Evelyn

The first prefects’ meeting of the year was held on Monday evening in the old classroom on the second floor that nobody had taught in since before Professor Weasley’s time. It had a long table, twenty-two chairs and a blackboard on which somebody, some decades ago, had written DOWN WITH in letters a foot high and been interrupted before the object. Every Head since had left it there. I suspected Professor Weasley of having written it herself.

I was there at a quarter to seven with the rota copied out twenty times on good paper. Leander came in at ten to, with Garreth’s Potions notes under one arm, which he was meant to be returning, and a bag of humbugs, which he put in the middle of the table without comment. By seven every chair but two was full.

“Rodgers,” said Leander, looking at the two empty chairs. “And Fawley.”

The Slytherin fifth years. I made a note.

“They’ll be along,” said a Slytherin sixth-year girl named Imogen Selwyn, examining her nails. “They’re very busy.”

“Then they’ll be very busy on Saturday afternoons as well,” I said, “because that’s when they’ll be making up their patrols.”

There was a small silence. I felt it go round the table and come back to me. I had been a prefect for a year and Head Girl for eleven days. I could feel every one of the twenty faces deciding which of those two I was.

Leander took a humbug out of the bag, unwrapped it and put it in his mouth.

“She means it,” he said, around it. “I’ve seen the rota. There’s a column for Saturday afternoons. It’s ruled in red.”

Somebody laughed. Not unkindly. The table loosened a little. Rodgers and Fawley came in five minutes later with their ties undone, saw twenty faces turn towards them and sat down quickly. I handed them their rotas without a word. Rodgers looked at the red column and went pale.

We got through it in under an hour. The patrol pairs, mixed by house as Leander had wanted and placed by me as I had wanted. The first-year corridors. The rule about hexing. A complaint from the Hufflepuff prefects about the suit of armour on the third-floor landing, which had begun reciting rude limericks to passing first years and had to be reported to Mr Moon. Leander chaired the second half while I wrote. I found I did not need to check on him. He did it well. He was easier with them than I was. They liked him for it, and he spent their liking on my rota without seeming to notice he was spending anything. I found I liked watching him do it. I found, halfway through the business of the third-floor armour, that I had been watching him and not the rota for some time, and made myself look down.

“You didn’t need the humbugs,” I said afterwards, when they had gone and we were stacking the chairs.

“I didn’t need them.” He stacked two more. “I thought you might.”

“I don’t like humbugs.”

“I know. They were for the table.” He picked the bag up. There were three left. He held it out to me anyway. I took one, ate it and did not like it.

The note came on Tuesday at breakfast, on Professor Weasley’s paper, in Professor Weasley’s hand: The Heads to my office at five o’clock, please. M.W.

There was one for each of us. I saw Leander unfold his across the aisle at the same moment I unfolded mine. I didn’t wait to see his face. I looked down at my porridge.

I had known it was coming. I had known since that first Friday night, standing at the foot of the Grand Staircase with the ledger held against my chest, that Professor Weasley read the ledger and that she would read his line. For ten days nothing had come of it. I had spent the week with Madam Blainey’s bedpans and Penhallow’s conditions and told myself that a seventh year out after curfew on the first night of term was not worth her trouble. By Monday I had begun to believe it.

At five o’clock we stood side by side in front of her desk.

Professor Weasley’s office was at the top of the Transfiguration tower, a square room crammed with books and a great many small clocks, all of them right. She was sitting behind her desk with the ledger open in front of her at our page. She let us stand for a moment before she looked up.

“Good evening,” she said. “Sit down. This won’t take long, I hope.”

We sat. She turned the ledger round to face us and put one finger, precisely, beside the second line.

“One seventh year in from the grounds after curfew, eleven o’clock. Sent to bed.” She read it aloud in her dry, clipped voice, as she read out the names at the Sorting. “Initialled L.P.” She looked at Leander over her spectacles. “Mr Prewett. Which seventh year?”

Leander didn’t answer at once. He looked at me.

It was not a long look. It could not have lasted more than a second. But it was enough for Professor Weasley to follow it, and for her eyes to come to rest on me, and for me to understand that he had handed it to me. He was not going to lie for me. He was not going to tell her the truth either. He was going to sit there and let me choose.

“It was dark, Professor,” I said. “He had his hood up. He was across the Entrance Hall and on the dungeon stairs before we were near enough to see his face.”

I said we on purpose. I felt Leander go still beside me.

Professor Weasley looked at me for a long moment. I looked back. I had lied to better-informed people than Professor Weasley, in places a great deal darker than her office, and I had learned in my fifth year that the trick was never in the face. It was in giving them something true to hold. There had been a broom. There had been the dungeon stairs.

Then she looked at Leander. He sat with his hands on his knees and said nothing at all. She looked at him for longer than she had looked at me.

“I see,” she said. “You didn’t see his face. But you knew he was a seventh year.”

“He was carrying a broom, Professor, and he didn’t hurry,” I said. “First and second years always hurry.”

“Indeed.” She turned the ledger back round to face her and closed it. “Then I trust that if the same seventh year comes in from the grounds after curfew again, on either of your watches, you will contrive to see his face. Good evening, Miss White. Mr Prewett.”

We stood. At the door she said, without looking up, “Miss White.”

I turned.

“I chose you,” she said, “because I thought you would tell me the truth when it was inconvenient. Don’t make me wrong in the third week, either.”

It went home, as she had meant it to. I had liked Professor Weasley since my first week, when she had looked at a fifteen-year-old who could not Transfigure a matchstick and decided, without saying so, that I would do. I had just lied to her face. I had done it well, and some part of me was proud of how well. I could not tell which of those two things made me feel sicker.

I went out. Leander held the door. He closed it behind us quietly. We stood in the corridor outside her office with the small clocks ticking faintly through the wood.

“You said we,” he said.

“You looked at me.”

“I looked at you because it was your round. Because you knew why he’d been out, and I didn’t.” His voice was low and even. “I wasn’t asking you to lie for him. I was asking you to decide whether to.”

“And now you know.”

“And now I know.” He looked at me a moment longer. “You’re good at it,” he said. “I didn’t know that about you.” He let that sit. “I didn’t lie to her, White. I didn’t say anything. That’s not the same, and you know it’s not, and she does too.”

He went down the stairs. I stood in the corridor until the clocks inside began to strike the quarter, all together. Then I went the other way.

I had wanted him to be angry. Anger I could have argued with. You’re good at it was not anger. It was a doctor noting a symptom, and it followed me down the corridor like a smell I could not get out of my clothes.

I didn’t speak to him on Wednesday.

It ought not to have been difficult. We had no lessons together on Wednesdays but Charms. There Professor Ronen set us to Silencing Charms on a cageful of frogs, which took all the concentration either of us had. At lunch he sat with his back to me, deep in an argument with Garreth about a Gobstones tournament. I knew the back of his head better than I had any reason to: the neat parting, the place behind his ear where the auburn went darker, the way he tipped his head when Garreth said something he didn’t believe. I looked at my plate. I looked up again. I looked at my plate. It was my night for rounds and not his. I walked them alone, from nine until the castle was quiet, along the route that now went out to the Viaduct and back because he had drawn a line on the plan.

The Viaduct at night was long and dark and empty, the wind coming up the gorge from the river below with a sound like breathing. I stood in the middle of it for a while with my wand lit, looking down at nothing. I thought about Sebastian at the window of the train, and Sebastian in the Entrance Hall with his broom on his shoulder. I thought about the cottage in Feldcroft with the lamp lit, and the girl inside it who had forgiven him. I thought about what I knew, and what I had promised myself never to say, and how easily we had come out of my mouth.

I went back in. At the foot of the Grand Staircase I opened the ledger and wrote: Wednesday 14th September. Rounds 9 o’clock to 11.40. E. White. Castle quiet.

Above it, in the square, unhurried hand, was his entry for Tuesday night. Tuesday 13th September. Rounds 9 o’clock to midnight. L. Prewett. Two Hufflepuff fourth years in the kitchens; sent to bed with cake. Castle quiet.

I read it twice. Sent to bed with cake. He had written it down exactly as it had happened. He would always write it down exactly as it had happened.

On Thursday afternoon I took my case notes to Professor Penhallow.

There were four of them, written out on foolscap in my best hand: the Fanged Geranium bite, the Pepper-Up ears, a Ravenclaw third year who had sprained her wrist falling off a broom on Tuesday afternoon, and the homesick boy. I had written up the homesick boy last. I had nearly not written him up at all, because there had been nothing wrong with him, but Penhallow had said every case, and then he had said not the wound, the patient, and I had sat at my desk until after midnight trying to work out what that meant.

He read them in silence, at his desk, with his spectacles on the end of his nose. He read the geranium bite and the Pepper-Up ears and the wrist without changing expression, making a small mark in pencil in the margin of each. Then he read the homesick boy. He read it twice.

“You have written,” he said at last, “that he told Madam Blainey he had a stomach ache.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And that he did not have a stomach ache.”

“No, sir.”

“And that Madam Blainey put him to bed with a hot-water bottle and did not contradict him.” He looked up. “Why didn’t she?”

I thought about it. “Because it wasn’t her business to make him say what was really wrong, sir. Only to treat it.”

“And what was really wrong?”

“He missed his mother.”

“And how did she treat that?”

“With cocoa.” I hesitated. “And with me, I suppose. She sent me back with it.”

He took his spectacles off and polished them.

“Patients lie, Miss White,” he said. “They lie to us about how much they drink, and how much it hurts, and how they came by the bruise on the back of the arm. Most of the time they are not lying to deceive. They are lying because the truth is too large to say out loud to a stranger in an apron.” He put the spectacles back on. “A good Healer knows when she is being lied to. A better one knows when to let the lie stand, and treat what is under it.”

I sat still on the hard chair.

“You are allowed,” he went on, “to let a patient lie to you. You are not allowed to lie to yourself about what you have let stand. Those are different things, and the difference is most of the work.” He tapped my notes together on the desk and handed them back to me. “This one is good. The wrist is careless. You have written that she fell off a broom and not asked why. Ask her why. Next Thursday.”

I took my notes and went out with my face burning. He could not have known. He could not possibly have known about Professor Weasley’s office, or we, or the broom on Sebastian’s shoulder. It made no difference. I walked all the way back to the tower with what you have let stand going round in my head like a stone in a shoe.

Thursday night belonged to the prefects. I sat at my window with the notes on the wrist open on my knee and did not write a word. Far below, a single wandlight went along the cloister and out across the courtyard, unhurried, stopping at each door. I knew it was him by the pace. It was not his night. He was walking it anyway. Nobody else walked the castle as though it were a ward and every corridor a bed he meant to look in on. I watched it cross to the far side and in under the Clock Tower and out of sight. Then I sat there a while longer, looking at the place where it had been, until Everett knocked to ask whether I had a spare quill and whether I was waiting up for something.

“No,” I said, and gave him the quill, and went to bed.

He was in the Clock Tower courtyard on Friday night.

I had not gone looking for him. It was his night for rounds and not mine. I had told myself I was going to the library. I had walked past the library door and kept walking, out along the cloister and down into the courtyard, where the duelling platform stood in the middle of the flagstones under the great dark face of the clock.

He was on the platform alone, in his coat, with his wand out. He was running drills, as Professor Hecat had taught us in fifth year: Disarming, Shield, Stunning, Shield, over and over at a target dummy that had been left there by Crossed Wands and had seen better decades. He was good. I had always known he was good. I had not watched him do it alone before, with nobody to beat.

He saw me at the edge of the lamplight and stopped. The dummy rocked on its pole.

Neither of us said anything for a moment.

“It’s your rounds,” I said.

“Rounds start at nine. It’s twenty to.” He looked at me. “Are you here to tell me something, White, or to duel?”

I hadn’t known until he said it. Then I knew.

I took off my cloak, laid it on the steps of the platform and climbed up. My robes underneath were buttoned to the throat. I drew my wand, walked to the far mark and turned. He was already at his, with his wand up, his coat buttoned and his face calm.

“First to three?” he said.

“First to three.”

We bowed. We had both been taught to bow. Then he moved, and I moved, and the courtyard filled with light.

I had duelled a great many people in fifth year, some of them in earnest. I had not duelled Leander Prewett since Professor Hecat’s class, when we were both fifteen and he had blamed his losses on the Slytherins. He did not blame anything on anyone now. He was fast and steady. He wasted nothing. He did not show off. Every spell he cast went exactly where he meant it to and did exactly what he meant it to do. He waited for me to come to him rather than going to me. I came to him. I came hard. I wanted, I found, very badly to win.

I took the first point with a Disarming Charm he did not see coming, off the back of a feint I had learned from Natsai. His wand spun out of his hand and clattered on the flagstones. He went and picked it up without a word and came back to his mark.

He took the second with a Stunning Spell that clipped my shoulder as I turned and sat me down hard on the boards. I got up. My shoulder ached. I did not say anything either.

The third went on a long time. Longer than either of us had meant. We went round the platform and back again, spell and shield and spell, until the sweat was running down my back under my robes and his hair had come out of its parting and fallen into his eyes. Above us the clock struck nine. Neither of us looked up. He cast and I blocked, and I cast and he blocked, and somewhere in it I stopped being angry with him and started being angry with myself, which was harder to fight and much harder to win.

In the end we cast at the same moment, both of us Disarming, and the two spells met in the middle of the platform with a crack like a branch breaking. Both wands left both hands. They flew in opposite directions and landed at the opposite edges of the platform. We stood there, empty-handed, breathing hard, looking at each other across the boards.

“Draw,” he said.

“Draw.”

He went and picked up my wand and brought it to me. He held it out handle first, as Professor Hecat had taught us. I took it. Then I fetched his and brought it back to him. He took it the same way.

“You’re late for your rounds,” I said.

“I know.” He put his wand away. He was still breathing hard. So was I. “I’ll write it down.”

“You’ll write everything down.”

“Yes.” He looked at me. His hair was still in his eyes. He pushed it back with the flat of his hand, and I watched him do it and forgot, for the space of a breath, what we had been quarrelling about. “I will. That’s what the book is for, White. It’s not for anything else. I’m not going to stop writing things down because you don’t like them. And I’m not going to ask you why you didn’t want that one written. That’s yours. You can keep it.”

I did not know what to do with that. I had come down here ready for a fight, and he had handed me something else instead, and I stood on the boards holding it like a fool.

I looked at him across the space between us. The lamps hissed. The dummy creaked on its pole.

“Same time next week,” I said. It was not what I had meant to say.

He considered it. Then something eased at the corner of his mouth, the first time it had eased all week.

“Same time next week,” he said, and went to do his rounds.