Chapter 119 — A Name That Shouldn’t Be There

Ron listened to the account of our second lesson with an expression I had missed seeing on him that week. When Harry said we had both managed it twice, he looked from one of us to the other, waiting to discover which part we were exaggerating.

‘Mist,’ I said. ‘No animals yet.’

‘You keep saying that as though it makes it less impressive.’ Ron leaned forward while Hermione asked for my notes. I gave her the pages about the casts and kept the private account of the memory underneath. She noticed, accepted the division and began with a question about the difference between the two lessons.

For a while, we talked about something all four of us wanted to understand. Then Crookshanks appeared at the bottom of the girls’ staircase, and Ron went quiet. Hermione got up and carried the cat back upstairs before he could cross the room.

I watched the doorway after she had gone. Searching for Scabbers every evening had given me plenty of time to remember something I should have told Ron long before this argument. I had put it off again each time, usually while finding a reason to be helpful about something easier.

That night, I spread the map on our table without opening it. Harry was still downstairs, and Neville sat on his bed with a book, far enough away for us to speak quietly. Ron moved the lamp to give us more light, then looked at my brush lying untouched beside the parchment.

‘Before we start,’ I said, ‘there’s something about Scabbers I need to tell you. Something I did in first year.’

His hand stopped on the lamp. I told him how the rat had emerged from behind a cupboard in the classroom where Hermione and I were working. I had recognised him, caught him and decided to try our preparations on him instead of bringing him straight back.

Ron stared at me while I explained the two effects: the induced fixation on another mouse, then the hiccups. We had used reduced preparations after observing them on ordinary mice. We had stopped the first trial and watched the strange behaviour fade, but Scabbers had still been hiccupping when I returned him.

‘You said you’d found him,’ Ron said. His voice was quiet enough that I wished he would raise it.

‘I had. I left out what happened afterwards.’ I kept my hands on my own side of the table. ‘And when you asked about the hiccups, I suggested stress. That was a lie.’

The lamp hissed softly between us. Ron looked down at the blank map, then back at me. ‘Did Hermione know what you were doing?’

‘She was there. She objected, then helped set the limits, and stopped the first trial.’ Saying that made it sound as though the limits had solved the important problem. I made myself finish. ‘Neither of us asked you. I’ll tell her we’ve spoken. She should give you her own account.’

Ron pushed his chair back a little. ‘You both decided I didn’t need to know,’ he said. ‘Was that another limit you agreed on?’

‘I thought telling you would stop us doing it. Afterwards, I didn’t want you angry with me.’ There was no way to make those reasons sound better by explaining them at greater length. ‘I’m sorry, Ron.’

He rubbed a hand across his mouth and looked towards his bed. Scabbers’s empty box stood beside his pillow. When he turned back, he asked whether there had been anything else, and I told him those were the trials we had carried out on his rat.

‘I’m telling you what I did,’ I added. ‘I’m not asking you to decide it was all right.’

‘Good. Because it wasn’t.’ He stayed where he was for long enough that I began to wonder whether he wanted me to leave. Then he pulled the list of searched rooms towards him. ‘We still haven’t found him. You can help with that.’

I nodded and reached for the brush. Ron waited until I looked at him again before making certain I understood that helping now wouldn’t make the other thing disappear. I told him I knew, then touched the map and gave the familiar words.

Lines spread beneath the lamplight. Ron brought his chair back to the table as the names appeared, and for the next half-hour we spoke mainly about rooms. Harry joined us, noticed the silence and accepted it when I said Ron and I had something to finish discussing another time.

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We compared the passages with places Scabbers used to visit, hoping a route or a cupboard might suggest somewhere worth checking on foot. Looking for a pet’s name had given us nothing useful so far. The map could show us plenty without explaining how much we were missing.

The Room of Requirement remained absent. The chambers beneath the old trapdoor were drawn now, as they had been when Harry and I noticed the change in second year, though we still didn’t know what had once hidden them. I followed an outline towards the edge of the page and tried to imagine what spaces a rat might reach beyond it.

‘He could get through something much smaller than that,’ Ron said, tapping the passage. ‘Percy used to lose him behind the furniture. Mum always knew where he’d turn up.’

It was the first thing he had said all evening that wasn’t a question, a direction or an accusation. Harry asked how long Percy had kept him, and Ron explained that Scabbers had come to him when Percy became a prefect and got his owl.

‘Fred and George didn’t want him,’ he said. ‘They thought he was boring.’

‘You’ve said that yourself,’ Harry replied gently. Ron took his finger off the parchment and looked at him.

‘I’m allowed to. He was mine.’ His eyes returned to the map before either of us could answer, and I thought of how casually I had picked Scabbers up in that classroom. At the time, I had been far more interested in what he could help me find out than in the person waiting for him upstairs.

Ron told us about taking him to Egypt, the trouble of keeping him with the luggage and the way he would settle into a warm pocket when everything around him was noisy. Some of it I had heard before. I listened more carefully now, following the names slowly while he talked.

Twelve years seemed a remarkably long time for a small animal. I knew too little about magical pets to make anything reliable out of that observation. It was long enough for Scabbers to belong to Ron’s idea of home, which made the empty box beside his pillow harder to look at.

Harry stayed until he could no longer read the names without bending close to the page. Neville had put his book down some time before. Gradually, the dormitory settled around us, leaving Ron and me with the lamp and the occasional creak of a bed.

At last he sat back and pressed his hands against his eyes. I offered to finish the section we had begun, and he checked which part I meant before agreeing to go to bed.

‘Wake me if there’s anything,’ he said. I promised I would, then turned the map so I could follow the corridor properly. He didn’t thank me, and I had no reason to expect him to.

After a while, I began rereading the same passage. One label entered a room, another blurred into a staircase, and my eyes wanted to close each time I blinked. I was considering putting everything away when Ron sat upright in bed and shouted about spiders.

My elbow struck the table. I caught the lamp before it tipped, then turned to find him staring through me with an expression of appalled confusion.

‘They want me to dance,’ he said. His blanket had gathered around his waist, and he looked down at it as though his feet might already have accepted.

‘Tell them you’re asleep,’ I suggested. Ron considered that with far more seriousness than it deserved, nodded and lay back down. Within a minute, his breathing had settled again.

I waited to make certain the conversation was finished, then moved the lamp to a safer place. That was enough for tonight. I reached for my brush as a label crossed the corridor near the section I had been studying.

Peter Pettigrew’s name moved beneath my hand. I stopped, bent closer and read it again, taking care to keep my sleeve away from the flame. The spelling remained the same when I moved the lamp.

I looked towards Harry’s bed, then back at the parchment. Footprints advanced beneath the label, paused and turned. There was no photograph this time, no Ministry statement or account of an award: just a name moving through Hogwarts while its owner was supposed to have been dead for more than twelve years.

My notebook lay beneath Ron’s list. I pulled it free and wrote the name exactly, adding the time from my watch and the corridor shown. The question I had asked over Hermione’s newspaper returned with enough force to make my fingers tighten around the quill.

The map might be wrong. There might be a ghost, a mistaken name or something else I hadn’t considered. I had seen enough of its limitations to hesitate before deciding that Pettigrew was alive, but I had also relied on it too often to close it and go to sleep.

The footprints moved again. I put on my shoes, then crossed to Ron’s bed with the map and woke him as I had promised.

On the first attempt, he pulled the blanket higher and told me he had already refused the spiders. I tried again, saying it was the map. His eyes opened properly, and he followed me back to the lamp.

‘Pettigrew?’ he said, bending over the parchment. He read it twice before looking at me. ‘But he’s supposed to be—’

‘I know. I need a professor to look at it.’ I gave him the notebook with the time and location. ‘Keep this. I’m going to ask the portrait to call the patrol.’

Ron glanced towards the door. ‘You’re going after him?’ he asked. I said I was going to get someone who could help find out what the name meant, and he looked back at the map as the last traces of sleep left his face.

‘I’ll wait downstairs,’ he said. I took the parchment and left him putting on his shoes, with my notebook open on the bed beside him.