Delilah didn’t even raise her head when she heard the door slam. She heard footsteps along the hallway and a thump as something landed at the foot of the stairs.
‘Miss Blackthorn?’ came a familiar voice. She didn’t answer.
After a moment Snape appeared in the doorway of the sitting room.
‘Fucking hell,’ he muttered.
‘Hi Professor,’ Delilah said listlessly from the sofa.
‘Are you ill?’
‘Huh?’
‘Are you ill?’ Snape repeated.
‘Nope,’ she said, still staring straight ahead. ‘I’m fine. Thanks for asking.’
‘If you aren’t ill, why do you look like you’re on your deathbed?’
‘Oh, just leave me alone.’
Severus stormed over to her, grabbed her by the upper arm and wrenched her into a sitting position. A crown of dead brown flowers slipped from the back of her head and shed a few crushed petals as it landed with a soft rustling sound on the sofa cushion.
‘What are you doing?’ she moaned.
‘Stand up,’ he commanded, yanking again at her arm.
‘Ouch,’ she said feebly, tottering to her feet. She pulled her arm from his grip and rubbed at the pink marks his fingers had left. ‘What’s your problem?’
‘I am plainly not the one with the problem. Your trunk was sent from your father’s house six days ago. Why are you still wearing the same clothes I left you in?’
Delilah looked blankly down at her blue dress and gave a half-hearted tug at its piteously rumpled skirt.
‘Dunno,’ she mumbled.
‘And when is the last time you ate?’
‘I woke up a couple of times and there was a sandwich beside me,’ she said slowly, frowning as though dredging up a distant memory. ‘I had a go at those. And someone keeps bringing me tea. I don’t know who though, I never seem to see them come.’
‘A Hogwarts House Elf has been assigned to care for you, for all the good it’s done. You are clearly spellbound by the glamour of your own misfortune, so have committed to a path of self-destruction. Perhaps you’d prefer that we withdrew our pesky efforts to keep you alive, and left you to suffer in peace?’
Delilah’s back stiffened, and she turned to Snape a face bearing an expression of purest hatred.
‘You think I’m enjoying this?’ she snarled, a hot throb of rage juddering through her with astonishing force. ‘You think I wanted to find myself in a strange house, entirely alone in the world? My father dead, my stepmother and sister in hiding, forbidden from communicating with my mother, Terry jinxed to forget he ever laid eyes on me, moving to a different school under a different name so I can exist as some kind of ghost?’
‘I think you are buckling under the weight of your own self-pity,’ Snape countered ruthlessly. ‘Yes, you’ve suffered losses, and yes, your circumstances have changed dramatically, but if you think yours is the tragic low-point of this blighted century, you are woefully misguided. Your tale is far from uncommon.’
‘Why do you care?’
‘Your self-absorption is almost inspiring in its resilience. It has been explained to you more than once that your life, or more precisely your death, contains consequences for the entire wizarding community.’ Snape clasped Delilah’s arm again and began to march her towards the doorway. ‘It is essential that you survive, it is essential that you remain undetected, and in order for that to happen you must resist the urge to draw attention to yourself.’
‘I’m not drawing attention to myself,’ Delilah growled, wrenching her arm again from his grasp. ‘I just want to be left a-fucking-lone.’
‘You expect to be left alone at Hogwarts if you slouch around with a face like thunder and hair like a bird’s nest? You expect to avoid raising suspicion if you refuse to wash, eat and change your clothes?’
‘When’s the last time you washed your hair?’ she shot back.
Snape lunged for her arm again and she span to avoid his hand, pulling her wand from the pocket of her dress and turning it on him in a blind rage. She had no sooner raised her arm than Snape’s wand seemed to materialise in his hand and he wordlessly disarmed her, then grabbed her by the shoulder and pushed her back against the wall, leaning into her, his wand-tip pressed to the side of her head.
‘Don’t raise your wand at me, you stupid child,’ he hissed.
‘I’m not a child,’ she panted. ‘I’ve been seventeen for almost an entire day.’
‘Nonetheless, you will bathe if I have to strip you and do it myself.’
Chest heaving with exertion, blood thundering through her veins, Delilah was assailed by the memory of Terry’s body pressing her against the garden shed at The Briar House as Snape’s was now, his trembling fingertips exploring her nipples, which even now responded to the memory, his palm sliding up her inner thigh, and as Snape’s obsidian eyes locked hers in a contact which she seemed incapable of breaking, she remembered that her dress had still been around her waist when he’d snatched her from that embrace, and recalled with a shock that the rough knuckle of his hand, clenched around the shaft of his wand, had been digging into the yielding flesh of her left breast as he restrained her, the side of his index finger nudging the pebbled skin of her areola. She felt a mad urge to tug the straps of her dress down and let it fall again from her shoulders, and imagined those flickering eyes slithering slowly down to her naked breasts, his hand sliding up her shoulder and tracing across her collarbone, then creeping down her sternum…
Snape suddenly released her arm as though it were scalding his skin, and stepped backwards.
‘You will wash and eat,’ he said roughly. ‘Today. I have recovered your belongings from your mother’s house. If you disobey me, I shall hear of it.’
She staggered at the abrupt release from his bodyweight and followed him into the corridor in time to see a flash of black vanish behind the door as it slammed after him. She saw her old suitcase lying at the foot of the stairs and sank to sit on the bottom step, willing her racing pulse to still.
*
So that was Delilah’s seventeenth birthday.
Ormond had tried to suggest a joint celebration for his fiftieth birthday and her seventeenth, but she’d managed to deflect the suggestion by pretending at mortification at the idea of a family gathering for her coming-of-age party, saying it just Wasn’t Done. In fact she had just been desperate to conceal the fact that she had almost nobody to invite.
She would always remember that day as the low point of her life. The several days leading up to it had been a miserable blur with no discernible pattern: day and night she slept, wept, sat in silence with no thoughts in her brain at all; pummelled the cushions of the sofa screaming with incoherent rage; stared at the ceiling; sipped the cups of tea that materialised beside her; got up from the sofa and drifted like a wilting helium balloon through the rooms and staircases of that bizarre house, returned to her nest of blankets and cushions to collapse again, worn out from her brief excursion, only to repeat the same exhausting cycle of grief… But on that day, her birthday, her situation seemed to present itself to her more clearly than ever. She tried to banish images of birthday cake, birthday presents (which she assumed had been bought but now lay neglected in wardrobes somewhere in the abandoned cottage), her father jumping around with a camera, contorting himself to get a better angle, shouting directions as the family sang and hugged her…
Snape’s arrival and harsh treatment just at that moment could easily have broken her, but the curious thing was, it actually did her good. Somehow it helped to know that it mattered to someone that she didn’t just fade away, even if it was only for the numbingly impersonal reasons Snape had given. She moved into a bedroom on the first floor (which she chose for its absence of creepy portraits) and slept in a hard-mattressed four-poster bed whose bedposts were carved with eerily realistic snakes. Each evening she ran a bath, sank into the grand marble tub embedded in the corner of the cavernous bathroom, and lost herself in thought. Perhaps it was self-preservation, a survival tactic her mind employed to keep itself away from painful and dangerous ground, but her mental meanderings almost never took her to The Briar House or her excommunicated mother, but instead busied themselves with memories of Terry.
Terry…
It frequently amazed her to look back on her first evening at Hogwarts, the first time she’d laid eyes on him. As she and the other students had gravitated towards the Ravenclaw table to squeeze amongst its existing dwellers, he’d shot her an appreciative smile, keeping his chin down and his head tilted slightly, flashing his brown eyes up through his fringe. At the time though, she’d been so drunk on the long-anticipated arrival at Hogwarts, and this early affirmation of her abstract presage of herself as a Hogwarts bombshell, that she’d almost disregarded it. Oooh, he’s cute, she remembered thinking flippantly, but I bet they all are. Or something like that.
That hadn’t lasted though. Admiration from the rest of the male Hogwarts student body came as perfunctory acknowledgement of her exoticism – an attraction extended without prejudice to all the foreign students for the first week or two – but faded quickly in favour of the older, better-groomed and more confident Beauxbatons and Durmstrang girls, whose flirting technique was more refined. She would have felt she’d withered back into social invisibility were it not for Terry’s lingering, suggestive eye contact which never failed to materialise when she walked past him in the Great Hall to take her seat at mealtimes, or when she encountered him on the castle steps or in the grounds. Before long she was spending the majority of her time at the rickety corner desk gazing dreamily out of the window, anticipating the next time she’d see him. He had brown hair – altogether too much of it – which swept into his eyes right down from the crown, and warm brown eyes which he used to full effect. He was ridiculously tall, easily over 6’5, but sufficiently broad-shouldered that he didn’t look as if he’d bend like a reed in a stiff breeze, like some overly-tall young men did. Delilah, who had shot to 5’10 by the time she was 13 and spent years towering awkwardly over the teenage boys of Beauxbatons, felt dainty and fey for the first time in her life just being near him.
They had first spoken when she made one of her many verboten forays into the depths of the castle after dinner: she had melted skilfully away from the chattering Beauxbatons crowd as they left the Great Hall, dashed up the first isolated staircase she saw to avoid detection in her distinctive pale blue robes, and slipped into a picture gallery that presented itself on her immediate left. Clearly the gallery wasn’t often frequented: when she entered, a hiss went round the room from the few portraits who were not fast asleep, and they dashed into neighbouring frames to nudge awake the subjects who were slumped gracelessly in chairs with their chins against their chests. The sleepers jerked to attention as they registered their guest and scrambled to assume studiously impressive, stately poses. One wizard dashed breathlessly through all the portraits as Delilah wandered up the gallery, arriving in his own frame as she approached it just in time to straighten his elbow-length black curly wig, rest his foot upon the velvet-covered footstool, arrange his features into a distant expression and brandish a golden sword, chest still slightly heaving from exertion. She was overcome with a fierce desire to laugh but didn’t want to offend the portraits who had put on such a show, so walked quickly from the gallery, closed the door behind her, and nearly collided with Terry Boot.
‘Hello!’ he said brightly. ‘You’re one of the Beauxbatons lot, aren’t you? I thought you went back to your carriage in the evenings?’
‘We do,’ she admitted, ‘but I snuck off to explore.’
‘Oh, well there’s plenty to see. Watch out for Peeves though: he’s on strict orders to be polite to our guests, but orders like that just tend to bring out the worst in him. In those robes you’ll be a sitting duck.’
‘…Peeves?’ she had repeated blankly, still dazed by the fact that she was actually talking with the object of her fantasies. When he grinned, she could see his pointed canines which protruded slightly. He always seemed to be smiling, moving between a benign smile and an unaffected grin which crinkled his eyes and tipped easily into exuberant laughter. The sleeves of his robes were pushed up to the elbow and he wore a black leather wristwatch. She found herself inexplicably flustered by the sight of his strong-looking forearms, as though there were something risqué about his baring them in public.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘he’s the school poltergeist. A right trickster. You don’t want to tangle with him.’
‘Wow,’ she said. ‘If a poltergeist ever dared come into Beauxbatons, he’d be expelled like a bullet.’
‘Yeah, well,’ Terry grinned, ‘Dumbledore’s pretty soft on the school ghosts, and Peeves certainly livens things up. I’m Terry by the way, Terry Boot.’ He extended a hand.
‘Delilah Blackthorn,’ she returned, putting her hand in his, worrying that her palm was clammy with nerves.
‘So, how come you’re not French?’ he asked, guiding her gently by the elbow along the corridor. ‘At least, you don’t sound it.’
‘I am,’ she explained. ‘Well, my mother is, but my dad’s English, so I grew up between the two until I was eleven.’
‘So which Quidditch team does that leave you supporting?’
‘Falmouth Falcons, I’m afraid,’ she grinned. ‘It’s compulsory in our house.’
‘Yikes, you poor thing. When’s the last time they were even in the second division?’
‘There are rumours that they crept in for an hour or two at some point in the 1920s, but they were immediately relegated after committing fourteen fouls in six minutes.’
‘Is that true?’
‘No idea…’
The amazing thing was how her nerves completely vanished within two minutes of talking to him. Although excitement continued to drum through her, their conversation was so easy that she entirely forgot that just that afternoon he’d existed to her only as a glimpsed fantasy. He showed her a famous tapestry depicting the school’s four founders enchanting the Sorting Hat, and then took her to the Shadow Garden, a flat terrace accessed by climbing through a narrow window on the third floor, designed to trap moonlight to nourish plants which flourished at night. Then he took her to the lower chambers of the Ravenclaw tower where the spectral form of a serene young woman stood gazing out of a glassless window, who started fearfully when they entered and swanned from the room through the stone wall. They took her place at the window, from which they could see the sloping curves of the surrounding mountains lit by an unusually luminous full moon.
All too soon he glanced at his watch.
‘I’ll be skinned if I’m found in the corridors after hours,’ he said, ‘and your lot are bound to have missed you by now.’
He walked her down to the Entrance Hall, still chatting easily, and walked her across the grounds. As the enormous carriage loomed into view, Delilah felt rising excitement, wondering how he was going to conclude their short dalliance.
‘Well, this is you,’ he said brightly at the foot of the carriage steps. ‘Better be getting back before I’m caught wandering the grounds after dark. See you soon!’ He waved jauntily and bounded off, leaving her gaping with disappointment.
He was just being friendly, she’d insisted to herself the next evening as she walked across the grounds for dinner. He’s a friendly guy, he was instructed to be hospitable to the guests, and he was. That’s all that happened. It didn’t mean anything to him, it just meant something to you because you’re a desperate idiot. And no, he hasn’t been giving you Special Looks: you just wanted him to be, so you imagined that he was.
But then she’d walked, the image of composure, towards the Ravenclaw table, deliberately not seeking his eye contact, only sneaking a glance out of the corner of her eye – and there it was, that look again, the ducked chin and tilted head, eyes following her across the Great Hall…
This baffling disjuncture entirely characterised the rest of the academic year: he’d wave enthusiastically when he saw her from across the grounds, catch her eye across the Great Hall, stop for an animated chat when they bumped into each other in a corridor, but then bounce off as though it all meant nothing to him. Each time she ordered herself to ignore him, concluding that he only ever spoke to her to be polite, he’d shatter her conviction by sprinting up behind her on a staircase to say hello; when she resolved to push the envelope and force things herself, wondering if he was simply too shy to actually make romantic advances, he didn’t seem to register her hand on his arm or her batting eyelashes, and stuck rigidly to the friendly tempo he’d established. His lingering eye contact across the room seemed undeniably flirtatious, but their actual exchanges – frustratingly few and far between – didn’t leave her with a shred of hope to cling to. She couldn’t draw inferences one way or another without him immediately contradicting them, and as hard as she tried, she couldn’t make herself just not care.
By the time a perishing midwinter had settled upon the castle, Delilah was, simply and completely, in love. He was gorgeous; but more to the point he was spontaneous, flippant, friendly, joyous, without an ounce of the smooth posey smugness the Beauxbatons boys all affected and which she found so maddeningly precious. Sometimes her stomach dropped to her knees with nerves when she spotted him in a distant crowd out of the corner of her eye, only for it to turn out not even to be him. She resolved to Do Something, and the announcement of the upcoming Yule Ball afforded just such an opportunity.
‘Eet would be in ze speerit of ze tournament eef you would ask a student from a rival school to ze ball,’ Madame Maxime had counselled after the announcement, and Delilah took her at her word. The next time she saw him, she decided, she would do it. She would ask him to be her date to the ball.
Several unrealistically-romantic fantasies later, Terry startled her on the castle steps and trampled over all of them.
‘Hey!’ he huffed, having just jogged over the grounds from the greenhouses. Clouds of steam were pluming from the heat of his mouth. ‘How’s it going? Decided who you’re going to the ball with yet?’
The abruptness of the question shocked all the alluring propositions she’d envisaged from her mind.
‘You,’ she’d blurted. ‘If you’re asking.’
‘Oh, I’m going with Susie – you know her? Susan Bones? Dark hair and glasses? She’s an old mate, so we decided to go together.’ As usual, he spoke as if his words carried no consequence for anybody.
He’d seen her from afar. He’d rushed across the lawn and up the steps to catch her. He’d ask her whom she was taking to the ball. He was going with someone called Susie.
So that was that.
On the evening of the ball she had feigned a headache and been reluctantly granted permission to stay in the carriage, where she sat alone, gazing through the window at the festively-lit castle, listening to the shouts of laughter from the students cooling off on fairy-lit benches, the distant snatches of music streaming through the open windows, and the spirited giggles of couples sneaking across the grounds to hide in the shrubbery.
