As pleasant as Mr Jarvis was, their first meeting had left Cassiopeia with serious doubts about the future. She was glad that the wars weren’t won by the enemy, but that was as far as it went. His mention of Captain America and HYDRA she could only accept as someone, somewhere, tampering with the timeline – hers or his, she couldn’t tell – because she remained quite firm in her belief that there was only one ‘universe,’ only one final reality. After all, if she were to believe otherwise, there would be no point in discussing the outcome of the wars at all.
She had listened, mostly, and only asked once if he had heard anything of a man named Grindelwald. Her own involvement she concealed, saying that her family thought it improper for a woman of her standing to undertake war work of any description. She knew how that must make her look, having heard that even the royal muggles involved themselves, but at the time it had seemed far better than telling lies she might be caught out in.
Most of what she heard did not surprise her, even if it was terrible. But Mr Jarvis’ explanation of the bombs dropped on Japan made Cassiopeia grow very pale. If it was true, then it was proof that Grindelwald was right. Not about wanting to annex and rule Britain, never that – but in his argument that muggles were capable of causing harm and destruction beyond their imagining, that they needed to be stopped. She was no innocent; she took a certain intellectual delight in learning the most dreadful curses she could. It wasn’t the same, though. The sheer scale of it meant that it couldn’t ever be thought the same.
None of this, of course, was poor Edwin Jarvis’s fault, and she hoped that he took her reaction for nothing more than shock to her delicate sensibilities. She didn’t intend to raise the matter again, at least until she’d had the time to think it over. Today’s meeting would be of a different sort.
She smiled softly as he greeted her. ‘Mr Jarvis, it is lovely to see you. I’m terribly sorry to hear that Mrs Jarvis couldn’t join us. I do hope that she is feeling stronger soon.’ Pausing, Cassiopeia reached into her pocket and retrieved a small glass potion-bottle, filled with a deep blue liquid. ‘Perhaps you will pass this on to her from me? It is a tonic that can often aid in recovery.’ From what she had heard, Mrs Jarvis was in need of stronger healing magic than it was possible to find at the Everdale apothecary – but it certainly would do her no harm, and Cassi genuinely wished to help.