So Much for No Strings Attached

Chapter 61 Old and New Alliances

It was a week and two days since the meeting with the board of governors. Things had been going well since then. Marcus had decided that he wanted to keep an eye on the Weasley girl to make sure she wasn’t taking any foolish risks and didn’t harm the children when they were born.

 

Thus, he had been hired without a single protest as the Defence Against the Dark Arts Professor. Naturally, that meant he could no longer be both teacher and on the Board of Governors so was forced the resign. Lucius had been reappointed as a governor by Fudge who Lucius had helped to forget the accusations of blackmail that occurred two years previously with a generous donation.

 

Meanwhile, Flitwick had happily accepted the position as interim headmaster and Vector as the new Head of Ravenclaw house. That left the Charms, History and English posts which were currently being applied to. They had interviews would occur at the next Board of Governor meeting.

 

They would also have to go over the survey responses which were already flooding back. Several of the core subject teachers had already expressed how little time they had with teaching all seven years, usually several classes per year, marking homework and exams. It meant they barely had time to take interest in the students which was especially difficult when they had other duties like being Heads of House and their own families. Apparently, they only managed that by prolific use of personal Time Turners.

 

Tom remembered when he was young there were two teachers for all the core classes but for some reason neither Dumbledore nor the school board had not seen the need to hire additional teaching staff when the previous teachers retired.  That was something that should be changed. It was not advisable to use Time Turners and quite honestly would be only marginally more expensive hiring more staff than renting Time Turners from the Department of Mysteries.

 

Additionally, Haran Nott had been booked in to check out the curse on the Defence position at the beginning of August. That would mean when Tom removed the curse they could actually keep a Defence position. Not that Marcus was planning to stay past the year as he only wanted to be around to keep an eye on the Weasley harlot. But removing the curse would actually attract more applicants to the post who had no wish to expose themselves to the dangers of Lord Voldemort’s curse.

 

Currently, Tom was attending a meeting with King Ragnok. They had been allies in the past as Tom had promised the goblins equal rights should he manage to take control of the Wizengamot which he was closer than ever to doing so. Quite honestly the current government were fools for not already doing so. It was better to keep positive relations with those who held your money and could quite literally hold the whole country at ransom if they so choose to. The only reason they didn’t was because they did not want a full blown civil war any more than the wizards did. Most goblin rebellions were small scale lead by a group of dissatisfied goblins not the government themself.

 

‘King Ragnok,’ greeted Tom in goblin-tongue with a nod. ‘May the gold flow forever in your favour.’