The Newcomers
And suddenly it was the beginning of term, and the teachers were back, and the pupils were arriving at the upper cable car station, with their baggage. There was no Beauxbatons equivalent of the Hogwarts Express: The pupils either arrived by Muggle train at the halt that served the lower cable car station, or twisted directly to the upper one. But by similar magic to the British version, parents weren’t able to enter the school except in peculiar circumstances.
And there was no Beauxbatons Sorting Hat either. Ginny was disappointed to learn that the seniors of each Beauxbatons family met with the Headmistress and the Head Monitors to discuss in a sober and adult manner which new entrants would best suit each of the twenty families, and vice versa. Ginny had to agree this was a sensible and mature idea, but she missed the razzmatazz of the Hogwarts Sorting ceremony all the same.
The Headmistress had already met with her new team of monitors. When she’d picked them, at the end of last term, they’d seemed a callow and immature lot in comparison with their predecessors, and she’d worried how they’d handle the responsibilities – and privileges – of monitorship. But seeing them now, eight weeks later, she was struck by how they seemed to have grown – physically, in some cases – into their new rôles.
Her choice for Head Monitor, Yolande Gaillard, was particularly reassuring. Ginny had taught Yolande History last year, and found her an astute and rewarding pupil. She was more than a little bookish, but Ginny felt she could work with that.
There had been a more obvious contender for the position: Jehanne Blavier. Jehanne was the more expected choice in many ways. She was a confident extrovert, adored by most of the Beauxbatons boys and many of the girls as well. Jehanne was not only a champion Choc player, but was probably the best broomstick rider in the school. Broomsticks were not as central to Beauxbatons life as at Hogwarts, where they underpinned Quidditch, but Ginny would have betted on Jehanne against a good number of Hogwarts house players, having witnessed her agility flitting between trees on a broom in impromptu races with other Beauxbatons.
But on the other hand Jehanne was not only a heart-stealer, but a boyfriend-stealer as well. As far as Ginny could tell, this wasn’t a result of some warped desire to get between existing couples; Jehanne never seemed to notice such relationships existed. No, the girl’s impulsive egocentrism seemed to lead her unerringly to attach someone else’s property, dazzling the property into the bargain, until she tired of them, and moved on to wreck another heart.
Ginny observed Jehanne closely in her first meeting with the new monitors. The girl was obviously annoyed at not being Head Monitor, but beyond a certain coldness towards Yolande, she didn’t let her feelings show. Probably good for her, Ginny decided. But she would need to keep an eye on Jehanne all the same.
Yolande’s deputy, Abel Carvalho, was Portuguese, a Choc player who commanded respect from his fellow pupils and particularly his teachers. He’d never excelled in Humanities, but Mr Lesassier, the Defence teacher, and Madame Desprez, who taught him Transfiguration, in particular praised his abilities in their subjects.
Lydia and Dominic, two of her former art pupils, were also monitors. Ginny was interested to see how the pair of them would handle not being Head Monitor: Dominic had a maddening sense of superiority, partly based on his good looks, and Lydia’s robust Greek nature could often bring her into arguments with others, but Yolande and Abel both listened to Lydia when she grew voluble and maintained camaraderie with Dominic whenever he pronounced on something. Ginny decided she could put her worries there lower down on her list of concerns.
Chief amongst Ginny’s active concerns was that she still hadn’t managed to find a replacement English teacher. At least she had new Potions and Music teachers: Samia Benamara was from Algeria, and would be taking over Potions, and Stelios Artino, an excitable Greek wizard, would teach music. It would be nice to have some younger elements in the staffroom, as the present atmosphere there could be occasionally stifling.
But she couldn’t convince Madame Allaire, the old Head of Humanities, to take back her Time Shifter and teach English as well as History, which meant Ginny would still need the Time Shifter to cover English, as well as Drama plus her Headmistress duties.
Concetta Agri hadn’t turned up at the beginning of term with the rest of the pupils, which nagged at Ginny when she let it. Ginny’s other recruits were here now: Ethan and Raoul, of course. And Qudra Jatt was here, and had left her earthquakes behind. And Menendo Perez, the diminutive Spanish fire-starter.
But not Concetta. Beatrix Holombec reported that the girl had turned up at the wand shop, and had taken her new wand away with her, so Ginny could console herself with the thought that at least Concetta could perhaps defend herself, even while she worried that there was now a rogue wand-user in Northern Italy, one who might find her powers over chance lessened by the wand drinking from her. Ginny just had to hope that one day a bell would ring in the caretaker’s room, that it would mean that Concetta had escaped and made it to the Beauxbatons railway halt, ready for her new life.
Qudra Jatt was no longer causing earthquakes in Belgium, but she was still having a seismic effect on Ginny’s day-to-day life. Qudra was two years older than the new intake, and smart, so it seemed unfair to put her with much younger children. So she was in the same year as her contemporaries. That was a stretch for her, when she lacked the underpinnings of the first two years, so Ginny decided the only solution was to extend her own Time Shifter hours to give the girl additional coaching in all she’d missed. The other teachers were cooperative in assisting Ginny with lesson plans and homework, as the alternative would be having to teach the girl themselves.
“I don’t know how you have the time,” Qudra would say to Ginny repeatedly. “Doesn’t being Headmistress keep you busy?”
The true answer to that was Yes, but Qudra was such a willing and hard-working pupil Ginny didn’t feel she could abandon the girl. And it was only a single Time Shifter strand, and could only happen when Qudra wasn’t in her normal lessons. So Ginny’s life was definitely less hectic than last year, even with Gosse to keep entertained.
And act as model for the premiere year life drawing classes.
“I’m Headmistress!” she’d said crossly when Gosse first suggested the idea. “I can’t lounge around with no clothes on!”
“You were Acting Headmistress last year,” he pointed. “And you managed.”
“Well, you do it then,” she suggested.
He shook his head, shocked. “It is not appropriate,” he replied. “It’s different for a man. If I wasn’t teaching as well, it would be OK. They would only see me as a model. But it would be too threatening in some eyes, if I was teacher and model as well.”
“Couldn’t you ask somebody else?” she tried.
“Who? Madame Allaire, perhaps?”
“Well, what about Samia?” Ginny asked then.
“She’s teaching,” Gosse reminded her. “Potions. Unless you want to hand over your Time Shifter.”
“Well… Look, fend them off for a bit, yeah? Let me think about it…”
Gosse had an unfair advantage, she decided, because he lived in the same house, and shared the same bed, as his blackmail victim. It was only a week later that she found herself back in the art room, being applauded by the enthusiastic pupils, as Gosse announced they had a life model to draw. And it soon felt entirely normal to be appearing in the class in her dressing gown, slipping it off and sitting so Gosse’s pupils could examine her, and draw, and paint. Gosse was a harder taskmaster than she had ever been, she decided, and displayed a bullying side to his personality that she never otherwise saw. But to Gosse, art was an entirely serious matter, and anything less than total commitment and application wasn’t sufficient. To some of his pupils, this was just a nuisance, but he was decidedly popular with many of them.
Life modelling was also a good time to reflect, she discovered. Constrained to stay still, she couldn’t give way to her normal urge to rush off and do things as soon as she thought of them. Last year, it had been an excellent opportunity for a snooze, but Gosse wouldn’t allow that either. It was frustrating at first, her mind dwelling on everything else she had to do, but she trained herself not to move, and spend the time mentally prioritising all her other tasks, and resolving issues that otherwise stayed at the back of her mind and nagged at her.
Although some issues defied fixing. Ginny had been very pleased with herself over selecting her new teachers. Both Samia and Stelios Artino were still in their twenties, which she felt helped bridge the gap between herself and the rest of the teachers, who were considerably older. True, the funereal calm of the staffroom had been dispelled by their addition, but it did seem that the only thing Stelios and Samia had in common was their age.
“Is that you humming, Mr Artino?” Samia asked at one point. “Or are you in pain?”
Ginny didn’t mind Artino’s humming. She could recognise and enjoy several of the songs that Stelios produced, and when she was teaching she could hear him encouraging the pupils to sing them, but Samia obviously preferred the more deathly silence of the old castle.
“Don’t you like humming?” Stelios shot back. “Would you prefer me to sing, Miss Benamara?”
“No thank you, Mr Artino,” replied Samia, shortly.
“Perhaps I should sing to your house-elves,” Artino suggested.
Samia frowned. “Why?” she asked, suspiciously.
“About mending your clothes,” said Artino. “They seem to be failing in their duties.”
Benamara glared. “These are my work clothes,” she said, freezingly. “I see no point in expecting the house-elves to wash and repair clothes that will soon be burned and stained once more. Potions is a complex and unpredictable art, you should know. I could dress as a tailor’s dummy if I wished, but I see no point.”
It was true that Stelios was invariably almost excessively dapper, and was never to be seen without a coloured bow tie, a smart jacket, trousers with a sharp crease and polished shoes, and it must have pained him to see Samia invariably dressed in a stained and holey boiler suit. Her hair also seemed to suffer from the potions she made, and was somehow shorter on one side than the other.
“We must set a good example. And it would be wiser,” shot back Stelios, “if you changed before you enter the staffroom, so that your potions are kept in the proper place. None of us appreciate sitting down in a chair, not realising you have recently sat there, and finding ourselves half our normal size.”
Benamara was unique in Ginny’s limited experience of Potions teachers, and seemed to spend much of her time in the Potions classroom, brewing up something new, and smelly, and sometimes dangerous.
A smile was tugging at Benamara’s lips. “I apologised…”
“With that grin on your face…!”
“…And reversed the effect immediately!”
“Ah!” cried Stelios. “But did you? I am now at least a centimetre shorter than I used to be, and I’m sure that is entirely your doing!”
“That’s not true…!”
“Perhaps you have been out in the rain too much recently, Mr Artino,” suggested Mr Cotte.
Fortunately Ginny wasn’t life modelling when she had some unexpected visitors. She was wrestling with some paperwork when the caretaker, Benard, stomped into her office.
“Didn’t you hear the bell?” he asked crossly. “Got better things to do, you know.”
A quick glance at the previous headmaster’s wall clock told her that it was eleven in the morning, which was Benard’s usual time to visit the house-elves in their kitchen and sample the forthcoming school lunch, but she didn’t bother mentioning this.
“The visitor bell, you mean?” she asked. “No, I didn’t, sorry…”
Benard sniffed, turned away and left, and there was a familiar face peeping around the door: Hector le Blanc, leading light of The Mage.
“Do you have time for an old friend?” he asked. There was a quirky smile on his lips.
She frowned at him. “Friend? Oh, you mean the friend who dropped me in it with the governors, and used up all my spare time tutoring his latest hobby?”
Le Blanc looked suddenly serious and embarrassed. “Actually, I wasn’t talking about me,” he said. He was gesturing to someone out of her sight, who slowly appeared in the doorway next to Hector. A small figure, with a face she dimly recognised.
“Concetta?” Ginny asked, uncertainly. “Concetta Agri?”
The girl didn’t answer, but merely stared at her and the room. She looked a little windswept, Ginny realised, not to say muddy.
“Do you take fugitives?” Hector asked.
“Fugitives from what?” Ginny asked, cautiously.
“Her father, to begin with. And then her local betting shop, which she tried to close with an interesting spell that turned their windows to cement. And then the Italian police, who would like her to explain how she did that. And finally the Italian Aurors, for violations of the Statute of Secrecy. Fortunately I have an acquaintance there who is always keen for his past sins to be forgotten, and he called me to say that Concetta was hiding in a ditch on the outskirts of Cellarengo, and that perhaps it would be better if I found her, and not her other followers.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Concetta, looking hugely guilty. “I thought I could manage, but…”
Ginny nodded. “I’ve had days like that. Well, welcome to Beauxbatons, Concetta. You probably want to change first, but after that you might as well catch up with your lessons. Let me see now… Oh! English. Madame Auvray. Well, she’ll be expecting you. Thanks, Hector, I’m very grateful for this.”
Hector frowned in surprise. “I was hoping to interview Concetta,” he said. “First impressions of Beauxbatons…”
“Hector, you’re not dead,” said Ginny. “Which leads me to believe you have already exhaustively interviewed Concetta on the way here. And that’s as much as anyone can take. But I do owe you a story, as soon as anything happens here. I promise!”
Ginny dug out a timetable for Concetta, then took her over the bridge to the family house planned for her - the same house, in fact, as Qudra Jatt - stopping on the way to pick up some items from the school clothing store. While Concetta showered, Ginny catnapped on the sofa there, so she was fresh for the final period before lunch – English and Drama.
“You will have some catching up to do,” Ginny warned as they walked over to the new classroom block, and Concetta’s first lesson. “I’ll be tutoring you for that. You’ll be sharing sessions with another new girl, called Qudra. She’s just arrived, like you, although she’s the year below you. Still, there’s plenty of common ground to cover for the pair of you.”
She delayed a few minutes after the start of the lesson to ensure Madame Auvray was ready for Concetta, then knocked on the door.
“Ah!” said Madame Auvray, when she caught sight of them. “Everybody, this is Concetta Agri, who has just arrived from Italy, and will be joining us. Concetta, here’s your desk… And your books, and a quill. We’re just starting a conversation about our experiences travelling to another country, so please join in when you feel like it. Thank you Madame Weasley!”
Concetta was giving Ginny a deeply suspicious look. Ginny gave her a bright smile and left. She had forty spare minutes now before she had to become Madame Auvray and be ready to greet Concetta as her new English teacher.