Chapter 2

As far as Tom was concerned, when it came to trips to the seaside, there was only one worthwhile destination: Skegness.

They'd gone there when he'd been just a wee lad, he and his mother and father and older sister Elba (rest them all). He'd taken the Muggle train for the first time in his life, and the excitement had been almost too much. His mother had had to give him a stomach-settling potion.

If he closed his eyes, he could still see the enormous, soot-blackened engine, steam pouring out of it to curl around the brightly-coloured posters lining the station walls: blue water and yellow sand and white clouds and big letters promising, "Skegness is SO bracing." There'd been a picture of an old sailor being blown happily along the beach, and Tom could almost feel the wind lifting him off his feet.

It had been cold, far too cold for bathing, but his mother had let him and Elba take off their shoes and stockings and wade into the biting water. Even after his toes turned bluer than the blue of railway poster, Tom hadn't wanted to come out.

The Muggles had fascinated him as much as the ocean and the train did, and Tom had to be reminded several times not to stare. They'd seemed so clever to him, these Muggles who had come up with non-magical ways to live their lives: the train porters pushed suitcases on trolleys instead of Levitating them; the fish-and-chip man used a little basket to lift the fish out of the hot oil instead of just accio-ing it.

They'd all eaten piping hot battered fish out of cones of newspaper, and Tom's father had made him and Elba each swallow a tot of whisky, to warm their bones after the cold of the sea. It had tasted like the worst medicine, but Tom came to think of it as a good omen, this first visit to a pub on this most fun day of his young life.

The poster had been right: Skegness was bracing, and in the eight decades since that first visit, Tom had returned several times: to mourn after his parents died, for his wedding trip with Julina, to clear his head head after Julina left him ("I need a life outside a pub, Tom!") He'd come to Skeggy, too, after the defeat of Grindelwald and the first defeat of Voldemort; he'd needed the cold salt air and the calming expanse of sea.

Of course, much had changed over the years: it was full of tourists now, and gaudy shops, and sprawling holiday camps, and caravans. The old pier had been washed away.

But the Jubilee Clock Tower still stood, the fish-and-chips were still hot and crisp, and the air was as bracing as ever.

Tom's portkey, a thick newspaper, brought him to the north end of town, near the Muggle holiday camp that he still thought of as "new," though it had first opened before the Grindelwald war, if he remembered correctly.

The pages of the portkey paper now glowed with golden letters and arrows: "Twenty yards forward, then turn right to Bradley's Wizarding Caravan Camp!" it read.

Tom's heart thrilled with anticipation; he hadn't been to Bradley's since just after the first Voldemort war, and in his mind, he could already see the trim caravans, tiny on the outside and spacious on the inside. Bradley's was quiet and old-fashioned and just the ticket for a man who still found Muggles fascinating, with their donkey rides and their fun fairs and their raucous game arcades, but who preferred soft, candlelit peace when bedtime came.

He spent the first day strolling along the sand and watching the Muggles at play, and by teatime, he had worked up a fine appetite. A pint or two at an out-of-the-way pub, he decided, and then some classic battered fish. For old times' sake.

It took him a bit of walking to find a pub to his liking – the White Oak. No touristy horse-brasses or obvious Victorian-reproduction snugs and fake gaslight. Just a straightforward workers' watering-hole, a place meant for drinking and low-key company.

The bar was almost empty when Tom pushed through the door, just a middle-aged man lingering over a ploughman's at a table near the window, and a dour-looking bartender stacking glasses behind the bar.

Perfect.

The barman looked up silently, waiting for Tom's order.

"Pint of Bateman's," Tom said, taking a seat at the bar. A good Lincolnshire brew, made by the same firm since Tom's dad had been a lad.

The bartender drew the pint with just the right amount of head and slid it along the worn wooden counter. He had sallow skin and long, dark hair drawn into a tail at the base of his neck; what looked a tiny silver cauldron dangled from one ear. He stared at Tom until the old man began to feel a wee bit uncomfortable. The look wasn't hostile, exactly, but assessing and just. . .unsettling.

"You'll have to be moving when old Billy Goslin shows up," the barkeep said finally, his voice raspy. "That's been his seat for thirty years."

Tom nodded. It didn't do to mess with the regulars' routines.

"Been in this line of work long?" he asked.

"Long enough," the man said. Then, after a moment, "You're not a local."

"No," Tom agreed. He wanted to talk to this man, figure out what had been behind that long stare. That's what he liked best about the pub trade, learning people's stories. Like reading a good storybook all day long. "Not local to these parts," he added. "Local to pubs, though. I'm a barman myself. On holiday."

This brought a flicker of amusement to the dark man's face. "And you're spending it sitting here? Bit of a busman's honeymoon, what?"

"There's a lot to be seen and learnt in a pub," Tom said, just as he had to Hannah Abbott.

And that's when he felt it – the lightest of feathery brushings in his mind, just a whisper of feeling. . .but unmistakable all the same. Once you've felt the touch of Legilimens (as Tom had done more than once during the wars), you never forgot it.

The bartender's face remained inscrutable, but Tom had little doubt that the invasion came from him. He pushed a simple memory to the front of his mind, just a holiday-maker walking on the beach, and as quickly as it had come, the tendril of Legilimency disappeared.

Tom finished his pint as quickly as he could without seeming to hurry, but he no longer wanted to linger. Counting out his Muggle money, he paid for his beer and stepped out into the long summer twilight. The bartender did not speak further.

Well, Tom thought, as he headed towards the town centre and his dinner, here was a pretty mystery. A wizard hiding himself as a Muggle barkeep in an out-of-the-way pub in Lincolnshire. . .and suspicious enough to risk illegal mind-reading. . .

"Musta felt my magic," Tom reasoned, "but he wouldn't know I knew Legilimens. So maybe it didn't seem much of a risk to him."

Still, he decided, as he ate his fish and chips from their paper cone and watched the sun set over the water from the end of the new version of Skegness Pier, the bartender of the White Oak would bear watching.

It would be an adventure.

"And what happened then, Tom?" he could hear Hannah Abbott's breathless voice asking in his head.

He was looking forward to telling her and the rest of the staff all about it.

- / - / -

That evening, Tom stood in front of the mirror in the bedroom of his caravan, practicing glamour charms so that he could follow the bartender tomorrow. Incognito, like.

"That's the idea," said the mirror encouragingly. "Go with a full head of hair. No one could possibly recognize you then."

"I know you're just being cheeky," Tom said. "But you're right – some blond hair and visible teeth, and. . . "

"And your own mother won't know you," finished the mirror.

"Nay," Tom laughed. "She's probably the only one who would know me. It's how I looked in me young days."

"Why don't you get some teeth for real?" the mirror asked. "It'd look better, and you could actually eat."

"Oh, I got teeth," Tom said, conjuring a fedora and tilting it over his brow to see the effect. No. . .too rakish. "I just cover them with a spell."

"Whatever for?" the mirror asked incredulously, and Tom supposed he could see its point.

He tried to explain. "You got no teeth, people think you're old and harmless. They tell you more."

"You in the blackmailing business?" The mirror sounded more interested than it had all evening.

"No!" Tom was affronted. "I'd never use people's stories against them! No one keeps better secrets than a bartender, and I'm a professional!"

"Sorr-eee," muttered the mirror.

"So you should be. I just like to hear people's tales, that's all. And it helps 'em to tell me. To get it all out."

"Cheaper than therapy?"

"I reckon it is therapy," Tom said, adding a pair of horn-rimmed glasses to his glamour spell. "There. What do you think?"

"I think I don't even know you," said the mirror.

Tom was satisfied.

- / - / -

He'd planned to wait outside the White Oak until closing time the next night and then follow the bartender home. But as luck would have it, as he was sitting over a cup of coffee in a Muggle café in Lumley Road next morning, he saw him – the bartender himself, slouching along the high street with hunched shoulders as though it were the middle of winter instead of high summer.

He still wore his silver cauldron earring, but didn't have his ponytail today, and as Tom watched, the wind blew his hair over his eyes. The man jerked his head in irritation to clear his vision and raked his fingers through the dark strands.

Tom froze, his coffee cup halfway to his mouth. He recognized that gesture. How many times had he watched that scene over the years: an ill-tempered dark man stalking through the Leaky Cauldron, looking neither left nor right, tossing his head as he made for the door the led into the Muggle world.

He was wearing a glamour now – a good one – but that made no never mind. "They can hide their faces, but not their movements. By their gestures you shall know them" – that's what old Mad-Eye Moody used to say, when he'd sat at Tom's bar and preached the gospel of vigilance, and Tom now knew who this dodgy dark bartender was.

It was Severus Snape.

/ - /

Author's Note: If you'd like to see the railway poster that Tom remembers from his childhood, go to Google Images and google "Skegness So Bracing."