Two Houses The car was not, as far as Julian knew about such things, all that impressive. It would stand out on a Muggle street, she thought, it was a bit too old-fashioned to not draw at least a few glances in her neighborhood, but it was normal enough by Ministry of Magic standards and therefore, she assumed, the standards of rich wizards who liked their novelty items. Lenore Crowley – somehow her cousin; Julian had never figured out the exact details of their relationship and thought that vagueness was a large part of why she could more or less comfortably think of Lenore as her cousin; acknowledging a generic sort of cousin, probably distant enough that Julian could have married her had she been so inclined, didn’t mean acknowledging more specific relationships with Lenore’s elders as much as acknowledging a specific degree of kinship did – seemed fascinated by it after she and Julian and William returned from an afternoon drive, though, staring at the wheels with a frown that boded ill for their survival.
William seemed to agree with Julian’s assessment of the look on her cousin’s face. “Whatever you’re thinking, the answer is no,” said William firmly, taking a protective step closer to his toy.
“Shut up,” said Lenore absently, waving him off and furthering the resemblance of Julian’s cousin and boyfriend to Julian’s next-to-youngest brother and Julian herself. “I’m trying to think…I think I see it,” she said, but she sounded doubtful. “How it could work – see that bit? It turns. Wheels. Things that are rolling keep rolling, but…How would you stop it without magic? What would you push it with without magic?” Lenore walked around the rear of the car and gave it a shove. William winced as her hands squealed across the boot lid. Lenore did, too; Julian assumed it was hot. “See? It’s too heavy to move. Julian, how does it work?”
She looked at Julian expectantly. Julian tried desperately to remember what little she had ever even heard about the topic. “It – er – you put – you put this stuff in it, gasoline, it’s – “ Julian fumbled her way back to silence. “For goodness’ sake, Lenore, I don’t know. I’m not an – engineer, or whoever would know that.”
“But you said you’ve seen ones that run without magic. You just said it twenty minutes ago.”
“I’ve seen a hippogriff before, too, but I don’t think I could tell you how it works!” exclaimed Julian in exasperation.
Lenore frowned at her for a moment as though she was being stupid on purpose, then shook her head and redirected her attention. “William, I just want to look at it, I promise I won’t break it – “
“I seem to recall hearing that line somewhere before,” sighed William, rubbing his temples. “I really should know better than to bring anything within a hundred feet of you, Lenore…”
Lenore, beaming, reached up and thoroughly disordered William’s hair. He swore as he ran his hands through it, trying to reestablish order. “Thank you!” said Lenore, and Julian very quickly started getting out of the way. Lenore didn’t seem immediately inclined to try to do anything with it – or at least Julian hoped Lenore knew it was probably impossible to operate the thing, and certainly impossible to operate it safely, while upright on her knees in the front seat – but she still didn’t want to be anywhere near this. William, not entirely surprisingly all things considered, seemed to have the same idea.
“Do you really think this is a good idea?” she asked William, worried, as they began slowly walking, half-backward, away from the impending disaster. “I mean, besides just – your uncle probably wanting it back, people really get hurt with those things….”
“If she can even figure out how to make it go – which I’m not sure she will – it’s enchanted to steer itself if it thinks it might crash, so even Lenore shouldn’t be able to completely reduce it – or herself – to dust,” said William. He looked glumly after his toy. “Not completely….”
Julian laughed, wishing, not for the first time, that she had William’s skill for dealing with people. If she and John had had that conversation, Julian was sure she would have tried to explain why his idea was a terrible one and then tones would have turned sharp on both sides and then they both would have ended up in a sulk somehow. William simply thought ahead and made sure he had the means to make the problem go away before Lenore could even create it – though Julian still didn’t know why he’d even introduced the stimulus in this case. Was he trying to impress her, she wondered? She had never really understood the whole men-and-cars thing, but then, the only ride she was really familiar with was her family van, which was hardly something any of her brothers had ever tried or would ever try to show off to a girl….
“You’ve not thinking of Lenore’s risk of an early grave anymore,” noted William.
“I’m sorry,” apologized Julian. “I was just thinking about…never mind.”
“That makes me mind even more,” said William.
Julian tried to figure out what to say, turning words over in her head. She could hear Lenore exclaiming something, though not exactly what. Probably for the best, really….
An odd trio, her and William and Lenore, especially considering that she’d met William when she literally walked into him while trying to flee a party in part because Lenore had referenced her status as Richard's illegitimate child right to her face, without even seeming to think that this might not be something about her background that Julian would really care to have announced to a group of people she didn’t know. Someone – possibly William, actually; they had evidently known each forever and ever and ever because William’s great-great-uncle somebody had been married to Lenore’s great-great-great-aunt somebody and William really did seem to look out for Lenore as if she was the little sister he’d never had – must have told her she’d been rude, though, because the next time Julian had been at what was technically her house to accept rent payments (and feeling, as she always did when she did that, like a great fool and poor imposter someone was going to out at any moment; she very much wanted to have them just pay the bank, or at least pay Sallie in her place, but apparently, there was a Way Things Were Done And Had Always Been Done And Would Always Be Done, Amen), Lenore had shown up, apologized, and asked if Julian would terribly mind reinstating her library privileges. Apparently Lenore was homeschooled, for reasons she had not seen fit to tell Julian about, and Richard, like most of her family, had let her largely have the run of his private library before he’d died. Julian had agreed, on the condition that Lenore show her, who’d never had the nerve to go exploring, where it was and how to get around it. From there, after Julian started dating William, it had sort of just…happened, the three of them falling together a couple of weekends a month – admittedly, at first because Julian hadn’t trusted William very much and had wanted a chaperone who stood no chance of ever running into any member of Julian’s family and who was pretty much the definition of non-threatening, but she had become fond of the younger witch, too, over the months. And now here they were.
“I was just thinking that my brothers will be home soon,” said Julian. An awkward, at least from her point of view, pause ensued. Her youngest brothers coming home meant it would be a lot harder for her to see him as often. “Strange, um, train of thought,” she rambled to fill the silence. “Lenore asking questions…I thought John could probably answer them, but I can just imagine, you know, the two of them – “ she laughed. “If they didn’t kill each other in a week, they’d have to, to marry for the sake of public decency as soon as they were old enough instead….”
William looked momentarily startled, then he burst out laughing. “I – I’m sorry,” he said when Julian stared at him, amazed. “Just – I don’t know about Lenore marrying him, but I am going have to meet this character, this John of yours, sometime…..
And there it was.
He said it so casually, but it wasn’t really a casual matter at all. She didn’t know if his family knew anything about her, but she did know that hers knew nothing about him. Julian had gone to some lengths, in fact, to keep them all from being able to confirm that she was seeing someone. She suspected William knew that, too, though he had never said anything to her about it. It was, after all, just a touchy subject, and not one she thought either of them wanted to think about. On the weekends, at this house so distant from everything else she owned that it might as well have been on another planet, the constraints of the real world didn’t matter. Everywhere else, they did, and out there, they were from completely different sides of the tracks no matter who her biological parents had been. His parents might be okay with her pseudo-biologically, but politically….
Well, they didn’t discuss it. She thought most often about how he’d never met her family and what she would do if he ever wanted to and how they would take it if they ever met him, but she had never met Mr. and Mrs. Welles, either, and William had never even suggested that she might ever do so. They were kind of each other’s dirty secrets and that was that and there had never been any need to discuss it.
“Really?” she asked.
William stopped walking. For once, Julian thought she could see something that looked like uncertainty in his expression, just beneath the surface. Across the lawn, Lenore somehow figured out what the horn was for, or at least what it did, because she hit it twice in a row. “I – have been thinking that perhaps it’s time,” he said slowly. “Unless you don’t think so?”
Julian shrugged. “John can be – difficult,” she said. “With new people. He’s – all right once you get to know him, of course, but he doesn’t really know how to get to know anyone outside of a science fair….”
“I wasn’t just talking about John,” said William.
Julian bit her lip. “I know,” she admitted finally.
It seemed to take a moment for the implications of that statement to sink in, but when they did, William blinked. He looked completely thrown. “That’s…Are you…Are you – saying you think your family will object to….”
Julian gave him a look, a little surprised he hadn’t thought of it before. “Of course,” she said. “My mother’s Muggleborn and one of my brothers is a Squib, William. I know you haven’t done anything to any of them,” she added quickly before he could protest his own innocence in the tensions between groups, “but…well.” She remembered John’s reaction when William had sent flowers at Christmas, and, more distantly but far more painfully, the time she’d overheard him basically telling Paul he thought she was both naïve and stupid for thinking Sallie might have any interest in anything other than taking advantage of her. “John’s never really been that good at hiding that he doesn’t think I should even talk to Sallie, and I…I’ve always been afraid that everyone else secretly agreed with him.”
There was a long pause. “Julian,” said William finally, “do – I’m sorry, I don’t mean this…the way it might sound, but – do they, does any of your family…know where you are right now?”
For a moment, Julian considered the possibility that he was a mind reader. “No,” she admitted.
“I see.”
“Don’t ‘see’ like that,” protested Julian. “It’s not – “
“As though I’m something you’d be embarrassed to show them?” he asked. “Or are they something you’re embarrassed to show me?”
“No!” Julian willed herself not to lose her temper with him. This was no different than dealing with her family. They weren’t in her position. None of them knew what this was like. They couldn’t help that, and honestly, she wouldn’t wish this nonsense on anyone. She was happy that they didn’t have to deal with it, she really was. She just wished they could…try to empathize a little more. That was all. “I don’t – none of you are – dirty laundry to me.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“William, they’re my family,” she said. “I hate it when I fight with any of them, but I’m not willing to break up with you just because they don’t like you, so it’s just…been easier to keep you all separate.” She rubbed her arms even though it wasn’t remotely cold. “But that’s not going to work long-term, is it?”
“I don’t see how it could.”
Julian made a hasty decision. “Meet me here again tomorrow morning,” she said. “Without Lenore. There’s something I want to show you.”
She regretted the decision within an hour, but the next morning, she did what she had planned to do and pretended she wasn’t feeling well to get out of going to early service. Once her family was gone, she got dressed, hands shaking a little, and then Disapparated.
William had beaten her there and was reading the newspaper. Julian tried to remember if she knew if the house got the paper. If it did, she really ought to cancel that, as she got a newspaper at home, too, and therefore didn’t really need another….She ought to have just sold the whole house back to that one cousin who’d thought he was going to inherit it anyway back in the beginning and saved herself a lot of trouble, she thought, but, well, it had just gotten all complicated….
Not relevant. She smiled and wiped her hands on her skirt as William looked up, noticing her presence.
“I hope you’re feeling adventurous today,” she said, trying to do so as lightly as possible. She thought she just sounded high-pitched, but maybe he wouldn’t notice. Sometimes she seemed to sound better to other people than she did to herself.
* * * * * * * *
He thought he did an adequate job of hiding it (if he did not, Julian said nothing, though she seemed enough on edge that William didn’t know if he should really attribute anything she did or didn’t notice to his own acting ability), but William did notice how high-strung Julian sounded as she announced that they were going on an adventure. Noticed how high-strung Julian sounded with some apprehension, too. The circumstances under which she’d asked – ordered, really; not typical behavior, but she did become assertive every now and then – him to meet her today had not been the best, so if she was still off-kilter, there was no telling what she might have it in mind to drag him into.
With that unhappy thought in mind, it was almost a relief, at least at first, when he saw where she had the bus drop them off. The place they were in did not look like a place to go on anything William would call an adventure. After a second look, though, he realized that he didn’t know what it looked like at all.
They were standing on a small, cracked sidewalk, which bordered what he recognized as a public road, one Muggles used all the time because they didn’t have any fast transportation methods. Cars, ugly ones, some in poor repair, moved along a much larger road nearby, one which produced so much noise and many foul odors that William winced. They were near something William thought looked, beneath the luridly bright and unnatural Muggle lights, like a string of small, poorly presented shops of some kind, the nearest a café. Julian pointed to a large, to his mind rather ugly, building not far away from it.
“That’s the church,” she informed him. “That’s where my mom and dad are right now, and probably my brother Steve, too.” She turned away from it, walking quickly in the opposite direction. William, bewildered, followed.
Julian offered him no further clues, or indeed any further communication at all, until they passed by another building, this one a bit smaller and with so much glass in its front that it looked more like glass framed in brick than brick containing glass. He marveled at the engineering, which he had to assume had been done entirely without magic. “That’s the library,” she announced. “Mom works there part-time and they have programs for homeschooled kids, so we all practically grew up in there. I’d give you a tour, but someone might ask Mom why I was here instead of at church, and she thinks I’m sick right now.”
“It looks very nice,” lied William hesitantly, but Julian was already walking again. “How – where are we going?” he asked, hurrying to catch up. “How far away is it?”
“Not far. We usually walk when it's not raining. It’s exercise and it saves money.”
“It’s good to save where you can,” said William.
“Yes,” said Julian, but didn’t speak again until she said, “this is called a crosswalk – you have to walk in it so nobody runs you over. The cars here can’t make decisions for themselves.”
She led William onto another sidewalk, this one even smaller than the last. Now, though, the surroundings were much smaller buildings than the church and library, though they were bigger than the little shops. He saw people around them – a man on a porch, a woman throwing a ball with some small children – and realized this was a residential area, presumably Julian’s. He tried not to look too appalled. He had thought Julian’s background was similar to his own, more or less, except for the Muggles and the Squib – he had a more useful last name, but he was only from a minor cadet branch of the family and only got to attend the sort of small party where he’d met Julian because he had a knack for making friends. Beside these things, though, the townhouse he’d grown up in was a mansion. Julian lived here?
Julian said nothing to confirm or deny that to William, but did smile and wave to some of the people they passed. A few of them called out to her by name. They looked at William, on the other hand, with polite distrust, recognizing a stranger; he expected he would have been asked his business had he not clearly been with Julian. Finally, she stopped in front of one of the houses, a low, single-story, rather brown structure with a painfully well-maintained lawn, a couple of small trees, and the strange, boxy architecture with bits taken out of the front which seemed popular in this area.
“This is my house,” said Julian. “This is where I really live.”
* * * * * * * *
Inside, after a tour of the back garden, Julian watched apprehensively through the open kitchen door as William looked around the living room. Her attention was so fixed on his body language, which was hard to read, that she accidentally added five spoons of leaf to the teapot before she realized what she was doing and then had to swear and try to fish some of the ones on top, ones hopefully still untouched by the remains of the hot water she’d used to warm the pot with, out of the infuser basket. When she finally had the dosage more or less right and the water on it, she then took the time to put the pot, the cheese plate she’d prepared first, and a pair of mugs on an actual tray instead of just hanging the mug handles on the fingers of one hand and taking the pot in the other the way she normally would have. There was finally showing William how things really were and then there was showing William how things really were, and she didn’t think they were yet ready for that second option.
His attention, however, was on the mantelpiece instead of her as she entered. She put the tray down on the table and took a step in that direction as he turned toward her, a photograph in his hand. She resisted the urge to snatch it away. “Is this everyone?” he asked.
It was from two Easters ago. Julian nodded. “Yes,” she said. “I – guess you can guess which ones are Mom and Dad.” The fact they were much older than everyone else in the picture was a good clue, as was the fact that the short, stocky, smiling middle-aged man with thinning hair and the tall, thin woman with wavy brown hair were on the top back step, posed above the five younger people in the photograph. Mom’s hand was on John’s shoulder, probably to remind him to look in the right direction and try to look reasonably pleasant while he did – John hated being photographed. He must have been in a good mood that day, though, because he was actually smiling in his place between her and Joe. John and Joe had both been a lot smaller even two years ago; John still looked slightly shorter than Julian in the picture, though she had been wearing tall shoes. “And which one is me,” she joked, pointing to the dark-haired girl in the center of the photo. “The boys – the tall one is Steve, the blond one beside me is Paul, the one on the other side of me is John, and the baby is Joe.”
“You lined up in order of age, then,” noted William. “I couldn’t tell at first – I thought it might have been a chromatic scheme….”
Julian blinked. She had never noticed, but yes, Stephen and John were both older than the family blonds. She guessed she would have lumped herself and John together in a chromatic scheme instead of John and Steve because they both had much darker brown hair than Stephen or Mom did, though hers was the darkest. “That’s just a coincidence,” she said. “We usually just group by age.”
“Which side do you usually take?” asked William.
“It depends on what we’re doing,” said Julian. “Here, the tea’s going to stew….” She poured his first. She’d deliberately taken down two mugs that matched – she thought they, a turquoise set with white interiors, had been a gift her mother had received in a Secret Santa at work, as most of their mugs were a mishmash of styles and patterns, acquired here and there either as gifts or just because someone had liked them. Julian’s favorites were the striped one and one with a pattern of blue daisies, Paul had consumed a majority of his beverages from an old speckled green enamel mug for years, John switched between using the green teacup which had lost its saucer and the small china mug with sailing ships on it and the big china mug with ducks on it, Joe had a tall porcelain one with a picture of a stick man literally flying by the seat of a pair of airborne trousers…She had thought about selecting a couple of those mugs, but had finally decided that while the occasion was deliberately not formal enough for her to get out cups and saucers, it wasn’t casual enough to present him with mismatched novelty mugs, either, or with a couple of her mother’s Alice ones.
“Do you take sugar?” she asked belatedly. “I don’t always anymore, I forget….”
“Usually,” admitted William. Julian’s hopes for anything about this turning out to be a good idea plummeted. If she couldn’t even serve tea properly, she really did not have a chance of impressing him with anything else.
“I’ll go get some, then,” she said.
William took a few sips unsweetened, but did break down and add a spoonful of sugar once Julian returned with a sugar bowl, one hastily filled from the big tin of loose baking sugar because they were out of cubes and the only other sugars in the house were a box of brown sugar and a bit of rock sugar left over from when Dad had decided they ought to have a proper north German teatime back at Easter. “So,” said William as he stirred. “How am I doing so far?”
Julian looked at him guiltily. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“Well,” he said, taking a careful new taste of his tea, “You’ve shown me what you wanted to show me. This. And now you’re clearly thinking about what you think of my reaction. So how am I doing?”
Julian wondered if she was really that transparent. Almost certainly yes. She could feel herself flushing and wished again that someone would invent cosmetics that could camouflage that effect. She attempted to retain as much composure as possible under the circumstances. “Quite well. Keep up the good work,” she said primly, as though congratulating a student for finishing a page in a workbook. William, to her immense relief, laughed.
“Yes, Professor,” he said.
Julian smiled, but it didn’t last. “Seriously,” she said. “What are you thinking?”
“That I am amazed just how many books you have in here,” said William. “No – really. I was just looking at that shelf. I can tell there’s at least one row behind that front one….”
“It’s just two and whatever fits on top,” said Julian. “We’re all readers, so there’s a little bit of everything…we keep the magical books in other parts of the house, of course, just in case. We don’t have much company, though.”
“And is that – does that table have a chessboard built into it?”
“Yeah. Grandpa gave us that – he’s, um, kind of obsessed with chess.”
“Really? Does he play professionally?”
“No. He just lives on a farm in the middle of nowhere in Saskatchewan, so when Dad was home from school when he was growing up, that was what they did at night. Played chess. Nonstop.”
“So if I ever play your father – I’m terrible at chess. Will losing spectacularly inspire contempt or will it ingratiate me to him?”
“That depends on how you take it when he shows you what you did wrong,” said Julian.
“I assume he prefers a graceful loser?”
“Infinitely.” Julian bit her lip. “You’re being very sweet,” she said. “But I saw how you looked when you first saw the house.”
William looked exasperated. “All right,” he said. “I admit, I didn’t know the place was – quite – this small,” he said. “But I’ve known for a while now that you didn’t live at Richard’s, and what your other father does for a living. I didn’t know exactly where you lived, but I had an idea. I just didn’t push the issue because I knew you were incredibly wary about me at first, and that you’re a very private person. I’m just glad you finally trusted me enough to disclose the details, honestly.”
Julian studied him for a long moment, trying to find – she didn’t even know what, but she didn’t see it. Just mild exasperation at most. She took a deep breath.
“William?”
“Yes?”
“Would you like to meet my parents and my brothers?” she asked, deciding just to cut right to the chase. Dithering caution wasn’t working so well for her lately. It was time to try something new.