On the list of Hogwarts bullies, there was another one — well, two more actually — outside Taylor’s rehabilitation program purview.
The first one was a known quantity: Filch and his cat.
The problem with Filch was that, after a month of observation, Taylor wasn’t sure she could brand the man a true bully. He scared most of the students — he scared the crap out of Taylor — but while he was abrasive, foul-tempered, creepy, and too happy to dole out punishments, he didn’t punish students without any reason or justification. His reasons were very petty, but also valid. The old codger had the unfortunate job of being the single caretaker of a gigantic castle with hundreds of magic weaving students doing mischief and looking for trouble, and Taylor had never seen him use a single spell to help with his job. Not even simple ones to do away with dirt and mud on rainy days.
He was unpleasant, maybe biased, and could probably do with a very long vacation in a place far away from kids, but Taylor didn’t feel comfortable applying the same rehabilitation to him, so he got a pass, barely.
The second one was Peeves. He was already dead, which left her with little she could do to him.
Peeves took to his curse immunity with renewed glee, much to the students’ detriment. Even the Bloody Baron had trouble keeping the poltergeist in check.
Taylor made notes of all of Peeves activities; she couldn’t do anything about him yet, but he wasn’t going to get a free pass. This was a magic school with a huge library with books about magic. Somewhere in there, something about ghosts probably existed. Taylor just needed the time to find it, and then he’d get his comeuppance.
October brought with, aside from a spate of colds, heavy, unending rain. Raindrops that sounded more like small pebbles thundered against the castle’s windows, and up in Ravenclaw’s tower, the sound made for comforting nights near the hearth and cuddling with Luna under blankets.
With that much rain, Taylor’s activities outside the castle ground to an instant halt. Her bugs couldn’t survive that long under such assault and their own instincts rebelled if she tried to push them out in the open. Not that she did that, Taylor liked her creepy crawlies alive and well fed, so for the sudden rainy season, she left the ones not working on her project resting and waiting and gorging.
Taylor wrote the last line of her homework barely paying attention to it. In a corner of her mind, she was rearranging her map of the third floor. A few of her spiders had found a gap behind a suit of armor that connected to a broom cupboard one floor down. She wasn’t sure if that was the signs of another secret passage.
Luna looked up from her own parchment. “You should wear your best robes on Thursday.”
Taylor glanced at her friend, waiting. Experience had taught her that Luna’s statements arrived in whatever order Luna’s head had arranged them, and asking for context up front only delayed it.
“For the tea party.”
“What tea party?”
“The one you’re hosting.” Luna turned her parchment around.
It showed a table with four chairs, a teapot, and a woman who had been drawn in grey ink while everything else had a semblance of colour. How Luna could draw with quills was a mystery worth solving later. Taylor more often than not left more ink on her fingers than the parchment.
“We invited the Grey Lady.”
Taylor’s quill stopped. Somewhere in the castle, about four hundred bugs stopped as well.
“I didn’t invite a ghost to tea.”
“We did. It was on the second day of school. You were trying to befriend every portrait and ghost looking for secrets.” Luna said without judgment, the way she said most things. “We passed her in the corridor by the Charms classroom. You said she seemed lonely and that she probably would like if someone invited her to tea.”
A inkling of a memory started to emerge.
Luna’s serene voice continued. “She looked at you, and you said, ‘Consider yourself invited,’ and she inclined her head in agreement.”
The memory returned and Taylor couldn’t believe she had forgot that. On second day of school she’d been running for hours exploring the castle, cataloguing portraits, challenging moving suits of armor to duels, and apparently, issuing social invitations to the dead out of some autopilot courtesy her mother had instilled years ago.
“That was more than a month ago!”
“Ghosts have a different relationship with time,” Luna said. “A month is quite prompt for them. She mentioned it to the Fat Friar, who mentioned it to a portrait on the fifth floor, who told me on Tuesday. She’s looking forward to it.”
“Why Thursday?”
“Ghosts prefer Thursdays. I asked the portrait why too, but he didn’t know either. Isn’t that wonderful? A whole new mystery just in the day of the week.”
Taylor put down her quill and began panicking about the situation: she had never hosted anything in her life! Mum had always been the one who invited people over, Taylor just showed up for the biscuits and tea.
“What does a ghost even do at a tea party. She can’t drink tea, can she?”
Luna’s dreamy eyes twinkled. “Can’t she?”
That night, Taylor’s letter to her mum might have had a slightly panicky question about how to host a tea party.
And because of her new hosting duties, Taylor spent Monday evening and the evening after in the library following a thread through a book titled ‘Ghosts of the British Isles, A Compendium of Spectral Etiquette’ (1811, badly foxed), and a slim, gossipy volume written in scrawling penmanship called ‘Dining with the Departed’.
What she found on both books was sad. Ghosts could not eat, ghosts could not taste. What they could do, or what some of them did, according to the compendium’s author, who had attended a Deathday party and never recovered from it, was position themselves near food so far gone that the smell was something vivid. If the smell was strong enough, a ghost could almost remember flavor.
Taylor read that passage three times over.
She could work with that.
Thursday afternoon found her and Luna in an unused classroom off the fifth-floor corridor. She had scouted the room with pixies and confirmed after three days of observation that no one even went there. Not even Filch and his cat.
Free to work unobserved, Taylor swept out the dust with spiders. Following her mum’s advice about ambiance, she had the pixies hung deep blue and bronze strips of spider-silk across the rain-soaked windows. If you were hosting a Ravenclaw, and every source agreed the Grey Lady had at some point been a Ravenclaw, you did your research.
Luna complimented the silk strips, running her fingers on the fabric, but thankfully didn’t ask where Taylor got it from, or how she had hung it over the windows.
A simple table stood in the center of the room with a cloth Luna had produced from somewhere. There were three chairs on one side, and a fourth for their ghostly guest on the other.
And the tea.
Taylor had approached the tea like it was a competition to win. If ghosts needed smelly things, she would do her best to make the smelliest tea ever.
The base was a black tea she’d over-steeped. Then she had added, after consultation with her Herbology books and a certain amount of experimentation that had cleared her end of the dormitory, a measure of flobberworm mucus, a crumbled bulb of something the greenhouse labeled stinking hellebore, and three drops of a fermented fish sauce that a Ravenclaw sixth-year kept hidden behind a portrait for reasons Taylor had elected not to investigate.
The resulting tea steamed in its pot like something with a grudge against the world. One of her flies had landed on the rim, sampling the air. It smelled like paradise to it; Taylor wanted to be nowhere near the pot.
The Grey Lady came through the wall at four o’clock. She wore her long cloak, and surveyed the room the way Taylor imagined queens of old had once surveyed rooms: Nose high in the air.
“Miss Hebert.” Her voice reminded Taylor of chilly winter days. “You issue an invitation and then require a month and an intermediary to honor it. In my day, a hostess kept her engagements in her head.”
“In her day, a hostess probably had servants to keep them there for her,” Luna answered, smiling at the ghost.
The Grey Lady looked at Luna and something moved across the grey face that was not quite a smile and was not quite not one.
“Miss Lovegood. Your mother once asked me the composition of ectoplasm in that same tone.”
“Did you tell her?”
“I did not know it. That vexed me for a decade.”
The ghost drifted to the table and arranged herself above it in a seated shape with the ease of someone who had a lot of practice. Then she saw the pot and turned her nose up. Taylor noted in the corner of her mind that a fantasy book would have called it a proud nose, a nose with lineage.
The temperature of the room did not change, but something in her bearing dropped ten degrees anyway.
“What,” she said, “is that.”
“It’s tea,” Taylor said. “I read that ghosts can experience very strong smells, almost like tasting. So I made it as strong as I could.”
The silence was thick enough to grab with both hands. Rain hammered the windows, the walls. Even Taylor’s spiders held still.
“You read.” The Grey Lady’s chin rose even more. “You read, no doubt, of the Deathday custom. Rotted proteins on tarnished platters, maggoted cheese, the Headless Hunt braying over a decayed salmon as though proximity to putrefaction were a pleasure and not a humiliation.” With each word, Taylor sank lower on her chair. “Understand me, child. I am not uncultured, like certain ghosts I could name and will not. I do not press my face into spoiled food and pretend. I do not yearn after the living and their functions. I died with my dignity, which is more than the living manage, and I have kept it for nine centuries. Remove that pot.”
Taylor dutifully removed the pot, feeling guilty about her mistake. She set it on the windowsill, where the rain could disapprove of it too, and sat back down. Then she made a decision she was aware of making: she was not going to apologize for that.
“Then I got it wrong,” she said, sitting straight on her chair. “The books made it seem like it was the correct choice. What would you actually want at a tea party?”
The Grey Lady regarded her, the nose with lineage lowered by a degree.
“Conversation, properly conducted.” she said. “It is the only refreshment I can still take, and the castle serves it weak.”
So they talked.
Luna poured ordinary tea for the living, and the Grey Lady spoke.
The Lady told them of the castle’s first century, when the moving staircases had not yet learned where to move to and would strand students in the rafters. Of a plague-cursed winter when the ghosts, even the one she would not name, had drifted through the infirmary in shifts, because the dying slept easier when someone kept them company and the dead did not need sleep. Of a Headmistress in the 1300s who had dueled a visiting delegation over a point of arithmancy and won. She had been censured by the school council, but hung the censure on her office wall in a gilt frame.
“The tapestry on the seventh floor, with the trolls in tutus,” Luna said after sipping her tea. “Is Barnabas the Barmy real?”
“Real, and exactly as advertised.” The Grey Lady paused, as if deliberating. “The trolls were more talented than history credits them, their misfortune was the choreographer.”
Taylor asked about the school founders, eager to learn more about the castle’s secrets, and saw the Lady’s face close like a door. She changed the subject to the castle’s architecture instead, and the door in the grey face opened again.
The rain kept on. The window-silk glowed faint blue when the lightning struck in the distance.
At some point Nap arrived, spraying heavy rain around the room. Instead of perching on the third chair like planned, the feathered cannonball royalty perched on top of Taylor’s head dousing her in heavy fat droplets.
The Grey Lady looked at the owl with what was unmistakably approval.
“Your owl does not fawn,” she said inclining her head to the lazy bird. “I respect that in a creature.”
Nap spread her very big wings and hooted. Taylor could almost swear she heard smugness on that hoot.
It was past six when the Lady rose, the seated shape unfolding into the standing one.
“The tea was an insult,” she said, “but the intention behind it was not. You are the first hostess in some decades to research her guest, Miss Hebert, even if your sources were slanderous. I am prepared to consider a future engagement.” There was a long pause where Taylor held her breath. “Without the pot.”
“Without the pot,” Taylor and Luna agreed.
The Grey Lady inclined her head the exact motion that had sealed the original invitation, and passed through the wall, taking the cold with her.
Luna gathered the cups, humming. “That went well.”
“She called my tea an insult.”
“Yes, but she stayed two hours.” Luna held one cup up to the light, checking it for something only Luna checked for. “Ghosts don’t stay for insults, they stay for company.”
Taylor looked at the pot on the windowsill, still spewing malice onto the world, and at the fourth chair, which held the faint chill of a dead guest.
Two hours of nine-hundred-year-old knowledge, one standing invitation and a confirmed report that the moving staircases had learned their routes (no one would believe her if she told someone else), which implied they could learn new ones.
As parties went, Taylor decided it was the best one she’d ever hosted.
She’d never hosted anything else, so it was even true.