The Half-Blood Prince Page 31

She looked too fierce to argue with at that moment, so Harry dropped the subject of Ron and recounted all that he had overheard between Malfoy and Snape.

  When he had finished, Hermione sat in thought for a moment and then said, ‘Don’t you think –?’

  ‘– he was pretending to offer help so that he could trick Malfoy into telling him what he’s doing?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Hermione.

  ‘Ron’s dad and Lupin think so,’ Harry said grudgingly. ‘But this definitely proves Malfoy’s planning something, you can’t deny that.’

  ‘No, I can’t,’ she answered slowly.

  ‘And he’s acting on Voldemort’s orders, just like I said!’

  ‘Hmm … did either of them actually mention Voldemort’s name?’

  Harry frowned, trying to remember.

  ‘I’m not sure … Snape definitely said “your master”, and who else would that be?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Hermione, biting her lip. ‘Maybe his father?’

  She stared across the room, apparently lost in thought, not even noticing Lavender tickling Ron. ‘How’s Lupin?’

  ‘Not great,’ said Harry, and he told her all about Lupin’s mission among the werewolves and the difficulties he was facing. ‘Have you heard of this Fenrir Greyback?’

  ‘Yes, I have!’ said Hermione, sounding startled. ‘And so have you, Harry!’

  ‘When, History of Magic? You know full well I never listened …’

  ‘No, no, not History of Magic – Malfoy threatened Borgin with him!’ said Hermione. ‘Back in Knockturn Alley, don’t you remember? He told Borgin that Greyback was an old family friend and that he’d be checking up on Borgin’s progress!’

  Harry gaped at her. ‘I forgot! But this proves Malfoy’s a Death Eater, how else could he be in contact with Greyback and telling him what to do?’

  ‘It is pretty suspicious,’ breathed Hermione. ‘Unless …’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Harry in exasperation, ‘you can’t get round this one!’

  ‘Well … there is the possibility it was an empty threat.’

  ‘You’re unbelievable, you are,’ said Harry, shaking his head. ‘We’ll see who’s right … you’ll be eating your words, Hermione, just like the Ministry. Oh yeah, I had a row with Rufus Scrimgeour as well …’

  And the rest of the evening passed amicably with both of them abusing the Minister for Magic, for Hermione, like Ron, thought that after all the Ministry had put Harry through the previous year, they had a great nerve asking him for help now.

  The new term started next morning with a pleasant surprise for the sixth-years: a large sign had been pinned to the common-room noticeboards overnight.

  APPARITION LESSONS

  If you are seventeen years of age, or will turn seventeen on or before 31st August, you are eligible for a twelve-week course of Apparition Lessons from a Ministry of Magic Apparition Instructor.

  Please sign below if you would like to participate.

  Cost: 12 Galleons.

  Harry and Ron joined the crowd that was jostling around the notice and taking it in turns to write their names underneath. Ron was just taking out his quill to sign after Hermione when Lavender crept up behind him, slipped her hands over his eyes and trilled, ‘Guess who, Won-Won?’ Harry turned to see Hermione stalking off; he caught up with her, having no wish to stay behind with Ron and Lavender, but to his surprise, Ron caught them up only a little way beyond the portrait hole, his ears bright red and his expression disgruntled. Without a word, Hermione sped up to walk with Neville.

  ‘So – Apparition,’ said Ron, his tone making it perfectly plain that Harry was not to mention what had just happened. ‘Should be a laugh, eh?’

  ‘I dunno,’ said Harry. ‘Maybe it’s better when you do it yourself, I didn’t enjoy it much when Dumbledore took me along for the ride.’

  ‘I forgot you’d already done it … I’d better pass my test first time,’ said Ron, looking anxious. ‘Fred and George did.’

  ‘Charlie failed, though, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yeah, but Charlie’s bigger than me,’ Ron held his arms out from his body as though he were a gorilla, ‘so Fred and George didn’t go on about it much … not to his face, anyway …’

  ‘When can we take the actual test?’

  ‘Soon as we’re seventeen. That’s only March for me!’

  ‘Yeah, but you wouldn’t be able to Apparate in here, not in the castle …’

  ‘Not the point, is it? Everyone would know I could Apparate if I wanted.’

  Ron was not the only one to be excited at the prospect of Apparition. All that day there was much talk about the forthcoming lessons; a great deal of store was set by being able to vanish and reappear at will.

  ‘How cool will it be when we can just –’ Seamus clicked his fingers to indicate disappearance. ‘Me cousin Fergus does it just to annoy me, you wait till I can do it back … he’ll never have another peaceful moment …’

  Lost in visions of this happy prospect, he flicked his wand a little too enthusiastically, so that instead of producing the fountain of pure water that was the object of that day’s Charms lesson, he let out a hoselike jet that ricocheted off the ceiling and knocked Professor Flitwick flat on his face.

  ‘Harry’s already Apparated,’ Ron told a slightly abashed Seamus, after Professor Flitwick had dried himself off with a wave of his wand and set Seamus lines (‘I am a wizard, not a baboon brandishing a stick’). ‘Dum— er – someone took him. Side-Along-Apparition, you know.’

  ‘Whoa!’ whispered Seamus, and he, Dean and Neville put their heads a little closer to hear what Apparition felt like. For the rest of the day, Harry was besieged with requests from the other sixth-years to describe the sensation of Apparition. All of them seemed awed, rather than put off, when he told them how uncomfortable it was, and he was still answering detailed questions at ten to eight that evening, when he was forced to lie and say that he needed to return a book to the library, so as to escape in time for his lesson with Dumbledore.

  The lamps in Dumbledore’s office were lit, the portraits of previous headmasters were snoring gently in their frames and the Pensieve was ready upon the desk once more. Dumbledore’s hands lay either side of it, the right one as blackened and burned-looking as ever. It did not seem to have healed at all and Harry wondered, for perhaps the hundredth time, what had caused such a distinctive injury, but did not ask; Dumbledore had said that he would know eventually and there was, in any case, another subject he wanted to discuss. But before Harry could say anything about Snape and Malfoy, Dumbledore spoke.

  ‘I hear that you met the Minister for Magic over Christmas?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Harry. ‘He’s not very happy with me.’

  ‘No,’ sighed Dumbledore. ‘He is not very happy with me, either. We must try not to sink beneath our anguish, Harry, but battle on.’

  Harry grinned.

  ‘He wanted me to tell the wizarding community that the Ministry’s doing a wonderful job.’

  Dumbledore smiled.

  ‘It was Fudge’s idea originally, you know. During his last days in office, when he was trying desperately to cling to his post, he sought a meeting with you, hoping that you would give him your support –’

  ‘After everything Fudge did last year?’ said Harry angrily. ‘After Umbridge?’

  ‘I told Cornelius there was no chance of it, but the idea did not die when he left office. Within hours of Scrimgeour’s appointment we met and he demanded that I arrange a meeting with you –’

  ‘So that’s why you argued!’ Harry blurted out. ‘It was in the Daily Prophet.’

  ‘The Prophet is bound to report the truth occasionally,’ said Dumbledore, ‘if only accidentally. Yes, that was why we argued. Well, it appears that Rufus found a way to corner you at last.’

  ‘He accused me of being “Dumbledore’s man through and through”.’

  ‘How very rude of him.’

  ‘I told him I wa
s.’

  Dumbledore opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again. Behind Harry, Fawkes the phoenix let out a low, soft, musical cry. To Harry’s intense embarrassment, he suddenly realised that Dumbledore’s bright blue eyes looked rather watery, and stared hastily at his own knees. When Dumbledore spoke, however, his voice was quite steady.

  ‘I am very touched, Harry.’

  ‘Scrimgeour wanted to know where you go when you’re not at Hogwarts,’ said Harry, still looking fixedly at his knees.

  ‘Yes, he is very nosy about that,’ said Dumbledore, now sounding cheerful, and Harry thought it safe to look up again. ‘He has even attempted to have me followed. Amusing, really. He set Dawlish to tail me. It wasn’t kind. I have already been forced to jinx Dawlish once; I did it again with the greatest regret.’

  ‘So they still don’t know where you go?’ asked Harry, hoping for more information on this intriguing subject, but Dumbledore merely smiled over the top of his half-moon spectacles.

  ‘No, they don’t, and the time is not quite right for you to know, either. Now, I suggest we press on, unless there’s anything else –?’

  ‘There is, actually, sir,’ said Harry. ‘It’s about Malfoy and Snape.’

  ‘Professor Snape, Harry.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I overheard them during Professor Slughorn’s party … well, I followed them, actually …’

  Dumbledore listened to Harry’s story with an impassive face. When Harry had finished he did not speak for a few moments, then said, ‘Thank you for telling me this, Harry, but I suggest that you put it out of your mind. I do not think that it is of great importance.’

  ‘Not of great importance?’ repeated Harry incredulously. ‘Professor, did you understand –?’

  ‘Yes, Harry, blessed as I am with extraordinary brainpower, I understood everything you told me,’ said Dumbledore, a little sharply. ‘I think you might even consider the possibility that I understood more than you did. Again, I am glad that you have confided in me, but let me reassure you that you have not told me anything that causes me disquiet.’

  Harry sat in seething silence, glaring at Dumbledore. What was going on? Did this mean that Dumbledore had indeed ordered Snape to find out what Malfoy was doing, in which case he had already heard everything Harry had just told him from Snape? Or was he really worried by what he had heard, but pretending not to be?

  ‘So, sir,’ said Harry, in what he hoped was a polite, calm voice, ‘you definitely still trust –?’

  ‘I have been tolerant enough to answer that question already,’ said Dumbledore, but he did not sound very tolerant any more. ‘My answer has not changed.’

  ‘I should think not,’ said a snide voice; Phineas Nigellus was evidently only pretending to be asleep. Dumbledore ignored him.

  ‘And now, Harry, I must insist that we press on. I have more important things to discuss with you this evening.’

  Harry sat there feeling mutinous. How would it be if he refused to permit the change of subject, if he insisted upon arguing the case against Malfoy? As though he had read Harry’s mind, Dumbledore shook his head.

  ‘Ah, Harry, how often this happens, even between the best of friends! Each of us believes that what he has to say is much more important than anything the other might have to contribute!’

  ‘I don’t think what you’ve got to say is unimportant, sir,’ said Harry stiffly.

  ‘Well, you are quite right, because it is not,’ said Dumbledore briskly. ‘I have two more memories to show you this evening, both obtained with enormous difficulty, and the second of them is, I think, the most important I have collected.’

  Harry did not say anything to this; he still felt angry at the reception his confidences had received, but could not see what was to be gained by arguing further.

  ‘So,’ said Dumbledore, in a ringing voice, ‘we meet this evening to continue the tale of Tom Riddle, whom we left last lesson poised on the threshold of his years at Hogwarts. You will remember how excited he was to hear that he was a wizard, that he refused my company on a trip to Diagon Alley and that I, in turn, warned him against continued thievery when he arrived at school.

  ‘Well, the start of the school year arrived and with it came Tom Riddle, a quiet boy in his second-hand robes, who lined up with the other first-years to be Sorted. He was placed in Slytherin house almost the moment that the Sorting Hat touched his head,’ continued Dumbledore, waving his blackened hand towards the shelf over his head where the Sorting Hat sat, ancient and unmoving. ‘How soon Riddle learned that the famous founder of the house could talk to snakes, I do not know – perhaps that very evening. The knowledge can only have excited him and increased his sense of self-importance.

  ‘However, if he was frightening or impressing fellow Slytherins with displays of Parseltongue in their common room, no hint of it reached the staff. He showed no sign of outward arrogance or aggression at all. As an unusually talented and very good-looking orphan, he naturally drew attention and sympathy from the staff almost from the moment of his arrival. He seemed polite, quiet and thirsty for knowledge. Nearly all were most favourably impressed by him.’

  ‘Didn’t you tell them, sir, what he’d been like when you met him at the orphanage?’ asked Harry.

  ‘No, I did not. Though he had shown no hint of remorse, it was possible that he felt sorry for how he had behaved before and was resolved to turn over a fresh leaf. I chose to give him that chance.’

  Dumbledore paused and looked enquiringly at Harry, who had opened his mouth to speak. Here, again, was Dumbledore’s tendency to trust people in spite of overwhelming evidence that they did not deserve it! But then Harry remembered something …

  ‘But you didn’t really trust him, sir, did you? He told me … the Riddle who came out of that diary said “Dumbledore never seemed to like me as much as the other teachers did”.’

  ‘Let us say that I did not take it for granted that he was trustworthy,’ said Dumbledore. ‘I had, as I have already indicated, resolved to keep a close eye upon him, and so I did. I cannot pretend that I gleaned a great deal from my observations at first. He was very guarded with me; he felt, I am sure, that in the thrill of discovering his true identity he had told me a little too much. He was careful never to reveal as much again, but he could not take back what he had let slip in his excitement, nor what Mrs Cole had confided in me. However, he had the sense never to try and charm me as he charmed so many of my colleagues.

  ‘As he moved up the school, he gathered about him a group of dedicated friends; I call them that, for want of a better term, although as I have already indicated, Riddle undoubtedly felt no affection for any of them. This group had a kind of dark glamour within the castle. They were a motley collection; a mixture of the weak seeking protection, the ambitious seeking some shared glory, and the thuggish, gravitating towards a leader who could show them more refined forms of cruelty. In other words, they were the forerunners of the Death Eaters, and indeed some of them became the first Death Eaters after leaving Hogwarts.

  ‘Rigidly controlled by Riddle, they were never detected in open wrong-doing, although their seven years at Hogwarts were marked by a number of nasty incidents to which they were never satisfactorily linked, the most serious of which was, of course, the opening of the Chamber of Secrets, which resulted in the death of a girl. As you know, Hagrid was wrongly accused of that crime.

  ‘I have not been able to find many memories of Riddle at Hogwarts,’ said Dumbledore, placing his withered hand on the Pensieve. ‘Few who knew him then are prepared to talk about him; they are too terrified. What I know, I found out after he had left Hogwarts, after much painstaking effort, after tracing those few who could be tricked into speaking, after searching old records and questioning Muggle and wizard witnesses alike.

  ‘Those whom I could persuade to talk told me that Riddle was obsessed with his parentage. This is understandable, of course; he had grown up in an orphanage and naturally wished to know how he came to be th
ere. It seems that he searched in vain for some trace of Tom Riddle Senior on the shields in the trophy room, on the lists of prefects in the old school records, even in the books of wizarding history. Finally he was forced to accept that his father had never set foot in Hogwarts. I believe that it was then that he dropped the name for ever, assumed the identity of Lord Voldemort, and began his investigations into his previously despised mother’s family – the woman whom, you will remember, he had thought could not be a witch if she had succumbed to the shameful human weakness of death.

  ‘All he had to go upon was the single name “Marvolo”, which he knew from those who ran the orphanage had been his mother’s father’s name. Finally, after painstaking research through old books of wizarding families, he discovered the existence of Slytherin’s surviving line. In the summer of his sixteenth year, he left the orphanage to which he returned annually and set off to find his Gaunt relatives. And now, Harry, if you will stand …’

  Dumbledore rose, and Harry saw that he was again holding a small crystal bottle filled with swirling, pearly memory.

  ‘I was very lucky to collect this,’ he said, as he poured the gleaming mass into the Pensieve. ‘As you will understand when we have experienced it. Shall we?’

  Harry stepped up to the stone basin and bowed obediently until his face sank through the surface of the memory; he felt the familiar sensation of falling through nothingness and then landed upon a dirty stone floor into almost total darkness.

  It took him several seconds to recognise the place, by which time Dumbledore had landed beside him. The Gaunts’ house was now more indescribably filthy than anywhere Harry had ever seen. The ceiling was thick with cobwebs, the floor coated in grime; mouldy and rotting food lay upon the table amidst a mass of crusted pots. The only light came from a single guttering candle placed at the feet of a man with hair and beard so overgrown Harry could see neither eyes nor mouth. He was slumped in an armchair by the fire, and Harry wondered for a moment whether he was dead. But then there came a loud knock on the door and the man jerked awake, raising a wand in his right hand, and a short knife in his left.