Correspondence Course

Chapter Three: Sincerely, Severus Prince-Snape

James came of age early in July. As was their usual custom on such occasions, his parents threw an extravagant party; the entire Gryffindor Quidditch team was invited, along with the children of the Potters’ business associates, and of course Lily Evans. She had brought Ether, Samoa, Estella, and Consumption for a visit, and I was pleased to see the young bunnies were growing well and seemed lively.

The food was excellent and we had a brilliant game of pick-up Quidditch in the garden before the sun went down, but the trouble with large parties is that a number of the people who have to be invited are the ones no one can stand, and they always stay later than the others. By eleven o’clock in the evening, the four of us had sequestered ourselves in James’ room with a bottle of mead and a bowl of crisps, and were hiding out from the other guests. Mr. Potter was a particular friend of Horace Slughorn, which meant most of his proteges had to be invited. James had vetoed sending an invitation to Severus Snape, but some of the other guests were almost as bad.

“Mind if I join you?” Lily burst into the room without knocking.

James hastened to clear a space for her on the floor and pour her a goblet of mead. Sirius glowered, but said nothing.

“Thanks,” said Lily. “I had to get away from Sybill bloody Trelawney. She keeps going on about how I’m going to have a short life and tragic destiny, and advising me to beware of black-haired men – I think I might go out with James just to spite her, honestly.”

At this revelation James nearly dropped his goblet on the floor.

Lily grabbed a handful of crisps. “Don’t get your hopes up. I said ‘might.’” She turned to me. “Oh, and I had a question I meant to ask you. It’s about Consumption. He’s a lovely bunny but he will eat things he isn’t supposed to. He chewed a pair of my sister’s silk stockings to shreds the other day, right before she meant to wear them to a dance with her boyfriend.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, although I couldn’t help wondering what she had expected from a rabbit named Consumption.

“Oh, don’t be. My sister’s a total cow. I swear, I don’t know how we can be related to each other.”

Sirius stopped sulking and looked up sharply.

“And Vernon – her boyfriend – he’s even worse. He keeps going on about how he’s a manager at the drill factory with a hundred people under him, and when he says ‘Jump!’ they say ‘How high?’ It’s enough to make you sick – I don’t know why he thinks exploiting the poor workers is anything to be proud of –”

Now it was Sirius’ turn to nearly drop his goblet on the floor. When he recovered himself he topped up Lily’s drink until it was overflowing, and Peter and I looked at each other in some alarm. It looked very much as if we would have to put up with two Marxists from now on.

“Anyway, Remus, what about Consumption?” said Lily, unconscious of the effect she had produced. “I was wondering if you knew any spells that would make him stop, or if you had any advice about training him.”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry, but none of our rabbits have had that problem before, so I don’t really know what to do. Maybe you could take him in to the Magical Menagerie.”

“Oh.” Her face fell. “I thought you were meant to know all about rabbits with behavior problems. James said something about you and a ‘furry little problem’...”

I tried not to spit mead across the room, not altogether successfully.

“Is something the matter?” asked Lily.

“Er, no. Nothing at all.”

“Give us a joke, Wormtail,” said James quickly.

“I’ve heard a new one, but it’s sort of ... well ... dirty.” Peter half-whispered the last word, eyes fixed on Lily the whole time.

“It’s all right, Peter,” said Lily. “I don’t mind dirty jokes, really.”

“All right. One day Hagrid goes into the Hog’s Head, and he has a steering wheel attached to his ... er ...” Peter glanced at Lily again, and went bright red, “... you know, bits.”

Peter paused to give us time to contemplate this arresting mental image.

“And old Aberforth says, ‘Do you know you have a steering wheel attached to your, you know, bits?’ And Hagrid says, ‘Yarr, o’ course I know! And I can’t get rid of it! IT’S STEERIN’ ME BALLS!!!’”

We stared at him for a moment, and then Lily started laughing so hard that she inhaled one of her crisps and James had to pound her on the back. “P-peter,” she said when she could speak again, “did you by any chance mean to say it’s driving me nuts?”

 

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“That girl’s a bit all right,” said Sirius after she had gone home.

“Told you so,” James and I said at the same time.

Sirius tipped the last few drops of mead into his glass and looked at me. “You’re going to have to tell her about ... about you, you know.”

“No.”

“I think you really do,” said James. “She can’t go on thinking you’re an expert rabbit behaviorologist.”

I saw no reason why Lily couldn’t. In fact, after the third goblet of mead I had started amusing myself by making up all sorts of rabbit lore in case she asked again.

“Besides,” James continued, “she asked what my nickname meant, and I felt all wrong telling her the old story about the Transfiguration accident with the fork.”

“Anyway,” said Sirius, “what are you afraid of? You already said she was all right. ‘One of the nicest people I know’ were your exact words, I think.”

“All right, all right. I’ll tell her. Give me some time, all right?”

 

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Dear Mr Lupin,

I am, alas, the most unhappy of wizards once again, for my wife has taken a terrible revenge upon me for making her grow a beard. She slipped an Aging Potion into my morning tea (N.B. will you teach me how to brew potions?) and, when it failed to produce results dramatic enough for her tastes, compounded its effects by hitting me with a Hairy-Ears Hex, an Arthritis-Aggravating Spell, and – I blush to say it, but the truth must be owned – an Impotence Curse. Please, please send me that Silencing Spell so that I may use it in self-defense and prevent her from doing more damage. I beg of you.

From the very depths of desperation, I remain,

Warlock D. J. Prod

The envelope containing the Silencing Spell had been sitting sealed on my desk for some days as I debated whether I wanted to embroil myself any further in the Prods’ marital problems, but it was this letter that tipped the balance. An Impotence Curse, I thought, was hitting below the belt in more ways than one.

Dear Proffesor,

Thanks so much for teaching me the baking spell! I made some rock cakes with it, and I thought I’d send you some! Your’e the greatest!

Cheers,

Sue

The rock cakes were, unfortunately, indistinguishable from actual rocks, but I devoured them as if they were manna from heaven. Sirius received a chocolate cake from Mrs. Figg that seemed to be suffering from the same problem, although the note that came with it said that she had been forced to bake it without magic:

... I do not blame you, dear boy, but when I tried to use the cooking spell from your last letter, the oven blew up and I was unable to clear the smoke out of the house without hours of help from both the fire department and the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad. Perhaps it would be better if we tried something simpler and less hazardous, such as a spell to turn a matchstick into a needle.

Yours truly,

Arabella Figg

“We covered that in first year,” Sirius grumbled. “On the first day of first year.”

“Well, maybe she needs to start at the beginning,” I said.

Apparently she really needed to start before the beginning, because the flattened and twisted metal object she enclosed in her next letter was like neither a matchstick, nor a needle, nor anything else on earth. “I give up,” said Sirius crossly. “How come your students learn stuff and mine never do?”

“Maybe I’m a naturally good teacher.”

“Maybe mine are the biggest Squibs who ever lived.” Sirius looked in the envelope again and frowned. “There’s another letter, but it’s not from Mrs. Figg. Roger must have put it in the wrong envelope by mistake.”

Miss Jones:

It is my considered opinion that you are the most talentless excuse for a witch ever to wield a wand, and if you never attempt to inflict a Stimulating Solution on the world again, it will be too soon. Nevertheless, I shall attempt to critique your pathetic effort in the hope that you may learn something, although I strongly suspect your case is hopeless. Your first error was failing to clean your cauldron properly, which you then compounded by placing it over the flame before you added any of the liquid ingredients. It would be a happy day for the science of potion-making if you had blown up yourself and everything in the immediate vicinity, but I suppose I can hardly be so lucky.

Sirius whistled. “Man, and I thought my students were bad.”

Thirdly, it is a mystery to me how you managed to read ‘lettuce’ for ‘lacewing’ in the third line of the recipe, as most five-year-olds could have told you the difference...

“It isn’t a mystery to me,” I said. The handwriting was tiny and cramped. As I read over Sirius’ shoulder, I had to squint to be sure what it said.

... but for future reference, lettuce is a vegetable, not an insect. It is green and leafy. You may find that you have a great deal in common with it, as it is also tasteless, devoid of intellect, and utterly useless in potions.

After you add the dragonwort root, stir three times. As a reminder, the only numerals you should ever use when you count to three are one, two, and three, in that order.

“And three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of thy counting shall be three.”

“What?” said Sirius.

“Never mind.”

I have no idea how you managed to get out of primary school without knowing this, but your teacher ought to have been sent to prison for fraud.

“By that logic,” I said, “shouldn’t he be sent to prison for fraud if she doesn’t learn how to do potions?”

“I don’t think anything is ever his fault. He sounds like that sort of person.”

Finally, you asked me for my advice on removing the black sludge from the cauldron. After examining the residue, I can only suggest that you build a Time-Turner, go back to last Thursday, and take the potion off the flame fully an hour before you actually did so. While you’re at it, you may as well murder your grandfather and prevent your own conception. The world would be infinitely better off without you.

“Encouraging sort of teacher, that one,” said Sirius.

“I’m not surprised. Look at the signature.”

Please do not bother me again.

Sincerely,

Severus Prince-Snape

Sirius snorted. “Prince-Snape? Putting on a few airs, isn’t he?”

The Princes were a well-known wizarding family that had made their fortune at the beginning of the last century, manufacturing Gobstones. Sirius’ parents rather looked down their noses at them, but nobody could deny that they had been wildly successful. Several members of the Wizengamot and the Hogwarts Board of Governors were Princes, or their in-laws or cousins.

“Maybe he really is related to the Princes,” I suggested.

“And he goes around in grey underwear and works for a correspondence course? Not a chance in hell.”

It occurred to me that perhaps Snape was in the same position as Sirius with regard to his family, but I had a feeling Sirius wouldn’t appreciate the comparison, so I stayed on safer ground. “I wouldn’t care to be one of his students, anyway.”

Sirius closed his eyes, and a perfectly bland and angelic expression stole over his face. I knew that expression only too well. It generally heralded the advent of some scheme that was liable to land us in detention for the rest of our natural lives.

“... Padfoot?”

Sirius’ eyes flew open, and he grinned. “Well, that’s too bad, because we are going to be his students. Lots and lots of his students. And we’re going to make his blood pressure shoot through the roof, because Mrs. Figg and that Prewett bloke are going to look like Professor Dumbledore compared to us.”

Considering that Mr. Prewett had ended up in St. Mungo’s with beads lodged up his nose and ears after Sirius had tried to teach him how to use a magical abacus, this was a rather alarming comparison. “Um,” I said.

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s only – Well, I’ve sort of gone off baiting Snape. If you want to know the truth.”

He folded up the letter and sighed. “Moony, this isn’t anything like what happened last year.”

“I know,” I said because it seemed to be expected, and paced over to the window.

“For which I am honestly sorry, and if I could go back and undo it all, I would.” He looked up at me, grey eyes wide and unexpectedly earnest. “Or at least, I would if there was any way to – you know – ” His voice trailed off, and I knew without asking what was going through his head: by now, the events of last autumn had led to a complicated web of consequences that included Sirius walking away from his family, James being appointed Head Boy and starting to act the part, and Lily warming up to James considerably even though she knew nothing of what had passed between us. It was impossible to imagine unraveling all those threads now, and just as impossible to imagine things going back to the way they used to be. It hit me for the first time that Sirius had chosen us, over his family and his inheritance and his whole life, and it didn’t really matter what had happened before that.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s do it. For old times’ sake.”

He caught my eye and grinned again. “Knew you’d be up for it.”

 

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Dear Wiz,

I’m in kind of a tight spot right now and I gotta keep one step ahead of the goblins, but I dunno how to cover my tracks and I could do with a refresher course in Disguise and Concealment, know what I mean? Prince-Snape is an old mate of mine and he owes me a few favours, so if you could slide me on over to him, that’d be good. Will pay double once a few of my business ventures sort themselves out.

Cheers,

Jake “Shifty” Smith

 

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Dear Kwikspell,

It has always been my dream to become a fully qualified wizard, but I was expelled from thirteen different schools of magic in nine years, and I had to leave the last before sitting the N.E.W.T.s as a result of some unfortunate spell damage to a classroom. (The Headmaster said he regretted it greatly, but he dared not place me in a sealed room with the examiners for their own safety. He suggested I pursue distance education.) Can you help? I have heard that you employ a tutor named Prince-Snape who can work wonders.

Regards,

Bartimaeus Bugleblower

 

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Dear Mr Harbottle,

I have been asked to conjure flowers for the church bazaar and was too embarrassed to say no, but it has become all too painfully clear that I need some help with Charms and Transfiguration. I am prepared to pay generously for the services of an instructor with tact, discretion, and excellent interior decorating skills. If I may, I would like to request Severus Prince-Snape. I hear he is one of your best.

Sincerely,

Temperance Flowerdew Yeardley

P.S. As a small token of appreciation, I have enclosed a copy of my latest children’s book, ‘Little Lucy the Lonely Lamb.’ Please pass this on to Mr Prince-Snape.

Peter, who was good at drawing, did the illustrations for “Little Lucy the Lonely Lamb,” and I wrote the edifying and touching story of Lucy, who had the bad luck to be born with sparkling pink wool. The other little lambs were jealous because she was so much prettier and nicer than they were, and they bullied poor Lucy until her sensitive temperament drove her to throw herself off a cliff. Fortunately, a fairy with shimmering purple wings swooped in and rescued her, and she lived happily ever after.

Sirius tested the efficacy of this narrative by reading it to his cousin Nymphadora, who, being a sensible child, promptly threw up.