Chapter 5
Rodolphus Lestrange
September 1st, 2003, Lestrange Manor
Rodolphus Lestrange was having his second cup of coffee this morning. He'd got up at six after laying awake in his bed for nearly an hour. Rabastan and his wife would not be down before the elves had cleared away all breakfast dishes. Luna was suffering from dreadful morning sickness, even the lingering smell of kippers would set it off. Rabastan was oscillating between absolute happiness about becoming a father and crippling fear of being a bad one. He kept his wife company in any case, having week tea and dry toast with her in bed.
There had been no need to get up so early for the current Lord Lestrange, the work for the smooth running of the estate was down to a manageable amount finally and the Wizengamot had no pressing new legislation to pass at the moment. Their last law had stirred up the population quite nicely. It was the fourth Marriage Law in Britain's wizarding world's history. The old geezers in the Wizengamot had wanted to use the one from the last Dragon Pox epedemy but the younger generation, he among them, had protested and had eagerly followed that Muggleborn researcher's explanations about genetics. Most landed members knew about what she was talking even if they'd not use the same vocabulary. They all were breeding some sort of magical or mundane animal or other and knew about the pitfalls of inbreeding. Until the early decades of the 20th century most families had used this knowledge and had married accordingly. While still being snobs they knew that the odd Muggleborn or Half-blood here and there was necessary and they welcomed the new family members.
The preachings of Grindlewald and later Voldemort had been taken in the wrong way by families like the Gaunts, the Blacks or the Carrows. With the advance of Muggle technology a stricter adherence to the Statue of Secrecy was a must, Muggleborns presented a problem in this. Privately Rod thought an earlier integration coupled with airtight secrecy vows for the parents would work just fine, it tended to prevent bigger, noticeable bursts of accidental magic. The Gaunts had always been a mad bunch of purists, even going so far as to speak only Parseltongue. That the Dark Lord had been a Gaunt explained a lot in Rodolphus' opinion.
The real reason for Rodolphus' early awakening was that today the owls with Marriage-Law-matches would arrive. The wizard had seen the calculations for matching people and he remembered enough from his Arithmancy NEWTs to know that they were brilliant. He'd no expectations to ever fall in love, he'd even suspected that his marriage to Bella had robbed him of the capacity for that emotion. But from his Ministry match he could at least anticipate matching interests and in time a form of amicable companionship. Rod had one condition for his future wife, namely that she accepted that the brothers would not be separated again. If she did not get along with Luna and Rab, all right, Lestrange Manor was big enough for keeping ones distance even if the young couple had ten more children, but he would never ask Luna and Rab to move out.
The thought of a child of his own deepened Rod's pensive mood. Not raised to expect a lot from an arranged marriage he had not been too disappointed by Bellatrix' behaviour. She'd joined him in their marriage bed in the early times of their marriage. Later, already affected by either the Black madness or too much Dark Magic or both, she had never made a secret out of her obsession with the Dark Lord. What had really hurt Rod was his wife's absolute refusal to bear a child. He had looked forward to care for a child of his own, to read bedtime - stories, to show him or her all the hiding places in the manor Rab and he had explored as little tykes, to go swimming in the pond behind the dairy farm. At the time the Dark Lord fell the first time Rod had instructed his solicitor to look into an anullment of his marriage on the ground of Bella's voluntary barreness.