5/9/42, later
I should have known when I put quill to parchment to state my complaints against the day before the setting of the sun that the day would be offended, and henceforth do its part to make things worse. A minor rune-casting and a few tests after my acquisition of the suspicious plain black purse full of gold which Kyteler’s youngest and my Whitechapel boy were preparing to divide among themselves, I have identified the purse, or at least its owner, the identity of the purse itself never really having been called into question.
The purse belongs to the missing boy, Claudien de Kernoël; I will not yet declare him dead.
Kyteler’s youngest, infuriatingly, knows a smattering of Occlumency, and refuses to look me straight in the eye without glancing off to one side. She insists that she took the purse from Oldman, but I really cannot argue that as Oldman’s mind is fairly open to me and he concurs with great and expressive fluency that she took the purse. So I sent her off, and I could tell that she did not much like the idea of leaving Oldman alone with me.
Oldman is far smarter than he looks and, I think, will become the real leader in his year, unless Theodore Abbott surprises me. Bilius Weasley at the moment has the undivided attention of Ryan Pettigrew and Dafydd Llewellyn because he dares to be openly defiant, but eventually it will become clear that Bilius is altogether too much like his father even for his own good. I hope the baby, Arthur, proves to be a better bet. Oldman is not so taken in by Weasley, perhaps because of Kyteler’s youngest, whom I quite nearly wish had gone the way of her father; Chattox deserves her.
At any rate, Oldman insists that he took the purse from a red-haired ‘bird’. When he touched her, he says, he got quite a good look at her, which makes me believe she was using a glamour and that, in the presence of all the iron on the train and beneath it, the glamour was not strong enough to hold up under physical contact. I will have to have him questioned further by Longbottom and Forrester as I believe they may get more information out of him than I have been able to do, but it sounds as though the woman in question was indeed Ailise Kyteler, in which case the boy is in Ireland by now. And there is something brewing in Ireland, I suspect.
Cíaran Rochford did not show up to supper tonight. While he is of an age to take his supper in Hogsmeade if he chooses, he normally does not, and his sister Aoife is visibly panicked, shrinking from eye contact. I would not normally be so concerned about it were it not for the reports from the Hogsmeade train station. While the Hogwarts Express runs only at the beginning and end of terms, there is a daily train from Hogsmeade to Londinium and another from Hogsmeade to Edinburgh. Periodically students try to run away from school, usually with the intention of elopement and/or enlistment in the armed forces. If they are old enough to cross the Age Line there is nothing we can do but remove them from the rolls, as they are therefore old enough to marry or enlist and to choose to leave school; but younger ones we may detain and keep at school.
Dippet was informed of another such attempt today; the station agent denied it and said she believed it a misunderstanding, but the station-elf was quite forthcoming when the local Auror arrived. My name, apparently, was mentioned as the students’ Head of House. The boy was able to cross the Age Line, and Disapparated before he could be detained. Cíaran Rochford is the only one of my NEWT-level students who is not accounted for. The girl ran away, and of course Aoife is here. I cannot imagine that it was not Aoife, as the only person I would ever have thought might elope with Cíaran Rochford is, in fact, Ailise Kyteler, with whom he was once embarrassingly smitten.
Curiouser and curiouser.