The Mouse
They all needed food, Ginny decided, so she left the pair of them in Undine’s room while she went to prepare dinner for everyone. She didn’t disturb Gosse from his painting while she did so.
She hoped the mechanical process of cooking would steady her, but her mind churned endlessly: What am I going to do about Anthony…? And what about Sandrin…? Anthony looked so innocent... But they put him in there for a reason… How can I convince Undine? It was like Sandrin really cared…
She found she’d made Moroccan wraps. A useful idea, though, because she could park a plate of them next to Gosse, who barely noticed her existence, so intent was he on his painting, and carry the rest upstairs.
She knocked and went in. Anthony was lying on the bed, and it was obvious that Undine had been lying in his arms, and was now just rising from the bed, her ivory skin tinged now with pink.
Is she in love with him? Ginny asked herself, perplexed. Is that what this is about? But she made herself behave as normally as possible, briskly handed out food to both of them, and sat on an empty chair to eat her dinner. It had been a long day, and she was famished.
Undine was more concerned with making sure that Anthony was eating than in feeding herself. Anthony, though, seemed more intent on his food than on Undine.
Ginny was sure her light-headedness was down to absence of food, but even when she’d eaten there was a strangeness in the situation that at first defied analysis. I’ve shared that bed with Undine, she realised at last. And now here she is sharing it with another. And she could still feel Sandrin’s hands on her.
The pair of them were fully dressed, and behaving with total propriety, but there was something in Undine’s manner that was unmistakable: Her eyes constantly on Anthony. Her hands frequently reaching out to touch him, lightly.
I shouldn’t mind, Ginny told herself firmly. Undine never objected when I spent time in Gosse’s bed.
But this is all going too fast.
“Anthony’s tired,” Undine said when they’d finished eating. “He needs to rest.”
“I’m tired too,” Ginny said in irritation. “But no way am I going to leave him here with you unless I know you’re safe!” She turned to Anthony. “So how did you get here?” she asked, sounding stiffer than she meant to. “To the Hall of Assembly, I mean?”
Anthony gave Undine an anxious look, but she nodded, silently. There’s already too much between these two, isn’t there? Ginny worried.
“I don’t know where to start,” he said, unhappily.
“Start at the beginning,” said Ginny, uncompromisingly. “Start at the Battle for Hogwarts. Which is when you went missing. I saw you there, after the battle. You were with somebody. A girl from Beauxbatons.” It had been over two years ago, but she could remember that. “Who was she?”
“Her name was Cadence,” said Anthony.
Ginny was on her feet and crossing the room towards him before she realised. “Cadence? Cadence Demoulin?”
He looked startled. “Yes,” he said. “Do you know her?”
Ginny shook her head in irritation. “How did you know her?”
“I didn’t,” he said in surprise. “I’d just met her.”
“Explain,” said Ginny. Was that too bossy?
“It was… It was after the battle. I wasn’t feeling too good. All the deaths. The Giants. The Dementors. I was terrified.”
Ravenclaw, thought Ginny. More thought that action.
“I… I saw a girl in my year – a Ravenclaw girl – get smashed by a Giant. I couldn’t think straight. I was trying to find somewhere… Not somewhere to hide, no, nothing like that… Just somewhere to go, where I could think properly. And this girl came up to me. From Beauxbatons.
“She asked if I was OK. She spoke good English, and she was kind. She was crying. She put… her hand on mine, and said I should be calm. I am calm, I said, but she said… I can’t remember what she said.
“I was saying things, and I must have talked about wands, because she said, she knew I was clever, that I’d made a wand, and if I was that clever, I’d soon be OK again. That everyone needed smart people like me to help fix the world, so there’d be no more battles.”
“You made a wand?” asked Ginny in shock. There were only a handful – a very small handful - of people in the world who could construct a wand. How could Anthony be one of them?
“She wanted to know about the wand I’d made. And I told her that I’d made three, and I started to tell her about them. The yew one, the two sycamore ones, and… And she was pulling at my hand, saying I should tell her all about it, but not there, it was too noisy, that I shouldn’t tell everybody.
“So we left, and I told her what I knew. About how the wood is like a living person. How it remembers everything. How the knots in the wood make it difficult to train a wand. Like they were people. And she said, why not make wands out of something else.
“We were at her house then. It was like a palace, really, and I had my own room, and she had servants to bring us food, but they weren’t house-elves, but people, because she said you can’t trust elves…”
“She told you to make a wand out of something else?” prompted Ginny. It appeared that Undine knew this story already. Her hand was in Anthony’s, and she was looking worriedly between them.
“She said, wouldn’t it be easier if they weren’t made of wood?” Goldstein’s glance was wandering around the room, fixing on nothing. “I said, maybe, and she asked what else you could make a wand out of. Anything, I said, as long as you can train it. What about metal, she said. I said, I didn’t know. But she wanted me to try, so I did.”
“So what happened?” Ginny asked, in horror.
“She took me to another room. It was amazing. There was everything there. Wandmaking tools, she said. I asked, can you make wands, and she said no, but her father could, but he was dead now. That was one lie.”
“One lie? What do you mean?”
His eyes found Ginny, and were full of despair. “Everything was a lie. Everything she said. But how was I to know?”
“So was her father still alive?”
Anthony waved his arms in the air in a sudden impatient gesture. “NO! He was dead, but he wasn’t a wandmaker! Don’t… confuse things!”
“It’s OK,” soothed Undine, recapturing one of his hands and holding it in both her own. He was edgily unhappy now, his eyes searching the room once more, but he didn’t try to pull free.
“And there were pieces of metal there, rods of brass, and silver, and gold. And she had a unicorn hair there, and I tried making a metal wand. And it was really hard. So hard. Nothing worked. Cadence got upset, then. I… made her get me a furnace, so I could make my own wand rods. That was better, even though the room caught fire, and she got upset again.
“But the wands weren’t powerful enough. Aquamenti would only make drops of water. Lumos just a faint glow. Then I tried iron. That was a lot better, but the wands still weren’t as powerful as wood. I wanted to keep experimenting, but she said it didn’t matter if they weren’t quite as powerful. She wanted me to make more, but I didn’t want to.”
“What happened?” Ginny asked.
“I had to,” she said. “Or I couldn’t…. Or I couldn’t share her bed again.”
“Why didn’t you want to?” asked Ginny. “I mean, make more wands?” Her face was suddenly hot, but Undine was gazing at Anthony, and Anthony wasn’t looking at either of them.
“They weren’t right yet! I wanted wands that could make food, and disguise people properly, new things like that, and they weren’t good enough. They could Stun, Cadence said. That was the important thing, she said, so we can defeat our enemies. I wanted to make them stronger! Stronger than a wood wand! But she was in a hurry, she kept saying.”
“So how many did you make?”
His shoulders dropped. “I don’t remember,” he said, unhappily. “A few dozen.”
“A few dozen?” Ginny echoed in horror. “What happened to them?”
“She gave them to her friends,” said Anthony. “She said they liked them.”
“Why? Did she say why?”
“Because metal wands can’t remember,” he said sadly. “Priori Incantatem doesn’t work. She talked about people’s rights, about the right to privacy, that a wand shouldn’t betray its master’s secrets. She made it sound so sensible, at first. But eventually I realised. Really realised. Everyone likes to keep little secrets, but secrecy protects the bad more than the good.
“I’d told myself everything was OK, and Cadence was… was nice to me, and let me…. But then I saw what I’d done. She was very upset when I said I wouldn’t make any more.”
“So what happened?” Ginny asked.
“Nothing. She just left me in my room.”
“Left you there? So why didn’t you just leave?”
“Because… because I still loved her. And the room was locked.”
“And you couldn’t escape?”
“She didn’t let me have a wand. Even an iron one.”
“So how did you escape?”
“I didn’t. Not for ages. Until I thought about it.”
“Thought about it? What did you mean? Did you Apparate?”
He shook his head, annoyed. “The room was shielded.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, I kept thinking. The bed was made of wood. So I had plenty of wood. And I found a mouse.”
“A mouse?”
“The room was sealed, see? Magically sealed. But still the mouse got in. I remember my mother saying, when I was a kid. It doesn’t matter how much magic you use, the mice can still get in.”
“I don’t…”
“So mice are magical, OK?” he said impatiently. “Obviously. So I just had to catch the mouse, and use one of its whiskers.”
“What?”
“As the core of a wand! Obviously. I had to drill a hole in the top of the bed post – which was difficult ‘cos it was a four-poster – and then I didn’t have a wand yet, so I had to bind the whisker into the wood by hand… that took ages. And most spells wouldn’t work with it, because the ratios were all wrong, see?”
Ginny could only shake her head in puzzlement.
“But Diffindo worked, eventually,” Anthony went on. “The spell nearly knocked me out – the whole corner of the house came down – but no-one came after me. Maybe I killed them all. I had to run then, and I couldn’t take the wand with me, not six foot long, and not working properly, so I just ran. Only I didn’t know where I was.”
“So what did you do?”
He shrugged, miserably. “I didn’t do anything. I kept running, but through the woods around the house. But then these people appeared and caught me. But they weren’t Cadence’s men. They said they were Aurors. I’d thought we were in France, because Cadence was French, but we were still in England. They said they were there because of a magical disturbance – that must have been me blowing up the room – and arrested me. I kept saying, I’d just escaped, and told them my story, but they put me in a cell. And then Umbridge came to see me.”
“Umbridge? Dolores Umbridge?”
Anthony nodded. “She made me tell her everything, and said I would go to Azkaban, because I’d joined the Death Eaters. I told her I hadn’t, I kept on telling her. She told me all about Cadence, about how she was a French Death Eater, that she’d told me lots of lies. But Umbridge said the only way the Ministry would pardon me would be if I showed them how to make metal wands. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell her! Cadence might have been a Death Eater, and a liar, but she wasn’t evil, like Umbridge! Don’t you see?”
“So they sent you to Azkaban?” asked Ginny in amazement.
“They said they were going to. And I thought I was in Azkaban, until Undine told me I wasn’t.”
Ginny found she was gripping her own head in bemusement. “Wait… Wait… I don’t understand. So you really didn’t tell them? How to make metal wands?”
“No, I didn’t. I couldn’t.”
“And they put you in Azkaban, only it wasn’t Azkaban at all, but it was Durmstrang’s House of Assembly? Did you see anyone else there? Could you describe them?”
He shook his head. Undine’s arms were around him now, her eyes full of pity. “I was in a cell in the Ministry of Magic – I think it was, anyway – and then they took me somewhere else, and I was in that room, the room where Undine found me, and they cast a spell and I was transformed into stone.”
Ginny shivered.
“I couldn’t move,” said Anthony. “I couldn’t see. I could hear things, but I didn’t know what I was hearing. It was very cold sometimes, and I felt awful, as if the world was ending, but then that feeling went away again, and I was just trapped there. But the cold and despair kept coming back. It was part of my punishment, I suppose.”
“So how long were you in there?” Ginny asked in horror.
“I don’t know.”
“How long were you at Cadence’s?”
“A few months.”
“And at the Ministry of Magic?”
“Less than a week.”
“He must have been in there for nearly two years,” said Undine, her voice shaking. “They just left him there. To stop him telling anyone else about metal wands.”