Evelyn

I was at his door at a quarter to seven on Monday morning, before the castle had properly woken.

The office was in the Astronomy Wing, along the corridor past the Charms classroom, up three steps and round a corner where the light from the tall windows didn’t reach. I knew the way without thinking. I had climbed those three steps more times than I could count, in the year when everything had happened at once, with a question or a cut lip or a piece of news I could not carry on my own. I had not climbed them since the end of my fifth year.

The door was the same door. Somebody had oiled the hinges.

I knocked. There was a pause long enough that I thought he might not be up. Then a voice said, “Come,” in the tone of a man who had been up for some time.

He was standing at a washstand by the window with his sleeves turned back to the elbow, scrubbing his hands. A basin of water steamed on the stand beside a bar of plain yellow soap. He was using a nailbrush on the backs of his fingers with slow, thorough strokes, as though it were a thing worth doing well. He didn’t stop when I came in. He looked at me over his half-moon spectacles, then went back to his hands.

“Miss White,” he said.

I had not told him my name. I had been about to.

“Sir. I wondered whether I might speak to you.”

“You are speaking to me.” He rinsed his hands, one and then the other, and reached for a towel. “Sit down, if you can find somewhere.”

I looked round for somewhere. Fig had kept this room in a state of comfortable chaos: books in towers on the floor, maps pinned over maps, a teapot that was never empty and never warm. All of that was gone. The shelves had been cleared and filled again with books I didn’t know, their spines in faded red and black, Diagnostic Charms and Wounds of the Magical Creature, With Plates and a run of bound journals from St Mungo’s going back fifty years. A row of stoppered jars stood along the mantelpiece, labelled in a small, upright hand. The desk had been cleared to the wood. There were two chairs: his, behind the desk, and a hard one by the wall. I took the hard one.

He dried his hands finger by finger, folded the towel in three and hung it on the rail. Then he sat down behind Fig’s desk, laced his clean fingers together on the blotter and looked at me.

“You want me to teach you,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“To be a Healer.”

“Yes.”

“You are the Head Girl. You have five NEWT subjects, none of them mine. You have, I am told, an interest in the hospital wing that Madam Blainey describes as persistent.” He said it without expression. “And you are the young woman who was in the Daily Prophet for most of the summer before last, in connection with the goblin business and a great deal else that the Prophet did not understand and did not trouble to explain.”

I felt my face go hot. “That wasn’t—”

“I read the Prophet, Miss White, even in retirement. I read it with care. I have spent forty years at St Mungo’s, and in that time I have treated a great many people who were in the newspapers. I have found that it rarely improves them.” He took off his spectacles and polished them on a clean handkerchief. “I don’t teach legends. I teach students. You will need to decide which you are before you come to me again.”

“I’m a student, sir.”

“So you say.” He put the spectacles back on. “Madam Blainey is short of hands. She is always short of hands. You will give her this week: every afternoon after your last lesson, until supper. You will do as she tells you, whatever she tells you. You will not take out your wand on her ward unless she tells you to, and I doubt that she will.” He unlaced his fingers. “On Friday you will come back here and tell me what you have learned. Then I shall ask Madam Blainey what you did. If the two accounts agree, we may talk.”

I looked at him. He looked back, patient and unblinking, a man who had sat at a great many bedsides waiting for a great many people to make up their minds.

I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell him that I had never asked for any of it, the newspapers or the goblins or the name they still called me in the Three Broomsticks. That would have been a lie, and he would have known it. Some of it I had asked for. Some of it I had liked. I sat on the hard chair and found I could no longer tell where the student ended and the other thing began.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Good.” He nodded at the box on my knee. “What is in it?”

I had not known he had noticed it. I had carried it in under my arm, black and scuffed, without deciding to. I put it on the desk between us. He opened the lid and looked inside without touching anything at first. Then he lifted things out one at a time and laid them on the blotter in a row: the bandages, the lint, the Wiggenweld, my five phials of dittany, the twist of silver in its paper.

He unfolded the paper and looked at the silver for a moment.

“Silver,” he said. “Most students your age don’t carry silver.”

“Most students my age haven’t needed it, sir.”

He folded the paper again along its creases and put it back. He put everything back in the order it had come out and closed the lid.

“Your lint is old,” he said. “Change it. Friday, Miss White.”

The rest of Monday was Charms, then Transfiguration, then Defence, and I took in almost none of it. Professor Ronen had to ask me twice for the incantation for a charm I had known since my first weeks at Hogwarts. Natsai looked at me sideways across the bench. The clock in the Transfiguration courtyard seemed to stop at a quarter past three for the whole of the afternoon.

At four I went to the hospital wing.

Madam Blainey met me at the door with her sleeves rolled and her apron on. She was a sturdy young woman, not so many years older than I was, with her hair pinned flat under a white cap. She had come back to Hogwarts as matron the autumn I arrived, and had been learning the ward ever since by the simple method of never leaving it. She had patched me up more than once in my fifth year without asking where I had been, which I had always been grateful for. She looked at me now as she might have looked at a parcel delivered to the wrong address.

“Professor Penhallow says you’re mine for the week,” she said.

“Yes, Madam Blainey.”

“Then you’ll want an apron.” She took one off a hook and held it out. “And you’ll want to put your wand somewhere you can’t reach it.”

I tied the apron on over my uniform. I put my wand in the pocket of my robe and hung the robe on the hook. Then I turned round in my shirtwaist and skirt with nothing in my hands.

She set me to the linen.

There were twenty beds in the hospital wing, in two long rows under the tall windows. Every one of them had to be stripped and made, whether anyone had slept in it or not, because Madam Blainey did not trust a bed she had not made herself that day. I had never thought about sheets. My mother’s maid made the beds in Islington. At the Prince Alfred, when I was small, I had followed my father down the wards and watched the nurses turn a patient without waking him. I had not once looked at what they were doing with their hands. I looked now. I stripped the first bed and made it again. Madam Blainey came and looked at it, pulled it apart and made me do it again.

“Corners,” she said. “Tight. A sheet that rucks gives a bedsore. A bedsore gives you a week of dressings you needn’t have done.”

I did the corners again. She pulled them apart again. On the fourth bed she looked at it for a while and then walked away without touching it. I stood at the foot of it with my hands aching, more pleased than I had been about anything since the train.

That was Monday. On Tuesday I scrubbed bedpans. On Wednesday I washed the floor under the beds on my knees, carried trays and rolled bandages for two hours at the table by the fire while Madam Blainey wrote up her book. There were never many patients in the first week of term. A second year with a Fanged Geranium bite on his thumb, swollen to the size of a plum. A seventh-year Hufflepuff who had tried to brew Pepper-Up Potion in his dormitory and had steam coming out of both ears. A first-year Slytherin with homesickness, who had told Madam Blainey it was a stomach ache and whom she put to bed with a hot-water bottle and a mug of cocoa and did not contradict.

I wanted my wand all the time. I wanted it when the geranium bite went septic on Tuesday and Madam Blainey drew out the poison with her own wand in three neat passes that I could have done, I was almost certain, in two. I wanted it when the Hufflepuff’s ears steamed onto his pillow and the pillowcase had to be changed four times. My hand kept going to my pocket. My pocket was on the hook across the ward. My hand came back empty every time.

It was not only impatience. It was pride, and I knew it, and I did not like knowing it. Two years ago I had walked into places that killed grown wizards. Here I could not be trusted with a pillowcase. Part of me was furious. Part of me, the part that had held the basin for my father, was quietly and shamefully relieved to be told exactly what to do.

On Wednesday evening, when I had wrung out the last cloth and hung it to dry, Madam Blainey came and stood next to me at the sink.

“The Slytherin boy,” she said. “The homesick one. He asked for you.”

I looked up. “For me?”

“You brought him his cocoa yesterday. He wants to know if you’ll bring it again.” She dried her hands on her apron. “I told him you were busy. You’re not. Go on.”

I took him his cocoa. He was eleven, with a thin pale face, and plainly ashamed of himself. I sat on the edge of the next bed while he drank it and asked him what he had in his trunk. He told me about a chess set and a book on dragons and a toad that had died on the train and been buried by a prefect in the lake. He was nearly asleep before he finished the cocoa. I took the mug back to Madam Blainey without a word. She took it without one either.

On Thursday she let me change a dressing.

It was the geranium bite, healing now. It needed a clean pad and a fresh bandage and nothing else. She stood at my elbow the whole time and watched my hands. I unwound the old bandage. I lifted the pad. The wound was clean and closing from the edges, pink and healthy. I cleaned it with boiled water and a fresh swab, put on the new pad and bound it.

“Too tight,” said Madam Blainey.

I loosened it.

“Better.” She looked at the boy’s thumb, and at me. “Your father’s a doctor, isn’t he? A Muggle doctor.”

“Yes.”

“It shows,” she said, and went away to see to the Hufflepuff’s ears. I did not know whether it was a compliment. I decided to take it as one.

On Friday afternoon I climbed the three steps in the Astronomy Wing for the second time that week, with the box under my arm and new lint in it.

He was at his desk this time, writing. He finished his sentence, blotted it and laid down his pen before he looked up.

“Miss White. Sit down.”

I sat on the hard chair.

“Well?” he said. “What have you learned?”

I had been thinking about it all week. I had thought of a great many clever things to say, in the bath and on the stairs and lying awake under the window in the tower. All of them went out of my head at once.

“That the patient doesn’t care who is holding the basin,” I said.

He waited.

“And that I don’t talk to them enough,” I said. “I didn’t know I didn’t. I was thinking about the wound and not about the boy it was on. Madam Blainey had to send me back with his cocoa before I saw it.”

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he opened a drawer of the desk and took out a folded note, written in a broad, firm hand that was certainly not his own. He unfolded it and read it again, as though checking it against what I had said.

“Madam Blainey,” he said, “informs me that you fold a sheet like a soldier, that you do not complain, that you reach for your wand approximately every four minutes, and that you do not talk to the patients enough.” He folded the note again. “The accounts agree.”

I let out a breath I had been holding since Monday.

“There will be conditions,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“You will continue in the hospital wing. Two afternoons a week, at Madam Blainey’s convenience, not yours. You will not use your wand on the ward for a month from today. After that, only when she or I am standing beside you.” He held up one clean finger. “You will write up every case you see. Not the wound. The patient. Who they were, what they said, what they were afraid of, what you did and why you did it. You will bring the notes to me on Thursdays at four o’clock, and I will read them, and we will talk about what you got wrong.”

“And what I got right?”

“If there is time.” There was the faintest change at the corner of his mouth. It might have been a smile. “There seldom is.”

I looked down at my hands. They were red at the knuckles from the week, the skin rough from soap and hot water. I thought of my father’s hands, scrubbed and cool, steering me through the crowd at King’s Cross. I thought of Penhallow’s, folded on the blotter, so clean they looked new.

“Sir,” I said. “May I ask you something?”

“You may ask.”

“Did you know whose office this was?”

He looked round it, slowly: the cleared shelves, the jars on the mantel, the window where the light came in grey off the lake. Then he looked back at me.

“I was told it had belonged to a professor who died,” he said. “I was not told anything else. Nobody seemed to want to tell me.” He paused. “Will you?”

I had not expected that. I sat with my red hands in my lap and tried to think where to begin.

“His name was Eleazar Fig,” I said. “He taught Magical Theory. He brought me to Hogwarts, when I was fifteen and nobody else thought I should come. He kept the room in a terrible mess. He made tea and forgot to drink it. He was the first person who ever told me that what I could do wasn’t something to be frightened of.” I stopped. “He died at the end of my fifth year. He died helping me.”

Penhallow didn’t say he was sorry. He didn’t say anything at all for a while. He sat and looked at me as I imagined he had looked at a great many people in a great many wards, not as though he were waiting for me to stop but as though he had all the time in the world for me to go on.

I had never said it aloud before. Helping me. I had always said in the fighting, or at the end of that year, as though it had been weather. It had not been weather. He had been there because of me.

When I didn’t, he said, “Thank you, Miss White.”

Then he held out his hand across the desk, palm up.

“Your box,” he said. “Leave it with me tonight.”

I hesitated. I had carried that box into places I preferred not to think about. Nobody else had ever opened it but me.

I lifted it off my knee and put it in his hand.

That evening at supper I sat at the far end of the Ravenclaw table, across the aisle from the Gryffindors. I ate everything on my plate for the first time in a week. Amit told me that Venus was entering my house, which accounted for my improved appetite. Everett asked whether I had been in the hospital wing again, and when I said yes, asked whether it was true that the Hufflepuff boy’s ears had set fire to his pillow. I said it was steam, not fire. He looked disappointed.

Across the aisle Leander was arguing with Garreth about something that involved a great deal of pointing at a salt cellar. He looked up halfway through. He looked at me, at my red knuckles on the table and back at my face. He raised his eyebrows a fraction.

I nodded once.

He lifted his teacup an inch off the cloth, set it down again and went back to the salt cellar.

I went back to my plate and found I was smiling at it. I could not have said whether it was for Penhallow or for the teacup, and I decided, firmly, not to find out.

In the morning the box was outside my door.

Somebody, a house-elf I supposed, had set it on the floor of the little round common room, square in front of my threshold. The lid had been polished. I knelt and opened it there, in my dressing gown, with the fire not yet lit and the windows grey.

He had changed the lint. He had replaced the bandages with better ones, finer and tighter-woven, rolled so neatly they looked machine-made. My five phials of dittany were there. Beside them stood two more I had not made, stoppered in green glass: a Blood-Replenishing Potion, and something labelled in the same small upright hand as the jars on his mantel, Essence of Murtlap: for the hands. The silver had been taken out of its twist of paper and weighed into three small envelopes, each one marked with its weight.

Under the envelopes, folded once, was a card.

Thursday. Four o’clock.

I sat back on my heels with the card in my hand. Down the stair, somebody was whistling. Above me, at the top of the iron spiral, a line of pale gold showed under the roof door.

I read it again. Then I put it in the box with everything else and closed the lid.