Chapter 3: A Daughter of the House of Black
Grimmauld Place was not, perhaps, the most restful environment for a weary man stealing hours of relaxation between bone-searing transformations and the shadowing of Death Eaters. Even after the six rambunctious teenagers returned to school, the house reverberated from basement to attic with rousing retorts and whispered confabulation, fist-pounding arguments and raucous laughter. In the entrance hall, the portrait of Sirius's mother bellowed reprimands at every half-breed and half-blood who crossed the threshold. In the master bedroom, Buckbeak snorted at visitors and tapped his hooves on the wooden floor. In the kitchen, Molly dished up savory stews and Tonks spilled them across the Order's master schedule, swept them up, and spilled them again as Mad-Eye Moody stumped around and poked his wand savagely at suspicious objects (once inadvertently stabbing Bill, who was trying to kiss Fleur Delacour good night by means of Floo powder and the fireplace). Kreacher lurked in dark corners, competing with Mundungus Fletcher for the possession of objets dark and decrepit beyond belief. Remus, tucked beneath blankets in his attic bedroom, presiding over the assembled Order in the dining room, reading lazily before the kitchen fire, merely smiled. The Order was reunited; the Order was enjoying its reunion, gay and rowdy and exhilarating; for the first time since he resigned from Hogwarts, he felt as if he had been reunited with a purpose in life.
Sirius steamed about his parents, Molly twittered of her children. Remus, brushing a quill absent-mindedly against his nose, remembered his own parents: his delicate, careworn mother, of a wizarding house once prominent but now impoverished and almost vanished amid a tangle of marriages with Crouches and Longbottoms; his bookish, bearded, Muggle-born father, who worked in complementary healing at St. Mungo's and who had, so many years before, given his stamp of approval to the experiments that had produced the first, utterly ineffective form of the Wolfsbane Potion. Remus had been a late and unlooked-for child, born to middle-aged parents who had already lost one son in infancy. How proudly his mother had claimed maternity leave from her modest position in the Department of International Magical Cooperation! How wearily, with what cold and aching despair, she had, a few years later, claimed another leave, to care for a toddler son almost too young to survive a werewolf bite! Well, he had survived, and she had had the pleasure of seeing her bookish, sickly son grow up, amid the darkening clouds of Voldemort's ascent, a passionate partisan of Albus Dumbledore. She had had the anguish of watching this son risk his life on behalf of the Order, the double anguish of seeing him lose each of his few friends, one after another, to madness, death, or betrayal. She died soon after the First War, full of years by Muggle standards, still young by those of the wizarding world. Remus's father, who had taken a profound interest in the treatment of werewolves before it became a matter of personal import to him, had survived her by a decade. He died six months before St. Mungo's certified the Wolfsbane Potion, a year before Remus achieved his longed-for position as a professor at Hogwarts.
Teasing, angry voices invaded the kitchen from the stairwell.
"I am not a daughter of the House of Black! Stop treating me like I'm my mother, Sirius."
"She's a mighty fine witch, Andromeda. A mighty fine-looking witch, too."
"Her looks are more in evidence than her magical powers these days."
"Why don't you invite her to dinner? Your father, too. Surely I'm allowed to see a few—"
"Not a good idea, Sirius. You know perfectly well that Dumbledore would never permit it."
"You know, Tonks, saintly though you are in other respects, your stubbornness is highly characteristic of a daughter of the House . . ."
"Sirius, will you please stop referring to me as a daughter of the House of Black?"
"Well, it's a good lesson for Kreacher." Sirius tossed his handsome black mane of hair and went out, whistling "Toujours Pur" under his breath.
Tonks slumped down in a chair and muttered, "What a pest. He had a crush on my mother when he was about ten, and of course she liked being teased about being a daughter of the House of Black."
Remus shifted uncomfortably. "But surely your mother can't have been much of a daughter of the House of Black if she—er—ran off with your father?"
"Oh, she had plenty of opportunity to be a daughter of the House of Black in the nineteen years before she married him," said Tonks bitterly. She sighed. "It's not her fault. She was brought up that way. Not here, of course—the other property." She added, answering the question on Remus's face, "There's a country house in Yorkshire. A Cyclops at the gatehouse, charmed locks that nip the fingers off intruders, sixteen bedrooms, and a fleet of house elves. It's Unplottable and Undetectable, that's why you've never heard of it. It's supposed to be one of the oldest wizarding homes in Great Britain."
"Sounds charming."
"Yes. That's where my grandparents brought up their three little pureblood princesses: Bella was 'the dark one'—she was always fascinated by the Dark Arts—my mother, Andi, was 'the pretty one'—not that her sisters were plain— and Cissy was 'the baby.' The three of them sat around all through the long winter evenings reading tea leaves and charming each other's hair and setting the Cyclops on the house elves, like sisters in some Muggle fairy tale. Bella was very bossy, and my mother was always a little afraid of her, but otherwise I think she enjoyed it."
"What happened, then?"
"She grew up. She came home from Hogwarts, and that was it. Cissy was still at school and Bella was already married. Her parents wouldn't let her work; and there was nothing to do at home, on account of all the house elves. She was supposed to wait for her parents to introduce her to some nice pureblood boys, but they had a hard time finding any—Blacks usually marry in the family, and there weren't many available wizards just then. So she sat around and twiddled her thumbs and plotted escape. She snuck out via the fireplace and went to a pub in Diagon Alley, and that's where she met my father. They eloped a week later. It made the front page of the Daily Prophet. A daughter of the House of Black and the son of a Muggle ship fitter from Liverpool."
"Your grandparents must have been angry."
Tonks raised one pink eyebrow. "An understatement," she said drily. "They threatened all sorts of retribution—blasting her off the family tree was the least of it. The day my parents moved into their first home, they saw something smoking in the sky overhead. I think it must have been a primitive version of the Dark Mark. There was a boggart in every closet, thoughtfully left by the welcoming committee, and some sort of illegal crossbred snake slithering in the kitchen drain. Bella tried to hex her so she wouldn't have children—but that didn't work. For a few years, my mother thought it had. She was so happy when she found out she was pregnant, and then when I was born, she thought the hex was manifesting itself in another form."
"What do you mean?"
Tonks tapped her hair and screwed up her face. Her hair turned green. A minute later, it was pink again.
"Not a very tragic hex," commented Remus lightly.
"Well, she thought it was. She's been shy around magic ever since. Doesn't do anything but household spells. She always says she wishes she could put a couple of charms on me—one not-wrinkling-tearing-or-tripping-over-robes charm and one not-dropping-things-in-the-kitchen charm—but either she hasn't tried, or they haven't worked."
Remus laughed and Tonks laughed too.
"Actually, it wasn't just me. It was the war. You-Know—well," she paused and took a deep breath. "Voldemort started his rise to power just about the time my parents got married. A coincidence, needless to say. But my mother thought the First War was half her own fault, for annoying Bella and ruining Cissy's life."
"How did she ruin Cissy's life?"
"By running away. After she eloped, my grandparents watched Cissy like a hawk. They pulled her out of Hogwarts a year early, before she took her NEWTs, and locked her up in Yorkshire just like they had locked up my mother. Cissy didn't have the nerve to cut and run. That's why she married late—it took my grandparents ten years to find a wizard whose lineage was sufficiently pure."
"Surely your mother recognizes that Cissy had a choice."
"Well—maybe. I'm not sure. My mother was a peppery girl and a jolly good witch; Cissy was always a follower. Actually, my mother's got much better magical abilities than my father does, but she doesn't use them anymore, except for cleaning the house and patching my robes. Growing up with Bella, she got this sort of conviction that anyone with too much magic ability was more or less bound to go wrong."
"Not all the purebloods became Death Eaters," objected Remus. "The Weasleys, the Longbottoms?"
"Well, my mother was raised to believe that the Blacks were the crème de la crème, and she never gave up that idea. When the First War came, all the best witches and wizards in the Black family—except Sirius—joined the Death Eaters. That confirmed her impression that the gifted tend to abuse their abilities. When Sirius was arraigned on thirteen murder charges, that sealed it for her. I got straight Os on my OWLs, and she hated it—kept saying she wanted an ordinary daughter. She hated it when I morphed, too, so I did most of my morphing at school."
"What did she say when you became an Auror?"
Tonks lifted her head and said, in fluid, tragic, pleading tones, "'Why?'"
"So why did you become an Auror?"
"Muggle killings."
Remus did some quick math in his head. "I don't remember any Muggle killings just then, when you were finishing up at Hogwarts."
Tonks laughed. "No, no. I was seven. We were staying with my father's parents in Liverpool. We used to go stay several times a year, and I loved it. It was magical—"
Remus smiled faintly.
Tonks realized what she was saying. "In the Muggle sense. Escapators and eckeltricity, as Arthur would say. It was fascinating. And lots of cousins and second cousins and next-door neighbors dropping in. Not like home, where none of our relatives was speaking to us. Then one day a building collapsed down by the docks and some friends of my grandparents were killed. We had to go home suddenly, three days earlier than planned. As soon as we stepped out of the fireplace, my mother started screaming about Death Eaters. My father wasn't there; he had gone to the Ministry, even though it was the middle of the night, to do some emergency liaising with the Muggles. My mother put me to bed in the basement under an invisibility cloak and put about three dozen imperturbability charms on the house—knowing, of course, that they wouldn't really help. And then I realized, for the first time, that it was my own aunts and uncles who were responsible for half the strange things that had been happening. It didn't click for me until it invaded my Muggle world—then it just seemed obscene."
Tonks paused and took a deep breath. "My mother is a decent witch, really, she is. Better not to use your powers at all than to use them for ill. And she would never do that. But she does—miss things. Not the Dark Magic, but being a daughter of the House of Black. The money. The status. The Gringotts' elf—"
"I thought that Gringotts' vaults were staffed entirely by goblins."
"They are, with one exception. My grandparents have a house elf stationed in their vault round the clock, to guard their special heirlooms. That's the kind of cachet my mother misses. For a long time, she went around telling her friends that her Muggle father-in-law was 'in shipping,' as if he owned the White Star Line."