Cedrella had long been Walburga's favorite cousin, especially since their time had Hogwarts hadn't overlapped by even a single year. In fact, Cedrella had graduated before even Lucretia had arrived at the venerable—ha! If by "venerable" you meant "infested with all sorts of filth that should never have been allowed inside"—institution. It was a case of absence making the heart grow much, much fonder. Walburga had always been aware of the competition from her cousins and even her brothers in being the most important of the Blacks, and that Cedrella had not played a large role in her life (like Lucretia and Orion had, for instance) made her company that much more enjoyable.

Besides, Cedrella was almost thirty and unmarried and working at that; she could hardly be considered much of a threat to Walburga's self-assured control over Grimmauld Place once she wed Orion.

So the invitation to tea had come as a pleasant surprise. Surely none of the other cousins had received such an honor from the Astronomy Professor, although Walburga suspected that it was partially because many of them (well, all expect Lucretia were required to take it, and she couldn't really bring herself to see whether or not the Head Girl was enrolled) still took Astronomy and therefore saw her more frequently. Walburga had dropped Astronomy not out of any comment on Cedrella herself, but simply because she could no longer bear to place trembling hands on the telescopes that had been held by so many mudbloods or put her face so close to the eyepieces that had been so near to so much filth.

One time, shortly before the OWLs, she had held her breath, trying not to breathe in the taint, until she fainted at the telescope. She suspected that Cedrella had written home about the incident, for only a week later a letter had arrived from her mother suggesting that perhaps, no matter her grade on the Astronomy OWL, she relax during her sixth and seventh years and drop the class, that Cedrella would most certainly not be offended in any way.

As a result, she had not seen Cedrella since last Christmas, when the Blacks had duly gathered at Grimmauld Place and Walburga had spent her customary hours before the tapestry, endlessly pleased by the smooth, flowing lines connecting her to the greatest witches and wizards in history. She had brought her face very close to it, running her fingers along the lines that brought her to Phineas Nigellus, her own namesake Elladora, and further back until she was standing on her tiptoes and she could no longer follow the lines by touch. When she lived in Grimmauld Place (and had thrown Lucretia out to be married, of course), she would be able to spend as much time as she wanted in there, close to the history and power and perfection that was the Most Noble and Ancient House of Black.

Toujours pur, after all.

She made her way up towards the Astronomy Tower, knowing full well that the invitation to tea had probably stemmed from the incident with that blood traitor Pratt. Well, if Cedrella wanted to discuss it, she was more than welcome to. Walburga liked to imagine that she had moved on from it already; certainly, Pollux had written a strongly worded letter to the Headmaster regarding the behavior and manners of some of the students allowed to attend Hogwarts. Drawing up to Cedrella's door, she knocked and let herself in after giving her cousin a moment to object. After all, she was expected.

Her cousin's office was neat enough to please even Walburga; she let out a long breath that she had not realized she had been holding, having tried to avoid contaminating herself with the filth she imagined filled the air through which she passed. "Cedrella?" she called into the empty room, stepping inside and closing the door behind her, feeling safer and cleaner in a Black's private rooms than she had since arriving at Hogwarts for the school year. "I've arrived for tea. I'm not early, am I?" For once in her life, she sounded like a sixteen-year-old girl rather than the terror of a number of students at the school; being among family was enough to soothe her constant fears of the filth surrounding her.

Walburga had always seemed... delicate, even for a Black. It pained Cedrella slightly to think about it, because the solution, she supposed, was an entirely different upbringing for them all. She was only too aware of her own issues, but saw in Walburga something more extreme. Cedrella's innate dislike for the unpredictable was nothing at all compared to Walburga's need for cleanliness and order. Cedrella kept things neat to avoid criticism. Walburga's concerns ran far deeper, and, at odds with her family though she often was, Cedrella did love them. She hated to see them upset.

The day Walburga had fainted in her classroom she had almost taken Cedrella with her, because the prospect that she might pass out unexpectedly and topple, somehow, from the top of the tower was enough to make Cedrella reach for the smelling salts herself. She had most certainly written to her mother and all but insisted she drop the class, though it had been delicately phrased and had left out the fact that Cedrella was certain she would have prematurely grey hair if she did not.

There wasn't very much she could do about the rest of the school, however. She had heard about the Pratt incident, but was at a loss to punish him for it retroactively, because Walburga had not reported it immediately and Cedrella hadn't witnessed it happening herself. Still, she had invited her to tea in a vain attempt to offer some degree of small comfort, and to remind her that if she wanted anyone punished for rude behaviour she had to be proactive in seeing it reported, and not to Slughorn, who was categorically useless.

"Not at all," Cedrella said, appearing in the doorway that led to her private living quarters. They were up a narrow staircase and sat between the office and the Astronomy viewing deck. "I thought you might like to come upstairs."

The staff quarters at Hogwarts were fairly generous. She had a bedroom and a living room area, as well as a private bathroom. Cedrella's living space was as immaculately kept as the rest of her things, but a little more indicative of her personal tastes. She had decorated it herself, naturally -- it was mostly white, but with tiny splashes of pattern and colour here and there, mostly red, mostly floral. Everything there matched and complemented everything else.

Of course, the fact that the cupboard contained something close to four hundred chocolate frog cards (that would, naturally, fall out if it was opened), and that she had squirrelled sweets into nearly every available hidey-hole was neither here nor there. Her bookshelf, filled with scientific texts and thick old astronomy tomes, did not betray her rather less refined taste in literary fiction, which tended towards the pulp end of the spectrum. Those were under her bed, and if anybody had asked she would have intimated that bodice-ripping could not possibly occur in such a manner and still conform to the laws of physics.

She had set the tea up on a small table in the living room, and offered Walburga a well-practised, encouraging sort of smile.

"Of course." A smile looked almost strange on Walburga's face; she spent much of her time wearing an expression of distress or anger that looked far more natural in the sharp lines of her face than did any sort of expression of pleasure or happiness. She followed her cousin up the stairs, sighing at the sight of everything clean and white and floral and complementary. It didn't so much remind her of home (which she thought of as Grimmauld Place, despite the fact that she didn't actually live there yet), which was much darker and heavier, but put her at ease nonetheless.

Before joining Cedrella for tea at the small table, however, she took the moment to look around, soaking in the different colors of the leather-bound books against the whiteness of the walls, running her fingers over the furniture as if inspecting for dust when it was really to feel the sense of something clean.

Then she found it: the stationary with the signature of a Weasley on it. Walburga had not forgotten her encounter with Percival Pratt, blood traitor, nor the fact that it had ended in tears or that it had been begun by Roberta Weasley (or so she assumed; she couldn't be expected to tell the Weasleys twins apart, or even remember most of the time that they were twins). Feeling as if the sanctuary of her cousin's room had been violated, she snatched up the paper with wide eyes, reading it aloud as if Cedrella had not known its contents.

"I forgot," she read, voice full of a mix of fury and incredulity, "that the Blacks teach their daughters not to have opinions on anything." Stung—she was quite certain that she had more class and education and intelligent opinions than all the Weasleys combined!—she continued, "Or otherwise not to speak. Cedrella." Her voice was indignant, her breath fast. "What sort of nonsense is this? Have you written to my father about this?"

Pollux would want to hear it; he would never stand for such things being said about the family. They had tried to teach Walburga to be silent, but it hadn't quite worked out the way that they had planned, and so it became generally accepted fact that Walburga's outspokenness and strong opinions on purism had actually been desired by the Blacks.

Scoffing, she added, "I hope you informed him that perhaps the Weasleys should learn to say and breed less—as if the world needs more blood traitors."

That she had kept that note was a testament to Cedrella's dedication -- she had, in plain writing, Septimus Weasley insulting she and her entire family, and she meant to keep it in case it became useful, later. She didn't expect that it would. The Weasleys were already defamed enough, and all it would be worth was perhaps Septimus' job, should she want to see the back of him -- but Cedrella wasn't so vindictive as her cousins and sisters could be. Though she often times displayed a tendency to overreact, it wasn't with any great pleasure that she did so -- instead it was a constant battle to reaffirm her position, keep her authority, and protect herself.

What she hadn't meant was for Walburga to have found it. Cedrella didn't let things go easily. She had gone back to that note and examined it countless times in a vain attempt to dissect why it had hurt so much to receive it, and to torture herself in silent guilt that she almost agreed with it, in principle. There were days when she was so tired of pretending to fit in with her family that she had already begun phase one of her utterly selfish plan to spend Christmas completely alone at Hogwarts castle -- dropping hints in her letters that she was just so overwhelmed this year. That, of course, made her feel awful -- because for all the work that they were, she loved them. It wasn't a functional sort of love. It wasn't even something that they had ever acknowledged. But Cedrella, at least, was self aware enough to recognise it, prepared to admit it, if only to herself, and at a loss for a resolution that would please everybody.

She felt as though she was on a tight-rope and that the end of it was drawing nearer -- either she would have to step over, or fall off. Soon this limbo she had made herself comfortable in, with the job, and the lack of a good marriage, would dry up and disappear. It spoke volumes that despite the fact that her mother was the source of all her problems, all she wanted to do was go to her and admit just how lost she felt. Lysandra Black had never given any indication that that would be acceptable, however, and Cedrella knew better than to push the boundaries any further than she already had.

"As if it needs repeating," Cedrella said, with a sigh. "You ought to know better than to put anything of the sort in writing, Walburga. I intend to hold on to that." She paused. She hadn't written to anybody's father about it, because it was only certain to encourage a response intimating that it was her own fault for taking a job alongside a Weasley in the first place, and would only become one in a long list of reasons that she should give up, get married, and then pregnant immediately.

"And don't trouble your father with it, it's nothing. Less than nothing. When it suits me, I shall deal with it myself."

It had not taken long for the vast majority of the school to realise that the best way to set off Walburga Black's temper was to make any mention of her family that was less than worshipful. This particular note, from a professor, no less, who was therefore under the school's authority and therefore under the Blacks' authority, made her feel almost physically ill. If Hogwarts still had a proper headmaster, if Phineas Nigellus, for example, had still been in control of who was hired and who was excluded from the best wizarding education in England, none of this mess would be happening.

Of course, Walburga would also not be taking tea with her unmarried cousin who was also a professor, but that was beside the point. She wouldn't have to bear the filth filling the hallways, nor those blood traitors who also deemed themselves so ridiculously superior. The loss of Cedrella's presence wouldn't be too terrible, then, and she would still have her brothers.

"I would say it directly to him!" she said angrily, crossing her arms over her chest and crumpling the letter slightly with her emotional movement. "A blood traitor is no better than the filth he associates with, Cedrella, you know that, and he ought to as well!" Even though the letter had been directed to her cousin, it was still incredibly, terribly offensive to Walburga as well; well, anything negative about her family was, but this, and from a professor, was awful. "I can't believe you would let something like this go!"

The Blacks always stood together, after all, and if Cedrella was too traumatised to stand up for the family, then Walburga would have to do it herself.

"It's not nothing," she continued, sitting dramatically at the table that Cedrella had prepared, resting the note next to her saucer face-down as if removing the offending words from her sight could make her feel any better whatsoever. "My father would be horrified if he heard of this." In fact, it was likely that Pollux would write directly to Dippet to let him know exactly what the Blacks thought of a Hogwarts professor insulting their family. There were a number of Blacks on the Board of Governors - Walburga's father and a few of her uncles - and she simply couldn't imagine how something like this would get past them. "I know Weasley's filth must be shocking," she added comfortingly, smoothing the note with nervous fingers, "but really, Cedrella, we cannot let slurs like that against the family go unanswered."

"I am not letting it go unanswered, Walburga, I am biding my time until I see fit to respond," Cedrella said, hedging a little. Her cousin's venom was unmatched, but she hadn't invited Walburga to tea so that she might criticise Cedrella on matters that she had hoped to keep private. "Sometimes a little finesse is better placed than all the wrath and fury the family can afford."

She delivered this advice as though passing some tried and true nugget of information to her, but in reality Cedrella was far less comfortable with the direction the conversation had taken. Try though she might to imagine she was callous enough to want to see Weasley dismissed, and furious and hurt as she may have been by his words, she didn't have the heart for it. Cedrella navigated conflict as though stealth was her primary concern -- she wasn't above using underhanded methods to win the day, but she preferred to do it with such covert methods that nobody would realise it had been her. To report Weasley would be to admit all manner of things -- not least of all that they had been corresponding frequently.

There would be an investigation. They would examine every inch of the complaint and the complainant, and then Weasley would try to prove a vendetta. Worst of all, and quite apart from the very real guilt she may have felt at the prospect of taking his livelihood, the Blacks would see her under siege from blood traitors and twist it. How uncouth, to engage with such a disgusting man -- to associate with him, so beneath her, and from there they would conclude she was in possession of weak constitution, and in need of a bloody good seeing to! And then she would be left floundering for reasons to retain what little freedom she had.

No. Cedrella did not want the attention. She needed to remain as out of sight and out of mind as possible if she intended to keep coasting in this manner. As ever, as the thought crossed her mind, she felt a gnawing reminder that this situation was less than ideal. If she could have had it forever, just this way, would she even want it?

Cedrella avoided the question by accepting the inevitable -- that it wasn't forever, and couldn't be, and so the question was irrelevant. She had long ago realised -- but categorically refused to acknowledge -- that what she wanted to keep was not the status quo, but the opportunity to change it. In this position of limbo there was every chance that tomorrow, by some blinding luck, she would awaken to find the whole world altered. The moment she said I do her life was written for her.

She couldn't confide that much in anybody, but especially not Walburga, who had been betrothed to Orion contentedly for years now. He'd been scarcely sorted into Slytherin when it had happened. Cedrella worried about them both, distantly, unable to imagine how she would have felt had it been her.

"And I won't let him ruin our tea," Cedrella finished, and reached to take the note from Walburga. "How do you like it?"

She hadn't meant to criticise Cedrella, really, and so even Walburga couldn't blame her cousin for the comment regarding finesse. Subtlety had never been her strong point, and as a result she had always preferred bringing down the hammer of the Black family's power and her own temper on anyone who crossed her. Of course, that rarely ended well; even if Cedrella had never seen Walburga in the Headmaster's office with her own eyes, she must have heard of her younger cousin's numerous visits following burnt bedding and shattered trinkets in the Slytherin dormitory.

Walburga couldn't help it if some people offended her by merely existing.

Finesse, she told herself. Cedrella was older and wiser and at least had the appearance of some autonomy in her life, even if she still wasn't even engaged and Walburga had been engaged to Orion for over two years now. Surely it couldn't hurt to take her cousin's advice, especially if it might lead to fewer visits to Dippet's office. Finesse.

So instead of pressing the point, she let the note slide from underneath her fingers as Cedrella took it and folded her hands in her lap, trying to look demure. "You've laid a lovely tea," she said very politely, doing her best to mimic Druella Rosier's quiet perfection and the ideal of the lady she was supposed to be. Of course, she actually hadn't tried the tea yet, having been far too distracted by Weasley's letter to even put her customary lumps of sugar in the tea, much less drink it.

It was probably a good thing for Cedrella that the letter itself had kept Walburga distracted from considering why it had been addressed to her cousin. Of course, the idea of a willing correspondence between Weasley and her cousin had never really occurred to her; in Walburga's mind, the note had come from nowhere, unprovoked, a cruel and unnecessary attack on Cedrella, who had surely never done anything to deserve it. In her mind, it was a given that Cedrella would never stoop to such an association, even one so relatively distant as letters.

Then she remembered, rather belatedly, that if Cedrella was so upset as to decline prosecuting Weasley over this letter - and, besides, Walburga still fully intended to write to her father once she had finished calling on her cousin - that she should most likely inquire as to her cousin's health. So she looked back up from her lap and asked, "I trust you've been well, apart from this?"

"Very well, thank you," Cedrella returned, knowing perfectly well that she could not expound upon her issues with her mother to Walburga of all people; it would spread through the castle like wildfire, and would be ringing in her mother's ears before nightfall. "Not a word of complaint. I hear you've had a little Weasley trouble yourself, however?"

She posed this question lightly, but watched Walburga's expression carefully. She had meant to call her here to discuss that incident and to try to soothe her doubtlessly jangled nerves, in the vain hope that it all might settle before they found themselves entrenched in an outright feud. Between Septimus Weasley and his numerous siblings it would seem that there was a definite problem brewing.

Cedrella did not like the prospect in the least, though it wasn't especially for any degree of pacifism so much as it was the selfish realisation that any degree of trouble at the school that she found herself in the very centre of would only add fuel to the potential fire regarding her employment and lack of imminent nuptials.

She leaned to pour the tea out carefully.

Walburga was nothing if not expressive about the way she felt about, well, anything. She signed dramatically as Cedrella poured the tea, and when she spoke, her voice hinted at being on the edge of tears. "It was terrible, Cedrella," she exclaimed, clasping her hands together tightly. Perhaps it was in distinct contrast with the demureness she'd been attempting for her cousin's sake just a moment before, but now Walburga could talk about herself. "They're such awful blood traitors. I can't imagine how it must feel to be surrounded by so much filth all the time."

Well, she could imagine it; not only were there halfbloods in Slytherin, but there was a mudblood, one of the filthiest beings imaginable, in her very dormitory. There was a reason why she didn't sleep very often: the thought of breathing the same air as a mudblood, of inadvertently allowing that sort of contamination to creep into her lungs and blood and eyes and--

She shuddered, watching Cedrella's hands and trying to remind herself to breathe. "And that Pratt, with all his ridiculous rhyming. He was so mean, Cedrella." With a sniff, she did her very best to look pitiful and asked, "What did I ever do?"

"Jealousy is terribly transparent, and ugly, when it rears," Cedrella said sympathetically, "you can't possibly have done a thing to encourage it, you've been brought up too well."

Cedrella delivered these words of comfort as if dosing medicine -- and knew perfectly well that Walburga was overindulged, spoiled rotten and categorically would have instigated the situation. It was with inherent Black deftness that Cedrella side-stepped this knowledge in favour of saying something soothing and false, for she knew perfectly well the extent of the tantrums her younger cousin was capable of. She felt absolutely no shame whatsoever in choosing the quiet life. It was no business of hers to correct Walburga's character, and it would be a fool's errand to try.

Cedrella finished with the tea and settled back carefully, raising her own cup only after she had sweetened it with one teaspoonful of sugar (though it was a heaping teaspoonful, she couldn't be so crude as to take more than one, but she certainly required the extra).

"You mustn't let it rattle your nerves. These people need to do something to make themselves feel better, after all." Her gaze strayed to where she'd left the Weasley note, thinking about him with uneasiness in the pit of her stomach. She didn't like to admit that he had occupied her thoughts rather more than she wanted to give him license to.

Walburga nodded in agreement with Cedrella's words, forgoing propriety to add two teaspoonfuls of sugar to her own tea; she always took it overly sweet, always complained when it was too sweet for even her taste, and always drank it anyway. She would never learn that, perhaps, she should only add a single sugar cube or teaspoon to her sugar. Excess was the way of the Blacks (or at least the branch from which Walburga was descended), whether it be emotional, physical, financial, or material.

She heaved a sigh before she took a sip of her tea, wrinkling her nose when it was, as always, too sweet. "They've nothing to feel better about," she said mournfully. "They're awful people. Hogwarts would be so much better without them."

It was her fondest dream, in fact, that the school would be purged of anyone who wasn't pure of blood. Of course, nobody was quite as pure as those privileged enough to be descended from the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black, but there were some students in this wretched school that would be passable. At least she had Orion.

"I didn't do anything," she added, as if Cedrella would ever doubt her. Cedrella was her favourite cousin, after all, and Walburga hoped that she returned the favour. "You'd think the Board of Governors would do something about it - like expelling all of them." She glanced down at the teacup in her hand, as if the tedium of having to deal with mudbloods and filth all day, every day, was infinitely wearying. Sometimes they passed so close to her in the hallways that she imagined one of them might touch her, and she feared that day intensely.

Thinking about Septimus Weasley at all gave Cedrella a strange sensation in her stomach. He had driven her to consume more chocolate that week than she probably had in the month before it. Cedrella's mother, a Yaxley through and through, had never felt quite settled with the Blacks. Where Walburga's side of the family revelled in their affluence and indulged to excess, Lysandra Black was miserly, and restricted Cedrella's access to sweet food, and sometimes food in general, for fear that she might grow horizontally after she'd shot up like a beanstalk. In truth, Lysandra's frightening obsession with appearances had much to answer for -- that Cedrella was twenty-seven years old and no longer living with her but still felt the need to squirrel food away in her office like a rodent was evidence enough without considering the rest of her mother's legacy.

"I'm sure you didn't," Cedrella agreed soothingly, delivering the words with conviction she didn't feel. It wasn't that she didn't find the Weasleys to be short-tempered, impulsive, rude and insufferable, but rather that she knew Walburga to be a trial of her own sort. If she hadn't begun the conflict she certainly wouldn't have backed down from it, and that was where Cedrella differed most greatly from her little cousin -- she navigated her life with the intent to avoid flaring tempers. Her childhood had been fraught with unreasonable punishments, though they were never violent they were certainly rarely justified; she had learned very quickly that to be manipulative was more valuable than to be direct.

That, she realised, was the source of her alarm over Weasley. He'd made her frustrated, flustered and worst of all, he'd drawn her into an argument. A toe-to-toe shouting match that ended in a slammed door! Unnerving. It worried her, privately, how very quickly she had unravelled.

"I'm sure the Board of Governors are only being charitable," she added vaguely, "it's an awful trial to put up with it, I know, but just imagine how altruistic and benevolent you must seem, to suffer it so graciously."

On some occasions Walburga was aware when she was being soothed, would realise that people didn't necessarily mean they things they were saying to her, and would bristle at the insincerity of it all, especially when people were simultaneously treating her like a child. But this time she refused to recognise Cedrella's tactics, preferring instead to believe that her cousin actually believed she hadn't done anything to provoke Pratt. Really, being able to rely on her family was what had gotten Walburga through Hogwarts thus far; after the first disastrous tantrum she had thrown upon finding out that she was supposed to share her room with a mudblood - even up here in the breezy Astronomy Tower, far away from the claustrophobic confines of the Slytherin dungeons, the thought could take her breath away - it had taken Alphard's arrival at school to make her feel comfortable again.

Some days were worse than others, of course, but she likes to think that she could keep her head up and her temper - and panics - mostly under control. Walburga had always been very good at pretending; she'd even been game to do voices when she'd read to Alphard when he'd been ill, and had been a remarkably good and patient princess for her brothers to rescue when they were younger.

Charitable! In Walburga's opinion, the Board of Governors was made up of blood traitors and Muggle-lovers, but, as always, compliments (not even subtle) distracted her from her impending tantrum. "As if the Blacks are ever anything but gracious, Cedrella," she said dismissively. Imagine, the Blacks - upstanding members of the proper wizarding community - being anything less than excellent examples for others! (The fact that there were plenty of occurrences of this even in her recent memory didn't faze her in the slightest; sometimes allowances had to be made for extreme circumstances.) "I do try so hard," she added, glancing down at her tea in a rare moment of confession. "Sometimes it just seems like there is more filth in the wizarding world than there are proper witches and wizards."

Even Walburga Black could be jealous of the Rosiers with their easy grace or Antares Lestrange with his clever little bourgeois friend who was so quick with coming up with new curses or even Zamira Gulch with her quick wit (even if she was a bit lower class, really) or even Prince with nobody to ever think about her. Sometimes being a Black was difficult, but she could rise it, certainly.

"I know," Cedrella said, as sympathetically as she could conjure. For her, it was less a matter of filth than it was a practical balance of interests. Cedrella had her prejudices, they were deeply ingrained, but she was the sort of person who inevitably acted as a snake in the grass regardless of who she was with. It was an easier, quieter life to pretend one didn't have such inclinations than it was to fight every battle like the scrappy little terrier Walburga sometimes came across as.

Cedrella's prejudice was more of a knot in her stomach and a quiet insecurity in herself that transpired when she was confronted with the unfamiliar. Like Septimus Weasley and his spitting temper, and his unexpected good humour that dissipated as quickly as it appeared. Such things, and Muggleborns especially, were wont to put Cedrella on the back foot because she didn't know what to expect from them. She didn't know how to adjust herself to get the correct reaction from them, and ultimately it left her in a state of fluctuation as she tried to decide which face she ought to wear for the encounter.

She knew, though, deep down, that the life she hoped to have wasn't one blanketed in purity. Everything in the world that happened and was exciting or new happened amongst a mixture of people, and regardless of how much it made her nervous, she was gradually coming around to the idea that staying in the one place she was absolutely guaranteed to be miserable for the sake the queasiness in her stomach and the prospect that she might be embarrassed was foolish.

She was yet to admit this to even herself, however, and on most days awoke bitterly determined to ignore or fight the notion.

"You mustn't make yourself sick worrying about it, Walburga, dear," she said. "What would Orion think, if you ended your time at Hogwarts a nervous wreck?"

It was always a relief to know that she could come to Cedrella for her sympathy and protection and understanding. Sometimes she thought that there was nobody else who could understand except for her cousins, and of all of them, she liked Cedrella the best. Lucretia was too busy being Head Girl and pandering to that embarrassment of a Headmaster, consorting with that failure of a Head Boy Ignatius Prewett far too often for Cedrella's comfort. In Walburga's opinion (which was always correct), Lucretia ought to have insisted that a proper Head Boy be chosen if Hogwarts wished the honour of having a Black as Head Girl.

There were so many things about this school that were improper that, when she took the time to think of it, Walburga couldn't help but wish her parents had chosen to break with tradition and send her and her brothers to Durmstrang, where there was far less filth and far more interesting subjects - namely, the Dark Arts - taught. Of course, tradition did have to be upheld, and the Blacks had always gone to Hogwarts, but things would have been so much easier.

The mention of Orion, though, made her draw a deep breath before taking a calming sip of her overly sweet tea. Boring though cousin Orion might have been - deathly boring, if you caught Walburga gossiping about him with Alphard - he was the key to remaining in the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black, the one way that she could live happily in Grimmauld Place in the ancestral home of her family which was, really, all that she'd ever wanted in her life. The fact that he was her second cousin didn't even make her pause; the practise of marrying cousins was an accepted one among her particular social echelon.

"Orion would understand," she said miserably. "He detests all this filth as much as I do." That, of course, wasn't exactly the truth: Walburga merely assumed that her cousin loathed the people surrounding them at Hogwarts as much as she did, simply because she couldn't imagine anything otherwise. She, of course, thought the same thing of Cedrella, as well.