Mordant

Chapter Two: At St. Mungo’s

The post-owl swooped in through the single window on the Dai Llewellyn Ward and began pecking insistently at Linus’ knuckles.

Suppressing a groan, he opened his eyes and untied the envelope from the owl’s leg. It was the first post he’d had in the two weeks since he had been admitted to the hospital – which was, he realized suddenly, a bit surprising considering that it was the height of Christmas-card season.

He opened the letter.

Mr. Berowne,

I have put up with a lot of things from you over the years and no complaining, but this is the limit. I mopped up the bloodstains when I came over to clean and feed the cat on Tuesday cause I didn’t know what happened to you, but now as I know the truth I won’t be coming over to any more. You couldn’t pay me enough to work in a house with werewolfs. You can do for yourself from here on out, and my husband says you better hope I didn’t catch lincan lykanth werewolf from your blood or there’ll be hell to pay.

Very truly yours,

Gladys Gudgeon (Mrs.)

P.S. The cat is IN.

P.P.S. If you meet Gilderoy Lockhart, could you get his ottergraff for me?

Linus crumpled up the sheet of parchment and threw it into a corner of the ward. Illiterate, ignorant woman, he thought. What she’d said about him was bad enough, but couldn’t she at least refrain from venting her prejudices on a helpless cat? If she’d had the sense to shut Chess out, he would have been able to get along catching field mice. He was a sensible animal, which was more than Linus could say for most human beings. Locked inside the house for two weeks, he’d probably starve.

The truth was that the letter stung him more than he would let on, even to himself. Mrs. Gudgeon had been his cleaning woman for fifteen years, and although he had long since learned not to expect intelligent conversation from her, they’d always had a perfectly pleasant working relationship. She’d even baked cakes for him on his birthdays – lopsided and burnt around the edges, usually, but at least her heart was in the right place. Or so he’d thought.

“Mr. Berowne?”

The trainee Healer on the ward, a sandy-haired young man with freckles and a likeably ugly face, was standing beside his bed.

“What is it now?” Linus asked grumpily. “More potions? I’ve already had three this afternoon.”

“No.” Healer Pye’s face was earnest. “I was wondering if you might be able to spare a minute or two to chat about your condition.”

“I think not.” Linus waved his hand around the nearly empty ward. “I’m expecting a visit from the Minister for Magic. And the Queen. They’ll be here any moment now.”

Ignoring this, Healer Pye sat down in the chair next to his bed. “I know this has all been a bit of a shock for you, but believe me, it’s not nearly the life sentence it was when you were growing up. We haven’t actually found a permanent cure as yet, but there’s been a tremendous amount of progress in potion-making over the last few years, and with proper care and precautions there’s absolutely no reason you shouldn’t be able to live an almost normal life.”

“Almost normal,” said Linus. “Very interesting way of putting it. Do go on.”

“It’s a painful illness, but it’s not progressive. And you’ll have a normal life expectancy and all that.”

“I see,” said Linus. “In other words, it doesn’t kill you, it just makes you wish it did.”

“It’s hardly as bad as all that. Many people affected by lycanthropy go on to lead very full and satisfying lives. You’ve heard of the Wolfsbane potion, I suppose? It won’t stop your body from transforming physically, but it makes the beast completely controllable if you take it every day for a week before the full moon. Basically, while you’re under the influence you have the body of a wolf and the mentality of a human. No bestial urges or anything like that – that’s all urban myth, you understand. Very few side effects at all. And it’s nowhere near as expensive as you’ve probably heard. The Ministry subsidizes it.”

“Suppose I’m in the mood to indulge my bestial urges?” Linus asked.

“Pardon?”

“If I don’t feel like taking this Wolfsbane stuff some month. Let’s say I want to track down the bloke who bit me and I think having a human mentality would cramp my style.”

Pye looked genuinely shocked for a moment, but recovered his breezy professional manner. “Oh. Well, naturally that’s not an option. Taking Wolfsbane is required by law.”

“Under penalty of...?”

“Six months in Azkaban. Longer if you injure anyone.”

Linus shuddered.

Pye quickly backtracked to the long list of benefits from the potion, which was a subject he clearly preferred, but Linus paid little attention to the details. He was beginning to feel slightly ill again, and the tray of boiled chicken and lemon jelly that the mediwizard on duty brought in for his supper did little to dispel this feeling.

After supper, the ward was invaded by a tribe of carolers from a local church. They sang “The Little Drummer Boy,” which Linus firmly believed to be the most irritating Christmas carol ever written, with a screechy-voiced woman in hot pink robes putting in the pa-rum-pa-pum-pums, and began passing out tracts.

“Have you found Jesus yet?” the pink-robed woman asked. Her speaking voice was even shriller than her singing one.

“Why?” asked Linus. “How long ago did you lose him?”

She tittered, making the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, and the oily-looking man next to her gave him an excessively broad smile. “Oh no, you misunderstood her. What she meant is, do you know that Jesus loves you?”

“Tell him I don’t swing that way,” Linus muttered. Fortunately this proved to be blasphemous enough to make both of his visitors clap their hands to their mouths and beat a hasty retreat.

It occurred to him afterwards that this might not have been, strictly speaking, nice, but he dismissed the thought at once. Since when were werewolves expected to be nice?

There was only one other patient on the ward, a woman who rarely spoke and had flatly refused to tell the Healers what bit her, so Linus spent the rest of the evening in undisturbed solitude. It was a relief at first, but he found himself getting bored as the hours wore on. He counted the cracks on the ceiling and contemplated the only portrait on the ward, which depicted a wizard with long, silvery hair and a peculiarly savage expression. It was labeled URQUHART RACKHARROW, 1612-1697, INVENTOR OF THE ENTRAIL-EXPELLING CURSE.

Linus gazed at Urquhart Rackharrow for a long time, wondering who on earth had decided he would make an appropriate decoration for a hospital ward. He wondered so hard that he fell asleep, and woke up the next morning to discover that a new patient, a middle-aged wizard with thinning red hair and bandages all along his side, had been moved into the bed opposite him.

When the hospital staff noticed he was awake, Linus was subjected to thin porridge, lukewarm tea, and a second and rather more tiresome lecture about making the best of life with his condition, this time from Hippocrates Smethwyck, the senior Healer on the ward. Hypocrites would be a more appropriate name, Linus decided after five minutes of conversation. Pye, at least, had appeared to be in earnest when he said prejudice against werewolves was all outmoded superstition; Smethwyck kept eyeing Linus shiftily, and he seemed to be trying not to sit too close to him.

After the older Healer finally gave up, Linus was left alone with the red-haired wizard, who unfortunately seemed to be in a conversational mood. “I’m Arthur Weasley,” he said cheerily. “Nasty leg injury you’ve got there. What happened?”

“I was bitten by a werewolf,” said Linus shortly. “Unclean. You don’t want to talk to me.”

Arthur clapped his hands together. “Oh, there’s no need to be that way, of course I want to talk to you. What an extraordinary coincidence!”

Linus narrowed his eyes. “What makes you say that? Are you the one who bit me?”

Arthur chuckled. “Oh no, of course not. It’s just that I’ve got to know one rather well over the past year or so. Nicest man you’ll ever meet, finds the condition very easy to manage. I expect you will too, once you get used to it.”

This was such a phenomenally stupid remark that Linus decided not to dignify it with a reply. Unfortunately, Arthur took his silence as encouragement, and Linus had to spend the next quarter of an hour listening to his new roommate natter on about his token werewolf acquaintance, who, it soon appeared, was not only a great friend of the family but practically a candidate for sainthood. The sort of person who bore his affliction bravely, never seemed to be the least bit bitter or depressed about anything, didn’t call attention to himself but was an absolute model of quiet kindness, and was liked and admired by everybody who knew him. He was not liked and admired by Linus, who was soon heartily sick of hearing about this paragon.

“I’ll give you another bite,” he threatened at last, “if you don’t shut up.”

Arthur fell silent and eyed Linus nervously. He began to think there might be a few perks to his condition.

 

                                                            *          *          *

Hope McRae brewed the next week’s stock of Memory-Replenishing Draughts with her usual care, although the chances that they would actually help poor Gilderoy Lockhart, or any of the others, were slim. She sighed, and picked up the tray of potions.

Over the wing of the hospital where Hope and her fellow Alienists had their offices, some forgotten hand had scrawled half a dozen lines from a Muggle poet:

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain

And with some sweet oblivious antidote

Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of the perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart?

They could. That was the entire problem, Hope thought in her occasional moments of bitterness. Wizards had a single “sweet oblivious antidote,” the Memory Charm, at their disposal, and they used it recklessly and indiscriminately. Hope had often been called in to heal the damage from amateur attempts at Obliviation – often, self-Obliviation, though strongly worded public service posters throughout the hospital warned of the dangers of casting a Memory Charm upon oneself.

And because Obliviation was such a simple and easy way to relieve a troubled mind – or so it seemed to the general public, who didn’t have to deal with the long-term consequences – the Alienists’ efforts to develop better solutions went largely unfunded and unregarded. Many of Hope’s old-school colleagues seemed reluctant to think of her as a Healer at all.

She delivered her stock of potions to the Spell Damage wing and made her rounds among the long-term residents while Miriam Strout, the Healer in charge of the ward, was on her lunch break. Broderick Bode, she noted, seemed a little better than usual. He was aware of her presence and appeared to be trying to communicate, though his speech was unintelligible. Hope thought there was some prospect of his recovery; he hadn’t been there long, after all. The ones who stayed on the ward for six months or more were usually incurable.

She spent half an hour helping Gilderoy Lockhart practice his writing, firmly deflecting his attention back to the quill and parchment whenever he attempted to flirt with her. He would probably never fully regain his memory, but she was hoping he would eventually re-learn enough life skills to survive outside of St. Mungo’s.

Hope was about to turn her attention to the last two patients – the ones everyone believed entirely incurable – when she noticed a new visitor on the ward. She was a woman no older than twenty-five, who had a mop of short hair in a vivid shade of pink and a box of chocolates under one arm. “Could I see Alice Longbottom, please?”

Hope was a little surprised by the request. The Longbottoms received many visitors, to be sure, but most of them were elderly relatives who came to see Frank and treated his wife as an afterthought. Alice had been an orphan of no particular family, and the Longbottoms had been less than enthusiastic about the match. She was also twenty years younger than her husband. To the longtime Aurors who visited occasionally, Frank was a respected colleague of many years and Alice a half-forgotten trainee.

“Of course you may. But I’m afraid the chocolates will have to be sent to the front desk, so we can inspect them for tampering. And I’ll have to stay in the room. It’s nothing personal. Hospital regulations for visitors who aren’t family.”

The young woman nodded. The Longbottoms were still, after all these years, high-security patients.

Hope had observed many different ways of managing the problem of carrying on a conversation with someone who was, to all outward appearances, an adult, but who might not have the mental capacity to understand a word you were saying and was definitely unable to reply. Some visitors spoke very slowly and emphatically, with broad gestures, as if the Longbottoms were foreigners. Others (and even Healer Strout fell into this category) seemed to regard them as overgrown children and resorted to baby talk. Still others fell into an awkward silence after a minute or two. This woman kept up a steady stream of easy chatter, as if Alice were a friend of a friend she was meeting for coffee.

“Wotcher, Alice ... d’you mind if I call you Alice? I’m Tonks. Mad-Eye’s told me so much about you, and I have a picture of you in my cubicle at work, so I’ve sort of got to thinking of you as if I knew you. I think you must have been about my age when it was taken, or maybe a little younger – it would have been right after you and Frank got engaged, and they had a party for you at the office.

“I’m glad we’ve finally met, because I’ve thought about you a lot. I don’t know if anybody’s ever told you about this, but there’s a fund named after you. It’s there to support promising young female candidates going through Auror training. I was the most recent one, only qualified a year and a half ago, but there have been loads of others – Agnes Sowerbutts, and Bianca Twogood, and Kathleen O’Farrell – well, she’s dead actually, but she was a very good Auror. And Helena Jourdemayne, she’s on maternity leave, but she’ll be back. You were a bit of a pioneer for all of us. You’d be pleased if you could see the Auror Corps now, it’s almost forty percent women. Anyway, I just wanted to stop by and say thanks. I really admire you, and I hope you’d be proud of me...

“Oh, and I brought you some chocolates, but I’m afraid the Healer on duty says they’ve got to be inspected first. Perhaps it’s just as well, that way you’ll have them just in time for Christmas...”

The visitor chattered on for a few more minutes, then looked at her watch. “Oh dear, I’ve got to go. A friend of mine is being treated downstairs – Arthur Weasley, you might know him from the Ministry. This great big snake took a chunk out of him, but he’ll be all right – anyway, I need to see him before I leave. Have a good Christmas, and I’ll come back after the holidays and tell you about everything that’s been happening at work.”

She turned to Hope. “Is it all right if I come back in a few weeks?”

“Oh yes, absolutely. Come as often as you like. Visitors are the best thing for her.”

“Then I will. I’m glad I can do something to help ... I mean, it’s silly but I feel a bit responsible...”

It was not until after she had gone that Hope began to wonder what she meant. She could understand why the young Auror, who had surely been only a child when the Longbottoms were tortured, might feel grateful toward Alice. But responsible?

 

                                                            *          *          *

Meanwhile, Arthur Weasley was also having visitors. His oldest son, Bill, stopped by during his lunch break, and almost as soon as he had gone, the rest of the family crowded into the ward: a plump red-haired wife, a pack of red-haired and freckled teenagers, and one dark-haired boy with glasses, who looked exceptionally morose. Perhaps, Linus thought, he’d been fathered by the milkman and was feeling depressed about it; he certainly didn’t seem to belong with the rest of the family.

Actually, he looked like Harry Potter, but this seemed so unlikely that Linus immediately dismissed the thought. He feigned sleep and tried to tune out the visitors’ chatter, although this was hard to do when he was clearly the topic of conversation.

To give Arthur credit, he attempted to lower his voice, but didn’t lower it far enough. “That fellow over there ... bitten by a werewolf, poor chap. No cure at all.”

“A werewolf?” asked his wife. “Is he safe in a public ward? Shouldn’t he be in a private room?”

For a fleeting moment, Linus wondered what would happen if he started growling and tearing his pillow to shreds with his teeth, but he decided this would bring on more trouble than it was worth.

“It’s two weeks till full moon,” said Arthur reassuringly. “They’ve been talking to him this morning, the Healers, you know, trying to persuade him he’ll be able to lead an almost normal life. I said to him – didn’t mention names, of course – but I said I knew a werewolf personally, very nice man, who finds the condition quite easy to manage...”

“What did he say?” asked one of the teenaged boys.

“Said he’d give me another bite if I didn’t shut up,” Arthur admitted.

The boy and his twin regarded Linus with newfound respect.

The visitors moved on to other topics of conversation after that, and some of the fragments Linus caught were tantalizing – something about the Prophet and the Ministry wanting to cover something up – but unfortunately, the Weasleys could keep their voices low when the subject wasn’t werewolves. Two more visitors joined them when the teenagers went out. One was a woman in her early twenties who might have been yet another daughter, although Linus wasn’t sure, because she seemed to have dyed her hair bright pink. The other was Mad-Eye Moody, a well-known ex-Auror whose Muggle alter ego – Peg-Leg Pat the Paranoid Please-Man – had appeared in the pages of Martin Miggs more than once.

The conversation became even quieter, but Linus heard enough to work out that the boy had been Harry Potter, after all.

Linus was not a great believer in heroes. He had always maintained that the most logical explanation of the events at Godric’s Hollow was that Lord Voldemort and Lily Potter had fired off Avada Kedavra at each other more or less simultaneously, and the child had nothing to do with it at all. By the same token, he felt that the press had greatly exaggerated most of the boy’s achievements since then, good and bad. Harry Potter, he believed, was mostly a humbug, although that was no fault of his own.

But now he felt sorry for the boy. He would never have the luxury of being ordinary. Linus didn’t have that luxury either, any more.

It was – he realized with a jolt – half-past-five on a Friday afternoon. His friends would be gathering in the Quill and Quirk for happy hour. Martin Lovegood would be buying round after round of drinks if the Quibbler had sold well that week, and mooching off of the others if it hadn’t. Little Thersites Mason would be ranting about the Ministry, Gringotts, Hogwarts, the Prophet, Puddlemere United, and just about every other institution of wizarding society that had annoyed him this week. Kathy Hudgins would be drinking Curiously Strong Ale by the pint and shooting dirty looks at the writers from Witch Weekly with their perfect nails and rainbow-colored mixed drinks. They might be wondering where Linus had been for the last two weeks, or perhaps they’d already heard and were gossiping about what had happened to him.

He supposed he’d never be able to have a quiet pint with friends again. He would fade out of everybody’s mind, the way that Skeeter woman had after she disappeared – not that anybody really missed her. Perhaps they wouldn’t miss Linus, either. He had a sharp tongue and a sharper quill, and both had made him enemies over the years. The Quill and Quirk crowd acted friendly, to be sure, but he had occasionally been surprised to learn that people who were perfectly cordial to his face disliked him intensely. His ex-wife, for instance, had seemed quite fond of him until the day she packed her bags and walked out, leaving a blistering note accusing him, among other things, of “emotional strangulation,” whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.

He turned over in bed and allowed the thin fog of depression that had been darkening the corners of his mind to roll in and blanket his entire consciousness.