Life in Black and White
Chapter Two
"This is poorly worded." Dorcas Meadowes' voice was sharp, her slender finger jabbed at a passage on the parchment Hestia was bent over.
"I—" Hestia began, but Dorcas jumped back in, shaking her head in obvious disapproval.
"No excuses. Tighten it up; it's a contract, you need to specify. If your wording was any less exact, you'd have a loophole on your hands, an actual loophole. The Science of the Back Door; a Study on the Utilization of Loopholes, that was on the list, I believe." Hestia opened her mouth to agree (Yes, the one by Justin Case, was the politely edited version of an answer she'd prepared, omitting the altogether unnecessary and critically dangerous finish of you nitpicky, impatient bitch) but Juriswitch Meadowes continued on. "Have you been keeping up with the reading? If you know what weaknesses and mistakes they're looking to exploit, then you'll know how to strengthen up the bits you need and avoid the pitfalls. Everything needs to be ironclad, Miss Jones."
Quiet fury flooded Hestia. Had she been keeping up with the reading,indeed! She'd finished all the books weeks ago! She kept her mouth shut, though; Hestia was smart enough to recognize defeat when it criticized her contracts. It's just a first draft, I was going to go back and edit it, Hestia thought mulishly, her mouth twisting up and her brow scrunching as Juriswitch Meadowes moved on to ambush Daniel Abbott, who nearly stabbed himself with his quill when her hand came down to point out some fatal grammatical error that would no doubt let murderous contract-breakers run free to flout legal bureaucracy and kick puppies. Can't get everything right in one run through, can you?
Mondays mornings were, in the tradition of Mondays mornings everywhere, hellish. Contracts were finicky, particular things that depended on a hundred thousand minute little details. Even Hestia, who excelled in noticing minute little details, found the subject frustrating and endlessly, painfully intricate.
The clockwork routine of the Monday was especially disappointing today; they'd been expecting something. Despite the excitement over their promised involvement in the Selwyn case, the three apprentices hadn't heard any more about it. They'd all studiously looked over the file they'd been given on Friday (Daniel Abbott was in the hesitant beginning stage of being able to recite the thing—in its verbose yet information-free entirety—on demand, but then he had the enviable gift of photographic memory) but they'd been shunted off into the same back office as always and told to draft up mock contracts much as they did every Monday morning when the Juriswitches and –wizards were too busy with the weekend backup paperwork from the DMLE to be bothered teaching the apprentices.
Alasdair Diggory, whose cousin was a secretary for Juriswizards Dearborn and Henley—the two in charge of the Selwyn case—had told Hestia and Daniel what little he'd managed to find out in at least four separate conversations during the course of the morning, each of which the two listened to with rapt, hopeful attention. And it wasn't anything that wasn't being plastered all over The Daily Prophet, anyway.
Ophion Selwyn was being tried, among a series of other very serious and rather well-substantiated accusations, on charges of belonging to an organization known as the Death Eaters, and the wizarding world was in an uproar. Under the law recently enacted by the Wizengamot under Albus Dumbledore, membership in any organization designated by the court as dangerous, cult-like, or otherwise objectionable—while not grounds for arrest and prosecution on its own, an important stipulation in the law—brought new and greater consequences on those who fell foul of the law. The Selwyn case was the first (of many, was whispered ominously in the corridors) Death Eater trial ever brought before the Wizengamot, the first case prosecuted under this new law.
Selwyn was being charged with at least ten counts of non-lethal Unforgivable use, two counts of lethal Unforgivable use, and two counts of murder by unspecified dark magic, in addition to unauthorized Obliviation and tampering with governmental Floo lines.
Or at least that was the deduction of everyone not in the know in the Department of Magical Law, bits of information and gossip gleaned from chatty secretaries and quick glances at parchments that 'slipped out' of files. Nothing had yet been formally announced and everyone was deathly curious. The resulting quilt of charges they'd pieced together was a damning one indeed; if convicted on all charges, Selwyn stood to spend more than ten lifetime sentences in Azkaban.
When Juriswitch Meadowes had finished ripping Alasdair's contract into tiny bits, she excused herself, telling them to rewrite the things and she'd be back before lunch to check them again. The minute the door closed behind her, Alasdair was out of his seat, his face red as the ink that marked up his parchment and the offending document crumpled up in his hand.
"Calm down, Ally," Hestia said wearily, pressing her forehead to her desk. "We know you're brilliant and unappreciated." The facetious tone of her voice did not go unnoticed by Alasdair, who shot her a filthy glance and tightened his hand around the crumpled contract.
"We all really are," Daniel said earnestly, looking morose. "I thought we were going to be able to be helpful today."
Alasdair pulled a face. "We won't be helpful until we pass that exam; they don't trust us now. Every time they look over and think 'oh, might we entrust a tiny bit of responsibility to our fine apprentices', they see these," he shook his wrist to waggle the grey tassel that hung down to the floor, "and remember that we are, indeed, simple apprentices."
"Well, these 'simple apprentices' better get on these contracts before Meadowes comes back," Hestia suggested, looking around to the other two. Daniel seemed to agree, looking back down at his red-riddled parchment with a sense of inevitability. Alasdair looked mutinous, glaring at the crumbled document in his hand with intense dislike. "Whinging about anything is just going to ensure we never see anything on the Selwyn case, so just do as we're supposed to, Ally," Hestia implored.
He grumbled, but did sit down and when Meadowes arrived an hour later, could not find fault with any of the contracts presented to her.
"She was looking so hard to find something wrong," Alasdair grumbled over his lunch. The three were seated around the Fountain of Magical Brethren in the Atrium of the Ministry, which was noticeably quieter on the lunch hour.
"That's what she's supposed to do," Daniel put in fairly, taking a pensive bite of his roast beef sandwich. "I mean, she's a bit…" Daniel trawled his vocabulary for an objective word, "…abrupt, shall we say, but it is what she's there to do for us. Our contracts were a bit loose."
Alasdair snarled, picking the crusts off his own sandwich. "Well, what are we supposed to do? Write a perfect example on one go 'round? I hadn't even finished, much less had a chance to go back through and proofread." Hestia had her mouth too full of lemon crème to do more than nod her enthusiastic agreement. Too right!
"Are you eating conjured food again, Hestia?" Alasdair eyed her china plate of lemon pudding suspiciously, turning on her rather unfairly considering she'd just sided with him. Hestia shrugged wordlessly; it seemed a bit pointless to claim she'd packed the elaborate pudding, plate, fork and all, with the single, vaguely withered apple she'd just eaten.
"That's really unhealthy," Daniel put in with some genuine concern. "My mum had a friend who starved herself into hospital like that."
"Eating disorder," Alasdair added acidly, his thin, annoyingly attractive face projecting disapproval but no surprise as he looked Hestia up and down critically. "I thought you looked skinnier." He chucked a wrapped Pumpkin Pasty from his own lunch at her head. "Eat that, you silly vain cow."
Hestia looked mutinous, but Daniel gently put in, "You'll want to have had something, Hestia, it might be a long afternoon." The man had an earnest, kind air about him and it made Hestia snatch the pasty and rip into it with a defiant glare at Alasdair, who looked entirely unconcerned with the turn of events.
"How's your new nephew doing, Alasdair?" Daniel asked politely as the conversation lulled a little awkwardly against the musical notes of the falling water. The younger man visibly swelled with pride.
"Marvellous. He's a lovely little chap, a real Diggory, our little Ced! Amos and Samantha are thrilled, couldn't be happier." Hestia smiled to herself, a little against her will, as she polished off the pasty, trying not to lick her fingers just because she knew Alasdair would notice how hungry she obviously was. There was something about men and their enthusiasm for babies that really was just irresistible, even when the man in question was generally somewhat insufferable.
Hestia shot a grateful glance at Daniel as Alasdair rolled on with the laundry list of accomplishments his three-month-old nephew had to his name, his formerly sour attitude forgotten. Daniel waved her off with a slight shake of his head that said it's nothing.
Juriswizards Henley and Dearborn were waiting for them in their tiny shared office, looking grand and imposing and too big for the apprentices' woeful little room in their official robes. Henley was holding court at Hestia's desk, looking through a file, while Dearborn held up the wall by Daniel's desk, having a low-voiced conversation with Dorcas Meadowes. The atmosphere among the interns morphed instantly from lunch-hour informality to steel-edged eagerness, and all three stood up a little straighter.
Joshua Henley was an average-looking man in his mid-fifties, edging towards the portly and with a definite hard edge to his look, which was fixed unblinking on the three. Hestia and Daniel cowered slightly under it; Alasdair seemed unimpressed. Caradoc Dearborn, on the other hand…Hestia cringed. He was handsome. Juriswizard Dearborn was the respectable, golden kind of good-looking that tied up Hestia's tongue and left her feeling fifteen years old and hugely inadequate. And he, like Daniel, had that kind, patient aura about him that made it ten times worse; not even someone you could write off as an arrogant berk and, horribly, the kind of person who noticed exactly how uncomfortable he made you.
Henley wasted no time and addressed them briskly. "The Selwyn case is, as you know, huge and the workload corresponds. You three will be taking on some of that; you'll be assigned to one of us." Hestia froze, already knowing which way the wind was blowing, and knowing her assignation was the best, worst, and only option. Henley barrelled on. "Mr. Diggory, you're with me. Mr. Abbott, Dearborn. Miss Jones, you'll be helping Juriswitch Meadowes."
Dorcas Meadowes smiled tightly at Hestia, and the only positive she could see was that at least she wouldn't be stammering, stumblingly incompetent in Caradoc Dearborn's golden presence.
Meadowes wasn't unkind in any way, Hestia decided as she climbed the steps to her and Sturgis' place in Clapham. It wasn't that she was unpleasant, or rude, or overly demanding—she was just the sort of person for whom such things came easily, and thus couldn't understand Hestia's ignorant missteps, her failure to immediately grasp the concepts and ideas presented to her. And she didn't quite know how to explain all those things that came easily to her, which left both of them quite at a loss.
But there was one thing that Meadowes loved about her—Hestia could read. Hestia could read quickly, and could retain the knowledge in just one read through. Meadowes was nowhere near as fast, and thus Hestia came to the task of reading through the old law books with cases that bolstered theirs. It wasn't a bad assignment at all, and Hestia left the Ministry that night feeling deliciously useful. It was something to tell Sturgis, at least.
Selwyn's lawyers, understanding how thoroughly they were boxed in, in terms of the charges being levelled and the sheer amount of damning evidence against him, were instead choosing to fight the new law and the extra weight it added to the sentence. It was prejudicial, unfair, contradictory to the freedoms outlined in The Rights of the Magical Citizen, etcetera and so on and so forth. They were going down, they knew, but they were going down loud and kicking and without any dignity whatsoever.
Sturgis wasn't at home, which was surprising. He was usually firmly ensconced in the sofa by six o'clock in the evening on any of the weeknights, but the flat was still and quiet. Hestia bypassed the kitchen and headed straight into her bedroom.
Hestia loved her bedroom. It was orderly and warm and familiar, all of her things piled around, the thick, jewel-toned Oriental rugs plush under her bare feet. She carefully placed her shoes back into their place and hung her bag off the hook on the back of the door, leaving the books inside. She'd promised herself a night off from studying, and she was going to have it.
She threw herself down onto her satin duvet, digging her face into the pillows blissfully. Hestia was quite sure she could lay there for the rest of her life.
Five minutes later, though, she was quite ready for something else. Sturgis had failed to return home, so she flipped on the wireless and turned it to a station that broadly advertised its disinterest in the news and current events in between long stretches of music—she was in no mood to hear anything more related to the Selwyn case, and that was sure to be all over the news anywhere she cared to look.
She conjured an ice-cream cone as she browsed her wardrobes, resolving herself to a night of creating new outfit combinations that she'd never have a chance to wear. She licked it thoughtfully, her mind wandering back to lunch. What was wrong with conjured food, anyway? She did a good job, too. Hestia wasn't extraordinarily talented with wandwork (Sturgis had bit his tongue when she'd mentioned that in their fifth year while pondering career options, restraining himself from the obligatory fifteen-year-old-boy, gutter-minded 'So that's why you never have a boyfriend!' for only a minute or so) but she was damn good at faking good food—she could feel the fat in the ice cream clinging to the inside of her mouth in the way that only really good ice cream did—and so what if it was actually non-existent? All the better, really; lemon crème puddings and butter-pecan ice cream weren't exactly good for you, and it wasn't as if she just didn't eat.
She was considering how a spring-green waistcoat might look under her apprentice robes when Sturgis thundered in the front door. She was pretty sure, from the footsteps, that that was the end of her quiet night.
A/N: James is in pieces on the desk next to me, and I'm PRAYING things get sorted. Just thought I'd post this, because I have no idea when I'll be able to get around to another, what with this disaster and my moving back over the weekend. It shouldn't be too terribly long, in any case, but probably not this weekend.