October 20th, 1891 — Hogsmeade after the Letter Prank

With clear skies and a light breeze it was a pleasant morning to be out on patrol.  It was still early in the day but Hogsmeade was already alive with the bustle of living.  It was a liveliness that Jack took in stride, his thumbs hooked comfortably in his pockets.  Of course he was watching for crimes since he was on duty, but he didn’t expect many.  In fact, he almost thought the whole point of patrol was mostly to be present - to be seen and perhaps make crimes of opportunity less… opportunistic.

His patrol was taking him slowly away from High Street towards the residential areas and it wasn't long before he was stopped by someone wanting to report a crime.  He blinked in blatant confusion before raising his hands, urging the person to stop.

"Hold on, what d'you mean you've been murdered?"

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“What do you think I mean?” Estelle uttered slowly, with a glower that could well have sent someone else to the grave with her. “Does it sound like I’m speaking Gobbledegook?”

Of course this man would never have even understood French, let alone the ugly guttural nonsense goblins spoke; Estelle was surprised if he could read and write in English, for that matter. The urgency of her situation was clearly lost on him. And, Estelle supposed, she would not have chosen him for help at all, if the first passer-by she had waylaid had not shaken her off with a wild look and gestured at this boy as if he were better-placed to see off the situation. She couldn’t fathom why... she had only cast him the briefest of glances before swooping over to him, but to her he seemed rather short and weedy-looking, with a youthful face that was not far beyond boyhood – and strangely familiar, though she couldn’t imagine why – and a daft, happy expression that could only, Estelle was sure, point to the presence of an unspeakable moron. 

She had held a brief spark of hope that he was an Auror-in-training, or something. But he looked utterly bewildered by her opening statement (as long as a statement could be, spewed out in one unceasing breath), which Estelle had thought fairly plain to comprehend. She had offered more detail to it, naturally, in as clipped and emotionless a way as she could muster, in spite of the newness of her condition. But surely any village idiot might have grasped the fundamentals by now? After all, I’ve been murdered was the gist of it.

Though in truth, there were some facets of this development that were inexplicable to her as well. The first was how had she ever gotten herself murdered in a time and place so gauche as the broad daylight of a Wednesday morning, in a mundane little corner of Hogsmeade? Estelle, on those occasions she had sorrowfully ruminated on her death before – usually hand-in-hand with wondering whether anyone in her life would bother to miss her – had always expected it would be a more drawn out affair, a long slow decline of tuberculosis and her floating about the house looking deathly pale in white nightgowns, and everyone around her remarking on her admirable stoicism and forbearance, and regretting their ways when she was gone.

But perhaps it was better to have gone like this, in some ghastly manner in her prime: at least it was shocking, particularly for a debutante of her name and standing, and she might see her portrait in the papers as some cause célèbre everyone felt obliged to speak about for months. Maybe they would even rename the Hogsmeade street on which she had been killed after her. Estelle Avenue. (Maybe they ought to erect a monument in her memory?)

But – Estelle quashed these deliberations for the moment, because first she ought to see about having her murderer caught and duly punished. Indeed, and having her body recovered and laid to rest. She had been a few streets away, coming to visit a friend in Wellingtonshire, when she’d stopped on the way to receive a letter from the owl flapping about her face. And then, out of nowhere, it had happened.

“I mean to say, I was walking just there, at the turn, when I stopped and someone came up behind me and just –” Estelle grasped a hand to her own throat and squeezed to express it: strangled me. The very words were too painful to bear saying out loud at this juncture; Estelle was afraid she might – well, choke on them. 

She had been choking, as she was throttled. And then she had felt the life fade out of her, and then she had gotten up and glided down the streets again to find help. (She had never imagined she would become a ghost – but she supposed she must be one, mustn’t she? She certainly felt cool and pale and and a bodiless semblance, drifting across the earth but no longer feeling anything. Surely he had seen a ghost before?)

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   Jack Dorset

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Well that cleared up nothing at all, Jack thought, his expression remaining mostly unchanged.  He actually wasn't sure he'd ever heard real Gobbledegook but that wasn’t the point.  He was sure, however, that he knew this woman.  There was something about that particular flavor of condescension that brought her name from the depths of his memory back to him with a jolt.  Miss Malfoy.  How could he forget. 

Of course the fact that they'd gone to school together or that she had been The Worst didn't change anything.  He was still a constable and she still needed his help.  Hands still raised in a placating stance he prepared himself to try and explain that there was no way she'd been murdered given the fact that she was still plainly alive… and also maybe convince her to let him take her to the hospital.  Maybe she was suffering from Hysterics - he'd heard that was something women got sometimes. 

When she finally clarified that she'd been attacked his skeptical confusion took on a tint of high alert his eyes shot towards the corner she'd indicated.  He saw nothing of note but really, it had been several minutes now, any attacker would surely have run by now.  Eyes still on the corner, he drew his wand and directed it to the sky and cast a spell that would summon back up from any nearby constables.

Reassured that help was on the way he focused his attention back on Miss Malfoy who, despite being who she was, was still a victim here.  He gave her a quick once over to rule out any obvious injury before locking eyes with her.

"I'm not an expert," he started carefully "but I'm fairly certain you aren't dead."  He searched her face for any indication that she might believe him.  She must be terribly shaken to be so convinced that she'd been killed and honestly he felt bad for her.  "Inferi don't talk and ghosts…. Well -" he reached out to her, intending to touch her arm as if to prove she was still quite solid but thought better of it at the last moment.  Instead he offered his arm to her - ghosts couldn’t touch things right? 

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   Estelle Malfoy

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No, indeed, obviously he had never seen a ghost before. (He must have been too poor to even attend Hogwarts, then; some luck she had, in handing over the precious case of her last minutes of life to some uneducated street-grunt.)

He at least looked as though he possessed some wits in his head, for he had cast off a spell and seemed to grasp a little of the urgency, until –

I’m not an expert. “No, evidently you are not, sir,” Estelle retorted, with a little more derision than she would have ordinarily let drip from her tone if she were having a polite conversation with a stranger – but this was not high society; the demands of the circumstance on her nerves were such that the usual rules need not apply and she would be forgiven; and besides, the rougher sorts never appreciated the appropriate conversational politeness anyway. Although, she supposed, in this case that she might as well have said nothing at all, and her pursed lips would have made her meaning clear enough.

Abruptly, Estelle recoiled – firstly, from his even insinuating that he had contemplated, for a second, that she might be an Inferius (an Inferius! She barely knew what one was, but she refused to believe that even her senseless, mindless corpse would ever submit to that grotesque fate. It would simply not be seemly!).

Next, she recoiled from his proffered arm without touching it, because how dare he. How dare he try to make her suffer some horrible sensation a ghost probably had when one came into contact with the living! She was very new to ghosthood, so she didn’t know much about the reality of it yet. Estelle at least knew she was one, though: she could not feel her feet in contact with the ground, and her hands looked pale and translucent to her, and if he asked her to fly she had no doubt she would innately know how to float up like an angel ascending from the earth with perfect grace. So, furthermore: how dare he not realise she was a ghost! How dare he not realise she was dead, when she had just made it so expressly clear! What was this, his idea of a joke?

“Since you have never died, I suppose you would not recognise the sensation, but I was there,” Estelle said with haughty gravity, much as if she were arguing the matter before the whole Wizengamot, “and I felt it.” She couldn’t believe this! No one ever took her seriously, and now that she had committed the most solemn act of dying, she couldn’t even convince a soul of it!

“Look,” she demanded, moving as near as she dared without being in reach of his groping hands, lest he try again. She unbuttoned the top button of her day-dress (once a deep mulberry, though now presumably the ghostly grey of the afterlife) to better bare her neck before him. There, he would see the bruises she was sure had bloomed from the attack of mere minutes ago, when she had had the life strangled right out of her. Was that not proof enough for him that she simply could not have survived? (Estelle was an exceptional young lady in many respects, but even she knew she could not have managed that.)

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   Brynn Rosier

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With eyes still locked on hers, he took the full brunt of her disparaging tone directly to his face and he blinked in surprise.  Somehow he'd fully expected his tactic of just… telling her she wasn't actually dead to work.  In reality there was a good chance every part of what he'd said might have actually made things worse.  Now what?  That had been his whole plan.  His only plan.  He peered about for some relief but unfortunately there was no sign of his backup yet.  He crossed his arms over his chest, keen to not give her another excuse to recoil from him

"Well, you have me there…" he agreed when she said he'd never died before, trying to buy himself some time to think.  He might have felt a twist of empathy at her words, after all he still thought even feeling as if you were strangled to death must be terrifying, but she kind of ruined it with the dramatics of her speech.  She was making it abundantly clear that any hope he'd had she might have become a bit nicer in the years since they'd been at Hogwarts was in vain. 

When she reached for her neckline and undid a button, surprise lit up his whole face.  "Woah!" he blurted, throwing up his hands and averting his eyes.  It wasn’t that it was especially revealing… but the whole business of just unbuttoning… without preamble or warning… out here in the middle of the street was a bit much. 

"What am I looking at?" he asked, taking the briefest of glances at her exposed neck from the corner of his eye.

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   Brynn Rosier, Estelle Malfoy

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Estelle first supposed that his dramatic reaction was due to the horror of her brutal strangulation, and the bruises from her murderer’s fingers that must have bloomed in ugly black and blue all over the creamy white skin of her neck, at least before she had lost all living colour – but she was forced to reassess this at the fact he had barely even looked before practically jumping back a mile, which made utterly no sense.

And he had asked, as if it weren’t obvious, so in addition to being poor and uneducated he must be either blind or witless or both, because she had Just. Explained. The. Whole. Situation. Instead of caring or taking this seriously, as he should, this – this – this boy had just averted his eyes as if she’d just unbuttoned her whole dress in front of him, thrown her chemise off over her head and her petticoats in the streets!

Which Estelle would most certainly never do, because she was a lady, but even if she had, it would not have been in front of the likes of him, she muttered to herself in her mind. And even if she had done that – even if she had been as good as a harlot in broad daylight – what right did he have to react like that? He ought to have been honoured or – something – not looking as though he were disgusted, like she had some terrible rash he might catch just from looking at.

(And it was not quite a contagious rash, but Estelle’s face had heated up considerably, a nasty flush spreading from her cheeks up to her ears and down to her neck where she had bared it. Which it probably oughtn’t be able to, considering that she was dead... it was strange that she could still feel sensations produced by severe mortification and nothing else, wasn’t it?)

Even though he had flinched, Estelle stubbornly didn’t button her top button back up, because that would just be proving him justified, which he was not. Instead, she just hardened her glare and hoped that might cow him into proper solemnness, as if she were a gorgon who could turn him to stone without need of a spell. “My cause of death,” Estelle got out finally, almost trembling with indignation. “The wounds inflicted by my murderer.”

She couldn’t understand how he couldn’t believe her now, when she offered him all the proof she had, but lest he didn’t – “Or perhaps you should check the scene to see if there is any evidence there. Or see if you can find him,” she demanded, gesturing back the way she had come from, though she suspected any murderer with half a brain cell more than this fellow would have fled by now. But maybe there was some clue left behind where she had died. “You are law enforcement, aren’t you?” Estelle added, narrowing her eyes as if she no longer quite believed it. (Dear Merlin; she had just been murdered and she was still having to do everything herself!)

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   Jack Dorset

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Jack's hands fell to his sides in bafflement, the threat of her completely defrocking seeming to pass.  He could see nothing on her neck, save the flush that had crept up. Probably from the rage she'd been seething at him.  In fact there was so little noteworthy about her neck that now he wondered if she'd been attacked at all.

He squinted at her for a moment but was saved from further comment by arrival of another constable who'd finally answered the summons Jack had sent off.  "Please - stay here." he urged her before pulling the other constable over to speak privately a few paces away.  The conversation quickly devolved into brief squabble.  One which, if either of them had had worse manners, would have involved furious pointing from Miss Malfoy to the corner. 

After a few moments he came back to her pinching the bridge of his nose as his partner took off toward the corner to investigate the 'crime scene'.  Clearly Jack had lost the argument.  "Constable Hopkins will see to the scene while I take your description of the attacker." he said, the words feeling exactly as rehearsed as they sounded.  He reached for a notepad kept in his uniform pockets but before he opened it he looked at her closely again.  "Is there - is there any chance you hit your head today?  When you were attacked... or otherwise?"

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He seemed to have no answer for her – no answer for anything; he seemed quite helpless – but thankfully (for them both) a colleague appeared to join them. At his please stay here Estelle only raised her shoulders in a haughty half-shrug, as if to say I’m dead, where exactly would I be planning to go? She wasn’t just going to continue on about her day, was she?! She could go... home, she supposed – she wasn’t certain how long it would take to drift back to London, as a ghost; she had never travelled that distance by countryside, so she couldn’t even guess how far it was – but the thought of going home was rather sour. Estelle could only imagine that she would recount what had happened, how she had died, and one of her siblings – any one of them really, but in her imagination it was Victoire – would have the audacity to laugh.

She shook her contemplation away from this and found that the two constables were still in discussion of her case. In... almost heated discussion, it seemed; Estelle squinted at them suspiciously, brow deeply furrowed and ears strained to hear, but they were speaking in too-low tones; she couldn’t glean anything.

Any satisfaction that something was finally being done, they were actually listening to her, was regrettably short-lived. Estelle’s expression rose and fell in the time it took for the man to take out a notebook, her brows drawing low and thunderous as she understood what was going through his mind.

Hit her head?

“No!” Estelle squawked, going shrill and high-pitched in another burst of indignation that he could ask such a thing, and so clearly be implying that she had suffered a head injury first. The cheek of it! “Of course not! So you think I’m delusional, is that it? Is that just your modus operandi here in Hogsmeade, shipping off every victim of a crime you obviously can’t solve to the asylum to get rid of them? That means mode of operation, by the way –” Estelle said, as an aside, convinced that he wouldn’t know; because if anyone had been dropped on their head at any point in their life, it most certainly wasn’t her – “but since my attacker’s mode of operation was strangling me from behind, I’m afraid you must forgive me if I did not get the chance to survey him for a full physical description!”

“For all I know,” Estelle continued, swaying on the spot before him and trying to quell her anger slightly here, for other passers-by now were pausing to survey this scene, and some seemed to be laughing and pointing – and Estelle Malfoy simply Did Not make a Spectacle of herself, it was not in her nature – “you might have been my murderer.” She raised an eyebrow at him in haughty triumph, daring him to defend himself against that. For he had been in the area, obviously. He was a coarse creature, presumably innately susceptible to acting on impulse. (He didn’t look like he had much of a violent nature, maybe – he seemed a little daft and cheerful for that – and he was not much taller or bigger than her as they stood here, face to face, and they didn’t know each other well enough for him to have any great motive for killing her, and if he were a constable then his dark side would certainly come a perverse shock to those who knew him, but... all that aside, it made quite as much sense as anything.)

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He closed his notebook without writing a single word.  Carefully stowing it and the pencil back in his pocket where they'd just come from, he waited calmly for her to finish her latest rant.  There was one good thing about her ceaseless berating… he almost felt like he was growing accustomed to it.  But he was now worried that her unfettered rage was some kind of… symptom.  Maybe she'd taken a bad potion that had addled her brain.  At this point she was even swaying on her feet.  His face shifted to a look of concern as he lifted an arm - close enough to be helpful if she fell but too far to be in striking distance if she suddenly snapped and tried to bite him. 

"Madam… I could not have murdered you because you are not dead."  He said each word with emphasis, in his best calm yet firm voice.  "You may have been attacked, which Constable Hopkins is investigating, but either you and I find a way I can convince you are still alive or we need to get you to the Hospital." 

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In a matter of moments, Estelle had grown increasingly convinced that her theory held water. He had murdered her, and that explained why he was feigning confusion, why he refused to acknowledge the truth, why he was attempting to gaslight her into thinking nothing had happened at all; he was too calm to be a moral, sympathetic gentleman upon encountering a lady who was dead. No, he was evidently trying to cover up his guilt. He had leapt back at her unbuttoning her collar because he was afraid he would see his own handprints in the bruising there, and have to acknowledge his own crimes. If she had caught him turning his wand on her, Estelle might even be half-convinced he had already tried to destabilise her with a babbling charm, that would make her keep talking and confuse her own story. The true story. He had sent his colleague off to the crime-scene, certain that he had already erased any footprint of his actions, and lest an impartial party heard her complaint. But, if anyone ought to be sent to an asylum, it was him: no doubt a serial killer, secretly prowling the streets looking to find unsuspecting victims in upstanding young ladies. What was the name the muggles had had, a few years ago? Oh yes. Jack the Ripper.

In her mind, Estelle was already picturing herself telling her story later, a hundred times, with a great deal of flourish and flair – and preferably to sold out crowds. That was, if it had not all come crashing down around her at once –

For he was trying to tell her the lies he had been peddling all the while, and had lifted his hand – in Estelle’s mind, this was nothing to do with her fit of pique and hysterical, near-fainting state, but another frenzy of rage of his; dear Merlin, he was going to try and throttle her again! – and, ghost or no, Estelle’s instinct this time was to defend herself. Physically.

She was a ghost, so casting a spell was out of the question. (Never mind that she so rarely lowered herself to using practical magic; since her NEWT meltdown and the memories of her practical exams embedded in her memory, Estelle had rigidly professed to everyone who knew her that actually casting spells on a day-to-day basis was for plebeians who needed magic, because they could not afford everything they wanted for themselves, or did not have anyone to perform the job of fetching things. And Estelle was a well-bred woman of society, so she had no need of jinxes. Naturally.)

So, instead – whether in self-defence or in some not-quite-so-well-buried fury of her own – Estelle leapt forwards to bat him away. She swatted bodily at his arm, in case he meant to touch her with it... But, in doing so, where Estelle had expected to see her arm slice through him like a flash-flood of icy water, to induce nothing more in him than a heartbeat of shock and discomfort – enough to stun him, and make him think again – her arm had... not. In fact, flesh met flesh (or rather, her hand collided with his sleeve) and her slap stung. She recoiled, eyes wide and horrified. For if she could touch him – had touched him – that must mean she was... corporeal. Estelle stared down at her arm, frozen in place, and then back up at the young constable. She reached out and patted him again – vaguely on his shoulder – almost as if she were blind or it was dark, and she was testing the space. But there was nothing extraordinary to it: he had a body, and she was in contact with it. This was not what it was to be a spirit.

Which meant he was... right? No. No, that couldn’t be. Estelle stared at him, her hand hanging uselessly in mid-air as she reconfigured the state of the world around her. There was another flush creeping into her face, because if she wasn’t dead, then she must be crazy. What had the world come to? Well, perhaps she was! Perhaps he was right about it all!

“I –” Estelle began, trying to hold herself straight and tall and upright, unimpeachable, but the sentence stuttering out before she had made any progress with it. “I –” there were words on her tongue that she utterly refused to use – it was a sincere truth that she would rather die than say I was wrong – so she just frowned at him as if that were enough to express her change of mindset. “I had received a letter, and was just about to read it as I walked –” Estelle explained, a little lamely, not quite able to meet his eye. She gestured over at his colleague, to say over there, as if reading a letter could possibly explain this! What sort of news could she have received in it that could have shaken her so? Had she been cursed? This made even less sense than before.

Estelle dropped her arm, belatedly, to her side, at a loss. Her frown abruptly became a pout and her gaze a touch imploring towards him; as if now, in spite of all her earlier outbursts, she really deserved this constable’s sympathy.

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   Jack Dorset

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If Jack hadn't already been holding his wand he might have been tempted to draw it.  She seemed to swell and sway with more and more rage with every passing moment and he was increasingly convinced he was witnessing a fit of the 'hysterics' he'd heard about.  He didn’t know what would happen if you let 'hysterics' get out of hand but by the looks of it she might end up exploding if he didn’t get her to a healer soon. 

His head reared back slightly as she swatted at him and he had just begun to raise his wand to a more defensive grip when she froze.  The blow had been nothing but something about it clearly shocked her… and then she patted him again, in a way he could only describe as questioning.  He frowned slightly as he watched her expression, clearly trying to puzzle through something. 

He hardly dared to move.  Could she be finally seeing reason?  Had simply telling her she wasn’t dead a second time actually done the trick?  Suddenly all the vim and vigor of her tirade seem to leech out of her, leaving her looking deflated and a bit lost in his eyes. 

His expression softened as she looked imploringly at him.  Her hysterics fit must be passing, he realized.  "Here -" he said gently, conjuring a chair for her.  He could only imagine she would feel drained after something like that.  "Right, you got a letter -" he echoed in the same gentle voice, as if repeating was somehow helpful.  All he knew was they were making progress and he wanted to make sure it stayed that way. 

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He had conjured her a chair. She took offence to that: whether this was because it was still too soon to feel another material connection to the earth in her newfound awareness that she was not a ghost, and could still sit, or because she simply did not like his patronising tone of voice, she couldn’t say.

“Yes,” Estelle said, continuing to stand and merely resting her hands on the back of the chair, as if this might project more surety and confidence to her telling of the story; as if none of her previous confusion had occurred. She had not liked him when he refuted every bit of her story, made her out to be unhinged. She fancied now she liked him even less. There he was, looking appropriately concerned and ready to believe her, and Estelle scarcely knew how to explain any of it at all!

“I got a letter, and it said I was dead,” she explained finally, narrowing her eyes to make him believe it, however unsure she was herself. “I’m sure of it. It said I had died.” How it followed that she had absorbed that lie into her very bones, Estelle had no idea – nor did she know precisely what she could order the young constable to do about it. He could not very well arrest a letter. And Estelle could not recall who it had been from. Who would wish her dead? It seemed ludicrous that anyone could.

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He nodded, taking everything she said seriously.  Maybe even a bit too seriously but he thought if she could see how seriously he was taking it it would encourage her in this direction back to sanity.  But it wasn't a stretch for him to believe, it sounded like a hex at the very least. 

"Do you remember dropping the letter or do you still have it on you?" Every now and then he'd unconsciously look at the chair seat, wishing she'd sit despite how firm and steady she was standing.  "If you still have it, don't reach for it just yet."  he kept his voice calm and even.  He didn't want her to worry but he also thought if she had something hexed or cursed just chilling in her pocket he might have to call some kind of containment team. 

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She felt a fool, now. The change to the constable’s manner, the new gentle tone of his voice; the chair, as if she were an invalid; the seriousness to him as if her being attacked had been quite impossible, but her being hexed, as a cruel prank, was that much more conceivable. There was something about being treated like this, something in her own sheepishness, that made Estelle bristle again.

“Why on earth would I have kept it?” She’d thought she was dead – a ghost, incapable of holding anything – and she resented the very presumption that she was stupid enough to hang onto something magically harmful.

(Apparently she had been careless enough to drop it on the street, instead, but... that was no longer her problem.)

“So,” she snapped, wanting nothing more than for the constable to simply stop looking at her like that, “you had better go find it, hadn’t you?!” It might be a clue towards catching the culprit – and now that she had told the tale once already, Estelle had absolutely no intention of being shepherded anywhere to relive the mortifying events of the past half-hour again. “And I have to be on my way, thank you,” she added haughtily, pressing the chair back towards him and relinquishing it with a flourish to demonstrate how much of a hurry she had been in, because she clearly lived a busy, successful life and didn’t have time to be cursed or detained by lowly constables. If she had known anything about memory charms, she might have wiped his mind entirely. But the next best option was evidently to turn on her heel and stalk away, hoping to herself that he would somehow forget this had ever happened of his own accord.

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He very nearly retorted 'why on earth would you think you were dead' but she kept right on before the sass could get the better of him.  His only concern about the letter was that she not touch it again.  And if she'd dropped it then that wasn't a problem.  Of course there was a chance someone else would touch it and have the same affliction, if it was cursed like he suspected, but Hopkins was over there to deal with that.  He realized belatedly that that didn't really solve the problem of Hopkins potentially touching it.

He looked over towards where the other Constable had gone which was just enough distraction for Miss Malfoy to push the chair back at him and stalk off.  A quick tap of his wand took care of the chair and he had nearly set off after her, worried to let her go off on her own so soon after being hexed but that would leave his partner uninformed.  He watched her walk away, mouth open ready to call out, for half a moment of indecision before shaking his head and heading in the opposite direction to tell his partner about the cursed letter.

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