survey Saturday if they could get it, the letter to Bunce first thing, the Floo Panel, the damp man, the roof. She pulled back a little and smoothed her hair and picked the note up off the wet table before the ink could run past saving.
"We'll want the survey done," she said, "before we exchange. A proper one—structural, wards, damp, the roof, the lot. I'll write to Bunce in the morning. Saturday, if he can manage it."
"Course you will."
"There's no sense getting attached before the survey."
"No," said Oliver, who was already, hopelessly, attached, and knew perfectly well that so was she. He caught her hand again across the table, over the owl's muddy footprints and the drying rings of spilled tea. "But Rose. For tonight." His thumb moved once across her knuckles. "We got it. All right? Just—we got it."
And for a moment she let the note lie flat under her hand and let herself believe, the way he did, easily, without doing the sums—that the difficult part was behind them now, and that everything from here was only a matter of moving in.