Mordant

Chapter Five: Celia

The intruder, oddly enough, proved to be a petite, pink-cheeked woman with mild blue eyes. Her hair was entirely grey, but she moved with a sort of brisk energy that suggested she could not be much older than Linus himself. He could scarcely have imagined a more harmless-looking individual, but as his house had already been broken into once, he was not inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt.

“Freeze!” He stared down the full length of his wand at her. “Put your hands up, back away slowly, and explain what in God’s name you think you’re doing in my –” He broke off with a start, recognizing the woman. She had been a prefect during his first three years at Hogwarts, and once upon a time, fifty-odd years ago, he’d had a bit of a schoolboy crush on her. “Celia Roper? In the name of all that’s wonderful...”

“Celia Lupin. My son asked me to check on you, and I thought it seemed a bit chilly in here.” She eyed the business end of his wand, which was still pointed at her, and added, “As you appear to be well enough to look after yourself, I shall be quite happy to go away and leave you alone. Unless there’s anything in particular you’d like me to do for you.”

Linus lowered his wand and promptly turned into a gibbering idiot. “I’m all right, but – Merlin, I’m sorry – what you must think of me! I don’t go around threatening old schoolmates as a rule, it’s just that I’ve had a housebreaker lately and you ... er, startled me a bit. You see, your son never mentioned you were coming – Is he normally absent-minded, by any chance?”

Celia’s lips twitched slightly, and Linus wondered why he hadn’t noticed the family resemblance at once. “Sometimes.”

Suddenly Linus remembered the cat-feeding incident, and certain impressions he’d had of his new acquaintance’s personality solidified. Before he could stop himself, he blurted out, “Or does he have a passive-aggressive streak and a taste for practical jokes?”

She laughed out loud. “Well, that too, I’m afraid.”

“I see. Well, to tell you the truth I probably deserved it, but it can’t have been very nice for you, having me on the point of Stunning you for housebreaking. Allow me to make it up to you.” He squinted at the mass of grey clouds outside the window, trying to work out what time of day it was. “Er, would you like some tea? Lunch? Wine?”

“Tea would be lovely, thanks. Would you like me to make it? You can’t be feeling very well.”

He wasn’t. The initial surge of adrenaline had worn off, leaving him shaky at the knees and very tired. “If you don’t mind, I’d appreciate it. Tea bags are in the cupboard on the far left, and everything else is about where you’d expect it to be.” He sank down in the nearest chair, feeling grateful that no further activity was required of him.

“Do you take sugar?” she called from the kitchen a few minutes later. “I’d offer lemons, but they seem to be looking rather ... furry at the moment, and I have a feeling the milk is probably worse.”

Oh, right, all the food in the house was a month old. Thank goodness she hadn’t accepted his impulsive offer of lunch. “Actually, they’re werelemons. They always get that way at the full moon,” he said, and she rewarded him with a snicker. “Just sugar would be fine, thanks.”

Celia reappeared in the living room with a couple of teacups and some slightly stale biscuits on a tray, and settled into the chair opposite him.

“So, er, what have you been doing with yourself since we left school, Mrs. Lupin?”

“Celia, please. I’m a philosopher.”

He stared at her. She wasn’t wearing beads or dreadlocks, and she certainly didn’t seem to have been smoking mandrake leaves. “Really, truly a philosopher?” he asked.

She nodded. “I write big books about contemporary issues in magical ethics. Very dull. Nobody reads them.”

“It doesn’t sound the least bit dull,” said Linus. “What sort of issues do you write about?”

“Things like ... oh, what it says about a society when they congratulate themselves on abolishing the death penalty but replace it with the Dementor’s Kiss, and why we think it’s more acceptable to use Obliviate on Muggles than on wizards, and whether there’s really such a thing as Dark magic, and if so, how do we define it ... Those kinds of questions, the ones nobody wants to talk about. You’re quite right, it isn’t dull at all. Just socially unacceptable. How about you?”

“I’m a cartoonist,” said Linus. “I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Martin Miggs, the Mad Muggle?” Merlin, that sounded childish after Contemporary Issues in Magical Ethics.

Celia smiled. “Of course I’ve heard of it – who hasn’t?” She took a sip of tea and tilted her head to one side. “I suppose you’re Muggle-born, then? You’ve got all the culture-clash humor spot on.”

“May as well be. My father was a wizard, but he was killed in a Splinching accident when I was two and my mother remarried, so I was raised more or less completely in the Muggle world.” Linus shrugged his shoulders, which were aching. “Now and again, people get offended by something in Martin Miggs and write in to accuse me of being a ‘self-hating Muggle-born.’ It’s always amused me that I’m neither.”

“Well, I am Muggle-born, and I don’t find it the least bit offensive. Martin’s wife reminds me a little of my mother, actually.”

“Really?” said Linus. Martin’s wife, Maisie, was highly enamored with the Color-Changing Lipsticks and Self-Pouring Teapots that kept making their way into her life, much to the dismay of Grampus and Storge, whose duty it was to confiscate these objects.

“Mum was a bit of an eccentric character,” Celia explained. “Tried to be more of a witch than most witches, really. She liked to use candles instead of electricity, and she wrote her shopping lists with quills and parchment, and wore robes everywhere even though she always looked ever so slightly wrong in them – like a little girl playing dress-ups.”

Linus nodded. “You’ve got to learn the culture as a child, otherwise it’s never quite right. Same way with pureblood wizards trying to blend into the Muggle world, they just can’t.” For years, Martin Miggs had poked riotous fun at a Ministry official by the name of Bartemius Crouch, whose theoretical knowledge of Muggle costumes and customs was impeccable and whose performance, in situations where he had to pass as one, was always quite, quite wrong. Crouch, sadly, had put an end to things by threatening legal action.

“Oh, dear, no. My husband used to wear pinstriped trousers and a tie when we went to the seaside. I never did make him see what was wrong with it.”

“How did your father take to your mother going around in robes?”

“He didn’t. He wasn’t really part of our lives by then.”

“Wizardry does funny things to families,” said Linus.

“It’s always the same story, isn’t it?” said Celia meditatively. “There are the children for whom the Hogwarts letter comes as a glorious escape, and then there are the parents and brothers and sisters left behind.”

“It was an escape for you?”

Celia nibbled at one of the biscuits with a faraway look on her face. “We lived in a little house on a dingy little street, and I had good marks at school but we all knew there wouldn’t be any money to send a child to university, and if there had been it would have gone to my older brother, because he was the boy, you know. We hadn’t anything in particular to look forward to ... I supposed I would work in my father’s shop for a while, and marry someone very much like my father. And then, just a few months before my twelfth birthday, I woke up to see an enormous snowy owl outside my bedroom window. And that was the day everything changed. At first it was like living in a fairy tale...” Her voice trailed off.

“And later?”

“Well, my mum was thrilled. I remember when she went with me to Diagon Alley to buy my school books. We spent hours looking in the shop windows, and she looked just like a little girl herself. Everything was so new and bright and magical. My father and my brother didn’t go with us ... they weren’t thrilled, not so much. I don’t know whether it was jealousy or fear, or ... Well, in fairness to them, I have to admit they had reason to be unhappy. They lost both of us to the wizarding world. Me for the usual reasons, away at school ten months of the year and half a stranger the rest of the time. And Mum, because she fell in love with a man she met in the Leaky Cauldron.”

“She divorced your father?”

“Not until many, many years later. Because Prospero – I can’t call him my stepfather, they were never legally married – and my mother both tried to play it off as if they were only friends, and they may have fooled themselves for a while, as well as everyone else. But I think she left my father in her heart long before that, and he knew it, too.” She broke off and looked embarrassed. “Goodness, I’ve told you all the family scandals, and we’ve only known each other for an hour. As adults, anyway.”

“It’s all right. I promise I won’t repeat any of it.” Linus looked up at the clock, and was surprised at how much time had gone by. “Won’t your husband be wondering what’s happened to you?”

“That would be rather difficult, as he’s dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. It was fifteen years ago.”

“Fifteen years ago” usually signified one sort of death, in particular, and it was an unpleasant and painful subject for most wizards. Linus changed the subject, but an edge of awkwardness had come into the conversation, and Celia said a few minutes later that it was time for her to be getting on home, after all.

 

                                                            *          *          *

The spotty-faced young man at the Werewolf Registry stamped Linus’ new identity card with a red W. “That’ll be five Galleons,” he said in a bored voice.

“Five? For what, pray tell? For the privilege of being discriminated against?” He’d already handed over fifteen Galleons for the card itself and another three for his photo; this was becoming ridiculous.

“For the stamp. I gotta eat.”

“And just how much work does it take to stamp an ID card? Can you explain exactly how what you just did is worth five Galleons?”

“Well...” The young man sounded even more bored. “It’s not like I get to stamp them things very often. Most of the time I just sits ‘ere.”

“So if I send more business your way – say, by biting ten people a month – will your fees go down?”

The young man continued to look bored for a moment or so, and then his eyes suddenly lit up. “Yeah! I don’t mind workin’ out a deal.”

“Never mind. I don’t fancy life in Azkaban.” Linus handed over his five Galleons and tried not to be too disturbed by the youth’s evident disappointment.

 

                                                            *          *          *

“Have you had any counseling since your bite?” asked the next nameless bureaucrat, the one in charge of actually creating Linus’ Registry entry.

“Sort of,” said Linus. “That is – a lot of the Healers came around to talk to me while I was in St. Mungo’s.” One of them, the McRae woman, had even succeeded in making him feel a good deal better. She hadn’t tried to lecture him, just listened.

“That won’t do. I need proof that you’ve seen a werewolf counselor before I can add you to the Registry.”

Linus was about to roll his eyes heavenwards when a sudden, happy thought struck him. “Does that mean a counselor who’s a werewolf? Because I know a bloke who’d be happy to –”

“No, it means someone with an official license to counsel werewolves. You’ll have to visit Werewolf Support Services and make an appointment.”

“I see. And where is Werewolf Support Services?”

“They’re in the Beings Division, at the Ministry Annex on the other side of London. But we’ve got a fast Floo connection you can use.”

The offices at the Ministry Annex were much shabbier than the ones in the main building; the carpet in the waiting room was threadbare, and the room seemed to be full of women with crying babies for some reason. A harassed-looking secretary claimed at first that Werewolf Support Services had no appointments available for the next three weeks. Linus protested that he was required by law to place his name on the Werewolf Registry within one week, and he needed an appointment first. The secretary insisted that all of the counselors were fully booked. Linus pleaded. The secretary stood firm. Linus Transfigured a chair into a sleeping bag and threatened to camp out in the lobby of the Beings Division until he got an appointment, straight through the full moon if necessary. The secretary made several hasty Floo calls and discovered that an appointment had miraculously opened up that very afternoon.

 

                                                            *          *          *

The “counseling session” consisted of an earnest-looking man in owlish eyeglasses reading a series of questions off of a sheet of parchment, and recording Linus’ answers in the spaces provided.

“Question Thirty-Seven. Do you advocate the overthrow of the Ministry by force or violence?”

“Well, I used to prefer force,” said Linus, “but I think after today I’ll have to go with violence.”

The counselor took off his glasses and peered at him over the parchment. “That wasn’t meant to be an either-or question,” he said seriously.

“Right. I suppose you’d better put down ‘no’.”

“Question Thirty-Eight. Are you prone to unreasonable fits of rage?”

“Certainly not,” said Linus. All of his fits of rage, including the one he was experiencing at the moment, were entirely reasonable.

“Question Thirty-Nine. Which sounds better to you, world peace or a nice, juicy steak?”

“World peace.” Actually, Linus would have settled for the steak, as he had considerably more evidence that steaks actually existed in the real world, but he supposed that would have sounded bloodthirsty.

“Question Forty. Do you ever have revenge fantasies?”

“No. Never.”

“Right, that will be all.” The counselor signed the bottom of the parchment. “Here’s your questionnaire. Don’t lose it or you won’t be able to get your dose of Rabies-and-Distemper-Preventing-Potion.”

“My dose of what?”

“Down the hall. Don’t go back to the Beasts Division without it, or they’ll only send you back to us.”

 

                                                            *          *          *

Miraculously, Linus managed to get his name added to the Registry late that afternoon, after jumping through several more bureaucratic hoops. He hurried away to the designated Apparation point in an alley behind the Ministry, conscious that he had promised to meet Remus Lupin for a drink in the Leaky Cauldron, and he was already half an hour late.

“Drink up,” said Lupin, pushing a mug of beer in his direction. “It’ll take the curse off having to deal with the Ministry. I hope the Registry didn’t treat you too badly.”

Linus took a sip of the beer. Pumpkin, ugh. Young people today had no taste. “The Registry,” he said, “is the most spectacularly idiotic organization I’ve ever come across. Not to mention corrupt, useless, and in blatant violation of basic human rights. Hasn’t anyone thought to protest this?”

“It’s a bit hard to get werewolves together for a protest. The Ministry can make things quite miserable for us if we get on their blacklist.” Lupin shrugged. “By far the easiest and most pleasant way to get on with our condition is to have as little contact with the Ministry as possible. Best not to get worked up about it.”

“Well, by God I think we should get worked up about it! How many years have you been putting up with this kind of treatment? And what makes you think it’ll ever change if we keep putting up with it?”

“Look, let’s not argue about this. It isn’t any use.”

Linus nodded, although he privately felt Lupin was going to prove a less than satisfactory friend if you couldn’t have a good knockabout argument with him.

The younger man took a sip of his drink and attempted to make his change of subject sound offhand. “You know, with your burglary and everything, I’ve been thinking there’s a chance there was something funny going on with your bite. Would you be willing to meet with a couple of Aurors and tell them your story?”

“You want me to meet with more Ministry drones?” said Linus. “Lucky me.”

“They’re friends of mine. Good people, and it would be entirely unofficial. I think it’s our best hope for finding out who bit you.”

“All right,” said Linus. He was, after all, anxious to learn this, and he had a particular reason for wanting to stay on Lupin’s good side. He drained his mug, and asked, in a fake-casual voice that was at least as good as his companion’s, “Oh, by the way, would you mind giving me your mother’s address? I’d like to send her a proper thank-you note for looking in on me.”

 

                                                            *          *          *

Dear Celia,

I wanted to thank you for your kindness, and once again offer my heartiest apologies for taking you for a housebreaker. Tea and biscuits seem like rather poor compensation, so I was wondering if you might be interested in joining me for dinner at the Grindylow Grill next Friday at seven?

Regards,

Linus

It took Linus almost half an hour to compose two sentences, and even so, he hesitated for a moment before tying the letter to the owl’s leg. The Grindylow Grill, he thought, would be a good choice; neither too rough-and-tumble nor outrageously expensive. It was obvious from the Lupins’ mode of dress that their means were modest, to say the least, but both mother and son had an air of determined pride that suggested they would be unwilling to accept hospitality they could not reciprocate.

Linus toyed with the idea of including Remus in the invitation, so that it would sound less like he was trying to pick Celia up, and almost immediately rejected it. He was, in fact, trying to pick her up, and the less confusion about that, the better.