Monday morning of the Hogwarts Spring Holiday



“There is something swearing in the garden.”

Katrine Elliot’s dark eyebrows drew a severe straight line below her brow. The look was uncannily like her grandmother when she did that. The eight year old witch was dressed in worn blue jeans, red wellington boots and a fern green sweater embroidered with a winged horse. Her brown hair had started the day in a ponytail she’d tied herself but was already half out of the ribbon at nine o’clock.

“Are you sure?” Her (step) grandfather asked, poorly concealing his amusement at his revelation. He was stood at the kitchen sink in the Hogsmeade cottage, finishing the dregs of a coffee.

“Sure.” Katrine replied, hands on hips, narrowing her brown eyes. “But it’s hidden. I can hear it but I can’t see it.”

The young witch cast a look in the direction of Gerda’s quarters. The family’s free house elf wasn’t home. She had been granted the morning off and knew better than to negotiate if her master suggested she did that. He paid her like clockwork and she’d seen more than enough through the years to confirm that he was more than capable of doing things she and her mistress would not approve of. It was best Gerda didn’t witness.

Katrine sucked air through pursed lips, establishing her other source of information was unavailable. Her grandmother was at work, and had it not been the school holidays her grandfather would have been at work too, as Hogwarts Headmaster. But instead he was home and he had sent Gerda away.

Something was afoot. She’d forgive him for not taking her up to the castle so she could explore, but only if it was really good.

“Lead on.” His coffee cup was in the sink and his icy blue gaze was upon her.

Katrine knew not to delay. Her wellington boots snapped together and she about turned out the back door of the cottage into the garden. This space was her grandmother’s pride and joy. Miranda loved gardening to relax when the sun was up and the weather was amenable. There was an enviable herb and salve garden, vegetable patch and then beyond that a lawn flanked by trees. At the boundary wall there was a gate leading out onto a rough path and dense trees and scrub. Katrine knew that area well. She could run circuits of it and jump the worst tree roots. Splash through the stream and had more recently begun to work out where would be most strategic for a tree house.

“There’s a spot here.” Katrine declared, leading her grandfather to the lawn. Something was swearing again, and when she crouched down and pointed out the grass she could tell something was there. “The grass is flatter here.” She seized a stick she had dropped nearby and poked at the air. There was a clang and the swearing intensified.

“Fine observation.” Her grandfather confirmed. He was dressed in his usual boots, a pair of dark trousers which had worn knees and a smudge of mud on his right shin. He wore a white shirt unbuttoned at the neck and a dark grey pullover. If Katrine had a larger vocabulary she might have suggested he had dressed in monotone like a black and white photograph, what with his white hair.

“What kind of spell might be used?”

Her cousin-of-sorts Feliks had told Katrine that her grandfather was a strict teacher at the school. She liked him challenging her, he wasn’t boring when he challenged her, even if she could get frustrated with him. The whole figuring it out for herself process could get tedious but the feeling when she solved matters was addictive, especially when he showed he was proud of her. It was like something nobody else got to see ever.

Katrine poked the invisible mystery once more with the stick, her tongue poking out the corner of her mouth. She paused, eyes to the sky before plucking an answer from memory.

“Dis.. Disillusionment.”

He didn’t confirm or deny but gestured with his wand in the direction of the absent-yet-not-absent thing. The air rippled and shivered and then suddenly there was a cage on the lawn, and inside the cage was a creature like a ferret. It was behind turning the air blue.

“JARVEY!” Shrieked Katrine in excitement. She fell to her knees in front of the cage, transfixed. Javeys could say all the language she was forbidden to use.

”Let me outta here you tramp!” the brown and cream jarvey exclaimed on seeing Katrine. ”I can smell the dozy gits. Let me attem!” It cannoned into the bars, trying to break out. ”What you looking at with your face like a torn old boot? Isn’t there a grave missing its dead body?”

“And what do you know about Jarveys?” Her grandfather approached the cage.

“They can talk.” Katrine stated without hesitation, eyes like saucers as she stared at it. “But you can’t really talk to them. They just gabble.”

”What are yer lookin’ at yer stray?”

“You! In a cage!” Katrine giggled.

“And what is their diet?” Her grandfather asked. Then clarified. “What do they eat?”

“Uhm…” Katrine paused and pulled the arm of her green sweater over her hands as she thought. A subconscious gesture she wasn’t aware she did when she was unsure of something. “Rats?”

“And?”

His granddaughter looked about the garden for inspiration, her gaze falling upon the little mound of earth that had been pushed up from the lawn. If she had been just a child of the muggle world the answer would have been moles, but as a child of the magical world Katrine Elliot gasped:

“GNOMES!”

She turned her face upwards to her grandfather in delight. Her grandmother only let Katrine fling the gnomes out of the garden after spinning them until they were dizzy. Her grandfather stunned a few and punted them with his wand when he thought her grandmother wasn’t looking. Gerda the house elf preferred to lure them out with a feast of worms laced with something that made them sleep.

“This is what we call a cull, Katrine. Stand back, this will be bloody.”

"You promise?!" With a delighted look on her face, the young witch skipped up and back to stand beside him. The cage sprung open and the jarvey shot across the garden, jumping straight into the mound of earth.

“Gerro—!”

Granddaughter and grandfather wore contented smiles for a rare moment as the gnomes screamed their last.



End