It was only when Watson spoke—declaring his intention to personally resolve their business difficulties that those gathered fully grasped the gravity of their situation.
Watson meant to make them answer, before the eyes of the entire wizarding world and its press, for the mass shutdown of their workshops.
He meant to do it here, publicly, with the people who had suffered the consequences of those shutdowns seated immediately behind him and the journalists' cameras pointed at every face at the table.
Without a satisfactory explanation, without something that could be presented to the watching public as genuine hardship rather than premediated sabotage, he had no intention of letting any of them leave.
The shape of the thing was now entirely clear.
Narcissa's brow furrowed slightly and her mind was unsettled and moved through the implications with the rapid attention.
Before the Dark Lord's return, Lucius had sent Watson a letter. The contents of that letter went without saying; Narcissa knew her husband's mind well enough, and she knew what such a letter represented.
Though Lucius had never raised the subject again in her presence, and she could not be certain with any precision what contact had passed between them in the intervening months, she knew that Lucius had, in secret, already cast his lot with Watson's camp.
And yet they still had to perform loyalty before the Dark Lord.
So today, in a gathering precisely like this one, she was obliged to stand in opposition to Watson. Even if she were ultimately forced, by the weight of circumstances, to agree to reopen the workshops, she could not be seen as the one who submitted first.
She thought for a moment weighing the various available positions, the various ways of speaking that gave ground while appearing not to and then raised her head.
"If the Ministry truly intends to do something for us…"
She inclined herself elegantly.
"Mr. Watson, our operations have indeed fallen into considerable difficulty. There are certain obstacles we have encountered that we cannot overcome…"
Bryan wore a patient smile. He extended one hand in invitation.
"Please, speak freely, Mrs. Malfoy."
The commercial empire the Malfoy family had built across several generations was second to none even among the oldest pureblood houses.
It was vast, diversified, and deeply embedded in the infrastructure of wizarding Britain in ways that were easy to underestimate if you didn't know where to look.
Seeing Narcissa Malfoy the most significant name at the table step forward and engage first, the gathered wizards exhaled collectively with relief and turned their expectant eyes toward her.
"The shrinkage of orders, Mr. Watson—"
On ground she knew well, Narcissa's confidence came naturally.
"As you are aware, ever since the Dark Lord's return to activity, Britain's wizarding world has known no true stability and the tremors of that instability have been felt across magical communities throughout Europe and beyond.
Magical civilisations the world over have grown anxious about the situation here. They fear that British suppliers may be unable to fulfil deliveries on time. They fear that the deposits already paid will simply vanish, absorbed by a war, or a collapse, or something worse.
And so, buyers who once came to us willingly and reliably with whom we had maintained relationships spanning decades, in some cases—now prefer to pay a premium for inferior goods from suppliers elsewhere, simply for the certainty of knowing that those suppliers will still exist next quarter.
Without new orders, the workshops cannot function. The operating costs of a closed workshop are vastly preferable to the operating costs of a workshop producing inventory that goes nowhere. We are, in this respect, Mr. Watson, genuinely helpless."
All eyes turned in unison toward Bryan Watson, watching for his response.
"This sounds…"
Hermione hesitated beside Harry, her voice was directed at Sirius.
"Not quite like an excuse. I mean—it's an excuse, clearly, but it's not entirely untrue either. Is it? What do you think, Sirius?"
"If it were Remus, he'd probably be able to give you a proper answer—" Sirius replied, looking faintly put out. "Business isn't exactly my strong suit."
The truth of the matter was layered, and the layers were visible to anyone paying close enough attention.
What Mrs. Malfoy had said was not entirely false. The instability of the past few months had genuinely affected international trade relationships with British wizarding businesses—that much was accurate.
But the picture she was describing—the scene of helplessness, of circumstances totally beyond any individual's control was selective. It was far from the whole truth.
The workshops under the control of the families at this table were not simply significant operations. Several of them were, in the global wizarding market, without parallel.
Floo Powder production, to take only the most obvious example: there was no second manufacturer of comparable scale and reliability anywhere in the wizarding world.
The Floo Network was the circulatory system of magical Britain and, by extension, of significant portions of magical Europe. Buyers who had "shifted to suppliers elsewhere" for Floo Powder had, in practical terms, nowhere to shift to. The nervousness and uncertainty regarding stability and future war from buyers may be true. The alternatives were not.
So yes, the turbulent climate had affected their business. The claim was not fabricated. But "affected" covered an enormous range of severity, and the gap between "affected" and "unable to continue operating" was where the story was being told selectively.
At its core, the workshop shutdowns were not a consequence of market forces. They were a consequence of the contest between Watson and Voldemort in a battlefield opened deliberately to create pressure on the Ministry, on the working population who depended on these workshops, and on the political position of anyone attempting to govern successfully while this particular wound was bleeding.
And in their hearts, not one of the people sitting at this table actually wished to see the workshops remain closed. Gold galleons did not care who was winning a war. Closed workshops produced no galleons at all.
"Is there anything else, Mrs. Malfoy?"
The unperturbed smile that hadn't left Bryan's face sent a flicker of uneasiness through Narcissa.
She had the strange impression that he wanted her to keep talking.
"The shortage of operating capital, Mr. Watson—"
She pressed her lips together and continued, and her words drew another round of assenting murmurs from the table.
"Operating capital… she means the Malfoys have run out of money?!"
Harry's expression had darkened considerably. His voice turned low and shot at Sirius, had an edge of open disbelief. "How absurd. I'd wager the Galleons sitting in the Malfoy vaults at Gringotts alone outweigh the Ministry's own treasury."
"Shameless lies!"
The voice rang out from somewhere in the crowd gathered at the platform's edge.
"Who in their right mind would believe that—you, who operate all these workshops have no money!"
For a moment, the air filled with jeers and condemnation.
"In the considerable period leading up to our decision to temporarily suspend operations—"
Narcissa raised her voice above the noise without raising her tone.
"Several of the Malfoy family's workshops had already been operating at a sustained loss for some time. We owe taxes to the Ministry. We owe wages to our workers. We owe payments to suppliers who have not been paid on time and whose own operations depend on those payments. And we receive no new orders against which to offset any of this."
She allowed that to sit for a moment. "Every day of idle production, every day of keeping a workshop staffed and lit and running without product going out the door costs us considerably more than the alternative.
And so, to prevent further and potentially irrecoverable losses, after careful deliberation, the Malfoy family made the decision to temporarily suspend operations. Once the situation stabilises, once the international wizarding community restores its confidence in Britain as a reliable trading partner, we will resume production."
"Our situation is even more dire, Mr. Watson—"
Callum Greengrass, the broad-faced man with the lank straw-coloured hair and the complexion that had not yet fully recovered its colour from earlier, rose to his feet for the second time.
"The Ministry has publicly branded the Greengrass family and Mr. Greengrass a Death Eater in service to the Dark Lord. I shall refrain from commenting on the accuracy of that characterisation—but I trust everyone present understands what a grievous blow it deals to a family's personal and commercial reputation.
Partners who once extended us trust and credit no longer do. Associates who once conducted business with us on the strength of relationships going back decades now prefer not to be associated with our name.
I fear that even if the present unrest were to completely pass and the wizarding world return to full prosperity, people would still refuse to do business with our workshops because of the association."
Callum turned to face the journalists' cameras—with one third true feeling, and remaining one seventh part of act.
"Our workshops may never recover from this. The damage to the Greengrass name may be permanent. That is why we had no choice but to make the decisions we did."
"Mr. Watson, as you know, our workshops are Nott family enterprises—"
A wizard with hair slicked into a gleaming widow's peak rose as well. His eyes were wide and filled with an expression of melodramatic grief.
"And you know that the Nott family's situation is significantly worse even than that of the Greengrass family."
That, at least, was true.
Greengrass was still at large as a fugitive under Ministry warrant. The Nott family Head, on the other hand, had that very day moved into his new accommodations, where he would be spending the foreseeable future in the company of Acromantulas.
Bryan's smile remained unchanged, savouring the thought with a streak of dark amusement.
Every individual at this table was either directly tied to one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight pureblood families by blood, or bound to them through a web of indirect connections that had been built over generations.
What they all shared in common was this: they had become instruments of Voldemort's will.
The greatest crisis now facing the Ministry was, in truth, a spillover from an entirely different battlefield—the contest of wills between Bryan and Voldemort had been conducted, for the most part, in a theatre invisible to the general public.
But that contest had never been in any real doubt.
From beginning to end, the situation had remained within Bryan's control. Even Voldemort's deliberate opening of this particular front had arrived at this table because Bryan's hand had guided it here, to this specific moment, in front of these specific witnesses.
The resources concentrated in the hands of these pureblood families were the Sword of Damocles that had been hanging over the wizarding world's economic body for generations and Bryan intended to change that. That was what this gathering had been arranged to accomplish.
One by one, released from restraint now that Narcissa had opened the door, the representatives of each faction shed their composure and rushed forward to air their grievances. As though the mere fact that their workshops had remained open as long as they had was itself a miracle deserving of commendation. As though they were the ones who had been suffering.
Bryan listened to each in turn; his patience was unbroken.
Bryan listened to each in turn; his patience reamined unbroken.
When the last of them had spoken, the platforms complaints could be sorted, Bryan had noted, into three distinct categories:
A shortage of orders. A shortage of operating capital. A shortage of guarantees.
Three problems. Each of them real, to varying degrees.
Both sides understood this. The pretexts were not believed by the people offering them, and they were not believed by the person receiving them. They were a form of language—excuses for a short-term closure with entirely other motives.
Outside, gathered in the platform behind Bryan, the workers and marchers and ordinary people of wizarding Britain who had been listening to the lords of industry enumerate their hardships had fallen into a bewildered silence that was several degrees beyond ordinary confusion.
The representatives of the oldest and wealthiest families in magical Britain had just spent the better part of half an hour explaining why they were suffering more than the people seated on the cobblestones.
It seemed, from where the workers were sitting, as though these men and women who had always lived their lives looking down on everyone else from the heights of wealth and name and privilege were somehow worse off than the people they had closed those workshops on.
As though it was the people demanding their work back who were the unreasonable ones.
A few people in the crowd had begun to look at each other with expression of trying to determine whether they were going mad or whether the thing they were witnessing was actually as absurd as it appears.
"Very well—"
When at last the gathered representatives had exhausted their inventory of plausible excuses, Bryan raised one hand, cutting them off before they could continue.
"I have heard everything you've brought to my attention. Now—let us solve these problems."
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