"What's SRP1?" Harry asked as they descended the slowly winding stairs of unfinished stone, hoping to get things back on an even keel. He didn't know what Hermione thought after the exchange with her father and certainly didn't want to see this trip ruined, so he thought it best to bury it with more talk. "Is it a title or something?"
"It stands for Standard Rate Plus One," Lichfield said with a bit of a chagrined look as he led them down. "I'd been hoping to get them a better conversion rate since the girl's a friend of yours but now that he's insulted Gringotts he'll be paying out the nose for a while."
Harry chanced a look at his - er - female friend to gauge her reaction to this bit of news, what he saw was a torn expression.
"My-my father sometimes lacks the filter which tells you now is not an appropriate time to joke," she said finally.
"Standing in the lobby of Gringotts and chatting with an Overseer in full view of two dozen or more goblins is certainly not the time to call them all crooks," Lichfield said dryly.
"Well, if it gets him to understand that some people don't like constant jokes at their expense then I guess paying an extra pound per galleon isn't too bad," Hermione conceded.
"That's not what 'plus one' means, unfortunately," he admitted.
"Then what does it mean?" Harry asked.
"That he's been bumped up an entire Trading Tier," Lichfield said as they approached an old iron door. "He's being treated the same as some big foreign investor from Germany, Italy, or France," he explained. "He'll end up paying close to fifteen per galleon today."
"Fifteen!" Hermione asked shocked. "Last time he paid five."
"He's paying five for the galleon, five for the insult, and five to continue doing his banking with us, because there's no other business that'll change out money," the old man replied.
"Isn't that rather unfair?" Harry asked, trying to smooth things over.
"Well," the grizzled old bailiff said as he led them through the door to a roughly cut hallway, its torches casting fluttering shadows across the uneven surface. "If he hadn't done something Barchoke would've been out of a job in an hour or so, which would have left us in a lot of hot water."
"He did that to save his job?" Hermione asked revolted.
Lichfield turned to look at her.
"He saved his job, your boyfriend's court case, and your father's head," he said as roughly as his gruff voice allowed before going on normally. "It was his misfortune today an Overseer was there - most of the time you never even see them unless there's a problem - but he was lucky it was Barchoke. Our Overseer of Security would've killed him and threw his body in the street as a warning to others."
"That's totally barbaric!" Hermione said with a horrid expression on her face.
"So is telling a room full of goblins everything they, their families, and their entire kind has done is disreputable and they're nothing more than common thieves," Lichfield said looking particularly menacing in the flickering torchlight from the wall bracket.
"And the Ministry just lets them get away with this?" she asked the question that'd popped into Harry's mind too.
"They hold Gringotts and all its adjoining territories to be the sovereign domain of the Goblin Nation," the old bailiff informed her. "The goblins might discard the very idea as offensive when they want to but they'll just as soon latch onto it if it lets them do what they want, and that's what your father did - he marched right into the heart of the Goblin Nation and called them all slimy panhandlers."
Hermione had one of those looks he'd last seen on Ron, where the person was looking inward and trying hard to see things from another person's point of view.
"Different creatures have different ways of looking at things, and the goblins are more bristly than most," Lichfield continued. "You can't go around treating everyone like they're human and have your sensibilities or your stay in the wizarding world will either be rough or short."
"The centaurs were the same way," Harry said, suddenly reminded of something from last year.
"What were you doing with centaurs?" Lichfield asked, his bemused grin doing odd things to his face in the flickering light.
"I had a detention and got separated from everyone else," Harry said embarrassed. "A centaur found me and brought me back," he continued. "The other centaur, Bane, didn't like it too well since I was riding on Firenze's back; he called him a 'common mule.'"
"I've read about them but haven't had any dealings with centaurs," Lichfield admitted as he led them to an iron door a little ways down the hall. "They don't use money. But they're an odd people from what I've heard; more prideful but less prone to violence unless pressed. It's their pride that keeps them as Beasts."
"Beasts? How can something capable of intelligent thought be a beast?" Hermione asked as Harry sensed her outrage level rising again.
"Because they demanded to be beasts," Lichfield replied. "Merpeople - merfolk? - are the same way. They refused the Ministry classification of Being because they found it offensive to be classified the same as vampires and hags - or humans," he finished with a look as he waved them inside a small stone room.
"But why would anyone not want to be equals?" a confused Hermione asked.
"Because they're different," Lichfield explained as he changed the room's roughhewn furniture into something more comfortable with a wave of his wand. "And the difference defines them; no amount of wishing them to be the same will make them so, or want to be so. You have to accept them on their own terms or things will be even more difficult than they already are."
"What do you mean?" Harry asked.
"Take your friends, the centaurs," Lichfield said as he picked a chair around the plain wooden table and settled into it with a groan. "They're migratory; their herd roams around, splits up, and scatters to wherever the wind takes them before they gather back up again," the old bailiff said, painting a verbal picture for him.
"This brings them into close contact with muggl-non-magical people," Lichfield corrected himself as they found their own chairs. "That creates a problem for the Ministry, who then tries to solve the problem by restricting where the centaurs can roam - but the centaurs don't want anything to do with us; they see themselves as a separate people - and better than us, from what I've been told - so they disregard the Ministry and do whatever they want, which only causes more problems."
"So how does treating them as different solve the problem?" Hermione asked. "Shouldn't they be expected to obey the same laws as everyone else?"
"Why should they when they have no input on the laws?" Lichfield countered. "Remember, they're Beasts, which - by definition - lack the intellect to understand or shape the laws which govern them, and they're Beasts by choice. They reject the Ministry so what's the Ministry supposed to do? What would you do?" he asked, putting her on the spot.
"I'd put them in all relevant legislative bodies and give them the same rights, privileges, and obligations as everyone else," Hermione said determinedly. "It'd have them buy into the wider society and make them feel like a welcome and accepted addition."
.....
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