Ch. 13 — A Very Optimistic Rune
Marietta must have returned home and she hadn't heard her. Hearing her laughing, the girl left her room and watched her cautiously from the doorway. "Mum?" she gingerly asked.
Josephine laughed and laughed, and then she started to sob. "I . . . I didn't go to work?" she said, "I didn't, did I?" She stared bleakly at the lump in the cloth on the table. "No, no I didn't." She looked up at her daughter and cleared her throat. "I didn't go to work, today, dear. I was . . . instead I stopped by Gringotts. I wanted to . . . to set this whole ridiculous nonsense straight, you see. Then I'd go to work and we'd have a proper talk after I got home. Oh, yes, we would! Only . . . I didn't go to work, not at all. I didn't even . . . I just . . . came back home."
"Um," Marietta said as a bemused response, her eyes a little wide. She slowly entered the room and sat next to her. "Mum," she said carefully, "What did you do?"
"I . . . I had that thing," Josephine pointed at the lumped table cloth . . . and oh . . . she'd hidden it under a table-cloth as if that actually would do anything! She rolled her eyes. "I took it to the Goblins. They verified it, just like you said they would," she said ruefully. She looked back at her daughter. "One thousand two hundred and eighty galleons, Marietta. One thousand two hundred and eighty galleons! Which is less than what they would have paid last week had not forty . . . forty . . . other bars been brought in before mine!"
"Ah." Marietta said, and looked at the lump on the coffee-table. She shifted awkwardly.
Josephine stared intently at her. "Who gave it to you, Marietta?" she asked accusatorially. She narrowed her eyes in suspicion. "What do they want from you? What did you promise them?!" Her voice rose at the end.
"I didn't . . .," Marietta said defensively. She fiddled with her hands, as if unsure what to do with them, and bit her lower lip. "No one asked . . .,"
Josephine knew that look. It was Marietta at her most serious and most conflicted. She only got that look when she knew, or rather, thought she knew, that she was in the right, but also knew her mother wouldn't believe a word of it. She was looking for the best way to put in the most positive light possible.
That was rarely good.
"Just tell me," Josephine demanded angrily, and grabbed her hand. "What do they want from you? What do they want you to do? Do they want you to convince me to spy on the Ministry? Do they . . .."
"No, no, no, of course not!" Marietta interrupted quickly and defensively, offended by the very thought of what her mother suggested. "I mean . . . I actually asked the Captain about it, back after Easter hols," she explained rapidly. "I told him about your job at the Ministry, and he offered, or sort of implied, but it's actually happening now, but . . .."
"Offered what?" Josephine asked suspiciously, desperate and wide eyed. "Captain who?"
"My Captain . . . our Captain . . . just . . .. Okay, just . . . listen to me for a moment, okay?" Marietta grabbed Josephine's hand in both of hers, serious and firm. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She opened them. "You know what the Ministry did at Hogwarts, right?" she said calmly. "About that woman, Umbridge, the High Inquisitor?"
"Yes. She's Minister Fudge's Senior Undersecretary," Josephine said, and tightened her hands on Marietta's. She read the articles, about what that woman had done to that poor girl. "Did she do . . . anything to . . .?"
"No, no, no, not to me." She shook her head. "That's not it at all. Just . . . hear me out, okay?" Marietta said and took another breath. "That woman, and the Ministry, they . . . they pretty much castrated the Defence Against the Dark Arts lessons." She started to get angry. "It was all theory, just theory, and not even good theory! It was just the Ministry patting us on the head, telling us that there was no such thing as Dark Arts in the first place. That if . . . we should just expect the Ministry to save us if anything went wrong. As if you'll have time to wait for aurors if you're attacked by a werewolf or Death Eaters," she said disparagingly, and rolled her eyes. "If we had followed her lessons, all of us would have failed our D.A.D.A. O.W.L.s."
Josephine frowned a bit, and said, "Okay." She'd heard some about that — Marietta had complained at length about it in her letters home from Hogwarts. She had worried about that, but what could she have done about it? However, she wasn't sure what it had to do with this. She glanced at the table-cloth hidden gold bar.
"So, we started our after-school club," Marietta said, a bit more calmly. "The . . . uh . . . Defence Association. We just wanted to learn Defence Against the Dark Arts, honest, just learn how to defend ourselves in case something happened . . .," she shrugged, "and with what's going on . . . well." She looked at her mother steadily. "We thought we could use it. Besides, no one wanted to fail our O.W.L.s or N.E.W.T.s. And that was going to happen with that woman. She wasn't teaching us anything. We just read and copied out of this horrendous, useless, book. So, we were going to learn on our own."
Josephine frowned. She hadn't even thought about that, though, with things being as they were in the Ministry. It hadn't seemed important. "That doesn't sound safe, sweetheart," she said quietly. "Defence is taught by a trained Professor for a reason."
"Trained Professor, sure," Marietta muttered, and glanced down a moment. "Then why did we have Umbridge as a Professor, she barely passed her O.W.L.s and never took the N.E.W.T.s for Defense." She shook her head. "We got a better trained teacher than Umbridge anyway. We got Harry Potter." She smiled at that.
Josephine's hands clenched tightly on her daughter's. "Marietta," she said in a hushed voice, and looked around, as if fearing they would be overheard. "The things the papers are saying about him . . .!"
"The Daily Prophet tells nothing but lies," Marietta said firmly and dismissively. "I've never had a better Defence teacher, Mum. I swear, he's good, he's soo much better than what the Daily Prophet prints. And besides . . . he cares." She really emphasized that last word. "He just wants us to be safe. And that's what he taught us. How to stay safe, I mean. Shields and stuff. I can do the patronus now, Mum! A fully corporeal patronus! Because he taught me . . . and the Captain learned it at thirteen! Thirteen!"
Before Josephine could even try to think of something to say to that, Marietta shook her head and said, "That's not it though. We . . . the club, we . . . we discovered something. I can't just tell you what, though, not yet, but . . . it's . . . huge. Bigger than all this stuff with the Ministry, bigger than You-Know-Who. Bigger than anything." Josephine watched as her daughter practically glowed at her last statement.
Marietta pulled off the table-cloth, grabbed the gold bar, and held it up. "This is just the tip of the iceberg," she said as she waved the bar before her mother's eyes. "I've got six more of these, all of them exactly the same, all of them real."
Josephine felt her jaw drop.
"Everyone in the crew got them," Marietta continued. "And they don't even really mean anything, anymore, we can get more of them any time we want."
Josephine stared at the gold bar, stunned at what she had heard. Her daughter had six more? That was . . . that was a fortune. George could finally leave that menial job in the muggle world he had had to take when no one in the wizarding world would hire him at anything but poverty-level wages. Or she didn't need to worry about losing her job at the Ministry! "But . . . how?" she asked, bewildered. "Why? No one just . . . gives away gold. Harry Potter gave these to you for a reason, what was it?"
Her daughter pursed her lips. "Partly, I think, because he has no idea what money really is. The Captain had a . . . hard . . . childhood. I don't think he really understands money. Or has any concept of what it can do. So, when several of the crew asked for gold, he just . . . gave it to them, gave it to everyone, actually. Hermione told me he decided on five bars this time, because it felt like a good number."
She stared at Marietta in disbelief. "This time? He's given you gold bars before?"
Her daughter looked a bit sheepish. "Well, yeah. Back at Christmas hols, he gave everyone two bars." She squirmed slightly in place, "I put them at the back of my underwear drawer."
Josephine leaned back against the couch. "Since Christmas?" she said weakly. Her little girl had had a fortune stuffed in with her pants? Well, that would be one place a burglar would never look!
The girl shrugged "I didn't know what else to do with them. And it was all so . . . new, too."
"And this time he gave you five . . . because it sounded like a good number?" Her voice had a slightly hysterical note to it that even she could detect.
Marietta looked thoughtful, for a moment. "And because he thought we could use them," she said, and shrugged again. "That was most of it, really, I think. His last words to us before end of term were, 'Be safe!' I guess he hoped we'd use them to bolster defences at our homes. Buy some protective spells for the apartment and stuff, you know. He just had no idea what something like that would cost, so he guessed.
"Some in the crew, they planned to cash theirs in and buy safe houses for their families, some of them even out of country, on the continent."
Josephine blindly stared at her, and tried to process what her daughter had said. But her mind stalled at the point that Harry Potter had given her daughter seven bars of gold worth thousands of galleons — no, no, not merely a few thousand, but over eight thousand galleons worth of gold — just . . . because?
No, she couldn't believe that. That was over two years' worth of her salary at the Ministry! There had to be a reason, an agenda, something he wanted from her — there had to be. Nobody just gave away that many galleons and didn't expect something in return.
Just thinking about the gold and the galleons it represented made her head spin. But the mention of protective spells for their apartment, and safe houses? That was tempting . . . embarrassingly so. It was enough money that she and George could just quit their jobs, couldn't they? They could buy a house and land with enough room for a garden, maybe, in some quiet muggle village. One that was out of any wizard's notice, and live peacefully, in hiding. They could hide away and no one would ever bother them again!
Except . . ..
"This crew you mentioned," Josephine said slowly. "They want you to stay with them, don't they?" She narrowed her eyes at her daughter, and focused again, on the main problem. "You can't just take this and vanish, can you? You have to go back."
"Well, no, not really," Marietta said just as slowly. "I mean, I will. Go back, that is. Because I want to. But I don't have to, if I don't want." She frowned as she thought a moment. "I think there are a few who won't. Mostly muggle-born. Their parents don't like what they've heard about Hogwarts this last year. Or read in the papers. Their parents are pulling them from Hogwarts and going out of country. They're moving to the United States, I think. Maybe Australia." She smirked. "I think they're going to try to convince the Captain to keep them as crew and arrange a way for them to . . .," she stopped and looked at her mother, "participate," she ended weakly.
"Maybe we should do that, too," Josephine said, though the whole idea didn't appeal to her at all. It felt too much like she was abandoning her home. She felt vaguely disloyal. And another country would be . . . foreign.
"You can, if you want to," Marietta said so earnestly that Josephine's heart sank. "You'd be safe from all the bollocks that's probably coming."
Josephine stared at her daughter in desperate disbelief, and shook her head. "No, no, of course not. We're not going anywhere," she said. Her hand shook slightly as she rubbed her forehead and tried to get her thoughts back on track. "So, what . . . what is this crew of yours going to do?"
Marietta hesitated for a moment, looked down at the gold bar between them, and chewed her lower lip lightly while she fiddled with her hands.
"Mum," she finally said. "If you don't want to run away, um . . . I might have a job for you."
And there it was. What she had been afraid of. The surreptitious string to the gold bar.
Her heart seemed to freeze in her chest. She swallowed thickly, but . . . there it was. The other shoe had dropped. "What do I have to do?" she asked, dreading every word. She steeled herself for whatever ultimatum she had to fulfil, to keep her daughter, her family, safe.
Marietta hopped to her feet, delighted. And practically dragged her mother to the floo.
██:::::██:::::██
Josephine stared. They were in Diagon Alley, which was filled with the general noise and activity of people merrily chatting, laughing, and hurrying as they went about their business. Most of the customers wandering the street were women and their children — no longer limited to just the children under the age of eleven as had been the case in previous months. Everyone was going about shopping or simply enjoying not being cooped up at home — or school. It was bizarrely normal, compared to the atmosphere at the Ministry.
And completely ignoring the incredible thing she was looking at.
In front of the two of them was a shop front, a brand-new shop front. There was a big, black, elliptical sign above the windows in a strict font, sharp, and slightly angled. It was all capitals, except the letter 'n' which was a lowercase letter that size of a capital. And it really was a font, not just fancy lettering. An eerily familiar font, too. One that was amazing to see in Diagon Alley, just by itself. Or any wizarding locale, actually.
However, it was the name emblazoned in that font that held her almost spell-bound attention.
"EnTERPRISE"
it declared for all to see, on a black background that had scattered, and different-sized, small, white, red, yellow, and blue dots all across it. Dots that winked, occasionally.
To compound her incredibility, behind the word, EnTERPRISE, there was a symbol, a rune. Josephine used runes a lot in her work at the ministry, her proficiency with them was what had landed her her job in the Ministry all those years ago before she met George, before Marietta. They were used extensively in the Ministry's filing system after all — so she recognised it easily.
A sharp point at the top, with side points more curved than pointy. At the bottom, instead of the bottom lines crossing to continue and form legs, they combined to form two thick legs; one side was markedly shorter than the other, and the line between the ends curved up steeply and gracefully. Altogether, it was rounded and lopsided, but it clearly recognizably as othila.
Othila, the mark of fair play, and great capacity for knowledge. The call of adventure and the personal skill to reach it, and adaptability, love of home, patriotism, family, and homeland.
It was a very optimistic rune.
It had been a while, but Josephine still remembered the show. A muggle friend had shown it to her, oh, so long ago, before she had entered Hogwarts. She easily recognized the Star Trek font, it was unmistakeable. Behind it, the rune othila was stretched and angled so that it bore more than a little resemblance to the lopsided three-pointed, elongated, emblem the crew of that ship had worn on their uniforms. Except this emblem was pinched in the middle, pulled together, to resemble othila. The centre in the top half was a diamond instead of a stylized star.
Yes, to those who knew of the show, the resemblance was unmistakeable.
"What . . . ?" Josephine asked, and glanced at Marietta in helpless confusion.
Marietta smirked at her and stepped into the shop. Baffled, Josephine followed. She vaguely noticed the signs in the window that said, "OPENING SOON!" and "HELP WANTED".
The shop was surprisingly normal-looking on the inside. Almost empty, but normal. There were shelves on the wall, but there was nothing much on them, just some bundles of cloth and a few pairs of strange-looking boots. No displays. The only counter was the one at the back of the room that had a register on it. Beside it was a door that led farther into the building.
"We're still setting up, so it's a little empty right now," a voice said. "We're still working out what we're actually going to sell here." A young wizard stepped out from seemingly nowhere. He had bright red hair and freckles all over his face — a Weasley, if Josephine had ever seen one. "Hi," the friendly young man said, and offered his hand. "Fred Weasley." He glanced at Marietta and back to her. "You must be Josephine Edgecombe. It's nice to meet you."
"Uh, hello," Josephine answered faintly and hesitantly shook his hand. She frowned a little, noticing that he was wearing yellow gloves. They felt like latex and skin at the same time. "I, uh . . .," she glanced at her daughter. It had been almost fourteen years since she had last tried her luck at getting a job. "Um, Marietta says you have a job for me?"
"Well, a job opportunity," Weasley said with a grin. He looked at Marietta. "How much did you tell her?"
She shook head. "Not much, actually," she said regretfully. "Just that we might have something for her so she can leave the Ministry," Marietta said. She looked at her mother. "This place is owned by our crew . . .."
"Specifically, by me, my brother, and Lee Jordan, the deed's in our name. It's the Captain, though, who really runs the show," Fred Weasley interjected.
"Yes," Marietta agreed, and rolled her eyes. "And we need someone to . . . work here." She waved her arms to indicate the store.
"Work here," Josephine said slowly, and look around at the empty space that seemed to be the only item they had an abundance to sell.
"Uh-huh," Marietta nodded. The Weasley boy nodded with her.
"Come autumn," Weasley said, "we're all heading back with the crew." He smiled. "Mind you, we who graduated, we'll popping in and out probably, but mostly we'll be out there." He waved his hand in a direction that might have been in the direction of Hogwarts, but looked suspiciously more like "up there."
She had the disquieting impression he didn't mean the flat upstairs.
"So, we need someone to man . . . er, woman, the desk here," he continued. "We're hoping that someone would be you." He raised his eyebrows and looked hopeful.
"Uh . . .," Josephine answered blankly. "You want me to . . . be a store clerk?" That was as far from what she had expected as you could get. They were willing to trade gold bars for someone to . . . mind a store!? From his expression, she could see he was sincere, as mind-boggling as that was.
"Uh-huh," Fred confirmed. He rocked on the balls of his feet. "I mean, it's probably going to be pretty dull." He glanced around the store. "Really dull. But, right now, at least, we just need someone to be here, and talk to people who come in." He was watching her carefully. "You noticed the sign, right? I mean, you're a half-blood, right? Lee and Hermione assured us that pretty much every muggle-born would notice it, but a half-blood might not, depending on if they had any muggle friends. Marietta told us you knew of the . . . show."
"Hmm? Yes, I am. And I did, and I do," Josephine said as she frowned. "About that . . . is it intentionally . . . like that?" She glanced out the front windows, which were remarkably clean. Odd that she hadn't been able to see inside when they were outside. Or was it that she simply hadn't thought to look inside, first? Were they spelled?
"Brilliant! It works," Weasley said and grinned widely. "And yeah, it is. You could say we're aiming for a very specific target group, here. The sign is supposed to be the hook. Only people who recognize it will react as we want."
"But . . ." Josephine hesitated, and looked around them at the empty shelves. "What are you selling? Cheese?"
Marietta snerked, but Fred just blinked a moment before he pompously said, "Adventure and excitement." And his grin got even wider.
"We're looking for certain type of people," Marietta said in a more normal tone as she shrugged. "People who will notice the sign, and then come in."
Behind them the front door opened and someone stepped in.
"And then what?" Josephine asked, and swallowed nervously. Maybe she was safe, but others?
"And then we'll see if they're looking for employment," a new voice said.
Josephine turned around to see a brown-haired girl had come into the store. "Hello, Mrs. Edgecombe," she said and offered her hand. "I'm Hermione Granger. Sorry I'm late. I'm here to interview you for the job."
"Right, okay, nice to meet you," Josephine answered faintly as she shook her hand. She glanced between her daughter, who nodded encouragingly, and Weasley, who threw Granger a sloppy salute before he turned and flamboyantly marched with swinging arms and exaggerated steps into the back room, stomping his feet.
She frowned. "How can you be late," she asked curiously, "When I didn't even know I was going to be here?" She eyed the girl suspiciously.
Granger smiled. "Your daughter told us you were headed here, so I finished up what I was doing and hurried over. I wanted to be here to greet you, but I didn't quite make it."
She glanced at her daughter again, who simply grinned at her. When had she had time to send a message? The only time she had seen the girl near the floo was when they went through it! How had she sent any kind of message?
She turned back to Granger. She took another deep breath to steady herself. "And . . . you really want to hire me as a store clerk?" she asked, "Just a store clerk? Nothing more?"
"That's the idea," Granger said as she nodded her head. She smiled kindly and motioned Josephine to follow her. "There are rooms in the back, we can talk more comfortably there."
Josephine followed, Marietta close at her heels, as they headed to the back rooms, which were most of the entire building, as it turned out. There was a long corridor with doors on each side, and a door at the end. Just before they reached that door, they turned into a rather spacious office. It was decorated with surprising finesse. And furniture that Josephine could vaguely remember seeing in Hogwarts.
"How did you. . ." she started to ask as she stared at the familiar-looking desk that dominated the room. Hadn't she last seen Professor McGonagall standing behind it? And then there were the comfortable, armchairs that were reminiscent of the ones she had seen for seven years in her Common Room, although those had been in Ravenclaw colours. These, however, looked brand new.
Granger anticipated her question. "They only look like the furniture in Hogwarts," she said, "I assure you that the originals are all still there." She smiled and looked around the room a bit proudly. "They are good copies, though, aren't they?"
Instead of sitting behind the desk, as Josephine expected, Granger sat in one of the five armchairs at the other end of the room. Josephine and Marietta sat in two of the others. "So," Granger said, reaching out to take a sheaf of parchments off the coffee-table around which the armchairs were half-grouped. "Before we start, here. This is a magic confidentiality contract," she said as she handed the papers to the mother. "If you want to work for us, you will be required to sign it. If you reveal what you learn here to outsiders, with a few exceptions, there will be consequences to you."
"That's . . . quite the opening," Josephine said faintly as she took the parchments.
"I thought you'd appreciate the honesty," Granger said as she shrugged. "Please, take your time and read it thoroughly."
Josephine did, carefully, checking the backs of the pages to see if they held anything. Granger took out a book, flipped it open, read something, and started writing in it. Marietta, beside her, shifted anxiously.
The contract was fairly simple, and entirely confusing to her. It just forbade her from sharing any sensitive information that she learned while employed by the Enterprise Store about the Enterprise Store, the employees, and the customers, and anything else involved with something called the Defensive Space Force.
She looked up at Granger, who was still writing in her book. "What is the Defensive Space Force?" Josephine asked nervously.
Granger closed and slid her book into a robe pocket. "Exactly what it says, a Defensive Space Force," she said, and shrugged. "It's a bit b-movie sci-fi of a name, but it works." She shook her head ruefully.
Josephine stared at her for a moment and then looked at Marietta, who just shrugged. Josephine looked back at the contract.
She'd thought . . . well, she'd thought many things. Some terrible, some horrible, all of them dangerous to some degree. Or compromising in ways she really didn't want to contemplate at her age. Or her daughter's, if it came to that.
But this . . . seemed as if it had little to do with Ministry, or even . . . even You-Know-Who. It sounded a little bit like a Star Trek fan club, to be honest, which was just ridiculous. Especially in the wizarding world. She would've laughed, if it wasn't for the solid gold bar on the coffee-table in their home — that, and the six others hidden in her daughter's underwear draw among her pants. So, what was it, then?
Aliens, perhaps? Were they aliens? She quickly rejected that. Her daughter had been writing to her about Granger since 1991. She had told her all about how Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley, and Harry Potter were almost joined at the hip when Harry wasn't in trouble of one kind or another.
Josephine wanted to laugh at the silliness of it, but she couldn't, not when Granger — who was younger than Marietta — stared at her so seriously, and Marietta sat beside her, back ramrod straight. Whatever it sounded like, whatever it was, it was still serious. It was possibly deadly serious. The gold bars proved that. And Marietta was hip deep in it.
Josephine sighed deeply. "I'll sign it," she said unenthusiastically.
Granger looked her silently for a moment, and her eyebrows slowly rose higher up over her eyes. "Mrs. Edgecombe, just what do you think is going on here?" she asked curiously.
Josephine hesitated, glanced at her daughter, and said slowly, "It's a recruitment office, isn't it?"
After a moment, Granger answered, "It is," She studied the mother a moment longer. "But I think you think it's for an army, don't you?" She nodded. "You think we're starting some sort of . . . underground revolutionary militia here, don't you?"
"Aren't you?" Josephine asked quietly. It made perfect sense — and it was brilliantly thought out, too. A distinctive shop to attract wizards and witches, but which would not be noticed, except in passing, by the snobbish pure-bloods and their equally conceited half-blood friends. Certain half-bloods, though, like her, and especially certain muggle-borns, would notice. Wizards and witches who, Josephine knew, had been slighted by the Ministry just because of their blood status or political views. And there were many, she knew, who fit those descriptions, who were upset with the Ministry. Maybe even desperate.
The ones with revolutionary new ideas got the worst of it, she'd seen it a hundred times over the years. The muggle-borns who spoke of technology or computers, and things like, well, space exploration. They got the metaphorical axe the quickest in the magical world. Now days, that axe might not be so metaphorical, either.
The Ministry was waging a quiet war against people like them, she realized. It had been coming more and more out of the shadows, lately, in doing it, too, now that she thought about it. In addition, it had started to wage a war against Harry Potter, too, though for different reasons. So, he was now starting to fight back, and his army would be made of the people Ministry had rejected.
That was the other shoe. That was the string attached to the gold bars. It made her stomach feel like it was in her shoes.
They wanted Josephine to be the face of the recruitment office. They wanted to put a nice former-ministry employee on the front to make it look nice and normal. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, they attracted muggle-borns, and marginalised half-bloods, and offered them the chance of future retribution.
There would be a civil war that would make You-Know-Who pale in comparison. A bullet in the back of the head would kill a wizard or witch just as quickly as a spell. It would be just as difficult to guard against and prevent. A muggle-born at the top of this very building could pick off a wizard or witch at the far end of the Alley, and no one would ever suspect what had happened — she had seen those war movies and spy shows in the seventies, before she had graduated. Put an explosive spell on the tip of the bullet, and nothing would be left as evidence that it hadn't been a spell.
And Marietta and Josephine were right in middle of it!
"Mrs. Edgecombe," Granger started to say and then stopped, thinking. Then she smiled wryly. "I won't say it's nothing like that, actually. We don't have a choice, but to keep it secret. What we're doing here goes against everything the Ministry currently stands for. But we're not interested in violence," she assured Josephine. "And yes, this is a recruitment office, but it's not one for an army. It's one for a business. We're looking for like-minded employees, not soldiers or violent rebels."
"Employees to do what?" Josephine asked quietly.
Granger considered that. She obviously wanted to hint it to her, but to do so without revealing anything before the woman signed the contract. Then she smiled. "To boldly go where no wizard, witch, or muggle has gone before," she said, and smirked.
Josephine arched her eyebrows in disbelief at that. She couldn't be saying what Josephine thought she was saying. Could she?
Granger chuckled at her expression. She pulled her book out, opened it, pulled something from between the pages, and handed it to her. It was a photograph of something with orange and white stripes and a big oval splotch of orange-red in the middle. It took only a moment for Josephine to recognize it as Jupiter's Great Red Spot. It took her a few moments longer to recognize just what the photograph represented. When she did, her eyebrows went even higher.
It was a very, very clear, and sharp, photograph, far better than any she had ever seen. And it was moving as she stared it — slowly, the Giant Red Spot was rotating as she watched, even as it drifted very slowly across the paper. It was a wizarding photograph.
Granger had given her a magical photograph of Jupiter, taken as if the photographer were right on top of it.
Stunned, Josephine looked up again at Granger, who just smiled, and then at Marietta, who was looking at her hopefully. Then she reached for the contract again. "Do you have a quill?" she asked, and her voice barely shook.
Marietta bounced in her chair as her mother signed the confidentiality contract, and became an employee. She could finally tell her mother what she had been doing for the last eight months.
Josephine, sighed deeply as she slid the signed contract to Granger, and then sat back in her chair, her heart racing.
The two Edgecombe's stared at each, Josephine with some trepidation, and Marietta with glee as Granger folded placed the signed contract in her book. Then she looked up and grinned. "Welcome aboard, Mrs. Edgecombe, welcome aboard," she said warmly.
They stared at each other a moment, then Josephine frowned. "How much am I going to make, anyway?"
Granger looked back at her, startled. "Oh, yes!" she said, and giggled. "Can't forget that detail!" She reached into her pocket and pulled out her purse. Opening it, she then pulled out two of those gold bars her daughter had. "I think these will do for the first six months," she said conversationally, as she handed it to the woman. "If you need more, just ask. We have plenty."
██:::::██:::::██
Harry was in the middle of a runes' chapter assignment when the comm-link on his chest vibrated. He still wore his Requirement spacesuit every day, in case Voldemort decided to try sending an imperiused muggle instead of visions and pain. Plus, it always kept him cool, no matter how hot it might be! Which, considering that the Dursleys would never spare the money for an air-conditioner in his room, was a godsend in the small stuffy room. Not even keeping the windows open would stir the still air.
"Captain!" Harry could hear the elation in Hermione's voice, after he announced he was in the clear. "Enterprise now has an employee! Over."
"Brilliant," he said happily. "Who?"
"Marietta's mother, Josephine. She brought her mother by the shop and I think she'll be a perfect fit. Plus, it gets Marietta off the edge of getting her mother in trouble at the Ministry because she's crew."
She paused, then laughed. "I think I broke her when I handed her two gold bars. She spent almost an entire minute just staring at them. Then she picked them up as if she thought they would bite her! Over."
"But she did," Harry responded, "right?"
"Yes, she said she'll quit her job tomorrow and be in to work on Saturday." She paused. "I think we should have her work Wednesday through Sunday, with myself and the twins filling in on the other days. Open at ten, close at seven, with an hour for lunch? How does that sound? Over."
"Beats me," Harry said shrugging, not that she could see him. "I don't know anything about stores or employees. Whatever you and the twins think is right is fine by me, as long as it keeps Marietta and her mother . . .," he thought a moment, "happy, I don't care."
≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ██:::::██:::::██