"Cathy Mick"

By F.P.Barbieri

"What makes Lord Voldemort powerful," said Dumbledore thoughtfully, "is the way his followers use him as an excuse."

Harry looked at him in bewilderment; Dumbledore smiled. "It sounds like nonsense to you, doesn't it? Like saying that what made him powerful is that he eats spinach." Harry looked, if possible, even more bewildered.

"Never mind that.... Muggle joke. But what I mean is that people like him gain followers because their followers use them to justify their own worst instincts. If the Leader, if the Hero of the Age, thinks this, or does this, then it cannot be wrong, can it?"

"I... I think I understand, at least a little, sir. Could you give me an example?"

Dumbledore fell into thought for a few seconds. "There are many examples, Harry," he said, "as many as the Dark Lord has followers; each of them has his or her own reason to believe his lies. But I don't think there's anything wrong with starting from the obvious. I'll tell you about Bellatrix Black, Bellatrix Lestrange.

"This may surprise you, Harry, but in her years here, Bellatrix was quite the wallflower. She looked and felt plain, she was almost pathologically shy, and she was depressed much of the time. Most people felt she did not have it in her to hurt a fly; although, looking back, I do not think they meant that she lacked the cruelty, but that she lacked the spirit. The fact that she was sorted into Slytherin, and the ridiculously overblown name her parents had fastened upon her - neither helped.

"Another thing you can hardly imagine, Harry: Slytherin, at the time, was a place of light and splendour. It was competitive, yes - the house of the ambitious, then and always - but largely, everyone competed at being the most fun, the most lively, the greatest social lion. The older generation still remember the parties thrown by Antander Goyle, Shirefna Ellenson, or Gunnhild Gudmundsdottir. Ask Filius Flitwick ... or even Minerva or Madam Pince ... and you will see their eyes go misty. Young persons from every corner of Hogwarts and Hogsmeade, dressed up like peacocks and dancing until class-time in the morning. Music, magical lights, spell pranks - and, believe it or not, witty conversation and wonderful company. Ah, many is the time I have had to teach a whole class dressed in the most bizarre costumes, because they had not had time to change, let alone have breakfast. It became a point of honour among them not to let it interfere with their studies ... they simply would not show that they were tired, even if they had danced two nights in a row.

"One occasion upon which I was forced to take notice and take points, was when all the Slytherins and their guests came in dressed in nothing, just spells distorting the air around them, making it look as if they were. There are limits, and besides, I could not let them think that their simple spells had taken me in. But... it will tell you everything about how Slytherin was then, the difference Voldemort has made ... they all took the loss of points as a good joke.

"Mind you, even then, Slytherins were ambitious. And perhaps they would not have taken it quite so easy, were it not that that particular class was led by Cathy MacMichael. She was the one who took it in good part, and everyone else just followed her lead.

"Catriona MacMichael - Cathy Mick, as everyone called her - was the unchallenged queen of Slytherin and all Hogwarts practically from the moment she was Sorted. She was this tiny golden girl, barely five feet tall, with lovely features and enormous smiling green eyes. She came from a troubled family - her mother had died when she was just old enough to remember and miss her - but she was always upbeat, witty and amazingly cheerful. She had a true dislike of gloomy and lonely moods. She nearly always cheered people. She could charm almost anyone into almost anything, and simply ruled every party by sheer force of personality. And the hardest thing of all - people loved to have her there. The Slytherins used to joke that tourists came to Hogwarts to see the Great Hall, the Astronomy Tower, and Cathy Mick.

"Bellatrix came in the next year, which put her at a disadvantage for a start. Myself, I wondered why the Hat had placed her in Slytherin at all; she was going to suffer there. She did not have any of the qualities of the social lions of Slytherin - charm, wit, quick and high spirits, the ability to put others at ease; she was plodding, brooding, and unhappy - and made people around herself uneasy. One never knew how to answer her.

"Of course, she was not the only person in Slytherin who could not live up to the social standards of Cathy or her likes. However, most of the quieter and less socially apt Slytherins could and would channel their ambition into academic or sporting success. This was practically expected at the time, and I am afraid that we teachers tended to be rather lazy about it. Mentally, I mean. We did not think that you could have Slytherins who were both ambitious and frustrated. We would quote to each other the example of Antocides Goyle, Antander's slow and unsociable brother, who worked at Quidditch till he became the greatest Beater in a hundred years or more. And then, of course, when he had established himself as a power in Quidditch, it turned out to help him socially: people just would invite him to every party, and he had gained enough confidence to stand there as if he belonged. This was the example everyone repeated to everyone else - it had become a cliché. If there were any poorly adjusted Slytherins, we all felt, the very fire of their ambition would lead them to something that would compensate for their problems.

"It was because of this basically wishful kind of thinking that we let things slide where Bellatrix was concerned. It was simply assumed that she would find her own way out of her depressed state." Dumbledore fell silent for a second; when he recovered, his voice was uncharacteristically bitter. "And in a sense, we were right - we just could not imagine what her way would turn out to be.

"As the years went by, I came to suspect that Bellatrix was pathologically jealous of Catriona MacMichael. I did not think much of it; jealousy among schoolchildren is not uncommon, and one tries to see that it does not do too much damage. Commonly they grow out of it as they grew older. In this case, I had underestimated the power of Bellatrix' obsession. Cathy had everything that she felt she could never have, and had it so easily, so naturally; and one could not escape her presence in Slytherin - she was always up and down the corridors, usually with a court of admiring friends. I don't think Catriona even noticed her; and in fact, in so far as she had anything to do with Bellatrix at all, she was kindly and encouraging - which, as it turned out, rubbed Bellatrix raw.

"Years later, Hagrid told me of an accident he witnessed. Bellatrix was walking near the lake, carrying almost every book she owned, when she stumbled and fell right into the mud. Cathy happened to be there; she pulled her up, summoned the books out of the mud, and cleansed and dried them with a spell. Then she handed them over to Bellatrix with a nice smile, kissed her on the cheek, and hurried away. Bellatrix just stood there looking at her go; and then, when she had gone, slowly and deliberately threw every one of her books back in the mud, and trampled on each. All the while, she was rubbing her cheek, as if to wash something away."

"It were bad, Harry," said Hagrid, who had been listening. "It were that bad. Yeh could jes' see all the black and twisted stuff pour out of her. It was jes' the way she looked as er were doin' that, treadin' and tramplin' her own books in the mud, an' yeh just canNOT describe that in words."

"Hagrid had seen more than most of us, alas," added Dumbledore. "But at that time he was just barely tolerated in Hogwarts. It took us years more to learn to trust him. At that time, he could never have got any of the teachers to take his insights as seriously as they deserved."

"Y' were always listenin', professor. Yeh mustn't blame yerself. I didn't think o' talkin' neither. I didn't have that much confidence in meself ... that come after."

"If you insist. However, the fact is not that the rotting of Bellatrix Black went unnoticed; it is that we noticed it and did not allow ourselves to be troubled by it. We should have been, Harry, we should have been; if nothing else, because we were in loco parentis to her, and should have been responsible for anything wrong that happened to her.

"And no matter what you say, Hagrid, I have to blame myself. There was one much greater affair, greater even than the corruption of a young girl, to which I had not been paying enough attention. Tom Riddle had long been on the loose, and I knew it, and knew something of what he had done, since in our last interview he had shown every evidence of having committed the ultimate in Dark Magic, and created a Horcrux. At least, I thought that was the worst.... My mind still was not reaching the concept of anyone willing to create many.

"I should have gone after him there and then, Harry; obtained the evidence of what he had done, and dumped him in Azkaban. It was quite enough. However, I had already had one Dark Lord in my life, and that had been my most grievous and protracted experience ever. Thus I was a coward, pure and simple. I did not want to face matters. I did not admit this, even to myself - but I hoped that someone else might be found to take care of this threat. And why not? Who had died and made me defender-in-chief of the magical world?

"That, Harry, is the path of fear and irresponsibility. That is what a frightened person, or a selfish person - there is not much difference between the two - will tell himself. Or herself. But if you must justify your actions to yourself, then you already know, deep down, that they aren't good enough.

"And they weren't, Harry. It was nonsense to say that I was not deputised to defend the whole magical world. I mean, whether or not it was true, it was wholly irrelevant. Voldemort was not attacking some magical establishment in Laos or Bolivia; he was already eating away at my own school, the school of which I was Headmaster. And that would have been to be expected, because Voldemort was obsessed with Hogwarts. That was one thing I knew. Whatever my duties to the wider magical world, Harry, it would always have been my duty to defend Hogwarts. And still I did nothing."

Harry sought some way, some word or reason, to excuse Dumbledore, to lighten the bitter sense of guilt that underlay every word. But the old man was right; there was no excuse for his failure. No excuse, but one explanation... "We can't always be at our best, Professor."

"True, Harry. They call it 'the Stoic fallacy' - to think that we can always act and think as we can act and think in our best moments. Nonetheless, I should have been more attentive. The curse Voldemort had laid on Hogwarts after our last interview - never to have a Defence teacher who lasted more than a year in the post - was already having a detrimental effect on the school. Rumours of his existence and his power were circulating in Slytherin and elsewhere, and some people began to seek him out. And ... something deeper was stirring ... something so profound, so epochal, as to make me wonder whether Riddle himself was not just a symptom of some deeper rottenness.

"Already by Cathy Mick's seventh year, Slytherin was visibly changing. Brutality rather than brilliance on the Quidditch pitch was one symptom. Another was that the character of the parties changed. A new generation was coming up that did not seem to have any of the grace, charm or wit of the previous years. The purposes of parties seemed sometimes to be to humiliate others, especially people from outside Slytherin and those not of 'pure' blood. People were showily excluded and vilified, and when I had something to say about it, the next party - given by one Lucius Malfoy - was called the "Hug-a-Mudblood Party". When points were taken from Slytherin for that, those Slytherins actually showed that they felt ill-treated and abused. They could not, it seems, understand that to insult people on their birth was neither gentlemanly nor funny.

"Cathy Mick and several seventh-years did not come to that party, and gave another of their own two weeks later, to which they invited people from all four Houses, and the musicians who were to become the Weird Sisters. It was a flop nevertheless. Many of those invited did not come; it turned out later that someone had spread a number of rumours about Cathy and the other hosts, especially about their attitudes to non-Slytherins. Many of those who came were suspicious and hostile; and to make matters worse, the Weird Sisters turned up drunk and performed so badly they were booed off the stage. That accident has never been explained.

"Cathy was in tears. She never gave another party, and I felt that the disaster of her last one had something to do with her poor NEWTs afterwards. Mind you, she was never very academic; I always felt that she was one of those people whose gift was as much to make others shine as to be brilliant herself. I could not imagine her except in a social context, with a dozen other people, entertaining and being entertained. And it may be coincidental, but she also broke with her widowed father about this time. Altogether, she went into adulthood and adult society as a rudderless ship into an uncharted sea. For a year or two, I lost sight of her, which was strange, seeing that everyone had expected her to shoot right to the top of the European wizarding social scene.

"At that time, Horace Slughorn and I were beginning to be seriously concerned about the deterioration of Slytherin. One thing Horace noticed was that his own little parties had fewer and fewer Slytherin students; there were fewer people whom his eagle eye could single out as obvious high-risers, people of talent and potential. As he put it to me - and I am sure he was right - the ambition of Slytherin seemed to be feeding, not energy and purpose, but only black resentment and poisonous vanity. The Slytherin you know, in other words, was becoming manifest.

"However, Bellatrix Black seemed, to an outside eye, to have achieved some sort of balance. She made quite a good fist of her OWLs, and did even better with her NEWTs, showing particularly well in Potions and Defence. What we never knew or even suspected, alas, was that the source of her success and of her apparent new balance was none other than the man I had turned down for Defence, Tom Riddle. She was the first of his followers, and did not leave Hogwarts without first planting a whole branch of Voldemort worshippers in Slytherin. Two members of her year, seven of the next, and a whole wave of the succeeding ones, have since turned up as Death Eaters. The former shy wallflower had turned out to be quite a successful preacher for her master, once she was sufficiently motivated!

"We, fools that we were, thought that her success had steadied her and calmed her. Soon, we had reason to think otherwise. You remember that one of the ways in which the younger Slytherins made their points was by whom they did and did not invite to their parties? Well, not long after Bellatrix had left Hogwarts with her clutch of NEWTs, it was announced that she would marry her distant cousin Rodolphus Lestrange, who had been in the same year at Hogwarts; and I was not invited. This made a great public impression, and we drew all the conclusions we were doubtless intended to draw.

"Looking back, it seems clear that Bellatrix' marriage with Rodolphus Lestrange was the place where old-fashioned pureblood politics met with the new terrorist movement of Voldemort and his followers. It was a negotiated pureblood marriage within the meaning of the act; neither Bellatrix nor Rodolphus loved each other, and the whole purpose of the marriage was to strengthen the compact between the Black and Lestrange clans. But behind this lay the fact that Rodolphus had been one of Bellatrix' own first followers in Slytherin, almost the first to join her in allegiance to the new Dark Lord, and that by binding them together, the two clans also effectively made themselves part of Bellatrix' band of Voldemort idolaters. It is no wonder that the wedding was followed by ructions within the Black clan, as Andromeda and Sirius marched out; even today, the old family feuds and manoeuvres underlie the Dark Lord's movement, although he will not admit it.

"As the Dark Lord's terrorist movement was a genuinely new thing, we were not equipped to understand what was going on. We understood clearly enough that the Blacks and Lestranges - and the Malfoys and Parkinsons and several others - were aligning themselves in support of the new Power about which whispers were beginning to circulate; but we were not ready for a war of murder and subversion from the very inside of our society, gnawing at our bones like a cancer, feeding on the fear that it itself caused. It took many, many disappearances, and many deaths, before wizarding Britain even realized what this power was, and how it worked.

"But the first blow came at the very gates of Hogwarts. A few days after Rodolphus and Bellatrix' marriage, I was called down by a clutch of terrified first-years; and found what could have been a child's body, with the signs of terrible mistreatment and torture. It was poor little Cathy Mick, delirious and barely alive.

"Some of the symptoms and of the injuries could be cured, and were. Madam Pomfrey was a barely qualified medi-witch at the time, but she was already brilliant, and she and Horace did an impressive job of bringing Cathy round. But when she was able to tell us what had been done to her, we realized that we had not imagined how bad things were.

"Cathy, everyone knew, had occasionally taken advantage of her beauty and charm to have flings. It was generally understood that these flings would not be serious, and they tended to end up without any great grief on either side. How should anyone find that odd? It was the pureblood way from of old; the great thing was not to get impregnated, and not to get seriously involved, and most of the time nobody got hurt. When they did, there were long-codified ways to apologize and make reparation. So, when Rodolphus - who, for all his political weirdness, was a good-looking and superficially well-mannered young man - interested himself in her, how was she to consider this strange? She would not be taking anything from anyone; that his engagement with Bellatrix was a political affair with no personal dimension had been practically shouted from the rooftops. She was at rather a low ebb, still not sure of the direction her life should take after Hogwarts. So she welcomed the chance of a little discreet romance.

"I keep going back to this: that the Voldemort movement was a genuinely new thing. The old ways of thinking, even in crime, were constantly being broken and made obsolete. Who could have imagined, in this case, a husband entrapping a young pureblood to make her the victim of his own wife? Even now, it seems too cold-blooded to believe; and yet it seems clear that this was what Rodolphus was up to all along. Cathy Mick was his wedding present to Bellatrix. Sexually, he never touched her; she fell asleep on their very first date - and awoke in Bellatrix' clutches.

"Understand that Cathy had no idea whatever that Bellatrix hated her. A few people could have told her that, but one wonders whether she would even have believed them. The days she spent in the Lestrange home were, to her, almost as horrible for the revelation of Bellatrix' hatred and insanity, as for what her body suffered. Frightful, frothing rants ... 'smug, arrogant, complacent cow'; that was the burden of it. Quite simply, Bellatrix hated that Cathy should feel so at home in the world, that she had no particular reasons to be unhappy or to hate anyone. And it went on for hours and hours, Bellatrix whipping herself up to a frenzy even as she abused Cathy in ways I do not want to describe.

"But perhaps the worst is that none of this was done in secret. Cathy was not in a dungeon, or in a safe house, but in the inner quarters of the Lestranges' own home. Guests came and went, house-elves went about their duties, while she was being abused mentally and physically. Sometimes, people like Lucius Malfoy would actually stop and calmly discuss what was being done to her. Once or twice, in the eyes of young Narcissa Black or of one of the Goyle cousins, she thought she saw shame and a wish to escape the sight, if not to help - but that vanished as soon as she tried to reach it. Cathy had already suspected that there was a distance between her year and the younger Slytherins, but she could never in a million years imagine a mind ... a state of mind ... where this sort of thing was done in public, in the sight of one's peers, and taken for granted. And she had spent years of her life with these monsters?

"We now know that the assault upon Cathy Mick was in effect the founding act of the Death Eater movement. The public nature of it was meant to test and bind together all those who had already committed themselves to Voldemort's goals and methods. If they could calmly or even happily contemplate the slow destruction of a person who was wildly popular and whose small size and unaggressive personality would appeal to protection rather than to cruelty, then they had the right stuff to become part of the new masters of the world. If not .... well, Narcissa managed to keep her instinctive revulsion to herself - if it was there at all; but the Goyle cousin, Girardus Goyle, showed it all too plainly - and vanished. To this day, no one knows where his remains lie.

"Before the final act of abuse was performed on her - an extended Crucio that reduced her body to a wreck and nearly broke her mind - Bellatrix stopped and told her what she had actually done to her. She actually cackled as she said it, like a pantomime villainess - she was too delighted in her own ingenuity. And what she told Cathy was not just terrible, but so shameful that the poor creature could not nerve herself to tell us for days - and so may possibly have contributed to it coming true.

"When she did, we threw ourselves into work - myself, Horace, Minerva, Madam Pomfrey, and several Healers from St.Mungo's and elsewhere - in the hope that a cure or a counter-curse could be found. It could not. I ended up having to tell her; Madam Pomfrey simply could not bear it, and actually burst out crying just looking at the small exhausted frame on the infirmary bed.

"Imagine, Harry, having to sit down and tell a young woman that everything that her enemy told her is true; that she is under a curse that cannot be reversed; that the curse is designed to kill her slowly, over a matter of years, and meanwhile inflict incredible pain on her day after day, with nothing except the most temporary recourse or relief; and that - just to add injury on worse injury - it began by destroying her womb, destroying her fertility - making sure she would never have a child. Cathy said nothing. As I told you, she had large, beautiful green eyes; and I saw them, without a sound, filling with tears, till they flowed over all the way down her face.

"To be frank, Harry, I never did feel any attraction to women. But I never before or since felt so intensely the power of beauty - beauty that pierces, beauty that breaks your heart - beauty that would move Zeus himself from his throne, as the stories tell, to lead the gods to war or to give birth to a child. Beauty like that is a special blessing, unasked for, unachievable, and meant to be fruitful. But this particular beauty would die in pain, unachieved and unfulfilled; and it had fallen to me to tell her so.

"'It is always later than you think, isn't it?' That was the first thing she said, after a long, long silence; and then she went on: 'I wasted my life. I thought I would have the time to do all the things I wanted - I did, Professor, I did want children. I thought I would grow old watching them grow up and loving and taking pride in them. I could almost imagine their faces and names. And I thought perhaps one day I would do some great thing, something like you did - I don't mean because of me, not because I'm anything important, but for the sake of greatness - something worth a girl's life to do. And now all I have left to do is sit here and wait to die. My life has no meaning...'

"And then her face grew firm. 'No,' she said; 'I am wrong. Without my friends, my life would have no meaning. But I am not going to tell my friends that their love for me has been wasted. If people like you, Professor, think I am worth the trouble, then I must be.'

"I said: 'You have many friends, you know that.'

"And she said: 'Yes. And I am never going to tell them that their investment in me has been wasted.' Incredibly, she was smiling: 'There still are good people to meet and good things to be seen, and I will not make them feel worse. I don't want them going out from my home feeling sadder than when they came in'."

"You know, Professor," said Harry with a hint of a grin, "for someone who doesn't care for women, you've been talking about this Cathy an awful lot. I thought I was going to hear about Voldemort and Bellatrix - and I did hear, a bit - but I heard a lot more about... Catriona MacMichael, was it?"

Dumbledore and Hagrid both laughed. "Y'r right, yeh know, Harry!" rumbled the half-giant; "but it be easier and more fun to talk about good folk like Cathy than about people like Bellatrix."

"That's it in a nutshell, Harry," added Dumbledore; " quite frankly, I could talk about my favourite students - and Cathy was one - for days, whereas talking about the likes of Riddle or Bellatrix Lestrange is neither pleasant nor very easy. It can be instructive... but I would rather learn from good persons than from corrupt ones.

"What I meant to say about Bellatrix, Harry, is this. I do not think for one minute that she would have pushed her unwholesome jealousy of Cathy or her general sense of dissatisfaction to the point of murder, had it not been that it had been reinforced and encouraged by others all her life. First you had the disastrous House of Black education, which sent her to Hogwarts quite unprovided for any social contact with other children. But the death point, in my view, was when she met Voldemort in her fourth year."

"Her fourth - ?"

"Yes, she has known him since before her OWLs. That was something that only became known during her interrogations after his first fall, and it made a lot of things clearer. The interesting thing is that Voldemort, who prides himself on needing no man or woman and who hates the very thought of being dependent on anyone, took so much trouble in grooming and perverting one underage witch. He must have been in Hogsmeade often, risking detection by me each time - and mind you, I did nearly get him a few times - largely so that he could encourage her to develop those tendencies he found most useful. Before she was an adult, she was being taught not to be ashamed of hating, not to be ashamed of wanting to kill - to take pride in her basest instincts. She was being taught to hide her hatred, to go around quietly and do her homework and prepare to kill and kill and kill again.

"And do you see, Harry, from her point of view, this would work only if she recognized him as the absolute authority, her leader, her lord and master. She could not follow his suggestions, receive his hints, accept his values, unless she accepted, first, that he had a real authority, a real right to teach. Otherwise there would be no excuse; and even Bella was not altogether so blinded as to believe that anything she liked was right for that reason alone. She needed a lord.

"So they were reinforcing each other. He gave her leave to indulge her murderous hatred; and she called him Lord, so as to believe that he had a right to. Hate, like murder, is addictive. You can never have just one. Didn't she brag to you that in order to perform Crucio properly, you have to hate and enjoy hating? Wasn't she proud, wasn't she happy, to be saying that? She had reached the point where her perversion was conscious and self-righteous. She handed herself over to him, body and soul, so as to be allowed to indulge her sick fantasies. And she went and recruited others for him, and helped them corrupt themselves in his name.

"The incredible thing is how little it takes. By the time she and her husband abducted Cathy, there were at least two dozen pureblood witches and wizards who were entirely sold on the Voldemort way of doing things, committed to murder and torture as values, who had turned self-indulgence into a cosmic principle. Their passive but committed part in Cathy's torture and murder shows that. In three years, a whole group of Slytherin students had stepped out of the common frame of reference of ordinary wizards and wholly accepted another; and that was only the beginning.

"Now being the head of a cult has a tendency to create its own dynamics. What I mean is, the group is not passive. It is not a wad of dough for Voldemort to manipulate as he pleases. People like Lucius and Bellatrix always have their own agenda, and use the Leader to foster it; others try to second-guess the Leader, to follow his wishes even where they don't know them, and so put more evil into motion. Having committed a crime such as Cathy's long-term murder, the Death Eaters could not be passive, and could not even be restrained. Not that Voldemort wanted them to. He fed them human flesh because that was the sort of beasts he had made of them. One murder followed another - and other crimes, such as blackmail and perjury. When I tried to prosecute the crimes committed against Cathy, it turned out that all the accused had cast-iron alibis, and the whole thing collapsed. One wizard lawyer who had come too close to a few of the Goyles disappeared, and his place apparently purchased by a Malfoy hireling. This was my first experience of how the Voldemort party does things.

"Wizarding society was entirely unprepared to deal with this sort of onslaught. We had never thought that the very pillars of our establishment could turn against us and threaten us. It had happened, I gather, in the Muggle world, but not in ours - not in Britain, at least, not for so long a time that memory of it had been lost. It is my view that Voldemort would have won there and then, both through the way he seemed able to destroy the order of Wizarding society, and through the sheer terror of his violence, except for... can you guess who?

"Cathy. The walking corpse, the girl with an incurable curse, the first person whom he had had killed - and killed, mind you, for convenience, to please his first follower and bind others in closer chains of complicity. From beginning to end, Voldemort cared nothing at all about Catriona MacMichael, one way or another; he had only encouraged Bellatrix' sick obsession with her in order to bind Bellatrix to himself. When she entered the long-term clinic at St.Mungo's, I do not imagine that he gave her another thought. (We are not the only side who has learned something from years of war. In the early days, Voldemort cared nothing for spies, and certainly never thought of placing them in hospitals.)

"But wounded Cathy, wombless Cathy, cursed and dying Cathy, did more in the hospital wards to keep up courage, to keep people going, than myself and three Ministers could in the wide world outside. People came out of long-term care more cheerful, more courageous and determined, than they had gone in. I don't know how she did; but I have seen her sit by the bed of a man who was dying from another Voldemort curse, and talk with him softly, and listen - and he was smiling, and kept smiling, and died with a smile on his face. She never forgot anyone; people came to see her two or three years after they had been cured, and she would greet them with a big, sweet smile, a personal greeting, and remarks full of personal gratitude - as if it was they who were doing her a favour by coming to see her.

"It took her seven years to die, Harry. I don't imagine that Bellatrix had expected her to last that long. She saw the whole length of the first war, from the vantage point of St. Mungo's and of our infirmary; saw the wounded and the dying, the cruelty of the other side and the fear and despondency of ours - and she never had a bad word for anyone. When she said that she did not intend people to leave her sadder than they had come in, she meant it. I tell you that without her courage, her cheerfulness, her determination not to be downcast or frightened, we had not made it. We should have been broken, terrified, spiritless - reduced to sheep ready for the herding, as Voldemort and his thugs wanted us. But Cathy had so much courage that nobody who came near her could not absorb at least a little. People who passed through that hospital came out braver and more resolute than they had been before. Madam Pomfrey had the skills to heal the body, but Madam MacMichael healed souls.

"All the time, Harry, she knew she was dying. The curse was slowly eating her from inside. Half the time when she spread fun and courage around the wards, she herself was in deadly pain - ignoring it, moving along, doing everything she could.

"One of the great things she did for us was to get people to accept Hagrid. She spent some of her time in the infirmary over here - mainly because she loved Hogwarts, but also because I was still hoping I could somehow find a cure for her curse - and that was mostly in the summer, when the weather did not trouble a sick woman and Madam Pomfrey had more time to devote to her. The problem with Hogwarts in the summer is that it is often empty, and someone like Cathy needed company. She grew stronger and healthier in the company of others. So she got to know Hagrid, who was always there - nervously at first, because she had heard all the stupid stories that originated with Tom Riddle and that nobody had been able to knock on the head. Then, as soon as she got to know him properly, she made up her mind that he had been the victim of a great injustice."

"Anybody would," said Harry drily.

"Yes, anybody would," repeated Dumbledore, "who had taken the trouble to talk with him five minutes and not let second-hand stories and size and hair put them off. But nobody had - except me, I might say - until Cathy came along, and she decided to do something about it.

"Cathy was good with parties, the fiasco of her last one notwithstanding. And when Michaelmas term came, she stayed in the Infirmary for a while and organized a series of parties - all designed to show Hagrid for what he was, and incidentally to have a lot of fun."

"Not just that, Professor," added Hagrid. "She also got me out of me shell. I'd never thought that the kids at Hogwarts would ever want to talk with - well - a half-giant, so I'd never tried. Then the little princess comes along an' waves her wand, and Bob's yer uncle! On a sudden, I be popular with three houses outten four and I do have dozens of young friends everywhere. I tell yeh, it was like bein' born a second time.

"Y'see, Harry, that's why I feel so much about what yeh went through. I've been alone half of me life, and feared and despised as well. If it wa'n't fer Professor Dumbledore and for Cathy Mick, I guess I'd never be gettin' out the Forbidden Forest at all. There's many people like to me about - wizards and ... others ... - an' it ain't every time as yer find someone who's willin' to take yer as yer is."

"I remember," said Harry thoughtfully, "the first time I met Draco Malfoy, part of what annoyed me about him was the stuff he said about you. That you were this wild man who lived in a hut on the grounds - some sort of freak. I as good as told him to get lost after that. Is that the kind of thing we are talking about?"

"Quite right, Harry" said Dumbledore. "Draco was just repeating what he heard from his father. And while I have no great admiration for Lucius Malfoy as a moral character or as an educator, in this case he was only repeating what a hundred wiser parents from his generation would have said just as thoughtlessly. Remember, Lucius was out of Hogwarts before Cathy decided to do something about Hagrid's unpopularity. He only handed down to his son what he himself had heard a hundred times."

"So Cathy Mick did not really put a stop to it," said Harry.

"Would you expect it? 'A lie is half-way through the world before the truth has her wand out,' says the proverb. And lies have extraordinary staying power. Someone like Malfoy, who regards his own views so highly, would be the last to change them, even when they are so ill-grounded."

"But Cathy did."

"See here, Harry," broke in Hagrid, "let me tell you what it was like fer me. I never even expected to get out of jail like that. An' now, because of what she did, I feel like I've got a fair chance against all the lies an' ignorance. I don't have to think that I be a-goin' to be found wrong whatever I do. An' if people insist on it, I know 'tis their problem, and none o' mine - they could think different if on'y they wanted to - other folk do, so why can't they? So they don't trouble me any more. An' tha's all because of little Cathy.

"I carried 'er around a lot those last few years, yeh know. I'd jes' put down my hand an' cup it, and she'd sit on it, an' I'd pick her up an' off we would go. She did say as it was as good as broomstick flyin', and me, I felt as I were carrying a princess in the palm of me hand. She were small an' light, Harry, an' as lively as a little singin' bird. When y' was with 'er, you did notice things as yeh'd never seen properly before. I wish as I could say what Professor Dumbledore said about 'er beauty, but yer'll hafta imagine it, I'm no good with they words."

"You'll do," said Dumbledore with a gentle smile. "Cathy was lovely. She remained lovely to the day of her death, even if the curse was eating her body from inside."

"She grew lighter an' lighter," said Hagrid sadly. "I could feel it every time I carried 'er. And she'd get tired easier an' quicker. Towards the end, y' coulda picked 'er up yersel', Harry. There wasn't much left bar thin bones and a brave smiling face."

"Even on her last days, resting on the sofa or in Hagrid's hands, she was still kind and positive. One never got the impression, talking with her, that anything was fundamentally wrong - so wrong that it could not be put right, so wrong that it could only be endured. She lived long enough to see Voldemort fallen and Bellatrix imprisoned, but that concerned her less than to continue to remind people that life is lovely.

"It actually made it hard to know how to act when she did die. I remember it still: it was a day in spring, and she asked Hagrid to take her outside. By that time, you could barely hear her voice, but he picked her up with both hands, delicately, like a piece of glass, and carried her into the gardens. She sat there, turning her head slowly, looking at the meadow and the great pond and the mountains beyond - and then, all of a sudden, she gave a slight shudder, closed her eyes, and toppled over from Hagrid's open palm, falling down into the grass, coming to rest among the flowers. And all of us wanted to howl with grief and rage, cry to heaven for all our loss; but we also knew that this would have been unjust to her, that the one thing she did not want was to bring grief and rage to those she loved.

"'Life is lovely even if you die,' she had said to me once, in great earnest. 'The blue sky, the grass, the snow, the sea - children being born, people living and working - it all goes on, and it all is good. And you have been given the chance to experience it - you have been given life, which is a gift compared with which even the worst suffering is irrelevant'.

Sing a song of joy and gladness,
Sing it just because you can,
In the face of fear and sadness,
It's still good to be a man.
Life is greater than all evils,
Than the sum of every pain;
Sense and sight and thought and freedom
Sing for thanks and sing again!

"I remembered her grief the day her doom had been spoken to her: 'And I thought perhaps one day I would do some great thing... - I don't mean because of me, not because I'm anything important, but for the sake of greatness - something worth a girl's life to do...' Great Merlin, girl, you did. Great Merlin, how you did. I hope that somewhere, someone has made it clear to you just how much you did.

"Thousands of people came to Hogwarts to see her off. There have been less elaborate funerals for headmasters and leading teachers. And when all was done, one of her friends sang her favourite song:

"...The greatest thing

You ever learn

Is just to love

And be loved in return."