Chapter 10 'Shall I assume I am blackmailed?'

Eve had long maintained an unorthodox relationship with sleep. This fact was not widely known. Her sense was that most people assumed she was as fortunate in that regard as she'd been in birthright— and, to be fair, the two did so often coincide. Unharried by the need to impress or to hold down a job, the child of wealth basks in sleep. Morning is for her a span of misty golden languor punctuated by inconsequential choices she can afford to fret too much about: brooch or pearls, turban or tiara, excavating from a stubborn mirror the most flattering angles of her jaw, her neck, the help arriving on slippered feet behind steaming trays of coffee and crumpets, OhhelpmeMaryIcan'tdecide…

This image did not quite align with Eve's upbringing, though she was irrefutably a child of wealth. No one who ever saw where she grew up could deny it.

Wroughthford Hall was a manor house in east Anglia raised in the 1650s by the great grandfather of her great-great grandfather's great-great grandfather. Even then it was built upon the foundation of a stone and timber residence erected some four-hundred years prior by the first of the historic Wrens, Geoffrey the Miraculous, whose charm for reversing cataracts in magical eyes gained the family its initial fortune. Set square on the highest point of 5,000 gently graded acres, Wroughthford was a becolumned red brick immensity layered in arcades, shadowed by pilasters and crowned with parapets. How many hours had Eve and her sister Lilith spent wandering the maze of yew hedge, only infrequently succumbing to the temptation to blast their way out with magic? What was the rush? Outside was preferable to in.

In was an entirely different weather system: full of quiet and people and pressure, the cast of characters ever changing according to customs impenetrable to the twins. A young man alights from a chaise led by a team of huffing stallions. He is fair-haired, broad-shouldered and poised, impeccably attired in the latest fashion. She and Lilith have been packaged to the entrance to greet him, whoever he is. He smiles vaguely. Her mother says, 'Girls, you remember your brother Amherst?'

And this sort of thing happened all the time. After a strategic marriage in the 1790s merged two of the premier families of wizarding healers, the Alysser-Wren clan developed into a thriving self-contained statelet. Brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles shifted through Wroughthford in a perpetual mix: some brothers older than some uncles, sisters indistinguishable from aunts, cousins ubiquitous and unplaceable. Arthur and Alice were matchless breeders, but the twins had been late to the party: Eve first and Lilith seven minutes later on a cold April in 1841, more than a decade since their last surviving addition. And if it'd been a boisterous house at some point, as it seems it must've, lively with children, crisscrossed with their energy and noise, the years intervening had tipped the scales towards the mostly silent, severe authority of her mum and dad. Accepting the rare but not unheard of incident in which Alice's coterie of hounds made an escape into human premises, at Christmas Wroughthford Hall was as hushed and orderly as a Gringotts. At least they had each other.

Days were for outside: the yew hedge maze, the greenhouses, gardens and bowling. The twins held hands, climbed trees, raced, squabbled, played Dragons against Maidens, foraged, spied, explored, hid and sought, got lost, rescued each other, ate what the earth rendered up. They pricked their fingers with rose thorns and made rash vows. They decorated each other with garlands. When they had to they faced the indoors side by side, inseparable at the weekly low tea Alice insisted they join and at every gathering they could not wiggle free of, though on the whole their distance in age from the gravitational bulk of the family and nearness to each other afforded the duo a kind of natural privacy: a pair of tiny sistered moons orbiting at great remove a dense internal cluster.

As lawless was the outside the inside was ruled. Eve had virtually no interaction with the nominal king, Lord Arthur, who was fifty on siring the twins. To her eyes he was an elderly bald gentleman with a paunch, delicate hands he fussed over, lavish taste in dressing gowns, and an old-fashioned meerschaum pipe carved in the image of Mungo Bonham perpetually sprouting from the thicket of his silver whiskers. The most she ever saw of him was when he'd sit for a portraitist in the Great Hall under all the other portraits. 'Lilith, is it?' he'd prompt.

'Yes, daddy?' her sister would say.

'But I wasn't talking to you. You're not staring.'

'Oh, then no. That's Eve.'

'Eve?'

'Yes, daddy?'

'Do quit gawking, dear.'

And then spiriting the twins away would come some faceless indefatigable servant, machines of knees and waists and paddling hands that nudged them clear of whatever peace could not maintain in their presence for a moment longer…

The silence that infused the house emanated from Arthur but was enforced by these tireless machines—common mudblood ilk mainly, the heirs of servitude in Wroughthford much as the children they looked after were the heirs of an outlandishly profitable tradition of healing. Oh the Alysser-Wrens had their share of house elves, too: a troupe of them lived and toiled in the cellars and had done since Geoffrey's time. Eve remembered still—indeed, could not forget—a raid she and Lilith conducted on their turf one autumnal midnight, wild with nerves only barely contained. Down in the dankest recesses of the house, where it was impossible to imagine the lofty arches of the Great Hall above or the cavernous solarium brilliant with light, they found and cracked open the littlest door in a slimy stone wall and jostled for a peek and glimpsed there in horrifying gulps of vision a numerous family of elephant-eared desiccated leather dolls sitting round a table the size of a shield, gumming soup from wooden spoons and giggling…

But house elves had lost a pinch of prestige in the rich 1800s, and all the great houses were more and more dependent on human labor. This, Eve had been given to understand, was a boon to wizardry's lower classes, who, before service, had had scarce few reliable aboveboard options available to them that were not already monopolized by legacy family businesses. Service was a way to recover and ultimately lend a sort of polish to a flotsam of morally and financially impoverished mudbloods who'd otherwise become street hooligans, confidence men and gypsies; precisely the sort of miscreant that had given wizardry a black eye in Muggledom for centuries—which did not go unnoticed by those occupying the highest rungs of magical society.

In fact, what was happening among the upper crust of Muggledom was very much the sort of thing Wroughthford paid attention to. The doings of Muggle swells was so natural a backdrop to their daily life that it came as a harsh reality of Hogwarts when, in Eve's first year, she realized society there gave it hardly a first thought, much less a second. No one seemed to realize at all the import of the immaculate bespoke white gown she wore to Sorting, though it absolutely set her apart from the rest of her class, hugger mugger in their anonymous sables or hopeful Slytherin greens, their ill-fit hand-me-downs and awkward dressings-up. Never mind the superlative cut of her dress and its enchanted white glowing: they sniggered at her. 'I am here to marry my house,' she explained. But they didn't know or didn't care that Victoria had turned weddings white in 1840, and in this catastrophe her isolation was perfect, because Lilith was dead.

Like ailments had done since as long as they could remember, the sickness bloomed in both of them simultaneously—just after their 10th birthday. Eve remembered—again, she could not forget—the pivotal moment: panting under the oak tree that was Coven, spotted with leafy afternoon light, bickering over who'd reached it first, the dispute swallowed up in a silence of mutual searching: twins finding something in each other's faces. 'But you're so red!' they said at the same time, dissolving into laughter at the same time, laughter resolving at the same time into wracking pains in their bellies… Together they vomited under some shrubbery and then went limp with weirdness over each others tongues, which both had just the look and stubbly character of a strawberry's rind.

Together they were put to bed, their daily routines canceled, their lives paused. Together they were subjected to the best magical healing galleons could buy. Together they watched Wroughthford grind to a halt round their sickroom. Alice, an incurable socialite forever encircled by a pack of enormous canines, banished the dogs and quit the rounds to throw herself into the care of her littlest girls. Arthur gave them the attention of his lithe, fastidious hands, his wand of willow with its core of unicorn hair, the supple command held in his fingers that they'd never had cause to suspect. Would they have known, absent the Fever, that for medical emergencies he dispensed with his pipe? That he hummed while he worked?

The rash appeared on them both in the same formation. It would've been hard to take otherwise. This way they could show each other what their backs looked like. On the thinking that natural light was a scourge to illness, their sick beds were wheeled into the Solarium.

At night they'd both blink awake the same instant and start talking. Moonlight gushed through the wall of mullioned windows, lit in pale rectangles the indoor garden and wickerworks and each other. This was a first. Before the Fever they'd slept soundly, unmoving, as habitual in their ways as wind-up toys. After, they claimed the witching hours, and substituted for the freedom of the outside the singular solitude of deep night.

But the twins in the solarium in the small hours were not the same girls who gallivanted about the twelve-acre gardens. These were a close, confiding pair, given to violent spasms of jealousy and rage, intimacies exchanged shudderingly and through tears, laughter—when it came—never perfunctory or sarcastic, but always riotous, liberating, anarchic.

Feverish, rashy, twins, and ten!

Then one night when she woke up, her strawberry tongue chattering, her soul laden with words that needed spilling, Eve found she'd risen alone. The body in the bed next to hers was still and soundless, and ever would be.

୫

'Merlin's beard, Eve. And you've been doing this late night vigil ever since?'

They were seated next to each other on the bench in the back yard overlooking the Black Lake. The sun was just winking up over the horizon. Snow blanketed the visible world. She was in a nightgown and wellies, he the full attire of an elderly bloke, including cane, false beard, humpback, and Hat That's Seen Better Days. He was no longer surprised to see her translate a careful toke from his pipe into a series of expert rings, one shot through the last. They were bracketed on all sides by floating balls of fire that had kept the chill off throughout her narration.

She gave him back the pipe. 'Every night,' she said.

There was something he wanted to know, but politesse urged against it.

Instead he said, 'I'm sorry.'

'Actually I believe I'd just turned in when you went down to make breakies for the house the day you vanished. I heard you tip-toe down the stairs.'

'What do you do, if you don't mind my asking?'

'Study, mostly. At the big table or in the parlor. Write mother. Write friends. Practice magic. Find something to nibble on. Sometimes I am disobedient and rather than be the least bit productive just toss and turn in bed…' Her voice trailed off and Lovegood imagined the internal monologue of the bereaved twin, frustrated by insomnia. Or could it be dialogue? 'Do you want to know the most scandalous thing I do?'

'Desperately.'

'Not often, but every now and then, I take a turn about town.'

'You don't.'

'I am Empress of Hogsmeade at ten after four in the morning—which is concretely the most remote hour of any day.'

'I believe you.'

'There are more itinerant and vagabond among us than we like to acknowledge, you know, Lovegood. When it's cold they herd together to sleep like sea lions. Even children. Muggles call them street arabs.'

'Is that so?'

She nodded importantly. 'Much is veiled to he who closes his eyes to the night.'

It seemed impossible that she was the same person he'd interacted with his first days at Shambhala. That woman was so delicate, so self-absenting. He decided that brown-eyed Lovegood might take a page from this reinvented Eve, and be new himself. 'I must say,' he spoke testingly, his voice a cat's paw proposing an imagined lunge, 'I hardly recognize you from the Eve I met at the beginning of term.'

Her eyes and lips narrowed knowingly. 'I am never myself at beginnings. This year's especially was fraught. Slow to accustom to new people: that's me, but I always do come round in the end. By the time Peter and Marta left we were right chums each. Then, in one poke, they're both gone, two entirely new people are in the house—three counting the Headmaster—and I'm Senior Chief! I'm sure you can sympathize with my plight.'

'I can, of course.'

'In truth it's your fault I came out of my shell so quickly. Don't look crestfallen; you'll like taking this rap.'

'Let me guess: the crisis of my disappearance…'

'Just so. It was no time for the Senior Chief to withdraw and lick her wounds. No time either for the Empress of Ten After Four. As soon as it was clear we had a problem, I had to take charge. The nightly vigils became all about how can we find Lovegood. Do you mind?'

The pipe again. He ceded it. She wiped the stem on the hem of her nightgown, then clenched it between her perfect white teeth. Within the bowl orange flared hot in the draw of her breath and vented up onto her face: that long alabaster face. It had seemed for the better part of her story a piece of the moon, wreathed in hair so fine that in the darkness it was more assumed than seen. The pipe bled notes of apple and ginger into the frozen air.

'So I suppose there's poetic justice in my finding you tonight, how I did. Such a fright you gave me coming up from the cellar! Whatever were you doing down there?'

In actual fact, Lovegood had no idea. Whatever he'd done had slid into the vacancy of his damaged brain. But he extemporized what might, for all he knew, be the truth: 'I'd left a bit of a mess on the third step. Just wanted to set things back how they'd been.'

She gave over the pipe. 'In disguise.'

'Y-yes.' But for a cursory once-over and a raised eyebrow there in the kitchen, she hadn't yet remarked on his disguise. 'Actually I was completing it,' he realized. 'The cane, you know, and overcoat. And this bit.' He indicated the pipe.

'Because, even though you only just found us again, you're leaving us.'

Instead of answering, he tried another toke. It seared his throat like sprayed fire and his eyes and nose sprung with liquid.

'No coughing this time,' Eve noted, 'that's an improvement!'

In agreement he issued a strangulated sort of partial guffaw permeated with expectorant.

Things being equal, the smoking was the least persuasive aspect of his costume.

She sighed. 'All right then, Lovegood. It's a Chief's prerogative, and I don't suppose it's for forever. Where are you going?'

'Ollivanders.'

'Bit early,' she said.

'Not if you only want to talk to the bloke who sleeps there.'

'Your man Gerry, is it?'

Now he did cough, a residual of smoke blended with fresh surprise. 'Eve, you astonish me.'

'Did you not know that Ollivanders have all the best gossip? And that society types eat gossip like tea cakes? I've been on Gerry's case since France.'

He couldn't help himself. 'What do you know about him?'

Smugness fit her. 'Well, it's all second-hand, but Beauxbatons I correspond with say he cut quite a rug during his time there. Always a different girl on his arm, that sort of thing. They say that, from a very precocious age, he was hardly ever seen in the company of boys.'

'Is that so?'

'And yet he never did make it stick with any of the girls; didn't even seem to want to… And as he got older he was rather less than ignored by the boys…'

'What does that mean?'

'They were hostile to him.'

'Because he is an Englishman,' Lovegood proposed. 'Of course he'd be unpopular. Especially if the French girls cared for him and he—'

'Showed them no respect,' Eve cut in. 'No doubt you're right. What business do you have with him? Does your baton need attention?'

'What? No!' He colored. 'No it's, it's another thing entirely.'

He felt something leave his hand and by the time he'd looked she was puffing the pipe again, ruminating. When next she spoke it was with a candor so relaxed and shocking he felt in an access of feeling what it was to be a twin in conversation— as though his presence wasn't required to nevertheless be taken for granted. 'If you're on the Brindlestick enigma and avenging McKinnon, why futz about with Gerry Ollivander? How deep a chap is this Linus Lovegood?'

But he'd embarrassed himself and could not abide remaining in the wreckage of their discussion. He stood.

'Are we finished already? After I've bared my soul?'

'Don't fret, Eve, you were right about it's not being for forever, I think. I'll be back.'

'Shall I keep the pipe?'

'I think that's best, don't you?'

He tromped through the snow, making for Hogsmeade. Morning had sharpened into a grey clarity. She'd stood to see him off: a silhouette against the backdrop of the black lake, a sylph. On second, third, fourth thought, he turned and asked the question: 'Do you ever see her?'

Her head angled up and a sequence of vague hoops parted from her fully formed and rose, expanding into the morning sky. She said, 'Get to know me better and maybe I'll tell you.'

୫

Lovegood added Get to know Eve better to his mental itinerary, an entry that was at least uniquely concerned with future matters. Everything else he wanted to do was mossy with past—either the very recent or the deeply historical. So he looked forward to this new thing. He'd been convinced they weren't going to be friends. Had felt queasy about it. She was the odd one in the group, the subject they all had to work around. Now he'd filled that role.

He turned to note the tracks he'd made in the snow on High Street. The left sole solitary and the right with the knob of his cane more or less aligned. His shadow splayed over the white field of the ground and he paused a moment. The hump he'd done with socks, going for subtle. Set in snow, the house was a lovely picture: black and white, still with sleep. He breathed deeply. His magically enlarged proboscis tingled with winter. He sighed it out and resumed.

His vanishing had defined everyone, each in different ways: Phineas Black found Shambhala and Coyne; Coyne let herself be happy with someone; Eddy hopped the border fence Poppy'd put up; Poppy helped him down it; Lovegood and Eve switched places in relation to the rest of the chiefs. But whereas Eve had been forced out of isolation, and that public turn had proved her redemption, he appeared set on fixing his problem by returning to its source.

This wasn't lost on him. Since coming back, with the exception of a handful of meals, he'd largely confined himself to the attic. (Moving into the 5th floor room was on offer, of course, but didn't feel right.) He spent most of his time exploring the ins and outs of magical cosmetics. It was less than ideal that Eve, upon their near collision in the dark predawn kitchen, had recognized him almost at once, but that she didn't faint or alarm the house with a scream at the horror of his grotesquerie he chalked up to victory.

Fierce erratic magic to handle, disguise: an instant too long or short in pronunciation, a glottal too stopped or plosive too pneumatic and the eyes went from artfully seasoned to freakishly decayed, from gently tired to mummified corpse. Meanwhile, dyeing the youthful blush from one's own skin with colovaria took more courage than skill, perhaps especially for someone intimately familiar with the dangers inherent in pointing wands at one's face…

Wrinkles he just couldn't get right: they were either shallow uniform grooves, like seashells had, or deep, random trenches, like gouge marks. Hats and shadows would have to do much of the heavy lifting.

Finally, it proved easier to conceal his young mouth in false whiskers than magically sour it, while mild enlargement charms did for his nose and ears (carefully modulated, with dozens of hysterical iterations along the way).

And they'd not been empty hours: it was ghoulishly addictive to age one's self before a looking glass. At one point, during the skin blanching, he'd tweaked the spell such that the distance between his wand and face determined his face's hue and elasticity: infinitesimal degrees of color slurped out of him as he retracted his wand. It seemed wrong that he couldn't feel the change, the leeching of all that vitality, the decades' worth of attrition in the flesh, or for that matter its inrushing return as he reeled the years back in…

But then he didn't feel it out in the world, either, in the days that rubbed at him one after the next. Each moment was normal, basically, status quo ante, and one only saw patterns when stepping back to examine great blocks of status quos at a time. He bumped into someone.

A lump of snow fell on him.

'I beg your pardon!' he said, forgetting to do the old man voice he'd practiced.

But it was a birch tree.

Well, there he goes, screwing himself so deeply into his own mind, his own thoughts...and what even about?

'I was thinking on...faces?' he said aloud.

Now he was addressing the birch. He brushed snow from his overcoat and adjusted the fit of his trousers. Dress up like a dotty old timer and see what it gets you…

Going it alone again—that's what he'd been thinking on. Whereas Eve used his vanishing as a springboard into the life of the house, he was using it as yet another in a series of springboards away. Would he never learn? And if he didn't, how long could he possibly expect to go before confusing trees for people and embarking on conversations with them became a regular part of his day?

'Excuse me,' he said, moving on.

He chuckled: embarking.

It was a handsome birch. Naturally handsome species, the birch, with its papery white skin. But a rare handsome sort too, that one. Even rid of its leaves for the season. Amazing how a tree shifts nutrients from way down deep in the soil back up to the top through the pump of the roots to the discrete deposits of fallen leaves. Possibly he'd spent some time in the attic reading up on trees, as well as working on becoming old. But amazing all the same, what a system each one was, each not merely perfuming the air but building the air around itself. And so apparently quiet—'apparently' because who could say, mightn't they be making some variety of animal noise but at a pitch too low or cadence too glacial for people to hear? A purr, say, like that of a cat? Or the white send of a river, of waves—could not a great forest have its own distinct call, lapping at the earth as it roamed slowly about? He thought of the shhhhhrrrr of a big canopy of leaves in a breeze. Was that the leaves talking or the wind, or were they married?

Mountains and forests and rivers don't hear us at all, he thought.

Actually there were birches everywhere, now that he looked: each one stark and proud and outrageously handsome. Lovegood found himself inclining his head to them, one after another—so often it made better sense to remain genuflected, like a monk in constant prayer.

He did so and found his way mentally into the vast unseen opera underway below. Imagine the root systems! Did neighbors defer to each other, underground, in the way branches did above? Above, crowns of trees neared but seldom touched each other, shyly, or respectfully. He supposed beneath rather a great enthusiastic sloppy tangling. Blindness would make for indiscriminate bedfellows. Roots would come to anticipate sudden contact. Every encounter to be celebrated, embraced. Imagine if people behaved thus! Maroon any individual in a desert long enough, the occasion of a single fellow traveler would transport him. But look how blasé we are enmeshed in the boggling numerousness of society. The exile's rejoicing at the sight of a stranger would not do at all in Diagon Alley at five of the clock. They'd throw you in the loony bin.

The stately birch, who above ground maintains a careful distance, an elegant reserve, below in damp soil renews its mad soiree with light siphoned from the legendary sky…

He realized he'd stopped. That he'd just halted in the middle of High Street on a snowy Monday morning. Like a nutter. Hogsmeade wasn't alive yet but there were signs. A pair exited Ollivanders. Speech, its meaning sanded away by space.

He'd stopped because trees were everywhere. Sentinels and bunches and troupes and woods. Copses and stands and groves and wildernesses. A smattering of sizes of them put up against the bank of the lightening sky. An array of kinds. Each involved completely in being. Each its own totality of matter quickened with life. Each a unique enterprise derived from common stuff. Not decor, landscaping, stage scenery, but main characters.

From one blink to the next, it was unthinkable to Lovegood that this truth was not universally appreciated. It was so obvious: Earth was for trees.

But then the voices weren't so distant, and glottal by plosive they enfolded him again into the frothing drama of people.

'Worth the wait, ey? Din't I tell ya?'

Lovegood would know Yegga Pilf's voice half-asleep. The boy with whom she'd just emerged from Ollivanders was known to him as well, though he couldn't place him at once. This one was preoccupied with a coin purse that, by all appearances, he'd not possessed for long. 'Is it heavy enough? Is that what ten green weighs?' He held it out to her. 'Does that seem right to you?'

'Zo ya eedgit, don't give it to me!'

Zo would be Alonzo St. John, ringleader of a band of ne'er-do-well traditionals. Lovegood remembered now where he'd seen him on the term's first day, drawing the attention of Rancorous Carpe…

As if he were a light post unlit, they passed on either side of doddering old Lovegood.

'I only mean, is it the whole lot? Would they short me?'

'Could ya blame 'em if they did? Lookit ye: fifth year and can't count ten yer own self? Sure, lad, hand it over, 'twas me took all the real risk in the first place…'

He snatched it back. 'On second thought…'

A green one, Lovegood knew, was a gold galleon. 'Green' for Gringotts. So called for the heads side of the coin, upon which was stamped in profile the bust of whichever goblin helmed the bank at the time of minting.

Their bickering ranged again gradually into incoherence.

Hogwarts' most notorious petty thief and Alonzo St. John? Leaving Ollivanders early on a holiday Monday when no one's around?

With a bag of money?

Oh, Yegga…

୫

It was a clergyman's hat with a soft square crown and a good wide brim for hiding. Who knew how many years of cellar dank it'd absorbed but in winter's sterilizing frost even the wearer ducked the worst of it. And now the wearer ducked behind the obscuring brim into the dusty dimness of Gerry's shop, where he was greeted with a note of false cheer. 'Top of the morning, sir!'

Lovegood turned to close the door behind him. His heart trotted its paces.

He heard planks creak under Gerry's feet: the clerk rises to help, shuffles through his treasury of experience, wonders what manner of transaction this will be.

'Are we quite alone?' Lovegood asked, back still turned.

'Sir…?'

'Is Briar here?'

Which put a quick stop to the squeaking of footsteps.

He turned but didn't remove his hat.

Gerry, taken aback, failed to recognize him; failed to note that the door had been locked.

Lovegood saw that they were indeed alone.

'At first I didn't understand,' he began, settling one hand into the other behind his back and taking a step into the shop. 'But then I thought of the last time I'd seen those two in the same vicinity—at least, the last time I recall. It was the first day of term. You can't have seen this coming, but that day's actually still quite fresh to me, as if it only happened a week ago.'

He started slowly pacing, keeping only a profile to Gerry.

'It was the first day of term and early, before the train, before everything, but already lots of students about. That was a surprise to me—to see how many refused the train. One knew that sort of thing happened, but most people focus on what's in front of them, not what isn't, don't you find? And I always took the train with the rest of the unwashed. Who I saw that morning were so many posh types that disdained public transit for, I don't know, portkeys I suppose? But "Baba" Yegga? She doesn't belong in that group! She belongs in the train. She always takes the train. I know because every year we bet on what she'd nick off the tea trolley.'

Gerry stood still, eyes following him. 'Do I know you, sir?'

'It was sheer chance I spotted her stealing Carpe's wand. Sheer chance. And there was plenty to distract, as I recollect: Porlis Wilder floating into the sky; Professor Perch sprinting across the quad; a fight forming between rival camps… But in the instant it was that particular pack of rising fifth years that always gave him trouble—you shouldn't know them, why would you, but Alonzo St. John's their captain. That was him leaving your establishment just now. He was teasing Elladora Black, I think, or perhaps her friend, the Red Indian. It's almost as if someone orchestrated all that chaos, for precisely that moment. Anyway, I watched Yegga make off with the caretaker's wand. What must her share have been if his was ten galleons?'

'You are mistaken. The lad sold a wand.'

Lovegood paused in his peregrination. 'What kind?'

Gerry's expression froze for an instant. 'Alder.'

'Produce it for me.'

Gerry scowled. Lovegood laughed, commenced his pacing. 'You had to try. Just as, for whatever reason, you felt you had to try for a leg-up on the competition in Paris. Isn't that right? Perhaps because they were making it too expensive to hang your shingle there. Or maybe that's just what Briar told you, seeing as she was the one shepherding you through that process. "Do you know what'll get you sorted, Gerry? There's a wych elm at Hogwarts I've had my unnerving blue eye on for quite some time. Rife with nargles." Isn't that right? I feel I'm slam-bang on the money so far. But help me out from here, would you? Did Yegga steal the tree herself or did Briar help? And where'd you store it these last several months while the heat died down? And where is it now?'

'Monsieur,' Gerry tried a showy laugh, 'who are you? How can I begin to make sense of this absurd plot?'

'Last question, then: was it you who obliviated me in the West Tower or Briar?'

Ollivander stepped back, pale as plaster. 'Lovegood?' he sputtered.

Lovegood winked. 'That's a confession.'

୫

They sat in back of the shop at Gerry's table. Thin light, dusty stacks, unmade cot. The older boy sniffed his tie, shrugged, used it to wipe clean a pair of teacups, then decanted into each a finger of Ogden's Old. He was aiming for unruffled, Lovegood saw, but his hand shook as he raised the glass.

'To your health,' Gerry said.

They downed them.

'Lovegood,' Gerry's eyes shone—from the drink's fiery return, no doubt—but his grin appeared true. 'It's unbelievable to see you. But you look very, very bad.'

'Tell me what happened, Gerry.'

The next five minutes he spent learning about the vagaries of the French bureaucracy. 'You wouldn't believe the briberies required. Or you would? I don't know. It seems you've changed.' A quicksand of vendor associations, area busybodies, politicos, illicits and brotherhoods of every kind needed a cut to make way for the foreign entrepreneur. Out of the woodwork they came, Lovegood, mon dieu! 'And this is not to mention at all the face of the company, the bastard my father himself!

'Who, it is his fault entirely I am Frenchified, have spent half my life in France. It is he who has said "Gervaise, it is your destiny to plant the family business in France." But now that I am ready, what does he do? Obstructs me, Lovegood. "Stay in England, Gervaise. Flit from one shop to the next whilst I fly broomsticks all over the globe alongside beguiling heiresses." Mind the inventory, he tells me. Learn from Briar. Prepare us for tax season. Training par excellence, he says. For what? For running British Ollivanders, O.K. But France? "That can wait, Gervaise." Meanwhile the owls come in and go out, come in and go out, so frequently they get to know one another. He burdens me with questions, tasks, updates. "It occurs to me Gervaise the sycamore haul from America's going to need another few seasons. You can't have it. Oh and the German spruce stock wasn't as promised. Not that either." I say Father, they have picked my pockets clean already. I'll be lucky to open up a shop selling matchbooks! The owls are nodding at each other as they pass. Romance maybe is in the air. He says "Jolly good experience it'll be. Now no more for lack of time. Beguiling heiresses, et cetera." The bastard my father, Lovegood: I could strangle him.'

'So you decided to boost the wych elm.'

'Yes yes, stay on topic, you are right. Forgive me. Another for you? No? Just for me then. The lubrication, it helps.' He made another finger of firewhisky disappear. 'Merde, am I open?'

'I locked the door.'

'That's Lovegood, always thinking! All right. Where were we. Ah, yes, it is as you imagined, my friend. One day, me and Briar are looking at each other here in this room, just like this:' his shoulders sunk with exhaustion, his eyes drooped, he raised the cup halfway to his mouth and stared dead-eyed at Lovegood, then snapped back: 'Just like that, Lovegood: we are so tired. And Briar says "I know how to give you a leg up in Paris." '

How much was real and how much had Lovegood fed him? He neither knew nor especially cared. This wasn't the part that mattered.

According to Gerry, they sniffed around enough to learn of Yegga Pilf's reputation, got in touch with her over the summer and laid their plans. On the day in question Briar took a swift stroll across the quad and Pilf met her at the elm with the caretaker's wand, right on schedule. With the attention of the few people on campus all gathered elsewhere, the Barker plunged an excavating spell into the earth around the tree, then floated the whole thing—complete with a root ball the size of a small house—inch by inch into the air. Then she transfigured it.

Lovegood was awed. 'You can transfigure an entire tree? And with someone else's wand?'

'She can, Lovegood: Briar! She is the most accomplished Barker in the world!'

'Into what?'

Examining him, Gerry settled back. 'For this she chose a younger version of itself. These magics have a way of recommending themselves. It is easier to turn back the clock than to change the clock into a pamplemousse, or something.'

'Where is it?'

Mum, he pointed down, indicating a basement.

Lovegood whispered, 'Is she there?'

Gerry spoke normally, 'It's doubtful, but she does come and go quickly and as she pleases. And down there is where the work takes place.'

'Can you describe it to me? As I remember it, you said you can only harvest magical wood once it's dead.'

'I would never have said "only". Perhaps most natural, simplest—something like this. For this is the case. Barkers like Briar, they have their ways. They sniff and feel and think and take decisions. Like a farmer considering his old sow, projecting menus. But as it happens, the excision of a tree so many decades established is a mortal blow, and the elm's been dying faster every day.'

'Ah,' said Lovegood, strangely disturbed.

'She undoes the transfiguration a part at a time, conducts an autopsy of sorts as the thing goes. It is planning, mostly, at this stage, because it takes many, many months for a thing as old as that to finally shuffle the mortal coil, as the man said.' The bottle of Ogden's Old wasn't as full as he'd hoped. He shook the last few drops into his cup. 'Mind you,' he said to Lovegood, 'we don't water it.' He drank.

Lovegood was glad the bottle was empty. 'And my bicycle?'

'Pardon?'

'A levitating bicycle. Lashed to it.'

This took Gerry a moment. 'You must forgive me. I have never heard of it.'

'All right then.' He crossed his leg slowly. His wand lay on the table. 'We've come to the nub of things.'

Gerry took a short breath. His fingers tattooed his leg, the table, tugged the lapel of his robe away from his throat. 'One day, early September, she stumbles in. What, le déjeuner? Lunch-time? The Pilf. Breathless. Panicking. "A student heard too much. He ran away but I got him and now I don't know what to do. He's at the bottom of the West Tower. Stunned and rendered unseen but you must help." "Who?" I say. "Who have you mistreated so?" Even though…why do I ask? What can it matter to me? Who at Hogwarts do I know? "It is Linus Lovegood. One of the smartest Ravenclaws in the whole school," she says—I am in earnest, my friend—"smartest in the school but I got him nonetheless." She is proud, you see. While I, I am aghast.'

He was such a good storyteller, Lovegood couldn't tell the true from the embellished. At every turn Gerry's face did what it ought—what his own would in the same circumstances. Even the blood under it, the colors, the skewings of his mouth and angles of his eyes. He kept from subtly checking to see if his story was landing except when doing so didn't strain credulity. Lovegood wouldn't testify to the veracity, but of the actor's performance he'd brook no criticism.

' "Take me there!" I say, and she does, as quick as she can without us both looking like fruitcakes. I—I don't know why—but I led her into the Tower, as though it was my crime scene to reveal and not hers. And of course you were nowhere to be seen until…' He thrust his right foot forward and made a sound effect Lovegood recognized from Quidditch. Gerry smiled at him with felt regret. 'My second time on campus in the new semester, both times colliding with you, mon ami.'

With a pang of memory the mystery ailments he'd had on surfacing from obliviation returned to him. Sore shoulder, bumped back of the head, soft ribs. He'd been so tight coming out of the four months incantatum, then so disoriented, he hadn't noticed they'd healed.

'And anyway, what is there to say…' Was Gerry crying? 'I obliviated you. I took your memory. I tried—' yes, hard now, hiccoughing with tears, 'to be gentle. We safeguarded the room, then I brought you back, reappeared you. You are—' he blew his nose into his tie, '—very peaceful looking. I open your eyes. But you look very confused. I close them again.' Once more into the tie. 'Oh, Lovegood! Just the night before was it not? The Dark Forest? Uncle Quercus? Merlin's grave?' He brought his fists to his eyes so his tears were shunted around them. 'And now I must do this thing. I tell myself,' a sniff and a laugh and the crying subsided, 'it's a good thing she found me and not Briar. I am much more considerate, you know.'

A more thoroughgoing Englishman might wipe away the tear tracks. Not Gerry.

Gerry eyed the emptied bottle of firewhisky and sniffed, adjusted himself in his chair. 'So I carved this memory out of you, Lovegood. Carefully. While Pilf kept watch, I carved. At this particular sort of thing Beauxbatons in general excel. And the job I did I believe was très magnifique. But I am ashamed and will do whatever I must to repay you. Whatever I must. But I did do it.'

Lovegood took a moment. 'Where was I in the room when you arrived?'

'Eh? Oh, she had pressed you up against a wall. Out of the way. Couldn't have someone tripping over you while she ran for help. A child hurrying from school for lunch—they could've died!'

'But I was found at the foot of the stairs.'

'Naturally, I moved you. You had to be found. You could've stopped breathing otherwise. You could've died paralyzed and invisible! The goal was not the end of Lovegood! A safe, intact, unpermanently hurt Lovegood, thinner by a pound of memory, that is what we needed. What my future depended on, even! Can you imagine how I felt when you went missing?'

Lovegood leaned forward. 'No.'

Gerry glared at him. 'Well, imagine it.' He sat back, looked around, examined his cuffs.

Lovegood chuckled. Doffed his hat. Angled forward, hat in hand. Considered the rug underfoot. Chuckled some more.

Behind the anvil of his old-man's nose, between the obscenely large wings of his ears, beneath the mussed bed of grey hair and sitting forward with the clergyman's hat clenched between his magically aged fingers, he must have made a bizarre portrait of a young bloke in love.

'Tell me something, Gerry.'

But having confessed to him, his mark was now suspicious. 'Something more?'

'Did Briar ever sniff something peculiar about me?'

Knowing flashed in the blue-grey eyes. 'Right after she met you. You and your friend, the, uh, counterfeited Coyne, you'd just left. And Briar said: That one has tampered with the root.' Gerry leaned forward on his knees, halving the space between them, blue-grey eyes inches from brown. 'Is that what you mean? She smelled forest magic on you. I don't know how. It was obvious to me, the next night, you didn't know from trees. But then again, didn't you write me about them?'

He was the best liar or the worst. Lovegood couldn't keep the grin from his face.

But Gerry was losing patience with him. 'Mon ami, tell the truth. Am I done for? Will you turn me in?'

Lovegood laughed. 'I need you to come with me.'

'Fine. Where?'

'Have you ever been to the Stoned Henge? Don't answer right away. Let me tell you what you need to know.

'I've developed a piece of magic I have to do in Wiltshire, but I can't do it alone. There's a man there named Munificent Barnes I think can put me in touch with a piece of furniture, a cupboard they say a man hanged from long ago. If it's got any magic left in it I may be able to solve a very old crime. But I don't want to be Lovegood out there, so it's better I not take one of my known confederates. And it'd be helpful, I think, in the end, to have at my side someone who knows all the gossip—who says "Ollivander" because he's wise to a secret in the same way a Ravenclaw says "Ravenclaw" because he makes a pun. Do we understand each other?'

If Gerry Ollivander had ever acted, he wasn't now. His mannerisms were his own. He thinkingly considered Lovegood. 'Shall I assume I am blackmailed?'

Where is Desire? What access does it have to a person? In an instant it blew into Lovegood and he trembled like a leaf. 'Assume you're free of all that forever. Assume,' he grinned, 'it's all forgotten. Think of this only as a friend asking for a favor.'

A flicker of a smile ran across Gerry's lips. He held out his hand.