There was something peaceful, Delilah thought, about being bound from neck to ankle. Resistance was futile. After the continuous, furious struggle of the last couple of days, it was almost a relief. She floated head-first through a long, high-walled walkway, being buffeted somewhat by the inept wandwork of the masked figures holding her suspended, gazing up at the night sky. Part of her brain tried idly to pick out the constellations she’d been taught in Astrology class, but her eyes were barely focused. On top of the tall ivy-covered wall to her right she saw a handsome, pure-white peacock strutting along, fanning its tail feathers, which was such a bizarre sight that she smiled faintly to herself. The creak of heavy doors opening behind her announced the end of the night sky, which gave way to a soft-lit, muralled ceiling, and then a plain stone one when they turned and began to descend a broad staircase. At the bottom there was a pause as a murmured discussion took place, and then she was conducted into a bare stone chamber lit only by wall brackets, and unceremoniously released so that she crashed to the floor, and the door was slammed behind her.
She didn’t know how long she lay there listening to the sounds of movement outside. There seemed to be lots of people walking back and forth, orders being shouted, and fractious replies. She moved her head as far as she could to gaze in a desultory way at her surroundings, but the only thing she could see was part of a high-backed chair that was turned away from her, which seemed to be elaborately carved at the head, and the top of a door beyond it. She closed her eyes and waited, until the movement in the corridor slowed, and all grew quiet.
After some minutes the door to the chamber opened and a short, masked figure came in. Without a word to her he crouched beside her and pointed his wand at the ropes so that they immediately loosened, and he pulled them clumsily free and grasped her left arm in his right, pulling her to a sitting position. The grip was so astonishingly tight and cold that she gasped and automatically tried to wrench her arm free, and when she looked down, she saw that the hand that restrained her was made of solid metal. The hand’s owner tried to pull her to her feet but she was much taller than him, so she had to stagger to her feet herself with him holding her, almost in a twisted farce of chivalry.
‘Thank you, Wormtail,’ she said acerbically. He seemed to blanche slightly at her knowing his name, and pushed her around to the front of the chair, which was indeed ornately carved all over, with red velvet seat and armrests, like the ones that Snape, Lestrange and Bellatrix had been seated on before the Meles ritual, but even larger and more imposing, and mounted on sturdy wheels. Wormtail shoved her into it, and a golden rod shot out immediately from one armrest to the other at rib height, like the safety bar on a theme park ride, trapping her in the seat. He then pointed his wand at the door in front of them which opened noiselessly, and he vanished around he back of the chair, pushing it smoothly through the door into an adjoining chamber, where she briefly saw a pair of drawn red curtains in front of her, before Wormtail retreated back into the back room and closed the door, plunging her into total darkness. There was not a single crack of light coming through the curtains, but she knew exactly where she was. She was sitting more or less exactly where Morgane Meles had sat, naked and brave, pleading for mercy for her parents, before she was hung up like a pig and slit from neck to groin.
The fear that eluded her when she was kidnapped now returned with force, piercing her sharply in the solar plexus, and she strained to hear what was happening beyond the curtain. A few snatches of sound drifted through to her: ‘Salazar Slytherin, Rowena Ravenclaw, Helga Hufflepuff, and Godric Gryffindor…’; and then ‘unassailable magical frontier… four wizards…’. She realised Voldemort was filling in whomever was assembled there on his scheme to unite in himself the four founders’ inheritance claims to the castle. She wondered whether Lestrange, Snape and Dolohov were also out there, pretending to be hearing it for the first time.
‘Harry Potter… ancient… bloodletting… Meles…’
There was a muffled burst of applause, and Delilah realised he had reached the part of the tale where he successfully took the blood of Morgane Meles. The applause smattered on for a moment, followed by a few indistinct words – and then, abruptly, the red curtains parted and swung open, and Delilah blinked in the profusion of candlelight, amid an outburst of jeering laughter and cheering.
‘May I present tonight’s guest of honour, Miss Delilah Blackthorn – or, as she has been masquerading this year, Delilah du Lac. Welcome, Miss Blackthorn.’
Seeing Voldemort in Snape’s memory, he had still seemed a distant, spectral figure, disturbing, but not entirely real. In the flesh he was entirely different. A kind of electric energy seemed to come from him, and somehow even his movements, although smooth, were frightening, holding the threat of unpredictability, like a tarantula. She thought she could detect a whiff of strange, acidic smell emanating from him. He had turned to face her and met her gaze with his red eyes, giving a slight, laconic bow of the head, never breaking eye contact. She was frozen absolutely rigid with fear.
He turned away to face the crowd, which she now saw comprised some forty cloaked figures in curved rows, seated on chairs of varying grandness, with a few humbly standing at the back in the shadows. He stood perfectly still for a moment, and the crowd fell so silent, it was as though the whole room had held their breath.
‘Slytherin’s claim is my birthright. Hufflepuff’s is my triumph. Now, Ravenclaw is my challenge.’
Voldemort began to pace as he spoke.
‘I discovered the existence of an illegitimate Ravenclaw bloodline – the only person in history to do so – as early as my schooldays. I secured the confidence of the ghost of Helena Ravenclaw, who confided that she had had a child out of wedlock, and abandoned it in an orphanage in Albania. I confess, at the time, I didn’t immediately register the value of the information, distracted as I was by other projects. However, when I set my sights on the domination of the Hogwarts castle, I knew that tracking down the descendants of that child was the key to my success. I didn’t know where or how I would set about doing that, but my research was still in its early stages, so I put the problem off until a later date, until I was ready to proceed with my plan. As it happened though, the answer fell directly into my lap, as though the fates wished me to succeed.
‘Blood magic is not a well-researched field – because it is not a well-used practice – but I quickly became aware that answers may lie overseas, where there have been reports of such rituals being practised even in our lifetime. I set my faithful researcher Dawlish’ – here he paused to gesture to one of the shadowed members of the crowd, who ducked his head humbly – ‘who brought me, among other things, a comparatively recent newspaper clipping from a journalist who had witnessed one of these rituals with his own eyes in the jungles of Madagascar, and had even secured photographs of the rituals in progress. I sent for all the records pertaining to this journalist, and, having established that he was a man of good standing, wrote to request his assistance with a matter in his field of expertise.
‘Well, friends, he refused me. Graciously, I must admit, but ill-advisedly. You, dear ones, know how it pains me to be refused, and so I sent my industrious researcher back to the records we had gathered on him, to try and find means to, ah… persuade him to assist.’
Voldemort must have smiled here, because an obedient chuckle of appreciation ran through the audience.
‘What I had hoped to unearth was one of the usual suspects – a skeleton in the closet, a vulnerability in the family – but the information Dawlish brought me was most intriguing. He had in fact traced the family history of the journalist back to its roots in the eleventh century, where, it seems, the line began with the abrupt arrival of an orphaned baby, from… where else, but Albania.’
A murmur of comprehension rose from the seats.
‘I suddenly saw that it had been right before my eyes: Helena Ravenclaw had even told me herself that she had given the child a pseudonym for a name. The journalist I was researching was named Ormond Blackthorn. Blackthorn. Ravenclaw.’
He let this ring in the air for a few moments.
‘Well, at that point, friends, my priorities for Mr Blackthorn changed. I decided instead to try to recruit his colleague Julius Prenderghast to advise on the ritual, of which the Blackthorn family themselves would be the subject. From the records I knew that Ormond had a daughter, and so, as many of you will recall, we laid our plans, and chose our moment to abduct the whole family – father, mother and daughter – and bring them here. However, things went awry: Ormond was killed, and the wife and daughter escaped, and have ever since evaded capture in spite of our best efforts to find them.’
Voldemort paused his speech here, held his spidery hand to his face, and began pacing thoughtfully, slowly, back and forth before the crowd, in a theatrical display of contemplative melancholy.
‘It seemed we were stymied in our efforts. The Blackthorns had outsmarted us.’ Here he turned to face Delilah with a flash of his red eyes, his thin mouth curved into a gruesome smile. ‘Well. Almost.’
A rumble of laughter started up in the crowd as Voldemort turned back to them.
‘That’s right,’ he said, lifting his voice rousingly above the laughter, ‘Ormond almost outwitted us, almost managed to conceal the existence of his older child, the lovely Delilah who sits before us. He’d wiped her out of official existence at the ministry, and our old friend Dumbledore was hiding her’ – now he was speaking at a full-throated boom, ripe with an edge of laughter, and the crowd were almost electric with excitement – ‘but here she sits before us. Now, I cannot fail in my endeavour. I – was – cleverer.’
Here he raised his arms and tipped back his head, inviting them to a frenzy of cheering, foot-stamping and roars of laughter and glee, which echoed so prolifically around the chamber that there seemed to be twice as many voices as there were people.
‘A valiant effort, Ormond Blackthorn!’ Voldemort bellowed over the crowd, now mad with elation himself, and he turned towards the stage where Delilah was seated, gesturing grandly. ‘Valiant indeed! I think he deserves a round of applause!’
At these words the curtain to the edge of the stage slid back further, and Delilah turned her head to see what had been concealed in the shadows. Amid the hysterical screams of laughter, howls of delight and febrile yelps coming from the crowd, a tall tank, suddenly brightly lit from all four corners, moved slowly into the centre stage. Inside it was suspended the naked body of Ormond.
‘No,’ Delilah breathed.
The crowd had now gone completely wild, all out of their seats and braying like animals. They started throwing random items at the glass, which bounced off and littered the floor. Voldemort, though, was looking at Delilah, a puckered, unutterably cruel smile distorting his hideous face into something not even human. She pressed herself against the rod that locked her in place, gazing determinedly up at Ormond’s serene face, eerie in the greenish water, utterly unperturbed by the screams and assaults raining upon him.
‘Stop it,’ Delilah whimpered. She looked at the crowd, many of whom had taken their hoods down in the heat of their mania, and yelled, ‘STOP IT!’, knowing but not caring of the futility of this plea, which only excited them further. Voldemort continued to watch her, and laughed and laughed, practically licking his lips with enjoyment.
‘STOP IT!’ Delilah yelled again, louder this time, bucking and railing against the chair, ramming her hips against the golden rod – which all of a sudden vanished, in the middle of a violent thrust against it, so that she splatted onto the floor, landing chin-first so that she bit her tongue and had to flail to pick herself up. The Death Eaters were now drunk with laughter, clutching each other and banging their armrests with their fists, wiping their eyes and jeering weakly. Delilah clambered to her feet and ran to the tank, slamming herself full-bodied against the glass, trying to be as close to Ormond as possible, staring into his peaceful, open-mouthed face, bobbing gently in the water.
‘Daddy,’ she sobbed into the glass, which misted with her breath.
‘Dear, dear…’ Voldemort said softly, and as if he had turned a dial, the laughter muted to a heaving wheeze to hear him speak. ‘Poor Delilah Blackthorn. He can’t hear you, you know. Shall we pretend he can?’ He brandished his wand and Ormond’s eyes snapped open, staring blankly ahead. At another flick of Voldemort’s wand, his head angled down so he was staring, dead and unseeing directly into Delilah’s face. She gave a ragged sob.
‘What would he say if he could hear you, I wonder?’ Voldemort went on. He waved his wand again and Ormond’s white hand went to his chest, and his other arm gave a limp flourish, his eyes still fixed blindly on her. ‘Delilah! My darling!’ Voldemort said in a horrible, pantomime drawl, ‘I wish I could hold you just one more time, but… I’m dead!’ He now shrieked with laughter and waved his wand energetically so that Ormond’s limbs began flailing energetically like a puppet, his head flopping, his blank gaze roving aimlessly around. ‘I’m dead! I’m dead! I’m dead!’
The Death Eaters joined in.
‘DEAD! DEAD! DEAD!’ they chanted, some pumping their fists. Voldemort made Ormond writhe mechanically until his head fell completely back on his neck to face the ceiling. She gave a howl of agony and turned to throw herself at Voldemort, but she had barely moved when ropes appeared again from mid-air and snaked around her, binding her this time from under her nose so she couldn’t even move her neck, and she fell again to the floor.
Voldemort turned again to the crowd, as if forgetting about her.
‘Dear Delilah will not join her father tonight,’ he said to the crowd, who had again quieted, although they were so riled up that the room seemed to ring with their supressed energy. ‘She is neither the last of the Blackthorn line, nor a pure-blood, and so shall be used only as a last resort: we will keep her until her sister is either captured or killed.’
Delilah was suddenly rocketed into a vertical position where she hovered, completely bound, staring at Voldemort, no longer tempted to avoid his eye contact, but now meeting his red eyes with her furious, tear-filled ones. This seemed to amuse him, and they stared at each other for a long moment, before he laughed softly, and raised his hands like a conductor so that the curtains began to slide closed.
‘Thank you for joining us, Miss Blackthorn,’ he said with mock courtesy.
‘Night night darling,’ trilled one of the Death Eaters, and the others cackled. Voldemort turned back to face them, and the last thing she heard before the curtains met was, ‘now, friends, to plan our next move…’
*
George stood at Genevieve’s kitchen window as the kettle rumbled beside him. He was looking out at Connie in the garden, who was in turns pacing the grass, muttering to herself, and sitting for a few moments at a time on the arbour bench, twined with a lustrously thick rosebush studded with dark-pink buds, already looking tempted to burst into bloom. She would sit with her elbows resting on her spread knees, clutching her hands to the side of her head like a mask, staring fixedly ahead for a moment, then spring to her feet and begin pacing again.
A door opened and closed softly in the hallway, and George turned. At the same moment Remus, Dumbledore and Madame Pomfrey looked up expectantly at the doorway, where the tiny form of Professor Flitwick appeared. He nodded to George, who rapped on the glass to catch Connie’s attention, who looked up at once and walked quickly into the house.
‘How is she?’ she said, entering the kitchen.
‘Confused,’ Flitwick said sadly from the doorway, ‘and exhausted. I have done my best to repair the damage, but it will take time, and she may fully recover.’
‘May I have my patient back now?’ Madame Pomfrey said tersely.
‘Of course Poppy,’ Flitwick said, standing aside to let her bustle indignantly past into the hallway. They heard the door to the living room open and snap closed again.
‘What happened?’ Connie asked. George filled the teapot and carried it on a tray over to the table with fresh cups, although there were five cold, half-drunk cups already scattered over it, along with a plate of sable biscuits, a milk jug and a sugar pot. Connie’s had barely been touched. ‘Did the Memory Charm not work? Did Snape make a hash of it?’
‘No,’ Dumbledore said, shaking his head. ‘This is not the fault of the spell.’
‘This has been known to happen,’ Flitwick said, hopping up onto his own chair and accepting a cup from George, ‘but it is a rare phenomenon, and unheard of in a Muggle. I have researched the area extensively. I published a paper about it just last year.’
‘Delilah said Genevieve had no idea who she was when she was here a couple of days ago,’ George said. ‘She said she tried and tried to make her remember.’
‘No, she didn’t remember at the time,’ Flitwick said, ‘but memories are an immensely complex thing. They don’t exist independently, like pages of a book that can be torn out. They are part of an intricate network, whose processes are still largely mysterious even to those of us who have dedicated our lives to studying them. The human mind takes on immense volumes of information, but it discards most of it to a kind of archive. It’s still there, in some form, but it isn’t readily available. Memory charms work by selectively forcing that process, so that the memory is archived along with meaningless snatches of overheard conversation, the date and time of a long-past appointment, the name of a shop you passed once in a foreign city. This process is comparatively straightforward when forcing out an isolated event or piece of information, but even a small piece memory, if unnaturally removed, leaves a space where it was, a sort of wound, and people who have been Obliviated often describe feeling like they’ve forgotten something, but can’t grasp what it is, until the space heals over, so to speak. Extracting something like a mother’s knowledge of her only child is much more complicated: it leaves a whole series of gaps, of wounds. Madame du Lac has told me she’s been depressed for many months, and been prescribed some kind of sleeping draught because she’s been having strange, confused dreams. I believe this was some instinct within her trying to resist the healing process, to prevent the gaps from healing over. It is, as I say, an extremely rare phenomenon.’
‘So she’d have remembered Delilah eventually either way?’ George said.
‘No,’ Flitwick said, shaking his head. ‘It is very unlikely. When Delilah visited, when she pleaded with her mother, she aggravated the traces of memory that Madame du Lac was clinging so desperately to, and the process began to reverse itself.’
‘So how much does she remember now?’ Connie asked. ‘I mean, she thought Matilda was Delilah.’
‘It’s hard to say. I think she has recovered the big picture but not the details. They will fill in in time, either by themselves or with prompting. For instance, as soon as she heard you Apparating into her garden she knew what the sound meant, and as soon as I took my wand out she remembered that Ormond had been a wizard. There are some things she will probably need to be told.’
Matilda, hearing her name, crawled out from under the table where she had been sitting, quietly playing with a family of porcelain mice she’d found on a bookshelf in Genevieve’s living room.
‘Mummy, the baby mice is hungry.’
‘Oh dear,’ Connie said. ‘Do they want a biscuit?’
‘Ess.’
Connie smiled and passed one from the plate on the table, which Matilda put promptly into her mouth without a trace of pretence.
‘Mummy, can I see Gen-vee?’
‘Not right now darling, she’s with the nurse.’
‘Wasn’t she afraid?’ Dumbledore asked once Matilda had vanished back under the table, ‘when Genevieve took her?’
‘Shocked I think. But by the time we’d Stunned Genevieve from the window and gone into the living room, they were just sitting by the fire together, and she was almost asleep, curled up on her lap. She knows Genevieve is Delilah’s mother, and just keeps asking when Delilah’s going to arrive.’
The door opened in the hallway again, and Madame Pomfrey appeared.
‘Madame du Lac has consented to eat,’ she said, ‘and asks if the little one will join her.’
Connie bent down and poked her head under the table.
‘Tiddles, you can go and see Genevieve now. She wants to have some lunch with you.’
Matilda wriggled out from under the table and ran for the door. Connie stooped and gathered up the mice, placing them on the table. She leaned back in her chair and fiddled distractedly with them, lining them up in size order, almost like a child herself, whilst all the men watched her.
‘When will Snape get here?’ she said, breaking the silence.
‘There’s no way of knowing,’ Dumbledore said. ‘He’ll come as soon as it’s safe to.’
‘But he won’t harm Delilah,’ she said, as much to herself as to anyone else in particular. ‘Voldemort won’t hurt Delilah. Not yet. It’s Matilda he wants.’
‘Yes,’ Dumbledore agreed. ‘There is no immediate danger.’
‘Well, not to her life,’ Connie said agitatedly, taking one of the mice and tapping it against the table. ‘Who knows what he’s doing to her though. He only needs her alive, he doesn’t need her to be…’ she trailed off. She made the mouse walk across the table, looking deep in thought. Suddenly she pushed her chair back and stood, resuming her pacing.
‘This is unbearable,’ she burst out. ‘He’s got Delilah hostage, and she’ll stay that way until he can capture or murder Matilda. There’s no way round it. We have to get her out of there. We have to, and we’re just sitting here.’
‘Getting her out will be incredibly risky, Connie. We will need to plan carefully, with Severus’ help. I know this is agonising for you, but I have secured this house from magical intrusion, and as you say, Delilah will not be harmed whilst Matilda is here.’
Connie nodded, and gave a deep, tremulous breath.
‘I’m going to get some air,’ she said, and made for the door, leaving the three men watching after her. She held back her tears until she’d closed the front door behind her, then let them fall with a single sob. She walked around the side of the house so that she wouldn’t be seen from the kitchen window, down the narrow side return and into Genevieve’s small back garden with its paved patio, and the rich green pond in the back with a water feature that poured water over the rocks with a soothing hush. She leaned against the wall where the jasmine climbed the trellis, breathing deeply, listening to the running water and the gentle creaking of the frogs’ mating calls. It was a warm afternoon and she closed her eyes against the sun, which fell lavishly on the south-facing garden. The French doors sat open a crack and through them she heard the lyrical voice of Genevieve reciting,
‘Matilda, who told such dreadful lies
Could make one gasp and stretch one’s eyes…’
*
After the curtains closed on her, Delilah was dragged back through the door into the adjoining chamber by Wormtail, where he untied the ropes from her legs, leaving her bound from the hips to the nose, and marched her stumblingly through several corridors, then down even deeper into the building where the air was freezing, and halted at a heavy door, which he unlocked with a tap of his wand and shoved her through into a dark room beyond. He waved his wand again and the ropes loosened and slithered from her arms, when he suddenly spotted her bag slung over her shoulder; he snatched it and turned it over onto the floor, where a clatter of things fell out: a handful of Galleons, a lip balm, her sunglasses, and – seeing it made her heart leap into her mouth – the parchment. Wormtail gave a snuffly sound of pleasure, bent down and snatched up the coins, shoving them into his pocket, and threw the bag back at her. Then he left, slamming the door.
The room was dark, but she immediately fell to the floor and felt around for the parchment, and gathered it up along with her glasses. She opened her bag and shoved her hand inside, feeling around in the lining, hoping in vain to find a forgotten quill in there, perhaps caught in the lining – then she suddenly stopped, drawing out her hand in wonder.
There wasn’t a quill in caught in the lining. But there was a wand.
