Hiding Behind Gunhilda

Michael was boiling--at Jack. Rookwood's ire, he understood, but Jack was acting like a first rate asshat. This wasn't anything like what he was used to seeing when he worked with her, and this was a side of her he did not like.

"People," he repeated, glaring at her. "You have 'people.' How fortunate for you, then. You obviously weren't listening when I did talk to the Minister about this very issue, and someone who looked amazingly like you was there with me. We know how they got there. Remember? Missing train? Robert isn't an idiot. Besides, he's got a child of his own on that train himself, a child he happens to be quite fond of, if you must know. If you still thought Robert was still a suspect, why didn't you ask him when he was standing right in front of you? Why do you need your own squad of people to go behind his back now?

"Now, hypothetically if any sort of decent witch or wizard just happened to look out their window and see that a whole train had set itself upon his garden or his lawn, wouldn't he have surely sent an owl by now asking someone to get the bloody train off their flowers and take the kids along, or something? If that sort of magic had happened here on English soil, our magical energy tracers, even if they had somehow covered the train's disappearance, should have traced the energy that would have been generated by the train's reappearance if it had been here on English soil. Here's a thought. Why don't you send your 'people' house to house looking for a train? That sounds lovely and productive."

Michael still believed the key was in who had access to the train itself, who had that much power to do that sort of magic, and who had the sort of space to accommodate an entire train and the whole student body of Hogwarts, all without triggering some sort of magic alert. That had to be some unplottable location, surely, and an unplottable location that size, with those assets were not unlimited. The longer that time went on without a word of the students, the more he was starting to believe that the students might not be in England anymore at all, but so long as he wasn't being taken seriously by these two, he wasn't going to even broach the subject.

"Rookwood," he said quietly to Theodore, "have a drink or three. It might help. This still isn't your fault, Lad--truly. As long as I'm here, I think I'll take a walk and see if I can't find anything useful outdoors and come back in a bit." He looked back at Jack. "You have the floor, then, Jack. Please, do go on and tell him how you and your people are going to solve this."

He whistled for Hiss who slithered from behind Gunhilda and slipped up into his pack. He got out a cigarette and lit it, and turned and headed down the stairs to go out and look over the grounds.

Theodore hung his head a little and brought the cigarette to his lips. He wasn’t sure if he took much reassurance from Jack’s words. He felt somewhat relieved that she wasn’t going to start hurling accusations at him that he couldn't withstand. At this point, his turmoil was such – as evidenced by the fact that he was rattling around the castle like a ghost – that he would have gladly let the Ministry take him, try him, and commit him to Azkaban. He knew that he had not done it but he had not prevented it, either, and in his mind, where the school was concerned, the crime of negligence was as bad as that of agency.

“I should have been able to protect them from the moment they left these gates,” Theodore corrected softly through an exhalation of smoke. “From King’s Cross to Hogsmeade and back again. When they are not with their families, Hogwarts is their family and their home. As the imagery goes, I’m their father, as well as their chief educator. I’ve failed them. So perhaps not all of the blame, eh? Just the majority.” His smile was wry and self-deprecating. It didn’t last long.

Theodore’s attention moved from his turmoil almost immediately, however, when the Gryffindor’s temper flared out at Tremaine. His eyebrows rose in surprise and then furrowed as he connected the unexplained dots that this Fawcett woman was supposed to have done this – or was guilty by her failure to notify anyone. So the train was in Ilvermorny, too? Was that what they were getting at? Or was he hearing wrong? Because one moment, it seemed as though they understood where it had gone. Then they said they didn’t. Theodre’s temples began to throb a bit. Someone had magic canny enough to transport over a thousand children over an ocean.

And then Tremaine bit back and Theodore found himself in the crossfire of an argument whose first act he had not been privy to. He moved back towards the firewhisky before Michael had the sense to suggest it. A glass was conjured by a slip of hand that Millie had taught him and he poured an unseemly amount into the glass after flicking some ash out of one of the windows.

It bothered him, what Michael said. If they were at Ilvermorny then surely someone would have said something. Theodore hadn’t taken up relations with them but he’d not poisoned the well, either. Although it was common knowledge that he favoured the brutality of Durmstrang and the juxtaposing gentility of Beauxbatons, no one from that side of the water had reached out to him, either. That said, he had a formidable relationship with the headmistress of Castelobruxo, having been the first to congratulate her on her appointment. She was unnervingly clever – he’d learned that much in her very first reply to him. It was fair to say that her mind was one he would have loved to crack open and study. She belonged to a rather long list, in that regard. Theodore would have started, first, with his grandfather.

She was also, however, jarringly beautiful. When he’d met her, he was ever so grateful for the headmaster of Durmstrang’s ability to talk through any situation without, seemingly, a break. It gave Theodore enough cover to build up the courage to finally interject and talk to her. It took him a good fifteen minutes. Suffice to say, he had a crush. Since that dinner, they’d become very good friends, though, and it was her letter that had sat on the top of the pile when concern came streaming in from his international colleagues. Although, not from Ilvermorny, either. Even the Uagadou head, whose busy schedule had never allowed for the two professors to meet. Theodore planned to remedy that as soon as everything was settled. Perhaps he’d just throw a party and be done with it.

“That went well,” he deadpanned when Tremaine was out of earshot. He rose to his feet, abandoning the glass and bottle on the bench he’d not realised he’d sat down on. Perhaps he was more tired than he’d thought. He stubbed out the cigarette and vanished it with a flick of his wand before looking down over at Jack again, curiosity this time playing at his features.

“I need a bit of a straight answer here. You think there’s a connection between the Ilvermorny ferry and my train. Tremaine suspects the Headmistress of Ilvemrorny. Are they …” he squeezed the bridge of his nose, trying to figure out if he was just going mad. “They’re not there, are they?”

Of course, before Michael gave her a chance to defend of explain herself, he was storming away, which was absolutely no help to their situation. Had she not been particularly disappointed at the spat with her friend, she might have made some joke at his retreating back, but she knew when an issue ran too deeply for it to be joked away. She suspected he was off to tell Robert that she had gone rogue and was not to be trusted - an issue that would worry her if the Unspeakable job position did not have the permission it did to work completely independently. And, upset as she was, she had another suspicion that Robert and Michael still wanted to trust her.

Well, she could hope.

That left her with Rookwood, a classmate she had expected no further acquaintance with upon graduation. But here they were, left with the burden of unhappy families all across their country. He said the exact type of thing she had considered buttoning Michael's exit with, again leaving her with the reminder that expectations were made to be broken.

She reached for the drink, now that no one was telling her to drink (stubborn as she was), and took a deep drought to warm her insides. Jack let out a heavy sigh. "We'll know soon, I think. Michael is stuck on pointing the finger at Gwen. I don't see how that helps until we locate the kids. Like I said, the transportation issue seemed to be the most interesting to me, and it was Alice Longbottom who really nailed that there can't be a coincidence there." She paused. "She's a good kid, that one. Probably annoys the shit out of her classmates, but..." she shrugged, drinking again. "Anyway. I have some colleagues on the ferry as we speak. They should be at Ilvermorny in a half hour." She raised a hand, twirling her fingers to reveal the DA coin, later of course used for Potter's Army, before tucking it away. "They'll be able to let us know what they find there. There's no evidence the kids are there except that there's only two schools in the whole world having issues getting their kids home. Unless they are all hiding in the forest, I think it's worth a check."

Michael wanted to check out the ferry launch, in particular. Someone had gotten to the train and had somehow tinkered with it. It should not have been possible because the train was very heavily warded for the safety of all on board, and even more so after James had managed to blow up the bloody bridge and sink the train. It didn't make sense that anyone could have tinkered with it.

So, what about the ferry? Had anyone tinkered with that as well? And, how the devil was Gwen getting back and forth to England at the drop of a hat? The portal between the schools to be used by the headmasters was the only thing that had made sense, but if Rookwood had sealed it off, then, had she somehow used it before Rookwood had sealed it and then perhaps created a portal of her own elsewhere? And if so, where? Surely the Hogwarts protections spells would have warned of an intruder, would they not?

But then again, the wards hadn't exactly warned Rookwood of Jack either. They'd warned him about Michael, but not Jack, and that didn't make any bloody sense either. Michael had figured he could get in. He was supposed to be able to get into nearly impossible places, but Jack? What special skill did she have? Even if the Order did have the Marauder's Map, still, Rookwood's wards should have warned him there was a second intruder.  That didn't make sense at all. So if Jack could get in without notice, then surely someone else could, especially if they'd had some sort of permission to do it.

The long walk to the Black Lake gave Michael a chance to smoke and think. Means, Motive and Opportunity. It always came down to those three. Jack was stuck at Means. Well, the means was bloody obvious. The train. They'd taken the train. It was purely a longshot, much like tossing a dart at a map, to decide where the train had gone. Michael at least had some idea of motive. Gwen. It came back to Gwen, at least in his mind. Gwen wasn't that powerful, though, so that did complicate his theory. How could she have managed that level of magic? So far as Michael knew, she didn't have it in her. Did she have confederates? Or perhaps one very powerful confederate? Neither explanation was very comforting. It did explain a lot in other ways, though. It half-assedly explained opportunity. It surely explained motive, enough to warrant looking at her deeper to either rule her in or out as a suspect.

He reached the ferry launch and was stunned. The ferry was gone. Just freaking gone. He looked around at the dock, examining it for clues and found nothing of consequence. That didn't make sense either. Just a few moments ago, Rookwood was a man who looked truly hopeless, helpless, overwhelmed, clueless, and the rest of it. If he'd even had a notion of something worthwhile to try, Michael was sure he'd have seen something besides a man half a step past his own edge. No, Michael was convinced Rookwood knew nothing about the pilfering of a whole bloody boat.

But that didn't make sense entirely either. If the students were on the train, then who took the stupid boat and why? Why not talk to Rookwood about the only other logical means to get to Ilvermorny and try to check things out--unless...unless someone had gone rogue on Rookwood and had decided to swipe the boat to take matters into their own hands. But who? And who else was even thinking about Ilvermorny?

Jack's words came echoing back into his brain. What had she said? "The ferry to Ilvermorny had some problems of it's own, if you didn't know. I've actually. I've actually got some people working on that one."

Oh, she wouldn't, would she? She wouldn't decide she was high and mighty enough to arrange with some rogue mob of her buddies and send them off in a boat across the Atlantic to try to rescue people from a school on a hunch while she simply used her and Rookwood as a mammoth stalling tactic to let them go? The possibility that she used him and for her own ill purposes was painful for Michael. He'd trusted her for years like he trusted few other people. And to now be turned on and used? He couldn't let himself even think about that yet. He had no desire to even go there, but if she expected them to smooth it over, over a pint, like they smoothed over everything else that went sideways, Michael wasn't sure that would work as well, if in fact she had used him.

And besides, the students weren't all going to fit on one load of the ferry to get back in one trip anyway--if Gwen didn't kill them all--the mob band of pirates Jack might have engaged, as well as perhaps the students as simply unfortunate casualties, for trying to breech school security and for causing an international crime at the same time. Did Jack not even envision that the school had security wards that England knew nothing about? Did she not consider that the school would defend itself? Besides, what gave Jack that right?

She surely couldn't justify it with her Unspeakable credentials. Ministry credentials, no matter what level, were still not licenses to sally forth and do whatever the hell one wanted, including risking many, many lives. This sort of thing, if she were indeed responsible, might very well put her job as an Unspeakable either right on the line or over it. If Robert had had some notion, he certainly hadn't acted like he knew that Jack was going to do something this asinine.

Breaking international law, especially with one's allies, was just a really stupid thing to do. If she really had wanted to do this, it would have been easy enough to do, and with the full blessing, probably, of Lee Shepherd and Robert to cover her behind, and probably with Rookwood giving her his blessings to use the boat. Why steal the bloody thing?

If she were responsible for this, Michael couldn't guarantee that she might not end up in a level of trouble that Michael couldn't help her out of. Michael didn't want to see her sitting on some cold stone bench in Azkaban, but there were former Ministry employees who'd ended up there for awhile for less than this. If she had indeed done this and risked so many innocent lives in the process, she might very well have committed a crime against the crown. He wasn't about to turn her in for it, but he didn't have one thing to help defend her either.

Tell me you didn't, Jack. Tell me you had nothing to do with this and that you weren't involved in this, he thought. Sadly, in his heart of hearts, he knew better. It was her style in too many ways for him to look past.

He tossed his cigarette butt on the grass and crushed it with his foot. He turned his attention to Gwen. If she were getting in and out with some sort of portkey or portal, how had she done it?

Not inside the school, surely. Not now.  Maybe at one time, but when the ferry had been running, what would have prevented her from taking the ferry over here and then making her own portal or portkey to come and go as she wished? If there were a portal, was it still on Hogwarts' grounds, and could he prove any of it?

He looked to his left and to his right. If he were Gwen, and if she had indeed taken the ferry at one point to get to England, where had she gone from here?

If she'd gone to the right, she'd have run into pretty much nothing but rugged, brutal rock. Gwen was not a climber. She was too proper and sissified for that. Besides, it would have led her back to being seen, full view, by anyone in any of the towers in the castle, or on the bridge. No, that didn't work.

However, if she'd gone to the left, it was rocky, yes, but not so much. Besides that, it was a much shorter route right to the Forbidden Forest where she'd have been well hidden--and besides, it was closer that way to Hogsmeade and civilization. She could have picked up a rock or a shell anywhere along the way and have made a portkey to get her back here--or just outside the school walls where a flux in magic would easily have been dismissed by the tracers as some buggared up student spell.

Why did that make immense sense in his head? It certainly gave her means and opportunity, and, with what he knew of her and the past history she had, he already believed she had plenty of motive.  

Of course, so far it was all circumstantial, but he might, now, have something to discuss with Robert. Maybe. Rookwood? He didn't know Rookwood well enough to know. Jack, so far as Michael was concerned, was on her own now if she had had any part in pilfering the ferry. He needed to keep working this end for himself. He started hiking, trying to retrace what he guessed Gwen might have tried, if she had tried it at all.

"Your liberal use of the word us is interesting," Rookwood's voice was low but his tone was verging on the airy and disinterested. His fingers reached behind his ear for the second cigarette and he took a break between words to puff it to life and draw in a deep belly-full. "When," he continued, the smoke emanating from between his lips, "you didn't even think to ask me if you could break people into my school to use the said launch."

Theodore rose to his full height, an expectant eyebrow rising just slightly. Dissatisfaction vibrated from every pore. He couldn't find it within himself even to care after the Hufflepuff whose cleverness he knew he should have given some credit to. All her mention did was rankle with him, and make him irritated that fate or some other slight of hand had seen fit to roll the dice in the favour of some at the expense of others.

And why hadn't he known? Had the portraits been so deafening? Had the distraction been such that he could not even feel the magic around him crackle and spit with-- unless...

"One of them's a staff member," he guessed. And his or her ability to come onto the grounds freely must have gone some way to hide those who could not. "I'm going to need you to get very specific very quickly about who you've sent across on the ferry, Dyllan."

His mind was storming over every stone, trying to detect within his own realm of reasoning who would be so bold as to defy any sense of protocol and so entirely keep him in the dark. He didn't doubt his family. He couldn't. Keiran wouldn't. Millie... She'd have told him somehow, at least. Baldric hadn't. He knew exactly where Baldric was. And so the list went on, doubt and panic affecting the Rookwood's ability to stay rational, level, and, above all, unruffled by the situation. It just compounded it all, didn't it? Failure, with a heaping dollop of betrayal straight on top.

Just fantastic.

It seems her ally was lost as easily as he was won.

She turned tilted her head, an eyebrow arching. "Transportation between the two schools was moderated by the Department of Transportation, meaning that it's just as much Ministry jurisdiction as it is yours. More so ours seeing as there's now an investigation into what happened with the train." She hated formality, and honestly hated upon relying on that blanket we're-the-Ministry authority, especially because she was so against it. But what had they wanted her to do?

Jack squinted at him again. "Pulling rank doesn't play well with me, especially when there's nothing to back it," she said. "I don't know if you know this, but each Unspeakable has their areas of study and specialization. One of mine, is national security. This falls under that blanket. This is my job."

If she were a pettier person, she might have asked him to start again, to give the respect she was so willing to give in return if he would just remember her place. The fact of the matter was, she had acted within her right. And if anyone suggested she hadn't, there was absolutely no proof she had sent them. She had not been the one to make the orders.

"They were both on your staff," she said, her voice still careful. "And the second they get there, they're going to contact me. There's no controversy here. There's only the opportunity to actually get in on an investigation that's not going to get bogged down in red tape, if you were interested."

And here he was, past the castle's vegetable gardens, at the edge of the Forbidden Forest. It was a relatively easy thing to get out from here. The forest actually came to a sort of a narrow point here at the corner of the property. It had been a long hike, but he was sure that Gwen could have made this. It was comparatively level ground, compared to going the opposite direction.

He went further, to the corner of the forest, and started to search to see how she might have gotten out from here. There was a fence here, designed to keep people from coming onto castle grounds if they'd simply hiked down the road or the tracks from the station.

Gwen wasn't going to climb anything, that was for sure. He started searching through the bushes here, and he almost missed it. Footprints in the mud under a spindly bush. Prints of a woman's high heels. Of course she'd be stupid enough to hike this distance in heels. That was what a proper woman wore, after all, wasn't it? What a git she was! And here, the print was smudged, as if one foot had slipped in the mud. But he had the proof he was looking for. Too bad he didn't have a camera on him. It wasn't something he'd anticipated he'd need.

But, back to the issue at hand. How did she get out from here? He got out his rope and sent it up the wall. He climbed up the wall and found scratches on the top of the wall, on the rock. They were just wide enough to give him the answer he needed. She'd somehow brought a fire escape ladder, tossed it on the top of the wall, and climbed the ladder, tossed the ladder over the wall on the other side and then climbed down. He guessed she hadn't done this many times, but for some reason she'd found it necessary.

Rookwoods permissions should have prevented this sort of elementary sort of exit, unless there either was a hole of some sort in his wards, or unless something had distracted him at the moment, or unless she'd had some sort of help to hide her presence. Rookwood wasn't stupid. This didn't make sense at how easily it had been done, but yet, the evidence was here. He was becoming more convinced the Gwen he'd known wasn't this designing, wasn't this strategic. He was beginning to think Gwen wasn't operating alone.

What he did have, though, was enough evidence to convince Robert that Gwen was more than just somewhere on the list of suspects. Right now, she was probably going to advance to the top of the list.

He was going to have to tell Rookwood. That was for certain. He had to know. But Jack? Apparently she didn't need to know. She'd opted out to steal the Hogwarts ferry. There wasn't any justification for it that Michael could see that would cover it, but that didn't mean Jack wasn't going to try to sell it to Rookwood. He was sure that was happening just about now. Whether Rookwood as going to buy it, well, Michael had no clue about that.

He put the rope back in his pack and started to hike back towards the castle, going much more of an 'as the crow flies" path, rather than going back the way he came. He was starting to wish he hadn't left the firewhiskey with Rookwood because he wanted a drink himself.

When he got back to the castle, he decided he would sit in one of the outside courtyards, on one of the benches under a tree and just sit, smoke, and think.

Nothing had ever charmed Theodore Rookwood about the Ministry of Magic. He had done his turn there, when his brother had had little interest in anything other than yachts in the Mediterranean and the company of beautiful women. Theodore had always been much more conscientious than Lionel and had wanted to show that he was an asset to his father rather than a waste of space like Thaddeus had always had him think he was. The Ministry was cold, in Theodore’s mind, bureaucratic, blunt, and inefficient. Impotent. It had always frustrated him but he had never truly hated the Ministry, not like he had come to in recent weeks. Every inch of it he loathed, from its disgustingly corrupted top to its seedy underbelly. Everything reeked with the stench of something long having gone bad inside of it. No, now he hated it. He didn’t think he had enough within him to hate something else, alongside his father. Somehow, though, he’d found it. That bit of himself that could hate something else.

And it tired him.

It tired him that he couldn’t do anything, that he had as much influence over events as a gnat buzzing around an Auror’s head somewhere, wherever he or she was, in the country. He was tired of being stamped over by Ministerial boots without so much as an explanation. He was sick of just being expected to take it; take the fact that he was left looking like a mug for losing the train while they fixed it all to the sound of applause and countless accolades, maybe a knighthood here and there. If the Ministry didn’t sack him for incompetence, just out of spite to shoot the dog while he was already down and kicked, perhaps he’d summon the courage to resign himself. But then, what sort of man did that make him if he left the school to someone who was potentially not as equipped as he was to deal with the annual crises that happened for seemingly no reason at all? Ah, but then, the Ministry would sort it out, wouldn’t it? Even though the Ministry was possibly responsible for it all in the first place?

“Well, as the pair of you have stunningly exemplified, I bear don’t bear any rank worth respecting do I?” He waxed, bringing the cigarette to his lips as he took a seat once more. He raised an eyebrow at her, incredulity staining his features. “I know I lost a train full of kids but if national security’s meant to be your job, love, then neither of us are going to make employee of the month, are we?” He shook his head and flicked the ash away, reaching down to pick up the firewhisky, pouring a hearty slug into his own glass before holding it out to her. A miniature olive branch. Not nearly as tasty as olives, either.

“I’m sorry, Dyllan,” he sighed. “I am. I’m sorry. You’re probably very fine at your job. After all, I suppose you have the unenviable task of having to clean up after everyone else’s messes, don’t you? And you have to deal with him and the mutterings about the bird from Ilvermorny,” Theodore gestured off in the direction Michael had gone. “But I don’t understand why no one knew anything. From your point of view, looking at me, I’m sure it’s weird that I didn’t know but the Ministry … something’s wrong here. We can’t have all been blindsided. Someone must have known something. Why didn’t the Department of Transportation shut the link down? I made it clear that I wasn’t using it so if it was being illicitly used why didn’t they investigate? What’s all this nonsense about the Fawcett woman? Why are they only interested in her now? If she’s so suspicious, why wasn’t she investigated before?”

Theodore stubbed out the cigarette. “If they find them, let me know, alright? Come to me first, please. They’re my kids. I don’t want to be the last to know. Give me that much, at least. Please? And you can have free run of whatever you like. I won’t bitch and whine … too much,” he smirked.

Jack waited patiently.

She understood how upset he was. Firstly, the personal stake in this whole debacle was enormous. Surely parents were already calling for his removal, over an act he could hardly be blamed for since no one else had predicted it, but the crowd needed someone's blood and they were going to be intent on having Theo's. (Misguided fools.) And then there was the issue of actual guilt and fear for the kids. Jack didn't take Theo for a cold, aloof Headmaster, so he certainly wanted his charges to be safe.

It was an ugly situation, and it was bound to bring out a mix of the best and worst in people. She knew that. She chalked up Michael's sudden complete lack of trust in her on that. It wasn't like he had acted outside of her knowledge before. She knew that people would return to their senses once the kids were safe.

So she could wait.

Fortunately, she didn't have to wait long for him to deflate and reroute. She took the bottle, though she didn't go to drink, just held it, giving him a break from it. Not that she was ever one to withhold drink from anyone, but she figured he might like the excuse not to drown out his miseries. She ticked her lips in minor amusement - she wasn't used to the apology part.

"I'm not here to blame you," she reminded, as a cap on his apology. "I'm really not. You're going to get a lot of unnecessary heat from everyone else, and that's just too bad. Blame doesn't help save those kids." Which is what she had been trying to tell- agh, whatever. "And I certainly don't consider myself blameless. But the reason we were blindsided, as far as I can tell, is because there was nothing to see. If someone knew something, they were involved. It's part of the reason I have an interest across the sea. It can't have come from within, because no one knows anything."

"As for Fawcett," she said, and now she took a swig of the drink, because she knew it. "If it's her, as Michael says, it's all something personal with Robert- and don't get me started on how f*cking cheesed I'll be if that's the case. If we have madwomen running around taking revenge on our Minister by kidnapping our problems, then a train is the least of our problems."

She blew air out of her cheeks. "It's fine, though. Chasing after Gwen seems to me a bit useless - if anything, and she is our culprit, it'll tip her off."

She smirked along with him. "I'm used to it," she said, flicking her eyebrows upward. "I'll send you a patronus the second I hear a peep," she said. "It's not a good time for everyone to turn on each other. Not with kids at stake."

The longer he sat and smoked, the more angry with Jack he became. He knew what she'd done, and as noble as she thought her mission might be, saving the kids and all that business, how she had done it was not so very noble. There was nothing in the nature of her mission that gave her the right to commandeer a boat the belonged to the school, not without notifying Robert of her intent to do so or getting his support. Emergent as it was, it wasn't as if she didn't have time to notify him. It did not appear that these "people" were Ministry workers b/c if they had been, Robert would likely have known.  And, if she had the time to draw in civilians into a Ministry investigation, which was not her right to decide anyway, then she had certainly had time to send off an owl or something. Yet, apparently, Robert didn't merit her time or respect. However, he was bloody important enough to her to give her the credentials she hid behind and the paycheck that went along with it.

No, he was now deciding that he didn't need to read Rookwood in on anything as long as Jack was still there. Let her think she was in the right. So be it. Let her go off and send civilians into harms way, then he wanted no part of reading her in on anything more. She had thought nothing of reading him in on her little escapade, so he was really quite good with her on her own trail instead of muddying his any further.

He drew in a deep breath to try to suck up some diplomacy and reel in his anger. Sadly enough, he wasn't sure there would be anything left of his relationship with her when this was over. And that was very regrettable indeed. However, if her behind were going to be roasted on a rotisserie back at the office, that was also something Rookwood didn't need to know.

He tossed his cigarette butt on the grass and snuffed it out with his shoe.

"Hiss, threaten to hang me if I open my mouth too widely about this," he said rhetorically to the rope. Then he realized that sometimes the rope did take things at face value, and that might not have been the best instruction to give it.  Oh well.

He went back inside and upstairs and found them much as he'd left them.

"Headmaster," Michael addressed him, "thank you so much for your hospitality, despite my unannounced intrusion upon you. I've found what I've come for. If and when I have news for you, I'll let you know." He didn't need to tell Rookwood to strengthen his wards. Clearly, Rookwood was irked enough that he'd had two intruders today that telling him that there had been another was hardly worth adding to his self recrimination.  Besides, Gwen had to have help to get this far. Michael hadn't figured out the how of it, but the evidence did speak for itself.

"I presume you'll be only too happy to have one less intruder on your premises, so if you'd be so kind as to allow me out, I'll just be on my way, then."  He knew if he had to, he could probably get out the way he came, but it seemed more appropriate now to not violate his trust or hospitality any further.