Chapter 29: The Anomaly Reconstructed

The courtyard was empty at that hour, which was seven minutes past eight by the clock tower Holmes had been calibrating against the sun's angle for the past three days. The frost had not yet fully retreated from the flagstones. In the centre of the open space, three wooden stands held an arrangement of apparatus that would have looked, to any arriving student, like the preparation for a particularly elaborate Charms demonstration — copper fittings, a glass prism the size of Holmes's fist, a series of linked rings suspended from a central pivot at precisely calculated intervals. Professor Flitwick stood beside it with the focused stillness of a craftsman who has finished a thing and is now waiting to see whether it is correct.

Hermione stood three feet to his left with a length of parchment covered in her own notations and Holmes's cramped marginal additions, cross-referenced in two different hands and at least four different ink shades. She had been here since half past six. Holmes, arriving at five past eight after sleeping for three hours and forty minutes in a chair rather than a bed — he had not been able to locate a reason to cross to the bed and had not troubled himself to construct one — noted this from the door of the corridor without approaching, simply observing the set of her shoulders and the particular way she was standing, which was the way of someone who has been still for too long and has decided not to acknowledge it.

He crossed the courtyard. His breath made small precise clouds in the cold.