Chapter Text
“Bye, Laura! Have a good term!”
“Bye Mum! Bye Dad!! See you at Christmas!” I waved to my parents as the scarlet-engined Hogwarts Express took off. They smiled sadly, always a bit upset when the first of September came around and their usually noisy house became quiet once more as my sister Beatrice and I left for school. I could see them looking for her on the train as well, but Beatrice had already forgotten them and was settled somewhere down the train with her group of oddball friends. At least Bea was now in her final year – next September would not be quite so hard on our parents.
Beatrice was a bit of a difficult sister to have. Two and a half years older, she was extremely intelligent – genius level in fact – but, as if to compensate, had no social skills whatsoever. Whoever handed out the small talk gene in the birth lottery had missed her entirely. To get around any awkward situations she found herself in – and there were a tidy few, let me tell you – she started hexing people at a young age, and since then had hidden behind that. At Hogwarts, where she was Sorted into Ravenclaw (where else?), she had found a couple of other kids just as odd as herself, and they had a wonderful time lost in their own little world, inventing spells that did weird things to people like making them sprout antlers or speak in Spanish for an hour.
Needless to say, Bea was not particularly popular. She got herself pretty well known from the start, not always for the right reasons, so when I started at Hogwarts two years later my arrival was surrounded by speculation that I’d be just like her.
Fortunately for me I wasn’t Bea Mark II, something the Sorting Hat recognised when it put me in Gryffindor. Why there, I wasn’t entirely sure, but maybe it thought I was brave for actually coming to a school where my sister was so universally disliked. (My dad’s family had traditionally been in Hufflepuff, so the Cauldwells had now been represented in every House bar Slytherin.) I was, however, somewhat stigmatised for the simple fact of being Bea’s sister, and I spent a lot of time trying to sort out her skirmishes.
This year, I was hopeful the train journey would, by Bea’s standards, be uneventful. There is after all only so much time you can spend trying to smooth over someone else’s indiscretions. In any case she was at one end of the train and I was deliberately down the other, so with any luck I would get through most of it unneeded.
As we pulled out of the station I turned to my best friend Mary Macdonald, who was sitting opposite. Mary was a displaced Scot, in that she was born in Scotland and lived there until the summer between second and third years, when her father died and her mother moved the family to London to be closer to her parents. Mary and her brother Andrew had held on to their Scottishness for as long as possible, but despite their best efforts – and retention of the strongest accent I’d ever heard – they were eventually assimilated into greater British wizarding society. I often used the Macdonalds’ house as a base when I had to go to London from my home in Bristol, to buy school supplies and the like.
A few girls who looked like they were about to start third year joined the compartment and jabbered away happily among themselves. Mary grinned at me. “So, Laura, tell me. Did Beatrice star’ talkin’ t’ ye agin?”
I laughed. Bea had given me the silent treatment at the start of the holidays because I got a higher mark in Charms than she did. She was more than a little competitive – the previous year she had single-handedly caused the near demise of the Gobstones Club by alienating everyone who had joined because they just enjoyed playing Gobstones.
“Eventually,” I said. “But only under sufferance. Mum said she wouldn’t buy her any new records until she apologised for behaving like a child. And you know how Bea loves her Muggle music.”
That was my mother’s doing. As a Muggle, she liked to make sure we were up to date with Muggle culture by giving us books and magazines, taking us to films when she had time and buying the occasional record. Bea had taken to Queen’s music and even had a poster of Freddie Mercury on her bedroom wall – though not her dorm, as she didn’t want her magical friends to know about this very Muggle obsession.
Mary giggled. “I can imagine,” she said. “My holidays were alright. Didn’ ge’ prefect, o’ course. Ma’s a wee bi’ disappointed bu’ there was no way I was goin’ t’ ge’ it, no’ realistically, an’ deep doon I think she knew tha’.” She pushed her long dark hair out of her eyes and smiled ruefully.
“If it’s any consolation I didn’t get it either. But then again my mum wasn’t Head Girl.” My mother, of course, hadn’t even attended Hogwarts. Mary’s mother on the other hand had been a brilliant student in her day; her name was all over the awards in the school trophy room with Charms prizes and the like. Unfortunately for Mary, while she’d inherited her mum’s strong work ethic, she missed out on some of her brains and was, like me, near the middle of the class.
“I expec’ Charlotte go’ the badge,” said Mary. “Tha’s okay. I’m happy bein’ where I am. A’ leas’ I don’ have tha’ responsibility. One less thing t’ have t’ think aboot, especially durin’ OWLs.”
I shook my head. “Actually it was Lily. I saw her on the platform, she was already in her robes and she definitely had the badge on. We’ll probably see her patrolling the train any minute now.”
Mary shrugged. “Same diff. Lily, Charlotte, Martha, any one o’ them coul’ have go’ it. Though Lily – I don’ know, I woul’ have thought her habit o’ talkin’ back t’ the teachers coul’ have worked again’ her.”
“Yeah, but she picks her targets. Only people like Slughorn who indulge her. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her talking back to McGonagall, for instance.”
“Aye, good poin’,” she said. “No’ worth worrying aboot now, anyway, is it?”
The other Gryffindor girls starting fifth year were Lily Evans, Martha Hornby and Charlotte Trimble. I liked them a lot – they had everything going for them, looks, brains, humour and compassion. Lily in particular really was one of the world’s beautiful people. But that was just it. Not only were Mary and I not in the same league as them, but we weren’t even in the same hemisphere. There was no dislike or even envy, just a recognition they were different from us – and it wasn’t just because they were English and we weren’t, Mary being Scottish and me Welsh. We did share a dorm, however, and that, if nothing else, meant they knew us and were happy to talk to us, and sometimes we got along very well – though if we’d been in different Houses, I had my doubts whether they would have even known our names.
“Which of the boys do you think would have got prefect?” I asked almost rhetorically. The four Gryffindor boys in our year were renowned troublemakers – it was almost a shame one of them had to be a prefect, though no one seriously thought it would put a halt to their antics.
“Remus,” Mary said immediately. “Peter’s go’ no leadership qualities whatsoever, an’ the other two spend too much time in detention t’ be real contenders.”
“Yeah, that makes sense,” I said, then changed the subject. “I’m getting hungry, I didn’t have much breakfast. Do you want to see if we can find the food trolley?”
Pulling out our money pouches, we wandered down the train looking for the trolley witch. Halfway through the second carriage, however, we were bowled over by two boys who had just been pushed out of a compartment.
“Oh, sorry!” said the first, a brown-haired boy in our year called Remus Lupin. I didn’t know him as well as perhaps I should, given he was one of only two other Welsh people in our year group (or half Welsh, in Remus’ case; the other was a rather unpleasant Slytherin girl called Scylla Pritchard), but I did find him reasonably easy to talk to. The other boy, a pudgy thing with colourless hair named Peter Pettigrew, just looked embarrassed as he tried to disentangle himself from us.
As I pulled myself up I saw the perpetrators laughing at the pile of bodies. James Potter and Sirius Black, the two most popular boys in the school – and the best looking. When we’d discovered boys, so to speak, in about second or third year, we’d found their extreme good looks more than a little intimidating. We were pretty much immune to them by now, having spent practically every day in their presence in the years since, but every now and then you still noticed it. Never mind that they were only in fifth year, they still had older students hanging off their every word and, in the cases of some girls, trying to hang off their arms as well. They knew it as well, adding a little reality to the equation: no one could be that blessed and not have it go to their heads.
“Girls, girls,” Sirius sighed with mock exasperation. He was tall and somewhat haughty-looking with features best described as aristocratic, a natural elegance and longish black hair that fell into his eyes, a haircut Mary derisively referred to as ‘Musketeer-style’. “We know we’re irresistible, but you really don’t have to fall at our feet quite so obviously.”
“Absolutely,” said James, who was just as tall as Sirius, also with dark hair, but his was shorter and stuck up at the back by itself, I suspected with his encouragement. He also wore glasses, which if anything added to his charm, though he was probably a touch too pretty for my taste. “There are easier ways to get our attention.”
We had by now extricated ourselves from the tangle of limbs on the floor, and Mary groaned. “I’m really no’ in the mood, lads. Tarantallegra.” The spell hit James on the chest, causing him to do a kind of tap dance around the compartment.
We giggled to each other and wandered away, looking over our shoulders at them. I caught the glint of a prefect badge on Remus’ robes – we’d been right about that one.
Before we reached the end of the carriage we heard Sirius call out. “Oi! Macdonald!” Mary turned around. “You know I can’t let you get away with that,” he said, a cocky grin on his face.
Well, we’d expected nothing less – you didn’t hex James Potter and not suffer any consequences. If he didn’t get you back in one way or another, one of his friends would. In this case, Sirius pointed his wand at Mary and drew it up slowly. Without him saying anything, she rose into the air until her head was banging softly on the ceiling. Bringing her down a little, he rotated his wand and she did two full three hundred and sixty degree turns, quite quickly, before he brought her to a halt and released her. “I thought of leaving you upside down,” he said with a smirk, “but you’re not in your robes yet so it’s not nearly so much fun.” He looked pointedly at her jeans.
I was gaping at him. “You can do non-verbal spells?” We weren’t due to start learning those for another year.
He shrugged, making even that look elegant. “So?” he asked, like it was nothing, and turned back into his compartment.
Did I mention he and James were also two of the smartest kids in school? Some people have all the luck.
****
The beginning of the school year was always a bustle of activity. On the first morning our Head of House and Transfiguration teacher, Professor McGonagall, walked along our table in the Great Hall handing out timetables. Mary and I, who had chosen almost all the same subjects as each other, consulted them eagerly.
“Double Potions wi’ Slytherins firs’ thing,” Mary groaned. Lily, who was sitting opposite, smiled to herself, her sparkling green eyes darting over to the Slytherin table.
Martha had noticed it. “I don’t know why you’re friends with him, Lils. He’s a nasty piece of work.” I knew who she was talking about – Severus Snape, Slytherin, and all-round generally creepy boy. He had a reputation for hexing people for no good reason and, even in first year, had known (and used) more curses than half of the seventh-years. For some reason Lily had always been friendly with him, despite his enthusiasm for the Dark Arts and seeming willingness to use them. The people he most often hung around with, fellow Slytherins Charon Avery and Irving Mulciber, were also known for their fondness for the Dark Arts. People who didn’t like him much – so, most of the school who weren’t Slytherins – had taken to calling him ‘Snivellus’.
Lily shook her head, sending a wave of dark red hair flying around her face. “No, he’s just misunderstood. Do you really think I would have been friends with him for so long if he was as bad as you make out?” She looked sternly at Martha. “And I don’t know how I would have got started in Potions if he hadn’t been helping me out.”
Martha and Charlotte rolled their eyes. “Lily, you are brilliant at Potions,” Charlotte said, pushing her glasses up her nose. “I don’t care what you say, even if you never spoke to him you would still be brilliant at Potions.”
“Yes, but at the start I’d have been completely lost, coming from a Muggle family and everything. He held my hand all through that first year when I didn’t know whether I was coming or going.”
Martha faked a choke on her bacon and eggs. “Sure it was just your hand, Lils? I get the feeling he’d like to hold onto more of you than that.”
“No, we’re just friends,” Lily said, blushing furiously and shaking her head again.
“Just as well,” said James Potter, who was two places down and had obviously been listening in. “’Cause if Snivellus laid one greasy finger on you, I’d curse him into next week.”
James had had a crush on Lily since third year, but he’d only asked her out maybe three or four times, probably because each time she put him down so scathingly that in all likelihood he needed a week to nurse his ego back to its usual substantial proportions. In fact, she was one of the only people at the school who could get away with jinxing him without retaliation. I knew she didn’t hate him as much as she made out – some of that charm had to get through, and he definitely laid it on thick when she was around – but she did think him a mite arrogant, and was waiting for that to settle down a bit.
“Oh, you would, would you?” Lily’s eyes flashed angrily. “Well, Potter, this may have escaped your notice but I’m a prefect now, and if you even try to do that I’ll take points from you quicker than you can say Quidditch. Yes, from my own House. So don’t push me!” She pushed her empty plate away, got up from the table and swept out of the Great Hall.
“Don’t think that one worked, mate,” Sirius Black said dryly from his seat opposite James. “Maybe you shouldn’t be threatening to hex her friends to her face. Just an idea.” He shovelled some scrambled eggs into his mouth, shrugging at James who was staring, stunned, at Lily’s empty seat.
“But it’s Snivellus! Can’t she see what a greasy git he is?” James sounded genuinely confused.
“But he is her friend,” said the measured voice of Remus Lupin, who was on the other side of James. “I think Sirius is right. Pick on someone else for a change.”
James pouted stubbornly. “You mean I have to get through a double Potions lesson without once doing anything to Snivellus? That’s a huge ask!”
“You’re right, it is a huge ask,” Sirius conceded. “Well then, at least make sure she doesn’t know it’s you.” He grinned, helping himself to more bacon and wolfing it down hungrily.
“Yeah, they sit at the front anyway, so they won’t be able to see you,” said Peter from his spot next to Sirius. Martha and Charlotte rolled their eyes.
“You lot are lucky we don’t like him either, otherwise we’d tell Lils what you’re up to,” Martha said, flashing a brilliant smile at Sirius as she pushed her empty plate away from her. “Come on, Charlotte, let’s go get what we need for today.” They got up from the table and sauntered off, their long hair bouncing behind them.
Sirius turned his head to watch them leave, absent-mindedly chewing on a piece of toast and paying so little attention to his surroundings that Peter waved a hand in front of his face, saying, “Earth to Sirius, Earth to Sirius.” Distracted, Sirius scowled and pretended to concentrate on his still overloaded plate.
Mary and I looked at each other, the empty space between us and the boys meaning we could see and hear everything they said. Mary was clearly doing all she could not to laugh. “Martha an’ Sirius?” she mouthed silently at me. I jerked my head towards the door, signalling that we too should leave the Hall.
“Well, that’s different from last term, to say the least,” I muttered as we headed towards the marble staircase that led to the upper floors of the castle. “They couldn’t stomach each other then. Wonder what happened to change that?”
It was true. Sirius and Martha had been at loggerheads for much of fourth year, apparently a result of her taunting him about his family, with whom it was rumoured he didn’t get along. I didn’t know a lot about the Blacks, being half Muggle and all, but Mary was from an old wizarding family and had heard all sorts of stories about them and their pure-blood mania. She had explained this to me in first year, when I was confused by the shocked silence in the Great Hall when Sirius was Sorted into Gryffindor – the first of the Blacks not to be in Slytherin. Anyway, Martha had got into an argument with him just after the Christmas break, when she had implied he wasn’t as different from them as he liked to make out and the world didn’t stop revolving just because a Black had asked it to. He had none-too-subtly suggested she get her facts straight before spouting off about things she knew nothing about, and the resultant screaming match had ended with her ears growing to about ten times their usual size and his hair turning pink, curly and cascading down his back. The ensuing feud had lasted at least until the train ride home at the end of the year, when they’d had a hex battle in the corridor.
Martha and Sirius continued flirting with each other throughout the day, like they had reached an unspoken understanding that the new aim was to snog each other senseless. It was baffling, to say the least, but it at least provided an entertaining alternative to James and Severus trying to hex each other into oblivion, each trying to outdo the other in an effort to win Lily’s affections.
James, true to expectations, hadn’t managed to get through double Potions without trying to sabotage Snape’s Draught of Peace, but realised he had failed dismally when Professor Slughorn, the Potions master, started waxing lyrical about the perfect silver vapour billowing out of Snape’s cauldron. Severus was easily as good at Potions as Lily was and I was sure they were comparing notes, the way they kept whispering together throughout the class.
James’ potion, on the other hand, was grey and a little gluggy, which was only somewhat better than mine. While he had undoubtedly been distracted, I couldn’t help but think that, in this class at least, he had nothing on Severus.
****
The mystery of Martha and Sirius was solved later that night, when all five of us were in the dormitory getting ready for bed. I was bursting with curiosity but didn’t feel like I knew Martha well enough to ask, or even how to ask, what the sudden about-face in behaviour meant. Charlotte, luckily, had no such qualms.
“Oi, Martha,” she said, throwing a towel through the bathroom door at her.
Martha looked at her, toothbrush in mouth. “What?”
“What’s going on with Sirius? Long story or not, you promised to tell us tonight!”
“Absolutely, ’fess up,” Lily said.
Martha went red, turning her back to us to both rinse out her mouth and hide her glowing cheeks. After splashing some water over her face, she came back into the dormitory.
Charlotte and Lily were both staring her down. “Well?” Lily prompted, after Martha didn’t say anything straight away. “We thought you two hated each other!”
“We don’t hate each other. We just had a – misunderstanding.” Martha looked around the dorm, her gaze briefly resting on Mary and I, sitting on Mary’s bed, noting we would to be part of the conversation too. “My dad found out about what had happened, I think McGonagall must have written to him after I sent Sirius to the hospital wing that time. One too many detentions for hexing people, probably.”
Charlotte giggled, a reminiscent look on her face. One of Martha’s jinxes had gone haywire and Sirius had come down with a nasty combination of octopus tentacles sprouting from his face, a missing nose and a muscular bind, where he couldn’t move his upper body. In the end they sent him to Madam Pomfrey in the hospital wing and she had, after much trial and error, managed to undo the damage.
“Anyway,” Martha said, warming to the task, “Mum and Dad sat me down and gave me a long lecture on stereotyping people. Apparently Mum went to school with Sirius’ folks and she gave me a rundown on the sorts of things they used to do and say to people, particularly Muggle-borns and half-bloods.” She looked at Lily and then me as she took a deep breath and went on. “She made me tell her exactly what Sirius had done, and I realised it was nothing like what used to happen in her day, and nothing like what Sirius must have been brought up to believe. She said that to even be Sorted into Gryffindor he must be really different from that, and, well, I couldn’t say anything. Because it was all true. I felt so ashamed of myself. So then they both sat me down and made me write to him to apologise.” She was now sitting on her bed, silent tears forming in her eyes.
“He was really nice about it,” she said finally, breaking into a grin when she saw the dubious look on Lily’s face. “Yeah, I was surprised too. It was only because I wouldn’t admit I was wrong that he kept it up all that time. He was angry with me because I refused to see what should have been obvious. So when I wrote and apologised, he wrote back, saying he forgave me and by apologising I was becoming a bigger person. So I wrote this really flirty and suggestive letter back, never intending to send it, but just to make me feel better. I never even finished it. Unfortunately Mum found it in my room and, thinking I’d forgotten to send it, gave it to Lechuza – our owl,” she explained, seeing Mary’s confused look, “and – well – he read it. ’Course, he’d just had that other letter so he’d know my handwriting, even though I hadn’t signed it. So I had three options – pretend it didn’t happen, get horribly embarrassed, or go along with it.”
Lily was getting red-faced from trying not to laugh, while Charlotte abandoned all pretence and thumped her mattress in appreciation.
Martha grinned suddenly, a mischievous twinkle in her damp eyes. “I figured the potential benefits of going along with it were far greater than any alternative,” she said. “I mean, Sirius Black! If he went along with it … wow! I couldn’t do much better, could I?”
“True,” Charlotte said. “He’s quite a catch, I must admit. Rich, too, everyone knows the Blacks are loaded.” She paused. “Pity his ego is larger than a Hungarian Horntail.”
“And just as dangerous,” said Lily. “Between him and James …”
I smiled as I headed back to my own bed. Trust her to bring James into it. That denial thing just wasn’t as convincing as it had once been.
“It seems to be working, though,” said Martha, grinning even more broadly. “Proves it definitely was worth a shot!”
Lily shook her head, though she was smiling. “Just watch out,” she said in a warning tone. “You’ll be doubly on Dione’s radar now.”
Dione Turpin, from Ravenclaw, was a nasty piece of work. She had a habit of launching character attacks against anyone – or really, any girl – she saw as a threat or felt inferior to, never needing anything as irrelevant as evidence to back up her claims. She was very effective in this because, while spiteful, she was remarkably subtle. Her attacks were always out of vision and earshot of any of the boys, to the extent I didn’t think they even knew about them, and as a result she was perceived by many to be a lovely person. No wonder she was in Ravenclaw: you’d have to be really smart to pull off a split personality like that. The Headmaster had even been taken in enough to make her a prefect.
Dione’s attacks were mostly jaw, all talk and little action, and it was uncommon to see her actually jinxing anyone. This was quite possibly one of her smartest moves, as it was much harder to undo damage to someone’s reputation than to remove bicorn horns from their head. (There was that Ravenclaw thing again.)
Fortunately for me I was well outside her radar – as a Cauldwell there was never any possibility she might feel inferior to me, as having Bea as a sister was more than enough to lump me well at the bottom of the social hierarchy. People like Lily, Martha and Charlotte, however, were prime targets, and especially after Lily too received a prefect’s badge she was singled out even more than she had been previously.
It had to be jealousy, of course, as there was nothing about Lily not to like. But she was beautiful and gifted and had half the boys in the year drooling over her, and Dione had taken exception to this. The rivalry had been going on since about second year, but it seemed to be hitting new heights.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Dione muttered as Lily walked past. “SHE’s a prefect? Dumbledore must really be scraping the bottom of the barrel, picking someone who has to copy all her work from the books in the library in order to pass.”
“Does she really?” asked Gertie Cresswell, her partner in crime. “Wow, I didn’t know that. We really should tell someone. Hey, do you think Elvira knows?”
And so it would start. I was never convinced Gertie felt any real malice towards Lily (or anyone else Dione was targeting), but she would generally do her bit in spreading the rumours anyway, possibly just to keep the peace.
Mary seemed to share this impression. “Ye know, Laura,” she said one day, watching them, “I’m no’ sure tha’ Gertie even believes Dione these days.”
“She probably doesn’t,” I said. “She’s fine with Lily and the rest of them when Dione’s not around, it’s just when she’s in full flight that Gertie goes along with it.”
“Prob’ly scared o’ her.”
“Well, would you blame her if she was? I certainly wouldn’t want Dione as an enemy.”
“Aye, goo’ poin’,” Mary said with a grin. “Well, she is in Ravenclaw so she’d have t’ be smart, maybe this is her way o’ showin’ it.”
Luckily for Lily, she was so well regarded that hardly anyone believed Dione’s allegations. Eventually those in the know started ignoring them altogether and began referring to them as Turpin Tales, a label enthusiastically adopted by their victims.
Martha, as Lily had predicted, was the first target of the year (apparently her luscious golden hair was in fact a wig from Madam Primpernelle’s), once it became clear by the end of the first week of term that she Sirius were an item. Every now and then I would notice her gazing dreamily off into the distance during classes, or sneaking away during breaks to grab a quick snog. They didn’t stop hanging around with their respective friends, though, and from what Martha said when she finally made it into the dorm late at night they never actually got around to doing much talking. They were, however, very much the golden couple, the ones everyone wanted to emulate, which wasn’t at all surprising considering, as Mary had said earlier, they were both gorgeous. It was the gossip of the school for a couple of weeks – until one day it wasn’t.