For two whole weeks, Hermione submitted to being managed by a being that could do it even better than Molly could have. Meals were cooked, clothes washed and put away, and every afternoon Hermione was encouraged to have a short sleep, to be woken by a house elf with a cup of tea and some sort of delicious home-made biscuit. The break from housework was wonderful, and Hermione definitely needed it. Dimity was effective without being subservient, and when Hermione put her foot down and demanded to be given a household task before she dissolved in a pile of superfluous uselessness, Dimity just nodded wisely, then showed Hermione the bedraggled back garden with the overgrown herb bed.
"If the Mistress can look after this, Dimity would be grateful. Dimity loves cooking, but the garden just …"
"I'm not surprised." Hermione wandered up and down the old beds, edges delineated by a border made of the local dark rock. Several familiar plants were visible between the obvious weeds and dead foliage, and she knelt beside one section and started separating out the stalks.
"Looking after a garden is a lot of work, and you have to know your plants and how they grow. Look, Dimity. It's rue, then pennyroyal, sage and parsley. Someone loved their herbs. And this…"
Plucking a leaf from the next plant, Hermione turned it over and over, crushed it and sniffed, then stood and held the remaining mass to the light.
"Sopophorous bean. Dimity, who planted this?"
"I is not knowing, Mistress, but the garden was the place the old master loved being in."
Hermione's eyes had a light in them that hadn't been seen much for years. If Harry had been there, he would have known she was thinking hard and working out a solution, and no-one could really tell if the triumphant look that came a moment later was from the solution itself, or from the joy of finding that after all her trials and tribulations, Hermione's brain was still working as well as it had. She turned to the house elf and looked as if she was about to ask a question, then she shook herself and instead requested that the house elf send an owl to Hagrid.
"After all, he'll know what to do. And maybe he'll be able to help me dig this garden over." And for the rest of the afternoon, Hermione made diagrams and charts of the gardens, and lists of possible plants. Hagrid came to visit within the week, and a mere fortnight after she moved in, Hermione had a well-laid-out garden with vegetable beds, the herbs, and a space for a couple of fruit trees that she would request as her birthday presents that year. Summer had been amazingly warm, and she suspected that with the shelter of the garden walls, even figs and oranges might stand a chance. At the very least a fine apple tree should be put in. On the two-week anniversary of the family's occupation of the cottage, she stood on the garden path and breathed in the scents as Rose and Hugo tended their own little beds.
"Mistress should be having her sleep now." Dimity came up behind her, and tugged gently at her skirt.
"I shall, Dimity. All that weeding and clearing has left me quite tired, and I didn't do most of it." Hermione allowed herself to be led inside, divested of her apron and escorted upstairs to her study where she could lie down and rest.
An hour later, Dimity put the cup of tea and a plate with a thin slice of fruit cake silently down beside Hermione. Looking over her new mistress, Dimity nodded in satisfaction.
"So you're pleased with this one?" The voice was sonorous, yet barely carried to the elf's ears.
"She is a good mistress. She is fair, and she tries so hard." Dimity spoke with great pride. "And she doesn't ask Dimity too many questions that Dimity cannot answer."
Dimity heard the snort behind her, and grinned. The old master had been so crotchety of later, and had hated all the other tenants. This one might be allowed to stay though. "May Dimity answer the questions?"
"No. No, she will work it out, but I would prefer that she did not for a long time. I could not stand her pity."
"Very well, sir." Dimity turned to face the tall, dark figure, bowed and then walked quietly out of the room, leaving him to watch her new mistress from the dark shadows at the side of the room.
Hermione woke slowly, and started to stir on the chaise longue. To an observer, the dark figure in the corner would have seemed to meld into the shadows, becoming almost invisible to all but a practiced eye. Nor did he move as Hermione stretched, sat up and took her cup while she looked over the room, as if discerning its secrets. She drank the tea with an unseemly haste, and ignored the cake, something that would horrify Dimity if she found out.
Putting her teacup down, Hermione stood and walked straight to the old fireplace. The mantelpiece was carved along its edge with a number of different plants, and today Hermione found one corner of it very interesting.
"Rue, pennyroyal, sage, parsley then what in Merlin's name is this?" She ran her fingers over the fifth plant, trying to ascertain its features. "Acuminate, entire – this is not the sopophorus bean, I'd swear. Which means…" She began pressing each of the features of the fifth plant, attempting to twist and pull the various points.
"Try sliding that last bean." The voice behind her spoke softly, and she muttered a quiet thanks as she attempted to slide the final, rounded black bean shape on the mantelpiece. A low "click" sounded as the entire mantelpiece jumped towards her an inch, enough to show that there was a passage behind it.
"Thank you! I never would have found that without you, professor." Hermione pulled hard at the mantelpiece, and the entire structure, including the fireplace, slid past her on a hinge. "So was this your secret hideaway?"
"How did you know?"
"Know that this was your hidden door?"
"No, insufferable girl. How did you know I was here, and not jump out of your skin when I talked?"
Hermione turned around and faced the ghost. "I've known you were here for weeks now, professor. I knew the house belonged to a Hogwarts staff member, and it was the sopophorus bean that narrowed it down to you, although I'd had my suspicions. Who else would have the rare ingredient for the Potion of Living Death in their garden?"
"Humph." Ghosts shouldn't look miffed. It really takes away from any sort of distinguished air they are trying to project, and it certainly didn't help Severus Snape. Hermione almost laughed at the sight of him so discombobulated, but she thought she'd better save his feelings a little, so she turned back to the fireplace.
"I knew there must be something up here. The length of the room doesn't correspond to the length of the house, and the wall here is slightly different to the other internal walls. And if you count the windows outside, there's one extra. But it wasn't until I realised that the plants on the mantelpiece are almost the same as the ones in the garden that I knew I had my key." Hermione pulled the mantelpiece the last few centimetres until it rested against the wall, revealing a small chamber that ran the width of the house. The room was lit from either side by a small window, and set up as a potions laboratory. Everything was covered in dust, and there was a slight smell of dried herbs and long-perished half-finished potions.
"Oh. It's beautiful."
Hermione wandered slowly in, followed by the ghost. She ran her fingers lightly along the benchtop, touched a bunch of puffapod stems that had been hung up to dry, and gently blew the dust off the lid of the cauldron. She took hold of the handle, then turned back to her escort. "Is this safe?"
"It should be empty. I wasn't brewing anything that last day."
"But… the agent said you died from a chemical experiment gone wrong."
"Idiot."
"Him or me?"
Snape turned to look out the window, where the view was of the waves gently running into the cove below and a pigeon resting on the sill. "You will have surmised that I did not die when Nagini attacked me. It was close, but the house elves found me and took me to St Mungos, where I lay for three months in a private ward with very restricted entry. I did not want the world to lynch me, nor to laud me. You understand?"
"I do." Hermione walked up and put her hand on his shoulder, but recollected herself when it just passed right through the ghost. "I quickly grew tired of the whole Hero of Hogwarts label. At least that explains why no-one found your body at the end. We thought it had been destroyed in anger by Voldemort."
"Well, obviously, it wasn't. But I couldn't face coming back. So I bought Cliff Cottage, fitted up this end section of the top room to be my workroom, and had a more conventional set of equipment in what you now use as your study. And for six glorious, quiet years I was able to rest, to recuperate, to experiment in various potions that I had never had the time to work with before."
"And no-one knew?"
"Minerva knew, because she sent all my things from Hogwarts, along with a certain stubborn little house elf who wanted a change of scenery. But that was it. To the village, I was Septimus Prince, reclusive retiree. I hired a cleaning woman once a week to keep up the Muggle appearance, but otherwise I had little to do with them. A weekly walk to the village to fetch the mail and order groceries, and twice-yearly train trips to my agents in London."
"Agents?"
"Handling the sales of my new discoveries. Have you heard of Minusdolore, the painkilling cream?"
"I've used it." Hermione's hand went involuntarily to her ribcage, where Bellatrix's carvings had shown for many years. "It worked wonderfully – that was you?"
"It provided a useful income stream, in both the wizarding and the Muggle world. I was careful to make it using only Muggle-normal ingredients and methods, although I am quite surprised that no rival products have yet appeared. Or rather, not one that works."
Hermione smiled at the pride which came through at this pronouncement, and wisely decided to stay quiet. In the silence, her breathing could be heard over the sound of the surf below.
"But you asked about my death. It wasn't what they said. As if I would commit suicide after everything I had survived." Snape huffed, and the pigeon took off in surprise. "No, I was having a rest on that very chaise longue that you have appropriated for your own afternoon sleeps. I had a batch of an experimental potion that needed to sit in the sunlight for a couple of hours for the scents to come out, so I had that on the table, catching the afternoon sunlight. So I lay down to think about some problems while I rested, and I just died."
"Just … died?"
"It turned out, Miss Granger, that my heart had been damaged by all the curses and punishments the Dark Lord had inflicted on me. And as I slept, it stopped. Quietly. Suddenly. Stopped. No pain, no lingering on for weeks, or collapsing in agony. I fell asleep, Miss Granger, and never woke up again, except, of course, in this form. Which happened pretty much as soon as I had passed away – I went to get up, then realised I was looking down at myself. It wasn't hard to guess what had happened."
"But the experiment? It didn't kill you? They said…"
"Fools and idiots. The potion evaporated more than it should have, but that just meant that the room reeked of the brew when they found me, and the doctor made a pronouncement he should never have made. And that, in fact, is probably why I'm stuck here."
"That, or you're too stubborn to leave." Hermione couldn't help laughing a little at him, which worsened when Snape turned what he hoped was his most supercilious look upon her.
"Miss Granger, you have no respect."
"It's Weasley now, Professor. But you really should call me 'Hermione'. After all, we're not at school any more."
At that, he smiled. "Indeed. You may, therefore, address me by my given name."
"Thank you, Severus. But I do have to ask …"
"And in that way you have not changed at all."
Hermione would have kicked him if he had been able to feel it. "You're still putting people down with every breath."
"And you are asking about everything and anything. So ask."
"Your equipment. Your portrait. The agent said they were 'upstairs', and we've found a door that must lead to the attic, but it's locked. Where's the key?"
"In the kitchen, in the vase on the shelf over the kitchen range."
"Oh bother." Hermione shook her head in frustration. "That's the one thing we didn't check. Dimity didn't know, and the agent won't give us his copy. He probably thinks we want to steal it."
Snape almost laughed at this. "The value in the equipment is in the potions it made for me. All the instructions and notes are in this room, not with my Muggle chemistry set. But it's also that I didn't trust any successive tenants with that sort of equipment."
He paused, then turned and looked directly at her.
"Except for you."
"Oh." Hermione looked around the hidden room, the awareness of just how much he trusted her dawning on her and rendering her almost speechless for a moment. "Thank you…" She looked back, but he had gone.
"Severus?"
There was silence, broken only by the yells as the children came back up the path for dinner, and the wind gently scraped a branch on the wall outside.
"Professor?"
But for the rest of the day, there was no answer.