Before she was Professor McGonagall, she was Minerva Macnair. After an arranged marriage forces her into an impossible situation, Minerva does what she must to survive. When she makes a new life for herself, her secrets follow and threaten everythin...
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"I can bear whatever I must during the marriage, but it would be very nice to have some control over this one thing. To have it be my choice."
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29 April 1944
The following weekend, Minerva found herself in her bedroom in Moray listening to her mother attempting to explain sex to her.
After several excruciating minutes, Minerva interrupted her mother's discourse on "the joys and sorrows of the wedding night", saying, "Mother, if you're trying to tell me that it's going to hurt the first time, it's all right. I know."
"Oh. Well ... there it is, then."
"Quite." Minerva managed a weak smile at her mother. She was doing her best, Minerva knew, but Glenna McGonagall had what her daughter considered to be an untidy mind and what devotees of Muggle literature would have recognised as a Victorian sensibility about certain matters.
"Minerva, you don't mean you ... you've ... you've not ... spoilt yourself?"
"No, Mother. Don't worry. It's just that, well ... the other girls, they talk. And some of them have ... you know ..."
Glenna sniffed. She had not been terribly enthusiastic about sending her daughter back to school after her O.W.L.s—Hogwarts was altogether full of the wrong sort, she had argued—but Magnus had insisted, to Minerva's profound relief.
"Well, is there anything else you'd like to ask? That the other girls have not expounded upon?" Glenna asked.
"No, Mother. But thank you."
Actually, there was quite a bit Minerva would have liked to ask, but her mother was not her first choice of informant on the matter. In point of fact, her first choice of informant on many forbidden topics was Tom Riddle. He was one of the few students Minerva could have a real conversation with, and he was a veritable fount of information on select subjects extraneous to the Hogwarts curriculum. But of course, Minerva wasn't about to ask a boy anything about sex—even if she did have the suspicion that Tom Riddle would be as informative on that subject as on anything else—and anyway, he had become rather distant after the Chamber of Secrets affair the previous year.
