June Week

Chapter 13: Arabella Attempts An Approach

Arabella Dumbledore Figg stood in the rear bathroom of her house, dipping her cats one by one into a galvanized metal tub of Flee vermin repellent. The stuff was thick and green and wobbly as a batch of half-congealed lime jelly, and not one of the cats had been willing to put a paw in it.

Bella had tried stroking and coaxing, but when that hadn´t worked, she´d simply taken out her wand and cast a somnolence spell on them. Better for them to just sleep through it, she thought, lifting Tufty out of the tub and laying her tenderly on a fluffy blue towel next to Tibbles. They shed like mad when they were subjected to too much stress. She didn´t care about the fur getting on things - every surface in the house was protected by anti-cling spells that worked wonderfully, if you didn´t mind getting a slight electric shock every time you touched something made of metal - but she always wanted to cry at the sight of the poor creatures going around with bald patches on their hindquarters.

As she worked, she mulled over the best way to discharge her duty to Albus. After his prickly young protégée had nearly been killed six weeks ago at the hands of Grindelwald´s recruiters, he had all but begged Bella to help him with the girl. Minerva had been questioned by some of Bella´s fellow Aurors as part of the investigation and had passed with flying colors - she´d known nothing but the standard rumors about the recruitment ring until she´d stumbled upon its members meeting that night. But Albus was quite sure there was something else going on in her life, and equally sure that Bella could succeed in getting her to talk about it where he´d failed.

Before she could do that, though, she would have to figure out a pretext for getting Miss Minerva alone. Despite Albus´ suggestion, she suspected the girl would not eagerly accept an invitation to tea, and she didn´t seem like the type who would want to bond over an afternoon of clothes shopping and manicures either. But perhaps a request for help - ah, yes, that would not only be an excellent cover, but would put Minerva at ease by making her feel as if she had the upper hand.

"What might I ask her to help me with?" Bella wondered aloud, removing the last cat - her lovely Persian, Snowy - from the green goo and beginning to wipe the excess from his fur with a spare towel. Considering Minerva´s amazing performance in stopping the undercover recruitment at Hogwarts, she could almost have asked for her assistance with some of her real work. Too bad it was all so highly classified.

She kept thinking while she cleared up the Flee mess and waved her wand to wake her pets from their naps. Eventually, she settled upon what she thought was the perfect solution. With the cats mewing and winding around her ankles, she sat at her desk, composed a letter and fired it off by owl within a quarter-hour.

Now we shall see what we shall see, she thought. She let the cats out for their nightly prowl and went to bed feeling very pleased with her own ingenuity. She was even more pleased when she woke early the next morning to find Minerva´s affirmative reply waiting for her.

They met in Hogsmeade that same night outside the confectioners´ shop. Minerva returned Bella´s welcoming embrace with more warmth than usual, and Bella nodded sagely to herself - asking for help, especially this kind of help, had been a good idea.

"I´m glad you were able to meet me on such short notice," she said. "I´ve been meaning to do this for ages. Albus has such a sweet tooth, I know he´ll be delighted."

"He´s got more than onesweet tooth," Minerva said fondly. "He was a dreadful hypocrite when I was younger, lecturing me about not eating properly at dinner and then going back to his office and stuffing himself with Chocolate Frogs. Of course, that meant I never had to look any further than his desk drawer for chocolate when I wanted it."

"Well, I´m very grateful for your assistance. I´m sure you´ll do a much better job of choosing than I would. I just don´t know what he likes these days," Bella lied. She gestured to the shop door. "Shall we?"

Inside, she watched Minerva picking over the bins and barrels of sweets, noting that the girl was still slightly favoring the arm she´d broken. She wondered if she should ask if it hurt, but decided not to. Sharp as Minerva was, she ought to know enough to go back to the infirmary if she were really in pain.

Of course, the workings of Minerva´s mind were hardly predictable. Bella hadn´t been around much when her own children were growing up - being an Auror wasn´t a nine-to-five - but she clearly remembered that her daughter Louisa had, at Minerva´s age, been as cheerful and flighty as a robin in springtime, with parties and new dresses and handsome young men occupying most of her thoughts. Bella herself, though always more practically minded, had still managed to have her share of fun at twenty, even under the dour Victorian regime of the day. That was what being twenty was for. There was more than enough time to be serious and sober later in life.

Minerva, on the other hand, appeared to be training for the world championships in seriousness and sobriety. If Louisa had been a robin, she was a raven, dark and wary and solemn. Only occasionally did a smile or a flash of wry humor break through her stern façade.

The exception to that rule, Bella thought, was when the girl was looking at Albus. Then her whole face melted into an expression of soft, yearning affection that made Bella´s heart ache for her. The look was tempered with equal parts of hopelessness and resignation, though, as if Minerva had weighed her chances of finding happiness in love and deemed them slim to none.

As far as Bella was concerned, the jury was still out on that. Albus had firmly rejected any possibility of being more than a mentor to Minerva, and in light of the grim tale he´d told her about Minerva´s parents´ own May-December relationship, his vehemence on the subject was easy enough to understand. But she´d known her cousin for a very long time, since he´d been not a venerable and respected wizard, but a lanky ten-year-old trying to shoo her and her toy broomstick away from his Quidditch games. And she´d been with him when he´d gotten the owl from Dippet, had seen the stricken look on his face as he read that Minerva had been injured. She wondered if there might not be a hint of something there, something that he wouldn´t even admit to himself - Of course, that was only her opinion. Far be it from her to question his motivations. He´d always been the noble one in the family, after all.

While she considered all this, Minerva passed over the Blood Pop bin with a faint grimace of disgust, tossed a couple of Jelly Slugs into the box she held, closed it and presented it to Bella.

"There you are," she said. "All his favorites, and a few new kinds for him to try." She leveled a cool blue gaze at Bella across the top of the box, as if she were daring the older woman to find fault with her choices.

Bella, not to be intimidated, gazed back. If Albus wasn´t interested in Minerva, she thought, it wasn´t for lack of looks - the girl was really quite attractive, though in a dark, angular way that was not at all in accordance with the current craze for voluptuous blondes and redheads. Every feature in her pale, heart-shaped face was slightly pointed, from stubborn chin to narrow nose. Even her brows seemed to naturally grow in points, like Gothic arches, giving her an air of being skeptical about everything. She resembled her father very much - Bella could remember McGonagall senior scanning her Potions homework with that same what-sort-of-fool-do-you-take-me-for expression. It seemed Minerva´s doomed young mother had left as slight a mark on her daughter´s looks as she had on her life. She´d been little more than a vessel to carry her husband´s rampaging Celtic genes into the next generation.

"Thank you," Bella said to the product of their union, who was still watching her and waiting to see what she would do next. She hefted the box appraisingly. "Gracious, there must be five pounds of sugar in here. He´ll be fat as a Puffskein if he eats it all." The corners of Minerva´s mouth curled up in a small smile at the image of a fat Dumbledore, and Bella grinned, thinking that this was going even better than she´d hoped.

~~~

Minerva, for her part, had been surprised and a little suspicious when she´d received Bella´s letter the previous evening. Bella struck her as a person who was used to handling things herself, and quite competently at that. It was difficult to picture her needing help with something as simple as assembling a care package of sweets. But the message had been friendly, and it was really all for Albus´ sake, so she´d agreed.

Thus far, she was enjoying the excursion more than she´d thought she would. She´d never spent any time alone with Bella - they´d always been two legs of an uncomfortable triangle. Now she discovered that the woman had her own version of the charm that every member of the Dumbledore family, even the certifiably mad Aberforth, seemed to possess in spades. Bella was complimentary without being insincere, interested without prying and funny enough that even Minerva had to smile at some of the things she said. When she suggested that the two of them visit her house so Minerva could meet her cats, Minerva only hesitated for a minute before saying "All right - why not?"

In appearance, the house was exactly what she expected Bella´s home to be. It sat on a well-kept street behind a barrier of rosebushes, sporting brickwork and pointing neat enough to please the most straitlaced member of the Ladies´ Club. On the inside, it was furnished with spindly-legged antiques that went perfectly with Bella´s tasteful, well-dressed image. Conflicting wildly with all this, however, was the overpowering smell of cats. Cats, and something else. Minerva wrinkled up her nose, considered politely ignoring it, and finally decided that she had to ask.

"Is that ... cabbage I smell?" she inquired.

"Why, yes," said Bella casually, as if everyone´s house smelled like a cabbage-processing plant. "I just made a batch of cabbage juice this morning. It´s wonderful for the kitties´ digestion. You should try it."

"Um," said Minerva, concentrating on breathing through her mouth.

Bella didn´t appear to be bothered by the smell in the slightest. She called "Snowy! Tibbles! Tufty! Mr. Paws! Mama´s home!" and was immediately swarmed by four pampered-looking balls of fur.

"Look, dears," she said, "I´ve brought a guest. This is Minerva."

The cats all looked at the intruder, sizing her up. Minerva would normally have switched to her cat form so she could greet them properly, but Madam Valerian had forbidden her to transform until after the Christmas holidays. The nurse had been afraid too many changes in size and composition would disrupt the healing process that was still going on deep within her bones.

Minerva was perfectly willing to comply with that directive for the moment. It was an excellent excuse for not doing as Dippet had requested and showing her transformation to Tom - who, to her dismay, had not only asked Dippet about it again, but had waited for her after a class one day and asked her himself. She´d simply told him she couldn´t do it because of a medical problem, and he´d been forced to walk away to where his little group of sycophants was waiting for him. She was hoping that she would be able to get at him somehow, without transforming, before her reprieve ran out.

Since she was stuck in human form, she settled for greeting Bella´s cats by saying "Pleased to meet you," as if they´d been a quartet of humans themselves, and holding out a hand to them. Each cat in turn sniffed, twitched its whiskers thoughtfully, then rubbed the side of its face across her knuckles and purred.

"They like you," Bella commented.

"They´re lovely," Minerva said politely. "May I hold you?" she asked the Persian. It mewed in reply, and she scooped it up and held it in the crook of one arm, where it dangled like a giant fur rug. Bella observed this with approval.

"Let´s have some tea," she said.

While Bella fussed over the tea things, Minerva stroked the Persian and inspected the framed photographs on the sitting-room walls. Unsurprisingly, most of them were either of cats on their own, or of Bella with various cats.

How many cats can one person own in a lifetime? she mused. If you figured fifteen years per cat and an average of four cats at a time ... and allowed for different start and finish times in ownership of each cat ... Well, no matter how you looked at it, it all added up to one thing: a damned lot of cats.

Mixed in with the cat photos were some that contained only people. She saw a series showing a pair of children - presumably Bella´s - growing from infancy to adulthood. There was one of a much younger Bella getting married to a rather pudgy, homely man. (Ugh! Is that Mr. Figg? wondered Minerva.) And there were quite a few of members of the Dumbledore family, including a tall auburn-haired boy with twinkling blue eyes.

Minerva smiled. She knew who that was.

"Come on over," called Bella, and with a final look at the grinning, waving young Albus, she went to collect her cup and sit on the sofa in front of the fireplace.

Bella´s tea was amazingly good, sweet and lemony with a slight kick that made it burn pleasantly on its way down and warm the insides when it reached its destination. By the time Minerva got to the bottom of her first cup, she was feeling very cozy and content. Even the cabbage aroma had stopped bothering her. She relaxed into the sofa and stared at the leaping flames in the fireplace while Bella poured her a refill.

~~~

They talked for a long time about nothing in particular, about the upcoming holidays and how cold the weather had been and how Minerva´s teaching was coming along. Then Bella began to tell stories - funny, endearing ones - about her schooldays and the people she had known, with a few anecdotes centering on times she´d gotten in trouble with a certain crochety old Potions Master. And then the stories changed to earlier in Bella´s childhood. Minerva listened raptly, sipping tea all the while, as Bella reminisced about herself tagging along after Albus, who was five years older than she. He´d been like an older brother to her, Bella said, making toys for her and entertaining her with the spells he was learning in school (there hadn´t been any rules against underage magic back then).

"But he always did worry about me so much," Bella said, levitating another log onto the fire with her wand and sending a shower of colored sparks up the chimney. "I can´t count the number of times I told him to mind his own business and let me mind mine."

"Yes, he´s still like that sometimes," said Minerva.

Bella looked down at the top of Minerva´s head - she´d slid down to sit on the floor with her back against the sofa some time ago, and had all four cats sprawled purring across her lap and around her legs. Watching her smooth their fur dreamily, Bella thought that the girl was as mellow and open as she was going to get. Now was the time to make her move. With all the firelight and liquor-laced tea, she reflected, it was almost like a seduction, except that she wanted Minerva to talk to her, not go to bed with her.

"He only worries because he cares, you know," she said gently. "I think - I think he´s rather worried about you at the moment."

"Oh? Why do you think that?" Minerva hadn´t stopped stroking the cat in her lap, but Bella´s practiced eye saw a little tension creep into her posture.

Kid gloves, Arabella, she reminded herself. She´s not a suspect you´re interrogating.

"No reason in particular," she said. "He just mentioned that the two of you had been very close when you were younger, and I got the impression that you weren´t so close now. And that it bothered him. He seemed concerned that something was troubling you - something you didn´t want to tell him about. Is there?"

~~~

It was testament to Bella´s skills that these words barely disturbed the warm, muzzy glow Minerva was feeling. Instead, she found herself thinking, as if it were completely natural, that perhaps she should finally unburden herself to someone, and that perhaps Bella was the right someone. The older woman was so kind, so friendly. Minerva couldn´t believe she´d ever been jealous or suspicious of her. Then, too, Bella worked for the Ministry - she was an Auror - it was her job to catch people who had done bad things. She had even more power than Albus when it came to that. And as a woman, she would know how Minerva felt about what had happened to her, would understand the embarrassment as well as the desire for justice. She would know how to help.

Bella, who seemed to realize that her companion needed a moment to think, had leaned past Minerva´s shoulder, picked up her empty teacup and busied herself making a fresh pot to refill it. She was nearly finished when Minerva turned around, drawing a trembling breath to tell her that she was right, there was something troubling her, and caught Bella pouring a jolt of some liquid into her cup from a silver flask.

She froze. Was this why she felt so strange - so light-headed and languorous at the same time? Had Bella had been trying to get her drunk, or worse? Was she manipulating her somehow? Trying to trick her into saying something?

The thought frightened her, but not only that. It infuriated her.

~~~

With all her years of experience, Bella was still surprised at the suddenness of Minerva´s change in demeanor. She shot up from the floor like a jack-in-the-box, shedding protesting cats to both sides, and stood swaying a bit and staring accusingly at her hostess.

"You put something in my drink? What is this all about? What are you trying to do to me?"

"Minerva, it´s just liquor," soothed Bella, "and just a bit at that. Couldn´t you taste it all along? It´s not going to hurt you. Neither am I. I only want to talk to you."

"I´m going home!" Minerva said wildly. "You - I can´t believe - I´m going right now!"

"Wait." Bella caught hold of her arm. "I won´t keep you if you truly want to leave, but you can´t Apparate in this condition. You´ll be splinched in an instant. I´ll get you some Floo powder, and you can go." She went to the mantelpiece, fetched a small porcelain box and came back to her angry, reeling guest. "Don´t say anything. Let me give the directions. And promise me you´ll go straight to bed and try to calm down when you get back to the castle."

When Minerva had gone, Bella stared into the fireplace after her for a long time.

"I don´t understand," she said to Tufty, who had come to sniff around her shoes. "What would make her react that way? It was something to do with her drink being doctored." Still puzzling over it, she repaired her broken china with a flick of her wand. Then she threw another pinch of powder into the fire.

"Albus," she said, and in a moment, her cousin´s face appeared

"How did it go?" he asked without bothering to greet her.

"Wonderfully, up to a point, and then terribly. She saw me making tea, the exact same way I´ve been serving it to you and everyone else for the last seventy years, and acted as if I were going to drug her and sell her into slavery. I´ve sent her back to Hogwarts. You might want to look in on her and see she´s all right."

"I will," Dumbledore said.

"Good. And I think you should probably leave her alone about it for a while. We know she´s not doing anything illegal, after all. Perhaps she´ll work through it on her own."

"Is that your professional opinion?"

"That´s my opinion as someone who´s just nearly been blown away by Hurricane Minerva," Bella said.

"I´ve had a few run-ins with that storm myself," said Dumbledore. "Thank you for trying, Bella. Good night."

"Good night, Albus."