The Plan
Ginny awoke to the sensation of someone sitting on the bed next to her. She could sense Gosse behind her, presumably still asleep, so when she cracked her eyes open she wasn’t surprised to see Undine sitting there. She was fully dressed, her coat sparkling with fine snow. Her eyes were gleaming too.
“When can I see Magon?” she asked.
“More questions?” Ginny asked, and yawned.
“I’ve been out to check,” said Undine. “As soon as it was light. It’s OK. It should work.”
Ginny was awake now. “Your design?” she asked.
Undine nodded, her expression alive.
Ginny bounced out of bed. The clothes on the floor around her were her Elf costume, but she ignored those and found something more headmistress-like.
Professor McGonagall had refused Ginny’s offer of a bed, and had insisted on staying with the rest of her pupils in the Dining Chamber. The room was still a sea of orange sleeping bags when she arrived, but McGonagall was awake and sitting at a table eating breakfast. Ginny couldn’t tell how well she’d slept, but she seemed her normal self.
“Of course,” replied McGonagall, surprised. “But already?”
“We need to show her the location first,” urged Undine in Ginny’s ear.
Ginny and McGonagall followed an unusually twitchy Undine out of the Dining Chamber and then right, across the weir bridge and then along the central school path, back towards the main entrance. The snow had stopped at last, but there was plenty of fresh snow under foot.
The valley narrowed at this point: The Great Cliff on the right loomed forward, bellying outwards, and the shallower slope on the left extended to meet it, hurrying the stream between its banks.
“Here,” said Undine, tautly. She gestured to the bluff on their right. To the right of the bulge – on the upstream, Beauxbatons, side - was a narrow waterfall, dropping unchecked to a pool which overflowed over rocks to join the main stream. To the left, downstream, the cliff dropped back once again, where the valley widened into the rocky plain beyond the main gate.
“What do you think?” Undine asked.
“Where?” asked Ginny, confused. Where in this narrow valley could you build a school? McGonagall was looking equally baffled.
“We use the rock,” said Undine. “The cliff. We build into the rock! It is dry here, very dry. Impermeable. See how the waterfall does not soak the stone!”
Ginny struggled to translate this to McGonagall.
“I don’t understand,” said McGonagall, to Ginny’s relief.
Undine was pulling out a large piece of parchment from her coat. “Here,” she said. “Hold this…” She unfolded it several times, then passed Ginny one edge, took the other side and pulled it tight.
Undine was pointing to the curved bluff. “This curve…” she was saying. “Is this curve!” She was pointing to her sketch, which showed a castle. A half-castle, a semi-circle of stone, crenelated at the top. Attached to one side, the left-hand side, was a broad tower, and beyond it a small one. On the right side, a taller, narrower tower, with an even taller needle next to it. Ginny could see a sketched waterfall beside the needle, and she could begin to understand how the diagram related to the rock in front of them.
At the bottom of the sketched curving wall was an archway, with a grille across it. In front of this was a complex bridge, crossing two parallel streams.
“What’s this?” Ginny asked, pointing to the bridge.
“It’s a castle,” said Undine. “So it must have a moat. See? And a drawbridge, and a portcullis. Yes?”
“A drawbridge? You mean it lifts?” Ginny asked, trying to grasp this.
“Yes, of course!” said Undine. “If you want. Through the arch – the portcullis can stay up if you like – is the entrance, and behind that, running into the cliff, is the Great Hall. Our Great Hall will have glass pillars, though.”
Ginny was trying to listen and translate at the same time.
“Behind the Great Hall,” Undine was saying, breathlessly. “Behind the hall, across the width of the castle, is for the house-elves. Their kingdom is here, yes? Now, on either side of the hall, corridors, and stairs, climbing, up, up, up. And beyond the corridors, classrooms. They have glass pillars, too. Below… Below this floor, the dungeon, for Slipper… Slipper House…”
“Slytherin,” said Ginny, trying to keep up.
“Yes, exactly. With windows into the moat. Like at ‘Ogwarts, yes? On this side, on the left, Griff…”
“Gryffindor.”
“…Griffin House, in this tower. A big, brave, tower, yes? The little tower for the owls, OK? On the other side, a sharper tower, taller, for your Ravens. Beyond that, the taller tower for telescopes.”
“So what’s this?” Ginny asked, pointing to the roof of the castle. It appeared to show an inset oval, surrounded by pillars supporting a roof, which slanted inwards and downwards towards the oval.
“It is like for monks, yes? For your Huffs…”
“Hufflepuff,” said Ginny.
“I tried to think what your Huff Puffs were like, they are calm and friendly, and I thought, perhaps they are like monks, and nuns. So this, yes? A cloister. But they have privacy, do not worry. The towers, for the Ravens and the Griffs, they do not look out on the Huff Puffs. So they are all separate. Am I right? Is this what you need?”
Ginny tried to explain all this to McGonagall, who seemed to take it in more quickly than Ginny. She nodded at Undine. “Ingenious,” she said.
“It is ugly…” began Undine, uncertainly.
McGonagall shook her head. “No. Not at all. And it has character.”
“See the roof,” said Undine, pointing at the roofs of the cloister and the towers. “The tiles are glass. They catch the light, for the pillars. The pillars go down – down down down - the whole way through the building. All the way down. So there is light everywhere. That is pretty, I think, and useful. And the water likewise. It is fed by the waterfall, it pours into the bathrooms, and out. The rest of the water feeds the moat.”
“What are these?” McGonagall asked, pointing, when Ginny had translated what she could. On either side of the entrance were slanting panels coming out of the castle wall, then dropping vertically to the edge of the moat.
“For the plants,” said Undine. “So they have the water and sun they need.”
“Greenhouses,” Ginny said to McGonagall.
It was hard to stop Undine’s tumbling words then. She was full of ideas and explanations. The only area where McGonagall and Undine didn’t see eye to eye was the bathrooms. Undine was envisaging a shelf high in one wall that poured magically warmed water continuously, to form a waterfall shower into a line of cubicles. Ginny had to explain that Hogwarts always used baths. Undine shrugged and with a few quick lines of charcoal replaced the shower wall with a line of sunken baths, each in its own cubicle. Then another change, where she removed the walls between the baths.
“You are strange people,” said Undine, shaking her head ruefully. “You like to see other people have their baths? Boys and girls together?”
“No!” said Ginny hastily. “Separate boys and girls…”
“And the toilets? No walls there either?”
“Keep the walls,” said Ginny.
“But the rest?” urged Undine. “What else don’t you like?”
Ginny worriedly passed that question onto McGonagall. But McGonagall shook her head. “It will do us very well,” she said. “Please thank Undine for us. Extraordinary. But how long will this take? I was thinking of some temporary buildings. Wood, perhaps. Wouldn’t that be much quicker?”
Undine shook her head rapidly when this was translated. “No! Not at all! This design is very quick. And your castle is made of stone, yes? We don’t need to bring anything, you see, except pipes, for the water, and the dirty water. And doors, furniture, things like that. You see, when we take out the rock, to make the rooms in the mountain, we keep the stone. We carve it into blocks for the face of the castle. For some rock – much rock, in fact – we use the same spell that was used to build Beauxbatons, that turns it into glass. Clear, clear glass. Some we make into tiles, some into drums to make the columns that take the light from the roof down to the rooms. It is very quick. But I must have Ginny’s help.”
“My help?” echoed Ginny, puzzled. “I don’t know anything about building.”
“I have this idea,” said Undine. “I hope it will work. We will have to see.”
“It’s amazing, Undine,” said Ginny, when they had left McGonagall surveying the cliff that would become the temporary Hogwarts. “Extraordinary, like McGonagall said. How did Beatrix ever persuade you to make wands instead?”
“Because most architects only do dull things,” said Undine. “Drains. Very dull houses. You have to be old, and lucky, to design interesting houses, ones for a person you know, not a line of them for people you don’t. And mostly even then you are following someone else’s ideas, and that always angers me.”
“Angers you? You’re never angry.”
“Only because I don’t have to work for idiots,” said Undine, with a playful smile. “I think the other magical architects will be angry when they find out I have designed a school on my own. They will be very envious. But I hope by the time they find out it will be too late.”
“But how long is this going to take?” Ginny couldn’t help herself asking. She worried where she was going to put nine hundred pupils, to say nothing of the staff and house-elves, as soon as term started.
“I’m not sure,” admitted Undine. “I have an idea, but ideas don’t count for everything. I need to make the changes that Magon has asked for, and then we will see. See if my ideas work, whether my sums work, whether my building will work. And whether we can build it.”