CHAPTER THREE. A New Brood.
Hermione awoke on a sunny Sunday morning in early spring feeling great. She and Ron had shared a lovely Italian meal which Hermione had cooked at home the previous evening, they'd got through a fair bit of a gorgeous French wine Fleur had recommended, then made passionate love before drifting off into a blissful sleep.
Ron was still asleep as she quietly got out of bed, attended to her ablutions then went down into the kitchen. "What a lovely day," she thought as she put out a dish of cat food for Crookshanks, who would probably return soon, ravenous from his regular nocturnal 'patrol' of his territory.
She then put the kettle on whilst looking out of the kitchen window across the garden and towards the river bank which their cottage stood by. "Perhaps I will do a bit of gardening later. The weather's good for it and maybe I'll even be able to mug Ron into helping me, rather than having him vegging out on the sofa watching Quidditch DVD's," she thought, smiling.
Hermione made two cups of tea and took them back up to the bedroom, put one on the night stand on Ron's side of the bed, one on her own, then with a giggle she mischievously leapt back into bed, kissing Ron, who woke with a start. "Wake up sleepyhead, you're missing the best bit of the day," she said.
"Bloody hell Hermione!" Ron, who was never the best 'morning person', exclaimed. "Can't you let a bloke sleep? After all, I seem to remember expending quite a lot of energy for your benefit last night." He was, however, smiling as he said it.
"I think you'll find, Ronald Weasley, that the amount of energy expended by BOTH of us last night for our 'mutual benefit' was pretty equal," said Hermione, faking annoyance but spoiling it by grinning. "Anyway, go and have a wee, then come back and drink your tea. Then we'll see if we've both still got a bit of energy left to 'expend' for a while," she cheekily winked at him.
Some while later after 'expending more energy' they were both dressed and sat in the kitchen reading the Sunday Prophet, which the delivery owl had left on the doorstep. They'd split it between them, with Ron reading the sports pages and Hermione the homes and gardens supplement. They had just eaten breakfast, although by the time they'd actually cooked it it was more like brunch. They'd enjoyed their usual Sunday treat of a good fry up, rather than the more healthy breakfast faire Hermione had been able to 'convert' Ron to having the rest of the week.
Hermione said, "I'm going to do a bit of gardening this afternoon, it needs tidying up after the winter and I was hoping you could give me a hand." Ron surprised her by not arguing and saying, "OK, sure, no problem, it's a nice day for it and it'll help me burn off the cholesterol from my gorgeous brecky."
Seizing the unexpected opportunity Hermione immediately took Ron by the hand and led him out into the garden and down to the shed. She opened the door, seized a fork and spade from the rack and handed them to Ron. She said sweetly, "Could you be a honey and dig over the veggie patch for us, whilst I tidy up the rest of the place, we'll need to get some new stuff planted soon."
Ron started digging but realised he'd been conned as soon as he saw Hermione swanning around the rest of the garden, using her wand to prune and dead head the plants, sweep up the winter's detritus, whisk the debris into the compost bin and generally tidying up with a minimum of physical effort.
He watched her for a bit then complained, calling out, "Oi you! You call that work? Here's me slaving away like a navvy and there's you flitting around like a fairy not even working up a sweat! Talk about fair division of labour! Why do I get the feeling I've been mugged?"
"Well you said you needed to burn off some calories," Hermione replied. "Anyway you know there's no easy way to use a wand to dig over the soil and break up the clumps properly Some things just respond better to the physical approach. Besides, you look so hunky with your muscles straining away there," she said, smiling her best 'you wonderful man' smile.
'I'll give you "the physical approach" if I've got any strength left after digging all this lot," Ron said, but smiled back at her. To which Hermione replied, "Promises, promises," and cheekily swinging her hips walked off towards the river bank saying, "I'm just going to check on our little family."
Seconds later Ron heard Hermione yell his name from the direction of the riverbank. Alarmed he dropped his garden fork and ran over towards her. He found her standing by a reed bed pointing at a clump of bloody feathers on the bank.
She looked grief stricken and said, "It looks like a fox has got our poor little family, that plumage must have belonged to Mummy Duck and he probably got the six ducklings too, how sad. It wouldn't have been Crookshanks wading into the reeds to get them, he hates getting his paws wet."
But just then they heard a squeaking sound amongst the reed bed and looking down saw four surviving little baby mallard ducks hiding amongst the stems. Hermione smiled in relief, waved her wand saying "Accio Punnet!" and an old garden basket soared out of the open shed door, across the garden and into her hand. She then levitated the ducklings one by one from the reeds into the basket and said, "At least most of the babies have survived, we'll have to keep 'em in the shed and latch the door closed to keep Crookshanks out, at least until I can have a word with him."
"Surely you don't intend to keep them!" Ron exclaimed. "Merlin's saggy y-fronts Hermione, are you out of your flippin mind, what do you mean, keep 'em? How can we raise four ducklings in the shed when neither of us have a clue about raising ducks? They're not like owls and for that matter we don't even breed bloody owls! That cat of yours would probably sneak in and get 'em eventually anyway. No it's just not practical, they'll have to go to the local wildlife shelter."
But Hermione seemed dead set on raising the little mallards, and said, "Crookshanks is a good cat, if I tell him he's to leave the ducklings alone then he will, he's unusually smart."
Oddly, Ron couldn't deny this as it was true. Crookshanks had never exhibited any specifically magical abilities since Hermione had got him from Diagon Alley, but when they were at Hogwarts he seemed to have been the first to realise that Scabbers, (who at the time was Ron's old pet rat), was in fact an evil Animagus called Peter Pettigrew in disguise. What Ron had originally taken for murderous intent against Scabbers on Crookshanks' part seemed in hindsight to have been more like Crookshanks trying to protect Ron and Hermione from Pettigrew.
Also Crookshanks seemed to have been able to form a friendly bond with Sirius Black and they were seen walking in the school grounds together when Sirius was transformed into his canine form, a most unusual relationship for a cat and dog to have. The cat, it seemed, also knew how to de-animate the Whomping Willow to permit access to the secret passage in it's roots, a trick it appeared somehow to have learned from Sirius.
After these and other more recent displays of the cat's considerable mental abilities they had speculated for a while that Crookshanks might in fact be another Animagus, who had decided to make the transformation to cat form permanent. However it seemed more likely he was in fact half Kneazle, a very intelligent magical animal that could interbreed with normal cats.
"OK Hermione," Ron said. "But even assuming that we can get Crookshanks to leave 'em alone we still don't know anything about rearing ducklings do we?"
"Well it's just as well we are a thoroughly modern wizarding household then isn't it," said Hermione. "You may recall that in the lounge we have a handy little bit of muggle technology called a laptop that is the gateway to a whole cornucopia of knowledge from the muggle's world wide web," she smiled.
This was true, as being muggleborn Hermione was perfectly able to use computers and other such electronic and electrical technologies and had now taught Ron how to do so as well. Having learned from Hermione, Ron now not only knew how to use simple machines like the telephone but other more advanced gadgets. He enjoyed watching DVD's, particularly DVD's of Quidditch matches that had recently become available to witches and wizards and also action movies of the more violent and explosive kind on their large flat screen TV. This was much to Hermione's occasional chagrin, as she preferred wildlife documentaries, costume dramas and current affairs programmes.
Ron was now also competently using a computer, both for pleasure (to play games on) and also in his business life in his partnership with George. Indeed, not to put too fine a point on it, he'd, 'taken to it like a duck to water' and displayed a previously unsuspected talent for web design, a somewhat ironic ability for someone terrified of spiders. For the past week he had been working from home setting up a brand new Weasley's Wizard Wheezes website and online store, on the equally brand new WWWW or World Wide Wizarding Web. This new network now ran in parallel to the normal muggle web, sharing much of the existing infrastructure and secretly renting time on existing servers, with the connivance of the muggle Government.
Their new 'virtual' store Ron and George hoped would supplement and probably eventually supersede a lot of their existing owl order service for their products, cost far less to run, be quicker and so be even more profitable. Thanks to the net they would also soon be able to export more easily and George had his shrewd business brain firmly fixed on the American wizarding market. It was also possible, given the new tendency towards 'openness' that some of their less 'radical' or 'de-tuned' products could possibly even be offered to muggles in the future, if they could get Ministry approval. Something which now, with the changes in Ministry policies by the new administration, no longer seemed completely impossible.
As Ron following Hermione's suggestion went back into the house to look up information about duck husbandry on the net he thought to himself, "Here I've been slaving over a hot keyboard all bloody week and she wants me to carry on doing so on my so-called day of rest! Ah well, I do love her even if she does have some bloody mad ideas and at least it gets me away from digging the bloody veggie patch!"
Meanwhile, Hermione made their new feathered friends comfortable in a big open topped cardboard box in the shed, then set up a well regulated source of warmth for them using a localised reversed entropy thermal spell she'd learned from a new American technomancy book called 'Doing Magic the Quantum Way'. This was a 'new fangled' magical tome she'd recently got from Flourish and Blotts and she had been dying for a chance to try out some of it's spells. She then put a large bowl of water in with the ducklings in case they wanted a swim. Finally she collected up the abandoned fork and spade thinking, "Ah well at least we've got some of it dug." Then shutting the shed door Hermione went back into the house to see what Ron had found out about feeding and raising ducklings.
Ron had got a huge number of links on the screen but they sifted through them together, tracking down the best and most knowledgeable sounding information and printed out several pages of their selections. "Well that should do for now," said Hermione, going off to the kitchen to prepare some suitable duck food.
She found Crookshanks sat by his own food dish, wolfing it down and Hermione said, "I'd like a word with you young sir if I may when you've finished eating, we've got some new additions to the family." Crookshanks briefly stopped eating and looked up at her with a quizzical expression on his distinctive flattened face, as if to say, "What's been occurring in my absence, I can't take my eyes off you lot for one second can I?"