Heels had been a bad decision. Though she had to admit that they made her legs seem to go on for days, Marine Reinard silently cursed whoever had invented the troublesome women's footwear as she slowly made her way through the cobbled and crowded streets of Diagon Alley. Navigating the throngs of people bustling from shop to shop during their lunch hour while trying to balance a very heavy stack of paintings would have been difficult enough in flat footwear. The task, as the slender French woman was discovering, was next to impossible in heels. Moving slowly, trying to glance around the paintings she carried in front of her, stacked in a precariously high pile, to avoid running in to people took a lot of energy and she was getting rather close to throwing her arms in the air and calling it a day. Heels and paintings be damned.
Under normal, unburdened, unheeled circumstances, Marine would be thrilled to be in London. She had a number of friends in the city and quite a few fond memories from her time here during a few short months after she'd graduated Beauxbatons and before she'd moved to Chatoeil permanently to try and run a museum. Today though, she was emotionally and physically exhausted. And it was only just now lunch time.
The stack of paintings she carried were ones she'd acquired that morning at an estate sale being run by the distraught family of a middle class witch who'd passed away just two nights before. They weren't exquisite works, or done by any of the big name painters in the wizarding world, but they were quite old and would make a good start to the landscapes collection she was putting together for a new exhibit. She'd received an owl from the deceased's daughter (an acquaintance from her London days) the night before asking is she was interested in coming and getting them before the lady's flat was emptied and sold. She'd arrived first thing in the morning to find the place crawling with relatives who were all taking turns sobbing and fighting over who got what. None of them had the remotest interest in the paintings, but it was still an emotional ordeal that she hadn't gotten enough sleep to deal with and one that left her alone in the tiring work of prying the paintings off of the walls where they'd hung for decades and would much rather have stayed. And alone to fight the doxies that had taken up residence in the attic where the last of the paintings were stored.
Doxy battles, it turned out, were another place where heels were wildly inappropriate.
She'd emerged from the attic with two paintings to add to her stack, two doxy bites on her left arm and one on her collarbone (luckily, one of the sobbing relatives had the wherewithal to find some antidote and quickly) and dust all over the
black dress she'd worn out of respect for the mourning family. Though someone had offered her lunch between sniffles, and another had tried to bandage her arm she had headed out of the flat as fast as her heels and stack of portraits would allow.
Using a spell to charm the paintings to fit into her oversized handbag would have made the brunette's life much easier, but because of their age she was concerned that any spellwork, particularly any done while she was as tired as she was, would damage them irreparably. So, here she was, stuck with a giant stack of paintings she couldn't see over, or really around trying to make her way through a busy street without hitting any-
She felt a shock of pain in her arm as the paintings jostled and dug into slender figure as they met some resistance on the opposite side. Resistance that meant she'd run into someone. "Zut!" she swore at herself, at her stupidity, before trying to peer over the paintings and see who she'd hit. "I'm so sorry- I didn't see, I, are you okay? I-" Her words came streaming out, heavily accented and highly flustered as she gave up on looking over them and kneeled to set the paintings down on the ground. She pushed a haphazard lock of her dark hair out of her eyes before looking up at her victim with another apology on her lips.
She was never wearing heels again.
