"Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead." (Benjamin Franklin)
A little while later the kitchen was suffused with the smells of a delicious cooked breakfast, and Lucius had to admit that growing up without magic or house elves made for the acquisition of a few rather curious but valuable talents. He now knew the intricacies of cooking proper scrambled eggs. Eleanor, who was sitting opposite him at the large kitchen table reached over and handed him another piece of toast that miraculously kept popping out of a metal box on the counter behind her.
"So, what are you going to do next?" she asked him. He slathered butter on his toast. "Well, I will first need to find out how the fight between the aurors and our group ended. Ideally they would have killed Lepidus – by accident of course – and the others got away. Worst case, Lepidus is at large, they have caught the others, and someone's going to squeal, naming me in the process. I may find a warrant out from the Ministry when I get home. Horrible nuisance. It will take rather a lot of money and a ton of work from our family advocatus to get off. Plus Narcissa will be in hysterics, and I'll never hear the end of it. Excuse me, please. I really made a bargain with myself not to mention her."
He spread some orange marmalade on the toast and took a bite, ordering his thoughts while he chewed. The aurors knew how to make someone talk. Veritaserum could legally only be used with an advocatus present, but regulations were circumvented in certain situations. If all else failed, "accidentally" locking someone up with a Dementor for a few hours without their wand usually did the trick. He had been through that particular experience when Voldemort got destroyed and all Death Eaters were rounded up. The shrouded figure had sat silently next to him where he was lying on the floor in restraints.
He was suddenly six years old. His father had just caned him, mercilessly, and locked him into the old cupboard in his study. He sat cramped in the dark little space, carefully avoiding the touch of the terrible, filthy things his father kept in there. Even so he felt cold spidery claws examine him, heard whispers and rustlings. His back felt like fire, but he would not cry. He knew from before that in this place among the dead parchment, they feasted on his tears. He clenched his teeth, rocked back and forth.
The image had overwhelmed him, as his world had shrunk to that dark place in which he would remain for all eternity; and he would have told them almost anything, not to have to go through that again. Fortunately Advocatus Tethering, who had been the family lawyer for a long time, had got him off. He had argued influence by the imperius curse. Others, like his sister-in-law, Bellatrix Lestrange, had not been so lucky.
Eleanor was watching her lover intently. His cool assessment of the situation had struck her as rather callous and she was surprised at the lack of loyalty among the individual Death Eaters. Then again, probably everyone was in it for themselves, hoping for an increase of influence and power and only compelled to act together by their shared interest and by their fear of the Dark Lord.
Lucius was eating quietly and looked like he had just immersed himself in some rather unpleasant thoughts. Well, the prospect of ending up in Azkaban, turned in by his precious friends and being yelled at by Narcissa probably didn't have much appeal.
She was more worried by the prospect of George Lepidus out there, searching for her. He was one wizard she didn't care to meet ever again. She had a hunch, however, that both she and Lucius would be seeing more of him. People like Lepidus never went quietly.
She refilled their tea mugs and concentrated on breakfast, when he interrupted her. "What will you do?" Then in an afterthought he lifted his palms at her. "Not meaning to spy on you." She considered. "Well, I need to get back to Hogwarts. There's school tomorrow. I will get in touch with the Oswalds and see how they are doing. Then I would be interested in the same questions you are. Especially in who got caught and who didn't. I didn't reveal myself to the aurors when I warned them about the raid, nor during the battle, so ideally they would not want me for questioning. However, the Death Eaters know me, as I gave my name to them, and they might talk. In which case I'll become a witness."
He considered. "I'd like to send you back the portkey bracelet," he said. "If Lepidus is out there, you'd have a place to flee to. Also, I'd like to see you again." She nodded. His suggestion made sense, and if it hadn't she just had to think back a mere hour to her steam-filled shower upstairs to feel immediately convinced.
The clock above the sink showed noon. Eleanor drank the last dregs of her tea and sat down the mug. "We should break this up," she suggested. "Time to go home." She pulled out her wand to clean and tidy her kitchen utensils, then she led the way to the hall.
As she pulled down her jacket and mittens she noticed Lucius' black robes. "You can't fly in these," she said. "If there are aurors out there, you might just as well holler at them. 'Hey, I'm a Death Eater, take me in.'" He considered, then took his wand and disappeared the dark cloak and mask. She looked at him in his thin shirt and shook her head. "Wait," she said and routed around an old wardrobe in the far corner of the hall.
Finally she emerged with a grey and slightly frayed old heavy wool coat. "Try this, it belonged to my Dad. It's not very fashionable, but it'll keep you warm." The blond wizard wrinkled his nose at the strong scent of mothballs and wet dog that escaped from the garment, but his supply of cold and 'flu potion at home was almost used up. The coat was a little short in the sleeves and tight across the chest, but it would work. "Thanks," he said.
Eleanor picked up the brooms that leaned against the wall by the door and handed Lucius the heavy black Malfoy broom. "Invis-," she started, but Lucius laid a hand on her arm that held her wand. "Wait," he urged her. The next moment she was in his arms as he pulled her in, stroked her face and hair and kissed her deeply.
She sank into the caresses of his tongue and lips and wished she would never have to break the connection. Finally he reluctantly released her. His hooded grey eyes regarded her gravely. "Be safe and be careful," he urged her. "I know you haven't told me the half of what you are planning to do, and I don't want to know. But please don't take any unnecessary risks. You're the only free agent in this setup. No one will be looking out for you."
"There you're wrong," she smiled at him, stroking his arm through the thick fabric of his coat. "I do have help. And now I have the promise of a Malfoy to protect me. I have no intention to die at the hands of scum like Lepidus. Be safe yourself, now." She gave his arm a last parting squeeze, picked up her broom, spoke the invisibilis spell and lifted off over the front garden. He stared for a moment at the point where she had last stood and then slowly and stiffly mounted his own broom to fly home.
He knew that the rest of the day's work was cut out for him. After all, he had not labored and spent money to have his contacts get dirt on anyone they could in the Ministry for nothing. Over the years he had maneuvered himself into a position where he could blackmail at least two of the Unspeakables, three, if Soren's wife took objection to her husband sleeping with that 15 year-old Malfoy had purposely put in his inebriated path after a Ministry function last fall. He had a few aurors on his private payroll as well, not to speak of other assorted Ministry employees. He had bided his time, patiently working with threats and enticements, always looking, always listening, always on the alert for any weaknesses.
Now it was high time to call in some favors. Preferably he would get any information suppressed that implicated him with the Death Eaters, before it even left the interrogation rooms. Even better, he could have one of the Unspeakables step in and obliviate any prisoners with respect to one Lucius Malfoy. A few minutes into his flight he was already busy plotting and scheming, ignoring the cold autumn air that cut through his clothes as he made his way back to Malfoy Manor.
Eleanor actually stopped her broom and hovered over the street for a few minutes, observing the blond wizard in her front yard levitate his broom, turn, and grow translucent as he lifted above the large chestnut tree. By the time he was above the roof of her house she could not see him any more. While she had not lied to him in telling him she needed to go back to school, she had omitted mentioning an errand she was planning to run on the way back. She turned towards the center of London and a little while later joined the crowds of wizards and witches in Diagon Alley.
As she made her way past the stores, listening to the calls of street vendors in the chilly air, she remembered the warm quiet summer afternoon when she had first laid eyes on Lucius Malfoy and shook her head. He was a Death Eater, an arrogant, unscrupulous bastard, a pureblooded dark wizard of the worst provenance, who cared for nothing and nobody save himself and his own advancement and power.
He was an also aristocrat with a sense of honor that prompted him to mutiny, openly defy his leader and draw an unforgivable curse in order to protect her. He had made a truce with her that could easily cost him any favor he had held with Lord Voldemort, should his master ever come back to power and discover how his servant had sabotaged an attempt to restore his body. He was finally the best lover she'd ever had, and even though she had seen him for only a few times now, she had discovered he had the capacity to make her want him and hate him to an extent that truly unsettled her.
Such musings accompanied her to the imposing entrance of Gringotts Bank and she had to forcibly clear her thoughts as she negotiated with a goblin for access to her family's vault. As the bank employee opened the heavy door for her she finally had him convinced to lock her in for exactly two hours, as she was not yet sure what if anything she needed to remove from her holdings.
The goblin gave her a strange look, but eventually closed the door behind him and she heard a series of locks and bolts slide back into place. In the dim light of several torches she turned to the jumbled assortment of trunks, caskets and parcels that was piled on the floor and scattered over the shelves at the back of the vaulted room. She had been here before and had surveyed her belongings in a general way, but now she had come looking for definitive clues about Falco's work.
From her previous visit she already knew that aside from a rather obscene amount of galleons that were contained in two huge chests she was also in the possession of several trunks of rare magical books, a large portion of her eccentric grandmother's wardrobe, which, while rather spectacular, would have even raised collective eyebrows in the wizarding world, and a quite large assortment of alchemistical instruments and mainly black magical items. She had uncovered boxes with poisons and potions, cursebearers, demon sigils, spellbooks filled with strategies and incantations for magical attacks and several rather vicious magical weapons, from aura-eaters and squibificants to hexed wands.
She ignored all of these for the time being, shifted a bale of tanned dragon hide out of the way and opened a large oak chest that contained piles of documents. Settling in she started to sift through the parchment. Old love letters written by her grandparents she could probably ignore, as well as any other documents that dated before 1948, which was the year in which Falco had written the letter from the Budapest auction that spoke of the generation of the homunculus.
When she heard the goblin unlock the door a while later, she had made her selections. She would be able to review the documents later at Hogwarts at her leisure. For now she was sure that she had not left anything behind that might hold a clue to the whereabouts of her grandfather's work. Using her wand she shrunk the papers to a size that would fit into her coat pockets and followed the goblin out of the vault.
The flight back to the school was cold, long and generally uncomfortable, and Eleanor wished she actually owned a racing broom. Perhaps it would be defensible to spend some galleons on her next visit to Diagon Alley and invest in an upgrade. At dusk she finally saw the lights of Hogsmeade shimmer below her and lifted her invisibility spell. A little later she crossed the black expanse of the forbidden forest and finally steered towards the mad jumble of lit towers and turrets of the school. The lights in the great hall showed that dinner was already under way. She sighed and decided that after her performance during lunch on Saturday she would prefer to avoid any questions from her colleagues and head straight for her rooms. Murry would bring her some food and she could get started on the documents.
Eleanor hoped that her return to Hogwarts would be as unmarked as her departure as she swooped up the tall expanse of masonry in the dark until she reached her open window. She ducked as her broom cleared the windowsill and landed back in her study. Isis, her cat greeted her with some accusatory sounds. The rooms were very cold.
Quickly she shut the window and used her wand to light a fire both in her bedroom and her working area. Had she spent a moment longer at the open casement she would have seen a dark figure on a broom detach from the shadows of the forbidden forest and make its way towards the school, following her. The rider kept low on the ground as long as possible and then hid under the cover of the inky shadows of the many roofs and gables.
A little while later Eleanor had finally settled in at her desk. She had expanded the documents to their original size where they now sat in several teetering piles before her. Murry had brought her a dish heaped with helpings from the dinner table and while she absentmindedly chewed on some steak and mushroom pie she began reading. What she had brought back with her certainly proved interesting.
After a few hours she sat back from her workspace and stretched. Isis had finished the remains of her dinner and now lay curled up on her lap, sleeping. The magical hourglass on the shelf by her desk showed it was well past midnight. Before her lay a copy of the rental agreement for the Four Elements Books and Curios store, a small map and a letter from a Signore Aurelio, registered architectus of the Scuola Magica at Verona. Eleanor rubbed her temples and reread the letter.
Dear Signore Sartorius,
I am pleased to inform you that my apprentice and I have successfully installed the obscuroom at your store. Be assured that we do not stand in breach of the rental agreement that expressly forbids structural alterations to the property, as an obscuroom is defined not as an architectural construct, but as an inhabitant.
The obscuroom will be undetectable to anyone who has not been authorized to find it and can be removed at your convenience. I will leave the appropriate process descriptions in your hands. If it pleases you, I would like to ask you and your wife to join us tomorrow at noon for an inspection and settle the financial aspects of our services if our work is meeting with your approval.
Yours sincerely, Juliano Aurelio, A(rchitectus)M(agicus) R(egistratus)
Picking up the map she shook her head. She had never heard of an obscuroom before but imagined that it had to be some kind of hidden undetectable space. Installing it was obviously a complex magical operation if it required a registered architectus magicus to perform the necessary spells. And her father had had one put into his bookstore. Why? He had already locked most of the unsavory family heirlooms he had taken with him from Cologne into the vault at Gringotts. What did he have to hide that he would not even entrust to the proverbial discretion of the goblin bank?
This was the best trail to the homunculus she had found yet. But her research into the properties of an obscuroom had to wait a few hours. She had a full schedule of classes on Monday and she desperately needed some rest. Gently she picked up Isis and laid her on the nest of pillows in the inglenook. Then she tidied the piles of documents into the drawers under her desk, leaving only the map of the store, the rental agreement and the letter from Signore Aurelio. A few minutes later she had slipped under the silk blankets of her bed and drifted off to sleep.
The wizard who had followed her meanwhile had landed in a narrow courtyard between two tall towers in a rather deserted part of the castle. He had not been in Slytherin for nothing all these years ago. Muffled in dark robes he moved swiftly and silently as he hid his broom and stepped up to a wall at the far end of the open space. From his schooldays he still remembered the incantations that would open a hidden doorway to a steep winding staircase that led right down to the castle dungeons. He cast an invisibility spell and slipped noiselessly into the shadows. The doorway closed behind him revealing nothing but a smooth expanse of masonry.