A/N: Elements in this chapter refer to the book Severus remembers Lily reading in Chapter 8, "The Secret Garden," by Frances Hodgson Burnett. One of my childhood favorites, this book appears in more than one of my stories. You can read this book free on-line, or look up a plot summary of it if you're interested and haven't read it. The 1990s movie took a lot of liberties with the plot, though the Hallmark (?) and BBC versions follow it more closely.
Chapter 9
"Electricity," murmured Harry. During this last year, he'd stayed at Shell Cottage, Grimmauld Place, the Burrow, Hogwarts. And when not at one of those places, he'd spent most of his time camping in a wizarding tent. He gazed at the light bulb in the ceiling in semi wonder.
"My father was a Muggle," said Severus offhandedly. He glanced around the tiny foyer and apparently found it all in order. "I found it…convenient...to keep it, no matter that oil lamps shed a much warmer light."
There were only two things in the foyer of any note at all. The first was a mirror, hung on the wall to the right. It was round and frameless, spotted with age, and of the right size and placement for a woman to check her hair or her hat before venturing out into the street. The wallpaper that the mirror hung on was as old as the mirror, if not older, wide green stripes with narrow gold piping. Harry stared at it, reminded of the old brass candlesticks at Grimmauld Place stained green with corrosion. It wasn't a Slytherin green, nor was it a Gryffindor gold, and for some reason that comforted him.
The other item of note was the coat tree.
It was made of wood, either a wood so dark as to be almost black, or a lighter wood stained dark with age and grime. It would have been almost unremarkable, blending in with the darkness and grime of the house around it, had it not been for the robes that hung on it.
Women's robes. Dark green, with a frill at the bottom and small pink flowers embroidered around the collar. Dusty. So dusty that the color was muted and the robe appeared streaked around the draped folds.
If Severus noticed Harry staring at the robes, he didn't comment.
"Come," he said instead. He turned and walked forward into a dim room, nearly dark despite the sunshine outdoors. Harry had the immediate impression, when he entered the room, of being slowly suffocated. The air was still and smelled musty and old. Ahead of him, Severus, who apparently was able to see in the dark, or, more likely, knew the layout of the room like the back of his own hand, turned on a floor lamp. The lamp glowed dully, its shade covered in thick dust, as the chain Severus had pulled to turn it on swung against the metal pole with a hollow clang. Harry's eyes moved to the most impressive feature of the room, a wall made entirely of books, while Severus walked to a window, pulled apart the curtains and cracked open the window, tugging on it to loosen it instead of using an easy "Alohomora." Light speared into the room, cutting through the dancing dust motes. Harry blinked, finding the light almost intrusive in this sepulchral tomb of a room.
The wall of books turned out to be a wall of bookshelves so laden with books that it was difficult to even see the wood of the shelves beneath and around the many tomes. An old leather chair sat in a corner, with a worn leather ottoman before it and a side table between the chair and the shelves. The floor lamp Severus has just turned on stood at the other side of the chair. A fireplace took up the entire wall between the two windows and a small sofa, plush, old-fashioned and worn, not even big enough for Harry to stretch out on, was grouped with the chair, lamp and table. A doorway on the other side of the sofa led into another room—the kitchen, by the looks of it. There was one more doorway on the wall behind him, next to the small entryway. It led to a narrow corridor which ended in a closed door.
Severus had disappeared quietly into the kitchen and Harry heard the clanging of old pipes then water spurting in staccato bursts from the kitchen sink as Severus ran the water and cleared the pipes of air. He heard the sound of breaking glass just ahead of a muttered curse and a terse "Reparo."
"Severus? You alright in there?"
Harry moved to the kitchen doorway, feeling like an uncomfortable visitor still, and flicked on the switch next to the door. Nothing happened.
"Bulb's burned out," commented Severus as he pulled up the old blinds over the sink, sending another shaft of sunlight into the room. His voice sounded both resigned and tired. Perhaps the bulbs burned out often here and he was simply tired of replacing them.
The kitchen at the Dursleys had been modern and sterile. The kitchen at Grimmauld Place was archaic and dark. The Weasley's kitchen was spacious and open and alive with laughter. The kitchen at Hogwarts was immense and magical, dancing with house elves, spotless and cheerful.
But this kitchen was unlike any of those. This kitchen was old and worn and tired. The sink was framed on either side by a short countertop and narrow, dark cabinets. An old cook stove, only half the size of Aunt Petunia's massive modern wonder, stood beside the short countertop to the left of the sink. An ancient fridge stood apart from the other furnishings, beside a second window. A tiny table was pushed against the wall beside the doorway leading to the sitting room and was surrounded by three metal chairs covered in brown vinyl.
The entire room looked sad. It was as dusty as the rest of the house, but otherwise neat and cleared of clutter and dishes and any sign of life or inhabitation. The linoleum on the floor was yellowed with age and worn through in the high traffic areas, leaving pathways from door to refrigerator and refrigerator to sink.
"Where did you sleep?" asked Harry. It was an odd question, considering he hadn't yet commented at all on the house or its contents since they came in through the front door.
"Upstairs," said Severus with the barest touch of a smile. "My father slept down here, in the front bedroom." He placed the repaired teacup he was holding on the rickety table beside a set of aluminum salt and pepper shakers and walked back out into the living room. He pointed toward the doorway across from the fireplace. "My father's bedroom. There's a small loo just off the hallway there. Flush it a time or two before you use it, if you need to go. That will clear the air out of the pipes and you won't get an unplanned shower."
He did not invite Harry to explore the bedroom and Harry couldn't help but note that he hadn't yet mentioned where his mother slept. He determined from what Severus wasn't saying that they had not slept in the same room.
"How do you get upstairs?" asked Harry, looking around the small room for another door. In answer, Severus walked over to the wall of books and reached into a spot where a book appeared to be missing and pulled a hidden handle. The bookshelf slowly swung forward, revealing a stairway.
"There wasn't enough wall space for the books," he explained with another almost smile. He turned to Harry then. "Well, have you seen enough?"
Harry was staring fixedly at what he could see of the dark, narrow stairway beyond the hidden door. He swallowed.
"Harry?"
Harry took half a step backward and steadied himself. He smiled apologetically at Severus.
"Sorry. Just reminded me of something there for a minute."
Severus had moved away from the bookshelves and glanced back at the stairway now, puzzled. Perhaps the stairs reminded Harry of some experience this past year, on the Horcrux hunt. Or perhaps of one of the stairways to the upper floors of Grimmauld Place. He looked at Harry's pale face as the boy struggled to regain control of himself.
"Do you want to tell me about it?" he asked, voice low and calm.
"Not really," answered Harry, looking away from Severus quickly. "And no, I haven't seen enough. Can I see your room? Didn't you want me to help you box up some things?"
"I had meant to start with some books," said Severus.
Harry glanced at the dusty volumes.
"Why don't we send Kreacher over here to dust them off first?" he suggested, taking a tentative step or two closer to the open doorway leading to the stairs.
"That is a good idea," replied Severus, surveying the hundreds of tomes. "It will certainly save our lungs from inhaling more of the filth of this town." He strode toward the stairs and ducked under the low doorway then reached inside and flipped a switch on a wall that Harry couldn't see. The dark stairs lit up with a faint, shadowy glow and Harry could now see that the steps were covered in a threadbare blue carpet. Severus disappeared up the stairs, footsteps echoing in the sitting room below, and Harry hurried to follow.
The stairs were squeaky, steep and narrow. Harry noticed how his foot seemed to fit in a groove in the middle of each riser where the carpet, and the wood below it, had been worn down into a slight depression. Had Severus been a different kind of person, had Harry been able to imagine him as a boisterous, playful child, he might have imagined that the stairs were worn down from a small boy sliding down them on his bottom.
But Severus would not have been that kind of boy.
Nor had Harry been.
The stairway, which seemed to climb along the far side of the house, ended at a little landing. A doorway to the left led to a short passage with four doors, all of them closed. Severus had his wand out and illuminated now and walked ahead to the end of the corridor, pushing open the door there to reveal a tiny bath with a black and white tile floor and an old white porcelain sink. The mirror over the sink reflected the wand light back at Harry and he blinked in surprise.
Severus gestured to the single door on the right side. "My mother's room," he said. Harry though his voice both sad and respectful. He wondered what was behind the door—had Severus left it exactly as Eileen Prince had left it? Were her clothes still in there? Her brush and comb on the dresser? Her shoes lined up at the end of the bed?
But Severus made no move to show Harry his mother's room and Harry dutifully turned toward the left side of the passage. Severus stood before the first door and waved his wand in a complicated arc, uttering a spell under his breath that Harry could not quite catch. The doorknob, an old-fashioned glass handle, glowed briefly and Severus reached down and pushed open the door.
Harry couldn't have said exactly what he expected to find in Severus Snape's bedroom in this, his childhood home. He imagined Severus had used this room most of his life, that it was in fact the room in the memory he had seen during those first Occlumency lessons during his fifth year. The room where a young Severus lay on the bed, lazily zapping flies. But that had been years ago, when his parents were still living, when he was still a student at Hogwarts. Surely the room would have been cleaned out since then, filled with the trappings of an adult, no longer a child's haven—no longer a young boy's prison.
That the room was a cluttered mess surprised Harry.
It was far cleaner than the downstairs rooms, if "cleaner" meant less dust and grime. But the clutter you might see in a normal house—not the Dursley's of course as that house was as far from normal as any—seemed to be absent from the kitchen and living areas and confined to this one room.
"Do as I say, not as I do," muttered Severus as his eyes swept the room with Harry's. He moved over to the low dresser with a plain rectangular mirror attached to its back and picked up a school scarf in Slytherin colors, fingered it a moment then hung it over the mirror and turned back to face Harry. "That means you are never to let your own room decay into the mess that you see here." He arched an eyebrow. Harry looked around again, certain he didn't own enough stuff to make that even a remote danger.
The bed was the antithesis of a Hogwarts four-poster. It was frameless and low, sunken in the middle, a plain double bed short enough that Harry imagined Severus had to sleep on it diagonally to keep his feet from dangling off the end. It was covered in a dingy white spread, the kind Mrs. Figg had in her guest bedroom, with little white puffs making patterns in the middle and long string-like fringe around the edges. At Mrs. Figg's, the fringe just grazed the floor. Here, it rested almost completely on the dark hardwood, looking more like a raveled edge than elegant fringe.
Harry was still staring at the bed when Severus handed him a large cardboard box—he'd enlarged a small box he'd found on the dresser—and pointed to a narrow bookshelf with three shelves against the wall at the foot of the bed.
"Start there, I suppose. I try to keep this room at least relatively dust free so the books should not make you cough up a lung." He glanced over at the shelf then sat down on the bed and pulled open the top dresser drawer. Harry could see that instead of the anticipated socks and underwear, the drawer was full of a riot of small items—like the junk drawer in the Weasley's kitchen that held all manner of things like string and glue and tape and Muggle postage stamps and quills and….
He stared at the box in his hand, looked again at the more enticing drawer, and moved over to the bookshelf, sinking to sit cross-legged on the floor in front of it with the box beside him.
He looked at the shelf and suddenly realized that instead of books on the Dark Arts and Potions he was face to face with Severus' childhood.
He quickly glanced back over his shoulder. Severus was still sitting on the bed, poking around in the junk drawer, his back to Harry. Harry could tell by his posture, his attitude, that Severus was not exactly enjoying his visit to Spinner's End.
Harry understood. It was like his cupboard, he supposed, a quick sinking of his stomach making him recall how that first look into the dark staircase had reminded him of the view into his cupboard from the passage. As much as that cupboard represented all that was wrong with his childhood—and with the Dursleys, he quickly reminded himself—it was, in effect, his.
It had been home, for whatever that was worth.
He reached up and removed a book from the top shelf. A battered dictionary, the kind with the gold leaf on the edges, most of it worn away now. He placed the book in the box and removed another dictionary—Latin—and placed it on top of the first. French, German, Italian, Spanish. Surely Severus didn't speak….? Harry filed that question away, unconsciously respecting the quiet of the room, and continued to remove books and place them in the large box.
The top shelf contained all reference books, including a tome on trees, shrubs and flowers of the United Kingdom and another on the reptiles, birds and mammals native to sGreat Britain. A child's guide to Potions, bound in dark brown leather with gilded gold letters, was the only magical volume on the shelf. Harry packed them all into the box carefully, thinking, as he did, that he hadn't even had a dictionary of his own at the Dursleys, then started on the bottom shelf, leaving the intriguing middle shelf for last. That shelf had what appeared to be novels and storybooks with brighter-colored spines and pictures on the covers.
The bottom shelf held mainly Hogwarts textbooks. Harry pulled out "The Standard Book of Spells—Grade 4" and smiled. The wizarding world certainly didn't update its textbooks as often as the Muggle world did. This one looked exactly like his own, down to the pig-tailed young witch in old-fashioned robes on the front cover. Severus hadn't kept all of his textbooks, though he did have a fair number of Potions books and apparently all of his Defense Against the Dark Arts text. Noticeably missing were the seven Gilderoy Lockhart books required during Harry's second year and the entirely worthless "Defensive Magical Theory" that the late Dolores Umbridge had used. Harry looked at Severus' fifth year Potions text, dog-eared and worn, before placing it in the box. He put it in his lap instead, and opened it to the cover page.
As he expected, Severus had written in this book as well. There it was—"Property of the Half-Blood Prince''—written across the bottom of the page in the fine handwriting he now recognized. He looked over his shoulder at Severus. He was sitting on the bed still, an old shoebox in his lap, quietly sorting through its contents. Harry turned back to the book and paged through it quickly. Severus had not written in "Intermediate Potions" as heavily as he had in the book Harry used in his sixth year, though he did find the expected alterations to ingredients and notes in the margins. On the inside of the back cover was a crude but amusing drawing of a cockroach. The roach, a particularly fat roach, was holding a piece of glazed pineapple in his little roach hand. The drawing was captioned "The Bug Club."
It suddenly struck Harry that he and Severus had had the same Potions professor, at least for a time; that Severus had been a sixteen-year-old boy once too, that he had doodled in his book and made fun of the Slug Club.
Harry closed the book, placed it carefully in the box and looked up at the last shelf.
A row of seven or eight books of the same size and shape caught his attention first. He pulled one out at random. "Hard-Headed Hector and the Pygmy Post Owl." Harry blinked. He'd never heard of Hard-headed Hector. He pulled another book out and looked at the front cover. On this one, Hard-headed Hector was on a broom chasing a two-tailed dog. "Hard-Headed Hector and the Magical Crup." He opened the book and could tell from the illustrations and the size of the typeface that it was the kind of book a ten or twelve-year-old might read. The books were well cared for, yet Harry could tell they'd been read many times. He paged to the back of the third one he took out, "Hard-Headed Hector and the Grumpy Garden Gnome," and ran his finger over the name written carefully along the bottom of the inside back cover. The words were printed in neat block letters, by a hand that could not have belonged to a child older than eight-years-old. Severus T. Snape.
Severus had written his name in these books. He'd read these books, perhaps in this very room, read them over and over again and when he was too old to read them had kept them anyway. Was he thinking, back then, that he'd someday pass them along to a son?
Suddenly, Harry wanted very much to read these books.
He pulled another off the shelf, smiling at the title: "Hard-Headed Hector and the Nibbling Niffler." He stacked it in the box on top of the others and asked, rather innocently, "Severus, what's your middle name?"
"Tobias," answered Severus idly. "It was my father's name. And I have already told you that-in a letter, I believe."
Harry filed the information away and smiled as he stacked the rest of the "Hard-Headed Hector" series in the box and pulled down a child's biography of Arsenius Jigger. He recognized the name of the author of some of his Potions textbooks. Several more biographies, a copy of Tolkein's "The Hobbit," a very worn copy of a book he'd never heard of, "Stranger in a Strange Land." He added a multi-volume leather-bound set of the short stories of Arthur Conan Doyle and the box was nearly full.
But there was room for one more book. The last book sat on the edge of the shelf, pressed against the side, and when he tried to remove it the paper jacket was stuck to the wood. He wiggled it carefully and the paper unstuck.
He could tell right away that it was a book unlike the others. Muggle, but there had been other Muggle books in with the magical ones. No, what made this book stand out was that it was a girl's book, the jacket light green, the font fancy, a picture of a little blonde girl in a severe coat and a plain hat on the cover. The book was titled "The Secret Garden." Harry had never heard of it.
He stared at the cover for a long moment then carefully opened the book to the first page, his eyes drawn to the inscription there.
June 30, 1978
Dear Sev:
"Where there is love, there is magic."
You know what this book means to me. I think you'll find yourself in here, though perhaps not where you'd expect.
Fondly,
Lily
Harry stared at the inscription, feeling like a voyeur, but soaking up the feeling, the feeling of seeing his mum's handwriting, of hearing her voice in his head, of knowing that she'd held this book, had touched this book. That this book was one she'd read, loved herself, treasured.
A feeling of overwhelming sadness, a melancholy so deep he didn't know how to push it away, overcame him then and he read the inscription again, and again. He wanted to know what the book meant to his mum. He wanted, so much, so hard, so deeply, to have a gift like this from his mum, a memento to treasure, even if he couldn't have her voice.
Except he had had her voice. On that final walk through the smoldering grounds of Hogwarts, through the Forbidden Forest, the snitch clutched desperately in his hands. The walk to the end, to the close.
To the beginning.
But it wasn't enough!
He choked back a sob he would not, could not, let out.
He read the inscription again.
She had called Severus "Sev."
"Where there is love, there is magic."
Who had said that? Was it part of this book?
The date. Their last day ever at Hogwarts. He knew they had fallen out of sorts by then, she with James, Severus with the Death Eater Crowd. Yet she had given him this. And he had kept it.
He paged through the book, too quickly, but was rewarded with more handwriting at the end, on the blank page between the end of the book and the back cover.
Sev:
I hope by now you see that you're all the children in this book. You're Mary, the unloved, forgotten child. You're Colin, long-suffering, afraid of life, neglected by his father. You're Dickon, who knows the earth and the plants and creatures who live in and on it. Just as they brought the garden to life, you made magic real for me, Sev, long before I knew it was real. Come what may, I'll always remember that. The gift you gave me. The light you brought to this child's eyes.
Lily
Harry stood and took two shaky steps toward Severus.
"Severus…Dad..." He had the book in his hand and as Severus turned, pivoting on the old bedspread, he held it out toward him.
"Give me that."
Harry stopped, stunned. He took a step backward and clutched the book against his stomach.
"But…I wanted to read it."
Severus stood, face stoic, and held out his hand for the book then paused, staring at his own outstretched hand, then at Harry. He took in the flush on the boy's face, the moisture on his cheeks, the way he was shielding the book with his body, then dropped his hand and sank back down on the bed. He held his head in his hands, his elbows propped on his knees. His hair fell around his face, shielding his eyes.
"Dad?" Harry's voice was soft, small, tentative, but it seemed to echo in the quiet little room, bouncing off the mirror, dancing around stacks of papers, ducking into the corner behind the old racing broom, the worn ice skates, the empty aquarium.
A ragged sob, trembling shoulders.
Harry froze, a step away from the bed, a step away from his father. He stared at Severus in confusion, trying to comprehend exactly what was happening. Another ragged sob and the bent head was shaking now.
"Dad? Are you alright?" Harry's own voice was shaky and unsure as he carefully placed the book on top of the still-cluttered dresser and stood in front of Severus, in front of his father, squatting down in the too small space between the man and the dresser, reaching up to take hold of one of the long-fingered hands pressed against Severus' head. Squeezing it. "Severus? It's alright. I put the book down. On the dresser. You can have it."
And Severus looked up at Harry then, tears streaking his face, eyes sad and distant, then reached out with one arm and pulled Harry to him, wrapping both arms then around the child, the boy, the young man, the Chosen One, defeater of Voldemort, motherless orphan, Harry.
Harry remained stiff and frozen for a stunned moment.
And then he broke.
Because it wasn't fair. Wasn't fair that Severus knew his mother, and he didn't. Wasn't fair that Severus had that book, that piece of her. That she had read that book and found Severus in it, and not Harry. That she had played with him in the woods, and swung with him on the swing set, and made a flower come alive for him. That he had turned the end of the jump rope, and knocked on her door. Hullo Mrs. Evans. Is Lily home?
That Severus had loved his mother, while he had nothing to love.
"I want the book," he sobbed when he could finally lift his voice through the anger and swelling sadness. "I want something of my mum's."
Silly child…you have her eyes.
A long hand smoothed back his hair. He could feel the dampness of Severus' cheek, the bristle on his jaw. He clutched his hands into the fabric of the shirt. He ached. He wanted. He needed. The book. The memories. The love. He wanted to smell her, to hug her, to hear her voice reading the words aloud to him, telling him that he was like Dickon. Admiring his love of living things. That he was like Colin. Long-suffering. That he was Mary, the neglected, forgotten child. Except he didn't want that. He didn't want to be neglected, forgotten.
"I want something of my mum's," he repeated, voice trembling, tears slipping down his face and wetting Severus' cheeks now.
"The book is yours," whispered Severus, voice raspy, his hand still smoothing down Harry's hair rhythmically. Harry took in a shuddering breath and hugged Severus tightly.
"Thank you. Thank you Dad." He sighed out the words into Severus' shoulder. "Thank you."
Another long silence, not awkward, not uncomfortable.
"Did you find yourself in the book, Dad?" asked Harry minutes later, face still pressed in Severus' shoulder, hands still fisted in his shirt.
A long pause. The words, when they came, were stark and empty. Like Harry's moments ago, they filled the small room, sinking into the worn white bedspread, sailing on tiny currents above the bare wooden floor boards, somersaulting into the open dresser drawer filled with gobstones and chess pieces and Chocolate Frog cards yellowed with age.
"I never read it. I couldn't bear to."
