On her first morning at Hogwarts, Delilah got lost trying to find the Great Hall. She took the staircase on the right hand side of the portrait of Eldwidge the Eccentric and his Army of Otters, which she had specifically memorised as a landmark the previous evening, and trotted down the steps only to push open the door at the bottom and find herself in a deserted and unfamiliar corridor, which judging by the view from the tall windows, was inexplicably on a higher level than she had been on before. She walked along the corridor, hoping to recognise something which would give her a clue as to where she was, but found only a disused classroom with the single word “Accio” written on the blackboard, a handful of locked doors, and a broom cupboard whose door she opened to find a ragged grey cat sitting with austere poise on an upturned bucket. The cat gave her a stern, chastising look, as if to convey that Delilah had rudely interrupted her in the middle of an important task, so she closed the door apologetically, and tried to retrace her steps, only to find that the door she’d come in through had vanished.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ she said aloud in frustration.
‘Tut tut. Language,’ said an oily voice from behind her, and she jumped around to see nothing but thin air.
‘Hello?’ she said, wondering if she was going mad.
‘Naughty newbie,’ the voice said again, and she followed the sound upward to see the ghostly form of a wizened old man in a Tam o’Shanter hovering cross-legged in the air by the chandelier. ‘Thought they taught better manners over in Frogsville.’
‘How do you know where I’m from?’
‘Make it my business to know about newbies, especially froggy-leggy ones who should know better than to get lost on their first day.’
‘Did you do this? Did you trap me here?’
‘Me?’ he said with mock offence. ‘Old Peevesey would never do such a thing! Anyway, I thought everyone knew this staircase lured you up here on a Tuesday. That’s first day stuff.’
‘Well, it is my first day,’ she said desperately. ‘You know I’m new, I couldn’t have known.’
‘No friends to show you around?’ he jeered. ‘Nobody to care what happens to you?’
‘How do I get out of here?’
‘Can’t,’ he said with a nasty smile. ‘You’ll be stuck here til tomorrow.’
‘Rubbish. Help me, or I’ll tell Dumbledore.’
‘Ooooooooh!’ Peeves trilled, pretending to quake. ‘Froggy-leggy newbie knows the headmaster! Don’t tell on Peeves!’
‘You’re so annoying,’ Delilah snapped, and marched off down the corridor, Peeves bobbing along behind her. She walked back to the broom cupboard and wrenched it open again.
‘You must know how to get out of here,’ she said to the cat, who stared at her with inscrutable yellow eyes.
‘Psssst,’ Peeves hissed over her shoulder in a stage whisper. ‘In case you didn’t realise, that’s a cat.’
‘Well, it’s bound to be more use than you.’
That seemed to galvanise the cat, who jumped with dignity down from the bucket and minced along the corridor to an ancient tapestry depicting two knights brandishing their wands at each other. She rubbed her ear against the tapestry, and Delilah pulled it aside to reveal a door.
‘Spoilsport,’ Peeves said to the cat, and wafted sulkily through the opposite wall.
When Delilah finally arrived at the Great Hall (after the staircase in the deserted corridor led her directly back to the portrait of Eldwidge the Eccentric, and she had to find another route) everybody else was already finishing their breakfast. Delilah approached Padma, who was sitting with Terry.
‘Mind if I join?’ she said, gesturing the empty seat.
‘Of course not,’ Padma said, ‘but we’ll have to get to class soon, where have you been?’
‘Oh, I went through that doorway next to the guy with the otters and got lost,’ she said, grabbing a slice of toast and buttering it quickly, before the dishes emptied.
Terry clapped his hand to his mouth.
‘I should have warned you about that!’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, that was really remiss of me. I should have noticed you weren’t here and come to find you. Anthony and I warned all the first-years this morning, but I completely forgot about you.’
‘That’s OK,’ Delilah said glumly. ‘A cat showed me the way out.’
‘We wouldn’t be so distracted, but it’s been a bit of a dramatic morning,’ Padma said, nodding towards the Hufflepuff table. Delilah craned around to see several grim faces, and a handful of girls crying into their napkins, being comforted by friends.
‘What’s happened?’ she said.
‘We’ve just found out a Hufflepuff girl was murdered over the summer, along with all of her family,’ Terry said. ‘We wondered where she was yesterday, but Professor Sprout’s just broken the news. Susie’s in bits, she’d known Morgane since they were kids.’
Delilah almost upset the jam jar in shock, realising they were talking about Morgane Meles.
‘Do they know who did it?’ she said apprehensively.
‘Well, You Know Who did – who else?’ Terry said bitterly. ‘The real question is why – nobody can think why the Meles’ would have been targeted. They weren’t particularly involved in the resistance, and they’re an old pure-blood family, which normally guarantees a bit of safety.’
‘Mmm,’ Delilah murmured awkwardly.
‘It’s like nobody’s safe any more,’ Terry went on angrily. ‘If Morgane can be killed just like that, why not the rest of us? Why not you, or me? Just for no reason, out of the blue?’
‘Come on, Terry,’ Padma said consolingly. ‘There’s no point freaking out about that. We’re safe while we’re here.’
‘I suppose,’ he sighed. He pushed himself back from the table and stood. ‘Let’s go. I’ve got Arithmancy first, what about you?’
‘Me too,’ Padma said, standing up. ‘We’re with the Slytherins, worst luck. See you, Delilah.’
‘Bye!’ she said as brightly as she could, but Terry was frowning at his timetable and wandered off without another word to her.
*
That morning more or less characterised Delilah’s first weeks at Hogwarts. She got lost at least twelve more times over the next few days, and even began to develop a paranoid suspicion that the castle had taken against her and was deliberately tricking her into dead-end corridors and dud staircases.
Everything, in fact, was going pretty badly. Although she was theoretically as capable as her classmates, there were several occasions when her different educational background left her at a disadvantage. In her first Transfiguration class, whilst most students made at least some progress turning their pomegranates into pigeons, hers turned repeatedly into a very loud piglet which seemed intent on making a top-speed escape, replete with ear-splitting squeals and skittering trotters, much to the class’ amusement. Professor McGonagall was patient at first, immobilising the piglet and calmly returning it to its original state, but after half a dozen very disruptive attempts which left Delilah almost in tears of frustration and humiliation, she took the pomegranate away and replaced it with a satsuma, saying Delilah had better start with trying to turn that into a sparrow. Even then Delilah struggled, and when she at last succeeded, she glared at the bright-eyed little bird as it hopped across the table to be dwarfed by a magnificently plumed wood pigeon conjured by the girl she’d seen sitting with Harry Potter at the Welcome feast.
She’d arrived at her first Herbology lesson to find everybody else wearing their thick dragon hide gauntlets, her pair of which were still in her trunk. Professor Sprout broke off her introduction to the lesson to ask Delilah why she hadn’t brought hers, to which she had to sheepishly reply she hadn’t known she had been supposed to, eliciting much sniggering from the Slytherins with whom they were sharing the greenhouse; then Professor Sprout had kept everyone waiting whilst she bustled around rummaging in a drawer for a spare pair, eventually producing some enormous bright green ones which almost reached Delilah’s armpits. Nobody seemed to want to associate themselves with Delilah in her oversized gauntlets, so when the class paired off to wrestle with the menacing-looking plants they’d been assigned, she found herself without a partner. Professor Sprout had said kindly that Delilah could pair with her, but of course spent the bulk of the lesson circulating among the other students, leaving Delilah alone.
Worse than that was the numbing sense of déjà vu surrounding Terry. His forgetting to help her to the Great Hall on her first morning was just the beginning: having been solicitous enough on the Hogwarts Express, he now seemed to look straight through her with absolute indifference whenever they passed, and each time it was like a physical punch to the stomach. During the Triwizard year she had been driven mad by his inconsistency, but she now thought desperately of those ember-eyed, head-tilted smiles with which he used to greet her across the Great Hall and across the grounds, desolate in the knowledge that she’d now do almost anything for even a glimmer of that interest in her. She had lost her exoticism, her Beauxbatons mystique, become commonplace, and apart from occasional bursts of hospitality and friendliness which she knew were everything to do with his character and sense of duty and nothing to do with finding her interesting, he paid no more attention to her than any other stranger in the school.
‘How was your afternoon?’ he asked in the common room one evening after dinner in her first week.
‘Oh, it was OK,’ she said, struggling into an upright position from being slumped in an armchair with an old copy of Witch Weekly she’d found stuffed down the side of the cushion. ‘I had Herbology with the Slytherins.’
‘Poor you,’ he grimaced. ‘How was it?’
‘We were caring for Devil Trees,’ she said.
‘Devil Trees,’ Professor Sprout had announced when they’d assembled. ‘Crinoida Dajeeana to give them their botanical name, known in some circles as Vampire Vines, although this is a demonstrably errant description.’ Devil Trees consisted predominantly of giant trombone-shaped flowers with stiff, ridged petals, hoarding a sac of deliciously pungent nectar at the base. The petals were highly sensitive, and when they detected a presence descending in towards the nectar sac, sent out vicious interlocking spikes like iron railings, forming a grid and severing or trapping the intruder, which was then consumed with gruesome gusto. This was demonstrated when Professor Sprout perched a huge dung beetle on the lip of the trombone petals; instantly drunk on the scent of the nectar, it stumbled directly into the trap and was loudly eaten by the pulsating plant.
‘The problem facing Herbologists,’ Professor Sprout explained, ‘is that the spikes tend to become slightly bent when regularly activated – for instance, during the Autumn lacewing season – meaning that they don’t interlock properly. We can extend the plant’s life cycle by correcting this damage.’ The students were tasked with lulling the plant into opening fully by stroking the petals in a firm downward motion, allowing them to tease out the spikes and gently straighten them, and possibly, in the case of the very skilled or the very brave, extract a vial of the powerful nectar – which Professor Sprout explained was an invaluable ingredient in Dermorestorative Poultices – whilst the plant was off its guard.
‘I’ve read about those,’ Terry said. ‘Sounds tricky, how did you get on?’
‘I did fine,’ she said, trying to inject a winning, buoyant energy into her voice to wipe the look of polite hospitality off Terry’s face. ‘The high point was when Pansy Parkinson almost had her arm bitten off.’
Her heart sang when Terry’s face creased into laughter.
‘Did she really?’ he grinned.
‘Yep. For a girl called Pansy, she’s pretty rubbish with flowers.’
‘What happened?’
‘You’re supposed to really gently stroke the inside of the petals so they flop open, they almost start to purr while you’re doing it, and they go into a kind of trance. It took a bit of practice but everyone got the knack in the end, except Pansy who rubbed at hers like she was polishing a mirror. She just got it more and more wound up until it launched at her and snapped its petals shut over her arm.’
‘No! Did she get spiked?’
‘No, she screamed like a pig and Malfoy pranced around flapping his arms about ineffectually,’ she said, making Terry choke with laughter, ‘but Professor Sprout came over and freed her. She said the plant was just warning her off rather than attacking, or Pansy would have lost her arm, but Pansy kept yammering on about how her father would be telling the Minister about dangerous practices at Hogwarts.’
‘Pansy?’ interrupted a sharp voice from the opposite armchair. ‘Pansy Parkinson? You had Herbology with Pansy Parkinson?’
Delilah’s heart sank as she turned to see Ariadne Hornby staring penetratingly at her, lowering a textbook into her lap.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Pansy’s a sixth year. I thought you were a seventh year?’
Terry’s grin faded to a puzzled frown.
‘I am,’ Delilah said flushing. ‘I mean, I was. I’m repeating my sixth year after all. In the end it made more sense to do my N.E.W.T.s from scratch.’
‘I said that,’ Ariadne said with undisguised triumph. ‘I said you wouldn’t be able to switch halfway through your exams, and you said Dumbledore had it all figured out.’
‘Well, he did,’ Delilah said hurriedly, knowing she sounded guilty, like she’d been caught out in a lie, and furious with herself for it. ‘It was Professor Flitwick’s idea, he thought it might be better to… he thought it might be better.’
‘Don’t you regret moving then?’ Ariadne asked bluntly. ‘Don’t you think it was a bit stupid to move now if it means repeating a year? Wouldn’t it have been better to stay where you were?’
‘Ariadne,’ Terry chastised quietly, but he didn’t sound like he thought Ariadne was being unfair, or harsh, so much as he thought she should be charitable to the poor misguided new girl who clearly had the sense of a flobberworm, and an interminable silence followed, during which Delilah tried to look interested in the cover of Witch Weekly which showed a young woman in short, flouncy dress robes pirouetting bouncily and giving little waves, before Ariadne turned to Terry as though a brand new thought had occurred to her, asking ‘Hey Terry, have you started your Arithmancy homework yet? Can I ask your advice about that Barthelme characteristic thing? I’m not sure I really get it…’ to which Terry jumped up as though relieved at the change in subject, and Delilah didn’t know whether she most wanted to burst into tears or launch herself at Ariadne and yank so hard on her stupid hooped earrings that her earlobes tore in half.
And then there was everything else.
It was easy to become distracted from the subject of her family by the intense concentration Hogwarts was demanding of her, and sometimes she realised she had gone several hours, an entire day even, without thinking about them; but quite unexpectedly, in the middle of dinner or halfway down a staircase, she would be assaulted by a memory of Ormond standing at the kitchen window gazing out at the garden in suspended animation, his arm across his chest, elbow resting on the opposite fist and his hand cupping his chin, frozen by the appearance of a French aria on the obscure radio station he listened to, and she would suddenly be so overwhelmed by how much she missed him, and feel his loss so violently, that she had to grasp at the wall or the edge of the table to stop herself collapsing from it.
Matilda and Connie appeared more frequently in her dreams. During waking hours their absence nagged constantly at her like a toothache, but the moment she drifted into sleep she was assaulted by bizarre scenarios in which she glimpsed Matilda out of the corner of her eye during a Transfiguration class and dashed after her, chasing shadows and snatches of giddy laughter, up and down staircases and through interminable corridors, clambering through portrait holes and heavy velvet curtains, becoming ever more exhausted and out of breath, until she spotted the child vanishing through a door which faded as she sprinted towards it, and knew she’d missed her chance; or tracked her to a broom cupboard in a secret corridor, and wrenched it open to find only Peeves sitting on an upturned bucket, dressed in a gruesome pantomime of a little girl costume.
In another dream she woke in the early hours feeling thirsty and crept up the long, flat flight of steps in the dormitory, past sleeping girls, to the little bartizan with high windows and a shallow stone sink to fill her water glass, to see Connie standing in the breaking dawn in the grounds below, looking around in distress, twitching up the sleeve of her robes to peer at her watch, and suddenly remembered that she had been supposed to meet her. She hammered frantically on the windows screaming her stepmother’s name, desperate to get her attention and let her know she was coming, but Connie glanced sadly at her watch one last time and hurried away, assuming Delilah had changed her mind, and Delilah sobbed until her throat felt like it would tear, wretched in the knowledge that even if she ran as fast as she could she could never catch Connie before she reached the school gates, so she just pressed herself against the glass and watched her vanish, rapid on her neat little shoes, into the early-morning mist.
She awoke exhausted from the night’s exertions, lurched grey-faced from her bed, and stumbled through her lessons. By the end of the day she was almost too tired to eat, even if an arbitrary memory of Ormond didn’t rob her of her appetite. Quite often she woke in a sweat in the early hours, and then lay awake until her alarm went off, comforting herself by picturing her mother, safe and sound in the little house in Uzés, filling the kettle or chatting on the phone, imagining herself back there with her in the simplicity and familiarity of her childhood home. As the weather began to turn in late October, she caught a glimpse of her face in the premature afternoon sunset light of the girls’ bathroom and realised she looked like nothing so much as the death masks she’d seen on display at the travelling exhibition which had once stopped at the Musée Georges Borias in Uzés.
‘Coming to watch the Quidditch tomorrow, Delilah?’ Lisa asked one Friday evening as Delilah collapsed into an armchair in the common room. Rain was hammering hard against the windows.
‘I guess so,’ she yawned, shuffling to try and get comfortable.
‘They don’t really do Quidditch at Beauxbatons though, do they?’ Ariadne put in sweetly, settling herself in another armchair. ‘Do you understand the rules?’
‘It’s an international sport,’ Delilah snapped. ‘Of course I understand it. And of course they play it at Beauxbatons, France is one of the best teams in the world.’
‘Not as good as England,’ Ariadne countered. ‘We beat you in the ’86 World Cup.’
‘And we – I mean, France – actually won the ’82 World Cup.’
‘What do you think of Weasley as Gryffindor’s new Keeper?’ Lisa said loudly, clearly trying to abort the tension.
‘Nepotism,’ Ariadne said dismissively. ‘He’s Potter’s best friend,’
‘Rubbish,’ Terry said, swinging his satchel off, having just come in from the rain. ‘The Weasleys have always been great at Quidditch. Even I know Charlie Weasley’s name and I’ve never set eyes on the bloke.’
‘Quidditch skill doesn’t run in families,’ Ariadne said peevishly. ‘It’s about training and practice.’
‘Nonetheless, Ron really is good…’ Cho said. The conversation drifted into Quidditch talk, which Delilah, despite her prickly protestations to Ariadne, had very little interest in, so she rearranged her cushion and dislodged the same battered back-copy of Witch Weekly which she’d flicked through in her first week, with the pirouetting witch on the cover. She thumbed it open again and cast tired eyes over the page it landed on.
‘…shouldn’t be hard to take down though, confidence is everything in a Keeper, and Ron…’ Cho was saying.
Delilah’s eyes roved over the Whispers page, a ridiculous feature to which people anonymously sent in elliptical, suggestive but ultimately nonsensical letters which were supposed to report social scandals. Connie had always been deeply amused by the submissions, which she said were masterpieces of creative fiction, and had relished chuckling over them with her Sunday morning coffee.
NOT-SO-SECRET SOCIETY!
This witch cannot help wonder whether in these troubled times, the
Head of an important Ministry Department should really be
spending his time on a week’s excursion to Togo for a ceremony
to induct him into a secret society, founded by the notorious minister known to
insiders as the “Sexretary of State”, with whom he was seen
fraternising at a recent Ambassadorial event. Reports that this ceremony
traditionally involves 70 substance-assisted wakeful hours
and the bewitching and humiliation of the region’s noble indigenous
Golden Cat for entertainment purposes are widespread but remain suspiciously
unconfirmed, leading this witch to wonder what Confundus Charm Conspiracy prevails
and into what echelons of power it reaches…
Delilah smiled to herself and scanned the rest of the letters.
She jumped to her feet.
Silence fell as everybody stared at her, Padma faltering mid-sentence.
‘Delilah?’ Lisa said cautiously.
Delilah barely heard her, staring at the page, her heart hammering. There was a tiny entry in the bottom right-hand corner of the page.
SUCH DREADFUL LIES!
Nothing’s black and white in the thorny tale of the late snapper,
his wife and a third, much younger female…
They’re safe as houses for now since this witch is keeping
to the shadows, but keep your eyes peeled for more clues –
there may be even more to this than meets the eye!
‘Delilah, what’s the matter?’ came Cho’s voice from a long way off.
‘Dumbledore,’ Delilah muttered to herself.
‘Dumbledore?’ Ariadne repeated loudly. ‘What about him?’
Delilah turned to the nearest person to her, who happened to be Terry.
‘How do I find Dumbledore?’ she said urgently, grasping at his upper arm. He stared at her in alarm.
‘You can’t just find him whenever you like,’ Ariadne put in scathingly. ‘He’s the headmaster.’
‘How do I find him?’ Delilah pressed Terry, ignoring Ariadne. ‘I have to see him now.’
‘I – I don’t know,’ Terry said helplessly. ‘I don’t know where his office is, maybe somebody else…’
Delilah pushed past him and out of the common room, running blindly down the steps and along the corridor, turned a corner and sprinted on, her feet pounding the flagstones, with no idea where she was going. She found herself at the top of the wide staircase to the Entrance Hall and carried on past them and up again, thinking she would find Professor Flitwick and get him to help her, but as she approached his office door she found it locked, and hammered fruitlessly at it.
‘FUCK!’’ she thundered at the door, wondering what to do next.
‘Profanity is not tolerated in this school, Miss du Lac,’ came a silky voice from behind her. ‘Ten points from Ravenclaw.’
Delilah wheeled around to face Professor Snape.
‘Dumbledore,’ she gabbled. ‘I have to find Dumbledore straight away.’
‘Professor Dumbledore is not on the premises,’ Snape said. ‘Your pressing enquiry will have to wait until his return.’
‘But this is absolutely urgent,’ she shouted. ‘How do I get hold of him?’
‘You cannot “get hold of him”,’ Snape drawled mockingly. ‘As I said, you will have to wait.’
‘Well,’ she said desperately, ‘then you’ll have to help me.’
‘I do not have to do anything. I do not answer the commands of students, however loudly they are administered.’ He was obviously enjoying her frustration immensely.
‘Professor, please,’ Delilah said, stepping towards him. ‘It’s about my stepmother.’
Snape regarded her with narrowed eyes.
‘This had better be quick,’ he said at length, and turned back towards the steps to the Entrance Hall. Delilah followed him down them and then through a doorway and down another flight of stairs, hopping with impatience as they proceeded through the dimly-lit dungeon passages, until he turned into a small alcove with a doorway which sprang open to admit them as they approached.
‘Now,’ he said, closing the door behind him, straightening a stack of parchment and seating himself with maddening leisure behind a handsome wooden desk. ‘Please calm down and tell me what this is about.’
‘It’s this,’ Delilah said in a rush, throwing the magazine down in front of him. ‘The one in the bottom corner.’
Snape stared at the page for several moments and then turned an expressionless face to Delilah.
‘Is this some kind of joke?’ he said flatly.
‘It’s Connie! Connie wrote it, that’s about her and Matilda!’
‘I fail to see how you’ve arrived at this deduction.’
‘Well, the title, that’s from this poem called Matilda Who Told Such Dreadful Lies, that’s how Matilda got her name, and the late snapper, that’s Dad, because he used to be a photographer, and he’s – well anyway, his wife, that’s Connie, and Matilda, she’s the much younger woman, and the pun on Blackthorn, and… and…’
‘I see’ he interrupted her, idly flipping to the cover of the magazine. ‘Are you an avid reader of Witch Weekly? This edition is dated from some weeks ago.’
‘No, I just happened to find that one in the common room.’
‘So you believe your stepmother placed a secret message to you in a magazine which there was barely an outside chance you would read?’
‘It has to be her, it is her, she loved that page, and it all fits, and…’
‘And?’
Delilah blinked at him.
‘Well, it’s them. They’re alive.’
‘If your deductions are correct, then they were alive at some indefinable point in the last several weeks.’
‘Yes!’
‘And you thought this was urgent information, worthy of interrupting the headmaster in his duties?’
‘Well…’ Delilah’s frantic excitement was subsiding. ‘Well, yes, it’s evidence, it’s evidence she’s alive. Was alive.’
‘And what do you expect the headmaster to do about it?’
‘Well… I don’t know, I thought he could…’
She faltered in the face of his icy glare.
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted at last. ‘I just got excited.’
Snape closed the magazine and placed it atop the stack of parchment on his desk as he stood.
‘You may go,’ he said. ‘This is entirely inconsequential, but since you feel so strongly about it, I will bring it to the headmaster’s attention if the opportunity arises.’
Delilah sagged. She noticed her surroundings for the first time: they seemed to be in Snape’s office, a cheerless little chamber with one high, narrow window spattered with the rain that had been falling relentlessly all day. The window must have looked out onto the portion of the grounds which cut away sharply at the edge towards the foundations: it let in hardly any light, so the room was lit only with wall-mounted brackets and a meagre fire that struggled in the grate. Apart from the desk and wall-to-wall bookcases, the room was furnished only with a small, hard-looking chaise lounge, into which she suddnely wanted to collapse.
‘Can’t we do something?’ she asked hopelessly. ‘Anything?’
‘No,’ Snape said shortly. ‘You may go.’
When Delilah still didn’t move he strode across the room and held the door open so that Delilah had no choice but to traipse balefully through it and hear it snap unceremoniously closed behind her.
