In Elladora’s estimation familiarity with people who were not of one’s own blood bred the very purest form of contempt and anybody who was not of that ilk she took pains to keep at arm’s length. Yet, without her particularly inviting the change, her opinion of Ursula had somehow gone beyond such trivial emotions as love or hate and had instead settled on a plateau of reluctant intimacy she was beginning to accept she might well be stuck with.

Which was why she had not objected to joining her sister-in-law on a rare expedition to Hogsmeade High Street – rare for Elladora at least – as, try though she might, she simply could not locate the kind of familiar she sought in London and had begrudgingly decided to visit the quaint little pet shop here. She had loosely decided upon a snake, but was quite willing to have her head turned by a companion she expected to offer better mental stimulation than the servants, elves or…well, no that was cruel, and she was trying her hardest not to be.

“It never ceases to delight me that the weather turns to frost here so much quicker than it does in London. It’s as though we’re excused a portion of the winter due to our excellent postal address,” she smirked out of the window of the tea shop, watching the shivering shoppers hurry by, wrapped in cloaks they had not yet adjusted for the chill. Gaggles of women with baskets, men with their collars turned up enough to give them the appearance of being neckless, and a group of children in neat, dull cloaks walking together as a group…

Her blood went cold.

The child, a slender boy of about six or seven with his shiny black hair and pale grey eyes looked towards her with an unearned sense of displeasure with what he saw. The glance was wholly, achingly, horribly familiar. The children continued down the path, their footsteps rattling in Elladora’s chest as her heart nearly broke out of it with sudden panic. They would move on. They had to move on.

But of course they did not. Instead their matron directed them through the door and in they flooded, childish faces roughed by the weather outside, with the exception of the chalky young man who was Ursula’s miniature.

“We need to leave.”

Ursula, as ever, seemed oblivious and Elladora was grateful for it. She even felt a smattering of something that might have been called affection towards the other woman for her predictability of her reaction. Indeed, her tenacity towards ignorance in the face of life’s unrelenting flow of miserable obstacles that practically leapt into one’s path without warning was almost admirable. Not that Ella would ever tell her as much, and certainly not in this moment when there was something much more pressing at stake, but the feeling was there.

Her twinge of fondness did not deter her panic though. If she’d been blessed with luck then the boy would have walked by, as oblivious as his mother, but instead he looked over at Elladora with a curious expression. It was impossible for him to know. He couldn’t. She must be giving too much away...although not, blessedly, to Ursula.

“It’s shambolic,” Ella agreed curtly. “We ought to return home.” She raised an eyebrow, sensing an opportunity. “Unless you favour the idea of catching lice?”

Later Elladora would reflect that it was entirely her own fault that she had drawn attention to the boy in the first place. It was extremely unlikely that Ursula would have been distracted from her own concerns for long enough to notice another person had she not made such a fuss. She gritted her teeth, Phineas would be ashamed of her lack of composure. She had to get them out of here before Ursula noticed the resemblance to-

Fuck it all.

“He looks nothing like him,” she lied blatantly, adjusting Ursula’s grasp so she was holding her hand and could apparate them both together. He could have been Sirius’ twin. In fact he probably resembled her oldest nephew more than any of his siblings did and only someone blind or idiotic would think otherwise. So there was the outside chance that Ursula might be convinced but Ella’s expectation was not high: even Ursula might connect the pieces once she’d had time to dwell on it so it was imperative that she got her sister-in-law away from the boy before she had chance to commit him to memory.

Of course that would have been easier had the matron, whom she had met once but apparently possessed a memory that would put an elephant to shame, not greeted her with a cheery wave and an entirely overfamiliar good afternoon Miss Black. Elladora gave the women a look that could have turned the heartiest person to stone and the stupid girl retreated, but the damage was done.

Elladora’s eyes had not wavered from the fool of a woman who had made her life that much harder by opening her mouth at an inopportune moment so Ursula’s comment was lost in the haze of her irritation to begin with. Quite some time ago now she had trained her brain to be able to tune the other woman out if needed, until Ursula’s voice became little more than background noise, like the buzzing of a wasps nest behind a glass pane that one was aware of but not paying a vast amount of attention to.

Eventually though one harassed ignorant woman was not enough to hold her attention and an echo of Ursula’s words bounced through her brain. It took her a moment. She would never admit to being flummoxed by Ursula, unless under the influence of vast amounts of veritaserum, but she very much was.

Panic went through her like a knife through butter and it was all she could do not to collapse into her abandoned chair like a hysterical maiden aunt. Which, she reasoned, she was and therefore she probably had every right to her panic, but now was probably not the time to make excuses for her own weaknesses. Not when they were both being confronted by Ursula’s weaknesses.

“That was the whole point.” She replied, as stoically as she was able. How could Ursula have known? She had been beside herself with self-indulgent misery and was hardly likely to have noticed that the dead child she had never seen was not the fruit of her or her husband.

“It was for your own good, you must see that,” Elladora replied waspishly, unable to turn her head to look the other woman in the eye. It was a wretched thing to do to a person, even if it had been the only solution at the time; the child had to go, one way or the other, and Elladora, when the moment had arrived, found she didn’t quite have the stomach for the other means of disposal. This has been the best thing for Ursula, for Phineas, for the child…

Why had the orphanage moved premises without informing her? She could have avoided this horror if only their management was more efficient and through the blind panic she held onto that annoyance to ground her.

“It would have done you no good to know about him.”

“That’s a little far, don’t you think?” Ella replied archly, barely glancing in Ursula’s direction such was her annoyance with the possibility that her sister-in-law might actually have a point. Iola had baulked at the thought of taking the boy away at the time – although admittedly her sister had never been given the chance to offer an opinion on the other option – and one of her arguments had been that the deception would make them as bad as Ursula’s betrayal.

Privately Ella had pondered that for years. She had never expected to have to actually defend herself.

“I did it for you, Ursula,” she admitted in a quieter voice, though one no less assured, and blindly she reached out to grasp for Ursula’s wrist, hoping it might compel her to listen to sense. “For Phineas and your marriage too but…well you must see now that he couldn’t have lived in our house?”

One only had to look at him. He was Ursula in miniature and no one would take him for a distant family member that had become Phineas’ ward: and she knew her brother would never have stood for it.

Elladora thought later that if she had been given time to think properly she might have seen Ursula’s mistake as a blessing. With little to no effort on her part she could cast herself as the slattern in this tableau, drag them both away and catch up with Ursula later on to obliviate her - but instead she was far too incensed at the very suggestion that she could be the same as her sister-in-law to think particularly clearly.

Holding tight to Ursula’s wrist she turned to stare at the other woman in shock, keeping a firm grip on her so, if Ursula lost her mind, she could apparate them both away quickly enough. She didn’t know why her sister-in-law was staring at their joined hands though, but then the inner workings of Ursula’s rat’s nest of a brain had ever been a mystery to Elladora.

“He isn’t mine Ursula.” She replied quietly, but with enough deliberateness that she hoped the message would be gotten across. Perhaps it would be better to obliviate Ursula either way? It would certainly be less painful.

The struggling made her panic. If Ursula slipped away then she had no control over what the other woman might work out, or what that foolish matron would say as she babbled Elladora’s secrets to the world without a second thought. So she did the only thing she could think of and apparated them both far, far away, all the way to London in the merest of moments. Grimmauld Place encased them both and she could still feel Ursula’s frantic panic but it was neither the safety of home or any particular desire to indulge her sister-in-law’s dramatics that made her finally let go.

She shouldn’t have apparated. Pain shot through her left hand like delayed fire and she glanced down to see blood streaming down her fingers, or what was left of them. Everything above the knuckle on her ring and smallest finger was missing and Elladora stared numbly at the space where her flesh had once been.