Heart's Desire | Harry Potter for Grown-Ups

Prologue

  Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart's desire; the other is to get it.

~ George Bernard Shaw

When Minerva McGonagall was five, the only thing in the world she wanted was a toy broom.

She had been allowed to ride on one belonging to her Ross cousins when she and her mother had gone to visit her mother's family the previous Christmas at Loch Alsh, and it had had her in its dizzying grip ever since.

When she asked for one the next Christmas, Minerva's father pressed his lips into the thin line that that Minerva knew meant she had disappointed him.

"I can think of more appropriate ways to celebrate the birth of our Saviour," said Father.

She knew he didn't approve of magic. He didn't approve of a lot of things, and young Minerva took care always to be among the things of which her father did approve, so she said no more about the broom.

But her dreams were filled with images of Little Silver Arrows and Cleansweep Juniors, and her waking hours were filled with hopeless longing.

When Minerva was seven, she received a gift from her mother. She opened the package, carefully removing the string from the wrapping, coiling it neatly into a ball and gingerly unfolding the gilded paper—her father would have disapproved of waste—with a trembling excitement, not daring to hope ...

She saw the look her father gave her mother, and then saw him soften as Isobel stared him down. Isobel McGonagall didn't often defy her husband, but when she did, he usually backed down, and it was always in the back of Minerva's mind that her father was just a wee bit afraid of her mother—afraid she would decide he wasn't worth the sacrifice and scoop up her three magical bairns to fly away to rejoin the wizarding world. Sometimes—just sometimes, mind you—young Minerva wished it would happen.

Just after the New Year, Minerva broke her arm. She was riding her Shooting Starlet in the barn that sat between the manse and the kirk, pushing off and taking the broom as high as it would go (five feet) and zooming around the empty barn at the astonishing speed of three miles per hour.

Truth be told, Minerva was getting a little tired of her broom. In the four months since she had first possessed it, she had exhausted its repertoire of tricks—hovering and zooming—and, come January, more days than not, the Shooting Starlet lay untouched in a corner of Minerva's tiny bedroom while Minerva read a book or played a game of plainy-clappy against the barn wall. She'd also taken to playing with a boy from the parish, enamoured of his bools, several of which she had handily won from him and that he'd been trying to reclaim ever since.

Minerva was hovering over the ground—not the soft hay in the far corners—when her brother Malcolm, aged five, grabbed hold of the tail, toppling Minerva unceremoniously to the ground. He ran off the moment he saw how white her face had got, and Minerva was left alone, wailing and shivering with shock, until Dougal happened by, having finished his chores early for once, looking for the chance to win back his favourite pearlie taw. He heard Minerva's cries, and seeing the strange way her arm bent where it should not, ran for the kirk where the Reverend and Mrs McGonagall (who played the organ) were overseeing choir practice.

As Robert McGonagall held his howling child while Dr McKay set the arm, he said, "Lat it be a lesson tae ye, Minerva. Ayeweys be careful whit ye wish for, acause ye juist micht get it."