Repast at the Table of Glorious Toxins
Zigadenus
Pensieve silver is strange stuff – it has no discernable crystal matrix, it flows like mercury, it glows. He is not convinced it's really memory. Memories do not produce light. Phosphorescence, fluorescence, and radiation are properties of physical substances, and memory is thought, albeit thought about the past, but generated each time anew as a synaptic burst, a displacement of ions and their electrons. There is no well of memory in the brain, no storage vault from whence might come this silvery liquid (he's done his share of dissections, he'd surely know). Memories are only stories that you tell yourself, to explain things you see, things you are doing. They are reconstructions, not facts – self-told tales lived in an immediate present. He writes things down, scribbles notes in the margins of his textbooks, because he knows not to trust to his future self's ability to string together a meaningful story unaided. He leaves himself trails of clues that he will later be able to reconstruct into a helpful narrative. A 'good memory' is an orderly and logical mind.
But pensieve silver defies logic. It ought not to exist. No individual can reconstruct the level of detail seen in a pensieve. He knows this as a fact; he likes to peer into people's heads and see what their synapses are doing. Things their memories reconstruct are blurry, indistinct, misshapen. They glow sometimes with colours, but it is never the pure silver light that rises from Dumbledore's bowl. The colours reflect whatever emotions are attached to them. There's an art to reading them, because the hues that light someone's memory are distinct to their own perceptions; there are peculiarities in the way each person entangles an emotion with one or several frequencies.
In Maxwell's theorem, light – real light - is a consequence of vibrating electromagnetic fields oscillating perpendicular to one another; different wavelengths of vibration can correspond to each of Newton's seven prismatic colours (although really there are six; indigo is only a slightly shorter wavelength of violet, a slightly higher frequency of blue. He remembers – or tells himself that he remembers - feeling oddly cheated in discovering that calculus and observation were cloaking mysticism and religion). And he has read that light is also a particle, a quanta of energy on a collision course with reality. If the frequency of its passage resonates with the material it encounters, it will pass into it; if not, it is reflected. And this is colour: the rejection of light.
How then, to account for the luminous, metallic swirl in the base of a pensieve, the wisps of purported reality? Solving the password to Dumbledore's office was a doddle; solving the pensieve is impossible. He'd looked into it only once, to satisfy his curiosity, but he's made countless physical experiments. He's pulled up strands of it: yes, they glow. He's held a mirror to the light: it is not reflected. How, then, does it shimmer in the air, if it is not alighting on any motes or even molecules? The lambent bowl is clearly an impossibility – if he passes the light into a prism, it passes through unaltered, where sunlight would be parsed into colours. Newton's trick with the second prism - weaving the rainbow back into white light – doesn't work here either. A second prism absorbs the pensieve's glow as if the glass were made of blackest night. So is it memory? No. Is it light? No. "It's magic" has all the astringent, charcoal flavour of defeat.
He's reconciled a lot of this world through fact and logic, through physics and chemistry. And where that falls short, well, there's a rich history of science-fictional tropes he's fairly comfortable drawing upon while he awaits further evidence. But the pensieve stymies his efforts. And it's a shame, too, because, especially now, he'd really like to trust that there's some external organ that will do a better job of remembering things than his imperfect brain, which is now trapped in reconstructing a life he lived on this bleak little street, with its dirty gutters, grimed brick houses, and the foetid miasma of the river lurking just beyond the sodium lamplight that competes with the dawn.
She has her old shawl draped across her shoulders and clasped beneath her bosom with a plain cheap pin. The miniscule jet beads at the fringe glint in the light, but the delicate fretwork of lace is lost to folds and mars-black shadow. He recognises now that it is acromantula silk. This midnight scrap of fabric is the finest thing she owns, a refugee, like her, from a world he is busily embedding himself in (pensieve doubts aside), a world to which she will never return.
Her elbows are tucked up beneath the fabric. It gives her a hunched, close look, even though she sits with her shoulders back. This shawl has been a feature of his life – it augurs changes, bad things most often, but occasionally good. Slow, quiet words in the Muggle police office. Tante Gretchen. The headmistress at the Muggle primary who'd strapped him raw. The furtive trip down Diagon Alley for his wand. Always, she has stood in this shawl, sharp angles and bony limbs suppressed, hidden. She has looked diminished, quiet, meek. He knows this is a clever lie, the heavy, vivid brushstroke that pulls you in and prevents your immediately seeing the subtle truths in the shadowed eyes, the heavy brow, the defiant pull of thin lips. This woman has never been a mouse, for all that she was made little and lost.
He hooks a foot around a chair leg, pulls it up, and seats himself at the table. When he was very young, there was an end of this surface always kept clear of palettes and the dusty, toxic jars of powdered earths. The intention, he thinks, must have been for them to sit close, elbows not-quite rubbing. He doesn't remember any meals taken like this.
He does have memories of perching alone on the edge of one of these battered chairs, like some ragged bird ready to take flight, drawing roads and faces through his gravy and mash with the tines of a fork. He is very young when he discovers he can calligraph his name this way, and that the proper angles lend it substance. "Well, when you're hungry, I suppose you'll eat it." This defeat is typical of her mien. He is often left to his own devices. He thinks now that this was perhaps neither pointed negligence nor malice, more incomprehension tied to lack of interest than anything else. Antipathy might have been better than apathy; he has courted the former assiduously, and learned an appreciation for its bitter tang.
He has memories, too, of his father's sigh of exasperation, the dull clunk of crockery, the unnecessarily loud clatter of a plate and utensils. It is a language: I am frustrated with you. She doesn't speak this language. She cannot. Or she will not. This seething knot of frustration usually retreats to the sitting room, to simmer in front of the static-ridden television, cursing at the rabbit ears that don't quite pick up the black and white match. Usually.
There are some times when it doesn't. When it thunders. When it hurls the hot skillet from the hob. When she says "Severus, up to your room", in that tight way that means she will brook no dissent. He will recognise later that this is protection.
He doesn't often think of this frustrated creature as 'his father'. He has never been encouraged to, exactly. It is more a biological fact, something you might write on a specimen label, after the genus and specific epithet: 'Snape tobias'.
"Ain't nothin' tha's beautiful, not 'til it's drug down to th' muck, spent a night or two in th' rubbish heap." He understands that this is the philosophy that underpins the twisted metal shape they are staring at. He follows Toby here, sometimes. He is never invited. He doesn't really know why he persists. Perhaps it is just for the chance of something different happening. He is curious about patterns that appear unchanging, because deviation is all the more intriguing when it occurs in seemingly-simple systems.
Someone has scribed graffiti into the metal, and there are literally colourful new phrases daubed onto it. He suspects it is the work of the local toughs, the dark-eyed, beardless young men who loiter about, sharing fags. He is wary of them, when he is out alone. He will go well out of his way, into the better parts of town, to avoid their malevolent glowers. He envies them, and sometimes passes whole afternoons, observing them from some safe redoubt.
Toby doesn't mind the graffiti, looks upon it, in fact, with a certain pride that he's never directed at anything else. It means people are choosing to interact with it. It means something to them. That the words are racist, derogatory, vile, only seems to delight him further. The deeper his work sinks into the muck of humanity, the happier Toby will be. But is this really beauty?
He doesn't think this can be right, but that is not his chief interest just now. He has caught sight of a dandelion, vigorously striving through a crack in the pavement, spreading its toothed leaves across the gritty remnants of a long-ago shower of amber glass which prisms sickly motes of light into the shadows. "Is Mam beautiful?" He tests the new hypothesis that is blooming in his mind: that Toby considers her transformed, somehow, by the wreck of the world at her feet.
"Your mam? That cunt's just a toity whore, what should 'ave kept 'er legs together."
He understands from this that either his hypothesis is flawed, or she hasn't yet been brought low enough. But there's time for that.
The problem is time: the motion of an object depends upon its mass and the work applied to it, the force necessary to overcome gravity, resistance. Objects (fists?) once in motion require substantial seconds to overcome these constraints. Sound (snarled profanities?) is faster: physical vibrations of vocal folds against cartilage suspensors, against air. Then the wave propagating out in a slight displacement of molecules until it crashes down upon a delicate membrane and is translated via hammer-anvil-stirrup to flicker miniscule cochlear cilia. Light is faster yet, travelling 299,792,458 meters per second. It falls upon the cornea and through the pupil, is focussed by the crystalline lens, passes into the vitreous body, and excites the rods and cones which are filaments of the optic nerve transmitting information to the occipital lobe of the brain via the optic chiasm and geniculate bodies. This elaborate process is instantaneous to human perceptions. It is also painless.
Hypothesis: infliction of hurt is proportional to time, of which there is simply too much available. There is too much, because there is enough for Toby.
"Why have I got to have his name?" It is an old complaint.
"Because it was the right thing." It is the old answer. After a very long while, she finally elaborates: "Because you're his. And there wasn't much else keeping him here."
It is an even longer while before he understands the extent of her small economies, and longer still before he realises how much it costs to feed and clothe a child. And it is not until several weeks after he first descends from the steaming scarlet train and is ferried across a malevolent lake in a pitching boat that he begins to understand it as another form of protection. It is anonymity. Camouflage. Because of this name, he can answer truthfully when his new housemates ask, "And who are you, then?" Nobody.
Nobody and nothing, an empty panel, waiting for his world to apply pigment. Nothingness is white, a reflection of all light. Chalk gesso, titanium dioxide, Krem's white lead, zinc oxide. The last of these is a deceiver's friend. Add a bit of linseed to the yolk that binds it; when it dries it will crack the paint, pull apart the layers above the grisaille. A board can look three hundred years old in thirty. There aren't many who work in tempera anymore; a clever forger paying attention to auctions of art stolen in the war could make a tidy living. In his experience of the household accounts, there's considerably less to be earned as an 'expert examiner'. Perhaps it's steadier, though. When he finishes the page where the earths and grounds are tallied, the numbers stay out of the red column lately. And it's not just one page, anymore - it stretches several. The latest entry is sinople, and here's another deceit: the scrawl on the bill of sale doesn't say whether the colour is a red or green, and he knows the word means either.
A sigh, the scrape of the kitchen chair as he stands, stretches. The answer to this one will be found amongst the unground earths; he shuffles through the parcels, the packages. They're beginning to pile up, he ought to spend some time grinding them for her. She gives no indication she's even noticed he's there. Well, and why should she? He's an unfinished work, and the least of them. Perhaps something slightly more than a board with chalk and size, but it is experience alone that paints a life.
There are little homilies and adages he once rote-learned at the primary, simple heuristics for being a decent person, living a life that anyone would recognize as good. He's not terribly interested in good, in simple, in mediocrity. Perhaps he drank disdain at his mother's teats, because rose garden hues don't interest him much – there's too much white in them to be compelling. Give him her shadows, give him deep moss, Hooker's green, deft hints of minium vermilion almost lost in umber and sienna depths. Dark colours absorb more light. When the sun falls upon your closed eyes as you lay on the riverbank and speak of future experiences, your skin absorbs and is warmed by this light.
So you can colour yourself ever deeper, layering on the experiences. If he takes her work as metaphor, purity is the only unbreakable law. Adulterated pigments are despicable, and, with a little effort, you can always discover the deception. There is a plant, Rubia tinctorum, the ground roots of which are better known as madder. They are prepared in a hot solution of alum in equal measure, to which a subacetate of lead is added. The process, despite its simplicity, can fail to produce the sanguine tones for which the filtrate is named and sold – it is common to find it adulterated.
She keeps a carefully hoarded stock of fine linen paper in a cupboard alongside a solution of tin bichloride, made by dissolving the metal in nitric and hydrochloric acids. It is a little ritual they often enact together when a new madder arrives: wet a strip of the paper, and sprinkle it over with a minute dusting of a suspect red madder lake. When it dries, the adulterants will react: crimson red if Caesalpinia echinata, violet for Haematoxylum campechianum, yellow for Maclura tinctoria. A violet madder adulterated with Alcanna tinctoria – what Borage calls 'alkanet' – is discovered when heated, as it evolves violet fumes; in alcohol the false madder dissolves from the lake, and the rinse is an inky blue.
She might use each of these lakes separately, but she never blends the colours. It is stylistic anathema. They can be laid down in a series so that their tones resonate together on the board, but every brushstroke delivers only unadulterated pigment.
He finally knows better, now, than to incorporate into his life those experiences which are false at their core. Lily taught him that much, where analyses of madder lakes failed to drive home the lesson.
He is himself impure, but he is only yet a shadow on a board; there may be many years remaining in which to accumulate form and substance. And she's never fussed much with the purity of the chalk she beats into the rabbitskin glue. Gesso is only a ground – simultaneously the most and least important element. If there is a bit of oxidized iron in it, what of it? As long as the grind is fine, it will mix in with the whole. If the pigments are pristine, they will redeem all but the worst chalk. Choose them wisely, and understand that sinople is a red or green.
"Am I a bastard?" he'd asked her once. He will one day find a newspaper in the Hogwarts Library, announcing banns. He will wonder how she managed the trick, because to his knowledge she'd left his world and scarce looked back. Gretchen, perhaps, trying to salvage something. Not him. Some hope of who he might have been. Regardless, it's made life a bit easier, so he's not terribly interested in correcting anyone's impression. He knows enough to recognize when things could be worse, even if he is not yet able to be entirely content with how things are.
"I suppose so. Words mean what you want them to." She always answers his questions like this: directly, and rapidly succeeded with a statement so simultaneously indirect as to be sideways. He expects she is trying, in her laconic way, to convey something important, some hard-won bit of knowledge. This one sits badly: it is not comfort she offers – she never does that. Therefore, it can't be advice, or if it is, it is meant only in the dry, authoritarian sense in which one must 'add a dropper of esile to the mix to prevent its foulment'. And he is not certain he wishes to live in a world where the true meaning of words can be obscured or altered, transfigured by an individual's intentions or suppositions. How then could anyone communicate? He will cleave to his Oxford Shorter. At least it offers some map through the morass. It is bad enough looking for hidden meaning in whole phrases, but if you can never trust a single word?
There are several definitions for this word: an unpleasant or despicable person; a difficult or awkward thing or situation; a person born of parents not married to each other. Perhaps she had never meant that the materia of language must ever devolve into the entropy and chaos of personal whim, merely that he must pick amongst these disparate definitions. This notion soothes him now, re-tasting the flavour of this memory. What was blank clean bitterness has mellowed to something more pleasing, hints of iron and mold. In this small way, he has perhaps been a dutiful son after all. A lesson practised, even in the absence of comprehension, ought to weigh the same if the outcomes are identical.
He never asks if she requires his assistance, never looks for thanks. Here, at the interstices of pestle and mortar, muller and plate, crumbling beneath inexorable pressure, are the last places where they remain part of each other's realities. They never speak of these little services he performs, unless the skritch of the silver point against the board is itself a one-sided conversation. It is as if words themselves, clinging to an exhaled breath, might somehow taint the lustrous earths. He adds a few drops of water; it is not really necessary yet, only precautionary, a measure taken in superstition. But in doing this, he is re-suspending the finer grit, so that coarser grains settle against the glass. This grating crunch is unlike most of the ingredients he grinds for his potions, but the motions are the same. Twisting, rocking, the movements of long tendons in his forearms highlighted in a play of light and shadow as he releases motes of magic in dried vegetable or mineral alike.
He has recently heard the other students referring to 'Old Sluggy' as the consummate Slytherin. This enrages him still. The consummate Slytherin is self-serving: Serving only the self. Standing beyond interest or care in the dross trappings of humanity. He kept his face blank, nodded noncommittally. This is something he has learned to do, from a consummate Slytherin, who sits hours wrapped in thoughts, in drips of gesso, in streaks of ore and yolk, manifesting tonal values solely to please herself.
The first placard he remembers is larger than his child's arms can encompass. She will mount it on a heavy wooden stave, but now it sits beside them on the train, another passenger whom they are having an uncomfortable conversation with. He knows what it says. He has watched her brush India ink into the outlines of the words. Before 28 weeks it cannot be 'born alive'. It is very early in the morning. The sun is only just rising: vermilion, madder, and points of cadmium dusting the undersides of leaden clouds.
They are going to a place called Downing Street. There will be A March. He hears it with capital letters and stark lines.
The placard will soon join others of its kind. They will say things like Your daughters, dead in alleys! and Equal Access - Equal Rights. She has spent part of the carefully hoarded egg money on the tickets. It will probably be late afternoon before Toby realises they are gone; they snuck past his snoring body draped across the battered couch, careful not to rattle keys against the thermos of hot tea. She shares it out with him now. It is dark, and treacle-sweet. He knows she never adds sugar to her own tea. Sugar is expensive. A teaspoon wasted in tea is one that cannot be used to feed the bread yeast. This is a bribe: be on good behaviour. He lets the heat, seeping through the blue plastic mug, warm his fingers. His hands are often cold. He tucks them in his sleeves, usually, but this is better.
He wonders if other women will have children with them. He suspects not. The others will have been more careful, or have met with more success in those imagined alleys. Perhaps he himself is a placard. You see? I didn't want this.
They are sitting once more in the train station, awaiting transport to a borough where 'their sort' of shops may be found. It is calming, after the frantic press of bodies, the jeering shouts, the incessant flap of sign boards, to remain seated on the solid iron bench. It is an island, and the waves of passengers flow to either side. It is orderly, and he finds it soothing. They share a hardboiled egg, and she has packed along a cheese sandwich for him. He does not yet realise that taking a cold lunch in a train station marks out their poverty; it is something they've always done on their rare trips.
It will be coming on winter soon, and they are commencing a quest to find a coat with longer sleeves. Last year, the gap at his wrist was supplemented with longer mittens, but that measure will clearly be inadequate now. There is no mention that this portion of their excursion is a cover, a blind. He recognises that one can lie with the truth. It's a useful thing to know.
There are other things he knows: for instance, he knows he mustn't touch anything in the dusty Oxfam shop they enter. Instead he looks, cataloguing the racks of apparel, the paltry mounds of kitchen things. There are several chipped mugs. One has a painted scene on it, a wide-eyed blonde child of indeterminate sex, carrying a fishing pole and accompanied by a scruffy yet somehow friendly-looking dog. It strikes him as unspeakably twee, and he despises it. There are no rivers clean enough to fish in, and how would you feed a dog? These are things he knows.
He prefers the table of books. They are arranged so that he can read off their spines, but he would rather look at covers. If he stands here long enough, and manages to catch the shopgirl's eye, she will perhaps smile at him, tacit permission to pick them up and carefully examine them. This unspoken negotiation is also a useful thing to know.
The ones he likes best have gleaming metal ships, brave explorers in bubble-headed armor, whimsical planets surrounded by rings of interstellar debris, small moons. She peers over his shoulder, flicks one battered paperback out of the row. "The fellow who painted this, he paints like I do." There is an earnest note he seldom hears. Please understand me. She adds it to the tidy heap of cloth at the register, doesn't wince at the tally as she counts out notes and coins. Passes it to him. Endless dark eyes searching his, a slight nod, some transaction accomplished. Restitution? It has a dusty dunefield adorning its cover, expanses of Naples yellow, red bole, ochres. He could take or leave the giant worm, but it is certainly an alien space.
He would like to visit another planet. Some other world, where fantastical things could happen. Somewhere far away from here. Magic is not yet a thing he knows.
It's those eyes now that draw him. They're glinting deep in their dusky sockets, presiding over the sharp angle of her nose. They stare past him; perhaps she's examining the orb weaver's tapestry – it's new, the arachnid hasn't been in residence long: the spun strands are still gossamer and there is only a single fly, its' iridescent body glinting tones of viridian and gold. It's possible, probable even; these are the sort of little details she tends to notice. Sometimes when he sits like this, sharing this repurposed room with her, she will raise velvet lampblack eyes, quirk a brow, and indicate some minute detail with the tail of a brush. Look at this, do you see it the way I do? He doesn't know. Questions of qualia are never his forte.
Or perhaps she's looking into the past, seeing memories as he has been – what narrative is sparked by the jar of uncrushed kermes scale, the potassium salts, the phials of acids, the copper sulphates? What tales can cochineal insects tell?
Or most prosaically, it could be she's merely gazing out the window, and wondering if the woad sky promises much rain.
It was a morning like this, with the clouds a bank of slate and gunmetal blue, when the owl fluttered through the window-box nasturtiums, wings shredding the blossoms: jewel-bright carmine, cadmium, realgar ripped asunder by its clumsy purchase on the sill. He remembers dismay, horror, confusion. She pulls the letter from its' clutches, shoos it out. More blooms flurry down; she reaches out, pulls the shutters in, closes away the sky. The emerald ink spells out his own name. It seems a blight against the glaring white of the envelope. When she passes it across to him, he notes her inky thumb has left a mark on the corner – good, it is not just he who desecrates this expanse.
The owl's arrival heralds many changes. There is the gift of another book, a battered and dog-eared history of the school he will attend. Its' incredible claims are printed in columns, like the King James that Toby sometimes made him swear on, long before the owl came.
"He doesn't care for anything, much." This is a fiction he maintains, that Toby still lives with them. Probably Evans' parents know the truth, but it's not something they would discuss in front of silly, impressionable girls. Well, he won't give it away. And it's true that Toby doesn't or didn't care about much. Just that piece of metal, all spiky shapes and hard edges, dripping with disdain courtesy the Tough Lads, who've graduated to dark glasses, shaved heads, and bottles in paper bags. He no longer envies them; they're not going anywhere, and he is. Far away from here.
The double-printed columns somehow lend the new book a moral authority, and he consumes it religiously. When he is not sharing his newly-won knowledge with Evans, he is poring over the paragraphs, studying the sparse illustrations in the minutest detail. He refuses the next haircut. The boys in one of these illustrations, with their broomsticks and strange uniforms, all have longer hair. He would like to fit in, now that there is a place he might fit into. "Suit yourself," she says, indifferent to this latest whim. She does not, after all, put a lot of stock or effort into appearances herself. Since the Owl Changes, she's taken to wearing men's trousers, black turtlenecks with the sleeves bunched up to her elbows when she's stirring up the rabbitskin glue or sanding down the gesso. Her thighs are a mosaic of chalky handprints. Another woman might wear an apron, taking prints of flour as her crest and sigil.
She might have been another woman once. He recalls a swirling indigo skirt. The colour is produced through fermentation of the plant it's named for, Indigofera tinctoria – when it's brought up to air, a fabric immersed in a vat of the stuff shifts from white to a deep sea-blue that will not wash away. He remembers bunching the fabric between ungraceful child's fingers, wondering at this piece of clear autumn sky that is ever bustling and eddying through a world that is mostly somber wooden floor, cracked tile, and things dimly recognised on distant countertops.
And then there is this indigo skirt, crushed and dirty on the same tile, bunched above milk-white thighs. Too many cracked and muddy boots trouncing in front of the low cabinet he's hidden himself in, where he observes this scene through a gap at the hinge.
Bruises, he will eventually learn, fade from bloody purples through to greens and finally yellows, in some strangely reversed alchemy of the oxidative reaction characterising the Romans' Tyrian purple, the dye that adorned emperors. There's a gland in a Mediterranean gastropod that yields scant precious drops of a clear liquid, which turns a white cloth yellow, green, and finally a purple deep as clotted blood. This creature, all but extinct, is called Murex brandaris. There are midden-heaps where hundreds of thousands of their skeletons have been discarded, small mountains of conquest, necessary for ceremonial displays of power. (And perhaps that's what the bruises are, although he's never sure what the purpose is of those left on a soul.)
Either way, he doesn't learn about indigo in Herbology, and no one thinks to include Murex in History or Magical Creatures. Why would they? If it's Muggle, it's useless, conveniently forgetting that the Statute of Secrecy postdates a shared history.
While he has some sympathy for the view that Muggles are useless in and of themselves, there's also no denying that at least Care of Magical Creatures is a stupid class. He is taking it because Evans asked him to. Slytherins generally have more sense, and he feels the absence of his usual cadre sharply. Only the imbeciles of his house are here. He supposes he numbers amongst them. Except that he isn't. He is prey. Avery and Macnair have decided that he's useful and he is thereby compensated with their protection – but for all their bluster and talk of shadow-lords, their reach isn't quite long enough yet. Matters aren't helped by his persistent needling at Kettleburn. But gods! Every third word out the man's mouth is a superstition, a fallacy, or misinformation.
"And have you ever seen one, a kobold?" It's like he can't help himself. But it's alright, the Slytherins are amused by his sniping today. "Because there's no such thing, you know. It's a superstition, a mistranslation from a German version of Agricola."
The word is 'kobelt'. There's an ore, smaltite, found in Saxon silver mines. It's composed of cobalt and nickel arsenides, and blooms in fibrous prisms when it oxidizes. The words 'cobalt arsenate' would seem to invoke a blue crystal, but it's the colour of blood, and named for it: erythrite. This corrosive and toxic red flower burns through shoe leather, scars the lungs. He doesn't doubt miners are tortured by it, but he sees no reason to invoke hairy night-goblins.
The night doesn't need goblins. The night's got Blackness.
Blood tastes like copper pennies. It doesn't matter if you've dirt mashed against your crooked teeth, the green smell of crushed clover in your nose, the salt of tears and more noxious substances dripping across your lips in runnels that have traced the planes of your face. The copper and iron of blood cuts cleanly through it all.
The rods of a human eye do not discriminate between colours – they perceive only light and dark - but they are more readily stimulated by the high frequencies of green and blue light. In darkness, reds are invisible, mars-black like the night. Is it the crushed bottle of ink he wipes away, or is it blood on his hands? Except for the taste, he can't tell until Dumbledore hauls him into the round office. There's a lesson here, somewhere, and it's not the shouting, nor the veiled threats.
Only one of the portraits wakes, gives him a long look. Professor Black shrugs, raises a supercilious eyebrow, but also grants him a sharp nod as he bows under Dumbledore's condemnation. He sucks the blood back from his broken lip, and wonders how the artist brought the headmaster to life. There's a hint of carmine in Black's hatband. Is it minium or true cinnabar? Is this the point of a paint's purity? She's been a devotee, why don't her figures twitch and stir?
When he first passes, wraithlike, beyond the whirling machines, hourglass contraptions, and the tilting astronomical models, it is not to investigate pensieve silver. It's to talk to Black, to find out the trick of it. It takes him many weeks of sleep deprivation to come around to the question, but eventually he has his answer: augury eggs, instead of hens'. It's a choice she made, then, another dismissal of this world that doesn't want either of them.
"Splendid, Miss Evans! You do have a knack for this!" Slughorn is smiling broadly behind his walrus mustache. The potion in their cauldron is a clear crimson, the colour enhanced by the cool green-gold tones of the brass cauldron in which it is slowly roiling. Evans smiles back, glowing, as always, in the concentrated light of others' adoration. It is a light that doesn't throw beyond the auburn fall of her hair, doesn't reflect anywhere else. Slughorn is an unsubtle master at directing it. He is peering, now, at Black and Potter's cauldron. This will be good, Severus already knows that "It has a distinctly purple cast, doesn't it, Mr. Black?" The criticism has gone to Black, but it was Potter's pestle that did the deed; he wonders if Slughorn realises.
He suspects not. Potions class is mired in alchemy, the rote repetition of recipes. They spend half their time memorizing and untangling the little puzzles that are meant to obscure the methodology of an ingredient's preparation. Chemistry seems to be a largely foreign concept.
"Do you know why theirs went purple? They were copying me – us." Her lips barely move; he thinks she probably doesn't want Potter to know she is speaking to him.
"Well, it's obvious, isn't it?" He keeps his voice low, but allows the words to fall in a conversant pitch designed to carry. This is the payment - the punishment - he will extract. "What have we ground into this? Kermes scale – minium grain. Crush their carapaces, it releases kermesic acid. Last week, we ground urchin quills, added them to the Draught of Living Death. And what are echinoderm skeletons made of, if not calcium carbonate? They can't have cleaned their mortar, or maybe it's Potter's money running true, that daft marble pestle. It's a calcinic reaction, anyhow, reacts with the kermesic acid to precipitate a salt of -"
"Oh, that's interesting!" It can't be, she's cut him off. Alright, it's a familiar tirade, this exaltation of chemistry over repetition and little tricks, but he will listen to her for hours, when she natters on about the indecipherable social miasma of Gryffindor House. Surely reciprocity isn't too much to ask?
"You're a useful sort of person to have around!" She says it lightly, congenially, but there is a wideness to her sap-green eyes that tells the truth: please shut up now. It exhausts him, always having to decipher this silent language, but he has nonetheless spent dutiful hours in the study of her face. He thinks he probably knows every shadow that can fall across it, every little twitch of meaning coded in the slight tense of muscles, the delicate tracery of capillary beds that blossom beneath a porcelain veneer. It exhausts him, but he has gotten good at it. He rarely makes mistakes anymore. (He will soon make a very large one.)
"It surely is a real art, brewing potions; I think that's why I like it." This attempted conciliation swings so far wide the field he can only gape. She's missed his entire point: it isn't an art. It's a science, or it should be. Knacks are not necessary, Slughorn notwithstanding. There need be no mysteries here, there is nothing incomprehensible. At no stage must one rely on faulty intuition, at no juncture is it necessary to fumble blindly, hoping for the best. When you reduce the world to its constituent molecules and atoms, and understand the discrete rules governing their behaviour, everything is gloriously explicable.
This is not to say that it's a simple matter, only that it can be understood without recourse to alchemical superstition. Consider the alignment of molecules in crystal matrices that form the ultrastructure of muscle fibers and cell walls – or the four types of carbon bonds, which may seem a meager number to the uninitiated. Until presented with the dizzying array of allotropes, a novice can be forgiven this presumption. Add in esters, diols, a methyl group or two – the possibilities are legion, massing like the crest of a tsunami, obliterating systems of mere belief, levelling away received wisdom.
In his experience, even artists don't leave things to bald chance alone. Or painters don't, at least. Because colour, too, is 'just' chemistry. It's a toss-up, to his way of thinking, whether Yves Klein's art is best defined by the monochromatic canvases or the 1955 patent for the chemical product that covers them in all its violent shocking electric splendour. The medieval equivalent, lapis lazuli painstakingly ground, suspended in resin or wax, and kneaded in lye, is more costly than its equivalent weight in gold. Vermeer's girl's wealth isn't her pearl earring, it's the lapis scarf that conceals her hair, as a Virgin's holiness is enshrined in the colour of her raiment. Klein and his chemist predecessors have bettered any of the alchemists Slughorn waxes lyrical about – they have invented ultramarine. Lead into gold is a paltry nothing, in comparison to Gmelin's 1828 process for synthetic blue at a tenth the cost of mining and transporting the gemstone from northeastern Afghanistan.
Her knowledge of this same chemistry is workmanlike, she's rarely as enthralled with the theory as he is. Give her results first and foremost, but at least she has a respect for the science behind it all. He should know – he imbibed lessons in orbitals and stoichiometry at this table, was nourished on equations and titrations. And for all that she's process and product-oriented, her workspace reflects an orderly mind. She's kept boards propped against the kitchen wall; they are a riot of haphazard tones in neatly layered strips. "Reproducibility," she has offered in explanation of these charts. Replicability. They are words from different sides of an artificial chasm between art and science, but it is the same concept.
Nothing left to chance, no mysteries, all the subtle magic of a finished piece decomposed to gradations and hues. Colours, at least, are understood, if nothing else is.
He wishes, now, that he knew a word in a language that she could understand, some phrase or term that – like a magic incantation – could transcend the silent gap between their separate dimensions. But perhaps it's ultimately unnecessary: their important things have always lived in the space between words.
He knows the way she works; it's apt to be a burnt sienna she will want next. He collects a few drams of condensate from the distillation coil. It's the purest that water can be, and he will add a small measure to a fresh yolk, gently squeezed from a yolk-sac dried of any clinging albumen. He looks in the icebox, expecting to find the usual cache of ochre-toned shells. There are none. The alien things inhabiting their usual spot are bright viridian.
They are augury eggs. There are four. Might there have been six? He can calculate their volumes in his head, measure that number against the little jars of terra verde and umber, the vermilion and the madder lakes dried and crusted in their ramekins.
He doesn't expect it, and yet he also hopes; perhaps this weakness lingers behind some faded-thin membrane of his heart upon which he once sketched dreams, crosshatched desire.
He moistens his lips, tastes salt. "Mam?" he asks the empty room.
The silence answers him, and the unfinished self-portrait looks on.
fin.
Author's Note: To view some contemporary examples of egg tempera painting, I recommend the work of Benjamin A. Vierling, Fred Wessel, and Madeline von Foerster. In writing this, I drew upon an online exhibit (www. bl .uk/sisterhood) of women's rights movements and the following resources:
Ball, Philip. 2001. Bright Earth: Art and the invention of color. University of Chicago Press, 382p.
Grandin, Temple, and Panek, Richard. 2013. The Autistic Brain: thinking across the spectrum. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 304p.
Riffault des Hêtres, Jean René Denis, Vergnaud, Armand Denis, and Toussaint, G. Alvar. 1874. A Practical Treatise on the Manufacture of Colors for Painting: comprising the origin, definition, and classification of colors; the treatment of raw materials Etc. H.C. Baird, 659p.
This work is also archived at Archive of Our Own. As always, I welcome all perceptions of my work - including your constructive criticism. Even just telling me that you've read this, and not simply clicked away after the first paragraph, is meaningful.