Chapter Five

I don't remember much about the next few days, passing as they did in a merciful blur of intoxication. I do recall some things though, whether figments of my troubled imagination or reality, I cannot say to this day. I know that Ethel spent a great deal of time out of her picture, and it seemed that she and I talked for long hours whilst I watched on. I know that makes no sense, that I was drinking myself into some sort of oblivion, and yet watching myself having fiercely debated discussions with an old lady who seemed to walk in and of a photograph at whatever whim possessed her. Of the conversations, if there really were any, I remember little, and yet even that is not entirely true. For many days, and indeed months afterwards, I found that I already knew fresh knowledge imparted to me, already understood anything about to be explained, and although I am somewhat vain in my own depth of knowledge, I am honest enough, at least with myself, to admit to what I don't know. One thread seemed to weave its way through these phantom talks; that was Ethel's, and latterly my own, concern for Andromeda's unborn child, the unborn child who would have the bloodlines required for me to embark on the task I had, the task I had in some way begun to accept when I took the Dark Mark. I had stooped to take the gauntlet in allowing Riddle to bestow his gift, and the moment I made any attempt, actual or mental, to begin to prepare Aqua Vitae, I would have picked it from the floor, and any half-blooded wizard born thereafter would be fair game.

On what turned out to be the fourth morning I had run out of the admirable supply of whisky I hadn't realised I had, and it seemed Ethel had run out of things to say; I didn't think then to wonder why the two events dovetailed so neatly. Whatever it was, as the fog in my mind began to be replaced by something altogether more vicious, Ethel retired to her picture. I tried to make sense of the last few days, but my head was becoming so sore that I could barely think at all. I swallowed what must have been an almost fatal dose of hangover cure, and waited until I felt I could continue my own quest, that of avoiding sobriety at all costs. But all that was left was Ogden's, which I didn't much care for, and the flask of finest elf-made wine that I didn't really want to think about.

I had had the elf wine for almost a year by then, having had to wait for a month for it to be illegally imported into Knockturn Alley for me; all that time I had spent rehearsing my useless lines, and waiting for the moment that would never arrive now. The wine came, of course, from Transylvania, with a provenance written in elfish, to the effect that the grapes were imported from Tuscany, and had been squeezed by the hands of pre-pubescent female elves, directly descended from those brought from Italy when Transylvania had been under the rule of the Roman Empire. All in all it involved quite an amount of clandestine travelling of one sort or another, and I had considered it a fittingly expensive gift, the very best that money could buy, with which I had intended to toast my engagement to Andromeda. I lifted it from the shelf next to where Ethel's picture faced the wall again, and deliberately smashed it on the stone hearth, watching the blood red wine spill over the stone to creep into the spaces in the floorboards, filling the knotty parts in a way that reminded me of the eyes of the Dark Mark. I had just reached for the Ogden's, when a loud demanding knock sounded on my front door.

There weren't that many people who knew where to find me, and apart from Muggles selling raffle tickets on the odd occasion I left the charms down, I had few visitors. It is a suitable testament to how drunk I still was that I didn't realise the state I must have been in when I threw open the front door in a rage at being so intruded upon.

'I had thought that if you were going to get drunk that you would have sobered up by now,' Sirius Black said, as he pushed past me and closed the door.

'Go away,' I said, in what sounded like an incredulous whine, even to me.

He had reached the living room, looking around himself, as though stepping from the miserable little hall to the luxury of the living room had been as surprising as jumping into a hot bath only to find it was cold instead. Despite my drunkenness, nothing apart from the smashed wine flask and a couple of the empty whisky bottles was really in a state of disarray. I'd been too busy drinking and either having or imagining long talks to make a mess, and I'd just slept where I fell down, usually on the floor. I could see Black was quite taken aback though; it hadn't been at all what he'd expected, and I felt no small satisfaction at having so effortlessly robbed him of his preconceptions.

'If you have come for a return bout, Black, either kick me in the balls and be done with it, or come back another day,' I said. 'I really do not care either way.'

'Yeah,' he said, wincing as though he had monetarily forgotten about my assault, and some phantom stab of pain had reminded him again. 'That was bloody sore. Remind me to thank you properly some time.'

'Why are you here?' I asked, without the thought even crossing what then passed for my mind to question how he had found the house at all.

He didn't reply, not directly anyway. He had sat himself on one of my leather settees, my favourite as it happens, the one I fancied I had worn a comfortable groove in, and he had spelled away the smashed glass and the spilt wine with a negligent flick of his wand. 'You wouldn't want to stain that rug, would you?' he said, and I could see he knew the value of the Afghan Dune Pixie weave. He turned to me with a frown, and I suspect the bald frankness of his own question somehow appealed to me. 'How do you pay for this?' he asked, looking around the room, with its exquisitely expensive books and its ebony desk and the other trappings of self-indulgence few could afford. 'Lucius?'

'Hardly,' I retorted. 'I am fortunate enough not to have to beg the Malfoys for scraps, not that it is any of your business.'

'Of course it isn't. Sorry,' he said offhandedly. 'For some reason I thought you were ... well ... poor. You always appeared so.'

'I always was,' I replied tartly. 'Until recently.'

'I see,' he said, and gave the little frown again.

I wanted him to believe me. I don't really know why, but I didn't want him to think my fortune stemmed from anything to do with Tom Riddle, or Dark Magic, or Lucius Malfoy. I didn't realise it, not then, but I needed someone apart from the photograph of a dead old lady to believe in me, and still unknown to me I had already cast Sirius Black in the role. Perhaps because we were such opposites that we were almost equals, or perhaps Ethel and I had discussed such a thing in the past four days, or maybe I just hated him enough to trust him.

'What do you want, Black?' I asked again, through the dull confusing ache of what, despite the potion I had swallowed, felt like it were working up to being a towering hangover, one I wasn't at all sure I had the courage to endure. 'I'm sure you didn't come to gloat over whatever poverty you might have hoped to find.'

'No,' he said, and looked away, towards where Ethel's picture was still facing the wall. 'I came for a few reasons.'

'Just one will do for now,' I said. My head was becoming so sore that I was finding it difficult even to maintain my hostility.

'Why don't you sober up and I'll tell you?' he suggested, looking back at me and then to Ethel's picture again, as though drawn either by curiosity, or something I didn't understand.

'Why don't you just tell me and go?' I countered, tiring of the spat, as a wave of nausea swept over me and left me sweating, trembling and as wretched as I ever hope to feel again. I only had time to wish I had the strength to blast the look of sympathetic empathy from Black's face when my eyes were drawn to the picture too. I wasn't at all surprised to see that it had turned itself around and now faced into the room. I knew I hadn't done that; I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't even know where my wand was at that moment in time, and I certainly didn't have the mental capacity at that point to do any magic without it.

'Why don't I go and make a nice cup of tea for you, Severus? Then you can go and get yourself tidied up,' Ethel suggested. 'I have standards to maintain, you know, dear, and you've really had enough whisky now anyway. I'll just put a little something into the tea to help you along, shall I?' she murmured as she disappeared from the picture.

I heard her pottering about in the kitchen and was pleased to notice that Black was every bit as intrigued as I pretended not to be. I wanted to open the kitchen door which led from the room we were in, just to see how she was going about her task, but I didn't want Black to know that I was as mystified as he was. After a moment, and it hadn't even been long enough for either of us to make attempt at conversation or for the lack of one to seem awkward, the kitchen door opened itself and Ethel came out, wearing a long lavender dress with a bustle that must surely have gone out of fashion a hundred years before she was born. She was a ghost, of course, but one who appeared to have the facility to function in the real world, yet not a poltergeist. It relieved me and frightened me and confused me, all at the same time, to realise that I, or some part of me, had indeed been conversing deeply with her, whilst the other part of me drank to insensibility.

'Fascinating,' Black said with what I'm sure he thought was a fetching, very Gryffindor smile, as she handed him a delicate looking cup and saucer I had never seen, and placed a plate of hot scones on the small table beside his seat, my seat. 'What are you, madam, if I may ask?'

'I'm Aunty Ethel,' she replied, and then turned to me, winked the wink that charmed me to my very soul, and handed me a cup and saucer too, one that she couldn't possibly have been carrying a moment before. She watched me until I sipped at the odd-tasting brew, before turning back to Black. 'And you, young handsome beau that you are, must be Sirius Black.'

'Amazing,' he replied. 'How did you know that?' he asked her, and shot me a suspicious look.

It was only then that I realised I wasn't drunk anymore; I didn't have a headache, I wasn't tired, I didn't even feel nauseous. 'Ethel knows everything worth knowing,' I replied dryly in her stead. 'And a few things that aren't. Don't you, Ethel?'

She had conjured a rather strange looking chair from somewhere. It was spindly and looked able to bear the weight of nothing heavier than she was, but it had a very deep seat, and it was only when she sat down, carefully arranging her voluminous skirts, that I understood it had to accommodate both the bustle and her bottom, and whatever other apparatus held her and her ensemble together.

'Of course I know everything, dear,' she said, patting my hand like the grandmother I had never had. 'Just as I know you are going to listen to Sirius Black, and he is going to listen to you, and then we are going to work out how we are going to get you all out of the terrible fix you are in. But for now, I shall rest a little, and you will have a bath and tidy yourself up, Severus.'

I dared a look at Black, but he was looking at the black and white photograph of an old lady in a sunhat with a wicker trug of herbs over her arm, and when I turned back to Ethel there wasn't even a space where her chair had been. I wondered if I were still drunk after all.

*****

I had stood up, quite at a loss as to whether to go for the now much longed for bath and leave Black alone with Ethel, or just to get rid of him. Now I was sober the questions had begun to seep into my awareness, demanding attention and answers, and I needed to speak to her alone, while I was in the full possession of what passed for my mental faculties. Ethel had turned herself to the wall though, and I took that to mean that she did not care to be disturbed. Black glanced quickly at the back of the picture and turned to me.

'I'll assume she isn't listening,' he said, nodding to the picture frame.

I shrugged noncommittally; in truth I didn't have the vaguest idea, but I wasn't about to let him know that.

'I should have told her, Severus,' Black went on. 'I'm sorry for that much. I'm sorry I didn't tell her; perhaps it might have prepared her in some way.'

'Prepared whom? Ethel?' I asked, totally perplexed. 'What are you talking about, Black?'

'Andromeda, of course. I should have told her ... but when we sat down to dinner Bellatrix told me that both you and Lucius were announcing your engagements to her and Narcissa at the end of the evening, and I just assumed I'd been mistaken.'

'Mistaken in what?' I asked, smarting at the reference to Andromeda, and not caring much for Bellatrix's misconception either. I didn't feel like admitting to Black that I had intended to be engaged to one of his cousins, but I had an uncomfortable feeling that he might have guessed something along those lines, and wondered again at just what he had overheard.

'I knew you were in love with Andromeda ... while we were talking, I realised it, and then when she arrived ... I'm sorry.' He trailed off somewhat lamely, having confirmed my worst fears.

'I don't know what you're talking about,' I snarled, furious at him and Andromeda afresh, furious that he had come here to rake about in my ruins to offer some patronising platitudes to satisfy his own pathetic ego. I crossed the room and grabbed him by the lapels of the long black leather coat he wore, much the same way as I had grabbed him a few nights before, but he was ready this time, and his hands dropped to cover the Black family jewels.

'Not another knee in the balls, Severus, please,' he groaned. 'Why don't you knock out a couple of teeth instead?'

I shoved him away, disgusted with us both equally. 'Why don't you just go, Black? I don't want to hear anything you have to say, and I'm sure you heard enough with your little eavesdropping exercise to satisfy even you.'

'I wasn't eavesdropping,' he objected so quickly as he sat back down that I was tempted to believe him. 'I was making sure no one hostile came onto the terrace. Fuck sake, I thought you were going to be talking about the Order of ... something else anyway.'

'The Order of what?' I asked, not at all sure that he hadn't deliberately hung a carrot in front of me.

'Nothing,' he snapped, standing again and beginning to make for the door. 'Have another vat of whisky and forget I even came.'

Even though I knew he was playing a little game of brinkmanship, and he knew that I knew, I almost let him go. Now I was sober, whatever I had managed to forget, along with what Ethel had imparted to me, was crowding in on me. I followed him to the door, wondering how to back down without seeming to, wondering why I should bother, yet knowing that I was turning away some sort of chance to right the wrongs of that night. I didn't have any idea of how that could be, but I knew I had to try, or wear my damnation around my neck for the rest of my life.

'What were the other things?' I asked, swallowing whatever of my pride was left to me.

'What do you mean?'

'You said you came to tell me a few things,' I said. 'What were the others?'

He gave me a level look, one I saw the relief through. 'Go and have a bath; you're a mess,' he said, nodding to where the stairs rose from almost the front door of the mean little hallway. 'I promise not to make free with your whisky or steal the silverware.'

'There's no whisky left worth speaking of,' I replied. 'Being of unsound mind, I drank the lot. You may help yourself to any silverware you find.' It was the best I could do at short notice, and I turned and began to climb the stairs.

*****