Riddlement

I've been asked what would happen if a Muggle picked up a magic wand in my world, and the answer would probably be something accidental... possibly quite violent. Because wands ... [are] merely a vehicle, a vessel for what lies inside the person... [Y]ou need the ability, in other words, to make these things work properly.

J. K. Rowling at An Evening with Harry, Carrie and Garp, 1 August 2006, Radio City Music Hall, New York, U.S.A.

CHAPTER SIX

Riddlement

by Jeremy Slater

The three bridesmaids in cherry-red taffeta were not ugly. And I knew at once that the bride – my new stepmother – was not wicked. She couldn't have been more ordinary. It felt odd to stand around watching, knowing I was meant to be the best man. A wedding, any wedding, ought to be more of a drama.

When the Vicar began the marrying part, my brother Christopher hissed to me, "Jeremy, lose the ring!" But it was a very weak, last-ditch rebellion. As I handed the ring over to Dad, it all felt decidedly anti-climactic. Nothing was going on here. Dad and this Julia woman were just signing some legal document, a contract that didn't bind anyone to anything nowadays; and for some reason, Christopher and I had to dress up in bright red waistcoats and rose-buttonholes in order to watch them sign it.

After the ceremony there was a small reception in the church hall. The eldest stepsister, Sally-Anne, spent the whole party behind the punch-bowl, serving out fruit punch to the guests. The middle stepsister, Ella-Jane, challenged Christopher to a tug-of-war, which resulted in a huge tear down the skirt of her hired bridesmaid-dress. The youngest stepsister, Molly-Rose, sat in a corner reading picture books to her teddy bear. The bride's mother – now my step-grandmother – wandered around taking photographs of everyone and everything. There was also an aged lady who sat in a rocking chair, draped in an old-fashioned lace shawl, pointing a thin stick at food crumbs on the floor. It must have been some kind of firecracker because every crumb burst into bright blue fire for a second and then auto-extinguished. The old lady said she was Domitilla Flourish, mother of the bride's father, and that she was ninety-two years old, so I suppose she was my step-great-grandmother.

Mum and her husband scooped us up from the church hall on the dot of seven o' clock, while I was still queuing for a second slice of the wedding cake. The floor was by now swept clean, and I was hoping to work out how Domitilla Flourish did her trick.

"So your father has changed his life," said Mum, hustling us out of the door before Dad could speak to her. "Is he planning to live happily ever after?"

Christopher shrugged. "The cake was good. I had four slices."

No fair!

"There was really no need for your father to remarry," said Mum. "He was settled in that nice little flat; he had a good job; he took you boys out every other weekend. The family was doing perfectly well until he met that woman. Why did he need to make any changes?"

I didn't know why Mum would still care what Dad did; they had been divorced for six years.

Christopher blurted it out loud. "You got married again, Mum. Why shouldn't Dad?"

"He was stupid to choose a woman with children," she said. "Those girls will make sure he never has any time alone with her, and she – is her name Julia? – she'll demand that he pay for her children instead of maintaining you."

"We don't yet know what she's like," I said. "She seems ordinary."

A month later, Mum deposited Christopher and me at Dad's new front door for our first access weekend. He had sold the "nice little flat" and moved into Julia's house, which Mum thought an "absolute rip-off. I'll have no sympathy if that Julia dumps his money into her mortgage but leaves his name off the title deed."

Dad let us in and showed us to a blindingly clean kitchen. No kitchen could be that clean – the floors and cabinets shone like glass. And it was too late to warn Christopher that this was a tidy house, because he had already planted his muddy football boots in a clear footprint-sequence straight across the white tiles!

"Oh, dear!" Sally-Anne, the eldest stepsister, had appeared; she was nine years old and was wearing an apron over her school uniform. She pulled a mop out of the cupboard and flicked it over Christopher's footprints. The mop-hairs barely touched the floor, yet somehow the mud completely vanished in a single sweep! "Did he print the hall carpet too?"

I nodded warily. Sally-Anne didn't seem angry, but she was obviously very serious about maintaining the house properly. She pulled a bottle and a clean rag out of the mop cupboard, tripped into the hall and sprayed a disinfectant-smelling liquid over Christopher's footprints. Then she swished the rag lightly over the spray, and suddenly there was no mud. Just nothing! The carpet was as pure and fluffy as a new lay.

"That's a powerful cleaner," I said, thinking of how long it took Mum to clean up after her toddlers. "What brand is it?"

Sally-Anne looked embarrassed. "It's... not for sale in the shops. Jeremy, I was going to make a pasta bake for dinner. Do you two have any allergies?"

Sally-Anne shooed us out of the kitchen to bake the pasta all by herself, so I wandered into the lounge, where little Molly-Rose was reading. She seemed to like dressing up, as she was wearing some kind of medieval princess gown. I picked up a book from her pile, one called Beadle the Bard, and read it out loud to her. It was a collection of very odd fairy tales, clearly set in some kind of fantasy universe that was never quite explained, but Molly-Rose listened in wide-eyed silence, so she must have been familiar with the concept. All the other books were picture books, so I worked through the pile and read her all of them. Not one was familiar. They had titles like Nigel the Knight Bus, Seven Fat Puffskeins, The Tale of Madam Curlyknarl and The Dragon who Came to Dinner, and they were all fantasies.

Julia didn't arrive home from work until the pasta bake was on the table. She seemed very tired. Her three daughters looked very like her: they were all slim with blue eyes and mousy hair. But we weren't going to have any trouble telling them apart. Only the prissy-neat Sally-Anne fussed about the house. Dreamy Molly-Rose had left an untidy trail of books all over the lounge furniture, and she never spoke unless someone spoke to her first. I didn't even meet Ella-Jane until Dad had called to her to dinner three times. Then she and Christopher both appeared, school uniforms torn and hands and faces covered in black dust.

"Dad, there's a great park around the corner!" enthused Christopher. "Ella-Jane was showing me which trees to climb."

"Did Ella-Jane mention that you're not allowed to go to the park without permission?"

"Oh..." Christopher glanced at Ella-Jane, who exploded in a fit of giggles.

"I did have permission," she said. "Christopher gave me permission. I gave him permission too."

I expect Dad and Julia frowned at them, but nobody noticed. Christopher had never cared what the adults thought of his behaviour, and it was clear that Ella-Jane didn't care either.

We had an ordinary Friday evening watching a video and an ordinary Saturday morning taking Christopher to his school football match. In the afternoon we visited the cider museum. It wasn't until we arrived back at Julia's house in the late afternoon that the really odd thing happened. Julia went into the kitchen to cook dinner; Sally-Anne started her piano practice; Dad shuffled snap cards and dealt them out to Molly-Rose and Christopher. I sat down in front of the old-fashioned hearth to set up draughts for a game against Ella-Jane. In front of us, the fireplace crackled and suddenly it was alive with bright green flames. Dad must have lit the gas by remote control, but green?

Before I could even ask about it, a face appeared in the middle of the flames, a face looking just like Domitilla Flourish, the old lady from the wedding.

"Hello," said the face. "Is Julia there?"

"I'll fetch her," said Ella-Jane. "Wait, though – "

Sally-Anne crashed a chord and sprang to her feet in alarm. Dad put an arm around Christopher and tried to march him out of the door.

"Sally-Anne, are you doing that with a slide-projector?" I demanded. "Stop – it's too freaky!"

Ella-Jane tugged my arm. "Come on, Jeremy, you need to..."

"What's going on?" I could tell they didn't want me or Christopher looking at their magic lantern show in the green fire, but what was the big deal?

Then a new voice spoke, one that seemed to be coming from behind the fireplace. "Mother, you need to come out of the flue!"

Ella-Jane tugged at me again, but nothing would have rooted me out of my spot. The Domitilla-photograph was speaking, exactly as if it was answering the strange man.

"I'm just having a chat with Julia, dear. We won't be long!"

"Don't you remember what I told you, Mother? We can't flue Julia this weekend because she has those Muggle stepsons staying with her. Imagine the trouble it would cause if they happened to see your face surrounded by green fire!"

Well, we had seen the face in the fire! Sally-Anne or Ella-Jane was evidently playing a nifty mechanical trick, and they were daring us to work out how they were doing it by pretending we weren't supposed to have noticed. But what on earth did they mean by calling us "Muggle"?

"The trouble has already started!" shouted Christopher. "I bet we'll have worked out how you're doing it by this time tomorrow!"

But at this point, the girls' imagination evidently ran dry, because Domitilla simply said, "Ohhh...." and then her face and the green fire vanished.

"You have to admit they put on a good show," I conceded to Christopher. "I bet Dad helped them."

"Dad should have helped us, too!" Christopher protested. "Dad, will you show us how to do that magic lantern stuff in Mum's hearth? I bet we give her a heart-attack!"

Dad and Ella-Jane were still standing in shocked silence. Finally Sally-Anne seemed to pull herself together and said, "Let's play snap."

"It isn't real snap," objected Molly-Rose. "Those cards don't explode properly. They don't move at all!"

Ella-Jane's mouth dropped open. It was the first time I had seen her look disconcerted by anything.

"There's something around here that they're not telling us," said Christopher.

It was late at night. We were bundled up in sleeping-bags that only just fitted the tiny floor of what was usually Sally-Anne's room. All her personal property, including her bed, had been moved into her sisters' room before we arrived; I wondered how long it had taken those thin little girls to shift that heavy furniture and then set up the room for us so slickly.

"Divorced people always have things they don't tell you," I said through a yawn. "Our stepfather won't tell us his ex-wife's name. Mum won't tell us why she broke up with Dad. Dad didn't tell us about Julia until a month before the wedding. Julia won't tell us where her ex-husband lives."

"He lives in Liverpool," said Christopher. "Ella-Jane told me all about her Dad. She says her stepmother stole him – she hates her stepmother. But Julia shut her up and wouldn't let her talk any more."

"As I said," I repeated, "divorced people never tell you stuff. Even if it's about your own life, they think they have the right not to tell you."

"But I think," Christopher persisted, "that there's something else they're not telling us here. Why did Dad teach those girls the face-in-the-fire trick but after all these years he's never taught us? We're his own sons!"

"Perhaps it was Julia who taught them."

"Yes... perhaps. But no matter who showed them how to do it... There was something weird about the way that green face just appeared and started talking."

"Do you remember the real Domitilla? She's..." I hunted for a polite word. "She's an eccentric old lady. Putting her face in the fire seemed like teasing; it was unkind. A kind person would have used a photo of someone more ordinary, like maybe Dad. But Dad wouldn't do an unkind thing, and Ella-Jane couldn't have done it without a grown-up's help. So does that mean Julia helped her? It would be really weird if she turned out to be the unkind one."

"No, it wouldn't." Christopher's voice sailed confidently through the darkness. "Everyone knows that stepmothers are wicked."

We agreed we would be careful of these people, however ordinary they seemed.

A shrill alarm woke me at six. Christopher was waving it in my ears.

"Christopher!" I expostulated. "It's Sunday! What's the big deal?"

"We're going to explore this house," he told me. "Come on! First stop – fireplace."

We spent fifteen minutes raking through that fireplace. It was large. We could actually stand upright inside it and stare up the flue to the dawn sky above. But there was no soot or ashes or traces of anything that might have been used for fuel. Although it looked like an old-fashioned coal fire, it wasn't one. Yet at the same time, we couldn't find any buttons or switches or levers to turn on the gas.

"Was it even real fire?" asked Christopher. "I mean, was it hot?"

I hadn't thought of that. But I had been sitting right next to it and I hadn't felt the heat.

"Then it was fake fire – just part of that video," Christopher concluded.

"But there's nothing like a projector screen here. The hearth wall is black. Come on, let's look for the projector itself."

We each took one end of the opposite wall and searched along it, floor to ceiling, ceiling to floor, for any sign of the hidden projector. There were no peep-holes and no ledges, just faded wallpaper of seventies-style giant poppies that I couldn't imagine Julia or Sally-Anne choosing. We met in the middle, admitting we hadn't found any sign of whatever-it-was.

"If we had a stepladder, we could do the ceiling," I said. "Perhaps it was hanging from the lights?"

Christopher peered up at the seventies-style hanging lamps. "That's funny. They have wax candles in their lampshades instead of bulbs. Don't they use electricity here?"

We agreed that, for safety reasons, they couldn't possibly use naked wax candles; but the candle-like lamps were a very convincing design.

"This is a very weird house," said Christopher. "Maybe Ella-Jane will tell us what's going on?"

"No, she was deliberately making a secret of the projector-trick," I said. "We should ask Molly-Rose because she's too young to keep a secret. Let's make some toast. Wait... Do you think Sally-Anne will let us wander around her kitchen for self-serve breakfast?"

"Stuff Sally-Anne," said Christopher. "This is our Dad's house, and we are jolly well going to make ourselves at home here."

Sally Anne came downstairs – fully dressed, even to her shoes and her hair-ribbon – while we were making the toast. She didn't say anything except "Good morning" before she started to boil the kettle, so self-service must have been all right. The younger girls both came down in their dressing-gowns and helped themselves to cornflakes, but Sally-Anne didn't eat anything before she took a tray of tea up to Dad and Julia.

Christopher nudged me. "Let's do their room while they're busy with breakfast and things."

"We can't do that! Bedrooms are private!"

"Exactly. So bedrooms are where they'll hide their private stuff, aren't they?"

We still had no idea what we were looking for, but Christopher's sense of adventure is not easily deterred, so as soon as Sally-Anne was back in the kitchen, I followed him upstairs. Three beds were crammed into the girls' room. Two of them had white padded headboards and mauve sheets, but the one in the middle didn't belong because it was pinewood. Sally-Anne had already plumped up the pillow and neatly arranged the quilt, both with a green patchwork pattern, as if nobody had slept there for a month. Christopher and I dived down to look for whatever was hidden underneath.

Nothing! Not even a speck of dust! Certainly not a gadget or a machine. Sally-Anne had obviously vacuumed before she dragged her bed into her sisters' room.

The bed by the window had a rumpled sheet; the quilt had been shoved onto the floor and the pillow was flat.

"Don't move that quilt," I reminded Christopher. "She'll know we've been here."

"I have to. We're investigating." He thrust the quilt back onto Ella-Jane's bed (its pattern showed happy dinosaurs in all shades of purple) to reveal her yesterday's-clothes and a half-finished lego ship. But they were ordinary clothes and ordinary lego.

Molly-Rose's quilt was decorated with lilac butterflies that would make any boy sick on sight. I lifted it up and saw a couple of books that had apparently shared her night. Then I looked under the bed, where she had stowed more books. On the shelf above her bed were a family of dolls, a piggy bank and yet more books.

"Plenty of mess here," reported Christopher as he crawled out from under Ella-Jane's bed. "But it's just lego that she couldn't be bothered tidying away properly and a teddy bear with one eye missing. Sally-Anne would have a fit if she saw it all. You know, they don't seem to have a lot of toys. Girls normally have dress-ups and craft kits and a whole lot of junk."

"Perhaps they're poor," I said. "Divorced families never have much money."

"Or perhaps they've hidden their toys, the same as they've hidden that projector thing. But the only other hiding place here is their wardrobe. Look – "

He pulled open the door and something crashed down on his head. It was only a broom, so we carried on snooping.

The wardrobe was crammed with school uniform (two sets each), weekend casuals (two sets each) and several more of those princess-robes that Molly-Rose liked. I was surprised that they would waste their money on dress-up garments like that, and even more surprised that two of them were in Ella-Jane's size and three were large enough for Sally-Anne. She had left her everyday clothes in her usual room, so why would she move her party dresses out here? We opened and closed the underwear drawers very rapidly, just to make sure they contained only underwear, and then turned our attention to a wooden box on the wardrobe floor.

It was a perfect cube, about half a metre square, with marquetry birds and flowers inlaid on all sides. We couldn't see any latch or lock, but when we tried to prise the lid open, we found it was jammed shut.

"Must have one of those secret catches," said Christopher. "Perhaps down one side? I bet this is where they keep their projector thingy."

"Don't rattle it! That projector is probably delicate."

"I'm just trying to work out whether there's one object or lots in there. It sounds like lots. No, I am not shaking it any more – I'm being careful!"

He wasn't, but it was the wrong time to argue.

"Let's put it away," I said. "We can't open it without breaking it and we don't want to be caught snooping. Just leave it exactly where you found it. Oh – and why on earth would they keep a broom up here?"

"Let's put it in the mop cupboard downstairs."

I examined it. It was one of those old-fashioned twiggy affairs, and several of the twigs were dropping off, so it didn't look as if it would actually sweep a floor clean. The handle was printed with the brand-name COMET, and scrawled underneath in felt-tip was the claim ELEANOR-JANE IGNATIA PERKS. "Let's not. She probably needs it for a school play or something. Let's get out of here before they miss us."

We nearly collided with Dad in the corridor. He only said, "Church in half an hour, boys."

What? We had never gone to church before he remarried!

Julia came out of their room a moment later, and Christopher hissed, "Now!"

Before I could speak a word of protest, Christopher had already dived into Dad's bedroom. It was an ordinary, boring adults' room, with a double wardrobe and a double bed and no toys or personal property at all. But going there made me cold all over. It wasn't like going into my own parents' room at all; that woman shared it, and it was like invading a stranger's space.

Christopher was prying in their wardrobe. I was about to look underneath the bed when I finally saw something not-ordinary. I stopped in my tracks, checking I had really seen it. And there was no mistake! There, on Julia's bedside table, was a cane.

A real, genuine beating-stick of the kind that old-fashioned headmasters used to punish disruptive pupils!

Did Julia cane her daughters?

She was evil after all!

Sally-Anne was tidy, hard-working, obedient and generally goody-goody. Molly-Rose was very quiet. But surely nobody would describe Ella-Jane as good, obedient, polite, tidy or quiet? In a beating-family, she ought to be black and blue with bruises by now!

I pointed calmly, though my heart was beating wildly. Christopher looked, and his eyes bulged like golf-balls.

"Let's get out," he said. "She'll cane us for being here! Jeremy, don't touch it – she'll kill you!"

"Never mind if she punishes us," I said, picking up the cane. "We have to save those girls! Let's break it first and look for a chance to tell the police afterwards."

I took one end in each hand, wondering how hard I would have to press in order to snap it. I smashed it down into my knee, and –

Suddenly the cane was boiling hot, and there were huge explosions of purple light, and cannon-balls were erupting around me, and the wood was too stiff to bend and too strong to snap, and some gigantic electric force blasted out and zapped me so that I lifted a metre in the air before being hurled flat on my back. The cane slammed against the ceiling before dropping onto the floor, and Christopher, losing all his usual instinct for keeping out of trouble, was screaming. I had no voice at all and I couldn't even tell him to shut up. Clouds of turquoise smoke were puffing all around us, and I hardly noticed the footsteps pounding on the stairs, because I was certain I was going to die.

"It's too late, Mum," Ella-Jane shouted over Christopher's din. "They've found your wand!"

Christopher and I were hustled off to church in a state of dire confusion. By the time Dad had checked we were all right, which we were, there was no time left for explanations, so we were dumped in our very first Sunday school session with no idea how we had created the explosion. Ella-Jane kept nudging us and whispering, "You didn't guess, did you? You had no idea at all, had you? We hid it really well!"

"Keep quiet, Ella-Jane," hissed Sally-Anne. "Don't you know how to behave in Sunday school?"

"Of course not," said Ella-Jane. "I've never been before, have I? The boys must be really, really surprised! They must be bursting to have us tell them everything!"

"But does your Mum actually cane you?" asked Christopher.

Ella-Jane looked genuinely surprised. "Mum? Why would a mother do that? The only person who ever smacks me is my stepmother. And she's the Hag of Deadmarsh – "

"Ella-Jane, shut up. You know we're not allowed to complain about our stepmother!"

Once we were finally home, the explanations took all afternoon and all evening. Dad explained that Julia and her daughters were real, live witches, but they hadn't planned to tell us about magic until we knew them better. Magic wands only worked properly for their correct owner, so it would be best if we didn't touch Julia's wand again; but magic in general wouldn't hurt us if we left it to the experts. We must be careful of all magical objects, but the girls would show us how to use them safely.

Yes, Ella-Jane's broom did fly, but it probably wouldn't work for non-magical people and it would be better for Christopher not to take the risk. Besides, she wasn't allowed to let the neighbours see her flying, so she couldn't give us a demonstration until we were out in the Malverns, away from prying eyes. Yes, the girls had locked away their magical possessions in the mysterious wooden box, and of course nobody could unseal the magical lock without a spell. And, no, there had been no projector trick last night: Julia's grandmother really had spoken to her through the cold green fire in much the same way ordinary people spoke on the telephone.

"So we've won the bet!" said Christopher. "Now we know how you were doing your tricks."

Dad and Ella-Jane exchanged glances. "Ella-Jane has won the bet," he said. "She bet me five sugar mice that it would be impossible for the ladies to hide their magic for as long as a whole weekend. I told her that they could hide it if they tried... But I imagine there was simply too much going on that they scarcely even knew about." He brought his hand out of his pocket and displayed the five sugar mice.

All five of us pounced on them before any of the others had time to take unfair shares.

After that, Julia brought down the wooden storage box, tapped it with her wand and announced, "Alohomora!" The lid sprang open, and Molly-Rose started to take their toys out of the box. There were puppets that danced without being wound up; vehicles that ran without batteries; painted animals that talked without any need to pull a string; jigsaws that created a different picture every time they were solved; a lego-like toy called Connect-a-Hex that sparked when pieces were connected and squeezed together in geometry-defying matrices; board games that played music or emitted stinks at every move; and Exploding Snap cards that exploded in your face if you didn't pay attention. There were far more objects than should have fitted into that half-metre cube, but most of them had a battered, fragile look, as if they had been picked up second-hand or from junk shops. Being a witch evidently didn't mean that Julia could conjure up money.

The girls relaxed once they didn't have to keep their secret. They explained that they couldn't do much magic yet because they needed to be trained at a magical school after they were eleven, but they were allowed to have magical objects, such as the amazing cleaning fluids, the impossible toys and Ella-Jane's poor old hand-me-down broomstick. Magic was not supposed to be discussed or displayed outside the family, so Great-Grandmother Domitilla should not have used the Floo network yesterday; but Christopher and I were family now, so perhaps no harm was done.

The chatter lasted long into the evening. Even after we were supposed to be settled for the night, we lay awake for hours, shouting questions across to the girls' room, until in the end Dad came charging up the stairs to remind us that we all had school tomorrow. Dad is definitely not a magical person, but somehow he had a force of personality that intimidated even Ella-Jane.

But the next morning, when Dad drove us to school, we didn't speak a word in the car. The girls went to an ordinary Muggle primary school, and we barely said goodbye to them at their school gates. When Dad dropped Christopher and me off at our school on the other side of town, we looked at each other and knew we wouldn't speak a word about our weekend to anyone at school.

I didn't pay much attention to my physics project that day. I couldn't even answer a basic history question about who had led Germany in the 1930s.

"Jeremy Slater," accused the teacher, "you stayed up too late last night!"

I couldn't deny it; but that wasn't the real problem, for I wasn't at all sleepy. My head was whirling around with questions, of which the most urgent was: What on earth will I tell Mum?

Long before I had closed my maths book, long before I had handed in my physics project, long before I had started my history essay, I knew that I would never tell Mum or her husband a single word about Dad's new life.

"So what is that Julia like?" asked Mum on Monday afternoon. "Is it strange to live with all those girls?"

"Not really," I told her. "They're all pretty ordinary."

A/N.This story is an outtake from Hearthlinks, which explains the blending of the Slater and Perks families from Sally-Anne's point of view. Jeremy's future wife, Mary Fenwick, is featured in The Banebrewer.