"And It Could Be Me, And It Could Be Thee" (Griselda Marchbanks, Augusta Longbottom)

[friendshipmods]

Author: wemyss
Prompt/Prompt Author: "Their friendship is canon, but unexplored. Their shagging each other through the mattress is fanon, but just for once, let's have a friendship story of these two." -- therealsnape
Title: And it could be me, and it could be thee
Characters: Griselda Marchbanks, Augusta Longbottom, Neville, Harry, Dudley, Minerva, Pomona Sprout, Lily Potter (née Evans), Hermione, Angelina, Charity Burbage, WG Grace, various Longbottoms and connexions, various Marchbanks and Sitwells, and the usual cast
Rating: BBFC12/12A
Warnings: Academic politics; Arithmancy, Duckworth-Lewis and; Betjeman; British humour; cricket; the Established Church; gardening; Goblins; Larkin; politics (non-academic); rural life; Miss Sayers; Socialism, donnish; suffragettes and other early feminists; TMS; various off-stage deaths; village life; war and insurrection
Word Count: 10217, bar footnotes
Summary: Augusta looks back upon a long friendship, and many surreptitiously-enjoyed cricket seasons, and bugger the pureblood fanatics.
Author’s Notes: Mr Roy Harper’s inspiration was invaluable. I am obliged to my editors, N & F, to whom this is aptly dedicated; to Wisden, naturally; to the dean and chapter of Durham; and to many, many others.

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And it could be me, and it could be thee

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Neville, Harry, and Dudley – a sight by now common in their maturity, firm friends who moved seamlessly between the Muggle and Wizarding worlds and enriched both by their presence – were in the Long Room, Harry and Nev in their eggs-and-bacon ties and Dudley, although himself an MCC member nowadays, in his Primary Club tie, never more proudly worn than there and then. It was stumps (England having enforced the follow-on, after having first set the Windies a difficult target to chase: 592), and they were preparing to amble over to the Plum – the Sir Pelham Warner restaurant – for a comfortable nosh and a lengthy discussion of the West Indian collapse. The Doctor in his portrait put up a minatory hand (of course WG had been a Wizard): Harry Disillusioned them as Nev cast a Muffliato.

Dinner was abandoned. Nev and Harry, with Dud, whom they were to side-along, made their way in haste to the Apparating Point located – aptly – just inwith Grace Gate. The Doctor's news had been grave, if not, upon reflection, unexpected: Griselda Marchbanks was dead in sere age. British Wizardom should mourn, of course, the mourning tempered by the reflection that she'd had, well, a good, long innings: very long indeed, not so very far shy of a double century (and, as Harry was to say, with the unique West Indies statistic in his mind, 'retired not out').* Harry had his own, nearer memories of her, and mourned sincerely; but it was Neville who felt the loss most keenly. He, like Harry, had come to know Madam Marchbanks, after the War, as a friend and advisor, an ally upon the Moot, no longer the remote academic figure of their schooldays; but Nev had known her before ever his Hogwarts letter had arrived, as his formidable Gran's nearest friend. And it was to Hurstholme Thorpe, Long Bottom, in wildest Lancs, that they were bound, to break the news to Augusta.

And as they hasted away, Harry and Nev, as they later confirmed one to another, could almost have sworn they'd glimpsed, fleetingly, a spectral figure at silly mid-on, there in the dimpsey that shaded with mystery the hallowed strip in the haze.

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On the day of Griselda Marchbanks' birth, Oxford and the MCC, far away at Magdalen Ground, were locked in the second scheduled day of what was to be a drawn match, with rain stopping play on both the first and last days of the three consecrated to it. Charles Brampton passed five hundred runs; James Grundy took his six-hundredth career wicket; several notabilities made their debuts (including CB Ward, JH Copleston, and HW Majendie). It was the year of Thomas Hayward's pyrotechnic batting and John Jackson's sustained assault upon opposing wickets, which fell to the Foghorn with brilliant regularity. On the day of Griselda Marchbanks' birth, Victoria was upon the Throne, Palmerston was PM, and Surrey and Sussex were battling the elements and one another at the Oval in leafy Lambeth, against the already iconic horizon of the proud, new, modern gasholders of Kennington. It was seventeen years before the first Test between England and Australia, two-and-twenty before the series became the Ashes.

The weather, that June day in Muggleswick, was kinder in County Durham than in far London and Oxon. Colonel Marchbanks, a Squib and not at all daunted by the fact, was bowling for the village XI when his brother-in-law, Jacky Fenwick, arrived peltingly with the news that the Colonel's wife was the lighter of a bonnie lass. In fact, she was a fortnight early, was the newest Marchbanks, and with his usual pawky humour, George Marchbanks immediately resolved to name his impatient daughter for Patient Griselda. And as the word spread by Floo, by owl-post, and by a flurry of broom-borne callers, through the ranks of Fenwicks from Upper Flagley to Coldstream, and the serried Marchbanks families from Wolsingham to Galashiels to Dennyloanhead – Border reivers and Durham paladins and thrawn Scots o' Falkirk, Squibs and Wizards alike – Colonel George Marchbanks imperturbably took Hunstanworth's last wicket and made his way without undue haste to welcome his ninth child and fifth daughter.

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They were arrived at Neville's red sandstone hall set in his overgrown acres of farmland, a hall half-crumbling and uninhabitable, the other half at best comfortably down at heel (the Longbottoms had never had any real money): Hurstholme Thorpe, at Long Bottom, where the air was cold and crisp and clean under an illimitable sky, between the forest and the fells. (Muggles passing by saw only a tumbledown ruin, scheduled Dangerous, there on the eaves of the green roof of England: which was precisely the point.) Augusta Longbottom had the Dower House, and was standing already before its doors, ramrod-straight – if wanting two walking-sticks to stay and hold her – and grim as millstone grit in Ratten Clough.

In her right hand, which rested but lightly upon her stick, was a red orb that they thought at first to be a Remembrall.

'Here to tell me Griselda's dead? Did you think I didn't know – or were you young heroes thinking to break it to me gently?'

She snorted, and cast, wandlessly, a charm that kept her upright without the aid of sticks; and then tossed the red ball to Neville, who fielded it easily, with negligent grace.

'Come in and have some tea. And I'll tell you young know-alls about my oldest friend. As if I wanted you three to tell me that she was dead.'

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When Griselda Marchbanks – a bookish, impatient, and short-suffering girl already, impatient of fools and with no prospect of beauty and no interest in the whole silly notion – rose eleven, her receipt of her Hogwarts letter was considerably overshadowed by other events of more interest to her, and to her family. The new Bank Holidays – 'St Lubbock's Day' – had come in, the first ever Bank Holiday on Whit-Monday, 29 May; and a few days before, they had taken the train all the way to Old Trafford, to see Derbyshire, in the first match of its first season, wallop Lancashire by an innings and eleven runs. In Lancs' first-innings collapse, out for five-and-twenty, Dove Gregory of Derbs took six wickets for nine runs, and not even FR Reynolds could save the Red Rose. And this was the first of the Years of Grace, an annus mirabilis for WG before ever he became the Doctor; a year in which he scored the first ton ever recorded in first-class cricket, and went on to score ten more of the seventeen made in the first-class game in the entire season. He was to end the season with an average of 78.25, having recorded 2739 runs, whilst, as a bowler, having taken nine-and-seventy wickets (James Southerton, who improbably managed to appear both for Surrey and for Sussex, took 151). The first rugger international, pitting England against Scotland and engendering much passion amongst the Marchbanks clan either side the Border, had been played in March; Stanley was in Africa, seeking Dr Livingstone, Victoria reigned and Gladstone governed, and before Griselda Marchbanks left her family's home in Langdon Beck – her father had moved them away from Muggleswick as it industrialised, having in any event succeeded his brother in the estate – the FA Cup had been conceived and the Cardwell Reforms put in place in the Army. There should no longer be youngish colonels with purchased commissions, and Colonel Marchbanks was perfectly content in his retirement that this should be so – although what the devil the families with Squib sons such as he were to do with 'em in future, he'd no idea. John Herschel had died; Babbage was dying. The Ministry were somnolent: that fool Spavin had not yet, as Minister, managed to cock things up as thoroughly as he was to do. The Statute of Secrecy was, naturally, on the books; but even Blacks, let alone other 'purebloods' (a term the Fenwicks to a Wizard, and every Marchbanks living, detested), were relatively integrated in their communities, and on reasonably good terms with other Beings: the rot was to set in only in subsequent ministries consule Spavin. Griselda herself became fascinated by Goblin society and artisanship the moment she first saw Gringotts, as a child, on a rare journey up to London, and by the time she went up to town with her mother to buy her wand and her set books for her first year at Hogwarts, she was something of a pet to the Goblin tellers, who responded with tolerant amusement to her respectful interest (and admired her tidy lack of stature).

And although – since that fateful year six years previous, when Spavin had attained to the top of the greasy pole, been forced to leave Gringotts wholly in Goblin control, and ignored perfectly clear warnings against allowing Borgin and Burke to establish themselves as purveyors of Dark and dodgy objects – the rot had begun to set in, Griselda, the impatient, recked nothing of this; and the accelerating pace of change in magical technology and in Quidditch was infinitely less important to her than Muggle cricket, Arithmancy, Charms, Oswald Beamish's controversial stance (and pamphlets) on Goblin rights, and Mr Gladstone's first ministry. For Herbology, alas, she cared not at all, despite – or owing to – her late distant cousin Beaumont Marjoribanks' pre-eminence in the discipline.

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Sad-cake and strong, stewed Indian tea: Augusta Longbottom had very much set-and-settled ideas of a tea for young fool-heroes. She had, however, unbent sufficiently, in deference to Harry's infamous taste for treacle, to bring out a bit of parkin, and some mature, crumbly Lancashire cheese.

'I suppose,' said she, grimly, 'I ought rather to have had singin' hinnies: Griselda never lost her taste for the outlandish things.'

Her gaze was very far away, as one who looks beyond the years to a distant prospect.

'Well. We'll remember her for a few years, I dare say, but there'll be none left who knew her, soon enough. Neville, do sit up properly and attend: I'm not maundering to no purpose, boy. Just you look at that ball and hand it round.'

It was an ancient thing, scuffed and battered, its seams ravelled. And it was covered in ink: signatures gathered over decades.

'Is that –'

With an air of quotation, Gran snapped: 'It might be Geoff, or it might be John.' Her grandson coolly raised an eyebrow worthy of a Malfoy, and silently handed the battered object over to Harry.

He saw soon enough that it was Geoff, and John, and a host of others who had signed the ball, as year had followed year.

There was the Doctor's hand; there, Snow's, and Boycott's, newer by far; Hutton's, Trueman's, Ranji's, Duleep's….

Douglas Jardine had signed, as had Farmer Jack, Jack White of Somerset; CB Fry's name jostled that of Alec Bedser; the Don's dash of ink abutted the sign-manual of Learie Constantine and the fist of Wally Hammond.

And it was evident whose signatures were the first and eldest. Harry and Dudley exchanged a look; and Dud murmured, 'O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago…'.

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For Wizards as for Muggles, there is always Some Damned Fool – commonly, indeed, a goodly number of Damned Fools – who shall invariably presume that an intelligent woman, a scholarly female, has retreated into the life of the mind through her having been Crossed in Love. It suffices simply to note that such persons are, by definition, Damned Fools.

Griselda Marchbanks was not, by her own admission, pretty – for which grace she unfeignedly and whole-heartedly thanked God. Although not tall, then or ever, she had in all other regards already established, by her third year at Hogwarts, her own style, which, upon a taller frame, her fourth cousin thrice removed was to bring to the Muggle world in after years: Edith, even more than Osbert and Sacheverell, was to take their much-older Cousin Griselda as a model and heroine, and Edith was in feature as in cast of mind to be an enlarged edition of the Formidable Professor Marchbanks.

Nor was she unaware of her world's slow but steadily accelerating slide into darkness, the long descent towards Avernus, that Spavin's successive ministries marked. Her choice of a scholar's life was not a retreat from a darkening scene, but a rallying to the only standard that must be kept flying in defiance of the dark, a call and a rebuke, a challenge to fear and obscurantism, to prejudice and shabby compromise. To defend the academic virtues, to teach the tools and arts of discriminating judgement and the discerning mind to those who might otherwise accede to the blandishments of banal evil, was no retreat: it was the taking up of positions in the defence of the central keep of Mansoul.

Goblin history, the relations and diplomacy between Wizards and other Beings, Transfiguration, Charms, and Arithmancy, these were her delight; yet they were also weapons of intellectual war, to which she trained her subtle mind and cunning arm. She learnt them with staunch determination, and, learning them, learnt herself as well.

Take, by way of example, Professor Courtenay, the Chulmleigh-born Arithmancer, who interspersed encomia of Devon in his formulae when he lectured. Joscelin Courtenay was, even more than the Squib line of the family, a living throwback, an avatar, of his ancient Anglo-Norman house, resembling nothing so much as Anna Komnene's description of Bohemond of Taranto and Antioch, in the Alexiad. Any number of silly schoolwitches, her school-mates, were enamoured of him – until he began to lecture. Griselda, although she admired his outer integument dispassionately, was fascinated only by his academic discipline and his attainments in it. She had realised at a young age that it is learning that lasts, and achievement: and that it is only in the records established, that judge and report and confirm all accomplishment, that fabled men and the noonday sun are discernible as more than the yarns of the day, life's recollection in the haze. And she learnt also, by opposition, the twitch of her own tether: that whilst she, like Joss Courtenay, cared passionately for Arithmancy and change-ringing, yet his remembered and celebrated West Country was not her country; and that brass bands and Border battles, moss-troopers and miners, railways and dalesmen, the Marches and the fells, were her portion: the debatable lands of the Marchbanks country, from Greenlaw to Tow Law, from Marston Moor to Stenhousemuir, Scots and English together, County Durham, Northumberland, the Marches, Lanarkshire, Roxburghshire, and Dumfriesshire. Her portion and her place were the Marchbanks-and-Marjoribanks Marches, and for her most particularly the Derwent Valley and the Burnhope Burn, Cross Rig and Bolt's Law, Rookhope and Hope Fell and Blanchland Moor. She came to see the deep connectedness, arithmantic and sound, the sense of place in Wizardry; and ever after kept that insight next her heart.

And, as she was to point out to Augusta many years after, as an Arithmancer, it made Duckworth-Lewis child's play for her.

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'Yes,' said Augusta, firmly. 'We never paid any mind to those fools in London and the South. Nothing bar Lord's and the Oval to bring us near 'em. Ministry halfwits with their orations and statues: the only statue that ever caught our eye was Old Father Time on the weathervane, and the only statutes that mattered were set down by the old men of the MCC. No words and wind from those damned fools in the Ministry ever spoke half so loudly as a smacking six or the clatter of the bails, and all the wands in Wizardom couldn't outweigh two pound six of willow-wood in the sun.'

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In the cold, wet Summer of 1878, Griselda Marchbanks, newly a school-leaver with a string of academic accomplishments to her credit – accomplishments that in after years were to be surpassed or equalled only by Albus Dumbledore and Hermione Granger – was contemplating her future. Most Old Ravenclaws moved almost as automatons into Ministry employ, although commonly as Unspeakables or in other departments that could ignore the burgeoning rot and keep clean hands. Griselda was never an automaton.

It was a disappointing Summertide. As a bowler, WG Grace dominated; but even he was struggling against the stars in their courses as a batsman in that season of cold and wet. He managed to attain, nonetheless, his sixth double in as many seasons, scoring 1151 runs and taking 152 wickets over the course of the campaign; yet his temper was vexed, and his character came in for some sharp criticism, not least when he nobbled Billy Midwinter, the Australian, at the Oval, enforcing that all-rounder's Gloucestershire overseas contract to prevent his playing for the Australian tourists.

This sort of sharp dealing seemed to Griselda to be characteristic of a time she felt to be out of joint, in both the Muggle and the magical realms. The – as she noted, duplicitously-named – Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery 1875 had shown that, so far as she was concerned: it wasn't in the least reasonable, and, what was far worse, it was a decree, not a law, another in an increasing number of actions that revealed a power-mad executive and a supine Moot, symbolic of the continuing collapse of Wizarding society as a society of laws and liberty.

It was in July, at Old Trafford, that Griselda made up her mind. Gloucestershire had come Oop North to smite 'new-risen Lancashire': EM Grace, WG's elder brother, a coroner, 'the long-whiskered Doctor that laugheth the rules to scorn', and WG himself, not yet qualified as a medico, 'the champion of the centuries', leading Glo'ster the irresistible, the Shire of the Graces, against the little red rose, that 'Shire so young that has scarce impressed its traces' now called upon to 'stand before all-resistless Graces'. And Lancashire managed a draw, with a ton from 'Monkey' Hornby and valour from 'Stonewaller' Barlow: O my Hornby and my Barlow, long ago.

Griselda made up her mind. London, the Oval and Lord's notwithstanding, was not for her. And her third-cousin and childhood friend, cousin in both the Fenwick and the Marchbanks lines, George Augustus Marchbanks, had turned his back on the Aurory, shaking from his feet the dust and corruption of Spavin's Ministry, and taken a commission in the Piffers. He had also proposed marriage to Griselda.

He was a shy, gawky Wizard, a few years her senior, an Old Hufflepuff and quite clever enough to have been a Ravenclaw. He was incorruptible, romantic, staunch, and tongue-tied: and, with it, tough as leather. She had thought deeply about the match, which her parents left wholly to her judgement (although she well knew that the marriage should unite several properties of no mean worth that had become sundered in the course of the generations). What tipped the balance, for her, was that Georgie had the same opinion of the Ministry as did she, and for the same reasons; and that, when she had honestly and with no fishing intention, pointed out to him that she was no great catch as the world judges these things, he had stammered a bit, and in the end replied that prettiness and cleverness faded, but that inner beauty and wisdom did not, and besides that, he was no oil painting himself, after all, don't you know….

She accepted him, and, with duty calling him, they were married quite swiftly. As she noted with a smile, she had not even been required to change her name. And then he was gone, and she remained, and began to consider the possibility that Muggle Oxford was on the cusp of offering, with the establishment of LMH and the prospective founding of Somerville. Georgie wrote her supportive letters from his cantonment, with the rest of the 5th Punjabis, at Sherpur, Kabul.

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Augusta Longbottom replaced her cup of tea with decision, and stood, disdaining aid. 'Come along, then. You want to see this.'

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By 1882, the widow Griselda Marchbanks had done with Oxford. She had been a wife for some eighteen months, and had lived with her husband, killed in action in December of '79, for rather fewer than eighteen days; she had tasted both Muggle and Wizarding life and had found the taste less than sweet. Lancashire had won the county title the year before, buoyed by a 1534 run season by AN Hornby. The Australians were back for the Test that was to result in a famous mock obituary: In Affectionate Remembrance of ENGLISH CRICKET, which died at the Oval on 29th AUGUST, 1882, Deeply lamented by a large circle of sorrowing friends and acquaintances / RIP / NB – The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia. The Ashes were born.

And Durham as well as Warks had fielded county sides.

It occurred to Griselda, seeing signs in these events, that the way to resist the rot inwith the Ministry was to surrender to the incessant Ministry offers of employment – but only as an Examiner of the Wizarding Education Authority. It did not require her to stop in London, which she loathed; it did not compromise her with ties to the ministry of the day; and it afforded her more scope than mere teaching might, to found and arm the new generations to see beyond, and fight against, the corruptions of ministerial and ideological falsehoods. The WEA were, thus far, independent of ministerial influence and meddling; it was her positive duty to keep it so. Her post, like her late husband's at Sherpur Cantonment, was in the besieged citadel.

She took up her place in the line of fire in September, 1882, after taking in the County Match at Clifton (Gloucestershire won over Surrey by six wickets, WG taking his hundredth wicket of the season with his first wicket in the Surrey second innings, and scoring in the two Gloucestershire innings 139 runs).

Her devotion to Muggle cricket and Muggle folkways – which, to her mind, were not Muggle exclusively – was one of the things she did not mention to Ministry drones. Another was the advice and guidance she had had and went on seeking, in making her decisions and choosing the studies she continued to pursue, of her Goblin and part-Goblin friends, not least Patrocles Flitwick, the Wizengamot member for Beds & Northants. (Northants CCC was founded in '78, the year Griselda left school, and Patrocles Flitwick had helped mightily, if surreptitiously, with that founding.) Flitwick very much approved of young Madam Marchbanks, not least because she was of a reasonable height amongst all these impossibly tall Wizards and Witches.

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The parchment was showing its age, its edges friable, its ink comfortably faded.

My dear Miss Leatherbarrow, it read, I write to urge you not to take counsel of the fears and favourite hobby-Thestrals of others – or your own. The arts magical are not mere matters of technique, to be learnt by rote. Charms are fiddly, certainly, but then, so are Transfigurations. That you excelled in the latter and not in the former is a fact, to be regarded simply as a fact. Unquestionably, one's personality affects one's skills in these matters, but that it no wise implies or supports any judgement as to one's character. I should encourage you to apply yourself, even when you have left school, to your weaker disciplines, but to apply yourself still more to your strengths – and in any event, to think nothing amiss in you that you have both strengths and weaknesses. I am aware that your people, and the Devices, Demdikes, Chattoxes, and the neighbouring Longbottoms, have long gone their own way, and, speaking unofficially, I quite approve: self-segregation from one's Muggle neighbours, their pleasures, insights, and ways, is unscholarly folly. In any event, you must be yourself, and not the person your family wish you to be; they in turn shall soon enough realise that they want to be proud of the Witch they have in you, rather than dissatisfied that you are not the Witch they should have wished you, quite stupidly, to be. We can all of us be no one but ourselves: the recognition of which is the beginning of wisdom.

In any case, I implore you to dismiss at once from your mind the uncommonly silly notion that a Witch who does not excel in Charms work is without charm – or charms – and that a Witch who duels is an offence against the settled order of nature. It is only in the decade previous to your own young lifetime, that Oxford has granted women's degrees; and if there is any aspect in which we of British Wizardom can truly claim to be well ahead of our Muggle neighbours, it is in the advancement of the rights and just claims of Witches. I expect to be very old indeed before the Muggles have a woman as PM; Artemisia Lufkin, of course, was Minister for Magic a century and more ago, blazing the trail (what a dire phrase!) since followed by Evangeline Orpington and Madam Gambol – and, unless I miss my guess, quite soon by Bathilda Bagshot, a Witch I fully expect to see as Minister before the decade is out – if ever she finishes her long-awaited magnum opus.**

Do not be daunted: although Charms is not your metier, your Transfigurations were quite as excellent as your scores reflect. And do please believe me when I implore you to be always yourself. If you wish to duel, duel (so long as you do so legally, of course); and when you have left school at the end of the year, if you wish to go to a cricket match, for Heaven's sake, go to a cricket match. You shan't, I assure you, be the only Witch present; and should you be in attendance at Old Trafford at any time, please do not hesitate to look out

Your firm friend,

Griselda Marchbanks, CDMG, APMO, MA (Oxon)

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Augusta Margaret Hilda Leatherbarrow was born in 1930 – a year in which Lancashire were County champions, Durham took the Minor Counties crown, and Don Bradman steered Australia to retention of the Ashes, scoring a never-equalled 974 runs in the Test series (and the year in which Ottaline Gambol became Minister, and, for a time, reversed the Ministry's course of obscurantism and prejudice) – and on the anniversary of the loss of RMS Titanic: if there were ever any omen in that, it inhered in her resemblance rather to the iceberg than the liner. She was from the beginning cold, forbidding, and dangerous – or so she seemed; and from the beginning, she, like an iceberg, concealed the greater part of herself.

There were those who saw through her, of course: several masters at Hogwarts; the examiner from the WEA, Griselda Marchbanks, who saw in her the same concealed resources that she also, herself a seeming-forbidding witch, could claim; and a young fellow from her own part of the world, Austen Longbottom, a young man with a fund of practical humour and madcap antic, who saw in the tall, statuesque, and formidable young witch a woman who could put up with him.

Minerva McGonagall, five years her junior, also knew Augusta as she was, rather than as she appeared – and chose to appear. It was Augusta Leatherbarrow, grim and glacial, who, when the young Minerva was panicky over her marks, simply said, 'I ploughed my OWL in Charms, and it never did me any harm that I can see': and thereupon, in a very unprefectly manner, gave the titchy Gryffindor second-year a bit of Everton toffee and sent her off to sit outside – and no books, not for at least an hour, child, get some sun you little fool.

For all that, the Charms OWL debacle rankled, and Augusta persisted in sitting a NEWT for it. It was in consequence of her NEWT marks that she received that unexpected letter, stuffing with good advice, of her examiner, Madam Marchbanks. And from that came in turn an unexpected friendship that endured ever after.

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In 1947, Austen Longbottom, in a lark typical of the man, popped a fanged gerbil into Augusta Leatherbarrow's bag, and waited, gleefully, for the dénouement. His interest in her sharpened with every day that passed impassively, without reaction. It was three weeks later, in the common room – when she asked him to dig out a quill for her from her bag, and he removed his hand swiftly with a mousetrap shut fast upon his fingers – that they knew they were suited: for Austen thought her riposte brilliant, and couldn't swear at the pain for laughing at her wit. And, to his final and complete captivation, she remained utterly dead of pan throughout. A witch of such ready address was clearly the witch for Austen Longbottom – a wizard so japesome found a seeming humourless, dry witch restful – and a wizard who could laugh as readily at himself as at others was not, Augusta felt, to be disdained, the more so as such wizards were, she well knew, vanishingly rare.

They left school with an understanding; and part of that understanding was that Austen, the impetuous, should wait a year and a day before approaching the Leatherbarrows to ask their daughter's hand.

In the interim, Augusta took to heart her examiner's words, spent some time in extra-tuition alongside young Filius Flitwick, duelling (although she, unlike Filius, was not seeking to become a professional duellist), and spent much of what spare time she had that Summer at cricket matches. (She had intended to do so with a fine air of defiance, but, as it transpired, and as Griselda Marchbanks had told her, no one, actually, gave a two-Knut Damnatio.)

On 8 July 1948, Augusta Leatherbarrow was firmly and uncompromisingly ensconced at Old Trafford – the Pavilion End – to see if Bradman's Australians were indeed the Invincibles. Denis Compton did his best, playing through a head injury that wanted stitching, to pass and add to 18000 first-class runs, and Alec Bedser bowled valiantly, but England's dropping of Hutton from the side and the threatening weather boded well for the antipodean tourists in the Third Test.

It was just after Denis Compton retired hurt on 4 – with England 33 for 2 in the first innings – that Augusta noticed a small, trim woman of apparent middle-age – or so Muggles should have thought her – waving to her with the end of her LMH scarf. A kindly gentleman gallantly offered to switch seats, and Griselda Marchbanks, to Augusta's firmly enunciated Why-hullo-Professor aimed at Muggle ears, sat down next Augusta with relief. (The kindly old buffer who'd sacrificed his seat was observed to smile at the idea of a female don and an apparent lady-undergraduate on the loose at Old Trafford: why, the next thing one knew, they'd be seeking to become lady members of the MCC, which should never happen – ah, the ladies, God bless them, the silly things.) Griselda cast, unobtrusively, an early form of Muffliato, or what in time was to become Muffliato, and sighed happily.

'You see I took your advice,' said Augusta, abruptly.

Griselda smiled. 'So long as it was because you wished to do so, and not because it was my advice, dear.'

Augusta paused, luxuriating in the confidence and independence that this implied. 'Do you know, it was.'

'Excellent.'

'Yes. What have you been doing, then, in the long vac., Madam Marchbanks? Some new frontiers in Transfigurations?'

'Good heavens, no. Mostly, going to matches – although I have been introducing Goblin methods, not that the poor dears have any idea of their provenance, to the miners' unions. And digging at Snettisham, of course.'

Augusta looked at her, twice. She wasn't, it seemed, joking. Suddenly, Augusta smiled. The Ministry might be going from bad to worse, and Wizardom with it – Werewolf Registries, deaths at Hogwarts, the last of the Gaunts gone from squalor to Azkaban – but work could yet be done, and done subtly, and by a Witch who looked cosy and harmless. There was hope, after all, even in these grim, postbellum years of dearth and rationing.

____________________________________

Augusta was not smiling at Nev, Harry, and Dud.

'Yes. That's how it began. Tell me, you young, celebrated heroes, was it the infirmity of my age or the infirmity of my sex that suggested three young men wanted to come break the news to me gently?'

____________________________________

From the first day of the Third Test in the 1948 Ashes, Augusta Longbottom – as she became in 1949 – rejoiced in the friendship and guidance of Griselda Marchbanks, and in her example: the proof vivant that a Witch could live her own life, marry, raise a family, and yet make a difference, pursuing such courses and engaging in such researches as she listed. More than anything, it was the simple fact that Madam Marchbanks remained her friend, confidante, advisor, and regular co-conspirator in slipping away to cricket matches, even whilst Griselda mentored Minerva and others, that confirmed to Augusta that her choice, to eschew employment and academic work, was an equal and worthy one, which did not carry any imputation of surrender or defeat or choosing a second-best – and which did not foreclose an intellectual life. Augusta's interests were rather practical than theoretical, and she was far too much a Leatherbarrow by birth and a Longbottom by marriage to engage in commerce, but she was much more than a chatelaine and a hostess. It was Griselda who had taught her that a Witch could effect her ends subtly, in whatever station she found herself called to fill.

Francis Austen Joseph Algernon Harfang Longbottom was born in the quiet, post-Grindelwald decade before the turbulence of the 1960s: in 1958, in fact, the year of the Munich air disaster, Paddington Bear, and the deaths of Hants' great batsman Phil Mead, of Charlie Townsend the Gloucestershire all-rounder, and of Ralph Vaughan Williams; the year of Peter May and all-conquering Surrey, and the second year of Albus Dumbledore's headmastership, in which year his reforms began fully to be felt at Hogwarts. Griselda was godmother to young Frank – and confided to Augusta that she felt more like a grandmother, as Augusta was one of the daughters she had never had in the body, rather than in the spirit.

'I did marry, you know, dear. We had just over a fortnight together before he went off to India, and into Afghanistan, and died defending his position. I've always wondered what course my life might have taken had he not….'

'You,' said Augusta, with decision, 'could never have been less – or greater – than you are.'

____________________________________

'That,' said Augusta, 'is the Muggle dinner service I bought in, for the dinners Griselda helped me devise. There are a surprising number of Squibs and Muggle connexions of Wizarding families in the Muggle world.

'Your mother, Harry, dined with us over the Christmas hols in her fifth year. Frank and Alice brought her along, very much to my delight. Griselda all but adopted her.'

____________________________________

The 1960s in the Muggle world were difficult times; they were equally disturbed, beneath a fairly placid surface, in the Wizarding.

And Augusta was fretful. Austen was accommodating in the extreme, and the Longbottoms were a family as old as they were, by their set's standards, poor; but she had set her face against relegating Frank too much to House Elves in his infancy – or, as Lancashire tended to disregard the more extreme notions of the far-off Ministry and such families as the Blacks, to Muggle servants, for all that the Longbottoms of Hurstholme Thorpe, quite as much as the Wizards of Upper Flagley in the North Riding of hated-rival Yorkshire, lived in discreet amity with their Muggle neighbours. And one could hardly carry on duelling and engaging in experimental Transfiguration with a small child underfoot, even when one's husband had retired from the Aurors at an early age to take on the tumbledown estate (and play at Aurory once a year as a Territorial).

'You silly goose,' had said Griselda, briskly. 'If, as you complain, all you can do any longer is to give teas and dinners, give teas and dinners. You can do a power of good bringing new ideas and fresh air to those stockfish in the Witches' Institute, can you not? And, good heavens, that Squib cousin of the Macmillans' is the Muggle PM, isn't he? Have him to dine – I shall help you to draw up a list of who you might shove the feedbag at. That fool Leach keeps him in the dark.'

It had burgeoned with shocking rapidity, that bracing notion. In 1962, Hurstholme Thorpe slept and fed Plum Warner and his old MCC side junior, the earl of Home, dining unexpectedly with Albus Dumbledore, the Minister for Magic Clericus 'Nobby' Leach, and Mordicus Egg, with Griselda making one of the party as an all-but-family member (Sir Pelham Warner was, after all, not only the Grand Old Man of cricket, but an Inner Temple barrister who had, after being wounded at the Front, served in John Buchan's MoI in the 1914 War, and Alec Douglas-Home was a Privy Counsellor: both were therefore well aware of the Wizarding world). In 1963 – the Wisden centenary year, in which Plum Warner and Jack Hobbs died, the Windies generally and Sobers particularly devastated England, and Yorkshire won the County Championship, to Augusta's disgust – Supermac, Harold Wilson, Nobby Leach, and the earl of Home stopped from Saturday to Monday (the use of 'weekend' as a verb never passed Augusta's lips) between Tottenham's apotheosis in Rotterdam – the European Cup Winner's Cup – and Man United's FA Cup victory over Leicester City at Wembley. Within the month, the Profumo Affair rocked the Muggle government, a march for Squib Rights was attacked by blood supremacists, and Lancashire thrashed Northants at Northamptonshire's home ground, in Rushden, by 131 runs. By year's end, Nobby Leach was but barely clinging to power, Macmillan was gone, Alec Douglas-Home had renounced his earldom to succeed Supermac as PM, and Harold Wilson was observably the PM in waiting.

It was well that they had all come to know one another at one of Augusta's celebrated gatherings.

____________________________________

'Or did you think,' asked Augusta, bending a gimlet glare upon Harry in particular, 'that it was only your generation, after the late rebellion, that moved between both worlds? Or are you not quite such a fool?'

Neville interjected, with massive calm, 'Of course not, Gran. We're simply surprised you were mad for cricket all along: one'd rather've expected all-in wrestling, granting the attitudes you adopt.' Nev had become calmly fearless in his seventh year at school, and not even his formidable gran could daunt him now.

The old witch gave a scald-crow chortle. 'Aye, happen,' said she, in affectionate parody. 'They were dark times, growing darker. Griselda and I had our projects and duties, but cricket … it was a way of keeping the flag flying, and damning the eyes of the supremacists and the segregation-minded.'

____________________________________

The Wizarding world as much as the Muggle was rocked and roiled by the 1960s. Griselda and Augusta were never in life to forget November 1963.

Clericus 'Nobby' Leach, as Minister, had – just – survived the summer crisis. It had caught the Ministry amidships: the riots of the 19th Century had been over sport (changes to the Rules of Quidditch, in the main); the emergence of political demos turned riotous by clashing extremists was new to them, and they had been wholly unprepared.

On a late November Friday, with no house-party for once and for a mercy, Griselda was stopping at Hurstholme Thorpe. Austen had taken the young Frank up to London, to do a bit of Christmas shopping, where they were to meet Algie and Enid.

Griselda and Augusta were enjoying a leisurely luncheon when the Floo flared to life, and Augusta's least favourite connexions came through, with a bewildered and unhappy Frank.

'Enid? Good heavens, Algy, put the child down, whatever is the matter?'

Algernon Longbottom was more of a lad, even now, than even his madcap brother. Augusta had never seen her brother-in-law so serious.

'Bit of a change in plans, my dear. Frank, go with Auntie Enid, there's a lad. Griselda, I'm glad you're here. You're wanted, very badly. Augusta, I'm afraid there's not a good deal of time to talk, I must get back, with Griselda. Austen's already gone down to Chipping Clodbury: the Ministry want all the aid they can recall to the colours. The negotiations for the Goblin Rights concordat – well, a gang of irreconcilables have descended on the town, and there's a riot impending. Griselda?'

'Bog, is it?'

'I beg – ah, yes. The Brotherhood.'

'I shall come along at once. Augusta –'

'Go on. Tell Austen I shall wait dinner.'

____________________________________

'We didn't realise it at the time, naturally,' said Augusta, 'but that was the beginning of your grandfather's last illness, Neville.'

____________________________________

Dinner that night was very late, and very subdued. Austen was feeling unwell: he was, he said ruefully, too old to indulge these tricks of the old rage, and that exploding shrubbery had cut him to ribbons before he'd been patched up. Griselda was little cheerier: the Brotherhood of Goblins extremists – 'bog-standard idiots' – had undone in one day much of her work of decades. And even had there been no riot in Chipping Clodbury, the day had been no less a desperately said one. It was 22 November 1963, and, in the space of one afternoon, the Muggle American president had been assassinated; one of Griselda's old sparring partners, her most affectionate intellectual enemy, the Squib Aldous Huxley, had died in that same America; and British Wizardom was shaken still more by the loss of one of its own, in Oxford: Jack Lewis had died.

Darkness was gathering.

____________________________________

'If you've not noticed,' said Augusta, crisply, 'there is this much to be said against moving in both worlds: there is twice the sorrow and pain.'

____________________________________

In the year of strikes and the last judicial hangings and the General Election that made Harold Wilson PM, there were rumours of grim, fell things, and of a nascent organisation calling itself the Knights of Walpurgis. Charity Burbage had finished her first year at Hogwarts, and made one of those of whom Minerva wrote to Griselda and Augusta, marked down as a possible high-flier to be cultivated against future want. It was the second Saturday in July, and Augusta was planting radishes, autumn carrots, and beetroot. Australia had all but certainly retained the Ashes with a win at Headingley the week prior. Lancashire and Sussex were locked in mortal combat at Aigburth, and Augusta, as she gardened, listened loyally by wireless, although in this, the year of Cowdrey and Boycs, of Shackleton and Standen and of Standen's conquerant Worcestershire XI, Lancashire was to fall to fourteenth in the table (although Lancashire Second XI went on to win the Minor Counties). Upstairs, Austen, who had been feeling off-colour for a fortnight and more, was resting, re-reading the book that had – unlikely though it seemed to those who knew him only as a bright spark who'd been a jolly subaltern of Aurors for a few years before taking on the family estate – re-reading, then, the book that had absorbed him since its February publication, Larkin's volume of poems, The Whitsun Weddings.

Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

It was the second Saturday of July, and Griselda was at the Big Meeting as she commonly was each year, the Durham Miners' Gala, marching along with her LMH scarf flapping in counterpoint to the banners of Christian Socialism, and pondering the ruins of hope. The Chipping Clodbury riot, setting the cause of Goblin relations back by years, effacing decades of her work, had shaken her, as it had shaken the majority of Goblins who had no truck with the extremists of the Brotherhood, and it had been at their urging that she had at last given way to long importunity and grudgingly accepted cooption to a seat in the Wizengamot. And the miners' struggle seemed to her increasingly to mirror and echo the Goblin plight, not least in the baleful influence of hotheads and short-sighted extremists…. As she had said many times to Augusta, and should say many times more in future, if moving in both worlds held doubled delights, it exposed one also to doubled sorrows. She remembered, as she marched along, shoulder to shoulder with miners, lay-preachers, and Labour hon. members, so many marches: the suffragettes she had supported and advised; the waiting queues as the news of Titanic's sinking was doled out; the unemployed, the Jarrow marchers, the old soldiers out of work in the slump, the staunch trades unionists of the General Strike; and those same old soldiers when they had been untried and young, the long lines swinging past in August 1914, the volunteers, the Pals, the Bantams, the men going to Golgotha to be crucified, bearing all unknowing upon their young shoulders, not rifles, but a Cross unseen; and their sons of 1939, knowing with grim resolution what war now was, and marching forward all the same…. She could hear the footfalls even now: the queues for bread and soup, the dole queues, the long lines filing past the catafalque of George the Fifth, the crowds that moved to line the streets for the funeral of George the Sixth; and contented, excited queues as well, at Lord's and Trent Bridge, the Oval, Old Trafford, for county championships and hard-fought Tests, and the joyous crowds of V-E Day: to live in both worlds was to have a double portion of joy and grief at once. Yet in these years, as darkness gathered, the grief shadowed over all joy….

It was the second Saturday in July, 1964, and as Augusta set out radishes to the sound of the cricket on the wireless, a sudden silence fell upon her, the world receded a moment, and her heart was clutched by an icy hand; and then sound and colour came rushing back, even as she Apparated to her husband's side, to find him slumped and dead, the words of 'An Arundel Tomb' staring back at eyes now lifeless. What will survive of us is love.

____________________________________

'That day,' said Augusta, all emotion long since spent, 'was the day I blasted the hedges away, and the garden. I might almost have cast Fiendfyre, but it was then that Griselda found me, and took me inside, and watched through three days when I had collapsed. I've never potted a plant since.'

Neville's face was white with sudden understanding.

____________________________________

Griselda was knitting: something white, and soft, and fleecy.

'I don't know why you are wasting your time here,' said Augusta.

Griselda refused to accommodate her in a quarrel. 'I'm not. I never have done. And I quite realise you wish for a quarrel, so that you can feel something once more, but that really should be a waste of my time.'

'Minerva –'

'Minerva'll keep, as well as the Burbage child. You really must disabuse yourself of this notion that persons of an academical bent are any more important to me than my other friends. We are all engaged in the same task, you know, our little circle: passing on something much more important than mere knowledge. What unites us, dear, is the realisation that, whatever some peacocking "pureblood" or some fool of a politician says or thinks, there are no Dark Arts or dark creatures can affright us, or force us to abandon our Muggle fellow subjects – indeed, our fellow humans, our equals in humanity. What unites us, Augusta, is our firm conviction, our recognition (for it is, after all, a fact), that reality is not in magic or genetics, but rather in Evensong, real ale, brass bands, and fish and chips: and not all the wands of the world turned against us can or shall outweigh two pound six of bat-willow facing a well-bowled googly.'

'Evensong indeed,' said Augusta, with her first flash of real interest since Austen's death. 'You know perfectly well that we're Friends.'

Griselda smiled, and knitted.

____________________________________

Augusta smiled, reminiscently. 'It was in that next year that Griselda and I began to take Frank to cricket matches. Remarkable how easy it was to get autographs on the old ball when your father looked beggingly at a cricketer – he really was an insinuating child. Of course, when they saw who'd signed it before them over the years, they were panting to add their names: who doesn't wish to make one in the company of the Doctor, the Don, Len Hutton, and Ranji?'

____________________________________

Griselda, politely inflexible, stopped at Hurstholme Thorpe for a twelve-month after Austen's death, as Augusta found her feet as a widow with a young son. Madam Marchbanks, herself a widow, after all, and with no children of her body, however many she had had in the spirit, bent upon her godson, the young Frank – and always, somehow, when Augusta might hear and learn – the full force of her tutelage. The Stump and Orpington ministries, Quidditch riots and Dent-Head's Demarche, the Protest Floats and Goblin Rebellions, mixed in her tales with Mafeking Night and the Old Queen's death, Reform and Home Rule, the Abdication, the Blitz, and the 1930 Test Match at Lord's. Duleep and the Don and Chapman and Woodfull became as familiar to young Frank as Dai Llewellyn's career statistics or the score of the infamous Appleby Arrows match. Frank Longbottom was to grow up listening as avidly, and with as much informed interest, to TMS as to the Quidditch commentary on the WWN. And Frank was very carefully told how, and why, and in what cause, his father had died, and how no one was to blame, not even the Brotherhood Goblin who had exploded the hedge or the Healer who had patched Austen Longbottom up in haste, as in battlefield Healing, and overlooked fragments of yew and box and pyracantha that remained in his wounds. No one, he was taught, was responsible for accident, mischance, and unforeseeable results of their actions. Accidents happen, and one goes on. Augusta, quite as much as her son, was comforted by this stern common sense, and found it healing and comfortable.

The 1960s and 1970s were as dire, or direr, in Wizardom as in Muggle Britain. There was, after all, the near riot of Magnus 'Dent-Head' Macdonald's campaign against the Creaothceann Ban; the Experimental Breeding Ban; the decline of the Cannons and the first rise of Tom Riddle. Griselda's cousin Edith died in December 1964; Hammond and Freeman and Hearne left the crease of this life for the eternal pavilion, and Winston died, in '65. Murder stalked the moors. A succession of hapless premiers presided over decline, Heath wetter than Wilson and Callaghan together; slump, war, and a loss of faith in the fate of the West hovered Dementor-like over Britain – save in a few defiant quarters. The dark was real enough. As Sirius was one day to tell his godson, the Ministry was in disarray, trust was a vanishing quality, and the Ministry was 'trying to keep everything hidden from the Muggles, but meanwhile, Muggles were dying too. Terror everywhere … panic … confusion…': these were the days of the first darkness, the first war against Riddle and his rabble, when death devouring roamed the land and evil was loosed, seducing even Muggles to madness the cause of which they could not know. Many of Griselda's protégés and Augusta's friends were killed: Dorcas Meadowes, Benjy Fenwick – Griselda's cousin – and the Prewetts, Caradoc Dearborn and Marlene McKinnon. A succession of weak ministries and interregna with acting ministers rose and fell as the war flared and flamed.

There were new faces now at table, but Augusta continued, with grim defiance, to entertain; and the flame was kept alight, the thread of gold that Griselda had passed to her spiritual children was not severed. As Headmaster, even had he not been also engaged in directing the only effective resistance to the crescent Death Eaters, Albus Dumbledore perforce remained, as he had long remained, in a sort of purdah, lest he be accused of favouritism to pupils and prospective pupils; Griselda, however, was not thus limited, and she commonly made one of the diners at Augusta's entertainments, introducing Muggles with knowledge of Wizardom to Wizards and Witches, and contrariwise. (Young Mr Clearwater, a spritely Wizard of a mere century and a bit in age, who had taken over his father's chambers, vetted the guest lists and kept Augusta and Griselda on the windy side of the Statute of Secrecy.) No topic was barred at Augusta's board, not the war, not even the dominance of and subsequent eclipse of Yorkshire under Geoffrey Boycott. And Madam Marchbanks, vice Albus Dumbeldore, conversed with seeming irrelevance and careful calculation of old struggles long ago, Muggle and magical alike: women's degrees at Oxford from 1920 on, labour issues, the educational theories of her (and Dumbledore's) old friend Cormell Price,*** Beardsley and Wilde, Buchan, Guy Burgess, her experiences at the Paris premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, the South Africa cricket tour controversy, Goblin views of economics, the poetry of Edith Sitwell, Sobers' captaincy of the Windies, colliery brass bands; werewolves, Grindelwald, Eliot, Larkin, Betjeman, Blenheim Stalk's observations of Muggles, vampires, Red Ellen, Marx and Morris and Shaw, Ceylon tea, Jutland, the ILP, Manny Shinwell, 'Beefy' Botham, and the Venerable Bede.

And even in the darkest hours, with Augusta at the head of the table, Griselda and Augusta and Minerva and Charity put down their markers and gave hostages to fortune. Barty Crouch was bade mind Nietzsche's warning against looking long into the abyss. Millicent Bagnold was groomed for office, and the right honourable member for Finchley introduced to that portion of Wizardom that ministers did not wish her to know of. Lily Evans was invited, and vetted. Horace Slughorn was gently prodded into Doing the Right Thing as often as possible (although Griselda quite lost patience with the cultivated old sybarite when she found that he had paid her the flattery of imitation with his purposeless, ideal-free Slug Club).

Augusta very nearly gave over in 1981 and 1982, when Frank and Alice were incapacitated, and she took on the care of her infant grandson; but she did not. Griselda stopped with her again, for many a month, and Minerva came to look after Neville when Griselda insisted, bracingly, that Augusta leave off moping and come with her to see Ian Botham and England take on India at Lord's (10 – 15 June 1982).

And the flame died not out, and the thread held.

____________________________________

'Yes,' said Augusta, with a certain satisfaction. 'We made Bagnold Minister, and we kept some sense of proportion and tolerance alive in dark times – we did that. Whatever else, we did that, over tea and gingerbread, fat rascals and orange squash, butter pie and hotpot and mutton.'

____________________________________

There was only so much Albus Dumbledore might do, as Headmaster and as Chief Warlock; and there were any number of influences working to undermine his tuition in toleration. Augusta's dinners, grimly persisted in even after the torture of her beloved Frank and cherished daughter-in-law Alice, and Griselda's independent and insuperable influence as WEA examiner, were very nearly the only forces ranged upon his side, against the 'pureblood' fanatics and the corrupted ministry and the Death Eaters in the shadows. These sufficed. It was because these sufficed that Griselda, in 1995, resigned her Wizengamot seat with a speech that very nearly brought down even Fudge's ministry for all its payroll vote, and that she remained head of the WEA. So long as she and the WEA stood firm, not even an Umbridge, not even, in the end, a Carrow, could warp the minds of the rising generations. So long as Madam Marchbanks was the court of final appeal in Wizarding education, that education should reject the shabby compromises of politics bereft of statesmanship, and the prejudice of blood.

It was at this point that Augusta wrote to a very disgruntled Minerva, in a letter that would in part provoke Minerva's own, sharp letter a year after ('simply because you failed Charms does not reflect upon the worth of the discipline. It is high time, Augusta, that you became proud of the grandson you have, rather than some idealised grandson you believe yourself to have wished to have had'):

Don't go wobbly, Minerva, or I shall send you out into the grounds without a book and with some sweets. That mazey pink cow was not going to be denied. What of it? It doesn't matter who bowls so long as the umpire sees fair play; and so long as Griselda retains the WEA post, it doesn't matter in the least. And if you're meithering yourself over her – and that fool Ogden's – leaving the Moot (and had he not resigned with her and spoilt the effect, we might have a new Minister this day), I can but say you're an eggwap: she's already making plans to go to Australia in November for the Test between the Aussies and Pakistan. Simply count yourself fortunate that that ass Fudge issued his fool decree only after the Windies played Yorkshire at Scarborough on 3 September.

And the flame died not out, and the thread held.

The darkness encroached, but the flame did not flicker. Charity Burbage was murdered, as Lily Potter, née Evans had been murdered before her, and even Augusta's dinners ceased; but Augusta and Griselda, Minerva and Pomona, had marked and noted Hermione Granger and Angelina Johnson and not a few others, and the flame died not out.

And when the dark seemed to drive all before it, and the flame guttered low, within a fortnight of Yorks v Derbs (Headingley, 23 April: Yorks by a Nelson, 111 runs, McGrath and Vaughan carrying all before them), and nine days before the University match, Oxon v Worcs, The Parks, a weary Harry Potter, in the midst of victory and of grief, of glory and of tears, felt a light tap on his arm, and turned to meet the keen eyes of tiny old Madam Marchbanks, her robes torn and her wand smoking feebly, with Augusta and Nev behind her.

She simply smiled at him, and said, 'Clean bowled.'

The flame blazed bright, and the thread held like a cable, and the new and cleaner world Griselda had worked towards was born, on 2 May 1998, in the one hundred-eight-and-thirtieth year of her age.

____________________________________

To the surprise of no one whatever, least of all a chastened Nev and Harry (Dudley was not so involved, to his great good fortune), Madam Marchbanks had left comprehensive testamentary dispositions, not least for her funeral.

And she had left Augusta in charge of it.

As Springtide gave way to the Summer, then, at Riverside, Durham's county ground, those who had eyes to see might have discerned, through a haze of charms in the noonday son, an army of Twelfth Men, glimpsed fleetingly, at silly mid-on upon a dusty pitch. Wizards and Muggles who knew the score were gathered, wearing mustard and onions in their lapels – Griselda had long regarded as a high point of her life the ascension of Durham to first-class status, long ago, in the year of Harry's Sorting, and the team that in the early 21st Century had included Colly, Phil Mustard, and Graham Onions had always had pride of place in her affections.

The Bishop of Durham officiated; and the lodges of the Durham miners, banners aloft, were there, staunch to the last; and the Goblins had come to pay just tribute; and brass bands from every colliery town in the North were there to play her home. And as Harry and Nev looked about them, whilst the gathering stood and the clock turned back to reflect the years of grace, they saw the candle-bright legacy Griselda and her friends had created, a thread that reached back to the beginning of all magic and went on, stronger than steel, into the future: Augusta and Minerva, Poppy and Pomona, Hermione and Rose and Harry's daughter Lils, and the lads as well, Al and Scorp and Jamie and Hugo and Teddy and all, the inheritors of toleration and wisdom, at ease in both worlds, Quidditch followers and connoisseurs of spin-bowling alike, fond of pints and herbaceous borders and Pygmy Puffs, roodscreens and Kneazles, and all at need with a new ball sting in the tail; and they knew fully at last that Griselda and her friendships, with Augusta most of all, had been the means of grace, and that through their dedication alone were the fabled men and the noonday sun of years long gathered, more than merely the yarns of their days and the sting in the ale.

Augusta's oldest friend had left the crease, unbeaten; but in that moment, they knew that she was not gone in any sense that mattered.

The flame died not out, and the thread held, a golden chain strong as love; and so they should do unto the end of time and a day, when the ball should have been spun in the umpire's pocket away. What survives of us is love.

____________________________________

FINITE

____________________________________

________________________
* 1983, 5th Test, WI v IND, St John's: CG Greenidge MBE (WI), retired not out on 154. The only such dismissal recorded in Test history (his daughter was ill in hospital and he went to sit with her until she died, a few days after).
** She didn't, perpetually revising it even after its 1947 publication, and she never did make a political career.
*** Kipling's headmaster.

Comments

[primeideal]

Although I can't claim to understand all the allusions I love integrating Muggle sport with the Harry Potter world, so nicely done. Some of my favorite moments from this piece were Austen and the mousetrap, setting up Augusta's schoolday struggles with Charms early on, and having Jack Lewis be a wizard.

Thank you.

[wemyss]

I'm delighted that it pleased, and gratified that you were kind enough to take time to say so.

[delphi]

*applauds and attempts not to swoon at the presence of footnotes*

What an incredible treat: one of my favourite formidable women of the series, and a wizarding world of particular weight and texture and tangibility. I have a stubborn ignorance of all things sport, but I loved the detail and enthusiasm of this story nonetheless.

Gorgeous work!

Thank you.

[wemyss]

I'm inexpressibly obliged.