Chapter 21: Poppy Reece Wakes With One Memory Intact

The Hospital Wing was never entirely dark.

Madam Pomfrey kept three lamps burning at minimum throughout the night — one near the supply cabinet, one at her office door, one at the far end of the ward where the windows looked out onto the grounds — and the result was a kind of amber geography of half-light that turned the rows of white beds into a landscape of gentle shadow and warm interval, everything soft, everything hushed, everything smelling of dittany and clean linen and the particular mineral sweetness of whatever Pomfrey burned in a small copper dish on the windowsill to keep the air moving.

Holmes had learned the Hospital Wing's layout in his first two days at the castle. He had not been a patient. He had walked through it twice at different hours, at the invitation of no one, noting the supply cabinet's organizational logic, the angle of the windows relative to the grounds, the fact that the door to Pomfrey's private office was hung on the left rather than the right, which indicated a left-handed installer — cross-referencing against Pomfrey herself, who was not. He had noted, without particular sentiment, that the bed at the far end of the second row had a view of the lake.