Although Lockhart's class remained Hermione's least favorite, History of Magic was a close second. Binns' droning on and on was entirely useless and bored her to tears. She spent the class generally reading something entirely unrelated in the back or practicing complicated Transfigurations on her desk.
Binns' ineptitude was a frequent cause of frustration in the Slytherin common room. Not only was his class boring, but he didn't cover any new history – nothing from the 20th century at all, if the seventh years were to be believed. Slytherins as a whole were very annoyed by this. If their classmates learned the truth about the rise of Voldemort, they felt, and how everyone had been terrified and scared, how it hadn't only been Slytherins who became Death Eaters, then they wouldn't be treated so unfairly by the other houses. But without the topic being formally covered in the curriculum, the only facts their classmates tended to learn was byword of mouth from their parents, most of whom didn't convey complete and accurate information.
Hermione had seen from Muggle history how important it was to know your history, lest you be doomed to repeat it. And Hogwarts not teaching the history of the world's most recent Dark wizard seemed to bode poorly, almost like a bad omen hanging over them all.
Binns' class today was on one of the goblin rebellions again – this time, wizards had seized a gold mine under goblin control, and then seemed surprised when the goblins weren't okay with that. That wasn't how Binns was spinning the story, of course – the wizards were the hero in his version, who fought off the greedy and jealous goblins – but Hermione could read between the lines.
She tuned him out and pulled out the 1943 yearbook that she'd checked out from the library, idly paging through it and looking for clues. Harry and the others hadn't wanted to go back to the library, and she'd had too much homework left to get ahead on to really look at it yet. Binns' class was as good as any.
Myrtle Warren had been in her 5th year when she died, just after her O.W.L. exams. Hermione sighed, looking at her picture. It was tragic.
Her eyes scanned the page, taking in Myrtle's classmates absently and lingering over the Slytherins before she paused over a photo of a particularly good-looking boy.
Tom Marvolo Riddle, the picture caption read.
She considered. Hagrid had said the prefect had been called Tom, hadn't he?
She flipped to the front of the book, scanning. There, with the photos of clubs and the like – there was a photo of all the prefects together. There weren't names under the photo, save for the Head Girl and Head Boy, but there was a mess of around two dozen people all crowded together. Hermione peered down carefully, scanning for green-tinted ties until she found the good-looking boy from before. She flipped back to the 5th years to double check.
Tom Riddle had been a prefect in his 5th year, the same year as Myrtle. It was probably him who had run into Hagrid, Hermione surmised. To be sure, she checked the 6th and 7th years for other boys named 'Tom'. She found one other possibility, a 6th year called Thomas Casper, but he wasn't in the photo with the prefects.
So. Tom Marvolo Riddle, she mused.
Who was he?
Hermione absently sketched his name at the top of a sheet of paper, idly writing down things she knew as her mind wandered.
Tom Marvolo Riddle
Possible Heir of Slytherin?
Facts:
• 5th year Slytherin prefect
• Caught Hagrid with acromantula, knew about it in advance
• Students had rumors of the Chamber of Secrets being opened
• One student petrified in 1943, one student died
• This year: one student petrified and one cat petrified
○ Can cats be Muggle-born?
• Monster has glowing yellow eyes
She trailed off.
That was all she really knew, wasn't it?
She gnawed at her quill as she considered, doodling a giant spider in the top margin of her parchment, hovering ominously over Tom Riddle's name. She added large hairy legs to cage in his name, so the words couldn't escape, and drew giant fangs dripping with venom and way too many eyes.
She smirked at her drawing, before adding a crude drawing of Ron running away, fleeing to the safety of the side margin.
The bell rang, and everyone began gathering up their things. Hermione hurriedly grabbed her parchment to stuff into her bag before stopping short, staring at it.
"You okay, Hermione?"
Hermione glanced over her shoulder at Blaise, who was raising an eyebrow at her.
"Yeah, I'm fine," she told him. "I'll be along in a minute."
Blaise shrugged and left, and Hermione waited until Binns had disappeared through the blackboard and the classroom was empty to pull her parchment back out, smoothing it out on the desk, examining it.
One of the legs from the acromantula that had caged in Tom Riddle's name had landed in the thin space between his middle and last name. As she'd shoved it into her bag and it folded, her eyes for a moment had read "Marvold" instead of "Marvolo".
Marvolo was a very unusual name, wasn't it?
And even if it was just a hunch...
Well, it was worth examining, wasn't it?
Hermione carefully penned Tom Marvolo Riddle in the middle of her page once again, before beginning to cross out letters.
Tom Marvolo Riddle
/om /a/ Ri/dl/
Voldemort
You could get 'Voldemort' out of his name, she realized. She wasn't just imagining things.
Hermione rewrote the letters she had left underneath, sucking on the end of her quill.
OM A RIDL
This time she paused for a long moment, rearranging things.
OMARIDL
IROAMDL
AMORDIL
IAMORDL
LORDMIA
She stopped.
/m /a/ /i/
Lord Voldemort
Then, all that was left…
/ / /
I am Lord Voldemort
Hermione stared at the parchment for a long moment.
Part of her felt it was too easy. It almost left her incredulous – anagrams of names were something out fiction books, not something people actually did. Hermione had read Carmilla and The Last Vampire one summer, where the idea that vampires just rearranged the letters in their names each 'lifetime' they lived was a prevalent one, and 'Alucard' had been the most obvious alias for 'Dracula' she had ever seen.
She remembered it in particular because she'd been ten at the time, and she had spent the afternoon trying to come up with her own new vampire name, to no particular success ('Imogene H.R. Ranger' and 'Germaine Rhonger' had been her best options, neither of which she had particularly liked).
But for Lord Voldemort to do the same thing?
Well, Hermione thought. If he was only a fifth year when he came up with this name…
As far as names went, it was pretty good, too. She was pretty sure 'Voldemort' meant 'flight of death' or something similar in French, which seemed pretty solid for a Dark Lord-type name.
But still…
She looked at her parchment, musing.
If Tom Riddle was Lord Voldemort…
Well. That would certainly clear up Dumbledore's ambiguous statement of "The question is not who, but how" nicely, too.