June Week

Chapter 10: Two Conversations

It seemed Minerva had been living under a rock for the last year - because the moment Dumbledore explained who Grindelwald was and she began listening for his name, she discovered that he was a hot topic of conversation throughout the school. The rumors about him were endless. He was working with Adolf Hitler, the Muggle dictator. He had an empire of his own. He only wanted to kill Muggles. He only wanted to kill wizards. He wanted to kill both Muggles and wizards. He was in Germany, in England, in France. The only thing that everyone agreed on was that he was bad, and getting worse.

As she was already busy snooping around, it was easy enough to add Grindelwald and his potential followers to her list of topics to inquire about. And now she was taking a much more aggressive approach to those inquiries. Early in the summer, she´d read her way through a pile of Muggle detective stories, and had decided that she´d relied too much on her own observations up to this point. Detectives interrogated people. So would she.

Not ordinary people, though. She began with the castle ghosts, every one from Nearly Headless Nick, whom she knew well from her Gryffindor days, to the old groundskeeper, Willie, who haunted the shed where Ogg and Hagrid kept their gardening supplies. The only two who were less than helpful were the Bloody Baron - he wouldn´t say a word against another Slytherin even if his life (or in his case, his afterlife) depended on it - and Myrtle, the poor girl who had been killed the previous year. Myrtle, like many newly created ghosts, had not yet got over the shock and confusion of her death, and was incapable of mustering a human shape or carrying on a coherent conversation. In a year or two, she would surely settle down and get on with the business of being dead. For now, all she could do was drift around, a formless, dolefully wailing blob of ectoplasm. Some of the students had started calling her Moaning Myrtle because of it.

Unfortunately, Dumbledore and Dippet had already spoken with the ghosts and learned the same thing Minerva learned: they had very little useful information to impart. Even though walls and doors were no barriers to them, they tried hard to respect the privacy of the castle´s living inhabitants. This was a delicate sentiment indeed, but one that prevented them from picking up the sort of gossip that she could use. She´d asked them - implored them, even - to do a little more eavesdropping, and they´d promised to help, but so far, had come up with nothing.

When she´d exhausted that avenue, she´d turned to another group that also had the run of the castle, and that no one else had yet spoken to for the simple reason that no one else could: the cats. The problem she´d encountered there was that cats, while entirely without scruples when it came to such human niceties as privacy, simply did not care what people did, and therefore didn´t pay much attention. Cats were interested in cat things: sleeping, eating and lying in warm places, in that order. You could get them to focus on very little else. Minerva could understand this to a certain extent - she found those pastimes strangely alluring herself when she was in her cat form - but it annoyed her anyway.

In this way the summer had passed. Now it was the first week of October, and she was helping Dumbledore pack to go on a special assignment for the Ministry of Magic. He wouldn´t - or couldn´t - tell her what it was about, but expected to be gone for at least a week or two.

"You´ll have to take my upper-level classes," he said, pushing a huge stack of clean, folded robes into a small leather valise that sat open on his bed. "They shouldn´t give you much trouble. The sixth years are working on turning solids into liquids - I had them melt down gold ingots to make jewelry last week - and the seventh years are getting ready to start animating inanimate objects. Hand me some socks, please. They´re in the top drawer on the left."

She went to his carved mahogany bureau, opened the drawer with an odd voyeuristic thrill, and started tossing balls of orange and plaid and candy- striped socks to him. Each one dropped into the valise, no matter how wildly she threw it.

"Enough?" she asked after fifteen pairs.

"A few more," he said. "It´s damp where I´m going, and I simply can´t concentrate on anything when my feet are wet."

They emptied the entire sock drawer in this way. After the last pair had vanished, Dumbledore zipped his bag (which looked no fuller than when they had begun), and picked it up.

"Ugh, it´s heavy -" And indeed, he was leaning to one side under its weight.

"Well, there you have it: the price of dry feet," said Minerva with a snicker.

"Here." Pulling out her wand, she did a Lightening Charm, and he straightened up again.

"Very good, my dear. If you were still my student, I´d give ten points to Gryffindor. As it is, I´m afraid all I can give you is a stack of essays that need marking."

"You´re a wicked old man, Albus." She put on her fiercest scowl to make him laugh, and was gratified when it worked. Despite his outward calm, she could tell he was worried about this trip for some reason. That made her worry too.

As they walked down to the Apparition point in Hogsmeade, he filled her in on other things that wanted doing in his classes, from the third years who needed extra practice in turning teapots into tortoises to the fifth years who had two more weeks of cross-species transmogrifications to go. Minerva scribbled it all down on the little notepad she always carried in her pocket, thinking that she´d be busy round the clock trying to get so many lessons ready on such short notice - Dumbledore had been at this long enough to do it all from memory, but she had to put hours of preparation into every class she taught.

"And one other thing," he said, just before they reached their destination. "One of the boys in my seventh-year class has expressed interest in the Animagus transformation. He asked if you would consider showing yours to him. It seems he spoke to Headmaster Dippet about becoming an Animagus, and Dippet told him you had accomplished it."

"Which boy?" Minerva asked, quill at the ready.

"Tom Riddle," said Dumbledore, and her breath immediately caught in her throat.

Can he know I´ve been watching him? No, how could he? He doesn´t even know that I know he´s the one who - who hurt me, so why would he suspect me of following him around? Damn the Headmaster. Why did he have to say anything?

But she knew why. Dippet had been overjoyed at the prestige of having an Animagus on his staff, and had hounded her all summer to demonstrate the transformation in front of the whole school at the Welcome Feast. She´d refused steadfastly - even with the thousand and one other cats prowling around the castle, she thought it best for as few people as possible to know what her other form actually looked like. It had gotten very hard to put Dippet off, though. Just a few weeks ago, he´d asked, reasonably enough, "What did you spend all those months learning the transformation for, if not to use it in teaching?"

Minerva hadn´t known how to answer that one. And now he´d not only given away her secret, but given it to the one person she least wanted to know.

Dumbledore was watching her very keenly, noting her reaction, and she squirmed under his gaze like a fish on a hook. He´d mentioned Tom to her a few more times after his initial request for her to watch the boy, but she´d never had anything to report - nothing, of course, except for the one thing she couldn´t report - and after several months, he´d stopped asking. She knew he was still keeping an eye on Tom himself, had heard Tom complaining to his friends that "the old man" was forever on his back. Clearly he hadn´t put his suspicions to rest. Suppose he became suspicious of her, too?

"Minerva?" Dumbledore asked. "Is that all right?

Oh, dear. Suddenly I´m "Minerva" again. No pet names. He´s serious.

"Yes," she said with a halfway successful attempt at nonchalance.

"Excellent. Ah, here´s Bella." The older woman got up from her seat on the bench reserved for arriving and departing travelers, smoothing down the skirt of her black Muggle-style suit, and greeted them each with a hug. Minerva accepted the embrace rather stiffly. She liked Dumbledore´s cousin better now - Bella had come to Hogwarts several times over the summer for private meetings, and she´d turned out to be nice enough, though she never seemed to stop talking about her cats. Still, the idea of her and Dumbledore going off on a secret mission together made Minerva unreasonably jealous all over again. Not because she thought there was anything romantic between them - they were relatives, for goodness´ sake - but because she wished she could be the one to help Dumbledore in whatever he was going to do.

It was a ridiculous wish. She knew that. Bella had been with the Ministry of Magic for fifty years and was clearly more qualified for any sort of assignment than a second-year, part-time teacher who would not even see her twentieth birthday for another two weeks. But it was impossible to squelch.

Bella, who was almost as good as Dumbledore at reading people, seemed to understand this instinctively, and offered Minerva an encouraging smile.

"So you´ll be holding down the fort for Albus," she said. "I expect you´ll have all his students in better shape than he left them when we get back."

"He´ll be lucky if I haven´t killed any of them," said Minerva.

"You´ll be fine," Dumbledore said. He looked up at the station clock. "We don´t need to leave for another half-hour. Would you like to wait with us, or head back to the castle?"

"Head back. I´ve got work to do. Have a safe trip, both of you."

The two of them watched for a minute as she started back up the path and disappeared around the bend. When she had gone, Bella said "I´m glad to see she´s decided not to scratch my eyes out after all."

Dumbledore laughed and let go of his bag, which, thanks to Minerva´s Lightening Charm, continued to drift gently at knee level. "She was terribly guilty about that, you know. She couldn´t help it - she doesn´t want anyone to come between us."

"Well, I can see why she wouldn´t. I mean, apart from the obvious fact of her being madly in love with you, you´re her closest friend, aren´t you? Didn´t she have any friends at school?"

"She was friendly with some of the other Gryffindor girls in her year," said Dumbledore, "but I don´t think they´ve kept in touch. Most of them have already married, and they haven´t much in common now."

"Aha, you see. It must be hard for her, being so much younger than all the professors, but not able to socialize with the students because she has to teach them. No wonder she relies on you. I don´t doubt it seems natural to her anyway. Look at how she was brought up, in the middle of nowhere with only her father for company. And a fine companion I´m sure he was."

"He loved her," Dumbledore said. "More than anything."

"I expect he did," said Bella, "but how often do you suppose he ever showed it? He taught me Potions when I was a student here. You had to half kill yourself in class to wring so much as a `well done´ out of him. Getting affection and approval from you - it must have been like rain in a desert for the poor girl."

Dumbledore sighed. "I only wish she would talk to me the way she used to. She´s been acting peculiar for a long time - ever since she started teaching, or even a bit before that. I thought at first that she was only embarrassed about her feelings for me, trying to hide them, but after all that came out into the open it was the same. I run into her in the oddest places, all over the castle, and she looks at me as if she´s been caught stealing when we meet. Then she goes quiet and faraway and won´t tell me what´s bothering her when I ask."

"She needs another woman to confide in," said Bella knowingly. "All girls that age do. A female friend, or a mother." She saw her cousin´s speculative look and held up both hands in a warding-off gesture, laughing. "Oh, no, Albus. Not me. I was hopeless as a mother; you know that. It´s only because of our housekeeper that Christopher and Louisa turned out all right. As soon as they were grown, I vowed to stick to cats till the end of my days."

"You aren´t so bad as all that," said Dumbledore. "You could invite her over for tea one afternoon. If you served her a few cups of your special brew, she´d tell you her entire life story." Bella was famous for fortifying her tea with lump sugar and single-malt Scotch. Everyone who knew her had learned to nurse a single cup, very slowly, to avoid being light-headed for the rest of the afternoon.

"I´ll think about it. It´s not that I don´t like the girl. Under all that prickliness, she really seems rather sweet. I just don´t know that I´m the right person for her to tell her troubles to."

"I don´t know that I am either," said Dumbledore. "If her own mother were still alive, this would all be far simpler."

"How did her mother die?" Bella asked. "I remember you telling me back when you first brought her to school that her father had passed away, but never what happened to her mother."

Dumbledore sat down on the bench, leaving his bag to orbit in a small circle by itself. "I try not to think of it," he said. "It was most ... unfortunate."

"I´m listening," said Bella. She sat next to him.

"Very well. Minerva´s mother, Alison, was only eighteen when she met Malcolm McGonagall. Who, I might add, was a hundred and twenty at the time. She wasn´t a student at Hogwarts, thank goodness - can you imagine the scandal? It causes enough difficulties when the younger professors run off with their students."

"Yes, I remember a few of those from my own schooldays."

"As do I. Anyway, Alison and Malcolm married that same year, probably because Minerva was on the way, though Malcolm never shared that particular bit of information with me. The minute Minerva was born, he bought a house up on a mountain in the Highlands, and all three of them went there, and there they stayed. Malcolm had never been much for society, if you recall, and once he had a family he saw no need to interact with anyone else, ever. And I think Alison must have felt - well, trapped. She´d been a young girl having an exciting, forbidden love affair, and suddenly she was an old man´s wife and the mother of a baby, living cut off from everything she knew."

"It couldn´t have been easy," Bella agreed. "So what happened?"

"Well, she did love Malcolm, deeply, and she would have known that it would devastate him if she left - she was the only thing he´d ever cared for more than his potions, except for Minerva. I suppose she didn´t want to bear the guilt of seeing him suffer. So one night, after he was asleep, she went down into the basement where he did his work and drank poison from his own store of ingredients. She killed herself, Bella. She was only twenty-four, and Minerva had just turned five. Minerva doesn´t remember her anymore, except in bits and fragments, and she doesn´t know the truth about how she died. Malcolm only told her that her mother had been ill."

"I see ..." Bella said. "And you think that if Alison were here, she would have a few choice words for her daughter on the wisdom of longing for a man a hundred years her senior?"

"Exactly right," said Dumbledore. "Among other things."

"Oh, Albus," said Bella softly. "Well, I´ll - I´ll see what I can do when we come back from this assignment."

"If we come back."

"Yes, if."

A moment of silence, then:

"Albus, I hate to ask it, but you don´t think she´s involved in ... well, in anything dark, do you? Could that be the secret she´s keeping from you?"

"No," said Dumbledore. "Not that. Not Minerva. Never Minerva."