When Delilah stirred into consciousness the next morning, she experienced a blissful moment of wakeful oblivion: sunlight crept through her parted eyelashes, and just then she had no idea where she was or what had happened. She opened her eyes properly and found herself on a squashy sofa, covered with an exquisitely soft purple blanket, in a sitting room that became familiar as her brain whirred back into life.
She propped herself abruptly up on her elbow, then gasped in pain and sat bolt upright, clutching her arm.
‘You’re awake,’ said a gentle voice.
Dumbledore was standing by the window.
‘What happened?’ she asked blearily. A dull ache thudded through her head and her mouth felt thick and swollen.
He came over to the sofa and crouched beside her, taking her wrist carefully in his hand.
‘You collapsed and landed on your elbow. Professor Snape gave you a draught for a dreamless sleep and I did my best to mend the break, but I’m no Mediwizard, so it might need further attention. Does this hurt?’ he asked, bending each of her fingers into her palm and back again.
‘No, it was just a bit stiff when I first leant on it. It feels OK now.’
‘Do you still feel tired?’
‘No. Is there any more news?’
‘We haven’t heard anything more about Constance and Matilda. I’m sure you’ll agree that no news is good news.’
‘And…’ she swallowed hard to try and control the tremor in her voice. ‘And Dad?’
Dumbledore didn’t answer for a moment, twisting her wrist experimentally.
‘We haven’t managed to recover the body. I’m afraid the Death Eaters took it with them. It may still turn up.’
This information, as with everything that would happen that day and for many days after, seemed to come to Delilah from a very long way off. There seemed to be a short time-delay, as if her brain were protected by a dense layer of glass and she was receiving only faint echoes from the outside world.
‘Oh,’ she said blankly.
Dumbledore moved to the armchair opposite as he had the previous evening, and with a wave of his wand summoned the same tea set. He tapped the small kettle, which immediately began to hiss.
‘The main thing now,’ he said, ‘is to discuss what happens next.’
‘Yes…’ Delilah struggled to make her brain work. ‘Yes, what shall I do? Go back to France?’
‘Actually, I’d rather hoped you would consent to come back to Hogwarts.’ Dumbledore sent a thin stream of tea leaves from the tip of his wand into the teapot, and then poured the now steaming water over them.
‘Hogwarts?’
‘Yes, Hogwarts,’ he said patiently, seeming to understand that she was having trouble processing even the simplest information. ‘The choice is yours, and Madame Maxime is more than capable of protecting you, but should news of your existence come to Voldemort’s attention, he will go directly to Beauxbatons to seek you. I believe Hogwarts is by far the safest place for you. In fact, I flatter myself that, for the time being at least, Hogwarts is the safest place on the planet. Of course, that’s providing we observe certain safeguards.’
‘Safeguards?’
‘Well, for a start, we don’t want the highly unusual name of Blackthorn to be repeated in any wizarding household anywhere. I had thought you might come to Hogwarts under your mother’s name.’
‘Delilah du Lac?’
‘If that suits you.’
‘I guess so.’ She smiled weakly. ‘I quite like it actually.’
Dumbledore poured a large, steaming cup of tea and pushed it and the milk jug towards Delilah.
‘The one thing I will ask of you is that you don’t communicate with your mother by any means. ‘We will make sure she is reassured of your safety, but I think it best – for her safety as well as yours – if we don’t tell her of our plan.’
‘Oh. OK,’ Delilah said, puzzled. ‘But I was supposed to go back for the last week of the summer.’
‘Let us deal with that. It’s for the best. You must see that she would be in tremendous danger if your existence were discovered. She would be targeted immediately, and Voldemort’s treatment of Muggles, particularly ones harbouring information he desires, is…’
Dumbledore left that sentence ominously unfinished and stood, gathering up his travelling cloak and swinging it around his shoulders.
‘I will leave you now. You are safe as long as you stay inside this house until we collect you to escort you to Hogwarts. Just remember: you will need to be very careful to maintain your persona. You will not be able to communicate with anybody outside the castle, and it is probably best if you keep your social circle fairly small. We’re fortunate that during your stay at Hogwarts before you didn’t have the opportunity to forge any very close friendships, so nobody in the castle is likely to know, or at least remember your full name.’
‘Except Terry.’
Dumbledore paused, his fingers on the silver clasp at his throat.
‘Terry?’ he repeated.
It was like the warm, soft glow of a lamp coming on in a dingy room, previously lit only by a bare overhead bulb. She was going to Hogwarts: she could be with Terry every single day. She wouldn’t have anything else, not a single friend or a single shard left of her tiny, broken family, but it was something rather than nothing.
‘Yes, Terry Boot. We’re… We’re friends.’
‘Is there anybody else?’
‘Er… Michael something. His friend. He told his friend about me.’
‘Which Michael?’
‘Michael… Corner I think it was? Yes, that was it, Michael Corner. I don’t know him, but he’s Terry’s closest friend.’
‘Anybody else?’
‘No.’
‘Think carefully, Delilah. Anybody else at all?’
‘No, it was… sort of a secret. Just Terry and Michael.’
‘OK. They must be dealt with. Most particularly Mr Boot.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed almost happily, ‘I’ll write to him – well, no, obviously not write, I’ll talk to him when we’re – well, I’ll find an opportunity, and I’ll tell him what’s going on, and he’ll be able to –‘
‘No,’ Dumbledore interrupted.
Delilah stared at him.
‘Wh… What?’
‘This knowledge puts him in terrible danger. Terry Boot’s memory will have to be amended.’
‘So that he forgets my surname?’
‘So that he forgets you.’
Delilah’s head pounded.
‘No,’ she protested weakly. Her eyes swam with tears.
‘Yes,’ Dumbledore said firmly. ‘It must be done. It will be done as soon as possible.’
He turned to leave. Delilah watched helplessly after him, a tear spilling over on to her cheek.
He turned in the doorway.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said more softly. ‘If he really loves you, he will fall for Delilah du Lac as readily as he did for Delilah Blackthorn.’
After he had gone Delilah flopped back on to the sofa and, after what seemed like a long time, began to cry, huge, throat-ripping, heartbroken sobs which echoed through the entirely empty house and would, were it not for the charm protecting the walls, have seeped through into the neighbouring properties and chilled the hearts of their inhabitants. As it was, the shattered, mournful howls bounced off the walls and encountered themselves in echo and in progeny, and a portrait in the hallway was wakened from a long sleep and began to wail in sympathy.
*
Genevieve du Lac was rolling pastry at her kitchen table when a faint pop made her freeze in panic. She stood perfectly still for a few seconds, then dusted the flour off her hands, set down her rolling pin, and ran down the hallway to wrench open the front door.
‘Hello?’ she called in frightened English. ‘I heard you come. Show yourself.’
A black-clad, black-haired figure walked slowly into view from around the side of the house. He approached the door and stood before her.
‘Who are you?’ Genevieve demanded bravely. ‘I am unarmed and I have no magic. If you hurt me you are doing so in unfair combat.’
‘I am Professor Severus Snape,’ said the man. ‘I’m not here to hurt you.’
Genevieve’s heart slowed slightly.
‘What do you want?’
‘I’m here to talk to you about your daughter.’
‘Delilah? Is she in danger?’
‘Yes. But we have managed to ensure her protection. For now.’
Genevieve glared at the man mistrustfully. It was a blustery, grey-skied sort of day, more like autumn than midsummer, and the trees rustled ominously in the unseasonable breeze.
‘Come in,’ she said at length, standing back from the door and holding it open as the man swept into the hallway. She closed the door after him and led him into the kitchen.
‘Take a seat,’ she said, indicating the table and turning to fill the kettle.
Severus looked distastefully at the flour-covered surface and remained standing.
‘Delilah is in danger,’ he reiterated without preamble. ‘We have taken her into our protection, but her father was killed.’
Genevieve stiffened visibly at the sink.
‘Ormond is dead?’ she whispered without turning.
‘Yes.’
‘But Delilah is safe?’
‘Yes.’
‘And his wife and child?’
‘Also safe.’
After a few seconds she turned and walked falteringly to the kitchen table, and sank into a chair, propping her elbows in the mound of flour, resting her forehead in her hands. Snape watched in silence.
‘How did it happen?’ she asked at last.
‘He was killed by Lord Voldemort’s Death Eaters. Delilah will be next if he manages to locate her.’
Genevieve raised her head.
‘But you will keep her safe?’
‘As best we can. We need you to cooperate.’
The woman gazed out of the window. A grey-yellow shaft of that strange afternoon light fell upon her face, and even Severus noticed that, although visibly tired, with a streak of flour on her right temple and her hair hanging quite unstyled about her face, distinctly unkempt in a loose-fitting grey-blue blouse, she was almost unnaturally beautiful.
‘I didn’t know,’ she said softly in her elegant, slanted English. ‘Ormond and I had her very young and very suddenly, and I was already pregnant before I knew what he was. He was an international correspondent for your newspaper and was here to take pictures of some horrible atrocities which were happening even here in France. He fell desperately in love with me, and I was younger than him and thought him so vibrant and brave and strong… I was only 20 years old. When he told me he was a wizard, I said some terrible things. I said he wasn’t handsome enough for me, so he must have seduced me with sorcery. He was furious. He managed to convince me he would never do such a thing. But the more I found out about this Lord Voldemort and the war that was raging, the more I realised how much danger came with being associated with him, the more afraid I became and the more defenceless I felt, and eventually I just ran away. I had Delilah all alone in my home town of Uzés, and prayed to God that Ormond and his whole world would leave us in peace.
‘Of course, I knew by the time Delilah was eighteen months old that that wasn’t going to happen: when I had to put her favourite toy rabbit in the washing machine because she’d got it covered in mud in the garden, she was devastated. One minute she was sitting watching him churning through the glass, wailing for her Lapsie, and the next thing I knew she was toddling back off into the garden holding her toy. It was still covered in mud but dry as a bone, and the washing machine was still going. In the end I had to sneak it out of her arms while she was asleep and wash it in the middle of the night.
‘Another time I tried to stop her from sucking her thumb by covering it in lemon juice, and at first she shrieked when she put her thumb in her mouth, but then she went perfectly quiet, and kept sucking it however many times I squeezed the juice over it. I tried the juice myself and it was sharp enough to make my eyes twinge, but when I licked it off her little thumb it was sweeter than a lollipop.
‘So I was actually relieved when Ormond showed up out of the blue one day, when Delilah was almost three. He told me the war was over, Lord Voldemort had been defeated and there was no danger any more. But by then the spell was broken – although I mean that purely as an expression, I don’t think I ever really believed he had enchanted me to love him; I had grown up, I was a mother, and everything was different. I loved him as Delilah’s father, but not as I had when we first met, before the years of terror for our lives and worry for this extraordinary child whom I didn’t understand. It broke my heart that he felt so differently, and at times I even thought about living with him, staying altogether as a family, just to make him happy. Because… oh, he was so miserable: Delilah was the light of his life but he only had her half of the time, and even less so when she went off to Beauxbatons, when neither of us got enough of her. Meanwhile, I could see the way he looked at me… He aged far beyond his years, and a couple of times he got drunk and sent me the most heartbreaking letters, making ghastly threats, pleading for my hand in marriage.
‘I was so pleased when Delilah told me one day that he had met that brilliant young journalist, and when I saw him again it was like a veil had been lifted, like he’d come back to life. We all had lunch together in Calais and he couldn’t stop smiling. Then that sweet child came along, and Delilah so dotes on her. A happy ending indeed.
‘And now he is dead and I am still alone.’
This last statement was made with frank, open-handed sadness, not at all regretful but heavy with resignation. Genevieve had addressed her speech out of the kitchen window at the mobile birch trees, and now remembered the abandoned kettle, which she stood to finish filling and set to boil.
‘Now, Professor,’ she said, turning to face him, briskly businesslike. ‘I gather from the information you’ve given me that your world is once again beleaguered by war. Lord Voldemort is back?’
‘He’s back, and promises to be more terrible than ever before.’
‘I see. And what does he want with my Delilah?’
‘We don’t know exactly,’ Snape lied, hoping by brevity to avoid another tedious monologue. ‘He has vowed to kill her and her entire family, but has not revealed the motivation behind his plans, at least not to any source to which we have access. This is typical of how he operates.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘In a safe house in London. We have agreed with her that her safety is best assured by her returning to Hogwarts in the autumn, instead of to Beauxbatons.’
Genevieve smiled sadly.
‘She will be delighted. She’s always regretted that I made her go to Beauxbatons. I should have let Ormond decide really, he was the one who knew what he was talking about.’
‘The point is, Madame du Lac, that you yourself are also in danger, and you represent a serious risk to Delilah. Drastic measures must be taken to ensure that these risks are avoided.’
‘Yes,’ Genevieve said calmly. ‘I understand perfectly.’
‘I doubt that you do. ’
‘Professor, you cannot begin to understand the undercurrent of terror that has characterised my every waking hour since the birth of my daughter. I have been ingratiated, quite without my consent, into a world which I cannot understand or permeate, but which my daughter can and must. A mother feels the unbearable weight of responsibility for the safety of her child, and yet I am singularly incapable of ensuring it. Have you ever lived in a permanent condition of hopeless, impotent fear? Do you think I had not already detected, even from across the Channel, the rumblings of unrest in your country? Do you think I have not taken the English newspapers all this time, looking for clues? Do you think I have not lain awake these sixteen years, terrified of the very news you bring me? If I am not hysterical at this revelation, it is because I’ve almost been waiting for it for Delilah’s entire life. It’s like a nightmare come true, but not at all a shock.
‘So yes, I see that I am in danger, but every ounce of my capacity for fear and preservation has been expended on my child. Just tell me what you need me to do.’
Severus and Genevieve regarded each other evenly for a moment before he spoke, her blue-grey eyes meeting his inscrutable black ones with stalwart calm.
‘You must forget about her.’
‘Forget about her?’ Genevieve repeated with a splutter of disbelieving laughter. ‘You think these things can be willed? Surely even you magical folk cannot…’
She trailed off as comprehension dawned. She stumbled back to the kitchen table and sank back into her chair.
‘No,’ she whispered.
‘Yes,’ said Professor Snape. ‘It’s the only way. You are of no use to Lord Voldemort except as a hostage and source of intelligence, and should he discover you, he will use you as both. You can’t help her. You can only hurt her.’
‘I would rather die.’
‘I cannot offer you that service. This way you will be relieved of the burden of your fear, of the burden of responsibility, and you will never know of that which you have forgotten.’
‘You’re a monster.’
‘You’re a fool if you don’t see that this is the… the utilitarian solution.’
Genevieve stood in fury, her chair clattering back on the tiled kitchen floor, a cloud of flour rising with theatrical flourish as she slammed her palm down on the table.
‘Utilitarian?’ she demanded, her French accent growing stronger with rage. Her face was terrible in its beauty, her eyes blazing and her hair seeming to stand back from her temples. ‘You are a cold, unfeeling psychopath if you think any mother anywhere, even any human would take oblivion over love, you monstrous, you foul, you beast – get out! Get OUT!’
‘Do you think this is a negotiation?’ Severus snapped. ‘If I were not under the governance of a sentimental old man, I’d have spared us both this conversation and amended your memory the second I set eyes on you. This is going to happen, because when the Dark Lord finds you, which he will, he will torture you for information, and you will give it, and Delilah will die, and we cannot allow that to happen.’
‘I will never give information that would endanger my daughter, whatever the circumstances.’
‘You are a fool,’ Severus repeated. ‘You have no idea what you’re talking about. The agony, psychological and physical, that the Dark Lord is capable of inflicting is unimaginable to those who have not seen it. He will make you curse the name of your child for being the cause of it.’
‘Never.’
‘I have seen it with my own eyes. Many times. People always cave eventually – every, every time.’
Genevieve leaned down on her palms and squinted at him from across the table.
‘You have seen the Dark Lord engaged in torturing his victims?’ she said suspiciously. ‘Many times? I should have thought that would be a privilege reserved for his followers.’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ Severus flared, losing patience and drawing his wand. ‘Obliviate.’
Genevieve’s eyes rolled back in her skull and she slithered to the floor. Severus strode into the hallway and brandished his wand again. He cast a spell so powerful it made the house tremble, and after some furious thumping from an upstairs room, an ordinary Muggle suitcase flew down the stairs, clattering into the walls and banisters as it went, and followed Severus Snape out of the front door, which slammed behind him.
When Genevieve regained consciousness in the early evening, it had begun to rain. She felt wildly disorientated, her head pounded horribly, and she had a sad, empty feeling in the pit of her stomach, whose source she couldn’t locate. She supposed she must have fainted whilst making bread, and swept up the flour from the table, threw away the dough which had hardened and cracked in the heat of the kitchen, made herself a cup of chamomile tea and curled up on the sofa in her tiny sitting room. She dozed off listening to the gentle rain pattering on the wall, and puzzling over a framed photograph on the coffee table whose presence suddenly struck her as troubling. It had been taken at the Pont du Gard many years ago – she couldn’t have been more than 25 – and had been sitting on the table ever since, but just now, she couldn’t for the life of her figure out why she’d chosen that particular one to frame: in the picture she was standing at the stone wall of the bridge, but wasn’t looking into the lens, instead off to one side and down a little; her arm was held outward at a strange angle, and her face was suspended in animation, her mouth open a fraction, almost as if she were talking to some ghostly presence.
She supposed it must have, at one time, held some long-forgotten sentimental value.
