By the time that the Morris Marina finally rolled up to the quaint farmhouse, Harry needed to be awakened by a firm shake from Gammy.
He'd fallen asleep on the settee in front of the telly while some news programme telling about far-away places played, showing scenes from a ghastly war in a country Harry couldn't have hoped to pronounce the name of.
Gammy walked him to the door, and to Harry's surprise, Severus met him there, looking tired and a bit harried as he always did after his late-night shifts.
"Mr. Snape, I hope the evening finds you well?"
"Hi, Severus." Harry added, himself. Behind one hand, he suppressed a yawn, and Snape eyed him with a bit of a knowing smirk—the sort of look that told his charge that he'd be sent straight to bed when they made it home.
That was fine by Harry. He didn't think he had it in him to sit up and jaw-jaw with the man for any length of time that night.
"I am no worse than I've ever been, Mrs. Hill, though I believe that I'm in the lamentable position wherein I must beg your forgiveness for my flight from our meeting earlier this week. I'm afraid I was made aware of a rather urgent situation which needed immediate redress."
Gammy frowned. "I'm sure Henry would have given you your paycheque at a more convenient time for all involved, there likely was no need to leave so quickly—but you're forgiven."
"My paycheque?" Snape asked, seeming a bit flummoxed.
"Harry mentioned to me that you're often paid on Wednesdays—we thought it might have been reasonable that you'd jogged down the street to collect it, given that you left your car in the car park."
Snape paled, and Harry noticed that the fingers of the man's right hand tightened into a fist, as though he wished he could be gripping his wand in his hand for reassurance. They relaxed after a moment, but still flexed at his side.
"I... that was a regrettable oversight."
"If not your paycheque, what could it have been?" Gammy asked, her eyes narrowing. For the first time, Harry saw a hint of shrewdness he'd never imagined that the old woman would have possessed peeking through, and he wished he'd considered a better answer than that the man would have rushed off to collect on the money owed to him. In retrospect, it didn't seem remotely probable. "One moment, we were discussing what the school might do about that bloody tree, and the next you were out the door like Old Scratch himself was chasing you. Whatever happened?"
Looking uncharacteristically flustered, Snape shifted and brought the flexing right hand up to draw through from the crown of his head to the ends of his hair, snagging a few times as he did so. He'd evidently not realised that he was still wearing the hair back, and the motion of it effected to pull the ponytail out, and the elastic he'd worn fell to the floor where he stooped to retrieve it.
"I'm afraid I..." He glanced around for a moment, and Harry thought he'd never seen him so hard pressed for a proper lie. "I have a bit of a condition. It saw me in need of some fresh air, so I retreated for as long as was necessary. I hope you'll understand that this is nothing I'd like to see advertised far and wide."
"Oh, goodness, no!" Cried Gammy, her face changing from suspicious to sympathetic with staggering quickness. "I'd not dream of it! I hope you won't think I'm being nosy—I was merely concerned when I noticed that your car hadn't moved from its spot..."
"No harm done, I suppose," Snape answered, drawing his dignity around him like a cloak—an impressive feat for a man whose normally greasy appearance was only worsened by sweaty work clothes and a faint smell of malty beer. "As it happens, while I was taking a constitutional, I passed by that menace against which we've found common cause. I took a moment to inspect the tree and found that in its advanced age, it may well already be dying. It seemed to me that several of its branches are compromised and would pose a danger of property damage to the school—or potentially to a student—should it fall at an inopportune time."
"Come in, won't you?" Gammy prompted him then, opening the door wider. "Harry, I hope you'll spare us a moment?"
Snape stepped across the threshold, his features betraying nothing besides a bland expression of obliging tolerance as he followed the older woman through to the kitchen where she set about preparing three cups of tea.
"None for the boy, if you don't mind, Mrs. Hill. The caffeine will deter him from bed. Perhaps milk, if you have it?"
"Of course—Harry? Pour yourself some of the skimmed milk from earlier today, the glasses are in the cabinet by the fridge."
The three of them settled around the table, each cradling fortifying drinks in their hands, and Harry tried to act sleepy as the adults discussed the yew tree as though he weren't even there.
Not that it was all that difficult to feign being tired when he felt like, at any moment, he might face-plant into his glass of milk, but he knew that so long as he put on a show of being disinterested or even impatient to leave, Severus and Gammy would be likely to speak freely, and presume that he wasn't paying as close attention as he truly was.
"Now, I know you left shortly after we made it into the office, Mr. Snape—"
"Severus, please."
"Severus, then... but I don't quite remember if you were there when Aida explained that the yew belongs to the council. There's a resolution against its removal, on any grounds. She didn't seem optimistic that we'd manage to make any headway."
"One student already almost died! Surely that's a good enough reason to at least consider removing it? At the very least they could have left it outside of the fence or modified the fence such that it excluded the trees from the play yard—"
Gammy clucked over her teacup as she ferried a spoonful of sugar into the warm, amber liquid. "That would make far too much sense, child. Tell me, did you grow up in these parts, or are you an offcomer?"
"I was born in Cokeworth, Mrs. Hill. I've lived my whole life here, excepting the years where I was away at school. I'm no stranger to bureaucratic indifference," the wizard argued, his voice going a touch nasally as it did whenever he took offense to something.
"Then it ought not surprise you to learn that what you've mistaken for 'bureaucratic indifference' is more along the lines of what I would call 'targeted negligence.'" She brandished the spoon in the air as she spoke. Had they not been talking about the tree that almost killed Snowdrop, Harry might have been amused to note how very wand-like the motion of it appeared.
"Now, Aida is no friend to the council, and she's taken up as many brays as she thinks she can win with them over the years. But she seems like she doesn't want to push the issue of that bloody tree, and I can't help but to think that a bit... odd."
His eyes closing to near slits, Snape considered her words while savouring a swig of his tea. He allowed it to swish from one cheek to the other before he swallowed, only then offering up his answer. "I don't suppose you have any theories? You know the woman better than I, and you seem as though you have a certain... understanding for the way things get done around here."
"Being the grandmother of Snowdrop Hill means I have cause to know Headmistress Shaw quite well," the woman replied, her voice going a bit tart. "I shall spare you the details—it wouldn't do to shame the poor girl after the dirt's been settled for so long."
Snape seemed a bit curious if the eyebrow he raised was any indication, but he didn't press the issue. Perhaps he didn't truly care to know what trouble the girl had landed herself in, or else, perhaps as a former teacher, his own insight into such things gave him fertile ground for supplying possible answers out of his own imagination. Either way, he sidestepped the untold story without seeming to pay it much mind.
"So it isn't the case that you're familiar with the woman outside of her capacity as Headmistress?"
Their host laughed a bit, though she'd clearly stifled it at least some—likely in an attempt to avoid waking her granddaughter who'd gone to bed hours earlier. "No. Should I be?"
At this dead end, the wizard appeared somewhat confounded, and he dissembled a bit by reaching for the milk that was sitting before him, adding far more than Harry thought necessary, especially given that Severus never took milk in his tea.
"Forgive me," he mumbled as he brought the cup to his lips, blowing a breath that scattered the steam rising from the tea's surface. "Given your use of the headmistress' first name I seem to have fallen into a false presumption about how well you knew her."
Gammy laughed at Snape's discomfort again. Perhaps she was even laughing at his stilted manner of speech. Maybe it was simply that she was laughing at the man, full stop.
Accordingly, Severus coloured red up to his ears. Harry half expected to see steam pour out.
"In my time of life, Severus, standing on ceremony loses its lustre and becomes naught but a stumbling block. My bones are brittle enough that I prefer not to worry much about tripping over silly things like good manners.
"Truthfully, Aida was at the school when my daughter attended, but I hadn't any cause to deal with her one on one until I was arranging for Snowdrop to attend this year. Unfortunately, Blossom had a reputation even in Nursery, and these things get around in a town this little. The classes were so small this year that they combined Year 4 and Year 3, and Nicky's father and I were called in for a few meetings when it was known that both Nicky and Snowdrop would end up in the same classroom."
Oddly enough, this seemed to sooth the man's ruffled feathers, and he contented himself with another sip of his too-pale tea.
"It surprises me that a student with her... record... would be up to integration in a Year 4 classroom."
"Oh Snowdrop causes trouble, that's certain enough, but she's always had impeccable grades. Granted, the standards for Year 3 are slightly lower, and some of their papers are a bit different, but Mr. Fowler has been supplying Snow with Year 4 coursework at my request since the start of term. She's been doing splendidly. If she keeps up I have half a mind to simply request that she move on to Year 5 next year, as I see little reason for her to repeat what she'll have learnt this year."
Severus grunted in acknowledgement.
"And now, I suppose I could turn the question around on you, child," Gammy took a languid sip of her tea. "Aida seemed as though she knew you."
"We had words after Harry's first bray with your granddaughter."
"Was that all?"
"By my count I've spoken to the woman four times now, since Harry's started school. For the first time after the incident in the play yard, the second time after the poisoning, and the third and fourth were in your own company."
Too shrewd by half, Gammy set her own cup aside and tucked her weathered arms over her bosom. "That's only since Harry's started at Rowky Syke, you say?"
Snape hummed. It sounded evasive even to Harry's untrained ear.
"You said you were from here. From here means you went to Rowky Syke—there's no other option for junior schooling. I don't know Aida well, and I didn't know her before I had cause to as Blossom's grandmother, but I know well enough that Aida's been at Rowky Syke for at least twenty-five years."
There were a few moments of silence where a war seemed to be waged across Severus' taunt features until, at long last, it seemed that the pressure to be forthcoming won out.
"She and Judith Murray. Perhaps a few other staff remain from that era."
"Ah—now Judy I do know. I asked about you, of course. After the row she started that first time we met after the poisoning, how could I avoid such a thing?"
Affecting a haughty manner, Snape turned his nose up. He was perhaps trying to look bored, or disinterested, but to Harry's eye, he almost looked a bit petulant—as might a child who was being scolded for some infraction or another.
"I imagine her words were uncomplimentary."
"That's the mild way of putting it." Gammy raised her eyebrows to the man, looking for all the world like a mother taking her misbehaving son to task.
Harry had rarely seen Snape so discomfited, and it was then that he was struck by how charming this ability was on the part of the old woman.
She could have made a fox repent of slaughtering chickens through nothing more than a judicious application of her own disappointment.
"I don't imagine you want Harry to hear any of it—"
"I can't see how it would matter," Snape all but snarled, leaning back in his chair. "Harry, is it not the case that Judith already spoke to you about our past?"
Harry started. He'd not been expecting to be pulled into the conversation and had been carefully maintaining his pretense of exhaustion, although he did perk up a bit upon being addressed and brought into what he considered 'an adult conversation.'
Dutifully, the younger wizard reported on what he'd heard. "She said you'd done something to her boys."
"Ah, there. See? He's well aware already."
Gammy Hill shook her head, looking somewhat amused. "That's not the half of it, according to her. She said you and your little friend scared all three of her sons into absolute fits."
The wizard snorted and rolled his eyes, no longer playing at being a respectful guest.
It was amazing how the old woman could so effectively disarm such fabrications.
"They had it coming, didn't they."
Leveling an intent look at the man whom she'd invited to her table, Gammy spoke in a low voice. "You think so?"
Severus' response was spoken with steel woven through the simple syllables. "It was no less than they deserved."
For several moments neither said a word more, although from the tense look that was shared between them, Harry knew that some great, unspoken battle was being waged.
He'd never known Severus to lose at anything, but if ever there was a match for him, it must have been Gammy Hill, a woman who had never encountered a bit of nonsense that she couldn't dispel in naming it aloud as being a ridiculous fabrication.
Eventually, she relaxed back into her seat and moved the conversation on to more benign matters, and Harry saw that his guardian was also able to let loose the rigidity in how he'd held his shoulders. Yet, if Severus had in any sense 'won,' it was only because Gammy had let him.
Even Harry knew that.
"Harry tells me he'd be interested in doing a bit of work around the barn on the afternoons he spends here. You're not opposed to that, are you?"
The black-haired man slanted a bemused look in Harry's direction, and Harry met it with open, guileless eyes. In his head he was chanting a refrain that sounded faintly pleading, to his mind: 'Please, can I? Please, can I? Please, please, please, can I?"
As though the man could actually hear his thoughts through their shared eye-contact, Severus quirked one thick brow at him as one long, pale finger came up to rub at his lower lip as it often did when he was deep in thought. "Why?"
The question was clearly meant for Harry, and Gammy didn't even attempt to answer it, merely looking at the boy who was sitting at the table with them, her mien a picture of patience. After all, hadn't she asked him the same question?
She too was waiting for some manner of answer.
Sometimes his brain was overcrowded, and there was far too much to consider, too many avenues for thought and deliberation. Particularly since his life had been upended in such a spectacular fashion, he'd been given new things to ruminate on, seemingly on a daily basis.
Work with his hands was the devil he knew. If he worked hard, sometimes he could manage not to think at all, and if he was occasioned to engage in deep thought in spite of the labour he undertook, it was a more orderly, more logical procession of ideas than he normally managed.
His carefully constructed understanding had been ripped to shreds before his eyes and milking a cow—in some small way—put to rights things that had been made wrong.
Chaos encroached into the barn in the form of accumulating manure and filth in the same way that chaos had manifested in his life by way of Severus' intervention into his personal crisis, and shoveling shit out of the stalls brought order to the miasma of discord in the same way that he only wished he could do for the odd set of circumstances surrounding his life in Spinner's End.
He was happy living there with Severus, but nothing about his current life made much sense given all that had preceded it, and there was an inherent sense and comfort in the fact that milk came from cows, eggs from chickens, and shit from sheep. Inherent sense, and also the sort of immutable, insuppressible problem that could only be solved through a man's work.
Harry deeply wanted to be given the chance to be the man for that job. At least twice a week.
If Severus wouldn't let him near the experimental potions and was indifferent or defensive about Harry's attempts to do any form of strenuous housekeeping around Spinner's End, he could at least allow him this chance to come by his self-respect honestly. If not for that—the possibility of hard-earned dignity, that was—then perchance for Harry's sense of sanity.
None of this Harry could put into words, nor even understand much himself however, so ultimately he shrugged down at the table, wiping at the condensation from his glass of milk with his fingertips. "Dunno. It's something to do."
"To what end?"
"I don't have much in the way of money, Severus," Gammy interjected now, appraising Harry with a shrewd glance down on his frightful mess of black hair, "but I'd be grateful for a bit of help that didn't come from needing to punish or coerce my own grandchildren. Harry would be entitled to bring home a portion of whatever it is that we manage to glean at the end of the day."
This was news to Harry, and he perked up at the prospect.
There was nothing wrong with the milk dropped off by the milkman, but he'd grown a touch spoilt by drinking it fresh. That he might be able to have it at home too was an exciting idea.
Snape was still treating him to a rather long look, even though whatever it was that he was thinking remained utterly inscrutable. Finally, however, he heaved a great sigh through his enormous nose and sunk down in his seat, drumming against the tabletop with the fingers of his right hand.
"If Harry has no objections, I suppose I don't see any issue with it."
Gammy nodded, looking rather pleased. "He's certainly not obligated—it was his own idea. But I'd hate to send him home emptyhanded after working hard."
Turning now to Harry, Snape pinned him with a withering glare. "This is all contingent upon your marks, mind you. If I see you slipping—even by five points on average—you're to spend your evenings here with your eyes on your homework. And don't think I won't tell Mrs. Hill if I suspect this to be interfering in your schooling," he cautioned, sharing a conspiratorial, adult look with the older woman who was now also nodding. "I'm certain she doesn't wish to see your education fall by the wayside any more than I do."
"It's not a proper job," she added, with a firm nod. "You can stop if you like and sit with Blossom instead. Whenever you like."
Harry nodded his agreement. He had enough good sense not to say aloud that it would be a cold day in hell before he wished to spend any time with Snowdrop alone—or sandwiched between she and her brother while the two were intent on sniping at one another.
"If that's all, Mrs. Hill, I believe it's well past the acceptable hours for visiting and I've work in the morning," Snape said as he rose from his seat. A quick glance at Harry had the boy scrambling for his school-bag as he also stumbled out of his seat and smiled at Gammy Hill.
She saw them to the door and waved them away, but only after she and Severus had agreed that they'd reconvene at their chosen battleground—Headmistress Shaw's office—on Wednesday, when Severus was next occasioned to have a day off during the week.
It must have meant a great deal to the man, Harry reflected then, as he had precious little time anymore to spend on his experimental potions, and that he would so willingly sacrifice it said rather a lot about how very much Snape wanted the yew tree gone.
Thus, it ought to have been no surprise at all when Harry took his break on Monday to see that there was meters and meters of yellow caution tape wrapped around the blackened trunk of the behemoth tree.
There were a few children who had gathered as close as the yard monitors would allow, gawking up at the sight of brilliant yellow wrapped in a lover's embrace around the seemingly charbroiled bark.
It was startling in its incongruence with the past, and there were a couple of loitering surveyors—perhaps from the council—who were peering up into the branches, or alternatively, kicking at dirt clods near the base, with speculative fascination.
When Harry glanced away for a moment he realised rather belatedly that at his shoulder stood Snowdrop. Her own eyes were turned to the scene, her mouth pursed in a pucker of anger and her cheeks inflated with air and indignation.
"None of it would of happened if you'd just left me alone." She said, her voice curiously restrained.
Harry had never known the girl to show restraint in anything. Perhaps her brush with death had had some salutary effects, after all.
"I bet you'd of eaten one anyway." He argued, feeling rather uncharitable. He'd not forced the younger girl to shove poison in her own mouth. "Besides, you weren't supposed to sit under the trees in the first place—"
"Well then, neither were you—"
"No," Harry agreed, "but it was my first day here. How was I supposed to know that?"
They fell silent, but eventually Snowdrop felt the need to have a final say, and to defend herself. "It was my first day too. No one told me I wasn't supposed to be there either..."
It very well might have been true, and likely, given the girl's reputation around the school—which had apparently carried over from her time in nursery—everyone had simply breathed a collective sigh of relief when she'd made herself scarce during breaks. Out of sight was out of mind, and Harry thought then that it may well have been the case that even the rather absent child minders that were supposedly there to keep watch had simply counted their blessings when it seemed that Snowdrop might disappear off their radars for an hour each day.
It made him rather sad, in truth, because he remembered being the child who was deliberately overlooked back at the school he'd attended in Little Whinging.
So long as Harry was 'absent,' then Dudley and his gang usually were tamer. So long as the worst bullies in the yard were tamer, the adults could breathe easy.
"What do you think happened to it?" Harry asked.
Snowdrop shrugged, though she looked to be a bit upset still. "It looks like it caught on fire..."
"Yeah." The boy agreed.
It might well have been the case, except that by Tuesday, the blight had extended to the lowest hanging branches, and by Wednesday, the entire thing was nothing more than a wraith-like shadow of its former self, the bark and needles and berries having molted off onto the ground where they'd already begun to compost. Something which ought to have been impossible given how quickly it had happened.
Add to that the fact that the nearby sessile oak and black mulberry were also beginning to blacken, Harry's opinion on the matter was beginning to calcify around one theory and one only: it must have been magic.
The school had finally, by then, roped off that portion of the yard. Wednesday's break saw Harry standing between Nicky and Snowdrop as the three children watched an expeditionary force—led by Headmistress Shaw and composed of Gammy Hill, Severus, and a loudly clucking Judith Murray—examining the roots of the tree.
It was rather odd to see Severus in this capacity, Harry thought. He wasn't there 'for Harry,' though of course, in some sense he was. He was there acting the part of concerned parent, and he and Gammy paid none of the three any mind at all as they pointed to this or that, making comments.
Severus had even taken pains to attire himself in a way that perhaps suggested that he was more than the scrappy Cokeworth youth he was well known to have been around those parts. His hair was rather dull—seemingly he'd washed it, though it lacked any of the shine that most people's clean, well-maintained hair usually evidenced—and that supposition was borne out by the fact that it was curling outrageously at the ends (a fact which he'd seemed to have tried to hide by pulling it into a punishingly tight tail at the back of his skull).
Harry hadn't really believed the man when he'd told him that his hair formed ringlets when clean, but here was the proof.
He'd thrown on a pair of twill trousers, which, like his normal jeans, were black, but they at least leant the slight impression that he cared about the meeting he'd undertaken. His poloneck was the same one that he often wore to work, as it was unobjectionable and looked professional enough, but he'd apparently seen fit to add over it a black sport coat, in a look that Harry had never seen the man trial before.
Gammy looked much as she ever did, which was unfussy, but unobjectionable in about every conceivable way. She wore a familiar blue gansey jumper over her own trousers, and a windbreaker to protect against the rapidly cooling northern air.
Their conversation could not be heard from so far away, but it appeared as though Ms. Shaw was explaining—in so far as she knew any of the details—about the recent turn that had befallen the copse of trees, as Gammy asked questions and Severus stood back with his arms crossed.
He appeared entirely too disinterested for someone who had made it his mission to see the trees removed, and that had Harry frowning with suspicion. Particularly when he watched Snape's polished shoe—not his boots, which was another odd, sartorial choice—kicking over a pile of the decomposing matter that had fallen from the three trees with an air of amusement. His mouth moved, so he must have been saying something, and the way he'd crossed his arms over his chest and smirked suggested that whatever he said was likely some irreverent quip.
Judith Murray's face purpled like a ripe grape and then creased like a dried raisin.
By Friday's break, a crew of workmen in dungarees had appeared, toiling and shouting noisily as they labored to remove the ancient bulwark of the play yard. First, they felled it near the ground, maintaining perhaps one or two feet of the trunk, and then they set to work digging a trench around the outside, unearthing a kraken-like configuration of twisting roots to the air as they did so.
Monday saw a crater in the ground where the envoy from the council had burned the remains in the pit, and the hole wasn't filled for another two days, at least.
They'd left the mulberry and the oak, which had stood in fierce competition with the malevolent yew, and now it seemed that the mulberry no longer served its apparent purpose in separating the two grander trees.
Whatever it was, however, that had felled the third of their number seemed unsatisfied with the end result.
It happened far more slowly than the yew itself had been taken over, but each day tendrils of pitch-coloured stain crept up around the sturdy trunks of first the oak and then the mulberry, until whatever it was that had ultimately claimed the life of the yew seemed intent to reap two more victims.