Harry Potter and the Demon Bowler

HARRY POTTER and the DEMON BOWLER

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The annual knawel had set its last flowers and gone to seed. The seed-pods that give bird's-foot its name had begun to swell, displacing the red-veined creamy flowers of August. The yellow flowerets even of black medick had begun to become lost in the swathes of gold and tawny that were over-painting the greens of the Summertide. Dense-flowered fumitory, too, no longer pointed the chalk downlands with bursts of fuchsia, magenta, and cerise. Cornsalads had spent themselves, their neighbouring spurges almost alone bearing the floral banner yet aloft. The equinox had not yet come once more to proclaim as herald the accession of Autumn and the passing of the Green King of Summer; yet the robin was gathering her sway, the cuckoo long silent, and field-mouse and harvest-mouse were busying themselves already. The first intimations of the great clouds and gatherings that are the starlings's response to their Harvest Home were being adumbrated in the still, blue sky, and swallows were displaying their first premonitory restlessness. The first King Edward potatoes were waiting their butter and salt to accompany the Sunday joint, and children had on Saturday picked brambles in every hedgerow.

The parishioners of Sutton Littlecombe, poised between the sun-drunk somnolence of Summertide and the gilt glories and sharp labour of the harvest time, sat calmly in the cool and shadowed nave, their thoughts upon the tilth and pasture, the cornlands and the flocks, of their terrestrial Eden, demi-Paradise, and all unknowing of who it was that dwelt amongst them and what dread challenge drew near them. The Revd Mr Priday - 'Call-me-Bill' - had gone away on holiday, and a certain holiday atmosphere had in turn fallen upon the parish in the absence of his bleating earnestness and his unremitting right-thinking and obtrusive mateyness. The parish were perfectly willing to sit decorously and remove their thoughts to other interests for so long as it pleased old Canon Broddside to give them, in place of Call-me-Bill's taking his text from SS Tony, Ming, Bono, and Zac, forty solid Edwardian minutes of orthodox theology and reasoned discourse. It all made for a change, after all, and that was always interesting.

In the choir, amidst their fellow choristers, Harry, safely ensconced amongst the other basses, and Draco, languidly adorning the tenors, were mostly considering the remaining intricacies of the service music for the day - Ireland in C - with occasional meditations upon, firstly, the vast improvement the new organs had made, secondly, the piquancy of having so many incognito Wizards and Witches larding the worshippers, and, thirdly, the reason why their friends and old schoolfellows were in attendance of a Sunday, that being the imminent commencement of the only nominally friendly Sunday forty-over match between the Sutton Littlecombe Second XI, of which they were ornaments, and the hated-enemy-of-the-week from Christian Malford.

'...the thousand names, the innumerable synecdoches, for God, attest to his transcendence. The omnipotent creator of all things is, in the old sense, terrible, awful - a term now so debased that it must be replaced with the American term, "awesome", which, I am given to understand, is used by the American Nonconformists equally for God, surfboards, and what I am told are called "burritos", whatever those may be. And yet - '

Of the magical folk seated in the congregation, dutifully supporting Harry and Draco in their capacity as their hosts and as choristers, although, naturally, really present only to watch them on the pitch so soon as this ordeal should be over, only Luna, who of all of them seemed least attentive to old Canon Broddside - she had already twice referred to him, over breakfast, as 'Canon Chudleigh' - was, with, to a lesser degree, Justin, paying any mind to the sermon at all. Beside her, Neville, whose opinion of liturgy and sermon was precisely what one would expect of a stalwart of the Pendle Hill Society of Friends (Wizarding Meeting), was studying the ornament of pew and pillar, hammer-beam angel-roof and clerestory, and wincing at the crudity of the botany portrayed.

'...but we are concerned rather with the immanence of God. The highest, the remote, the creator of all things, the transcendent, became immanent, for he was made man. The Incarnation hallowed forever our mere created flesh. God descended from a throne immeasurably remote and took on our flesh and dwelt amongst us. Before the Incarnation, he could be addressed, referred to, only by indirection, as befitted his transcendence. After the Incarnation, we are allowed to call him "Abba", Father. And so you may see...'

Justin, who had been brought up in the odour of the Establishment as a good, solid, East Anglian Low Churchman, kept his own counsel as to the more Anglo-Catholic strains in old Canon Broddside's sermon, but he was at least comforted by its length, logic, and orthodoxy, all of which were he felt sadly out of fashion in the all-too-modern C of E. Blaise, for his part, elegantly bored as he sat with negligent grace next his Justin, was reflecting upon how fortunate the Wizarding dispensation within his own communion was, to have not been bound by Vatican II and its abandonment of Latin and liturgical propriety, without which, frankly, one might as well be C of E, which at least could yet attain to a dignity long lost in the Muggle Roman church with the abandonment of the Tridentine rite.

'...yet, if there is now an immanent and personal God to whom we may have recourse, so too must we remember that there is a personal devil. For we fight against powers and principalities...'

Ginny, for her part, with Hermione, Molly, and Aunt Andromeda, was exclusively absorbed in keeping a minatory eye upon the gaggle of children whose capacity for mischief was adequately indicated by their possession, in varying degrees, of Black, Potter, Lupin, Tonks, Weasley, and indeed Malfoy blood. Powers and principalities were all very well, but when it came to a daily personal struggle against Original Sin, old Canon Broddside wanted to try managing this lot before he stood up in a pulpit and began gassing on....

'...evil, of course, in many guises. All of us strive against it, and of course, there are those in this congregation whose vocation and service it is to confront evil in its most fearsome manifestations on a daily basis...'

The Brigadier, attending upon his aunt, Lady P, and rather hoping that the village cricket would in some wise compensate for the annoyances inherent in stopping with his aunt for the weekend - he had regretted not pleading pressure of work and remaining at Shrivenham within ten minutes of tea on Friday - tended to take that remark of old Canon Broddside's as being to his address, and that of the other secret warriors whom it was his task to train; and of those whom he had not trained but whom he recognised and approved, such as Potter, and Malfoy, and Weasley, and that long Lancashire lad Professor Longbottom, all of whom were by way of being favourites of the formidable Lady P as well. A few pews back and over on the decani side, Old Gryffindor Jack Sloper exchanged the ghost of a wink with his Muggle - but well-informed - uncle, the churchwarden, who had done so much to draw both Harry and Draco into the life of the parish, from vestry to ringing to the choir. They knew, if old Canon Broddside did not, just how personal a struggle with some of the forces of evil certain of those in the choir and the nave had fought.

'...as we all may call God our father, we are likewise one family. The Church, the company of all believers, may be conceived under many names and metaphors: the Bride of Christ, the People of God: yet what I most wish to impress upon you are two conceits. The Church upon earth, the living members of the Body, is the Church Militant, an army. And the Church is also a family, and all of us are to one another brothers and sisters in Christ.'

George Weasley, in his pew, with Percy at his side like a bodyguard, appeared to be turning a deaf and artificial ear to old Canon Broddside; yet Arthur, a pew behind, knew better. If, Arthur reflected, Our George seemed to be turning an artificial ear to old Canon Broddside, it was akin to Nelson's putting his sceletope - no, that wasn't right, was it? Ah. Yes. 'Tellus Scope' - to his blind eye: George knew what the message was, and was going his own way. And in truth, George was reflecting upon brothers and brotherhood, and how he might persuade Percy that Percy had more than atoned for his manifold sins and trespasses, and need no longer make a vocation and a penance of attempting to smooth George's way, of coddling George to an extent even Molly would be incapable of, of trying to make himself over to be George's lost Fred. It was desperately good and loving and penitent of Percy, but it was past time it was ended, as much for George's sake as for poor old Perce's.

'I need not, I imagine, tell this congregation, with so many Service families in our midst, that men fight only at a remove for Crown and country, for the Sovereign's and the Regimental Colours. Rather, they fight immediately for the extended family that a regiment is, for their brothers in that regiment, for their immediate band of brothers. And so it is that the Church Militant is a family, a band of brothers; so it is that we do, in the words of the Collect for today appointed, "true and laudable service"...'

In the porch, to which they had noiselessly Apparated from the Ministry, and where they were waiting out the sermon so as not to cause a stir, Ron and Kingsley, listening, were recalled to old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago.

Finally, old Canon Broddside wrapped up his thunderous periods and brought his oratorical flights to earth, and said the Offertory sentences.

'Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.

'Who goeth a warfare at any time of his own cost? Who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? Or who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock?

'Blessed be the man that provideth for the sick and needy: the Lord shall deliver him in the time of trouble.'

And, as Ron and Kingsley slipped into their places, the choir rose, and responded with full throat and voice, to the setting of William Walton,

'Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm:

for love is strong as death

Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it:

for love is strong as death.'

And the Offertory being concluded, old Canon Broddside, on this quiet and unremarkable Sunday amongst the interminable Sundays after Trinity, said, 'Let us pray for the whole state of Christ's Church militant here in earth....'

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It is often thought by Wizards that 'Muggles simply do not notice': that, like the good Dr Watson, they see, but they do not observe. This is not, strictly, true. Natural selection over the centuries has caused Wizards to develop an unconscious magic that helps them hide themselves amidst Muggle neighbours when they dwell in such places as Tinworth, Mould-on-the-Wold, Upper Flagley, and Godric's Hollow. And the Muggles benefit mightily: as in Sutton Littlecombe, where the presence of manorial Wizards dowers them with amenities other villages and districts can scarce recall having had since the spacious pre-War days. And they accept this as being the way of things, and even visitors subtly forget the happy anomaly as they depart.

Just as a sort of natural Muffliato guards Wizarding names from Muggle ears, and prevents Muggles hearing such startling variations as when Wizards sing their own words to the hymns ('All things bright and magical' for example, 'Lead, kindly Lumos', or 'Lift up your heads, ye cauldrons brass, ye wards of iron, yield, and let the King of Glory pass; the Cross is in the field', or of course that staple of every meeting of the Witches's Institute, 'Bring me my wand! O clouds, unfold! Bring me my hippogriff of fire! I will not cease from mental fight, nor shall my wand sleep in my hand, 'til we have built Jerusalem in Britain's green and magic land'), so too does this subconscious and autonomous magic lull Muggles in such fortunate places as Sutton Littlecombe into not realising their fortune in possessing a marvellously preserved Buttercross in the market square, an unimpeachable farm shop groaning with unblemished produce, and an undiminished trinity of pure, sweet, and sacred water-sources, St Aldhelm's Spring, St Aldhelm's Well, and the Village Pump beside.

They accept as due and right - as very meet, right, and their bounden duty - the downs and their orchids and butterflies, the woods and coppices, ash, beech, oak, and field maple, rowan, wild cherry, holly, and hazel, bluebells in their season and willow, alder, and poplar in the wetter ground. They accept as proper and unremarkable the badger and the squirrel, the roe deer and the rabbit, the fox and the pheasant, as the companions of their walks and days. They remark with pleasure, yet take as granted, the hedgerow and the garden, the riot of snowdrops, primroses, and cowslips, the bright flash of kingfishers, the dart of swallows and the peaceful homeliness of house martins, the soft nocturnal glimmer of glow-worm and the silent nocturnal swoop of owl.

And so it was, naturally and unthinkingly, that the village turned out for the match, amongst them old Canon Broddside in a broad soft hat, his words of the morning forgotten by his erstwhile auditors as soon as uttered; so it was that the village turned out for the match, pleasantly replete with Sunday joint and mash and trifle, turned out for the match upon a village green that was the envy even of far Marden as it was of every village in the county.

The gentle sun had long since burnt away the earliest morning's fog, that had bedewed and bejewelled the first autumnal spider webs in hedgerow and rosebush (for the hiding-away of which Ron was most heartily and unfeignedly thankful).

The green was vast, its turf immemorial, ecclesiastical, verdant: full, springy, fern-green, malachite, and viridian: and more than capacious enough to sport pitch, pond, and bandstand, all three. The parish church anchored one end, and the WI and the Mothers's Union competed for gustatory honours in setting out a late-summery cream tea on long, trestle tables.

The Coronation Hall, last remodelled for the Golden Jubilee, stood just across the Grovely Road - at its junction with Cornbadger's Lane, which weaved its tipsy way towards the eponymous ford and mill at Twatford Mulliner, and thence to Starveall and Stony Down across the river - just across the Grovely Road, as we said, from the Buttercross end, the end furthest from the church end: a centre point of village life and amusement, and a refuge from sun or any rain. Within, those in charge of the evening's jollifications were chatting, and waiting. If the weather held, there would be a band, the village's own pride, the Silver Band, in the dimpsey, and an illumination all 'round the green as the twilight deepened on the land. The glow-worms in the churchyard would, doubtless, provide their own lumière show later on.

The British Legion branch had kindly provided ice-cream, Signor Blanco's best, and the children's choir were getting stuck in before going back outside. They and the hand-bell choir - if, as was by no means certain, they had not made themselves sick with ice-cream and the hand-bell choir had not spend overlong in the pub - were to be a part of the evening's festivities, along with the Silver Band, after Evensong. Ad interim, they would follow every ball of every over with a critical eye and an unshakeable conviction that they, when they were of age, would do better, raaaaather.

Opposite the Coronation Hall, across the green, on the Fonthill Road, the White Horse, a proud free house since its establishment in the days of Good Queen Anne, was doing a brisk trade in cider and real ale. The parish smiled to a man to see the green so filled with folk, in place of ponies and cattle: for all the village pride in their cricketers, they'd not had a day quite so eager and as thronged as this since the Pony Club gymkhana, last month, or even the Flower Show back in the Springtide. But then, neither Mr Potter nor Mr Malfoy had been available for the intervening matches.... Lady P had already been in deep consultations with the White Horse's jovial landlord, Mr Albert Hemmings, regarding the Village Show and Fair upcoming, and the Harvest Festival, so there was that to look forward to. Beside the pub, a marquee afforded extra shade, and those intent on conversation had clustered there. The village fire brigade were running a tombola, heavily supported by several of the young women, who appeared to be rather more interested in the firemen than in the prizes on offer. Lady P and old Canon Broddside's spinster sister were keeping keen eyes on the smaller sproglets, one of whom had already been sent home with strict instructions to change clothes, into something that did not look like the outfit of a Whitechapel harlot, scaled down. There'd be none of that sort of thing here, by God.

The sky was perfect, as blue as the butterflies that adorned each sunny surface fit for basking; the breeze gentle, and the air murmurous with the hum of bees and the drowsy susurrations of wood-pigeon and stock-dove. There were shy, largely unseen bullfinches in the ancient hedge that bounds the pub's back garden, where it slopes down towards the winterbourne. The ancient turf was sweet underfoot, and God, assuredly, an Englishman today: here, at least, There Would Always Be an England. Just beyond the peaceful, quiet churchyard, the village trailed away into countryside: white horses in the chalk, and larks, above, ascending. Sand martins were on the wing above the river and the quarry, thrushes and meadow pipits darted and fluttered. Local JPs and the district medico were talking of roses and wall-fruit: the good doctor was complaining of his never-ending war against a nearby sett of badgers who had taken his garden's bulbs as a buffet supper for the third year, now.

The Ringer's Guild were hosting their opposite numbers from a Southwold parish and a Berkshire parish; not a few once served in the same regiment, the old RGBW, and its forebears.

Some of the village youths, intent upon seeing the cricket, were trailing back, muddy, damp, and chuffed, with the trophies of a day's fishing, their long poles casting shadows in the afternoon's long slant of light that recalled the spears of Alfred's army when Wessex fought the Dane.

And just outside this charmed circle, where the countryside began, the Ancient ever and always is: the land everlasting, sacred with circles and henges, horse-carven, stream-scrolled and fluted, rich; otters and voles slide into the waters and play in the wild cress, dormice sleep in coppiced bluebell-woods, foxes and deer, nightingales and woodcock, make them their homes in ancient woods of oak and ash, beech and silver birch; and the great bustard once again makes the downs its home.

It was for this, Harry reflected, that they had fought.

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It was apt that Harry should reflect upon his late war and victory, and the uses of victory: for Ron, called to the Ministry over breakfast and before church, and having returned accompanied by Kingsley himself, had brought back also news of grave import.

'Who's your next match against?'

'Hmmm? After today?' Harry frowned a moment, and then remembered. 'Oh, a friendly against the Sunday side from Kilmington & Stourton. That's in a fortnight, mind: we've nothing on until then. Dangerous lot, KSCC, damned good and damned crafty. Make an interesting end to the season. Why?'

Kingsley looked grave. 'I don't suppose you've heard that they've a ringer?'

Draco snorted. 'As in Grandsire Triples, or as in some demon bowler with County form who's pretending to be a simple rustic hind from Norton Ferris? This is village cricket, Minister, it makes mere warfare seem genteel.'

'As in the latter. Specifically, a chap named Gul.'

'Ghoul?'

'Gul. Nazim Gul. A recent incomer from Oop North, and already, I'm told, given the name "Nazgul" by those who've been bowled by him.'

'Kind of you to tell us, Shack,' said Harry, impeccably flannelled and imperturbable, his eye already assessing the wicket, 'but would you condescend to inform me as to why this is Ministry business of what must surely be a bloody urgent nature?'

'Because, Auror Potter, Malfoy here has somehow gotten hold of the right end of the wand. The term "demon bowler" is apt. Nazim Gul - a Muggle, I may add - is originally from, as it happens, Todmorden.'

'Ah.' Harry was very much on the alert. It was in Todmorden that the Evanses had dwelt for a time, when Lily had been young, and it was in Spinner's End, in Todmorden, that Severus Snape had lived.

'Played,' said Ron, with a strange reluctance, 'for the Todmorden Second XI and was unremarkable in every way. Well. Until last year. They were playing a weekday twenty-over match there in Yorkshire. Put him in to bowl. It was an away match. He took a hat trick. For the rest of the year, he was untouchable. Hat tricks were nothing to him; he took six, seven, eight wickets in as many balls. You'd imagine he was sought after: wooed by selectors and All That. Funny thing - rum, in fact - somehow, instead, without anyone's saying just how or why, he made the place too hot to hold him. And since that time, this bloke - a Muggle, mind you - has turned up, briefly, in Upper Flagley ... then in Mould-on-the-Wold ... then Tinworth.... And now he's here, well, Kilmington, just midways 'tween here and bleedin' Godric's Hollow, and set to face you and Cousin Ferret on the pitch. I don't like coincidences.'

'There are,' chorused Kingsley, Draco, and Harry, 'no coincidences! Constant vigilance!'

'Right. And the worst of it is where this bloke was, when he suddenly transformed into someone who ought to be a Test cricketer. I said it was an away match, there in Yorkshire?'

'Yeeeeees....' Harry knew he was not going to like this at all.

'Little Hangleton, mate.'

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The turf of the Sutton Littlecombe village green was, as may possibly have been remarked, deep, lush, immemorial, and ecclesiastical. The wicket, in consequence, ranged, depending upon weather, from green to fair: the sort of wicket that was once known the length and breadth of England, before the pursuit of £.s.d. by English cricket and English cricketers led them into evil courses, into the days of pitches covered against God's own weather, into the severance of cricket's ancient links with the natural order. It was the perfect wicket for seam bowling and suited, when fair, to spin bowling as well; old men who remembered the great days at Bradford, Southend, and Tunbridge Wells, at Gloucester and Cheltenham, Portsmouth and Basingstoke, Taunton and Bath, often saw, or fondly believed that they saw, upon the Sutton Littlecombe wicket, flashes of a form and style of cricket that is now but a memory.

And on a day such as today, with the wicket tending fair as the afternoon sun burnt off the morning's dew, it was the perfect wicket for the crafty local form of finger-spin, of which Harry and Draco alike, their hands long conditioned to the snitch, were masters. The pace bowlers of Christian Malford, for all their graft and cunning, and for all the late swing at the command of their captain and premier bowler, young Hulbert-Jacques, were likely to rue this day's work, and their batsmen to curse the names - and hypnotising flight of the finger-spun cherry - of Messrs Malfoy and Potter; and of the blazing Sutton Littlecombe seam-merchant, the left-handed David Applegate, whose delight it was to feast upon opposing batsmen demoralised by the spinners they had faced in the early overs at the hands of Potter and Malfoy.

Sutton Littlecombe having won the toss, their captain, that same David Applegate, had elected to bat first: his instincts were always those of the poacher-turned-gamekeeper, not to say the buccaneer, and limited-overs matches always brought his most cutthroat tendencies to the fore. The Christian Malford Sunday XI were more at home on their own, less temperamental pitch, and Applegate the Shrewd looked forward with savage delight to seeing their usual strategies for fast bowling on a green wicket come to grief. A green wicket may be presumed by some to favour the bowler, as the ball's erratic and literally eccentric behaviour comes into play - the more so, of course, for slower bowlers and spin artists, but to some effect even for the proud pacemen of such sides as that fielded today by Christian Malford. But when the bowlers are less than intimately familiar with the peculiarities of the green wicket and the batsmen are masters of its secrets, it may be the bowler who is surprised, not to say startled, by the behaviour of the ball - and its flight to boundary when the batsman shows no surprise at all, and smites it for four or for six.

The shrewd and cunning David Applegate had also matched his batting order to the conditions, and to the prejudices of his opponents. If there were two batsmen on whom he could rely to fulfil the customary openers's functions of defending their wickets and taking the shine off the ball, and who could also, as is essential in limited-overs matches, bat aggressively for a high rate of runs and take full advantage of the restrictions on fielding placement that are a corollary of the limted-overs format, they were Potter and Malfoy. Either - both - could well suit the top order in a conventional match, but today they were indisputably destined to open the batting.

Today, to no small grumbling, all of it very much sotto voce - the Cunning Applegate ran a tight ship - Malfoy went in as the non-striker, at the Buttercross End - what might easily have been called the pavilion end due to its relative proximity to the Coronation Hall, which served much the same function as the Pavilion at Lord's and did duty as a pavilion of sorts, but would always and ever be, formally, the Buttercross End in the village phrase, and, informally, the Duck-pond End to everyone in the district - whilst Potter went in to defend his wicket at the Church End, to his quiet satisfaction. For reasons different to the thirty-nine or so articles detailed in old Canon Broddside's sermon of that morning, Potter always liked to have the Church behind him. As he awaited the bowling, from the unpredictable Hulbert-Jacques, he was thinking of the sudden shock that had been dealt them before the match.

'Little Hangleton.'

'Yeah. Er. Sorry about that, mate. But ...yeah.'

'Well, I can tell you this,' said Harry, tapping his cold, white, faded scar. 'It's damned well not Voldemort. He's dead and damned, for good.'

'I don't question that,' said Kingsley. 'Still and all, evil leaves its mark. I'll be speaking with Arthur shortly: it's by no means impossible that some Muggle artefact, enchanted for ill -'

'Oh, quite,' said Harry, a trifle shortly. 'I should hope you would consult Arthur. In fact, I think we'd best get everyone in on this. Draco, would you mind terribly? Ah. Thank you. And I should imagine that Dean and Seamus will have joined us by now as well - yes, if you'd summon them also. Chapel and RC be damned, they simply stopped at home this morning whilst the rest of us trooped dutifully off to service.... Lazy buggers.'

'What are you planning, Potter?'

'Come, come, Malfoy. And you a Slytherin. Whatever this Muggle ghoul is about, we've to meet him and hit him for six.'

'Hullo, Harry,' said Justin, strolling up, the 'first of the gathering clans', his face keen with interest. 'Crisis?'

'Sadly, yes. There's a possible magical complication - a Dark Arts complication - with one of the bowlers in our next match. I intend to find a way to defeat that in a match.'

'Really, Harry,' said Draco, his voice warm with pride. 'How very Slytherin of you. Using magic on the pitch. My, my.'

Harry and Justin looked at him, in outrage. 'Good God, no. That wouldn't be at all cricket, not in a regularly scheduled match.'

Draco rolled his eyes. 'Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs. And just as I was beginning to think better of you. Pray how, then, do you intend to defeat this Gul chap and whatever Dark enchantment's on him "in a match" if you won't use magic in the match against the bugger?'

'By interposing an exhibition fixture in aid of some charitable interest or another before Sunday next, of course.' Harry smirked an almost Malfoyesque smirk. 'No one could object to a little mild cheating in a festival match.'

Draco laughed outright. 'And have you informed our gallant and cunning captain of this new fixture?'

'Oh, it won't involve the Sutton Littlecombe Second XI. What shall we call ourselves - the "Wessex Wanderers", perhaps? Emphasis on "Wand", mind.'

'Ah,' said Justin, gleefully. 'So we're fielding an Old Hogwarts Quicket side, are we? I'll be glad to carry a bat under your captaincy, old man.'

'Ron? Wicket-keeper suit you?'

'What? Oh. Well. All right, I s'pose, though I'm no hand to bowl or bat.'

'Weasley the Walking Wicket,' snorted Draco. 'Well, they do call the only batsmen in the tail who are worse than the rabbits, weasels.'

'Or ferrets,' said Harry, warningly. 'Kingsley, if you would contact Ollivander? We'll want a set of Quicket bats, of the best wand cores and wand-woods he has. Now. What can we put this exhibition on in aid of?'

'You're obscenely prepositioning me, Potter,' muttered Draco.

'Well, let me try,' said Justin, taking out a mobile phone heavily enchanted to work despite ambient magic, and keying in a number. 'Hullo? Cousin Heneage? Justin here ... yes. Er, my Minister wants to know, have we anyone doing an ADC stint just now? Ah. That's - yes. Excellent. Absolutely. Right, then, thank you - cheery-bye.' He turned to his waiting auditors. 'Well, that's that. Any objection to the Wessex Wanderers, under HRH the Earl of Wessex as Hon Captain, puttin' on an exhibition against the K&S Sunday XI in aid of the brain injury trust, Headway Dorset?'

'I object,' said Ginny. 'I want to play.'

'Gin -'

'Or is it Old Boys only?'

'It's cricket, Weaselette -'

'Ginny.' Harry cut everyone off. 'Someone wants to be in the crowd, guarding us all from ambush. Frankly, you're the one I best trust to have charge of that.'

'Nice save, Potter. All right.'

Harry kissed her cheek, and then slapped Draco on the bum, making him squeak. 'It's past time I reported to the Shrewd and Cunning Applegate. Shack, it's up to you to make this happen, "influence" the Muggles into accepting, and hide everything from them. Let's say in ten days's time, the Wednesday, shall we, a twenty-over afternoon match? Right. Come along, Draco, we've a real match to win and a tourist XI to humiliate.'

'The full resources of the Ministry are behind you,' said Kingsley, gravely.

'Good. They'll damned well want to be. Oh, do come along, Draco, we're cutting it fine already.'

As Harry drove a deceptive - but not, as it happened, deceptive enough - outswinger to cover, he smiled. Ghoul or no ghoul, he was intending to hit Kilmington's demon bowler all around the wicket. For now, it was enough to embarrass the Christian Malford bowling. 'No nurdling,' said he, as he nipped past Draco at speed. 'I scent blood.'

__________________________________________________

'Bugger,' said Tony Hulbert-Jacques to Applegate the Shrewd. 'If that's your Second XI, your First XI must play for bloody England.' Only the special rules that apply to limited-overs cricket had prevented Harry and Draco from dominating the match - both as bowlers and as batsmen. Although the village standard was serious, not to say savage, David Applegate and the rest of the Second XI had played rather as one would expect of a village Second XI, if one possessed of grim dedication. It required none of Applegate's shrewdness and cunning to know to what - and to whom - Hulbert-Jacques was truly referring.

'You're speaking o' Potter and Malfoy. Mister Potter and Mister Malfoy. I don't question my good fortune. I know main well that my uncle'd give his eye-teeth to have 'em on the First XI -'

'I'm sorry, I'd not realised that, well, Bob's your uncle.'

'Mum's youngest brother, he is,' said Applegate the Shrewd, referring to the village blacksmith and perennial captain of the Sutton Littlecombe First XI, the iron-muscled Robert Cyril Goodfellow, known inevitably, off the pitch, as 'Robin Goodfellow', and, upon it, Homerically, as Goodfellow the Fanatical. 'Come to that, County selectors'd want 'em, if they were available. One thing to be gentlemen-and-not-players, mind you, but, well: there's a reason they're Second XI players, we haven't 'em save a third of the matches, what with their going up to London and all sorts. Something hush-hush, with the Ministry - don't say which, but stands to reason it's MoD, and as for what they do, well, no names, no pack-drill, but a nod's as good as a wink to a blind mule, isn't it.'

'Well, all I can say,' said Tony Hulbert-Jaques, 'is, next time we meet, I'll set the fixture for a day when the two of them aren't available. Seriously, old man, if they were available for all your matches, you'd have this sort of crowd every Sunday. Now, I believe my lads and I owe your lot the first round?'

__________________________________________________

Within five years of the day on which Harry Potter had left Privet Drive forever, a series of changes had occurred in Dudley Dursley's life: changes that would never have been imaginable for or to the Dudley Dursley whose parents had warped his character from birth; changes that were potential only in the Dudley Dursley who, himself leaving Privet Drive as the fate of the world hung poised upon a point of agate, had thought to thank his cousin Harry and to wish him well.

Within three years of Harry's victory, Dudley, to Vernon's mingled satisfaction and annoyance, had obtained a plate-glass university degree: a BSc in Sport Sciences from Brunel University. Vernon should have preferred a degree, from a university, that conferred upon the Dursleys greater opportunity to swank and put on side. He should also have been much happier had Dudders managed a joint honours course that had comprehended, say, Sport Sciences with Business Studies. On the other hand, that Ickle Diddykins had managed a university education of any sort, and any degree at all, had been a great relief.

Within five years of Harry's triumph, Dudley was a married man, married to a young woman who quite thoroughly outraged the elder Dursleys's sense of suburban propriety. To her credit, Elspeth was very much a cut above the Dursleys and all their acquaintance, as who, indeed, was not: a jolly-hockey-sticks Old Girl who had ended up at Brunel, for all her St Trinian's sort of background, due to a quite invincible distaste for those odd academic buildings that had inexplicably been attached to the playing fields of her youth. Curiously enough, when given her head at university, she had embraced her chosen field, and had done herself credit in attaining her BSc (Hons) Physiotherapy qualifications and her NHS, CSP, and NHC registrations. She had also kept Dudley up to the mark for all that time and through and since their marriage, such that he was nowadays a fit, healthy, muscular, and remarkably calm and contented man: Elspeth Dursley was a born Matron.

Petunia detested her.

Partly this was due to Elspeth's clear, if unspoken, condemnation of how Dudley had grown up, over-indulged to the point of having had his health, both physical and mental, endangered; Elspeth's management of her husband as a man nothing like his father was a standing rebuke to Petunia's mothering. Partly, of course, Petunia's dislike of her daughter-in-law was the result of Petunia's envy and social insecurity: whilst it was nice to have a daughter-in-law whose social background shed a reflected light upon the Dursleys, it was far better that that daughter-in-law be a remote lay-figure whose name one might drop in Mrs Number Eight's hearing than that she actually appear of a Sunday for tea, and make one feel all over thumbs and bumptiousness.

Vernon, for his part, considered Elspeth soft and impractical, and responsible for the wholly unsuitable way in which Dudley had turned his back upon a nice, safe job in industry or perhaps running a chain of boxing gymnasia where budding Corinthians might spill one another's claret in the best Smeltings tradition.

But the primary reason for the elder Dursleys's horrified disapproval of Elspeth was simplicity itself. For Elspeth Dursley, née Bulstrode, was a Squib, and second cousin of Millicent of that name. It was as if a dread Nemesis waited upon the Evans and Dursley lines, and they forever bound to have those miserable freaks marrying into the family. And when Harriet Dursley was born in due course to Elspeth and Dudley, Vernon and Petunia feared the worst, and quite soon, to their paralysed horror and the proud glee of Harriet's namesake, uncle, and godfather, the worst came, with Harriet's first showings of accidental magic.

By that time, Dudley Dursley was a well-regarded staff member of Headway UK's London office, and Elspeth had been headhunted as an administrator for the Physiotherapy Unit of the Great Ormond Street Hospital NHS Trust. And Elspeth, Dudley, and the quite surprisingly pretty infant Harriet, were regular and welcome visitors wherever Harriet's Uncle Harry might be found.

It came as little surprise, then, that, Justin's hurried machinations with his cousin Heneage and the ADCs of Prince Edward's suite having resulted in Headway Dorset's being chosen as the charity in aid of which the festival match was to be played, the newly-minted working trustee of the national charity who was given the task of showing the flag at the match should have been one Dudley Dursley.

__________________________________________________

It is a curious characteristic of magical objects that they seem often to have minds of their own: the Sorting Hat, for one, and, to the enduring annoyance of the Goblins, Godric's sword. They certainly have some capacity for showing up when and where they are needed, wherever they were last left. And there are no magical objects so heavily enchanted, so powerful, and so wilful as the Hallows of Britain. Not even Albus had realised their full potential, for not even Albus had united them. Only Harry Potter, descended in right line from Ignotus Peverell, having the reversion of the heirlooms of Antioch and of Cadmus, had ever held mastery of all three of the Hallows at once, and become master of Death and time.

For all Harry's intentions to cast the Hallows to the four winds so that they should never again become a snare and a delusion, the Hallows had had other plans, and the Master of the Hallows was himself bound by and to them in turn. The Resurrection Stone had declined to remain lost and unfound, and had insistently reappeared in Harry's possession, repaired and whole. The Cloak of course had remained with him always. And the Elder Wand, the Wand of Destiny, was no more confined forever to the White Tomb than was Godric's blade to wall of the Headmistress's office. These objects might be stored in a place, but they appeared when and where and as their master had need of them, and those times and places were not always of their masters's choosing.

So it was no surprise at all that Minerva McGonagall should arrive at Pottersfield on the Monday, after tea, to assure herself of what the curiously-wrought silver instruments in her office had signalled to her.

'Minerva!' Harry was in a teasing mood. 'Come awa' ben; ye'll have had your tea.'

'I imagine,' said she, repressively, refusing the gambit, 'that you can guess at the reason for my presence.'

'You're here to visit your first-favourite old student, of course.'

'No, Mr Potter,' she riposted, 'I'm here to see you.'

Harry laughed, and poured her a dram of single-malt Firewhisky. 'Well, here I am, Headmistress.'

'Aye. And I doubt me, hae you suddenly found yersel', once mair, unexpectedly possessit o' twa wands, lad?'

'Damn,' said Harry. He rucked about in his robes, and his face fell. 'Bloody thing's turned up again, yes. Why the blasted object won't stop in Albus's tomb where I replace it again and again....'

'So long as it is you who has it, Mr Potter. Or, perhaps, so long as you are he whom it has.'

'Alas - to borrow from Albus - so it is. I take it you were alerted by one of those devilishly complex and unfathomable silver toys of Albus's? Umm, yes. You might easily have firecalled, you know, or sent a Patronus message.'

'I might hae done. But then I'd not have been given a dram.'

'Minerva!'

'Or been able to suggest that you have Ollivander in to talk about the incident. The Elder Wand kens well when it maun be used, Harry, and certainly there's nae risk of its being taken as a prize by a Muggle, even were you o'ercome yersel'. Och, the young aye know best, ye need but ask them and they'll say as much, but if you will take my advice, despite my age and for all my years and experience, ye'll summon Ollivander and consult that man, how best to use yon cammelt, waefu', wanchancie thing.'

__________________________________________________

When forced to go up to London, and not forced by crisis and exigency to apparate, portkey, or floo, Harry preferred either to take to his broom, or to avail himself of the Wizarding train system - the secret network of railways that had been restored to a solely Wizarding use by a wave of Dr Beeching's wand. From the halt at Twatford Mulliner to the last fields between Baulking and Challow, he would look with interest at the doings of his neighbours and fellow farmers. Thereafter, he looked with fascination upon the increasing instances of industry, as, heading eastwards, he approached its fringes at Grove Wick, just before the A338 passed over the line, with the sewage works to the northwards and an industrial estate to southwards. This, he always felt, with a quiver of excitement, formed the first few bars of the symphony of labour and manufacture, a symphony few others of all his acquaintance could hear. After Didcot, the strains of the new ever swelled, the tempo driving relentlessly, intricate harmonies played fortissimo: the countryside was now behind him, and the land was now less Lark Rise to Candleford than Lent Rise to Cippenham. Even the industrial estate between Slough and Langley, hard by Little Whinging, in which Grunnings had their lair, was to him, now, an occasion of mild interest and not of old hurts remembered.

Particularly now, after his years in the Wizarding world, Harry was a firm, if sometimes lonely, advocate for industry and innovation: his most reliable allies in that endeavour being Hermione, naturally enough, and, still more naturally, the recovering George, who, as he had emerged from his grief and shock, had thrown himself into the wildest realms of invention with as wild an abandon.

And so it was that Harry, on railway journeys, marvelled at the boundless ingenuity of Muggle industry. Trading estates, trafficking in sheet metal and plumbing fixtures, model aeroplanes and milling machines; trading estates, housing fish processors and fibreglass manufacturers, veterinary surgeries and dealers in used Jags. Industrial estates, whose featureless facades concealed makers of pork pies and distributors of carburettors, printers and purveyors of industrial filtration devices, ropewalks and sausage-makers. It was to Dye Urn Alley as Brunel's works and British Rail had been to a model railway, and, to Harry, endlessly fascinating. He had that cast of mind.

And that is why, today, he was simply Uncle Harry, strolling along Silver Street and then along the High, with one hand gripped tightly by an excited Hugo Weasley, whose other paw was firmly in the competent grasp of his Uncle George. Hugo, although an equable and obliging child by nature, shared something of Harry's interests, and was, like Uncle Harry (and, indeed, Uncle George), readily intrigued to the point of quivering exhilaration by How Things Worked. Hugo's temperament and cast of mind was the inevitable result of his combining Hermione's questing thirst for knowledge with Ron's craft, stolid pragmatism, and abiding interest in such tangibles as, say, food.

Earlier, Hugo, in accordance with a perhaps rash parental promise, had been taken by Uncle Harry to visit Mr Fouracre-the-Farmer, and had soaked up, sponge-like, the conversation: 'very well set', 'a very competent udder, Mr Fouracre', 'well, well, very nice indeed, Mr Fouracre, very sound: when she calves, do let me know': for Hugo had been promised a Devon calf for his very own. And now, Uncle George and Uncle Harry were taking him to the butcher's, that fascinating place.

Harry smiled. Young Hugo's enthusiasms made for excellent cover. Assuredly, he'd business with Mr Goodfellow - uncle to Applegate the Shrewd and brother to the smith, Robert Cyril Goodfellow - yet this making the rounds of the shops: Goodfellow the Butcher, Goodenough the Greengrocer, Old Mrs Bramble, vice Old Mother Garlick, who was now pensioned off, the Sub-Postmistress, all the Happy Families of the village: had another purpose as well, one which would be performed also by Draco in the parish and down the local. Mr Goodfellow wasn't a man for gossip - unlike Old Mrs Bramble, notoriously a pillar of indiscretion, and Pococke, the jobbing gardener, an inexhaustible fount of misinformation - but his patrons could be relied upon to spread the word with supersonic rapidity.

Naturally, given what Draco admitted to himself - but assuredly to no one else, although Harry was perfectly aware of the fact, and privately amused by it - given what was Draco's invariable tendency to Get Things Slightly Wrong when dealing with Muggles, it fell to Harry to spread the word through the High Street shops. (There had been the memorable incident in which Draco, asking advice of Mr Gooodfellow with reference to an alternative to the traditional Sunday joint, had completely mistaken the good butcher's meaning when he had said, 'Oi tell 'ee what you want, Mizter Malvoy, what you want of a Zunday avternoon is you-err zauzage in zoider', which had ended in general embarrassment.)

'Mizter Harry. And thick yere - can that be Mazter Hugo? Ah, how they do zprout up, to be zure.' A long experience of dealing with tourists and trippers had confirmed Mr Goodfellow in the wisdom of a cunning retention of a rural accent.

'Say hullo to Mr Goodfellow, Hugo. George, you recall Mr Goodfellow? Your cousin, Mr Ayliffe, plays for the KSSC Sunday XI, doesn't he?'

'Zo he do, Mizter Harry. Avter Zunday lazt, Oi don't know az how you want to worrit, mind.'

'Ah. Well, about that. Malfoy and I, and Young Hugo's father and Hugo's Uncle Bill, have been roped in to a charity match, as being on strength for the Wessex Wanderers, against your cousin's lot on Wednesday next. I've already promised your nephew David that we'll take copious notes for Sunday fortnight. The thing is, we're all of us decamping to Pottersfield for the interim, getting into training and whatnot. Now, I know Mr Ayliffe is a reliable butcher in his own right, with whom I'll be speaking regarding the catering for the charity match, and my chap in Potterton Mallet is sound, but what have you that I'll want to bring along whilst we're stopping in Darkest Somerset? I've a good number of mouths to feed....'

Typically, the honest Mr Goodfellow insisted that it would be a disservice to 'Mr Harry' to sell him any ham, gammon, or mutton, on the grounds that Mr Harry's own home-cure couldn't be bettered. Equally typically, in keeping with the course of village negotiations since time immemorial, the conversation ended in Mr Goodfellow's arranging to provide a very profitable quantity of meat, from chipolatas to topside, to Harry and to the Wanderers for the festival fixture.

And most typically of all, as intended, the news of the charity match, its details, and the temporary removal to Pottersfield of Potter, Malfoy, and all their friends now stopping at Sutton Littlecombe, had reached everyone in the village and was being disseminated in Twatford Mulliner, Starveall, and Stoney Down, before Hugo and his Uncles George and Harry had left the shop.

'Right, then,' said Harry, with an almost Malfoy-esque smirk. 'Let's get behind cover and apparate ... and then we can see just how well these military-grade time-turners that Kingsley liberated from the Ministry, actually work.'

__________________________________________________

Although Hermione was as a matter of principle in favour of innovation and progress - or, rather, of Innovation and Progress - in the Wizarding world, she had remained a trifle perplexed by Harry's own interest in How Things Work. Hermione had always preferred theory to reality.

'Honestly, Harry! You're as bad as Arthur,' she had complained a year or so before. 'And now Hugo is following in your footsteps. When - after the War - you embraced your heritage, both as a Wizard and as a country gentleman, a pillar of the County and a rustic Merlin -'

Harry had grinned. His old friend had been indulging a trick of the old rage, referring obscurely to that eccentric 'rural court magician', the Revd Mr Henry Crabtree, Restoration vicar of St Mary's, Todmorden, and author of Merlinus Rusticus, the Country Almanack. Typical that she should have pursued such a trivial bit of Wizarding history.

'- yet now you're increasingly fascinated with trade. Well, I suppose it's very enlightened of you, renouncing the usual classism of the rural gentry, but, honestly, it seems rather out of character.'

And it had been Rose, just pipping Hugo to the post, who had said, in wide-eyed innocence, 'Mummy, that's silly. Farming's an ind-, indrus-, an industry too' - and, turning to her Uncle Harry without so much as a pause for breath, had said, with her usual enthusiasm for all the aspects of country life, 'Uncle Harry, can I go see the tractorses again?' And Hugo had nodded vociferously, wanting in on it, as Ginny had laughed at her sister-in-law and Hermione had thrown up her hands in surrender.

'Don't come over all rural on me, Ginny,' had said Hermione, joining in the laughter at her own expense, 'the Burrow's livestock runs to chickens and veg.'

'Yes,' had said Ginny, 'and if you'd ever levitated what the chickens generate, over to the compost for the veg. on a hot August day, you'd be as interested in charmed machinery as Sirius was in charming motorcycles to fly.'

Harry had snorted: something he found himself increasingly doing as age and cynicism crept up upon him. 'Sirius wasn't interested in charming motorcycles, as such. Sirius was interested in charming anyone who might be charmed by a charmed motorcycle.'

__________________________________________________

Fielden Evans, MB BCh, MRCS LRCP LMSSA, District Medical Officer and GP, had ever retained that commitment to improving the lot of the poor that had characterised his uncle - in his own day a DMO for the Todmorden Poor Law Union and then a physician devoted to serving Stansfield View Hospital for the mentally handicapped - and his grandfather, the Revd Hywel Evans, DD, who had taken up a curacy in Walsden, thus bringing the family forth from Wild Wales and into Todmorden and the Calder Dale, and had, after succeeding to the vicarage, been a member of the Board of Guardians and a supernumerary chaplain, off his own bat, to the inmates of the Union Workhouse. Dr Evans had been a popular man, admired by the rich and loved by the poor, known equally for his tender care of the truly ill and for his bluff rudeness when occasion called for it ('of course you're feeling seedy! Look at all that fat! You're digging your grave with your teeth!'), and cherished the more for his bluntness even than for his gentleness with the infirm. He had been a devoted cricketer, an evangelical believer in the NHS, and an unceasing advocate for improving the conditions of the poor - including by getting them onto the cricket pitch and bringing some joy to their lives. He had had but two regrets in his life: that he had not spotted one Dr Harold Frederick 'Fred' Shipman for what he was, back in '74 and '75, and that he had not done more to ameliorate the conditions of the impoverished and infirm. For this, his elder daughter, Petunia, had never forgiven him. He had been named for one of the Fieldens, the local magnates who were his father's friends, he had been welcomed in the best Society yet had preferred to waste money and time upon paupers, and he had expected Petunia and Lily to meet on equal terms even with the ragged denizens of Spinner's End. Like most adolescents, Petunia had been furiously embarrassed by her father; like many adults, she had never given over her adolescent resentments. Perhaps this ancient wound also had played its part in her distaste for her NHS matron of a daughter-in-law, Elspeth, née Bulstrode.

There had also been fear to underpin the embarrassment. Petunia's parents and their high-minded acquaintance, very much in the Todmorden traditions of radicalism and reform - Todmorden, after all, was the sort of place in which the very mill-owners and JPs were the Chartists in that revolutionary year of 1848 - had combined egalitarianism and paternalism in equal measure, and, because they were the local equivalent to the great and the good, had gotten away with it. It did not, however, take much reflection for even Petunia at the age of six to grasp that Daddy was a doctor, and doctors go forth and do battle with illness and pain, and illness and pain seemed mostly to dwell in the grim, glum fastnesses of Spinner's End, Millwood, Industrial Street, Market Street, Shade.... And Daddy, as the eleven-year-old Petunia soon realised, considered money to be something to be spent or, better yet, given away. What if all the money went away? What if they were forced into those terraced houses, two-up-two-down, where the people who fell ill lived? What if they slid and slipped into that noisome realm of disease and pain and hopelessness, where children like that awful Severus Snape dwelt?

These fears had shaped Petunia, and her life after.

And so it was that now, sitting stiffly and unnaturally upon the very edge of a chair in what she persisted in calling the 'lounge' in the meticulously restored and recreated house on Privet Drive, Petunia was prattling and embroidering the facts to conceal her fears.

'But, truly, Mr Shacklebolt - Minister - I can hardly recall. I'm not so young as I look, you know -' and here Petunia forced forth what she fondly hoped was a silvery laugh - 'and it was ever so many years ago. And of course, my dear father positively devoted himself to public service, as it were, the doctor to Those In Need: well, noblesse oblige, and all that -'

'Ah,' said Kingsley, with relief. 'That should be Harry at the door.'

Petunia blenched.

For the purpose of dealing with Muggles generally and the Dursleys in particular, Kingsley had arrayed himself in raiment suitable to his position as the first minister of his government, much to Petunia's open relief (and as open determination to make sure that the neighbours knew that a senior-if-obscure ministerial official had called upon her). Harry, at Kingsley's behest, had likewise put himself into the Muggle equivalent of his robes of office, although he had managed to talk Kingsley out of his initial notions; and therefore, when Petunia - with great reluctance and no little trepidation - opened the door, her nephew stood there exuding the aura of a Gallant Major in mufti.

She shooed him in, and steeled herself.

'Aunt Petunia. Look, I know the Minister has explained what we are hoping for, from you, and why. Let me tell you, if I can, just why this is so important.'

'Your Minister has told me it's, well, a security matter.'

'Yeeessss.... Well. You know what I do, Aunt Petunia, who I am.'

'Yes.' She froze. 'Tell me that that Dark Wizard isn't somehow returned! They said you'd put paid to him!'

'Oh, he's gone, for - in every sense - good. No, what I was going to say, was, it's true that I'm mainly concerned with, well, security, and some forms of policing. And it's true that evil remains even after Voldemort's vanquishing. But what we're dealing with just now, Aunt, is ... it's more a contagion than anything else. A Dark artefact, we think, is causing people to fall ill - and so far, Wizards haven't been victimised: it's Muggles who've succumbed.

'And all I'm wanting from you, Aunt Petunia, is a name or two. To stop a possible epidemic that seems to be spreading from Todmorden. All that's wanted is a name or two: anyone you can think of, nurse or medico, who'd remember my grandfather, who knew and liked him.' Harry refused to pause on the fact that he had not had that opportunity, to know and love his grandparents. 'Because that gives us an in, a way to insinuate ourselves into the situation, without making things official and sparking a panic.

'Just a name, Aunt. That's all I want. Can you help us?'

And, as it happened, she could do, and, in the end, she did do. And thus began what Harry privately christened Operation SLUGHORN, so named because it involved taking the backstairs route to some unsuspecting blighter's memories, for an end that one did not reveal.

__________________________________________________

Justin had had, to the extent that such a thing exists, a Good War. Whilst Dean had been off gathering information for Potterwatch and avoiding the Snatchers - until the end - and Nev and Seamus and All had been leading the Hogwarts maquis, Justin had found himself, under Kingsley's personal command, liaising with the Royal Corps of Signals to keep Potterwatch on air: which, as his father (late Royal Artillery) had said, was slumming, rather, but one must do one's duty, of course. There was no immediate glory in being a back-room boy, but Justin never thought of that; had it occurred to him, he should doubtless have dismissed the idea with the reflection that, not once or twice in our rough island story, the path of duty was the way to glory, and, in any event, duty was to be done. A thirst for glory was the foible of Frogs and other Lesser Breeds Without the Law.

It was, then, no surprise that he'd done yeoman duty in exerting himself to arrange the charity match. Had it not been for the rather tiresome delay in finding a pitch for it, Harry and Malfoy might easily have been able to spread the word by village telegraph a day or so before they did do. Not that anyone had been disobliging, but it was only to be expected that choosing a side and choosing a site would require a certain amount of discussion.

The former had, in fact, been rather the easier of the two. Nev had pointed out that, no matter what the ministry of the day had thought, he and his Gran had dealt with their Muggle neighbours all their lives, and, besides, there had been that early worry in his family that he, Nev, might be a Squib, which meant that Nev had spent his childhood playing both Wizarding Quicket and Muggle cricket. In Lancashire. Which ought, he rather thought, to establish his credentials, as indeed it did. So there was one right-handed batsman and right-arm fast bowler accounted for, and with enough Wessex connexions to qualify: he would be listed as 'Prof N Longbottom, Right Arm Fast Bowler, RHB, Hurstholme Thorpe, Long Bottom, Lancs, and Lovegood Stanners, Ottervale, Devon', and would go in in the top-middle order as fourth to Justin's third ('Mr J Finch-Fletchley, LHB, Left Arm Medium Pace Bowler, ffinch Hall, Fletchley Abbas, Burwell, Cambs, Budleigh Babberton, Devon, and Flete Ferrers, Devon'). Some officious twit in HRH's secretariat had drawn up the list to show the 'Rt Hons' and the 'OM's, but that had been quickly shot down, and, with the exception of the professorial Neville, everyone was appearing as simple 'Mr' in this Muggle-attended match.

In the end, Dean, Lee, Dennis, Theo Nott, Ernie, Bill, and Ron would round things out, with the Pride of Upper Flagley, Mr Z Smith, in reserve, all of them having holdings in the West Country - well, if one includes Mould, in Glos - sufficient to justify their inclusion in Harry's and Malfoy's side, to face KSCC's Sunday XI (the Hon Jno Seymour, Maiden Bradley, Captain, and Mr Alec Ludlow, Stourton, Vice-Captain) at Zeals.

Zeals had not been chosen entirely by default, or in compliment to KSCC, or as being closest to the point where Somerset, Wilts, and Dorset met: these were considerations, to be sure, but secondary to the condition of the wicket. Other possibilities, some well into Somerset and Devon, had all thrown up insuperable objections - 'you're not serious, I've been there, cow corner has actual cows grazing it' - and the pitch at Zeals had been chosen largely on its own merits, although it was also a fitting site for a match that would be of equal interest in the three counties. The fact that it was suited to the finger-spin bowling in which Harry and Malfoy dominated was of course purely coincidental.

But these issues had been resolved in short order, after all, and now, at Pottersfield, the Wessex Wanderers and all their company were using the Ministry time-turners to their fullest in order to prepare for battle against the demon bowler, Nazim Gul, late of Todmorden and now of North Brewham.

__________________________________________________

It had not taken much persuasion to co-opt Old Canon Broddside into serving as an umpire. He might nowadays be old and creaky, but he had known, in his Keble days, the sun-dappled turf of The Parks - and the notorious 'batsmen's pitch' of Fenner's - for he had been awarded his Blue, playing for OUCC under Colin Cowdrey and MJK Smith, and facing on a memorable occasion that greatest of Tabs, Peter May.

It would not have occurred to him that part of his being chosen as an umpire for this harmless festival match, was the desire of Wizards, confronting a possible Dark artefact, to have a priest on hand.

__________________________________________________

Whilst the new-minted Wessex Wanderers and their families and friends were faffing about with time-turners, and the Ministry were creating a glorious history for the Wanderers and an air of inevitability and naturalism to surround the match, at least for Muggle consumption, Millicent Bulstrode, with a slightly cowed Pansy Nott (formerly Parkinson) in tow - Pansy, even after bringing off a successful marriage to Theo, had never quite lived down her injudicious suggestion that Potter be turned over to Voldemort as the price of saving the rest of the students - was forgathered with her cousin Elspeth. Millicent being the (surprisingly civil) civil partner of Susan Bones, and Susan being an increasingly senior Healer at Mungo's, it was natural that Millie and Elspeth should take charge of combing the health records of Todworth, the Hangletons, Upper Flagley and Brockdale, Mould-on-the-Wold and Chipping Clodbury, and Tinworth. It was equally natural that Millie should have jollied, chivvied, and bullied Pansy into coming along and helping with the donkey-work.

The pattern that emerged was not an attractive one.

__________________________________________________

Harry, thanks to judicious use of the Ministry time-turners, also had, as it were, time on his hands; and that is why he was to be found in Todmorden, with Ron and Draco, having a substantial tea with a Dr Ainlee, whose surgery was in the town and who remembered, albeit as a very junior man to a very senior one, old Dr Evans.

__________________________________________________

It fell to Dudley to break the news to Harry - or to one of his iterations, at any rate, as the time-turners were still being given a thorough workout - and to a quite temporally undivided Kingsley.

'Harry? Those things that attacked us that time, the - Demon-ters? Dementors, that's right. The ones you saved me from. You said, once, something about how they ... ate souls? Ruddy weird, but. Well.'

'Yeah, D. Dementors. They do that, yeah. Did Elspeth and Millie turn something up, then?'

'Well, it's rum, it was actually Pansy spotted it, but, yeah. There was never a problem in Todmorden or Walsden before their side played a match in Little Hangleton. But after that, in Little Hangleton, and then in Todmordon and Walsden, Lydgate, Cornholme, Mankinholes, and Lumbutts and all. And then, wherever that Gul bloke went. After a match he bowled in, people were suddenly being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Never a sign of it before, either, just a sudden onset, severe dementia, and a swift, almost immediate slide into absolute mindlessness. Which sounds a bloody sight close to what those Dementor thingies do, and maybe it's not really Alzheimer's then at all.'

'Who were affected?'

'Sometimes it was people who'd turned out to watch the cricket, sometimes it was members of the other XI, and if it wasn't them, it was friends or families or mates or people who worked with 'em.'

'Kingsley?'

'I'll get Susan Bones and Poppy and Smethwyck to take a butcher's at them all. Sorry, not the most felicitous phrase, that, but you know what I mean. Does this fit with what you learnt from Dr Ainlee?'

'More with what we learnt when he handed us off to his junior, Dr Haigh. Ainlee was simply our bona fides, thanks to his having known my grandfather - ours, Dud, Mum's and Aunt Petunia's dad. Dr Haigh - funnily enough, some of the Haighs moved to Wales about the time the Evanses got stuck in in Todmorden, you'd think it was a trade-off - Dr Haigh mentioned a curious incidence of Alzheimer's in the area, suddenly appearing, and centred on the Burnley Road cricket ground. We'd been talking of the old mills and how polluted the River Calder had once been, back in grandfather Evans's day, and that got him off onto environmental influences on disease.'

'I'll have the medical investigation team report directly to you. Now: what else can we do with you in this timeline?'

'I think the current versions of Hermione, Ron, Ginny, Draco, Nev, Luna, and I will be headed back to Todmorden. I want to know everything there is to know about the journey a certain cricketing side set out on from Todmorden to Little Hangleton, just before people began falling ill and Mr Nazim Gul became an unstoppable demon bowler.'

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The charabanc - as the witnesses jocularly referred to the coach - had, apparently, turned north on the A6033, leaving the A646 at Hebden Bridge to travel on to Keighley, Riddlesden, and thence to Little Hangleton. The witnesses whom the team had interviewed, Nazim Gul's former mates, remembered the trip well: those of them, at least, who were not now shells of their former selves, their minds gone: remembered it not least because the 'bus had suddenly shuddered, juddered, and died in the broad and lonely middle of Wadsworth Moor, before they had even reached Oxenhope, for no cause anyone could discern. The match was not until the morrow, of course, but any delay would cut into the planned pub time they were anticipating at each stop on their journey and at their destination, and was resented accordingly.

Gul had simply shrugged, resigned himself to the delay, and stepped onto the verge to practise his bowling. The sheep of the district had managed to crop the verge as well as the moorlands, so there was no reason to expect him to lose the ball. Yet lose it he did, it hitting a concealed stone and bounding over the wall. To the jeers of his mates, he leapt the lichened dry-stones of the ancient boundary wall and went to retrieve it, the Winny Stone to his eastwards and Bedlam to the westwards.

For some reason, no one had ever quite been able to say, after, for just how long he had been gone; but upon his return, the conveyance suddenly sputtered into life, and they forgot the incident as they sped away northwards from the desolate stretch of moorland between Pecket Well and Dike Nook.

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Mr Ollivander was hard put to conceal his excitement at being once more in the presence of, much less being asked to opine upon, the Wand of Destiny. 'Remarkable,' he muttered with every intake of breath, 'remarkable, indeed, Mr Potter.'

He had stopped at Pottersfield for a weekend to assist the Wanderers in living up to their names, by providing them with suitable Quicket bats that would pass for cricket bats. Willow, after all, was a very well-known wand-wood: Lily Potter's own wand, for example, had been willow (ten and a quarter inches, swishy, an excellent wand for Charms work). Now, however, Minerva and Harry had between them sparked him to a leap of invention. He would not, as was traditional, create for them Quicket bats of willow with embedded wand-cores. Inspired by the Elder Wand and Minerva's musings, he would create for them bats into the handles of which they could place their wands, which would extend into the blade itself.

'And if I'm bowling, Mr Ollivander?'

'My dear Mr Potter, in that event you'll not be facing this Muggle's bowling, now, will you? In any event, Mr Potter, you've your own wand to hand ... and I daresay, from what we are discovering of the Doomstick, that it will appear in your hand should you require it at any time.'

Later that evening, after their nursery tea, Hugo proclaimed that he now wished to become a wand-maker. As, three days before, his goal had been to charm flying motorcars when he was older, this was almost a relief.

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The team combing the moors for a lost cricket ball from a year and more before would have seemed barking mad to any passing Muggles, but any passing Muggles, after all, wouldn't be glimpsing them under the charms they had placed upon themselves.

They need hardly have bothered. Suddenly, without warning, a swift-rolling and impenetrable fog swaddled them, and showed no signs of dissipating or moving on, swiftly or otherwise. The temperature, as well, was dropping, dank and miasmic.

'I must say, Neville,' said Draco, 'I quite see why you are so proud of your North Country weather. Rates with the Riviera or the Costa del Sol, doesn't it.'

'Good thing we've Nev along,' said Harry, smoothing things over. 'Neville, we shall rely upon your local knowledge.'

'Booger that,' said Neville, 'happen we'll rely the more on your own expertise. This isn't quite t'fog of Dementors, nor yet t'chill of ghosts, but it's not a natural moor fog, sithee, not by a good, long chalk.'

Hermione's intake of breath was loud, although curiously flat-sounding, in the mists.

But Harry was as casual about it as Nev was, admirably unconcerned. 'Well, then, that's all the better, isn't it: shows we're on the right track.'

'Damn good thing it shows something,' said Ron, quite as casually. 'Because I can still see Gin and Hermione and Nev and Cousin Ferret, vaguely, but you, Harry my lad, seem to have vanished.'

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In Kilmington, Messrs Gul, Cucknell, Snook-Vincent, Ayliffe, Darvill Eastman, Rainsford, Dysmer, and Mr Cyril Pinnell (Penselwood, Somerset, wicket-keeper and left-hand bat), were listening to their captain and vice-captain with attention.

'And do remember, please,' said Jack (the Hon John) Seymour, 'this is a friendly, a festival match, and a Royal charitable occasion. Winning would be lovely, but it's not precisely the point. George -' this was to Mr Ayliffe-the-Butcher's address - 'are we set for nosh? Right, then. Off you go, all of you, and we'll be back tomorrow at 4.0 sharp for another bit of training.'

Jack Seymour would have made an admirable Hufflepuff, had he not been a Muggle.

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'Vanished?' Harry's voice was amused. 'So I have done. Damned cloak. If there is one thing that annoys me, it's magical artefacts with minds of their own. I may add that seem also to have acquired a rather ornate signet ring and a second wand.'

'Ah,' said Draco. 'Carry on, then, I assume they're wanted, or soon shall be. Wands out, I think.'

Ron winced in sympathy: he knew full well that, although Cousin Ferret had meant no harm by that remark, it would inevitably recall Cedric's death to Harry's mind.

Harry's voice was still collected, however, when he answered. 'Quite. And I think we should remain where we are, within sight or hail, so as not to lose one another. I rather doubt we'll need to search further; I imagine we're quite soon to find what we seek, and a bit over.'

Luna giggled. 'Oh, Harry, I'm so glad it was a cloak rather than a dagger. Otherwise, I could never read the Scottish play again without connecting Gruoch's "damned spot" with Macbeth's dagger-that-he-saw-before him.'

'Bugger,' said Hermione, as Ginny sniggered, 'now I'll never be able not to think about that when I read the play.'

'That,' said a cold and stony voice, a voice like the shattering of a menhir in a killing frost, 'presumes you will ever return to hearth and lamp and books to read, living and with your red blood yet in you. I should not count upon that, mortal.' And from within the fog, in the direction whence the voice seemed to come, there was a cackling of many eldritch voices, full of malice.

It was Luna who just edged out Harry in replying. 'You know, it's terribly rude not to identify oneself. Will you introduce your companions and tell us your name?'

The voice was like iron on a freezing night in dark of moon, at once cold and burning, and infinitely cruel. 'You are brave, or foolhardy. Perhaps these are the same thing. You seek my name and those of my host? Why? It will avail you naught. Surely you are not so foolish as to think that our giving them to you will grant you any power over us, even if your scent does proclaim you a magical wight. And you cannot be such a fool as to imagine such knowledge will otherwise avail you: you shan't, after all, live to pass the knowledge on.'

'I shouldn't be too damned cocksure of that,' said Draco, sounding almost amused. 'Your name and station, at once, whilst yet you can give it.'

'You are arrogant - cocksure - in your folly, boy. Of damnation we shall speak anon. As for our names and kind, we do not choose to reveal them to those who will not live to profit by the experience. And what I am and how I am called, you have no true names for in your mortal tongue.'

'Bugger doesn't know when he should surrender, eh, Nev?' Ron also was putting in a front, even as his sister whispered to his wife, if all this testosterone-posturing gets us killed, I swear I'll haunt, well, somebody, see if I don't.

Whatever the beings were, they were perceptibly nearer, looming shapes of uttermost blackness in the unearthly fog.

'I'm half inclined,' said Luna, to no-one in particular, 'to apparate away from such rude creatures, but I'd not like it thought that we feared them. Pity I haven't a camera, this would make an excellent Sunday supplement alongside the Snorkacks.'

'Quite right, Luna,' said Neville. 'Draco, let's not descend to their level. Make introductions, there's a good chap.'

'Quite,' drawled Draco. 'My name is Draco Malfoy. With me are Hermione and Ron Weasley, Luna and Neville Longbottom, Ron's exceedingly dangerous sister Ginny, and the Rt Hon Harry Potter, Order of Merlin First Class, Grand Sorcerer, and so on. Any of this sounding at all familiar?'

'Potter?'

'Indeed,' said Harry, clearly amused and as clearly exasperated. 'I suppose it's as well that the fame has spread, but I really cannot be arsed to give out signed photos or autographs.'

'There are many Potters,' said the voice, grimly.

'But only one Harry Potter,' said Draco, his tone as languid as the being's was grim. 'A fact for which, I may add, I have often given thanks. Still, such as he is, this is he. Some of the family, I understand, English the name as "Crocker", particularly the senior branch on Dartmoor - I assume you moor-creatures stay in touch. In any event, Harry Potter, scion of the first Wizard, direct descendant of Ignotus Peverell, sole remaining heir of Antioch Peverell and Cadmus Peverell, and all that, with all that implies.'

'All?'

'All,' said Harry, with evidently increasing impatience.

'With Old Crockern of Darty-moor I am ... familiar.' The voice hesitated; yet it spoke again, with the finality of the slamming of a crypt's door. 'Yet however high-born and however magical, you are but mortal meat.'

'Mortal I will admit,' said Harry. 'As to the other, however, I should perhaps make clear that I am not merely the heir of the Brothers Peverell, but hold and am master of their gifts. Upon my finger rests the Resurrection Stone, upon my shoulders the Cloak of Invisibility, in my hand, the Elder Wand, and I stand before you possessor of the Hallows, master of Time and Death. Now, spirit or fell creature, be you what you may: Make. Your. Choice.'

It was immediately obvious that the beings had drawn back, almost flinched back, dwindling in the mist. The voice, when it spoke, was hesitant.

'What seek you here, master of the Hallows?'

'Curiously enough, a lost cricket ball, from months ago.'

'A ... cricket ball.'

'Yes, yes, and spare me the Fifth Doctor humour. One lost here, as I suspect, some time hence, and something else taken away in its guise and stead.'

'Yes.... Yes, we know of what you speak. It was ... yes. Look down and you will find it at your feet.'

The fog thinned in a keen wind, revealing the turf of the moor and showing the silhouetted forms of the dark creatures that had drawn back from the threat of the Hallows. Luna, naturally, was fumbling for a quill and parchment, to sketch them.

'Very amusing. One would swear, to look at it, that it was a stone.'

'And the mortal who took away the stone would have sworn that he carried away a cricket ball.'

'Hermione? A little revelatory spell-work, if you please. Ah. Yes. Got it. Well, that's a turn up for the books. Neville, if you've still that moke-skin wallet I gave you for Christmas last, the one with an outer covering and inner lining of Graphorn hide? Excellent. Draco, be so good as to levitate the stone, or, as it may be, cricket ball, into Nev's bag, there's a fellow. Thank you. Now, you black-cloaked, horse-skull-headed herd of whatsits, I believe you are going to quietly and peaceably lead us to the source from which the stone currently out there, loose, masquerading as a cricket ball, came. I most urgently advise that you not try any trickery. Ginny, if any of the buggers so much as fidget, blast them. Right. Quick ... march!'

They marched, the thin but persistent fog accompanying them, to the contortion of stone upon two horizontal slabs that was the Winny Stone. The looming figures, their formless black cloaks writhing in the wind beneath horse-like skulls, in the eye sockets of which burnt infernal fires, left little doubt as to the name's derivation.

'The stone came from here, I take it. Very clever. I suppose you don't feed as often as you'd like, hereabouts, waiting for walkers to wander past. Well, I can certainly address that problem.'

'You will send us meat, souls to feast upon, as payment for our help?'

Harry snorted. 'Not sodding likely. Ligare vinctum! You are bound forever within these rocks!'

The mist vanished, the wind dropped, and they stood blinking in the late autumnal sun. 'Very indifferent Latin,' said Draco, 'like most spells, but rather effective.'

'Yes, well, I don't approve of soul-eating. Well. Shall we find a floo?'

'Let's find a pub,' said Ron.

'Oh, is my big, fearless brother wanting a pint after all that?'

Nev laughed. 'Ron? Lass, he's not in want of a drink. It's Ron. He wants food.'

'Well, work makes me hungry.'

'Honestly, Ron, we did none of the work. Breathing makes you hungry.'

'Scotch eggs and cask ales at t'Red Cap, in Heptonstall,' said Nev, pacifically.

'Lead on,' said Ron.

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At Pottersfield, their other iterations had not wasted time. Physically, magically, and mentally, they were as well prepared for the match as they might be. The match was, admittedly, a friendly; but there was to be, they all fully expected, nothing at all friendly about what they were really to face at the match.

To the glee of the assorted children, Mr Ollivander had been joined, for the purpose of creating the new model Quicket bats, by the veritable King of the Wood, Professor Rubeus Hagrid, who was immediately rushed by the smaller members, with Rose in the lead, shouting gladsomely and shrilly, 'Oakfather!' His black eyes dancing, beaming all over his honest face, Hagrid swept them all into his arms.

'Now, then, now, then,' said he, chortling. 'All right, young'n all. Who's coming along o' me to look at these yere bat-willows down the riverbank? Teddy, you take 'em in hand, and mind they get their wellies on proper, it be roight plashy in them pucksey rhynes where weem heading. Now, now, none of thick yere nunny-fudgin', there's work to be done. Off wi' you, now. Mornin', Mr Ollivander, how bist? You'm lookin' brave this day, it's good to see yer in health. Just you let me to get my gurt axe, and when them unbelievin' chillurn be ready, we be headin' up-along a bit, I do know where's some fine bat-willow fer yer to look at.'

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With the coming of Hagrid, the King of the Wood, Autumntide was fully upon the land.

Already, it had been adumbrated, in the scent of the woods's duff, in the spice of the air: imminent, oncoming, desired: the time when at last, in accordance with the eternal round, the oil paints of Summertide would give way to the stained glass, the bold metals and gilt, of the harvest time, to be followed in turn by the charcoal, pen, and ink-wash of the Wintertide before the pastels of Springtime once more coloured the land. They had ploughed the fields and scattered; soon, they would raise the song of harvest home, and all be safely gathered in.

The Wednesday had dawned crisp and bright, the skies a deeper blue than those of high summer, and the afternoon was tart as cider, and as crisp, excitement in its every air. All could feel that the flowers of the Springtide and the Summertide's long growing were crowned now with completion, and the days stretched before them as ripe as Bramleys or Worcester Pearmains, as taut and swollen with juicy possibility.

HRH was in fine fettle, moving easily amongst the players of both sides, and giving particular credit to Mr Ayliffe and to Mr Goodfellow along with the Zeals WI (providers of the cream tea, all proceeds to Headway Dorset, Reg. Charity Number 1027594; Patrons, HRH The Earl of Wessex and the Baroness Maddock) for the bang-up catering. The mood of the crowd was jovial in the extreme, and no one had been at the scrumpy yet.

Harry was in a hilarious mood himself. With the Wives and Girlfriends - and Boyfriends, as far as that went - along, he had been reduced almost to tears of laughter when Blaise, whose roving eye was matched only by his unshakeable fidelity to Justin, had incautiously asked, 'Merlin! Who is the blond muscle-god?', and had had to have it broken to him that the bloke in question was Harry's cousin Dudley, as reshaped by boxing and by Elspeth the Matron. He had also been unconscionably amused when Dudley, humbly, said, in answer to the query, whether he played cricket at all, 'I'm hardly Jim Troughton, you know.'

The Wanderers, as might be expected with magic in the mix, had won the toss, and had, as might also be expected, elected to bat first. Limited-overs matches being what they are, with a premium on runs (and wickets), this had meant that Jack (the Hon John) Seymour had naturally chosen his demon bowler to open the bowling. Harry and Draco took their appointed places in their respective creases, and the battle commenced.

With Gul bowling, the pace was demonically fast and furious. Draco, in accordance with the agreed strategy, played a largely defensive game, although he was aggressive with such opportunities as came his way, and his leg glance to fine leg on a very tricky ball was a superb example of Slytherin subtlety in action. He blocked, he pulled, he hooked a bouncer that was a thing of beauty, he treated a remarkably cunning inswinging Yorker with lazy contempt, he was vehemently applauded for an upper cut over leg gully, and he played a Marillier that brought the crowd to its feet and caused the KSCC wicketkeeper to swear in the most heartfelt manner he had heard in years, but most importantly, he restrained himself from hitting anything that might go for a boundary. For the Wanderers had spent the night before, under a full and dragon moon, warding and charming the boundary, and it was the Elder Wand that was destined to hit the dark-enchanted ball for six.

And that time was now upon them. The KSCC wicketkeeper, Mr Cyril Pinnell, had been so demoralized by Draco's Marillier as to have allowed an easy bye on a nasty leg cutter that Draco had wisely left strictly alone. Now Harry was the striker, and Gul bent his glare upon him. The demon bowler's eyes, as black as ever Snape's had been, were shark-like, inhuman, and glittering with an inhuman intelligence and malice. Once more, Gul delivered a Yorker, but not a sandshoe crusher like the inswinger he'd bowled to Draco. This was an outswinger, and Harry, his bat an extension of his will, the Elder Wand alive and singing within it, drove his shoulder down and slogged it towards cow corner. It carried, and carried, borne aloft by an older magic than itself, and went for six, and as it broke the wards upon the boundary, the very sunlight seemed for a moment to flicker. This was forgotten even as it occurred, as Nazim Gul the demon bowler promptly sat down, hard, upon the wicket, his legs giving out under him.

Harry hastened to him, bat still in hand as if forgotten, and Gul looked up at him, his eyes brown, limpid, human, and clear, and whispered, 'Thank you.'

He was swiftly helped from the pitch, and KSCC's right arm leg-spin bowler Johnnie Cucknell sent in in his stead, as Elspeth hurried to look him over. He did not, the crowd observed, seem obviously to limp - the initial assumption had been that It Was Something to Do with His Ankle - and Harry overheard some of them murmuring, 'Fair mazed, poor lad, I reckon as it's a touch of the sun', and, 'Something he et, it may be - begging your pardon, Mr Goodfellow', to which Harry had audibly said, 'So long as he's not eating souls, I don't much mind', although, fortunately, Mr Ayliffe of KSSC, overhearing, responded by saying sententiously that one could never trust a fishmonger, any butcher could tell you as much.

The remainder of the match was anti-climactic, although marked by quite workmanlike wicket-keeping by Ron, classical form on Justin's part, an exhibition of solid Lancashire competence by Nev, characteristically fearless and aggressive batting by little Dennis Creevey, and admirable bowling from Dean, Lee, and Theo Nott.

As the victorious Wanderers were being carried shoulder-high off the pitch by all their acquaintance, Kingsley motioned Harry over, before HRH could summons him.

'Well, Harry. That was well done. Now. I've just had two reports in, the first of some remarkable medical recoveries the length of the country. Excellent work.'

'Thanks, Shack.'

'The second, however, concerns the odd experience of some Muggle fell-walkers near the Winny Stone in the West Riding. Seems that the stone, which has never done so before, is rocking a bit, and they swear they heard odd noises. Is there anything you can say that might clarify that?'

'Well, er, Kingsley, it's in my report, I mean -'

Harry was saved, for the moment, by the approach of his Hon Captain, HRH the Earl of Wessex. But as he was gathered up by the royal suite, he could tell, from the cold and fish-like look in Kingsley's eye, that there would be paperwork awaiting him in the morning, before the episode of the Deon Bowler could be called resolved.

Harry sighed. He knew Kingsley's paperwork requirements of old.

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END

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