An Englishman’s Castle

An Englishman’s Castle
Chapter 6: Criminal Antics

Hermione Granger twisted another curl of her hair around three fingers, winding so tightly that her scalp flared into a patch of pain. She released the frizz, only to seize it again seconds later and repeat the anxious procedure. Her right leg, cross over the left, jiggled and bounced so much that her shoe was precariously balanced on her toes.
With trembling fingers she smoothed the newspaper that had arrived from Harry Potter that morning, squashing the palm of her hand over the sneering picture on the front page, and then unfolded the note that had arrived with it. Barely taking in the scribbled words she re-folded it and scored along the creases with a pair of fingernails bitten down to mere stumps, surrounded by strips of red and thin flaps of skin.
She could hear him in the hallway.
“Professor!” she blurted out, even before he could readjust his blonde burden in order to open the heavy classroom door, “Professor, we have a problem!”
“Can’t you keep your mouth shut until I’ve actually managed to get through the door?” he snapped, “and here, take the cretin.”
Dumbly she accepted Malfoy as Snape crossed the room and opened tapped the bricks behind his teaching desk in a semicircle. The wall sucked itself in, as if it was trying on a new dress it was desperate to squeeze into, and then fanned outwards into a high archway through which Snape strode.
Hermione followed him into the laboratory and sat Malfoy onto a high workbench stool.
“I hardly think it is sensible to put a small child somewhere he may fall off,” Snape rebuked sharply; “he is an idiot after all.”
“Professor, there’s a problem,” she bleated, transferring the child to the floor.
“With your research? And yes, Minerva has as much belief in this child as she could, given previous issues.”
“Not with my research!”
Draco Malfoy began a long wail from the floor and waved his arms around, propelling himself onto his stomach in order to beat his fat arms against the floor more effectively and punctuating the noise from his mouth with soft thumps.
“Be quiet!” Snape barked, “Desist!”
When the child refused to stop the racket, he poked the soft stomach with a dragonhide boot, which resulted in an even louder yell, smoothing back into the wail.
“Malfoy, be quiet!” Snape tried again, punctuating his instruction with another nudge.
“Stop kicking him!”
Something flickered faintly inside Granger’s eyes as she bent down to rescue his victim, affording him a lengthy glance down the front of her jumper. Unfortunately, he was thwarted by a shirt that was firmly buttoned up to her neck.
“Snape!” she finally yelped, “we have a serious problem because, well, see for yourself.”
A newspaper was pushed over to him along the bench, the headline circled in red pen.
“Dear sweet Merlin.”
Snape sat down rather heavily on a lab stool and held the newspaper out at arms length to peer at it more effectively. Granger was hovering over him, Draco Malfoy held under her arm tightly and pulling her hair; he was rewarding her grimaces with smirks and trying quite hard to insert a rounded hand underneath her jumper.
“You are a perverted baby!” she hissed, “stop it!”
“Shit,” Snape finally pronounced, “shit and bugger.”
“Exactly!” Hermione’s voice was rising in intonation as she got steadily more and more worked up, “This is just fabulous – I thought the law was bad enough, but this – well, what are we going to do? – my research is going to be put on hold again – moonstones getting more expensive – stupid child – stupid law – I thought we could trust Art--”
“Silence!”
She trailed off in the middle of her sentence as he roared, tears filling her brown eyes and threatening to spill over her cheeks to her chapped lips. Even Malfoy stopped squirming and trying to cop a feel to gaze at the Potion’s Professor whose pale face had been decorated with two, high splodges of pink.
“What are we going to do?” she whispered after a moment had passed in silence.
There was a long pause.
“I’m not entirely sure,” he admitted.
“You’ll think of something,” she reassured awkwardly, “err - we’ll just have to –err - set him to rights and -uh- pretend we’ve been working and missed the whole story?”
“Minerva has seen him.”
Hermione, her intestines coiled tightly around her stomach, jiggled the baby on her hip automatically when he began to fidget. As he reached for her hair she gently closed her long digits around his fingers and guided them down again without releasing them.
“We’ll be fine,” she stammered out.
Snape was briefly aware of the heat of her upper arm against his and then she stepped backwards and her face filled with the palest red imaginable.
“Sorry,” she excused herself, “no free hands.”
“Put him down in the corner,” Snape replied with his heart beating a tiny bit faster, “I found a blanket and Pomona sent down a few harmless plants for him to play with. That ought to keep him occupied for a while.”
Hermione complied and then returned to where he sat with the newspaper in front of him.
“Shall I fetch some tea?”
“Yes, please.”
“Beef and mayonnaise?” she questioned, and he nodded.
“I’ll be right back. Could you make sure he doesn’t eat anything? He keeps putting things in his mouth.”
“Yes, well, he always did like a full mouth.”
In the corner, Malfoy let out a loud squawk of indignation and Hermione’s blush compounded as she slipped out of the room again. Malfoy started humming.
“What are you doing, you idiot? Are you aware of the problems you’re causing for us?”
There was quiet from the child as Snape looked over the newspaper, and then he started humming again. Snape ignored him in silence, hoping he would tire himself out, until Hermione returned with a silver tray levitating in front of her.
“What’s he humming?” she asked as she poured him a mug and slid it closer to his hand.
“Sitting in a tree,” Snape added the words in a sing-song voice, “k-i-s-s-i-n-g. Surely you know it?”
“First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a baby in a baby carriage,” she finished.
Snape had misjudged his mug’s position and his fingers scraped alongside hers for a brief second as Malfoy hummed even louder.
“WOULD YOU BLOODY WELL SHUT UP?!”
Malfoy shut up. Hermione deepened to the approximated shade of an aubergine, and even Snape’s two splashes of colour re-emerged on his cheekbones. They drank their tea in silence, and ate the sandwiches and crisps.
It wasn’t until Malfoy let out another loud squeal that Hermione remembered he needed food too, so she wrapped half of a sandwich in the newspaper and carried it over with a banana.
“Here, and you can look at the pictures too,” she added, dropping it all down in front of the child.
Malfoy let out a delighted yell as he moved the sandwich and saw himself scowling on the front page. Beating his hand against the newspaper in delight he smeared the banana over the article until all that remained unsullied was the grimacing picture of a tall, slender blonde outside the Ministry and the words “Embezzler of Public Funds” printed directly above.
Underneath the banana were the words:
Draco Malfoy is wanted for fraud. Over a period of four years he has embezzled over G1, 000,000 from the Ministry and is therefore a Class 1 criminal. Any information leading to the capture of this fraudster will be amply rewarded, and any deliberate attempt to pervert the course of justice will be met with a minimum sentence of a G1, 000 fine and a stretch at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.
Shit, shit, shit. Snape and Granger were harbouring a known criminal in their potions’ lab and Snape didn’t seem to have any ideas on how to extricate the pair from this steaming pile of dragonshit. Hermione swallowed hard and thought about shoving a spatula up Malfoy’s arse.
“He would probably enjoy that,” Snape commented idly, tapping his fingers on the work surface.