Correspondence Course, Part Four
Mar. 21st, 2006 09:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a_t_rainPart One
Part Two
Part Three
24 June
Dear D. J.,
My name is Remus Lupin and I am going to be your instructor for the Kwikspell course. I have received your letter, and I am very sorry to hear of your troubles. You may rest assured that your situation is more common than you might think, and it is nothing to be ashamed of. If you would like to talk about it and perhaps give me some more guidance as to what you would like to learn, please feel free. For now, perhaps we should go over some basics of Charms and Transfiguration, and possibly Defense Against the Dark Arts if you feel that your wife falls into that category...
The following day brought letters from two new students. Roger had assigned one of them, an accountant named Prewitt, to Sirius, and the other to me.
25 June
Dear Proffesor,
I want to improve me magic. Its not very good right now because I am from another country and I never had the good luck to go to Hogwarts and study under Proffesor Dumbledore. (Great man, Dumbledore.) We don’t have such good schools in me home country. I know basic charms and transfigrashin, up to what might be third year level in Britian, but I will be happy to learn anything else you can teach me.
Cheers,
Sue Hurdabirg
P.S. Do you like animals?
I did, and I found both her eagerness to learn and her slightly fractured English charming. “What sort of name is Hurdabirg?” I asked Sirius.
He glanced at the letter. “Swedish, I think.”
I am ashamed to say that my imagination went off in all manner of wild directions at this revelation. While Sirius had merely said “Swedish,” I heard “Swedish model,” and I was soon lost in visions of the mysterious Sue, clad in a skimpy bikini and stretched out on some distant northern shore. I took a great deal of trouble over her first lesson, picturing how grateful she would be to the wizard who personally taught her how to perform magic up to British standards. (I had, of course, taken trouble over my letter to D. J. Prod as well – but perhaps not quite so much.)
I was confident that we had chosen the best of all possible summer jobs in the best of all possible worlds. This blissful state of assurance lasted until Mrs. Figg and Mr. Prewitt sent Sirius their first efforts.
“Ugh!” yelped Sirius when he opened the package from Mrs. Figg. A black, melted-looking object fell out, along with a shower of greyish gravel that we were eventually able to identify as cat litter. The black item might once have been an ordinary litter tray, but was now trying to see how it looked as modern sculpture, and the smell was indescribable – a combination of scorched plastic, Kneazle excrement, and the inimitable odor of magic gone horribly wrong.
“I think some people shouldn’t try to do Scourgify,” I said after a moment.
“Agreed,” said Sirius when he had stopped coughing. He tried to Vanish the object, but Mrs. Figg’s spellwork had apparently rendered it impervious to all other forms of magic.
Unfortunately, he had opened the package at the Potters’ kitchen table. “My mum’s going to kill you,” James observed when he walked in.
“No, she isn’t. You’re going to help me get rid of it before she gets home,” said Sirius.
“Not me, mate. I don’t even work for Kwikspell.”
“Exactly,” said Sirius. “You don’t work for Kwikspell. In fact, you don’t work at all –”
“That’s because I’m not of age –”
“And you stand to inherit the Potter fortune. In short, mate, you are Capital, one of the Bosses, and you’re going to have your back against the wall when the revolution comes, and it’s time to show you can do an honest day’s labor before it’s too late. If you give us workers a hand, we might spare you.”
We buried the item in the garden and spent the rest of the morning sweeping up cat litter and casting deodorizing spells on the kitchen. It didn’t help much.
Prewitt’s first effort was even stranger. A considerable volume of paper with numbers printed on it fell out of the envelope, but it had all been shredded to confetti. The flakes of paper drifted slowly down to the floor of the Potters’ kitchen, where they spelled out the following words in elegant handwriting:
(the smallest prime number) minus (x divided by two) plus (the cube root of eight) minus (83x divided by 166) equals the square root of (three squared plus four squared) minus x
We stared at this in silence for some minutes, except for James, who immediately started scribbling something on the back of the envelope. “Padfoot, what did you try to teach him?” I asked.
“Just a few of the accounting charms that Flitwick taught us last year. Maybe I got a little too fancy with the Arithmancy.”
“Flitwick is part goblin, you know,” I said. “He has it in his blood. Did you really think that sort of thing was suitable for a beginner?”
“Well, how was I to know? I’ve never taught anything before!”
James looked up from the envelope. “You realize that whole equation is just a fancy way of saying two and two make five, don’t you?”
Sirius groaned and reached for the broom and dustpan yet again.
I had better luck with my own clients. Sue Hurdabirg was, as she had said, clearly a beginner, but there seemed to be nothing wrong with her innate ability. She made slow but steady progress and sent me a number of grateful and chatty letters, which I kept in a box under my bed when I was not poring over them looking for indications of more-than-friendly regard. (She signed herself “Your’s Affecktionatly” after the second letter, which I took as a very hopeful sign indeed.) I asked her what it was like in Sweden and whether she had ever seen the famous broom race; she responded in the negative, but sent a detailed description of the care and habits of the Swedish Short-Snout. I supposed it was really too much to hope that a girl would be interested in sport and discovered, instead, that I was very interested in dragons. And so it went. I caught Sirius smirking sometimes when I mentioned Sue and her letters, but I chalked this up to his belief that love was a bourgeois invention and thought no more of it.
D. J. Prod was making progress as well, although I was somewhat concerned about the way he seemed to be applying his lessons. I had taught him a few personal grooming spells, believing that they couldn’t do any harm and might help him recapture his wife’s affections, but he found a rather more creative use for them than I had intended.
... I must thank you for everything you taught me in the last lesson, particularly the instructions for the shaving and hair-cutting spells. I shadowed my rival home from the Ministry on the evening of Tuesday last and waited until he was alone in a remote alley; then, creeping up stealthily behind him, I murmured “Radito” and was glad to see his beard fall away as though it had been shorn by an invisible shepherd. I divested him of his hair as well, and then betook myself homeward, where my wife lay sleeping and unawares. I shaved her so that she was as bald as an egg and her shame evident to the whole world. When she woke and saw her reflection in the mirror, her screams nearly destroyed my eardrums, but she has made no attempt to visit my colleague since, and I consider my hearing a trifling sacrifice in the achievement of such a desirable end. Nevertheless, I wonder if I might trouble you to send me the instructions for a Silencing Spell?
Your most grateful pupil,
D. J. Prod
I wrestled with my conscience for several days about whether it was really a good idea to teach him any more magic, but mindful of Roger’s admonition that we would need to please our students to remain employed, I decided at last to do as he asked. It was only a Silencing Spell, after all. What harm could it do?
* * *
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 they 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 people no one can stand, and they are always the ones who stay late. 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 others 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?”
* * *
“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, 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?”
Part Two
Part Three
24 June
Dear D. J.,
My name is Remus Lupin and I am going to be your instructor for the Kwikspell course. I have received your letter, and I am very sorry to hear of your troubles. You may rest assured that your situation is more common than you might think, and it is nothing to be ashamed of. If you would like to talk about it and perhaps give me some more guidance as to what you would like to learn, please feel free. For now, perhaps we should go over some basics of Charms and Transfiguration, and possibly Defense Against the Dark Arts if you feel that your wife falls into that category...
The following day brought letters from two new students. Roger had assigned one of them, an accountant named Prewitt, to Sirius, and the other to me.
25 June
Dear Proffesor,
I want to improve me magic. Its not very good right now because I am from another country and I never had the good luck to go to Hogwarts and study under Proffesor Dumbledore. (Great man, Dumbledore.) We don’t have such good schools in me home country. I know basic charms and transfigrashin, up to what might be third year level in Britian, but I will be happy to learn anything else you can teach me.
Cheers,
Sue Hurdabirg
P.S. Do you like animals?
I did, and I found both her eagerness to learn and her slightly fractured English charming. “What sort of name is Hurdabirg?” I asked Sirius.
He glanced at the letter. “Swedish, I think.”
I am ashamed to say that my imagination went off in all manner of wild directions at this revelation. While Sirius had merely said “Swedish,” I heard “Swedish model,” and I was soon lost in visions of the mysterious Sue, clad in a skimpy bikini and stretched out on some distant northern shore. I took a great deal of trouble over her first lesson, picturing how grateful she would be to the wizard who personally taught her how to perform magic up to British standards. (I had, of course, taken trouble over my letter to D. J. Prod as well – but perhaps not quite so much.)
I was confident that we had chosen the best of all possible summer jobs in the best of all possible worlds. This blissful state of assurance lasted until Mrs. Figg and Mr. Prewitt sent Sirius their first efforts.
“Ugh!” yelped Sirius when he opened the package from Mrs. Figg. A black, melted-looking object fell out, along with a shower of greyish gravel that we were eventually able to identify as cat litter. The black item might once have been an ordinary litter tray, but was now trying to see how it looked as modern sculpture, and the smell was indescribable – a combination of scorched plastic, Kneazle excrement, and the inimitable odor of magic gone horribly wrong.
“I think some people shouldn’t try to do Scourgify,” I said after a moment.
“Agreed,” said Sirius when he had stopped coughing. He tried to Vanish the object, but Mrs. Figg’s spellwork had apparently rendered it impervious to all other forms of magic.
Unfortunately, he had opened the package at the Potters’ kitchen table. “My mum’s going to kill you,” James observed when he walked in.
“No, she isn’t. You’re going to help me get rid of it before she gets home,” said Sirius.
“Not me, mate. I don’t even work for Kwikspell.”
“Exactly,” said Sirius. “You don’t work for Kwikspell. In fact, you don’t work at all –”
“That’s because I’m not of age –”
“And you stand to inherit the Potter fortune. In short, mate, you are Capital, one of the Bosses, and you’re going to have your back against the wall when the revolution comes, and it’s time to show you can do an honest day’s labor before it’s too late. If you give us workers a hand, we might spare you.”
We buried the item in the garden and spent the rest of the morning sweeping up cat litter and casting deodorizing spells on the kitchen. It didn’t help much.
Prewitt’s first effort was even stranger. A considerable volume of paper with numbers printed on it fell out of the envelope, but it had all been shredded to confetti. The flakes of paper drifted slowly down to the floor of the Potters’ kitchen, where they spelled out the following words in elegant handwriting:
(the smallest prime number) minus (x divided by two) plus (the cube root of eight) minus (83x divided by 166) equals the square root of (three squared plus four squared) minus x
We stared at this in silence for some minutes, except for James, who immediately started scribbling something on the back of the envelope. “Padfoot, what did you try to teach him?” I asked.
“Just a few of the accounting charms that Flitwick taught us last year. Maybe I got a little too fancy with the Arithmancy.”
“Flitwick is part goblin, you know,” I said. “He has it in his blood. Did you really think that sort of thing was suitable for a beginner?”
“Well, how was I to know? I’ve never taught anything before!”
James looked up from the envelope. “You realize that whole equation is just a fancy way of saying two and two make five, don’t you?”
Sirius groaned and reached for the broom and dustpan yet again.
I had better luck with my own clients. Sue Hurdabirg was, as she had said, clearly a beginner, but there seemed to be nothing wrong with her innate ability. She made slow but steady progress and sent me a number of grateful and chatty letters, which I kept in a box under my bed when I was not poring over them looking for indications of more-than-friendly regard. (She signed herself “Your’s Affecktionatly” after the second letter, which I took as a very hopeful sign indeed.) I asked her what it was like in Sweden and whether she had ever seen the famous broom race; she responded in the negative, but sent a detailed description of the care and habits of the Swedish Short-Snout. I supposed it was really too much to hope that a girl would be interested in sport and discovered, instead, that I was very interested in dragons. And so it went. I caught Sirius smirking sometimes when I mentioned Sue and her letters, but I chalked this up to his belief that love was a bourgeois invention and thought no more of it.
D. J. Prod was making progress as well, although I was somewhat concerned about the way he seemed to be applying his lessons. I had taught him a few personal grooming spells, believing that they couldn’t do any harm and might help him recapture his wife’s affections, but he found a rather more creative use for them than I had intended.
... I must thank you for everything you taught me in the last lesson, particularly the instructions for the shaving and hair-cutting spells. I shadowed my rival home from the Ministry on the evening of Tuesday last and waited until he was alone in a remote alley; then, creeping up stealthily behind him, I murmured “Radito” and was glad to see his beard fall away as though it had been shorn by an invisible shepherd. I divested him of his hair as well, and then betook myself homeward, where my wife lay sleeping and unawares. I shaved her so that she was as bald as an egg and her shame evident to the whole world. When she woke and saw her reflection in the mirror, her screams nearly destroyed my eardrums, but she has made no attempt to visit my colleague since, and I consider my hearing a trifling sacrifice in the achievement of such a desirable end. Nevertheless, I wonder if I might trouble you to send me the instructions for a Silencing Spell?
Your most grateful pupil,
D. J. Prod
I wrestled with my conscience for several days about whether it was really a good idea to teach him any more magic, but mindful of Roger’s admonition that we would need to please our students to remain employed, I decided at last to do as he asked. It was only a Silencing Spell, after all. What harm could it do?
* * *
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 they 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 people no one can stand, and they are always the ones who stay late. 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 others 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?”
* * *
“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, 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?”
