Under a Dragon Moon

UNDER A DRAGON MOON

by Wemyss

a Sequel to Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn

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The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes liked to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst one could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died...

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

-- Auden

Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes out not to be what they meant, other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.

-- Wm Morris

The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid 'dens of crime' that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.

-- CS Lewis

In government, perfect freedom of discussion in all its modes - speaking, writing, and printing - in law and in fact is the first requisite of good because the first condition of popular intelligence and mental progress. All else is secondary. A form of government is good chiefly in proportion to the security it affords for the possession of this.

Therefore mixed governments, or those which set up several concurrent powers in the State, which are occasionally in conflict and never exactly identical in opinions and interests, and each of which is interested in protecting the opinions and demonstrations of opinions which the others dislike, are generally preferable to simple forms of government, or those which establish one power (though it be that of the majority) supreme over all the rest, and thence able, and probably inclined, to put down all the writing and speaking which thwarts its purposes. It remains to be proved by facts (which in America are more promising than might have been expected) whether pure democracy is destined to be an exception of this rule.
-- JS Mill

. . . Tu lascerai ogne cosa diletta

più caramente; e questo è quello strale

che l'arco de lo essilio pria saetta.

Tu proverai sì come sa di sale

lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle

lo scendere e 'l salir per l'altrui scale....

. . . You shall leave everything you love most:

this is the arrow that the bow of exile

shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste

of others's bread, how salt it is, and know

how hard a path it is for one who goes

ascending and descending others's stairs....

-- Dante

Not that I ever indulge in despair about the Future; there always have been men who have gone about despairing of the Future, and when the Future arrives it says nice, superior things about their having acted according to their lights. It is dreadful to think that other people's grandchildren may one day rise up and call one amiable.

There are moments when one sympathises with Herod.

-- Saki

Two decades prior to Watkins the pioneer place-names scholar, W.H. Duignan, had noted that there was an ancient farm known as Black Lees about three miles south-west of Cannock. He states that 'Land covered with gorse and heath was locally called black land, as distinguished from cultivated land' [footnote omitted]. He goes on to describe 'Blake Street', which was 'the name of an ancient road forming a portion of the boundary between the parishes of Shenstone and Sutton Coldfield, and the [then] counties of Stafford and Warwick.' Duignan considers that 'blake' has the same meaning as 'black'. The country around Blake Street was heath until the mid-eighteenth century and therefore 'black land'. He notes that another ancient road, also called Blake Street, once a portion of the great London to Chester road, formerly went over Cannock Chase between Brownhills and Hednesford and formed a manorial boundary. In 1300 it was written 'Blake streete'; in 1595 'Black street'; it was surround by uncultivated land.

-- Penny Drayton, 'Black places', Mercian Mysteries No. 18, February 1994

We are the firemen, free from passion, who must put out the fire. Later there will come the explanations, but that is not our concern.

(Nous sommes calmes comme des pompiers dont le devoir est d'éteindre l'incendie. On s'expliquera ensuite, cela ne nous regarde pas.)

-- de Vigny, The Problem of Military Obligation (Servitudes et Grandeur Militaires)

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4 The Things That Truly Last / When Men and Times Have Passed

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When we sleep, when we dream, we are at once in both realms, and in neither. In all realms, and in none. We are in the marches, the borderlands, the debatable lands between what is and what is not - or is not yet: far from the fields we know.

These are the dreams and some of the days of Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy, as the crisis of the ages overshadows them, and the world's last night.

But which are whose, now? And which are dreams, and which, days? What is future, present, past? What is true vision, and what, nightmare?

To this question they return no answer. They do not answer it; they do not ask it. They hardly know to ask. They do but dream, and dreams, of course, need not hold coherence, sense, consistency.

They had failed, once before, failed themselves and their world, failed Albus, failed all. They had failed in their waking lives after coming so near triumph in dreams. Now the too-vast orb of the world's fate was poised, balanced, trembling, upon the merest point of agate, suspended, pendant, pending upon their choices. And they slept. A hundred miles and more from each other, they slept, and met in dreams, and in dreams was decided the future of the world.

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'This,' said Draco, 'is Monte Pontio.' He could be excused a little drama: the chalet - if a misplaced schloss could be thus named - was typically breath-taking, in that ostentatiously Wizarding fashion one has come to expect. 'Lucius was never allowed here by his father, and after my grandfather ... died ... Lucius was never able to breach the wards.' He could be excused the smug tone, as well, under the circumstances. 'Welcome to my - our - home.'

'And to my country,' said Blaise, with pardonable pride. In that moment, Blaise was, for once, stripped of all affectation. He gestured to the scene that unrolled before them, icy alp and now-frozen rill, snow and sky.

'Well?' He grinned at young Rhys. 'The land of my fathers.'

Tony snorted. 'The land of your fathers is Camberwell.'

Blaise ostentatiously ignored him, without even a reference to Golders Green. 'Well, then,' he said again to Master Rhys; 'well, then?'

Rhys paused for a moment. Justin was looking at him - looking at them both - with an anxious fondness.

'Well, Uncle Blaise.... It's a lovely bit of country -'

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'Attention all Apparating, especially in Heligoland and the Wash. The Neph Office issued the following gale warning to Apparating at 2206 today, Thursday. Heligoland, west or northwest gale 8 to storm 10, expected imminent. The Wash, west gale 8 or severe gale 9, expected soon. That completes the gale warning.'

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Harry had come to love that country that he shared with Draco, under the eaves of Grovely Wood, tucked in the lee of the Great Ridge, and nestled in the Valley of the River Wylye, extending across the river at Twatford Mulliner to ascend the flank of the downs at Starveall. It was there where their two ancestral countries merged in one, and ancient ties of blood from more lines than that of the House of Black held them fast.

And Draco, also, had come to love that country, in a way in which he could never have done before: its little churches and its coppiced woods, its vernacular architecture from thatched cottages to Chilmark or Bath stone houses with Clench - 'clunch' - flint patterned in quincunx on their faces, its sharp village minds and sharp village tongues scabbarded by slow speech and broad, indulgent charity ('house-proud, they are, in a gentry way, a bit darnt an' shabby as gentry are, and how they do do it I dunno, without sight nor scent of a servant, but, there, menfolk is queer, and queer menfolk, well...').

Awkwardly but eagerly had Draco come to love the country that was his, but had never been his, truly, until it became his and Harry's. Even outwith his country, he had been a driving force in helping to restore old ways, as at Pottersfield, whence he had become involved in the renewal of the Priddy Sheep Fair, and where he was a moving spirit in the Old Twelfth-Night cider-orchard wassailing; and in his own country, he had thrown himself into Grovely Rights Day and been instrumental in restarting the Rogationtide traditions of the hay-meadow auction at Great Wishford. He loved this country of his because it was their country, his and Harry's alike, now, and Harry loved him for that.

And it was a country to love, with its slower magics, its charms that Flitwick should have approved, all the placid, spread banquet of a country from Pyle Farm by Whitestaunton at Frome, where the Roman villa had been, to Pylewell Point and Lymington Spit where Hampshire looked across the Solent's waters to the Isle of Wight - the Isle of Wight where, across the island, the hamlet of Pyle stood over Whale Chine between Atherfield Point and Rocken End - and clear on to Pyle Farm beneath the ancient earthwork at Blendworth Common, nigh over to West Sussex and the South Downs, where the last lingering glories of the West Country have long faded away and there is nothing but mere England left. Yet there was more to it than charms-work and placidity, and they both of them loved it the more for that sharpness, that piquancy of the ancient and restless, the deeper and less comfortable magics: Silbury and Avebury, Woodhenge and Stonehenge, the illimitable plain of Salisbury and the infinite skies; the barrows and the older, deeper magics. It was country worth loving and living in, and apt for their sharing, and it could not but be loved in its grandeur as in its homely cosiness: when, in Autumn, the high chalk alone stood above the banked fogs and cloud, as the rim of a bowl stands above posset; or when, in Winter, under a slate-roofed sky, the clouds came on: clouds like galleons, deep laden, like ships of war and of merchantry, an armada of clouds, driven like that other Armada by the wind onto shoals (Deus sufflavit, said the medals that Good Queen Bess ordered cast to mark the victory: God blew, and they were scatter'd), driven before the wind to wreck themselves on steeple and Cathedral spire, tearing their bottoms out, spilling their holded cargo of snow....

Yes, it was a goodly country, and a fine country to share with his beloved. But Harry stood beneath the canopy of cider-trees at Pottersfield, and looked to the south-westwards.

Behind him the Mendips rose, and behind him the rivers ran eastwards and northwards. On his left hand, rivers rose to fall laughing to the Channel strand, through southern Somerset and mild Dorset. But before him were the Levels, the Levels and Moors where ancient men long forgotten had built the Sweet Track, and on his right hand were Wells and Glastonbury, and the Gorge of Cheddar behind and beyond. Before him the Mendips sank into the Levels, that sedged and reedy place of wonder where Justin, visiting, was most nearly at home here in this West of Harry's, far from Justin's beloved East Anglia: the Levels, and the rivers in them, Axe and Parrett and Brue, and the Polden Hills between Brue and Parrett. The Levels, where Axe the sacred river ran down to the Severn Sea. And beyond the Levels, beyond the Poldens and, after, the Vale of Taunton Deane, the Quantocks rose, and the Brendon Hills, and the land with them, to Dulverton and Dunkery and the headsprings of the River Dart: there were the moors that Golden Godric knew, Exmoor on the right hand of the westwards-looking Harry, and ancient, grim, haunted Dartmoor to the left hand, over and away in primordial Devon.

Dartymoor, Old Dartymoor, that land ancient of days. There the Hill of Bards lowered over the Wiseman's Wood, and there the bard Essara rebuked the Dumnoni for their paganry and confessed Christ. There, too, had hag and Witch - such as Old Moll of Chagford - long held sway: not least at Widecombe, which had given a well-known surname to hags, and there had been a redoubt long held through all the years of the Statute of Secrecy by Cunning Folk who refused to cut themselves off from their Muggle neighbours - men of the stamp of Parson Harris, near to Chudleigh, beyond the bounds of Dartmoor, to be sure, but of its quality. There Cranmere Pool kept its ancient secrets, and Pew Tor and Vixen Tor were places of eldest magic; and at Yes Tor had the old ones, in their darkness, before the Light came, worshipped Eostre.

Harry's mind leapt over the miles as with seven-league boots. He spanned the Levels with a bound and took in Exmoor, to which Godric's line had come from Dartmoor and Nearer Devon, and he turned to Devon, now: Chudleigh and Chudley, and the sweet vale of the River Otter, but beyond these, Hennock and Okehampton, Halwill and Hatherleigh, and on further into the West, into the past, the mists of time, to Dartmoor and the tors. Godric had come from hallowed land, although the tongues of men had long abraded that hallowed sanctity to hollowness: Hollow Tor rose between Ashburton and Widecombe, south of Hameldown Tor, east of Dartmoor's chine; and north-westwards of Yes Tor and Cawsand Beacon, hard by Halwill and Holsworthy, were Hollow Down and the hamlet of Quoditch. From Pylemoor by Stoodleigh, westwards of the Valley of the River Exe, southwards of Dulverton, the tamed portion of Devon was but a memory, and the moorlands rose frowning and grim upon either hand, Exmoor to the northwards and Dartmoor to the south-westwards, untamed and untameable, all the way to Pew Tor. And in the very midst of the innermost heart of Old Dartymoor stood Wistman's Wood, the Wiseman's Wood, that dwarf-forest of antiquity, stiff and shapen with magic and legend, kennel to the Wisht Hounds of the Wild Hunt, and above it the abode of their master, Old Crockern, the Spirit of Dartmoor, at Crockern's Tor. The Tor had been the moot-place of the Stannary Parliament, time out of mind, where the miners who served the Smith - that elder magician - met; but before the Smith had been, the Potter was, the Crocker - for either form has been applied to that eldest of magicians by English tongues - and Crockern Tor and the genius loci, the old god himself, Old Crockern, took their name from the hold there of a Crocker, a Potter, Figulus, Artifex, the first mage. Crockern Tor, home of no true god but of imagining by fearful Muggles, the fons et origo of that line whose name and quality is indifferently Englished as Crocker and as Potter: thence it was that the Potters came, and Godric the Golden and the Wrights descended of him. From Crockern Tor had they come, and settled in hallowed lands, Quoditch and Halwill and Holsworthy and Hollow Down, Hollow Tor west of Chudleigh of the Canons, and moved slowly on into England, through Godric's Exmoor and his Hallow, which men call Godric's Hollow now, and ever eastwards.

Harry looked out from the motherly lap of the Mendips, his mind's eye piercing the veil of distance. From Pye Hill and Pylle he looked out, towards Pylemoor and beyond, and saw: saw that he had spent time enough on the heights, with their bitter and their cutting winds. Crockern Tor and the moors, even where hallowed, were before him, but what they meant was long behind him (although they had come with him, and with his fathers before him: where every roof beam crossed, the Three Hares danced, and from each boss the Green Man looked down, the true foliate face: it, with the Hares, the ancient symbol of the moors, forever distinct from the foliate faces, sucker-faced or spewing, that had inspired Tom Riddle to design his Dark Mark); fons et origo might moor and tor be, but he had come to his settled place, and his meet end earned by merit, and it was well, and it was well, and all manner of things were well. Like most of the Victors, he had seen enough and to spare of the wild, and in the days of peace he sought the Georgian, the Augustan, comfort he had won for himself. He 'cultivated his garden' in peace, in the quiet land, the land of apple and sloe and pear, of cider and perry, the land of dry-stone wall and wall-whitlow-grass, of coppices and Cheddar cheese. The farms were trim, the woods well-tended; halt and small station were snug and homely, and the steam trains hooted sharply like owlets as they began their panting ascent up the grades, wreathed in steam, birthing cloud, hissing in Parseltongue, their iron wheels upon the rails making rolling thunder in the cuttings. (Not for nothing had Dr Beeching, wielding neither axe nor pen, but, rather, a wand, restored rails other than the Hogwarts Express to Wizards, removing the Wizarding lines from Muggle ken.) It was a fat and a trim and a goodly land, a peaceable kingdom, a land of milk and honey; it was the country of Summertide, the County of Somerset, secure and at peace. Winter was exhilarating, in its time, but he was here at home, in the Summer Country, on the gentle Mendip slopes above the Somerset Levels, home amidst aged orchards, home 'builded gallantly' of Ham stone brought up from the Pethertons and from Stoke sub Hamdon: home, and deservedly - and who better? - deservedly at home in the Isle of Avalon.

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'... all this tonight, on "The Wizengamot Hour."'

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'You have brought a giant to my country?' Signor Unterperger was clearly striving to control himself.

'A half-giant actually, besides, he's sworn to the Privy Council and has ambassadorial rank as our delegate to the ICW Committee on the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures.'

'He is a magizoologist? For what possible purpose is he here in my jurisdiction?'

'Forensic magizoology. I remind you, my dear sir, that this investigation does involve two of our subjects who possess diplomatic immunity, Mr Zabini and Mr Finch-Fletchley. Surely you are willing to allow us some cooperative input in it....'

'I have little choice, apparently. I cannot help but notice that everyone involved - one might almost say, everyone who comes abroad from your country - seems conveniently to be possessed of diplomatic immunity or holds a position that would render any dispute an international incident.'

'Yes, funny thing, chance. The ways of coincidence are strange beyond mortal ken, are they not. Mind you, after what my country has been through in the past few decades, it's just as well, isn't it.'

Signor Unterperger simply glared at them, rather evidently biting his tongue. Oh, the perfidy of the English! The French were perfectly correct in that, at least....

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Dossier in the files of Signor Unterperger in connexion with the investigation in the matter of Signora Zabini:

Nome: NOTT Theo (q: Que? Nome reale?)

Nazionalità: INGLESE

Sesso: MASCHIO

Condizione di ascendenza ('Condizione di anima'): Redatto (questa parte di questo questionario è obsoleta) PURO

Sposo: PARKISON Pansie

Luogo di residenza: Comunità DEVONN

Crimini anteriori: NESSUN CONOSCIUTI

Motivo: (RITENUTO SOSPETTO) SIMPATIZZANTE PRESUNTO DI MANGIATORI DELLA MORTE; SOSTENITORE POLITICO DEL PARTITO DI PUREZZA DI ANIMA (DI ASCENDENZA); intelligente ed autonomo, ha rifiutato di seguire i desideri del suo padre, ma le sue scelte possono essere differenti ora che il suo padre è guasto ed il conflitto delle personalità fra loro finito

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'... tonight, on "Scrying Wales"; only on WWN Radio Wales.'

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Llanfrynach slept in the sun, beside Afon Wysg in the fat vale of Usk, that suntrap formed by the mountains to either side; Llanfrynach slept, dozing in the warmth, with the very church tower of St Brynach's seeming huddled in upon itself for a long drowse. The River sprawled in the vale, somnolent and at ease, and the Monmouthshire and Brecknock Canal made its way past the town at the grave and solemn pace that canals adopt; even the high-born tributary of Usk, the Nant Menascin, had cast off its youthful fleetness as it flowed through the village to the River, keeping to a more calm gait like a schoolboy reined in from his usual pelting by the presence of a master. Above the village and the vale, Bryn and Allt Ddu of the Brecon Beacons gazed down; and beyond the meanders of the River Usk, the western scarp of the Black Mountains and the foothills of the Mynydd Epynt, Mynydd Troed and Mynydd Llan-gors, returned their steady gaze, the sudden ridge of Allt yr Esgair erupting between the river and the hidden secret of Llangorse Lake, which it hid, the secret-keeper of the Lake. The ancient pattern of hill and ridge and shallow valley tilting down to the vale repeated itself on every hand, like the incised patterns in a Norman church, like canon and fugue, like life itself. The high slopes were clad in their baize greens of turf and their brass-burnished heather and gorse, that was half-autumnal even in Springtide, punctuated with the changeless deep, dull green of resinous conifer.

Further up the River Usk, where Honddu and Tarell join their waters to Afon Wysg, Rome had been, where the fort of Brecon Gaer had stood sentinel to the Roman road that forded Usk on its legionary march from Fforest Fawr to mid-Wales and beyond, even unto Kenchester; and there stood Aberhonddu, the town of Brecon, ancient caput of the Vale, sending its influence down upon the waters to sleeping Llanfrynach, as it has done since the time of the legions, when near Llanfrynach was the grand villa at Maesderwen, west of Llanfrynach between Nant Menascin and the running Afon Cynrig.

Here it was in Llanfrynach that Rhys Jones-Morgan, Muggle-born Ravenclaw, foster-son to Draco and Harry, had spent the first eight years of his life. They had been troubled years, overshadowed by his outbursts of accidental magic, and by the resulting well-meant but damaging care of Muggle specialists, the length of his family's purse paradoxically exposing him to greater harm than would have befallen a poorer child, as his parents could afford correspondingly more intensive, invasive, and incessant 'care' - all of it, naturally, if unintentionally, harmful. But they had also been years of kinder moments, in the pacific vale, his father commuting only a few days a week to look after his interests in Brecon and in Hay-on-Wye, where he owned an antiquarian press and bookseller's and, in Brecon, had his hand in numerous schemes for relieving tourists and trippers of their money, quaintly, whilst Mrs Jones-Morgan had been an anything but silent partner in a working farm, rather preciously 'traditional' ('artisanal cheeses, darling, and hand-spun woollens, you know'), that doubled as a bed-and-breakfast for the anoraked walkers of the Park: the both of them, with Master Rhys, living quite comfortably off the Englishman's pound and the enthusiasm of conscientiously Wordsworthian hikers. It had been here, also, that Master Rhys had at first encouraged his parents, right-thinking advocates of cultural diversity and the return to the land, by learning Welsh as well as English and interesting himself in rural pursuits with the other lads of the district 'round the village - and then horrified them by his indiscriminate usage of Welsh and Wenglish, both of the region and taken up with childhood's mimicry from outsiders, in place of their careful professional English, delighting as children do delight in wrong-footing their elders and preceptors.

Llanfrynach slumbered in the late-Summer sun. The Jones-Morgans, Owain and Margot, drowsed with it, sun-drunk and sleepy.

Then the late-Summer skies were cleaved by a skein of geese, early harbingers of the coming Autumn: the red-eared white hounds of the Celtic soul harrying the spirits of the dead, racing north-eastwards from Pen-y-Fan. Their cries rang faintly like the clamour of a pack from fields away, far from the fields we know, and the cloven air closed behind them as they vanished beyond Allt yr Esgair and the ancient hill-fort upon it, whose ramparts once knew the tread of men who believed in the omen of the geese, before St Illtud and all the Welsh saints came to lighten their darkness with truth.

The geese had banked, turning there over the floodplain of Usk, slipping around the guardian flank of Allt yr Esgair, passing over St Illtud's hermitage in the long barrow of Tŷ Elltud: bound with passionate longing for the waters and reeds of Llangorse Lake, Lake Syfaddan, that place of ancient mystery. The ice had carved it, long ago, and men with ties to green Ireland had built there the only crannog, the only artificial island, in all of Wales: Ynys Bwlc. There, say Muggle historians and archæologists, the power of Brycheiniog had its seat, and there were the verses of the Canu Llywarch Hen set down. But the people of the villages preserve the tale, long antedating the Muggle rediscovery of the crannog's remains, that a great city was there upon a time, and was cast down beneath the waters, for its wicked princess had agreed to wed a poor suitor only if he brought her wealth, although wealth she had already and in abundance; and for her sake he murdered a rich merchant for his money, but did not live to possess her long, for the ghost of that merchant raised a terrific storm of vengeance and cast the kingdom into ruin, drowning its shattered city and all its royal pretensions.

As Llanfrynach slept in the sun of late Summer, Master Rhys gazed at the illimitable Welsh sky, too young and full of life to sleep with the drowsing afternoon village. Another skein of fowl passed overhead, crying out the tidings, promising an end to Summer's stasis, promising Autumn.

Autumn in Wales, o Autumn in Wales, thought Rhys, quivering with excited hope. Wild days, wild winds, the wild weather of Wild Wales! The autumnal rubescence of still ruddier slopes, the reds of sunset after a day of storms, red kites stooping upon red grouse from a clean-washed sky, the redness of the ling answering the red sandstone of farm and barn, or perhaps dusted by the earliest snows like lime-wash on those sandstone structures. O Autumn, he thought, Autumn in Wales! Sere leaves and blazing, tumbling through skies, sticking wetly to ancient stone on days of rain only to be whirled away again by driving wind, and the wet laving the split-stone roofs to brilliance against the darkling sky!

And best of all, perhaps, Autumn at Plas Rhaeadr, hidden away from Muggle eyes in the Brecon Beacons, beside and behind its namesake waterfalls, thrumming like a harp-string to the elements, ancient and earthy, comfortable yet capable of grandeur, a mage's manor, Welsh in every fibre. Plas Rhaeadr, like Giraldus Cambrensis's Llan-ddew 'a place of dignity, but no great omen of future pomp or riches; and possessing a small residence ... well adapted to literary pursuits, and to the contemplation of eternity.' Plas Rhaeadr and his parents, Owain and Margot, and his foster-fathers Harry and Draco, and the nexus of connexions that Harry as much as he joyed in discovering, through Lily Evans's blood, a web of kinship and affection that reached from beyond Brecon Aberhonddu all the way down to sweet, gentle Cowbridge, Y Bont-faen, in the Vale of Glamorgan, hard by the lands that Helga once knew: Joneses and Morgans and Evanses, yes, but, such being the old Welsh way, others joined in blood and not in name, Williamses and Davieses - cousin Roger, for one - and Lloyds and Hugheses, Vaughans and Watkynses, Dawdys - not the Norfolk lot nor the Irish, but Hywel Dawdy's line - and Dees, Howells and Powells, Pryces and Proberts. Llewellyns and Griffiths, Harrieses from Cwrt-y-cadno, physicians and Cunning Men from time out of mind.

There would be cawl and tatws rhost, salmon brought in and sewin fresh caught, all in green-butter or in herb sauce, lamb and leeks, bara brith and teisin, and much merriment, and then, o! and then, Autumn in Wales, blest Autumn in Wales, then would the company gather and the triple harp and the fiddle and the pibgorn come out, and far into the night the noson lawen would go on, and the full-throated singing, 'David of the White Rock' - Dafydd Y Gareg Wen - and 'The Lady of Sker' - Y Ferch O'r Scer; 'Taliesin's Prophecy', 'Men of Harlech', and at the last, 'Suo Gan' for lullaby, singing, ever singing, deep in the Brecon night, in the heart of Wales, in the heart of the Land of Song.

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Dossier (from a cooperating foreign authority) in the files of Signor Unterperger in connexion with the investigation in the matter of Signora Zabini:

Name: Justin Finch-Fletchley

Nationalität: British

Geschlecht: Männlich

Blutstatus: Abgefaßter Getilgt nichtmagische Abstammung; Adliger oder Niederadliger

Gatte/in: Blaise Zabini (männlich)

Wohnsitz: Grafschaft Cambridgeschire

Vorbestrafungen: unbescholten

Beweggrund: Opfer ist seine Schwiegermutter

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'... Inshore Waters Forecast to 12 miles offshore from 1700 UTC to 1700 UTC.'

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Master Rhys was far more a Welsh Wizard than ever had been David Lloyd-George, and as he watched the geese tear the firmament in twain, could say with far more truth than that politician, and not in answer to a charge of corrupt treachery, 'God knows how dear to me is my Wales', and he did say that, in his fiercely Welsh heart, even as he prayed, Autumn in Wales, o Autumn in Wales, God send us soon our blest Autumn in Wales.

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'"...a nationwide general knowledge contest for the title 'Wit of Wizard-dom'; your chairman is Professor Filius Flitwick. Tonight, our contestants are...."'

____________________________________

The sky was blue above them, blue with that improbability of blueness that seems almost unnatural, artificial, too good to be true: a blueness that belongs rather to Constable's palette than to the light of common day. The narrowboat glided upon the waters, calling up all the bell-mouthed associations that that mage of rhetoricians, old Will the glover's boy, had bestowed upon narrowboats and barges, Nilotic, Cleopatran; calling up, also, the wealth of associations long accreted to lighters, barges, and narrowcraft in England: Mr Toad heading for home after a misunderstanding involving a motorcar, fat London aldermen full of ale and turtle soup, Bluff King Hal at Hampton Court, the pomp of merchantry in the days when the wool towns thrived, three men in a boat - to say nothing of the dog Montmorency - giving way to the traffic of an Empire, guilds and livery companies on the feast days of their patron saints, the mediæval wool clip and the sherris-sack from Bristol; John Taylor, Gloucester-born, plying the Thames in Shakespeare's own time, the Water Poet, and Thomas Doggett's Coat and Badge Race, still maintained by the Worshipful Company of Watermen and Lightermen; Severn trows and West Country barges....

Town and bridge, field and meadow and wood, church and churchyard under the yew, farm and pasture, sheep safely grazing and sweet-breathed, doe-eyed milch-cows beneath the oak, bowls on the green and cricket on the pitch, the click of the bowl upon the jack for a toucher and the snick of the bails when a batsman was clean-bowled, treble-arched town bridge and packhorse bridge, swan and heron, angler and rambler, and always the pollarded willows on the bank. The towns turned their best faces to the water, warmly-coloured Chilmark stone crisp in the lambency of morning's light, Georgian and placid, mediævally assertive with all the pomp of burgess's chain and guild-master's rich fur tippet, unshakeably secure in imperial Victorian brick or ashlar.

The towpath in the country reaches was the colour of asters or champagne, and walkers and the occasional tow-horse kicked up dust as fine as meal.

The water was cool, and suggested a greater coolth still: smooth and glassy as a bowl of dripping awaiting the Sunday joint, it seemed almost gelid, as if it were as chilled and bracing as the long drinks of summer, the Pimm's Cup and pink gin, the Buck's fizz and the gin and tonic, that they sipped as all the world slid slowly past the fixed point of the narrowboat upon the still waters.

________________________________

'You must remember, Harry, that at the time - before your post-War reforms - the Moot was at once a parliament, and a court of judicature as well, and of appeal. I was the Chief Warlock. I could not intervene in the Moot lest the case come before me. I could not intervene after because the case never came before me.'

Harry glared at Albus's portrait. 'You'd the right to die for your principles. And you did do. But this was Sirius! You had no right to allow others to die for your damned principles and points of law! If you weren't already dead, damn you, I'd kill you myself! What sort of man sacrifices, not himself only, but others, for a legal principle?'

'One who is our sort, Harry.'

'You -'

'My dear Harry, you were always willing to sacrifice yourself for a few basic principles. Can you truthfully tell me that you did not sacrifice others to your principles?'

'I. You ... you manipulative, smug, self-satisfied, pi-jawing old bastard.'

'Perfectly true. I do not ask that you like what you now recognise. I do encourage you to reflect upon the rather uncomfortable fact that it is adherence to principle that distinguishes a young man such as yourself from, say, the young Tom Riddle - and all that Tom became.'

________________________________

'... In a moment, we take a farm-hob Floo-trip to catch up on the week's events in Pymford: "The Bowyers Omnibus," next on the WWN Home Service:

'"Arr, 'er have gone off 'er hay. Nogtails, I'll be bound: half they beasts is brack, ain't milkin' but next akin t' nuthin', and...."'

____________________________________

'I'm impressed,' a voice called from outwith the mill. The speaker entered, black against the spill of light. As he came closer, his figure resolved into that of the Brigadier. 'Harry. Afternoon. Good to see a young chap who's a man of his hands. The both of you, I gather. In addition to your numerous other talents that no one ever speaks of, you make a competent miller, I see, not a mere owner.'

'Yes, well,' said Harry, with a grin, 'I have leat skills.'

Draco snorted, from the stone-floor, above, and descended to stand by Harry next the meal bin, there on the meal-floor of the mill.

'All well?'

Draco nodded. 'The stone-floor and the bin-floor are all square. Your own inspection went well, I take it?'

'Sluice is fine, penstock's fine, pentrough's fine, waterwheel's fine, main shaft and pit wheel right as rain. We shall, though, be wanting to replace a few cogs on the spur wheel by the end of the month, I suspect.'

'Well, at least it's only cogs, that's easy enough. It's the iron that gets dicey, when it's the wallower, say. Have we cogs in hand?'

'We do. Seasoned apple-wood from Pottersfield, or seasoned hornbeam from Starveall. I'll be as glad to be shed of the beech-wood cogs we inherited, frankly, they're just not quite up to the mark.'

Draco nodded, again. 'Apple and hornbeam are always best. There's sense in the traditions, you know. As to which to choose between 'em, it makes no odds, I think.'

'Yes,' said Harry. 'When in doubt, consult the accumulated wisdom of centuries. Whether milling, or considering what is laughingly called the British constitution.'

'Ah,' said the Brigadier. 'I did wonder why it was you wanted to have speech of me, away from m' aunt.'

'Ye-esss,' said Harry, evidently reluctant. 'I'm afraid, rather, that it is a matter of aid to the civil power.'

'Right,' said the Brigadier, crisply. 'Let's have it, then.'

'You've met Kingsley Shacklebolt?' Draco thought it best to make sure.

'Yes, as a matter of fact. Young Creevey performed introductions, once - after his lady wife elbowed him in the ribs to recall his mind to the duty. He liaises, I gather, does your Mr Shacklebolt.'

'Yes, on occasion. Has done for some time,' said Harry. Then he smiled. 'I remember his first bit liaising, actually, when John Major was PM and Draco and I were still at school. Kingsley's no innocent, but he's relentlessly apolitical -'

'Quite right,' said the Brigadier, with marked approval.

'Well, yes, but it did lead him to drop the occasional brick. Our then Minister wanted the PM urgently, and Kingsley made the memorable mistake of explaining that the PM had - unfortunate choice of words, really - "stepped out for a quick curry". The powers were not best pleased.'

The Brigadier chortled. 'Oh, Lor'. I do see the problem. But tell me your current problem, please.'

'We want to lose a couple of dentists for a few months.'

'What the devil am I to do with two dentists? Put them up at Shrivenham?'

'Precisely.' Harry's tone was diffident, understanding of the imposition, but immovable for all that. 'Kingsley can give you fuller particulars, but. The fact is, they're quite nice people, really, and their daughter - Ron's wife, in fact, you've met Hermione - has a job of work in hand that makes it best that they not be where they could be, ah -'

'Snatched and used as hostages?'

'Well, yes, actually.'

'Service family?'

'Yes and no,' said Draco, judiciously. 'In their private lives, they're appalling Wets, muesli-eaters, sandal-wearers, LibDems, no doubt. And astonishingly innocent with it, they truly believe that the world is a peaceful place in which evil is sporadic and has root causes that could be addressed and - appeased. Everyone's good-hearted at bottom, and if only society were a bit better planned, everyone would be decent and kind and we'd live in a sort of Guardian of Eden.'

The Brigadier harrumphed, and the three exchanged a commiserating look, reflecting on such pitiably invincible innocence and what the real world would do to it, given the chance.

'On the other hand,' said Harry, 'this would not, actually, be their first contact with our world - I mean, the one we all know.'

________________________________

Name: DOLOHOV Antonin Bedrich

Nationality: Stateless

Sex: M

Blood status: Redacted

Spouse: None known [marginal note: who'd have the sod? Bella?]

Place of residence: Vagrant: escaped convict

Prior crimes: See annexe

Motive: Personal gain, personal-political hatreds, terror....

---------------------------------

Nome: ZABINI Blaise (!)

Nazionalità: INGLESE (?!)

Sesso: MASCHIO

Condizione di ascendenza ('Condizione di anima'): Redatto (questa parte di questo questionario è obsoleta) PURO

Sposo: FINCH-FLECHLY Giustino

Luogo di residenza: Comunità CAMBRIGESHIR

Crimini anteriori: NESSUN CONOSCIUTI

Motivo: per profittare di ereditando la proprietà della sua madre?

________________________________

'And now it's time to join popular "I'm Sorry, I'm Not on the Floo" mega-stars Fred and George Weasley, their friends, and their omnipresent pints of scrumpy, for a long, damp slog through West Country humour: we're off to the Devon home of two much-loved Wessex favourites, Dan'l and Albert....'

'"Arr, Dan'l."

'"Arr, Aaaal-bert. Get thik pint down, 's you-err shout nee-axt...."'

____________________________________

It had been the summer after Hermione's sixth year at school. Hermione's principles, and her rather exaggerated respect for authority, had not - for various reasons, not least her own interest - moved her to shatter her parents's blissful ignorance of what threatened her world, and theirs. But now, of course, there was little choice. They had been alarmed enough by the Ministry's cack-handed bumf, telling, or purportedly telling, Muggle-born students's households how to protect themselves, and what a load of duff gen that had been. As one might have expected, they had been torn between their convictions that people were in the main decent and that even those whom a government labelled 'terrorists' might not be so black as they were painted, and their fiercely protective parental instincts that so often tempted them to try to keep Hermione safely wrapped in cotton-wool (a tactic she rebounded upon them when it came to not mentioning details of the Voldemort situation, it may be added). In the end, their fears had, initially, been assuaged. But this was no longer wise, nor even practicable.

Fortunately, the Order - or, rather, Tonks, Kingsley, and, above all, Alastor Moody - had undertaken to resolve Hermione's dilemma for her. The first approach had been made before she could quite screw her courage to the sticking point and tell Mr and Mrs Granger the awful truth of the war now breaking out in the Wizarding world. They had first been approached at their shared surgery, by a rather older gentleman - a Mr Ted Tonks ('"Tinker", you know, been called that since I was at m' prepper, hardly know to answer to anything else') - who, he explained, had recently changed dental health insurance packages, and been referred to Mr Granger accordingly. (Mr Granger kept the family very comfortably afloat with his rather remunerative practice, allowing Mrs Granger to burnish their socially-conscious principles by performing NHS dentistry for the impoverished and exempted.) After that, a succession of middle-aged and elderly gentlemen of a certain stamp had turned up in the oddest places, crossing paths with the Grangers, all of them sharing a few salient characteristics: they spoke quietly of subjects that assured the Grangers that they were part of Hermione's world (and it was they who, citing the Statute of Secrecy as having prohibited Hermione from being forthright with her parents until then, pre-empted a blazing row between parents and daughter over Hermione's having been rather less than forthcoming with them); they were rather evidently in mufti; and they displayed that combination of self-effacement amongst civilians with a hidden but occasionally discernible air of sharp command, that is the identifying characteristic of the British officer at large amongst the general public.

What they told the Grangers, chilled them, not unnaturally, to the maxillæ. Worse still was the realisation that Hermione, the eldest of the Gryffindor Trio, was now come of age under Wizarding law, and could, if she wished, take her place in the very line of battle without their having any say in the matter. They were not, to their credit, at all motivated by any fear or cowardice, but they were assisted to grasp quickly the danger they were in, and the greater danger they might pose to Hermione and the world as a whole were they to be seized by Voldemort, whether as martyrs or as hostages. It was for this reason alone that they seized, with whatever reservations and dubieties, the solution the Order and their discreet contacts in Muggle officialdom presented them with.

'After all, damn it all,' Tinker Tonks had said, 'not even his self-styled lordship, Voldewhassit, is likely to take on the lot we'd be hiding you amongst. What? Of course we can manage this, do it all the time, the devil d'you think was the reason for movin' all the Muggles out of Imber durin' Grindelwald's time?'

Of course, the cover, the legend, that went with it could not be kept from all their Muggle acquaintance. Mrs Granger did her best to face it out, indeed she became lightly passionate in defence of the position. 'But, darling,' she explained to one of her friends at a party, 'it's precisely the same as NHS dentistry. Just because these unfortunate members of the underclass have taken the Queen's shilling doesn't mean they oughtn't to have dental care. And with those awful Tories, surely, on the way out soon, well, really, it's quite a respectable means of social service.' But the Grangers's friends were not persuaded, and they soon ceased to go to those parties.

Soon enough, the Grangers found themselves far removed, both spiritually and bodily, from their well-loved house in Tufnell Park and their old familiar surgery, and staggering bewildered through the Vicars-and-Tarts course at RMA Sandhurst. Fortunately for them, Harry - and Hermione and Ron, and some rather unlikely allies alongside the old Order - put paid to Tom Riddle before they could be caught up too permanently in this strange new life, but the fact remained that they emerged from the short course for professionally-qualified officers and their brief first postings as very different people to the Grangers who had first found themselves blundering about the Wish Stream in Dettingen Company for their TAPQO course. Yet they remained themselves, even now, resolutely high-minded and conscientiously liberal, and Harry and Draco felt no small remorse in shoving them off on the Brigadier.

---------------------------------

Nome: POTTER Harry (Sono tutti dell'inglese pazzo? È 'Enrico' chiamato? O 'Harold'?)

Nazionalità: INGLESE

Sesso: MASCHIO

Condizione di ascendenza ('Condizione di anima'): Redatto (questa parte di questo questionario è obsoleta) METà E MEZZO

Sposo: MALFOY Draco

Luogo di residenza: Comunità WILSHIR, Comunità SUMERSET, e molte altre proprietà e residenze in Inghilterra, nel Galles ed in Scozia

Crimini anteriori: NESSUN

Motivo: Per generare una situazione politica nel suo favore?

________________________________

'Hmph,' said the Brigadier. 'No damned idea what they can contribute at Shrivenham, but we'll set them to some work.'

'I'm terribly sorry to do this to you -'

'No, you're not, or if you are you damned well oughtn't to be. We're all the centurions of the Gospel, after all, and men under authority. Orders are orders, if lawful, not set topics for a debating society. I'll work it out with Shacklebolt, and you'll be kept advised.'

A week later, the Defence Academy at Shrivenham and JSCSC welcomed the newly posted Maj Edmund John Robert Granger QHDS DDS MSc BDS FDSRCS RADC (TA) and Maj Helen Joan Charlotte Granger QHDS MSc MClinDent BChD FInstD RADC (TA). This was welcomed with quiet rejoicing by Mrs Watson, the Grangers's char, who had borne up nobly and in silence for years under Mrs Granger's irritating insistence on pretending that they were friends and social equals one of whom just happened to work for the other, and Mrs Granger's refusal to leave off wishing to be addressed as 'Helen' and calling Mrs Watson by her Christian name of 'Edna'.

________________________________

'.... "Wireless Erin News": It's ten o'clock, and this is WWN Wireless Erin News, from both sides the Muggle border, read by Padraig Lynch. At midnight this last night, a banshee was reportedly heard in Clonbur....'

____________________________________

Nome: CREEVYE Ginevra (Weasely) (Finalmente! 'Ginevra': un nome ragionevole e proprio!)

Nazionalità: INGLESE

Sesso: FEMMINA

Condizione di ascendenza ('Condizione di anima'): Redatto (questa parte di questo questionario è obsoleta) PURO

Sposo: CREEVYE Colin

Luogo di residenza: Comunità DEVONN

Crimini anteriori: NESSUN

Motivo: Una certa cospirazione diabolica sull'ordine di le autorità britanniche?

---------------------------------

'Consider this, also, Harry, my dear boy. We cannot know, of course, what might have happened had I gone outside the law to seek what was, we both agree, justice for Sirius. But it may well be that the day would then have come, upon which, looking back, we had all three of us wished I had never done.'

Harry frowned, but, reluctantly, allowed himself to consider what Albus's portrait was saying. His mind conjured the images. Sirius, freed. Sirius, his godfather, taking him from the Dursleys to raise, to love, to be a father to him. But also a Ministry in shambles, all but open internecine war between the Ministry factions and a faction largely coterminous with the membership of the Order. A Wizarding world distracted, squabbling, even more disunited than had been the case. The Weasleys placed in an impossible position, Arthur made redundant by the Ministry, Ron embittered by still more grinding poverty, the Order itself beginning to split. And then - Voldemort's return, to a distracted and more than ever divided Wizarding world and a fractured Order trying and failing to oppose him as the world sank in flame and a sickly flare of green light, going down before a Voldemort who had found them easier prey than Harry had ever feared at the worst of moments....

'I hate you the most when you're right, you know.'

Albus smiled from the canvas, eyes twinkling infuriatingly. He knew, and Harry knew, that the lad - young man, now - truly meant, 'I love you, I miss you, you're family to me.' And he was. That was enough to be going on with.

________________________________

Name: Zacharias Smith

Nationalität: British

Geschlecht: männlich

Blutstatus: Abgefaßter getilgt magisch; 'Reinblut'

Gatte/in: Anfragen werden betrieben [later interlineation: Alicia

Spinnet Smith]

Wohnsitz: Grafschaft unbekannt. (Anfragen werden betrieben);

Großbritannien

Vorbestrafungen: unbescholten

Beweggrund: unklar; gerüchtweise soll er fragwürdige Ansichten vertreten, habe sich aber aus persönlichen Gründen den jüngsten

Aufstand nicht angeschlossen.

---------------------------------

'"... from the public loos at Bath - I'm sorry, I'll read that again, from the public baths at Lewes."

"Aaaa-oh, stop faffin' abaht!"

'"Meanwhile, for those of you who are more easily amused, here's thirty minutes of duff attempts at humour, as Oliver Wood takes you ... 'Through the Wood'. On tonight's episode, we continue our saga of the Muggle heiress, the Dark Wizard, and the elf-made wine. For those of you who have forgotten last week's instalment ... congratulations."'

____________________________________

The most quaint, the most chocolate-box, villages in these isles - not in England only, but in the Principality as well, and in the Duchy of Cornwall, and in Scotland, and throughout all of Ireland, North and South alike - differ in detail, and a closer examination still would suggest that they differ in certain fundamental ways. Certainly the self-consciously twee are distinguishable, in the main, from those that simply are what their history, and their innate corporate character, their civic spirit and ancestral memory, has made them: iconic, preserved as in amber, set apart and unforgettable.

And yet a deeper look still - one that Muggles cannot essay - would reveal in the latter class of market town and village and hamlet one thing, at least, in common: the presence of Wizards. From the fatal year in which the secrecy regime was established, until the Restoration after Tom Riddle's final defeat and the rebuilding that came in its train, these might have been Wizards or Witches known to the Ministry and owing it allegiance, owning its sway, or, again, in those times of separation, they might have been the non-jurors, the rebels, the Cunning Men and Women who refused to cut themselves off from their Muggle neighbours and fellows. Now, of course, in these more spacious times, that distinction no longer applies, and a wise discretion has replaced the draconian secrecy regime, yet the fundamental fact remains: the presence of magical folk in a community has strange effects.

And only Hogsmeade, after all, in all of the Three Kingdoms, is a village that is solely Wizarding.

To say that certain towns, villages, and hamlets enjoy a certain, imperceptible (to Muggles) advantage from the nearby presence or the actual residence of Wizarding folk, is not to say that the Witches or Wizards in question wittingly employ magic in pursuit of granting such advantage to their neighbours. It is simply a function of magic that it causes ripples in the fabric of the created order of which it is a subtle and fugitive part.

There are many villages, after all, that are privileged to have some fine old buildings, a church that remains largely Perpendicular in both senses, a plashy ford through which the water runs chuckling in the shadow of a packhorse bridge, a green fit for fetes and a High Street of architectural worth. There are rather fewer that inexplicably and effortlessly find themselves, without conscious volition, without charitable appeals and sheer dedication to the task, free of material crime and yobbishness, untainted by Asbo and hooded chav, unspoilt by insensitive development, undisturbed by road traffic and never vexed by road repairs - as the residents of Ringwood, staring at the complete Horlicks that road repairs have made of the A338, would glumly attest. The number of such places that, in the Age of Blair, are blessedly free of NHS closures, political blundering and corruption, and sheer bloody incompetence, that rejoice in a vibrant market, a talented choir, a well-regarded band, a lively series of community groups, a well-attended parish church, and a winning village XI, is vanishingly small.

Yet these exist, and when they are found, these hidden jewels, the finder may be sure that there is a Wizard about, and responsible.

So it was, for example, at several sites in Wilts and in Somerset that were graced, all unknowing, with the proximity and frequent residence of Harry and Draco; so it was in the Vale of the River Otter, held fast in the comforting if unseen arms of generations of magic, furnished by Weasleys, Notts, Turpins, Fawcetts, Diggorys, and Lovegoods.

And thus it was at Sutton Littlecombe and throughout the district, in Sutton Mallet, Sutton de la Mere, Sutton Malvey, Sutton Grimsditch, Starveall, Stony Down, Stoney Chalke, and Twatford Mulliner.

For example, at Sutton Littlecombe, Draco had felt uneasy that the village was without a smith, as even mixed Muggle-Wizarding villages want to have that next-eldest of magicians; and in due course, ostensibly in response to market forces, but in fact drawn by Draco's sheer subconscious magic and longing, a smith had chosen to set up his smithy in the village, turning his teaching hand to the finer arts of architectural adornment and repoussee as much as to ploughshare and horseshoe.

Something similar happened in various Wizarding interactions with Muggles: Hogsmeade might bide yet the only solely Wizarding town in the Three Kingdoms, but that meant only that there were any number of towns, villages, and hamlets in which Wizards lived discreetly amidst their Muggle cousins, and that meant that certain unthinking magics came into play. Just as Muggles tended simply not to see magic or its artifacts - as witness their inability to notice the Leaky Cauldron no matter how often they passed it by - so too did they tend to mishear or to misunderstand, wilfully, with never a conscious Muffliato, Wizarding names: as, for instance, they would call Ron's surname, always, Wesley, or Wellesley, or Wheatley, and never Weasley.

Thus it was that, in the years of the Restoration, after the end of the old secrecy regime, Wizards came back to or emerged from their ancient holds in mixed villages and towns and small, half-hidden hamlets.

Once again, there were magical folk to be found, at least for part of the year, in Potterne Mallet, at Pottersfield: and, thus, extending their subtle and unconscious influence over Whitelake Magicorum, Sticklemoor, Pye Street, Bagbone Mallet, Pottersfield, Crockmoor, Pyecreech, Bollocks Green, Upham Overy, Wraxbrook, Wormsleight Abbas, Dulder Wood, Dincote, Pott Tor, Newditch, Shepton Potter, Potterton St Aldhelm, and Crockerton St Aldhelm.

Once more, there was magic in the air at Troneyford Hellions and throughout the Crockern Barton District, emanating from Godric's Hollow. Once more, magic seeped into the air and soil of that most magical of lands, Exmoor, spreading its fine filaments to net and hold Crockercombe, Ghoulsbarrow Common, Stokeleigh St Godric, Queen's Nymphleigh, Godric's Cross, Crockleigh Hellions, Gryffin Priors, Potworthy, Monks Griffin, Crockern Magicorum; linking at the last with the fringes of the web of magic that spins out from Dartmoor and the Hallowed Lands, from the old dwellings and the Ancient Tenements, from Crockern, Widecombe, Chagford, Hollow Tor, Hollow Moor, Quoditch, Halwill and Holsworthy.

Once more, the subtle and unseen influence of the Longbottom magic spread through Cornley in Pendle, Buttock Wood, Ram Hole, Cockstool, Raven's Clough, Black Hough, Upper White Moss, Rimington Head, Lower Cornhead, Cold Nick, Gravemoor Eaves, Cockspring-le-Moors, Crowtrees Clough, Sabbath Dene, and Pendle-le-Witching.

Once again, the ancient and understated magic of Fawcett and Lovegood, Turpin and Nott, Weasley and Diggory, informed the Vale of the River Otter and flowed through its country round, seeping upstream and outwards, capillary to the fringed and filamented watershed, even unto the stannaries of the Dartmoor uplands: at the Otterys, at Foulmile, Ottercombe, Coombehay, Stoatshay, Bishop's Catchpole, Otter Ralegh, Otterbeare, Crutchgate, Snood Cross, Talestocks, Yellingmill, Clyst Arthur, Chuddle Priors, Weasley Barton, Nottery Abbas, Lovegode St Aldhelm, Turpinstock, Fawcett Combe, Coombe Diggory, Fawcett Monachorum, and Lovegood Stanners, knitting itself to the Potter magic, to Godric's magic, between Dartmoor and Exmoor, at Crediton and Cheriton Fitzpaine, at Huish Champflower and Sampford Peverell, in the Ten Parishes and Mid Devon.

Once again, in the uttermost West, the Celtic lands of fateful sunset and omen, in Cornwall of the Trelawneys, the fine filaments stretched and linked, a root system, running and wrapping round, from Greenaway, Trebeterick, and Shilla Mill running and knotting into Devon, and from Devon into the Summer Country and Wessex all, and from Wessex into mere England: the magic, ancient and renewed, filamented and fine, a root system, not a set of ruled 'ley lines' on a map - as if magic, being organice, a part of the created order, were more like the straightened rails of some suburban commuter line than the recursive, organic, ravelled and rooted scrawl of an unseen and almighty hand!

Once more and newly, the old Black magic held in its spell Cannock Chase and Furvus Bridge, radiating from Atrum Old Hall, pooling imperceptibly at Great Atrum, Blackcock Moor, Glum Bridge, Black Edge, Ouncewas, Norton Blacks, Pye Mill, Etching Trussell, Bednall Gate, Brocton Slade, Brindley Green, Pottal Coppice, Penkridge Slade, Flaxley Gorse, Brereton St Lawrence, Brereton St Alphard, Satnall Lodge, Sowford, Upper and Lower Penkmill, Mickleridge, Halfmoor Lodge, Chase Slade, Muckley Bank, Blackslade, Blackslade Magicorum, Bleakmore, and Sandywells.

Once more, from the now Royal Burgh of Hogsmeade, that leal toun now crowned by victory and elevated to the status of administrative capital of Wizarding Scotland under its Lord Provost, the Rt Hon Aberforth Dumbledore, OM (2d), MW, the magic spread, to Aviecraig, Abermoor, Invermurchie, Drumdruie, Dunluineag, and Rothiedruidh.

The magic had been there always, in the land, and in the veins of those who dwelt upon the land, present in them - either actual or potential - all the while, and in the years after the Rebellion it became too evident to ignore, that all the old, false notion of blood and lineage were but fevered dreams, and all folk had it in them to engender Wizarding sons and daughters. The magic had been there always, in the land, waiting and wanting only the birth of a Witch or Wizard to kiss its sleeping beauty into waking life. The Fletchleys had sprung from Fletching, East Sussex, and the Finches had been long in the land in Cambridgeshire, and it had wanted only Justin's advent to wake the magic at ffinch Hall, Fletchley Abbas, near Burwell. And why had none foreseen this? Fletching, Uckfield, and Buxted were well known for Witches, not least for Nan Tuck, whose Apparating away from pursuing Muggles gave rise to a legend, and whose aunt, of the same name, was amongst those of Eastern folk who removed to Salem, in Massachusetts Bay, and gave her name, she being a Witch also, to that nearby site the name of which has so perplexed philologists and etymologists, Nantucket Island. And the Fletchleys shared distant kinship with Nan Tuck the Elder. As for the magic in Cambridgeshire, Nigel Pennick has written - although, he being a Muggle, he has not fully grasped the significance of his findings - that,

The most notable holy well of the Cambridge area gave its name to a former suburb of the town, long since incorporated into its area Barnwell. Although the name Barnwell has been extended to cover a considerable area along the Newmarket road, originally it applied to a holy well at which certain festivities took place. For a record of this, we are indebted to Dugdale in his Monasticon Anglicanum (1692 edition). At Barnwell stood the Priory of Barnwell, a major foundation of the Canons Regular. In 1029 [sic: 1092, surely], Picot, the Norman sheriff of Cambridge, and Hugolin, his wife, founded as the result of a vow made when Hugolin was believed to be dying, a monastic foundation next to St Giles's and the Castle (the corner of the modern Castle Street and Chesterton Lane). Six Canons were brought in to set up the monastery, but after Picot's death, his son was implicated in a conspiracy against King Henry I, and fled the country. Paganus Peveril was given his property, which was forfeit, and moved the monastery. In the words of the Monasticon:

'Perceiving that the site on which their house stood was not sufficiently large for all the buildings needful to his canons, and was devoid of any spring of fresh water, Pain Peveril besought King Henry to give him a certain site near Cambridge ... from the midst of that site there bubbled forth springs of clear fresh water, called at that time in English Barnewell, the Children's Springs, because once a year on St John Baptist's Eve, boys and lads met there, and amused themselves in the English fashion with wrestling matches and other games and applauded each other in singing songs and playing musical instruments. Hence, by reason of the crowd that met and played there, a habit grew up that on the same day a crowd of buyers and sellers should meet in the same place to do business.'

Thus Paganus Peveril moved the monastery to the site of observances of the Elder Faith, and took over the site. The great fair of Starbridge which survived until 1933 as a horse fair and until 1969 as a camping ground for gypsies, was held a few hundred yards downstream of this holy well, and may have transferred thence at the enclosure by Picot. On the dissolution of this house in 1536, the buildings were demolished gradually, and the area, which adjoins the river, was quarried for gravel. Finally, the 1811 enclosure of the Barnwell Commons led to the land being built upon, and the site of the springs, which is now the edge of Saxon Road, was obliterated.

So writes Pennick, in 'Holy & Notable Wells of the Cambridge District', in Source: The Holy Wells Journal, Issue 1, March 1985.

And now the magic once more ruffles the surface of the waters and whispers in reed and corn, and rimes the margins of the lode in Winter-tide, at Grasp, Swaffham Abbas, Lodewade, Finchwell Fen, Finchwell Lode, and Witchen Abbey.

So too does the magic yet run, newly augmented by Dean's kinship protection upon his family, in fat and fruited Kent, East of the Medway (for the Thomases are now Men of Kent, not Kentish Men, and safely away from an East End that is now alien to them), there in the mixed Wizarding-Muggle community that lies in the triangle formed by Maltman's Chart, Tuestead, and No Quarter, West-Northwest of a line from Ashford to Tenterden.

Where even the least trace of Wizarding influence remains, the magic is drawn out of the land, the waters and the air, as in the heavy-boughed orchards of Herefordshire, whence no small part of the Potter cider and perry comes, in the Overham Dunwith district that centres on the mixed Wizarding-Muggle village of Ham on Wye.

The magic is everywhere - or all but everywhere. Only the most burning of hatreds, fanned by bigotry and fear, can sear it away. As at Little Hangleton. As at Little Whinging, dead ground for magic now, from the brutal façade of Grunnings's offices at the Datchett Industrial Park to the murky waters of the Edward 8th Reservoir.

________________________________

Name: MALFOY (-POTTER) [Rt Hon] Draco Orion Junius Brutus Black

Nationality: British

Sex: M

Blood status: Redacted [marginal note: as if anyone hasn't heard, at great bloody length]

Spouse: Harry James Potter [marginal note: insert three pages of post-nominals and honours for Our Harry]

Place of residence: See annexe [marginal note: posh bastard]

Prior crimes: No prior convictions; no other comment appropriate

Motive: Subject's (sole) loyalties are, firstly, to HJP, secondly to himself; as attempt on Madam Zabini failed spectacularly, cd be a typical Unspeakables / Old DA entrapment ploy using Madam Zabini as bait to draw out remaining DEs hiding on Continent? Sod it, there's no discernible motive

---------------------------------

'... your Floo-calls and owls, here on "Sunday Morning with Victor Ringwood," on Wireless Cotswold.'

____________________________________

Summer upon the land, and the unceasing drone and chirk of insects, the chorus of lesser birds, the cry of the bustard - and, especially, the song of the skylark. Harry smiled to himself. The skylark's song was its own Cheering Charm. No: say, rather, that for its auditors it was an Expecto Patronum, and for the unwearied singer, the sky-borne cantor of the silver throat, it was a Patronus in itself: for birds of prey will not attack, or, stooping, will break off attack, upon a singing skylark. As Harry well knew, he, after the War, having at last elected to explore his Animagus form, partly out of curiosity, partly for prudence, partly out of a sense of homage, of filial duty, but mostly for Remus's sake. (Draco had not so chosen, professing disinterest, in fact being terrified to discover what his form, the mirror of his soul, might be, despite all Harry's comforting.)

Draco's refusal had been made the more firm when Harry's Animagus form had - perhaps predictably - been revealed as being a merlin.

________________________________

Name: MULCIBER Fabricius Lewis Hephaestus

Nationality: Stateless, formerly British subject (treason - attainted)

Sex: M

Blood status: Redacted

Spouse: None known

Place of residence: Vagrant: escaped convict; formerly Gribthorpe, E Riding Yorks

Prior crimes: See annexe

Motive: Personal gain, personal-political hatreds, terror.... NB: Imperius curse a personal speciality

---------------------------------

Foxmange & Burns, the Wizarding solicitors, dustily Dickensian, had done well as the men of business for the brothers Creevey, managing their affairs and those of the Creeveys as whole after the War, cannily investing their just rewards for them - and the dowry that Gabrielle Delacour had brought Den Creevey when, after her gallant undercover jaunt to Britain shortly after the War, she had fallen in love with and eventually married him.

As a result, the Creeveys had prospered, and Roy and his wife Jean, Colin's and Den's parents, had been able to buy and retire to a small dairy farm, where the former Muggle milkman became a noted, prosperous, and innovative farmer, much sought after in the district and listened to with attention even by those who were, by now, his fellow Governors of the Royal Agricultural Society. The Creevey's dairy and good fortune were shared by all the rollicking, larking family - for Dennis and Colin had come by their temperaments honestly - and whilst Dennis and Gabrielle and Colin and Ginny made their way in the Wizarding world, Jean Creevey and her twin, Maureen, and their youngest sister, Vanda, their parents, Wilf and Dora Itchenor (Dora had been born a Handley), Roy's brother Alfred, his sister Doreen (Mrs Walter Blundon, and mother of the irrepressible Dave), and the Creevey grandparents, Albert and Muriel (née Mawby), all forsook the dark Satanic cities of the Black Country and the Potteries to become again the countrymen their forebears had been.

And each and every one of them had descended upon Pottersfield, to Draco's undissimilated relief, to aid them in preparing their own milch-cows for the Bath and West Show.

________________________________

'"... Amen."

'That was Archdeacon Francis Wandwright-Fortescue, of the Wizarding Church of St Godric, Felton, with the "Prayer for the Day" for this morning. Now, Aberforth Dumbledore introduces us to goat's cheeses, and we hear tips from Muggle dairy farmer Roy Creevey, on "Husbandry Today."'

____________________________________

Name: YAXLEY Petrus Wm Clive Holme

Nationality: Stateless, formerly British subject (treason - attainted)

Sex: M

Blood status: Redacted

Spouse: None known

Place of residence: Vagrant: escaped convict; formerly Snailwell, nr Soham (Cambs)

Prior crimes: See annexe

Motive: Personal gain, personal-political hatreds, terror....

---------------------------------

It was a good thing, Hermione reflected, that even in the Wizarding world, men could not become pregnant. The poor things would never bear up under the strain. Men were such ludicrously delicate creatures, really: impractical, sentimental, prone to hysterics. And one could not even grant honorary female status to the gay men amongst them: they were quite as bad as the husbands-and-fathers. Men: really, they were absurd. Tinkering, pompous, ineffectual, train-spotting, nostalgic, and emotional at their best, even the best of them. What on earth did it matter, for example, to know the muddy, mucky farm where one's forefathers once dwelt?

It wasn't, after all, as if that were real history, the sort of thing one could put in a book.

Ridiculous creatures, men. Although they did have their uses.

________________________________

Name: TRAVERS Edmund Marius Caius

Nationality: Stateless, formerly British subject (treason - attainted)

Sex: M

Blood status: Redacted

Spouse: Conflicting reports

Place of residence: Vagrant: escaped convict; formerly Somerleyton in Norfolk, and Burnfoot, Co Cork, Ireland

Prior crimes: See annexe

Motive: Personal gain, personal-political hatreds, terror....

---------------------------------

'I miss the butterbeer down the Fawcett Arms,' shrugged Ron. 'But this is a nice place, I s'pose.'

________________________________

'Black anise and horehound mint balls,' Nev said. 'Great-Aunt Enid were pleased: she and Great-Uncle want them for Harfangs.'

'Good Lord,' said Draco. 'Is that your people?'

'On HL's mum's side, yes, and now war's over, they're back up and running.'

'I'm sorry,' said Harry, 'but I'm rather lost.'

'Harfangs Holiday Camps,' Arthur said. 'Hermione tells me there's something similar in the Muggle world?'

'Butlins,' said Hermione, with a faint shudder of upmarket distaste.

________________________________

Name: CARROW Amycus Fitzlisle John

Nationality: Stateless, formerly British subject (treason - attainted)

Sex: M

Blood status: Redacted

Spouse: Don't be daft

Place of residence: Vagrant: escaped convict; formerly nr Cartington and also residence nr Guyzance, both Northumberland

Prior crimes: See annexe

Motive: Personal gain, personal-political hatreds, terror....

---------------------------------

'... tonight at 11.5; but now, on "Scroll at Bedtime", a mysterious goblin and a band of centaurs bring dire news to our Animagi heroes. Sally-Anne Perks reads The Town Musicians of Bremen, by Lemuel Strafford-Catchlove.'

____________________________________

'Young Flume is after Nev. Making a dead set at him.'

'So are Fred and George, I believe, but you know Our Nev, he's not really worldly.'

'No, but, when one isn't watching, Luna is, rather. I don't imagine that his new Liquorice Allspice will find much use in good plain cookery, but in boiled sweets, well, one sees why Flume wants him under contract to Honeydukes.'

'Hmmm. No reason, is there, why we'd not give an old friend a helping hand.'

'Not least when you consider that we know our way about the provender trade, what with the cider and the perry and the barley for Ogden's.'

'Not least when Uncle Aberforth is a liveryman and past master of so many useful guilds. The Victuallers, the Pepperers, the Malenders....'

'And you a miller, at that. Indeed, a Miller, Warden-Elect of the Worshipful Company of Millers, Granators, and Furners.'

'Owdonabit, lads, hast it arse-uppards.' The tone was affectionately reproving, and the words came from behind them.

'Nev!' cried Harry, slewing round and wrapping his brother-in-fate in a hug. Draco swiftly insinuated himself into the embrace: he didn't care at all for such displays, really, any more than Harry did 'outside the family', but if Harry was hugging anyone at all, Draco was damned well going to be a part of it.

'Kind of the two of you to look out for my interests,' said Nev, gently disengaging himself. 'Happen I'd thought of it already, though. Here: have a sherbet greengage, Draco. Harry, these are for you, Uncle Algie's loganberry boilt sweets. And I've centaursfoot rock, and mint graphorn-eyes.'

'Nev?' It was Harry who spoke: Draco was dealing with his sherbet greengage.

'Well, no reason, I thought, as you did, why I should take exclusive contract with any, even t'Twins, let alone Honeydukes. Luna and I sat down with Hermione and then I went to solicitors - Taperie, Wriothernaught, and Floddle - and formed company. Now I can licence what I come to, summat here and summat there, and discounts for old friends, mind thi boath.'

'Nev. We didn't mean to be, well, I mean, it is your life and work and business, it's simply that -'

'Ah, Harry, wouldn't be the two of you, not plotting and scheming to do good by stealth. How's sweet, Draco?'

'My God, Nev, it's ... magic. I only wish Albus were here to try it out.'

'Aye. And magic it is, lad: I've had sherbet lemons and sherbet strawberries from Muggles, and you allus get a scrap of papper with 'em: they stick to sack, sithee. Twins've been in on't, developing these sweets, so, you may say, Harry's fronted seed money from the start. Now, then, let's talk about cider apples, I've idea abeawt that....'

________________________________

Name: ROOKWOOD Augustus Antony Ambrose

Nationality: Stateless, formerly British subject (treason - attainted)

Sex: M

Blood status: Redacted

Spouse: None

Place of residence: Vagrant: escaped convict; formerly nr Winchfield (Hants)

Prior crimes: See annexe

Motive: Personal gain, personal-political hatreds, terror....

---------------------------------

Neville had paid them little mind. He was certain it was a perfectly nice country, as country went, but, well, it wasn't Lancashire, now, was it? And what more needed to be said?

Instead, they eventually found him in the conservatory, where the plants were sheltered from the winter without, humming to himself an ancient Herbologist's-and-Simpler's mnemonic.

'Alcea rosea, beloved of bees....'

________________________________

It had been a comforting thing to find that the Head Teacher at the village C of E voluntary-aided school - and churchwarden, as well, and tower captain for the ringers at St Mary's (bells cast by Bilbie) - was a member of the Sloper family, a kinship who were rooted deep in the land from Great Bedwyn to Bishop's Cannings and on and over to Grovely Wood; who were long familiar with the Suttons: Littlecombe, Mallet, de la Mere, Malvey, and Grimsditch: with Starveall, Stony Down, Stoney Chalke, and Twatford Mulliner. Indeed, Mr Sloper, although himself a Muggle, was Old Gryffindor Jack Sloper's uncle, which smoothed things over considerably, really.

Mr Sloper - Geoffrey Sloper, MA (Oxon) - had wasted little time in involving Harry and Draco in the life of the parish, and in smoothing their way amongst the Muggles: a task made much easier by their having been snapped up by the choir in positively predatory order. (There are never enough baritones and tenors to hand in a parish.) Geoff Sloper had gone into positive transports when he found that the two were also capable enough to be trained to be reserve ringers as well, on the rare occasions on which they could be spared from the choir, and he had made a dead set at getting them inextricably involved in all the affairs of the parish, pressing them to serve on the PCC: to which inevitability they had given away with good grace. Within a matter of months, they had found themselves thoroughly entangled - and not infrequently imbrangled - in the affairs of the Friends of St Mary's Church, the Coal Charity that kept the poorer villagers snug in winter, the Lady Penruddocke-Wyndham-Ludlow-Bruges Trust, the village and district history society, the RSPCA, the RNLI branch, the village Concert Society ('beats Milverton hollow', the village stoutly maintained, to a man), the Bowls Club, the Choral Society, the Operatic and G&S Society, the Gerald Penruddocke-Wyndham-Ludlow-Bruges Day Centre (meets in Sutton Littlecombe Village Hall every Thursday: contact the Parish Clerk for details), the Sutton Littelcombe Cricket Club, on the Second XI of which they now played, the Squash Rackets Club, the Friends of the Cottage Hospital, the Golf Club ('Of course, Muggle golf, Hermione. Magic would only make it easier and less sporting'), and, in Draco's case, another group of essentially the same membership, the local Conservative Association. They had joined the Hunt, they were JPs and were persistently begged to become parish councillors, and they were supporters and patrons, not to say underwriters, of the Sutton Littlecombe Football Club, although they did not play (Draco's actual words had been, 'Mud and blood? I think not, I'll keep to my own wicket, thank you'). It was, Draco had often said, just as well that they were clearly and permanently - bar Polyjuice - ineligible for the WI and the Mothers's Union, or they'd doubtless be involved with those as well. But it was the parish church around which local life revolved, even for the Nonconformists, RCs, and unchurched of the district, it being the primary cultural venue for the whole of the country 'round.

The vicar - a relatively new man, although of local origin, and, older residents said, for that reason alone (and for no others, to be sure) just not quite the most satisfactory, or, rather, least unsatisfactory, since the days when the advowson of the living had been in the gift of Christ Church, Oxon - had called this night's meeting to confront an increasingly pressing need. The church organ had gone from wheezing to emphysemic, and was now all but mute.

To Draco, present and keenly interested as a chorister as well as a very new member of the PCC, this seemed an easy enough challenge to surmount. The Reverend Dr William ('Call me Bill') Priday, MA (Cantab, to his everlasting discredit), DD, being after all the scion of an old local family, had foreseen the probability that Lady Penruddocke-Wyndham-Ludlow-Bruges would insert herself into the discussions and attempt to take the reins of any appeal for funds. He had not foreseen that his rather alarming and rather new parishioner, who had become far too prominent in the parish far too rapidly, would override the usual forms more magnificently and arrogantly than even the formidable Lady P could have thought to do.

'Not to worry,' drawled young Mr Malfoy, waving a negligent hand. 'Just you leave that to us, Padre. In fact, I see no reason why Harry and I couldn't run to a new Frobenius at one end the church, and something nice and traditionally English at the other - Willis would do, or Mander, but all in all, I think it would be best to send over to Buckfastleigh in Devon and see what Drake and his lot have in the way of time for a project, or, no, a Willis or a Mander for the second organ and then we do need a small choir organ suitable for Baroque work, we want Drake for the builder for that and Stephen Bicknell to design it, Penny's Mill, over at Great Bedwyn, have some superb quarter-sawn oak for the case and gallery -'

'I fear,' said the vicar, clearly gobsmacked, 'that we will be fortunate indeed merely to secure the funds for repairing the organ that we have -'

'I'm sorry,' said Draco, 'I was unclear, Harry and I will pay for the lot, we can certainly afford -'

'We're hardly All Saints, Kingston,' said the organist, clearly torn by the necessity of urging caution and his sheer, naked lust for the dream of an organist's heaven that Draco had so casually dangled before him.

'No reason we can't do better than that lot,' said Draco, taking his cheque-book from an inner pocket. 'Now, to whom do I make out the -'

'DRACO.' Harry was clearly struggling to hold something in check, though whether it were his temper or his laughter, no one, not even Draco, could be quite sure. 'May I speak with you a moment outside, love?' And he all but dragged Draco into the corridor by his ear.

'What is wrong with you, Harry?' Draco was well on his way to a major bout of temperament. 'It's not like you to be mean with money, we can well afford -'

'DRACO.' Harry took a deep and calming breath. 'Love. Listen very carefully, please. It is immaterial that we can readily afford to restore the whole sodding church if we choose. It is vulgar to offer, at least in this way: this is not how things are done, certainly not in the country. If you doubt me, ask Aunt Andromeda. Or Uncle Ted the Tinker. Ah, ah: listen. The church and its fabric are the responsibility of the vicar and the churchwardens, we're rather insulting them by suggesting that, er, "Bill" and Geoffrey and Lady P aren't capable of doing their jobs. Moreover, love, the church is the common property of us all, the parish, the community. An appeal makes all of us stakeholders in it; our simply flashing our dosh about and putting on side is gravely offensive to everyone else, who wish to help, yes, even with a pound here and a pence there, a widow's mite. Do you see what I'm saying, here?'

Draco was crestfallen, and looked it. In fact, he was very, very close to allowing his lower lip to tremble, which, as Harry well knew, would cause them both to cease to be rational (a tactic which Draco was by no means above using to get his way, it may be added). 'I'm sorry,' said he, in a small and perhaps calculatedly miserable voice. 'I just wanted to do something nice....'

'I know, love.' Harry's tone was indulgent, and his arms were comforting around a huddled and ostensibly penitent Draco, but his resolution was unimpaired. 'I think we can compromise, here.'

It was not for nothing, after all, that the Sorting Hat had tried to place him in Slytherin House.

'Vicar? Lady P, Geoffrey, Martin; fellow members and choristers. Perhaps I should explain why we got a bit carried away.'

Bill-the-Vicar ('Vicars oughtn't to be called that, or wish to be,' Draco had often complained. 'We mayn't be All Saints, Kingston, but we're not bloody St Albion's, either, I can't stand this intolerable false matiness, I don't go about calling the publican by his Christian name') looked a bit dubious, but Lady P was rather impressed and Geoff Sloper, who had heard his nephew Jack hold forth on the subject of one Draco Malfoy many times and at length, was stifling a grin. The organist, Martin Vizard, was simply hoping that, somehow, he was yet going to get three new pipe-organs out of the deal.

'Draco and I had been thinking for some time about some tribute we could make to, ah, well, as a memorial to some old comrades of ours who served and, in some cases, died, in ... unacknowledged action.'

'Ah,' said Lady P, gustily (Lady P had a whisper that would have drowned out the sounds of an air exercise at RAF Lyneham, and which was but a few decibels less loud than the parade-ground power of her speaking voice). 'Yes. Actions that were unacknowledged. Quite. And of course cannot be acknowledged.'

Lady P was clearly thinking in terms of Porton Down and Winterbourne Gunner, Boscombe Down, Shrivenham, and indeed Chicksands. Geoffrey Sloper, by contrast, was thinking in terms of the Wizarding war of which his nephew Jack had given but a few tantalising hints, and of which he knew Harry to have been the greatest hero.

'Well. We needn't go into that. It's simply that our wish, to memorialise some old comrades in an unobtrusive way -'

The vicar could be seen to mutter, soundlessly, and with evident irony, 'unobtrusive', but Harry ploughed on.

'--Well, I'm afraid we got a bit over-enthused. We don't at all wish to push ourselves forward in any way -' the vicar's snort, this time, was perfectly audible - 'but we should very much like to come to some compromise here if we can, to the benefit of all, in order to fulfil that hope of having an appropriate memorial to our old comrades.'

'I like the cut of your jib - both your jibs,' said Lady P, roundly, and not for the first time. Martin Vizard perked up, hopeful that this meant he was getting his three new organs after all, and Geoff Sloper did smile, this time, knowing full well a foregone conclusion when he saw one.

Of course, the rest of the PCC and the choir were waiting to be given a lead (and waiting, in fact, not on Lady P, but on the level-headed Geoffrey Sloper, although no one was rash or unkind enough to point that out to Lady P), and Mr Sloper's smile was lead enough.

There was a certain amount of further clerical waffling, not least because Call-me-Bill had now managed to convince himself that these 'old comrades who fought and died in secret warfare' were somehow connected with Iraq and intelligence work and all the things that the Guardian and the Independent instructed him to disapprove, over breakfast at the Vicarage every day; but, in the end, a face-saving formula emerged whereby an appeal for funds would be made for the Frobenius organ, with an announcement of matching grants and underwriting by Anonymous Donors, and those Anonymous Donors would then, at the conclusion of the appeal, also - quite unexpectedly - present the parish with a traditional example of the best English organ design and with a Baroque choir organ.

Of course, within five minutes of the meeting's breaking up, everyone in the village and the surrounding district knew perfectly well what three pipe-organs St Mary's was to have, and who the less-than-anonymous-donors were, and the memorial impulse behind the donation. That was village life, after all; but the appearances had been saved, and no one was at all put out with Draco and everyone was very pleased with Harry, and that, too, is village life, all over.

---------------------------------

'Perhaps, Harry, the most difficult thing I was ever forced to do was to keep you with the Dursleys. Arabella did her best, as did others you do not know of, but of course we knew that you were not treated well. Any other child ... I could never have countenanced leaving any other child in these circumstances. Without love, almost without contact, deprived of affection and the simplest human touch that was not a slap or a beating. Daily, I agonised over it, and wished to remove you: to the Burrow, to the Diggorys's care, to the Bones's, to the Tonks's, to my own care. But all these things you were forced to endure were as nothing compared to your life. Although her family and protectors were more loving than yours, even as her fate was darker, I could not help but think of another child, a non-magical child, who was forced to hide in such a manner from a very similar evil: your Muggle school, I think, may have given you to know of the history of Anne Frank? All other considerations had to go to the wall compared with the necessity of keeping you alive, here, with the protections of your mother's blood and kin. Not - as you might, alas, be tempted to think - because of your destiny, or some calculation that you would be used as a weapon. But because James and Lily died for you, so that you might live; and because we who saw you in the ruins of that house could not but love and weep for you. We could not let their sacrifice go for naught. At all costs, they deserved that we keep you alive.'

---------------------------------

'... Godwin Sands Lumos-Vessel Automagic: North by East two, mist, one mile, 1004, falling more slowly....'

____________________________________

Name: McNAIR Walden Malduin Gilchrist

Nationality: Stateless, formerly British subject (treason - attainted)

Sex: M

Blood status: Redacted

Spouse: None

Place of residence: Vagrant: escaped convict; formerly Stuckgowan (Argyll & Bute)

Prior crimes: See annexe

Motive: Personal gain, personal-political hatreds, terror....

---------------------------------

It had been a pious - or, rather, a political - fiction that the Statute of Secrecy had succeeded, or had been meant to succeed, in wholly segregating the Muggle and Wizarding worlds. (The very fact that Hogsmeade was the only solely Wizarding settlement in the Isles was proof of that.)

This was especially so in commerce, in politics, and, most particularly, where the two intersected.

For much of the 16th through 19th Centuries, Asia - China in especial - was a vast sink into which the specie of Europe vanished without a trace: tea, spices, porcelain, materials both raw and finished, emanated from Asia, and could be paid for, as a rule, only in cash. Asia wanted little that the West could supply.

Or so it was on the Muggle level. Wizarding trading was another matter entirely, and the interpenetration of the two could occasionally be glimpsed.

The Borgins had come to Britain - to England, specifically to London - from across the Channel. There were those who said that the name was originally 'Bourgin' and that their flight was not that of persecuted Wizards, but rather of persecuted Huguenots. There were those who said that the name was indeed Borgin, and that they were Baltic Jews fleeing the latest pogrom. What was undeniable was that they were Wizards, and that they were born to mercantile genius - based in no small part to an indifference to traditional and Ministerial distinctions between goods Light and Dark. To the Borgins, business is business.

The Burkes, by contrast, consisted of two branches, not counting all the Muggles who shared the de Burgh - Burke surname: a line of Wizarding Nonjurors who refused to accept the Statute of Secrecy 1692, and a branch whose obsessions with blood-purity and segregation, and whose tenuous ties to the worse elements of the House of Black, kept them firmly in the Wizarding world even as their fortunes declined and they dwindled from merchant princes to mere shopkeepers.

It was the Flints who were largely responsible for fostering closer ties between their Black and Burke kinsmen, and this was made the easier because of the somewhat double-minded Wizarding view of those in trade: at the end of the day, in a world in which cauldrons and tea-kettles are magical and the products of magic in their making, the usual class distinctions were rived through by the fundamental separation of those who practised magic, even in their jobs of work, and those who did not and could not do.

In 1736, a young man who would otherwise have been starting Hogwarts, one James Flint, a Squib, found himself in Macao, where it was hoped that his youth would be an asset to him in his learning spoken and classical Chinese, tongues which continued to baffle older European Wizards and Muggles alike. His employers were the Court of Directors of the Honourable East India Company, to whom he, in Bengal for instructions, reported in 1739 on his 'endeavours to make myself acquainted with the Mandareen'. By 1759, a comparatively sinicised young man who now spoke several several Chinese dialects, who read and wrote ideograms with a fine brush, who lived, dressed, and dealt wholly in the manners and customs of Canton, Flint was the official interpreter to John Company's Canton factories, agents, and ship captains. He was also the public face of the East India Company's challenge to the local Hoppo and the Cantonese Co-Hong: for which pains he found himself spending three years's detention, by decree of the Imperial authorities, at Macao.

Within a decade of Flint's release from detention, the first in the train of events he had - largely inadvertently - begun, had come to pass. John Company had, through him, found out the extent of China's weakness, a means of exchanging something other than specie for Asia's inexhaustible supply of goods: the opium trade. Squib he may have been, but had James Flint been able to attend Hogwarts, there is little doubt that he should have been sorted into Slytherin.

The East India Company Act 1773 and the formation of the Bengal opium monopoly, the explosion of that dark trade, the rise of Warren Hastings, the Opium War of 1840, the seizure of Hong Kong, all these things emanated, in the end, from seemingly inconsequential decisions made by a Squib in Company service, a living embodiment of the sub rosa links between the Muggle and magical worlds; and the impeachment of Hastings, the eventual end of the East India Company, and much else besides, may be seen as a family quarrel involving branches of the House of Black, the Flints, the Dark Burkes, their Borgin partners, and the scion of that branch of the Burkes that stood against the Statute of Secrecy, the man who, himself a shareholder in the Company, was instrumental alike in its attempted regulation and in Hastings's impeachment, Edmund Burke.

Edmund Burke was the first, and remains one of the greatest, of those of the Cunning Men, the dissidents who refused to accept the secrecy regime, to have played a great part in the Muggle political arena. As Burke was the first, so the last to attain the dignity of a Cabinet seat before the Great Rebellion of Tom Riddle and the Restoration changes to the Statute of Secrecy, was a member of a dissenting, pro-Muggle, Devon branch of another traditionally Slytherin family, a family from the Vale of the River Otter, hard by Ottery St Catchpole: the Tory Defence Minister during the Falklands War, John Nott.

---------------------------------

Name: JUGSON Oliver John

Nationality: Stateless, formerly British subject (treason - attainted)

Sex: M

Blood status: Redacted

Spouse: None

Place of residence: Vagrant: escaped convict; formerly Braunston-in-Rutland

Prior crimes: See annexe

Motive: Personal gain, personal-political hatreds, terror....

---------------------------------

'Broomhill? Broomhill? Christ, Harry. Could you have chosen a more transparent incognito? Half your enemies are looking for a man who, but for the War, should doubtless have been capped to Seek for England, and you're going under the name of Broomhill? That must be the most defiantly indiscreet refusal to hide since the House of Anjou started calling itself "Plantagenet", otherwise known as "look at us, Muggles, we're your new sovereigns, and we're Wizards, we ride brooms" - are you actively meaning to be found, Potter? You -'

'Er. I hadn't thought of that.'

'WHAT?'

'Well.' Harry wouldn't meet Draco's eyes. 'I just picked the surname by ... well, I pointed my wand at a map, with my eyes closed, and used the name of the nearest place on it.'

'Broomhill. You picked an incognito because there's a village named Broomhill.'

'Er. Yes.'

'A village. Broomhill.'

'Yes. Well, hamlet, it's not a village, I've since learnt that the parish church is St John the Divine, Acklington.... Little place in Northumberland, between Felton and Radcliffe. I never thought about the "broom" element in the name.'

Draco sighed. 'Sometimes I wonder precisely how you managed to off the Dark Tosser, really, I do.'

---------------------------------

Name: Violetta Maria (Zen-d'Este-Conti-Contarini-Magris) Zabini

Nationalität: Unbestimmt; möglicherweise doppel- oder dreifache Staatsbürgerschaft: italienisch, britisch oder österreichisch?; Amerikanischer Abstammung; Mischling† (Mulatta)

Geschlecht: weiblich

Blutstatus: Abgefaßter getilgt magisch; 'Reinblut'

Gatte/in: sechsmal verwitwet; z.Z. vermählt mit Francis Lawrence Peter Michael Zabini, britischer Bankier.

Wohnsitz: Venedig, Triest, Wien, London u.A.

Vorbestrafungen: soweit bekannt unbescholten; ungeklärte Umstände um den Toden ihrer Ehemänner.

Beweggrunde: unbekannt, möglicherweise: Betrug; Selbstinsenierung; politische Aussage; Spionage

---------------------------------

Hermione dropped her spoon and pushed away her Healthful Bowl of Muesli with a small shriek. Pointing with a trembling finger, she rounded upon her hosts.

'Is that ... that ... that is not reduced-fat, skimmed milk! That's not even Gold Top, it's all but cream, positively dripping with fat! What are you thinking, you have children to consider, and guests, and people's arteries, and -'

Harry sighed. With a nod to Draco, he rose, and Draco rose with him, and they each took her by an elbow and frogmarched their friend to the window.

'Hermione. Do you see those large, fawn-coloured animals? They are not animated garden decorations, love. We don't buy milk. We have milk. Largely because we have our own dairy herd, certified Wizarding-Organic. Ministry-approved Fair Trade, too, just so your suburban sensibilities can remain unscathed.'

'Granger - oh, right, Granger-Weasley.' Draco's tone was one of fond exasperation. 'Come along. You're going to meet a cow.'

---------------------------------

Name: Theophrastus Hugh Mulliner Nott

Nationalität: Staatenlos. Britische Staatsbürgerschaft wegen Hochverrat aberkannt.

Geschlecht: männlich

Blutstatus: Abgefaßter getilgt magisch; 'Reinblut'

Gatte/in: Witwer

Wohnsitz: Grafschaft Devon; Anwesen in Dorset

Vorbestrafungen: siehe Anhang

Beweggrund: Terrorismus, politisches Verbrechen, Rache

---------------------------------

'Actually, I've come rather to terms with Justin's ... talents.' Major (retired) the Hon Rupert Alwyn Theodoric Miles Finch-Fletchley, late Royal Artillery, Justin's father, seemed markedly content as he surveyed the breakfast board that Harry and Draco had had the House Elves lay on for their guests.

'Alarmin' at first, damn it all, but damned convenient, at the end of the day. I have never regretted it, once I found that, between warmin' charms and House Elves, Wizards are the only lot in Britain who regularly enjoy properly warm, properly crisp, toast.'

---------------------------------

'Ma'am?'

'Good morning, Jardyne.' HM quite approved of her Squib Page of the Presence, who most suitably performed the whole of his duties as touching the Wizarding world. One so relied upon one's Household, and one was very much pleased when the Household were reliable. 'The others have gone on, then, by Portkey? Thank you. I shall leave now, then.'

Jardyne, soberly, handed HM a stuffed, plush corgi, admirably maintaining his dignity. As she felt the rather tiresome sensation associated with Portkeys, she could just hear Jardyne, his voice as respectful as ever, wishing her 'A very happy birthday, Ma'am, and many happy returns of the day, if I may be so bold.'

HM Corps of Aurors do not carry colours. As with the guns of the (Muggle) Royal Regiment of Artillery, the Auror's wand is to be regarded in the light of a regimental colour. Its loss is a disgrace that can be erased only in blood: that of the enemy from whom it is retrieved, or that of the Auror from whose corse it is taken by an enemy. An Auror who loses or surrenders his wand to an enemy before breath leaves his body is forever reviled.

How lovely. Philip had the Family party properly on parade (although, oh dear, one did rather hopelessly wish Charles would stand up properly and not fidget with his cuffs). A rather odd-looking person - not a House-Elf -swiftly relieved HM of the soft toy Portkey, and vanished with the most discreet of pops.

One was always struck by the really quite curious fashion in which the weather - and, indeed, the calendar - in the Wizarding parts of one's realm, seemed rather different to that in the Muggle. It was certainly what used to be called 'Queen's Weather' today, here, in Upping Street close by Hit Wizards Parade in Wizarding London, outside the Ministerial residence. One was so very gratified by that, and by how very loyal one's Wizarding subjects were, judging by the quite flattering number of onlookers displaying every visible evidence of loyalty. Wizarding London in the Restoration, that perfectly horrid affair with that Riddle person having been resolved, was most attractive, really. In its own, rather peculiar fashion.

HM had taken all this in, in a single sweep of the eye. There was no one more experienced in gauging all the little formalities, by now, after years of practise, and little escaped her. Her smile, which she now directed upon those to whom had fallen the honour of welcoming the Royal Party, was unaffected. Such dear people: Minerva McGonagall, of course, who always put one in mind of one's old governess, Crawfie, and who was very much an ornament as an honorary member of one's Household in Scotland; that nice Mr Longbottom, who in addition to being Lord Moderator of the Council and Leader of the Wizengamot was one's Herbologist Royal; that exceedingly kind, if exceedingly large, Rubeus Hagrid, the Verderer Royal, always so very pleasant to one.

'Your Grace - to use your style as Queen of Scots - Your Majesty is verra welcome,' said Mistress McGonagall, her 'R's rolling like summer thunder, 'and I am chargit on behalf of us all to express to you, Ma'am, and to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, how verra saddened we were to hear of Major Shand's dying so recently. We are fu' sorry that the Duchess of Cornwall cannot be with us, but we trust, Ma'am, that that will be the sole cloud upon this auspicious occasion.'

'The Minister,' Neville added, 'had to be forcibly restrained from being one of the welcoming party, Ma'am, but he'd have gone mad, were he here, fretting over the ceremony if he weren't there to supervise.'

HM laughed, affectionately. It was still quite a young woman's laugh, if one did say so oneself. 'I expect, knowing Mr Potter as we all do, that his hair is positively standing on end.'

Hagrid snorted, and then looked embarrassed.

There was a succession of reports, like a salute from the King's Troop of the Royal Horse Artillery heard from afar, and a double line of Aurors in dress robes appeared upon either side of the Royal Party. Imposing and resplendent in command, Kingsley Shacklebolt inclined his head to his Sovereign, and discreetly snapped his fingers. The Aurors acting as the Sovereign's Escort for the day raised their wands, forming an arch under which the Royal Party passed to enter their carriages, as the Aurors's wands emitted streams of red, white, and blue sparks.

HM and her Consort looked out from the Thestral-drawn phaeton as its tyres began to crunch crisply upon the gravel of the parade ground. As the phaeton entered Hit Wizards Parade, the stone lion crowning one gatepost roared and the stone unicorn crowning the other whinnied, the stone dragon shot flames and clapped its wings and the stone boar tossed its heavy head, the statues saluted, and the cannon atop the Badajoz Memorial shot off dazzling golden sparks. Precisely, at the very instant that the phaeton had entered the wards, the Wizarding Royal Standard had been magically broken out from the flagstaff atop Hit Wizards building.

Numbers one through eleven Aurors and the Hit Wizards companies had marched on and taken their positions at 10.45, with the Sharpcasters, the Hit Wizards, and the Aerial Squadron on their brooms, and the Massed Bands, then taking their respective places. The Royal phaeton had arrived at precisely 11.0 as always, and reached the Saluting Base, as always, at precisely 11.3.

HM and the Duke of Edinburgh dismounted - one remembered the days when it was an actual dismounting, before one decided one might not ride quite so much, although of course one wasn't at all growing old - at the Saluting Base, and the Corps presented wands in the Royal Salute as the massed bands - which, this being the Wizarding world, carried some very peculiar instruments indeed, including, here and here alone, Exploding Tubas - played the familiar strains of the Wizarding version of 'God Save the Queen' ('Send her most sorcerous, Magically glorious, Long to reign over us: God save the Queen').

HM re-entered the phaeton for the long, steady drive down the lines, her eye keen as ever, inspecting every polished robe-clasp and crisp, velvet magician's hat. It being the year for the West Country Aurors, the Wessex Aurors, to troop wands, the massed bands played an arrangement of 'Get Thik Pint Down, Albert' as the Slow March and 'The Vly' as the Quick March as HM carried out her Inspection of the Line.

HM returned to the Saluting Base well satisfied with her Aurors and Hit Wizards. She smiled with grandmotherly affection upon the Minister and his Cabinet and officers who stood solicitously behind the Family party. Dear, familiar faces, all. Young Harry Potter, her Minister for Magic, not quite as young as the Younger Pitt had been when he had become First Lord of the Muggle Treasury, and very much more mature, the victor and survivor of a war incomprehensibly great. Nice young Ernie Macmillan, already taking on very much the air of his Muggle relation who had been her PM so long ago, but, like SuperMac, with a vein of humour that relieved his tendency to be the least bit stuffy and the least bit grand: now, already, Deputy Minister for Magic and Lord Enchantellor of Scotland. Such a loyal young gentleman, as well - but then, one must bear in mind that he was a Hufflepuff, after all. That wonderfully, comfortingly reliable young Tony Goldstein, Chancellor of the Tally and Lord Purser of Scotland. Her Secretary for Outlandish Affairs, the Wizarding Foreign Secretary - and how more apt was 'Outlandish Affairs' for a Wizarding department of state than its previous, meaningless title of 'Western Department' - Hermione Granger-Weasley. One had certainly seen women of dear Hermione's stamp before: Minerva McGonagall, in the Wizarding world, and one's late mother's favourite PM, Mrs Thatcher, in the Muggle world. One might not always agree with such strong and independent women, but one most certainly approved of a world with such strong and independent women in it. Certainly one might rest assured that Hermione would suit as the Secretary whose remit included the Department of International Magical Cooperation, for all that she was no conventional diplomat (to say the least), and one well knew how much there was to be done in restoring those ties now that the war was over.

The Massed Bands Troop and Drummer's Call was progressing properly, HM reflected with great satisfaction. And of course, that the Slow March was 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' was, as ever, sublimely impertinent and perfect for the occasion. How satisfactory it all was, she reflected: as satisfactory as knowing that the former 'Eastern Department' that now prided itself, with typically British self-deprecation, on being universally known as the Gnome Office, was in a safe pair of hands, indeed, the safest possible. Young Mr Malfoy was superbly suited to head the department that included Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures and the Department of Elfin Welfare - particularly with that very acceptable young Charles Weasley as Chief Ranger, and dear Mr Hagrid as Verderer Royal - Magical Accidents and Catastrophes (young Augustus Pye was shaping very well as President of the Board of Healers and Chief Medi-Wizard), and Magical Games and Sports, which latter portfolio that charming young Ronald Weasley held in plurality with his charge as Secretary for Magical Warfare, for all that he'd had to be forced to take leave as editor of Wizden's Quidditchers's Almanack at wand-point. Equally, one was relieved to find, one's Lord Enchantellor and Chief Warlock, heading the Department of Mysteries and the DMLE who were on parade before one today, was a seasoned veteran with quite as safe a pair of hands as any, Arthur Valerian Garret Mornington Weasley (and that told one all that one wanted to know, really).

The lone drummer had finished the Drum Call, and the Escort For the Wand had formed and had now reached the Wand Party.

One imagined that one's Auror Marischal, that charming young wife to one's Lord High Warder Remus Lupin: dear old Teddy-Tinker-Tonks's and Andy's daughter Nymphadora: was the least bit tense just at the moment, although one could not, of course, turn in one's seat to look. That remarkable man, Alastor Moody, one's retiring First Lord of the Auroralty, and his incoming successor, the dapper Mundungus Fletcher - how that poor man had stood his years as an Unspeakable under deep cover as a ragged petty thief, one could not imagine - must likewise be keenly anxious that their troops did not disgrace themselves, but one had seen far too many of these ceremonies to be at all concerned: one could tell from the very start that today's Trooping of the Wands would be carried off flawlessly.

Ah. Everyone was rising for the first eight bars of one's anthem. The Escort For the Wand had now taken the ceremonial wand of the senior Auror of the company that was Number One today, and become the Escort To the Wand. The Wand would now be Trooped.

One must admit, Wizards do square-bash with the best of them: indeed, with a certain added flair. One might almost, HM reflected, suspect it of being magical. 'Escort to the Wand' and 'The Auror's Slow March': such suitable tunes. One could hardly resist the urge to pat one's foot as the intricate manoeuvres were carried out, perfectly executed evolutions, grace and power married in pageantry. That solemn young man who was now one's Lord Privy Spell and Leader of the Lords of the Articles, Terry Boot, wasn't it, might just be brought to forget himself and hum along yet. Well, why ever not? One's eightieth birthday - and dear Philip's eighty-fifth - did not come along every day, and it was most gratifying that everyone else was enjoying it along with one.

It was particularly gratifying that so many of one's Scots and Irish and Welsh and Manx and Channel and Isles and Norman officers and secretaries were present. Euan Abercrombie was absurdly young to serve as one's Scottish Secretary and Lord High Commissioner, but, then, the late rebellion had had its effects; for just such reasons, such elders as dear, gruff Alastor, and dear Tinker as Owl-Master General, and one's Master of Requests for Wizarding Scotland (and Lord Provost of Hogsmeade), Aberforth Dumbledore, had been plucked from retirement to assist in the Restoration, and were still going strong. One could at least be certain, nowadays, that one's Wizarding government would be untainted by corruption and not tempted by bribes, as well as fiscally sound: that formidably intelligent young Roger Davies made for a most superior Law-Wizard General, as did his equally youthful and equally battle-hardened counterparts, young Kirke as one's Lord Pursuer for Scotland, one's Wizarding Lord Advocate, and the deceptively fragile-seeming Natalie Macdonald as Procurator Magical, and the High Shrieve, young Cauldwell. And of course, with Bill Weasley, that very sound young man, as Purser-General and Chief Commissioner of the Department of Outlandish Revenue, and that dangerously charming Blaise Zabini being accepted by the Goblins as Deputy Governor of Gringotts, and the equally charming Dean Thomas as Enchantellor of the Duchy of Normandy, Minister of the Council Office, and Superintendent of HM Parchment Office, one had no fears for one's Wizarding Budget.

And now the Auror Officer in Brigade Waiting would normally see to it that, the Auror and Hit Wizard companies, having - to the solid old tune of 'The Dashing Light Wizard' - formed divisions now that the Trooping itself was done, the Slow March element of the March Past would begin. But, then, one did not celebrate one's eightieth birthday every day, or dear Philip's eighty-fifth, and HM was looking very much forward to what was to come next.

She heard Philip grunt with approval as the Aerial Squadron, the Broom Squadron, went over, in a breathtakingly aerobatic flying-past, Fred and George Weasley's best Wizarding fireworks effects trailing from their brooms. One rather imagined, HM thought, suppressing a smile, that young Harry Potter and young Draco Malfoy were very unhappy at not having been allowed to display their undoubted superiority as flyers, but now that one had reliable ministers, one was not inclined to risk them unnecessarily. It rather recalled one's darling papa's difficulties in forcing dear Winston not to take a personal part in the Normandy landings.

Ah. The Slow March Past. Of course, it was necessary that any Slow March played overall during evolutions not be associated with any one unit on parade, but one was rather inclined to think that the first of these had been chosen by one's Chief Secretary for Ireland, the irrepressible Mr Finnigan: 'Fields of Athenry', indeed. Cheeky, Mr Finnigan, very cheeky indeed.

The several elements of the Aurors Corps were now passing the Saluting Base, each in turn to the strains of its own Slow March. The Wessex Aurors, first, to the tune of Hatley Savage's 'Wessex Anthem', then the Isles Aurors ('The Skye Boat Song'), the Scots Aurors ('The Fluers o' the Forest' - the Wizards regarded one, really, as the tanist of the Stuarts rather than as the descendant of the Hanoverians), the Manx Aurors ('The Mauthe Dog'), the East Anglians ('From Fen and Broads'), the Norroys ('Roses, Roses, Red and White'), the Midlands ('Common Clay Fired in Battle'), the London and Home Counties Aurors ('From Tower and Hamlet Upon the Thames' - and was that Dean Thomas giving a quiet hurrah?), the Southern Aurors ('Dover Chalk and Channel Gales'), the Channel and Norman Aurors ('Dieu et Ma Magie'), the Welsh Aurors ('Suo Gan', naturally), and the Irish Aurors ('Danny Boy', of course). As the Irish Aurors completed their march past the Saluting Base, the massed bands reverted to a neutral tune, clearly the answer of one's Secretary at War, the Devon-born Theo Nott, to young Mr Finnigan's sly choice of earlier: 'Scrumpy in the Zider Press', as one might have expected.

And now the Quick Marches. Even Roger Davies, even poor dear Amos Diggory, one's President of the Board of Husbandry, who had suffered so much, even old Horace Slughorn, one's Albion Principal King of Arms, would surely be compelled to pat a discreet foot to the music now. 'Merlin's Jig' to start things off, and then the appropriate quick marches of the respective Auror elements: the Wessex Aurors, to the tune of 'The Varmer's House-Elf', then the Isles Aurors ('Wha'll Be King But Cherlie'), the Scots Aurors ('The Standard on the Braes o' Mar'), the Manx Aurors ('Tower of Refuge'), the East Anglians ('The Lincolnshire Auror'), the Norroys ('The Pennine Winds'), the Midlands ('The British Sorcerers'), the London and Home Counties Aurors ('London Bridge'), the Southern Aurors ('Wizards of the Queen'), the Channel and Norman Aurors ('St Mary and St Michael'), the Welsh Aurors ('Merlin of Harlech'), and the Irish Aurors (cheeky as ever: a medley of 'Brian Boru's March' and 'The Wearin' o' the Green').

Young Mr Finnigan - 'that false, deluded young man' in the words of the very next tune in question - was having perhaps more fun than was warranted, one thought, indulgently, seeing his fine Irish hand also in the choice of the last, neutral Quick March after the Irish Aurors had gone past: 'All Around My Hat', to which one rather hoped the children present did not know quite all the lyrics.

And now the Massed Bands, led by the Pipes and Drums of the Scots, Isles, and Irish Aurors, marched away from the Saluting Base, to the tunes of 'Wi' a Hundred Wizards' and 'Welcome, Royal Cherlie': Jacobites all, at heart, Wizards. Ah, well: last year one of the Slow Marches had been 'The Wild Mountain Time-Turner', and one mustn't repine.

And now it was the turn of the Hit Wizards to perform their Walk Past, followed by the Aerial Squadron (with the Wandwrights, Hansards, and Besomwrights bringing up the rear) at a slow, low, Fly, to the tunes, respectively, of 'Medley: The British Sorcerers / The Voice of the Wands', and 'Diagon Alley'; and then the final Royal Salute and one's anthem, again, the Wizarding version. Confound their hexèd spells, Their candles, books, and bells, Set them in dungeon cells, God save us all.

Under a cloudless sky, in perfect weather, to the ringing cheers of her Wizarding subjects to a man, HM resumed her place in the phaeton to lead her loyal Wizarding forces in the March Off. It had really been quite lovely, and one was very touched and gratified by such loyal devotion and high spirits - and even a bit of affectionate cheek. The Thestrals moved forward and the tyres rattled on the gravel as her Wizarding forces fell in behind her in perfect step.

And such lovely weather, as well. Queen's Weather. Well, one's eightieth birthday, actual or official, or, indeed, dear Philip's eighty-fifth, did not come along every day, after all. A very happy birthday, indeed. Most suitable.

God save our gracious Queen
Long live our noble Queen,
God save the Queen:
Send her most sorcerous,

Magically glorious,

Long to reign over us:

God save the Queen.

O Lord, our God, arise,
Scatter thine enemies,
And make them fall:
Confound their hexèd spells,

Their candles, books, and bells,

Set them in dungeon cells:

God save us all.

Thy choicest gifts in store,
On her be pleased to pour;
Long may she reign:
May she defend our way,
And we shall ever pray,
As in Great Merlin's day:
God save the Queen.

---------------------------------

'... "Ri Cluinntinn": WWN Rèidio nan Gaidheal. Tha e cairteal an dèidh ochd....'

____________________________________

Funny old town, Hogsmeade.

Funny old world, Wizard-dom.

Not least the old world that existed before the War, Aberforth thought. The Ministry had so deteriorated, then, that a man in those days could be prosecuted for using a goat as a test subject for new spells, whilst those who practised Dark curses on Muggles were fawned upon. Well, Albus and Harry and young Harry's friends had put paid to that, at least.

The 4,399 cast ewes and rams saw all the usual buyers forward with trade slightly sharper. Top of £60.50 for heavy Texel ewes from Hoggbanks, others to £54.50 Albuskenneth; Suffolk £56.50 Raven Cleugh; Suffolk cross £54.50 Albuskenneth and Stackmeades....

He missed Albus dreadfully, of course, for all his faults; Albus, and Amelia, poor old girl, and so many others. Certainly they had willingly sacrificed themselves for this braw new world, but it was sad indeed that they'd not lived to see it. If nothing else, they'd have laughed themselves silly to have seen the look on the faces of the old Fudge-Scrimgeour-Buggins's-Turn crowd - such folk as that prize ass Gawain Whossiname - when, after the War, the unspeakable old Dung Fletcher had been revealed as an Unspeakable so senior that successive Ministers for Magic had not been cleared to know of his role ... or when they'd gaped as the disreputable barman of the Hog's Head was unmasked as the chief intelligencer for the Order.

Albus would have had a good laugh over that, would have been, in the local vernacular, 'hert gled' at the 'lichtsome' jape. Albus had been a great laugher, when in his innermost circle, far more openly mirthful than his dignity permitted outwith it - for all that he'd indulged, twinkling madly, in the licensed eccentricities of a dominie. It had been typical of Albus to have made a standing joke of that business with the goat, and to have said of his Ravenclaw brother that he 'wasn't sure Aberforth could read, actually' - old goat himself.

Rams to £52.50 for a Texel from Hoggbanks; Suffolk £49.50 McGonagall; Leicester £44.50 Hoggside and Elfburn; Cheviot £34.50 Tonks; Blackface £26.50 Lupinscleugh; Swaledale £23.50 Stackmeades.

But, then, Albus had been one of those Gryffindors who had a fair smattering of the traits of all the Houses, which is why he'd become Headmaster of Hogwarts: you could almost talent-spot the future rectors of the auld scuil, really. Harry; young Neville, bless his little cotton socks; the Malfoy lad - all Black, really, that one, and surnames be damned; Ron Weasley's bittock wifie (and there was a family that was steps and stairs, the Weasleys), canny hen that the wee quean was - if a wee bit of a targe. Aberforth chuckled. Had Hermione but realised, his pretence of being a coarse, Victorian old tyrant who playfully feigned to regard her as a mere adjunct to her husband, was a tribute to her: it always provoked a pointless argument, always resolved in the same way by the irenic phrase, a surer spell than any magic, 'My round': for just such pointless and unmeaning jocular rows, pacified by a pint, were precisely how men interact down the pub. Hermione wished to be treated on an equal foot with the lads, did she? Then she would be, would the lass but realise it. Clever, the quean was, but not always astute to these small things, for all that she'd mair degrees than a thermometer.

Still and all, though, she was as certain sure to follow in Albus's footsteps as any now living, and for the same reason: she, like Harry and Draco and Nev and a curn of fowk mair, had Albus's quality, and Minerva's, of being an amalgam of the qualities of more Houses than they one they'd sorted into.

Ah, Minerva. Funny old place, Hogsmeade. Sassenach-founded, and a defiantly English town set incongruously in the Highlands, a sort of left-handed Brigadoon, and yet it had inevitably, in the long years, become Scots as much as English. As had he, Englishman - West Countryman - by birth though he was. Hogsmeade was in spirit something like Minerva herself, double-natured, even as the canny auld quine hersel' was double-tongued, speaking the English claik up the school - but nae primsie, dichty-watter English, he'd grant her that - and braid Scots amang the fowk o' the toun. It wad be gey easy to get the smit for the lass, she was a stoater yet, and they were neither of them sae auld, after all....

Bullocks
Charolais £575 Cornfoot, £550 Malfoy Hall, £545 Hagrid End, £510 Long Bottom and Hogwarts, £480 Cornfoot, £470 Hagrid End and Hogwarts Castle.

Limousin £570 Tonks Farm, £565 Veela Hill, £550 Wandwood Hill, £545 Veela Hill, £540 Malfoy Hall, £535 Pottersfield and Tonks Farm, £520 Wandwood Hill, Tonks Farm and Hogwarts, £505 Malfoy Hall, £500 Pottersfield and Malfoy Hall.

Saler £550 Hogg Side....

Aberforth chuckled, again, to himself - and chuckled again at the thought that, had anyone seen him at it, they'd have thought him fair daft, grinning to himself, and dafter still had they known he was thinking of winching Minerva McGonagall. They'd hold him for a loon, in the English rather than the Scots meaning.

Funny old world, really, the English and the Scots at one another's throats for aye, Muggles and Magical folk sundered and suspicious, everyone finding a way and a reason to look askance at one another for meaningless differences. He'd knocked around a fair bit, had Aberforth, in his years: been a scholar and a barman, a sporting publican and a dominie and a don, a tramp and a gentleman, an Englishman amongst the Scots and able to pass for either, an intelligencer and Severus Snape's case-officer, a herdsman and a laird.

Belgian Blue £545 Nether Creevey, £450 Tonks Farm, £410 Low Burrow, £390 Old Auror House.

Simmental £500 Hogg Side.

Aberdeen Angus £490, £425 Pottersfield.

Galloway £410 Thomas's Hill.

Shorthorn £315 Atrum Old Place....

Funny old place, Hogsmeade. Particularly now, in the peacetime, with the War done and dusted and a new political settlement in place, it was more and more an amalgam of Scots and English traditions, although the Hogsmeade the students knew was but the surface of it. They saw the tearooms and the public houses and the inns, the stationers and the sweetie-shops, and that was all. It occurred not to one in a hundred of them that there was a whole, thriving village behind the fronts of the high street shops: but, stay, 'village', did he say? No longer, indeed never that: long a burgh of regality, since its first founding, it was now since the War a royal burgh, with all that that implied. An honourable estate, and proudly testified to by the market cross, the Merkat Cross in good Scots, standing minatory in the midst of Hogsmeade High Street, there in the very toun-heid, the names of the fallen of the late War incised deep in its plinth, so that a thousand years after, Wizard-dom would yet mind that finest hour.

No, the students, most of them, never knew or stopped to think that a burgh maun hae its props and supports, and nae toun in the world might lang bide wi' oot a flesher and a sutor, a baxter, a wabster, a shewster, and a jyner. Someone maun provide the meat and the boots, the bread, the clouts, the clothes, and the work in wood from cabinet-making to the framing a bit house to live in. At least, as a Wizarding burgh, Hogsmeade could dispense with the need for a scaffer's yaird, what the English of Aberforth's Somerset childhood called a rubbish dump. It was as well, perhaps, that the students never thought as much on it: there were Muggle-borns in plenty and a few mildly subversive 'purebloods' - though none from the Great Houses: the Blacks, for example, had thought only of blood, and had not blinked an eye at having a mere shop-keeping Burke in the family - who would look down upon the people whose hands and sweat made the world turn on her axis and kept all things going on. Time and experience would larn 'em in due course, now that peace was in the land: a few years of real and earnest life would suffice to teach them yet that a man's a man for a' that, and that we are all in the end alike Jock Tamson's bairns.

Even so, he was glad that the War was behind them all, and all pretence cast off, and prosperity come upon the land with the peace. He need no longer pretend to be the sullen and shabby barman of a down-at-heel pub at the fit of the toun, and the toun herself was weel-foggit the noo, prosperous and trim. And why for would it not be? A royal burgh, now, rewarded for its long leal-being, its loyalty, to the Light, and the administrative capital of Wizarding Scotland; it was the seat, now, of the Wizarding Fiscal and Sheriff, and had its Bailie - wee Flitwick, of all Wizards in the world, and fine he kenned his duty and well performed it, and never a keelie or picky-fingered local limmer to take up space in the Tolbooth under the new burgh hall. The Wizarding department of Jenners had opened a shop now square in the toun-heid, and the burgh was sleek and prosperous. And it was Muckle Friday the day, the day of the Muckle Fair, the twice-yearly hiring market - what in his English youth they'd called a 'Mop Fair' - for the louns and the pleuchies and the plummy, Morningside-tongued shop assistants who served the fermers and shearers and the shopkeepers. It couldn't all be done by House-Elves, after all; and in the Wizarding world, even the small wares, the cauldrons and the cups, the teapots and the tailoring, were functions of the use of magic, imbued with magic: there was no shame or indignity in making and selling, no taint in the Wizarding world to 'being in trade', and rightly not.

Greyface ewe hoggs with singles - £66, £56 Shacklebolt, £56 (x3) Bulstrode.

Texel cross hoggs with singles - £35, £34.50 Nott.

Suffolk cross hoggs with singles - £42, £34 Creevey Grange.

Texel cross shearlings with singles - £30 Bell's.

Texel cross shearlings with twins - £28.50 Hogsmeade Downside.

Greyface shearlings with twins - £34, £33 Evanshead.

He had not far to go to the Fair, although he had no need of hirings. His presence would be for other reasons, the consequence of his post-War choices. Which he did not repine: he'd been a scholar once, that was sure enough, and many other things since, but the height of his ambition now, in this time of peace, was realised and embodied in this, merely commercial distinction though it might have seemed to Muggles: this was his visible achievement, palpable, the honoured position and the grand house on the market square, sign visible that he was a burgess, one of the hie heid yins, a man of mark - and more.

A large show of ewes attracted buyers from as far as Wiltshire, Somerset, Dorset, and Wales, all good quality proved very good to sell.

Lowland sheep sold to £71 for Texel cross gimmers from Pottersfield, others to £65 Glenblackholm; Greyface £70 Creeveys Mains, £65 Buckbeak; Suffolk £54 Nott House; Cheviot Mule £48 Turpin; Lleyn £46.50 Wandknowe. Ewes to £68 for 1 crop Texels from Pottersfield, 2 crop to £56 Brockshead, 4 crop £44 Stackmeades; Greyface £48 Hogg Side (Baxter), £44 Englishtown; Cheviot Mule £41 Stackmeades. Ewe lambs to £50.50 for Greyfaces from Wandlands, others to £48 Green Farm, £45 Raven Cleugh; Lleyn cross £36 Lovegood Hill.

Cheviot ewes were a good show with the majority sold to Welsh buyers. Top of £54 for North Country gimmers from Newhill, with correct North Cheviot ewes to £40 Plas Rhaedr. Hill ewes to £35 Sprouthope, others to £34 Tonkslade and £30 Lupinshope; gimmers to £43 Pottersfield; ewe lambs £30 Easter Macmillan, £29.50 Malfoy Haugh.

Time was when an ox-team, even of twenty owsen or mair, could not have dragged him to such a scene, with the hail clamjamfrie of the burgh milling about. But he'd made his choices, now that the War was ahint them, and that had been the point of it all: a world of choices, no longer dominated by some titanic struggle between an aspirant Dark Lord and an implacable, if virtuous, curn of fighters for the Licht. A world in which the feck of fowk were free to make their own ways in it, and not condemned to choose sides in some great war. It was a free world of free choices now, and it was that that they'd fought for: a world of open possibility, and every man able to mak' kirk or mill o' it. Knickety-knack, which haund will ye tak'?

It had been worth the fight. And they couldn't hold the Muckle Fair without him, he having made his own choice, and happy enough with it, so he might as well keep a ca'm sough, and not let himself be awa' in a dwalm, day-dreaming and making the fowk of the toun wait.

No more the ragged clouts of the Hog's Head's barman, clothes that he might have stolen from a particularly disreputable bogle - what the English call a scarecrow. Not today; not for him, at the Muckle Friday fair. Funny old world, it was.

Goats (Golden Guernseys, Wizarding-Organic certified, from Pottersfield estate, Somerset, and Malfoy Manor, Wilts, herds) were the subject of a private sale, the details of which have not been published.

He donned his best robes, and smiled sadly at the image in the looking-glass as he bowed his head for his chain of office: he looked more like Albus these days than ever, and it was bittersweet. But there: there was work to be done. He strode towards the door.

Aberforth Dumbledore, OM, MW, the Right Honourable the Lord Provost of the Royal Burgh of Hogsmeade, ex officio Lord-Lieutenant, Ulnager-Royal of Hogsmeade, past Prime Warden of the Worshipful Company of Victuallers, thrice Master of the Worshipful Company of Vintagers, Maltsters, and Stillers, Master of the Worshipful Company of Hostellers, Upper Warden of the Worshipful Company of Apiarists, Renter Warden of the Worshipful Company of Grammar-Clerks, Middle Warden of the Worshipful Company of Aurors, Bailiffs, and Manciples, Clerk-Warden to and Liveryman of the Most Worshipful Company of Scribes, past Master of the Worshipful Company of Pottlers, Freeman of the Worshipful and Worthy Company of Pepperers, past Master of the Worshipful Company of Malenders and Husbandmen, Master-Elect of the Worshipful Company of Merchaunts Venturers, strode forth from his cherished and elegant House on the Merkat Square, not as to war, but to take up the duties of peacetime.

Let the fair begin.

---------------------------------

'"Right. Now, Den and Derwent, you are Healers at St Mungo's; Fred and George, you're suffering from a miscast hex - one that prevents your telling the Healers directly what that hex was. Off you go, Gred and Forge."

'"Arr, Dan'l."

'"Arr, Aaaal-bert. Get thik pint down, 's you-err shout nee-axt...."'

____________________________________

No one else laughed the way Derwent Shimpling did. As heartily, as innocently, as freely. After all these years, his face was still that of a happy child, little marred for all the greasepaint. Oh, there was a tinge of purple to his countenance, no question, but there was many a retired colonel in a Gloucester village or many an ancient Indian Political in clubland who might say the same, and worse things happened at sea, so thank-you-for-allowing-us-into-your-hearts-and-good-night-and-God-bless-us-all.

For many a decade he had trod the boards, the halls his first love but rep in small, forgotten villages and panto in town halls by no means beneath him (and he was a talented dame, if he did say as much himself, ta, ducks). There had been good nights and - less good: he still treasured, fifty years on, the comment of a visiting American vaudevillian, a Muggle-born, who'd said, 'You're not ready for the big-time until you've bombed more than the Eighth Air Force': a joke he'd inherited on the other fellow's death, and repeated, suitably amended to refer to Bomber Harris and the RAF, to younger performers who wanted bucking-up. And it had never really touched him, the life he'd led, never touched the essential innocence that was his distinguishing characteristic - and that had, had he but known it, been what made him the great man he would never for a moment have considered himself to be. Not the draughty dressing rooms and the restive audiences, not the seedy theatrical hotels and the mad landladies and the war years and the absconding impresarios and the splinched luggage: none of it had ever really touched him. No one else laughed the way Derwent Shimpling did, but it wasn't for his lack of effort, for that was the key to the man: he loved laughter, pursued it all his life, coaxed it and cajoled it. It would have been a very easy thing to have done, had he wished to do, to pursue applause and fame and such fortune as the halls could provide, but it had simply never occurred to him to do. He wanted only to make everyone laugh, and whilst he was incredibly pleased and proud when they did do - most of all when, at a Royal Command Performance, far from Muggle eyes, he had reduced the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother to helpless giggles (dear, dear people, the Royal Family, albeit Squibs) - his end and aim was the laughter, not the taking credit for it. And that, of course, was what had made sure that the world laughed with him and loved him well, and that was why he had never lost his innocence.

Oh, Mr Potter, what shall I do?

I meant to sweep the chimmin-ee, I'm trapped now in your Floo!

Please fly me back to Diagon, I'll stay there all me life,

You're a hero to the world, sir, but I've no real taste for strife

(You're a hero, Mr Potter, but - I wouldn't be your wife!

You're a hero, that is certain, and the world may owe you much,

BUT -

Not for all the gold in Gringotts, I'd not envy your old dutch! )

His parents, God rest 'em both, no doubt had never contemplated such a career for their young Gryffindor - oh, yes, he'd been a Gryffindor at Hogwarts, truncated though his schooling had been, in the end: tragedy demanded Ravenclaw brain, managing took a Slytherin, you couldn't hope for better performers than Hufflepuffs for the rough and tumble work, vent acts and aerial acts and tumbling and such, but comedy wanted the raw courage, always - but they'd never complained. There were a few folk in Wizard-dom who seemed to share the Muggle attitude towards labouring and trade and the stage, if you could call the halls 'the stage', it wasn't as if he were doing Shakespeare, after all - and oddly, the few who held those notions were Muggle-haters to a man - but for most of the Wizarding world, magic use was magic use, and whether you used or didn't use magic in your profession or trade was the dividing criterion, be you a driver on the Knight Bus or the Headmaster of Hogwarts ... or a song and dance man with a line in patter and physical comedy.

Daddy wouldn't buy me a Kneazle

Daddy wouldn't buy me a Kneazle

I 'ave a little Crup

And I've raised 'im from a pup

But I'd ravver have a Kneazle, please!

The years had been kind, really. It had been a goodly apprenticeship, from Cordwainer's Wells to Dreary Lane, and a few pointers from some kindly theatrical ghosts, and on to every Empire, Palladium, and Alhambra from Holborn to Hogsmeade. He was still sound enough of wind and limb for a song or two and a bit of the old ankle, and why not? Why, the years from eighty on are the prime of a Wizard's life. And after years of honing the business and polishing the lines, after years of craft such that his well-known 'after all' could, standing alone, bring down the house, he could still - 'still'? Make that, 'better than ever' - knock them, in the words of his youth, in the Gawber Road.

'Your surname, please.'

'Ah. It's ... I'll spell it out. B-O-U-G-G-W-A-R-I-N-G.'

'Lovely, but I shan't be spelling it when I want you, how is it called?'

'Er. You know how "Mainwaring" is called as "Mannering"?'

'Yes. What - OH. Oh. Right, then. I'll call you by your Christian name, then. What is that?'

(Pause.) 'Ah. Roger.'

The thing was - the funny thing was, if you will, guv'nor - that he'd played his part (wait for it) by playing his part. In the halls or over the wireless, when times had looked a bit darkish, he'd done what little he could do (he never accepted that it had been, really, a great deal) to keep spirits up and see to it that the lads and the Home Front alike had kept 'smiling through'. Grindelwald, those two nasty episodes with Screaming Lord Twunt, it had all been the same, he hadn't had the opportunity to bear a wand but he'd done everything he'd been allowed to do in putting on appeals, entertaining the Aurors, and bringing what cheer he might to the nation at large. He could take an innocent pleasure in that, and did do; he could have, although he didn't, take considerable pride in it and a good deal of credit.

And now it was time to banish the last of the darkness and put off the memories of the late war. Laughter was the best potion, after all, and the Wizarding world deserved to celebrate a little, now, after all, you couldn't say fairer than that, now, could you. Most fears and dreads, even the worst - and, Merlin, but they'd seen the worst of late, now mercifully past - most fears and dreads after all were just so many boggarts, and there's one sovereign remedy for that, now, isn't there: Riddikulus!

From the wings, he could hear the chairman, putting his all into the old, familiar, comforting words: 'And now, Witches and Gentlewizards, I give you -'

His timing was by now instinctive.

'--the comedian who does exactly what it says on the cauldron -'

He limbered his joints and edged forwards.

'--the potion as before, just what the Healer ordered -'

The usual charm to muss the hair in the usual fashion, a quick fist through the crown of the self-repairing boater, a quick drag of his soles through the chalk, a twitch of the striped jacket, and he loped out on stage impeccably on his cue.

''Ullo 'ullo 'ullo, thank you, Wallace Greenslade couldn't've said fairer, good evening, all - oi, cocky, what's with the long face, oh, sorry, didn't know you were a Metamorphmagus, thought you were off-colour - I don't care to know that! - thought you had a megrim, lad, and we'll be having none of that tonight - don't want anyone being glum, 's like the Wizard from Bedale who came up to Diagon Alley, went into the Cauldron, and Tom said they hadn't any Yorkshire pud, poor old lad was so dismayed he went back to Yorkshire and battered himself to death -'

Boggarts be gone, he thought, luxuriating in the laughter, it's peacetime now.

---------------------------------

'My God. That's ... that's diabolical.'
'Yes, I know. Had Voldemort succeeded in his plan....'
'We should surely have lost the war. We couldn't have functioned. Everything would have shut down.'
'I know. It was a damned close run thing.'
'Oi! What are you two on about?'
'Oh, hullo, Ron. Draco was just telling me, he and Hermione discovered a plan old Tommy was about to put into operation when, well.'
'When you did for him? What was it mate, that was so diabolical - yeah, I heard you two rabbiting on as I came in.'
'He was trying to cut off all supplies and imports of tea.'
'Bloody hell. We'd've lost the war, we couldn't have functioned.'
'I just said that, Ron.'

---------------------------------

'So, Justin, I expect you, also, have had a sufficiency of Italy, and are eager to get home to Huntingdonshire.'

'Cambridgeshire, actually, the other side of the county from Huntingdon District,' replied Justin, through clenched teeth.

---------------------------------

'... not your grandmother's annual stroll down the lane through the hedgerows, picking brambles for jam. At the Wizarding Pick-Your-Own and Farm Shop at Pottersfield, Wizarding families of all classes and length of immersion in the Wizarding world join enthusiastically in....'

____________________________________

The post-War Wizarding World had seen off its share of threats: nothing so dramatic as a new Dark Lord, but mundane concerns such as budget crises, incredibly annoying foreign governments (the French, of course, well to the fore in that), and the horrific possibility that Horace Slughorn might contemplate standing for Minister, which Draco cleverly scotched by finding the pompous old parasite a sinecure that he in fact performed splendidly in and that suited him down to the ground, a billet as Albion Principal King of Arms, the chief herald of British and Irish Wizard-dom.

After, the Victors had settled down to enjoy the fruits of peace, secure in the certainty that nothing alarming would happen again for many a long year. The years stretched before them in prospect, as smooth and seductive as Ogden's best single-malt firewhisky ('Smoky and complex, long in the finish, with notes of brandy-mint, bergamot, cinnamon, and Keillor's Ginger Preserve' - The Arbiter, Wine & Food Section, 12 June 2007).

To which the Fates replied, scoffing, 'Not 'arf.'

---------------------------------

'... "Bells on Sunday," which this morning comes from St Aldhelm's Church, Ottery St Catchpole. A successful appeal has recently resulted in the restoration of this ring of ten....'

____________________________________

Hermione had been quite as astonished as Draco to realise how much of what the Wizarding world took for true in its history, had not been. The idea that any number of Wizards had declined to accept the Statute of Secrecy was as startling as the realisation that Muggles had never successfully managed to persecute magical folk - unless other, hidden Wizards and Witches were pulling the strings.

She read on, taking solace in her books.

'The history of religion within the British Wizarding Community has taken on a renewed importance since the Great Insurrection was put down.

'Partly this is in consequence of the slight but observable revival of religious observance in the wake of war, a common phenomenon enough. Primarily, however, the resurgent importance of the churches, like their previous eclipse, is a political and constitutional matter.

'For most of its existence, the (imperial, that is, union) Wizengamot and its predecessors at Winchester (formerly, at Avebury), at Falkland, at Machynlleth (formerly, at Caerleon), and at Tara of the Kings, included the Lords Spiritual, ex officio, as members. The Moot is in this as in many regards different to its Muggle counterpart at Westminster and that parliament's predecessors, in that its members have always tended to represent certain interests without regard to geographical constituencies, and no Reform Acts have been felt desirable. Hogwarts School has always had its own members; the University did and now does again; there are members elected by St Mungo's Hospital, by the various Guilds and Livery Companies, and so on. This was not changed, but was, rather, reaffirmed as well as judiciously reformed, in the post-insurrection Settlement.

'It is with that Settlement that, rather to the shock of many, Wizard-born and Muggle-born alike, that the Lords Spiritual reappeared on the benches of the Moot.

'There had been brief periods in the past when all or most of the clergy had been non-jurors in one or another sense, or had withdrawn from the arena wholly: the Peverel - Peverell - Peverill Rebellions, beginning with that of the third William Peverel of Bolsover Castle (the first William Peverel was a half-Saxon bastard of William the Bastard's - or, "the Conqueror's" - getting), were one such instance, as were the Gaunt-Swynford-Beaufort feud, the resultant York - Lancaster Wizarding War, and the Whig - Jacobite Blood Struggle, for more on which, see these notes on the Statute of Secrecy 1692.

'The Whig - Jacobite Blood Struggle, as an extension of yet another feud within the ruling house, itself caused horrific political upheaval in the Moot, and it was in effect a Rump Wizengamot that sat from 1692 until 1807, when, with the death of Henry 9th and 1st of the House of Stuart, a number of secular members accepted George 4th ("and 1st") as his tanist and were reconciled to the Hanoverian Succession. (It has been said that this factor alone, with or without the absence of the clerical estate, was what left the American Wizards independent whether they wished to be or not. As is well known, the Statute of Secrecy, by its mere existence, long stifled the rationalisation of Wizarding borders and governments, which even now do not comport with Muggle bounds and political reality on the ground.)

'It was, however, the Statute of Secrecy as such that occasioned the removal of the Lords Spiritual from the Moot, just as it was the Statute of Secrecy that led to the closing of Domdaniel (although its organisational continuity was preserved by the self-perpetuation of the Fellows of Paracelsus as a body corporate) and very nearly put paid to Hogwarts School as well. The clergy, to a Wizard, refused to accept the Statute of Secrecy, on the grounds that it amounted to a capitulation to the "pureblood" extremist faction and was, moreover, an unconscionable abandonment of mutual discourse, aid, and charity as regarded our Muggle neighbours. As a body, they left the Moot, and, as a body, the rump of the Moot declared them as having been deprived of membership in perpetuity.

'It came as a shock to even the most historically-learned Wizards and Witches when, hard upon the Great Victory, and immediately upon the new constitutional settlement's being adopted, the Great Ledger was seen to update itself and summonsing owls were magically despatched with letters patent of election to Wizards whose very existence was largely unknown to the Wizarding World, or to Wizards who were, if they were known, accounted as being of little importance. The shock was redoubled when, at the next sitting, some 102 Wizards appeared at the bar of the Moot in response, and revealed themselves as the long-absent Lords Spiritual of the main religious bodies of Great Britain and Ireland, ranging from the Bishop of Salisbury (and Wizarding Archbishop of Wessex and Primate of All Britain) to the Chief Rabbi. In addition to those who were Muggle clergy, the Wizarding clerics and prelates included Wizards who passed amongst Muggles as farm labourers, physicians, gardeners, dons, solicitors, a Tory MP, writers, journalists, Writers to the Signet, barristers, farmers, fishermen, gentlemen of leisure - amazingly, a few yet remain in the Muggle world - trades union leaders, Naval officers, Army officers, one retired member of the England cricket side and official of the MCC, shopkeepers, bankers, butchers, two Other Ranks, a dispensing chemist, a thatcher, a plumber, and several hereditary peers. All had, in keeping with the traditions of the Cunning Men, lived and made their way amongst and amidst the Muggles, aiding them on the sly and helping to protect them from the worst of the past half-century's Wizarding disasters and upheavals.

'If nothing else, the Wizarding World may congratulate itself upon the strength of its charms and spells. As is true of the appearance that Hogwarts presents to passing Muggles, the churches and cathedrals of Wizard-dom are thought even by the most perceptive Muggles - such poets as Wordsworth, such painters as Turner - to be mere ruin'd choirs where late the sweet birds sang. Fountains, Rievaulx, Cambuskenneth, Tintern, Kirkham, Killone, Lindores, and a thousand others, reveal themselves only to Wizarding eyes in their continued and undiminished splendour, in the same way as in which Dunfermline and Linlithgow, Wallingford and Corfe, are reserved to the wonder and awe of the Wizarding Court.

'It will be noted in the following discussion that the metropolitan provinces of the archiepiscopal sees, the diocesan names and boundaries, and the overall geography of the churches's reaches do not, save by rare happenstance, coincide with those of their Muggle counterparts, and are not cognizant of Muggle national frontiers. This is hardly surprising, given the distinctly different courses taken by Muggle and by Wizarding history in these isles. It is also noteworthy that the Latin designations from which bishops's official signatures are taken, often preserve, as in amber, an earlier Roman, or Romanised, pre-Roman British, name of their sees, even when those sees are now known by a newer name or have their cathedral in a newer city.

'Similarly, again as a result of Wizard-dom's rather distinctive history, the Celtic Church, in Wizard-dom, has existed in unbroken continuity, and did not participate in, nor did it accede to the decisions of, the Synod of Whitby; it evaded, moreover, the destruction visited upon the Muggle Culdees by the Margaretsons. Equally, it would be fair to state either that none of the four primary Christian churches are by law established, or that, in a sense, all of them are established, in Wizarding law. Certainly the dewars, abbs, and coarbs of the Celtic communion, the bishops of the Anglican Wizarding communion, and the Wizarding prelates of the Roman Catholic Church, with the Regulator of the Wizarding Assembly of the Kirk and with the Chief Rabbi, are all ex officio Lords Spiritual of the Moot.

'It must finally be noted that, as a unique Wizarding dispensation, the exclusively Wizarding branches of the Scots Presbyterian, Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Columban Celtic churches are all in communion one with another: their primary differences being ones of usage, of ecclesiastical polity, and, bar the Kirk of Scotland, in their being episcopal churches that are respectively religious and monastic, and celibate save only rarely and for certain orders (the Celtic communion), mostly secular and married (the Anglican-rite Wizarding Church in Britain), and celibate whether secular or monastic (the Roman communion).

'In the Wizarding Church in Britain, the Archbishop of Wessex and Primate of All Britain is always the Muggle Bishop of Sarum, who, in that capacity, signs himself, 'SORVIOD'. The Archbishop of Llandaff is the Primate of Britain (LANDAV); the Archbishop of Iona & Arran is the Primus of All Scotland (INSUL); the Archbishop of Kilrymont & Falkland (formerly, of St Rule's) is the Primus of Scotland (REGUL); the Abbatial Prince-Archbishop of Lindisfarne and Hallam is the Primate of the North, formerly, of the North and the Danelaw (LINDIS); the Archbishop of Ard-Macha (WCiB) is Primate of all Ireland (ARDMACH); and Archbishop of Kells is Primate of Ireland (CEANN).

'In the Wizarding Celtic Church, the Primus is the Coarb of Iona and the provincial metropolitans are the Dewar of St Rule in Scotland, the Dewars of Caerleon and of Bardsey Island in Wales and Cornwall, the Dewars of Glastonbury and of Whithorn in England, and the Dewars of Rathbreasail and of Clonmacnoise in Ireland. The Wizarding Celtic Church is monastic and eremitical in organisation and tradition, and many Abbs and Dewars are not in episcopal orders, yet have within their communities a resident bishop who is not the leader of the community. Equally, many Wizarding Culdee bishops have no fixed see, and are, in the old Celtic tradition, episcopi vagantes.

'The Wizarding RCs, as a "particular Church" in RC canon law, are in the cure of the Bishop of Cerne (Dorset), the Bishop of Stoke, the Bishop of Prittlewell (Essex), the Bishop-Abbot of Melrose, the Bishop of Barra, the Bishop of Huntingdon, the Bishop of Kenfig, the Bishop of Ross, the Bishop of Kilfenora, the Cardinal Archbishop of Aviemore, the Cardinal Archbishop and Patriarch of Alresford, the Cardinal Archbishop (RC) of Ard-Macha and Louth, and the Cardinal Archbishop of Thurles. These metropolitan Wizarding sees are by canon law cardinal sees, and their incumbents are invariably granted the red hat.

'The Wizarding Kirk in Scotland is governed by the Regulator of the Wizarding Assembly, by synods, by presbyteries, and by local kirk sessions.

'Nonconformists have various ad hoc arrangements. There are many Wizarding meetings of the Society of Friends.

'The Chief Rabbi personally coordinates with the Jewish Wizarding Community in all regards, and with Orthodox, Masorti, Reform, and Liberal Jewry alike. In this, he is assisted by the principal figures of the New London Synagogue, of the Sternberg Centre, and of Leo Baeck College. The late Dr David Daiches and his father, the Revd Dr Salis Daiches, were longstanding Muggle-Magical Relations Coordinators for British Jewry, with special ties to Scotland. The Chief Rabbi and both Drs Daiches were Ravenclaws whilst at Hogwarts. Scotland, of course, in stark contrast to England, and indeed uniquely in Europe, has never seen a state persecution of Jews; to the contrary, the Declaration of Arbroath, asserting Scots independence and defying Edward of England and Pope John 22d both, defiantly proclaims, cum non sit Pondus nec distinccio Judei et greci, Scoti aut Anglici.

'A quibus Malis innumeris, ipso Juuante qui post uulnera medetur et sanat, liberati sumus per strenuissimum Principem, Regem et Dominum nostrum, Dominum Robertum, qui pro populo et hereditate suis de manibus Inimicorum liberandis quasi alter Machabeus aut Josue labores et tedia, inedias et pericula, leto sustinuit animo:

'From these countless evils, with His help who afterwards soothes and heals wounds, we are freed by our tireless leader, king, and master, Lord Robert, who like another Maccabaeus or Joshua, underwent toil and tiredness, hunger and danger with a light spirit in order to free the people and his inheritance from the hands of his enemies;

'Hinc est, Reuerende Pater et Domine, quod sanctitatem vestram omni precum instancia genuflexis cordibus exoramus quatinus sincero corde Menteque pia recensentes quod apud eum cuius vices in terris geritis cum non sit Pondus nec distinccio Judei et greci, Scoti aut Anglici:

'It is for these reasons, Reverend Father and Lord, that we beg your holiness with humble hearts and every urgent prayer, knowing that you will review everything with a true heart and a saintly mind since before Him in Whose name you reign on Earth there is neither bias nor difference between Jew or Greek, Scot or Angle....

'The attitudes of many branches of Islam towards Magic are problematic, precisely as is the case for many Chapel families (Plymouth Brethren, for example, are notoriously unimpressed by the receipt of a Hogwarts letter in the family), and this is particularly so for Muggle-born Witches and Wizards from Muslim families. Various Ismaili and Sufi disciplines are more accepting, and are generally found to be the traditional adherences of Wizarding-born British Muslim Witches and Wizards.'

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'"...Och, come ben, come ben, welcome to WWN Scotland's 'Cunning Folk', the finest in Scots folk-minstrelsy. On this nicht, we have...."'

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Lundie in Angus shelters beneath the Sidlaws, at the head of the Dighty Water and the Clushmill Burn, between the Long Loch and Blacklaw Hill, within scent and sound of the Firth of Forth, there southwards beyond the Carse of Gowrie. Many of its sons go no further in life than Dundee - aye, or but to Pitlochry or Coupar Angus.

In that fateful year of Our Lord 1692, the year of the Statute of Secrecy and of the Massacre at Glencoe, a canny young Scot set up to trade in the Strand, in 'London far': away and away from the craigs and cotts of Lundie. His surname being Campbell, he was not suspected of disaffection towards the Glorious Revolution and the Protestant Succession. He was possessed of the art of smithcraft, a goldsmith of no mean repute, and he appeared to have, as well, some considerable amount of capital to lend at interest. There in the Strand, beneath the sign of the Three Crowns, this Scot of unknown origins and unspecified attainments and schooling set up as a goldsmith and banker. His gold was pure, his credit sound, and his craft sure. A few years before, the last of a family of dyers and tapestry-makers in Paris had abandoned their trade and the surname that their skills had earned them from their superstitious neighbours, immersing themselves wholly in the affairs of the petty nobility they had joined; and men said of the craftsmanship of John Campbell of Lundie and London, banker and goldsmith, what they had said of the craft of the Gobelins in France, that it seemed almost magical, goblin-work.

Two years after, the Bank of England was formed. The year after that, the Scots Parliament established the Bank of Scotland, which would later be shunted aside, though it bides in existence yet, for the Royal Bank of Scotland, in 1727, the 'Auld Bank' being suspect of supporting the King O'er the Watter, Guid King Jamie o' the Hoose o' Stuart, to whom, indeed, it was gey leal, having been the paymaster of the Jacobite Cause in the '15.

All these storms did John Campbell weather, untouched, hammering out the fine gold and lending sound money to the rich and the titled.

Braw Jock o' Lundie and his partner, successor, and son-in-law, George Middleton, another Scot of uncertain antecedents from a family long established in Forfarshire, Kincardineshire, and Aberdeenshire, had founded a commercial dynasty, and within a few decades, the business was solely a banking house: 'the Bankers at 59 Strand', at which address the company would remain for the next 165 years. John Campbell's granddaughter married yet a third Scot, from a family that was a sept of the Clan Farquharson, in 1755, ten years after the '45, when it was safe to arrange a marriage between a typically Hanoverian family of Campbells and Middletons and a traditionally Jacobite family that was a part of the great Clan Chattan Confederacy. This new blood, that of James Coutts, took the bank to new heights, and gave it the name it has today.

'Do you seriously mean to tell me -'

'Hermione! Please. Quietly.'

'Oh, honestly, Harry, what do you expect? This is ... you are telling me that Gringotts's Muggle branch -'

'Not branch, love. Its correspondent bank.'

'--That the link between Gringotts and the Muggle world is Coutts?'

Ron looked perplexed. 'Aren't they just the posh branch of the old NatWest and now the Royal Bank of Scotland? Bankers to the Queen and all that?'

'Precisely,' said Draco, with a smirk. 'In other words, the link between Gringotts and the Muggle City financiers and banks.'

'But.' Hermione gave them an evil look. 'I suppose you'll tell me that both of you, and your families before you, are clients?'

'Why would that matter?' Ron was mildly puzzled, but not particularly interested.

'Ron! You can't open an account with Coutts unless you've at least £100,000 in ready cash or £500,000 in assets, they cater - truckle - to the rich and titled, they are in fact precisely the sort of private bank that the Blacks and the Malfoys ... and, yes, the Potters ... would use, they were probably founded by Slytherins -'

Harry laughed. 'Take off the red rosette, Hermione. Jock Campbell of Lundie was a Ravenclaw, actually. You can look it up, actually, it's in Hogwarts: A History -'

'HARRY!'

'--And you can only bank there if you're invited.'

'Oh. So you're not a client -'

'Sorry, Hermione, I am, just as the Potters have been since 1692. But remember - ah, ah, calm down - I said, "invited", and you're not quite correct, you know, about the basis of that invitation, it's not just mun.'

'For example,' said Draco, rather coolly, 'although the Blacks and the Potters have been clients for yonks, they never accepted the Malfoys as clients.'

'And the capital requirements are there for Muggles. Simply being a Witch or a Wizard gets you in - unless, as Draco says, your reputation is bad. They are after all in with Gringotts and with Goldstein & Zabini, you know.'

'Then why have I not been - is this some blood status nonsense?'

'Hermione! Do you think I'd accept it for a moment if it were?'

'Oh, Harry, I'm sorry, it's just -'

'Granger - oh, all right, Hermione - you don't actually bank in the Muggle world, do you. I assure you, though, that if you were to do, your accounts would be found at what the Muggles call, "Coutts" -'

'What the Muggles -'

'It's kept the old name amongst Wizards, Hermione. Christ, they've an office in Hogsmeade High Street: Campbell & Middleton Private Bankers.'

'Oh,' said Ron, twigging. 'Yeah, we all bank there, everyone does, it's nothing special, it's the retail bank and Muggle-Wizard contact for Gringotts. Dunno what all the fuss is about.'

Hermione glared impartially at the three of them.

---------------------------------

'Ah, yes,' said Tessa Zabini. 'I'm sure that the culture shock compounded dear Justin's dismay, didn't it, darling? Such a long way from, ah, from ... what county is it again your people are from?'

'I'll give you a hint,' said Justin, struggling to control his annoyance. Unterperger already suspected him of wanting to kill his mother-in-law, simply because she was his mother-in-law: evidently Unterperger was a married man, and considered that to be motive in itself. 'It's famous for its gentry, its food, its churches, its pubs, its rowing, its undergraduates punting on the river, and its ancient University.'

'Oh, of course, darling, Oxfordshire, then.'

'Damn it, Tessa,' said Justin, 'Cambridgeshire, damn it all!'

_________________________________

'... "Magister Which: Hex Storm'; and whilst the Magister prepares to leave the Stadium* and enter the fray, Troughton is plotting to execute his Dark orders.'

____________________________________

'Well, then,' said Blaise to Master Rhys; 'well, then?'

Rhys paused for a moment. Justin was looking at him - looking at them both - with an anxious fondness.

'Well, Uncle Blaise.... It's a lovely bit of country.... But. It isn't Wales.'

---------------------------------

'Signor.' Signor Unterperger's tone was very dry. 'Non-magical persons and Wizards are always at one another's throats, and so it has ever been. It is the state of nature, it cannot be changed. One merely keeps it within the bounds of law.'

'If you believe that, if you've no hope of a better future, why, pray, do you not simply give up?'

'Because, Signor Potter, it is my duty. Hope does not enter into it.'

It was at that point that a flash of silver was seen: a message, urgent, full of portent.

---------------------------------

END

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* 'Space-Time and Dimensional Interface under Magic', of course.