Chapter 210: The Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare

The library was almost empty that afternoon, and the sun came through the coloured glass and put patches of red and blue across the open page in front of him.

Edward had The Sources of Ancient Potion Formulae lying under his hands and had not read a line of it in twenty minutes.

Snape's warning was still sitting in him where it had landed. The attempt in the dungeon had gone wrong in every direction available: he had learned nothing whatever about what Moody was running out of, and he had persuaded the one man who might have known that a Black boy with a famous name had designs on his storeroom. The door had not merely stayed shut. It had been bolted, and he had handed over the bolt himself.

Moody's behaviour on the shore, the words through the office door, the bottles, the name. Every line of it ran straight into Snape and stopped there like water hitting ice.

He turned his wrist over and let his fingers find the Mithril at the cuff. He had gone at it too fast, which was the same mistake twice in a season, and this time it had cost him the only route he had.

"Edward. I knew you would be up here."

Hermione arrived at his table with an armful of parchment and put it down in a stack that spread as it landed. Her hair had come loose on one side from walking quickly and she did not appear to have noticed.

The top sheet carried a drawing of a badge: a small gold elf holding a placard, and underneath it four letters with full stops between them.

She pushed her glasses back up her nose with one knuckle. "This is the whole of the research. The Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare. Wages, for a start, and the right to refuse work that could kill them, and a say in whether they stay with a family or leave it. Harry and Ron have joined already, and we are going to put up notices and hand out badges, so that if you supported it publicly a great many people would follow."

Edward closed the book and did not answer immediately.

He weighed how to say it and decided there was no gentle version. "Your intention is a good one and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But you have the situation wrong, and you have the history wrong underneath it."

The brightness went out of her face and something harder came up in its place.

"Wrong how? I have met Dobby, who wanted to be free so badly that he was punishing himself for saying it out loud while your own cousins treated him like furniture. And Winky was thrown out for a kindness Mr. Crouch was pleased with himself for, and she has not put herself together since. What part of that am I getting wrong?"

Edward tapped one finger on the table before he answered her. "Dobby is not the ordinary case, and Winky is more complicated than she looks. "Ask the elves in the kitchen here what they want and most of them will tell you they do not need saving. Serving a wizarding house is not a humiliation to them, it is what they are for, and a good many consider it an honour and would say so. Tell them there is a student upstairs who wants to pay them and give them Saturdays off and see what happens to their faces."

He let her take that in and then gave her the rest of it. "A great deal in this world runs on very old magic. Whatever binds an elf to a house is not a contract we could produce and read. It is older than that and nobody properly understands it. Cut it in the name of freedom and you may not be freeing anybody so much as severing them."

Hermione's voice went up, and Madam Pince's head came round at the far end of the room, and she dropped the volume and nothing else. "So the answer is that it has always been this way. "Edward, listen to what you are actually saying. You are telling me the elves are content. Of course they are content. They have been bred into it for a thousand years and taught from birth that wanting anything else is shameful, and then their contentment is produced as the proof that the arrangement is just. That is not an argument so much as the arrangement defending itself."

Edward opened his mouth and discovered that the answer he had expected to have ready was not there.

"If a hundred elves tell you they are happy," she went on, "you cannot know whether that is a hundred answers or one answer repeated. And I notice the people most confident that the elves are perfectly content are always the ones who have never had to be one."

He said the next part carefully, because it was true and he had not been ready for it. "That may be true. "It does not make the alternative harmless. Freedom handed to somebody who has not asked for it can be a crueller thing than what it replaced. You saw Dobby afterwards, and Dobby is one elf with an unusual temperament. Turn every elf in this castle out on the same principle tomorrow and most of them have no means of living, nowhere to go, and no idea how to exist in a society that has never once made room for them. That is not a small side effect, and in a good many cases it would be the whole of the result."

Neither of them was going to shift the other and both of them had worked that out.

She believed a wrong should be ended the moment it was identified and would not be argued into patience by anybody, while he had spent his life inside a world running on very old machinery and had learned that pulling out a part because you dislike the look of it tends to bring down a good deal more than the part.

Hermione's colour was high.

She gathered herself and came back at him. "None of that is a reason to refuse to help. Harry thinks I am right. Ron thinks I am right."

"Ron thinks the badges are funny."

"Ron is coming round, which is more than I can say for some people."

Edward's voice stayed exactly where it had been all afternoon. "I am not refusing because I think you are wrong about the wrong. "I am refusing because you have chosen to walk at the whole of magical tradition from the front, alone, at fourteen, and that is not how any of this gets moved." He paused. "And if you want it to work, Gryffindor is nowhere near enough. You need Ravenclaw, which will argue with you properly, and Hufflepuff, which will actually do the work, and you need Slytherin, whose families own most of the elves in the country. This is not one house's business. Take it to the people who have something to lose by it, or you are running a club."

Hermione had drawn breath to answer when a small vibration went through the inside of Edward's robes.

He stood and gathered the book off the table.

"I have to go. This is not me conceding anything."

"Wait, I have not finished -" She came half out of her chair. "You always do this. The moment it turns into something of yours you are through the door."

He raised a hand without turning round and went out between the shelves.

Hermione stood where she was and watched him all the way to the doors, and said something about Slytherins that Madam Pince would certainly have objected to. Then she sat down again in front of the sheet with the badge drawn on it, and did not touch her quill for some time.