The rooms in the old tower were cosy and comfortable. Fires in each room kept everything warm, even in the depths of the Scottish Highland winter. Winter wasn’t here yet, but it wouldn’t be long. Hugo loved his room. He had all his favourite toys and books. There were other children who Hugo could play with if he wanted to.
Hugo continued at his school in London. Hugo and Hermione had an early breakfast in their rooms. Hermione took Hugo by floo, apparition, and a short walk to a street corner in London where the school bus picked him up. It was a tightly timed schedule, but Hermione managed. Magical travel to London and back in an instant allowed it to happen.
The lessons were arranged for Hermione. Septima Vector had a lesson plan for each year which Hermione took over. The senior students and post-graduate candidates were the last to transition to Hermione. There were no dramas.
The project started to get more attention.
The Marauders Map made a reappearance. Hermione had quietly made a copy of it while they were living in the tent during the Horcrux hunt. Harry had asked for a copy to be made, first to see if a copy would work, and second to keep at least one map if the first one was lost or destroyed.
The arithmancy that powered the map was extensive but not complex. The map connected to the Hogwarts wards and repeated everything that the wards detected.
If the wards were revised into a more modern configuration the map would stay blank. There was no hint of security.
The map also showed that the wards did not go underground. The wide-open holes that allowed students to use tunnels to get in and out of the school undetected were still there.
Hermione added more layers.
The magical portraits were added. Each portrait watched and listened in the hallways and staircases. They reported anything suspicious to the headmaster’s office portraits who then relayed that information to the headmaster.
A ghostly layer was added including a special enchantment to provide a Peeves activity alarm.
Then the biggest item on the list.
The enchanted items layer.
It was gigantic.
There were suits of armour, statues, gargoyles, runes engraved around doorways, and display cases containing trophies, and then there were the trophies. The most prominent were the House and Quidditch Cups. Each time a major trophy was awarded a smaller memorial trophy was issued to the House and put in the House Trophy Cabinet. The Head-Of-House kept the major trophy in their office until it was awarded in the following year. Minerva McGonagall was always unhappy when the Quidditch Cup was not on display in her office. The House Cup had been retired but the Cup itself and all the memorial trophies were still there.
There were ten major towers in Hogwarts each tower averaged thirty rooms. That added up to three hundred rooms above the dungeons in the towers alone. There was a similar number with entrances from the connecting corridors. Most of these rooms were magically enlarged, which meant more enchantments. There were more rooms in and below the cellars and dungeons. Each room had at least ten enchanted items. The Mirror of Erised was still there. It was standing in a small cellar room.
There were magically enhanced spaces which did not show up on the maps. The Room of Requirement was one; there were more, a lot more. These were represented on the new map by unexplained blank spaces.
The enchanted items layer was almost black with detail.
Hermione listed the towers. There were more on her map than could be seen at the castle. Some towers were there but were invisible. She reviewed the arithmancy that detected the building structures. Several adjustments were made and then a vanished wing with four more towers appeared on the map. They were there but were in hard-to-reach places. The doors to the connecting corridors were blank walls. The wing was built on rough cliff faces. There were no people, portraits, ghosts, or enchanted items in the vanished wing. That was something to be investigated.
Hermione listed the major spaces, the Great Hall, the Kitchens, the Great Staircase Tower, Gryffindor Tower, Ravenclaw Tower, the Astronomy Tower, the Divination Tower, the Defence Against Dark Arts Tower, the Clock Tower, the Bell Towers, the Dark Tower, the Central Tower, the Hufflepuff Cellars, the Slytherin Dungeons, and the Main Library. There were libraries in other places such as the Ravenclaw Tower and the Divination Tower. Hermione decided to scan the Main Library first. Not only was it the most accessible place in Hogwarts, but it was also still her favourite place.
--ooOOoo--
The third-year class had assembled in the Arithmancy Lecture Hall. As usual, the students were drawn from the four houses as there were not enough students taking the elective to schedule house-based classes.
The class list had been given to Hermione the day after she arrived. There was one name on the list which her eyes hesitated over as she looked down the list. It was James Potter.
“Good morning class, I am Professor Granger. You may address me as Professor or Ma’am. I know that one of you may address me as Aunty Hermione on family social occasions but at Hogwarts, I am a professor.”
Hermione stared at James with the faintest of smiles.
“Some of you may also wonder why my name is now Granger instead of Weasley. The answer is that Granger is my name and always has been. In fact, my full name is Hermione Jean Granger-Weasley with a hyphen between Granger and Weasley. I may choose to be a Weasley or a Granger or a Granger-Weasley as is convenient for me. Since I have been made a widow, I prefer to use my Granger name.” Hermione waited and looked around the class.
“Assignments are due today; you may now place your essays in the tray on my desk.” The parchment scrolls were deposited in the tray.
The lesson progressed in much the same way as it would have with Professor Vector.
At the conclusion, Hermione made an announcement. “There will be a short test at the start of the next lesson. It will not count for subject assessment. It is being set to give me a better idea of what stage you are at in this subject.”
James waited as the class left the room. “Um! Professor, um, thanks for explaining your name. The guys know that Rose is Rose Weasley and then the headmistress introduced you as Professor Granger. Some of the guys asked me about that and I didn’t have an answer. Ah! Rose and Albus and I have been talking, you know! Rose has been telling us a few things and I don’t know what to say.”
Hermione smiled, “Don’t worry, James. There are no secrets between Rose and me. She has had to deal with a lot, and it is wonderful that she can talk to you and know that you will never talk about her to anyone else.
I know that I hate it when people keep secrets from me that I should know, so I try not to keep secrets from her.
Because of that, Rose has had to hear about some grown-up problems which she is very young to have to deal with.
Thank you for being a friend to Rose.”
--ooOOoo—
The Main Library held many more books than Hermione ever saw when she was a student. The Restricted Section held books which were available to those students who had permission to read them. There were other shelves, bookcases and rooms which were not visible to any student but were now visible to her because she was a professor.
Each room, each bookcase, each shelf, and each book had an embedded set of runes.
The Hogwarts Main Library held more than 12 million books and manuscripts. The oldest items were over 4000 years old. Cellars below the library held the archives. There were 150 million books and other items in the archives. For over a thousand years, post-graduate students had written books to prove that they deserved their masteries. Each book had to describe a new development in magic. The other schools of magic had similar collections. Copies of all those books were in the Hogwarts Library archives or the Hogwarts Main Library collection. Every book on magic published anywhere in the world is deposited in the Hogwarts Main Library. The Hogwarts Main Library was magically linked to the British Library in London. If a book was borrowed from the British Library, a magical copy was made and temporarily deposited in the Hogwarts Library.
The British Library was larger with 14 million books in the main collection and over 200 million items in the archives and other collections.
Hermione had the list of those book titles magically compressed into one piece of parchment. They all had embedded sets of runes.
She needed to think about this.
How did Madam Pince manage the library on her own?
The answer was that she used magic. Magic and an undisclosed number of Hogwarts house elves.
Library magic gave Hermione spells which allowed her to get access to the text of the embedded runes in each library item, one at a time.
Hermione sat at her desk in her study at Hogwarts. The floor-to-ceiling window beside her desk gave her a view across the Hogwarts grounds to the Forbidden Forest. Hermione looked out the window and let her eyes lose focus. She allowed her mind to let every other concern drop away. She allowed her conscious grasp of the problem to grow until there was nothing else other than the problem that she needed an answer for. It was like juggling balls. One ball was easy. Two balls were not so easy. Each ball represented a part of the problem. Soon, many balls were being juggled. Eventually, she had all the balls in the air and under her control. She could see every part of the problem at once.
--ooOOoo—
“MUMMY!”
The balls came crashing down and scattered across the floor.
Hermione: “Yes, Hugo!”
Hugo: “When can Lily come to visit?”
Hermione: “That isn’t so easy to arrange. Can you wait until next week? I will take you to Sunday lunch at The Burrow and Lily will be there.”
Hugo: “I want to show her my room.”
Hermione: “I will ask Aunty Angelina if she can bring Lily here by floo one day. It may take a while to arrange. Will that do?”
Hugo: “Kay.”
Hermione: “Is that all? I have work to do.”
Hugo: “Thank you, Mummy.”
--ooOOoo—
Hermione collected her thoughts. She regained her focus. It always seemed to take so long to get it all back together again. The juggling began again.
The answer came. She wrote out the answer using her mundane fountain pen on a block of ruled paper. When no one was looking she never used a quill and parchment. The pen was refilled by magic.
The Ministry of Magic forms used in the Wizarding Marriage Ritual had a distinctive rune sequence. The same sequence would not appear in the linked object. It would be an answering sequence. It was like a conversation. The form would say ‘Hello’ in magic. The linked object would say ‘Who are you?’. The form would answer, and the conversation would continue until the magical identity of the bride and groom were reported to the linked object. The runic sequence of the question ‘What is the bride's name?’ was distinctive.
Hermione’s spell would read the list of titles. For each title, a spell would request the text of the embedded set of runes. The next spell would take the returned set and search it for the distinctive question. If a match is made, then the title would be written out by an auto-quill.
The arithmancy was calculated and the spell was derived from the arithmancy. Hermione wrote out the spell on the auto-quill parchment. She enchanted the parchment, and the spell was cast.
A visit to the librarian was the next. Mr Smith had replaced Madam Pince years ago.
“Good afternoon, Mr Smith, may I have this issue of the Arithmancy Master’s Journal, please?”
Hermione gave the form with the journal issue number to the librarian.
The librarian wrote the journal name and issue in the request book. The book responded that the journal issue was available, and a house-elf was sent to collect the issue from the archive.
The book had done its magical work without delay. Hermione was reassured that her monster spell run would not tie up the library magic and make the normal work of the library impossible. She would continue with a series of simple requests to make sure that she was not creating havoc in the unseen parts of Hogwarts.
Dinner progressed and Mr Smith seemed to be behaving normally. So far, so good; Hermione returned to her rooms and checked on the auto-quill parchment.
One title was written out. The spells had worked. A result had been found. It did not take months. It had been less than two hours.
The title was ‘A Book of Wonders’. It was located on a hidden shelf, in a hidden bookcase, in a hidden room which was behind a secret door in the Restricted Section.
--ooOOoo—
The first plan was to break into the library at night and raid the Restricted Section. Then Hermione remembered that she wasn’t a student anymore and she could arrange for the hidden room to be investigated.
She would have to explain how she knew it was there and why she was interested. The correct explanation was the best one. She was searching for a book which had shown up in her arithmancy project and it was hidden in this secret room. That information was recorded in the Main Library catalogue. There were 12 million other entries, so the catalogue entry could be safely hidden in the open.
The opening of the hidden room needed to have support from an influential person. Hermione knew that she was welcome in the Pomona Sprout’s office so why not go to the top?
The time for her appointment arrived and Hermione rode the spiralling staircase up the office. Pomona welcomed her in.
Pomona: “Hermione! Come in! Sit down! Would you take some tea?”
Hermione: ‘No, thank you, Pomona. I had a thought as I came into the office. The portraits of Albus Dumbledore and Severus Snape. They seem to be sleeping. Are they really sleeping, or do they listen to everything?”
Pomona: “HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! Hee! Hee! Hee! The first thing I did when I walked into this office was to put a Sleeping Charm on both and then a permanent Stasis Charm. I check on them both through my own spy network. They don’t seem to have broken out yet. I’m ready for them if they do.”
Older portraits: “Well done!” “Bravo!” “Hip Hooray!”
Hermione: “Oh! I am surprised.”
Pomona: “Don’t be dear! I could never stand Albus, and he did everything he could to get rid of me. You know Aberforth’s opinion of Albus, well that is my opinion too. He was never what he seemed to be.”
Hermione: “Albus Dumbledore was a problem for me too. I became a problem for him, and he dealt with me in a very hateful manner. I was too concerned for my best friend and Dumbledore used his magical power and knowledge to push me away from my friend and into a life that I did not want.”
Pomona: “Your best friend was Harry.”
Hermione nodded.
Pomona: “I see!”
Hermione: “The war could have been finished years before it did if Dumbledore wasn’t so certain that only his plans could work. I’m sorry Pomona, I don’t want to explain any more about what happened. I’m still recovering from it.
I don’t want to see or hear anything from Dumbledore or Snape. If I do, I may react in a very unfriendly manner.”
Pomona: “You won’t hear anything from those portraits if I can help it. Now! What is it that I can do for you?”
Hermione: “I have a commission to investigate the arithmancy of a certain set of magical laws. A book which is connected to that investigation is in the library. It is hidden in a room which has a hidden doorway from the Restricted Section.”
Pomona: “That on its own is reason to get this room open. There are far too many secret things at Hogwarts, and, in my experience, that has caused nothing but trouble.
Let’s put it in our schedule for Saturday morning. I want to be involved. Opening secret doors and revealing secret rooms and other things will all certainly need the headmistress's authority.”
--ooOOoo—
Owl mail arrived on Friday morning. A heavy parchment scroll landed in front of Hermione. She opened it and studied the contents. This was unexpected. A social housing organization had offered to buy her house. It was a generous offer. Hermione had finally agreed that it would be better to sell the house and never deal with moving back to the place of her captivity. The process of selling the house revealed unexpected news. The house was mortgaged to a finance company.
Hermione never knew this. Bilious had mortgaged the house and gambled the money away. Hermione had never heard of the finance company which owned the mortgage. She had asked the company to tell her where the mortgage payments came from because she knew that the payments were not taken from her vault. The answer was written on the parchment. The payments were all made by a reconstruction and recovery fund which assisted families damaged by the wars. She knew what this organization was. It was entirely funded by Harry Potter.
Hermione had asked questions about the finance company. It was based in the mundane world and was entirely owned by Harry Potter. Her questions about the social housing organization came back as well. It was run by an independent board but was entirely funded by Harry Potter.
Written notice of all of these arrangements had been sent to Ronald Weasley. It seems that he put them in the fire without reading them. The name Harry Potter was not mentioned on any parchment.
Bilious had done his best to ruin the family and leave them penniless and evicted from their home. Harry had secretly taken over the mortgage and made all the payments. All while Bilious and Hermione were spitting out endless hate about him. The mortgage was nearly paid off.
Hermione decided to not talk about this. That decision was probably bad for her and undermined her progress. She simply did not want to talk about it. She signed the sale forms and returned them to the solicitor’s office.
--ooOOoo—
The headmistress and Hermione walked to the library on Saturday morning. Pomona sensed unhappiness in Hermione. She could not let it pass.
“Hermione dear! I know I’m being nosy, but is there anything bothering you? You seem preoccupied.”
“Oh! I am. I’m sorry Pomona, I should be focused on the job. Opening secret rooms at Hogwarts has sometimes been a risky business,” Hermione replied. “I have had something revealed to me that has been hidden from me for years. I decided to do an unhealthy thing and ignore it. I will have to do something about it, but later. Much later if I can manage it.”
Pomona gave Hermione a sideways look.
“Very well, please let me take the lead on this. Give me any warnings that you can.”
Hermione sighed, “Yes, Pomona.”
Mr Smith checked the Restricted Section. “It’s all clear. There is no one in there now.”
Pomona nodded, “Please stand by Mr Smith. We don’t know what is going to happen when this door is opened.”
The door had been revealed after the headmistress had cast the Enchantment Revealing Spell. The authority of the headmistress could not be defied.
Pomona cast the Opening Spell. Touching anything with hands was too risky.
The door swung open. The dark room was revealed.
Nothing came flying out at them and no other enchantments had been detected.
Hermione sent her blue flame light charms into the room. The was no response.
Pomona looked in. “The walls are bare. I shall cast the concealment removal spell.”
The spell was cast, and bookcases loaded with books appeared.
“That’s better. There doesn’t seem to be anything too concerning here. I shall go in and look for the ‘Book of Wonders’.” Pomona said to Hermione.
Pomona stepped into the room. A voice called out.
“Who are you? This room is out-of-bounds.”
Hermione looked around the corner. The voice had come from a portrait on the wall at the far end of the room.
The portrait was of a younger Albus Dumbledore.
Pomona pointed her wand at the portrait. “I am the headmistress of Hogwarts. This room is no longer out-of-bounds.”
“You can’t say that!” Young Albus commanded.
“I can say that, and I have. I have authority at Hogwarts, not you.” Pomona barked.
The portrait looked angry but stayed silent.
Pomona walked along the line of bookcases on one side of the room and then back along the other side. She stopped at one shelf and pointed her wand.”
“Stop! Don’t touch anything! You don’t know the damage that you can do!” Young Albus called out.
Pomona turned to the doorway. “Hermione dear, please come in and see if you can locate the book that you are interested in.”
Hermione walked in. She decided to let the headmistress see one of her secrets. She opened her enhanced map and laid it out on a table in the centre of the room. As Pomona watched, Hermione enlarged the map view until it showed the Restricted Section of the library. Previously, the map had shown a blank space where the secret room was located. Now the secret room with its bookshelves, table and portrait was shown in detail. The room’s name was shown. It was “The Forbidden Secrets Room”. The portrait was named “Headmaster Albus Dumbledore”.
“Women are not permitted in this room!”
Pomona spun around. “That is enough!”
She fired two spells at the portrait in rapid succession. The painted figure of Dumbledore slumped down as if he was sleeping.
“My favourite treatment for Dumbledore portraits. A Sleeping Spell followed by a Stasis Charm.”
Hermione watched the portrait for a few seconds and then turned back to the map.
The title had changed. Hermione had decided to retire The Marauders. It was now Hermione’s Map.
“I have heard about a map like this. I believe that it belonged to Mr Potter.” Pomona murmured.
“This is a copy. I have modified it so much that I decided to claim ownership. I cut out all the original smart-ass talkback crap that was built into it as well. The original was put together by James Potter Senior, Sirius Black, Remus Lupin and Peter Pettigrew.”
Pomona chuckled, “That explains a lot.”
The bookcases were not labelled. The shelves were not labelled. The books were not named. A reader had to take each one of the books and open it to see a title. Hermione touched the page with her wand and said, “Show me A Book of Wonders.”
The map changed to show a single bookcase and highlighted one book on a shelf.
Hermione cast a spell at the bookcase. The bookcase name that was shown on the map now appeared on the top and base of the bookcase. Another spell put the shelf labels on the shelves.
Hermione cast Revealing Spells at each book on the shelf in question. Each book had enchantments which were intended to do harm to an unwary browser. None of the books allowed a name to be shown.
“This may take a while. I will have to extract the rune sets in each book and then work out how to unlock each one before I can touch the one that I want. I think that the sets of runes have all been linked. I can see the book that I think is ‘A Book of Wonders’. I’m certain that taking that one book will set off the traps in all the others. That will be bad.”
Pomona looked around. “Are all the books in here booby-trapped?”
“Probably, that is the sort of thing that Dumbledore would do to protect his secrets,” Hermione replied. “Now that I have seen this room, I can work on the next stage from my office.”
Pomona moved to the portrait, “Dozzer!”
A house elf popped in next to her. “Yes, headmistress.”
“Cover this portrait and put it in the quiet storage cellar. Don’t allow anyone to touch anything else in this room. No cleaning! Understood!”
“Yes, headmistress.”
The room was locked but not hidden. The headmistress and Hermione were the only ones who had access. They both agreed that they would not go into the room alone. A capable witch or wizard had to stand guard while any work was done in the room.
As they left the library Hermione asked a question. “Why did you shut the portrait down like that?”
Pomona snorted. “I have heard too much of Dumbledore’s misogyny to tolerate another word of it. He was clever at hiding his opinions. His true attitude was that all females were to be kept barefoot and pregnant.”
“Ah! That explains a few things,” said Hermione.
“Indeed!” said Pomona. “I want to know something Hermione, what do you want for yourself? For your whole life, you have lived for others. What about you?”
“I’m happy living my own life, Pomona.”
289Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡnWNEKHCDrI
