Maura Dumbledore

'I thought the plan perfect,' said Dumbledore slowly, sitting in his armchair by Minerva's fireplace, his night robes wrapped tightly around his body, a mug of cocoa in one hand. 'When Maura went into hiding, I believed the plan of making her best friend, a Muggle, as yet unknown to the wizarding world, her Secret Keeper to be the perfect solution to all our problems, given that she had refused my proposal to take the job into my own hands. Grindelwald would not have stopped looking for her in our world. And he would not give up until he had found the witch or wizard hiding his greatest enemy...'

At this point, Dumbledore laughed quietly, but without mirth, and wiped his left eye with one swift, instinctive movement of his arm.

'You understand? Enemy. A girl of thirteen years. To an adult wizard, known and feared by most people of his time. But he saw her as an enemy. So I had to protect her. Fidelius was the only way.'

The room had gone very quiet. Neither Mandy nor Emeric, nor Minerva herself were moving now, all sitting in a semicircle around the fire, waiting patiently for the old headmaster to continue his story. Dumbledore sighed. He looked rather downcast by now and Minerva presumed that he had had Firewhiskey beforehand. As every Christmas. Just a drop to kill the pain inside.

'If only ever people would start listening to me when it comes to choosing their Secret Keeper,' he whispered. 'You see - a Secret Keeper cannot be selected against the person's will. A Secret Keeper must, under any circumstances, be a person known to and trusted by the one to be hidden. And they must chose their Secret Keeper. They alone.' He sighed and threw an unusually downcast look into his mug, ignoring the steaming liquid in it. 'Maura,' he said after another small while, 'chose Maude.'

'And you thought it was the perfect plan, because she was a Muggle,' said Mandy quietly. 'You thought it was safe.'

'I begged her to let me take the burden,' said Dumbledore tiredly. 'But as I say, people don't listen to me. And I did approve of her choice. Maude was extremely reliable. And on our side. However often we obliviated her, she kept bumping into witches and wizards by accident, and she kept keeping it to herself. So in the end we had stopped obliviating her, because she'd simply turn up somewhere else again sooner or later. I should have foreseen that it was too obvious despite her being a Muggle. She was too close. And, of course, it was always a bit of a gamble against the officials. If they had known...' He hesitated for a while and stared into his mug of cocoa, lost in thought. 'Officially,' he continued after a small while, 'Muggles are not to know about us. The law has remained the same. Only the means have... changed. But we were prepared to take the risk of having her around. And Maura was prepared to take the risk of letting her take the job as her Secret Keeper. She was... an exception. A weapon, unknown to the enemy.'

'What happened?' asked Emeric.

'Several things,' said Dumbledore, now staring into the fireplace again. 'Grindelwald never found out where Maura was, and he did not find out about Maude in the beginning. All he could gather was that Maura had apparently chosen a Muggle as her Secret Keeper, and that it would be almost impossible for him to trace her.'

Minerva gave him a nervous look. She knew the story and knew that the now following part was not something to tell just anyone. But Dumbledore trusted Mandy and Emeric. He had trusted them for years, and there was no reason not to tell them what he knew. In any case, it would not make a difference now. It was just... Minerva shifted uneasily... the headmaster seemed so vulnerable when he told people about his past. And this story in specific was something you could use against him - emotionally. It was not something he liked to be reminded of.

'It is something Minerva reminded me of when yelling at young Robertson tonight,' said Dumbledore, a weak smile flickering over his tired expression. Minerva looked up.

'Me?'

'When you told Rodney that, in your view, soldiers were nothing but how did you put it...?'

'Rule-abiding, authority-obsessed, inconsiderate idiots,' said Minerva coldly. 'I didnae intend to be so rude, but he insulted my family and my beliefs. Besides, there is some truth in it.'

'Certainly,' said the headmaster softly and Minerva realised that he had been trying to make a point. 'What I am trying to say is - your accusations reminded me of the incident when Grindelwald used a certain of these... rule-abiding people to trace Maude for him. I had not had much to do with the wizarding army at that time, and I hadn't... shall we say calculated on them? I knew not just how aware they were of what was happening all around. I had no idea that there were people in this organisation knowing as much about current events as I did. They even knew about Maude. Well - some of them did, at the very least.' He sighed once more. 'I considered myself clever. I was haughty and did not realise that other people might know more than I did. That Grindelwald might use... our own kind against me without them ever knowing it.'

Minerva noticed Mandy giving Emeric a knowing side-glance and sighed in sympathy with the old headmaster. It had been a difficult time for him, she knew. And it had not ended well. Not at all.

'My uncle is still looking for her, ye ken,' she whispered after a short while. 'He disnae think Lance did his job.'

Dumbledore smiled weakly. 'Yes, I have heard he is still out there. Unfortunately, I fear, he is searching in vain. Maude is dead. The reason for me being so sure is that I know Lance very well. There is two things you can say about this man. One, he knows his job and how to do it, and two, everything is a matter of honour. He would not have let Maude off, even if he had known who she was and whom she was hiding. He might have spared her life long enough to settle matters, but he would not have spared her and told everyone he had done his duty afterwards. It is just not his way.'

'His duty?' said Mandy alarmed. 'What on earth do you mean by that?'

Dumbledore looked unhappier than ever. 'The rules were very clear on that matter in those days,' he said quietly. 'Muggles could not know about us. It was a security lack. In those days, if an unregistered Muggle happened to learn the truth about our world the rule was to kill him or her on spot. No exceptions.'

There was a long, stunned silence. Mandy stared at the headmaster in what looked like silent horror, and even Emeric seemed surprised, although the times Dumbledore was talking about were not unfamiliar to him.

'He killed her?' he whispered.

'He did,' said Dumbledore, looking downcast. 'And transformed the body into a single bone, as used to be the custom. Security precaution, you know. As I say - he knows his job, and how to do things properly. He did not, however, know that Maude was Maura's Secret Keeper. Grindelwald used this to his advantage,' he added unhappily. 'He tricked both of us.'

There was another long silence. Mandy, however, shifted uneasily in her chair, and as expected could not keep still for long in this matter.

'It must have been a hard time,' she said carefully. 'And it was certainly a great loss to you, but I wonder why... I mean... I am sure she meant the world to you, but...'

'You cannot see why the life of one person should be so important to a wizard so powerful and dangerous as Grimmauld Grindelwald?' said Dumbledore. 'Well, it has to do with families. Pureblood wizards can be as stubbornly superstitious as the most cut off, conservative Highland farmer.'

Minerva coughed, almost imperceptibly. Mandy grinned.

'The thing is,' said Dumbledore, ignoring his colleagues, 'that there is one or the other belief about people being destined to rule and other people being destined to fight them. The problem being...' he hesitated for a moment, then licked his lips and went on, 'I do not believe in destiny. I do not believe in predestination, prophecies, heroes, miracles - at least not the ones people expect of those heroes -, and I do not believe in fate. If anyone claims it is a Dumbledore's "fate" to rule and to slaughter his own family members till the end of our times, quite frankly, I start wondering whether this person has spent too much time in a pub. Life is not about what we are born to do, but what we choose to make of it,' he said weakly, his eyes assuming a strange glitter behind his half-moon spectacles. His mug was still placed between his hands on his lap, while he seemed to have forgotten all about it. 'It's what I always say. But you all know that, of course.' He looked rather fragile and old for a fraction of a second, so that Minerva and Emeric nodded quickly and Mandy got up, placing an arm around the old headmaster's lilac robes.

'We do,' she said, taking the lukewarm mug out of his hand, carelessly handing it to Minerva who, lost in thoughts, took it and sipped the liquid the headmaster had ignored all evening. 'And we know you tend to be right in such matters.'

Dumbledore smiled, but said nothing. A fraction of a second later, there was a sudden jolt of energy letting everyone in the room jump in surprise and shock. Minerva felt herself shaken and drilled through by warm, soaking beams of light. As if through a veil she saw the headmaster gasp, flick out his wand, pointing it directly at her chest, and heard an incantation as old as the bearded man himself, which made her limps go stiff. She barely managed to look down herself, seeing that she was not seeing anything. Her body was nothing but a glassy substance, which hardened at a worrying speed, her intestines had dissolved into gas. She would have gone pale, if that had been possible at her state, and instead looked up in horror, trying to grasp what was happening.

'Albus...' she said, seeing Mandy collapse on the floor, but that was when the stiffness had reached her neck and everything went suddenly quiet.