Building a vanishing cabinet wasn't as easy as it first looked.
Not only did Harry have to learn how to read the blueprints, he had all things considered very little strength in his arms. As results using the saw and other tools could be a real pain and Harry was starting to believe the electric drills and other tools Uncle Vernon had been selling were one of the greatest inventions in history and would have probably bought him one had he been there.
Still, even though was completely out of his depth, the thought of fooling the Ministry of magic with pure muggle work after all they've done was enough to make him grit his teeth and keep going.
"You're doing rather well," Mr. Evans commented when he came to check his progress. "It's not going to be perfect of course but it's not bad at all if that's the first time you're doing it."
Harry tried to catch his breath. "You think it's going to be finished on time?" he asked.
The man checked his fob watch. "Apparently, yes. It'd probably be a close call but we should have finished the polishing before the representation." Pocketing his watch he pensively looked at the cabinet. "Honestly, I was afraid I'd have to correct your mistakes and that'd lengthen the process but I barely have to do anything. I must say, that's a nice change. Oh well, I think we can call it a day and go home."
Harry sharply nodded and cleaned his hand with a red cloth the man gave him.
When Harry gave it to the man, the magician showed the red clothes and a bouquet of flowers appeared.
"Alright, how did you do that?" Harry asked the man. "No, really, how?"
"Magic."
Harry made a face.
The man chuckled all the way to the theater's exist and it was only when he saw the inspector asking questions to a member of the theatre's staff that he frowned.
"Is everything alright, inspector?"
The man closed the notebook he had been writing on and answered: "It appears that a few regulars and workers here have spotted a strange man wearing a ruff roaming around the theater the night the vanishing cabinet burned down. I must ask you to come to New Scotland Yard," he told the woman. "And tell a colleague of mine what you told me so that we can have a clear picture of what that man looked like."
Mr. Evans shook his head and lowly chuckled. "Still thinking a strange man came to burn down a little cabinet, inspector? You must realize this is just a little bit ridiculous. I admit it'd make a nice detective story but this is, sadly, real life. Really, what makes so convinced it was arson, inspector?"
"You."
Mr. Evans stopped chuckling.
"You're working very hard to make sure nobody gets near your cabinet," he began explaining. "And this piece of furniture is what ultimately makes you earn your keep. So why as it is on fire you're not even trying to save it and only watch it burn?"
Mr. Evans didn't say anything.
"You were not even surprised," the inspector continued. "Your nephew and I ran to the smoke but you? You weren't even surprised to see it was that cabinet that was the source of the fire. You knew," he accused, "you knew as you were weaving some stupid lie on how I lost consciousness that somebody was messing in the storage room and what that person was after."
Mr. Evans opened his mouth.
But the inspector didn't let him speak. "I'm sure you have a nice explanation for me," he drawled. "But I honestly stopped believing a word coming from your mouth a long time ago. So, if you're not going to tell the truth by yourself, I guess I will have no choice but to make you."
A glance in their direction was enough for Mrs. Evans to know there was something on Mr. Evans' mind when they came back. "What happened now?"
Mr. Evans pensively looked at the window.
The woman turned to Harry and gave him a look making it clear he should be more talkative if he wanted the two of them to stay of good terms.
When Harry explaining the muggle inspector was looking for the one responsible for the fire she stilled. "And is he right?" she asked.
"Do you know many men wearing a ruff, Maggie?" Mr. Evans answered. "Of course, he is right. Now, I don't think he's going to find Brutus but..." He sighed. "If something happens or he gets too close to the Wizarding world, I get the feeling that we're the ones who'll have to fix Brutus' mess."
The woman seemed to hesitate a moment. "Would it really be such a bad thing?" she asked.
He hesitated. "This inspector is making a point in finding out how my magic tricks are done and getting me to confess there is no such thing as magic. While he is not a bad man, he is very noisy; and if he somehow discovers magic is, in fact, real, I fear he will tell everybody. And if the statute of secrecy is broken, who do you think is going to be blamed?"
Her jaw tensed. "In other words, we must stop a police inspector from doing his job and you have to cover that wizard who is harassing you because if we don't we'll be the ones in trouble, she dryly stated. "Am I missing anything here, Patrick?"
The man hesitated. "I'm pretty sure that inspector has more or less figured he got attacked. So if if I play it wrong and he finds out I'm trying to cover up his attacker -or if he thinks I'm the one who attacked him- I may get in trouble?" he tried.
Mrs. Evans was not amused.
"I'm not supposed to know, you know?"
Harry stopped cleaning the plate and turned to Mrs. Evans. "Know what?" he asked.
"Your sort. Magic. I'm not supposed to know there are people a few streets away who can solve any problem with a stick of wood. If these people finds out I know, they could mess up with my head."
Harry frowned. "But you're married to Mr. Evans. I'm pretty sure you're not breaching the statute of secrecy if you tell your wife or close family."
"That's not what Patrick said. That… That secret thing, nobody is allowed to know. Apparently when children from normal families learns they have magic, they're asked not to tell their own parents."
Harry couldn't help drawing back at that. That wasn't what had happened to him or other muggleborns. "Shouldn't-Shouldn't their parents have a say? I mean, they've got to know where they go."
But even as he said that he realized he himself should know better. Didn't the Dursleys refuse to let him go to Hogwarts after all? And when Uncle Vernon had told Hagrid he wasn't to go at Hogwarts, hadn't Hagrid barely listened and almost laughed to his face?
Her lips curled in barely veiled disgust. "They lie. The kids lie and give their parents a nice little story; and if they refuse to follow these strange men, their memories get erased."
Harry sharply raised his head. "What?"
"Shouldn't you know all that?" she dryly asked. "It's in your world after all. You're clearly not used to this place, but Patrick cannot help noticing you've got severe gaps for somebody who should have lived in that wizard world."
Harry winced. While it was true he was doing his best not to make any faux-pas, it had happened once or twice that Harry would not understand something Mr. Evans was saying when they had been working the vanishing cabinet. And if the man would explain some expressions or examples, Harry was aware it was evidence enough he was not from this time.
"W-Well… I travelled," he tried.
Mrs. Evans' eyes narrowed. "And how does it work where you're from?"
Harry hesitated. "My relatives know. They're muggles."
"And no wizard come to bother them, I suppose," she drawled. "The same way, I'm sure they're perfectly fine with the way things are."
… If Harry was being honest a moment, the Durleys have had their perfectly normal lives outright shattered the day he had found out he was a wizard. And if Harry didn't pity them at all, he had to admit that after everything Dudley had no reason to like the Wizarding world at all.
"It's complicated."
Her lips curled in barely veiled disgust. "I'm sure it is."
Harry uneasily looked away and grabbed the first dish to clean.
For a moment, none of them said anything. Finally, Harry couldn't handle it anymore.
"Not all muggles are nice."
Harry didn't quite know who he was really trying to defend here. Perhaps it was the wizarding world, perhaps it was himself.
"Some people just hates magic. And they'd do everything to beat the magic out of them. So sometimes we need to pro-"
Mrs. Evans's towel forcefully hit the table.
"Don't you dare," she hissed.
Harry gapped a moment. "Bu-"
"You don't get to pretend you're the victim here. Not after what your sort did to my Patrick."
Harry was speechless at the pure hatred he could see in her eyes. "What… What are you talking about?"
She sneered. "Don't pretend you don't know this as well. What happens to normal people like my Patrick. They tell their parents they're just sick and will finally do magic if the child drink these potions they're selling, they take advantage of them and let them ruin themselves to 'cure' a perfectly normal boy."
Harry gapped. "Wh-"
"And again, I get the feeling Patrick's parents were the 'nice' ones. You can do far, far worse."
And she started talking about parents trying to beat the magic into their children or pushing them out of a cliff to pushing them into doing magic. About 'nice' parents hiding their children in the attic or erasing their memories before dropping in a muggle orphanage under the pretense they were doing this for the kid's own good.
It was clear the woman has wanted to scream this for a long time and now that she's started she wouldn't be able to stop until she was done. And Harry couldn't help listening with growing horror to how the Wizarding world could look like from the outside.
"I wouldn't be surprised to learn some… some squib got some mysterious illness and died before anybody could find out they were not like your sort," she finished. "So, no, you don't- You don't get to say you're the good guys and we're some dangerous monsters who'd hurt a child because he's different. I may be a muggle, I'd rather die than to a tenth of what you did to my Patrick to a child of mine! You hear me? I'd rather die!"
She stopped to catch her breath and Harry uneasily looked away.
Seeing this she said, voice small, "You thought I would."
"You remind me of my aunt."
Perhaps it was how she was handling her home, but Harry had more or less assumed she and Aunt Petunia were cut from the same cloth and would have been great friends.
Now however, Harry could see he had judged her too quickly.
"She and my Uncle would have loved to beat the magic out of me," he said. "And when I left to learn magic they were more than happy to see me gone. They were normal, you see."
"That's not normal."
Harry couldn't help pausing at these words.
She sighed in exhaustion and weakly put a hand on her face. "I shouldn't have lashed out," she said. "I just- I'm tired. Can't you- Can't your sort just leave us alone? I-I'd do anything for this to end."
Harry hesitated. "Perhaps I could..." He then bit his lip, not quite knowing how to finish that sentence.
Her lips stretched. "I'm afraid there's little you can do."
But there had to be, Harry couldn't help thinking. There had to be something they could do to make it all stop.
But no matter how hard he thought about it, he just couldn't see what.
When Mr. Evans told Harry they weren't going to do anything the next day, Harry couldn't help protesting.
"There has to be something we can do!"
The man sighed. "Why do you think he told us the reason why he's so convinced somebody came? He wants to drive us to give something away. As of now, he had suspicions but nothing whatsoever. You act rashly, you will give him evidence."
"But-"
"You heard him, Brutus might have attacked him and burned down my cabinet, it is me who made him suspicious." He sighed. "I have to say, I really messed up there."
"You were upset because of the-"
"The show must go on." Seeing Harry frowning he gave him a wistful smile. "That's something we say in circuses. Even when everything goes wrong, the performer must keep smiling, pretend it is all part of the act. You just cannot break the mask and you must keep audience under your control. I got upset, and just like that-" He snapped his fingers. "I lost control. And it is very difficult to get it back. In our case, there's some silver lining."
"Which is?"
"I know our dear inspector," he told Harry. He then lazily smiled. "He's been a regular for quite a long time so I know what makes him tick. And I can tell you he's too logical to even consider a magical explanation if there is another one. I make him believe he's found the right one, he will stop looking where I don't want him to. Besides, we have a vanishing cabinet to finish for Monday and cannot afford to lose time here."
Seeing there was nothing Harry could say that'd make the man change his mind, Harry sighed and numbly nodded before going back to working on the 'vanishing cabinet'.
At first glance, it didn't seemed that different from a few days ago. If Harry squinted he could see the few spot where he's had trouble making the holes but there was otherwise nothing to show it wasn't just another plain cabinet you could buy in any shop.
"Shouldn't we paint it or do something to show it's not an ordinary cabinet?"
Seeing Mr. Evans' horrified look he sheepishly apologized.
"Magic," the squib dryly stated, "is not about bright colours or loud noises. This cabinet is perfect the way it is, you don't ruin it for cheap attention."
Harry knew there was some truth to the magician's words, but part of him had trouble believing anybody was going to be fooled.
The older man sighed. "Secrecy is the main component of magic," he began explaining. "That's what makes it different from science and why a magician must never reveal his secrets. You put a sign saying 'vanishing cabinet', nobody is going to be surprised. You know -or think you know- how it works, you're not awed when the person inside disappears. I mean, look at you, you didn't particularily care whenever I did something before. Now that you know I'm a squib however you cannot help asking me 'how did you do that?' You make something extravagant, people suspect there's more to it, that's it's a trick. You use something ordinary, something they could have, their imagination runs wild."
"But what if they're not interested and you can't fool them?"
"They want to be fooled."
Harry stopped working.
The magician shrugged. "Every single one of the spectators do, even the dear inspector, deep down. They want to believe extraordinary things can happen, because they want to escape their lonely life, because they want to believe there's more to this life than what they've been told. We're selling dreams there and they're willing to suspect their disbelief one evening to get it. Well, apart from the inspector but you get the gist of it."
Harry suddenly remembered seeing Hagrid doing magic for the first time and all the awe he's felt when he was young and he was just discovering there existed a entire world where magic was real, Dudley could get a pigtail and Harry could learn to fly.
And when he's started learning how it was supposed to work and was supposed to hand essay after essay, that awe had slowly started to fade to be replaced by something akin to boredom or annoyance when the sneakcoscope was bothering him.
How strange it was to realize that Harry these days was more awed by the squib pulling out a flower from seemingly nowhere than he was by Professor Dippet's latest charm.
"Could you teach me a magic trick or two after we're done with the cabinet?" he asked.
The magician's green eyes shined in amusement. "I thought you'd never ask."
A/N: A little info dump to those interested in Mrs. Evans' story and how it worked for muggleborns in the 19th century.
The idea that muggles whose children are magical are not supposed to know about their kids going to a magic school is surprisingly based on canon. Most specifically, Albus Dumbledore is the one giving it credit to this idea. When we see his meeting with young Tom Riddle, one of the first things he did twas meet Mrs. Cole to say Tom got some scholarship for some kind of school.
And Mrs. Cole asked him many questions on said school. How did Tom get a scholarship to begin? Where it is? Can I get some identification papers? We can have our headcanons about her, she was at this moment acting responsibly and asking the questions any parents would ask and was looking for Tom.
Professor Dumbledore's answer was to give her a charmed paper and get her drunk with a bottle oh alcohol he selflessly provided. Albus Dumbledore, the defender of muggles and so on, cursed a muggle so that she'd stop asking legitimate questions on where that strange man would take an eleven years old.
He had no reason to believe at this point she wasn't a concerned caretaker. Meaning most probably that it was just standard procedure in the 1930s. Even in PS, Hagrid makes it clear the Dursleys cannot stop Harry to go to Hogwarts.
Conclusion: muggle parents have literally no say on whether or not their child go to Hogwarts or not, it is the child and only them who can make the choice. And if the parents in the 1980s know about magic, odds are the statute of secrecy was much stricter in the nineteenth century and children were asked to never say a word of magic.
