Chapter 29 — One Useful Name

I recovered the Nimbus from the grass and handed it to Hooch after the match. She kept it for inspection, which suited me much better than carrying it upstairs and hoping the next flight would be different. She had watched Harry during the warm-up and seen what happened later. Now she turned the broom in her hands, checking the handle, the twigs and the join between them.

She asked whether I had seen it behave like that before. I hadn’t. The fresh scrape I pointed out had come from the match, and nothing I knew about its time under my bed explained a broom trying to throw its rider off. Hooch told me to return when she had finished examining it.

When Harry and I collected it, she had found no fault which explained the bucking. ‘If it shudders without cause, you come down immediately, Potter,’ she said. ‘Being able to stay on is not a reason to ignore it.’

He agreed promptly. I carried the Nimbus back towards the castle and told him he could still borrow it for the team under the same permission, provided he listened to her. He looked at his scraped knuckles and admitted that he had thought he was going to fall. I told him I had thought the same. We walked a little way without finding anything useful to add to that.

Then Harry glanced towards the emptying stands. ‘Do you remember talking about what we’d do after school?’ he asked. ‘I think I’d like to play Quidditch. Properly, perhaps for a living.’

His smile was much less certain than it had been while he held up the Snitch. I suggested telling Wood once people stopped making him sit down, and Harry’s expression brightened. He could imagine returning to the pitch after what had happened. For the moment, I was satisfied to walk beside him with both of us on the ground.

By evening, studying in Gryffindor Tower had become impossible. Somebody found food, somebody else started a chant which kept losing its rhythm, and Wood returned from the hospital wing with a sore side and an apparently inexhaustible account of Harry’s dive. Percy settled for keeping people off the tables after his first attempt to control the noise failed.

I put the Nimbus beneath my bed before joining in. Hermione caught my eye across the room, but each attempt to reach a quiet corner was interrupted by somebody who wanted Harry’s attention. We waited until the last groups went upstairs. Then Ron pulled chairs towards the fading fire, and the four of us finally had enough privacy to discuss the part of the match nobody was celebrating.

I asked what had happened in the teachers’ stand. Hermione folded her hands before answering, explaining that people had been standing and watching Harry. She had struggled to get through to Snape while nobody looked down to see who was trying to pass.

‘I got behind him and set the hem of his robes alight,’ she said. ‘Only a little. He jumped up, and everyone moved. Somebody behind him fell, but I couldn’t see properly.’

Ron asked what she had done next. She had put the fire out once Snape stopped casting, she said; she hadn’t wanted it spreading through the seats. That accounted for the smoke I had seen from the pitch. She had left the stand afterwards without finding out more about the person who fell.

Harry listened as we described using Hagrid’s binoculars. From the broom, he had seen little beyond what he needed to grip and the ground beneath him. When he understood what Hermione and I had noticed, he stood up beside the chair.

‘He tried to kill me,’ he said. I told him we had seen Snape watching and speaking, but hadn’t heard the words. Harry pointed out that his broom had been trying to throw him off at the same time, and I couldn’t make that fact sound comfortable.

Through the lenses, Snape’s concentration had been unmistakable. The fragments from my other life suggested there was more to him than his treatment of Harry, but supplied no explanation I could offer the boy who had nearly fallen. Disliking the accusation wasn’t evidence against it, any more than disliking Snape proved it true.

Harry said he wanted to tell Dumbledore. Hermione agreed that he should describe what had happened without beginning with a claim we couldn’t yet prove. Ron turned towards her, incredulous that she could say that after setting Snape’s robes on fire.

‘I thought it was him,’ she said. ‘Harry was falling. I had to do something.’

Her voice shook enough to stop the argument for a moment. I remembered the talisman I had held below the broom, with no certainty that it could do what I might need. We had acted on what we could see. Discussing it afterwards gave us time to admit what we still didn’t know.

Hooch already knew about the broom, I said, but somebody also needed to hear about the casting. We could speak to Hagrid, who had watched with us and knew the teachers. We had intended to ask about the dog too. Ron expected him to defend Snape. I told him we would make certain he heard the observations even if he disagreed with what they meant.

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Harry remained standing a little longer. ‘I don’t want to be alone with him,’ he said at last. I assured him he wouldn’t be, and he sat down again while we settled on finding Hagrid the next morning.

We caught him leaving the castle before lunch. Hermione reached him first, and I walked beside his other elbow while Harry explained the broom. Ron supplied details from the stands with increasing indignation. Hagrid slowed as soon as Snape’s name entered the account, looking at us as though we must have mistaken the person we had seen.

‘We used your binoculars,’ Ron insisted. ‘Oswald saw him too.’

Hagrid said that didn’t tell us what the professor had been doing. Hermione described the interruption and the broom settling, while he looked towards the pitch and called it a nasty business. Then he asked why Snape would want to hurt Harry. Harry answered with a question about trying to pass the three-headed dog on Halloween, which brought Hagrid to a complete stop.

‘Who told you about Fluffy?’ he demanded. For a moment I forgot the broom and repeated the name, unable to make it fit the jaws I remembered blocking the doorway.

Hagrid asked what was wrong with it. I said nothing, apart from the difficulty of reconciling it with the number of teeth. His expression softened enough for him to tell us he had bought the dog from an Irishman in a pub the previous year. He had lent it to Dumbledore to guard something, then stopped before naming what.

Harry stepped closer and asked whether it had come from Gringotts. Hagrid’s voice lost its warmth when he told him to leave the matter alone. We were asking about dangerous things, he said. Whatever we suspected about Snape, we were to stay away from the corridor.

‘Will you tell Dumbledore about the broom?’ I asked. That brought him back to the part I wasn’t willing to leave as another unanswered question about the dog.

‘I’ll tell him what you’ve said,’ Hagrid replied. ‘And you’ll leave it to the people responsible. No poking about where you’ve been told not to go.’

It was a promise to pass on our account, not an explanation of the match. I would have preferred both, but at least he had agreed to carry the part concerning Harry’s safety to someone who could investigate it. He started walking again, and the others fell behind while I kept pace beside him.

I told him I understood not wanting students near something dangerous. He agreed, apparently relieved that the discussion might finally be ending. I let him take another step before adding the claim I hoped would make him correct me.

‘But if stealing it could endanger the whole school, someone ought to know there’s already been an attempt,’ I said. ‘Whether that’s Snape or somebody else.’

Hagrid frowned down at me. ‘The whole school? Who told you that? This is between Dumbledore and Nicolas Flamel—’

He stopped abruptly. Behind us, Hermione caught her breath, and Hagrid looked from her to me as though he could now see exactly how much we had known before I spoke. I had another question ready when he shook his head and mentioned Dad.

‘That clever head of yours,’ he said. ‘Your father could do the same thing. Didn’t always make him pleasant company either.’

The question stayed where it was. Hagrid looked more disappointed than angry as he told us to get lunch and refused to discuss anything further. We watched him continue towards the hut, leaving me with a useful name and a reminder I hadn’t been expecting about the person whose habits I might have inherited.

Ron asked when I had discovered that the whole school could be in danger. I admitted I hadn’t. I wanted Hagrid to correct the claim, and he had done so with more information than he meant to give us. Hermione smiled as she repeated Nicolas Flamel’s name, making certain we all had it before beginning the next question.

None of us knew who he was. Harry thought it sounded familiar, and so did I, but the feeling produced neither a face nor a place where I could look. We had an association with Dumbledore and enough reason to think the name mattered. At least we could look up a person now, instead of guessing which valuable object somebody might keep beneath a school.

We started with recent biographies and people who had worked with the Headmaster. The first search found several similar names and nothing which explained why their belongings would need guarding by Fluffy. Hermione kept a list of the books we checked so we wouldn’t repeat them. Ron favoured indexes, while Harry sometimes stared at a page long enough that I had to ask whether he had found something or begun worrying about Snape again.

Flamel remained missing from the shelves we tried. Ordinary lessons continued regardless, with essays due and practical work which didn’t become easier because we were interested in something else. My Potions results improved, but the possible delayed talismans stayed on paper as questions. I stopped bringing every experiment to the library and chose the one problem I meant to work on that day.

Harry borrowed the Nimbus for authorised practices and returned it afterwards. It didn’t buck again. Each uneventful flight should have made the loan more reassuring, yet it also made the match feel less like a fault we could explain by examining the wood. Hooch’s inspection had found no cause, and I still remembered Snape’s lips moving through the binoculars.

November gave way to December. Damp gloves occupied the space near the common-room fire, and Hagrid carried trees over the grounds with branches dragging through the snow. Decorations appeared between meals in the Great Hall, where people began discussing trains and holiday plans more often than Quidditch scores.

One evening I opened Emma’s latest letter over a book of modern magical biographies. She wanted to know which train would bring me home, then listed three meals and asked which I preferred. There was still no useful entry for Flamel on the page beneath it. I set the book aside and began my reply, thinking of a kitchen where the chairs stayed in place and somebody would be waiting to hear how my term had gone.