Author note: This story contains a few lines of dialogue from J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (New York: Scholastic, 1999), pp. 93-94, a quotation from Rupert Brooke's sonnet, "The Soldier," and a quotation from William Shakespeare's Richard II, Act I, Scene I, lines 182-183.
He loved chivalrie,
Trouthe and honour, freedom and curteisie. . .
He was a verray, parfait gentil knyght.
-- Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
The Unknown Soldier
1997. Berlin.
The Alexanderplatz has been renovated—again—but it still looks gritty, as it did in his childhood, in the waning days of communism. The Brunnen der Völkerfreundschaft, the Fountain of Friendship, is still there, and in the traffic lanes cars whiz to and fro. Tourists eat strawberries and ice cream at a sidewalk café and leave tips in foreign currency. A thin stream of pilgrims mounts the stairs to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Justin Finch-Fletchley stops at a distance, swings the rucksack off his shoulder, kneels, and stares.
They spent ten months in Warsaw when he was nine and Dad was the senior military attaché at the embassy. There, in the tarnished elegance of a pre-war flat, Justin sat mesmerized as scenes of a man and a tank, of half a million rioting in Tiananmen Square, flashed across a television screen. There he learned first-hand the meaning of containment and the limits of glasnost. There he was when jubilant East Berliners first crossed the death strip unimpeded, hurling themselves into the arms of West Berlin, dismantling the wall piece by piece, tearing at it with picks and axes, sledgehammers, bare hands. In December Lech Walesa was elected president of Poland and there was a shake-up at the embassy, replacements right and left, and they all went home. Next thing Justin knew, Iraq had invaded Kuwait and Dad was back in the regular army, posted to Riyadh and then to Amman and then to Baghdad, whither his family could not follow him. He was still there when Justin went to Hogwarts. He knew nothing of the matter until he got home six months later and Lady Finch-Fletchley had the dubious pleasure of explaining why Justin would not be going to Eton.
He has seen Tombs of Unknown Soldiers all over Europe, in Westminster Abbey and at the Arc de Triomphe, at Heldenplatz and Pilsudski Square. He has been to the original one in Fredericia and to the colonial shrines in Ottawa and Canberra—and yes, Canberra was an expensive trip, but Grandma insisted and as she said, travel is never wasted. Life is short, you must go once. Life is very short.
It's coal money, mostly. One of the great-greats, three hundred years back, was a by-blow of Charles II, and he dowered her with Welsh lands that were useless for farming but turned out to be chock-full of coal. When George III elevated the Rutland branch of Finches to the peerage, they built themselves a magnificently geometric pile, fancifully named "Albany" because that's how they won their stripes, chasing the French out of Albany in the Seven Years' War. The rambling unsanitary Elizabethan house, they abandoned to the Northamptonshire line, soon to be the Finch-Fletchleys, and 230 years later, the family's still there. They couldn't afford to replace it if they wanted to. The coal money's not what it used to be, and they've sold off some of the land. They all work now: diplomatic corps, regular army, MI5.
One of the pleasantest things about being friends with Ernie is that's he's a sheltered pureblood, raised in Glasgow's tiny wizarding quarter, where Muggles are rarer than banshees and every second person is a Macmillan. Thoroughly middle-class and middle-brow himself, he nonetheless takes the Stubbs paintings and the vintage Rolls Royce for granted, as conventional Muggle foibles. He can't tell a baronet from a busboy. It is Wayne who always bursts out with remarks like, "Canberra, man! How many quid did that cost?" Wayne's family all worked the coal mines until coal went bust, and then they went into the steelworks at Port Talbot. Then that went bust, too. For reasons that have never been entirely clear to Justin, Wayne holds him personally responsible for these misfortunes. Wayne has explained his logic to Zacharias Smith, who's magic-born and doesn't understand enough of Muggle commerce to realize that the Finch-Fletchleys were not the ones who laid off Wayne's father, that the Hopkinses never worked the Finch-Fletchley mines. All Zacharias sees is that Wayne's father is out of job and on the dole while Justin's keeps jetting off to glamorous places like Warsaw and Riyadh and Zaire.
There's a lot of cold-shouldering goes on in the Hufflepuff dormitory. The dreams only make it worse. Some nights he dreams of footsteps, and some nights he dreams of falling. He doesn't believe in Divination, but he does believe in dreams. He doesn't believe in bird entrails, but he does believe in ghosts. He wakes up thrashing, as a stout pajama-ed Ernie squints at him from the right and mutters, "Justin? Justin, you were talking in your sleep again," and on the bed to the left Wayne stretches lazily and snorts, "Man, you can tell the little prince never shared a room!" Zacharias sighs and pulls a bottle of fire-whiskey out from behind his headboard and says, "As long as we're all up, how 'bout a nightcap?" Ernie buries his head in hands and mutters impotently, "I'm a prefect."
Wayne and Zacharias think he's putting on a lot of swank with those bad dreams. At Hogwarts, bad dreams are the privilege of the Boy Who Lived and the other students whose families and futures were maimed by Voldemort, not of mere Muggle-borns like Justin. It has been nearly five years since Justin held out his hand in Herbology class and said brightly, "Justin Finch-Fletchley. Know who you are, of course, the famous Harry Potter . . ." He said it with perfect good will, true to the training he had received from early childhood, partly at county livestock shows and partly at embassy tea parties behind the Iron Curtain. He said it without revealing how much he would have liked to trade places with Harry, or how much he felt as if he already had. He paid compliments all around, ceremonious as a courtier, but he couldn't resist adding, "My name was down for Eton . . ." He thought, Harry and Hermione come from the Muggle world, they'll know what that means . . . but they didn't rise to the bait, so he put a good face on it, just as he was dutifully doing at home, and he said, "Of course, Mother was slightly disappointed, but since I made her read Lockhart's books I think she's begun to see how useful it'll be to have a fully trained wizard in the family . . ."
Well, he was twelve. Everyone's egocentric at twelve. Even Finch-Fletchleys.
The name Finch-Fletchley speaks volumes in Northamptonshire. In Northamptonshire, but not at Hogwarts. Every September, when Justin crosses the barrier to Platform Nine and Three Quarters, he enters a world in which there is no country house, no coat of arms, no motto; no M.C.s, no O.B.E.s, no plaque at Sandhurst, no Old Etonian tie. Here Potter is the name that matters: Potter, Prewett, Dearborn, Bones, McKinnon, Longbottom. Or in other circles, Black: Black, Avery, Lestrange, Rookwood, Rosier, Malfoy. From being a Finch-Fletchley, the incipient 21st baronet, Justin has become a cipher. He has become an unknown soldier. He is a mutation, a new creation, a man without a past. And maybe without a future.
There have been nine Justins in the family since Sir Joseph Finch consolidated his fortune by marrying Charles II's half-French by-blow Justine. Nine Justins, and few have lived to inherit. None has reached the age of thirty.
London, 1916. Lady Mary Osborne's on night duty, drinking tea in a surgical ward that is silent except for the drugged raspy breathing of a man with half a throat. Sleepily, she turns the pages of the volume of poems that her fiancé Sir Justin Finch-Fletchley sent her for Christmas. At 3:15 the orderly brings the letters from the Paris night mail and there, by the oddest coincidence, she sees in Sir Justin's hand the lines of Rupert Brooke that she was reading to herself ten minutes ago. If I should die, think only this of me; That there is some corner of a foreign field that is forever England . . . The orderly clicks his heels and strides down the ward, but just as he turns into the corridor another figure appears, hovering between the rows of beds. She squints short-sightedly through her reading glasses and she almost thinks . . . Sir Justin. But Sir Justin is miles away in France. The figure stands there, luminous, and she raises a hand in greeting. Slowly, slowly, the luminous soldier raises a hand and salutes her. She half-rises in her chair, but he is gone.
When the telegram came two days later she already knew. He expired at half-past three on Sunday morning.
Lady Mary married late, a widower, a veteran of the trenches, and had by him one daughter, only one. In due course came a granddaughter, also named Mary, who married Sir Andrew Finch-Fletchley and bore Justin, Jerry, and Joe. So Sir Justin's letters to Lady Mary came back into the family, and Justin knows them well, but he also knows the dream. It crops up at the oddest moments, disembodied footsteps, a salute, and he is gone.
He told his parents about the D.A. He told both of them straight away, as soon as he got home for Christmas. Was he the only one? He didn't know that Hermione had cursed the parchment, and he wonders now, why it didn't catch him, but Hermione must have cursed it to shame anyone who told a wizard, or maybe just anyone who told a Hogwarts teacher, or maybe she didn't specify, but her unspoken intention carried through into the magic, because intentions can do that sometimes. It's creepy how smart the charms are, how easily spells can read one's mind.
Certainly, charms and spells seem to read Justin's mind readily enough. They read the diffident skepticism like an open book, and it carries right over into the magic, no matter how hard he prays it won't. "Concentration, Finch-Fletchley!" exclaims Professor McGonagall as he transfigures his porcupine into—well, a porcupine. Again. "You're not using your imagination," sighs Professor Trelawney, as he tells her that what he sees in the crystal ball is just clouds—some cirrus and some cumulus—nothing more. "You must unleash your Inner Eye." "You did not add the dragon's blood," storms Professor Snape as Justin shamefacedly explains that he's sorry, he forgot, he didn't understand why—"You're not supposed to understand it, you're supposed to do as I say. You're a Muggle army brat, are you not? I thought Muggle army men were obsessed with following directions."
He would think he's hopeless at magic because he's Muggle-born, were that not so plainly not the rule. Some purebloods are dullards, while Muggle-born Hermione's a genius. She has all the self-confidence, the passionate uncritical total belief in magic, that he lacks. And then he would think that getting Petrified, lying stationary so many months in the hospital wing and missing all those classes, marred his academic future, except that Hermione was Petrified too and she's still a genius, and Penelope Clearwater passed her exams with flying colors, and if Colin Creevey's a bit of an idiot, well he was that before. . . so there's really nothing to blame. It's something inside that's holding him back. He needs a role model, a pattern, a guide dog.
His guide dog is Ernie.
Ernie's not a genius like Hermione, but he's patient and hard-working and he pulls down very good marks. He tutors Justin in the evenings and pulls him through exams, year after laborious year. Justin can't begin to tell Ernie how grateful he is, because he can't begin to convey how much he lost by coming to Hogwarts. After his first tentative overture to Harry and Hermione failed, he gave up trying to convey that to anyone. Well, anyone except Hannah, who's Muggle-identified and, wonder of wonders, has heard of Eton, though her rural, rather working-class family—crofters one side and market gardeners the other—never aspired so high. Hannah has a genius for sympathy. Hannah understands anything. Hannah's rather a dear. He's sent her five postcards in three weeks, and a sixth one sits in his rucksack now, already written, unstamped.
Yes, he knows that Hannah is Ernie's girl. Thank you very much, he knows.
Honor virtutis praemium. He learned that in prep school.
Mine honour is my life; both grow in one;/ Take honour from me, and my life is done. It's the family motto.
He rises and walks to the post office to mail his postcards.
It was April of his fifth year at Hogwarts when Justin went to Professor Sprout's office for career advice. Professor Sprout was there of course, as his head of house, and Professor Umbridge, because she's an expletive, and Professor McGonagall, he didn't know why, maybe as Dumbledore's deputy, maybe just to tick off Umbridge. Professor Umbridge kept clearing her throat and playing with the wooly ends of her pink scarf, while Professor McGonagall silently rolled her eyes. Professor Sprout sat down at her desk and pulled a quill out of the watering can she uses as a quill-holder and said affably, "Well now, Justin, what do you think you'd like to do?"
No one had ever him asked this before. Not the whole time he was growing up. Finch-Fletchleys don't ask that question, not of boys—and all the children are boys. All they ask is, "Army or R.A.F.?"
He bit his lip and said, "Professor Sprout, what I'd really like to do is be a communications officer, or maybe a tactician—"
She peered at him, uncomprehending, and said tentatively, "Floo Regulatory Network? Wizarding Wireless?"
Heavens, no, he didn't want to do that.
"Well, no, actually I meant something military—except wizards don't really have that, do they?—well, maybe police—"
"Auror Office?" said Professor Sprout, raising her eyebrows. It's not a path many Hufflepuffs choose. He doesn't know much about the wizarding world but he did know that.
"Well, I—"
"Pomona," said Dolores Umbridge, looking straight through him as if he weren't there, "this boy is Muggle-born, not much better than a Squib, really. He is quite unsuited to the demands—"
"Finch-Fletchley," said Professor McGonagall quietly, "that's a noble goal, but frankly, an E in Tranfiguration is essential, and I don't think you'll make the cut. Have you any other ideas?"
"Intelligence," said Justin. "I'm willing to do desk work—I'm good with computers—"
"Muggle relations?" said Professor Sprout hopefully. "That doesn't require Transfiguration. Doesn't require anything really, except a good attitude and a good sense of fun . . ."
"What a fine idea!" exclaimed Dolores Umbridge. "So suitable, Pomona, very suitable indeed. Everyone finds his level . . ."
There was no point prolonging the scene. He couldn't say, "Excuse me, ma'am, you're wrong, it's a family tradition." He couldn't say, "Excuse me, ma'am, my uncle works in MI5." He didn't have the credentials, he wouldn't have the credentials, and that was that. He saw their point of view. As he slipped sheepishly out of the office, he heard Dolores Umbridge trill merrily, "Pomona, is that the boy who failed Potions last year? Cornelius tells me he's quite a dingbat!"
He thought, what am I good at? I'm good at hiking. I'm good at camping. I'm good at meeting strangers. I'm good at mastering computer software and taking apart radios and reading The Economist. None of these skills seemed to transfer well to the wizarding world.
So he took his OWLs, and the results were just as bad as he knew they would be. He failed Potions, he failed Arithmancy, he failed Divination, and he failed History of Magic, even though history was his favorite subject in prep school, because he attributed too much agency to Muggles and put in too many details about the Muggle wars. He only just scraped through in Transfiguration (thank you, Ernie) and Herbology (thank you, Hannah). He got Es in DADA and Astronomy, which are the only two Hogwarts subjects that make any sense to him, and also, curiously, in Charms, because he's good with his hands there and as Flitwick says, it's all in the wrist. So he's trying for NEWTs in Charms and Astronomy and DADA, and he's taking the Transfiguration OWL over again because McGonagall's right, Transfiguration is important, no matter how bad at it you are, but he still has no career plan, and not much future as a wizard.
It makes him restless. Hence the trip across Europe. A summer of a rucksack, and no fixed address.
Justin loves his brothers fondly, he loves his parents so much it embarrasses him, but it's getting easier, every year, not to be home. He's of age now in the magical world, and soon he will be in the Muggle world too, and in September, little as he wants to, he will cross the barrier to Platform Nine and Three Quarters for good. He walks aimlessly to an ice cream stand and he buys a chocolate-hazelnut ice cream, four scoops, and he wonders what Mother will tell her friends.
Mother is the worst liar on God's green earth. As an adolescent, he could hardly believe that she expected her friends to swallow the whoppers she told them about Justin's very small, very select international military boarding school in Switzerland, which didn't advertise, because they were so many royalties there, don't you know, and security was so very tight. Lately he has come to realize that she never expected her friends to believe those tales. They know he's not in Switzerland, not at boarding school anyway. Mother is the perfect army wife, top brass: tall and willowy, articulate, looks good in hats. Mother knows so many secrets she can't tell that she has learned to lie badly so that her friends know not to ask questions. They know where the blanks are.
Hogwarts students, on the other end, are tone-deaf to mystery, at any rate to Muggle mysteries. They don't notice the blanks.
Justin trails his sticky sunburnt hand in the cool water of the Brunnen der Völkerfreundschaft and he thinks about disappearing. He thinks about how his great-uncle tried to bomb the city of Berlin.
Duxford, 1940. Flight Lieutenant Weybridge and Flight Lieutenant Finch-Fletchley are dancing the jitterbug to a squawking radio rendition of "How High the Moon." They are both pimply youths of twenty, nearly six feet tall, and they look ridiculous, but there's a lot of down time, waiting to go out on bomber raids, and the Major hasn't got the heart to tell them off. The radio is blaring, "Somewhere there's music/ how faint the tune," and the Major is reaching for his bottle of aspirin, when the orderly telephones the wire down to the flight room. The Major takes the call, and he turns off the radio. He says, "Finch-Fletchley, get your things. I'm sending you home on short leave."
"Sir!" says the Flight Lieutenant. "Sir, whatever for?"
The Major hands him the scribbled text of the telegram. Flight Lieutenant Finch-Fletchley reads it and says, "The hip? Well, that doesn't sound so bad. Jerry's indestructible, sir. Always, from a child."
The Major says, "Your parents will want you to see you now. Just for a bit."
Flight Lieutenant Finch-Fletchley says, "Don't worry, sir, I'm the spare. Really and truly. My brother's wife just had a baby."
The Major looks glumly at the telegram. He is more than twice the age of Flight Lieutenant Finch-Fletchley, and he can read between the lines. He was a subaltern in the First World War, and he wrote a lot of telegrams like this, and letters to the parents of his men. Shot in the head means brain-damaged and blind, and shot in the chest means already dead but let them down easy, and shot in the hip means crippled for sure, and possibly no more children, which will matter, in a baronet's family. But Flight Lieutenant Finch-Fletchley flies well, and he's short of men.
"It's a boy," says the Flight Lieutenant, inanely.
Flight Lieutenant Weybridge comes over and says, "Sir? Sir, this is the night we were going to make Berlin. We need three pilots, sir. Three pilots, three navigators, three planes. Finch-Fletchley and Willis and me. Benton's still on sick leave."
"Tomorrow, sir, please," says Finch-Fletchley. "My father would agree, sir. This is the night we make Berlin . . ."
Northamptonshire, 1944. The dappled shady green lawns of the Elizabethan house, days after the invasion of Normandy, when the Major finally came to call. Justin has seen the photos that Grandma took that day, with her old Kodak Brownie. Grandpa sitting up in his wheelchair with a blanket across his lap, and Andrew—Justin's father—careening wildly across the lawn on a tricycle, and the younger son, the adopted one, an orphan of the Baedeker Blitz, crawling vigorously after him and kicking his heels in the high green grass. Grandma tells the Duxford story proudly, insisting that's the way that Grandpa told it, though Grandpa isn't here anymore, and somehow she always looks straight at Justin when she quotes her brother-in-law's notorious line, "It's a boy."
It makes him shiver inside. It is the same look that Draco gave him when he set the snake on him, second year. Grandma looks beaming and Draco looked bratty, but the essence is the same. When Justin checks into the youth hostel that night, the kindly gray-haired woman behind the desk looks appraisingly at him as she hands him the key to his dorm room, and he shivers and looks both ways, watching for enemy aircraft, watching for snakes.
It's not as if his parents don't want him. Baffled at first, they have grown very proud, especially since Voldemort returned, since he joined the D.A., since he got his father a low-level Ministry of Magic security clearance and took out a subscription to the Daily Prophet on his behalf. It's not as if his parents don't want him. But even Muggles have intuition, even Muggles have ways of seeing. And the quiet fatalism with which they accepted his duty to go to Hogwarts extends to other things too.
He's dreamt the dream a thousand times but the explosion always takes him by surprise. It rocks the wooden hull of the de Havilland Mosquito like a ship in a storm, and the seat drops out from under him. The navigator's gone. The tail's on fire. Without realizing it, he is falling, through the clear blue air, towards the harsh blue sea, not in this world nor the next, but somewhere lost between. The burning wreckage pursues him, and he thinks, if the parachute doesn't open . . . and he pulls. He pulls. It opens too late. He hits the water sideways, fast, and he feels his kneecap break. . . .
He wakes up thrashing.
"Ja, wer ist das?" says a sleepy voice from the upper bunk in the cramped dark hostel dormitory. "Seien Sie still bitte! Es ist noch nicht Morgen."
But for Justin the days come too rapidly, and morning is always too soon.
He's heard it said that going to bed is like a rehearsal for dying, but so is waking up, if you lived in your dream.
Historical footnote: The character Justine Finch is very loosely based on one of Charles II's genuine illegitimate children, Charles Lennox, 1st Duke of Richmond. See Stella Tillyard's Aristocrats.
The description of Lady Mary Osborne's V.A.D. work is loosely based on several passages in Vera Brittain's memoir Testament of Youth.
The night fighter model of the de Havilland Mosquito was not actually introduced until the spring of 1941. Let us assume that Flight Lieutenant Finch-Fletchley was flying an experimental model. The Mosquito was unusually fast for its day, and in 1943-44, de Havilland Mosquitos based in East Anglia were among the first Allied aircraft to bomb the city of Berlin (a mission that Nazi leaders had previously claimed was impossible).
This story was inspired in part by Diana Summers's essay, "Secrets of the Class List," which you can read on the HP Lexicon, and in part by the urgings of Possum132 and Nyeren. Thanks to all.