1939
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Magic, to Hermione Granger, was love at first sight.
When Professor Dumbledore came to her house, he had given her family an introduction on the magical world. Although it had been informative, and he'd shown them his magic wand and performed a simple transfiguration in their sitting room, it was still a lecture. And so Hermione absorbed it with the same academic interest as she would have done for a lesson on Biology or Chemistry. It wasn't magical, not really. It was learning. While knowledge had a magic of its own, it wasn't magic.
Magic was the moment when the bricks had fallen away, in that alley behind the dingy pub on Charing Cross Road. Magic was seeing broomsticks fly and drawings move and tiny, wrinkly-faced men with gilt livery and golden axes.
It was multi-faceted, that magic of one's first impression. It was wonder, it was connection, and it was kinship. It was a whole world opened to her that she had never known existed, full of opportunities waiting for her to grasp. It was filled with people just like her.
But that love wasn't perfect and everlasting. It was honeymoon love.
Hermione would always remember fondly how her wand had chosen her and showered Garrick Ollivander's floor with leaves and flower petals, and how the clerk at the bookshop had shrunk and wrapped her three dozen magical books with a cheery wink and a wave of his wand.
But she would also remember how, in her second week of classes, her fellow Ravenclaws giggled to each other when a Hufflepuff in their Potions class blew up his cauldron and burned half the skin off his hands. He'd been crying as he was shunted off to the Hospital Wing, and the rest of the class had tittered and resumed their work as if nothing unusual had happened. And in the first half of her second term at Hogwarts, Jasper Hastings was publicly humiliated during breakfast, by his mother and his own Housemates. For weeks, no one spoke to him in the corridors unless it was to mock him; she could only guess that it was worse in his Common Room where there weren't any teachers to see and intervene.
(She didn't count the instances where she'd been called a know-it-all by students in other Houses. She was immunised to this from her years of Muggle primary school, and while it had stung at first, she didn't think it was a flaw to want to know everything. None of the other Ravenclaws in her dorm had disapproved of her constant need to study, and neither had Tom. Besides, if she was a know-it-all, then Tom Riddle was an unabashed teacher's pet.)
She knew she'd been raised in a sheltered environment, but this amount of... of casual disregard of fellow human beings was something she'd never witnessed before. When she'd asked her dorm mates about it, she was told her unease was due to cultural dissonance between the Wizarding and Muggle worlds. Wizards didn't make a fuss about physical injuries because they could be healed within a day. Wizards of the traditional stripe were pressured to marry well and marry early, and public displays of "deviant behaviour" diminished one's prospects for making an advantageous match. It was all well and good if Hastings had waited until he'd secured the line, so to speak, before he indulged his tastes, but he hadn't and it had gotten out and that was that.
She had been enchanted. And she was now disenchanted.
Magic was still magic, of course. She would always love it, all its simple convenience and its grand potential; she couldn't see herself ever taking it for granted as witches and wizards did when they were born knowing what they were. But people, magical people, had lost their lustre for her. She had, unconsciously, held wizards to a higher standard, the same way she had expected families with wealth—like her own—to be generous to those less fortunate. But it turned out that wealth, just like magic, didn't make the people who had it any better, any different, than those who lacked it. She had given them the benefit of a doubt, but the evidence came out, and she couldn't ignore it.
Wizards just didn't care about the war.
At first, Hermione thought the lack of reaction was due to the old British custom of the stiff upper lip. There was no sense in hurting morale or scaring the youngest First Years by making a big fuss of it. But a week later, Hermione had gotten several letters and newspaper clippings from her mother, about city-wide curfews and blackout hours. And still, no one at Hogwarts seemed to be talking about it. When Hermione compared the Evening Standard to the Daily Prophets she found abandoned in the Ravenclaw Common Room, there was scarcely any mention in the wizarding papers.
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Notice from the Ministry of Magic, Department of Magical Transportation:
Temporary interruption of service to International Portkey and Floo Terminals for the following cities...
...To request an exchange or a refund, please send copies of your booked itinerary to the owling address below.
The Department hereby apologises for your inconvenience.
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It was a list of several major cities in Central and Eastern Europe, and it was buried on Page 9, in between an article on obtrusive fireworks set off by spectators at the latest Kestrels versus Wasps Quidditch game, resulting in fines for any future occurences, and a report on the renovation of a wing in St. Mungo's Hospital.
Hermione showed Tom the disparities between the Muggle and Wizard newspapers in the library one Saturday, while they were labelling diagrams for a Herbology assignment.
"It reminds me of French aristocrats," Hermione observed. "They sit in their towers and eat cake and throw masquerade balls, until one day the peasants are banging on their doors."
"That's why they invented moats, you know," said Tom, not looking up from an illustrated field guide of shrivelfig subspecies. "And if the average wizard can dodge a burning stake, then a guillotine won't be any more trouble."
Hermione did not point out that the ghost of Gryffindor Tower, a Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington, seemed to have had trouble evading the guillotine. She knew that Tom would have said it was his own fault, a result of his own incompetence. Because what kind of wizard allowed himself to be arrested and disarmed by Muggles? Clearly a very inept one, and therefore if he died, it would be no tragic loss to wizardkind.
She imagined that he'd be smug about the fact that the Slytherin ghost was rumoured to have taken his own life. Tom would overlook the motivation behind the deed and jump straight to the fact that his House's ghost had died by a wizard's hand. Since the Baron himself was the wizard in question, and his death was by his own prerogative and no one else's, it was, all in all, a much more dignified end than being offed by a Muggle.
Hermione thought Tom had a very unhealthy view of death and mortality, not to mention a severe lack of sensitivity when it came to other people's feelings. She had brought it up once or twice in their past letters, but Tom stated that they were his genuine beliefs and he saw no need to censor them. He respected her opinions, so why could she not grant him the honour of respecting his? Did she not respect him? Was she dismissing his beliefs just as Christian missionaries did in Papua, Ceylon, and Tonga, because having been raised in brick houses—and not in communal lodges or palm huts or orphanages—they inherently knew better than everyone else?
She hadn't known what to say to that, so she'd said nothing.
Tom, when he spoke to her through words on paper, was only convincing because he laid a foundation on legitimate points. In person, however, in his most passionate and persuasive moments, he didn't even need that veneer of legitimacy.
"I don't know why you're not worried about it," Hermione said, her quill scratching into the parchment with more force than necessary. "They've handed out gas masks and evacuated half the children out of London."
"Simple," Tom replied. "We're not in London, are we? Nobody at Hogwarts cares because everyone knows this is the safest place in Britain."
"We won't be in Hogwarts the whole year," Hermione pointed out. "Mum says she wants me to stay during Christmas because it'll be safer out of the city, and on top of that, they'll start rationing in the new year. But the teachers won't let us stay during summer, so we'll have to go back to London, no matter what's going on there. And... and you're not the slightest bit alarmed!"
"I always knew I was going back," said Tom, "and there wasn't anything I could do about it." He leaned forward in his seat, tapping his quill nib on the rim of his ink bottle so the extra drips fell away. "You see, Hermione, as I've mentioned before, Wool's Orphanage is Hell on Earth. When you transplant Hell to a warzone... well, Hell is still Hell, isn't it? Just one circle lower down, if you take Dante's word on it. And what's the difference, when it comes down to it? More orphans, less food, no electricity, complimentary mustard gas. I've had all of those before, except for the mustard gas, of course. But luckily, I'm told that everyone gets a free gas mask."
Hermione's mouth dropped open. "I'm going to assume that your nonchalance is a coping strategy. Not a very good one, though; I daren't think you'd ever be one for sobbing, but if you need to, I'd never judge you for it—everyone needs a good cry once in a while." She cleared her throat, ignored Tom's petulant expression, and continued with, "But you're right. If my family have got to worry about rationing, then the conditions on your end will be even worse. I'm going to try and think of something to fix this..."
"You're going to defeat Germany and end the war?" Tom asked incredulously.
"No," said Hermione, "I'm going to find something to make summer better for us, or at least safer, if we can't be at Hogwarts or use magic without being expelled. Mum says if London is too unsafe, we'll be packed off and evacuated to the countryside. And if we're out of London the whole time, not only won't we be able to see each other, but we won't have any way to visit Diagon Alley, and then we'd start our Third Year electives without having bought our textbooks!"
Hermione was almost hyperventilating by the end. She always, always, started a new school year with the assigned texts fresh on her mind. To do otherwise would be tantamount to coming to class unprepared. It was unthinkable. One didn't come to class without their pens and paper. Hermione Granger didn't come to class unless she could recite their textbook's table of contents and flip to the relevant pages as soon as she saw the topic of the lesson written on the blackboard.
(Tom was amused by Hermione's obsessive study habits, and had called her a pedant on more than one occasion. Hermione didn't understand Tom's own revision methods: he paced around in circles, summarising the key points of their class lectures, while his Dictation Quill jotted it all down in a sort of stream-of-consciousness commentary. He barely took notes in class, and when she looked over his shoulder, much of it was in abbreviations and references to books and authors outside the professors' supplementary reading list.)
"What are you going to do about it, then?" Tom asked, his eyebrows lifted in interest.
"I'll have Mum arrange somewhere else for you to stay that isn't the orphanage," said Hermione firmly, not knowing how she'd pull it off, but aware that if Tom was hurt or crushed to death in an overcrowded public air raid shelter, she'd never be able to forgive herself.
"Dear God, you're not going to have your family try to adopt me, are you?" said Tom, a flash of revulsion passing across his face, before he smoothed it away. "I don't need a family, not even for convenience's sake."
"I'll have you know that my family are wonderful people!" Hermione said, though not with much acid. "My father thinks you've a clever mind and good prospects, and my mother... Well, she doesn't talk about you much, but I've never heard her say anything bad. They like you. If you weren't a wizard, I'm sure they'd have sponsored you through university, and a good one at that. Dad was impressed when I explained why I wanted to borrow his old Latin primers." Hermione paused for a moment, thinking through the implications. "Besides," she added, "I think 'Tom Granger' is a good name. It suits you."
Tom rolled his eyes. "Just as much as 'Hermione Riddle' suits you."
"'Tom Riddle-Granger', then," said Hermione, smiling.
He made a face. "Are you going to come up with any more horrible examples to support your belief that family members should share the same name? If so, consider repeating 'Hermione Granger-Riddle' out loud three times before you open your mouth."
"I think it would give my mother a heart attack," Hermione said. "But at least the hyphen makes it sound posh."
"Flights of whimsy aside, was this the best idea you've thought up?" Tom asked. "Or are you and your family going to rent rooms at the Leaky Cauldron for the whole summer? It'd cost well over a hundred pounds with the exchange rates the way they are. Your family aren't hard up for money, but that's still quite a sum to spend to stay in London. Especially as you don't know how long it'll last, and you'd have to do it every summer as long as there's a war on."
"It would be cheaper if my parents were allowed to rent directly in Diagon," Hermione grumbled. "It would be easier if we were old enough to rent in our own names. It's unfair that we, as children, have to think up a solution on our own because the Headmaster and the professors aren't going to do a thing about it."
"I seem to recall someone saying that we should always listen to the teachers..."
"If their duty of care as teachers expires in the summer, and they absolve themselves of responsibility for our welfare," Hermione said, "then we have no responsibility to listen. Only for the duration of the summer, mind you. We might have to take matters into our own hands, but it'll be out of necessity. It's certainly not an excuse to devolve into anarchy."
She didn't like it, but what else was she to do?
Muggle London was growing dangerous. Wizarding London was expensive, and many parts of it were inaccessible to her parents. Living in Diagon Alley meant that they wouldn't be able to come and go as they pleased, and both her parents needed to work at her father's clinic. Since Mum and Dad didn't have wands of their own, they'd have to rely on her wand or, if she was somehow unavailable, on the indulgence of other wizards to let them in through the brick gateway. Mum visited Diagon Alley to stock up on groceries, and either a kind wizard or the Leaky Cauldron's bartender would open the gate for her on request. Hermione knew that not all wizards would be keen on letting unattended Muggles wander around Diagon, knowledge of magic or not. In the worst case scenario, someone with a grudge would report them, and Mum and Dad would run afoul of a Ministry Obliviation squad with an inflexible "clean up first, ask questions later" policy.
Or she could be evacuated to some distant village in the countryside, with most of the city's children. She and her parents would be separated from one another, just as she would be from Tom, as he'd be sent along in a group with the other residents of Wool's. Her parents would have to go to a great deal of trouble in bringing her back to London in time to catch the Hogwarts Express, but it was still possible. They could afford to send her money for rail fare and the family had their own motorcar, and enough money to buy black market petrol since the official stuff had been under ration from the first week of September. Tom didn't have any of that.
"Oh, Hermione," said Tom, propping his chin in his hands and giving her a very self-satisfied look. "Every day you grow closer to seeing the light."
Hermione huffed and turned back to her books.
I've heard Tom say that magic is only limited by one's knowledge and imagination, thought Hermione. If only we were allowed to use magic in the summer! I know if we use it in self-defence or emergency, we can get the official reprimands struck off our permanent records by appealing to the Ministry, but just like the Hogwarts Board of Governors, the old families have an advantage that we won't.
I'm in the Hogwarts library. There is no source of magical knowledge better than here. I just need the imagination part, but I'll have the rest of the school year to think of something.
Imagination wasn't her strongest suit, she knew; Tom had proved to be much better at it, completing his transfigurations on his first or second try, while she had to spend half the lesson focusing on the proper visualisation. They were top of their class, as most of their other classmates only got a halfway decent result by the end of the lesson, and a good quarter hadn't managed a successful transfiguration at all. In Charms, however, they were evenly matched, as the subject required a great deal of precise wandwork and timing. And this was where her textbook skills put her in good stead.
So when she returned to her Common Room after dinner, Hermione decided to go about her plans logically.
She approached the Sixth Year Ravenclaw Prefect in one of the reading alcoves set in each of the windows of Ravenclaw Tower. Devina Holbrook had been the Fifth Year Prefect last year, which meant she had been in charge of introducing the First Year girls to life at Hogwarts. The six Ravenclaw Prefects divided responsibilities so the First Years went to the same person for advice and tutoring up until their Third Year, and anyone above Fourth Year was considered old enough to be able to figure out their problems on their own if they could, or by asking a classmate if they couldn't. It seemed like a sensible system to Hermione; she'd wondered if the other Houses did the same thing.
"Devina, can I talk to you?" Hermione asked. Step one: always ascertain the facts.
Devina held up a finger, her eyes scanning the page of a book in her lap. She gave a short sigh, then lowered the finger and shut the book with a brisk snap. "Yes? Granger, isn't it?"
"I've heard people say that Hogwarts is the safest place in Britain. Is that true?"
"Worried about the rumours?" said Devina, cocking her head. "They do say Hogwarts is safe, that much is true. But you weren't asking me to repeat hearsay, were you? I can only confirm that, according to my historical knowledge, Hogwarts has never been captured by enemy force. Goblin rebellions, Danish invasions, pre-Statute royal succession crises, more goblin rebellions. They've come and gone, and while the castle has been attacked before, they were all successfully repelled.
"So the evidence does point toward Hogwarts being a safe place to be. I'm not sure if is the number one safest place, as I hear the Unspeakables in the Ministry's Department of Mysteries have got their patch locked down tighter than a goblin's pocket. But whatever rank on the list it has, Hogwarts is definitely safer than the average home, and you don't have to worry about anything while you're here."
"Oh, good," said Hermione, pulling a bit of parchment out of the pocket of her robe and jotting notes on it with a pencil. "What exactly makes Hogwarts so safe?"
She'd seen wizards frown in silent disapproval at those who used fountain pens—which she still used when writing on the train or outdoors where there wasn't a good place to set a bottle of ink—but they still used pencils in such tasks as drawing diagrams or filling out astronomy charts. Wizard pencils, however, looked like thick, square sticks of graphite wrapped in string or paper and not the slim, machine-manufactured wooden cylinders she was used to.
"First: there's the teachers, of course," said Devina. "All of them have qualified for a Mastery in their respective subjects, so trust me, they've got a bit more skill than your average housewitch. Never seen proof that they could match up to an Auror in an all-out duel, but I expect Professors Dumbledore and Merrythought could give them a run for their money.
"Second: the Founders built some sort of native protections into the castle walls. I've never seen them myself, and neither have my grandparents, so this is either rumour or quoted from Hogwarts: A History. It says, in an emergency, that when called on in a time of need, the castle itself will come to life to defend its charges. Make of that what you will.
"And third and finally," Devina said, clearing her throat and waiting for Hermione to catch up with her frantic note taking, "the everyday protections in the form of wards around the grounds. Most wizarding homes have some sort of simple ward: things like keeping the gnomes out, Muggle repelling, or for the families who live around Ballycastle or Tutshill, noise wards to keep the shouting out when there's a Quidditch match in the village. Hogwarts has wards built by the Founders, the strongest anti-intruder protections I've ever heard of. No Apparition, no Portkeys, limited internal Floo, no one comes in unless the Headmaster personally approves them."
Hermione jotted all this down, except for the bit about Quidditch. "Can anyone have a ward around their house?"
"I suppose," said Devina. "But not everyone can cast one. Well, they could, but an amateur job wouldn't last a day. And most people would prefer to pay a professional to do the work than study years for the Mastery themselves, or do a rush job and have to re-cast it every other day. It might work if you want a small silencing ward for a Quidditch game once a week, but anyone who wants serious wards hires a wardmaster."
"How does one... get a wardmaster?" asked Hermione.
"You could owl the Ministry for their list," Devina said, shrugging. "They have a pool of warders on call, in the Department of Magical Accidents. They're the ones who set up barriers while waiting for clean-up to arrive and do their job. Sorry, I can't tell you much about this—I'm not a warder, and it's my mum who takes care of our family's banking and filing."
"Thank you, I learned a lot," Hermione said gratefully, putting her parchment away. "As a Muggle-raised student, I'm glad I had someone to explain all this." And, taking a page out of Tom's book, she gave Devina Holbook a bright smile and said, "I really hope you make Head Girl next year. I can't imagine anyone else who'd do a better job at it."
Devina beamed and patted her on the shoulder. "Any time, Granger."
Hermione went up to her dormitory, deep in thought.
I want a ward for our house, but I don't want the Ministry involved. I don't think I should use a Ministry warder—would they be obligated to file a report on all of their unofficial housecalls? Is it the same way a doctor is obligated to breach patient confidence if they believe a serious crime has been committed? If I'm asking them to perform magic in a Muggle home, it might be a breach of the Statute of Secrecy, thought Hermione, gnawing at her lip. She didn't want her parents Obliviated, and the Ministry warders worked directly under the Obliviators!
She knew some Obliviations could be undone, but if she had her parents committed to St. Mungo's to get their memories returned—and who knew how long that took—what would happen to her? To the Muggle world, it would look like her parents had disappeared without a trace, and left with no adult guardians, she'd be in the same boat as Tom.
I need a wardmaster, she decided. But not an official one. A black market wardmaster, if that exists.
Hermione could consider buying black market petrol morally permissible in an emergency. Nothing counted as more of an emergency than ensuring she had a way to get to Hogwarts, to study magic. And it wasn't as if the Germans would roll Britain over just because her father bought a few cans of petrol from some shady man in a back alley, in order to get her to school on time.
Therefore, there was nothing inherently wrong with the existence of a black—or grey—market. All economies were built on shifting webs of supply and demand. No government, no matter how powerful or restrictive, could take total control over the wants and needs of a population of forty million people, so there would always be blind spots. In the British wizarding world, the population numbered in the tens of thousands, but the pattern still stood.
She just had to look harder.
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The weeks and months passed, the warmth of late summer fading to autumn and a snowy, freezing winter.
Hermione kept up with her classes, studied with Tom on the weekends, and whenever she had some time free before dinner, buried herself in the library to look up information on wards and warding. She noticed that she met with Tom less often than she had the same time last year, but it didn't seem to bother him. He'd managed to ingratiate himself with his Slytherin year mates, and while he still sat next to her in their shared classes—Defence and Transfiguration—his "friends" always saved a space for him at dinner. She presumed that Tom sat next to them in his Slytherin-Gryffindor classes, based on his complaints about their lack of skill and poor grasp of the English language.
She called them his "friends" because he never had anything nice to stay about them; he held more fondness for Peanut than he did for the likes of Avery, Lestrange, or Travers. When she asked him what positive attributes he saw in the other Slytherin boys, his response was rather telling. But in the end, she couldn't count "rich" as a compliment, and definitely not "gullible". He didn't respect them, and she didn't believe that he ever would. They would only ever be "friends", and as long as he spoke of them with such disdain, there would be no chance whatsoever of their sharing a true and genuine friendship.
"But why on Earth do I need to be friends with them, Hermione?" Tom had asked, a thin smile lifting up the corner of his mouth, throwing the planes of his cheekbones into sharp relief. "I have you."
It was the way he said it that seemed so unsettling, as if friendship was in the same category as chattel, like a chocolate frog card or a coin in one's pocket.
You are my galleon, he implied with the gleam of his eyes and the tilt of his head, and everyone else is worth a knut to me. I would rather have you than four hundred and ninety three knuts. They might be equivalent, but they will never be equal.
She knew he meant well, and before he'd met her, there wasn't anyone else he could speak to in so forthright a manner. She assumed that he just didn't have much practice at—at sounding nice.
He could make himself sound nice if he wanted to, said that voice of circumspection in the back of her mind. Have you seen the way he acts around Professor Slughorn?
But whatever she was to him, it did not go unreciprocated. She was "friends" with the Ravenclaw girls in her dormitory; they spoke amiably to one another a few times a day, and reviewed their class notes together during meals. But the only things they had in common were magic and schoolwork, and the relationship built on that was... academically fruitful but ultimately unsatisfying on an emotional level.
To be harsh on Tom for his inability to make genuine friends would be unfair. Not to mention hypocritical.
It was during an afternoon meeting in mid-November, when they were practising spellwork in the abandoned classroom in the dungeons, that Hermione considered telling Tom about her personal project. It wasn't as if she was deliberately keeping him in the dark about it, but she had enjoyed studying with a goal in mind beyond getting yet another perfect Outstanding mark. Yes, having Outstandings across the board was nice, but she had five years' worth of class assignments ahead of her, so in the greater scheme of things, a single perfect mark was insignificant compared to her already perfect record.
(If this had been her O.W.L.s year, it would be a different matter, naturally.)
Tom had his own personal projects, too—which he'd been keeping to himself. She knew he was still looking for answers about magical mind control whenever he had a chance of being left unsupervised by the librarian, or unobserved by the other students. Not even the threat of arrest and imprisonment had been enough to discourage him; in fact, he had been quick to look up the technicalities of the law, but it didn't do much to soothe her worries.
"Did you know that the mind control spell is only illegal when used on an unconsenting human being?" asked Tom idly, as he stacked five cups upside down and hid a knut under one of them. Peanut, Tom's pet rat, watched with sharp eyes and twitching whiskers. "It used to be illegal against witches and wizards only, but they revised the law in 1717 to encompass Muggles."
"I don't see a problem with that," said Hermione. "But it's somewhat insulting that wizards had to go through a referendum to consider my parents worthy of legal protection. And I don't see why anyone would consent to being mind controlled. If you valued someone enough to respect their consent, couldn't you just ask them to do things of their own free will?"
"The law book said some wizards can be granted exemptions in special circumstances. For research and education purposes," Tom replied. He moved the cups around so that the one with the knut was hidden, and clucked his tongue. Peanut leaped to his hand and began sniffing around the cups.
"I imagine that somewhere out there, wizards are studying for their Mastery by casting mind control spells on each other," Tom breathed. His eyes were unfocused and he was sitting very still. "And the most interesting thing about mind control spells is that you can legally cast them on animals and creatures, so long as the creature isn't registered as property to a wizard owner who hasn't granted consent. There was one precedent in the 1840's about someone cheating in a horse racing championship by spelling a competitor's Granian stallion to throw the match in the last furlong. Of course, it'd have been legal if the owner had given permission, though the perpetrator would still be found guilty of match fixing."
"By law," said Hermione slowly, "a wizard would be able to buy animals to test spells on them, and even if a pet shop or animal breeder knows the creatures would have illegal curses put on them, no one can do anything about it?"
"It wouldn't be illegal," said Tom. "That's the point. But I don't see the point in making it public that you're planning on using advanced spells on your pets. That's just going to get you on a watch list, because why else would someone practice on animals unless it was to train themselves up to working on humans? If it was me, I'd have gone with a reasonable excuse for needing so many disposable animals, like working on a Potions Mastery." Tom frowned, his brows furrowing in thought. "That wouldn't be a terrible idea; Potions Masteries can be fairly useful."
Hermione objected to the notion of 'disposable animals'. She decided to put that aside for later; if she tried to rag on Tom for it now, he would no doubt present her eating habits as his side of the argument, and it would end, quite predictably, with Hermione renouncing meat for a week while Tom made faces at her from the Slytherin table, putting on a grand show of piling steak and sausages onto his dinner plate.
However, if he'd said the words 'disposable Muggles', she would have stopped him right there and demanded an explanation. That was crossing a line he couldn't come back from, and one she couldn't excuse.
Hermione was aware of Tom's distaste for the general Muggle population. What he had once referred to in his letters as peons had almost overnight been replaced by Muggles. And Hermione, trying to comprehend his hostility, had turned her thoughts to the people who surrounded him when he wasn't living at Hogwarts. She remembered meeting girls her age at the orphanage, when she was nine years old. They had looked at her as if she was an extra-terrestrial, as if they had trouble restraining themselves from touching her wool coat and gold buttons and silk hair ribbons. It had made her distinctly uncomfortable; she couldn't articulate why, but she hadn't left the place with the best of impressions—it had also been the first time she'd met Tom. And then there was Mrs. Cole... "Likeable" was far from an applicable description of the woman.
"Well," she said forcefully, "if it was me, I'd owl the Department of Magical Education and keep an up-to-date list on who's undertaking a Mastery program. Anyone pursuing topics too far outside their Mastery supervisor's field of expertise is worth taking a second look at."
"Ah, the old conundrum," Tom sighed, his dark eyelashes cast down in false resignation. "You'd stifle innovation in the name of moral integrity. I find it funny coming from you of all people, Hermione, since I've heard you complain more than once about how stagnant wizarding society is."
Hermione had been focused on transfiguring a fork into a spoon, and that spoon into a knife. Fluid, sequential transfigurations were difficult to complete within a self-imposed time limit, and harder when she didn't have examples next to her to copy, but she wanted to be prepared when the class studied them after Christmas. It was one of the basic skills for advanced transfiguration techniques, so it was never too early to become competent.
She paused, her wand half-raised. She knew what Tom was doing, after years of debating with him. He was probing the edges of what she called her moral compass, trying to figure how hard he could press and where to push to make her North swing a few degrees in his direction. It didn't bother Tom that her compass didn't align with his, or that he didn't seem to rely on his own; Tom appeared to have relegated his internal compass to the same function and importance as his appendix.
"Instead of devoting my time to arguing whether integrity is better than innovation," said Hermione primly, "I would much rather find a way to innovate with integrity. There's nothing that says you have to pick one and forgo the other."
Tom watched Peanut point at a cup like a well-trained hunting hound. Tom tipped the cup over, and revealed the bronze knut beneath.
"Some people say that walking the middle ground means you lack conviction," Tom remarked. "But I think that a man who has the ability to successfully take the middle path can show up the two groups on either side. He might not be popular, but he'd be superior."
"I don't think popularity or superiority matters that much to me," said Hermione. She hesitated, then added, "Of course it would be nice to have people like you, but I'd rather keep my principles intact than sacrifice them for the sake of other people's opinions."
"You know," Tom mused, "Machiavelli once debated whether it was better for a prince to be feared or to be loved. You already know what I'd choose. But I'm not quite certain he'd know what to do with you, since you don't seem to care about either—so long as you're convinced you're in the right."
"Do you think I'd make a good prince, then?"
"I think you'd make an effective one."
"That's good, then," Hermione said. "Being feared or loved is irrelevant if the person in charge is ineffective. Nor is public opinion an indicator of the merit in a leader's public policy. You might as well replace the prince with a parliament if it would prove a more dependable guarantor of social progress."
"It looks like someone has got their priorities in order," said Tom approvingly. He picked up the knut, rubbed it with his thumb, and slipped it into his trouser pocket.
.
.
Hermione decided that the best solution would be the simplest one.
After a few mornings of loitering around the Great Hall after breakfast, Hermione noticed that a good third of the castle's population subscribed to or borrowed copies of Wizarding Britain's largest newspaper, The Daily Prophet. There were a handful of others who read sport and hobby magazines, upper year girls who liked fashion plates and gossip rags, and N.E.W.T. students who browsed academic publications to prepare themselves for taking an apprenticeship after leaving Hogwarts.
But the most widely-read publication by far was The Prophet. She'd read it on occasion, as there was always a copy or two left on a chair or table in the Ravenclaw Common Room, free for anyone to take back to their dorms. She'd never thought about purchasing a subscription herself, as her mother bought and sent her the Muggle paper from London via Gilles, the family owl. She had preferred reading reports on Britain's contributions to the war effort, instead of wasting her time with Quidditch rankings or brazen Statute violations by drunken great-uncles at their 150th birthday party.
It was only natural, with Wizarding Britain's limited population, that the newspaper would have to invent "news" each day to fill the headlines. She'd seen the same thing in local papers when she and her family had holidayed in small seaside villages when she was young. They reported when a prize-winning ewe gave birth to twins, complete with photographs of the darling little lambs. The Daily Prophet reported on local Quidditch teams' mascots having a cold. Their photographs, however, were animated.
So she forced herself to read The Prophet cover to cover, and thus found her solution.
If she needed to catch a wizard, then she ought to cast a net.
.
.
Looking for:
Private and Discreet Wardmaster, to secure London residence.
Will pay market rate and above, negotiable in galleons or pounds sterling.
Must prove familiarity with Laskaris' Alternating Ravelin.
Send inquiries to H. Granger,
care of Classifieds Correspondence Desk
Daily Prophet Office, 43 Diagon Alley.
.
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She composed the letter to the Daily Prophet office, and enclosed a pouch of galleons.
Most people would leave their own owl address in their classifieds, but Hermione didn't want to draw the wrong sort of attention by putting her parents' Muggle address in a public newspaper. Nor did she want to put her own Hogwarts address out; anyone reading would assume it was some trick or prank if they saw it was a student running the ad. So she acquiesced to paying extra for the Daily Prophet people to hold her mail until her private owl could pick it up.
Now she would have to sell her mother on the idea, because market rate for a private wardmaster was more than her allowance and birthday money combined could afford.
It was a good thing, she observed, that both she and her mother went by the name H. Granger.
She'd handle the magical side of the deal, and she was sure that Mum could manage the rest.