From the top, left to right: Pleione Carrow and Flora Greengrass, on their wedding day, March 1

From the top, left to right: Pleione Carrow and Flora Greengrass, on their wedding day, March 16th, 1950. Portrait of Flora Greengrass, 1975. Portrait of Pleione Carrow, 1979. Pleione Carrow and Flora Greengrass at a soiree, 1943.

No one was surprised when Flora Greengrass and Pleione Carrow chose to have their weddings on the same day, in the same venue.

Even in school at Hogwarts, the two could always be found with their heads together, sharing in some secret the rest of the world was not privy to. Upon graduating in 1945, they both took up jobs in the Department of International Magical Cooperation, working as secretaries to the department head and his deputy.

The rumours first started in the summer of 1948, when Flora Greengrass scandalized the wizarding world by turning down an eminently respectable offer of marriage from Titus Fawley. Titus Fawley was considered an excellent catch by all the matchmaking pureblood mamas, and Flora’s turning him down shocked even the most liberal-minded of them. Very soon the ballrooms of the wizarding elite were afire with whispers of an illicit relationship between Flora and Pleione and formidable dowagers tut-tutted openly at the Carrows and Greengrasses for having let their daughters run so wild. The source of the rumour is still disputed, but most accept privately that it was Titus Fawley, jealous of the closeness of the two, who first spread the rumour that Pleione and Flora were not merely friends, but were lovers.

Naturally, their parents could not be seen to be doing nothing about this breach of morals and respectability and began pressuring their daughters to find husbands for themselves.

Two years passed before the two were approached by Henry Mulciber, a fellow colleague at the Ministry of Magic (quite respectably betrothed to Dahlia Parkinson), who offered them a means out of their predicament. He had two friends, he said - naming no names - who were similarly situated and would understand the delicacies of their circumstances - unlike most other pureblood men their age. They would, he was sure, be able to reach an agreement that would be mutually satisfactory to both parties and keep their parents’ noses out of their private sex lives.

Intrigued, the girls agreed to meet with his two friends and were pleasantly surprised (and impressed) when both the gentlemen in question amicably discussed the terms of their marriage and did not impose upon them the behavioural strictures most pureblood men of the time would have imposed upon them.

Of course, both Pleione and Flora knew of the rumours about those two. Practically the entire wizarding world knew about those two.

In the spring of 1950, Pleione Carrow and Flora Greengrass married Antinous Lestrange and Charles Nott, under the strict proviso that both sides be allowed to continue their non-marital relationships with each other.

Thus it was that the Lestrange boys came to have not one father and one mother, but two fathers and two mothers. Perhaps it was the best for them, for their natural parents were aloof in nature while Charles and Flora were doting and fond adoptive parents, showering the boys with affection where their mother coolly reprimanded them for being rowdy and their father coldly demanded to know if this was how Lestranges behaved.

Yet all the affection in the world did not keep them from following in their fathers’ footsteps and becoming Death Eaters.

[Picture sources: ‘Let them Eat Cake’ by Jimmy Backius for Elle Sweden, August 2008, Tilda Swinton by Paolo Roversi for Vogue US December 2005,Hedvig Palm wearing Valentino Spring/Summer 2012 by Julia Hetta for Elle Sweden June 2012  andCaroline Trentini and Heather Marks, Ladies in Waiting W by Paolo Roversi October 2004.)