Chapter 35
Her mum didn’t seem impressed with the office, or the many interesting paraphernalia, or the dozens of portraits behind the headmaster pretending to be asleep. She wasn’t smiling, and more importantly, she was looking directly at the headmaster.
Taylor wanted to pull at her mum’s robes, do something so she wouldn’t stare at Dumbledore, but her mum gently squeezed her hand. Taylor, on the other hand, kept her eyes on him. She had nothing against the headmaster personally, but if he dared to peek inside her head, it wasn’t really her fault if he got hurt.
“Good morning, Mrs. and Miss Hebert. Please, have a seat.”
There were two chairs in front of the headmaster’s desk. Taylor took one, her mum the other.
“Would you like a lemon drop?”
“No, thank you,” her mum said.
“Can I take one for Luna?” Taylor asked. “I think she would like them.”
“Of course,” he said, offering the candy bowl.
Taylor grabbed a handful and put them in her pockets.
“First, I’d like to apologise,” the bearded one said.
Like the previous night, Taylor’s mum didn’t seem intimidated by the most powerful wizards of Britain.
“For ignoring my letters? Or for allowing that man to bully my daughter a whole term? Or are you apologising for interrogating Taylor when you should have been talking to me instead?”
“All of that,” Dumbledore said with his grandfatherly smile. “Things shouldn’t have reached this point.”
“Right,” Annette said.
“But rest assured, such actions won’t happen again.”
Taylor wanted to point out that they wouldn’t happen because Snape was in the hospital, hopefully not waking anytime soon, but common sense prevailed.
“We conducted an investigation about the accident in Severus lab,” the headmaster said. “We know young Taylor wasn’t involved, but there is still one question that needs answering.”
“Ask,” her mum said.
The headmaster turned to Taylor. “Do you know why Severus was so certain you were involved?”
Taylor sniffed. “Why was he yapping about the boomslang skin?”
Dumbledore watched Taylor from behind his half-moon glasses. “He found out that his potion exploded because an additional ingredient had been added.”
She scrunched her nose. It really had been a horrible idea.
“He asked me about it on the first day,” Taylor said, crossing her arms. “He was mad because I had taken Nap with me to his class. I forgot she was on my head.”
“Nap was it?” Dumbledore asked. “I’ve been told she’s a delightful owl.”
“She is,” Taylor said. “Fat too,” she added a beat later.
Dumbledore chuckled.
“Professor Snape asked what would happen if you added boomslang skin to a potion. I’d read the books before school started, and I tried to tell him it would explode, but he didn’t let me say anything, and then took points away because,” Taylor crossed her eyes and stuck her tongue out, dropping her voice into sneering imitation, “I couldn’t be arsed to read the book before coming to school.”
“Language!” her mum said from her side.
“Sorry, mum.”
“Ah. That clears that mystery.” Dumbledore sounded sad. He grabbed one of the candies. “Are you sure you don’t want one?”
Taylor shook her head.
He removed the wrapping and popped the candy into his mouth. He turned to her mum.
“I won’t take more of your time,” he said. “Minerva will take you back in the afternoon. Meanwhile, feel free to explore the castle. It is not often a Muggle has the opportunity.”
He gave them another of his grandfatherly smiles.
By her side, her mum looked ready to strangle Dumbledore. “That’s it?”
“Hm?”
“What are you doing about Snape? He attacked my daughter. What about the ghost professor? Or the one who keeps asking them to write poems?”
Dumbledore’s smile didn’t slip. “There will be a Board of Governors meeting. We’ll discuss your concerns there.”
Annette stared at Dumbledore for a moment longer. Then she got up. Her smile was the fake one she used when people kept trying to sell her things. “Come, Little Owl. You wanted to show me the castle, right?”
Taylor followed her mother out of the office, casting one last glance at the dying bird. It still glared balefully at her, gagging on any bug it could snatch. It looked even more pitiful today. Poor thing.
Once they were far enough away, and there was no one nearby, she asked the question in her mind.
“Mum, you were looking into his eyes. What if he read your mind?”
Annette stopped and turned toward Taylor. She crouched down, one hand smoothing Taylor’s hair.
“If I tried to avoid eye contact, he would probably get suspicious,” her mum said. “Yes, he might have read my mind, but If I acted like I was trying to avoid exactly that, he probably would have done it sooner or later.”
That… made a lot of sense.
“Sorry,” Taylor said, looking down.
“No, you did nothing wrong, sweetie.”
Since Taylor was already skipping classes, she was going to try her best to show her mum everything she could. First, it was the astronomy tower. Even in winter, the view of the surrounding area was fantastic.
They hadn’t even got to the top of the stairs and her mum was already huffing and puffing, with a hand at her sides.
“Why are there so many stairs?”
“A hundred and forty-two,” Taylor said, nodding. She was a bit out of breath, but nowhere as bad as her mum.
“God have mercy.”
Taylor helped her mum climb by pulling on her hand the rest of the way.
Up on the tower the cold wind made her shiver, despite the layers of clothing. Her mum wasn’t much better, hiding her hands under the fold of her robes.
“I… need… to… sit down,” her mum puffed out, then did just that.
Still, it was worth it, seeing the amazed look on her mum’s face.
Taylor debated if she was too old for what she wanted to do, then stopped caring about it altogether. There was none here to see her. She plopped on her mum’s lap, with her back pressing against her mum’s front.
Annette pulled the robes around, covering Taylor from the cold winds.
With her hands hidden under the fabric, Taylor pointed north. “That’s the Forbidden Forest.”
It didn’t look so forbidden right now, with the tops of trees coated in fluffy white snow.
“Can you see the hut?”
“I can,” her mum said.
“Hagrid lives there. I think he’s a giant. He’s so tall. Even his pumpkins are big! He made this Jack-o-Lantern for Halloween that was big enough for me to crawl inside.”
“Really?”
“But there were no surprise gifts inside them,” Taylor sniffed.
Her mum chuckled.
Next she pointed north east. “That’s Hogsmeade. I haven’t gone there yet.”
“Are there scheduled visits?”
Taylor nodded. “Third years and above get Hogsmeade weekends. The train station is around there,” she said pointing across the lake, more east than north. “But you can’t see it from here.”
“Ah, that’s a shame.”
Cloth hidden hands pivoted to the opposite side. “That big oval thing there is the Quidditch pitch. It’s a shame you can’t visit to watch the matches, mum.”
“You said there are teams competing in some tournament outside school, right? Maybe we can go watch a match?”
Taylor craned her neck until she could see her mum from the corner of her eye. “Really?”
“Really.”
“Thank you, mum!” She tried to turn around to hug her mum, but Annette held her in place, by hugging her first.
“Sweetie, in all the confusion I never asked. How did you get the gifts?”
Taylor shrugged. “I made them.”
“You did? How?”
“Do you want to see my spiders?”
Her mum was quiet for a moment, then nodded.
Taylor decided it was a good time to introduce most of her friends. She had Dee and Dum grab some of her prettiest bugs as well a few of the rainbow spiders. Bity trailed behind the duo, looking nasty as always.
“Mum, this is Dee,” she said when the pixie showed up, carrying an armful of bugs. “That other one is Dum.”
Her mum chuckled.
“And the grumpy one at the back is Bity.”
“That’s a lot of teeth for such a small… what are they called?”
“Doxy. And he’s very nasty. If I didn’t stop him, he’d have bitten all of my other pixies.”
“The name fits, I suppose.”
“And these are some of my best bugs!” Taylor took her hand from under the fabrics, opening it and waiting until Dee unloaded the spiders. “These are the rainbow spiders. They are the ones I used to weave the silk. Aren’t they pretty?”
After the rainbow spiders, she showed the other types of spiders she’d been collecting in her nest. They weren’t as pretty as the jewelled themed ones, but still cute, in Taylor’s opinion.
Between showing one bug and another, several other bugs suddenly popped into Taylor’s awareness.
“The secret room!” she said, getting up from her mum’s lap. Given how things went last time, she didn’t have much time until the room disappeared again.
“What?”
“Come, mum. We have to get there before the room disappears again!”
Taylor had her pixies carry the bugs back to her nest, while she ran down stairs and across corridors pulling her mum’s hand.
“Taylor, wait. Don’t run.”
Taylor was too focused on the secret room to pay attention to that. To make sure she wouldn’t lose sight of the room this time, she had one of the bugs which were inside the room leave through the still open door.
It popped up somewhere on the seventh floor corridor, opposite to the tapestry depicting Barnabas the Barmy and his band of ballet dancing trolls.
They weren’t halfway there when the room disappeared again, but this time, she learned something new. It had been one of the house elves that used the secret room. Taylor hadn’t caught which one, exactly, since leaving bugs near them was asking for the bugs to disappear, but she was certain it was a house elf.
With the room gone, Taylor lowered her pace. They arrived at the seventh floor corridor with her mum breathing even harder. The wall that was supposed to have a door showed none.
Taylor stopped in front of it. She knocked.
“What are you doing, sweetie?”
“There’s a secret room on the other side. Open Sesame!”
The wall didn’t budge. Her mum giggled.
Taylor pulled out her wand. “Alohomora!” she cried out next, to no avail. “Mum, help me.”
Annette walked closer, touching the wall here and there. “Open up, pretty please?” she asked, still giggling. The wall didn’t budge.
Taylor stared at the wall for a moment longer, before pivoting. “Let’s go get lunch,” she said. “There are students coming.”
At the lunch table, Taylor unloaded the candies on Luna, who happily took them, popping one into her mouth.
Hogwarts meals were more like feasts than meals, and Taylor wasn’t shy about abusing that.
“Try this, mum,” she said, dumping a bunch of different dishes on her mum’s plate. They’re the ones she enjoyed the most in the past semester.
“Slow down, sweetie, I can’t eat that much.”
Taylor slowed down, eyeing her mum’s plate. There wasn’t space for much more food. She placed one last piece for good measure.
When lunch was over, Luna left them for her transmigration class. Taylor felt bad about skipping, but it was just for one day.
For the rest of the afternoon she led her mum everywhere. From the Trophy room to the dungeons, to the Ravenclaw’s tower, but as much as she wanted her mum to see even more of the castle, time ran out and McGonagall found them resting near a moving suit of armor that Taylor was trying to goad into a duel.
The professor looked more stern than usual.
“Good afternoon, Mrs Hebert, Miss Hebert.”
“Hullo, professor,” Taylor said, looking down.
“Hello.”
The head of Gryffindor was all business. “Are you ready? There’s a fair distance to walk before we can Apparate.”
Annette nodded, then hugged Taylor. “I had a lot of fun, Sweetie. Thank you for showing me around.”
Taylor sniffled. She wasn’t going to cry in front of the professor. “Let’s go,” she said.
Her mum hugged her closer. “Only up to the castle’s entrance, sweetie. I don’t want you wandering the grounds alone at night.”
Taylor nodded.