Chapter 11 'Stonehenge!'

Because portkeys and the Floo Network were monitored for missing persons, and the prospect of hours on a broomstick in the wintery elements was untenable, and Gerry Ollivander had a paralyzing fear of apparition, they ended up booked on an expensive stagecoach hauled by a team of thestrals, slated for a 9 A.M. passage to Godric's Hollow with lots of stops along the way—one of them Stonehenge. 'We'll consider this a business expense, Lovegood,' Gerry said while clinking coins onto the counter of the Hogsmeade General Post, also known as Bruin Joey's, home and office to the unofficial mayor of the village.

Gerry'd chucked his hunter green robe in favor of a black overcoat and green suit that showed to advantage his long legs and svelte body.

Sitting opposite a low glass divider, Bruin Joey, a paunchy, gummy-eyed fellow with a gin-blossomed beak and elaborate whiskers, took note. 'Lovegood of the Linus Lovegoods, sir? The chap what went missing?' He indicated with a thumb hooked over his shoulder a bulletin board, where Lovegood saw his portrait from the Daily Prophet, upon which someone had thoughtfully scrawled his name.

'Eh, yes,' he said. 'I am Larchmont Lovegood. The chap is a nephew, of sorts.' He was aware Gerry was frozen solid next to him.

What the devil was a nephew of sorts?

'Sad business, that. Oughtn't s'pose he'll show now, ought we? With half the year on?'

He hedged. 'We Lovegoods are a hopeful sort.'

'It would take one, sir. Your tickets. The coach departs at 9 sharp. If you've a mind to, a thestral always likes a pot of beer.'

Gerry swept up the tickets. 'That's something we have in common.'

'Ha ha, quite right, sir! Ha ha. Me too!'

As they filed away, Gerry whispered: 'Won't happen again, Larchmont.'

The stagecoach was driverless but harnessed to a straining network of bridles, bits and blinders that betrayed the outlines of the invisible beasts surrounding a punch bowl of butterbeer sloshed by invisible tongues, vanishing into invisible maws. As they looked on a person anonymously ensconced within a constricting quantity of coats and scarves waddled out and managed with great effort to mount the driver's cab.

'Our cue,' said Gerry.

Lovegood clicked shut his watch. 'Bang on time.'

The side door opened into a spacious interior with two facing benches already seating one apiece. Please don't be anyone I know, thought Lovegood. His luck held: Gerry with a step to his left greeted an affable young witch, while Lovegood settled in across from him alongside an expensively tailored goblin already snoring into his pointy goatee. No sooner had they situated themselves than there came an audible snap of reins and a lurch forward.

He was accustomed to thestral-travel from the ceremonial start-of-year trips from Hogsmeade to Hogwarts. He pulled back several inches of curtain from the window to watch as the village tilted, flattened and miniaturized beneath them. High Street condensed into the central artery of a capillary system empowering the village; the village resolved into an assemblage of chimneys. Clouds sat in tatters amid the soft bed of the Forbidden Forest. Ponds impressive when walking round them melted into glassy ditches aglint in the morning sun, grand lochs dwindled into shimmering pools.

There was an inherent sense to arrangements when pictured from a long view. Human enterprise clung to shorelines, gripped riverbanks, flourished near wildernesses. Vast swathes of land were apportioned to livestock. Castles at varying stages of disuse, erected by Muggles long forgotten, invariably commanded strategic views: of fertile valleys, harbors, likely roads, intersections of waterways.

It became seductive to conceive of civilization primarily as a factory for the conversion of turf and lumber into smoke. Trees became firewood became smoke. Forests became townships became smoke. Logs crowded waters, waters drove mills, mills planed logs into townships, into buildings, into fire.

He closed the curtains. Gerry and the witch were hitting it off.

'Mademoiselle, you ask me to believe that you go now to marry purely on the strength of a reading of cards…never having met the man?'

She was coy, happy, and deeply Scottish. 'Sir, what you describe as madness, I call tradition. Me mam, her mam, her mam, each have wed by the cards, sight unseen.'

'But does it work? Are they good marriages?'

'I didna know me mam's grandmam or da, but they're buried right beside one another, same as her lady daughter and her beau, and me mam ne'er had a sore word to say about them; while for her husband, my dear da, I've naught but sweetness and respect.'

'But how does it work? Where do you find the men?'

She blushed. 'You'll laugh…'

'So what if I do?'

She twinkled. 'They apply.'

He leaned his head back and laughed.

The goblin shifted.

Lovegood worked himself into the corner, found some support for his head, tilted his hat down and closed his eyes.

He awakened to the sound of Gerry shuffling a deck of cards. The sleepy goblin had been traded in for two young men in workaday robes. 'You in, Larchmont?'

He shook his head and assigned himself the task of determining their location. Grassmarket, Canongate, Scott Monument…Edinburgh fell away beneath them: a magnificence of stark, grimy architecture with dots of people crawling all about. A testament to mankind's facility for work. A family alone couldn't plan and raise St. Giles' Cathedral, but give a few score of them a century or two…

Gerry plead ignorant of euchre, dealt whist instead.

Lovegood thought about the fifth house.

What did he know? What could he guess?

Founded by a Bridgit Brindlestick, ostensibly a peer of Rowena Ravenclaw and Salazar Slytherin, et al. Suggested by Nightless Day to be uniquely concerned with 'villains and heroes, evil and good.'

If Ravenclaw was cleverness, Slytherin ambition, Gryffindor courage and Hufflepuff work, what did that leave Brindlestick? What was their claim to the essential human character? What didn't wizardry do today that it once might have? And could it pertain to morality?

We shall abide no gods on High Street…

Does not thy religion forgive lying to persecutors…?

They'd turned a piece of luggage on end for a playing surface. Lovegood paid marginal attention. Gerry and the affable Scots girl opposed the lads from Edinburgh.

Ask any single one of them, What house are you, and odds were they'd answer without hesitation. Even the homeschooled routinely pledged themselves to one of the four. The house was among the first defining elements. And maybe those badges mattered less as a person aged and put down stakes in a society that didn't divide into common rooms, yet still the initial division would have been, in many ways, decisive. On the precipice of adulthood one found one's self where one was after decisions made at younger ages established a course: we set sail under house colors and piece together our lives from mementos of the voyage. And who craved division more than a mob of youth, desperate to differentiate, to know what made them them and not the other? The heat of those brands seer our brains when they're still plastic, and then our brains harden.

The Edinburgh team collected the first six tricks in order, and Gerry, who even Lovegood could see was playing awfully, needled the Scots girl like a big brother. She responded with good-natured glowering. The eldest of the Edinburgh team jingled a mokeskin coin purse in his hand and proposed making it interesting.

Does not thy religion forgive…

Thy religion…

In Henrietta Hewlitt's Yorkshire, Sunday worship brought all the Muggles together. In fact if there were a Muggle corollary to the word Wizardry, it was Christendom, which, as Lovegood had been given to understand, derived from the arresting, if fanciful, notion that a person ('the Nazarene tablemaker', in Lector Darby's words) either descended from or was himself a version of the sovereign author of creation. In Alain Caché's amazing fictions, the Muggles pressed together every week into ornate 'houses of God' to raise their voices in song, bow their heads in prayer, submit to lengthy 'sermons' on virtuous conduct, then join in rituals of pantomimed cannibalism in which, by way of an esoteric magic known only to the priests of the order, the blood and flesh of the tablemaker were transfigured into a light snack.

He inched the curtains back. Below unraveled a road they followed at altitude. On either side of it at graceful distances promontories bulked aloft, their heights blends of pearlescent snow, sheer rock and barren trees, with castles and ruins in abundance. Looking up, Lovegood beheld a high grey sky much trafficked by gauzy clouds the color of wet newsprint.

Darby: We who are unpoliced by gods…

Brood: Submit to a higher power.

Possibly he was overlooking the obvious. Possibly the ancient religion celebrated by Ann Susurro and her followers in Brindlestick was Christianity. Ain't any justice absent our lord, Bryn had said to Nightless Day. Not even you can stand in for Him.

This after all was a time when Oswyn Doddle, Chief of the Wizard's Council, was baptized and 'reborn' as Lord Castlemore. Even today the Christian witch or wizard was not entirely unheard of. Lovegood recalled a family in Catchpole who, very privately, but every week, disguised themselves to attend a Muggle service. The need for explanations—for why anything existed at all, let alone magic—wasn't strictly the purview of Muggles, and Lovegood was passingly aware that Wizardry included among its ranks several philosophies and departments that aspired to provide answers. The Followers of Gove, for instance, who'd created a sort of Adam, or first wizard (the primum maleficus) from dusty, dubious origins in the Mediterranean. Or the shadowy Caladrian Society, a hobbyhorse of crackpots, which allegedly existed to service Muggledom according to the dictates of an undisclosed celestial power… Could it be that simple?

Could Susurro have been a Christ-worshipper responsible for Doddle's baptism? Did Rybel deMille discover her motives, and is that why she killed him?

Commotion at the whist table: Gerry and the bride-to-be had pulled off the improbable, taking seven consecutive tricks to win the match. He divided their winnings happily. Had the carriage a higher ceiling, the Edinburgh eldest might have been on his feet. As it was, his jaw was clenched, his face flush, his voice low and threatening.

Lovegood gazed out the window. Gerry talked them into another round. Double or nothing, the Edinburghers proposed. Lovegood rolled his eyes.

In Newcastle and Gateshead the party momentarily dissolved. Mumbling, the driver sought out a fire to thaw beside. Hangdog and poorer than they ought to have been, the Edinburghers vanished back into their own lives. Lovegood approved of the victorious team's decision to apply their winnings towards beer for the thestrals. He accompanied them to a brewery on the Tyne and then went his own way for a moment.

It was a bustling knot of cities, redolent of dock slime and stagnant water, spanned by three bridges. Lovegood strode first a gently sloping stone one and found himself the target of a strange old Muggle's conversation.

'They're aboot to change this bridge oot, they are,' said the fellow, hobbling next to Lovegood on his own cane. He had the relative length and mass of a preying mantis.

Lovegood recalled that he was a strange old Muggle, himself. 'Are they?'

'Aye, on account of this Armstrong fella Toonside. This bridge is too low for the shippin' he's after, aye.'

'Is that so?'

'They say gan put in a bridge that spins to open like a gate.'

'Like a gate? Fascinating.'

They'd come to an amiable stop at the apex. Newcastle and Gateshead clanked and steamed and horsed all round them, the Tyne a sleepless greenblack whispering beneath. Redlegged kittiwakes wheeled overhead. Scents of manure and horseflesh and fresh bread and old water. Before carrying on his own way, the old man said: 'The Romans did the first bridge, in A Hunderd and Twenty-Two.'

All in all it wasn't difficult to be among Muggles. Massively invested in their own lives, most of them, and habituated by experience to see what they expected to see. Was this different for wizardfolk, or did they too regularly fail to look beyond their own noses?

If one group spent its days among but in hiding from the other, would not the two come naturally over time to diverge in important ways? What a slippery thing it was to puzzle over, for who could say which effects were the consequence of having magic, and which attributable to thousands of years of programmatic secrecy?

On the other hand, was it not likely that an individual Muggle hid himself in plain sight of his kith and kin in precisely the same way that he, Lovegood, hid from his? In which case, was anyone different from anyone else—outside of the extraordinary presence, in a body, of magic?

A family of stolid Liverpudlians (mother and father, daughter, daughter, son, daughter) accompanied them as their southerly course turned west. While the bank of children stared at him across the width of England, Gerry coaxed from the paterfamilias his story in nouns (Christmas visit, magical meteorology, MacPhail, Hufflepuffs, cherry with a core of kneazle whisker). Then from Liverpool to Birmingham they were discomfited by stories from the new passengers, a young married witch and wizard (also Hufflepuffs) who were fleeing their ancestral home on the coast owing to conditions in war-torn America.

Lovegood knew twice as much about the conflict in the former colonies by the time they decamped in Wiltshire. The entire country had come apart. The Northmen were more clearly virtuous, but lots of England's Muggles were dependent on trade with the Southern gentry. When Northmen embargoed the Southern ports, masses of Liverpudlians and indeed whole British industries stacked up out of work. And unemployed Muggles were troublesome Muggles—the worst kind, really. At the first descent of idleness, gangs formed dedicated to the molestation of foreign agents—for it was invariably they who were to blame. And foreignness was so usefully fungible a quality: even after the obvious candidates of skin color, race, sex, language, creed and class, an accent could qualify, a set of ideas, a way of walking. One never need run out of scapegoats. Witchery was of course ever to hand and a favorite of belligerents.

The Scots girl counseled the Hufflepuffs. 'At least you have each other,' she said.

Brood: Everything born deserves mercy.

Having no illusions about his capacity to deceive magical folk, Lovegood kept to himself in the coach. He thought and planned and napped. He wondered if Rupert Brood was a secret Brindlestick—or, more likely, if he would have been, in another time. He tried to imagine a religion for wizards. He tried adjusting to the reality that it hadn't been Brood and Darby tampering with his memory. He thought about what it meant that in many parts of the country down below the search for Linus Lovegood continued. He closed his eyes and saw America smashing itself to bits, heard the crunching repeat of the cannons, the snare drum tattoos in the roil of musket smoke, saw in the fog-shrouded sea the silent iron forms that by dint of their presence alone had scattered witches and wizards an ocean's length away from their familial inheritances.

'Stonehenge!' came the muffled voice of the driver.

Lovegood pulled back the curtains, and through a dazzle of light saw a ring of standing stones dial shadows over Wiltshire. The snow hadn't followed them south.

They landed just beyond the edifice. Not one of the elegantly-dressed Muggles in touring attendance noticed. With hours to spare before sundown, Lovegood decided to attend to a crucial errand. He thanked the driver, bid farewell and good luck to the young Hufflepuffs and agreed with Gerry to meet later at the tavern. The Scots girl he nearly ran over upon turning to go. 'Forgive me, my Lord Larchmont,' she said. 'I didna wish to surprise you.'

'Eh, just Larchmont, my lady,' said Lovegood. Had he even introduced himself?

'I know this is goodbye, with my John waiting in Godric's Hollow, but I felt I had to say: I hope you didna take my reading too seriously.'

'Madam,' said Lovegood, telling the truth, 'I haven't a clue what you're talking about.' He was already used to this.

'Ah, good,' she said, perhaps more relieved by his courtliness than concerned with his amnesia.

'Tell me your name again, please?'

Cheer chased worry from her face. 'It's Dinah, sir. For now Dinah Brown, but Stevenson soon enough.'

Lovegood nodded and made some space before, perhaps inadvertently belying his age, slamming his foot down and spinning—

—into the longspace, where everything was the color of one's eyes when the heels of one's hands mashed against them—and naught occurred of sound but an oscillating wave of roar and mute, as though the ears deafened themselves protectively from a mounting chaos over and over—and his body and its every part was squished into the slipstream—then one foot after the next touched solid ground and in a whirl he grew into a place again.

There was the chess piece of a house conspicuous on the plain, a rook ever so slightly hunched with age, gardens arrayed round it in reflection of some starry equinoctial keystone above. There were the skeps of kept bees weaving their ceaseless hum, there the root cellar entrance hidden beneath a more or less immortal carrot the size of a donkey he used to be too weak to roll away, there the authentically old fellow doddering among the dirigible plums.

Lovegood doffed his hat, tucked it under his arm, shook his face back to normal, slung the cane over his shoulder, and walked up the stone path home.

୫

'Your mother is going to be very pleased and terribly angry all at the same time. Would you like some boomberry juice? I squeezed it this morning.'

Carl Linnaeus Lovegood hoisted a ewer from an ice box and poured a sluice of dark purple matter into a clay cup for his son. Then he tapped his fingers together and frowned. 'How about a nice hot bowl of crying soup?' He emptied a sack of onions onto the counter.

'Don't make it for me, father.'

'I don't mind!' A pause while the old man stooped down to arrange something. 'Do you know the trick about standing on bread?' It was a tenet of Carl Linnaeus's culinary philosophy that standing on a slice of bread took the sting out of cutting onions. He got to chopping. 'The Forbidden Forest the whole time, ey?'

Lovegood nodded. A cold breeze worked the edges of beaded curtains over the turret's windows. Onion fumes slashed the air. Handy, artful fires burned here and there: the one in the sooty hearth might have been a thousand years going, whereas that beneath the cauldron Carl Linnaeus had only just kindled with a magical snap. It was an article of his parents' faith that, when possible, hot and cold airs should be mixed, hence the fires and the opened windows, the familiar basket of familiar quilts ever to hand.

The give and rebound of the knotty wood floors beneath the well-worn rugs…

The usual infestations of books…

He hadn't anticipated it feeling so good to be home. Hadn't he only been gone a week?

'In a manner of speaking I was in the Forbidden Forest,' he clarified. 'In another, I was in Hogsmeade in the 1550s.'

'I see.' Carl Linnaeus's eyebrows had bridged. His nostrils appeared impenetrable with hair, likewise the deep channels of his ears. Over time a man self-insulates, Lovegood thought. 'Pity the Headmistress could not locate you—your being, in a manner of speaking, so close.'

'She lost her job, you know.'

'Did she?'

'Rupert Brood got it.'

'I rather thought he was hunting vampires in Vienna.'

Lovegood shrugged. Explaining things wasn't often worth the time and energy it took to do so at the Rookery, since everyone was always lost in their own thoughts anyway. 'They said she falsified a test of the Diggory girl's. What's the name of the Christian family?' he blurted, one train of thought hijacking another. 'On Longdog Lane, isn't it?'

'Sadler,' said his father.

'Do you know them at all?'

A resonant, equivocating note sounded from within his father's nasal passage. 'Not as well as your mother.'

Lovegood used to think, Someday, I shall have that noise. 'Where is mother?' he asked.

'Out looking for you, I dare say. There's a gathering most days.'

'Can you call to her?'

His father's laugh was an abrupt honk repeated several times, like an interesting bird. Around it his face blued. 'With what, a speaking trumpet?'

'People do have their ways, you know. I thought, a married couple, of longstanding…'

'Ah.' Carl Linnaeus lifted the cutting board and swept the pile of diced pungous onions into the salted boil with a level, hairy-backed hand. 'Except that your mother and I put rather a steep premium on privacy.' He sliced his son an apple and arranged it on a block of wood. 'While you wait,' he said, then started pinching garlic bulbs free of their skins into the pot.

'How come you never told me you made Easterhedge pudding for Rupert Brood?'

His father's one eyebrow hiked into the broad, mole-spattered wrinkle pit of his forehead. 'Did you ever tell me you wanted to be told?' Then he sniffed and flecked a tear from his eye and kicked the bread away and gave Lovegood a red-eyed smile. 'Of course the most reliable way to get the tears out of the onion is to cut it.'

The dregs of Lovegood's cup was all pulp and a few errant boomberry seeds. His father peered down into it, like an archaeologist, then angled his head to regard his son. Shadows spilled over the long crannies of his face, and his eyes were wet. 'Care for another?'

୫

They'd settled into an equable silence by the time Nedda arrived: the father cooking, sampling and soliciting opinions from the son, making notes in a book of recipes; the son leafing through a pamphlet called Astonishments of Muggle Astronomy, testing the father's work and giving feedback. The Rookery was designed so that all the daytime living happened in the middle; the top, where the heat collected, was for sleeping bodies, while the ground level and entrance was stores. This meant that between the sound of the front door opening and his mother's ascent, Lovegood had plenty of time to experience fresh terror.

First visible was the back of her head, its tight gray bun fixed in place with a knitting needle, then, the staircase spiraling up, the rotating aspect of her slender shoulders, always too seemingly slight and narrow for the weights she piled on, normally tense with them, at the moment tense in a simple blouse of raincloud blue—but then she'd stopped, halted, for the face was in alignment with the son's.

The face: downy, lived-in, incapable of suppressing the least feeling… Body frozen, it registered a blizzard of them. Oh Lovegood saw joy in the quicksilver eyes, a flash that could double as knee-buckling relief, but it was the depths of cold stunned shock that sped his heartbeat. He was supposed to be mangled, bleeding, weak with death's approach, not reading at his leisure next to a bowl of rhubarb pudding.

She said, 'What's happened to his eyes?'

From his father's upraised finger red matter dripped into a pan and sizzled. 'I hadn't asked yet,' he replied, riveted to his wife.

She stepped fully up onto the level: a tall woman who wore long skirts and high boots that laced themselves up every morning while she sat on the end of her bed judging her lot in life, her men.

'It is him, though,' Carl Linnaeus averred.

'Yes, I can see that.' She stepped towards him slowly. 'You look well.'

She meant it sarcastically. He couldn't summon a word in his defense.

'He's been in the Forbidden Forest,' his father explained, 'time-traveling.'

'Has he?'

Lovegood said, 'Not on purpose.'

'Accidental time-travel?' His mother came closer still, looming over him. Then her hands, with a ferocious strength, lifted him up by the armpits and she cleaved to him, the steel in her arms stifling his breath. Her face pressed to his—had he grown so tall? Was he finally as tall as his mother? The evidence suggested it. The downy softness of her face, hot drops seeping from the creases of her eyes. She shuddered and a single sob came out—then it was over. He was being held by his shoulders at arm's length, then he wasn't. She wiped her nose and laughed and sighed. 'Accidental time-travel! I suppose you'll tell us all about it when you're ready.' She cleared her throat. 'It's good to see you, Linus.'

A heat of emotion charged into his eyes. 'It's good to see you, too, mum,' he managed.

'Fancy a bit of soup, Nedda?'

Which was how things got back to normal at the Rookery.

୫

As it happened, Lovegood never did get around to telling them 'all about it.' He was still working out how to restore Gwen McKinnon, but he knew it wouldn't be done without upsetting powerful people. Inevitably they'd track down his loved ones. The less they knew, the safer they'd be. But he did tell them he meant to take advantage of his temporary disappearance, and asked that they maintain the secret of his resurfacing.

Nedda nodded, thin-lipped. She'd established chapters of Lovegood searchers all across Great Britain. She'd quietly fold them up. Have Carl Linnaeus do it, actually. Go around paying personal visits. Defiance was a mother's work; fathers acquiesced. It's awfully kind of you, L.L. Search Society Captain—Sussex Chapter—Dover Chapter—Cornwall—but it's time we begin making the necessary arrangements… Life must go on, and so forth. Then he could miraculously appear stumbling out of the forest someday soon, and everyone would rejoice. How was he disguising himself currently?

He showed them. They were appalled. 'Cosmetics is not wandwork,' his mother scolded. 'You've got to get your hands dirty.'

Carl Linnaeus said: 'Let's rummage about in the garden, shall we?'

And they spent their last hour together crushing odd plants into pastes they rubbed into his skin and tweaking the charms on his ears and nose. Nedda attempted to reverse-engineer a wrinkle cream from an anti-wrinkle-cream's list of ingredients, and they outfitted him in a faded but better-fitting (and smelling) suit of his father's.

Lovegood was surprised in making the transfer to discover a piece of paper tucked into one of his pockets: names in his own handwriting with appended dates and information from the Shambhala's archives. The Secret Chiefs from Susurro's day. So that's what else he was doing in the cellar.

Before releasing their son they orbited him appraisingly, scratching their chins.

'Pity about the neck,' said Nedda.

'Indeed, it's much too toned,' Carl Linnaeus lamented. 'You'll have to leave the scarf on, Linus. It's a dead giveaway otherwise.'

'Do everything slower,' his mother advised.

'As if several different mechanisms of your body—perhaps even most—have something slightly wrong with them,' said his father.

'Also, don't speak if it can be helped.'

'Heed your mother, Linus. Your natural voice hasn't hardly any years in it.'

'And your pretend one is much worse,' Nedda added.

Lovegood heeded her: he gave out silent embraces, then took his leave.

'Slower, Linus!' his mother called after him. 'More tentative!'

'Remember,' said his father, 'the entire machine rusting at once!'

୫

Some said Stonehenge was consecrated ground 10,000 years ago, the birthplace of burial. Druids in there. Celts and Picts. Saxons and Angles. Vikings and Normans. The earth for ten millennia the receiving pit of life concluded one way or another. It was said that sacrifices once hung from the lintels of the enormous trilithons or burned on pyres beneath them, that it was mourners who'd engraved cryptic runes into the stones.

Or it began as a calendar, arrayed on an east-west line that mirrored the setting sun of the winter solstice and the rising one of summer. That the tonnage of bluestones were especially chosen and shaped and pushed over miles of logs greased with sheep fat for their ringing properties when struck: lithophones whose distinctive clacking was said to promote healing in the broken body. That it was a primitive hospital. Bodies had been exhumed whose origins suggested a global cachet: German archers, Macedonian pikemen, war written into the stress of their bones.

But Wizardry clung to its own mythology: that in the first morning of the world Celtic giants strode down to Africa and plucked up healing rocks to arrange upon a mountain in Eire; that old King Ambrosius commissioned the wizard Merlin to steal them; that this Merlin did alongside Uther Pendragon and an army of knights, who slaughtered thousands of Celtic warriors before the infamous Slytherin magiced the monument over the sea to Britain.

There were at least as many theories as stones, each in the long exhale of days submerging into the land and becoming part of the mythos that enchanted this particular stretch of Salisbury plain.

Water, stone, sky, grass. Horizon, cloud, hill, silence. Time lived here.

It seemed fitting, anyhow, that all the action happened below the surface.

He'd personally never been, but magic had a handwriting to it detectable to the wizard at large if he knew how to look. After a few minutes watching Lovegood observed a not inconsiderable quantity of quirky types disappearing behind a large solitary stone and not re-emerging. He went there.

A shadow that for some many thousands of years had been flavored by this very mineral bulk draped over Lovegood. Someone had etched into it a sheaf of barley and a bunch of grapes: symbols easily misconstrued by clever Muggles as pertaining to death rites or the afterlife, when really they only signaled the availability of intoxicants nearby. Lovegood took a few steps back before walking resolutely into the stone.

He nearly fell down the stairs. Even by English standards it was excessively cramped: an unlit earthen descent. The analogy to burial was irresistible. At least it was quick: a ramp of crude steps opening into a low-ceilinged tavern. He tripped down into a place lively with shadowed nooks, smelly of moist earth and crackling wood, spicy witches and musky wizards, a continuous low press of talk never fully penetrating the deep subterranean silence surrounding.

It was a badger sett of a place: a network of tunneled-out chambers spoked round a central bar. The floor was flagstones with sawdust scattered over, the walls rammed earth and the ceiling a grid of immense joists. Each chamber featured its own hearth and fire, which other than the odd floating candle accounted for all the light and heat in the place, though no chimneys presented themselves. Lovegood studied one long enough to realize that the smoke was disappearing. It would take a powerful charm indeed to transport a constantly replenished smoke stream to an innocuous aboveground site, but Wizardry stopped at nothing to make a pub nice and warm. And the Stoned Henge was comfortable. Busy, too.

It bore a resemblance to the Hogwarts library during OWLs: a hive of nooks, each one base to a coven in muffled collaboration. Making his reconnaissance, attempting to walk as though the whole machine was rusting at once, eyes moved to Lovegood and disregarded in turn. The bar mimicked the style of one of the big trilithons on the surface: a pi symbol of shaped sod with enormous varnished planks of wood atop. If this was the library, the bartender was Nehemiah Tombs—though he wore a soiled apron, had a face like a chisel, a scraggly beard, and eyes unseeably shadowed behind the great sail of his nose. Not a stool stood vacant.

Everyone looked equally familiar and mysterious in a place so dark and populous. Lovegood came to one end of the bar where coves opened off either side of a hearth. In one he saw a mostly shadowed table encircled by men, meaty tattooed arms with brawny hands pinching cigarillos, fluffing stacks of coins, whipping cards about, faces visible only in splashes of firelight. For an instant he thought he recognized a muttonchop, a glimmer from a lens—but closer scrutiny was discouraged. A giggling witch brushed past him, knelt down by the fire, tossed in a handful of floo powder, and stuck her face into it. 'Bug, are you there? Me and Francy been tellin' dirty jokes!'

He heard a known voice to his left.

Gerry and an older gentleman were seated behind a pair of frothy pints. He edged towards them. Gerry glanced up, then startled and focused, 'Ah! Here he is now.' He came to a half-rise and indicated a chair. 'Please, my friend, sit down. Can I stand you a pint?'

'No, no, thank you, I'm well.'

Through the fire and dimly they heard, 'Ah shut yer sauce box, Pris! Who has time for jokes? Tell us one, though.'

Gerry winked. 'I was just saying to Mr Barnes here that my friend should be along any moment, and how he should like to introduce himself!'

Mr Barnes was caught with a mustache laced in beer foam. 'Friends call me Muni,' he said, dabbing his upper lip with a handkerchief of Slytherin green.

'Sadler,' said Lovegood, on a whim. 'Longdog Sadler.'

If the name was unusual, Barnes had tact enough to ignore it. He lifted his pint, snuck a glance in the direction of the card players, then once more baptized his mustache.

The witch whispered into the fire and the fire cackled back.

'Muni is head man at Malfoy Manor, as it happens,' Gerry noted.

'Is he?' said Lovegood. 'Are you?'

Munificent Barnes was a slab of a fellow in a charcoal vest and swallowtailed coat that had the hue and somehow the liquidity of mercury. His helmet of combed pewter hair, his nattily whiskered face and the trunk edging on too big for his garments were all of a uniformly rectangular shape. He was well-groomed and small-nosed for a man of his years. 'It's been my pleasure to serve the Malfoy family since Eighteen-Hundred and Twenty-Seven.' His voice had a deep, pleasing timbre, kindled in the barrel of his chest. 'When I was first brought on, Ottaline Gambol had just been elected Minister for Magic—over my Lord Drake's most strenuous objections, don't you know. He thought her insufficiently pure, don't you know. But then when one is head of family of one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, one does owe a certain debt to snobbery.'

The cackling witch backed out of the fire, got to her feet and returned to the bar.

Lovegood was at a loss as to how to proceed. Make conversation? 'Gambol instituted the train to Hogwarts, did she not?'

'She did at that, Sadler. And how Lord Drake railed against it! I was valet at the time to my Lord Squamous—'

Gerry stood, 'Excuse me. Sadler, I must fetch you a pint. It isn't civil to abstain.'

'Oh but—'

Barnes glanced again at the card players before clearing his throat. 'As I was saying, I was valet at the time to my Lord Squamous; just boys, really, both of us. Sixteen or seventeen years of age, I should think. He didn't mind the idea at all. Oh he put on a show for his father, but in private the notion of a train filled to bursting with his classmates quite titillated. You probably don't know this, Sadler, but Squamous Malfoy isn't quite the stuffy-buttons he is made out to be. What are you, 60?'

'Eh, yes. Well, thereabouts.'

'Probably just too senior to've attended class with him, I daresay. But perhaps I'm wrong?'

'No, I'm afraid you're not. I didn't.'

'Slytherin?'

'Eh,' Lovegood was lost at sea, 'didn't attend, actually.'

Barnes almost choked on his porter. 'Didn't attend?'

Lovegood shrugged. 'Homeschooled, Mr Barnes.'

'You don't say? Point of principle, is it, Sadler?'

'Yes. Actually, we're Christians.'

'Ah. Well. Isn't that. Yes. What hey, Ollivander returns!' Gerry set before Lovegood a full stein with a glob of foam slugging over the brim. Barnes said: 'I was just telling Sadler here, my Lord Squamous doesn't necessarily think himself such big pumpkins. He's even encouraged the Malfoy brats to cast about for spouses among mudbloods.'

'But of course,' Gerry slid into the conversation without effort, 'it is only proper! If the Sacred Twenty-Eight bred exclusively amongst themselves…'

'A ghastly picture,' Barnes concurred. 'Very ghastly indeed. You see it beginning to happen already with the Lestranges, don't you know, to say nothing of the Gaunts. Once extraordinary families brought low—and by their own prejudice, no less.'

Gerry said: 'He is a great collector of rare artefacts too, isn't he? Your Lordship? Cheers!'

Their three glasses met in the middle with a damp thunk. 'Indeed he is, Ollivander! How profoundly unsurprised I am you knew that. My Lord Squamous's interests run far afield, and he isn't shy about deploying the family treasury. Indeed, he considers it an obligation.'

Gerry squinted, walking through a dark room of memory. 'Isn't there a piece in his collection—forgive me, I am not sure of my facts—a cupboard of some kind, linked to a great mystery from wizarding's past?'

Barnes leaned back into his creaking chair, crossed his arms and hiked an eyebrow at his interlocutor. Lovegood wondered, not for the first time, how their meeting came about. 'A cupboard of some kind, you say?' He scratched his chin like an actor might on stage.

'Oui, and not one of the grand Burgundian sorts, the size of a wall. Just about yea high,' Gerry leveled his left palm about two and a half feet above the floor. 'A humble corner wedge of oak, but with elaborate carving on the door. Do you know of the piece, Sadler?'

Lovegood sunk into a shadow from which to contemplate his friend. How interesting that he knew so much about it. He said: 'They made it out of the tree Rybel deMille hung from in 1553.'

'Ah-hah!' Barnes clapped a palm down onto the table. 'The Executioner's Tree cupboard! Yes, of course. In fact it has passed through my Lord Squamous's possession.'

'Passed through…' Gerry tried the phrase on. 'He doesn't have it now?'

Barnes's eyes were thirsty. He steepled his fingers and took them all in one at a time: Gerry, Lovegood, the gamblers next door. 'Gentlemen,' he said, 'let us dispense with our fictions. Your "happening" into me was not random chance. Don't object, Ollivander—I am well accustomed to being approached by shadowy agents with hidden agendas. One of the reasons I make a habit of coming here as punctually as I do is so that you types know where to find me. It is a discreet line of approach to the top man at Malfoy Manor. And why needlessly involve my employers? Don't you agree? We've shared a tipple, now,' he rubbed his thumb against his forefinger, 'let us break bread. You aren't the first wandmaker to express an interest in the Executioner's Tree cupboard. I daresay you aren't even the first Ollivander! It isn't at Malfoy Manor anymore, but I do know where it is. And for a price, you can too.'

Gerry was blushing. 'Not the first Ollivander?'

'Shush, Gerry,' said Lovegood. Theoretically, this was going very well—better than he could have hoped, even. But he had no money and no idea of how to find any. 'What's the price?'

'No doubt you've observed the ruffians across the way. I rather want into that game, you see, only I've been on a stretch of bad luck just lately and I'm afraid I've gone and worked myself into a bit of a hole with them, don't you know.'

Gerry held up a halting hand. 'Say no more, my friend. The house of Ollivander will be more than happy to settle your account.' He rose—

—but Barnes interrupted him. 'Settling it is one thing, young man…'

Gerry required no explanation. 'An ante, a small pot from which to begin your new streak of luck. I understand completely and shall inquire at the table of the going rates.'

Lovegood made way for and watched his curiously competent friend walk over. He couldn't hear what was said, nor hardly make out the people to whom he spoke.

' "Longdog", ey?' Barnes chuckled.

Lovegood frowned. 'Bohemian Christians,' he clarified.

'Naturally.'

Gerry selected a small article—a business card perhaps—from a coat pocket and handed it down. A many-ringed hand emerged from the darkness to take it. It was examined, accepted. The negotiations were concluded. Gerry eased back into his chair. 'You're in,' he said.

'Magnificent.' Barnes pushed his chair back and stood, swished the tails of his coat out, smoothed his lapels. 'Lord Squamous has been known from time to time to engage with some of the better houses of Muggledom. He is not unlike previous masters of Malfoy Manor in this regard. The deMille Cupboard he made a gift of several years ago—Christmas, I think, of '57—to a Colonel Sir Moses Jones, Lord Bracknel, the Earl of Blackwine.'

'Blackwine,' said Lovegood. 'That's nearby, isn't it?'

'About twenty miles east, as the hag flies. The butler's called Moresby. Er,' he seemed on the verge of thinking better of what he was about to say, 'I haven't a clue what you men have in mind for the cupboard, but it might disappoint you to know that Lord Bracknel's habit is to take his entire family to the Continent for the holiday season. The estate at Blackwine is therefore, at the moment, almost certainly empty—save a few servants, of course. Then again,' he lifted his pint, 'perhaps this does not disappoint. Thank you, sirs, for a most profitable interview.' He pivoted on his heels, downed half the stein in one go, and swelled like a wooing bird. 'And now, gentlemen, kindly make space for a prodigal comrade returning to the fray!'