-7-
As the chemistry-laden weeks go by, Samantha misses the magical world more and more. She was never much of a novel reader. Penelope's tales of Hogwarts, Hogsmeade, Diagon Alley, and the Ministry were her fantasy world, her playground, her escape hatch, for nine years—her only tantalizing brush with the irrational. Fondling the Sneakoscope, shoving the mysterious compact still deeper into the chaos of her lingerie drawer, she wonders how risky it would have been if Penelope had let her keep her copies of Hogwarts, A History and Dragon Species of Great Britain and Ireland, transfigured perhaps to look like Muggle novels, or science textbooks. Penelope's bonfire notwithstanding, the war has left Samantha more, not less, entangled with the magical world, and she thinks she might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.
Very early one Sunday morning, the telephone rings. She picks it up. "Samantha?" inquires a man's voice.
"P—P—you?" she gasps. She is happier than she thought she'd be, to hear his voice again.
"I'm using a kell-ool-ar felly-tone. It's bizarre."
"Yes," agrees Samantha, smiling at this image.
"D'you actually use these things everyday?" he inquires, and she realizes that he meant not that his use of a cellular telephone was bizarre, but rather that the cellular telephone itself was bizarre.
"Where are you?"
"I'm in the bathroom on your landing. I couldn't come directly into your room, on account of the wards."
"I'll be right there," says Samantha, slamming down the receiver. She smuggles him down the stairs—he's Disillusioned again—and locks the door behind him. Percy taps his head with his wand, resumes his ordinary appearance, and takes possession of her desk chair. Samantha sits cross-legged, facing him, on the unmade bed.
"It's great to see you, Percy, but—why are you here?"
"I wanted to check on you."
"Percy?" He smiles silently. "Don't insult my intelligence. It's dangerous for you to be here, whatever the hour and however Disillusioned. You wouldn't have come for no reason."
"Someone laid information."
"Yes?"
"She's supposed to be involved in—well . . . did she ever mention Dirk Cresswell?"
"Dirk Cresswell?"
"He was in the Goblin Liaison Office. He's been on the run since September, and he's another person that Umbridge can't trace. Did Penny ever mention him?"
"No."
"Hmm," says Percy. "Did she ever mention Ted Tonks?"
"No."
"Just as well," mutters Percy.
"Is he another Ministry staffer on the run?"
"Not Ministry, no. Just a Muggle-born wizard. But he has links to several people on the Undesirable list, and I think they're planning to take him out."
"Take him off the list?"
"No," says Percy dully. "Take him out."
"Murder him, you mean," says Samantha, wishing that, just once in his life, Percy would call a spade a spade.
"Yes. I hope Penny doesn't know him. He wouldn't be very safe—what about Kingsley Shacklebolt?"
"She knows Kingsley," says Samantha.
Percy does a double-take. "What—in the Auror Office?"
"Yes. He used to pass her a bit of information from time to time. Things that didn't make it into the Daily Prophet." Percy removes his horn-rimmed spectacles and wipes his brow. "Is he on the list of Undesirables?"
"He's number four." Percy hesitates. "You don't think—Penny would cooperate—or join him, if she were in trouble—"
"I don't . . ." Samantha trails off, remembering her last conversation with Penelope, back in August. The blank identity cards. "What was Kingsley Shacklebolt doing, before he went underground?"
"He was protecting the Muggle prime minister."
Things fall into place. Except— "She said she was going abroad," says Samantha firmly. "She left the first week of August, and she said she was going abroad."
"Is Sangbleu still stalking you?"
"Yes."
"It's a good sign, you know," he says mournfully. "I'm terribly sorry about it, but it's a good sign. They're baffled. That's why they keep questioning people, and harassing you, and spreading rumors that Penny joined the Order—" He hesitates. "I assume you would tell me if she had joined the Order?"
"I might," says Samantha.
"So you know what the Order is," says Percy, eying her warily. "I always wondered."
So Jean-Benoit's not the only one who can lay snares for the careless tongue. Samantha shifts uncomfortably and looks away. It's quite true that she's not telling Percy the full truth, it's just that the things she's concealing are not the things he thinks they are . . . and she's sorry to hurt him, but not so sorry as to give up her last reserves. She's so tired of this game of shuttlecock, so abominably tired of being buffeted between two inquisitive young wizards, neither of whose motives is entirely transparent. Penelope didn't want her to trust Percy, Penelope certainly didn't envision that she'd be receiving incognito visits from a Disillusioned Percy at 7 a.m. on Sunday morning and accepting magical gifts from him, but Penelope's instructions are three months out of date, and Percy is clearly the lesser of two evils. She would not care to be abandoned to the sole company of Sangbleu.
"Your father's in the Order," says Samantha conversationally. "If the political situation is as you say it is, then why is he still at large?"
"Thicknesse and Umbridge are using him to get to Harry and Hermione," says Percy quietly. "As soon as they do, they'll assassinate him. Or, if pureblood pride prevails, send him to Azkaban, which isn't much preferable."
She has never heard him speak so bluntly. Maybe he has a better command of the situation than she realized. "Have you warned him?" she asks. "Another anonymous owl?"
Percy shrugs. "Is it worth the risk? His contacts are better than mine. I assume he already knows. Samantha—"
"Yes?"
"A lot of people are going into hiding now. Not just Muggle-born witches and wizards. Muggles, too. Entire families. If you want to disappear—"
"Skive off, you mean," says Samantha. "Abandon everyone."
"That's not what you said when your sister left," points out Percy.
Well, no. But she has thought it once or twice, in the months since her sister left. She didn't realize quite how thoroughly Penelope intended to vanish, nor for how long, nor how much she and her parents would be seeing of the Ministry's oily representatives in Penelope's absence. She's not feeling particularly well-used. But given that she's not telling anyone the full truth about her life these days, that there is no longer anyone within reach who is fully in her confidence, it seems quite possible that Penelope's decision to abandon her was based on more than she chose to divulge . . . and in any case, whatever risks Samantha is facing, Penelope is surely facing greater ones.
"I could help you," says Percy. She is silent. "Or, if you don't want my help, I could put you in touch with other people who could help you." They regard each other, across the piled lab notes and the concert programs and the tousled sheets of the unmade bed, sizing each other up like mutually hostile cats bent on a common enterprise. "Even the Order," says Percy. "I'm not telling you what to do. But—well, I could help."
"I'm not going into hiding," says Samantha slowly, "but if I were, I would probably ask you to help." She realizes, as she says it, that this is a very equivocal declaration of friendship, but it seems to please Percy. "I don't care for espionage," she announces after a minute. "Or even politics. I like chemistry. Chemistry and math. And sometimes writing stories."
Percy smiles ruefully and for a moment she sees a glint in his eye that must be, she thinks, what Penelope saw, all those years ago. "You're so much like your sister," he says, with astonishing tenderness. "You look like her, and you sound like her too."
"I'm not her, though," says the girl on the bed. "My name is Samantha."
"I know," he says gently. "Can I do anything for you?"
"News," says Samantha. "I need news."
"No, you don't," says Percy. "Reading the Prophet would just depress you—most of the media outlets have gone over—"
"Don't patronize me," retorts Samantha. "I can discern a biased source just as well as you. There's nothing worse than not knowing. The Muggle media doesn't report anything until the people are already dead."
"Well," says Percy grimly. "Well—is this a radio?"
"It's a clock radio."
"Muggle radios tell the time?"
"Some do."
"Bizarre," mutters Percy, jabbing the device with his wand. "Fascinating, but bizarre." After a couple minutes he looks up and says, "All right, then. The AM setting is tuned to Wizarding Wireless. Don't listen to it too much, though, okay? It isn't good for morale."
He Disillusions himself. She escorts him to the bathroom. He disapparates. Samantha lingers by the mirror. Standing on tiptoe, tumbling dark curls into her face, pulling her dressing gown about her like wizarding robes and plumping her breasts up a bit, she realizes with a jolt that a casual observer might quite easily mistake her for Penelope. The resemblance is stronger than ever, right down to the stricken expression, and the dark circles that ring her eyes.
When she comes home from the phys. chem. lab two evenings later, through the dark November night, there is a book in her pigeon hole, a dog-eared paperback copy of The Story of Philosophy. It's so subtle, so simple, just the sort of the thing she might have borrowed from a friend, except that she never did. She hugs it to her closely as she steals across the quad. She waves it by the Sneakoscope, which of course registers nothing. In her bedsit, behind locked doors, Samantha shakes out the binding and slowly turns each of the dog-eared pages. On p. 202 she finds it, a thinly penciled message: "9 P.M. 94.3 AM/WW hippogriff word changes daily try tonight. Hermes."
Three years ago? Four years? It's like a message from another lifetime. But Samantha knew Hermes. She knows who sent the package. She doesn't know for certain whether it's safe. There is, as Penelope would say, such a thing as the Imperius Curse. And there is also such a thing as treachery, and double-dealing. She is not absolutely certain that, if Penelope were here, Penelope would want her to tune the radio dial. But Penelope isn't here.
She used to think she had secrets. At Roedean, when she couldn't say her sister was a witch, when she couldn't publish her Pigspots stories in the lit. mag. The lies she told about her sister's Highland boarding school. At Oxford now, there is no one who knows she has two sisters instead of one.
She used to long for contact with the wizarding world. On her rare visits to Diagon Alley, she smiled surreptitiously at the teenage boys in Eeylops Owl Emporium, and she thought, wouldn't it be lovely . . . Now she prays fervently that every man she meets not be a wizard. She couldn't handle another one. Yet she has grown dependent on the two she knows . . . and distasteful though she finds Jean-Benoit, his disappearance would not be an encouraging sign.
She used to think she missed Penelope. She used to feel neglected if she went a week without a letter. Now she doesn't know where Penelope is. (Corsica? Mali? Vietnam?) She doesn't know whether she's alive or dead. It has been 119 days since she last saw Penelope. She tots up the tally in her head, as she tosses a throw pillow against the wall and clicks on the radio.
Huddled in a woolen jumper, crouched over the wireless, with one eye trained on the third hand of Percy's Sneakoscope and the other, through curse-proof windows, on the inky night, Samantha listens disconsolately to Potterwatch.