Roman Holiday

Chapter Forty-Seven

Hermione didn’t know if this was the best idea she’d ever had, but she was committed to it now. Not necessarily because she liked it, but because she didn’t see a better option.

Her partners in crime and knowledge - that is to say, Ginny, Harry, and Draco - were less concerned than she with vague moral dilemmas of destiny and free will, and were following her fast descent into Murky Waters with thinly-veiled fascination. “I have to hand it to you, Hermione,” Harry remarked at one point. “When you decide to do something, you really do it.” He’d looked amused and impressed in equal parts. “And let’s face it - if you’re going to dabble in Dark magic, you couldn’t have found a better teacher.”

He had a point there.

The last two weeks before the holidays were spent marking time in class, handing in homework that had been finished for weeks, and otherwise learning more about Medieval entrapment charms than Hermione had ever dreamed there was to know. The first step had been to find a suitable receptacle for the spell; if the receptacle was weak, Salazar warned her, it would burst under the force of the charm.

And, as she well knew, she only had one shot at getting it to work.

Traditional Trapping receptacles, according to Slytherin, ranged from marble statues to river rocks to lead-lined snuffboxes … even, on one occasion, he said, a pair of emerald earbobs. At this last, Hermione shuddered.

“Earrings?” she echoed. “How … creepy. Who would want to wear another person as jewelry?”

Salazar laughed. “Well, this was a very particular case,” he said. “The owner of the earrings found her husband in flagrante with another woman. So she bided her time, charmed the earrings, and Trapped the woman in one and her husband in the other. Then she claimed he’d been smothered by a Lethifold, and lived out her days as a rich widow.” He waggled his eyebrows comically. “That’s not even the best part, though - afterwards, she only wore those earrings when she met her lover. I believe she got a bit of a charge out of it, actually.”

He looked, Hermione thought snidely, as if he did, too. She wondered idly how he knew the story.

One didn’t delve too closely into some things.

“Practically speaking, however, there’s another good reason to use a piece of jewelry, providing it’s a quality piece,” he continued. “You can keep it with you, and it’s inconspicuous. People don’t think anything of it. Quite safe, actually, as possible receptacles go.” He gave the unassuming bits of gold at her ears an assessing look. “You don’t happen to have anything suitable, do you?”

As it happened, Hermione did.

**

Her mother wore very little jewelry. For evening affairs or dinner parties, she had a pair of modest diamond studs and an elegant matching choker that Hermione’s father had given her for their fifteen-year wedding anniversary, but apart from that she stuck to plain gold posts in her ears and a wristwatch. While she was working, she didn’t even wear her wedding rings.

Needless to say, Hermione hadn’t gotten the jewelry bug from her. Her grandmother Granger, however, was another story altogether.

Gram Granger was tall and willowy, a retired operatic mezzo-soprano who even at seventy-five possessed enough grace, poise and … well, glamour, for any two women half her age. She had what she herself referred to slyly as a “chequered past” - many were the summer afternoons Hermione had spent paging through her scrapbooks of programs and kohl-eyed photographs and newspaper clippings, with the occasional warm note from Leonard Bernstein or Rudolf Bing - or a melody-covered napkin from some Paris bistro, crowned with a scribbled signature: Samuel Barber, Ned Rorem, Carlisle Floyd.

Gram had been married twice - the first time in a highly-publicized, short-lived liaison with a Tortured American Novelist, the second time - “for real,” she’d told Hermione with a wink - to Hermione’s grandfather, an Old Money patron-of-the-arts who by all accounts had lived to adore his whimsical, statuesque, considerably-younger-than-he raven-haired Sex Goddess of a wife. Hermione remembered him mostly as small, shiny-headed, and benevolent, dispensing cookies on the sly before teatime, and ten-pound notes on birthdays. He’d died when she was seven, in his armchair, listening to the BBC broadcast of Glyndebourne’s opening gala - a deeply happy man.

Gram still missed him. Hermione could tell.

But of all the delights of Gram’s house, most entrancing to the young Hermione had been the Proposal Scrapbook, which was packed from front to back with dried rose-petals, carefully-pressed sprays of orchids, and written protestations of love from all over the globe. Companion to the Proposal Scrapbook was a drawerful of glittering trinkets - presents from Gram’s admirers - that looked to ten-year-old eyes like the Crown Jewels and were valuable enough to be kept in a safe in the library. (On more than one occasion, Hermione had overheard quietly heated conversations between Gram and her father, who maintained that the jewelry collection ought to be kept in their bank vault.)

She was rather glad Gram never gave in to him. The jewelry went with the Proposal Scrapbook, after all - every piece was a gift, every gift had a story, every story was long and involved and romantic and fascinating enough to require that they flop belly-first in the middle of Gram’s big four-poster, open the scrapbook in front of them, and spill the jewels in a fascinating, light-bending heap onto the satin comforter.

Hermione still knew every story by heart.

**

It had been Gram who had talked Hermione’s parents into letting her attend Hogwarts - Hermione, letter clutched possessively in her sweaty hand, had been listening at the door.

“I know it seems a bit odd to you, Peter,” she’d said in that still-creamy contralto. “But then, your choice of career seemed a bit odd to me, too, back in the day.”

“Mother, I’m a dentist. What’s odd about that?”

“My baby,” Gram sighed, fluttering one white butterfly of a hand over the arm of her chair so that Hermione caught the flash of her canary-yellow diamond solitaire. “Such a lovely voice … such talent … and with my connections ….” She trailed off dramatically. “Ah, well.”

“Mother, we’ve been over this.” Mr. Granger sounded like a man who’d been having the same argument and losing it for years. “I’m a medical professional. But this .. this Hogwarts …”

“A medical professional, yes,” Gram agreed sweetly. “And who, pray tell, put you through medical school?”

A disgruntled sigh. “You did, Mother, as you very well know. But -“

“And who, my dearest, supported you in everything, even when you went against my wishes?”

(Oh, she’s good, thought the eleven-year-old Hermione.) Another sigh from her beleaguered, clearly-outclassed father.

“You did, Mother.”

“Of course I did,” Gram said (gently - she was too kind-hearted a person to crow, once she’d made her point). “Because your wishes and needs were no longer my own … and to deny you any dream would have been a disservice.” She took another contemplative sip of her tea. “Hermione’s not just an extension of you anymore, Peter,” she said. “Oh, she’s brilliant, all right - and to look at the two of you together, it’s like seeing the past and the future in one room. She’s got that cool analytical streak, and that eagerness to please, just like you did at her age. But …”

“Yes?” Peter Granger sounded, if not convinced, at least resigned.

Hermione held her breath.

“If she has this talent,” Gram said slowly, “and I truly think she does, it would be a grave mistake to deny her the development of it.”

And at that, she’d laughed, a smoky sexy chuckle that belonged to a much younger woman.

“Besides,” she said. “Being a witch doesn’t mean you can’t do other things, too. It just means you’re more successful at them.”

**

Just before the fourth-year Yule Ball, Hermione had gone up to her room after dinner to find a package on her bed. Inside the plain brown wrapper was a velvet jewelry case and a note from Gram: Your mother said you were wearing blue. Knock him dead, sweetheart.

And in the case had been the sapphire pendant, the one from the Russian KGB official that he’d claimed came from one of the Tsarina’s private collections, before the Revolution. Gram had been suspicious of the story, but the jeweler’s appraisal on the gem, at least, didn’t lie: fourteen carats and clear as a bell. Dangling from its fine gold chain like a giant lapis teardrop, it was at nearly as big as the first joint of Hermione’s thumb.

Fit for a princess to wear, to dance with a champion. Since then, it had been carefully tucked away in the secret compartment of her ballet-dancer jewelry box, hidden with an Anti-Theft Charm so that only Hermione’s hands could find it. Now, she scooped it out of its hiding place and took it down to Salazar for inspection.

“Will this do?” she asked, and held it out in the lamplight. Salazar looked at it closely, his ghostly eyebrows furrowed over his eyes.

“Yes, and quite nicely,” he said. His lips curved in amused surprise. “Who were you in a past life, anyway? Cleopatra?”

Hermione blushed.

**

The trick to performing a successful Trapping Charm, Salazar claimed, was visualization.

“Let’s start small,” he said, nodding his head toward the copy of Great Expectations that lay on the table. “Now - the initial holding charm’s been done on the receptacle, and that means forever, all right? As long as you possess that pendant, it can be used indefinitely for Trapping and Releasing. Just be aware that the spell isn’t specific; you can add as many objects to the receptacle, one at a time, for as long as you like, but once you utter the Release, the receptacle will be cleared. Got it?”

Hermione nodded.

“Good. Now - take this page, for instance.” Salazar waved his wand, and Great Expectations flipped itself open. “Look at that page, Hermione,” he said; “really study it, hard - then close your eyes so that it’s imprinted on your brain. Can you see it?”

“Yes.”

“Now,” he said. “Imagine that the center of the page is a whirlpool, a vortex - in your case, it’d be helpful to think of it as the colour blue - into which the page itself is crumpling. Perform and reverse that mental process a few times, until it’s easy for you.”

Hermione’s eyes were squeezed so tightly shut that she could feel veins throbbing in her temples. “Okay,” she said. “I think I’ve got it.”

“Excellent,” Salazar said. “Now. Open your eyes again, point your wand at the page, keep that blue vortex in your head, and say “Inlaqueo!”

“Inlaqueo?” Hermione tried it out on her tongue. “Inlaqueo. OK. Here goes.”

She took a deep breath, turned her gaze on the book, and raised her wand.

”Inlaqueo!”

The sapphire pendant around her neck pulsed with a single throb of heat. Hermione jumped. “Did it work?”

“Look for yourself,” Salazar said, sounding smug. She peered at the book.

The pages were blank. Hermione looked back up at Slytherin. He was grinning.

“Kid,” he said, “you’re a natural. Now - let’s move on.”

**

The words themselves were easy - Inlaqueo to Trap, Libero to Release. Even so, the charm took more mental energy than any other incantation Hermione had ever learned. Still, Sal was a good teacher and she a motivated student. By the end of the week, she’d successfully Trapped not only pages of a book, but the book itself, Salazar’s ottoman, a glass of pumpkin juice from across the (deserted) Gryffindor common room, and … in a moment of malicious glee, egged on by Draco … Mrs. Norris.

The cat had trailed them into the Trophy Room and refused to leave, forcing them to make awkward conversation with Morgan and pretend to admire the awards. Clearly, she’d picked up on the increased traffic to and from that particular tapestry - from the evil look in her slitty yellow eyes, it was only a matter of time before they had Filch on their case.

Still, the holidays were due to begin in just under a week, and Hermione couldn’t afford to miss a training session - Mrs. Norris or no, Filch or no. Unconsciously, her fingers went to the small bulge that the pendant made beneath her robes … a movement that was not lost on Draco.

Their eyes met.

“Do it,” he said, and grinned at her. “I dare you.”

Thirty seconds later, they were past Morgan and running down the secret corridor. Hermione’s pendant was throbbing with heat - if this was the emotion one angry cat could muster, she couldn’t imagine wearing her husband and his mistress on her ears. Still, the sheer audacity of the act had the tips of her fingers tingling.

Was this what being Seduced By The Dark felt like - this heady, giddy flush of power?

She couldn’t bring herself, for once, to be too worried.

**