Severus Snape pulled yet another heavy parchment scroll from the shelf. Having nothing to go on but a name and style of clothing, he'd begun searching the Hogwarts records, starting with those dating back to the fifteenth century. Several hours later, he'd reached the late sixteenth century with no sign yet of the portrait-girl. Of course, Snape could have simply asked the child for the information, but he preferred to find out about her on his own, if at all possible. She already seemed to know far too much about him. The potions master sneezed as he unrolled the latest scroll; mildew darkened much of the text. "Ah, there you are." Snape let out a sigh of satisfaction. Veronica Stuart, Slytherin, 1578-1583. Slytherin, eh ? Well, that didn't exactly come as a shock. Running a finger over the line of script, he memorized the dates. It gave him a chill to think that the child who'd inspired the portrait had been dead for over four hundred years. How did she die ? Snape replaced the scroll and turned his attention to one of the weighty tomes containing decades of Hogwarts minutiae.
Miss Veronica Stuart had been absent from her frame a great deal in the past few days. Snape hadn't approached the portrait since issuing his challenge; he wasn't about to offer the girl any encouragement. But he had been grudgingly pleased to see a new addition to the painting just that morning. A fresh bunch of daisies lay on the table next to the cauldron, plucked from one of the landscapes, no doubt. Later, as Snape left the library and descended the main staircase, he was amused to see the portrait-girl stealthily enter a painting he'd always thought utterly ridiculous. It was a massive canvas depicting a giraffe crossing the African savanna. He slipped behind a pillar and watched unobserved as the girl stalked the beast through the tall grass, hot on the trail of the Abyssinian shrivelfig.
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Veronica surveyed the neat piles of ingredients with relief. It hadn't been difficult at all to acquire the shrivelfig or the daisy roots. The caterpillar had been located on a stem in a botanical print. She'd managed to get the rat spleen as well, borrowing a knife from a still life of fruit and catching the rat in an improbable painting of the animals boarding Noah's ark two-by-two. She shuddered; she'd dreaded killing the rat, and it had been even more difficult for her than she'd imagined. Veronica had never killed anything larger than a spider before. Once the rat had stopped squeaking and thrashing, though, she'd dissected it and removed the spleen without a qualm.
The most difficult ingredient of all to acquire had been the leech juice. There were no leeches to be found in any of the Hogwarts paintings. She'd nearly despaired before the idea had come to her to ask Dilys Derwent. The former Hogwarts headmistress had also been a Healer; she could travel between her frame in the headmistress' office and the one in St. Mungo's. It had been nerve-wracking to approach such an important portrait, surrounded by other venerable former headmasters and mistresses of the school, even Albus Dumbledore himself. But after six days of searching, Veronica had been desperate enough to overcome her shyness. Thankfully Dilys Derwent had been sympathetic. She'd brought the leeches from a painting in St. Mungo's just an hour before. Satisfied that everything was in order, Veronica waited patiently for Professor Snape to enter the lab. She would prove herself worthy. She would pass his test.