Evelyn

I woke on my eighteenth birthday to the sound of Amit singing on the stairs. He was not singing to me. He was singing to Saturn, which he had been up all night observing. The song was in Gujarati and possibly rude. I lay under the eastern window and listened to it go past my door and down towards the common room. Eighteen, I thought. I waited to feel different. I felt exactly the same, only hungrier.

The post came at breakfast. I never looked up for it; hardly anyone wrote to me at school. But it was my birthday, so I looked up, and I saw our owl long before she reached me. She was the plain brown bird my mother had bought in Diagon Alley the year Professor Fig began teaching me. My father called her the bird and would not give her a name. She came down the length of the Hall with a parcel almost as big as herself and dropped it beside my plate, with the air of having done far more than could reasonably be asked.

Natsai and Poppy had come across to the Ravenclaw table before the owls, which was not allowed and which nobody had ever stopped. Poppy had a box with holes in the lid. Natsai had something small wrapped in brown paper. They put them down on either side of my mother’s parcel and sat on the bench opposite, beside Amit, who moved up without looking up from his almanac.

“Ours first,” said Poppy. “Ours are better.”

Hers was a Puffskein. It was the size of a teacup, pale gold, with a long pink tongue and no visible eyes. It sat in my cupped hands and began, after a moment, to hum.

“It hums when it’s content,” said Poppy. “It’s most content on people who need it. I’ve been watching it all week. It’s never hummed like that for me.”

I held it and didn’t trust my voice. Then I opened Natsai’s.

It was a hatpin: a long steel pin with a small head of red enamel and gilt, shaped like a fox’s face, sharp-eared and narrow and very slightly smug. I looked up at her. Natsai looked back at me without a flicker. She had sat with me for three months in sixth year, in the Room of Requirement and on the hill behind Lower Hogsfield, while I learned to be something other than myself and back again. Hardly anyone at Hogwarts knew. Natsai did, and Leander.

“So you don’t forget,” she said.

“Forget what?” said Poppy.

“Natsai’s idea of a joke,” I said, and put the hatpin into my hair, where it stayed.

My mother’s parcel was wrapped in brown paper and string, with a card tucked under the knot in her round, careful hand. Many happy returns, my darling girl. For the spring. With all my love, Mama. Inside the paper was a pasteboard box from the glover’s in Upper Street. Inside the box, in tissue, was a pair of kid gloves the colour of cream, so fine they might have been folded into a walnut shell. Wrist-length, with three pearl buttons at each wrist. The kind of gloves a girl wore once, in the spring, holding flowers.

Under the tissue, folded once, was a letter in my father’s hand.

My dear Evelyn,

Eighteen is an age for being sensible. I have every confidence that you will be.

Dr Hale and I have agreed that the notice should go to The Times in the week before Christmas, while you are at home, so that our friends may hear it from us and not from rumour. He sends his warmest compliments, and asks me to tell you that he has taken the liberty of choosing the stone. Your mother is speaking of April.

I know that you think me unfair. I hope that in time you will find I have been the opposite.

Your affectionate father

I read it twice. Then I folded it along its crease and put it back under the tissue, under the gloves. I closed the lid of the box.

He has taken the liberty of choosing the stone.

I picked up my teacup. It was empty. I put it down.

I wanted to be angry. Anger would have been simple. Instead I sat with the box in my lap and found, underneath it, the thing I hated most: a small, obedient part of me that read I have every confidence that you will be and wanted, even now, to deserve it. He had carried me on his shoulders down the wards of the Prince Alfred. He had taught me to count a pulse before I could tell the time. Every good thing I knew how to do with my hands had begun with him, and he had looked at all of it and found it a husband, as though it were a dowry.

And Dr Hale had chosen a stone. I tried to picture his face and could only see his hands, folding a napkin into thirds at our table in June. He had not been unkind. I could not even have the comfort of hating him.

Across the aisle, at the far end of the Gryffindor table, Leander had a slice of toast halfway to his mouth. He was not looking at Garreth. He was looking at me. I had not been quick enough to stop my face, and for once I didn’t try. I looked back at him across the aisle for a long moment. He looked at me. Neither of us did anything at all. Then Garreth said something and he turned his head. I looked down at the box with the gloves in it. The Puffskein in my lap went on humming.

“Evie?” said Poppy.

“Nothing,” I said. “Let’s go. I want a sugar quill the length of my arm.”

I took the box up to my room first. I could not have carried it to Hogsmeade, and I could not have left it on the table. In my room I knelt by my trunk and took out the japanned box. I looked at the two of them side by side on the floorboards: one black and scuffed, full of lint and silver and things for stopping blood; one white pasteboard tied with ribbon, full of gloves for holding flowers. Then I put the healer’s box back in the trunk. I put the glove box at the bottom, under my winter stockings, with the letter inside it. I shut the lid. I took the stairs down two at a time, before I could think too hard about which of the two boxes was mine.

The road down to Hogsmeade was white with dust and loud with third years. It was the first Hogsmeade weekend of the year. It seemed to have arrived on purpose. The sky was blue and high, the bracken on the hills just beginning to rust, the air cold enough to make your cheeks sting and warm enough in the sun to take your cloak off. Poppy walked ahead with her hands in her pockets, naming every bird on the wall. Natsai walked beside me and said nothing, which was how Natsai said a great deal.

We went to Honeydukes first, because it was my birthday and I had said so. The shop smelled of hot sugar and peppermint. It was so full of third years that we had to queue on the step. I bought a sugar quill as long as my forearm, which was nearly the length I had asked for. I bought a quarter of Fizzing Whizzbees for Poppy and a box of pepper imps for Natsai because she would never buy them for herself. Then we went up the High Street with our paper bags, past the post office with its rows of owls, past Gladrags and the bookshop and the house with the blue door where an old witch sold eggs from a basket on the step. At the top of the street Poppy stopped dead in front of a shop window full of Kneazle kittens and announced that she would be some time.

Natsai and I left her there and sat on the low wall by the churchyard gate, in the sun, with our bags in our laps.

“Well?” said Natsai.

So I told her. The platform, and what my father had said. The dinner in June. Dr Hale, who was the most promising young surgeon at Bart’s and who had chosen the stone. The notice in The Times in the week before Christmas. The gloves.

Natsai listened without interrupting. When I had finished, she was quiet for so long that I thought she was not going to say anything at all.

“He chose the stone,” she said at last.

“Yes.”

“Without asking you.”

“He doesn’t need to ask me. That’s rather the point.”

“And the gloves are from your mother.”

“Yes.”

Natsai looked down the High Street at Poppy, who had her nose pressed to the glass of the kitten shop. Her face was very still. I had seen Natsai Onai angry before. I had seen her angry enough to break a goblin’s arm. I had never seen her this quiet about it.

“You know you could stay here,” she said. “At Christmas. You’re eighteen. You’re Head Girl. You have Fig’s money and a castle that does what you tell it. You don’t have to go home and be put in a newspaper.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

I turned the sugar quill over in my fingers. “I know it. I don’t know it yet. Not all the way through.”

Natsai nodded slowly, as though that were an answer she could respect. She put her hand over mine on the wall, briefly, as she had on the hill behind Lower Hogsfield when I had come back to myself for the first time shaking and not sure which shape I was in.

“Then know it by December,” she said. “And wear the hatpin.”

When Poppy at last gave up on the kittens, we found the Three Broomsticks full to the rafters with Hogwarts students and steam. Madam Sirona had taken on two extra girls for the day and still could not pour fast enough. We found a table near the fire only because Poppy, coming in last with no kitten and a sad face, walked straight up to a table of fourth-year Hufflepuffs and asked them, politely, whether they would mind, and they were so startled that they gave it to her.

We had been sitting there ten minutes when Garreth Weasley came in out of the cold with Leander behind him.

Garreth saw us at once. Garreth saw everyone at once. He came across the room with his scarf trailing and his hair standing up in every direction. He said, “Is it true? Is it Ravenclaw’s birthday? Prewett says it is.”

I looked past him at Leander, who had stopped just inside the door to unwind his own scarf and did not look in the least repentant.

“I said it might be,” Leander said. “You asked.”

“How did you know?”

“It’s in the prefects’ records. Date of birth. I read them. You read them too.” He hung his scarf on a peg. “I know when Rodgers’s birthday is, if you want to send him a card.”

Garreth was already climbing onto his chair.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced to the Three Broomsticks at large, in the voice that had once blown the doors off the Potions classroom. “It has come to my attention that the Head Girl, Miss Evelyn White of Ravenclaw, scourge of the patrol rota and terror of the Slytherin fifth years, is eighteen years old today!”

There was a confused cheer. Somebody at the back banged a tankard. Garreth raised his butterbeer.

“For she’s a jolly good fellow,” he sang, loudly and in no key I knew. To my horror the whole of the Three Broomsticks took it up. Third years and fourth years and seventh years and two old warlocks by the bar who had no idea who I was, and Madam Sirona behind the counter, and Poppy, standing on her own chair now, conducting with a sugar quill. I put my face in my hands. Natsai, who did not sing, sat back with her arms folded and watched me with great satisfaction.

Leander didn’t sing. When I lifted my face out of my hands at the end, he was picking Garreth’s scarf up off the floor, where it had fallen when Garreth climbed onto the chair, and hanging it on the peg beside his own, as though nothing whatever had happened.

They sat with us. Garreth told Poppy about an exploding cauldron with such conviction that she forgot the kitten. Natsai and Garreth argued about whether a Shield Charm could be cast silently by anyone under thirty, and Natsai won. Leander asked her, with great politeness, where I had learned the feint that had cost him his wand last night. Natsai said, with equal politeness, that she couldn’t possibly say. I kicked her under the table. Leander sat at the end of the bench beside me with his tankard and said almost nothing. Once, when the Puffskein climbed out of my pocket and onto the table, he held out one finger and let it hum against his knuckle.

“It likes you,” I said.

“It likes everyone. It’s a Puffskein.” He looked at it. “Poppy’s?”

“Poppy’s.”

He nodded. Then his eyes went to my hair, to the fox’s head with its sharp gilt ears.

“A fox,” he said.

“Natsai’s idea of a joke.”

“I know the joke, White.”

“Then don’t tell Poppy,” I said.

He considered that. He looked at the hatpin a moment longer than he needed to, then at me, then back at the Puffskein. He let it go.

We walked back up in the dusk. The sun had gone down behind the hills while we were in the Three Broomsticks. The road was blue with cold and smelled of woodsmoke from the village chimneys. Natsai and Garreth went ahead, still arguing. Poppy fell behind at every hedge, looking for something she said was a hedgehog and was probably a Knarl. So without either of us arranging it, Leander and I walked together, a little apart from both, up the long white road towards the lights of the castle.

He walked on the outside, nearest the ditch. He did it without thinking, as he took the outside of every staircase. I noticed and did not say so.

We didn’t talk about the letter. I had thought he might ask. He didn’t. We talked about nothing: the Gobstones tournament, which he was losing; last night’s duel, which he said he had let me draw, and which I said he hadn’t; the harvest at home, which his mother would be bringing in without him, as she had every year since he came to Hogwarts.

“She says the barley’s better without me there to argue with it,” he said.

“In Sydney it would be spring,” I said. I didn’t know why I said it. “The wattle would be out. Yellow, all along the roads. I used to think they were the most beautiful thing in the world.”

“Are they?”

“I was nine.” I thought about it. “Yes. I think they probably are.”

“What did they smell of?” he said.

I had to think. Nobody had ever asked me that. “Honey,” I said at last. “Honey and dust. And the river, when the wind came off it.”

“The barley smells of dust,” he said. “At the end. The week before we cut it. You can smell it from the house.”

He didn’t say anything more after that. He walked beside me in the blue dusk with his hands in his pockets and his breath going up white, close enough that his sleeve brushed mine twice on the steep bit below the gates, and both times I felt it all the way up my arm. I thought about Dr Hale choosing a stone for me in a jeweller’s window on Cheapside. I thought about the gloves. I thought that I had never in my life wanted so badly for a road to be longer.

It was a foolish thing to want. By Christmas my name would be in The Times beside another man’s. I had no business noticing the warmth of anyone’s sleeve. I noticed it anyway, and despised myself a little for it, and then noticed it again.

At the gates, Poppy caught us up with her hands full of something that was not a hedgehog. Natsai turned round and looked at the two of us. She said nothing at all.

I went up to the tower and sat on my bed with the Puffskein in my lap until the supper bell, and did not open my trunk. At supper I ate without tasting anything. Then, because it was Saturday and the Saturdays were shared, I went down to the foot of the Grand Staircase at nine and found him already there. We walked the whole of the route without saying much. Up through the Astronomy Wing, along the library corridor, back through the Clock Tower courtyard where the duelling platform stood empty under the lamps. A pair of fifth years in the Trophy Room. The castle was tired after Hogsmeade. So was I.

Out on the Viaduct he stopped where I had stopped on Wednesday and looked down into the gorge. I stopped beside him. Neither of us said anything. The wind came up off the river and pulled at my hair, and the fox’s head of Natsai’s hatpin knocked against my ear. After a while he said, “Cold,” and I said, “Yes,” and we walked on. It was the best conversation I had had all day.

In the Entrance Hall we found a Hufflepuff second year in her nightgown, sleepwalking, talking reasonably to the hourglasses. Leander didn’t wake her. He fell into step beside her, matching her pace. “This way, I think,” he said, as though they were going somewhere together, and turned her by the elbow towards the basement stair. She went. At the top of the stair he handed her over to a Hufflepuff prefect in curl-papers who had come looking. He stood there until the door closed. I watched him do it. It was the platform again: the dented cauldron, the low, steady voice. I had spent two years being wrong about him, and I was only now finding out how wrong.

At midnight we stood at the newel post with the ledger open between us. I uncapped my pen and wrote the date, Saturday 17th September 1892, and the time, and our names.

“Happy birthday, White,” he said.

I stopped, with the pen an inch above the page.

Of everything anyone had said to me that day, it was the plainest. I did not understand why it should be the one that reached me.

He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t ask about the letter, or the gloves, or what my face had done at breakfast. He stood beside me with his hands in his pockets and waited, as he had waited on the platform at the start of the duel, for me to come to him or not.

I looked down at the page. Then I finished the entry: the fifth years, the sleepwalker, Castle quiet. The last two words came out in thinner ink than the rest, as though my hand had not pressed as hard.

“Thank you,” I said.

He nodded, took the pen and initialled under my name. Then he went up the east stair and I went up the west. In my pocket, against my hip, Poppy’s Puffskein hummed all the way to the top.