Albus Potter, Classmates and Elves

Ch 9 A Little This and That

Again thank you for my Beta Deb, who frequently challenges me on something I write.

*

Sunday November eleventh, two-thousand and eighteen, the family gathered for Sunday breakfast. Molly looked distracted. Harry and Ginny had attended the funeral for Aunt Muriel earlier in the week, so Ginny asked her mother, "Are you still grieving the death of Aunt Muriel?"

"She was close to one-hundred and fifty," Molly noted with a sigh. "It was really her time. It is not her death that is bothering me."

"What is?" Ginny inquired, sensing that there was more to the story. The family stayed around the table wondering what they could do to help.

"Muriel left me the tiara," Molly explained with a grimace. "Not only is it charmed to stay on until a marriage is consummated, but it will not stay on unless a couple will have children. There are spells on the tiara to insure at least some fertility. Aunt Muriel was a Weasley before she married, and I think the tiara is one reason the Weasley family has usually had more children than the average family of Magi."

"That's not a bad thing, is it?" Ginny asked.

"Not usually," Molly admitted, "but there are Weasley families that have not been very successful, generations of poor people with children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren that have struggled. Not all branches of the family have been as successful as you and your brothers. It is not just financial success. The Weasley clan is no stranger to unhappy marriages, or other problems."

"Solon, my head Elf, and the beings working for him have done everything they could to make Dad's older brothers Anthony and Adrian, successful," Harry lamented. "It didn't work. It was like they were cursed to fail."

Bill Weasley grumbled, "I finally had to repossess their land and turn them into employees. Both of them had big families. They are hard enough workers, but not smart enough. They are thick headed, set in their ways."

"So what happens if the tiara does not stay on when you try to put it on?" Ginny had to ask.

"Family drama like you would not believe, and the person who owns the tiara is right in the middle of it," Molly complained. "Once in a while I think having that tiara is a curse."

"Do you have to keep the tiara, Mum?" Ginny asked.

"I think I do, Ginny," Molly sighed. "There are family spells and such on it, and prophesies, and I don't feel I can just sell it or even get rid of it. I did sell those stupid desert plates with the flying cupids and some of the other floozy things Aunt Muriel left to me. Other more distant relatives of ours received the bulk of the inheritance."

Bill wondered if he should carefully scan the tiara to see what curses and spells had been place on it and see if he would be able to break them. He would have to do it after he talked to his mother and Fleur as he didn't want the curses to backfire on them either.

*

Mapping was more successful with four people, so some Saturday afternoons Albus and Cleo, Rose and Scorpius would spend some time re-mapping Hogwarts castle. They paid special attention to areas not on the original Marauders Map, especially the lower levels. It was frustrating, however, not only to Albus and his friends, but also to the Elves.

"When we make a map it looks like that there is nothing in that direction," Albus pointed out a spot on the map to Plato, the Elf he was working with, as they examined the latest map. "We know you want to expand the Elf area in that direction, but something is keeping us from mapping that area or expanding into it."