A Garden and a Library

Chapter 4 – Consequence of Curiosity


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“The garden is the poor man’s apothecary.”

-German Proverb


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Hermione dabbled, bored in her advanced Herbology class. The lesson was in magical hybridization, and she had mastered it effortlessly. Arranging her seedlings for the fourth time, she glanced around in an idle fashion, taking nothing in.
Thoughts of her book tiptoed silently through her mind. Fragments she had read over with intensity. ‘If one shows herself too rebellious and refuses to follow her ravisher, he picks her up and, pressing her lovingly to his bosom, exclaims, \"Why with tears do you thus dim the lovely radiance of your eyes? What your father is to your mother, that will I be to you.\"’
The passage came into her mind, seemingly random in her ennui. She allowed herself a modicum of amusement partnered with the obligatory righteous disapproval. A tinge of embarrassed blush escaped her notice and crept into her cheeks. She tried not to think of that warm self-discovery, her night in the common room armchair. The thoughts pulled her in despite her reluctance, and she felt a shadow of that warm ripe feeling flash over her. Again, briefly, she became one with the guttural, animal sensation.

Upon discovery, she waved away her reverie with a flustered impatience.

“Miss Granger!”

Professor Sprout was standing in front of her, clutching a basket. “Miss Granger dear, as you have finished early, I was wondering if you’d do me a bit of a favor.”

Hermione, it must be said, was relieved to be occupied. The feelings her library discovery evoked in her were not familiar, and she was wary of their seemingly salacious motives.

Sprout’s task involved fetching a quantity of herbs from a garden patch behind the main greenhouse, and Hermione was more than willing to leave the stifling warmth and moisture for a little fresh air. In the heavy heat it was easy to forget her cool exterior, when something positively humid was being nurtured, cultivated inside her.

Taking the basket, she pushed the back door open and stepped out into the dim, chill afternoon.

It was just barely spring, but Sprout had insisted that the desired herb would already be growing despite the still-cold ground.

Peering around her, she spied the garden patch at the bottom of a gentle hill in front of her. Stepping towards it confidently, she found herself straying to the side, her path curving around the side of the hill, and then down.

An average witch would have thought nothing of it. But Hermione’s mind registered the change in route, and she stopped. Turning, she walked back up the hill, to the same effect.

“I smell a spell,” she muttered, irritably wondering what errant student had been mucking about behind the Greenhouse it his or her spare time.

Drawing her wand from her robes, she directed it at the general area she had avoided in her walk, and attempted a revealing spell, which proved ineffectual. Annoyed, she muttered an anti-camouflage incantation, and began readying her wand for another charm. Before she could begin, her incantation took effect.

The air swam before her eyes, the particles of colour rearranging themselves into an image, integrating itself into the landscape.

She found herself staring into the angry eyes of the Potions Master.

For a extended second, they stared in shock at each other. Severus Snape’s vampiric countenance always had a stunning quality, and in such a situation Hermione was wont to flinch. She restrained herself, freezing in that strange moment, the air hanging thin and cold like glass about them. His black eyes started fires in her temples.

Then it splintered, warmed, time once again began its long count. A black-clad hand swept forward.

“What in the name of Hades do you think you’re doing, insolent girl?” he locked his long fingers around her wrist, forcefully twisting it until her wand fell to the ground. She stifled a cry of pain.

“Forgive me sir,” she retorted, trying to mask her fear. “But I sensed some sort of concealing spell and…”

“And nothing. It was not your duty to investigate whatever you thought you had found. You should not even be here,” he added sharply, indicating their surroundings with a sweeping gesture. “These are the private gardens of Hogwarts.”

Hermione looked where he had indicated, and saw only barren ground. But then, she remembered, it was very early spring.

“Professor Sprout sent me back here on an errand, sir.”

His irate stare was beginning to sear her, a coal-walker who has paused amongst the embers. She willed herself not to be afraid.

“Not to my garden, I’d imagine!” spat Snape.

Only then did she realize that they were standing on a small stone path, lined with neat rows of soil. It had, of course, been hidden by a diversion spell.

And why would Snape have a garden? Hermione answered her own silent question. He must be growing potions ingredients.

She averted her eyes from his, finally cowed by his insistent and accusing stare. She noticed, absurdly, that his robes were stained with earth from kneeling in the garden. The hand that had grasped her wrist was darkened by a sheen of dirt. The edges of his nails were black.

She banished the urge to smile that welled briefly inside of her. Something in that warm new part of herself flared up.

Hermione stepped around the patch of land, as the now-defunct spell had willed her to. “I’m sorry, professor,” she murmured, avoiding his eyes. “It won’t happen again.”

“I certainly hope not, or it will mean points taken from your house that no amount of correct answers in class will replace.”

Outwardly, Snape was playing his role to perfection. But she sensed an inexplicable hint of exhaustion in his voice- it dulled the anger just enough to be noticeable.

She did not look back as she walked down to Sprout’s herb patch. She could still feel his eyes on her.

That night, in the unmentionable kitsch of the Head Girl’s quarters, Hermione opened the bottom drawer of her expansive desk and pulled out a Muggle spiral-bound notepad. Part of a care package from her parents, who still couldn’t get their heads around Hermione writing essays on rolls of parchment, it had gone unused since she had received it.

Casting a thickening spell on the pages so her ink wouldn’t bleed through, she touched quill to paper with an apprehensive intake of breath. The past week had filled her with words, and she could no longer contain them.

Ovid’s book had inspired her. She would, she decided, write down her thoughts and emotions, so she could better understand them.

The quill began to glide, her mind’s eye picturing the scene in the garden.

‘Today I met a man,’ she wrote tentatively. ‘A man who I knew before but now I know differently. Today I found a garden... a barren patch. It was tended by this man. I wanted to smile at him in his garden, to bask in his humanity.’

Hermione lifted the quill, staring almost in disbelief at her own words. And she knew in that instant that this was only the beginning, and now she could explain it all on paper.

It filled her with joy. Dipping the quill tip in the rich dark ink, she closed her eyes and surrendered to her thoughts, allowing them freedom to wander where they wished.

When did she first begin to notice him? She wasn’t sure. Of course she had always known him, as a dark presence, a blight, an ink stain across her consciousness. All at the school knew him in this way, except of course Dumbledore, whose unyielding trust in the Potions Master remained a mystery.

But all of a sudden, regardless of her years at the school and how accustomed she had become to him, he was there, a presence edging into the back of her mind. As if he were just outside her field of vision.

Something in the garden had jarred her.