Chapter 11

Plantae Feralia

Who had ever heard of a witch being allergic to Kneazles? It was not just ridiculous—it was embarrassing. Nevertheless, when she had gone out to meet Madame Murchison and look over the latest litter of kittens, Patience discovered that although she did not have any problems with her mother's cats, she apparently did with any cat having Kneazle ancestry. This after all the trouble to which she had gone to persuade Rem to escort her out to Ms. Murchison's house, too!

Patience was perfectly well aware that Professor Snape probably would not approve of her going to Madame Murchison's, especially since it was not technically inside Hogsmeade. Rem's ugly face had twitched nervously when Patience had told her where they were going and the old housekeeper had anxiously tried to persuade Patience not to go. Yet Patience now knew that she had the upper hand, so she had not relented. Rem was understandably more afraid of Professor Snape; but whatever he had said to Rem when Patience was ill, it had Rem almost as terrified of upsetting Patience. Therefore, Patience had got her way and they had wasted an entire afternoon looking at two litters of cats that had made Patience's eyes water and her skin itch.

Patience squished the seal into the hot wax on the envelope's edge with determination and dropped the heavy silver stamp onto the desk in disgust. It was the most unfair thing ever. She supposed that she could go back into town tomorrow and look at regular cats. The sort that would probably be too foolish to know which corners harboured nasty creatures that would prey upon a sweet, unsuspecting kitten, especially near that area under the second storey stairs which had produced a Boggart twice since Patience had come to live in Wygracket Road. Or else she could buy an owl, which would be useful but not really a companion.

As she marched angrily up the stairs towards the attics, Patience passed an unenthusiastic glance over the gloomy wallpaper along the stairway. Even if she were given full rein to redo everything in the house, she did not think that she could make it a nice place to live. Too many hateful words had been spoken and Dark curses cast over the time the house had been inhabited. The soul of the place was sick, Patience decided. There was not much she could really do.

Despite that, since she had to live there, she might at least make it less miserable. Plants would help. The problem was whether Wicket had any ability with plant care. Patience smiled when she thought of Sarah's nickname for her in Herbology—Dark Mistress of the Glasshouse. Sarah had thought it very amusing to Charm Patience's fifth-year project plant to scream in terror when Patience sat down at the worktop. Patience remembered with satisfaction that Professor Sprout had not been impressed and had assessed a weekend detention. Just because Sarah could grow an Epidex level plant in a desert whilst blindfolded and wandless didn't mean that she ought to tease those who couldn't help forgetting how much to water Estrophus Aridus. How was she supposed to know to leave the thing dry? It had looked sad, so she had watered it. Plants were a hassle, but they were at least alive and generally without menace—unlike most of the other living things in the house.

Patience stomped back down the stairs feeling a vengeance against all animals, owls in particular. She certainly did not know how to clean owl mess off her shoes, so now she had to go find Wicket. As she passed through the entry hall, she looked round and thought for a moment how different the house seemed now that she lived in it from when she had her first memory there. The house had not seemed quite as evil and dreary then, just old and oddly uninhabited. Perhaps that was why they had such a problem with Pecoins. Shadow dwellers were surely more of a problem when no one really used a house. If she had Wicket, and perhaps Rem depending how sour Rem looked when Patience saw her next, open all the windows and doors of the house so that the air was changed out and light was let in, then perhaps that would help.

Patience stopped beside the ebony table she remembered from that first day. She still had no idea what the three odd little silver objects there were. One of them occasionally emitted a puff of green smoke, but otherwise they merely seemed to be spiky, shiny sticks with bulbous ends. A superb sense of self-preservation, well-honed from years in her family's home round Luther's and her father's dangerous possessions, kept Patience from touching the silver objects as she stood regarding them with interest.

A noise from one of the portraits on the wall caused Patience to look up with narrowed eyes at the beautiful, blond witch in the painting.

"Did you have something you wanted to say, Elzbieta?"

Patience waited for a reply, whilst glaring at the woman who merely stared back with a malevolent expression in her wide, brown eyes.

"I didn't think so. Don't forget, one more comment and I shall hang you next to Aonghus."

The woman in the portrait was now pretending to be asleep, so Patience moved on down the corridor towards the sitting room. She had endured more than enough from the portraits in this house. That one in particular, the majority of whose insults were in a language Patience did not recognise, was apparently Professor Snape's great-grandmother. However, since learning from the portrait of Treasa Prince Wodestaff on the second storey corridor that Elzbieta Prince had hated her husband Aonghus, Patience had taken control of the situation. She had found that a portrait of Aonghus Prince resided in the drawing room and pointedly reminded Elzbieta of this, after which the barbed comments had stopped.

However, the portraits had been useful in another way. Patience had found out some of the history of the house from a thin, whey-faced woman named Maude, whose portrait had been hidden in the attics before Patience brought it down into her own sitting room. It seemed that the house had belonged to the family of Snape's mother. Maude, who had lived in the house in the 16th century before marrying an impecunious alchemist and dying in childbirth two years later, had been able to tell Patience some of the history of the Prince family, but almost nothing about Snape himself. Apparently, Professor Snape had not grown up in the house. In fact, his mother had only inherited the home when Snape's grandmother had died 10 years ago. His mother had died five years after that—leaving everything to him. He only lived in the house during the holidays from Hogwarts and even then rarely left his suite of rooms on the third level. Maude had also told Patience something else that was quite a shock. Professor Snape was a half-blood.

Patience, who had been raised in a family with almost unmatched fanatical pure-blood beliefs, could not believe that her mother would have married her to Snape if she had known. However, she must have known. This would have been something relatively easy to find out, would it not? His father had not even been a Muggle-born. He had been a total Muggle—no magical power at all! Additionaly, if Maude were to be believed fully, Tobias Snape had been a labouring class boar who had cruelly abused his wife and son before meeting a satisfyingly bad end whilst Snape was still at school. How desperate must a witch be to marry such a man? Of course, this explained all of the Diapseusma potions, the woman had thought she was ugly and must have settled for Snape's father. However, it was all unspeakably sad.

Patience looked into the drawing room and thought about how a few plants along the wall with the windows would make the room look less like a mausoleum. Removing the ancient draperies would help, as well. The only items less than 100 years old in the house were the draperies and bed furnishings, but even these were old enough to have faded past any former beauty. Wicket had kept everything as clean as feasible, but even house-elves could do only so much.

Patience clapped her hands and called out, "Wicket."

Almost immediately, the elderly house-elf appeared before her with a deep bow, saying, "How may Wicket help Madame?"

"It's my shoes again. Gwynedd."

With a mere snap of his fingers, Wicket removed the traces of owl droppings from the red suede of Patience's delicate slippers and bowed before his mistress to indicate that he was finished.

"Thank you, Wicket. I am sorry to make you bother. I ought to learn that spell, but I'm afraid I'll only turn that portion of my shoes blue or something."

"It is no trouble for Wicket. Wicket is happy to serve kind mistress."

Patience, who was still feeling embarrassed that she still could not handle menial spells, flushed as she said quickly, "Well, I do appreciate it anyhow. You are awfully good about my robes, as well. However, I did want to mention again the fire, Wicket. I know you are busy, but it does seem that…"

The house-elf seemed to teeter in place as he looked up at Patience with an anxious, pained expression, "Wicket is very sorry Madame. Wicket will set a Memory Charm. He will never forget again. He promises kind mistress. May Wicket boil his feet in punishment?"

Patience shuddered at the hopeful expression on her house-elf's face and said sharply, "No! I have told you before that I will not have you doing those things, Wicket. I cannot force you to refrain concerning Professor Snape's orders, but about mine, I can. It is an awful thing, Wicket. You really mustn't."

The house-elf hung his head dejectedly and said wretchedly, "Yes, Madame. Wicket will obey. Is there anything else that Wicket may do for kind mistress?"

"No, Wicket. I am going to my room to read. I won't need you until tea."

"Yes, Madame."

Patience sat down after the house-elf had disappeared and looked round the sitting room. She spent very little time in this room, in fact no more than she must. It made her think too much of the man about whom she did not want to have any more thoughts than necessary. He was an enigma, but she was not certain that she in any way cared to understand the riddle of his personality.

He certainly had a liquor chest stocked to overflowing. She supposed that this should not surprise her, yet it actually did. She would never have thought that Snape would indulge himself in any pleasures and she rather felt that he would hate the loss of control that intoxication would bring. Patience stood up, walked across the room to the cupboard, opened the doors, and moved a few bottles round to see the labels.

Several bottles of quite old Black Aquavit, two types of Bloodwhisky, a number of liquors with labels in foreign languages, three bottles of l'Armagnac Noir de Limousin…even Patience knew that l'Armagnac Noir was unbelievably expensive. Her own father only drank it with visitors to impress them. How could Professor Snape have ever afforded all of this? A thought came to her that all of the bottles, except some recent Felton's Firewhisky, were labelled with years ranging from 1960 to 1982. Nothing was new, so he had likely inherited the liquor.

As Patience was putting one of the bottles with an odd foreign label back on the middle shelf, she noticed a very unusual red glass bottle at the very back. Curious, she pulled the bottle forward and looked at the strange carvings on the outside. This bottle was strangely familiar. Where had she seen something like this before?

Patience suddenly knew exactly where she had seen a bottle like this one. Her brother Govan, who she knew to be an addict of the yggdrasilsap, kept a bottle just like this one in the secret drawer in the closet where her mother had locked Patience after the broken engagement to Bobby. Patience shivered as she remembered finding the bottle there and asking Luther about it later. His response had been to storm from the room to find his twin. The resulting row had been monumental and the cause of Patience's knowledge about her brother's addiction.

Was Professor Snape a sap addict, as well? Patience moved to the red bench and sat down so absently that she almost missed the cushion. He had not got the same oddly coloured fingernails that Govan did, but she had not spent enough time in his presence to know whether he exhibited the shaking legs near dosage or the unusual thirst.

This idea crept into Patience's mind even more deeply, so that she began to feel somewhat ill. There was almost nothing about her husband that she could find to like, yet still she had felt a bit of respect for him. Now she knew that he was a half-blood and she feared that he was also a pathetic sap addict. Certainly, he had been a Death Eater; but, well, that was a thing of the past was it not? He-who-must-not-be-named was gone and the truly evil Death Eaters were in Azkaban, weren't they? Naturally, she sympathised with the idea that pure blood should be kept pure, but Sarah and Elspeth had explained to her repeatedly that if pure-bloods only married pure-bloods then eventually all their babies would be born with two heads and a tail. So she understood that it might not always be bad when a wizard married a Muggle-born witch or the converse. At least both parties were magical and no one could help to whom they were born, could they?

Yet his father had been a Muggle! How horribly embarrassing that must be for him. Yet there was no doubt of the Snape's magical ability. Luther had told her once that Professor Snape was uncommonly gifted at the Dark Arts—beyond question a very skilled wizard. Patience had not been thrilled with this information at the time, since she had been in Professor Snape's fourth year Potions class and almost scared out of her mind by him already. Patience did not doubt his intelligence or ability, not even if she felt that he had likely never used either for anything decent or good.

Patience thought back over everything that she knew about yggdrasilsap. After she had learnt about Govan's addiction, Patience had persuaded Eva to find out about the potion. Eva had told her that it was almost exclusively used by Dark wizards, since it focussed the mind on one particular desire to the exclusion of all others and gave the wizard great confidence and a feeling of power. In addition to being highly illegal and therefore shockingly expensive, the yggdrasilsap was very dangerous—addiction led to the need for increased dosage and taking portions above a certain amount led to an irreversible process of organ liquefaction beginning with the liver. Patience already suspected that her brother might have passed this point. Yet, although she truly despised her husband, she did not have any desire to see Professor Snape die such a painful death.

Patience wiped her face clean of tears with her handkerchief and stood up to return to her rooms. She did want to finish that book that Eva had sent and what better than the travails of Rosalind Goodspell to cheer her up and direct her mind away from thoughts of him? The plot really had got interesting now that Caiphus Darkwood's evil designs on Rosalind's fortune had been discovered.

Patience had just begun to climb the stairs to return to her room when she heard the front door to the house open and then close immediately with a bang. She spun on her heel and looked round the entry hall, but there was no one there. She could hear muffled breathing and a whooshing sound like a wand being whirled rapidly. Someone was there. Yet there were an unbelievable number of spells and curses on the front of the house that would have to be undone for someone to enter. He had told her that it was almost impossible for anyone to get in, in fact. Could it be he?

Patience moved down a step and raised her wand towards the door. If it were not Snape, then Rem was too far away to help. She would have to face this herself. Not that she knew any defence spells, but an intruder would not know that. Patience tossed back her head and called out, "Who is there?"