Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

He read the letter again, but could not take in any more meaning than he had done the first time, and was reduced to staring at the handwriting itself. She had made her “g”s the same way he did. He searched through the letter for every one of them, and each felt like a friendly little wave glimpsed from behind a veil. The letter was an incredible treasure, proof that Lily Potter had lived, really lived, that her warm hand had once moved across this parchment, tracing ink into these letters, these words, words about him, Harry, her son.

Impatiently brushing away the wetness in his eyes, he reread the letter, this time concentrating on the meaning. It was like listening to a half-remembered voice.

They had a cat… perhaps it had perished, like his parents at Godric’s Hollow… or else fled when there was nobody left to feed it… Sirius had bought him his first broomstick… His parents had known Bathilda Bagshot; had Dumbledore introduced them? Dumbledore’s still got his Invisibility Cloak… there was something funny there…

Harry paused, pondering his mother’s words. Why had Dumbledore taken James’s Invisibility Cloak? Harry distinctly remembered his headmaster telling him years before, “I don’t need a cloak to become invisible.” Perhaps some less gifted Order member had needed its assistance, and Dumbledore had acted as a carrier? Harry passed on…

Wormy was here… Pettigrew, the traitor, had seemed “down.” Had he? Was he aware that he was seeing James and Lily alive for the last time?

And finally Bathilda again, who told incredible stories about Dumbledore. It seems incredible that Dumbledore—

That Dumbledore what? But there were any number of things that would seem incredible about Dumbledore; that he had once received bottom marks in a Transfiguration test, for instance or had taken up goat charming like Aberforth…

Harry got to his feet and scanned the floor: Perhaps the rest of the letter was here somewhere. He seized papers, treating them in his eagerness, with as little consideration as the original searcher, he pulled open drawers, shook out books, stood on a chair to run his hand over the top of the wardrobe, and crawled under the bed and armchair.

At last, lying facedown on the floor, he spotted what looked like a torn piece of paper under the chest of drawers. When he pulled it out, it proved to be most of the photograph that Lily had described in her letter. A black-haired baby was zooming in and out of the picture on a tiny broom, roaring with laughter, and a pair of legs that must have belonged to James was chasing after him. Harry tucked the photograph into his pocket with Lily’s letter and continued to look for the second sheet.

After another quarter of an hour, however, he was forced to conclude that the rest of his mother’s letter was gone. Had it simply been lost in the sixteen years that had elapsed since it had been written, or had it been taken by whoever had searched the room? Harry read the first sheet again, this time looking for clues as to what might have made the second sheet valuable. His toy broomstick could hardly be considered interesting to the Death Eaters… The only potentially useful thing he could see her was possible information on Dumbledore. It seems incredible that Dumbledore—what?

“Harry? Harry? Harry!”

“I’m here!” he called, “What’s happened?”

There was a clatter of footsteps outside the door, and Hermione burst inside.

“We woke up and didn’t know where you were!” she said breathlessly. She turned and shouted over her shoulder, “Ron! I’ve found him!”

Ron’s annoyed voice echoed distantly from several floors below.

“Good! Tell him from me he’s a git!”

“Harry, don’t just disappear, please, we were terrified! Why did you come up here anyway?” She gazed around the ransacked room. “What have you been doing?”

“Look what I’ve just found—”

He held out his mother’s letter. Hermione took it out and read it while Harry watched her. When she reached the end of the page she looked up at him.

“Oh Harry…”

“And there’s this too.”

He handed her the torn photograph, and Hermione smiled at the baby zooming in and out of sight on the toy broom.

“I’ve been looking for the rest of the letter,” Harry said, “but it’s not here.”

Hermione glanced around.

“Did you make all this mess, or was some of it done when you got here?”

“Someone had searched before me,” said Harry.

“I thought so. Every room I looked into on the way up had been disturbed. What were they after, do you think?”

“Information on the Order, if it was Snape.”

“But you’d think he’d already have all he needed. I mean was in the Order, wasn’t he?”

“Well then,” said Harry, keen to discuss his theory, “what about information on Dumbledore? The second page of the letter, for instance. You know this Bathilda my mum mentions, you know who she is?”

“Who?”

“Bathilda Bagshot, the author of—”