Disclaimer: I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

Mary Esmond has always loved the tourist attractions; when she and Jackie first walked along the Thames embankment, Mary had regaled her with the story of Monet coming to London to paint the fogs, and feeling aggrieved at the unexpectedly clear weather.

Of course, that opalescent mist was coal smoke and similar poisonous effluvia, but it was quite beautiful, Mary added by way of footnote. At least if one can judge by the paintings…

Jackie had asked, "So are you a painter?" with that wide-eyed look: wide-set dark eyes, she had, and dark hair that the sun struck into burnished copper.

She told Jackie that she read, and liked to think about the connections between things.

But Jackie Bones is dead.

That knowledge still nestles under her ribs, even under the bright blue sky over Shakespeare's Globe, even as she and Addie McConnell crowd in with the other groundlings, laughing at the mistaken identities, at the plot twists, even as the crowd jostles them together and McConnell—Addie—doesn't move away. It's companionable, pleasant, standing shoulder to shoulder.

Only afterward does Addie say how very numerous are the Londoners, and the visitors; along the embankment, it's the crowds she watches, far less than the famous architecture or even the river.

"So how many are there, where you live?" Mary asks, feeling awkward about the phrasing, and intrusive about the question.

Addie is evasive, just as Mary knew she would be. "Not as many as on your side of the border," she says. "We're rare, you know." That with a strange not-quite-a-smile.

On the bus, on the tube, Addie looks at everything: the adverts overhead, the gleaming doors, the other passengers, the streets or darkness sliding by the glass windows.

It isn't until they reach Mary's flat that she begins to feel awkward. It's nondescript to the point of vanishing: a place for sleeping, and eating, but most of all for reading; there are the shelves of books, and then there are the pictures. A poster or two on the wall, from student productions in New York, small theater companies or experimental reading groups that appeared like bubbles in the froth of that great city and then vanished again, leaving in their wake only these evanescent bits of paper, and somewhere on each of them, the name: Jackie Bones.

Addie investigates the flat discreetly, looking without looking as if she's looking, like a cat. She doesn't pick things up and look at them; she doesn't touch anything except with her eyes. Her soundless tread and comprehensive glance remind Mary once more that this is a professional.

That makes it awkward all over again, for she can't forget what she's learned: this was Jackie's bodyguard, who failed in her task.

ooo

Just before the weekend, it had been too warm in the waiting room; there'd been something amiss with the ventilation. Mary noticed for the first time that everyone was wearing short sleeves; even the Widow, all in floor-length black as she was, was wearing something with flowing slashed sleeves that left her exquisite alabaster arms bare halfway to the shoulder behind panels of black lace.

Everyone, that is, except the Widow's son, who wore his customary black pleated trousers and white dress shirt, the cuffs fastened with onyx cufflinks. The baby was sleeping in her improvised bassinet on the seat next to him, and he was leaning back watching her.

It was summer now, high summer, but the boy was still dressed for winter; his only concession to the weather had been to leave the jumper at home. He was not comfortable in those clothes; she could see the minute beads of perspiration on his forehead and upper lip, but no change in his expression.

It's the little hints that tell you when someone has been under military discipline. A civilian wouldn't have sat quite so motionless.

She'd looked up and seen that McConnell was watching him, and there was ice in her expression, as had been in her voice when she spoke of the Widow's husband, "A bad lot. He won't be seeing daylight these twenty years, if he survives it." McConnell's glance rested on the onyx cufflinks, and her lips twitched faintly in an expression of contempt.

At first, all she would say was that he'd never be rid of it, and everyone knew what was under those sleeves, so why pretend?

ooo

Mary stands in the middle of her front room, that had seemed quite adequate before, more than adequate, with the light pouring in: a summer day, a perfect summer day that someone had trotted out for the tourists and the theater-goers, the lovers and the mothers of small children. McConnell—or is she Addie?—is looking at the books, discreetly, and as discreetly keeping her in peripheral vision.

She has that plummeting feeling, that's like missing a step while descending the staircase… only in this case it's the floor, and the ground beneath it, that's missing. Jackie is missing. Jackie is gone. Nothing will make that up. And if she'd been allowed to feel that, three years ago when it happened…

… except that she had not remembered. She still doesn't remember, not the real part, the part that Addie assures her she doesn't want to know.

She does remember the killers' emblem, now that McConnell has shown it to her. Has had someone show it to her…

ooo

Mary frowned curiously at the boy sitting in the plastic chair, with his impeccable posture and his expressionless face, except when he glanced at his baby sister and a flutter of tenderness, like an Alpine sunrise, would soften the sharpness of his features. The only thing she could think he would be hiding with his long sleeves was the track marks of the addict, and his thinness seemed natural, not drug-induced.

McConnell's fingers closed on her wand (for now Mary knew that's what it was) and she said, in a low but commanding voice, "You. Young Malfoy."

The boy looked up.

"To the desk."

He obeyed with such alacrity that Mary was now quite sure that he had been a soldier.

McConnell said, "Show her the Mark." He compressed his mouth and stared back with those very pale eyes: defiance, and something else.

"Go on, show her. You were pleased enough to show it before." Again, that silent duel of glances; he wouldn't say no, but he was letting his eyes say it for him.

McConnell's voice dropped so low that Mary could barely hear it. "Unbutton your sleeve, Malfoy, or I will do it for you." He flinched as if she'd ordered him to strip naked.

He obeyed, slowly, with shoulders hunched against the others waiting, so no one else would see; with his right hand, he unfastened the left set of cufflinks, placed them on the counter, undid the pearl buttons on the left sleeve—it was clearly a very expensive shirt—and slowly pushed up the sleeve to his elbow, as if baring his arm for an injection.

All that Mary saw on that pale, thin forearm was a tattoo—a remarkably crude and ugly tattoo, with a snake emerging from the jaws of a skull, the sort of thing they do in prison or in gangs, not at all what she would have expected from this long-haired schoolboy… and it was a bad job, too, looked as if it may have been infected in the past, because the whole design was raised, and the inking blotchy and faded.

McConnell's voice was at her ear now. "Have you ever seen that design before?"

Mary almost shook her head, when there was a remembering twinge in her chest, and an answering quiver in her stomach. She whispered, "The last time it was a firework."

She looked up, and the boy was staring at her now, his eyes wide and his whole face rigid in the attempt to control his expression. He licked his lips, and whispered, "I'm sorry."

She didn't remember his face from before, but of course that didn't mean anything.

She turned to McConnell, "Did he kill Jackie?"

McConnell says, "No, but he's the only one walking free with that on his arm."

ooo

Mary bustles about the kitchen, taking out the dishes, uncorking a bottle of wine; the take-away, in its white boxes, fills the room with its marvelous savor. McConnell turns to her and says she doesn't mean to be discourteous, simply that … it's so strange out here, in this other world. Except for duty, she's never been here. Certainly, she's never been in anyone's home.

"Any Muggle home, you mean," Mary says. She still isn't sure who's designated by that funny word, if it's insulting or neutral. "So Jackie's Aunt Amelia wasn't a … Muggle."

McConnell looks at her for a moment, then bursts into laughter. "Oh no, no." Laughs some more, an unexpectedly musical sound, wipes tears away. "No. Amelia Bones, the head of Dimly, a Muggle? No, I think not."

Eccentric had been Mary's first word for Amelia Bones, with her short hair and monocle, her boots and her swirling nineteenth-century redingote, and that lordly white Persian always following at her heels. Darius—who did in fact conduct himself as if he were King of Kings—looked her over on their first acquaintance, then condescended to be petted, which Jackie assured her was the highest compliment.

"So I've been vetted by your aunt's familiar," she'd said, with a laugh.

Jackie had laughed along as well, "You're more right than you know," she'd said.

Aunt Amelia had served them a wonderfully eclectic supper, followed by Turkish Delight and very strong coffee in tiny cups. The conversation was neutral, but Mary had had the distinct impression that she had passed an interview.

That impression had been reinforced on subsequent visits. Aunt Amelia came to all of Jackie's performances, sometimes with women friends her age, who might have been colleagues (except that Mary was not quite sure where Amelia did work, or if she were simply being too middle-class in assuming that she did); and once, with a tiny, wizened woman all in black, who was by far the witchiest of them, and whom Jackie addressed very respectfully as Madam Marchbanks.

She remembers Madam Marchbanks because she had said, with a straight face, that she rather enjoyed this modern style of performance, for all one might feel nostalgic for the palmy days of the Divine Sarah. It was bracing, she said, and Jackie was quite good at it.

And then she'd turned directly to Mary, and said how very pleased she was to meet the girl who had made Amelia's Jackie so very happy, and extended her tiny, wrinkled hand with an air of royal condescension.

Mary accepted the handshake; to this day, she remembers a certain electricity and strength in it. Whoever Madam Marchbanks was in their circle, it was plain that she was a woman of power.

And she had quite a dry sense of humor about aging, too, to be claiming with a straight face that she remembered Sarah Bernhardt in her prime, and (over the eternal coffee and Turkish Delight afterward) that her mother had seen the immortal Rachel on her London tour.

ooo

Author's notes:

Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) toured England in the 1880s and 1890s (George Bernard Shaw reviewed some of her performances, although he did not care for her style of acting); Rachel (Elise-Rachel Felix, 1821-1858) toured London in 1841.