Night fell over a small village in Northamptonshire, United Kingdom.
There were quiet cottages built of thatch and stone, green country fields, and traditional pubs. In people's memories, Northamptonshire lay in the heart of England, an ideal place to relax, recuperate, and experience traditional English rural life. From farms to luxurious old houses, canal barges, and inns, it was only an hour's drive from London, and it was close to Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon, the university cities of Oxford and Cambridge, and the magnificent Warwick Castle that William the Conqueror had built by the river in 1068.
All the way at the end of the village, in a small three-story building utterly devoid of luxury or respectability, the heads of several families among the United Kingdom's Sacred Twenty-Eight had cast aside their former dignity and splendor and gathered here.
Servants and several bodyguard wizards had been left downstairs as lookouts, while most of the wizards had gathered in the relatively spacious room on the second floor. In the very center stood a small table, several low stools, and a cabinet. Borgin and Burkes and Bulstrode occupied the middle, while the other wizards clustered around them. Because the discussion had gone on for so long, some had simply sat down on the carpet.
"These Muggle things are awful. The teapot can't fly up and refill itself, and it's scalding to the touch." A goateed wizard complained with a gloomy face. "If we weren't afraid of drawing attention... that Muggle actually dared charge us so much money..."
"Merlin, descendants of the twenty-eight Pureblood families have actually fallen to this state! These filthy Muggles, and perhaps bedbugs too..." A witch beside him wrapped her cloak tightly around her body, terrified that the dirty carpet in the room might touch her skin.
"Who did this? Speak