Disclaimer: I am not J. K. Rowling, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, or anybody else I may allude to in this story.

A/N: Thanks to all of my reviewers. There are three more chapters after this. If you know anything about Gothic literature, please let me know if it reflects any aspects of it.


"Don't accept another person's opinion unthinkingly." – The Trial

The next morning, Lily awoke to find herself alone in the Head's common room, the fire nearly dead, and a blanket spread across her body. She smiled a little, knowing one of the boys must have placed it there after she fell asleep, and got up, stretched, and headed up to her room. With the sunlight streaming brightly through the window, Lily could not help but feel silly once again at her reaction to the noises she thought she had heard the night before.

She got dressed quickly to go down to breakfast, but as she turned to leave, she glanced once more at the bookcase and noticed something she had not seen before. There was a small book on top of the bookcase, lying haphazardly as if placed there by someone with more important things in mind than putting a book away neatly. The fact this book, unlike all of the others, was not placed precisely where it should be drew Lily towards it. Being only 5'5"(1.7m), she had to stretch in order to reach the book. She glanced at the small, black book, and, shrugging, placed it gently in her book bag to look at after breakfast.

Since it was Saturday morning, there were few people in the Great Hall for breakfast, many students opting to forego the very important meal in favor of a lie-in. Without anyone to converse with, Lily ate quickly and headed to the library, intending to get a head start on her weekend homework. Once there, she reached into her bag and felt the small book she had already forgotten about. Curiosity overcame her once more, and she opened it eagerly. On the inside cover, scripted carefully were the words Property of Elizabeth Ann Canton, a gift from her grandmother, Caroline Brown Canton, 6 February 1872. Lily gasped with surprise. 'This must be her diary!' Lily thought to herself. With increasing zeal, Lily turned a few pages, but found nothing. She sighed, 'she was Head Girl. Elizabeth was probably intelligent enough to put a concealment charm of some sort on her diary.' Lily then set aside the diary to try to crack into some other time and, sighing, pulled out some parchment and her Charms textbook, began the first of her many essays assigned for Monday.


That evening at dinner, she was telling Samantha about the diary when Snape came up behind her and snatched up the book. He sneered at her, and, thinking it was hers, said, "Well, well, Evans has a diary. I wonder what it says." He opened it, and seeing nothing, took out his wand, saying, "Reveal yourself." He looked in surprise at the words that appeared on the page. Open-mouthed, he stared at Lily, stating, "Well, Evans, I didn't think you had it in you." Then, seeing James and his friends approaching the table, Snape tossed the book back to Lily and departed, leaving behind two speechless girls.

Lily recovered first and opened the book, only to find it blank once more. James sat down next to her, glaring at Snape's retreating back, and inquired, "What was that all about?"

Snapping out of her reverie, Lily looked up at James; "I found this book in my dormitory. I think it's the diary of Elizabeth Canton. Snape obviously thought it was mine. I hadn't been able to see anything in it, but when Snape told it to reveal itself, it obviously said something, but I cannot imagine what it might have been."

Shrugging, James reached for the book, which Lily handed to him. He flipped through it quickly, and then pointed his wand at a page near the middle, ordering, "Reveal yourself." Unlike when Snape did this, the book shot water out at him. This prompted his "friends" to laugh at him, hysterically. He shrugged, "that's odd. I wonder why it responded to Snape and not to me." The rest of the group looked as clueless as he felt. None of the others wanted to risk the embarrassment of getting a face full of water in front the entire school, so no one else tried to order anything of the diary at that time.

After dinner, though, James, Lily, Sirius, Remus, Peter, and Samantha all retreated to the Head's common room, and while Remus and Peter started a game of Wizard's Chess, the rest continued to discuss the diary. Sirius, being the brave Gryffindor that he was, asked to see the diary, and, upon receiving it, ordered the same thing of it as James and Snape had, and, like James, received a face full of water. Wiping his face on his robes, Sirius cracked, "Well, maybe the diary knew that Snape would melt if water touched him and did not feel like being responsible for the death of an 'innocent' student," prompting laughter from everyone but Lily, who tried to glare admonishingly, but failed as a smile appeared on her face.

Looking up from his chess match with Peter, which was surprisingly close, Remus said, "you know, I was reading the other day about passwords and secret codes and there was one particular article that stood out." He glanced around the group, and, confirming that he had their attention, continued, "It said that there is a way that you can charm an object to respond to any order given to it by a family member. As long as the caster is alive, it will not respond to anyone but the caster, unless a specific password is uttered. It went on to say that, upon the caster's death, it would respond to the orders of their survivors and their descendants, but to non-relatives only upon uttering the specific password. Basically, maybe Snape is a descendant of Canton, so it has to do whatever it wants, but if one of us must have the password in order to see what's inside the diary." The other boys knew that he must have read this in his research to improve the map, but the girls assumed he had been reading for a class or for fun. Either way, everyone believed his hypothesis, and were entertained by the idea that Snape was some sort of descendant of the Muggleborn Canton.

Since a few of the students present had short attention spans, the conversation once again turned to simpler matters, and before she knew it, Lily found herself falling asleep in the common room once again.