A Strange Appointment
On the first Tuesday in October, Meredith Richardson felt elated when starting her last double period of Muggle Studies before lunch with the first-year Ravenclaws and Slytherins, her favourite class. The children in this class – bright, interested and well-mannered – were every teacher's dream, and to her own surprise, Richardson, a Gryffindor, particularly liked the Slytherins among them. She had not only taken a fancy to Bernard Wildfellow, the only real Muggle at Hogwarts, but also to his friends.
Bernard excelled in every subject in which he could do without magic, including, of course, Muggle Studies, and she pretended not to notice that he sometimes whispered answers to his classmates or let them copy down, for she knew from her colleagues Flitwick and Macmillan, that Potter and Malfoy – two lovely boys too, she thought – returned the favour in Wizardry and Transfiguration by clandestinely boosting his attempts at magic with their wands under the table, which Flitwick and Macmillan, for their part, deliberately ignored.
In the Nineties, Richardson would have liked to study at Oxford to really become thoroughly familiar with the Muggle world, in which she had always been passionately interested. Unfortunately, the Ministry had rejected her request at the time. So she had to resort to the Muggle press, books and occasional short stays to keep up to date. She certainly knew more about the Muggle world than most witches and wizards, but Bernard's knowledge was much more up-to-date, and it was not learned from books like hers, but came from real life. Other teachers might have feared for their authority and resented him for sometimes politely correcting his teacher. But Richardson was self-confident enough to let him have his way and even encouraged him to tell about his life in the Muggle world.
Today they were talking about telephones. For this lesson, Meredith had borrowed the collection of five historic telephones from her Ministry colleague Arthur Weasley who shared her enthusiasm for Muggle technology. The oldest was still from the nineteenth century, one from the early twentieth, one from the thirties, one from the eighties. Her pride and joy was a mobile phone, which she was just presenting as her latest achievement when she saw Wildfellow suppress a grin.
"Bernard?" she asked encouragingly, "is there anything wrong?"
"Well, I'm afraid," Bernard said, "it's not really up to date any more. I would guess from the design that it is at least twenty years old. Today, you can do a lot more than just make phone calls with mobile phones."
"Really? Tell me, what do you do with them?"
And Bernie told about it. The conversation shifted from smartphones to computers and finally to the internet.
"You can do anything you like," Bernie bubbled forth, "even really weird stuff. For example, I used to play audios backwards this summer."
"What for?" his teacher asked, puzzled.
"Well, some people say that this way you can hear messages that are unconscious to the speaker himself, for they come directly from his subconscious."
Meredith was amazed. Bernard really was an exceptionally inquisitive boy. What other eleven-year-old would come up with such an idea?
"And?" she asked curiously. "Have you heard such messages?"
"Well," Bernie said, "most of it is gibberish. But once I had a real hit: a video with a woman that praised any lipstick, and she seemed to be all excited about it. But when I played it backwards, I understood very clearly: 'Don't – buy – this – rubbish".
They all laughed.
Meredith loved such classes, and it didn't bother her at all that they often drifted far from the topic. What mattered to her was not necessarily to teach her students technical details about telephones – they would learn soon enough how to make phone calls or browse the internet – but to allay their fear of the strange Muggle world whose ambassador and living representative, so to speak, was Bernie. To her, it seemed an unbelievable piece of luck that he had ended up with the Slytherins, where the reserves were the strongest, and a real miracle that MacAllister, of all people, had arranged it.
After all, if the Slytherin first-years were her secret favourite students, the sixth-years of the same house were her nightmare, and MacAllister was the worst of them all. Since the beginning of the school term, they had been studying the Muggle political system of Britain in class. Richardson's efforts to convince her sixth-years of the virtues of British democracy were repeatedly smashed by MacAllister's biting sarcasm.
When she explained how democratic parties work, MacAllister quoted the "iron law of oligarchy" of a German sociologist Meredith had never heard of:
"In short," MacAllister explained, "those already at the top determine who is allowed to join them."
He defined press freedom as "the freedom of two dozen people to determine what the rest of society is to believe."
Everyone is free to express his opinion? "Sure, unless he's got one. Especially one different from the opinion of the two dozen people."
But on the internet they can, can't they? "If Facebook let them."
Human rights ... "always get fashionable when the government is about to start a war against any adversary dictator, while allied dictators, as a matter of course, never violate human rights."
Market economy? "Just try competing freely with Google."
"Tell me, Mr Wisenheimer," Richardson asked testily, "which system would you think was so much better?"
"That's not my problem," MacAllister replied impassively, "it's the Muggles'. I just want to prevent your Ministry from making it my problem."
It was hopeless. She bravely countered, of course, but only had the success to have MacAllister substantiate each of his theses with an entire cataract of arguments. In this way, the students learned a lot about the Muggle world, but unfortunately not what they were supposed to.
Worst of all, however, was the fact that MacAllister did not politely and modestly present his extensive knowledge of the Muggle world, as Bernie did, but rather showed that he did not take his teacher seriously, thus causing his classmates not to do so either. Not only the Slytherins, but even the Ravenclaws had fun with MacAllister cornering her again and again and sometimes even ridiculing her.
In October their subject would be multicultural society, and for days Meredith had been suffering from nightmares in which MacAllister played the leading part ...
The wonderful double period with the first-years flew by. After kindly sending her students off for their lunch break, Meredith packed her shoulder bag and made her way to leave the grounds. She had an appointment. A strange appointment.
This morning, a Ministry owl had landed on the staff table in front of her. It delivered a letter with the ministry's official letterhead:
Dear Mrs. Richardson,
please Apparate to the entrance hall of the Ministry at 12.15 p.m. today. I will pick you up and take you to an extremely important and strictly confidential meeting.
Do not mention to anyone that you are leaving Hogwarts and going to London to the Ministry. To Disapparate, you must leave the castle grounds. Make sure no one is following you and no one is watching you Disapparate.
You will be back in time for afternoon classes.
This letter will self-destruct in a few seconds.
With kind regards
Cesar Anderson
Magical Security Office
No sooner had she read the letter than it shrank and disappeared. Only a tiny cloud of dust remained, which quickly dissipated.
When leaving the castle grounds ten minutes after twelve, she felt her heart beating. After all, the letter did not come from her department, but from Anderson, whom she knew as the head of the bodyguard unit – she had never heard of a Magical Security Office before – who wanted to pick her up himself! This could only mean that he wanted to take her to the Minister in person. On the one hand, this was flattering, but on the other she racked her brains in vain about what the secrecy was supposed to be good for.
When she Apparated to the entrance hall, she spotted Anderson's distinctive appearance next to one of the reception desks. Anderson greeted her with a curt nod of his head, then led the way to the ministerial lift, which normally only the Minister herself was allowed to use. When they stood in silence in the lift, Meredith didn't dare ask what the meeting was about, but she was very, very excited – not only because of the conspiratorial circumstances, but also because she fervently adored Hermione and hoped she hadn't done anything that might have provoked the Minister's displeasure.
Cesar led her straight to the door of the minister's office and stayed behind while she entered. Meredith heard him close the door behind her from outside and found herself alone with Hermione.
The Minister now invited her to take a seat with a wave of her wand. Meredith's heart was beating up to her throat. As if by mere coincidence, Hermione's wand was still pointed at her. The Minister gazed at her long and penetratingly. Then she said:
"Imperio."