Part Two
Christmas Present
In the spirit of Christmas, Alphard decided to forgo the cheerless courtesy he might have afforded his brother-in-law by retiring quietly to his bedchamber as instructed, and instead walked the brisk fifteen paces down the second floor corridor to Orion's study and flung the door open.
After a brisk double knock, of course—he was not a savage.
"Shall I—'come in, and know you better man'?" Alphard leaned against the doorframe. "No—you'd need a garland of holly 'round your head for that, wouldn't you, 'Rion? And I suppose you're far more the Jacob Marley, in type, anyway." He pulled the door back and examined the front of it with theatrical care. "You ought to have a knocker installed shaped like your face."
The man sitting behind the ornate desk in the center of the room gave his intruder the briefest of upward glances.
"You may come in," Orion Black said, in a voice as dry as Christmas kindling. "As for the rest, I haven't the faintest idea of what you're speaking. And nor—" He stood up from his desk, eyebrow quirked upward in an expression of bland irony. "—Do I believe you have any intention of explaining it to me."
Alphard shut the door behind him and strode in, a sporting laugh on his lips. Unlike Cygnus, Orion at least had the intelligence to recognize when his cousin was making one of his private, queer jokes. Used to the younger man's love of theatrics (which he tolerated while privately disapproving of heartily) Orion was utterly unfazed by the door banging open without warning. Alphard Black had been pushing into places he was not invited since they were children—and he understood well that it was only his natural charm and sense of humor (not a gift many in their family shared) that prevented his normally jumpy relations from hexing him on the spot.
Not that some of them hadn't considered it. He'd trained himself up in counter-curses for a reason.
"None in the slightest!" Alphard laughed, gaily. "I consider it a gift of the season not to tell you from whom and where I pick up my notions."
"For that I am thoroughly grateful."
Alphie took the outstretched hand from across the desk and gave it a firm shake. Orion had stood up to greet him, in gentlemanly fashion, but he had not circled around the desk—it would take more than a drop-in from Alphard to dislodge his younger cousin from the spot where he was most comfortably situated.
Orion settled back into his chair and immediately went back to the business of reading through the massive red accounts book. Alphard had some vague notion it was very important—or at least, for his brother-in-law, it was.
"I thought I told that elf to see you to your chambers," Orion said, dipping his quill into the ink stand. "And get you—freshened up, and the like."
Was that thinly-veiled disapproval of his beard, Alphard wondered, amused.
"You know me, Orion—don't like following orders overmuch." He settled himself down in the old sofa chair at the far end of the study—the one he suspected Orion would've spent three-quarters of the day in, if he could get away with it. "And I've come to rouse you from this cheerless pall you've found yourself in."
"You've come to do nothing of the kind, Alphard," his cousin rejoined, dryly. "You're avoiding your mother's company by pretending to prefer mine."
Alphard clutched his chest, as if he'd been struck by a particularly nasty curse.
"How uncharitable! There's no pretense about it. I do prefer your company."
Orion used his wand to siphon off a splotch of ink from the parchment into the inkwell.
"You ought to write her more," he observed, lightly. "And visit more than twice a year."
Alphard folded his arms and leaned back in his seat.
"I should say, I only prefer your company when you don't turn scold on me." Orion didn't raise his head from the parchment over which it was bent. "Why should I write her? She wouldn't be interested in what I have to say." He stroked his beard. "And she certainly wouldn't have anything interesting to say to me."
Orion set down his quill and gave his cousin a severe look.
"Are you under the impression I was suggesting you write her letters for your—own amusement?"
"Well, why else would I write 'em?"
Orion open his mouth and closed it again—confounded and annoyed, he shook his head with a familiar resignation and crossed out a line, severely. Alphard resisted the urge to laugh. He could all but see the turning of the well-worn cogs of Orion's mind—a steady, predictable machine, like the steam-powered locomotives which had come into vogue the last century.
That one wrote letters to one's mother because it was the expected and proper thing to do would be the entire basis of his line of reasoning—and as Alphard's wanton disregard for his testy mamma's feelings indicated he clearly didn't accept the premise, 'Rion's argument was cut off at the legs from the jump. His cousin had long since given up trying to talk 'the black sheep' into making sense—for Alphard had a dizzying array of rhetorical tricks and sleights of hand—things that would have left far more imaginative men than Orion speechless.
"If you don't know, I couldn't begin to tell you."
Having decided to forgo further arguments with his impossible cousin, Orion instead informed him he would go as far as to personally escort Alphard up to his sleeping chambers, as he knew there would be no getting rid of him now, and that the interloper would do nothing but attempt to distract and confound his efforts to do work until he left the study with him.
As Orion still had a column of sums he insisted on finishing up, Alphard was left to observe his brother-in-law at his leisure. He took genuine pleasure in this task. He was fond of his cousin—he even admired him, in the way a great study of human character and foible must admire a specimen of manhood so wholly and completely unlike himself.
He's grown a mustache, Alphard observed, highly amused. On any other man of seven-and-thirty, an old-fashioned thick mustache of that kind would have looked ridiculous, but on Orion's handsome face—for he was as classically well-proportioned as a Greek statue—there was something almost dashing about it, though it also aged him. Perhaps that was the aim.
He did not think he'd ever known a wizard who enjoyed being young less than his cousin.
All the pleasures of youth that had been afforded to him by right of birth, station and fortune were utterly wasted on Orion. He could have had any woman he wanted as a wife and many more besides—but instead, to the dismay of every envious wizard they knew—he'd fixed on Alphard's willful elder sister as his bride at the ripe old age of twelve and never so much as glanced at another pretty face.
He'd once overheard Cygnus say (in that shrewish tone of voice that barely masked his ill-conceived jealousy) that he suspected Orion had a tendre for Walburga only because she was the first girl apart from his sister he'd ever spoken to, and
As far as he could tell, all Orion had ever wanted was to be settled and married to his family's satisfaction, such that he no longer had to bother with social functions such as this party.
The Black heir had gotten his wish.
Sitting behind the desk, nose to the grindstone, he was at ease, contentedly wiling away the hours of the social event of the season with the 'affairs of state' his elderly father was only too happy to fob off on his workhorse son.
Alphard supposed it made a kind of sense. The natural solemn dignity that had seemed unbearably pompous in a schoolboy and priggish in an unmarried buck of two-and-twenty—quite suited the established husband and father of two he had become.
Orion had at last grown into the staid, middle-aged homebody he had always been at heart.
What a contrast to poor Cygnus, still trying to reenact the 'glory years' while his waistcoat burst at the seams.
"I always miss this house when I'm away," Alphard remarked, staring idly around the room at the faded pictures and objects which had adorned it for the better part of a century. "And then when I'm back in it, I never remember why." His lips turned up in a caustic sort of smile. "There's something about it…"
"Not the company?" Orion asked, head still bent over his account ledger.
"No—never that!" Alphard laughed. "It must be the…siren song of my blood."
His cousin smiled, appreciatively. Orion may not have had the soul of a poet, but he had the mind of a satirist—Alphard's cousin only heard the irony, not the kernel of real truth behind it.
One couldn't shake off blood, like dust from one's boots.
Grimmauld Place was like a magnet. It could attract as it repulsed, depending on how one's heart had turned.
"How do you like living here?"
Orion glanced up.
"Well enough."
"Better now that your father's out of it, I'd wager."
A thin smile flashed across Orion's face.
"He always preferred Noire House, anyway."
An amusing game—trying to get Orion to speak ill of his father. He was scrupulous about the honor owed him, but at the same time, could never lie outright to a direct question. If there was one creative bent Orion's mind turned, it was to polite euphemism where Arcturus was concerned.
He snapped his accounts book shut and looked up.
"Shall I take you to your room, then?"
As they ascended another flight of stairs to the third floor corridor, Orion made a few polite inquiries as to how long Alphard would stay.
"Out before New Years, I should think." He stretched his arms high, as if he was already feeling the walls of his ancestral home closing in around him. "I'm for Tonga, next."
"Really?" Orion asked, in a flat voice, as he opened the door for his brother-in-law. "What on earth is of interest there?"
Alphard smiled, mysteriously.
"Oh, nothing much—for you, anyway." Alphard stuck his hands in the pockets of his robes, hoping to find one of those toffee sweets his traveling companion had given him 'for the road.' "There's a famous shaman there by the name of Atamai Lomu—specializes in weather magic. They say he's responsible for every typhoon this side of Taipei. Have you heard of him?"
"No, but he sounds like a charlatan. If God had meant for us to meddle with the elements—"
"—He wouldn't have given us the means by which to do it?"
Alphard's trunk and the smaller carpetbag he used for more personal effects (including his wand, when he was traveling in mixed company, for there was not an inconspicuous place to hide it in Muggle garb) had been brought up already, the latter next to the nightstand, wedged awkwardly in between the corner of the bedside table and his four-poster.
Lucretia had evidently not been wrong about the quality of the help, at present. What a strange place to put his bag. If it had turned 'round the other way it could have slid right next to the nightstand.
Odd…
He looked around the dark green damask bedroom he'd stayed in this house ever since he'd outgrown the nursery he and Cygnus had shared with Orion when they were boys. It was the room their parents used to stay, in those days—the Emerald Room, a ghastly monument to all Slytherin House trophies and memorabilia from time immemorial.
"Home sweet home," Alphard murmured, already feeling a tad depressed at the sight. It was like being back in his school dormitory. Some men might've taken comfort in that thought—he was not one of them.
Like Orion—though he suspected for very different reasons—he was only too happy to cast off the shackles of his youth.
The young host had just begun the tedious affair of offering excuses for why he must leave his brother-in-law there and return to his guests, when they were interrupted by the sound of a familiar quick, light step and a breathless cry, somewhere between alarm and gratefulness.
A woman appeared at the door, clothed in a mountain of black satan and crowned with a goblin-made tiara that could have fetched the price of a large Tudor cottage at auction
"Ah! 'Rion, there you are, goodness me—" She smiled, before her elegant and swanlike neck doubled over with a cough. "It feels as though—I've been searching the house—an age, looking for—well, there you are—anyway…!"
Orion goggled at her—then gave his cousin a perplexed look. Neither he nor Alphard had ever seen Madam Melania MacMillan Black, wife of Arcturus and grand dame of English magical society, collapsed against a doorframe and breathing heavily she might have climbed every stair in Grimmauld Place twice in a bout of resistance training.
"Mama, whatever is the matter?" Orion took her arm, his placid face showing a flicker of concern. "Are you ill? Shall I fetch someone, or—?"
Madam Black waved off her son's attempt to check for early onset signs of dragonpox, and instead pulled herself up (difficult, with that several pound silver diadem) and turned to their guest, who had just sat down on his bed.
"Oh—Alphard!—dear me, didn't even—even see you—" Melania smiled, vaguely. "Your—your mother will be so pleased—but whenever did you arrive at the house? I didn't hear a word!"
"Half-hour ago, or thereabouts." Alphard leaned back, resting his head lazily on the ornately carved headboard. He turned to study it with academic detachment. Pair of snakes—mating or biting off each other's heads—perhaps both at once? One never knew, in this house. "I make a point of not letting words be heard of me, Aunt Melania."
She blinked at him, in that curious, birdlike way that showed she had heard what he said and knew just enough to be sure she couldn't make him out.
Instead of probing further as to why he would want to make himself scarce at his own family's social bash of the year, she instead turned back to her son. An aura of desperate entreatment hung about her like the mild lavender scent she'd been wearing since she was quite a young girl.
Miss MacMillan had been a creature of habit, too.
"It's the children, Orion—they've...disappeared."
Alphard had rarely seen Orion ever lose his temper, but at these words, a black cloud passed over his face. His brother-in-law drew himself up to his full height and let out a tight breath through his teeth.
"Again?" He demanded, curtly. "I thought we employed a nursemaid for this purpose."
"Well, it is Christmas, 'Rion—and they're very excitable, though of course they should have been bathed and in bed hours ago." Alphard had to stifle a laugh—Melania hated anyone in her family to be cross, especially with her. "We've been looking all about the house for them, and haven't—yet—had luck."
"Does Walburga know about this?"
Melania winced and blanched.
"I didn't want to—bother her about it," she said, in a small voice. "Oh, you know how she gets."
Alphard sat up, his curiosity piqued. You would have thought Melania was talking about her own mother-in-law, from the nervous and—quite frankly, awed manner in which she spoke of her strong-willed daughter-in-law. But that was Aunt Melly, in a nutshell. A tall and elegant woman, she had been considered a great beauty in her day—a debutante of grace and, if not wit, incomparable sweetness—but Alphard thought that marriage to a demanding, forceful husband, coupled with long exposure to his difficult and temperamental kinsfolk, had exacerbated an already nervous disposition, making her prone to fits of mild hysteria at even the possibility of a family quarrel.
Which in their family was any occasion where two or more Blacks were present and breathing.
"How long have they been missing?" Orion asked, rubbing his temples to ward off the rising headache. "And where have you looked already?"
"The lower bedrooms are all empty. We thought—that is, Miss Bisset and I—we thought they might've come in here and hidden." She turned to Alphard. "They so excited when they heard you were to visit. S in particular, he was quite cut up when he was told he'd have to wait until Christmas morning to see you."
"Was he?" Alphard drawled. 'S' must've been the older one Cyg called 'a terror'—of course, it had slipped his mind what it stood for, at present. "Whatever for?"
He could not imagine being an object of interest to a boy of—that—well, whatever age they were. Younger than ten, surely…
"Oh, Miss Bisset said it's something he heard from Andromeda about you being in Nepal." She fluttered her hands, vaguely. "He's got a yen for yetis."
He sat up even straighter, at this—but his brother-in-law, whose brow was already firmly fixed in a furrow, now turned full-on scowl at the suspected reason for his sons' disappearance.
"If that girl spent less time listening to the nonsense my children spout and more time disciplining them," Orion said, severely. "She wouldn't be packing her bags later this evening."
"Oh, Orion, you're not going to dismiss another one?"
"Well, if I don't do it, Walburga certainly will—after another trick like this. It's insupportable. They're seven and five-year-old wizards, not trained circus performers."
"Whatever are you talking about, 'Rion?"
"All that escaping, Mama!"
"Ah!" Alphard clasped his hands together. "That's how old they are, is it?"
He watched impassively as Orion strode across the room to the large wardrobe on the other side and flung the door open.
It was empty.
Orion let out a sputter of annoyance and slammed the door shut again with a wave of his wand.
"Damn." He spun on his heel, sharp eyes darting about the room. "Not there…"
At the sight of Orion pulling up the coverlet to peer under the bed, Alphard's brief flicker of interest in his cousin's troubles sputtered and died. Children were, then, as he imagined them to be, a mostly tedious affair. He already was wearied by the whole business. Alphard stretched his arms up again, thinking vaguely of pulling out the bottle of liquor he'd stashed away and fashioning himself a nightcap. He could always summon an elf for any fixings he needed, if he wanted to avoid a run-in with his father, who most certainly could be counted on to be the one wizard waiting in ambush in the pantry at two o'clock in the morning.
"The—the thing is, darling, she'd be the fourth one dismissed just this autumn," Melania pointed out, in what was for her the closest she got to cajoling. "Oughtn't you and Walburga…just perhaps…give Miss Bisset more of a…chance to get her bearings? If she was just allowed to be a tad more familiar with the boys—"
"Walburga doesn't think it's proper," Orion snapped, irritably. "For the help to be forever fawning and petting and spoiling her children. And I must say that I agree with her."
Especially when she was not permitted to do so herself, Walburga's brother thought, dryly. From what he understood of his sister's domestic arrangements, their parents were still very much involved and constantly giving input in the ways in which she failed to meet their exacting standards for the rearing of young Black children.
"Well, she's not above spoiling them," Melania said, in a rare moment of pointedness. "In her way, when she thinks no one's looking. S will have a swelled head from all the boasting she does about him, in earshot—"
"—Nonsense. Walburga has never exaggerated or misrepresented either of their talents—"
"—Yes, but one doesn't always want them to hear it themselves, dear. It makes children far too self-possessed, and that's not becoming! Better that a boy think he's worse at his studies than he is, that's what your father has always told me, and I think he's quite—"
"—It does seem a tad ill-advised to throw a girl out on her back Christmas Eve night," Alphard interrupted, conversationally. "Who will watch 'em tomorrow? Seems more sensible to wait until Boxing Day, at least."
Alphard had rolled onto his side, and was about to reach his arm in the direction of the nightstand, where his carpetbag and the brandy lay—when his eyes fell on the hitherto unseen space between the wall and his luggage, and he froze.
"Oh, Andromeda can help with that, if it comes down to it," Orion said, pushing aside the dresser with a wave of his wand. "She's better than the paid nurses, as far as I can tell."
"I don't think Cygnus would like that very much, Orion. He'll say we're taking advantage."
For a long moment Alphard stared into the corner. A look of puzzlement crossed his face, which quickly turned to decision—then, in a flash, he turned his head in the direction of his cousin and Melania, who by now were pulling aside all of the curtains to check the windowsills for wayward young wizards.
The decision he had come to surprised him—and he was not used to being surprised in this house.
If there was any time of the year for a reversal, though, he supposed Christmas would be it. If this was when the spirits chose to draw would-be misers and cynics out of themselves and into the bountiful bosom of Christian charity, would it not be a time to do the same for a worldly and selfish wizard of nine-and-thirty, as well?
Perhaps he was not beyond saving.
"I've an idea, 'Rion—instead of trying to flush these nephews of mine out like rabbits or Jarveys—" Alphard flung his feet over the side of the bed and stood up. "Why not appeal to their sense of reason, and er—provide a bit of verbal incentive? They are Blacks, after all. I'm sure they're sensible and just of mind—like their father."
Orion turned from the curtains and considered this suggestion—he was naturally able to read the sly inference in Alphard's tone.
"You think I ought to cajole them?"
"Fear is a great motivator, in my experience." Alphard's eyes twinkled with mirth. "I recall your father once telling Cygnus and I that he would curse off our fingers if we should ever have the insolence to stick them in a pie again. Quite did the trick! I was never tempted again."
"Your brother did it again at the first opportunity."
"And his thumb has never looked right since!" Alphard exclaimed, cheerily. "Only proves my point."
Orion nodded, coming to a decision—failing to notice the shadow of a wink his cousin gave the gap between his carpetbag and the wall.
He walked to the center of the room and cleared his throat.
"If any sons of mine are nearby and can hear me," Orion said, in a raised and what he undoubtedly thought very authoritative voice. "They should know that if both of them are not up in the nursery, in the bathtub in twenty minutes, I will be taking all their Christmas presents down to the furnace and—throwing them upon the fire."
A heavy silence followed this grave threat. Orion held up a hand to silence the anxious muttered words he anticipated his mother exclaiming at the thought of the fit her grandsons would likely throw if this horrid possibility came to pass.
Alphard, meanwhile, made a point of looking everywhere but in the direction of his luggage.
"Said presents will be used as fuel to heat these disobedient sons' rooms—" Orion peered at the curtains. "—Is that—is it quite understood, what will take place?"
Only the ticking of the hall clock broke the silence.
Orion waited another few seconds before releasing a long, weary sigh of frustration.
"Come on, Mama—they're obviously not in here. Probably gotten stuck in the airing cupboard again." He rolled his eyes in Alphard's direction. "As for you—well, I suppose I'll need that drink of ours to be stiff, now I've got this to contend with."
Alphard bowed to him.
"I shall pour it for you myself, my dear man." He winked. "And I—ah, won't mention any of this to Burgie, should I run into her, eh?"
Orion's scowl deepened. He nodded once and stalked out of the room, robes sweeping behind him, reminding Alphard amusingly of an Oxford don in a high dudgeon.
Melania flitted forward and, after two light pecks on the cheek—the French way—told him she thought his new beard quite frightful and expressed her wish that he grace Noire House with a visit before the new year, as they had excellent pheasant and jabberknoll hunting this season, and her dear husband got very lonely after Christmas Day, when the family festivities wound down and everyone went away. She then trailed after her only son, and as Alphard stood in the doorway and watched them ascend the staircase towards the upmost floor of the house, Melania chattering nervously in Orion's ear, he thought how very alike they were.
How very credulous and hardworking—and how very easy to fool.
"I believe, as they say—" He shut the door and bolted it behind him. "The coast is now clear."
There was a short pause, and then a small face—in which was set a pair of bright grey and intelligent eyes, identical to Alphard's own—poked out of the spot between his carpetbag and the wall and peered around.
Seeing no father or grandmother in sight, the mouth split into a cheeky grin.
"Golly—that was a close one, wasn't it?"
Happy Third Day of Christmas! A wild Sirius appears. :) As always, comments appreciated.