Chapter Four

As I stepped into the minstrels' gallery, the sounds of the orchestra, striking up yet another tedious waltz, wafted up from what seemed to be another world. Which, I wondered, was reality? I made my way to where the grand staircase led down to the reception hall, pausing for a moment to look over the balcony, coward that I am, but I didn't feel up to seeing any Blacks as I made my escape from the manor that night. Lucius seemed to have made himself scarce, and I knew it would be a day or two before he managed to un-ruffle his remarkable feathers and seek me out; I knew he would not let the insult lie for too long though. I fretted as I waited for an elf to bring my cloak, and it was only as I was helped into it, that I caught sight of Sirius Black. He was standing behind one of the huge Spanish mahogany uprights at the end of the banister, and I got the feeling he had been waiting for me coming down the stairs and had been watching me. He knew I had seen him and made no effort to conceal himself further, and I don't know why, but I felt less alone for some reason, as though somewhere on that most wretched of nights, someone else was out there, someone else cast adrift in a maelstrom of their own making. I know it is just fanciful to say that he was there for me, but I knew one thing more than I thought he did; I knew we were on the same side.

I Apparated to the disused warehouse at the bottom of the street next to Spinner's End that I always used for such a purpose. It wouldn't have done, after all, to appear from nowhere in the middle of a Muggle street, even one as mean and cheap as the one I lived in. I had only been seen Disapparating once, and that time by such a pitiful scrap of a teenage boy, under the influence of some miserable substance, that I didn't even bother to modify his memory; he wouldn't have had one worth speaking about anyway. It was late by then, well past midnight, and though it had been only one night, enough had happened since the early evening to cause me nightmares for a lifetime. Every time my scattered wits tried to rest on one thing, they were dragged away by another. I was desperate to be home, to try to put what had happened into some type of perspective, and yet terrified to let the fractured images coalesce into the larger picture.

I walked quickly along Cottontrader Row and into my own street, not bothering to conceal the clicks of my boot heels, as they followed me along like some ubiquitous doppelganger. I liked Spinner's End: shabby and uncared for, tired and dispirited, it suited the martyr in my soul; perhaps in some perverse way I wore it as a hair shirt. I identified with every cracked grey pavement slab, and weed-choked garden, and every barking mongrel dog. The charm I always cast on leaving hadn't been disturbed, but then it never had been, not in the five years since I had left Hogwarts. The house swam into only my view as I passed from the light of the Muggle street lamp into darkness so deep that, even knowing my own territory as I did, I always had to resist the urge to light my wand for the few steps to the unwelcoming door to the only thing of value, material or otherwise, that I had inherited from my parents.

My parents had both died the summer I left school, my mother from a lung affliction from which she had suffered for years, and my father two months later, when he fell down the stairs drunk, having forgotten to buy food as well as drink that week. I did some transformations on the house not long after I buried him. The main one was the living room the rest of world saw, not that they cared to look, but it was what they would have expected had they taken the effort: tatty old books lining the walls, and a rickety table and a couple of horrible chairs, just enough to maintain a front of disinterested neglect. What was hidden from view, the room in which I really lived, but charmed away for myself, was similar in only the oddest way. Books still lined the walls, but these had been culled from the finest antiquarian bookshops of Europe, and even a few from the Orient and the lands of the Arab peoples and the Jews. Many of them were imported for me by a small Chinese wizard in Knockturn Alley. Few of the books were written in English, and most were banned as being unsuitable for various reasons, not least amongst them being the Dark Magic ones. The old seats were still old seats, but were settees of comfortably worn and shiny hide, and the rickety table was replaced by a desk made of solid polished ebony; it was where I sat most of the time. The biggest concession I made to my vanity, and one of which I was fittingly proud, was that I had enhanced the space to that which could not possibly exist in so small a house. I didn't bother with two kitchens; I cooked quickly on what had been my mother's stove, mainly by magic, and ate at my desk.

My parents hadn't been the only relatives of mine to die that year though; an ancient aunt on my mother's side, whom she hadn't ever mentioned, died too. As her only living relative, I inherited a former mill owner's mansion in Northumberland, every bit as splendid as Malfoy Manor and considerably more tasteful, and a sizable working olive grove in Tuscany, which she herself had inherited some years previously, but led me to believe she had never visited. She had left me a letter too, with her solicitor, which surprised me greatly as I had not even known of her existence, although I learnt quite soon that she had known of me. Inside the letter was a photograph of her, in an old-fashioned sunhat, with a wicker trug of herbs over her arm. I confess that I listened to little of what the solicitor told me, as he droned on about arranging probate for what seemed to be a sizable estate, and what funds of my aunt's he had available to pay the crippling inheritance tax that had been incurred on her death. It didn't matter to me; the residual fortune which was just about to be dumped in my lap was more than I had ever expected to earn in a lifetime. Quite apart from that, I could hardly contain myself with the odd feeling of anticipation which had overtaken me, one which had nothing at all to do with money. Just as I had been about to slip the photograph back into the envelope, the wrinkled old smiling face had winked at me.

When I left the solicitor's office in Chancery Lane in London, a very much richer man in the worldly way of things, I slipped the still unread letter from my pocket and picked out the photograph again. I would have been unreasonably disappointed if I had been mistaken, but I hadn't been. The woman in the picture had taken on quite a different pose this time. The sunhat was gone, to leave a mass of feathery white hair above twinkling pale blue eyes, not that faded watery blue of old ladies, but the colour of forget-me-nots and summer sky. I looked into the envelope again to check that there weren't in fact two pictures, but as I did so the wrinkled old face winked again.

'There's just the one, Severus,' she said. 'You don't know me yet, but I know all about you. I'm your Aunty Ethel.'

The letter was long and flowery and seemed to imitate the styles of several authors, one moment as though she had been reading Thackeray, and the next Dickens. It informed me that she had taken a personal interest in my Hogwarts days, hinting of having information passed on to her by what she mysteriously referred to as inside sources. I was sceptical of course, and when she failed to make any attempt to converse with me again, I put her photograph into the envelope and stuck it in my desk drawer. About a week later I was sitting trying to translate an Ancient Macedonian text, when I heard an odd tapping sound, much like an owl requesting entry at the window, but coming instead from the fireplace. At first I couldn't think what it was and eventually tried to ignore it. It became out of kilter and extremely annoying, and I found I was unable to concentrate until I found its source. Ethel's picture had appeared on the horrible tiled mantelpiece, and she was knocking on the glass of a photograph frame I had never seen in my life, as though she were behind a window and trying to get my attention.

'I didn't leave you all that money for you to stick me in a drawer and ignore me,' she said. 'And either sell up this place or do it up nicely, Severus, but I'm not staying here the way it is.'

I sold the mansion in Northumberland eventually, instead of Spinner's End; Ethel said she hadn't cared much for it and had found the ghosts aloof and somewhat wanting in intelligence. I could have lived in the big house I suppose, displayed my wealth with a vulgarity equal to that of the Malfoys, I certainly had the funds to do so, and Ethel and I had had more than one amusing conversation about how Lucius would handle being so rudely upstaged. It never occurred to me to wonder how she knew so much of my world and the people in it, although I know now why that was. I think it was she who convinced me to stay in Spinner's End, saying that it was a good house, and only the memories were bad, and that as I had been born in the house it owed me the debt of protection, and somehow I understood what she was trying to say. Whatever it was, it seemed that just as I thought I had decided otherwise, I changed my mind and stayed put.

Ethel didn't say much most of the time, only commenting occasionally as I made my home improvements, berating me for drinking too much or not eating properly, but her odd charm quite knocked me for six, and it wasn't long before I found her almost to be a confidant. I think she genuinely enjoyed funding what I had always secretly wanted as my lifestyle, and I kept my lifestyle secret; I didn't really want anyone to know anything about me, and let them quietly assume I was the impoverished Snape they had hitherto taken me for.

There was one exception to that, one person who knew most things about me, and that was Lily Evans, although there were possibly two by then, if the rumours about her romance with James Potter were true. I hadn't spoken to Lily for some time after I left school, maybe two years or so; relations between us had soured to the extent that when we met we weren't even civil to one another. That had saddened me deeply, even though I knew the blame lay entirely with me. I had been very fond of Lily, as fond of her as I was of Andromeda, although in a different way. It's odd I suppose, but I viewed Lily in much the same way as it now seemed that Andromeda viewed me. What goes around, as they say, comes around. A couple of years before, Lily had come to me in desperation, thinking herself to be pregnant. Just what she had expected me to do about that, I'm not sure; she was every bit as good a potions maker as I was, but on reflection I think she just needed a friend at that time, someone who would neither be judgmental nor try to talk her into doing anything she didn't want to do. It turned out to be a false alarm though, although the weeks she spent at Spinner's End taught me a few things. The first was that no matter how hard one tries, no man can isolate himself completely, and the second one was that I am fool for women's charms.

The next alarm she had wasn't false, and I confess it is a bitter regret to me that I didn't insist that we marry right away to at least give the child what I rather pompously considered to be a decent moral start in life. That didn't happen of course; she went back to stay with her parents, promising me that she would bear the child. She lost it in the tenth week of her pregnancy, and I lost count of the times I wondered if she would have borne the baby if she had stayed with me, or if she had moved away to rid herself of it, or if any amount of prayer can ever undo what the gods have already ordained. Whatever it was, I was alone.

That night, the night I came home from Malfoy Manor a fully-fledged Death Eater and single man with no prospect of change, I was tempted to wallow in the version of the living room that I walked into; cold and unwelcoming, it would at least afford me the opportunity of my first success of the night, that of becoming monumentally drunk. I hoped Ethel was asleep. I had turned her picture to the wall before I left, tired of her harking on at me not to go to the manor that night. I left the picture the way it was; I didn't want her to know what I had allowed to happen to me, as though somehow I had betrayed her as much as I had betrayed myself. I sat on the lumpy armchair, and uncorked a bottle of single malt I had brought through from the kitchen.

'Fuck it all,' I snarled out loud to myself and raised my wand, letting the Concealment Charm drop. If I were going to get rat-arsed and maudlin, I might as well do it in comfort.

I drank quickly at first, almost panicked that I wasn't becoming as drunk as I wanted to be. I had to become anesthetised before I allowed myself to think properly, a contradiction in terms I know, but that way maybe one thing wouldn't hurt so badly, or another frighten me so much. My demons wouldn't be chased away so easily though, they floated from the corners of my mind, demanding attention. At last I stood up, half the bottle lining my otherwise empty stomach. I took off my tailcoat, loosened my white bow tie and pulled aside the sleeve of my high-necked evening shirt. I only realised I had closed my eyes when I summoned up the dregs of my courage to open them, to look at the atrocity I had permitted to befall me.

I felt the bile rise in my throat at the motionless black tattoo with its red eyes. And then it writhed, and it was all I could do the keep the whisky I had drunk in its current place of residence. I was trembling and sweating, hoping against hope that my vision was swimming, or that I was just imagining it, but even as I tried, I felt something move under my skin, something alive, and I only just made it to the kitchen to throw the first lot of whisky up into the sink. It was going to be a long night.

'Oh, Severus,' Ethel's picture said, still turned to wall, as I staggered back to the living room. 'Turn me round, boy. I am afraid to do it myself.'

I shook my head in denial of everything, without saying anything. I had nothing to say, neither in my defence nor in explanation.

That was the first night she left the picture, but I was too drunk to really realise it had happened.

*****