the wizard of yorkshire

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Tom woke up with the sounds of footsteps. Actually, it sounded like there was someone hopping around the place and at each muffled sound against the floor, the man remembered the last things that had happened: his dead parents, his son, the odd cottage, the weird man with a wand like Merope's, 1421, everything going black…

"Keep calm," he thought as he felt his heart pick up a faster pace.

He took a deep breath once, twice, before opening his eyes and stare at the straw roof. Right above the bed where he was laying, there were several knick-knackeries hanging from the ceiling: ravens' feathers stuck in braided strings, pieces of wood and glass in makeshift mobiles, something that looked like a bird's skeleton… It was strange and interesting at the same time. When he finally looked around to search for the source of the irritating thumping noise, all Riddle could do was to widen his eyes and stay still for a moment, before slowly sitting up.

There was a cauldron there. A simple black cauldron, but with a foot that seemed to grow from its bottom and that kept it up and hopping. The object started to jump faster, like an excited animal, now that it had some attention, and Tom got down from the bed and knelt on the floor, lowering himself until he could see the member under the object. All the while his mind kept telling him that he shouldn't be getting anywhere near a freaky hopping pot.

The foot under the cauldron looked like a human's… It had skin and toes and even callouses on its sides. From the angle in which he was looking at it, he could see that the foot seemed to be embedded on the metal surface of the object.

"What the bloody-" the man whispered.

"My father left it for me."

Tom jumped back and turned around quickly to see the man he remembered being named Evert by the cottage's door. He wore a pointed hat he expected to see children wearing on Halloween night and his yellow tunic was dirty with mud up to his knees. Part of Tom's mind was already telling him to be careful and to run away as soon as possible.

"How is your arm?" asked Evert, putting the basket he was carrying on the top of the table and analysing its contents for a moment, before taking out some mushrooms. "I'm sorry, I had to black you out for a few hours after you panicked."

"My arm…?" Tom looked at his own arm that was still bandaged. He didn't even remember it was hurt as he didn't feel pain anymore. "It's better."

"Great." The younger man smiled, before pulling an ugly face to the hopping cauldron. "Leave him alone, you old thing."

The object approached Evert, before stopping by his side.

"You're a wizard," whispered Tom.

"I am," he said, before sighing and taking off his hat. "And you're not. And even though you're not one of us, you ended up here by magical means… Do you want to talk about it?"

"No," said Riddle, automatically, as he pulled his legs towards himself and hugged his knees. "I'm sorry."

"It's alright." Evert shrugged as he kept taking out mushrooms and plants from his basket. "Where are you from?"

"Little Hangleton," he mumbled, before trying to correct himself. He had no idea if that boy had noticed he had come from another time or not. "I mean, Hangleton."

"And your name?"

Tom stared at him for a moment. He still didn't know if he trusted him and knew that the main reason for this hesitation was the wand buckled to the other's belt. His mind kept telling him that something bad would happen: he would force him to drink some weird potion, he would hex him… Even non-magical threats came to his minds, like the punch he had received from his son and that now was still marked on his face by a purple stain on his cheekbone.

Before he could come up with an answer to whether give out his real name or not, Riddle saw the young man put his hand inside a leather bag. When he approached Tom again, he brought with him a little black, leather notebook.

"This was in your pocket," said Evert, handing it to the other. "I'm sorry, but I ended up reading some pages. I didn't understand half of what it said, but from what I gathered, you're not in the best of the situations. I mean, the dates and the things you write about in it..." The wizard placed his hands on his waist, watching the man who now was holding the notebook as if it was the most precious thing in the world. "How about Beedle?"

"Beedle?" asked Riddle, confused, while he finally looked up to the wizard.

"Yes. It's almost like the name of one of the villages in the north, Bedlam, and it almost sounds like your last name," the wizard pointed to the notebook. "Riddle, Beedle… It's almost like saying your name while having a broken nose."

Tom stared at him for a minute, slowly blinking as he tried to understand everything they were discussing.

"It's alright, I guess."

"And what's your age?"

"I'm thirty eight."

"Will you want to be a Muggle or a squib here?"

"What?"

"You told me you're not a wizard, but no one knows, just me and the cauldron," said Evert. "If you'll be staying around here, you'll need to create a new life for yourself. You can't be the man who wrote in this notebook anymore; we'll have to start from the beginning once more. So, do you prefer to be a Muggle or a squib?"

"What's a squib?" he asked, trying not to think about the fact that going back home didn't seem to be an option. Well, it was not as if he wanted to go back. He didn't want to walk into his house again and remember his parents being murdered in the drawing room.

"Someone whose parents are magical, but that can't perform magic. They're considered wizards, but… Disabled," the man explained. "They're basically Muggles, but they grow up surrounded by magic. Both Muggles and squibs can access some kinds of magic, like potions or divination or herbology, but it's not as if some important wizards around the world want people to know that. Anyway, you could easily pass as a squib."

"And why would that be any good? I mean, to pretend I'm a magicless wizard."

"Because you came here by magical means and you may find an answer to how it happened if you keep interacting with us," said Evert. "Aside from that, living amongst wizards is still easier… I can teach you some things that'll make life easier even if you keep the Muggle façade, but, if a witch or wizard meet you and recognize you as part of the magical folk, they'll be kinder to you."

"Knowing a little about potions and herbs isn't enough to make me look like a wizard to the… Muggles?"

"Sometimes. But, by the things you wrote in there." Evert pointed at the notebook in Tom's hands. "You'd already be considered a wizard by them."

"So pretending to be a squib or keep being a Muggle won't make a big difference."

"As I said, as a squib, you'll have a wizard's or a witch's sympathy more easily." The young man cocked his head while the cauldron started to hop again. "So, Beedle, will you be a Muggle or a wizard?"


The days – that easily became weeks and, then, months – that came after were a mixture of nightmares and reality. Living with a wizard meant being in contact with magic all the time, be it when Evert was performing a spell or when he saw a magical creature creeping into the house. And living with magic, to Riddle, was the same thing as putting a soldier to live in a house full of firecrackers that went off in the most diverse hours of the day.

In the beginning, anything made panic take over him: the cauldron hopping when he was not aware it was around, the snaps of spells, the owl bringing ingredients in its little claws… Any potion made him remember of the dizziness and nausea he felt after waking up next to Merope and any sparkle of a spell made him think he would see the green light that had killed his parents.

Evert tried to help him with it. The boy left his wand aside and showed him books of magic and fantastic beasts, made silly magic just to show him how it worked, explained to him most of the potions he brewed, etc. With time, it became easier to look at the bubbling cauldron and not think of Merope or see a swish of a wand and not think he would die a second later.

What remained, though, were the nightmares. It was not uncommon for him to wake up in the middle of the night feeling Merope Gaunt's hands on him, but this feeling was an old one already. The new nightmares managed to be as horrifying as those: the boy, his son, always appeared with his wand at hand, hissing in the same way he had heard Morfin Gaunt hiss to the snakes. He always killed him and his parents several times. Tom never knew what was worse: Merope and her hands seeking some kind of love or his son and the infinite times he murdered the Riddles, seeking revenge.

Despite the difficulties to accept magic and the nightmares, Evert insisted in teaching what he would need to survive there: he had to learn to recognize whom he could trust, how to act and many other things, but, at the moment, the main worry was to learn a way to make money. The wizard was skilful: he knew plants and herbs that could heal, he knew what could be worn as amulets, how to create symbols containing magic, how to foretell the future… And these were just the things that, according to him, even a magicless person could do.

It was funny, for Tom, how the concept of magic slowly changed in his head. Before, magic was a spell or a glowing potion. But one of the things that helped him to accept magic and not fear it as a whole, was to understand that magic was everywhere: it was there when they harvested herbs, on the small objects they carried to feel safe, on the teas Evert made to calm him down and even, according to the wizard, on the drawings Riddle made to be able to remember all the things the other taught him. And these were things that his parents, and even the gardener, Frank Bryce, used to do.

The plants were his first lesson. Evert spent days making Tom follow him into the woods and the fields, explaining to him the properties of each flower and herb they found on their walks, even though they never risked going too far away from his cottage. It was interesting and, slowly, Riddle was filling with drawings and notes the makeshift notebook Evert had given him.

"This one is important," said Evert, pointing to a bush with tiny pink and purple flowers. "Do you know what it is?"

"No…"

"Lungwort," he explained, crouching to cut a handful of the plant and stocking it in the little leather bag that hung from his belt. "Some of its dry leaves in a cup of boiling water, thrice a day, will heal a cough. Use it with coltsfoot for children with whooping cough."

"Alright," whispered Tom, leaning towards the bush to take a better look at the flowers.

"Coughing children is one of the things you'll see the most, along with diarrhea… What would you use for it?"

"Blackberries and… Goldenseal?" said man, hesitating, and then smiling as he saw the other nod. Evert joked that Tom had only two expressions: concentrated and distracted. It was weird to think he was starting to feel comfortable enough to let himself smile near a wizard. "And tell them to drink a lot of water."

The days outside the cottage passed by faster. When Tom stopped to think and noticed it had been at least two months since he arrived, all he could do was to thank Evert, for the man never asked anything about what had happened to him, after gathering enough information from that quick look into his notebook, and had a great patient to teach all those things to him.

It was just after two months that Riddle saw another person.

A man appeared by Evert's door, asking for help while waving his bloody hand in front of the wizard. The hopping cauldron seemed to become overexcited, jumping all around, until the man entered the cottage and the object became still, as if it had never been alive. Tom acted like the cauldron: he perched himself on the top of the bed, trying to pass by unnoticed by the newcomer.

"How did you manage to do that, Duncan?" asked Evert, taking the man inside the house and making him sit by the table.

"I climbed a tree to catch a magpie," said Duncan, stretching his hand out on the table and shaking his head to push his sweaty, blond hair away from his face. "I slipped and tried to grab a branch. It broke and tore my hand open."

"That's why you should not bother the birds," said the wizard, narrowing his eyes and then waving at Tom. "Come here."

"Who's that?" asked Duncan.

"A friend that's been spending a few days with me," said Evert, taking a step back so the other man could get nearer to see the cut that crossed Duncan's right hand.

"It needs to be closed," said Riddle. Even without Evert's classes, it was easy to know the wound needed a well-done suture. The problem was that they didn't have anything to use to stitch it closed. "But there isn't something for us to-"

"Of course there is." The wizard put a ball of fine threads and a needle on the top of the table.

"It's not sterilized," said Riddle, pulling a face.

"What?" asked Evert and Tom could see that the man, Duncan, seemed confused too.

"It's not clean."

"Of course it is. Come on, just stitch the wound so Duncan can go back to work."

"You showed me a plant one of these days… Camphor? Do you still have it?"

The wizard smiled, before going up to a shelf and bringing back a small pot which he handed to Tom. The man wriggled his nose as he felt the strong smell that came from the ointment that was stocked in it, before taking a bit of it on his fingers and applying it to the cut, seeing Duncan pull a face.

"It'll relieve the pain," said Riddle, before getting up and looking for the bowl of water and soap they kept in there. After washing his hands (he could still hear the voice of his friend, Ellen, screaming in his mind about how unsanitary that whole thing was), he went back to the table, sitting next to the man and cleaning the ointment.

The only thing Tom could think while he passed the needle through the the man's skin several times, making several stitches and closing them with tiny knots, was that Duncan's skin was so thick it reminded him of a corpses'. He remembered how he and Ellen ended up closing the corpses at the anatomy laboratory after they spent the afternoon studying there: Ellen because she was studying to be a nurse and he, because he was curious and anatomy proved to be useful when he needed to draw the human figure.

"It's good," said Evert, at the end, while he inspected the result before letting Tom bandage the man's hand.

"Try to clean it as much as you can," Riddle asked, giving a last knot on the bandage. "And try not to use this hand for at least a week."

"But I need to go back to work…"

"He meant to say that you need to rest your hand as much as you can," said Evert. "Come back in a few days for us to see if we can take the stitches off."

"Thank you very much, sir," said Duncan as he got up, smiling. "Ah! My wife asked me to see if you have something for her morning sickness."

"Oh, yes…" The wizard went back to his shelf, taking a glass bottle filled with dry leaves. He filled a little cloth bag with the leaves and gave it to the man. "Raspberry leaves. Tell her to take an infusion of it everyday."

"Thank you, sir," the man thanked him again and, holding the cloth bag in his hands, turned to Tom and nodded in a small reverence.


"It was not the first time you stitched skin."

The hopping cauldron seemed to be in ecstasy while Evert polished it with care. It was an interesting ritual to watch: every night, the cauldron jumped to the top of the table and waited for its owner to sit by it and polished its surface for a few minutes.

"It wasn't," said Tom from where he was on the bed while he tried not to spill any ink on the bedsheets while he drew a branch of lungwort next to the notes he took on the plant.

"Are you some kind of barber surgeon?" the wizard asked, making the other laugh.

"No."

"Have you ever been?"

"Never," said Riddle. "I had a friend who was a nurse, though. She taught me some things."

"How could a nurse know anything of a barber surgeon's work?" asked Evert, raising an eyebrow.

"Not a wet nurse." The man laughed, shaking his head. "Anyway, I ended up studying some things about human anatomy because of her… You know, corpses."

"You studied corpses?" The wizard widened his eyes while he watched the Muggle and even the cauldron seemed to be agitated.

"Yes…"

"How did you do it? I mean, it's forbidden."

"Magic is forbidden too," said Tom, shrugging.

"Yes, but even amongst wizards necromancy is frowned upon," said Evert. "Did you steal the bodies from the cemetery?"

"Of course not! We… The school had its corpses, of people who died on the streets and whose families never came to take their bodies, or of criminals," the man explained. "Indigents. They would be buried in a common grave and would rot in there, forgotten by everyone. At the lab, they kept being unknown, but they ended up helping a lot of people."

"Pretty way of talking, isn't it?" Evert asked to the cauldron and it gave a small jump. "So you opened corpses and looked inside them. Interesting. I think not even in our schools of magic we do that."

"Wait a minute, schools of magic?"

"Yes, where do you think we learn everything?" The wizard laughed. "Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Founded around 400 years ago by two witches and two wizards. From what gather, in the beginning it was more like a shelter for children who couldn't control their magic yet, but ended up becoming a school."

"You have a school of magic," whispered Tom, still amazed by it. To imagine a place where children were taught spells and magic was… Incredible and a little strange. He imagined something similar to Eton, but with classrooms filled with kids wearing pointy hats and teachers explaining how they could turn a porcelain cup to a toad. "How is it?"

"It's a school… Well, I know a lot of people can't go to school, but you seem to be the kind of man who attended to one. It's a castle, in Scotland. It stands by a lake, at the top of a rock."

"It's must be beautiful," murmured Riddle, before asking himself if Merope studied in that Howarts. That thought made his excitement regarding the school diminish. Did they teach their students how to control other people like Gaunt had done to him?

"It's beautiful… but I'll only tell you more about Hogwarts if you tell me more about the corpses!"

"There isn't much to talk about them," muttered Tom. "They're cold and stiff, with skin as coarse as leather and a smell that make you cry like a widow at their husband's burial."

"But how are they on the inside?"

"Fascinating," said Tom, automatically. "It's… Perfect in every aspect."

"What is in here?" the wizard asked, pointing to his own abdomen, at its lower right corner.

"Ahm, the intestines and the appendix."

"Appendix?" The man narrowed his eyes.

"It's part of the intestine that looks like a worm. Why?"

"I've already met two people with pain in this place," said Evert. "I gave them all the potions I knew, but both ended up dying. Luckily, it wasn't around here, so no one can associate their deaths with me."

"Appendicitis," said Tom. "That's the name of the disease. The appendix gets inflamed until it bursts open. You need to open their bellies and take off the appendix before it ruptures."

"Do I look like a barber surgeon?" asked Evert, indignant.

"Do you want me to tell you the truth?" asked Riddle, smiling.

"I'm a healer," said the wizard, straightening himself up. "Opening people to treat diseases is a Muggle thing…"

"But your potions couldn't heal an inflamed appendix," said Tom. "Maybe, next time, it'll be wiser to use the Muggle way to fix it."


A/N: Ellen is a character of mine that always shows up in the stories I write about Tom Sr... She usually gets to show up and be part of the story, but, in this one, she'll just be mentioned. I hope you liked the chapter and, as always, reviews are amazing, so feel free to share your thoughts.