The next morning at breakfast, Mum gave us some more frustration.
"I hope all of you are wearing clothes you don't mind getting a bit dirty today" she said.
"Why?" asked Ron
"Because as soon as we've finished eating, we're going to start decontaminating this house. I'm sure you've noticed that it's absolutely filthy all over the place, stuff's breeding too, this house hasn't been lived in for many years"
"But there's Kreacher!" said Fred, "why can't he just do it?"
Sirius gave a hollow laugh
"Kreacher hasn't done any proper cleaning since the last time this place was occupied. Think the only thing he has done is make sure mum's painting is in good condition. He's more loyal to that than he is to me, follows every order of hers without hesitation, whereas I have to ask him 3 or 4 times and shout at him to get him to do what I want. He sees me as a traitor to the family"
"Therefore" said Mum "we have to make this house into a fit place to live in, and to host meetings regularly. It looks and feels pretty horrible at the moment"
"But we're on summer holiday!" I complained
"Yeah, this is meant to be about us getting out and about and having fun, not cleaning up some old house!" Amy said
"Plus, this is Sirius's house, not ours Mum! It should be up to him what happens here!" said George, looking at Sirius
Sirius shrugged.
"I don't care personally. You can clean up this place if you want, it's doesn't bother me"
"Yeah, it doesn't bother us either" I said, looking at Demelza and Amy, "come on, I have a bet to fufill-"
"You will help if you want any dinner tonight!" Mum snapped "and you're not going out without supervision, and especially not into Muggle London!"
"How did you know-"
"Ginny, I have raised 7 children including yourself. I know how you work, believe me, I'm not someone you can fool. We'll start right here in the kitchen today"
It was pointless arguing further.
Sirius levitated the tables and chairs into the back garden so that we'd have enough space, then we got to work. It actually turned out to be a fairly eventful day, and we found several interesting things. There were some ashwinder eggs hidden beneath one of the big cutlery cabinets, for which Mum didn't let us hear the end of about how lucky it was that she insisted we do this. Sirius apologised profusely, saying he'd left the fireplace in his bedroom on and forgot to check it. Had we not bothered to do any cleaning or even started on a different room, the place could have caught fire. We froze them and left them to one side, in that state, they are very valuable for using in potions or eating as a cure for ague.
Behind the cabinet, we found a secret door leading to a room filled with dark artifacts and spellbooks. One of these was a disembodied hand with a mind of it's own, as it leapt up and wrapped itself around Demelza's throat very tightly, strangling her! It took combined relashio spells from myself, Dad, Sirius, Hermione and Amy to get her free, and thankfully we determined that she would be ok as long as she sat the rest of the day out.
"Bet that was a nice security trap my parents set, considering what's in here!" said Sirius bitterly
"You mean you didn't know about this room?" said Mum
"Of course I didn't! Don't you think that if I did I'd have warned her before she opened the door?"
Hermione snuck a couple of the books out and up to our room on the pretext of needing to use the toilet.
"You never know when research like this might come in handy" she whispered as she passed me.
We discovered a few loose floorboards beneath where the table usually was, and in the hardest possible way, as I fell through them and into a room piled with gold! I hit the ground hard and awkwardly, breaking my ankle, which put me out of commission for the rest of the day too, as Mum isn't fantastic at bone mending spells and the healing potion I took is slow acting. We didn't go to St Mungos because this was a very trivial injury compared to the stuff they usually see there, so there would be people needing it much more than I did. It turned out that this was the Black's "emergency supply" of gold in case their Gringotts vault was ever robbed. If that was their "emergency supply" I couldn't imagine what their regular supply looked like!
Thankfully Mum decided that, with 2 of us having been injured, it would be wise to call off any further cleaning and allow Mad Eye to first take a look at each room before we did anything. He would be attending the next Order meeting, that evening. He had been unable to attend the first one as he had been on a mission, which Dumbledore gave him as soon as he recovered from the time he had spent locked up in the trunk.
Demelza and I were unable to use the extendable ears that night as we were bed bound, so the others had to report back what they heard to us. Stugis Podmore had been apperating around the country, trying to convince as many people as possible of the truth about Voldemort's return. Mad Eye had been tracking the Death Eater Actur Mulciber, father of Calo. Tonks gave her first report on Darius Avery, saying that he was passing confidential information on Ministry finances to Voldemort. She had also discovered that Voldemort wanted to place a spy within the Order, similar to what Peter Pettigrew had previously done. That had lead to everyone in the room being security checked, and thankfully all were cleared. Not everyone in the Order had attended that meeting though, so we weren't sure of who it could be, which was very worrying. Charlie apparently had made a floo call to the meeting to say that he had been successful in recruiting some Romanians to the cause, which was fantastic considering the lack of foreign help we'd had in the first war.
After the meeting, Mad Eye cleared the rest of the kitchen to be cleaned, which was annoying, but not entirely unexpected. We would start on it again the next day.
