Crown of the North

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Green Shoots of Assault

Saturday 26 January 1985 - Thursday 11 April 1985

Diagon Alley, London; various Muggle streets in the north of central London.

Rated PG-13 for violence.

It was after the flowers had faded into nothingness that Ariadne heard Belladonna Jigger shouting at somebody in the shop. She corked the last decanter, then left the empty cauldron to see what was happening. Remus was standing very quietly at the counter while Belladonna's angry words washed over him. His face broke into a smile when he saw Ariadne.

"Remus, I'll be out in a minute. I have a cauldron to clean first." It was three o' clock; Ariadne would normally expect to be on her feet for at least another three hours. The Jiggers would be angry if she left the shop before they gave her permission, but she doubted they were able to feel hurt over such an occurrence, whereas Remus would be hurt, and perhaps misled, if she made him wait until evening. "Madam Jigger, I'm believing I have to adhere to Guild regulations just for today. I'll tidy the laboratory, then see you again on Monday morning."

Ten minutes later, Remus was closing the front door of Slug and Jigger's behind them, and they set off across the snowy cobblestones. The winter sunlight was just beginning to fade, and there was no trace of a moon in the sky. They did not speak until Ariadne pushed open the door to the side of Madam Malkin's. "It's more like afternoon tea time now, but you will not be avoiding lunch so easily today. Honestly, Remus, you're looking as if you have not eaten for a week."

"You're making personal remarks, Miss MacDougal!"

"I thought that was the whole idea." She flew up the stairs before he had time to reply. He followed hard on her heels.

They stopped outside the door on the second landing and looked at each other. He was laughing at her, although she had not made a joke, and she knew that she had caught his laugh and was laughing back for no reason at all. His face was too thin, the skin stretched too tightly over his prominent bones, and the largeness of his grey eyes might equally well be the result of happiness or of hunger. But the ice was broken; he was at ease with her, and this time she knew what to say to him.

She tapped her wand against the lock, and the front door swung open. "I live here," she said.

An hour later, after Remus had Vanished the toast crumbs and Ariadne had washed the mugs, she asked him, "Why are you yet afraid of me?"

He fell silent. She moved from the opposite chair to the one next to him, and he looked her in the eye. "Ariadne, whatever it is that's happening between us... I've promised you that I'll play it out for the term of its natural life, and I will. But I don't seriously believe that the ‘natural life' will be anything other than short. Perhaps ‘nasty and brutish' too."

"Short? Are you planning to change your mind about me?"

"Of course I won't be the one to change my mind. But now that you've left school - now that there are no enforced absences, and I can't be useful to you, and we aren't dabbling in the forbidden - what is there left to fuel your inexplicable infatuation?"

She smothered her first instinct to lean against him and caress his shoulder with her forehead - somehow, it was very clear that physical touch was yet against the rules. She also smothered her second instinct, to be angry with him for under-estimating her, as if she were a child who had a crush on her teacher. They had time; she would let him see that he was needing to revise his judgment of her. She even smothered the obvious words, "There is yet you," because she knew he would not believe her.

Instead, she said, "If you're wanting to be useful, there is something you can do."

He looked almost too eager.

"But only if you promise that your own inexplicable infatuation will not die of starvation as soon as the useful part is over."

"No danger of that."

She Summoned a red folder from her room. "Here. This is where I'm keeping information about my friend Veleta Vablatsky. This photograph was taken shortly before she disappeared." It showed a teenaged girl posing with Professor Vablatsky beside a large crystal ball. Both had distinctive long-lashed, chocolate-brown eyes and thick, curly, chocolate-brown hair.

"After you started... speaking to me again, I realised I could not have been absolutely wrong about everything, so I decided to open Veleta's file again. I asked Sturgis to find out if anybody at the Office of Births and Deaths might have any vested interest in her story. He found out that everybody who works there is a Muggle-born, so they would be unlikely to have ties to the politics and petty revenges of old families. But read this... "

Sturgis had written:

The O.B.D. gave me exactly ten minutes to look through their filing cabinet (not really allowed, but they owed me a favour). The Vablatsky deaths were formally reported to the O.B.D. by Auror Scrimgeour himself. He had ticked the "corpse identified" box for four of them, but Veleta's was marked as "corpse presumed destroyed".

I understand why the O.B.D. would co-operate with a heavy like Scrimgeour: but why should Scrimgeour decide to investigate no further?

"Good point," said Remus. "If the Macnairs had some guilty knowledge of Veleta's whereabouts, they'd be in no hurry to draw attention to themselves by begging the Head Auror to rubber-stamp an uncertain death as certain. Not unless they already had the Head Auror in their power."

"But they have," said Ariadne. "Aunt Macnair - that is, Walden Macnair's wife - is Auror Scrimgeour's sister. If Uncle Macnair said he was wanting a certain stamp on the report, then I'm thinking the Head Auror would not even ask why."

Remus exhaled slowly. Finally he said, "You and your pure-blood connections! So Walden Macnair owns the Auror Office. He's already gone to some trouble to sabotage your career. What do you think he could - and would - do to you if he heard that you were still pursuing this?"

She sighed. "Please do not bury the important thing in a graveyard of caution, Remus. Obviously, Uncle Macnair was a Death Eater and he is a dangerous man. But that does not mean we should leave it alone."

"So what do you intend to do?"

"Nothing dangerous: stop looking at me like that! I was thinking that it's time to report this to the Auror Division - if we have enough evidence to make a worthwhile story. I'm wanting to write a statement suggesting what the Aurors ought to be looking into. But I'm not knowing how to express it without accusing the Macnair family of some fantastic kidnap operation."

"In other words, you don't know how to write something that isn't the truth. The point is, as we have discussed before, that sometimes you don't tell the whole truth. The immediate issue is not whether Veleta is the victim of some crime, but only whether she is alive at all. You think the Office made a mistake in issuing a death certificate; you wish to establish Miss Vablatsky's status as a living person. Why she or anyone else might have wished to fake her death is not yet relevant."

Something cleared up in Ariadne's mind; she knew now how to express her letter. "And evidence? Two people saw a face at a window."

"Actually, I saw the face too."

"What?"

"Ariadne, I'm sorry I didn't realise this eighteen months ago. There were hundreds of windows, and I saw several faces in one brief glance. But one that I would definitely recognise again was the girl on this photograph; I'm sure I wouldn't mistake those eyes. How was I to know that the girl I saw was the same one at whom you were looking?"

"So we can write to the Auror Division on the strength of three witnesses and an intuition?"

"Leave out the intuition. Include the ‘body never found', the three witnesses, and the possibility of memory modification by, or fear of further persecution from, whoever killed her parents. We can express it as if the Macnairs are offering generous sanctuary to a refugee. The Aurors have a duty to look into a case like that, no matter how crackpot they at first assume it to be."

After they had owled their letter, Ariadne said, "Remus, I really do have to put some time into my project for Professor Jigger this evening."

He nodded. "To be honest, I have a lesson to prepare too."

The lonely tone in his voice weakened her resolve and she said, "Can you do it here?"

"We'll see if I can. Accio science manual!"

"Remus, did you just Summon some huge textbook to fly across the countryside? What if some Muggle had seen - ?"

The book thudded into his hands at that moment. "Apparently so. Don't worry - it's dark, so at that speed no one would have seen it."

* * * * * * *

Professor Jigger was furious when Ariadne's non-Potions interests invaded his shop at ten o' clock on a Wednesday morning in April. It took five minutes to convince the Jiggers that Auror Dawlish was present in a purely professional capacity, and then they bitterly resented his insistence that Miss MacDougal assist him with an inquiry. But finally Ariadne was seated in a corner of the laboratory with the Auror, while Belladonna Jigger watched them just out of earshot. Dawlish opened a photograph album onto the table and asked, "Can you identify the woman whom you knew as Veleta Vablatsky?"

Ariadne turned one page, and then another, past portraits of the Macnair family and house-elves and human employees liveried in thirteenth-century style, and finally lighted on one half way down the third page. "There. That's Veleta." The photograph stared blandly at her with no attempt to wave or introduce itself; it might as well have been a Muggle picture.

"Interesting," said Dawlish.

Ariadne saw that this portrait was clearly labelled, like all the others, with a name. The brown-eyed girl in the filet was identified as "Jane Smith".

"What makes you think this person might be named Vablatsky?"

"Oh, but it is Veleta." There was no question in her mind. This girl was older than she remembered her friend being - fully five years older, of course! - but the curve of the cheek, the tilt of the head, the shape of the nose, as well as the large expressive eyes, were all far more like the real-life Veleta than any mere memory could be. "Auror Dawlish, is this a recent picture?"

"Every picture in this album was taken the day before yesterday," said Dawlish. "We were finally cleared for access to Macnair Castle, and we photographed every inhabitant. But it's interesting that you pick on that girl, among them all. We nearly didn't shoot her. She and her children were hiding out in some secret room. If Williamson hadn't swung his detector at the exact spot on the wall, we wouldn't have found that room at all, and she'd never have made it to the album."

Children? And secret rooms? "Auror Dawlish, did the Aurors find every secret room in the castle?"

"That, Miss MacDougal, is not the kind of thing of which one can ever be certain. Suffice that we found several. One turned out to be a servants' hall for house-elves. Another was inhabited entirely by ghosts. Another seemed to exist for no useful purpose at all. But Mrs Smith's room was definitely one that could have been missed, even with magical detectors going full blast."

"What was the room like?" An irons-dungeon, a reptile pit, an attic of Dark artefacts?

"It was a very comfortable room." Dawlish sounded unconcerned. "Soft drapes, good quality furniture, plenty of toys and books. It was difficult to see why anyone would bother to hide such a room."

"Why were there children with her?"

"They were her children. Can't you pick them from the album? Look... "

And Ariadne herself saw, quite plainly, that the next two photographs showed bairns with huge brown eyes exactly like Veleta's. There was a lassie of about four, "Mary Smith", and a boy of perhaps eighteen months, "Peter Smith". Both were in thirteenth-century costume, but there was nothing else remarkable about them; they were just gorgeous, smiling, large-eyed bairns.

And her astonishment over the bairns was masking the most important and astonishing fact of all: Veleta was alive.

It was too much to absorb at one sitting. "What happens next, Auror?"

"We return to Mrs Smith and try to establish whether she has any connection with Miss Vablatsky. You must prepare yourself, Miss MacDougal, for a dead end; even if there is a connection, identity will be difficult to prove."

"But surely it's not so difficult? She has a grandmother yet living; there have to be ways of proving kinship."

"Our understanding is that the grandmother emigrated to New Zealand. Our Department doesn't have the resources to spend on an international inquiry unless there is clear evidence of foul play. But there isn't any so far."

"And if Mrs Smith is Veleta?"

"Then, naturally, we find out her wishes - whether she needs to hide because she is too frightened to invoke the protection of the law, in which case we insist that the law does adopt her cause; or whether she has lost memory of who she once was, in which case we recommend a Healer; or whether this alias is merely a matter of personal taste. Obviously, we correct any mistaken records; but that might be all we ever do. Be prepared, Miss MacDougal, for the possibility that even if this person is your former friend, she may not wish to re-establish contact with you."

"Oh, but she will. You can tell her that I am always available to her."

"No, we cannot. We do not name our informants when we conduct an inquiry. That is a matter of basic safety."

As Dawlish closed the photograph album and walked out of the laboratory, Ariadne realised that he was right. Veleta was alive; she had been alive just two days ago. There was no point in throwing incriminating information around and inviting the Macnairs to punish her again.

* * * * * * *

"Be careful," said Remus the next day. "The Macnairs aren't going to like where this investigation is heading and they are certain to suspect you. Until you hear from the Aurors again, try not to go out alone, especially not outside Diagon Alley... Sorry, I know this sounds over-cautious. But I... I think I had better come round every day."

"It's not sounding over-cautious," she admitted. "I'm glad you're taking this seriously, Remus. Are we allowed to go out to dinner today?"

"We can't afford it."

"But we can. My parents gave me some money."

"What, they paid you to take the farmhand out to dinner?"

"It was actually to buy robes." She was painfully aware of the difference between their situations. Her parents supplemented her income with cash presents whenever they deemed that she needed to buy something; Remus had no income and nobody who would ever bail him out. "But Madam Malkin was having a sale, so I did not spend it all. Can we not go somewhere Muggle?"

He hesitated. "I know, I know. Hestia and Sarah are taken everywhere, but all you ever do is work for Jigger and help me write essays. It's time someone took you out to dinner, and I can't even afford to do that. Do you really want to go to Muggle London dressed like that?"

"It's not very different from the way Muggle women sometimes dress to go to parties... And it's not really because I'm wanting to be ‘taken everywhere'. I'm just feeling so closed in, spending all my time in Diagon Alley. I'm wanting want to go somewhere with spaces."

"The Highlander learns the truth about the big city," he teased, but he conceded the point, and they stepped out of the Leaky Cauldron into Muggle London. The streets were crowded, and nobody took any notice of a young man in an ordinary anorak and jeans (their shabbiness clashing a little with his businessman's briefcase) deep in conversation with a very young woman in an outlandish grey cloak over a full-length but shapeless navy skirt. And Ariadne saw that there were no real spaces anywhere in London; but at least the huge buildings were not Diagon Alley buildings.

After they had walked through a couple of streets, she asked, "What's distracting you?"

"Don't look round now, but I think we're being followed."

"Why are you thinking that?"

"Two Muggle policemen - Aurors - have been taking the same route as we have ever since we turned the corner from the Leaky Cauldron. Only I somehow don't think they are real policemen. My suspicious instinct from my Order-of-the-Phoenix years is kicking in."

"What's the correct thing to do?"

"Keep walking for a while and see if we shake them off. But keep your wand ready just in case. Can you do a Protego charm?"

"I'm hoping so." She had managed it once; she did not know if she yet could.

After half an hour of walking through London, Remus said, "We haven't shaken off those policemen. I don't like the look of this. Let's stop at the next eatery... This one will do." It was a very cheap Chinese take-away. "Buy us our dinner - anything will do - but don't let go of your wand."

Ariadne turned to the counter. A middle-aged shopkeeper with a Chinese face but a Cockney accent was serving an elderly Muggle woman. A teenaged shop assistant was the only other person in the room. Ariadne mustered a smile and asked for one serve of fried rice and one of green vegetables with noodles (Remus did not seem to like meat these days). As the shop assistant was shovelling the food into plastic containers, the shop door jangled open, and two policemen burst inside with right arms raised.

Remus was quicker. He had shouted, "Expelliarmus!" before the two intruders had even opened their mouths.

They both declaimed, "Avada Kedavra!" before they had time to realise that their wands were arching towards Remus's open hand. They were falling backwards, and Remus had caught their wands - belching out thin green sparks - by the time the Muggle customer began to scream and Ariadne realised that she had been hairsbreadth away from witnessing an Unforgivable Curse. Remus threw out two Stunners before the now unarmed policemen even hit the ground.

"Ariadne, can you do the Memory Charms?" He sounded so businesslike.

Ariadne did her best with the Obliviate, but she knew she was clumsy. She had to run it three times, once for each Muggle, and each time she inelegantly wiped out the whole of the last hour.

"What am I doing here?" shrieked the Muggle customer.

"Mrs Edwards, you've just bought your dinner, do you not remember?" She did not know how she had dredged up the lady's name; she supposed she had heard the shopkeeper use it. "See, Mr Liu put it in this bag for you." The shopkeeper's name was painted on the window below the words The Bamboo Bowl - Chinese Takeaway. She took the woman's elbow and gently steered her towards the door.

"So I have. But why don't I remember - ?"

"Well, what's worth remembering about ordering beef in plum sauce and receiving fifty pence in change? Have a lovely evening." The door clanged shut behind Mrs Edwards, and Ariadne turned around the OPEN sign. "Those policemen look hurt," she said brightly.

Remus was standing over them, calling for a Finite Incantatem. So of course they revived from stupefaction; but their Muggle police uniforms, which must have been merely Conjured, also vanished, and they were now wearing very un-civilian costumes.

"Stupefy!" Ariadne only managed to re-Stun one of them, the one in a grey thirteenth-century cotehardie, but Remus had caught the other, the one who was dressed in wizards' robes of the red and green Macnair tartan.

"What's goin' on?" asked the shop assistant.

"We need an ambulance," said Remus. "I'll make the call." He threw blue sparks out of his wand-tip, sending an emergency message to St Mungo's, while Mr Liu plaintively pointed out that there was a telephone in the corner, and why didn't one of them use it?

After all those spells, Ariadne realised they would have to give another Memory Charm to Mr Liu and his assistant. But if she blocked out the same hour twice, she might seriously damage their long-term memories, while if she only blocked out the last thirty seconds, they might remember something they should not. It was a mess.

"Memory," she said. "Remus, I cannot do that charm efficiently."

He waved his wand again, while Ariadne did not move her eyes from their captives. They both looked as if they were out cold, but the whole point of the Stunner was that it was a temporary and easily reversible hex; her fingers were curled around her wand, in case either of them showed the smallest sign of revival.

"Wot are those blokes doin' in my shop?" asked Mr Liu.

"They fainted as they walked in," said Ariadne glibly, feeling that this was almost the truth. "My friend has belled for the ambulation."

"Was I servin' you?" asked the shop assistant.

Ariadne repeated her order, her eyes still on the invaders, and passed over her sterling without bothering to count the change.

Remus turned to her, and said, "Ariadne, this is a very important question. What is your friend Ivor doing tonight?"

It took her a second to understand why he was asking. "Ivor's in Egypt. He went yesterday, and he will not be back before next week." The full force of the danger hit her. Since the Macnairs had stalked her from the minute she had left wizarding territory, there was no question that they would hunt down Ivor too.

"So what about the girls? Where are Sarah and Hestia this evening?"

"They're all right for now. Sarah's in the south of France, modelling Muggle bathing costumes. She'll be there until Sunday. But Hestia... she's with her parents for the evening... but after that... she'll be returning to London."

At that moment the Mediwizards arrived. After that the situation became complicated as the Mediwizards assessed the situation, Apparated the unconscious men away to St Mungo's, took statements from Remus and Ariadne, and measured the state of the Muggles' memories.

"Who did this one?" muttered one Healer. "Amateur job, the poor Muggle's lost every detail of a whole hour."

Ariadne burned with shame. Mr Liu protested, "'Oo are you callin' a mug?"

Remus changed the subject. "There is a young lady still at risk." He gave Hestia's details.

"We'll have the Aurors pay her a visit within half an hour and warn her to remain in Shrewsbury," said the Mediwizard. "The D.M.L.E. will require a formal statement from both of you, but I expect tomorrow will do if you'll just give me your names and addresses for now... Right, if you two will Disapparate, that will leave me free to fix the Muggles one last time."

Ariadne had no time to protest that she could not Apparate; Remus had her by the shoulders, and the last sound in her ears before the noisy shop vanished was the pop! of their own Disapparition.