Dawn Rivera

The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black

Mrs Weasley follows us upstairs looking grim.

"I want you all to go straight to bed, no talking," she says as we reach the first landing, we've got a busy day tomorrow. I expect Ginny and Misty are asleep," she adds to Hermione and I, "so try not to wake them up."

Hermione and I bid them all goodnight and go into our room, where we tell Ginny and Misty everything that happened.

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It takes me half an hour to dress and breakfast, then I enter the drawing room, a long, high-ceilinged room on the first floor with olive green walls covered in dirty tapestries. The carpet exhales little clouds of dust every time someone puts their foot on it and the long, moss green velvet curtains are buzzing as though swarming with invisible bees. It is around these that Mrs Weasley, Hermione, Ginny, Misty, Fred, George and I are grouped, all of us looking rather peculiar as we have each tied a cloth over our nose and mouth. Each of us are also holding a large bottle of black liquid with a nozzle at the end. Harry, Danny and Ron come through the door.

"Cover your faces and take a spray," says Mrs Weasley to Harry, Danny and Ron the moment she sees them, pointing to two more bottles of black liquid standing on a spindle-legged table. "It's Doxycide. I've never seen an infestation this bad - what that house-elf's been doing for the last ten years -"

Though Hermione and I's faces are half-covered with a tea towel we distinctly throw a reproachful look at Mrs Weasley.

"Kreacher's really old, he probably couldn't manage -" says Hermione.

"You'd be surprised what Kreacher can manage when he wants to, Hermione," says Uncle Sirius, who has just entered the room carrying a bloodstained bag of what appears to be dead rats. "I've just been feeding Buckbeak," he adds, in reply to Harry's and Danny's open inquiring looks. "I keep him upstairs in my mother's bedroom. Anyway...this writing desk..."

He drops the bag of rats into an armchair, then bends over to examine the locked cabinet which, I now notice for the first time, is shaking slightly.

"Well, Molly, I'm pretty sure this is a Boggart," says Uncle Sirius, peering through the keyhole, "but perhaps we ought to let Mad-Eye have a shifty at it before we let it out - knowing my mother, it could be something much worse."

"Right you are, Sirius," says Mrs Weasley.

They are both speaking in carefully light, polite voices that tell me quite plainly that neither have forgotten their disagreement on the night before.

A loud, clanging bell sounds from downstairs, followed at once by the cacophony of screams and wails that were triggered the previous night by Tonks knocking over the umbrella stand.

"I keep telling them not to ring the doorbell!" says Uncle Sirius exasperatedly, hurrying out of the room. We hear him thundering down the stairs as Mrs Black's screeches echo up through house once more.

"Stains of dishonour, filthy half-breeds, blood traitors, children of filth..."

"Close the door, please, Harry and Dathaniel," says Mrs Weasley.

Harry and Danny take much more time than needed closing the door, and I'm glad; I want to hear what's going on downstairs. Uncle Sirius has obviously managed to shut the curtains over his mother's portrait because she has stopped screaming. I hear Uncle Sirius walking down the hall, then the clattering of the chain on the front door, then a deep voice I recognise as Kingsley Shacklebolt's saying, "Hestia's just relieved me, so she's got Moody's Cloak now, thought I'd leave a report for Dumbledore..."