He didn’t have the heart to tell her that for his liking, it was already too much time. He didn’t even feel like reminding her that they had ��� quite a number of years ago ��� agreed that their paths would never cross again. His mother didn’t appear to remember at all, or at least that was the impression she was set on conveying when she was very probably ignoring it deliberately. Jack found that he didn’t have the energy nor, surprisingly, the anger to challenge her behaviour.
He looked at his mother with a mixture of doubt and resignation in his eyes. Eileen smiled at him then, sat down on the sofa again and indicated the spot beside her, inviting him to sit down and talk to her. It was obvious that she had every intention of spending the evening with her son.
Jack stole a covert glance out between the half-closed curtains. The box room window of the opposite house was dark now.
He sighed, went over to the sofa and sat down beside his mother.
It was before the break of dawn on a Saturday morning when a loud banging shook the inhabitants of The Burrow out of their slumbers. It was so ferocious that the walls of the awkward old building ��� which had withstood storms, a fire, a crashed wedding and, not least, a Death Eater invasion ��� shook and the ghoul in the attic started to howl pitifully. Within a matter of seconds, dreams and snores were interrupted and lights hesitantly flickered to life in various rooms.
In one of the first-floor bedrooms, Ginny Weasley dove out from under the covers and raised a sleepy head. ‘Who the hell is that?’ she mumbled sleepily.
‘Dunno’, murmured Harry, ‘perhaps they made a mistake?’ He turned around and his breathing became deeper almost immediately as he slipped back into sleep.
‘Too fierce for a mistake.’ Ginny sat up and shook him. ‘Get up, Harry! You’ve got to go back to your room before Mom notices. You know she doesn’t like it if you sleep in my bed ���’
Harry moaned. ‘Hasn’t she heard we’re fast approaching the twenty-first century?’
Ginny giggled mirthfully. ‘Well, these things are a little different in the wizarding world ��� Get a move on now!’
Another bout of fierce banging shook the house, and not only did it sound impatient, but also seriously pissed off. From the floor below, the clicking of a door and the shuffling of feet could be heard, as well as the wary voice of Molly Weasley, ‘Alright, alright, I’m coming ���’
With a tremendous yawn, Harry struggled into an upright position and groped for his glasses on the nightstand. ‘Still gives me the willies’, he mumbled, ‘knocks at the crack of dawn ���’
‘Me, too’, Ginny whispered and sneaked her arm around him, planting a moist and sensuous kiss on his neck. Harry responded eagerly, his finger tips touching her throat and slowly trailing down. She was soft and warm, like a candle on the verge of melting, and when he took her into his arms, she became even softer as if her flesh wanted to merge with his, and the sensation made his head spin. Their kiss started playfully, but quickly became deeper and almost impossible to break. Ginny did it, anyway. ‘Go now’, she whispered into his ear with a giggle, ‘or she’ll go bonkers. The Potter privilege doesn’t go that far with her.’
‘Don’t I know it’, sighed Harry and climbed out of bed reluctantly. ‘Listen, do we really have to wait until we’re married? I mean, who does, these days?’
Ginny grinned. With her tousled red hair and the lips deeply red from kissing, she looked irresistible, like a warm and smiling invitation. ‘Most witches and wizards do’, she informed him. ‘But we’ll see ���’
That, at least, was some encouragement and so Harry slipped out of the room as soon as he had calmed down a bit, winking at Ginny over his shoulder. Out on the landing, he looked over the bannister and listened to the voices that could be heard from downstairs.
‘��� d’you know what time it is, girl?’
‘Sorry, Molly, but I had to come immediately!’
The voice was bossy and a little shrill. Hermione, unmistakably, and quite obviously with her knickers in a serious twist.
‘But why don’t you just come in? You know the jinx, after all. No need to wake everybody up.’
‘I disagree’, Hermione responded curtly, ‘you should all hear about this.’
Harry frowned. Hermione could be impetuous, but it wasn’t like her to raise an entire household for no reason. Quietly, he went back to his room where the bed was untouched, got rid of his pyjama bottoms and slipped into a non-too-smelly shirt and clean jeans. He cast a quick glance into the mirror, only to make sure that his eyes were puffy and his black hair as unruly as ever before he went back to the corridor and shuffled towards the stairs. It was at that moment that Ron came down from the floor above, trudging like a sleepwalker and looking at Harry doubtfully.
‘Is that the sweet sound of my girlfriend’s voice down there?’ he asked groggily, yet sardonically.
‘Sounds like she’s got something important to say’, Harry replied with a shrug.
‘Yeah, probably she’s pissed off about declining N.E.W.T.s standards’, Ron said with a bored yawn.
Together, they shuffled down the stairs to The Burrow’s kitchen where Molly Weasley was busying herself making tea. At the large table sat Arthur, bathrobe slung over his pyjamas and not quite knowing what had knocked him out of sleep. Hermione, however, looked fresh and alert, although there was a deep frown on her face. In front of her on the table, a pristine copy of the Daily Prophet was spread out, beside it lay an issue of Witch Weekly.
‘What are you doing here?’ Ron demanded as soon as they entered the kitchen. ‘Didn’t you say you were going to stay at Hogwarts this weekend? To study?’ The last word came out edgily, giving away Ron’s thoughts on Hermione’s priorities.
‘Have you seen this?’ Hermione asked with a dark frown and pointed at the Prophet. ‘It’s outrageous!’
‘We do get the Prophet, Hermione’, Arthur grumbled good-naturedly, ‘you needn’t have come all the way to show us.’
Hermione, however, ignored him and pushed the paper at Harry. ‘Look at the headline!’
Harry followed her instruction and picked up the Prophet. After a few moments, he gave a low groan. ‘Not again!’
The headline was fat and sinister. In sensational letters, it spelt Kill The Spare. Below it was a moving photograph of a grinning Cedric Diggory, posing and flipping his hair. Harry’s heavy eyes scanned the article that confirmed his worries. The whole affair was being raked up again: the Triwizard Tournament that Harry and Cedric had entered together on behalf of Hogwarts, and the ghastly outcome that was the other boy’s death. The Prophet held that the necessity of Diggory’s demise was as of yet not properly explained. Why, the article asked, had Cedric been allowed to enter at all? Why had Dumbledore’s famed foresight failed in this case, why hadn’t the Hogwarts headmaster taken prudent measures to make sure that both boys would come out of the whole thing unscathed?
Reading the piece made Harry feel sick to his stomach. Not only did it break up the old wounds: Cedric’s death was something he still dreamed about at night, and when he did, his scar started to itch although it hardly did that anymore these days. What worried him even more, however, was what the article suggested between the lines, namely that Cedric had been a pawn sacrifice from the start, that his death had been no more than collateral damage, readily accepted by Albus Dumbledore to keep his ‘Golden Boy’ safe. Obviously, the Diggory family had been interviewed, as well. Amos Diggory was quoted to have said ‘We’re still missing Cedric every day. It’s like the light of our lives has been blown out. The question we cannot shake is Why? Why did our boy have to die?’ Of course, Harry would never have blamed the Diggorys. Their grief, even after more than three years, was entirely understandable. However, he doubted the merit of dragging the whole affair up again, and he passed the paper on to Ron with a sigh.
‘Yes’, said Hermione with a dry smile, ‘it’s starting once more. Our fifth year all
over again. They’re trying to upset the truth we gave them, holding that it’s no more than a version of the truth. Remus said that this would happen, remember?’
‘Sit down, boys’, Molly Weasley commanded cheerfully and put a steaming pot of tea on the table. ‘Since we’re all awake, we might as well have an early breakfast. ��� Good morning, Ginny!’
Ginny had snug into the kitchen, hair still mussed up, cheeks still glowing and lips tellingly red. She and Harry exchanged a conspiratorial glance. ‘What’s up?’ she asked when she saw Hermione sitting at the table looking glum.
‘Hermione has come to play owl’, Arthur explained with a small chuckle. ‘Thought that we couldn’t wait to read the new piece in the Prophet.’
‘God, is it very nasty?’ Ginny asked with a look of ill foreboding.
‘Bloody muckrakers’, Ron murmured and tossed the Prophet onto the table for his sister to peruse, ‘they just have to dig it up again and again, giving it a new spin every time! ��� I’m not going to read that! It’s a bunch of baloney and none of you should take it seriously.’
‘Ignoring it won’t help’, Hermione pointed out.
‘Reading it all won’t help, either’, Ron argued. ‘They’re writing what they want.’
‘The really interesting question is’, remarked Harry, ‘who are ‘they’?’
Hermione gave him a pointed look to convey that this was, indeed, the crucial question.
‘What d’you mean, ‘who are they’?’ Ron grumbled irritably. ‘The papers, of course.’
‘Yeah, but ���’
‘Ron’s right’, Molly chimed in, cracking eggs and having her wand stir them in a bowl. ‘Journalists need to write something. The Victory doesn’t cut it anymore, and since there are hardly any sensational news now ���’
‘I’d say the satyrs are sensational enough’, Hermione stated matter-of-factly, ‘did you hear that there was an incident at Hogwarts?’
‘No! ��� Did someone get hurt?’
‘Fortunately not. However, Hagrid, Flitwick and Daysen searched the Forbidden Forest all night. And the day after, they upset the whole Hogwarts schedule to teach all years how to deal with a satyr ambush. The first and second years are all upset and anxious, it’s next to impossible to keep them in line and concentrate, the whole school’s in a turmoil ���’
‘Ghastly business with those satyrs’, Arthur said with a shake of his head. ‘Just imagine if one of the students got attacked ��� like that girl in the Forest of Dean ���’
‘Poor love’, Molly Weasley said and tsked, ‘how do you ever recover from a thing like that? I hear she’s still at St. Mungo’s?’
‘The point I’m making is’, Hermione went on tersely, ‘that there are enough topics the Prophet could write about. What about the Death Eater hunt, for instance? I haven’t heard about that for quite a while. ��� But no, they have to bring up all the old questions again and distort the recent past. To me it looks like there’s an agenda behind it.’
‘What kind of agenda?’ Ron asked gruffly as he sat down and poured himself a cup of tea.
‘Doubting everything we told them, stupid!’ Hermione said impatiently. ‘Don’t you see it? It’s been going on for weeks, and even more so since Daysen’s trial ���’
‘It was a hearing’, Ron corrected her with narrowed eyes.
‘Felt like a trial’, Hermione insisted.
‘She’s right’, Harry murmured. ‘There was an article right after the hearing ��� not on the first page, though, but still quite a large one ��� that questioned Dumbledore’s decision to trust someone like Daysen and even claimed that he willingly put Hogwarts into the hands of a criminal for an entire year.’
‘But do we have to take it seriously?’ Ginny wondered. ‘I mean, there are always going to be people who have their doubts about Dumbledore, basically because they’re jealous of him or resent his influence. Those who were at Hogwarts at the time, however, they know and they will always set it right.’
‘Sounds nice in theory’, Harry agreed, staring at the plate of scrambled eggs that Molly placed in front of him. For his stomach, it was still far too early to eat. ‘However, the number of those who were not on the front lines far exceeds those who were. And many of those who were are now dead.’
Hermione nodded fervently. ‘The gist being that those who were ��� us, in other words ��� are some kind of elitist clique that has taken it upon itself to dictate the truth. Along the lines of ‘the victor writes history’. A lot of people are probably angry with themselves because they didn’t contribute, were too scared to do so, and resent those who did and hence paint them ��� well, maybe not as liars, but as histrionic drama queens at the least.’
‘Good Lord!’ breathed Ginny who was immersed in the article and completely ignored her scrambled eggs. ‘Did you read this? ‘To Albus Dumbledore, the prime objective was always to save Harry Potter. So invested was he into this project that other ��� seemingly lesser ��� dangers appear to have slipped the legendary Hogwarts headmaster’s attention, thus promptly leading to the demise of Diggory. Was Dumbledore too focussed on his pet? Did he ��� a wizard of reportedly more than a hundred-and-ten years of age and with a lot on his plate since the reappearance of Voldemort ��� simply forget to cover all the bases? Did he make a mistake? Or did he simply not care? It is a well-known fact that in the past, Dumbledore was ready to accept personal loss and grief in order to further his powers and position in the wizarding world (cf. page 3, ‘Deconstructing Dumbledore’).’ ��� That’s bloody rich!’
‘It’s also logical’, Hermione pointed out. ‘Since the war, we were trying to rebuild the wizarding world in Dumbledore’s spirit, with his values as our standards. ��� Looks like this doesn’t go down so well with some. Taking Dumbledore down a notch in the public mind is an obvious step in discrediting what he wanted for us all.’
‘But it’s obvious crap!’ Ron broke in and fixed his girlfriend across the table. ‘Like I said, papers will write what they want, and like Mom said, the Victory is stale news by now, so they’re running a little wild. It will calm down. No one’s seriously doubting Dumbledore ���’
‘Nonsense!’ Hermione hissed. ‘The Prophet is a mirror of the wizarding world, or a barometer, if you will, representing its atmosphere.’
‘Which has always been moody’, Arthur grumbled in-between sips of tea. ‘I agree with Ron. Things will calm down.’
‘I don’t know, honey’, Molly sighed from the stove, ‘I’d just hate for Harry to be shown in a false light again. He’s suffered enough, especially from those rags. And Dumbledore! Let’s be honest, none of us could even touch the hem of his garment! I hate it that they’re trying to smear him, now that he cannot speak for himself anymore.’
‘It’s true about his dark past, though’, Harry argued. ‘He did a few things, Dumbledore, when he was young and friends with Grindelwald ���’
That elicited a snigger from Molly. ‘Yes, even old Albus wasn’t immune to a bit of romance ���’
‘These details are becoming more and more known’, Hermione went on, ‘and they’re used against him, to mar his reputation.’
‘Still, it could have waited, don’t you think?’ Ron squinted at Hermione, his eyes still heavy with sleep. ‘No reason to throw us all out of bed at the crack of dawn. It’s not even light!’
‘I think it’s great!’ Molly declared brightly. ‘We can all start the day early now and work together in giving the house a good clean. Sorely needs it, too!’
‘See what you got us into?’ Ron hissed at Hermione, but was silenced by her glowering stare.
‘Once more, you don’t get what this is about’, she stated dismissively. ‘You’ve become fat and lazy after the war, all you want is not to be bothered anymore! And so you’re closing your eyes to anything dodgy that might be going on behind the scenes!’
‘You k
now what I’m thinking?’ Ron was slowly becoming heated. ‘You miss the bloody war! You’ve become an adrenaline junkie and you can’t stand peace times ���’
‘That’s completely moronic!’
‘��� and that’s why you’re starting to see conspiracies at every corner when all that’s happening is people voicing their opinions! That’s not a crime, you know?! In a free society, you’re allowed to say what you want and not just what Hermione Granger, the Golden Girl, deems appropriate ���’
Hermione issued a frustrated groan. ‘You’re totally missing the point, Ron! Again!’
‘Come on now, Hermione’, Arthur murmured in a placatory tone, ‘you’re not being quite fair.’
‘Not fair?’ Hermione stared incredulously into the faces at the kitchen table. ‘Am I really the only one who’s wondering where these articles come from and what kind of development they reflect?’
‘Just told you!’ Ron erupted. ‘It’s called ‘free press’! You as a Muggle-born should know! But no, you insist on making a drama!’
Hermione groaned once more and her eyes found Harry’s. There, at least, she could detect a gloomy thoughtfulness that mirrored her own, and that helped her to calm down while she realized that arguing with Ron didn’t get her anywhere. She took a couple of deep breaths. ‘By the way, has anyone heard from Remus recently?’ she asked with forced brightness. ‘I haven’t seen him in a while.’
All eyes turned on Harry. He swallowed hard on his eggs and cleared his throat. ‘Nor have I’, he said eventually, ‘didn’t you know he quit his job with the Ministry?’
‘He didn’t!’ Hermione stared at him in disbelief. ‘Why now, of all times?’
‘He basically agrees with you about the present mood’, Harry explained. ‘And he says he doesn’t want to work for an institution that is so prone to being undermined. He’d rather take a different approach.’
‘Ha!’ For a second, Hermione looked smug. ‘What kind of different approach?’
‘I have no idea.’ Harry shrugged.
‘Well, we might find out soon enough’, Arthur Weasley said calmly. ‘I got an owl from him yesterday. He wants us all to meet soon. At Grimmauld Place.’ He looked at Harry. ‘Provided you give your consent? It’s your house, after all.’
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