A year ago, the place shone from years of attentive work in the gardens at his mother's hand. Rose bushes bloomed throughout the year thanks to a spell she had invented herself, and the hedges were trimmed to perfection in any number of shapes and sizes, leaving plenty of space for the stupid peacocks to run and hide and sometimes fornicate. Draco could still remember one summer when he, Theo and Blaise had seen the preening dance of the male peacock right before one of the females accepted his advances. It had been Draco's first lesson on how to deal with the opposite sex. Granted he had only been seven, and it could hardly be transferred to witches - certainly not his witch - but it had still been a sight that stuck in his memory.