Chapter Text
***
1 November 1997
All Saints' Day
Justorum animae in manu Dei sunt,
et non tanget illos tormentum mortis.
She had never lost the understanding she had developed in childhood of the ebb and flow of the liturgical year, of its rhythm of celebration and grief, of the gentle tide of her father’s sermons - solemnity with Lent blossoming into jubilation at Easter - as he sat on the hard, straight chair she had taken into her quarters at Hogwarts as her own, bent over his Bible, looking for the thread he would pull out of it to lead his flock, the weatherbeaten men and women of moor and glen, through times of trouble.
She was an old woman now, although she had never lost her essential vigour; the straightness of back and primness of manner which made generations of students know she was not one to be crossed. Her father had been dead for many years, like her two lost loves, waiting until his appointed time to rise in glory. The pain of their parting had always been softened by the recognition that he had lived and died well, that the passing of a fine elderly man is less tragic than the deaths of the young and full of promise, a lesson she was learning all the time now. She still missed him, of course, missed the fondness for bagpipes and mussels-in-brine she had been the only one of his children to share - a secret language woven into the flax-loom air of the highland manse which only they could speak.
She missed that still.
The hidden speech of sound and taste the Reverend Robert McGonagall had shared with his daughter had spun out into words, as soft as heather and honey. He had always been a man who could be counted on to provide comfort, woollen and warm, the rectitude of simple, unadorned religion. She had grown used, as a child, to a procession of the grieving coming through the house at all hours, all seeking the consolation of her father’s wisdom, in a voice rich and sure, that blessed are they that mourn.
Minerva McGonagall longed for that consolation, while she herself was mourning.
October ends with All Hallows’ Eve, November blooms with All Saints’ Day. Both are feasts to honour the souls of the holy dead. She had many such people on her list this year.
She clutched a wreath in her hand - teasels and heather and broom, transfigured from the latest posters of wanted members of the Order, which they were compelled by Educational Decree to display in their classrooms; a way to draw beauty from savagery - as she made her way towards the marble tomb where Albus lay, unaware that the school he so loved was now in the hands of his murderer, that its almost miraculous wonder was beginning to crumble under the demonic forces Lord Voldemort had let loose across Britain. The halls were quieted, the students wan-faced and nervous, ripping the letters they received from home each morning open like beggars tearing into bread, restless for news that their parents were still alive, that their families had not heard the knock on the door of skeletal fingers, that the walls of their houses had not trembled under the virescent curse of poisonous yew.
Here, at least, at the edge of the forest, life was trying to continue. The leaves were decaying, yes, but they would mulch the ground for things to creep and crawl, and rot into the earth to bring life forth anew. She heard birdsong, defiant in the morning air.
It reminded her of Fawkes.
‘I miss you,’ she said to the tomb. She was fond of plain speaking. The old bugger deserved to hear it from her frankly.
She told him of her longing for his Muggle sweets and ridiculous fashion sense, for his steady calm and ancient power, for the fact that his tone-deafness did not stop him humming along to the chamber music blasting from his gramophone. She did not tell him of his more profound absence in her life - that she missed his ruthless pragmatism, his incandescent skill, the fact that he was the only person on earth of whom Lord Voldemort was afraid. Why would she? There was no point, she reasoned, in delving into the constant state of despair she found herself in, when Albus was in no position to do anything about it. What need was there to tell him about the horror, stark and unrelenting, of seeing Snape’s yellow fingers rest on the arms of Albus’ chair, or Snape’s dead black eyes peering across Albus’ desk, or Snape’s thin lips curved in a malevolent smile when the Carrows brought him news from their master? What use would there be in tearing her garments and screaming at Albus over his utter witlessness, his deranged lack of judgement, his holy fool’s compassion, in trusting a man so patently evil, which had led to him festering in his grave, and the greasy boy he had sworn to be reformed standing, like a pretender, where he had once stood?
And what use was there in making Albus aware of her second loss, of the clenching ache of feeling as though her Snape had also been replaced with a usurper? This had been one of the great shocks, when he had alighted from the train on the first day of term, clutching letters patent with Lord Voldemort’s effete black flourish of a signature on them, and nodded at her curtly, malice in the tight line of his eyes, and she had realised her fury was not just for Albus, or for Harry, or for the good people who were trapped in the Dark Lord’s web of cinereous evil, but for herself.
It had struck her - with a grief that was absurd, given his manifold other crimes - that she would miss hearing him needle Filius in staff meetings, or stealing the last chocolate biscuit from under Horace’s nose, or arguing about Quidditch, or muttering rudely under his breath about Sybill. The man who had done those things had been, while not her friend, part of the furniture of the castle, deceptively solid despite his thin, sallow wretchedness. His absence, his replacement with the vampiric creature who had assassinated Albus in cold blood, was like another death had come to a castle already heavy with sorrowing.
But, then again, perhaps she should not have been surprised. Death had always seemed to follow Snape around, like crows after tilled soil. Even as an eleven-year-old, his robes had not been smart, as they were on handsome boys like James Potter and Sirius Black, but the dull, heavy jet of widow’s weeds. He had sat in her classroom, simmering with an anger which rolled out into the air like incense, but there was a plaintiveness too, lurking beneath the surface, as though he felt that only by anger could his essential misery be consoled.
This was why it had been so odd for her to realise, after weeks of watching the other boys in his house - rich boys, pureblood boys, boys whose fathers were on first-name terms with Lord Voldemort long before the fighting started in earnest - ignore him in lessons, that he had a friend, and that his friend was the ball of coppery light she always remembered Lily Evans as being. She had observed them after that, as a woman and a cat, and had seen Snape’s poor heart soothed by closeness to the girl, had watched as he sat, rapt, in her radiance as she wittered on about the others in her dorm and Horace and chocolates and her sister and all the various concerns of those on the cusp of growing up, vital and trivial all at once. She had watched, and had seen James Potter lurking all the while behind them, and Sirius lurking behind James.
She had always suspected, when Snape lost Lily, that James must have had something to do with it.
She hadn’t said anything, of course. She hadn’t really regarded it as a particular loss for the young woman, to jettison the awkward mongrel who followed her around with ungainly adoration and choose a boy like James, much less interesting but much less complicated, a safe bet. James had died as he lived, stupidly and bravely and with love in his heart.
She had suspected the girl mourned over her parting from Snape nonetheless, no matter how well she hid it. That is the way of the world, when you are a woman. Women’s withdrawing is different than men’s. Men lose in sound and fury, the collapse of a baccarat table or decimation on a battlefield; men get to be sore and stubborn, to consider themselves the victims of forces beyond their control, to blame and forget. Women, in contrast, must continue on, even when a part of them has been lost. They must be the solid walls of empty houses, the sturdy soles of unfilled shoes, the distending space of a liquid-less cauldron. Lily had walked away to miss and to die, and Snape had lived to rage and to kill, and that was the fact of the matter.
Hopefully, her repose in paradise, whither she had been sent by the reptilian monster Snape bowed before even now, on the strength of Snape’s own word, had put paid to any celestial affection for the man. Hopefully, her childhood friend’s incandescent hatred of her son would have made her angry, the sort of anger - self-interested and self-pitying and bitter - that Snape had always indulged in but women are so rarely allowed, as sweet as they are expected to be.
Hopefully, in the heavenly realm Minerva always hoped had greeted her father with a good whisky and a comfortable chair, Lily would have the means to know where her son was, and if he was alright.
The souls of the just are in the hand of God,
and the torment of death shall not touch them.
***
24 December 1997
Christmas Eve
Ecce civitas sancti facta est deserta,
Sion deserta facta est, Jerusalem desolata est.
The days grew increasingly darker, autumn’s dampness giving way to winter’s chill, until it was December and the entire castle was enveloped in a shroud of heavy gloom. Beyond its walls, the world grew bleaker still, the news which came from London so inhuman as to seem almost nonsensical. Muggleborns were being rounded up, daily, to starve on the streets (if they were lucky) and die in Azkaban (if they were not). Dolores Umbridge’s toadish face simpered out from the front pages, as she gave speech after speech about the ‘safeguards the government is taking to ensure that magic endures’.
‘What would she know of endurance?’ Minerva thought, scrunching the paper into a ball and setting fire to it, unwilling to allow its poison the courtesy of anything other than ashes. She wished she had cursed Umbridge during the agonising year in which they were colleagues, instead of trying to cow her with flinty dismissal and being disappointed when she simply came back, like mould, all the stronger. Umbridge had never strived or struggled for anything in her life, slithering like a centipede into the gaps between right and wrong and then wiggling out of them again when she had corrupted them sufficiently. She was a performer, a rattling boggart, with no steadfastness or truth to her at all. No wonder she suited Lord Voldemort, with his mask of a face and his fake name and the rumours, which even the Carrows could not quash, of the circulation of Muggle blood in his veins.
Minerva had Muggle blood too. Her father, as Muggle a man as ever had lived, had spoken often of endurance, especially during Advent, when the nights around the manse were oppressive with wind and snow. When Elphinstone had died, in the chill of a December squall, exposing the fragility of happiness to her with devastating effect, he had come to her, into the magical world, and held her hand, and told her that her grief would be something steady, not something to fix, but something to carry along. He had told her that this was true of the time before Christmas, that the season was one of waiting, despite the darkness, for something better to come.
Before she had been born, before her father had met and married her mother and been introduced to the world of transfigured teacups and levitating books, he had served, as so many men did, in that most famous of Muggle disasters, the Great War. He and his men had been shivering and suffering all through Advent, despairing and dying in the mud near Ypres while the top brass continued to insist the whole thing would be wrapped up soon. Scores of her father’s comrades had expired already, young men - boys really - whose lives were expendable in the face of the greater good.
God, she was so angry at Albus. She had not visited his tomb in weeks.
There had been a mutual agreement, initially, that the teachers were not going to touch Rita Skeeter’s hatchet job, that the book wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. They had stopped their ears as the Carrows read passages from it at dinner, Amycus pausing at bits he thought sufficiently damning to say that he would be sure to send the quotes to the Dark Lord, while Snape listened intently, one stained finger tracing the outline of his lips. Filius said they should shred the book for paper chains, to try and bring some of the festive levity Albus had so loved into a castle grown cold and hard with fear.
Albus had adored Christmas, its gemstone twinkle the physical manifestation of his own whimsy (carefully constructed, she knew now). He had adored colour and sound, he had worn garish robes and given thoughtful presents, he had spoken gently to her on Christmas Eve nights of his mother’s own steady Methodism, and the candlelight and carols of his childhood, and she had felt as though they understood each other, that he was her confidant and friend.
And then, when the magnificent dinner was done, he would disappear back into his tower, to his secrets.
‘He must have a plan,’ they had all said, as Lord Voldemort grew stronger.
‘There must be a reason,’ they had all said, as evil rose and Dumbledore did little to stop it.
‘He must not have known,’ they had all said, when their friends were killed, or when Pettigrew went free, or when an imposter wore the skin of Alastor Moody for a full year and Dumbledore didn’t notice. ‘He was not infallible.’
And then they had learned he had been reluctant to confront evil for his entire life, letting his golden-haired idol desecrate Europe because he feared to see horror in his beautiful face, letting one of his own pupils kill and maim under his very nose, because to confront him would be to admit the impossibility of his redemption, letting Snape wheedle and cringe his way into favour, into a comfortable bed and a well-paid job, while he waited for Lord Voldemort to rise from his grave.
How pathetic, for the man proclaimed everywhere as the greatest of wizards.
Her father had no wand, no power more potent than his faith in the cross, but he had confronted evil with a stout and resolute heart. He had climbed from his trench on Christmas Day and strode out into the desolation of No-Man’s-Land, to shake the chilblained hands of men he had been told were his sworn enemy, and kick footballs with them, and seek amid the bloodshed the truth that the cause they were racing to die for - the cause of King and Country, the cause of the Greater Good - was a macabre futility. They were all God’s creatures. Could they not live in peace?
No. Muggles had not learned their lessons, had not understood the message of their poppies and ‘never again’. Another war had followed and others after that.
Wizards, too, were still fonder of fighting than they were of peace.
But surely even some of Lord Voldemort’s men loathed the crimson tide their master had set roaring across Europe?
In her weaker moments, she wondered if Snape was one of them. He looked ill - grey-skinned - and he was losing weight where he had no weight spare to shed. He paced the halls unsleeping every night, robes no longer billowing behind him but hanging limp, like a cloth from a coffin. When letters came, in emerald ink, in Lord Voldemort’s flowing, spidery handwriting, his hands trembled as he unsealed them.
She thought sometimes, idly, about frog-marching him to his office - his old one, in the dungeons, not the one he had usurped - and forcing him to soup and sleep. She had done so during the year Sirius was loose, and they all feared him coming to the castle to kill Harry, when Snape’s unshakable conviction that Lupin knew something had almost given him an ulcer, and she had snapped at him about trying to control his anger, to shed his self-pity, and just eat some bloody dinner. And he had laughed - one of his genuine laughs, the rare ones - and she had felt a crack appear in the wall of house loyalty and communication styles which always seemed to hold them back from understanding one another. It would, she thought, hands shaking as she listened to the latest Potterwatch, be pleasant to feel that easing again.
And then she remembered who he was and what he’d done, and was disgusted.
But then she would berate herself for her revulsion, as angry at herself as she was at Albus. For they had all seen him as a child - seen how he stayed every Christmas, every Easter, even if he was the only Slytherin in the castle, how he was tired and thin and careworn even at twelve. How, once he lost Lily, he was alone, a bitter fruit, pocked and unattractive, undefended by brambles and ready for plucking by Lord Voldemort’s long fingers.
If they had intervened, would things have been different?
Surely not? What teenage boy wishes to take the advice of his teachers? What teenage boy looks for friends among the old and the lonely? She could feel confident that Snape’s evil was innate, that it had not been something which had seeded by accident, that she had done nothing wrong in her failure to grasp out the weed taking root in his teenage soul. Couldn’t she?
The truth, which she loathed to admit, was that she could not.
She had always chafed against the expectation that, since she was a woman, she would be maternal, even as she and Elphinstone had felt the sting of the room set aside as a nursery lying empty. It had been a shock, a hammer-blow, when she had returned to Hogwarts to teach, pleased to shed the stifling masculinity of the Ministry for a castle of learned - and equal - discourse, and had discovered instead that the men on the staff all believed that she, through virtue of her sex, should do all of the emotional labour they considered beneath themselves. Armando, Horace, even Albus, all of them had viewed boyfriend trouble and homesickness as her job, and had shut themselves away to debate the finer points of theory while she battled against a tide of hormonal teenagers.
When Albus had become headmaster, she had said no more, and had taught from then on as the men did, detached from the emotional drama of her charges’ lives. When the children in her care wanted to be coddled, she sent them elsewhere - to Filius, whose own masculinity was already so unconventional that he did not think it sullied by tears and chocolate, or to Pomona, whose earthy motherliness, all biscuits and tea and rib-cracking hugs, Minerva had always felt uncomfortably betrayed by.
No longer. Now, she wished she had been more like them, and less like Albus, and Horace, and Snape - intolerant of those who were not brilliant, unsympathetic to those who struggled. Snape had loathed Harry, and she had allowed it, instead of seeing it as the clearest clue of his great malignancy. Because Harry hadn’t tried in Potions, had needled Snape constantly and shouted and defied, and she had felt, to some extent, that Snape was therefore right to be enraged by him, as she herself had been enraged by Peter Pettigrew, or Fred and George Weasley, or Neville Longbottom.
Neville was turning into quite a figure, a plump knight with burnished shield and bloodied face, as he exhorted the others to resistance and hope, Harry’s name like a saint’s on his lips. God, he looked so much like Alice. Everyone focused so intently on how profoundly Harry resembled James (‘except for the eyes,’ Albus would say, twinkling) that they missed how many other students wore scars from the first time war had raged - Susan Bones had her uncle’s manner, Hannah Abbott her mother’s grace, Ginny Weasley the blazing stare with which Fabian and Gideon had faced Antonin Dolohov. So many of those who were in her care were palimpsests of grief, forced to be brave beyond their years while their teachers barely succeeded at the job of keeping them alive.
She wondered where Harry was, and if he was alright. He had not been spotted since the summer, since an audacious break-in at the Ministry which had forced Snape into a week’s worth of crisis meetings with a furious Lord Voldemort. She felt sure he was alive, though. That was the hope she had through the darkness of Advent.
On Christmas Day, in 1914, the fighting had ceased for a single day of peace and goodwill-to-all-men. Would Lord Voldemort allow them that? Did he celebrate Christmas with feasting and fairy lights, a paper crown on his skull-like head? Did he go in for rosaries and transubstantiation, or the plain religion of her childhood? Or was he as godless a sinner as had ever been created? Would he let them all meet on the Quidditch pitch and play, just for a couple of hours, Rolanda refereeing and the Lestranges in goal, and her and Snape in the stands, teasing each other with the warmth and wit of their other life, before they had to take up their wands against each other again?
No, of course he wouldn’t. And why should he? The brief peace in the trenches had done nothing - there had been fighting before it and fighting after it, it had done nothing to stop the death on wholesale scale, men and boys lost to the mud of the fields.
This war was the same. The fighting would stop when Harry killed him.
That was what they were enduring until.
Thy holy city is a wilderness,
Sion is a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation.
***
25 February 1998
Ash Wednesday
Audire me facies gaudium et lætitiam,
et exultabunt ossa, quæ contrivisti.
Her mother had died on Shrove Tuesday. Died young, for a witch, from what Minerva - rushing to her childhood home from Hogwarts so quickly she had splinched a fingernail, aware of the irony that she had left a bit of herself in the magical world as she whirled back into the Muggle one - had viewed as a surfeit of tiredness, of simply being unable and unwilling to continue living in the world she had only tentatively accepted and which had only tentatively accepted her in return.
The next day, as the heaviness of loss settled, a cooling teacup on a windowsill, a book now never to be finished on a bedside table, her father had stepped from the manse with heavy feet, to lead his flock out on their long journey through Lent. He wore simple black, as Minerva’s own students did. He did not wear ashes on his head, as the Romans were fond of - her father, although a tolerant man, had no leeway for popery - but Minerva’s own head had felt weighed down with dust. She had watched her mother’s still body, lying as though sleeping in her bed, and been unable to grasp at words which expressed the profundity of her journeying forth, of the now-quieted grace of her mother’s clever fingers, of the now-unheard melody of her voice, of the now-never-to-be-discussed knowledge she possessed of her mother’s misery and jealousy, a lonely sprite made a clergyman’s wife, while her daughter danced off to remain forever in the magical world.
Her father had sensed her torment. Lent is a time of grieving, he had said. But it is a time for forgiveness too.
She had been bright enough to perceive it as a child, and, by the time she was a grown woman, had understood incontrovertibly that her parents’ marriage had been forever marred by the revelation of magic. She knew that her father, as he held one slim hand in his own, a solid and silent presence by her mother’s bed, was offering the burnt sacrifice of his love, his careful, solid fidelity, to a woman who had felt so often constrained by the lime-white walls of the manse.
Why didn’t you leave? She had raged at her mother once, when the ache of her dual citizenship, stretched between her father’s world and the magical one, had become too oppressive. Why didn’t you simply marry a wizard, and keep me far from this mess? For, surely, love had not been so all-consuming that it had made her mother shed the world of her birth like a snake-skin, and leave her wand in a drawer, and cry with mingled sorrow and joy when her daughter clicked her toddler-fingers and made flowers appear? For, after all, she had refused a Muggle’s suit, shutting love up in a box with her Muggle clothes and her Muggle music and her Muggle folk-dancing, and retreated behind the impenetrable walls of the Statute of Secrecy.
When students came to Hogwarts, fresh from the Muggle world, she pretended not to feel a pang of envy curl around her heart. She offered no childish comfort to questions about why telephones didn’t work, or whether their parents could come to the school if they were sick, explaining instead that the answer was ‘no, because of magic’ and that was all there was to it. She shut her eyes to how many of her Muggleborn students became secretive, never truly telling their families anything about their experience at school, conditioned to believe from their first week in the castle that the world of their birth was lost to them now, that they would never be truly understood by those who numbered among the mundane. She turned her face away from how many of her Muggleborn students took to magic with the zeal of converts, pouring over Hogwarts: A History, lest some pureblood child, with sneering face and ancestral authority, decided to examine them, to question their right to walk the same hallowed halls as they did.
She made herself blind to the fact that those who were Muggle-raised teetered on a knife edge. That Harry could have fallen in with Draco Malfoy, and seen the cause of blood-and-magic supremacy as entirely sensible. All sides practised it, after all. All sides were intolerant of anyone who tried to cling to Muggle science and sense, who wished to visit cinemas or carry a credit card, who wished for relationships with their Muggle fathers unaffected by the fact of magic.
Snape had been one of those who fell from the knife onto the wrong side. He never wore Muggle clothes or expressed any admiration for Muggle culture, but she knew very well where he had come from. She knew his father had worked in a mill and smoked a packet of fa*gs a day, and that he had been friends with Lily Evans, who would die for the crime of being Muggleborn.
And she had not felt it necessary to intervene. She had seen Lucius Malfoy’s fingers curl upon his shoulder, seen Edmund Avery’s words sink into his soul, seen Maxwell Mulciber’s curses adapted by his skill, and she had done nothing more than mention her concerns in passing to Albus. He had done nothing either, and she had considered the matter closed, not realising that he was thinking of Abraxas Malfoy standing beside an earlier half-blood, also dark and too thin, and pouring poison into him which, once unleashed, could only spread.
She had not realised this, because she had not felt the need to look, the knowledge that her own discerning unease about her blood would have raised her worth in the eyes of Lord Voldemort and his supporters always sitting uneasily, and uninterrogated, upon her heart.
But now she was an old woman, and a lonely one herself, and she could forgive herself her pride and her mother her loneliness and her hope, and conclude that the resilience she had instilled in her daughter was a gift so golden that it atoned for all the pain of their earlier relationship. Now she was faced with the whirling vortex of emotion, she could forgive her father his determined grip on rationality - which she herself had certainly inherited when it came to Sybill - and his lack of superstition, his stubborn dismissal of the magical and miraculous. She could understand why such things are too painful to confront.
And, anyway, her father had taught her about forgiveness.
‘I forgive you,’ she had whispered to Albus’ portrait, before she left the headmaster’s office, having stormed up there in a rage at the Carrows and forgotten all self-preservation to scream at Snape, who had simply sneered at her and banished her from his sight.
‘I forgive you,’ she had told the portrait, its oil-paint robes a distracting fuschia, its stippled gaze as unwavering as Albus’ had been when he was alive, and she had meant it. She had been able to see the loneliness and the love and the logic and the weakness for golden hair which had been his downfall, and recognise the same impulses in others she had lost.
‘But I shall never forgive you, Severus,’ she had said, voice hard with rage, as she had whirled from the room, down the moving staircase, not willing to spare a glance backwards to see if there was any note of sorrow on Snape’s thin face.
Not that she would have cared if there had been.
‘He must retain some capacity for goodness,’ Filius had said, his voice a small squeak of hope. Snape had found Amycus torturing a Ravenclaw first year and sent him away, before escorting the boy to the hospital wing. ‘We must nurture it. We must try to get him to choose the light, even after all the darkness he has done.’
‘Hear, hear,’ said Pomona.
Minerva had said nothing. She could not, she would not engage in this play-acting at hope, she would never try to bend her soul towards forgiveness, when Snape’s soul was a festering thing, a pile of offal unworthy of care.
Oh, it ashamed her. Of course it did. She had been raised to be in awe of the power of contrition, of the exculpatory nature of mercy. She knew that rage made the soul corrode with lesions. But she was just so angry. And sometimes anger is, in itself, atonement. Sometimes anger is an acknowledgement of wrongdoing, of being too quick to trust and too slow to reject and too weak-willed to destroy.
This is not how women are expected to be sorry. Women are expected to look at the floor and be meek. Women are expected to hear those above them say ‘you disgust me’ and to accept it. They are not expected to burn with the righteous fire of grief and salvation, until they, like palm fronds, have burned away to ash. When she had been in the Ministry, when she had realised how wrong she had been in continuing to stay in a job which despised her, they had told her that her outrage was unbecoming, that it was not cleansing or powerful, and she had been furious.
When Harry had stood before Dolores Umbridge, furious and potent, she had advised caution. No more. When Harry came, as she knew he must, she would stand beside him, until the darkness was engulfed by their rage.
Make me to hear joy and gladness,
that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.
***
10 April 1998
Good Friday
Vidit suum dulcem Natum
moriendo desolatum,
dum emisit spiritum.
‘But we must never lose hope,’ her father would say, as the church was still and desolate at the time when Christ died on the cross. ‘Today is not a day of sorrow. Now is not the hour for mourning or crying. It is an hour to rejoice. It is a day to trust in the resurrection, a day to hope in the triumph of life over death.’
She had been clinging to hope recently - not the soft hope, the hope of feathers, but hope like a rose with thorns, the sort of hope that pierces the skin and draws blood, like a spear in the side of the saviour of the world. Bitter hope, the hope of being given vinegar to drink. The hope of Elphinstone’s firm hands and Dougal’s ruddy face, talismanic sights which drew her back to times of happiness, shot through with the solidity of grief. The hope of her mother’s solitude. The hope of her father’s faith, not the weak faith of the comfortable but the martyred faith of the Apostles, the faith of believing and bearing witness as the state rolled its forces out to destroy you. The hope of red eyes dulled, of monsters thudding to the floor like mortal men, of her friends and her students battered and bruised and alive and victorious.
That is what hope means when you are a woman. Men can hope in simplicity and certainty, hope for a fish from the sea, hope for a seed to give shoot. Women have to hope in silence and waiting and pain, concealing their mission like a secret guarded by Occlumency, like the women outside the tomb with their gauze and their spices and their love.
She had been waiting, watching, in the greyness of the spring morning, the days lightening and warming even if the news from the front did not. And she found herself, against all reason, filled with hope.
Snape continued to get greyer, but there was a fire in him she could not recall from his childhood, opalescent and bright. Lord Voldemort had visited them, to survey his castle and seize something from Albus’ tomb, and Snape had looked triumphant, as though a plan was coming to fruition, as though decisions the Dark Lord believed himself to be making were being directed by a quite different hand. She had seen a Patronus, a doe - a gilded icon, silver and pure - walking through the mists of the lawn, while she was out hunting in her cat form. She had seen that doe before, bounding around a woman who was long dead. And she wondered…
‘What if he was dying?’ whispered Filius to her once, in the stillness of pre-dawn, so quiet that his words could have been imagined, so gentle he might not have spoken at all. ‘What if that curse in his hand was killing him? What if he planned to go that way, on his own terms, before he got so weak he could not resist He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named? What if that’s the real truth?’
But what is truth? That is the question of Good Friday. In whom can they place their faith? Who can they trust to lead the vanquishing of death by the golden flame of love?
She had begun visiting the tomb again, laying spring flowers - foxgloves, which break your heart, and bluebells, which allow one to speak the truth - on the marble. She had deigned to talk to Albus again, to remind him of how they would both look forward to the end of the Quidditch year, when the entire school was feverish and childish with excitement. She would tell him, fingers tracing the inscription on the marble, that there is still Quidditch this year - Snape had insisted, even though the Dark Lord seemed to loathe the sport - and that it allowed the students a small respite from their grinding stress, as they cheered themselves hoarse, hoping that their team would win as if that was all that mattered in the world.
They have had so little hope, in anything, in Albus, for this past year. They have assumed him blind, tricked. They have never dared believe that he may have planned the whole thing.
‘We cannot let ourselves be vulnerable,’ Pomona said. ‘We cannot think of anything joyful unless in secret and silence. If You-Know-Who visits the castle…’
If he visited the castle, and he read hope in their thoughts, then he would slaughter Severus, and probably a handy few of them for good measure.
So they must hope in waiting, in the stillness of the three day vigil before God would roll the stone from His own tomb. Hope that there is goodness lurking in their walls. Hope that trust has not been misplaced. Hope that Harry will come soon.
She saw her sweet Son
dying, forsaken,
as he gave up the spirit.
***
31 May 1998
Pentecost
Hostem repellas longius
pacemque dones protinus;
ductore sic te praevio
vitemus omne noxium.
The Romans celebrate Pentecost with red - the red of rose petals, and wine, and blood. The red of cleansing fire. The red of Lord Voldemort’s ruby eyes shattering under the force of their own curse. Gryffindor red. The banner of the brave. The sort of colour that befits a time of furious joy, a joy of grief and rage and hope.
But the bouquet she gathered on the edge of the forest was green, for a Slytherin. The plants were magical, the herbs and weeds - unloved by the gardener, since they are not beautiful, adored by the sort of man to whom beauty is a stranger - which made the potions he so loved, which heal and sing, which are like liquid lullabies for the broken and alone. Their colour was the verdant emerald of the silent, ancient glade, where the unmarked grave in which they had unceremoniously dumped the man he had faced and loathed and fought would soon be covered in lilies of the valley, the emerald of the lake at morning, the emerald of the eyes he had chosen to keep hoping for, green lamps across the dock, illuminating his way in the darkness.
A bird spoke and a branch broke and the air glittered with the promise of a world transformed.
‘All is well,’ she said to the forest. ‘It is time to live.’
Far from us drive our deadly foe;
true peace unto us bring;
and through all perils lead us safe
beneath thy sacred wing.
***
