Welcome to Charming, where swirling petticoats, the language of flowers, and old-fashioned duels are only the beginning of what is lying underneath…
After a magical attempt on her life in 1877, Queen Victoria launched a crusade against magic that, while tidied up by the Ministry of Magic, saw the Wizarding community exiled to Hogsmeade, previously little more than a crossroad near the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. In the years that have passed since, Hogsmeade has suffered plagues, fires, and Victorian hypocrisy but is still standing firm.
Thethe year is now 1894. It’s time to join us and immerse yourself in scandal and drama interlaced with magic both light and dark.
Kaatjie was nervous. This would be the first letter she had ever sent to her father. But she'd been careful to try to remove any identifiers, and it was important that she knew this information — and it was not as if she could ask her uncle. (Besides — this was the first time she could send a letter without her mother, or her uncle and aunt, knowing.)
So she would send him a letter. Just to check. And it didn't matter if this one was particularly impressive, because she was not going to tell him who she was in it.
(And Gryffindors were supposed to be brave, right? Everyone had told her that Gryffindors were brave.)
Mr. Don Juan Dempsey,
I am doing research on great writers and obviously decided to reach out to you. Can you send me the Hogwarts houses of yourself and your family, please?
Not an auspicious start to your career as a researcher. I'll do you the favor of not forwarding him the letter, so you can make a better first impression if you write him.
Kaatjie spent some amount of time staring at the letter, and then took another day to reply. Her mother had told her she was nothing if not tenacious. Ana would not have given up after one letter So neither could Kaatjie.
Mr. Don Juan Dempsey,
No, I definitely meant to write you. There is already a great deal of research on Mr. Eamon Dempsey.
X
(There wasn't, or it was written at a level that she had been unable to understand. But writing to another grandfather was daunting in and of itself, because she had had a grandfather who loved and spoiled her very much, and missed him dearly. What if Eamon Dempsey did not live up to the expectations set by Grandfather Spaans?
She'd never had a father — so there were no expectations.)
No one was busy until December. Things that were more likely: she was in mourning and couldn't get to events until December, and had too firm a hold on propriety to suggest a more private venue. She was pregnant and planned to have finished the pregnancy by December. Possibly she was out of the country, possibly fleeing scandal — maybe fleeing the scandal of being pregnant. He did the math; November delivery less nine months was February. He couldn't remember what he'd been doing in February with any degree of specificity. Anything was possible, he supposed. Gross.
But the persistence of the letters had intrigued him. His past experiences — and to some extent his present ones, with Valencia — taught him it was better to be apprised of what others wanted from you than to be blissfully ignorant. So he ought to go, even if all December brought was an attempt to trap him.
![[Image: 0hYxCaj.png]](https://i.imgur.com/0hYxCaj.png)