Mordant

Chapter Ten: Ghosts From the Past

Remus insisted on escorting Celia home and double-checking the new protection spells around the house. She felt, on the whole, that he was being overprotective; he hadn’t done anything of the sort for Linus, who was likely to be the Death Eaters’ most immediate target. Nevertheless, she was glad of his company because it gave her a chance to ask him the question that had been tugging at her mind since the day before.

“Peter Pettigrew is a Death Eater. Is Sirius Black one as well?”

His voice was a shade too calm and matter-of-fact, the way it always was when spoke of that Halloween night fourteen years ago. “No, Mum. He’s innocent. He’s always been innocent. They switched Secret-Keepers, you see, a week before the Potters died. Peter was the one who betrayed them and killed all those people. And then he faked his own death.”

Mother and son met each other’s eyes. “Are you certain of this?”

“I would trust Sirius with my life.”

“I see.”

She watched him closely as he checked the last of the security charms, his hands quick and competent. He’d always been rather too fond of his friends, quick to forgive and make excuses, but he was a sensible young man – Well, not so very young any more. She was used to the grey streaks in his hair by now, but she always felt a pang of sorrow when she happened to notice them.

“I’m not going to ask you if you are sheltering him,” she said at last, “because it’s probably safer for everyone concerned if I don’t know. But if you should happen to see him, tell him I am sorry I believed him guilty.”

“I will.”

“Stay for a bit and have a cup of tea?”

“I’d like to, Mum, but I’m due back in London. Take very good care of yourself, and let me know if you see anyone suspicious hanging around, all right?” He kissed her on the forehead and Disapparated.

She made tea for herself and sat down in the living room, thinking.

This house, she sometimes thought, was full of ghosts. Oh, not the sort of ghosts that walked and talked and glided through walls; hers were invisible. They were the shades of a tall, bearded Frenchman with a voice that filled the house, and four boys who had often lounged around the room during their school holidays, laughing and chattering and plotting their next bit of mischief. Even now, she could almost see a tall dark-haired youngster with a roguish smile loafing in one of the chairs with his feet up on the coffee table ... and another, smaller boy toasting sausages by the fire, his face glowing with heat under his fair hair.

Sirius Black had always been good with potions. He used to spend hours in the backyard laboratory, helping her husband with his experiments; and he’d eventually confided in René, not completely, but enough for the Lupins to understand something of what his home life had been. Celia had thought she understood the demons that drove him to betrayal and murder, and, as the years wore away, she had forgiven him in part.

Now, it seemed, she had a great deal of understanding and forgiving left to do. She would have to start over again. If she so chose.

She sipped the tea and let her mind take her back to the past. The fair-haired boy offered a bit of sausage to a spotted kitten, coaxing her out from under the ottoman where she’d taken refuge from James Potter’s teasing. (The kitten was another of the household ghosts; Celia had buried her in the back garden seven years ago. She had been a very old cat when she died, and she’d outlived James who had been so young and vital.)

Linus had a cat, she thought irrelevantly. And the remote farmhouse where he lived didn’t have any resident ghosts. Or if it did – she realized that he had never talked much about his daughter or her friends – they weren’t her ghosts.

It had a nice view, too. Green fields and low winding stone walls. She walked to the window and looked out over the soot-blackened brick houses of a nondescript city street, and the next-door neighbors’ laundry hanging out on the line.

She remembered twelve-year-old James and Sirius raiding the neighborhood clotheslines and dressing up in frilly aprons and black lace brassieres. How she’d scolded them, and how she’d laughed afterwards! She realized, with a slight ache in her throat, that she didn’t want to leave this house and this city. Linus probably didn’t want to leave the comfort and privacy of his own home, either, and she certainly didn’t want him to give that up for her.

But she wanted him. Love was complicated when you were older.

And then he was right there on the front walk, motioning for her to take down the charms that protected the house for a moment and let him in.

“It’s funny,” he said as he scraped the mud off his shoes. “I’ve always liked living alone in the middle of nowhere, but there’s something suffocating about being sealed inside your house and knowing the rest of the world is sealed out. It gets lonely very fast.”

Celia nodded. “It’ll take some getting used to.”

“How long do you think this is going to last? Are things ever going to be normal again?” There was a plaintive note in his voice that made her want to reach out and take him in her arms; but being a Lupin, she handed him a cup of tea.

“I don’t know. Remus didn’t seem inclined to give me any hints.”

“Would he know?”

“I’ve suspected for a while that he knows a great deal more than he’s telling me,” said Celia. “Minerva McGonagall does, too, and we’ve been friends since we were schoolgirls. I get the impression they might be part of a secret society of sorts – like the ones you kept hearing about in the last war, but nobody seemed to be sure they existed.”

Linus nearly choked on a sip of tea. “A – secret society? McGonagall the perfect prefect? Are you sure?”

“I’m not sure of anything. It’s just a feeling.”

“Why do you think they aren’t telling you what they know?”

“Honestly? This is going to sound absurd, but I think it might be because I’m a Ravenclaw. I get the sense that whatever they’re involved with – it’s a bit of an old Gryffindors’ club.”

Linus nodded. “It’s funny how much of your adult life gets determined by your old school House. Where you drink, who your friends are, where your loyalties lie ... If you have any loyalties, that is. That’s the whole problem with us Ravenclaws, isn’t it? We’re not going to kowtow to Dumbledore just because of who he is, and we’re not going to stop asking the hard questions just because it’s inconvenient for our cause.”

“But that is a sort of loyalty,” said Celia positively. “Just because it’s loyalty to truth and not a particular party line, that doesn’t make it any less real or less valuable ... They need our sort of people. And they’re not having any of us. That’s what stings.”

 

                                                            *          *          *

Remus pulled Minerva McGonagall aside as the next Order meeting was breaking up. “Might I have a word in private?”

Her face, as usual, was unreadable; he couldn’t tell whether his mother had told her anything about the Riddle incident, or whether the request had taken her by surprise. “In here,” she said crisply, motioning him into what had once been a pantry and was now a makeshift archive for the Order’s records. “What is it?”

“It’s about my mum. She’s stumbled across some information ... well, she’s stumbled across Peter Pettigrew, actually, and she nearly got herself killed because she didn’t know everything we know. I think she’s got a fairly good idea what the Order does and that you and I are involved. I also think she’d be willing to help out. I’d like to propose her for membership, and I was hoping you’d second it.”

“Your mother has already been considered for membership,” said Minerva. She did not add, “and rejected,” but her tone conveyed this clearly enough.

“What? ... When – ... Why?”

“Not everyone who wishes to defeat You-Know-Who is suitable for membership in the Order,” she said evenly.

“I’m aware of that, naturally, but – May I ask exactly why my mother is considered unsuitable?”

Minerva opened a cabinet drawer and removed a large file folder. “It’s nothing personal, Remus. She’s been my friend for sixty years. And it isn’t that I doubt where her sympathies lie. It’s a question of temperament.”

“Are you saying you don’t think she’s brave enough? She’s seen her husband and her mother die at Voldemort’s hands, for God’s sake. And she walked straight into a Death Eater ambush last week. And made it out alive.”

“Celia’s courage is not the issue,” said Minerva, opening the file folder and spreading its contents out on one of the shelves. They consisted of copies of Celia’s publications, notes from her lectures on magical ethics, and a petition to abolish the use of dementors at Azkaban, dated some ten years earlier. “What is at issue are certain of her political and moral beliefs.”

“What about them?” Remus demanded. “I signed that petition myself. You took me, didn’t you?”

“But your mother was the one who wrote it, and who made quite a name for herself as a crusader for prisoners’ rights – the rights of the very people who have now broken out of Azkaban and rejoined their master.”

And also the rights of the owner of this house, Remus thought, but he refrained from saying it aloud.

“And your mother publicly affirmed her belief in Bartemius Crouch, Junior’s innocence as recently as a year ago – while he was engaged in an unprecedented series of kidnappings and murders.”

“That was an honest mistake,” said Remus, struggling to suppress his irritation. “And she was hardly the only one who made it. All it proves is that she didn’t have the facts she needed to make an informed judgment. I’m proposing to let her in on them.”

“It’s part of a pattern. Here’s an article of hers dating back to the first war, in which she says flat out that Crouch’s father did more to recruit new Death Eaters than You-Know-Who ever did.”

“There’s some truth to that.”

“Perhaps. But 1979 was not the time to voice it, not when they were killing people every day. And how about this lecture, where she claims that the Dark Arts do not exist? I’m sure all the people who’ve been hit with the Killing Curse would be gratified to know it’s an illusion.”

“That isn’t what she’s saying at all. She’s saying that all magic has the potential for misuse, and we’re being arbitrary when we label certain spells or creatures as Dark and fail to acknowledge their legitimate uses, and when we gloss over the fact that things we don’t consider Dark can cause just as much damage –”

Minerva sighed. “Yes. I understand that I have oversimplified her position. But the point remains that Celia deals in shades of grey; that is her work in life. And our work requires us to recognize that some things really are black and white. Your mother is a very dear friend of mine, but she has no place in the Order.”

Her voice contained a note that Remus knew, from long experience, meant there would be no further discussion of the topic. “Very well. May I at least tell her as much as she needs to know for her own safety?”

“Yes. We have never sought to withhold information from people who genuinely need it.”

That sounded fine in principle, Remus thought, but the trouble was that you never knew when people were going to need it until they decided to have lunch with Death Eaters of their own accord.

Minerva put most of the documents back into the folder and left the archive room. Remus was about to follow her when he noticed that one of his mother’s articles had fallen to the floor. He picked it up. It dated from shortly after Millicent Bagnold’s resignation, and the title was “The Ethics of Retreat.” He skimmed the first few paragraphs; they dealt with the question of whether one had the moral obligation to accept an appointment to a public office in which one had the potential to do much good, and the other candidates were likely to do just as much harm. No names were mentioned, but the application to Albus Dumbledore and Cornelius Fudge was unmistakable. His mother’s criticism of Dumbledore, he remembered, had been a good deal more specific and pointed in private.

Minerva hadn’t mentioned that particular piece of writing, but he had a fleeting, bitter, and entirely unworthy thought that her sense of loyalty to her boss might almost match that of another female Hogwarts staff member.

 

                                                            *          *          *

The dementors were hungry tonight. They swarmed together in the halls of Azkaban, prowling in the shadows outside his cell like jackals waiting for an ancient lion to breath its last. He had seen them stake out other cells before, as one prisoner after another went mad and lost the will to live. So it was his time now. He walked toward the bars with a curious calmness and a thrill of something like fascination. At last he was to see what no man looked upon and lived.

The nearest dementor lifted its hood. Its eyes were like weeping sores and its white skin was ancient, paper-thin and wrinkled. It was so close now that he could feel its rotten breath on his face. Incongruously, its lips as red and wet as his cousin Bella’s lips at fourteen. It was Bella and her face was a death’s head now.

Be mindful of me, she whispered in his ear, and her voice was gentle like the voice of a lover. As I am today, so must you become tomorrow. There is no remedy.

He turned his face to the bars and gave his lips to her. Her mouth was sweet for an instant, and then it was the cold and yawning mouth of the grave –

“Wake up! Padfoot, wake up!”

Someone was shaking him and slapping him in the face. Dementors didn’t slap. Bella slapped sometimes. Like the time he Transfigured her hair ribbon into a snake. Silly girl – it hadn’t even been poisonous. Had that been yesterday?

His eyes focused first on the candle burning on the nightstand, and then on a figure in a dressing gown who was sitting on the edge of the bed. Oh. It was only Moony.

“Breathe deep. Easy, old mate. I’m right here.”

“You didn’t have to get up,” he tried to say through chattering teeth. It came out gibberish. He took a deep breath and tried again. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine. I could hear you all the way down the hall.”

He put a hand to his face and was embarrassed to discover that there were tears on his cheeks.

“I kissed Bellatrix once,” he said irrelevantly. “When I was thirteen and she was fourteen. Upstairs in the attic.”

“Did you?” Remus’ voice was light and matter-of-fact. “Well, I’m glad your taste improved. Sit up. Have some chocolate.”

His stomach felt sick, but he forced himself to break off part of the large bar of chocolate Remus was holding out to him, and he nibbled at a bit of it. Slowly, the shivering that racked his body subsided.

“Better?” Remus asked after a moment.

“Y-yeah.” He took another bite of chocolate and pushed his hair out of his eyes. “It’s nothing. Stupid, really. For some reason I always go to pieces when I dream about those dementors. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

“I don’t blame you. Any sane person would feel that way about dementors.”

“Well,” Sirius retorted, “how much more of a loony do I have to be before I can stop feeling that way about them?”

They looked at each other in the candlelight and laughed until they were shaking helplessly – not so much because the joke was funny, but because it was a joke, and because there were two of them to share it, and because Azkaban hadn’t won yet.