Chapter 23: The Propaganda War

The drawers in Selwyn’s little tea-room did not shut all the way. Steam breathed from the gaps as if the furniture had lungs and the kettle’s sigh had worked its way into oak. The place had been a watchmaker’s once; the thin copper faces of old clocks still peered from a high shelf, their hands stopped in polite astonishment. Through the window the Alley went about its business at the late hour with its chin tucked down and its collar up; it was raining the sort of light rain that makes even stone look like moth-wet cloth.

Selwyn stirred her tea with a pen. Ink ran in a pale milky thread around the spoon, tight as a noose. “If you want it in print before noon, you pay the Sunday rate. If you want it below the fold, you pay the supplement. If you want it on a mouth, you pay in a currency that has nothing to do with me,” she said.

Tom watched the ink ring even itself and disappear. He had never liked the way ink will pretend it is part of the cream and then leave you with a bitter aftertaste at the bottom. “We don’t do anything ‘below the fold’,” he said. “We are answered as if we belong on the front.”

Selwyn made a face that was half a smile and half something else. She had powdered her nose badly; a faint line of it clung to where the spectacles would sit, if she wore them. “You will be answered where they have space and appetite,” she said, “which today is a narrow place, because a man set his own shed on fire attempting to stave off a garden gnome infestation and the papers are very full of agricultural advice.” She tapped the rate card without looking at it. “Twelve galleons for a third of a column in the Prophet’s lunch edition. Fifteen for the Evening Ledger. My fee is a separate matter, and don’t make that face; you knew this was not a charity when you came to me.”

A shadow paused, then lengthened across the table. An Auror walked past the window, cap pulled low, a rain darkening on his shoulder. He glanced in as people do when they pass light. Tom kept his chin where it was. He noticed, with a small, precise satisfaction, that his fingers did not reach for his wand. There was nothing to reach for yet. He held Selwyn’s gaze until the reflection of the Auror’s back had passed, and the room took a breath as if a draught had been let out.

"We answer today," Tom said.

"We do," Selwyn said. "With the word you're set on, we do not. Not in paper. Not on a respectable tongue. Not yet."

"It arrived in this morning's edition," he said. "If I leave 'Eaters of Death' uncorrected until tomorrow—"

"Until tomorrow it becomes fact," Selwyn finished. Her pen stopped moving. "I know how this works better than you do. I was making lies into furniture before you could hold a wand." She leaned forward, and the powder on her nose caught the light. "But you should know: the Auror office has been sniffing at the edges. They've got a man who likes to make examples. If we push too loud, too fast, your respectable friends become targets before they're ready to be martyrs."

Tom's expression did not change, but something behind his eyes recalculated. "Who?"

"Avery's father. Rosier's uncle. Names that look good on letterhead and fragile in a holding cell." She tapped the rate card. "You want to play this game, you play it knowing the stakes aren't yours alone."

"You do not correct an insult by repeating it," Selwyn said, quiet and short, returning to the immediate question as if she had not just shown him the edge of a cliff. “They’ve tossed a rotten egg into the yard. If you pick it up and throw it back, you will never get the smell out of your sleeve.” She slid a small slip towards him. On it someone had cut out and pasted a line from that morning’s Prophet, the paste already buckling the paper in damp little waves: Eaters of Death, the less reputable column had called those men who were said to have put down a riot without the Ministry’s leave. It sat there, cheap and pleased with itself, greasy as chip-paper.

Tom put one finger on the margin and did not smudge. “Then we will answer without it,” he said. “We answer now, we take up all the air, and later we take what they meant. We reduce and refine.”

Selwyn watched him for a moment. “Say it, then,” she said. “How you will say it now.”

Tom did not look at the words again. He had already taken what he needed. “They have taken the King’s English and turned it into a poke in the ribs,” he said, mild. “We will speak as if the language still had its bones. No monster talk. No hunger. We tell a clean story. We put a word like a hairpin in the hinge so that when they open it at supper tomorrow, it will catch.”

“Plain,” Selwyn said, pleased despite herself. “All right. Plain. A line that will sit nicely in any mouth. What’s the hairpin?”

“You will have that when the doors are shut,” Tom said. “I am not paying for you to sell it to someone else for a guinea.”

Selwyn’s hand stilled. Tea clinked around the edge of her spoon. “I don’t sell secrets,” she said.

“You sell everything else,” he said, and set the money down.

The coins on the table looked almost indecent in the soft room; gold always did. Selwyn made them disappear with the neatness of a woman who had once smuggled perfume over a border in her bodice. She pinched the rate card and the money together and tucked them away in the bent mouth of the till. It breathed like a small stove when she shut it; a little heat, a little sigh, as if it were tired of being opened and closed on other people’s needs.

An owl tapped at the window and sidled along the sill with thin offended steps. Selwyn did not get up. Tom stood and opened it, one hand light to keep the rain back. The owl stuck its leg out, professionally bored. The Malfoy seal glared up from the note, immaculate and pale as a thumbnail.

He knew what it would say before he broke it. Abraxas liked to make his favours into instruments.

—Your assurances must become measures.—

The rest in the neat, hard hand: Funds contingent upon a demonstrable advance by Friday. The word demonstrable underlined, not too hard, just enough to be seen. A specific line: we must be heard not only answering, but being answered. A condition tucked in a corner, almost domestic: do not use that phrase in print until we have it on a Ministry mouth.

He folded the note once, then once again, until the paper made a little square that could not be folded any further. “He ties the purse to the bell-rope,” Tom said.

Selwyn made a small humming noise. “He would tie it to your wrist if he could do it without bruising you in a way others might remark upon,” she said. “What does he want that he has not said to me already?”

“A result they can wrap in linen and set on a shelf,” Tom said. “A man in a hat saying our phrase without understanding where it came from. He wants that mouth.”

Selwyn sipped her tea as if it offended her and she intended to finish it anyway. “You want it more than he does, and for a different reason,” she said.

Tom sat again. He let the owl hop off and shake itself and go. “His conditions stand. Your fees stand. My timing stands,” he said. “You will place a letter to the editor in the lunch edition—three sentences, twelve words each, no adjectives I wouldn’t say aloud in a courtroom. In the evening paper you will pay for an advertisement that looks like an advertisement and isn’t one. No names. No hunger. A line that says what we are for and does not leave the air smelling of old meat.”

Selwyn’s pen moved, its nib making a whisper on the cheap paper. “A slogan,” she said, with the disdain of someone who can do better and will be paid to, but knows that the dullest tool sometimes does the job. “A respectable mouth. We’ll get Madam Jenkins in the Housewives’ Circle to say it on the wireless if we have to.”

“We won’t,” Tom said. “I have another mouth in mind. Write down the number for the man at the Ministry canteen who likes to be thought blasé. He looks as if he’s always just finished laughing at something you haven’t heard. He will repeat anything that seems as if it might be a joke in six months’ time. It will be his by tomorrow, and then it will be everyone’s.”

Selwyn turned the rate card over and wrote carefully in a hand that other people would be able to read. “You do realise Abraxas will not open the purse until his condition is met,” she said, without looking up. “You will be broke by Thursday if you keep buying half-columns and fish suppers for men with loud voices.”

“My supper will be fine,” Tom said. He checked his watch. The second hand limped, stubborn. He made a note to shake it later and see if it chose to behave.

Selwyn slid the paper across. He read, touched it once with his finger where she had put a misplaced comma, and gave it back. “You will go to press now,” he said.

“I will,” she said. “And you, I imagine, will go to the other end of the world to put a nail in a door.”

“There are hinges,” he said. “It is only the wrong kind of ward if you put the wrong thing through them.”

Selwyn’s eyes flicked up. “You promised blood in your letter, and she refused,” she said. “If she refuses again when you’re there, what then?”

“Then the door will shut without me,” he said, and stood.

“Tom,” Selwyn said, almost kindly, before the tone went away like warmth out of tea. “If you cannot have what you asked for, you might settle for something you can bear. It is not the same thing as failing.”

He looked at her a second longer than was polite. “It is, sometimes,” he said, and the bell over the door rang with a little cough as he left.

The Alley smelled of rain and paper and the faint sourness of wool drying on a radiator somewhere behind a fogged window. He kept to the shadow side. The men who stood under the eaves of the bookshop were not talking about anything he needed. A paperboy went by with his scarf up to his nose, calling the latest with the muffled cheer of a boy who would rather be home.

A white-haired wizard under the awning of the apothecary lifted his eyebrows in greeting. Tom returned something that could have been the same. He did not alter his pace. When he reached the place between the umbrella stand and the narrow gap where the shops pinched together, he folded himself into it, twisted, and was somewhere else.

Spinner’s End had been built when mill-owners wanted the workers to smell their own work even on Sundays. The canal breathed the way a sheep does when it has been left too long in the rain; slow, steady, a little stubborn. The brick had sweat running down its face and the lamplight was the tired yellow that makes every scratch on a man’s knuckles look like a small admission.

He went on foot. Magic would have made the street look up. There were curtains that moved in the old manner, with hands behind them. A dog barked as if it had been trained to be brave and had not yet learned not to be.

Number fourteen had its paint worn thin where fingers had found the latch for years. The step had a neat half-moon of scrubbed wet at its edge; someone had been out with the brush today. The draught under the door had the tea-and-iron smell of a house that is careful because it must be.

He knocked. The sound made a small room of the hall and went back into itself. There was the clink of something being put down in the kitchen and the sound of two footsteps that wanted to be light and were not allowed.

Eileen opened the door with her hand on the inside latch. She wore a shawl that had not realised it was old yet and her hair was pinned with those stubborn pins that leave little bruises on the scalp if you fall asleep in them. Her face did an odd thing when she saw him; it took a breath and then shut the window against it.

“You’ve come,” she said. She did not say it as if she were surprised.

“You telegraphed,” he said. “You asked for the hinge.”

Eileen glanced down and then up, quick, the way one does when one half expects to see a line drawn on the threshold that wasn’t there the last time. “You’ll not use blood,” she said. It was not a question and she did not apologise for it.

“No,” he said, calm. “You refused it in your letter. I said there were other ways.”

She stood aside. He put one foot over, then the other, carefully, because houses like this remember feet. The hall had a green runner that had learned to be good under boots. A coat hung on the peg that was not a wizard’s; it had that shine on the sleeves where a man has carried things in all weathers. He let his gaze brush it and pass by.

“Kitchen,” she said. “The kettle’s on.” She nodded at his sleeve. “You’ll want to warm your hands.”

His hands were warm enough. He let them be warmed anyway; the chip in the rim of the mug matched the chip in the enamel of the stove. He looked at the hinge.

It was the sort of hinge that knows what it is; iron, clean, oiled recently with something that had done a poor job of not smelling like lard. Three screws, the head on the second with a burr where some man had slipped and sworn quietly under his breath while he fetched another screwdriver from a tobacco tin under the stairs. The door had been painted over so many times that the edges of the hinge had a white line like a church memorial. He put his thumb to the bevel. The iron was honest about its temperature.

“You wrote that you knew a hinge-spell,” Eileen said. She stood a little to the side, shawl tight. “An old one.”

“It goes through the hinge and makes the threshold useful,” Tom said. “It takes the weight of the house and says who it will sit on. Anyone who isn’t welcome and tries to push it right will feel as if their shoulder has met a brick wall, and anyone who is welcome can push it with a finger and it will go. You can set it to ring in your bones when someone you don’t want puts a hand on it. Old kitchen magic,” he added, to make it smaller.

As he spoke he was measuring the door in the old way: who had gone out and in, what the wood kept, how the light dropped across the sill in the afternoon. There was flour under the edge of the mat and a string tied to the key and hooked on a nail.

“The old way uses blood,” Eileen said.

“The old way uses what you have plenty of,” he said. “When you haven’t plenty, you use your name and breath and iron and you make do. It will hold long enough.”

Her jaw clicked. “Long enough for what.”

“For a man with loose hands to learn to put them in his pockets,” Tom said. He had never been a patient teacher, but he knew how to set a lesson so that it would be learned.

Eileen looked at his face instead of at the hinge. Her eyes went quick to his mouth and to his hands. “You’ll not be putting any part of you in it,” she said, low. “Not a hair. Not a fingernail. I won’t have you fixed to my door.”

“I wasn’t going to,” he said. He had been going to, of course. An old habit—make the threshold remember the maker. It makes the mending simpler when you do not have to knock like a stranger.

“You bring the words,” she said. “You leave nothing.”

He took the small roll of tools from his pocket and put it down on the scrubbed table. She looked at it with the automatic distaste of a woman raised to think that knives should be in drawers and not traveling about in a gentleman’s coat. He unrolled the cloth. Small screwdriver, a nail with a head like a coin, a length of black thread, a bottle of iron filings the colour of ash when you blow on it. He put his hand on the nail.

“You set it through here,” he said, and drove the nail into the wood above the hinge without magic, because the house would feel the difference. The nail went in with the sound of a thought being thought and then lodged. He took the thread and looped it around, over and under, until the hinge sat inside a figure-of-eight that he could feel even with his eyes shut.

“Say your name,” he said. “Full.”

Eileen’s mouth made a little line that could have been about anything. “Not yours,” she said. “Not in my kitchen.”

“Not mine,” he agreed. He did not look at her. He dipped his finger in the filings and let them dust the thread where it crossed, the fine iron sticking to the black, thin as soot. “Yours. You need the door to recognise you.”

She did not say it at once. The kettle banged its lid faintly. The house chose not to look while she did it. When she spoke, the simple shape of her name made the air behave as if a new person had come into the room. He felt the way the iron warmed itself. He liked it, clean and old and not at all to do with him.

“Once more,” he said.

She said it. There was a little frown that took root between her brows and stayed when she had done. “You’ll not write it,” she said.

He smiled without showing his teeth. “What would I write it with,” he said, very light. “The lard. Don’t be stupid.”

Her mouth twitched. It made her look a little like the girl she had been the last time she had left a place by choice. “Watch your tongue,” she said.

“Say it into the hinge,” he said. “Close to the iron.”

She knelt. Her shawl slipped and she pushed it back with a hand that was reddened from not having gloves. She put her mouth by the hinge and said her name as if it could have been an apology. The iron took it, sour and good. He tied the thread off, left a long end, blew once on the filings and watched them turn dull.

He felt the house notice. It was not like blood. Blood runs quickly and tells everything, even what you would rather not hear. This was a quieter thing. The hinge took a small breath and shut it inside itself.

“It will lift for you and hold for whoever you tell it to,” he said. “You have to tell it. It won’t make up its own mind.” He stood, pushed the door with two fingers. It resisted as if it owed him money and intended never to pay until Eileen, without being told, laid her own palm flat on the middle panel. The door went at once, smooth as if it had always intended it, and made the little pleased sound that doors make when they fall into a habit that suits them.

She looked at him without gratitude. “And if he pushes with his shoulder,” she said.

“Then he’ll think he’s become clumsy overnight,” Tom said. “He’ll bruise. He’ll blame the wood. It will not matter what he blames.” He untied the thread and let it fall, caught the end in his hand and wound it back around the nail, neat as a gentleman rewrapping a string round a parcel. He put the nail’s head under the rail so that the whole of it sat there like a secret that was polite enough not to go spoiling anyone’s supper.

Eileen stood, rubbing the heel of her hand with her thumb without knowing she did it. “You’ll not bind it to yourself,” she said, again.

“No,” he said.

“You won’t come by unless I send,” she said.

“No,” he said.

“You’ll not put my name anywhere but here,” she said, very soft.

He did not answer that. He looked at the coat on the peg and then at the small clock with the painted flowers that looked as if they’d been dabbed on by a girl with cold hands. He thought of the coin in the tea-room drawer and the way the till had breathed.

“This is a poor ward,” he said, and the honesty of it made her stare at him.

“It will hold,” she said, hard.

“It will hold what you asked,” he said. “It will not keep out anything worse than a man with fists. It will not keep out a word. It will not keep out a look. It will not keep out anything that knows how to say please.”

“I know what it will not keep,” she said, with a bitterness that came out like smoke under the door. “You tell me if I send.”

He nodded once. “Send a penny post. The envelope can be empty. I’ll know. I’m not coming unless you ask.” He rolled the cloth around the tools and put it away.

“And the price,” Eileen said. She didn’t move. The kitchen clock ticked as if counting out stitches.

He studied her. There is always a price, he had learned, and if the other party does not name one you must worry what they are taking instead. “What else,” he said.

“You said it in your letter,” she said. “You wrote that if I put this on my door you will not put yours through it. You won’t come back and find a use for anything in my kitchen. That’s the price. You leave me with what I’ve got, such as it is.”

He almost smiled then, at the small insolence of it, and at himself for wanting to encourage it. “Done,” he said. “And when you send, I come for what you say and not for what I can take.”

“Done,” she said, and stuck out her hand as if they were men.

He shook it, formal as any agreement they might have written under a seal. Her fingers were cold, but her grip was not meeker for it. He let go first.

There was a small weak cry from upstairs; not a child; the noise an old pipe makes when it is about to settle. Eileen did not look. The way she held herself told him enough. He did not look, either. It would be a mistake to know any more about this house than he already did. He had already put his breath by her hinge; he was not going to put his eyes on her stairs.

He stepped back to the hall. “I said I would bring you the wording,” he said. “You’ll see it tomorrow. Not as you think.”

She put her hand to the door, and it opened as quietly as if it had decided to do it a long time ago. “Don’t make it clever,” she said. “Clever breaks.”

“It will be simple,” he said.

He put one foot on the step and felt the way the canal moved its weight in the dark. He felt the door behind him, the hinge thinking about the work it had been given. He didn’t look back. It is a bad habit, looking back, and he had unlearned it young.

The street took him as if he had been absent for an hour instead of a moment. Someone down by the lock had lit a cigarette that smelled thin and brave. On the far side of the bridge two men were arguing about money under their breath. A woman pulled her child along without saying anything, her arm tight as a belt. The canal made that patient animal sound again and the rain set its small neat hands on everything.

He went up into the dark where it thinned and made a path. He had, for a second, the ordinary feeling that he had left something behind on a table. It was only the thread. He rubbed his thumb and the fine iron dust came away grey on his skin. He put it into his pocket, then took it out again and blew it into the canal. The iron fell and the water took it without comment.

He could have gone back to the Alley at once. He did not. He turned instead into the public-house on the corner with the name that had been painted and repainted until it had become as much a fact of the street as the stone—The King’s Arms, the old letters showing faintly through like bones under a thin face. It was warmer than it needed to be. The windows sweated. The floor had the slickness of a room that has been mopped with a bucket that kept its dirty secret. Nobody looked at him twice. They never do if you don’t ask them to.

A man with the sort of voice that goes through doors without knocking was telling the barmaid what the paper had said. “—the lot of ’em, right? Eaters of—” He stopped as if he had suddenly remembered he was not alone on the earth, looked at Tom’s hands, saw they were clean, and said in a less convinced tone, “—trouble.”

The word hung on the wet air, cheap as the paste in Selwyn’s clipping. Tom took a sip of beer he had no intention of drinking and looked at the man until the man looked away.

On his way out he passed the little square of board where notices went—houses to let, jobs if a man did not mind not being paid this week, lessons in handwriting for girls. Someone had chalked on the brick just below it, where the landlord wouldn’t look because of the habit of his neck: a crooked set of letters, a child’s hand or a man’s in the dark. Death-Eaters, it said. The hyphen had been put in with care. The rain had touched it and the chalk had melted a little at the edges so that the white ran down and made it look as if the word had once been alive and had been pulled quickly back.

He stood, not long. The chalk had made a decision that the paper would make tomorrow. It had taken the insult and cut a piece of it off like mould off bread. He put his thumb to the hyphen and made it neat.

The boy with the papers came in under everyone’s expression and put his sack down and blew on his hands and called it without meaning to: “Death Eaters,” he said, because he was reading what was on the chalk without knowing he was doing it, because someone had said it behind him, because mouths are careless things. He laughed at the sound of it, a little, because it did sound like a joke if you hadn’t thought about it yet. The men at the bar repeated it under their breath with the fraternity of men saying a thing that belongs to none of them and all of them.

That was the one new thing he was given that night. He let himself be pleased by it for exactly as long as it took to walk from the chalk to the door. Then he set it in his mouth the way a man folds a letter and puts it away and intends to send it in the morning. He left his half-pint where it was and went to find the mouth in the canteen Selwyn had written down.

The Ministry canteen was bright as a dentist’s and smelled of cabbage and steam. He did not sit. He stood behind the man with the laugh and the worn place on his sleeve, and put his line into the room carefully, like a dropped spoon: not a speech, nothing that would make anyone turn their head. He let the new contraction touch the edge of a sentence and pass on, no emphasis at all, and the talk took it up the way a stream takes a leaf.

By the time he went out there was a little chorus of it, all off-key and pleasing. He did not go back to Selwyn’s tea-room to report his success; that was not what this was. He went into the dark and let the Ministry behind him be a tall stone with many lit windows.

An owl made a line across the sky that looked too straight to be an animal’s path. He thought of Abraxas’s conditions and the neat underlining and the purse tied to a bell-rope. He felt in his coat where the little square of paper with the Malfoy seal had made a corner and found it, and did not take it out. He had paid for Selwyn’s ads and this supper of other men’s words with his own money. He had promised Eileen he would not bind her door to his hand. He had not got what he wanted in either place.

He stopped under the narrow arch by the old post office, where there was a draught and the smell of stone and old gum on the floor, and made himself as still as the arch’s edge. The failure sat as clean as a dry spoon in his mouth. He did not spit it out. He turned it in his fingers and saw what shape it was and put it away. It would keep. It would keep and it would make a firmer thing when he used it.

The night had the honest sound that comes when the rain means to go on without any apology. He walked until his feet let the street become a series of useful facts again. As he turned down towards the narrow set of steps that would take him to the place between things, he heard it once more, without his name attached to it, without anyone in the world thinking he had anything to do with it. A man with a pleasant voice said it in mockery and the man beside him, who had better sense, said it as if he wished he had thought of it: Death Eaters.

He did not smile. He did not hurry. He stepped off the last stair and the dark took him, and when he came up in the Alley again, the paperboy was standing under Selwyn’s window with his scarf on the wrong way and his cheeks chapped, and was shouting for sale what would be written tomorrow.

He went in. The tea-room had emptied and the kettle had done sighing and was sulking on the back of the stove. Selwyn was blotting a page and not thinking about the ink. She did not look up when the bell coughed.

“The lunch edition will go,” she said. “Your letter is dull, which is the compliment you meant it to be. The evening piece will draw three replies from men who care more about the placement of commas than anything in the world. One of them will be an Auror, which you will be pleased by. The man in the canteen will say something he thinks he’s made up. The rest will follow. Abraxas will untie his purse a bit and make you show him the knot.” She put the blotter down. “And?”

“And the ward holds,” he said. “It will do what it has to. It will not do what I like.”

Selwyn blew out a breath that lifted the hair at her temple. “That sounds like most of my clients,” she said. “You’ve paid my fee. If you don’t sleep, it won’t be because of me.”

He put the folded square of Malfoy parchment on her counter and pressed two fingers on it without pushing. “He makes funds contingent on today being heard tomorrow from a respectable mouth,” he said. “Tie this to your copy.”

Selwyn raised an eyebrow. “A message,” she said.

“A measure,” Tom said. “He can count it with his neat little ruler while he’s waiting for his tailor.” He lifted his hand. “Don’t show him how we did it.”

Selwyn made an expression at him that looked almost like pity. “He won’t ask,” she said. “Men like him only ask about the bits that flatter them. It’ll be your boy with the red ears and the straight back who gets questioned at three in the morning, not Abraxas.”

“He knew that when he wrote demonstrable,” Tom said, and the faint contempt in his mouth made it belong to a stranger’s face for a second. He turned towards the door. “If there’s a man with a badge under your window tomorrow, let him in. Make him tea. Put his story on page two. It will cheer him up and he will forget to ask about the drawer.”

Selwyn’s mouth shifted. “Tom,” she said, as if there might be a version of his name that belonged to her. “Don’t teach a door to shut when you’re still inside.”

He had the good sense to nod.

Outside the Alley had turned the colour of cold milk. The owl-lines crossed and re-crossed and made something like a net if you looked long enough. He did not. He cut across the slow crowd and felt the pockets of air as if they were rooms he could go into and lock. At the corner he paused an unnecessary second, until the boy with the scarf stumbled and righted himself and grinned at a girl, and a man reconsidered a purchase and put his purse back in the wrong pocket. He listened to what the street had chosen to repeat of what he had given it, and measured it against what he had wanted.

He had promised no blood and kept it. He had not bound a door to his hand. He had paid for words with coin and had to wait to see if they would behave. He had put a hairpin into a hinge and would have to find out, tomorrow or the next day, whether the door caught.

It would have to do. The canal drew a breath, far away, patient. The chalk ran in the rain and left the faintest pale taste on the brick. The word he had cut down to its bones moved from mouth to mouth and left nothing on his hands.

He went on.