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We bumped into auld Rosy Gillies at young Dougal McGregor’s wedding (I don’t know if you remember him, lovely young man, he’s married that wee lass from the Kinnaird farm) and she was asking after you; I told her that you had taken up a teaching post at a boarding school, though of course I told her that you were teaching science rather than transfiguration!
Her mother could not have known, when the ink flowed smoothly over the page to create that elegant cursive, that such a chatty, innocent paragraph would reduce her to this.
The wee lass from the Kinnaird farm. Minerva remembered her; Mairead. She had thick, golden hair and pale blue eyes, rounded cheeks on a heart shaped face that blushed sweetly pink when she giggled, which she did a lot.
The letter crumpled against her heart as she clutched it to herself and imagined, as much as she tried not to, the joy that Mairead and Dougal surely flourished in. Their little farm with the gentle highland coos lazily grazing, the crackle of the fire in a merry hearth to warm their humble home, the children that would surely come, as giggly and beautiful as Mairead and as witty and clever as Dougal.
Her shoulders shook and her vision was blurred, but the words so cheerfully written haunted her with a piercing ferocity. It came as a shock, the pain of it, though it shouldn’t have done. It had writhed in her for so long, twisting tightly around her heart, smothering her with terrible misery. Yet she had pushed it aside, or tried to, and now it overwhelmed her. She felt that she might crumple from it, succumb to her heavy sobs and collapse into nothingness.
She could see him so vividly, as though it had merely been the day before, his knee sinking into the soft, freshly ploughed earth, his hands grasping hers, his handsome face in a nervous but earnest grin. The mountains around them had been cast in glorious purple heather, the sky above a sunset of moody greys and dusky yellows and blossom pinks. She sobbed and remembered her own joy, and, yet again, as she always did, wondered if she might have held onto it, if she might have allowed herself to take that joy gently into her hands as one would do a baby or some other precious thing and clutch it to her chest as she now clutched the letter that had so devastated her.
Choking and spluttering and blind with hysteria, she stumbled from her desk and across her room to her bed, where she collapsed heavily onto the uneven floorboards. She shook here for a moment, screwing her face up against the dark wood, and then, dragging herself slightly as though a wounded animal, reached under her bed for the box.
With trembling fingers she reached beneath the high collar of her robes for the cord about her neck, on which was the tiny brass key that unlocked the box that held all her pain. Inside were letters, all her letters she had ever received from Dougal, his slanting handwriting, his wit, his love that poured from the page. She wiped away the tears as much as she could to try and read the letters that fell from her shaking hands, but such was her crying that she could see only snatches.
My darling, how I long to see you and hear your voice telling me something indisputably wrong so that I might correct you and finally have the upper hand.
You remain relentlessly in my thoughts, words fail me when I try to describe the depth of my feelings for you. A fact I'm sure you find very funny.
Minerva, my wise Minerva, when can I see you again? Say you will meet me soon, my love has made me selfish and I cannot bear to be apart from you.
Til all the seas go dry, my dear, and the rocks melt with the sun. I will love you still my dear, while the sands of life shall run.
Better that letters be locked away than a wand, she had always told herself, but in the tumultuous sea of her despair, in that moment she hated herself for her choice. She hated herself, she hated Mairead and her beautiful simplicity, and she hated the ramshackle farmhouse that might have been hers and she hated her brief career in London where the only good thing had been Elphinstone, and she hated being back here in the Highlands where, even though it wasn't home, the purple heather was still cast upon the mountains and she still hated that terrible memory of his bewildered, heartbroken face, his shaking voice, his questions…
'Because I'm a farmer?' he had asked hollowly, and that had hurt the most.
'No,' she had said, but it was yes really - not because he was a farmer particularly, but because she could never entwine her life with his, not wholly, not truthfully.
But she could not tell him this, so she left him without answers altogether.
She was so cruel, sometimes, she thought. That had been a cruel thing to do, and this was her punishment.
Even crueller , said an unpleasant voice in her head, to harbour hope that he would stay as lonely and lovesick as you.
She closed her eyes against the stinging tears, her teeth pressing hard against each other to hold back the wails that threatened to scream out of her. Let him at least be happy, she told herself. She would never want to condemn him to this agony.
I will love you always, it is an impossibility to think otherwise.
But he had been able to think otherwise, eventually; he had found new love, not with her, but with the sweet, cheerful farmer's daughter who had the beauty to match his.
There was a rapid knocking at her door; it jerked her out of her despair with such sharpness that she jumped, and then, heart pounding, hurried to messily shove the letters back into the box.
‘Minerva?’
‘Yes - coming,’ she called, trying her best to sound normal as she hurriedly wiped at her face. She rose unsteadily and hurried through to her classroom; the late summer evening was shining a warm gold over the empty desks, catching dancing dust particles in the air. The knocks continued.
‘Sorry - here,’ she choked out, and she tried to fix a pleasant smile onto her face as she opened the door.
It did not work.
‘Sorry to trouble you, I just wanted to go over the learning objectives for the- are you all right?’
Professor Dumbledore was fixing her with a sharp sort of gaze, his blue eyes piercing as they took in her face. She had no doubt that her efforts to wipe away the tears had not hidden the redness of her eyes or the puffiness of her skin. She tried weakly to smile. ‘Yes, of course - for the fourth years, did you mean? I was having a… a…’
But she could not finish, for Professor Dumbledore had stepped over the threshold and gently took her by the arm, guiding her into the classroom. At his touch, she had dissolved into tears again.
‘I’m sorry - ignore me,’ she spluttered out. She was trembling, and her sobs had left her breathless and dizzy. How humiliating, for him to see her reduced to this - how unprofessional.
‘Certainly not. Sit down.’
He ushered her into her chair, and then conjured up one for himself, which he set beside her, before prising open her tartan tin of biscuits that she kept on her desk. She tried to decline, but he pushed it firmly towards her and, trying not to hiccup, she steadied herself with the ginger sweetness.
‘What has happened?’ Professor Dumbledore asked, kindly but with a reassuring authority. ‘What is the matter?’
‘It’s…’ she swallowed, and though she had always considered herself professional and private and dignified and all the other things that were the perfect antithesis of sobbing in front of your boss, the whole story came tumbling out of her mouth before she could help herself.
How she had loved him, Dougal, with his square jaw and weather-beaten arms, always streaked with mud from the fields. How they had argued fiercely and happily about anything they could think of-
‘It’s altrostratus-’
‘Absolute nonsense, you’ve lost your head. It’s cirrus, absolutely, I’d stake my worldly possessions on it-’
‘Then you’re a fool, look at it, have you never seen the sky before?’
How he had seemed, to her, like the very earth he tended on his farm, deeper and richer and more precious than anyone seemed to recognise, and how she felt that in another life, another world, a world where borders stretched beyond Caithness, people might have noticed that - he might have noticed that. But she knew, always, that even if he had noticed that, if he had recognised his own intelligence and wit and tenacity, he would have still chosen to nurture his beloved family farm. He had been born into that life and even if he had born elsewhere he would have found it anyway.
‘Look at that. Look at the way the dawn hits those rocks, Minerva. Look at the red of it. Rain on the way, make no mistake.’
How he had proposed to her, and her heart had soared as though she were on a broom, soaring up and up and up into the golden evening sky and exploding in colour, she had never been so happy, would never be so happy again. She had accepted him at once.
How doubt had not entered her mind until she returned home, to tell her parents. Her mother had been turning the mangle by hand. Minerva had stared at it, watching the water squeeze out of the muggle-style dress, the droplets falling to the stone floor, the machine creaking and squeaking as her mother blistered her hands on the wooden handle.
‘Do you want me to do that?’
‘Oh… no, no, dear… your father could be home any moment.’
It had taken just one night of the clarity that being awake while the rest of the world sleeps brings. Those strange hours that stretched and went by in a flash with no sense or rhyme. The clouds of her mind had rushed and sank lower and lower, thickening into a fog.
She told Dumbledore, without really thinking, how Dougal did not know what she, Minerva, truly was, any more than her father had known the truth about her mother before they had married. In that awful night, Minerva had seen clearly what kind of marriage she might have if she wed Dougal. It would be the end of all her ambitions; it would mean a wand locked away, and children taught to lie, perhaps even to their own father. She could not fool herself that Dougal McGregor would accompany her to London, while she went to work every day at the Ministry. He belonged in the rugged terrain of the highlands, he needed the feel of rain in the air and the wind whipping at him, he lived for the burn across his broad shoulders as he guided a stubborn plough horse across a field.
She told Dumbledore how she met him the next day, and broke off the engagement before it had even begun.
She told Dumbledore how she had heard that he was married now.
‘Of course…’ she said eventually, her voice hoarse and low, ‘I should have known this day would come. This was the choice I made.’
Professor Dumbledore nodded gently as she spoke, listening intently, leaning forward slightly, his hand a steady presence on her arm. ‘I see,’ he said solemnly, as she finally finished.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘I’m sorry, I’ll - it won’t - I’ll be all right, I’ll sort out the learning-’
‘Please do not trouble yourself with school things,’ he said, waving a dismissive hand. ‘Minerva, I am so deeply sorry.’
She didn’t know what to say in response, just shook her head slightly and tried to wipe away more of the tears with the handkerchief. ‘A situation of my own doing,’ she muttered eventually.
Professor Dumbledore seemed to be hesitating on the edge of something, his blue eyes cast downwards, his mouth slightly parted. Then, in a slow, measured voice, ‘such choices are unimaginably painful, but often… right.’
She swallowed, and gave a shuddering sort of intake of breath as she looked up at him.
‘The misery of such a marriage,’ he said heavily, ‘and it would be a misery - would have corrupted that love you have for him, and maybe his for you. It is painful to watch someone you love walk down a path you cannot follow; please do not be so hard on yourself for sparing you both that agony.’
‘This is agony,’ she said breathlessly.
He nodded. ‘I know,’ he said quietly, and a new sort of hoarseness in his voice jolted her. ‘I… I know what it is to make such a choice, not because it is easy, but because it is right. No matter how painful, we owe it to ourselves… and to them… to do the right thing.’
‘He will be happy with her,’ she said faintly, thinking of Mairead’s sunny smile and rounded cheeks. ‘That is… I will eventually find comfort in that, I hope.’
‘I hope so too,’ he said.
She dabbed again at her eyes, trying to steady herself. Her heart was thudding more normally now, her mind returning to the walls of the stone castle rather than wandering despairingly through purple heather. ‘Did you?’ she asked. ‘Find comfort?’
He seemed to think for a long time. ‘In my case… I comforted myself in knowing that it was the right choice. Not just for myself, but for many…’ At her bewildered look, he gave a twitch - the merest hint of a smile. ‘Do you know the barman at the Hogs Head Inn?’
Minerva considered it a matter of pride that she did not enter that particular establishment.
‘Only in passing,’ she said.
‘He is my brother,’ Professor Dumbledore said lightly, and then looked amused at her shock. ‘Oh, yes - a few years younger and, I’m sure he would agree, differently, er, minded to myself. But at the… at the funeral of our dear sister, he told me a few hard truths.’
Minerva was staggered. She had never expected to be entrusted with such deep, personal pain. But then, she supposed, she had entrusted him with hers. It was a certain type of bravery for both of them, she knew.
‘My duties to family, and to her especially… they had been neglected for the sake of a dalliance with one who was increasingly following a path I could not - or rather, should not - take. It was tempting, certainly, but it would have corrupted us both into misery, and we would have continued to drag others down with us. Just as you stated that it is better to keep love letters in a box than a wand, so too did I have to reckon with locking some things away.’
‘But you thought about it? About following that path.’
‘I did,’ he said honestly. ‘Because, of course, I loved him.’
He said the last words so distantly, so gently, with his eyes so far away like an early morning sky, that Minerva wondered if he realised he had said them at all. Things seemed to drift gently into place. She reached out and grasped his hand without thinking. She squeezed.
He squeezed back.
Then he fixed her with an intense look again, and though his eyes were shining, there was a slight smile in his expression. ‘We cannot live in our regrets, or construct them in hindsight. We would both make the same choice again, would we not?’
She nodded. ‘Because they were right.’
‘Precisely, Minerva! And though our broken hearts may leave us hard pressed on every side, this pain is to be human, and we will not allow ourselves to be struck down with dwelling on that pain - we owe it to ourselves to find higher purpose. Happiness will come again.’ He reached into his robes, and drew out his wand. With an elegant flick, intricate little stemmed glasses had appeared, along with a bottle of mead.
‘Oh,’ she said hurriedly, ‘please - I’m fine, thank you - I’m working-’
‘If you continue to politely refuse, I will, of course, retreat with equally polite grace, but if you’ll pardon me, Minerva, I think a steadying of the nerves and a shared drink between friends is perfectly acceptable, even if it is a school night.’
He looked quite mischievous all of a sudden, and she could not help but give a watery sort of chuckle, and accepted the small glass of golden drink he offered her.
It was sweet, and warming, like a pleasant dawn. Warming too, was his reference to her as a friend. She thought briefly and inexplicably of Elphinstone, and what a comfort it had been to her to have a boss that she considered a close friend. It seemed that she would have that comfort here, too.
‘The higher purpose,’ she said. ‘I suppose it is teaching?’
‘Oh, yes,’ he said easily. ‘Very much. And one for happiness, too. You see, I have found, working here, that despite moments when all seems dark… the children have a way of bringing some light.’
He moved his glass to her own, and the chime of the toast was like phoenix song. Her eyes were still hot with tears, but she smiled back.