Severus Snape stood at the edge of the Forbidden Forest and watched the headmaster approach across the lawn from the castle gates. Even if there had been any students on the grounds it would have been too early to have met anyone out there. The few clouds in the early morning sky were still streaked with the last tinges of sunrise, and the bright light rendered Dumbledore’s streaming hair and beard a cold, gleaming grey like old snow, stark against the folds of his midnight blue travelling cloak, and, as he approached, Snape saw that his lined face was similarly bleak. If he noticed the deep welts disfiguring Severus’ face, he didn’t acknowledge them.
‘I came as quickly as I could,’ he said. ‘Has Hagrid found him?’
‘Nothing yet. He’ll send up a signal when he does.’
‘We shall look too,’ Dumbledore said, and made immediately for the forest so that Snape had to jog to catch pace with him.
‘So. Fill me in,’ Dumbledore said shortly.
‘Voldemort called a meeting the night before last to coordinate the Jersey invasion, and whilst we were all assembled an urgent note arrived from Prenderghast. He has failed in his mission to capture the Blackthorns – as Voldemort knew he would – and decided to betray Delilah instead.’
‘As we knew he would,’ Dumbledore put in acridly.
‘As I said he would,’ Snape said with a hint of petulance. ‘You said he wouldn’t.’
‘I said I wouldn’t put it past him, but I thought on balance he wouldn’t condemn his oldest friend’s child to death. I was wrong, as I so often am. Go on.’
‘Well,’ Snape resumed, ‘he explained all about Delilah, her Muggle parentage and Ormond concealing her, and said that he was in the Hogwarts grounds and had her captive, and requested backup and further instructions.’
‘How did he get into the school?’
He was walking so quickly that Snape’s breath was laboured answering his questions, but Dumbledore didn’t seem to feel the pace, his eyes darting around for clues, occasionally swiping his wand to clear a hanging branch or rangy scrub that could be concealing something.
‘He didn’t say. Presumably the same way she got out, which we also don’t know.’
‘How long was it between him sending the note and her being sighted at the Leaky Cauldron?’
‘Twenty-four hours or so.’
‘George Weasley sent word this morning that he’d taken her in, but she’d left during the night. Presumably she was captured at once. Do we know why she would leave a place of safety?’
Snape hesitated.
‘Yes. It was me. Somehow she saw me in the alley, and she came to confront me. She knows everything.’
‘Everything?’
‘She knew about her mother. And she knew about Ormond.’
Dumbledore stared at the ground ahead as he walked, slowing his pace slightly. He took a tuft of his moustache and twisted it agitatedly between his finger and his thumb, then threw his hand back down by his side.
‘Damn,’ he said quietly.
‘Prenderghast must have said something about it.’
‘How could he have known about her mother? You didn’t mention it to anyone did you?’
‘Of course not.’
‘And did Delilah inflict these wounds?’ he said, gesturing with his hand at Snape’s face, who flinched instinctively away from his gaze.
‘Yes,’ Snape said evenly.
‘You weren’t exaggerating her duelling skills I see,’ Dumbledore said with a shrewd dryness. ‘You found yourself powerless to defend yourself in the face of her attack? Has the student surpassed the master?’
Snape clenched his jaw and didn’t respond.
‘How did Voldemort react to Julius’s letter?’
‘Elation. Fury. Prenderghast has signed his own death warrant: he tried to imply in the note that he had only just discovered Delilah’s existence himself, but Voldemort wasn’t fooled.’
‘So he would have brought Julius to Malfoy Manor and then killed him for the deception?’
‘Yes, but after we received the note, repeated messages to his pendant went unanswered, and of course the tracking doesn’t work inside the grounds. Filch, Lupin and the ghosts are still searching the castle, but it seems unlikely that–’
Dumbledore stopped suddenly and held up his hand. He signalled east, where a shower of red stars had erupted over the treetops. They both paused for a beat and then hurried for the fork in the path ahead.
They arrived at the clearing in the woods, where the curtain of branches that Prenderghast had erected had been torn down and tossed aside. Hagrid was sitting immobile on a fallen tree trunk, hands hanging by his side, head bowed, staring down at the lifeless body of a tiny white dog laid carefully across his lap.
‘Hagrid?’ Dumbledore said.
Hagrid raised his face, streaked with tears.
‘Wilbur,’ he said brokenly. ‘Just found ‘im. He was just lyin’ here.’ He gave a hiccoughing sob and wiped his eyes with a red handkerchief from his coat pocket. ‘Prenderghast’s over there,’ he said, jabbing his thumb in the direction of a prone lump in the corner of the clearing. Dumbledore strode over and crouched beside him, and held his wrist for a moment.
‘He’s alive,’ he said grimly, standing. ‘He’s freezing though. And he stinks like a goat,’ he added rancorously. ‘We should get him to the hospital wing.’
He waved his wand to summon a stretcher from mid-air, and lifted Prenderghast’s body jerkily onto it. A revoltingly blackened wound disfigured Prenderghast’s balding scalp, and his face was crusted with dried blood. His robes were torn and bloodied, and fell aside to reveal a scabbed purple bite mark on his lower leg. Straps appeared around the stretcher and shackled his shoulders, wrists and ankles, and at another twitch of Dumbledore’s wand it began to drift out of the clearing.
‘Hagrid,’ he said gently. ‘Thank you for your hard work tonight. Take Wilbur home and get some rest. I will come and see you as soon as I can, and we’ll bury him together.’
‘Thanks, Albus,’ Hagrid said in a muffled voice, and gingerly lifted the floppy little body in his arms. He shambled out of the clearing, head still bowed, and Dumbledore followed, conducting the stretcher through the gap in the trees.
Snape waited a moment until they’d started along the forest path, then walked a few places across the clearing to a folded piece of parchment lying on the forest floor. He picked it up, opened it, and scanned the words inscribed there, then slipped it into his pocket.
*
In happier times, the early morning bustle of Diagon Alley had been made up of Ministry wizards meeting for breakfast meetings, people doing early morning shopping to get the freshest fruit, often with small children in tow, friends meeting for coffee on the bistro tables on the sunlit cobbles, a steady trickle in and out of the marble frontage of Gringotts, and the general chaos of deliveries clattering up and down the alley and its tributaries, dodging the shouting merchants with their carts assembled between the shop fronts.
Today, there was nowhere to hide for a woman undercover and her overexcited child.
‘Mummeee can we get an ice cream?’ Matilda trilled, swinging from Connie’s hand, overjoyed to be back in a place she recognised. ‘Can we get an ice cream sundae with nuts and strawberries?’
‘OK darling,’ Connie said as evenly as possible, knowing not to draw attention to them by conspicuously whispering. ‘If you walk nicely and stay completely quiet.’
Matilda immediately stopped skipping and fell silent, trotting alongside her mother, but continually craning her head around to look at all the boarded-up shops.
‘Why’s everything closed?’ she asked.
‘I expect everyone’s gone on their summer holiday,’ Connie said.
‘Oh.’
She was a little taken aback herself by the extent of the desolation. She had hoped to move as much as possible from one shop to another, pretending to browse, so she could scan every inch of the street from hidden vantage points without being too much out in the open. She’s expected a much quieter atmosphere than before, and some closures, but there seemed to be hardly anywhere to hide. She was feeling desperately exposed, and resolved to find a quiet café somewhere, stuff Matilda with ice cream as she’d promised in spite of the early hour, and then leave. It was too dangerous.
They stopped in front of Gringott’s bank which was always the busiest point, and she quickly scanned the faces of the beggars assembled by the steps and in the doorways, trying to glimpse the faces of passers-by hidden under hoods whilst escaping scrutiny herself.
‘Mummy, look! It’s Lilah!’
‘What?’ she gasped, turning in the direction Matilda was pointing, ‘where?’
‘Look!’
Connie looked in horror at the line of posters along the shop fronts beyond the bank, Delilah’s face blinking in unison from several of them.
WANTED
REWARD: 500G
They both stood for a moment, hand in hand, staring at the blurry but unmistakable face that they’d come here to find, before Connie turned abruptly, chivvying Matilda alongside her.
‘Mummy, why was there pictures of Liilah? Is Liilah here?’
‘I shouldn’t think so darling,’ Connie said quickly. ‘Let’s find that ice cream shall we?’ she added, anxious to keep Matilda from repeating Delilah’s name in her carrying, high-pitched voice.
‘So why was her picture up everywhere?’ Matilda persisted. ‘Look!’ she yelped, pointing at another boarded-up window with Delilah’s face looming from a poster pasted to the window, ‘there’s another one!’
‘Yes I know darling, how funny,’ Connie said desperately, ‘I wonder why, perhaps she’s become a film star.’
It was completely the wrong thing to say. Matilda stopped dead.
‘Delilah? A film star?’ she exclaimed at top volume, utterly spellbound. ‘Delilah? A real real film star? Like Namouna Silver?’
‘No no, of course not, I was just being silly. Here, this shop looks fun doesn’t it, shall we go inside?’ she said hurriedly, spotting a bright orange shop front that looked like it was stuffed with exciting things to distract an inconveniently-inquisitive child. Matilda’s eyes locked on the window display and fell mercifully silent, making a beeline for the bursts of noise and bubbles emitting from the doorway.
Once inside, Connie picked up an orange fabric basket to fill with treats for Matilda. This was better than an ice cream, and would keep her happy for longer once they went back to their quiet, lonely lives on the run. She trailed around after her daughter, who was in heaven dashing between the displays, tweaking levers and pushing buttons to make things sing or spurt bright lilac goo or perform a tap dance, as the basket filled with Intergalactic Bouncy Balls, a pink biting coin purse, a plastic dragon who roared and spewed artificial fire when you pressed a button on his stomach, a miniature toy crup who ran around in circles, barked and did back flips, and a clutch of comics about ‘Martin Miggs the Mad Muggle’. Connie was examining the Defence range with half an eye on Matilda, who was repeatedly pressing the demo button underneath a rat orchestra in a glass cage so that they gave a short mariachi performance over and over again. She was idly examining a box called ‘Freeze!’, a kind of snapper which could be thrown on the floor in the path of a pursuer for a five-second advantage, presumably for children or people who couldn’t perform an Impediment Jinx, when she heard a low voice beside her, almost in her ear.
‘Don’t turn around. Amycus Carrow is directly behind you.’
Connie froze.
‘Has he seen me?’
‘Not yet. He’s with his son.’
Connie glanced out of the corner of her eye in the direction of the voice to see a man in magenta robes, clearly the proprietor, arranging a step ladder with exquisite nonchalance, climbing onto the second rung to reorganise the wall display. She looked at him for a moment, disguising her gaze as interest in the display, furiously calculating what to do.
‘Go through that beaded curtain over there,’ the man said with the tiniest tilt of the head, speaking in a conversational tone, but too quietly to be overheard. ‘I’ll follow with your daughter in a minute.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Order of the Phoenix.’
He climbed down from the stepladder and ambled off, consulting a sheet of paper. Connie dithered for a moment, glancing as casually as she could over at Matilda, who was still utterly engrossed in the rat orchestra. She chanced the briefest look at Carrow, who was staring vacantly at a rotating display of fake wands whilst a rosy child of six or so rifled keenly through a display of Muggle joke products. She couldn’t get to Matilda without passing directly in front of them. After a long pause, she moved slowly, without turning, along the wall display in the direction the man had indicated and into the shadows, and slipped through a beaded curtain, which stroked her shoulders with a crackle as she passed through it.
Once in the room beyond, she ducked to the side of the doorway with her back to the wall, wand raised, counting slowly to ten in her head. As she reached nine, she felt the throb of a powerful spell pulse through the room, and the man stepped in holding Matilda by the hand. In a flash Connie snatched and tugged Matilda’s free hand so that she gave a startled cry and stumbled into Connie’s leg, and Connie looked steadily at the man, wand raised.
‘Thank you for doing that,’ she said. ‘Who are you?’
‘George Weasley. Order of the Phoenix, like I said. You’re Connie Blackthorn. We’ve been looking for you for months. What are you doing here?’
‘I heard Delilah had been sighted here.’
‘She was. She was here, in the shop. I took her in, but when I woke up this morning she was gone.’
‘Why did she leave?’
‘I don’t know, and I don’t know what happened to her. I sent a message to the Order this morning, but nobody’s responded except to acknowledge.’
‘What did you say your name was?’
‘George Weasley. I promise I’m in the Order. I can help you,’ he said earnestly.
After a moment Connie lowered her wand and picked up Matilda, who was clinging to her thigh, trembling.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Journalist trick. Sometimes people can lie convincingly once but not twice. I knew you were a Weasley straight away, you’re the spit of your dad. So you had Delilah here? How did that come about? Are you friends? From Hogwarts?’
‘Not really, but we’ve met, and I knew about her from the Order. You’ve probably seen her posters are everywhere, and it was just lucky that I saw her from the window and managed to get her in. But she left in the night without saying anything.’
‘So I’ve missed her,’ Connie said flatly. ‘She’s gone again.’
‘Yes,’ George said, ‘but you’re here. We’ve been looking for you. Will you come upstairs? I promise you it’s safe. And I have to tell the Order I’ve found you – I lost Delilah, I can’t let you slip away too.’
Connie turned to Matilda, who was holding her earlobe with her right hand and had her other arm in a stranglehold around Connie’s neck, staring with fixed fascination at George.
‘What do you think?’ she said to the child. ‘Time to rejoin the land of the living?’
Matilda looked uncomprehendingly back at her mother, and gave an obedient nod.
‘OK,’ Connie said to George. ‘We’ll come. If only so that Matilda isn’t lying on a therapist’s couch in twenty years time talking about the time mummy took her into a room full of vibrators.’
George grinned and gestured for them to follow as he led them across the room to a door in the very back corner, which led up an unlit stone staircase, through a high-ceilinged room piled with delivery pallets, into another staircase, up again, and then into a comfy attic-style living room, with a squashy sofa and chairs, and a cluttered coffee table bathed in a beam of warm morning sunshine. The fire was already lit, and smouldered comfortingly in the grate. Connie walked over to the armchair and tipped Matilda onto it, then straightened and turned to George.
‘Coffee?’ he said.
‘Yes please,’ she said.
‘I’m starving’ Matilda piped from behind them. ‘And you promised me an ice cream’ she added reproachfully.
‘Matilda,’ Connie said reprovingly, ‘I’m sure Mr Weasley will be happy to get you something to drink if you ask nicely, but you’ll have to wait for your ice cream.’
‘Would lemonade be the thing, Miss Blackthorn?’ George said courteously to the child, giving her a comical bow. Matilda giggled and nodded. ‘How about you?’ he said, turning to Connie. ‘Something to eat?’
‘Just coffee for now, thank you.’
He left, and Connie, realising she still had the orange basket slung over her forearm, dropped it on the coffee table and massaged the purple groove it had left on her wrist. She passed Matilda one of the comic books, which she opened greedily.
‘Ladies,’ George said sonorously, returning with a tray bearing a cafetiere, two mugs, a milk jug, a sugar bowl, a tall glass of sparkling lemonade with a red and white striped straw, and a bowl with three scoops of strawberry ice cream in it.
‘That’s far too much for her, she’ll be sick,’ Connie laughed as Matilda’s eyes lit up and she set greedily upon the bowl.
‘Oh, sorry – I don’t really know any kids, I didn’t think,’ George said guiltily, eyeing Matilda shovelling ice cream into her mouth. ‘We developed an excellent antiemetic for our Puking Pastilles though, we can always cram one in her if she manages the whole lot and starts to look green.’
‘No, don’t worry,’ Connie said, also watching Matilda fondly. ‘I was kidding. She needs a treat. She hasn’t had anything nice in ages. Speaking of which, we didn’t get round to paying for Matilda’s stuff,’ she said, indicating the orange basket. ‘Can you run it all up for me at some point?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’s on us.’
Connie almost protested, but when she looked at George he had a stern expression, as though girded to challenge her, so she just smiled graciously and nodded her thanks. George poured them each a coffee, added milk and sugar to his own, then pushed the tray towards Connie, who added nothing to hers, took a long sip, then lay blissfully back on the sofa cushions, her lower back cracking audibly as she did, holding the cup in both hands on her lap. She closed her eyes for a moment as she rested her head, basking in the beam of sunshine from the window, and raised one hand to her forehead where she pressed two fingers into her right temple so hard that she left a mauve smudge in her grey-white skin.
‘Do you want to sleep?’ George said. ‘I can watch Matilda, I’ve got tons of toys and stuff around, and Verity’s got the shop covered.’
Connie stretched her neck to the left and the right and blinked hard three or four times, then sat up straight, readjusting her shoulders.
‘No,’ she said, leaning forwards to face him squarely, sliding into journalist mode as smoothly and completely as if she were pulling on a jacket. ‘I want you to tell me about Delilah.’
So he did. At first he only told her about the previous night, about finding Delilah outside the shop and bringing her in, and hesitated to repeat any of the rest of her story, feeling it wasn’t his to tell, but Connie somehow managed to make that impossible, exerting polite but surprisingly firm pressure. She finished her coffee and poured herself another from the pot, and listened with unswerving attention as he spoke, leaning forward with her elbows on her parted knees, and behind her incisive blue gaze he could see the flickering of her mental quill as she noted and filed all the facts. Nothing seemed to shock her: he hesitated over parts of the story, for instance relating Delilah’s deception before Christmas, but Connie could detect evasion like a dog can hear a bark in the night, and pressed him with such specific questions that he floundered, and when he still hesitated she simply repeated the questions, which was so wrong-footing that he found himself telling her everything; but she simply nodded as she had at every other detail, and let him proceed. He was even more apprehensive telling her about Prenderghast’s betrayal of Delilah, having learned that Connie had been living with him until so recently, but all she did was close her eyes and take a deep, tremulous breath, then hiss a short stream of invective through her teeth, which he suspected would have been longer, more colourful, and far more audible if not for Matilda’s presence. She finished with a bitter head shake and a dry, mirthless laugh, and gestured for him to continue. She interrupted only to ask for clarifications of details he’d missed – how had Prenderghast got into Hogwarts? How had Delilah got to France undetected? – until he neared the end of the tale, which he was most dreading telling.
‘…so when Delilah got to her mum’s house, she wasn’t there, but Delilah didn’t think anything had happened to her so she waited and her mum came back home, but…’ he glanced at Matilda, who was now scribbling haphazardly and with immense concentration over the illustrations of Martin Miggs with a quill she’d found on the coffee table, her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth. ‘Her mum didn’t know her,’ he said in an undertone. ‘Someone amended her memory. She said she didn’t have a daughter.’
He’d expected Connie to react with horror, or at least distress, but she simply nodded.
‘Dumbledore’s doing, I expect,’ she said. ‘Nobody else would have the balls to do something so wicked to save someone’s life.’
‘That’s what I said – well, I said the Order sometimes modify Muggles’ memories – but Delilah was convinced it was the Death Eaters. But then she said she didn’t want to talk about it any more. Then we went to bed–’ he stumbled for a second over that phrasing and hoped he wasn’t blushing– ‘I mean she went to bed, but when I woke up this morning she’d gone. I don’t know why and I don’t know where she is.’
Connie stood, and stretched her back again. She swung both of her arms backwards and clasped them behind her back, and stretched her joined arms to the left and to the right so that her shoulders crunched.
‘Well. Thanks for telling me,’ she said, easing her joints back into place. ‘I did sort of wonder if she might have ended up at Hogwarts, but I had no idea how to find out – the place is a fortress and I couldn’t trust anyone even if I could contact them.’
‘So, your turn,’ George said. He felt quite wrung out from her questioning. ‘You have to return the favour.’
Connie had wandered to the window and was looking out of it over Diagon Alley. She turned her head slightly towards him, but continued to gaze distractedly into the morning sky.
‘It sounds like Delilah’s filled you in on most of it. After the party we went to stay with Julius Prenderghast. I urgently needed to find somewhere safe for Matilda, and especially someone who would keep her safe if anything happened to me.’
‘Can I ask why Prenderghast? I mean, I know hindsight and all that, but the way Delilah described him, he sounds like the last person you’d trust. Was all this stuff with the Death Eaters totally out of the blue?’
‘No, not entirely. He’s always been really, really suggestible, and a weird combination of foolhardy and cowardly. Ormond was always having to bail him out when he got himself into stupid fixes trying to impress people. Like one time he gave a ton of money to this shyster who started hanging around the newspaper offices, who said he had an inside track on a new model of racing broom which was going to be the next big thing, but it hadn’t had clearance yet, so he could get them cheap.’
‘Prenderghast fell for that?’
‘Hook, line and sinker. The guy was very flash, he said he knew loads of famous Quidditch players and ministers, and he did seem to have some kind of clout at the German embassy, he took Julius to a huge banquet there and introduced him to a bunch of people, kept talking about the astronomical profits they’d make when the brooms hit the market, then walked off with Julius’ life savings as well as a chunk of money he’d taken from similarly gullible people placing pre-orders.’
‘And was never seen again?’
‘The brooms did materialise eventually, but they might as well have been logs from a garden pond. Julius still has about a hundred of them in his shed. They barely even flew, and everyone who had been thick enough to buy one from him wanted their money back, which he couldn’t give them. He was too scared to face anyone, so he tried to hide in his house until Ormond turned up to deal with a lot of angry people and repay them out of his own pocket. Anyway, it was always things like that – he’d go all starry-eyed over someone he thought was big and impressive and agree to go on a stupidly expensive holiday to the Maldives which he then couldn’t swing, or miss a load of deadlines because he went on a three-day bender with some playboy with a fancy mansion.’
‘So an idiot, and naïve, but not necessarily bad.’
‘Exactly. So you see what I mean, the Death Eater thing’s not entirely out of character. I trusted him, though – I thought that if it came down to it he’d protect Matilda, because she’s Ormond’s child. I had this crazy idea he’s draw the line at endangering his oldest friend’s kid. Guess I was wrong there,’ she said bitterly. ‘Anyway I didn’t really have any options. I have next to no family – my dad’s a wizard, he was Hungarian and cleared off before I was born, I don’t know him at all. My mum’s a Muggle, she’s 70-something and getting confused and losing her sight. She’s met Matilda a handful of times but they don’t know each other and she couldn’t possibly keep her safe. Ormond’s parents are dead, and we’re both only children. We have lots of friends but nobody I could burden with that kind of responsibility. It’s a bit of a worry,’ she concluded, and George could see in the chilly delicacy of this phrase that, far from being a bit of a worry, it was the single greatest anxiety of her life, which gave her no rest from its constant threat. She looked for a moment over at Matilda, who had flopped back so she was lying flat across the sofa with just her head propped up against the cushion, her feet dangling off the edge, her comic up propped on her tummy.
‘So the thing is,’ Connie resumed after a pause, ‘like it or not, Julius actually is our oldest friend – he and Ormond worked together on and off for over thirty years, and he was the one who introduced us. I lived in Wales with my ex for all of my twenties, and I only moved to London when we broke up, I was already thirty-one when I started at the Daily Prophet. It’s really hard meeting people in a new place as an adult, and Julius was really kind to me, he took me to loads of parties and things, and that’s how I met Ormond.’
‘Were you and Prenderghast…?’
‘Oh no. No, no. He was crazy about me, but he’s one of those people who’s at his worst when he fancies someone, he becomes all slavish and oily. I am fond of him though – or, I was fond of him. I’ve known him for ten years, he was Ormond’s best friend, best man at our wedding, and he’s got lots of good qualities. But the real reason I was sure we’d be safe with him was that I thought he’d sold Ormond out, and I could put him forever in our debt.’
‘Sold Ormond out? How?’
‘He was the only one who knew about the Ravenclaw thing. This all started with Lucius Malfoy making a Records Request about Ormond – he asked for “files relating to Ormond Blackthorn” or something, but I initially thought it was to do with me, as I’ve published loads about the Death Eaters, especially the Malfoys. I figured it was plain old intimidation. But so much time went by and they had so many opportunities to get to me, and they didn’t. So it had to be about the Ravenclaw thing after all, and Ormond was absolutely sure he was the first person to follow the paper trail, and the only person he told except for me was Julius, who was a no-show at the party, so it was obvious to me that they’d leant on him and he’d sold us out.’
‘Did he admit it?’
‘Well, no. He said he didn’t do it. And at this point, I actually believe him. I guess they found out another way.’
‘How could they?’
‘I don’t know, and it’s driving me–’ she glanced over at Matilda, whose eyelids had started to flutter, ‘it’s driving me fucking insane,’ she finished in an undertone. ‘And when the Death Eaters did finally make it through, he shafted us anyway.’
‘So you were staying with Prenderghast until Delilah sent that package and you had to leave,’ George prompted.
‘Yep,’ Connie said, ‘and there’s very little to tell since then. Being on the run is much less exciting than it sounds. We went to Beauxbatons to see if we could find Delilah there, but as you know, that went disastrously too. That’s when I realised Julius was after us, and I doubled down on our protection measures. That was two near misses, so I’ve rented us a flat in a retirement community in Falmouth, and that’s where we’ve been hiding. We’re Matilda and Mrs Meldrick. We walk by the sea every day and eat crab cakes, with our dodgy dye jobs and our sensible raincoats. Nobody pays any attention to us.’
‘But you’re here today? How’s that’
‘Well,’ Connie said with a smile. ‘I admit I chose Falmouth for a reason.’
‘I thought as much.’
‘When that Death Eater almost caught us at Christmas, I knew he must have been local. I did some research, and found out Avery and his family live in Falmouth. I tracked him down and spent a few weeks following him around to see what I could learn.’
‘And?’
Connie leaned over to pick up her handbag from the floor beside the sofa, and pulled out a pewter pendant on a thick chain from the inside pocket. She dropped it heavily on the coffee table.
George peered at it, nonplussed.
‘What’s that?’
‘A Death Eater pendant. It’s the thing Julius had, how he knew there was a meeting. I stole this from Avery.’
‘Oh,’ George said. ‘I’ve heard about these, someone in the Order mentioned them. They’re like temporary Dark Marks. But Avery? He’s got a Dark Mark, why would he have one of those?’
‘They do more than that. They pick up a kind of radio signal, and the Death Eaters chat on it, even the really senior ones. I found out quite accidentally: I was watching Avery at home, so I found out that he has this shed in his garden where he tells his wife he’s going to work, but it turns out he goes out there and just chats on this pendant to his mates. I used to drive over, climb over the garden wall and sit in the dark listening. All the Death Eaters have conversations all night on it, they use weird nicknames for themselves and have all this special slang. Took me weeks to decode it. They play that game Warlock Warfare by just announcing their moves over these pendants.’
‘Wow,’ George laughed, picking up the pendant and turning it over in his hands. ‘That’s sad even by my standards. How did you get this one though?’
‘From Avery. One night he went to the pub and got completely plastered, so I Stunned him and stole it. Next morning he just thought he’d fallen over drunk and lost it, and got a replacement.’
‘So now you can listen in on their chats from anywhere?’ George said wonderingly, peering at the snake design on the front.
‘Unfortunately not. I worked out pretty quickly that they have a tracking device on them, so I have to keep it under a Vacuum Charm when I’m not using it – I don’t know how they’re monitored so I couldn’t risk having it activated at home. But I decided I could safely activate it in the region of Avery’s house – if for some reason they followed the signal, I’d just chuck it out the car window and leave. I just drive up to his house most evenings and turn it on, and sit in the car to listen to them. It’s much more convenient than sitting in his garden, because I can take Matilda with me – I had this nice Muggle woman watching her for me for a while, I told her I work night shifts at a nursing home, but that meant I couldn’t stay late into the night, and I was always worried she’d wake up and do or say something to give us away. Now I can just bundle her into the car and she sleeps in the back seat.’
‘And you do this every night?’
‘No, not every night. I have to wait until she’s almost asleep before I put her in the car so she’s properly asleep when we pull up, and then I wake her up again carrying her to bed when we get home. Too many nights of that exhausts her,’ she said, gazing guiltily at the sleeping child.
‘And you, I imagine,’ George said. Connie dismissed that with a flick of her hand.
‘I’m a journalist, I’m used to going without sleep. Anyway, that’s how I knew Delilah had been spotted. I was listening to Avery when the meeting was called, so I was waiting for him last night hoping to hear what it had been about, when there was a sudden flurry of activity. They were all going nuts shouting “she’s been seen, she’s been seen,” and a load of them had orders to congregate in Diagon Alley. I saw Avery come out in his Death Eater mask a few minutes later and Disapparate, but I sat there all night and didn’t hear any more chat on the pendant – I guess they had no need to use them when they were all together – and then as early as I thought I could get away with it, I took Matilda home, and we got dressed and came here.’
George had been sitting with his elbows on his knees. Now he gazed fixedly at the coffee table, lost in thought, and nodded ponderously a few times. Then he raised his head.
‘OK,’ he said resolutely. ‘I think it’s time to contact the Order. What do you think?’
Connie nodded.
‘I think we might as well.’
‘What do you think Matilda?’ he said, turning to the child, but finding her fast asleep, her comic flopped over her chest.
‘She has my proxy,’ Connie said, with a ghost of a smile.
‘It’s still quite early so there may not be anyone around, but let’s see.’
He stood and made for the fireplace. He flicked his wand so that the smouldering embers jumped to life, and took a pinch of powder from a ceramic pot on the mantelpiece in the shape of a monkey with its hands clamped over its mouth, and threw it into the frame.
‘Grimmauld Place,’ he said. ‘George Weasley here. I have Constance Blackthorn.’
Even they both watched, to their amazement, within a few seconds a figure appeared spinning fast in the fireplace, and gradually took the form of Remus Lupin, who stepped out of the grate and shook his robes clean of soot.
‘Constance,’ he said at once, turning to her, without even acknowledging George. ‘Voldemort knows about Delilah. We are about to leave for Uzès to safeguard her mother’s house. You can come with us if you come now.’
‘Yes,’ Connie said at once, standing up. She turned to George.
‘Keep Matilda safe, will you?’
‘Fuck that,’ George said. He strode over to the sleeping child, picked up a thick, hand-knitted blue throw from the arm of the sofa, and bundled her up in it. He picked her up and turned to face them. ‘We’re all going.’
*
On the pier at Dover, they met with a man in a flat cap, who, after a word from Remus, nodded them discreetly through into the International Apparition Space. By mutual unspoken agreement, they instantly took off for Calais, landing within a few feet of each other. George didn’t know where Genevieve lived, so he tried to tip the child gently into Connie’s arms in order to Apparate alongside Remus, but she wriggled and moaned, and woke up with a grumpy start.
‘Morning sunshine,’ Connie said cheerfully. ‘We’re off to France, isn’t that fun?’
‘No.’
‘But we’re going to see Lilah’s mummy, remember Genevieve?’
‘No.’
‘Yes you do, she gave you all that ice cream and you said she looked like a film star.’
‘No.’
‘Well, you’ll remember when we get there. Come on.’
‘NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.’
Matilda threw herself heavily on the ground, crossed her arms, and tucked her hands into her armpits, rolled onto her front and pressed her forehead stubbornly into the concrete. Connie looked apologetically up at the men.
‘Sorry. Toddler tantrum. This might take a minute,’ she said. ‘You guys go on, we’ll be right behind you.’
Remus took George’s arm and they Disapparated, reappearing in the jasmine-scented garden around the side of Genevieve’s house. They walked slowly around the building towards the front door.
‘Now,’ Remus said, ‘I’ve met Genevieve before – she may not remember me, but let me go first so that–’
The sound of thunderous footsteps from inside the house, and the frantic scratching of a key in the lock cut him off. Genevieve ran outside, barefoot, wearing a pale grey cardigan with a garnet brooch attached to the breast. She saw them, and ran towards them, her hair standing away from her head as though she had been electrocuted.
‘DELILAH!’ she shrieked in a terrible, cracked voice, vibrating with desperation. ‘I ‘eard you come! Do you ‘ave Delilah?!’
Remus and George exchanged a bewildered glance, before another pop made Genevieve wheel around towards where Connie and Matilda had appeared in the middle of the lawn. Matilda wriggled out of Connie’s grasp and ran across the grass, directly into the path of Genevieve, who shouted ‘DELILAH!’, snatched her up and vanished into the house, slamming the door behind her.
