Chapter 14: Evidence

"So do you think Audra Sparling was in love with a Muggle?" I asked Severus as we both sifted through the contents of her rooms later that afternoon. I was going through the writing desk in her bedroom while Severus searched her closet, and we both considered the small amount we'd learned from Minerva over lunch.

"It sounds likely. Though I don't see how knowing about her love life helps us now."

"It helps us understand her," I said.

Severus shrugged as he examined the pockets of a gown and found nothing before shoving it to the side and pulling out the next one. "Why does it matter whether we understand her or not?" he asked.

I closed the drawer of the writing desk after finding nothing inside but blank pieces of parchment, a few pens and two or three bottles of ink. Standing up, I considered where to try next, decided on the dresser and crossed the room to pull open the first drawer as I answered him. "If we know what she valued and how she thought, it might make it easier to spot her treasure when we come across it."

Severus smiled as he pushed another dress with empty pockets to the side and reached for the next garment in line. "When we come across it, not if? I'm beginning to think you're being rather optimistic."

"Don't say that. The treasure is real, and it has to be here somewhere."

"Does it?" asked Severus as he finished searching the last piece of clothing and stepped back with a sigh to stare up at the line of hat boxes that sat on the shelf above her clothes. "The recording told us to find her treasure and take it to heart, it never said, search the house and grounds and you'll find it waiting for you. The damned thing could be anything and anywhere."

I closed the first drawer and moved on to the second. "We have to believe that she wanted us to find the treasure, Severus, and if she wanted us to find it, then either the treasure itself or a clue to its whereabouts has to be here on the estate somewhere. That's the only thing that makes sense. If it isn't here, then we have almost no hope of finding it and there's no point to this at all except to keep us guessing."

"Or to tempt us... to give us a taste of what living here would be like only to yank it all away and hand it over to Skyrm when we failed because there is no treasure to find."

I sat back on my heels and looked at him. "You can't really believe that."

"Why not? Aunt Audra didn't care enough about me to get in touch while she was still alive. Why should I believe that she cared enough to want me to have her estate now that she's gone?" A scowl as dark as night had taken over his face which he tried to keep averted from me.

This wasn't the first time he'd raised this point and I was beginning to realise just how much having had some contact with his mother's family when he was young would have meant to Severus. I hadn't had the best of upbringings myself, but that was mostly due to my getting bitten. Becoming a werewolf tends to put an end to the carefree days of childhood, and forces you to grow up pretty fast.

My parents had loved me dearly, both before and after I was cursed, and they'd always taken care of me and did their best to shield me from the hostility of the world. It wasn't their fault that they'd failed. I'd been targeted by someone with a grudge against my father, and what happened to me destroyed him. He never got over his feelings of guilt. I was his only child, and I meant the world to him. He blamed himself for everything, and he died only a couple of years after I was bitten.

My mother, lost without him, only lived long enough to see me enter Hogwarts, a dream none of us expected to see come true once I became a werewolf. After she died, I went to stay with her sister during the summers until she, too, died shortly after I completed school. Her death left me without any family, just like Severus, but apparently unlike him, I knew that my family had loved me.

"You don't know why she never contacted you," I said quietly. "Hester told me that she wanted to, but when you were involved with Voldemort, she didn't dare. After all, she had no way of knowing what your loyalties really were."

Severus shook his head. "That doesn't make any sense. How would she have even known about my involvement with the Dark Lord? I certainly never advertised my position as one of his Death Eaters, far from it. Up until that last year of his attempt to rule over us all, no one should have been aware of my involvement with him unless they were involved in some way as well."

I'd been continuing to search through the last drawer in the dresser while Severus spoke and had uncovered a small square box hidden in a corner. I pulled it out and opened it. "Well, this might explain how she knew," I said as I reached into the box and pulled out a crystal ball about the size of my clenched fist. I held it up and the bright light streaming through the windows pierced its surface and sent glittering reflections dancing off across the walls of the room.

Severus left the closet and came over to join me, taking the crystal from my hand and turning it over in his own. "You think she was a seer?"

I shrugged and looked up at him. "The library is full of books on divination, books far too complex for someone with only a casual interest in the subject. If she was a seer, it would explain a few things."

"Such as?"

"Just some things that Hester said about the two of us not being the way Miss Sparling said we'd be. How would she know what we'd be like? She didn't actually know either one of us. Clearly she investigated us somehow. Watching through a crystal might explain her knowledge. It also might explain why she left a share in the estate to me. If she saw us together, as we are now..."

"You think she saw us living together and took steps to make it happen by leaving her money to the two of us? That's seems a bit farfetched to me." Severus handed the crystal back to me and returned to the closet.

I stared into the shimmering ball, slowly passing it from hand to hand. "Hester said Miss Sparling was always right, but that we weren't the way she expected us to be. If Miss Sparling told Hester that we were a couple, she'd have been surprised when we showed up here and weren't together. The only way Miss Sparling could have ever thought we were together was if she looked into the future. I mean, all we did in the past was argue and fight, right? Besides you don't have one of these unless you use it, do you?"

Severus snorted. "Simply having and using a crystal ball is no guarantee that anything you think you might see in it is real. Look at Sybill Trelawney and all the foolish predictions she used to spout that had no basis in reality."

"Sybill wasn't always wrong though, was she," I said.

Severus frowned and a shadow crossed his face as he reached for a hatbox. "No," he said quietly. "No, she wasn't."

I returned the crystal ball to its box, set the box back where I found it, and slid the drawer shut. Then I got to my feet and walked over to join Severus in front of the closet where he was now peering into one of the hatboxes from the closet shelf.

"What's in the box?" I asked.

He handed it to me and reached up for another one. "An appallingly ugly hat. I imagine that the rest of these boxes contain similar headgear. This is a waste of time."

I shrugged and set the box aside, agreeing with his assessment of the hat but not of how we were spending our time. "We need to be sure we've looked everywhere," I said sensibly. "Besides, what else do we have to do with our time this afternoon?"

Severus shot me a sidelong glance and the heat of it drove a shiver of desire straight to my groin. "I could think of a few things," he said, and his voice had acquired a seductive purr.

I must admit that suddenly I, too, had no difficulty thinking of better things to do, and my thoughts must have been plain on my face because in the next instant, Severus tossed the box in his hands aside unopened, closed the bedroom door with a gesture, and had me pinned to the wall as his lips captured mine in a searing kiss.

I quickly found myself quite lost in the demanding heat of his mouth. His hands, never idle, slid under my jumper and began to trace a warm path first across my chest, then down over my abdomen to the hardening bulge in my jeans. I moaned into his mouth as he opened my fly and slid his hand inside to wrap his fingers around my cock, pulling gently, as it grew in response to his touch and my need for it.

I felt my trousers and underwear slide down to pool around my ankles as he caressed my balls and slid one long finger back along the strip of flesh between my cock and my anus. I pulled him closer, one hand clutching the front of his shirt, the other deep in his hair as the blood began to pound rapidly through my veins.

Then suddenly he slid from my grasp and, kneeling in front of me, he took my engorged cock into his mouth and began to suck. I gasped and my knees weakened, my fingers wound through his hair and I moaned once more as pleasurable sensations threatened to overwhelm me.

The next thing I knew, I was on the floor with him beside me. As he continued to lick and suck on my flesh, I somehow got my trembling fingers to work with enough coordination to unfasten his trousers, shove them aside and pull his hardening member free of its imprisoning cloth. I stroked the lovely length of him firmly and felt his body shiver against me. Then I slipped him into my mouth and began to pull him into me as deeply as I could, humming gently. I was rewarded by the swelling of his cock until it throbbed at the back of my throat and the delicious feeling of Severus moaning around my own.

So overwhelmed with sensation, I wasn't sure if it took an hour or only a moment more before we came together, spilling out into each other's mouths, our bodies shuddering in concert. We lay gasping beside each other for a long moment, until I twisted myself around so we were face to face, then I smiled into his eyes and said, "You're right. This was a much better use of our time."

He chuckled lightly and I smiled to hear the lovely low sound of his amusement. That Severus now felt comfortable enough with me to actually laugh in my presence made me happier than I had words to express.

"I thought you might agree with me," he said softly. He rolled onto his side and threw an arm across my shoulders, pulling me against him, and the two of us simply lay there together until we'd caught our breath and our rapidly beating hearts had resumed their regular rhythms.

Finally we both got up, adjusted our clothes and cleaned the lingering stickiness from our bodies. Then I moved back to the closet to get another box from the shelf.

Severus sat down on the edge of the bed and said, "You won't find anything in those boxes other than ugly hats that no one will ever wear again."

"Perhaps not," I responded as I took another box down from the shelf. "But this is the only room in the house we haven't searched. We might as well do a thorough job of it."

"Oh, very well," he reluctantly agreed as he rose and came forward to pick up the box he'd cast aside earlier.

It was in the last box on the shelf that we found them. Under a peacock feather bedecked hat that was marginally less awful than most of the others was a small tissue-wrapped bundle tied with faded green ribbon. I took it out of the box and laid it on the writing desk to unwrap. Inside were three letters addressed to Audra Sparling in a strong, masculine hand, a yellow edged Muggle photograph of a very young Miss Sparling standing next to a tall, slightly older man with a moustache, and a fragile clipping from a Muggle newspaper.

"Mementos of her Muggle lover, no doubt, but hardly a treasure," Severus said.

"I'm sure they were a treasure to her." I said as I picked up the newspaper clipping and examined it. "Though a painful one," I added as I realised that the clipping was of a wedding announcement for the marriage of Richard Holmes to a Clara Shaw. The printed photograph that accompanied the notice showed the same man who'd been standing so happily next to Audra Sparling in the other picture, now standing beside a totally unfamiliar woman as they both posed in formal wedding attire.

I handed the clipping to Severus and picked up one of the letters. As I slid the letter out of its envelope and read through it, I heard Severus sigh. "So her Muggle lover married someone else, did he? Perhaps it was just as well."

"Why do you say that?" I asked as I held up the letter. "This is a love letter and I'll wager the others are as well. Clearly he loved her as much as she did him. Under those circumstances, why do you think it was better that he married someone else?"

"Because marriages between Muggles and Wizards don't tend to be happy ones. Muggles always end up resenting their magical partners for the things they can do that Muggles can't."

I knew he was speaking through the unhappy experience of his parent's marriage, but I also knew it wasn't always like that and felt compelled to say so.

"Not all Muggles resent the magic of Wizards. My mother was a Muggle, and she and my father had a very happy marriage until..." I faltered for a moment before finishing. "...until I was bitten."

"Did your mother blame the magical world for foisting such a fate on her son?" he asked in a tone that clearly said I was proving his point.

I shook my head. "No. Actually, it was my father who placed blame and that was only on himself. He'd run afoul of Fenrir Greyback and, to get back at my father, the bastard inflicted the curse on me, but my mother never blamed my father, or the wizarding world in general, for any of it."

Severus looked shocked. "Your being bitten... it was deliberate? Planned, I mean. Greyback specifically sought you out?"

I nodded. "Yes."

"I had no idea. I knew Greyback was a particularly nasty and callous monster, but I always assumed that your turning was just... blind fate. That you were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"Oh, I was that all right, but from what I subsequently learned, he'd waited for me through several full moons before I was unlucky enough to stray into his path. He was determined to get me. Whether it took months or years, he would have found me eventually. And he was very careful to be sure that I lived. My death wouldn't have served his purpose nearly as well as my turning did."

Abruptly I tried to bring the conversation back to Audra Sparling's failed romance, I didn't like the look of horror and pity I saw in Severus's eyes. It made me uncomfortable. The last thing I wanted from Severus was pity over something that was over and done years ago.

"I'll bet Hester knows more about what happened to Miss Sparling. We should ask her about these." I brandished the letter.

Severus nodded slowly and finally turned his gaze away from me and back to the brittle clipping he still held in his hand. "If you want... I suppose it won't hurt to ask her."

xoxox xoxox xoxox xoxox xoxox

We found Hester in the kitchen busy with her dinner preparations and not very pleased to be interrupted, though she was too polite to say so. When I handed her the things we'd found in the hat box, she sank down into a chair at the table and sighed as she looked at the still picture of her former mistress and her one time love.

"She was so happy back then, but it all came to sadness in the end," she said with a shake of her head.

Severus and I sat down across the table from her. "Minerva, the lady who had lunch with us, knew Miss Sparling back when they were both at school," I said gently. "She said that Miss Sparling left school without finishing her seventh year, was the man she's pictured with the reason?"

Hester nodded. "Yes, Richard Holmes. She met him the summer before her seventh year when she went to spend some time with a girlfriend from school. The girls must have gone into Muggle London because that's where she met him. He worked in some shop, I think. She fell very hard for him, even snuck away from school and Apparated into London to meet with him. The poor dear was madly in love and was desperate to marry him, but her father found out and put a stop to it."

"How?" I asked.

She frowned, as if even after all this time, the memory made her angry. "He pulled her out of school and locked her up here at home for months, then one day he turned her loose without any warning and handed her this newspaper clipping," Hester pointed to the marriage announcement. "He told her that she'd have to stop being foolish now and marry someone he approved of. Of course, she told him he hadn't won yet and left the house to go and find her Muggle, but Mr Mordecai had won, at least, he'd won that battle. He never really did win the war, not with Miss Audra."

"What had Mordecai done, Hester?" asked Severus.

"He'd done something to Mr Holmes to make him forget all about Miss Audra. She went to him, talked to him, pleaded with him to remember her, but it was no good. He didn't have the faintest idea who she was. As far as he was concerned, he was in love with this other Muggle woman and had never laid eyes on Miss Audra.

"Now Miss Audra knew what her father had done, but she didn't have the knowledge or ability to undo it, so she just came home. She kept an eye on her Mr Holmes from afar, but he seemed happy enough with the woman he'd wed, so she let him be and never spoke of him again. She didn't forget though."

I looked down at the fragile mementos, carefully preserved against the passage of years, and I had no doubt that Audra Sparling never forgot either her lost love or the cruelty of her father. There seemed to be no doubt that singular, unhappy episode hung like a pall over the rest of her life, and that thought made me sad. What would make a father care so little for the happiness of his child? It was something that I, thankfully, had never had to endure, and that made me feel fortunate.

"She didn't speak to her father for months afterwards," said Hester, a slightly hard edge had crept into her tone. "Eventually she gave that up, but there was always a rather cold stiffness between them. Very formal, you know, as if they were almost strangers. In some ways they were two of a kind, both stubborn to the core. Eventually he made a good match for your grandmother." She nodded to Severus.

"But he never could get Miss Audra to consider marrying anyone after that. You wouldn't believe the number of well connected wizards he paraded through here to try to spark her interest, but she wouldn't even talk to most of them."

Hester shook her head. "Oh, the arguments they used to have, it made me want to hide under the bed and never come out. It all came to naught though. She vowed to remain a spinster until she died, and she followed through on it. It remained a bone of contention between them until Mr Mordecai died. He might not have been so stiff-necked about it if his son had lived, but Mr Arcturus died when he was little more than a babe, so Mr Mordecai only had the girls to control. He did his best to make things go the way he wanted, but he met his match in Miss Audra, yes he did."