#quartusbellumopen

@OPEN PARA Sunday, Nov 4, 1980 -- late evening

Delightfully, Gabriel was the first to notice -- or at least the first to scream. Narcissa couldn’t have planned that better if she’d done it on purpose. He really was such a dear -- maybe she’d talk to Lucius later about keeping him in the household permanently. He added the perfect amount of drama. Of course, there were limits to how far they could trust him...but at least that kept things interesting, too.

Speaking of keeping things interesting, she probably should have found a way to warn her husband about her little scheme beforehand, but she didn’t want to risk somebody overhearing them conspiring about something and putting two and two together after the screaming started. Besides, Lucius was a clever man (she would never have married him if he weren’t, no matter how pretty he was) and she was sure he would figure it out. If she had had the opportunity to place a bet, Narcissa would have guessed that he would recognize that charming little snuffbox and be able to deduce immediately what was going on and who had arranged for it to be placed there...

(So many people failed to pay any attention to their House Elves. It was truly a shame.)

She would have further bet that her husband -- never one to pass up an opportunity for drama -- would have made sure to get himself a good dose of the hex Narcissa had placed and...ah yes, that melodious shriek of indignation was unmistakable: Lucius at his most outrageously outraged. Narcissa was forced to clap her hands to her mouth in horror to hide her grin. She would be sure to run to Lucius’s side shortly so that the both of them could be appropriately outraged and horrified together (and she could give him a wink or a handclasp or something to assure him that yes he’d guessed right and she had done this on purpose), but first she ought to establish her individual reaction -- and make sure that plenty of people saw her out here in the garden, nowhere near the source of the outbreak, just as she had been all evening -- only now the façade of poised guest was gone, replaced by a frantic bystander and fearful wife searching for her husband amidst the chaos.

@OPEN PARA Sunday, Nov 4, 1980

Narcissa looked around, forcing an appropriately-awed look into her eyes while inside, she was sighing. It looked to be very much the usual Nott affair -- ornate but stodgy, with far too conservative a color scheme for her fashionable tastes -- and from the barely-visible way Lucius quirked the tip of one eyebrow at her, she knew he was equally unimpressed. Perhaps that wasn’t the decorator’s fault, though (she was sure old Alexander would have hired someone) but the pall that the evening’s theme cast over the event.

Inside, Narcissa was seething. What had Alexander Nott done for the Dark Lord that her husband had not? Boring, dull, washed-up, brittle old man... she thought venomously, while offering a charming smile to the first round of guests as she and Lucius sauntered through the garden gates.

Ordinarily the two of them would have spent a goodly portion of any party circulating together, but they weren’t here for fun tonight: they were here on business...and not the smarming, cozening-up-to-power Death Eater business that Nott had invited them for, but Silent Dagger business. They were here to fish behind the pretty smiles and see who else had resentment festering in their well-dressed breasts. So after a brief turn through the garden to exchange the first round of cursory greetings, Lucius and Narcissa split-up -- he to go inside and hob-nob with the rest of the high-ranked (as if that term meant anything any more!) Death Eaters, and she to circulate through the lesser guests in the garden. Narcissa would make her way inside to join him eventually, of course -- but for now it was best they split their efforts.

Casting about for the first of her likely targets, Narcissa staggered as she was jostled from behind. She whirled around, glaring hexes, and the offending wizard slunk off with his head bowed, not daring to voice a single word of complaint for the toadgin that now stained his unfashionable robes.