Hermione had been barricaded in her room for the past two days, and she had no plans of coming out any time soon. Orlando had departed on a trip to the Highlands and her father was away on business in London, meaning that the only company she could presumably enjoy was her mother's. Which was an oxymoron.
It was times like this that Hermione was glad for the perks of nobility. She usually considered them a lazy display of opulence, but she would not have survived until now had it not been for the handy bell she had by her bed, which she could just ring to summon a servant to bring up food, tea, books, or anything else she might need (which was not much). It was very simple: all she had to do was claim to be ill. Her mother, of course, wouldn't use time to visit her. And Hermione was perfectly fine with that.
Today was going much as the other days had gone: she had risen, called for breakfast in bed, gotten dressed in a simple bluish-gray house frock with a fraying lace trim at the sleeves, opened the heavy cream-colored drapes to let some light in, and settled down in the white chaise longue by the window with her book in her lap. As she flipped the pages, drawing herself deeper into the story, she unconsciously tucked her legs under her body to get more comfortable. It seemed like the chaise longue could not bear the change of weight: with a loud crack, Hermione suddenly toppled over as the far right end dove toward the floor. Hermione scrambled to her feet and took a good look at the lopsided chair. One of the legs had snapped clean off, probably as a result of prolonged use and old age (it was an antique, after all), and now lay a few inches away from where the corner of the chair's mahogany frame scraped the floor.
"Well, that's no good," Hermione said to no one in particular. She crouched down to examine the damage more closely. It wasn't a simple matter of a screw come loose: it was the wood that had snapped, leaving behind only a jagged stump. The leg would have to be reaffixed and polished to fix the chair to the same quality with which it had been manufactured. And that was beyond Hermione's abilities. A repair of that caliber would require an experienced handyman...
No, a sharp thought popped in her mind. No, whatever I do, I am not calling Ronald in.
After she'd stomped off at the rose corner, the last thing she needed was for Ron to bear witness to two humiliations in a row— and, even worse, to have him play hero for the second one. It would be too embarrassing to ask Ron to come to her rescue, and Hermione was determined not to give him the satisfaction.
"The chair doesn't have to be fixed now," she mumbled to herself, as if speaking the words aloud would somehow convince her of them. "It can be something temporary. Then, eventually, one of the maids will notice and call Ron in. But it won't be me that does it. Yes, something temporary should work just fine."
She thought briefly about just fitting the leg back in its place like a puzzle piece, hoping the mere fit would be enough to bear the load, but the crack of the angle promised to betray her again as soon as she put so much as an ounce of weight back onto the chaise longue. She briefly considering nipping down to the kitchens to ask the lobby boys for some of the glue they used on the smaller fixes, like saddles and sole decay, but she knew that the substance would probably damage the fine wood and leave the fix worse off than it already was. Hermione's regard for the finery of the furniture's craft far outdid her current need. That option was therefore discarded.
Her next idea was to gather a pile of books and jam them under the stump as a replacement leg. The pile just barely reached the leg, but it seemed like it would hold. Contentedly, Hermione returned to her spot on the chaise longue; however, she couldn't concentrate on her reading, for it felt like even the smallest motion of her chest as she drew in a breath was enough to make the chair creak perilously. Sighing, Hermione stood up off the chaise longue. Her precarious arrangement had failed.
She now simply sat on the floor, her back resting against the wall by the window, but it wasn't long before she grew uncomfortable. The angle at which she was sitting made the tulle of the dress's lining chafe uncomfortably against her thighs, and her lower back was already sore with the strain of such a position in such an inflexible dress. Besides, she might tear the fabric, and that would take a lot of explaining to her mother— explaining Hermione was entirely unwilling to do. She stood up. Sitting on the ground wouldn't do, either.
She shot a quick glance around the room to survey her other options. There was the armchair by the hearth, but that was at the other end of the room, behind the four-poster bed, whose imposing frame ensured that almost no natural light reached that corner at that time of day. Using a lamp was not an option: to rely on either oil or electricity when the sunlight through the window was so radiant seemed like an absolute waste. Of course, leaving her bedroom to just read someplace else (and risk bumping into her mother) was out of the question.
She sighed. Only one option remained— even if that option was practically an admission of defeat. I'm going to have to call Ron.
She rang the little bell by her bedside, dreading the few seconds it took for the summons to travel down to the servants' quarters and issue one of them forth to attend her call. It didn't take long before there was a knock at her door and a wiry, wide-eyed maid appeared. "M'lady, you rang?"
Hermione recognized her as one of the newer members of the housestaff. "Cathy, is it?" The maid nodded. "I seem to have run into some trouble with my furniture. Would you mind calling the handyman up for me?"
"The handyman, m'lady?"
"Mr. Weasley? Tall, freckly, redheaded..." And absolutely insufferable.
Now the maid tittered, and Hermione detected a faint blush creeping into her cheeks. "Oh, Mr. Weasley, of course. Right away, m'lady."
The maid disappeared along the hall again and Hermione let her weight fall onto the footstool at the end of her bed. It was done now. All that was left to do was wait. It wasn't long before she heard steps down the hall again, and she braced herself for the inevitable teasing.
The door opened and let in the sight of Ron. He wore tan trousers made out of a coarse fabric, well-worn workboots, and a stained shirt with the sleeves rolled up all the way to the elbow. Hermione stared for a few seconds before realizing her gaze was lingering. She cleared her throat and stood up from the stool.
Ron saved her the trouble of speaking first, though he did so through a smirk. "M'lady."
"Mr. Weasley."
"I understand there is something I can be of assistance with?"
"Yes, there is. Please, step in."
Ron took a few steps into the bedroom, standing in the center as he looked around it. However, the door remained open: Hermione spied the same maid that had fetched Ron still lingering at the door, her eyes following him as he stepped into the room and firmly fixed on his back. "That will be all, Cathy, thank you," Hermione said sternly.
The maid seemed jolted back into consciousness: flushed a bright red, she gave an awkward curtsy before shutting the door with a little too much force and skittering back down the hall.
Hermione was now alone in a room with Ron.
"You've got an admirer," she commented as she walked toward him at the room's center.
"Who? Cathy?" Ron said, the smirk still pressed on his lips. "Oh, she's just being sweet."
"Sweet on you, perhaps."
"What's the matter, Lady Granger, jealous?" Ron said. Hermione found herself unable to reply. Ron seemed to relish in her stunned silence for an instant before he brought them both back to business. "I suppose you didn't just bring me up here to talk about Cathy, though, did you?"
"No, of course not," Hermione said, clearing her throat (again) and hoping it came out sounding like a laugh.
"Well, what's the problem?"
Hermione gestured vaguely toward the lopsided chaise longue by the window. "Trust me, I tried everything I could not to call you in, but..."
Ron stepped toward the chaise longue and crouched by it as Hermione had just scarcely before. A couple of books had slid from the stack, so the weight of the chaise longue was back to being oddly distributed, and the leg still lay nearby. He brushed his fingers along the jagged edges of the remaining stump. "Did you get a splinter?"
This wasn't teasing. If anything, Hermione would've thought Ron sounded... concerned? "Pardon me?"
Still crouching, Ron looked over his shoulder and at her. His fingers were still touched to the jagged wood. "This split is rather nasty. You might have hurt yourself with it if you tried too hard to fix it. So, any splinters?"
Hermione checked her hands, flipping them over— anything to avert looking at him. "No splinters."
"Well, that's good, then."
He worked in silence for a few moments, surveying the damage. Under his shirt, the muscles of his shirt were pulled taut in his crouching position, and he kept bringing a hand up to his forehead to brush away what few strands of red hair dangled in front of his eyes due to the bend. Hermione watched expectantly as he worked, but found her gaze trailing more not along the movement of his hands as they worked, but along the curve of his body in his position. She was mesmerized— so much so that when Ron moved to stand back up she darted her eyes to a far-off corner, as if persuading herself that she hadn't been staring.
"I'll have to bring this into the workshop," Ron announced, just as Hermione had forecasted. "It's a clean snap, so thankfully I'll be able to affix the original leg again without having to look for replacements —which in an antique is of course excellent news—, but that also means I have to be careful when I reattach it. I need space, light, and a few more tools that I've got down at the shed. It'll probably be a few days, but I'll work on it and have it back in no time."
"Thank you so much," Hermione said, examining his face. There was little trace of the boyish demeanor which she'd known in him thus far: his features were set in serious concentration, and he looked assertive, a man in control of his work and its implications. Maybe I like this Ron better.
"Can I ask you a question now?" Just like that, the fleeting glimpse was shattered, and Mr. Weasley the handyman was back to just being Ron.
"You're going to ask it anyway, aren't you?"
Ron didn't even bother to address that. "Why was it so urgent that I come up and look at this chair? Cathy made it sound like a real emergency."
"It is, in a way. I can't leave my bedroom. There's only mother, and without Orlando or father to either save me or distract her, any run-in with her might ensnare me in something I desperately do not want to be in, but from which there is absolutely no getting out of."
"I see," Ron nodded, but the seriousness in his face was now jokey. "Dire straits indeed."
"Oh, lay off," Hermione said, swatting playfully at him with the back of her hand. "It would be dire straits for you too if you had my mother."
"You forget I work for her. That's somehow worse."
Hermione laughed— a pleasant, honest laugh, a laugh that didn't care who heard it.
"Tell you what we'll do, then," Ron said. "I'll take your chair down to the workshop, but I'll bring in one from the guest rooms. They're all unoccupied, anyway. They won't be missed. That way you can barricade yourself in in total comfort. Sound good?"
"Sounds excellent."
Ron moved back toward the chaise longue, lifting widthwise so it stood almost to his height, and used his shoulder as support to heave the chair upwards so he could carry it. "Hand me the leg, would you?" he asked Hermione, who retrieved the leg from the floor and stuck it in the back pocket of his trousers. She felt immodest as her hand slipped into the pocket, because she had felt it brush against Ron's behind and found that she wasn't entirely opposed to what her touch found. If Ron noticed, he refrained from commenting.
Hermione looked on as Ron carried the chaise longue out of the room. She heard him set it gently against the wall closest to the stairs, and then heard him traipse down to another room, returning with an olive-green chaise longue that he set in exactly the same spot as Hermione's own had been.
"Look at that," Hermione said miserably when the chaise longue was set down and Ron was dusting his hands off. "I tried to be a Beatrice and fix my own chair, but turns you were right and I'm a Hero. Maybe not even an Ursula, or a Margaret."
"I think this was very Beatrice-like of you," Ron said, turning from the window to face her. "Strength isn't always the same thing as stubbornness. Sometimes it just means asking for help. Even Beatrice went to Benedick when she needed help sorting the whole Claudio business out..."
"By that you mean she asked him to murder Claudio, so I'm not sure what exactly you're hinting at here," Hermione said as the sourness in her dissolved into a fluttering ease.
"Well, we're not exactly at the 'I-would-murder-my-cousin-for-you' stage yet, but I would say the 'I'll-fix-your-furniture-so-you-can-hide-from-your-hag-of-a-mother' stage is a step in the right direction."
Hermione laughed again, that same, easy laugh that Ron had brought out in her once already today.
"Anyway, thank you, Ron," she said, stepping forward. She placed a hand on his upper arm and Ron seemed to tremble slightly under her touch. Surely it's because he didn't expect it, she told herself, because surely a touch from her hand couldn't make Ron, so strong and solid, shake. To save herself from asking any further question, she was as quick to withdraw the hand as she had been to place it. She spoke again, averting his gaze, "I really appreciate it."
"It's my job," Ron smiled meekly. Perhaps Hermione had startled him after all: his face bore no trace of its usual impishness.
"Anyway, thank you," Hermione said, and hoping to squeeze humor out of the tension that now hung between them, joked: "I suppose you're going to lord this over my head until the day I die, though."
"Oh, absolutely," Ron shifted back into the self Hermione knew, and though she felt momentarily relieved, part of her was disappointed that she'd let whatever moment was forming between them dissolve so easily. "I got to play knight in shining armor, and as if that weren't good enough, you didn't even get to play the part of the fainting damsel in distress well enough because you broke your fainting couch."
"Oh, I shouldn't have brought it up."
"What, like I'd forget? Absolutely not, Lady Granger. You'll be hearing about this forever."
"Get out of my bedroom, scoundrel," Hermione said, placing both hands flat on Ron's back as if to push him out. Again she felt his skin move under her touch, and again she didn't know what to make of that, so she simply continued pushing. Laughing, Ron let himself be pushed until he was out of the room, standing out in the hallway whence he'd come and giving Hermione an amused half-smile.
"Y'know, Hermione, if you really want to be a Beatrice, there's one easy way to do it."
"Oh, yeah?" Hermione taunted, leaning against the doorframe with her arms crossed. Her defiant gaze met Ron's with as much intensity.
"Yes. The shortcut to being a Beatrice..." he said, and beckoned her closer as if to whisper in her ear. Hermione obliged, and felt the hair on the back of her neck prick when Ron's breath grazed her earlobe. Ron held silent for an instant before he spoke: "The shortcut to being a Beatrice is to eat a man's heart out in the marketplace."
"Oh, get out of here!" Hermione cried, and Ron stepped back, bubbling over with laughter. Hermione found the same laughter twisting at the corners of her mouth for a third time already. "I know no such man, Ronald Weasley, but if you don't leave soon enough it might just end up being you."
"I hear that, m'lady," Ron said, and, giving her a wink, dodged out of sight and back toward where he'd left the broken chaise longue.
She closed the door behind him, muttering about him to disguise the laughter that still threatened to trickle out of her mouth, and she felt the familiar hint of annoyance that generally tinged her interactions with Ron. But behind it lurked something softer, nicer, and yet much less familiar. As Hermione returned to the olive-green chaise lounge and crossed her legs to prop her book up against them, she thought of Ron and found that just the thought of him sent, running through her, a twinge of gratitude.