A/N: This was my entry for the 2011/12 edition of HoggyWartyXmas at Livejournal. Kelly Chambliss wanted a subversion of Minerva's Pottermore backstory, but I decided to give her the full truth instead. My deep thanks go to Kelly for giving me the opportunity to write this, to The Real Snape for assigning the prompt to me and for hosting this wonderful fest, and to Pale Moonlite and Featherxquill for their fantastic beta work.
Today you'll get the first two chapters, and then it'll be a chapter a week until the full beginning of the story is told.
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Ombra mai fu
Being the Beginning of the Very True Story of Minerva McGonagall and Elphinstone Urquart
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~ by Tetley ~
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Highgate, London, October 1944
At the age of nineteen, Minerva McGonagall was sure that she was not made for this thing they called love.
And it was fine with her, really, she thought as she put the kettle on and made herself a cheddar sandwich. Dinner was a frugal affair that evening, thanks to an earlier overindulgence at Flourish & Blott's that had overstretched her budget. But it had been worth it.
All of it was.
Minerva dropped two teabags into the mug and sat down by the window of her bedsit. She'd called it her own for some two months now, and she was proud of it. Tiny it might be, and sharing a bathroom and kitchen with three other fellow single women, all Muggles, might not be what she had dreamt of. But it was hers. Her bedsit, paid for by her own money, with her own, oaken secretary desk. The latter had been Aunt Pat's gift on what she'd jokingly called M-Day - the day Minerva McGonagall had turned her back on the prospect of being a farmer's wife and accepted the position of secretary-in-training to the new Deputy Head of the Wizengamot Administration Service.
It wasn't a bad job. Granted, she had secretly hoped that her father might agree to pay her keep for another four years of study at the Institute for Advanced Transfiguration in Salem. The scholarship they had offered her would only have covered the tuition. But four more years of rent and board, to study Transfigurationof all things - well, that had been asking too much of the Reverend Robert McGonagall. Especially with two younger sons still at Hogwarts.
Naturally, Minerva hadn't complained. Money wasn't in abundance at the McGonagall's, and it wastrue that Malcolm and Robert Junior would - hopefully - have to support families eventually and needed the education more. Plus, truth be told, Minerva had found that she didn't really mind standing on her own feet, even if it meant clerical drudgery instead of academic laurels. It felt good to be one's own woman, to have to rely on nobody, and even to be able to save a few Galleons each month. Who knew, one day her vault at Gringott's might even be full enough to allow, if not for a full course at Salem, perhaps for a year or two in Cracow or Nantes.
Mug in hand, Minerva went to the bookshelf to select the evening's reading. The shelf had been a gift from her aunt's elderly friend, and it had come with two boxes full of books from the old lady's own supply - mostly scholarly works, Arithmancy having being Miss Roberts's field in her active days, and a few well-thumbed Muggle novels in inexpensive editions. "Keep your brain well-oiled over all that work," she had admonished Minerva in her stern schoolmarm tone when she'd come to deliver the goods, and Minerva had promised.
It was a promise more than easy to keep. Not just because Minerva had little else to do - although there wasthat, given that most her friends were engaged by now. But most of all, it was the sense of freedom that her books gave her. It had always been this way: when Minerva had her nose in her books, it was as if the walls around her expanded, and the whole world suddenly seemed to fit into her room. Quick-witted heroines in buns and high collars, orphan boys, Celtic witches, and Vijay Kumar with his Principles of the Numerical Determination of Transfiguration Intensity - they were all regular guests in Minerva McGonagall's fourth-floor bedsit in Northern London.
It was curious, the feeling. She'd been afraid that the smallness of the flat and the stifling summer heat under the roof would make her regret that she'd turned down a man who clearly loved her, and instead chosen the lonely and frugal life of a woman about to turn spinster well before her time. But Minerva found that she hadn't felt so light around the chest and so tall in her shoes since her first Transfiguration lesson, seven and three quarter years ago.
It was a matter of walking down her own path, she supposed.
Work at the Ministry was better than expected, too. Certainly, the downside was that it meant no more late-night reading sessions, for Elphinstone Urquart was an early riser and liked his assistant at her place by seven in the morning. But as far as bosses went, Minerva found that she had been lucky. Mr Urquart wasn't irritable like Mafalda's boss, or unforgivinging like that perfectionist, ambitious, oh-so-polyglot, Moustache-in-Chief of the Hit Wizard Squad. In fact, Elphinstone Urquart was a perfect delight to work for, if one disregarded the hours he kept. He could make his own tea, and when he did, never forgot Minerva (nor her preferred number of teabags per mug). He expected her to develop a good understanding of Wizarding Common Law and the Statutes of the Wizengamot, and he gave her the time to study them. And, last but not least for someone with a circulation like hers, he provided the workplace with the least danger of cold feet in the entire Ministry - thanks to Orfeo, the black Labrador, who had judged the rug under Minerva's desk a most adequate place for an office dog to spend his working hours when his master was out on court duty.
Moreover, Minerva's boss had quite an interesting past. She'd discovered it bit by bit over tea and ginger newts, on the many breaks they took to fortify themselves when once again they were working overtime. They could talk for hours; it seemed that Mr Urquart took as much pleasure in her Scottish accent (although she was working on it) as she did in his (faint as it was). He often asked her about childhood in Scotland, about life in the parish house, and about her mother, her brothers, even Aunt Pat, the writer, and Aunt Pat's friend, the teacher. He seemed to want to know all about growing up a bookish child in Dundee, about the workings of an extended family, and about dorm life and lessons at Hogwarts.
The reason, Minerva discovered, was that the Deputy Head had had none of that.
Interestingly enough, it turned out that Elphinstone Urquart was the only child of an old childhood friend of Miss Roberts's. Jane Nott had married well; her husband had been the British Magical Consul of the Gold Coast Colony, and Jane his devoted wife, who hadn't strayed an inch from her husband's side, even when a child was born to them in the hot and feverish climate of Cape Coast.
Thus, Elphinstone had never known the noise and excitement, the fights and the companionship of Hogwarts life. Instead, he'd grown up in a dim, colonial mansion, with fans that fought ineffectual battles against heat and mosquitoes, and with few friends apart from books, lizards, and the local children whom he would seek out as often as he managed to escape his ever-present mother and the governess du jour. He'd had little schooling apart from what the governesses had managed to teach a reticent child in a sweltering heat that didn't allow for long sessions, and the instruction in medicine and potions that his mother had insisted on. And then, of course, there had been his father's library.
How exactly it had come that he'd ended up alone in London at age nineteen, he never said, and Minerva never asked. She also didn't wonder much. After all, it wasn't as if shehad been much of a family person of late. Perhaps - and Minerva found it not all that improbable - Mr Urquart was a homosexual. It would explain why he rarely spoke of personal acquaintances, and why the stories of his youth always ended at age ten and resumed only with his arrival in Britain in 1921. Minerva had read about homosexuals in a book that she'd found in one of the boxes Miss Roberts had given her. They generally seemed to have a bit of a troubled youth and appeared not to like to talk about it except anonymously. They also quite often seemed to have a taste for opera.
And it suited Minerva just fine if it should be so. It spared her the trouble of worrying how friendly she could be without being misunderstood, and whether the invitations for tea breaks were really just that. She enjoyed their talks too much to want to be on her guard all the time.
Yes, those tea breaks. Many were the days when she left the office no earlier than eight in the evening because once again they'd taken a short tea break for a little chat about Scotland - and somehow found themselves soaring off on a tangent that spanned early Celtic law, the Roman invasion, the beauty of Tuscan sculpture, the advantages of Verdi over Puccini (Minerva) or Puccini over Verdi (Urquart), and what the climate of West Africa did to a violin, complete with what Mr Urquart professed to be a truthful imitation of the audible effects. Pomona had begun teasing Minerva that she and her boss had become as good as an old couple, and one day as she went down the corridor to lunch, Minerva had overheard Mr Crouch's and Mr Benson's secretaries discussing the adequacy of keeping an assistant working such long hours. But then again, Minerva had nothing else to do with her time, did she, and since Mr Urquart obviously was a lonely heart, too, perhaps it was all for the better that he'd been assigned the spinsterish maiden instead of a woman with a life so he might have at least someone to talk to apart from his dog.
Minerva had said nothing and simply smiled to herself. Lonely hearts or not, she didn't believe that she could possibly have been assigned a better boss.
The fact that, with slim hands and narrow hips, with unassuming movements, a clear-cut, clean-shaven chin, and a more than extraordinarily shapely behind for a man his age, Elphinstone Urquart also was unusually handsomeas far as bosses went - well, that was something Minerva would only admit to be a pleasant extra benefit.
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