So, guess what I'm not doing? All the papers and presentations I have due this week! YAY! I'm picking through all the half-finished stuff on my word processor, studiously avoiding my quadrillion-word essay on the Hungarian revolution. Ugh.

Between the Lines

Bad Blood

Blacks die young, is Percival Prewett's hesitant warning when Ignatius comes home after his seventh year and confides in him that, in a year's time, when Lucretia Black leaves school, he wants to ask her to marry him.

Bad blood, is what Percival means. Blacks went mad, went bad, died with their preternatural good looks still beautifully vivid in their faces. For as well as their selective breeding had kept them beautiful and pure, it had decayed the faculties beneath that veneer of pale and black, given them the sheen of insanity and weakness in their luminous grey eyes.

Lu's not like that, Ignatius protests. For all her diamond-sharp Black beauty, she has sense in her head and a rather level view on the world (once he's dragged it out of her).

And Percival shakes his head, and says in his slow, careful way, perhaps, but she has the blood. Blood will out; if not in her, maybe in your children. Are you sure, Ignatius? And will you be able to say goodbye to your young, beautiful wife should her blood catch her up?

Aunt Muriel, concerned as she is with the feelings of those around her, is, of course, quite sensitive about the whole affair and sums all of Percival's careful hedgings up quite quickly. "She'll go mad as a hat before she's thirty. Can't help it, it's in the blood. Don't go bringing that madness into the Prewett blood, boy.

Ignatius marries Lucretia anyway (her family is pleased enough with the match), and Muriel recovers quickly enough to be mortally offended when Lucretia has to refuse the offer of Muriel's precious goblin-made tiara in favor of her great-grandmother Ursula's opal-and-diamond-studded coronet.

And Ignatius teaches her how to laugh, to smile because she wants to, because something's made her happy, not because it's the polite, programmed thing to do in certain situations. He holds her hand underneath the table at her family's dreary near-silent dinner parties while she tries rather unsuccessfully to keep the appropriate, reserved, bored look on her face. He kisses and hugs her for no good reason, skives off afternoons at work to pull her away from Prewett estate accounts (she's terribly clever with numbers and housekeeping) and into their bedroom.

And she makes him happy. Tall, burly, red-haired Ignatius Prewett loves his tiny, delicate little Black princess with her graceful ways and clever mind, her awkward, uncertain expressions of emotion and the hesitant, unsure moment before she smiles or laughs, as though she's waiting to be chided for inappropriateness.

But there are still moments:

When he looks down at the little white and pink bundle named Molly and Lu marvels at her downy hair (Pink! she whispers as she runs a careful finger across Molly's head, awed, looking up to grin at him with no hesitation whatsoever), Ignatius is seized with terror, that underneath her Prewett-red hair and Prewett-brown eyes Lu's given her Black madness. He worries the same with Gideon, and even more for the red-haired, grey-eyed Fabian who looks so like his mother.

When Muriel baits and prods poor Lu into near-tears one Christmas, he watches her wand hand twitch, flexing, and he is so afraid that, had she not had toddler Fabian in her lap, it would have been an unpleasant Christmas indeed.

When Molly brings home sweet, shabby Arthur Weasley and Lu is quiet and painfully, frostily polite to him; a Weasley for her Molly? She loves him in the end, that he makes Molly happy is enough, but Ignatius always knows that she'll never really approve of such a life for her daughter. When Lu says to him, that first night after Arthur hesitantly kisses Molly goodbye and goes, but she's a Prewett! what she really means is, but she's a Black. There is no love in the Black family, not like the love in the family Ignatius has made with Lu, but there is respect and pride carved down deep in her flesh and bone.

When Gideon and Fabian quietly tell them of their Order, and Lu's eyes flash with something dangerous when she absolutely forbids her sons to be involved with…that. She doesn't have a word to call it, but Ignatius has never seen Lu worked into such a towering rage, and her petite frame seems suddenly enlarged, even next to big, broad Gideon and tall Fabian. And it's maternal, it's protective, but the Black fury in her eyes is terrifying.

Lu dies beautiful, like so many of her family before her. At fifty, she fades, for no reason at all. Muriel whispers bad blood like it's someone's fault and Ignatius has never seen gentle Gideon closer to hitting anyone. By fifty-two she is gone, her diamond face still unlined, her maple-brown hair untouched by grey. Her coffin is lined in forest green satin and she looks painfully beautiful as they shut her up in the box and Ignatius cries with his children.

When Fabian and Gideon are laid in the plot beside her, he envies her terribly for keeping in the natural order of life; she never had to bury a child.

When he holds his only granddaughter for the first time, beautiful and new and named for her (but not Lucretia, she'd insisted once, long ago, it's an ugly, cold name), he just misses her.

Ignatius looks at Ginny, at Molly, at the rest of her children. He looks over photographs of his brave sons, his own mirror in Gideon and Lu's in Fabian.

And, for all the worry, it's not such bad blood at all.