Garden Fencing

Weeks passed, and August fulfilled its promises with blue skies and an unusually small amount of rain. In the Muggle world, buses with hordes of tourists flooded the Lake District. But even though the Eskdale and St. Mary Green were a popular place for wanderers or admirers of the old mill, and the rooms in the Virgin Inn and any holiday homes available were fully booked – to the great satisfaction of the local tourist board - the general run kept within a bearable limit. Sometimes Stephen Seeker saw small groups of wanderers, heavily laden with rucksacks and neatly furled sleeping bags, heading towards Scafell Pike, and he wondered about the strange urge of Muggles to climb up any mountain available; it seemed to him as sensible as the witless up and down of a fly on a window pane.

He still kept his self-imposed solitude. Subscribing to a "normal" newspaper had been a clever step to prevent the people around him from getting suspicious; the postman brought the bills on a regular basis, and Winky did all the grocery shopping in Berwick, which additionally provided him with the Daily Prophet. In the mornings he sat close to the kitchen window in a patch of sunlight, idly flipping through the pages, but with the ongoing days the moving images and announcements in the wizard media seemed to him as surreal as the news in any Muggle gazette. They had nothing to do with his life… he wasn’t even sure if he had a life at all.

In the years… before… there had at least been the interaction with teachers and students (however detested); now he had only Winky, and she was not the kind of counterpart he found himself longing for. He had not dared to go to Berwick yet; the encounter with the boy and his aunt had been sobering enough to warn him against any spontaneous foray into what now seemed to be an alarmingly alien and dangerous world… a world that held no place for him whatsoever. The risk of being recognized was too much to bear thinking about, and in his darkest moments he struggled with the staggering realization that he held himself in a more effective custody than the Wizengamot could have accomplished by sending him straight away to Azkaban.

The idea that he should safeguard Harry Potter from afar seemed more and more ridiculous; the boy (who wasn’t a boy anymore) was easily able to protect himself. Potter had defeated Voldemort after all, and was certainly not in dire need of his (rather rusty) skills. Perhaps it would be better to pull up stakes and to move to where he could make himself really useful.

Perhaps it would be better to leave before Ruta Lupin turned out to be a problem.

The worst thing (as he thought while staring at the front page of the Daily Prophet without taking in a single word) was that he had actually enjoyed that silly, short conversation between them. The realization that she recognized him as a wizard, simply by taking a short look over his fence, had both shocked and intrigued him. And she had surprised him even more by proving that by no means it could have been he who had put the garden to rights. Her logical conclusions after the quick comparison of their hands had been a small, unexpected glimpse into a mind as clever and sharp as a well-balanced blade. She had caught him off-guard, and she had shattered his laboriously achieved balance.

Better to avoid any further contact.

*****

Following his grim resolution turned out to be easy and difficult at the same time. Ruta Lupin didn’t intrude, but he saw her on a daily basis; St Mary Green was a small community and she had to take the way leading past his garden to reach the main road from her own cottage. And while the fact that he was hiding among Muggles filled him with a kind of nervous unease, she seemed to blend in without any visible effort. She wore no wizard robes (at least not here), and the morning when he actually saw her ride past his cottage on a bicycle, giving him a friendly wave, he caught himself staring after her in utter disbelief.

When Ruta came back that afternoon, he had ventured into the garden, sitting on a bench Winky had put beside the entrance and reading in a book about Egyptian potions. There had been a short shower of rain half an hour ago, and he heard the hissing of the bicycle wheels on the warm, damp asphalt, raising his head just in time to see her coming down from the center of the village. She wore what he called her “Muggle uniform” – cotton blouse, fluttering cotton skirt and sandals. A folded cardigan was clamped on the carrier behind her.

“A bicycle, Miss Lupin?” he called, secretly angry at himself for failing to resist temptation, but unable to put a bridle on his tongue. “How very eccentric!”

She jumped down from her vehicle and propped it against the garden wall. Slowly he got up from the bench and came over to her.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Seeker,” she replied blithely. “Why eccentric? I work in Berwick, less than three miles from here, and taking my bicycle is a perfectly acceptable way of getting there.”

“How about Apparating?” He tried his best to banish a certain arrogance from his voice, but given the twitch of her lips he didn’t completely succeed. “Or using a broom?”

“And scare the blissfully ignorant farmers around St. Mary Green silly? But yes, Mr. Seeker, I do have a broom, and not for sweeping my front yard. I never made it into a Quidditch team, but I’m very well able to keep myself on my Cleansweep Nine without crashing.”

“Not a Bluebell?” he said, still unable to hold back.

“I’m not the type of witch for a family model,” Ruta answered, her tone a little bit more serious. “And to come back to the bicycle – I use it for the same reasons Muggles do. To keep myself in shape… and because I like to exercise in fresh air.” A critical gaze, surveying him from head to toe. “You could do with a bit more light and air yourself. It must be months since you’ve been in the sun for more than a few minutes.”

She was doing it again. He cleared his throat.

“You work in Berwick?”

“Yes, I do, at Fionnula Flannery’s Fascinating Flowers. If you are in need of ivy plants able to overgrow your entire cottage overnight, you would find them there.”

“Why should I need them?” he shot back, his face unmoving. “To scare my blissfully ignorant fellow citizens silly?”

Ruta Lupin began to laugh; a bright, happy sound that made him stare at her. She was not what he would have called a beauty; heavy-lidded eyes of a slate blue, high cheekbones, a narrow, long nose and a mouth, slightly too big to match the proportions of her plain, angular face. But her laughter transformed her completely – not by making her lovelier, but by giving her an air of indomitable joy and vividness. He felt the corners of his mouth curl, unable not to respond to her easily kindled sense of humor.

“Touché,” she said. “That was well-deserved. And the magical plants are far more popular in Berwick. I do often get orders from the Muggle families in St Mary Green, though, for weddings, birthday parties and funerals; they like the fact that my tulips, roses and violets take much longer to wilt.”

“An Enduro-spell?” he asked.

“Kind of,” she said, her eyes dancing. “But you don’t seriously expect me to reveal one of my most precious professional secrets, do you?” She stepped back from the fence, setting her bicycle back on the road. “And now I have to go home; I’ve promised Teddy’s grandmother I'd cook dinner.”

He had intended to bear her a polite farewell, but instead he heard himself say:

“It must be difficult for her to get on with such an agile, strong-willed child all alone.”

She turned back to him, eyeing him thoughtfully. In fact he felt thoroughly appraised, and he hid his sudden tension behind a mask of even-tempered patience.

“She does her best,” Ruta finally said, “and she loves Teddy, very much. But the first two years were rather painful. Andromeda lost nearly her entire family. Her daughter, Dora, and her son-in law died in the battle of Hogwarts in 1998, and her husband had already been killed before.” She fell silent, and a shadow clouded her face. “This is why I came here. We had a lot in common, and I wanted to help her.”

He knew that he had no right or prudent reason to ask.

“What is it that you had in common?”

Ruta Lupin’s eyes darkened with an old anger.

“The loss of relatives, Mr. Seeker,” she quietly said. “Teddy’s father, Remus, was my cousin. And in case that you don’t own the helpful literature to give you a clue – in one of the bestselling books written after Voldemort’s defeat he is called 'the faithful werewolf’”.

This time it was Ruta who abruptly turned away and left him standing in the garden. He watched the strangely stiff back and the raised head, realizing that for a change he had managed to get through her defenses. But it was a bitter victory, for any satisfaction he might have felt was erased by an overwhelming sense of unease. The faithful Werewolf. That definitely smelled of Rita Skeeter and her Quick-Quotes Quill -- the malevolent mixture of gossip and feigned commiseration she was famous (and feared) for.

With sudden clarity he remembered Remus as a strangely reluctant part of the Marauders, his eyes turned away, his back tense and his voice – though never really objecting – softly murmuring a word or two of disapproval and even distaste, on the occasions when James decided to set the dogs loose. For the first time he allowed himself to ponder how much worse it could have been without Remus’ discreet attempts to keep his coltish companions at bay.

He had barely been able to value Lupin’s resistance back then, of course… his feelings, his hate and desperate abhorrence had been focused mostly on James and Sirius, like a dark burning glass. It had been because of them that he tried to spy out Remus’ whereabouts as a student, and the memory of old pain had shaped their year as colleagues. He had only brewed the Wolfsbane Potion because Albus Dumbledore had asked him to - determined to keep the old, angry animosity alive - and still Remus had, in a way, impressed him with his quiet thankfulness and dignity, each time he was handed the draught that kept him sane during the change. In spite of that, he had justified letting the truth about Lupin’s… problem… slip out after Sirius Black’s escape from the Dementors. Had thought of it as a late revenge for long-past pain and mortification, in spite of the certain knowledge that Remus had never once been the first to begin the torment.

He knew too much about the general attitude of the Wizarding World towards werewolves not to be able to imagine how incredibly difficult the time after his year as a teacher in Hogwarts must have been for the man – knew all too well what it meant to act on both sides not to understand the pressure that Lupin had been subjected to as he became Dumbledore's spy among the werewolves - and yet it was only now that he felt a sting of honest sympathy towards Remus Lupin. Foolish or not, Lupin had abandoned any fragile blessings he’d finally gained to rush to Hogwarts' defense when the Second Battle began… only to lose everything, the woman he had finally allowed himself to love, and in the end his own life.

Another memory filled his mind. James and Sirius and Remus crowded around him, pounding him fondly on the back, and thanking him, in that bright, dreamlike place he had left, to use the second chance he had been given. The chance Remus never had got.

Suddenly he was able to shake off the paralysis; he hurried through the garden gate, reaching Ruta just as she was about to mount her bicycle.

“Miss Lupin.”

She didn’t look at him. “Yes?”

“Are you ashamed of your cousin?”

Ruta whirled around, and now the hidden anger in her eyes was a blazing fire. “Merlin, no! How can you possibly believe…”

He raised his hands. “I can’t, and I won’t. From all I know of Remus Lupin, he was a true friend and an honorable man.”

He saw the anger slowly trickle out of her body.

“Thank you.” She spoke with a kind of disbelieving wonder. “Thank you for your comfort and sympathy.”

“This has nothing to do with comfort or sympathy,” he said, his tone brusque. “It is a simple fact.”

Her gaze held his.

“I know,” she said, “but if the wish to put balm on my old wounds was important enough for you to leave your garden and to come after me, I fear you will have to accept my gratitude – even if it goes against the grain. Goodbye, Mr. Seeker.”

“Good bye. Miss Lupin.”

He watched her leave, silently pondering the words he had spoken. To his surprise he felt the weight of an old burden actually lift from his heart; rancid rage, desperately nurtured over the years until it clouded his gaze and ability to judge and poisoned what was left of his soul. Now he knew that he could at last abandon it, and whether the relief was imaginary or not, he was able to breathe easier.

A true friend and an honorable man.

Stephen Seeker stood in the bright light of day, filling his lungs with the smell of summer and evaporating rain, and he finally accepted that he had told her the truth.

*****

Planned or not, this was the end of his self-imposed isolation, and the beginning of what he called in retrospect “the time of garden fencing”. In the mornings, when Ruta set off to Berwick, she usually gave him a short nod or wave before she vanished around the bend to the main road of St. Mary Green. In the afternoons, however, she developed the habit of parking her bicycle on the sidewalk, waiting for him to come out of the cottage and start a duel of words.

She had graduated from school in 1981. Aside from outstanding achievements in Herbology she had been a quiet, inconspicuous student (“No teacher except Professor Sprout would remember without having to consult the records,” she remarked with a smile).

He did consult the records – which was rather difficult, but not impossible – and found a few interesting facts. She had been a Ravenclaw (which he had more or less expected), she had never been a Prefect, much less Head Girl, but he found more than half a dozen teacher reviews attesting her attributes like “quick cleverness” and a “cold-blooded presence of mind”. The latter came from Madam Hooch; when Ruta was in her second year and a classmate banged with her practice broom into the teacher who was just demonstrating how to do a rollover, she kept both from crashing to the ground by using an Immobilus Spell.

To his surprise he discovered that while still a student, she had authored a monograph about the several uses of Mandragora Vernalis; excerpts of that monograph had actually been published in Magical Herbology Today, and they caused a small uproar in academic circles because she contradicted the widely accepted doctrine of Phyllida Spore about the effect against the Pestis Curse (that became alarmingly popular when the Dark Lord gathered his armies in the late seventies). After the publication in 1980 Pomona Sprout took sides with her student - which led to a rather heated correspondence between her and Spore and an ongoing argument that took years to cool down.

Increasingly curious, he provided himself an edition of the magazine in question and found Ruta Lupin’s arguments on the matter neatly researched, well worded and absolutely convincing. Suddenly he remembered a visit Phyllida Spore had made to Hogwarts when her book One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi had just been included in the curriculum. She had been an impressive and exceedingly formidable old witch, and he could readily imagine her indignant surprise at the fact that a completely unknown seventh-year student had had the brazenness to dispute one of her theories.

Given all he had discovered he was more surprised than ever that she had buried herself in a tiny Muggle village. One afternoon he asked: “Given your skills with herbs and plants, I am surprised that you never considered a teaching career.”

Ruta stood on the other side of the fence, as usual; today she wore a blue dress, her hair held back by a thin scarf of the same color. Waiting for a reply, he studied her high clear brow and the faint shimmer of freckles on the bridge of her nose and on her cheekbones.

“Oh, I did,” she said absently. “I did indeed. Pomona Sprout would have liked to see me as her assistant, and I felt very flattered by her offer, but the timing was a bit… unfavorable.”

She fell silent, a deep, vertical line between her eyebrows.

“The Potters were killed, and Voldemort was banished – you'd have thought that made things easier, but in my case it didn't.”

Another long pause, and he waited patiently, wisely refraining from pushing the matter. Finally she continued, her voice soft and slightly strained.

“My mother fell ill and passed away soon after. My father had always been a strong man, but her death ate up his courage, and I didn’t dare to leave him alone.”

“A missed chance for scholastic glory… don’t you regret it?” Stephen Seeker remarked.

"Glory?"

Ruta laughed.

"Pounding the basics of Herbology into the heads of students who would rather be somewhere else never struck me as glorious, Mr. Seeker. And it's so much time indoors..."

She shrugged.

"Greenhouses are all very fine and well, but they're best for someone who likes their plants in neat rows of pots and not growing wild over walls. No, Neville Longbottom will fill the post better than I ever could. He's had his share of glory."

Her lips twitched.

“And besides, when I did want work my father found me a position. At Corminius Slug’s apothecary in Diagon Alley. He promised Father to give me all the practical training I might want."

“Really?” he asked, his tone clearly amused. “If you prefer the open air, I shouldn’t care to guess how long you were able to endure the stench.”

“I worked there for a year," she said with mock indignation. And then the corners of her mouth curled upward. "And I was heartily sick of the place after three weeks. Poor Uncle Corminius was very disappointed that I never really got fond of beetle eyes and toad slime.”

She gave a small sigh.

“My father was disappointed, too, of course, though he thoroughly cherished the fact that I'd run his household for that year. But he had more or less recovered by the end of it, and my noble… erh… sacrifice gnawed at his conscience. I was allowed to search for a job that might actually please me instead of him, and I found it in a small town near Dover. The market garden there had half a dozen magical nurseries and greenhouses and won awards for its new rose varieties; the potion against mildew I had invented was very useful. I liked the job and I liked the ocean; if not for Teddy and Andromeda, I would still be there.”

As if the mention of her other responsibilities had reminded her she excused herself then, and Stephen Seeker returned into his cottage for a late tea, pondering what lay behind the friendly, calm face of the woman he nearly saw every day. Talented and clever, she had nonetheless chosen to be ordinary. She didn’t begrudge Neville Longbottom the position she’d been forced to reject but spoke about him with warmth and deep sympathy. Whatever she’d wished out of life, she had sacrificed it once to take care of her father, and again to help an old, desperate witch raising her grandchild. He understood that, but still... She seemed to accept each new turn of things – however unpleasant - with some strange, unshakable peace of mind that he could not grasp. Once such a serene lack of ambition would have unnerved and greatly exasperated him, but his own dreams and desires were long since burned to ashes, and now he came to feel a kind of reluctant admiration for the grace with which she had accepted her fate. His own penance had not rested so easily.

“You don’t know what to think about me, do you?” she observed three or four days later.

“Why do you ask?”

“Because of how you look at me from time to time - as if you were trying to find the solution for an odd mystery,” Ruta said. “You think I should have wanted to reach more, to accomplish more… instead of fiddling around with roses and tulips and burying myself in St. Mary Green, dancing attendance to the needs of a child that is not even mine.” She shot him a gaze from the corner of her eye. “That was close, wasn’t it?”

He hesitated. “What do you expect me to answer – without proving myself to be hopelessly rude?” He saw her smile and felt his own face relax in return. “I must confess it was not too far off the mark. You seem to know me very well, Miss Lupin.”

“Oh no, I don’t!” Now it was Ruta who intently studied his face. “Aside from the fact that you are a wizard, I know nearly nothing about you, not even the most basic things. I don’t know if you have a family, I have no idea about which books you read or what kind of food you prefer...”

“Boeuf Stroganoff,” he said automatically. “Winky has a very good recipe, and it will be even better as soon as I succeed in making her believe that the dish should not be drowned in sour cream.”

“Thank you!” Ruta laughed. “Another secret solved. And now I must go and keep an eye on Teddy; Andromeda has her weekly tea – a perfect chance to share the newest rumors with the local gossips. Goodbye, Mr. Seeker.”

“Have a nice afternoon with that sly little rascal,” he said, an ironical glint in his eyes.

“I’ll try to do my very best.” She pushed her bicycle down from the sidewalk and slowly began to cross the street.

“Miss Lupin?”

She turned back to him again. In the bright, golden back light of the sun he couldn’t see her face clearly; the fine strands trying to escape the scarf around her head framed it like a shimmering halo. "Mr. Seeker?"

“Do you play chess?”

“No, I don’t. But… perhaps you would like to teach me.”

“Perhaps.”

When she was already out of sight, he still stood behind the fence, filled with growing chagrin, and facing the fact that even the ordeal of the last twenty-five years had failed to teach him enough to keep from taking most unreasonable risks.