Sirius jabbed a finger at the very bottom of the tree, at the name REGULUS BLACK. A date of death (some fifteen years previously) followed the date of birth.
“He was younger than me,” said Sirius, “and a much better son, as I was constantly reminded.”
“But he died,” said Harry.
“Yeah,” said Sirius. “Stupid idiot … he joined the Death Eaters.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Come on, Harry, haven’t you seen enough of this house to tell what kind of wizards my family were?” said Sirius testily.
“Were — were your parents Death Eaters as well?”
“No, no, but believe me, they thought Voldemort had the right idea, they were all for the purification of the Wizarding race, getting rid of Muggle-borns and having purebloods in charge. They weren’t alone either, there were quite a few people, before Voldemort showed his true colors, who thought he had the right idea about things. … They got cold feet when they saw what he was prepared to do to get power, though. But I bet my parents thought Regulus was a right little hero for joining up at first.”
“Was he killed by an Auror?” Harry asked tentatively.
“Oh no,” said Sirius. “No, he was murdered by Voldemort. Or on Voldemort’s orders, more likely, I doubt Regulus was ever important enough to be killed by Voldemort in person. From what I found out after he died, he got in so far, then panicked about what he was being asked to do and tried to back out. Well, you don’t just hand in your resignation to Voldemort. It’s a lifetime of service or death.”
“Lunch,” said Mrs. Weasley’s voice.
She was holding her wand high in front of her, balancing a huge tray loaded with sandwiches and cake on its tip. She was very red in the face and still looked angry. The others moved over to her, eager for some food, but Harry remained with Sirius, who had bent closer to the tapestry.
“I haven’t looked at this for years. There’s Phineas Nigellus … my great-great-grandfather, see? Least popular headmaster Hogwarts ever had … and Araminta Meliflua … cousin of my mother’s … tried to force through a Ministry Bill to make Muggle-hunting legal … and dear Aunt Elladora … she started the family tradition of beheading house-elves when they got too old to carry tea trays … of course, anytime the family produced someone halfway decent they were disowned. I see Tonks isn’t on here. Maybe that’s why Kreacher won’t take orders from her — he’s supposed to do whatever anyone in the family asks him. …”
“You and Tonks are related?” Harry asked, surprised.
“Oh yeah, her mother, Andromeda, was my favorite cousin,” said Sirius, examining the tapestry carefully. “No, Andromeda’s not on here either, look —”
He pointed to another small round burn mark between two names, Bellatrix and Narcissa.
“Andromeda’s sisters are still here because they made lovely, respectable pure-blood marriages, but Andromeda married a Muggle-born, Ted Tonks, so —”
Sirius mimed blasting the tapestry with a wand and laughed sourly. Harry, however, did not laugh; he was too busy staring at the names to the right of Andromeda’s burn mark. A double line of gold embroidery linked Narcissa Black with Lucius Malfoy, and a single vertical gold line from their names led to the name Draco.
“You’re related to the Malfoys!”
“The pure-blood families are all interrelated,” said Sirius. “If you’re only going to let your sons and daughters marry purebloods your choice is very limited, there are hardly any of us left. Molly and I are cousins by marriage and Arthur’s something like my second cousin once removed. But there’s no point looking for them on here — if ever a family was a bunch of blood traitors it’s the Weasleys.”
But Harry was now looking at the name to the left of Andromeda’s burn: Bellatrix Black, which was connected by a double line to Rodolphus Lestrange.
“Lestrange …” Harry said aloud. The name had stirred something in his memory; he knew it from somewhere, but for a moment he couldn’t think where, though it gave him an odd, creeping sensation in the pit of his stomach.
“They’re in Azkaban,” said Sirius shortly.
Harry looked at him curiously.
“Bellatrix and her husband Rodolphus came in with Barty Crouch, Junior,” said Sirius in the same brusque voice. “Rodolphus’s brother, Rabastan, was with them too.”
And Harry remembered: He had seen Bellatrix Lestrange inside Dumbledore’s Pensieve, the strange device in which thoughts and memories could be stored: a tall dark woman with heavy-lidded eyes, who had stood at her trial and proclaimed her continuing allegiance to Lord Voldemort, her pride that she had tried to find him after his downfall and her conviction that she would one day be rewarded for her loyalty.
“You never said she was your —”
“Does it matter if she’s my cousin?” snapped Sirius. “As far as I’m concerned, they’re not my family. She’s certainly not my family. I haven’t seen her since I was your age, unless you count a glimpse of her coming in to Azkaban. D’you think I’m proud of having relatives like her?”
“Sorry,” said Harry quickly, “I didn’t mean — I was just surprised, that’s all —”
“It doesn’t matter, don’t apologize,” Sirius mumbled at once. He turned away from the tapestry, his hands deep in his pockets. “I don’t like being back here,” he said, staring across the drawing room. “I never thought I’d be stuck in this house again.”
Harry understood completely. He knew how he would feel if forced, when he was grown up and thought he was free of the place forever, to return and live at number four, Privet Drive.
“It’s ideal for headquarters, of course,” Sirius said. “My father put every security measure known to Wizard-kind on it when he lived here. It’s Unplottable, so Muggles could never come and call — as if they’d have wanted to — and now Dumbledore’s added his protection, you’d be hard put to find a safer house anywhere. Dumbledore’s Secret-Keeper for the Order, you know — nobody can find headquarters unless he tells them personally where it is — that note Moody showed you last night, that was from Dumbledore. …” Sirius gave a short, barklike laugh. “If my parents could see the use it was being put to now … well, my mother’s portrait should give you some idea. …”
He scowled for a moment, then sighed.
“I wouldn’t mind if I could just get out occasionally and do something useful. I’ve asked Dumbledore whether I can escort you to your hearing — as Snuffles, obviously — so I can give you a bit of moral support, what d’you think?”
Harry felt as though his stomach had sunk through the dusty carpet. He had not thought about the hearing once since dinner the previous evening; in the excitement of being back with the people he liked best, of hearing everything that was going on, it had completely flown his mind. At Sirius’s words, however, the crushing sense of dread returned to him. He stared at Hermione and the Weasleys, all tucking into their sandwiches, and thought how he would feel if they went back to Hogwarts without him.
“Don’t worry,” Sirius said. Harry looked up and realized that Sirius had been watching him. “I’m sure they’re going to clear you, there’s definitely something in the International Statute of Secrecy about being allowed to use magic to save your own life.”
“But if they do expel me,” said Harry, quietly, “can I come back here and live with you?”
Sirius smiled sadly.
“We’ll see.”
“I’d feel a lot better about the hearing if I knew I didn’t have to go back to the Dursleys,” Harry pressed him.
“They must be bad if you prefer this place,” said Sirius gloomily.
“Hurry up, you two, or there won’t be any food left,” Mrs. Weasley called.
Sirius heaved another great sigh, cast a dark look at the tapestry, and he and Harry went to join the others.
Harry tried his best not to think about the hearing while they emptied the glass cabinets that afternoon. Fortunately for him, it was a job that required a lot of concentration, as many of the objects in there seemed very reluctant to leave their dusty shelves. Sirius sustained a bad bite from a silver snuffbox; within seconds, his bitten hand had developed an unpleasant crusty covering like a tough brown glove.
“It’s okay,” he said, examining the hand with interest before tapping it lightly with his wand and restoring its skin to normal, “must be Wartcap powder in there.”
He threw the box aside into the sack where they were depositing the debris from the cabinets; Harry saw George wrap his own hand carefully in a cloth moments later and sneak the box into his already doxy-filled pocket.
They found an unpleasant-looking silver instrument, something like a many-legged pair of tweezers, which scuttled up Harry’s arm like a spider when he picked it up, and attempted to puncture his skin; Sirius seized it and smashed it with a heavy book entitled Nature’s Nobility: A Wizarding Genealogy. There was a musical box that emitted a faintly sinister, tinkling tune when wound, and they all found themselves becoming curiously weak and sleepy until Ginny had the sense to slam the lid shut; also a heavy locket that none of them could open, a number of ancient seals and, in a dusty box, an Order of Merlin, First Class, that had been awarded to Sirius’s grandfather for “Services to the Ministry.”
“It means he gave them a load of gold,” said Sirius contemptuously, throwing the medal into the rubbish sack.
Several times, Kreacher sidled into the room and attempted to smuggle things away under his loincloth, muttering horrible curses every time they caught him at it. When Sirius wrested a large golden ring bearing the Black crest from his grip Kreacher actually burst into furious tears and left the room sobbing under his breath and calling Sirius names Harry had never heard before.
“It was my father’s,” said Sirius, throwing the ring into the sack. “Kreacher wasn’t quite as devoted to him as to my mother, but I still caught him snogging a pair of my father’s old trousers last week.”
Mrs. Weasley kept them all working very hard over the next few days. The drawing room took three days to decontaminate; finally the only undesirable things left in it were the tapestry of the Black family tree, which resisted all their attempts to remove it from the wall, and the rattling writing desk; Moody had not dropped by headquarters yet, so they could not be sure what was inside it.
They moved from the drawing room to a dining room on the ground floor where they found spiders large as saucers lurking in the dresser (Ron left the room hurriedly to make a cup of tea and did not return for an hour and a half). The china, which bore the Black crest and motto, was all thrown unceremoniously into a sack by Sirius, and the same fate met a set of old photographs in tarnished silver frames, all of whose occupants squealed shrilly as the glass covering them smashed.
Snape might refer to their work as “cleaning,” but in Harry’s opinion they were really waging war on the house, which was putting up a very good fight, aided and abetted by Kreacher. The house-elf kept appearing wherever they were congregated, his muttering becoming more and more offensive as he attempted to remove anything he could from the rubbish sacks. Sirius went as far as to threaten him with clothes, but Kreacher fixed him with a watery stare and said, “Master must do as Master wishes,” before turning away and muttering very loudly, “but Master will not turn Kreacher away, no, because Kreacher knows what they are up to, oh yes, he is plotting against the Dark Lord, yes, with these Mudbloods and traitors and scum. …”
At which Sirius, ignoring Hermione’s protests, seized Kreacher by the back of his loincloth and threw him bodily from the room.
The doorbell rang several times a day, which was the cue for Sirius’s mother to start shrieking again, and for Harry and the others to attempt to eavesdrop on the visitor, though they gleaned very little from the brief glimpses and snatches of conversation they were able to sneak before Mrs. Weasley recalled them to their tasks. Snape flitted in and out of the house several times more, though to Harry’s relief they never came face-to-face; he also caught sight of his Transfiguration teacher, Professor McGonagall, looking very odd in a Muggle dress and coat, though she also seemed too busy to linger.
Sometimes, however, the visitors stayed to help; Tonks joined them for a memorable afternoon in which they found a murderous old ghoul lurking in an upstairs toilet, and Lupin, who was staying in the house with Sirius but who left it for long periods to do mysterious work for the Order, helped them repair a grandfather clock that had developed the unpleasant habit of shooting heavy bolts at passersby. Mundungus redeemed himself slightly in Mrs. Weasley’s eyes by rescuing Ron from an ancient set of purple robes that had tried to strangle him when he removed them from their wardrobe.
Despite the fact that he was still sleeping badly, still having dreams about corridors and locked doors that made his scar prickle, Harry was managing to have fun for the first time all summer. As long as he was busy he was happy; when the action abated, however, whenever he dropped his guard, or lay exhausted in bed watching blurred shadows move across the ceiling, the thought of the looming Ministry hearing returned to him. Fear jabbed at his insides like needles as he wondered what was going to happen to him if he was expelled. The idea was so terrible that he did not dare voice it aloud, not even to Ron and Hermione, who, though he often saw them whispering together and casting anxious looks in his direction, followed his lead in not mentioning it. Sometimes he could not prevent his imagination showing him a faceless Ministry official who
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