"Patriae quis exul se quoque fugit? – What exile from his country is able to escape from himself?" (Horace, Carmina II, 16, 19)
Lucius found himself standing on the pavement of a narrow, filthy London side-street, his black cane in a white-knuckled death-grip and his robes in disarray. He caught his breath. Of course he had never reached his wife's lover. Aurors had grabbed him immediately, had dragged him though the gawping crowds of wizards and witches at the Ministry and had rather unceremoniously thrown him out.
He was still fuming at his wife's – ex-wife's he corrected himself – gall at daring to call it quits on him. Whatever their private hang-ups had been, she had always supported him in public, just as he had done his part at her social functions. He would have never revoked the commitment that they both had made, however tempting that might have felt at times.
It was almost unimaginable that she had actually dared to shame both him and her with her open act of disloyalty. Divorce among the pureblood houses was just unheard of. And the most unnerving aspect of it all was that she had nothing to gain by her scandalous course of action. As far as she was concerned, he was out of the picture in any case. It had to be some harebrained plot cooked up by her lawyer-lover in order to secure the Malfoy fortune for the Blacks. He sincerely wished he could go back and beat the pair's motivation out of them, which, of course, was out of the question.
He was now in the world of muggles, and already sticking out like a sore thumb. How many muggles made it out on a sweltering hot day in June wearing floor-long black hooded robes? Out of habit he shook the heavy fabric back in place and then reached into his pocket to pull out the small vellum-wrapped parcel Tethering had slipped it to him earlier.
A few women were walking towards him now, and one seemed already to be commenting to the others about his rather strange appearance. He stepped back from the street and slunk behind the phone-box that allowed magical folk access to the Ministry. On examination he found that the parcel contained a rather small flat key and some strangely colored oblong pieces of paper showing numbers and the face of the muggle queen of England. "Twenty pounds," one paper read, which made little sense. It certainly was not information about its own weight.
Lucius put the key and the papers back in his pocket and found that the vellum wrapper had a penned note on the inside. He recognized Eleanor's handwriting in her signature amber ink. The women had now passed after casting a few curious and blatantly appraising glances in his direction. Lucius lifted the parchment and read:
"Dear Lucius,
When you read this your first minutes of exile will have passed. I will do everything in my power to make this time as short and as safe for you as possible. Enclosed please find some muggle money. One galleon is about equivalent to five muggle pounds. They use the decimal system, believe it or not! So there are 100 pence to a pound.
The key leads to my old muggle house in North Finchley. Do you remember it? You liked the shower, last time we were there… My suggestion would be to make your way to a major street and wave down a taxi. Give the driver the address on the back of this note. The trip should cost you about 25 pounds. Pay the driver when you arrive.
Once you are there I will send a muggle friend of mine to bring you what you need. Please try not to damage him. He is really quite nice, and I am rather fond of him. He knows a bit about wizards, so don't be shy, either.
I will have to go back to Durmstrang for now, as I have acquired a rather large trail of aurors keeping tabs on me after my Azkaban excursion, courtesy of Mr. Moody, no doubt. If they see me trying to get in touch with you, I am sure they will arrest me. I'll write you through the muggle post, though!
I miss you terribly, but I am glad you are at least free and alive. Take good care of yourself, Lucius.
Yours, Eleanor"
He turned the paper to read the address, and then proceeded to follow his lover's recommendation. Taxis were apparently easy to find, and after some waving at the hulking black cars that sped past him, one even stopped. The driver stuck his head out of the open window. "Need to get back to the set?" he asked. Lucius lifted an eyebrow. "The set?" The man shrugged his shoulders. "Yeah, the movie set, you know. I just thought, the blond wig, the robes, that flashy pimp cane…"
The wizard shook his head. This conversation was as incomprehensible as it was pointless. Had this muggle just dared to call him a pimp? Normally he would have put the insolent little bugger in his place, but he needed him and was in no position to fight. "I need to go to this address," he said very slowly and loudly, so the idiot would understand him, and held out Eleanor's note for him to read.
"Whatever you say, guv'nor," grinned the man. "Get in." The door-handle proved a bit of a problem, after Lucius realized the driver was not going to do the polite thing and get out to open the car for him. Muggle servants were obviously rather ill-bred and churlish.
Eventually he settled in the back of the taxi, arranged himself, his cane and his robes in the rather cramped, small space and decided that transportation by any other means than carriage or magic seemed rather tedious. The taxi wound its way among buses, cyclists, pedestrians and other cars, stopping almost constantly for no apparent reason and in between scheming how he would punish Narcissa and her lover if he ever got back to the wizarding world, Lucius looked out of the window at the hustle and bustle of muggle London.
To him it was an odd sight. So far in his life he had carefully avoided any contact with muggles where possible and encountered them mostly at night during raids and usually in much smaller numbers. This sun-drenched, sweltering beehive of activity felt actually rather intimidating. There were so many of them and they were so blatant about who they were, going about their business as wizards and witches only dared in special places like Hogsmeade or Diagon Alley.
Lucius hated them, their noise, their smell, their stupid self-confidence, the ugliness of their machines, their clothes, their houses. They were an infectious pest not only in the magical world but even for their own world, spreading everywhere, polluting everything. People like Arthur Weasly, who welcomed them were demented fools. True wizards like Lord Voldemort held the real vision of how things had to be: separation first, extermination next. However, the blond wizard had to admit before the sheer numbers of people that zipped past him, that the second part of the plan appeared rather utopian in broad daylight.
Eventually the roads seemed to clear somewhat. People and cars got more sparse, houses had less stories and the occasional tree appeared. Lucius even found he could tolerate some of the older buildings, the ones that had bay windows with lead-glass panes, carved wood-beams and pointed gables above the doors and trellises with blooming roses around the sides. Truth be told, they were rather small, and he was unable to see how people could in all decency live in them, but they did not quite offend the eye like some of the square hulking concrete towers with hundreds of featureless square windows in them that he had seen earlier.
Finally the taxi came to a last stop. The driver pushed open a glass panel that separated his side of the car from the passenger compartment and craned his head back. "Okay, here we are. That'll be 28 quid." Lucius lifted an eyebrow. Pounds and pence he understood now, but what was a quid? Something like a sickle? He decided that the number was close enough to Eleanor's estimate to go with the pounds. He pulled out two colored papers that showed a ten and a twenty respectively and held them out to the driver.
He got two small coins back that reminded him a bit of galleons and then had to figure out how to get out of the damn car. Eventually the driver relented and did get out himself to open the door from the outside. "Not from around here, eh?" he asked. "No, not really," sneered Lucius, swept up his robes, grabbed his cane and stalked away from the taxi towards a familiar looking broad chestnut tree in bloom that he remembered stood in the front garden of Eleanor's old home.
As he opened the squeaky cast-iron gate in front of the property he heard the taxi drive off. Lucius took a deep breath and walked up to the narrow two-storey house that he would be forced to call his home for a yet indefinite amount of time. Eleanor's key fit the lock, and soon he found himself standing in the long dim hallway that he recalled quite vividly from a cold autumn evening six years ago.
That night Eleanor had saved him from a contingent of aurors after a botched Death Eater raid. He had suffered from the after-effects of a rather nasty cruciatus that had originally been intended for her, and she had been furious with him, because the raid had been directed at some of her friends. She had also been grateful for his intervention with regards to the curse, but he had really only found out about that the next morning, when she had introduced him to the rather fascinating muggle invention of a shower.
With a sigh he pulled off his heavy Death Eater robes and hung them on the coat-rack on the wall. His cane found a new home in the umbrella stand beneath it. Now robbed of its core it would have a mostly decorative purpose anyway, though Lucius knew from experience that it could be relied on to deliver a rather well-placed and incapacitating blow at need. The snake-head handle had certainly seen its fair share of blood.
The wizard looked around. He had survived his trial, he had made it to his new home, he had taken off his robes – he had absolutely nothing else to do. The silence of the old house descended on him like a tristitia spell, and he swallowed hard as he realized that he could quite easily go mad with boredom over the following weeks and months. "Still better than prison," he murmured to himself as encouragement and then shook his head. "Oh Hecate, I'm already talking to myself – great!"
He decided to get himself a cup of tea and some decent food and then explore the rest of the house. The kitchen still looked like he remembered it from his last visit. He gave the various muggle implements on the counter a wide berth and opened some cupboards and drawers at random.
Many objects he recognized, though he had to admit that even a magical kitchen would probably hold surprises for him. After all, they were the domain of house-elves or perhaps mudblood witches, not of a self-respecting pureblood like himself.
Eventually he had located a long tin of biscuits that looked promising. It spelt "Plain Chocolate Hob-nobs" down the side, and the muggle-picture of the contents seemed quite appealing. He had also found a box of tea-bags that said "PG Tips." It seemed muggles needed to have strange additional names for everything.
Now for boiling water. Obviously waving a wand over a mug of water and casting a heating spell was out of the question. So how did muggles get water to boil? He decided that his alchemistical and potions training might help. If you lit a fire under an alembic, its contents would eventually start to boil without any spells. Muggles had to rely on simple physics like that the entire time. So the logical next step would be to start a fire – again without magic.
Half an hour later a very frustrated wizard sat at the kitchen table munching on a plate of biscuits and drinking a plain glass of milk from the fridge. It seemed very likely that his food would be mostly cold in the near future. This proved to be a rather inauspicious start to his life without magical powers. Lucius sighed and broke another hob-nob in half. At least the biscuits were rather good.
Suddenly a shrill ring tore through to silent house. Lucius jumped out of the kitchen chair that fell back with a crash, peered into the hall and grabbed his cane from the umbrella stand. Behind the stained glass windows of the front door a shadow indicated a visitor. The wizard approached cautiously. No one outside of his lawyers and Eleanor should know he was here, and surely they would simply apparate. The shadow moved slightly and another piercing ring echoed through the rooms.
Lucius took a deep breath, lifted his cane, stretched forward and opened the door. A muggle man in his forties stared at him, and the wizard slowly lowered his weapon while trying not to burst out in mocking laughter.
The man before him wore the most ludicrous attire he had ever seen: brown pants, cut off above the knee to show off the muggle's pale and hairy legs, even allowing a glimpse of the man's socks, that went half way up his calves, a shirt, also brown, with most of the sleeves cut off and a skinny brown necktie, that hung down the man's chest like a leash. The shirt had a front pocket with a small coat of arms emblazoned on it that spelt "UPS". Not even a wizard child would ever willingly wear such demeaning clothes.
Lucius forgot his previous caution. This ridiculous muggle couldn't possibly pose a threat. "What do you want?" he asked curtly. The man blinked slowly. He had many odd people open the door on him for his deliveries, and the tall man before him certainly didn't qualify as the worst. But this guy had definitely read too many Anne Rice books or something: white-blond hair half-way down his back, a knee-long waistcoat that maybe Queen Victoria would have thought looked sharp and a walking stick with a spiny snake-head thingy for a handle. Who did he think he was? Dracula's cousin?
He realized that the owner of the house seemed to grow impatient, and something in the icy light of the grey eyes that stared down at him told him that he should concentrate on his job. He indicated a hefty parcel on the floor beside him and held out a pad and pen, wondering why he should feel goose-bumps on a hot day in June. "Delivery for you, sir."
Lucius couldn't believe his ears. His first impulse was to bellow at the idiotic muggle in anger. How stupid were these people? Didn't he know to use the delivery entrance at the back and give the parcel to the house elves? He gripped his cane, then realized that Eleanor's house didn't have a delivery entrance, merely a back-door to the garden. There certainly were no house elves, either.
He tossed back his hair. "Fine," he said haughtily. The man swallowed. "Could you please sign for it here?" The muggle held out the pad and pen again and tapped a little box next to the name "L. Sartorius" with his finger. Lucius considered for a moment, then he wrote "L. Sartorius" in the box with a flourish and gave the pad and pen back to the man in the ridiculous brown robes. He neatly stepped aside to allow the servant to carry the parcel inside, and was highly surprised and offended, when the man merely flipped shut the pad, turned on his heel and walked off down the path to the front gate after a short good-bye.
Lucius stood rooted to the spot, speechless at such insolence and rudeness and watched the man start up a large car, the same color as his clothes and drive off. It dawned on him that he was really expected to carry the delivery himself, just as he had been expected to get in and out of that taxi by himself. Curiosity eventually won out against outrage. So he carefully leaned his cane against the inside of the door frame, bent down and with a grunt lifted the cardboard box. He closed the front door with his heel and walked back into the kitchen where he set the parcel on the large dining table.
After some work with a steak knife he was able to open the box to reveal a piece of paper and what looked like piles of small scraps of fabric. He placed the paper on the table and touched the first piece of cloth, only to find that it quickly grew and expanded under his fingers until he held what appeared a pair of dark grey somewhat washed-out trousers. 'Shrinking spells,' he thought to himself, feeling quite touched at encountering some magic, even if it was not of his own doing. He laid down the pants and picked up the paper.
"Dear Lucius,
This parcel should reach you after you got to my place. I hope you have settled in a bit already. I left the kitchen fully stocked before I moved out, so you should be okay for food for the next few days. The parcel contains a bunch of muggle clothes and shoes. I hope they fit, even though they will be a bit unfamiliar to wear at first. At least that way you can get out of the house when you feel like it without drawing undue attention.
I have also included some wizarding stuff for you, and a book that I wrote a couple of years back on living as a muggle when I wanted to put my muggle-studies curriculum that I developed at Hogwarts to some use.
You will probably find it offensive, but I highly recommend you read it before you do too much about the house, particularly in the kitchen… Muggle households can prove lethal to the uninitiated, occasionally they even take the lives of their non-magical inhabitants. So be careful. If you're unsure about something, try not to mess with it.
Mr. Oswald who you may remember from your raid six years ago will be by on Friday with food. He was a friend of my father's and assures me he does not hold a grudge regarding the fact that you and the other Death Eaters tried to torture and kill him at one point.
I'm still in cahoots with your advocatus and will write you soon with news of our progress.
Yours Eleanor."
Lucius explored the rest of the box and eventually had a rather large pile of muggle clothes spread across the table. He was glad to see that none resembled in the least the cut-off pants, shirt and socks of the servant who had made the delivery. He also found several pairs of shoes and boots that expanded under his hands, and finally some decent wizard clothes, some of which he recognized as items that he had left behind in Eleanor's rooms at Durmstrang over the years.
The last item on the bottom of the box was a thick leather-bound volume with the title "Living Like a Muggle. A Practical Guide for Young Wizards and Witches. By Eleanor Sartorius." Lucius opened the cover and looked at a magical picture of the author on the flyleaf. Eleanor was wearing muggle clothes, smiling and waving at him. He compressed his lips and ran his fingertips over the photograph. He remembered some of her last words to him. "You are a Slytherin, Lucius, you are a survivor."
Well he'd better make damn sure that the world of muggles didn't kill him, then. So, despite his disgust at having to immerse himself in muggle studies of all things, he sat back down behind his plate of biscuits and began to read.