Release
Release
As August blurred into September, I stayed awake for longer and longer periods of time and slept shorter ones. I coughed less, ate more and, under Willow’s watchful eye, drank enough tea to fill the deep lake at Hogwarts.
Having returned to the land of the living, I also began to venture into the world beyond the settle. First, to the chair by the window where I stayed for an hour or two at a stretch. Barely moving, hardly even thinking, still floating somewhere in that peaceful in-between space. Weird, amazing, being able to sit like that, content to listen to the sound of birds outside or watch the changing colours of the day.
Later, I added in trips to the kitchen table, where soup and porridge and sweet herbal tea began to give way to eggs and bread and chicken stew with potatoes and carrots.
The sense of being suspended between past and future faded as my strength began to come back. I was almost sorry to see it go. Without it, the sense of urgency tugged at me to get up, get going, get on the road, get to Harry, get home, get home, get home. Then I’d wander to the window again, not to sit and watch Willow’s garden, but to stand and search for the future hidden somewhere beyond it. All I’d find was my own reflection looking back at me from the glass, its face even thinner than the one that used to greet me in the mirrors of Grimmauld Place, its shadowed eyes full of questions about how I could ever hope to get back to where I belonged. Then the echo of recent illness and despair would stir restlessly in my bones.
Turn away, I’d tell myself. Turn away now. Don’t think about it.
As much as I wanted to start searching out a way home, I had to admit to myself I wasn’t ready. Not when the walk from my new spot in the room that had once belonged to Willow’s grown son, to the kitchen table still seemed ten times further than it looked. Not when the slightest effort left me drained or winded. Whatever shape my journey back to the future would take, I must first be healthy and clear-minded enough to undertake it.
I began asking Willow to find me things to do to help out around the place. Little things at first, to occupy my mind and start me getting my strength and endurance back.
She found all sorts of tasks for me. Let me carry on with them too, even though, to be honest, most of them I wasn’t very good at.
Two years of Muggle studies hardly prepares you to remember all the fussy little details, even of the things that look easy.
Like fixing vegetables.
I sat at the kitchen table and cut up potatoes for a stew Willow was making. It took a long, long time. It wasn’t only that my hands still shook with the effort of working the knife. I had never done anything like it since school, not even with a slicing spell. My Mother had insisted it was a task for House Elves only and given ours firm instructions that I was not allowed in the kitchen unless I wanted something prepared for me to eat, and then it was only to make my order.
The first challenge was paring away the slippery tan potato peelings. There were no seams to show you where to start. No loose, stretchy parts to grab onto or pull off. Who’d ever have guessed how tightly sealed those jackets were to every inch of the potato’s outside? Then came chopping the inside into neat pieces of a close enough size to cook through at an even rate. Everything else was ready long before the potatoes were finished, but Willow sat and waited, chatting to me about her apple trees and some sparrows she’d seen that morning until every last one of them was done.
“Let me stir the porridge for you,” I offered one morning when she had returned, tired and hungry from delivering a baby girl to a family a couple of miles down the road. I had watched her make porridge the day before and it couldn’t be all that difficult. I wanted it to come out hot and perfect and filling for her. In the event that I had rambled about having wizard powers during my fever, I hoped to reassure her that, now it had passed, I was a very sane, ordinary person, not a madman. Mostly though, I wanted to serve her something as nice as all the things she fixed for me during my illness.
Maybe, I decided, watching Willow eat it, lumps and all, if I was going to make myself truly useful, the place to start wasn’t in the kitchen.
I took a wicker basket of laundry outside and handed her pins as she hung clothes up to dry in the sun. I carried away pans of wash-water to dump by the back door. I gathered eggs from the chicken-coop.
“Never raided the hen-house before have you, Town Scruff?”
Willow laughed when I walked into the house covered with straw and feathers. I shrugged and grinned. If she only knew!
At least I had been encouraged to learn that hens make about as much racket on the approach of humans as they do for big black dogs.
“Shall I bring you in some firewood?” I asked a few afternoons later.
“If you’re feeling up to it, that’d be great. I’ll come with you,” Willow said, her green eyes sparkling as she grinned at me. “It’ll go quicker, after all, with the two of us to carry it in, and I want to get supper underway.”
I started out into the yard and made my slow way along the wall and around the corner of the house toward the woodpile. A moment later, I heard the door close and her footsteps coming behind me.
“Here you go, it’ll need some cutting first.”
I turned to find her holding out a large axe to me with both hands.
“Cutting?” I asked, looking at the blade shining in the afternoon sunlight. I stared at its bright, sharp edge, the sturdy looking wooden handle resting in her hands and then the pile of logs. I touched the handle, ran a finger along the deep-grained surface and tried to remember what it looked like when somebody cut wood. How far down the handle should my hands be? Did I saw the blade back and forth like cutting bread, or swing it down the way a troll wields a club? If I sawed, how did I keep the log from rolling? If I swung, how hard did I hit it?
“Ummm, Willow…” I raised my eyes to her.
She was laughing. “Never cut wood before, hmm, Scruff?” she asked helpfully.
Over the next weeks, she taught me how to weed the vegetable garden, wipe down windows with vinegar and how to sweep the floor. That seemed like a really disrespectful way to treat a broomstick, even when I realized that the weight and design of the handle would make it almost useless for flying.
As day followed day, the tasks grew easier. My wandless hands discovered the dance of weight, pressure, speed and angles in ways that they’d never experienced before, then learned to understand the subtleties between them as I worked around the place. And little by little, my strength was returning. It seemed like a great accomplishment when I stayed awake all day without the need for a nap. Even more when I carried in an armload of firewood without breaking a sweat and having to sit down afterward to catch my breath. Sometimes I remembered the conversation I’d heard in the village about the man who’d had an accident “down the pit” and how he’d be all right in only a month or two…
Only?- I’d thought at the time with some amazement. I had certainly learned a lot since then about weathering illness without the Magic of Medi-Wizards like Hessia (my darling Hessia) who had once healed the bones of a shattered hand for me in only a matter of minutes. As intrigued as I had been growing up to learn about the nature and inventiveness of Muggles, it had mostly been theory, motivated largely by rebellion against my family. Now my slow but steady non-Magical recovery was giving me a whole new appreciation and respect for their patience and perseverance.
Another thing that I found amazing as my strength returned was the amount of pleasure I was taking from the meals Willow and I shared. It had been years since I’d had both food and an appetite at the same time. In Azkaban, eating was an apathetic duty to an old habit. It was much the same in Grimmauld Place. The food had no flavor. In the woods of Hogwarts and the cave I’d shared with Buckbeak, the food was delicious when, as a dog, I could catch or scrounge it for us. Even tastier when Harry, Ron and Hermione managed to send owls with a sack full of treats from the Hogwarts kitchen.
Now there were soups and stews, roasts, breads, biscuits and vegetables by the platefull. “Well, then, eat up,” Willow would encourage, pushing a steaming serving dish toward me when I’d finished my first helping. “Come on, you’re far, far too thin. You’d never have been so ill if you’d had a bit more meat on your bones. Here, let me dish you up a bit more parsnips and carrots.”
In the evenings after supper, Willow and I would sit for an hour over one last cup of tea. Sometimes we watched from the back garden for the stars to come out, or sat by the fire listening to the falling rain. At others we talked. Slow, ambling chats about the happenings of the day, usually. After a while she began to tell me a bit about her life and family. That her husband, Hal, had been dead for two years and how their son, Dylan, lived with his wife, son and two daughters on a farm a couple of days’ easy horseback riding from here. She often went to visit, she said, but refused to move in with them. She was reluctant to give up the little house she’d had since she married, or the freedom she enjoyed to come and go at her own will.
“Dylan’s used to the idea of me making up medicines for people, I was doing it from the time he was small, but he doesn’t like it when I go midwifing all round the neighborhood,” she said. “Thinks his old Mum’s more than a bit unconventional, I’m afraid. But I like doing what I do. It makes a difference and it’s important. Not that he ever would, or could force me to do it, but if I lived with him, I think he’d keep urging me to stop.”
“Maybe he worries about you,” I said, thinking of her walking the hills in a storm the night we met.
“That’s probably a lot of it,” she nodded. “I suppose kids- children that is- though I shouldn’t call him that now he’s grown- worry as much over their parents as we do over them. What do you think?”
I shrugged. Worry wasn’t exactly the word that came to mind when I thought about my Mother and me.
What, she asked me, had I done before I landed on her settle? Where did I come from and, wasn’t there someone we should write to about where I was and what had happened to me. I knew she was curious, maybe even rather concerned by my hesitation to talk about myself, but she was always gentle in her questioning, and quick to change its direction if she sensed I was uncomfortable with it.
When she learned I had no family of my own, she asked instead if I had stories about my Godson. Like everything else about my past, I kept my tales of Harry very general because I wanted neither to shock or frighten her with the truth nor to tell her a lie. If I was a Muggle, it stood to reason that my Godson was also. And very quickly I got the idea that she was really more interested in hearing me talk about what he was like than in what he did. I appreciated her kindness as she helped me keep his image clear and my hopes of returning to him, alive.
One particularly sunny morning after three days of grey drizzle, she got up from breakfast and headed into the pantry while I finished up a plate of eggs. A moment later a metal pail and a woven basket plunked onto the table on either side of my plate. “Well, Stephen, I think you’re up to taking a walk. Really giving your legs a good stretch today. When you’re done there, we’ll get the dishes scrubbed up and be out the door and on our way. It’s too fine a day to spend puttering around the house.”
There was a briskness in her manner I hadn’t seen before. “What do you have in mind?” I asked, looking from Willow to the pail and the basket.
“I know where there’s a patch of late strawberries,” she said. “It’s a ways past the place where I met you. I want to make preserves. I have a feeling this is the last of the really fine weather until spring. It’s past time I started gathering in my herbs to dry for the winter.”
I nodded. “Yeah, okay. If we’re both picking berries, the work should go really smooth. Will you start making the preserves this afternoon?”
She looked shocked. “Well, of course not! That’s for tomorrow! Today we’re going to sit on the ground in the sunshine, have a good conversation and eat a great many berries ourselves, along with the bread and cheese I packed before you got up.”
Overhead the sky was a clear and cloudless blue as we set out, following a narrow road that led down a gently sloping hill and out of the clearing where her house stood. The warm breeze stroked the flowing willow leaves, making them rustle and whisper with pleasure.
I grinned at the woman walking beside me with the bucket swinging in her hand. “Does anyone ever tease you about being called ‘Willow” when your house is in a grove of them?”
She laughed. “Those trees are the reason why my husband picked this place when we got married. He said if he was traveling, he’d always remember where to come home to. ‘I’ll just look for that grove of Willow’s.’ he’d tell me. He used to tease our daughter-in-law that, unless it was summer, he’d need a road-sign to visit his two grand-daughters. Their names are Iris and Daisy. Both of those disappear every winter!”
“Iris? Daisy?” I asked. Willow had turned off the road and was leading the way through some high grass alongside an old stone wall overhung by oak trees. “How amazing! The three of you are all named after plants!”
She shrugged, slowing her pace to fall into step beside me. “My whole family is. Well, not the men. My husband was Hal, my son is Dylan and my grandson is Kelton. But the women…” I juggled the picnic basket to my other hand so I could take the bucket from her as she lifted her long skirts to step over a log. “Let’s see, now. My great-great grandmother was Rosemary and her daughter was Gentian, though everybody called her Jenny. She had three girls, Ivy, Fern and Magnolia-” Her eyes were sparkling with amusement as she looked at me and held out her hand for the bucket. “Magnolia was my grandmother She hated it. She insisted everybody call her Maggie.” Her grin had become giggles. “But even so, after my Uncle Owen was born, she still named my aunt Jasmine and my mother, Heather. Jasmine had Jonathan, then Ivy and Rose…”
I was laughing, too. “My family…” I began.
The basket banged against my leg as I paused in my steps and tried to look as though I had been distracted by a rustling sound coming from behind the wall.
Thinking of my cousin Andromeda and my brother Regulus, I had almost said “My family names people after stars.”
But I wasn’t Sirius here and Stephen was hardly a stellar name. “Say, Willow! What’s that noise over there?”
She followed my gesture. “Noise? I didn’t hear anything. Maybe it was John Burkett’s bull. Nasty creature. He’s usually not pastured up here, though, but in the field down the hill. You’re sure you heard something?”
I stood staring at the wall without seeing it. How close I had come to blowing my Muggle identity to pieces! At the very least I’d reveal myself as an untrustworthy liar… or worse! One slip of the tongue and the smile on Willow’s face as she spoke of her grandchildren would be replaced by fear and suspicion. Maybe even loathing.
For the first time in my life I wished I had tried harder to stay awake in Professor Binns’s History of Magic classes! Then I would know just when the absolute terror of witches and wizards had been at its worst. It seemed to me that had been during a much earlier period of history, and by this time it was waning. But what if I was wrong? I knew nothing of the beliefs and ideas Willow had grown up with! Horror or fear would be a terrible repayment for all of her kindness.
Mistaking my hesitation for fascination, Willow moved to stand beside me. “You really are a town scruff, aren’t you?”
I nodded, absently. A rich, spoiled, rather arrogant town scruff I had been, all right! How many times had my good friend Remus Lupin told me that even Professor Binns’s boring lectures might come in useful someday?
Willow touched my arm. I turned to see her grinning at me. The grin became a gentle, throaty chuckle. “Even if there was anything there, you’re certainly not going to see it through the wall.”
“Oh, right.” Again I nodded, drawing a deep breath and trying to make my tone casual. “It probably wasn’t anything.”
“Well, come on then, Scruff, let’s go! I know where there is something to see! I don’t know about you, but even the thought of those berries is making me hungry already!”
We walked in silence for a time. That had been close! How had I been so careless? Especially over something as simple as a name? But then, years ago, when I first trained to be a spy against Voldemort, I was told that the simple things were the ones that trip people up when they’re lying. Back then the stories I told hadn’t felt like lies. They were protections, cover-ups needed to keep people safe. I wasn’t a spy anymore. Just a stranger who was misleading the person who had saved his life.
I stopped. Glanced behind me to where Willow had paused to gather some green leafy vines growing up the side of a tree. For a moment, I’d thought I felt that slow prickle of being watched, as if her gaze had settled on the back of my neck and rested there. No more than my own uneasy conscience though, because, as I turned, she was busy examining some sort of fat buds tangled in the vines. Catching my look, she smiled briefly and pointed to a blossom just beginning to open.
I mustn’t think like this, I reminded myself as I nodded and smiled back. This isn’t at all like when I spied against old Snake Eyes and his followers. For one thing, I’d have a hard go of it, trying to do anything like that, since none of them are even born yet!
And of course, I hadn’t tripped up. Not really. Not in words, only in thought. But covering for myself didn’t mean I was lying to hurt her or to take advantage of her. I was attempting to stay clear about who and what I was in this time. I certainly wouldn’t want to scare Willow into thinking she had taken in a raving madman by explaining how I was really this Wizard who had accidentally left his wand a hundred or so years in the future. Witches and Wizards just don’t go around announcing things like that to Muggles. Not for their sakes nor for our own.
Protections again, after all then. Maybe, what had happened would turn out to be a good thing, a reminder to be more careful next time.
“Look, Stephen! I was right! They’re ready!”
At the edge of a sunny meadow, Willow pointed at several large clusters of short green plants. From beneath their tousled leaves, bright red berries peered. I watched her drop to her knees and with quick twists of her fingers and wrist, she began flicking bright, round strawberries into the bucket. I knelt beside her and reached for a vine, then hesitated. As she looked over at me, amusement narrowed her eyes and I could almost hear the teasing words a moment before she spoke. “Well, Scruff, I suppose you never picked a berry, either?”
I laughed, then shrugged. “We had servants.” I said a little apologetically.
“Poor you!” she exclaimed and putting her hand over mine, showed me the twist and tug trick. A big juicy berry slid into my palm releasing a delicious aroma.
We picked and picked, watching the berries pile higher and higher in the bucket. As we worked, I thought about my Mother who would have dismissed this task in disgust, calling it “servants’ work”. There was an odd tug of sorrow for a pleasure I had never experienced before and one that her pride would never have allowed her to know at all.
When the bucket reached its fill, we set about reaching ours. We sat on a blanket in the lush grass, not talking much, savoring the berries along with the tastiest bread and cheese I can remember.
We ate until neither of us could hold another bite.
Willow drew a long, satisfied sigh and then, brushing a scatter of leaves and breadcrumbs from her skirt, got to her feet. “I thought I saw some wild comfrey growing at the edge of this meadow. I could use a bit of that to dry for the winter. I’m going for a look. Want to come or maybe you’d fancy a nap instead?”
The truth was, all the walking and fresh air had already lured me down on the blanket.
“I think I’ll stay here,” I said, closing my eyes.
“All right, see you in a bit!” called Willow over her shoulder. I could hear the swish of her skirts amid the undergrowth. It faded, leaving only the sounds of squirrels chattering in a nearby tree, birds calling overhead and the low drone of insects.
I yawned. Stretched. Felt the sun on my face.
The sun…
On my face?
That sweet, stolen feeling which had never grown less precious during the long years-
My eyes opened on cloudless blue sky.
I wasn’t in Azkaban, staring through bars-
I wasn’t stealing out through the rocky entrance of a cave, glancing first to left and right to see if anyone was around…
An amazing thing occurred to me at that moment.
I wasn’t basking in the sun the way I usually did, as a dog, but in my human form!
I wasn’t hiding from anybody! For the first time in fifteen years, I was lying beneath an open sky like anybody else, totally unconcerned that someone might be looking to capture me or worrying that I might need to take flight at an instant’s notice.
I wasn’t on the lam, on the loose or at large.
I was free.
Bellatrix never would have intended it, but she had zapped me out of a world where I lived undercover, hiding in shadows, almost as much a prisoner in Grimmauld Place as I had been in Azkaban, all the way to a place where I now rested at ease, out in the open.
“I can’t believe it,” I said aloud to the morning, hearing a breathlessness in my voice that had nothing at all to do with illness. “I’m free here! Safe and free! The Ministry can’t find me here! Isn’t even hunting for me! Nobody is! Nobody knows my face! Knows my name! Merlin’s Beard! I really am free here!”
It was a sweet and awesome thing. Slow as in a dream, I sat up. Gazed around at my surroundings, half expecting them to dissolve into darkness. The ground stayed solid beneath me, even as I rose to my feet, though I felt as light as if I were levitating. Walking to the very centre of the meadow, I tipped my head back as the bright sun shone warm on my upturned face.
Free.
I had almost forgotten.
“Did you have yourself a good nap?” asked Willow from a short distance away.
“Great!” I exclaimed, unable to keep a huge grin from spreading across my face.
She had the berry bucket in one hand. Our picnic basket was in the other, now filled with sprigs of leaves in several shades of green. “By the look of you, I don’t think you dreamed you were dead this time!”
“No,” I could feel the smile fill my face. “This time I think I dreamed I was alive, then woke up and found out it was true.”
She gave me a slow, searching look. Would she ask what I meant by that? Were there words to describe the delight and amazement rising through me at that moment? Instead we stood looking at each other in silence before she shrugged, returned my smile and held out the basket to me. “I was thinking that we should start home so I can get these herbs hung up to dry before supper. While I do that, maybe you’d like to start the stew.”
“All right!” I laughed, taking the basket from her. “In that case, you know you’ll have lots of time to get them done!”
We ambled homeward through that rare, sunny English afternoon, retracing our steps of the morning, across the meadow, along the wall and up the road toward her clearing. It gave me time to look at everything through the eyes of a free person. The leaves seemed greener, the clover smelled sweeter, the birds sang their most incredible songs. The world seemed to stretch out wide and brilliant in front of me. Even the day’s first puffy scattering of clouds took on shapes of ships, dragons and castles in a way they hadn’t done since I was a child.
“Willow?” I said after a little way, delighting in the sound of one free person, speaking to another as we walked, together and equal, up a gently sloping hillside. “I know I was pretty out of it when we met, but if you found the berries on the way home from going out to the neighbors to deliver that baby-”
“To check on that mother, yes. But mostly to ease the father’s mind. Honestly,” she put in on a laugh, slowing her steps to match mine. “Men have no sense at all when it comes to these things!”
“All right, to check on that baby!” Only slightly breathless, I laughed too. How great it was to laugh out loud without having to think first about who might be trying to overhear. “Was the hill where you found me only steeper than this one because I was so tired? Or was it actually a different spot altogether?”
It truly didn’t matter where she had found me. But suddenly I wanted to get to know each tree and rock and blade of grass in this place, in this time, where I was free.
It could be hard, giving up this wonderful freedom to go back to a future lived in hiding.
But this was no time to think about the past or the future. This was a moment to drink deep and savor to its fullest. I knew I was walking taller, breathing deeper, moving without the lease drag of furtiveness on my muscles. Free! It was hard to believe this was the same road I had traveled in such horror and despair.
“Probably a bit of both,” Willow was saying in answer to my question. “The place where we met is further on, past a fork where this little road meets a larger one. And yes, it is a bit steeper there. But even this gentle slope would seem like a mountain to me if I was as ill and exhausted as you were that night. Especially walking against all that wind and rain.”
“Well you’d know about that part of it too!” I paused, glanced back the way we’d come. It wasn’t a mountain anymore, but still steep enough to have me panting a little and grateful for a moment’s rest. Amid the shadows that were beginning to stretch long and longer behind us, the whole wooded landscape was taking on the serene, slightly copper tint of an evening in earliest autumn. It was difficult to see much resemblance between this place and the black, rain sodden one that it had been that stormy night at the tail end of July.
Even more difficult to think of someone who had gone to help a neighbor being set on the road in such a downpour.
“Why didn’t your neighbors have you stay at their house when it was storming?”
“Well, Stephen, you don’t have to look so indignant! Clarissa was asleep. Ian was much too distracted to think of it. I hardly thought about it myself since it was barely sprinkling when I left. I thought I’d make it home. When it started to rain harder, I just climbed the wall and cut through the field, then climbed out on the other side and…”
“The field? But what about that bull?”
“I was teasing, remember? I said John usually pastures him down the hill. Even if he had been there, in all that rain and thunder the poor thing would’ve been more interested in sheltering under a tree than chasing after some silly human. Anyway, I was out of there and almost to the edge of my clearing before the thunder and lightning started. That’s when I heard something splashing and sloshing through the roadside ditch.”
“Me.” I said, indignation at her neighbors giving way to surprise and gratitude.
She had turned back to rescue me!
Risked herself on the slope and in the storm because she had heard someone she thought needed help. The same way she’d gone to help her neighbor. “You heard me!” I exclaimed, turning to stare at her. “I’d likely be dead now if you hadn’t! Thank you, Willow. Thank you, more than I can say.”
Throughout my entire childhood, my Father and my Mother had told me over and over and over again that Muggles and Muggle-borns were inferior to pureblood Wizards. They were beings who did no more than pollute the lines of pureblood Wizarding families like ours. After I’d gone to Hogwarts and shocked the family by being sorted into Gryffindor, not traditionally pureblood Slytherin, I learned what I’d suspected because of my Cousin Nymphadora, that my parents were wrong. I’d argued the point long and loud with Regulus during my holidays at home. After I left there, I’d even gone back to school and signed up for two years of Muggle studies. But not until today had I realized how completely ignorant my parents had chosen to be.
If it turned out that, in the end, I had to abandon my plan to return to the future, but instead lived my life out here, in this time, as a Muggle among Muggles, I knew in a way I had never known before, that I would regard it as a highly honourable thing to be.
Willow looked at me and nodded slowly. “Well, you’re welcome, Stephen, but I have to tell you-” She hesitated.
“Tell me what?”
She shrugged, then smiled a little apologetically. “Well, actually, I have to tell you the truth. It wasn’t really you I heard at all. I think it was that big black dog. Stephen? Stephen! What on Earth are you laughing about?”