Irma Pince watched a fifth-year boy race out of the library, headed to whatever class he was about to be late for. He had crammed his textbooks into his bag in a dreadfully cavalier manner, but Irma was not in the mood to reprimand careless teenagers.
She’d been working without a break all morning. The spell she used to make the books shelve themselves was by now routine enough that she could do it in her sleep, but today she’d had to make several repairs on newly returned books. The worst was a book of potion recipes that had been recently spilt on (or vomited on”it was hard to tell the difference); it took a full hour to dry the pages enough to begin the stain-removal process.
Then it took another fifteen minutes to think of and then dole out a punishment severe enough to fit the crime (yet not so severe that the Headmaster would object). She hoped that the third-year culprit would serve his dungeon detention on the week when Professor Snape decided to re-inventory his collection of stomach-turning ingredients. If Mr. Creevey wished to puke on school property, he could do it into a conveniently placed cauldron.
While she’d been distracted, Miss Parkinson had found the time to leave off writing an essay and drag Mr. Malfoy into a dark corner of the stacks to engage in an inappropriate display of affection. Irma hadn’t even derived much pleasure from the Stinging Hex she directed at their backsides as she shooed them away.
Mondays. How she disliked them. She lived for Hogsmeade weekends and holidays, when most students went to disturb the peace outside the castle. It was twice as bad as usual this year, because Dumbledore, in a moment of senility no doubt, had invited students from two other schools to attend Hogwarts for the Triwizard Tournament. Not only was this tempting fate, safety-wise”Irma had read about the previous Triwizard Tournaments, and they almost always ended in fatalities”but it populated the castle with a whole pack of extra students who smoked in the loos (yesterday she’d hexed a Beauxbatons girl’s cigarette through the stall door; it exploded and singed her eyebrows off, to Irma’s vindictive amusement) and felt it was acceptable to skip class so long as they were in the library. Irma constantly had to remind them this was not the case, mainly by causing their book bags to bite them in the backside until they vacated the premises.
She justified this later to McGonagall by explaining that nonverbal reprimands were her only option, as she didn’t know how to speak French.
Now that most students were in class, things had quieted down. Irma ducked into her private office and checked the enchanted mirror that showed her a bird’s-eye view of the library (a necessary measure, as she had no assistant to watch the library when she was busy) and then picked up a tuna salad sandwich from the tray that an obliging house-elf always left for her.
“Pince. PINCE.”
“Keep your voice down! This is a library.” The reprimand was by now an automatic answer to anything said in a raised voice, and she called it out before remembering that her mouth was full. Ashamed at the garbled sound of her usually precise diction, Irma put down the sandwich and huffed angrily through her nose. What was it now?
It was the surly, not-very-hygienic countenance of the castle’s caretaker, Argus Filch, who had allowed his mangy old cat to perch on a stray book. Irma waved her wand, sending the book back to its place, and dumping the cat unceremoniously on its tail.
“Do you want something, Mr. Filch?” she said coolly.
“You need to put a stronger locking charm on the doors to the restricted section,” Argus said. “I caught another herd of first-years in there last night. Thought they could use Dark magic to summon spirits or some other rubbish. If first-years can Alohomora your doors, Pince, then you need to read up on charms in one of these books of yours.” He flicked his hand contemptuously as he said books, an action that did not endear him to Irma.
“Mr. Filch,” she said, the temperature of her voice dropping to ice, “I have already put an extremely advanced charm on the books themselves, as you well know. The students cannot remove books from the shelves unless they have express permission to do so. It is therefore none of my concern whether they can enter the library at night. Keeping students from leaving the dormitory is part of your job, is it not?”
Argus glowered.
Irma couldn’t resist a parting shot. “In any case, you are in no position to lecture me about the strength of my magic. If you’ll excuse me, I’d like to return to my lunch.”
From the growl that issued from Argus’s throat, she knew she’d hit the mark. She experienced a momentary glow of triumph, and then a creeping sense of shame. Argus was sensitive about the fact that he was a Squib. To taunt him about it was unnecessarily cruel.
But it could not be unsaid, and Irma decided to blame it on her foul Monday mood. She bit into her sandwich and flipped to a new page in the novel she was reading. It was long and complicated, the sort of book that most students wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot wand because it had nothing to do with their homework. Despite her best efforts, wizarding literature was still not part of the Hogwarts curriculum.
Irma could hardly bear to put it down. Though to others it might seem tedious, to her it was another life she could escape to”another life that wasn’t hers. When she read it, she wasn’t a fifty-seven-year-old librarian who had never been pretty and had only been kissed by her dearly departed mother. She became beautiful, loved, extroverted, uninhibited. Free.
She reached for another sandwich, not noticing that one of them was now missing from the tray, and there were three long cat hairs in its place.
Argus Filch muttered darkly to himself as he stomped off to mop something. That library lady got under his skin, always looking down her long nose at him and talking like she swallowed a dictionary. If she wasn’t so obsessive about dusting the shelves in the library, saving him the effort of keeping the place clean, he might outright hate her.
“Isn’t that right, my sweet?” He looked down at the cat who followed at his heel.
Mrs. Norris emitted a smug prrrow, wafting the scent of tuna salad to Argus’s nostrils. The caretaker cackled. His cat liked Pince because she was persistently absentminded about leaving food lying around.
The school was fairly quiet today, so Argus sent Mrs. Norris off on patrol duty and went into his office to put his feet up and enjoy a good book. He had abandoned Kwikspell after a year of diligent practicing yielded no results whatsoever, and now instead chose to read up on ancient wizarding torture methods. Argus had always been a bit turned on by chains.
A loud, disembodied meow reached his ears. Through his unusual mental link to the cat, Argus knew that Mrs. Norris was on the third floor and had found Peeves defacing one of the paintings.
Argus marked his place in Moste Heinous and Sadistic Tortures, removed his heavy-duty leather boots from his desk, and, grumbling, stuffed a sheaf of incident report forms into his coat pocket.
The two inhabitants of the pastoral painting, an innocent young maiden and her goat-herding boyfriend, were hiding behind a tree when he arrived on the scene. Their picnic looked undisturbed, but when they peered out at him, Argus saw that the maiden now sported a thick mustache across her upper lip, and one of her front teeth was blacked out.
The goatherd refused to come out altogether, and the maiden informed Argus through hysterical tears that “that nasty creature” had bestowed on him an obscenely large phallus. Argus tried not to laugh. Why either of them were complaining, he had no idea; but it didn’t pay to make enemies with the paintings, as they often helped him identify troublemakers and vandals.
“Which way did he go?” he growled. The maiden pointed.
Mrs. Norris bounded ahead of his stumping boots and found Peeves before he did; the poltergeist was now deeply involved in writing words like “fart,” “gullible,” and “buttcheek” on the wall, just high enough that Filch would not be able to reach them without hauling a stepladder up several flights of stairs.
“Aha!” Argus said, breathing heavily through his nose. “Peeves, I’m warning you, Dumbledore will hear about this.”
Peeves said a long string of swear words, interrupted occasionally by things like “soup” and “a stick of dynamite.”
After the poltergeist swooped away to wreak havoc elsewhere, Argus sat down heavily on the stairs and filled out the incident report form. Then he went to fetch a bottle of Mrs. Skower’s All-Purpose Magical Mess Remover and began the chore of scrubbing the marks off of the painting.
It took some time to coax the goatherd to come out. By the time he finally skulked into the light, the maiden was already sitting in a corner bewailing her raw features and the faint five o’clock shadow that still lingered on her upper lip. She averted her eyes from her boyfriend’s embarrassing state, two blush spots appearing on her painted face. Argus poured more Mess Remover on the stained rag and began scrubbing.
“Dear me, Mr. Filch,” said Charity Burbage, the Muggle Studies teacher, as she passed by. “Don’t rub that thing so hard.”
Argus gritted his teeth and focused on happy thoughts, most of which were about hanging students (or inappropriately witty teachers) by their thumbs.
“And then I said, ‘Don’t rub that thing so hard!’” Charity finished, giggling so much that she could hardly tell her story.
Minerva McGonagall, who had happened to be the only other person in the teachers’ lounge when Burbage walked in laughing like a loon, was working very hard to contain the undignified whoop of laughter threatening to escape. She settled for an amused smile.
“Merlin’s pants, but that man needs to get laid,” Charity said, mostly to herself. “Minerva, you’ve been here as long as he has. Did he ever, like, ever…?”
“I haven’t felt the need to ask,” said Minerva delicately. “Mind you, when he first started work here, I thought he was a little sweet on Irma.”
“The librarian? You’re kidding!”
“Well, he never did anything about it,” Minerva said. “Only I caught him in there a few times, asking her what books he should borrow and letting her bend his ear about how Muggle literature is undervalued in the wizarding world. I’ve never seen anyone else listen to Irma talk about books without falling asleep in the first three minutes.”
Charity laughed.
“He was just a kid, then, and she in her twenties,” Minerva reminisced. “Maybe, after all, he was a little scared of her…”
“Hmm,” said Charity, wheels turning in her head. “It’s never too late, you know.”
“I wonder if he doesn’t still carry a torch for her.” Charity grinned at this; apparently Minerva did have a romantic bone somewhere in her body. “The students certainly think so. If their gossip is to be believed, the two of them are going at it in the Restricted Section every night.”
Charity made a face. “Not with that ratty old coat”and that hair!”
“He could stand to bathe a little more frequently,” Minerva agreed.
Charity’s wheels were turning faster. “Have you read much Shakespeare, Minerva?”
“Long ago,” said McGonagall. “I must say, for a Muggle, his portrayal of the Weird Sisters is one of the best historical accounts we””
“Not the tragedies,” said Charity. “I was thinking of a comedy, actually. Two people so determined not to fall in love, and yet it takes only a tiny amount of prodding from their friends and family…”
“Much Ado About Nothing,” Minerva said. She tilted her head thoughtfully. “You aren’t suggesting that we encourage fraternization between staff members while on school grounds?”
“I’m suggesting exactly that,” Charity said.
She thought for a moment that Minerva would cite some rule forbidding matchmaking, but the Transfiguration professor just smirked.