Chapter 12: Hermione Reaches for the Spell-Index and Stops Herself

The portrait of the Flemish cartographer was smaller than Holmes had implied, and was located, Hermione discovered after eight minutes of increasingly irritated corridor-walking, not on the third floor but on the landing between the third and fourth, which was technically neither and which Holmes had evidently considered close enough.

He was already there when she arrived, standing with his back to the portrait and his case-book open, holding a piece of chalk between two fingers as though he had abstracted it from somewhere without noticing.

She had taken the back passage as instructed — down through the tapestry corridor, left at the disused prefects' bathroom, up through the narrow servants' stair that smelled of generations of floor-wax — and arrived slightly breathless and more annoyed about it than she intended to show.