Three: When you're in love

Seven Brides For Seven Snapes 3: When you're in love

"Hold still, you stupid bugger!"

Hermione was surprised to hear any voices at all – the admonishment itself barely registered.

"Severus?" She was puzzled.

They had Apparated to a small country lane bordered along one side by a high stone wall. There was a wide but modestly-styled wrought-iron gate near where they had appeared, set between pillars topped with rusty spear-heads. Somewhat obscured by lichen, the words "Prince Hall" were discernible, carved into the left-hand pillar. Beyond the gate, a neglected gravel drive curved away to disappear behind a stand of beech trees. Severus dismantled the wards and opened the gates wide enough to let her pass; she waited while he set everything in order again.

"Old habits die hard?" she enquired mildly, having recognised some of the charms used in the Hogwarts protections mixed in with a weave of hexes and diversions that must surely be of her husband's own invention.

"Old habits and new caution – I've only just been cleared, remember? I am not a popular man, Hermione."

"Never mind – you're popular with me, and that's all we need."

She took his hand and started up the drive, wondering why he seemed reluctant to move with her.

"Hermione, there's something you ought to know before ..." He was looking singularly grim for a bridegroom.

"Don't be silly! What can there be that's worse than what I already know of you?" she quipped. "Come on, Severus! I want to see the house!"

She could have sworn he muttered, "Gryffindors!" but she chose to let it pass.

The front doors of the house, a handsome three-storey building, were evidently unused. Weeds grew through the steps, and there was rust under the flaking paint of the hinges, she noticed as they passed. But the stable-yard, to which Severus led her, took her mind off the sadness she felt at the building's air of neglect. Broad and sunny, its brick paving shining after a recent shower, it bore signs of use and care, and ... occupation.

The voice spoke again, more gently.

"That's right, you great idiot – just rest it a bit now..."

And then a hand reached over one of the half-doors to pull the bolt aside. The owner of the hand followed, backing out of the gloomy interior and crooning gently at whatever was whickering inside. When he turned, Hermione gasped.

She stared open-mouthed at the man, then at Severus, then back at the man again. What she was seeing was a younger version of her husband – well, a younger version if Severus had been stunningly beautiful, and blessed with pale skin and a nose merely aquiline. Shame about the scruffy hair, scraggly beard and odd, baggy tunic belted clumsily about his hips.

The young man, for his part, goggled an instant and then broke into a broad grin. He dashed across the yard to seize Severus by the hand and then envelop an utterly flummoxed Hermione in a hug that crushed her breathless – perhaps not such a bad thing, really, considering he smelt rather strongly of menagerie.

"You did it! You really did it!" exclaimed the stranger. "I never would have thought it! And she's even pretty! How did you manage, you old dog?"

"Severus?" queried Hermione faintly.

He looked uncomfortable.

"Ah, yes, my brother Septimius. I was trying to tell you about ... Septimius, this is Hermione."

But Septimius wasn't listening. He had rushed into the house, yelling, "He did it! He did it!"

Severus sighed, took Hermione's unresisting hand once more, and with an even grimmer expression, followed.

As they crossed the threshold, another figure loomed out of the shadowy hall into the light falling through the doorway.

"Shut your confounded trap, kidlet," he said in tones so silky he made Severus sound like a fairground barker.

This one was immensely tall and broad, and where the first brother's facial hair had not hidden his beauty, Hermione thought it might be rather a good thing that this one was heavily bearded. Black-haired and coal-eyed, his face was rough-hewn and forbidding, yet when he took her hand and bowed over it, murmuring, "Hermione, it is a fortunate day when my brother wins such a woman," she forgot his looks entirely.

"Seneca," said her husband shortly.

"Pleased to meet you," she managed to say. "I had no idea that Severus had broth...."

Two more darkly bearded men emerged from the bowels of the house, shoving the still-shouting Septimius out of the way.

"Salvius and Scribonius," supplied their eldest brother.

They did not speak to her, but stood looking down at her as though she were a mildly interesting laboratory specimen.

"Pleased to meet you," said Hermione. She was beginning to feel numb. "But which one is Salvius and which one is Scribonius?"

"I am," they said in unison, smirking.

"Are there any more?" she asked.

"Better get it over with," muttered her husband, then bellowed. "SEJANUS! Get your backside out of the lab right now and come and meet your sister! SI..."

"I'm here, Severus, you don't need to treat us like a room full of Hufflepuffs," said a sarcastic voice from behind them.

Hermione's jaw dropped again. There was that beaky profile and the tall, rangy frame that seemed to characterise them all, but the young man standing in the doorway wiping earth from his hands had light brown hair and extraordinary amber-coloured eyes that seemed to have captured the essence of honey and sunlight.

"Couldn't do any better for yourself than Severus, then?" Obviously a Snape, despite his looks.

"And your name is?" she prompted him, unfazed after years in a Snape classroom.

"Yes, Sidney, tell her your name, why don't you?" jibed a man who must be Sejanus, ascending a steep flight of stairs from the cellars. Where Septimius obviously had all the looks of the family, this brother had cornered the market in physical grace, thought Hermione, admiring the way he moved, which was not disguised even by the shapeless tunic he, like his brothers, wore. But ...

"Sidney?" she queried.

"Yes, Sidney," said Sejanus in a sing-song, resting his shoulder negligently against the door frame, "do introduce yourself."

Whereupon Sidney launched himself at his brother and they went down in a flurry of fists. Severus stepped over them indifferently, and helped Hermione pass by into the kitchen.

"Sidney's name doesn't seem to follow the pattern," she said tentatively.

"Grandfather had a bit of a thing for Roman history, which explains the rest of us. But our mother went into labour early with Sidney, before Grandfather could bring her here for the lying-in, so Dad took her to the local Muggle hospital and got the baby registered before anyone else even knew about it," he explained as he pulled out a chair for her. "He said – and I quote – that he was 'buggered if he'd have another damned poncy stupid name in his family'."

"Shame he's the only one that looks like Mam played away," said either Salvius or Scribonius.

Hermione was looking over her shoulder at where the fight continued.

"Never mind them, Hermione. Would you like a cup of tea?"

"I might need something a little stronger. Are there any more?" she asked wryly, feeling dwarfed by the crowd of bearded men looking down at her with expressions ranging from well-disguised guilt to open curiosity.

"Just the seven of us," he replied.

"Just ... Vodka it is, then." She winced as someone's head met the floor rather hard.

Stiff drink in hand, Hermione followed Severus on a tour of the house, feeling rather as though a barbarian horde of questions was stampeding from the back of her brain to gather behind her forehead, waving interrogation marks and baying for answers. She held them back with difficulty, biding her time lest the existence of a hitherto unsuspected extended family should not prove the only surprise of the day. The addition of some analgesic to her cocktail was beginning to look like an attractive option, though. Particularly with her shaggy retinue following inexorably in her wake as she was introduced to what she had expected would be her secluded idyll with Severus. She caught his eye as he turned to usher her through a heavily-carved dark oak door into the library. There will be explanations later, she ordered silently. He had the grace not to pretend to misunderstand.

"The library," announced Severus.

Hermione fell in love (it was becoming something of an annoying habit, she felt), even though the library presented what was at first a very unpromising facade (she was definitely developing a pattern). It was dark with old panelling and ancient beams; it was high, occupying two storeys and dimly lit by tall latticed windows; it was long, and it was crammed with books and scrolls and parchments. It was also a mess – an unholy chaos that made her want to scream. One of the brothers slouched forward and half-heartedly shuffled some papers into a rough stack, thereby clearing a small space on a table, into which a pile of books promptly collapsed. Some of them went so far as to make a break for the floor. He caught them expertly and shoved them back into place.

"It needs a bit of sorting out and cataloguing," he shrugged. "Grandfather bought everything he could lay his hands on, never tidied anything, and I'm too busy with research to waste time on that kind of thing."

Hermione's glare would have done Madam Pince proud.

"You do know that a library is only a truly useful tool if it is properly organised, don't you?"

"I keep telling Salvius that he ought to tidy up before getting stuck in," Severus grumbled.

"Those would be the times you stride through here scattering papers left, right and centre, and demand that I find you some half-arsed Etruscan thesis, and 'now, dammit'?" Salvius griped.

"Hmph."

"What's next?" sighed Hermione.

The tour continued through the many rooms of the ground floor. Those which were in use were so obviously in use that it was difficult to negotiate a way through them. It seemed that although all the brothers were engaged on some work or other, none of them had evolved beyond the 'hey – a horizontal surface! I'll put something on it!' school of organisation – a method which apparently required a large quantity of dust, broken quills and other detritus to hold the piles of books and parchments in place. The rooms which were not in use, a collection of pretty parlours and comfortable snugs, were pristine, the furniture under dust sheets, the air a little chilly and sad.

She asked to see the potions laboratories and was led down the precipitous stairs, past many closed store room doors, to a large and rigidly tidy space which Severus proudly announced as his own. Hermione was impressed at the set-up, until she poked her nose into the adjoining office, which looked as though something had been nesting in it for the past century or two. With a sinking feeling, she opened another door, on the far side of the office. She had found the otions store room, a cornucopia of the strange, the dangerous, the revolting and the mundane, all in ... She searched for a word. It was her wedding day. She had to try to be nice. All in ... in ... disarray.

There were two further doors leading out of the store room. One led back into Severus' lab, where he had got distracted, showing his brothers some papers (Oh, Merlin! Not more paper...!) he had brought back from London. She closed it quietly and tried the other, which opened onto something like the lair of a mad scientist from a 1950s B-movie, with added explosions. From there, more alarming stairs brought her up to where she had first entered the house.

At least the kitchen was nice.

She sat herself down at the long, well-scrubbed table and tried to gather her thoughts. She had anticipated that marriage to Severus would ring the changes in her life, but... She sighed and tipped her head back, inhaling the sweet scent of the herbs which hung in bunches from the beams, drying.

When she straightened again, there was a fresh pot of tea in front of her, with milk in a little yellow jug, and a hand-turned pottery mug, slightly chipped, slightly wobbly, with the legend "Sev" painted on it in careful, childish letters.

*

Night was falling, and she was out in the yard, leaning on the door from which Septimius had first emerged and communing with the Thestral she had found in there. She had once found them disturbing and ugly, she remembered, scratching the creature's cheek as it hung its head over her shoulder, but this one, which looked distinctly sorry for itself with its bandaged leg, was rather a sweetie. It might look all grim and frightening and bare its teeth a lot, but two soft words and a chunk of raw liver she'd found in the fridge, and it was putty in her hands. Hagrid had been right when he said they were misunderstood.

"There you are," said Severus from behind her.

The Thestral twitched, but Hermione didn't stir nor cease the caressing motion of her fingers.

"Supper's ready, if you'd like to join us." His voice was neutral.

"Yes, of course," she replied, equally carefully.

It was hard to read expressions in the gathering dusk, but after a brief moment, he held out his hand and she took it. They turned towards the house and walked into the warm light spilling from the open doorway.

They ate in the kitchen. Severus, naturally, sat at the head of the table, after he had held Hermione's chair for her, to the right of his place. Other than that, there seemed no particular order. The food was plentiful and very good. Hermione busied herself with it while she listened to the conversation around her.

The Snape brothers had a plan, she discovered, to rival the Weasleys as the wizarding world's foremost business enterprise. Between them, their areas of expertise covered most of the specialisms, and her impression was, as the discussion ebbed and flowed around her, that they were brimming over with ideas. It was wonderful, how they sparked off one another, challenging each other's conclusions and assumptions and interjecting observations which set off whole new chains of thought. Intellectually, it was the most stimulating environment she'd ever experienced. But they were never going to get anywhere without managing to be far more organised than they were. She knew it, and so did they. The phrase she heard most often, as she sat unusually quiet in their midst, looking round at their flushed faces and eyes sparkling with excitement, was "Now that Hermione's here ..."

Suddenly she became aware that the voice saying those words was that of her husband. She looked at him, leaning forward and tapping his forefinger on the table as he said something forceful to Seneca, and discovered that she was angry. She lurched to her feet and glared at them all.

"So nice to know that I'm going to be useful around here," she spat into the abrupt silence.

It seemed only fitting that the newest member of the Snape family should slam the door as hard as possible on leaving the room.

*