Jehane Desrosiers

Note: The French pronunciation of the name Guy is Gee, with a hard G. Sounds better that way, n’est pas?

I did not have any romances at Beauxbatons. I was a late bloomer, then I was a grieving girl, and then I was just as happy to be in the stable with the hippogriffs and leave the frightening world of boys to Thalia.

And then, there were my looks, which were nothing like my pretty mother’s. She was small and fine, with shiny dark hair and red lips. By the age of fifteen, I was six feet tall. I have the kind of fair skin that looks especially reddish around the nose and eyes, that blushes and breaks out and shows the mark of everything that touches it. I have my father’s large pointy nose and big hands, and his pale greenish eyes and invisible lashes. To myself, I looked like an albino rabbit.

If I have a best feature, it might be my hair on a good day, which is to say once or twice a month. On a good day, it curls in strawberry blond waves and ringlets. On bad days, it forms a pinkish cloud that can only be tamed by the strongest binding spells and extra-thick elastics.

I despaired of my small breasts, overlooking my broad shoulders and long muscular legs as insufficient compensation. A boy in my Magical History class told me I looked like a giant and I never got over it.

Rather than go down in defeat, I took myself out of the competition. I was shy anyway, and busy, and not in need of a crowd of admirers, as Thalia was. I enjoyed her romantic life vicariously, but I didn’t look at boys, and if they looked at me, I never noticed. I read a lot.

Now I know that there is so much more to loving a face and body than how well it approximates the ideal. But I hadn’t learned it then.

Once graduated, I had one or two boyfriends, nothing that lasted and no one special. I preferred not to consider why this state of affairs — or no-affairs — never came under examination. I suppose the truth was that I felt myself deficient in some way. Thalia had had the gift of flirtation and attraction, but it was as mysterious to me as one of those magical talents some are born with, like divination — or for that matter, non-magical talents, like rolling one’s tongue. Once out of school, my job as a Healer-apprentice at an animal hospital put me in the middle of a jolly group of people, and of course the animals were a source of constant pleasure and friendship. I set owls’ and augurey’s wings, dealt with bilious cats, injured dogs and infertile screwts. It was a good life. And of course, I had Protecteur and Serrebrune to keep me busy all weekend.

Healer Lefkowitz called me into an examining room; he was a yeller, and his voice carried all over the facility. "Hey, Jehane! Is Jehane out there? Jehane, I’ve got something to show you here!" I put down my charts and followed his voice. In the examining room was a hippogriff about six weeks old. She was the size of a Labrador, a beautiful golden tan all over, and shivering with nerves. I crouched to look at her, while Healer Lefkowitz spoke to the owner.

"Jehane here keeps two griffs herself. You won’t find anyone who knows more about them."

"Hey, little girl," I said. "Where’s your mama? You are some beauty." I stroked her neck and noted that she stretched up to receive my hand. Good, she wasn’t traumatized, and someone was taking good care of her, if her glossy coat and clear eyes were any indication.

"Her mother got tangled in some power lines," said the owner. "She died, and I found the nest. Took me three days."

"Come on," I said. "There’s no place around here wild enough to hide a hippogriff nest."

"Nah, of course not. I’m a ranger at Astolfo National Forest. When I found the mother’s body on the road, I suspected there was a baby. I’ve had her for two weeks and I was coming here to visit my folks, so I thought I’d get her checked out."

I stood up. "Do you know anything about raising them? You can’t keep her like a pet, you know, or she’ll be spoiled." I turned around and stopped. This creature was as beautiful as the hippogriff. He had a thatch of multicolored blond hair, bright on top and dark beneath, with streaks of all shades running through, and a straight, handsome slightly sunburned nose. He gave me a perfect white smile that crinkled up his eyes. Muscular and compact, as far as I could see under his outdoor robes, and a bit shorter than me. The hand he gave me was surprisingly soft and warm.

"I’m Guy Lavigne. I’m really glad to meet you, Jehane." It was a measure of his genuine friendliness that I grinned back goofily instead of manifesting my usual shy and formal first-meeting self.

"Yeah." I just stood there. He held my hand a little longer than necessary.

"Look, I checked her over and she’s fine," Lefkowitz said. "Beyond that, I’m really no expert. You should ask Jehane about training her. Tell him what books he needs, Jehane." And he left the room.

"Um, well, the classic is Le Soin de Hippogriffes," I said. "It’s in print, but you’ll have to order it. Not much call for it, of course." His eyes were green, and he was looking at me intently, yet again, in the friendliest way. I wondered vaguely if he did this to everybody.

"Lefkowitz said you keep hippogriffs," he said. "Did you train them yourself?"

"Uh, yes, I guess I did. But I didn’t exactly train them. I have sort of my own method." I could hear myself and thought I sounded mentally defective. Argh.

"I’d love to hear about it," he said. "If you have a few minutes." He looked down, a little shy himself. "You’re probably pretty busy in this practice."

"Uh, well. Not really." It was that shyness that made me want to encourage him.

"Well, have you had lunch? Can I buy you a sandwich?"

Was he asking me out? My heart pounded uncomfortably. "Sure," I said. "We can put your griff in the kennel."

"Oh, great," he said. "Excellent. I have a lot of questions. Thanks so much."

That is how we started. Two days later he came over to my place in the country, to watch me work with the hippogriffs. I gave him some tips on his little one. He named her Filleambre.

The second time was meant to be a morning’s training session. It turned into twelve hours of walking, talking, cooking and silent companionship. Before he left, he put his arms around me.

"I really like you a lot," he said. "Can you tell?"

"Yes, I guess I can," I said.

"Okay then," he said, as if something had been settled, and he kissed me.

After that he was at my place on all his days off, and I was as happy as I had ever been. I couldn’t believe that this glorious sunny boy was mine, that he so passionately liked and admired me, and that we could have so much fun. He was a natural rider; he took Serrebrune out when we flew and I took Protecteur, whose quirks and needs I understood better. He stabled Filleambre with me; she was the first griff I worked with from a fledgling and I saw that the bonds of trust and communication I had formed with the older hippogriffs could be established even sooner with a young one. Filleambre, for her part, seemed to regard us as parents and showed an even partiality for each, although I felt she flirted more with Guy.

I had never met anyone like Guy, so uncomplicated and smart at the same time. In everything he did he was present and wholehearted. He said what he meant and no more. He didn’t speculate, second-guess or worry. For someone like me, for whom thinking, imagining, fretting and planning were a whole second life, he was a revelation.

His simplicity brought me up short. One summer day we spent hiking and flying around the park where he worked. We sat and rested at the top of a mountain, watching the griffs circling below us. Guy played with my ponytail and stroked my neck.

"Do you think we should get married?" he asked.

"Just like that?" I responded as if he had spoken impulsively, yet I knew well enough it was his way simply to speak when a thought was ready.

"Not just like that," he said. "I’d like to. I love you, you know." He looked at me sideways, teasingly.

"Aren’t you supposed to cast a glamour on us and offer me a binding charm?" The old romantic cliché.

"I will if you want."

"No. But we’re only twenty-four."

He took my hand and kissed my palm. "I know what I want."

"Is it that simple?" I asked. His work on my hand was growing more sensual and distracting.

"It is for me. Not for you. I hope you’ll think about it and answer me later."

"Okay."

When I took my hand back, there was a wooden ring on my finger, carved in the shape of a hippogriff’s head.

"Oh–" I laughed. "I don’t know that spell. Is it charmed?" He grinned. He already knew my answer.

"Just a few protective charms. And a love charm. I hope I’ll get to give you a better one later."

+++++

We were married in the field outside my house, with Thalia and Sandrine as bridesmaids. Guy’s father and brother stood up with him. He looked terribly handsome in dark blue velvet dress robes that set off the blond of his hair. Guy had wanted us to enter on Protecteur and Filleambre, but I felt it was too showy, and I didn’t want to rumple my traditional fancy black robes. They had black crocheted lace at the collar and cuffs, and a silver clasp that had been my mother’s.

All three hippogriffs stood with us, however, bedecked with flowers, and they behaved very well, although Filleambre scratched for worms during the vows.

"Do you want your father to give you away?" Guy had asked me during the planning phase.

"He already threw me away," I answered, affecting a light tone over my bitterness. The truth was, I had grown more and more distant from my father in my adulthood. He hardly knew Guy, and had hardly tried to. He was a guest at our wedding, but only a guest. Yet later that night when I opened his gift to us and read the card, I wept.

"I wish your mother could see you grown into womanhood," it said. "You are everything she dreamed you would be." It was many more years before I could understand how he had been destroyed by her death and forgive him for protecting himself from loving me in its wake.

The gift was a beautiful inlaid box imbued with protective charms. The wood was from our vineyard. My mother must have made it when I was small; he had saved it all these years, and inside were her tools.

+++++

I had Guy for ten years. In that decade we refined the best ways of training hippogriffs without dominating them. I liked to do the work and think it out, but Guy wanted to publicize it. We both loved hippogriffs and wanted them to have the best possible lives by disseminating our methods.

In our fifth year together Guy’s parents and my father lent us money and we opened a stable in a posh wizarding community outside Paris, offering lessons. I wrote some articles for scholarly journals. We called our method the Unroped technique because the name was catchy and emphasized the use of trust and bonding rather than physical restraint. Breeders had long understood the use of imprinting — being the first object seen by the hatchling — and we enlarged on it further by sleeping with the fledglings and mimicking the teaching methods of wild mother and father hippogriffs.

Our methods were unusual enough to garner some press. A picture in Le monde de la magie showed me feeding a newborn griff raw chopped meat from my mouth. Another short article in the British magazine Witch Weekly was devoted mainly to photos of my good-looking husband and our good-looking hippogriffs.

Guy thought we ought to write a popular book. I wrote it — he cooked all the meals on my writing days and brought me endless cups of coffee and bars of chocolate --and we edited together. To our surprise and that of the publisher, Les chucotements des hippogriffes became a bestseller.

I had never wanted to be a semi-famous person. It embarrassed me and I was eager to see the fuss die down. I did not like people showing up at the stables to look at me and get their book signed.

It was his idea to start a foundation. Guy loved to get people together and was a natural leader. It was a little group, composed of friends and avid riders from our stables, dedicated to rehabilitating abused and ill hippogriffs and disseminating more humane methods of training griffs in general. Guy’s dad, although a Muggle, agreed to be on the Board of Directors -- a fancy name for the bunch of folks who had sat around the kitchen table planning the thing.

Le sauvetage du hippogriffe launched to favorable notice and immediately began to garner support and contributions. Guy and his dad enjoyed it hugely, planning fundraisers like hippogriff shows and invisible tours of Muggle Paris and parties at the stables, dictated by their expansive natures and boundless energy. I did my best to duck the public aspects of the work, but Guy thrived on it. He was that most unusual public figure who neither seeks nor shuns publicity but uses it as a tool in the service of his clear purpose. The foundation was intentionally small, with modest goals, so it would not overwhelm our direct work with the griffs. As Guy did more foundation work, I took on more of the day-to-day management of the stables. We had a well-balanced life. We were so happy we never thought of happiness. We were passionate and well-suited to our work and knew the pleasure of being a team.

In the eleventh year of our marriage, Guy was killed by a hippogriff.