A full two weeks passed Harry by with the sort of speed that bordered on mockery. Where every other month he'd stayed with Severus had seemed to move at a glacial pace, December seemed to jump from hour to hour and day to day. No sooner did Monday come along than it was Friday, and surely it wasn't possible for Friday the twenty-third to follow so hot on the heels of the first of the month.
Why was it that things he didn't want to do approached at a relentless pace, while normal life seemed to lazily drift even when he wished he could get well past the dull days of primary education?
Was it all some sort of divine farce? Perhaps, Harry resolved, he could lay the question at God's enormous feet when he passed through the doors of St. Mark's that very evening.
However, by the time Harry filed into the grand nave of the church, he was far too nervy to remember that he'd had a question for the Lord to answer.
It wasn't all that different from St. Catherine's, that it was Anglican notwithstanding. There were beautiful, stained-glass windows that during the day would have let in streamers of coloured light, and pews that lined the central aisle, already filling up with parents.
Near the front, risers had been erected for the choral groups to sing from, and the presumptive set of the Nativity play had been arranged in the front, for their performance was to precede the singing by the other forms.
Harry had arrived with his guardian (along with Severus' father, whose presence did little to settle the boy's case of jitters), and Severus seemed more familiar with the layout than he himself was, which was to be expected, given that he had been volunteering (if one could call conscripted service volunteering) several hours of his week to labouring in the church since the beginning of the Advent season.
Of course, this was Harry's first time seeing any of it. He assumed most of the children hadn't yet seen the stage unless they attended St. Mark's on Sundays, and even then, the set had only been moved to the front of the church the night before, so unless the children in question had leave to walk through the storerooms, they still likely wouldn't have seen the arrangements.
For the final week of rehearsals, they had been working with a set of props and improvised costumes in the music room. For all of the worries that they were all feeling, there weren't actually many possible points of failure. Most of the play consisted of characters moving from one side of the stage to the other, and usually—even if they forgot—their characters were prompted to action by the voice of the narrator.
Once they reached the centre aisle of the nave, Severus propelled Harry forward with a small shove between his shoulder blades and nodded up towards the front, where Ms. Tibbons was flitting around with a kinetic sort of energy, looking very harried indeed.
Her hair was a towering tornado of blonde frizz, and for the evening she'd selected a cheap, sateen skirt suit that didn't fit quite properly. In her earlobes were garish, chunky, gold-tone earrings, and her black patent court shoes clacked loudly against the stone floor when she rushed to-and-fro, martialing every student within arm's reach.
The parents were being handled by Mr. Fowler and, near the rear, another teacher that Harry suspected taught some of the upper classes.
Most of the parents looked rather clueless and probably would have stood around chatting with the other people they knew well had Mr. Fowler—who would not have looked misplaced at the London Opera in the ridiculously formal get-up he had chosen for the evening—not been patrolling the pews, pointing this way and that as he took head-counts.
"Three for Wallace? There, in row six, if you please. Five heads for Lowry? Middle of row nine, to your left. Move all the way up to the Greenes, thank you. Potter—"
He abruptly stopped, and Harry had to look quizzically over his shoulder in order to figure out why.
Behind him, Severus was faced off against his teacher in a one-sided stare-down from no less than fifteen paces away, and Tobias seemed to be providing back up by way of an additional grumpy countenance and crossed arms.
Harry's eyes darted from one party to the other, wishing he could disappear. He truly hoped that Severus didn't dare say anything that might embarrass him, but, in the end, it didn't appear that words were necessary.
Mr. Fowler cleared his throat and made a broad sweeping gesture with an open palm. "Gentlemen, I trust you can find your seats. P-please make yourselves c-comfortable..."
Harry tore his gaze away and tried to act as though he'd not witnessed it.
It was bad enough that Snape and his father were clearly the worst dressed in the church. Neither had taken any especial efforts to clean themselves up for the event, although Harry considered it a blessing that Severus was wearing the poloneck he often wore for work (underneath a pea coat he'd donned to keep off the frigid December air) instead of a Guns N' Roses shirt underneath the much-abused donkey jacket he seemed to favour.
His hair was as shiny as a puddle of oil that had dripped out the bottom of a car's engine onto the asphalt, but at least it was pulled back out of his face. It was limp, straight, and tangled. Not a ringlet in sight. That meant that he'd not bothered washing it for well over a week.
Tobias, for his part, had done no more to improve his normal appearance than to shave (which he'd done three days earlier, leading to a healthy jaw of grey-brown bristles) and bathe. His coat was threadbare and a drab brown, worn over out-of-date, high-waisted, pleated trousers that were held up by a pair of suspenders so old that the elastic crunched rather than stretched.
It was lucky that Harry was well used to being relegated to the position of family ragamuffin by his relatives, otherwise it might have bothered him to see the comparison to the well-turned-out families that surrounded the father and son duo on all sides.
Near the doors, he caught sight of Nicky, towed behind a good-looking man wearing a smart suit who appeared to be perhaps ten years Severus' senior, and a plump but well-maintained woman in a fashionable, polka-dot dress and fur-trimmed coat who was fussing over the pair of older boys who had entered along with them.
Nicky ran ahead as soon as they were through the doors and didn't spare a glance back, although it didn't seem he'd yet caught sight of Harry.
The young wizard craned his neck around, looking to see if he could find a trace of Snowdrop, but she either hadn't arrived yet, or else had already been corralled by Ms. Tibbons.
The upper and lower forms she arranged by class in the front pews, which had been reserved for their use, and the principal players in the Nativity she swept to the side. In front of him, before he managed to approach the milieu, Harry watched as she wrangled Jack Sandys and Woody Ward, pointing them towards one of the side-aisles where they were presumably meant to change into their costumes.
Before she could get to him, Harry followed in their footsteps, finding that he preferred following the herd to being at the mercy of the shepherdess' crook.
It was when he finally reached the winding passageway that would take him to the storerooms that he managed to catch a glimpse of Gammy.
She was seated in the first pew behind the rows set aside for use by the student body and was probably quite eager for the night's performance. She had primly crossed her ankles underneath her thighs and to the side and had chosen to wear a fussy pair of white-lace gloves in addition to her unassuming button-down dress. Beside her she had laid her warm winter coat and a shiny, red handbag with a top-clasp.
She, along with many of the women, had chosen to wear a hat for the occasion, which Harry thought might have been a bit much. It wasn't a wedding or anything, after all. Harry knew that when he'd most often seen women wearing hats, at least in his aunt's towering pile of tabloids, it was for only the most formal of occasions.
Things like posh garden parties, or an event that was called Royal Ascot by the breathless British press corps.
In fact, he knew that his aunt had something of a complex about the fact that she only owned one 'suitable' hat, and that his uncle supposedly gave her too few occasions in which she felt she could rightly pull it from its florid, pink hatbox.
Before he turned back—having attempted to wave at the older woman without success—he noticed that she was absorbed with whispering furiously to the woman who was seated to her left.
The conversation didn't appear to be at all pleasant from the faces that each of them were making, and Gammy wore the same expression that she so often adopted when she was made to discipline Snowdrop or Nicky with farm chores.
It was enough to make Harry dip aside as a few more of his classmates darted past him. He sidled up and slightly behind a column and squinted out at the pair, staring hard at the stranger seated beside Pamina Hill.
She was rather unassuming, besides the disagreeable scowl she wore. Her hair was medium length and decidedly dull. It hung in a single layer around her shoulders, which wasn't remotely fashionable—from what Harry could tell by looking at the way the women around him wore their hair—and she had kept her coat on. Beneath it she was wearing a pair of tan, chequered trousers that flared slightly around her feet. Like some of the other women present, she wore a hat, but hers was an orange beret. It was so faded that in some places, such as under the rim, it appeared a vibrant tangerine, and in others, such as on the top, it was a more sedate peach.
She'd crossed her arms over her breasts as her eyes darted about the church, curiously looking as though she were both searching for something and attempting to avoid whatever it was that she was searching for.
Gammy was keeping up a running commentary to her under her breath and appeared to be speaking to the young woman as a stable hand might attempt to speak to a spooked horse.
Whatever it was that she had most recently said to her companion apparently met with resistance, as the young lady's eyes stopped darting about and settled into an angry grimace trained solely on the woman to her right.
They were speaking too low for Harry to hear, but whatever she said back must have been scathing, for Gammy blanched an appalling shade of white and reared back. Not even Snowdrop had ever managed to elicit such a reaction from the normally placid old lady.
Harry's curiosity was piqued, but before he could inch forward and attempt to hear any of their conversation, his shoulder was pinched from behind and he was redirected towards the last stranglers who were making their way to the makeshift dressing rooms.
"The show starts in just a bit, l'al yan, best be on your way."
When he glanced up, startled, it was to see a kindly, balding vicar who must have been the one hosting Rowky Syke for the evening.
Harry nodded, not wishing to argue—for he really didn't have any desire to be late, which would only have disappointed Ms. Tibbons—and he sprinted to make it into the room that had been set aside for the boys' use.
Inside were the male members of his class, all running and shouting over one another as they struggled into their robes made of repurposed bed sheets.
"Do I have a beard?"
"No, I have a beard! Sheep don't wear beards!"
"Here, give it to me. I'm a Wise Man, I need a beard," Alec Benjamin said, yanking on the scraggly, white hair piece. It looked to be made of carded wool, and someone had artfully embellished the moustache tufts with small, gold beads.
Harry cleared his throat and edged around the wall, hoping to avoid drawing attention to himself. "Er… are there piles for each of us, or…?"
Thankfully his voice blended into the chaotic chorus of scrambling boys, and his question was answered by a frantic Carl Masters, who, besides answering, paid him no mind.
"On the chairs, over there," Carl gestured toward the far wall. "Everyone's costume is on a chair with your name on a card on top."
Harry worked his way over, having to push past the excited mass of other children in order to ease his passage. As promised, a row of folding chairs sat lined up against one of the walls and he quickly found one of the chairs furthest to the right with a pile of brown and tan robes that he supposed must have been his costume.
He pulled an off-white tunic on over his white button down (the uniform for school which had also been requested as their outfit for the choral portion of the show so that everyone looked to be matching) and tied a bright blue sash he had been provided around his thin waist. Over top was the brown robe, which someone had thoughtfully fouled up with far too much dirt; perhaps in the interest of historical accuracy.
He was accorded a dark brown beard, and a veil of sorts, held in place by a circular cord of rope. When he went to check his reflection in the mirror, he felt satisfied that he looked very unlike himself, though he wasn't so certain that he looked much like a carpenter from two millennia past.
To his mind, he looked like a rather scruffy waif who had had it in mind to adopt an entirely unconvincing beard.
This hair piece, too, appeared to be made of wool, rather than cotton or anything synthetic. He learnt the truth of that when, upon tying it to his face, he promptly began itching away at his chin through the fibers.
He'd be lucky if, upon taking it off, he didn't have a giant, red rash spanning the lower portion of his face.
Then again, when he glanced over at the other boys who were unfortunate enough to have been given facial hair, he found them in similar straits. Bruce Prior was loudly complaining about how itchy his long, black beard was, and repeatedly pulling it away from his face in order to get some air underneath.
Harry envied Nicky, Matthew, and Woody, whose roles apparently were inconsequential enough not to require facial hair.
Eventually, all of the chairs were emptied of biblical raiment and a loose queue formed at the mouth of the storeroom door. Beyond, they could hear the dull roar of the parents freely conversing in their seats, and the boys at the front of the line reported back—as though in a game of telephone—that the front seats were all but full: a sure sign that the show was about to begin.
Harry breathed deeply. He wasn't sure whether he felt scared of his first foray onto the stage. Part of him had been keeping up a running mantra over the weeks that if what he really wanted was the kind of stardom enjoyed by the likes of his great heroes, he would have to prove to himself that he could handle the pressure.
A Nativity was nothing. Less than nothing, really. He couldn't break a string, or blank out on the solo. There weren't going to be any screaming fans or shirts yanked up in front of his dazed eyes (which Severus had attempted to protect him from with a carefully placed hand at the concert, but Harry knew what he'd seen).
He took a deep breath in and then did his very best to put on the face that Severus wore every day. Aloof. Dispassionate. Superior. He wasn't the tallest in the class, but he lifted up onto his toes just a bit in order to feel as though for a moment he could be above them.
They were all tittering to one another, and some—like Jack Sandys—seemed to be nearly hyperventilating.
Ironic, given that he was a mere sheep and he'd begged for the main speaking part. In no way did it appear that he could have made good on his ambitions.
Harry mentally tested his lines as he blinked slowly, attempting to look like Severus always did.
Severus always looked cool, even when he was absolutely blowing his top.
The lines came to mind easily, as did the stage directions (which amounted to little more than moving here or there), and the prompts to which he was meant to respond. He felt ready.
Which, incidentally, was a good thing, as within seconds of Harry cloaking himself in grim determination, Mr. Fowler arrived at the door and began to lead them out to the colonnade that separated the side aisle from the central chamber.
They were to wait in the wings for their parts to be called, and Harry quickly found and paired up with Snowdrop, so that they could enter together.
Like himself, she didn't appear at all galled by the fact that she'd be under scrutiny, which might have been odd, had Harry not suspected that the girl didn't care one whit what any other human being thought of her.
What had surprised him in the weeks leading up to the production was that where their joint playacting was concerned, Snowdrop was businesslike and professional, as though she had something to prove (although to whom she meant to prove herself remained a mystery, as he didn't know who it could be that she cared enough about to desire praise from).
Where Harry was trying to be cool, Snowdrop merely looked bored. In the same way she was always bored with her homework and resolutely ignored the fact that Gammy tried to shower praise on her for maintaining the best scores in the class.
"Who cares?"She had asked with a roll of her eyes, when Harry had once asked her why she was so ungracious about the fact that her grandmother was proud of her. "It's all dull. Dull as dishwater. Really stupid stuff. I can't believe you lot have trouble with all of it," she had sneered, staring pointedly down at Harry's low score on the quiz that had been returned to him on that afternoon.
Coming back to the present, Harry pressed his elbow into her side. "You're not scared, are you? You remember what we're to do when we come to the inn—?"
She turned to glower at him and slapped a hand over his mouth, looking about to make sure no one heard him. Her eyes lingered on Candace Rhys and Portia Foster, her two biggest nemeses.
"I'd know what to do even if we were doing something as stupid as Shakespeare, and we're not, so don't let those two cows hear you."
Oh... that might have been it then, Harry realised. She got to be Mary, and even though Snowdrop hadn't any interest in the part for her own sake, she was petty enough to lord it over Candace Rhys' pretty, blonde head.
Suddenly he had all faith in her. If it came to spiting someone, there wasn't a chance that Snowdrop Hill would cock up her lines.
Harry nodded so she could see and she slowly removed her hand from his face, shaking it a bit and scratching at her hand when the beard caused her palm to itch.
"Your stomach is all wonky," Harry observed, poking at the pillow that served as Snowdrop's faux gravidity.
It was. The pillow had unfurled and lay flat in places and seemed too low beneath the light-blue tunic she was wearing.
The girl cursed and reached up under the hem to rearrange the stuffing until it appeared round and bulged at the front.
"Better?"
"Yeah, much."
That was the last they managed to say to one another before Ms. Tibbons announced their play and stood at the podium to the left of stage.
Borrowed spotlights lit up the pasture and Nicky, Matthew, and their flock started out into the limelight, marching beneath a sparkling, party-store star that was suspended overhead.
The entire production passed quickly, and without all too many hiccups. King Herrod stammered and failed to sound remotely menacing or convincing. Gabriel, being played by the shyest girl in class, mumbled her lines, and Snowdrop had to catch her belly as it fell while they were walking alongside the donkey-on-wheels that was slowly marching them to Bethlehem.
All in all, Harry considered, it probably couldn't have gone smoother.
That opinion was borne out by the look of radiant joy on Ms. Tibbons' face when they finally stepped from the stage after the curtain call (which wasn't exactly a curtain call so much as it was all of the members of the class lined up by role as they all stared down with forced expressions of wonder at the plastic baby doll swaddled in the wooden trough that had been donated by Gammy Hill for the production).
At that point, Harry finally felt safe enough to shift his focus and to look for Severus in the crowd.
He found him easily—as no one else seemed to be wearing unbroken black—and smiled a bit in triumph.
To his disappointment, Severus merely nodded back, his face mostly impassive. But then he at least didn't look irritated or bored. To Severus' left, Tobias most certainly looked bored. Or he likely had been bored before he'd leaned back in the pew, crossed his arms over his chest, and had allowed his head to lull forward onto his chest. He was asleep.
Severus did, at the very least, join in with the applause, and he offered Harry a rare smile, a nod of acknowledgement, and a mouthed 'well done.'
That was all Harry noticed before raucous cheering erupted from two rows behind the Snapes. A group of four were seated together, three adults and a child who looked to be only a year or two Harry's senior, and the woman in the group had risen from her seat and was letting out eager whoops of praise.
Harry certainly didn't envy whomever it was that they'd come fo—
He coloured crimson and absentmindedly scratched at his beard before he offered a shy wave as recognition set in. Suddenly he felt both embarrassed and uncomfortably warm inside.
It was Lola. And beside her were her husband, and two relations of the Padiernoses, come all the way to see Harry's performance. Severus must have tipped her off, for Harry certainly hadn't told the woman about any of it.
He recovered himself enough to glance over at Snowdrop across the manger and found her face to be a blotchy shade of red. She was scowling—a very un-Mary-like expression—out at the woman who sat beside her grandmother in the pew and had begun to snarl. It was a similar expression to the one she'd worn before she'd cannoned into Nicky's chest that day during break.
It was a good thing that they were soon ushered off-stage to the backrooms once more. Once they arrived, they were instructed to shuck their costumes and to line up so that they could replace the oldest class in the front pews. The choral portion of the evening had begun, and the performances were set to occur in descending order of age.
Rowky Syke was so small that there were only three classes. Year six, the oldest children, who were taking the stage first and had the most complicated arrangements, year five, who were a year older than Harry and Nicky were, and the combined class of years four and three, which had so few students each that they barely filled out a whole classroom. Their numbers had been squashed together by a decision handed down by the school governors in the interest of saving money and time.
From what Harry could gather, through gossip he'd heard in bits and pieces at the Hill's dinner table, the school had been desperate to keep Snowdrop (who, herself, was only in year three) and Nicky apart but had no other options. The number of students born in the 79-80 bracket and 80-81 bracket had been so low that they had had no choice but to combine classes, even after a conference with Gammy and Nicky's parents begging the school administrators to keep the siblings apart.
Snowdrop had arrived from Rowky Syke's adjunct lower-form school with a reputation for violence and antagonism towards her older brother. Their ascension into the primary school had apparently been the source of much nail biting in the year leading up to her matriculation.
Fortunately, after all was done and dusted following Snowdrop's inadvertent poisoning, their reciprocal antipathy had cooled, or at least it didn't often interrupt class.
In any case, it was a good thing that the oldest students would be taking to the risers first. Harry felt knackered, and he was grateful to take a seat and have the attention off of himself for a moment. However, when he looked over to Nicky—who was seated to his right—he found that the boy was now staring at the woman beside Gammy as well.
Only he didn't look angry, he looked positively mortified.
"Who is she?" Harry asked in an urgent whisper as he shoved his shoulder against Nicky's.
"Shhhh," Nicky let out a woosh of air between his teeth and seemed as though he were forcibly making himself look ahead instead of behind him. "No one."
"I'm not stupid," Harry cajoled him again, this time earning a glare from Ms. Tibbons who was taking the stage in order to conduct. He mouthed a quick, insincere 'sorry' to her and turned backwards in his seat, craning his neck to catch a glimpse at the sullen visage of the woman who was sitting beside Gammy.
Except the woman was no longer looking forward. She was pitched sideways in her seat, nearly draped over the man next to her (who looked most uncomfortable and upset) as she gestured wildly to someone else across the aisle and several pews behind.
To that point they were keeping their voices low enough that they hadn't interrupted the performance, but Harry could see her gestures growing all the more violent and Gammy's frantic attempts to soothe the younger woman.
They were a mere two rows back from Harry and far too preoccupied to pay the fact that he was staring any mind.
"Papagena—Papagena, stop!" Gammy hissed, trying to take hold of the younger woman's round cheeks and turn them forward. "Watch the show! Just... please wait! Snowdrop will be on-stage soon—!"
"Don't callme that!" Her feral guest seethed, without looking at Gammy. She just as quickly renewed her efforts to flag down whomever it was that she was signing to on the other end of the church.
"Genie, please, don't cause a scene! Don't embarrass her—!"
"If you would stop and let me go then there wouldn't have to be a scene, would there?" Her companion asked in a nasty voice.
"At least go outside... I have the keys to the Ford. Here, go start the engine and you can sit in the warm car," Gammy pleaded, fishing the keys out of her red handbag and attempting to force them into the woman's—was it Genie or that odd name? Papagena? Was that even a proper name?—hand.
Harry was distracted from the argument when the year six students took a bow to a roomful of applause and stepped down from the risers, queuing to replace year five in the pews as the younger students began their walk to the front.
Year six had performed 'Carol of the Bells,' 'O' Come, O' Come, Emmanuel,' and 'I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.' Harry wasn't certain what year five had in store, but it seemed that they were starting their performance with a very out-of-tune 'In the Bleak Mid-Winter.'
Harry's awareness of which song came next was undermined by the argument taking place a few rows back resuming in earnest.
"I don't want to see him, Mam. I told you I don't, I don't want to watch him today."
"For Heaven's sake, Genie, tomorrow's his birthday! The very least you can do is—"
"You can't make me! You can't make me—I'm leaving!"
"Sit down!" Gammy hissed, so loudly that more people than just Harry were staring now. Genie, whose wrist was caught up in a vice grip, looked murderous, and had she not been held physically in place by whom Harry now knew to be her mother, she clearly would have bolted for the door.
That was her then. That was Snowdrop's mum... Nicky's mum.
(To be continued in Part II...)