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Witch Weekly · July 30, 2018 – 1:33 PM

Would the fate of the Minister's wives have been different if a more conservative candidate had been elected in lieu of the sharply liberal candidates seen in the last decade? Or does the malice of Mrs. Spavin stretch to include anyone who stands to replace her husband?

The Curse of the Minister's Wife
Britain has seen a wide array of Ministers in the past several years, with no one being able to hold the post down longer than a handful of years since the disgrace and subsequent imprisonment of former Minister Farris Spavin. There has been an equally high volume of Minister's wives, though no one seems to have survived their husband's term in office. No one batted an eyelash when Mrs. Eulalie Potter died in childbirth in 1884, as she had always been of a rather retiring nature and a frailer constitution (and the shock of her husband's murder followed so shortly afterwards that it was quite impossible to focus on the event for long). The subsequent election of Minister Urquart was followed less than a year later by the sudden and unexpected death of his wife, who fell to an unexpected bite from a venomous snake.

This was, to one reporter, a bit suspicious, and it was with the death of Mrs. Mary Urquart that our investigation began.

The wife of former Minister Faris Spavin has been something of an enigma in the years since her husband was deposed, having entirely faded into social obscurity and residing now with a distant relation in northern England. Mrs. Spavin's own views on Muggles and Muggleborns are not entirely known, but she seems to have become a bitter and hardened woman by the loss of her husband, and speaks of every subsequent Minister (when the subject was, at last, able to be broached) with derision, and at one point described them as weak men, with equally weak wives before she recovered her decorum and fell silent on the matter.

Those close to Mrs. Spavin have said that she hardly spoke a word from the time of her husband's imprisonment until the death of Mrs. Potter in 1883, but has been slowly recovering some of her old iron in the years since. It seems clear that the woman takes pleasure in the misfortunes of her husband's successors, and it is not entirely unreasonable, in the view of our investigators, that she had something to do with them!

"Mrs. Spavin is a hard, cruel woman; she would have wanted revenge," said private detective Fairweather Matthew, who had looked into the case at the request of a reporter. "And, being a woman and thus concerned primarily with the domestic sphere, it would naturally have occurred to her first and foremost to use that sphere to instigate that revenge."

Is the Minister's wife cursed? The evidence mounts in favor of the supposition, though it is not clear at this point whether it is the role itself which bears the curse (which is a much more powerful type of magic, and which may outlive Mrs. Spavin) or whether the woman herself is cursing each woman in turn. The fate of the Urquart family might suggest the latter; when the death of Mrs. Mary Urquart failed to cause then-Minister Urquart to crumble, his domestic difficulties were only compounded (first by the disappointment of Miss Lovegood, and then by the well-known fate of his daughter, Topaz Urquart) until he was at last forced to resign.

In any case, there is every probability that Mrs. Ross, the current wife of Minister Ross, is marked as Mrs. Spavin's next target. Both of her predecessors have failed to last through their husband's first year in office; what will befall the poor Mrs. Ross before the turn of the new year?

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Issue #190 - The Curse of the Minister's Wife