Chapter 12

Ruth would not deny that she was nervous to go to the Ministry of Magic, but on the other hand she was as excited as a young girl who had been offered free access to the candy shop. It was who she was. She liked to learn and the wizarding world was a world to be explored, within the limits of her work, of course. And limits there were, because her task today would be to plough through family trees with lots and lots of names in order to find out all that they could about Lysandra Black's possible links to the wizarding world. It would be a long and tiring job of cross-referencing their data against the wizards' information and there would be no computer to help her do it.

She did however have the young Auror recruit to help her sort through the information they would hopefully get to see. Amy was quite convinced that her boss would let them see whatever they wanted, but that there were a lot of other witches and wizards who were none too pleased by the prospect of having Muggles in their temple of wizardry.

Amy had tried to explain the prejudices, but this was something that remained a bit alien to Ruth. According to her protégée most wizards did not like Muggles very much, even if they officially were strongly against Muggle discrimination. It had something to do with the two Wizarding Wars, but she had been unable to find out what. All she had were a few brief references to the policy and opinions on Muggles and the relation to the wars, but unlike in novels, people didn't spell out their entire history in mails and phone calls for the benefit of any people listening in. They already knew what they were talking or writing about, so there was no need to explain. And while that was perfectly logical, it did mean that there were now gaps in the intelligence analyst's knowledge and she did not particularly like that. She was used to being the one best informed.

'How will we get to the Ministry?' she asked Amy as they crossed a street.

'The visitors' entrance,' the young Auror replied. Miss Hamilton was a capable young woman, but, very like Ruth sometimes, far too shy and nervous. And the nerves were very much present this morning. 'Most people Floo or Apparate into work, but we can't do that, because you're a Muggle and I haven't got my wand.' She sounded a bit frustrated.

Most people wouldn't know what the Floo network was or what people meant when they talked about Apparating, but most people weren't intelligence analysts in Section D of MI-5. Ruth Evershed was. It did give her a distinct advantage in dealing with the wizarding world, which was probably why Harry had sent her here with Amy today. Of course looking through papers was her job, but she had the other advantage as well and that reassured her somewhat, even if it wasn't much.

The text came in just as they walked into an abandoned alley with a lot of graffiti-plastered walls. Wand found belonged to Rabastan Lestrange. Blackthorn, dragon heartstring, 12 ¾ inch, unyielding. RM. Ruth smiled a little as she showed the text to her companion. She may not like Ros very much, but she was good at her job and had somehow managed to find this all out before it was even ten in the morning. She supposed she was okay with the fact that Ros Myers worked for MI-5, as long as she didn't have to do her work anywhere near the woman. Something about the new Senior Case Officer always either made Ruth nervous and very ill at ease or irritated and angry.

'So they were there,' Amy said. 'Over here, Ruth.' She pointed towards an old red telephone box that looked like it had been placed there in the seventies or even earlier and nothing had been done about it since. It was as shabby as the neighbourhood it stood in and while Ruth knew from various intercepted emails that the Ministry itself was underground, it still came as something of a disappointment.

Amy however acted as if this was all fairly normal, opened the door and made an inviting gesture with her hand. It is magic, Ruth reminded herself. It is not supposed to be normal. Everything else in this magical community was different. If she had learned anything at all from her digging, then it was that. And she had seen the bewilderment of the two male Aurors when they had first entered the Grid. The Muggle world was as alien to them as the magical one was to her.

Ruth ended up closest to the phone itself and Amy squeezed herself in after. 'Can you dial six, two, four, four, two?' the girl asked. She could not be very old yet, not even really out of her teens, Ruth thought. Yet she had held her own in this line of work. That had to count for something.

The intelligence analyst did as she was asked and dialled the number. 'Welcome to the Ministry of Magic. Please state your name and business.'

Ruth had been telling herself that it was stupid to expect that things would go as she was used to, but that this voice came from seemingly nowhere, that was startling. For a moment she actually thought that there was someone standing next to her, but a quick glance over the shoulder made it clear that there was no one there and Ruth felt immediately rather stupid. At least Amy had the decency not to notice or pretend not to notice.

The young magical desk spook was calm and composed as she answered. 'Amy Hamilton, Auror Department. I am here with Ruth Evershed, MI-5, to investigate a matter of national security.'

'Thank you,' the disembodied voice said. It reminded Ruth of the kind of woman who told the frustrated people at train stations that their train was delayed and that the next train to Exeter would depart from platform five instead of the normal one. 'Visitor, please take the badge and attach it to the front of your robes.'

There was a clatter in the metal chute for the return coins, but instead of coins Ruth found a badge in it. Ruth Evershed, MI-5, Investigator. She arched an eyebrow at it. 'This is automatic, isn't it?'

The female voice in the box said something about submitting to a search and registering, but Ruth did not really hear it, because Amy answered her question. 'I think so,' she said. 'I've never really wondered about it, but I believe it is the Magical Maintenance guys' job to keep this functioning.'

The telephone box descended into darkness and Ruth could feel both nerves and anticipation as they went deeper and deeper underground. Amy kept her composure, but it was obvious from the way she behaved that she was nervous as well, but Ruth would not press her if she did not want to talk about it. She could however offer. 'Do you want to talk about it?'

The girl flashed her a reassuring smile that did not quite reach her eyes by the light of the telephone box. 'You may find that some people will not be too kind to you.' She bit her lip. 'Because you are a Muggle.'

Ruth repressed both the urge to take this as an insult and the urge to say that she was used to unkindness from working with Miss Myers for some months now. But she was made of tougher stuff and could deal with it. Insults she could swallow. She merely hoped no wizard would hex her while she was here. Amy's behaviour seemed to imply that the prejudice was stronger than she might have realised at first.

She would have pondered this longer had the trip down not come to an end then. The telephone box was now in a large hall with a lot of fireplaces. There were people in it, but they had come after the rush hour and it was not as crowded as the intelligence analyst imagined it could be. And that was probably a good thing too.

They left the box as soon as it had properly halted and then followed her protégée through the hall to a desk at the end of it. They passed a fountain that was the main source of noise here, at this time of day anyway. If her little investigations were worth anything, then there were hundreds of people employed here.

'Good morning,' Amy said to the man behind the desk. He was dressed in what appeared to be robes, which apparently were the wizard fashion if the email from Auror Weasley about stains in his best robes that he could not seem to remove was anything to go by. It were only snippets of information she had access to, but Ruth had not ended up where she had by being stupid. She could connect dots. That didn't change the fact that this was a strange world with rules and customs that she did not understand. And that made her very ill at ease indeed.

The wizard had been reading a newspaper with a moving picture – that seemed to be a wizarding thing – of a tall man giving a speech. Minister for Magic Opens New Wing of St. Mungo's, the headline read. In a strange way it was reassuring that some things were not so different from the world as Ruth knew it at all. Their important people did occasionally do something as normal as opening a hospital and their terrorists were not that different from the usual headaches Muggle Britain suffered from. It made her feel a little more comfortable.

'Morning, Miss Hamilton,' the wizard said, his face lighting up as he recognised her. The bored expression he bore before vanished in an instant. 'I thought you were on a…' Here he hesitated. 'A mission?' he finished eventually.

Amy grimaced. 'I'm here for research, Lorcan,' she said. 'And I am bringing a guest.'

That alerted him to Ruth's presence. 'Oh.' The spy could see the realisation dawn on his face. 'I didn't see you, Miss….' He peeked at the badge on Ruth's blouse. 'Evershed. Step over here, please.'

Ruth had no idea what this was about, but there was something unnerving about all this magic around her and while she supposed that the golden rod he waved around her, in a way that betrayed he had done this more than once before, was just the magical equivalent of the equipment they used to check people for weapons and bugs, there was still something off about it.

'You're clear,' he announced. 'Wand, please, miss.'

'I haven't got one,' she replied. This Lorcan had looked at her badge, but had he not noticed MI-5 behind her name? Or did ordinary wizards know so little about the Muggle world that they did not know what MI-5 was? She could not tell, but some things that Amy had said about prejudice and ignorance and the snippets she had found in the records of emails and phone calls slowly started to make sense. And that did make for a rather terrifying picture. Her people, the non-magical ones, were kept ignorant of the wizarding world on purpose, she now knew. But wizards did not have a good excuse for their ignorance. Many of their jobs demanded that they went out into the normal world from time to time. 'I am the liaison officer from the Muggle security services,' she added for good measure. 'And I am not carrying any weapons.'

The wizard's eyes almost popped right out of their sockets as he stared at her. 'We don't allow Muggles in here,' he told her. Apparently she had shocked him bad enough to make him forget his manners and the almost hostile tone of voice took her completely by surprise. There was shock to be heard as well, as if her presence was the worst thing that had happened here in years.

'She is working with the Aurors on a mission,' Amy snapped at him before Ruth could formulate a coherent reply. 'And if that is not okay with you, I suggest you take it up with Mr Potter. Or better still, the Minister. Good day.'

She turned on her heels and marched away, leaving Ruth little choice but to follow the girl towards the lifts. It was obvious that Amy's blood was boiling. Ruth herself was still too busy wondering about what had just happened. The young man – she guessed him to be in his early twenties – had seemed nice to her, right up to the moment he had found out she was non-magical. Prejudiced indeed.

'He's not a bad person,' Amy said. She stabbed the button for the lift. 'He's just a pure-blood who's heard far too much nonsense about wizard superiority. His uncle was a Death Eater, went to Azkaban for it, but Lorcan was actually nice to me. He was a few years above me in Hogwarts, in Ravenclaw as well, and always prepared to help with my homework. Really clever too. And I can't figure how he can be so seriously stupid when it comes to Muggles.' It did not take an expert to realise that this got to her. 'It's like that with all those pure-bloods,' she complained. 'They may be nicer to Muggle-borns these days, and some of them only because they have to if they don't want end up social pariahs, but when it comes to Muggles…' She stabbed the button again. 'It's almost as if they can't seem to help themselves!'

It was only now that Ruth started to understand something of the problems the wizarding world was facing in relation to the normal world. Rather than to say that it did not matter, she kept her silence as they ascended to level two, where the voice announced that the Wizengamot Registration Services were situated, which was what they had come for.

She tried not to let it get to her, but she felt the looks people threw in her direction. Few were sympathetic, few were curious, but most were simply hostile and unpleasant. Despite all the research she had done on the magical community, she could not have predicted this. Or maybe she could, because she remembered well enough what had happened when the Aurors had first arrived. Julius Burke, the tallest of the lot, had glared at Zaf when he had tried to shake his hand and had then demonstratively done a step back to show that he thought Zaf far below him, not worth it to shake his far superior hand.

It gave her a desperate urge to run in the opposite direction, but she had a task to do here and so she blocked out the unwelcome notion of the wizards around her and focused on the sheaf of parchment she was sorting through in an altogether dusty room of the Administration Services. It was more of an archive, Ruth thought, but nothing like a normal one, if only because things were not written on paper, but on parchment. And the words on them were written with a quill rather than a pen. These wizards may think themselves superior, but in some things they were far behind the times.

There were far more magical Blacks in the twentieth century than she would have even believed possible. All of them seemed to have unusual names. Suddenly Lysandra Black would fit in well with this family. She ploughed through birth certificates for what felt like an age, while Amy was trying to see if she featured on the student lists of Hogwarts, although, she said, if she wasn't on those that proved nothing, because the Black family had apparently produced a fair number of so-called Squibs. The young Auror had explained that although it did not happen often, some magical couples produced children without magic. The Black family had been the kind of family who would disown any child that did not have the gift on which they so prided themselves. It seemed like a very cruel kind of world and the more time Ruth spent in it, the less alluring it became.

But you have a job to do, she reminded herself. Harry himself had tasked her with it and she would not go back without results. If they found Lysandra Simmons, née Black, here, then that could be the breakthrough they were hoping for.

And so she sorted through birth certificates until her eyes hurt and all of those things started to look the same to her. They had established that Lysandra would probably have been between twenty and forty when she had Andrew Simmons, which would place her birth between the early twenties and early forties of the twentieth century, with a five years margin on both sides. That were a lot of Blacks and a lot of birth certificates. She did notice though that, even though there had been a lot of Blacks, the family seemed to have died out in the last half of the last century. Now the name did not even exist anymore; the male line was extinct. Maybe the war was to blame for that.

It was almost five o'clock and the librarian was starting to send them pointed looks in a very unsubtle attempt to make them leave. Ruth pretended not to see it. She was not leaving here until she had what she came for, even if that meant that she would spend the night in this dusty room. She gave one look at the name Alphard Black and then moved on to the next one, only to find the name Lysandra Black almost jumping off the parchment on which it was written.

'Amy, I think I have her,' she said.

'Merlin's stinking beard,' the young witch muttered angrily at the same time. She only realised that Ruth had been talking to her a moment later. 'Sorry, what did you say?'

'Lysandra Black,' Ruth said. 'Born the twenty-second of September 1936, daughter of Pollux Black and Irma Black, née Crabbe. The date fits.'

'And she was a Squib,' Amy said. 'She must have been. I've been looking at student names of Hogwarts between 1930 and 1960, and there are a lot of Blacks, but her name wasn't on those lists. But if you found her…' She pondered for a moment. 'Ruth, do you think we could make a family tree with all those certificates? See who her closest relatives are?'

Playing with parchment like that was not usually in Ruth's job description. She liked working with computers better, but the thrill of being on to something made her agree, even if the librarian's looks got more sour by the minute, especially when he saw what they were doing. Ruth pretended not to see him.

Amy's enthusiasm helped her in focussing. Enthusiasm might not be the right word though. She was like a terrier after a bone as she helped Ruth rearrange the parchments, creating a family tree on the table. They shoved all the other things aside to make room and Ruth sorted through the parchments while Amy laid them in the correct spots.

'That's it!' she said half an hour later, undeniably triumphant, stabbing her finger at a birth certificate that at first glance seemed to belong to a niece or nephew of Lysandra's. Ruth peeked a bit closer and read the name Bellatrix Black.

'Who is she?' she asked.

'Bellatrix Lestrange, née Black,' Amy answered excitedly, a twinkle in her eyes now that they were on the scent. 'She was a Death Eater, but was killed at the end of the Second Wizarding War.'

'Lestrange?' Ruth asked. What was this all, a bloody family party? 'Was she Rabastan's wife?'

Amy shook her head. 'His brother's. Rodolphus was married to Bellatrix. He's still in Azkaban as far as I'm aware.'

It was a snippet, a vague link, and most of the people who could give any answers to the questions this snippet of intelligence had conjured up, were either dead, imprisoned or the very terrorists they were hunting. It was frustrating beyond belief. 'Amy, did Simmons's file mention if his parents were deceased?' There was no such thing as getting the information from the horse's mouth and if Lysandra was still alive – which she might be, because seventy was not that old – then she might be able to tell them more. Because for some reason it seemed highly unlikely that wizards, who thought themselves so superior to Muggles, would work together with them even if they were relatives. There had to be something they had overlooked somewhere. With all these confusing parchments that wizards called an administration, that was not unlikely.

Amy frowned as she tried to remember. 'I think his father died three years ago from a heart attack, but it said nothing about his mother.'

Ruth nodded. 'Then I think we should find her.'


I am not how sure how well I wrote Ruth, but I hope it wasn't too Black is my own creation, invented for this story. The rest of the Black family is canon as far as I know and it took an awful lot of work to research it all and make it work. I really hope I didn't make any mistakes with that, but if I did, feel free to point them out to me.

Anyway, next time we'll be checking in with Robert and Zaf as they will pay our dear Mrs Simmons, née Black, a little visit. Next time will not be next week however, because I'll be on holiday then, but I'll be back the week after that. Sorry about that.

Please review? I'd love to hear what you thought about this.