Under a Dragon Moon

UNDER A DRAGON MOON

by Wemyss

a Sequel to Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn

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'I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year, "Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown." And he replied, "Go out into the darkness, and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way."'

Of Law there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world. All things in heaven and earth do her homage,--the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power.

- Hooker

He that goeth about to persuade a multitude that they are not so well governed as they ought to be shall never want attentive and favourable hearers, because they know the manifold defects whereunto every kind of regimen is subject, but the secret lets and difficulties, which in public proceedings are innumerable and inevitable, they have not ordinarily the judgment to consider.

- Hooker

A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies, form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against the enterprises of an aspiring prince.

- Gibbon

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5 Time present and time past

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When we sleep, when we dream, we are at once in both realms, and in neither. In all realms, and in none. We are in the marches, the borderlands, the debatable lands between what is and what is not - or is not yet: far from the fields we know.

These are the dreams and some of the days of Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy, as the crisis of the ages overshadows them, and the world's last night.

But which are whose, now? And which are dreams, and which, days? What is future, present, past? What is true vision, and what, nightmare?

To this question they return no answer. They do not answer it; they do not ask it. They hardly know to ask. They do but dream, and dreams, of course, need not hold coherence, sense, consistency.

They had failed, once before, failed themselves and their world, failed Albus, failed all. They had failed in their waking lives after coming so near triumph in dreams. Now the too-vast orb of the world's fate was poised, balanced, trembling, upon the merest point of agate, suspended, pendant, pending upon their choices. And they slept. A hundred miles and more from each other, they slept, and met in dreams, and in dreams was decided the future of the world.

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The most soured and hopeless, the most foreboding and grim, settlements in these isles - not in England only, but in the Principality as well, and in the Duchy of Cornwall, and in Scotland, and throughout all of Ireland, North and South alike - ward and borough, street and neighbourhood, city, mill town, and village of ominous repute, all differ in detail, and a closer examination still would suggest that they differ in certain fundamental ways. There exist pockets not only of hopelessness that no programme and no effort seems to ameliorate; there exist districts, houses, council estates, country cottages, and castles, flats and fens, moors and mansions, that exude so powerful a reek of evil that even the most imperceptive of Muggles is daunted, and not even the local authority's glib tourist brochures can make light of - or a quick quid or two from - the 'haunting' Muggles sense there. Such loci of malice and evil, adumbrations of the Void, Azkabans writ small, are distinguishable from those unfortunate but not unnatural sites and places that simply are what their history, and their innate corporate character, their civic spirit and ancestral memory, has made them: these sites of great dread are minatory, petrified as by a basilisk's glare, set off from the common run of mere natural misfortune, and the stuff of lasting nightmare.

Naturally, a deeper look still - one that Muggles cannot essay - would reveal in these most dread sites, be they certain rooms in a block of flats or entire districts or parishes, one thing, at least, in common: the presence of Dark Wizards. From the fatal year in which the secrecy regime was established, until - and, ominously after - the Restoration after Tom Riddle's final defeat and the rebuilding that came in its train, these were those who withdrew from the Wizarding world, not in protest of the harshness of the Statute of Secrecy 1692, but of its leniency. These were the Dark Wizards who were not willing to remain within - and, indeed, to subvert - their world, but were, rather, those whose hatred and fear of Muggles was so great that they went to ground amongst them in order to prey upon them: the heirs of Cromwell and of Matthew Hopkins, the 'Witchfinder-General', the followers in the footsteps of Frances, Countess of Essex and then of Somerset, whose poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury was the least, and least witching, of her manifold crimes. Most of the Cunning Folk who hid themselves amongst the Muggles during the secrecy regime were the friends of the Muggles, akin in their views to the Weasleys and the Prewetts and most of the Potters (although the Potters were rather patronising of the Muggles, extending condescending aid de haute en bas, than advocates for their sundered non-magical cousins). But the recurrent incidence of certain Cunning Folk leading witch scares and witch hunts, and sacrificing their Muggle neighbours by labelling them as what they themselves were in fact, leaves no doubt that there was a faction of Dark Wizards hiding in the Muggle world; and where they established themselves, the Dark took hold.

The fundamental fact is this, that the presence of magical folk in a community has strange effects, for ill as for good. And only Hogsmeade, after all, in all of the Three Kingdoms, is a village that is solely Wizarding.

To say that certain towns, villages, and hamlets absorb a certain, imperceptible (to Muggles) character from the nearby presence or the actual residence of Wizarding folk, is not to say that the Witches or Wizards in question actively employ magic in pursuit of their ends and to influence their neighbours, though many do: the influence derives from their mere presence, however passive. It is simply a function of magic that it causes ripples in the fabric of the created order of which it is a subtle and fugitive part. Nonetheless, the Dark Ones who insinuated themselves, like parasites, like Dementors, into the Muggle world, the better to wreak ill upon it, were rarely content merely to corrupt it passively. They posed as victims of malefic witchcraft rather than as its practitioners, and, so pretending, condemned as witches others who could not work evil magic by their very natures. Like bigots who secretly fear that they themselves lack the factitious 'purity' they espouse, like closeted and conflicted homosexuals who raise a clamour against gay men and Lesbians, they used their innocent neighbours to play out their own psychodramas, to the death.

There are, alas, far too many places, from country house to council estate, that are tinged with the atmosphere of despair and wickedness, of old wrongs and old crimes, of ghosts that cannot be laid and tragedies that will never heal. Not all places that exude a sense of evil and the loss of hope are twisted so by the past or present influence of hidden Dark wizards and witches: Muggles and Magical Folk alike are at base human, and apt to sin, having in them the Old Adam. Yet places of great and lingering evil that are rooted not in mere human sinfulness, but in wicked sorcery, do exist, and when they are found, these lurking-places of old evil, the finder may be sure that there is or has been a Dark Wizard about, and responsible.

So it was, for example, at Catspray, near Ninfield, in the Rother District of East Sussex, where the Averys had long held sway: a place at once of open smuggling and of paraded piety, of Puritan leanings and reciprocal persecutions, persecutions egged on by the Averys time out of mind, of which perhaps their proudest accomplishment - achieved by cunning, seduction, Imperio, and Confundus - came in 1652, when they extended their reach all the way to Cranbrook, where, under the very noses of the implacable Crouches, the Muggles Anne Ashby, Ann Martyn, Mary Brown, Mildred Wright, and Ann Wilson were wrongfully convicted of witchcraft and sentenced to death at Maidstone assizes.

So it was at Turgidwick, Winchfield (Hants), the ancestral holt of the Rookwoods, at Quillbury Down, Inkpen, Berks, where the Rosiers long practised forbidden arts, at the Wilkes's ancient stead at Stockwitch, Wednesbury, Staffs, and on Foulness Moor, Gribthorpe, in the East Riding, where the Mulcibers had dug in. Even the long-abandoned Jugson holdings at Blackwych, between Peopleton and White Ladies Aston, Worcs - for the Jugsons had now dwelt at Braunston-in-Rutland for some generations since being forcibly removed from Worcestershire - retained an air of menace.

In theory, such places were watched closely, monitored and warded, by the Ministry. In theory. But it was the Order, now in the aftermath of war as much as during the deceptive peace that tenuously held between Harry's first defeat of Riddle and his final conquest over him, that kept the only actual and effective watch, not on these sites only, but on all places associated with Riddle's late followers, even where - as at the Crouches's Chittenstead, not far from Swattenden, near Cranbrook in the borough of Tunbridge Wells - those followers had risen from families not thitherto known for evil ways.

Until about the time of Albus's early childhood, Aurors had been largely recruited from Muggle-borns, 'half-bloods', and the 'pureblood' families that had - and did not pretend not to have, but who, rather, kept up with - Squib and Muggle branches and septs: such as the Weasleys, and the Macmillans, and the Potters, who always maintained a rather amused and perhaps condescending, but nonetheless largely kindly, interest in those of their kin who married out of or left or did not possess sufficient active magic to participate in the Wizarding world. (Many of these last emigrated and took up their lives in the Low Countries, from whom the Potters d'Indoye in Belgium arose, and the notable painters of the Dutch Golden Age, Pieter Symonsz. Potter and his son, Paulus Potter, a fellow-guildsman in the Delft painters's guild with the great Vermeer. The Potters have long displayed an artistic strain, as witness the result of the marriage of Theophilia Potter to the Revd Samuel Reynolds at Monkleigh, Devon, the fourth child and third son of that marriage, born at Plymouth Earls, being the renowned painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds.) Even the political prejudices of the past century and more, which had so crippled the Aurors, had not been allowed to affect the Unspeakables, who were still in many cases drawn from those who had grown up around - or as - Muggles, which was an obvious advantage to them in their roles. Kingsley himself, Auror though he had been, was from Bristol, Croaker from Shaldon, in Devon, and even that ass, Dawlish, from Bishopsteignton. The Boneses, those great captains of the fight, had long lived in Muggle Ilford. They and those like them well knew that it was not only in ancient refuges of the Dark, away from Muggle eyes, that wickedness grew, wickedness and the seductions of bigotry and of the Dark Arts. Peter Pettigrew, after all, had come to Hogwarts from the meagreness of Gowkthrapple, Wishaw, North Lanarkshire, and Severus Snape, who had been seduced by the Dark for a time, from a North of England mill town. The Yaxleys dwelt openly in the Muggle world, at Snailwell, near Soham, Cambs, and Walden McNair was born at and brought up in Stuckgowan. Meigleholm, Galashiels, in the Borders, had been the holding of the Light family of the Hopkirks since the days of the Founders, but a Muggle family of Galashiels had thrown up a canny lad who'd made his way to Yorkshire and made his fortune and founded what he anticipated would be a dynasty of Radical MPs and local magnates, turning brass into land and honours; only to see the brass and the dreams fail in three generations, and the last son of the name, dubiously born of the family's heir and a mysterious local slattern, bring all to ruin in two worlds before his own resounding fall, ruining from heav'n. For the Riddles came of Galashiels in their beginnings.

And so these places were watched and warded, for the sure safety of the world. It had been wiser to have watched as well such places as Succloin, Arrochar, Argyll and Bute; Grundgrum, Methven, Perth and Kinross; Ringmore, Devon, hard by Croaker's ancestral Shaldon; and Spellbrook, Bishop's Stortford, Herts.

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'Well,' said Luna, distantly as was her wont, 'I do hope you've all sworn off Ogden's.'

Seamus's answering 'Whaaaat?' was outraged. But he soon found himself, along with the rest of them, less outraged than shuddering when Luna went on, her voice and manner seemingly unchanged, but somehow ringing with the prophetic force of the seeress, causing their spines to chill and their hackles to bristle: 'We stand at the gate of the year. The truth of the past and the lies of the past struggle for mastery in this present, and from their struggle is born what future we shall have. The darkness surrounds the light, and the light shines in darkness, and the darkness cannot comprehend it. In the dark, one once signed by the light and marked for goodness falls into blackness, and the son of filth shall seek to vindicate the lies of the past and choke the truth.'

'Who, precisely, is the "son of filth", I wonder,' whispered Draco.

'I imagine,' said Harry, grimly, he having been urgently recalled from his meeting with Signor Unterperger by Luna's Patronus-message, 'we'll find out soon enough.'

'Oh, and Harry,' said Luna, in the same sibylline tones, 'your elf will arrive shortly.'

She paused, and blinked, and continued quite casually, 'Hullo, Dobby, I see you've brought Khan. And a chair.'

They looked about them wildly, and it was only then that Dobby arrived, popping into sight with a four-oven Aga cooker - duly enchanted, of course: it had been a wedding present from Molly and Arthur - and an opulently overstuffed, heavily Victorian armchair.

Dean levelled a hard look at Harry and Draco. 'I knew you had the bleedin' thing, but. You call your enchanted Aga, "Khan"?'

Draco shrugged, helplessly, tipping his head towards Harry, who simply smiled inscrutably. 'He calls the range cooker at Seelie Court, "Sir Henry",' Draco sighed.

Harry shrugged. 'Well, it is a Rayburn. Although it doesn't paint. I don't think.'

Dobby, however, was not interested in Wizarding humour, but rather in his task. 'Oh, Harry Potter, sir, and Harry's Dragon, sir, Dobby is being worried. Dobby is thinking that the great Khan is the last thing he can bring to sirs from home, the last thing even elf-magic can bring to the Continent. There is terrible things happening in England, Harry Potter, sir!'

Draco gestured towards the chair. 'The last two things, I think you mean, Dobs - and we'll get to that in a moment. But had it not been you who brought it, that thing would be kindling already: I don't recognise that chair and it certainly isn't ours. Dobby: why should I not blast that appallingly tasteless bit of upholstered tat into matchsticks?'

Harry snorted. 'Dobby was being precise,' said he, evenly. 'You want to re-read Alice, love, you can't distinguish a carpenter from a walrus.' He looked steadily at the chair, and smiled, faintly. 'Khan was the last thing to get out of England. Not the last person. Hullo, Horace. Welcome to the Trentino.'

The chair quivered, shuddered, and transformed itself into the opulently overstuffed, heavily Victorian form of Professor Horace Slughorn, MMA: indeed, and very much at the moment, of the Rt Hon Horace Slughorn OM, WPC, Albion Principal King of Arms, plummy as ever and in full fig.

'Ah, Harry, m'boy. Draco. Hermione, Ron, Blaise, Justin, Dean, Seamus. Hullo, Luna, my dear; Neville. Minerva, you look lovely as ever; as do the Graces who attend your train, hullo Tessa, Cissy, Molly. Arthur, delighted to see you. Dobby, thank you, I am in your debt. Ah, young Master Rhys! And are the children - I see they are, hullo Sirius, Lily, are you -'

'Professor Slughorn,' said Harry, firmly, 'we can defer call-over to another time. I cannot imagine how dire the emergency must be to have brought you here, and by stealth. Whatever it is, it must be urgent, and I suggest we deal with it urgently.'

Horace looked crestfallen. 'Quite so, m'boy, quite so, I'm afraid. Perhaps - if I may be permitted to switch the wireless on?' He flicked his wand without staying for an answer.

'"... in effect, a vote of no confidence, or censure motion. First, the main news in detail. WWN Overseas Service News, with Barbara Celerant. In a stunning and entirely unexpected occurrence in the Wizengamot late last night, the Government - in the caretaker's hands of the Deputy Minister, the "night watchman", the Rt Hon Percival Weasley - lost what amounts to a vote of confidence. Specifically, the Government were surprised by a "loss of supply" when the Opposition and numerous backbenchers unexpectedly defeated a supply bill, that is, a money bill, or proposed budgetary and spending legislation. As a matter of constitutional and parliamentary convention, the Minister is, under these circumstances, generally required either to resign the seals of office, or to request that the Crown dissolve the Moot and call a general election. However, the circumstances surrounding last night's late-sitting shocker pose grave questions.

'"Firstly, there is the fact that the Minister for Magic, the Rt Hon Neville Longbottom, together with a considerable number of the Magical Privy Council and most of the Government frontbench, are currently abroad - a point to which we shall return.

'"Secondly, there is the issue of what the Government were defeated upon. The adjournment of the Moot, so recently recalled after Christmas and New Year's Day, for the post-New Year's holidays - a recess - was, of course, imminent. Accordingly, there was a late sitting - pursuant to an "any hours" motion - to entertain the adjournment motions that are commonly referred to as consolidated fund debates. Simply put, a Consolidated Fund Bill is the measure - when passed, it becomes the Appropriation Act - that allows the Government to continue spending public funds whilst the Moot has risen and is in recess. As such, it is a money or supply bill, the loss of which is tantamount to a repudiation of the Government: a vote of no confidence.

'"Debate in the Moot became contentious over clauses in the bill that provided for policing and security appropriations, and overseas intelligence and diplomatic issues. Former Chief Auror Gavin Robards, the Opposition MW for Spellbrook, led the attack, asserting that he had learnt that senior members of the Government, including the Minister for Magic, along with numerous other former members of the wartime Order of the Phoenix, had been engaged in "sexing up" the domestic threat from traditionally Dark families, whilst doing nothing to assist the Continental ministries to discover and detain the last remaining Death Eaters. In what now appears to have been a coordinated, not to say choreographed, attack upon the Government, the member for Arrochar, Argyll & Bute, Mr Cormac McLaggen, MW, rose from the Government backbenches to repudiate the Government and resign the whip, alleging that he had received reliable intelligence that an incident had occurred in the town of Cavalese, in Italy, in which -"'

Harry silenced the wireless, wandlessly. 'He then crossed the floor, I suppose, gathering self-righteousness around him like a cloak, and was smugly welcomed by Robards, Rufie Scrimshaw our esteemed former Ministwat, and That Crowd.'

Minerva pinned him with a glare. 'It's as well I've the presence of mind aye to cast Muffliato gin the bairns are in the room and the claik turns to politics, Mister Potter. I but regret me I can no longer dock you the points.'

'Sorry, Minerva. You're right, I just ... good God. Horace. Clearly, there's more to this than a political ambush.'

'Well, I suppose ... that is to say ... well, not to put too fine a point on it: yes.'

'It must be dire if you took only twenty words to answer.'

Horace hesitated. 'I fear, my dear fellow, that we may, perhaps, be upon the verge of ... well ... a Very British Coup.'

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Davies had the sort of laugh that seemed appropriate to an Old Ravenclaw: a sort of cawing 'kronk'. 'Is there any doubt?' He shook his head, fondly amused. 'Mind you, he was a Hufflepuff. But, really. Had a father of mist-or-mystery-shrouded antecedents? Romantic Jacobite to the end? Always a bit off in his interactions with the Muggle world? I assure you - and do recall that it was in his friend Tom Davies's, ah, rather curious bookshop - so-called - that he, the son of an ostensible bookseller himself, met his young protégé and biographer, a meeting that, I assure you, has been part of family tradition ever since.... Damn it, this is a fellow who, when up at Pembroke - briefly, for reasons that are now rather obvious - when up at Pembroke missed four tutorials and, when asked about this by his tutor, answered. without thinking it odd, that he'd been sliding in Christ Church Meadow. Bozzy asked him, years later, if that wasn't a rather a brave answer, and he said, No, it was stark insensibility. Of course the man never fit in amongst the Muggles, he was a Wizard, damn it.'

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'Harry? Oh, Harry serves his turn as Minister whenever he's up on the rota, from a sense of duty. And he teaches from a sense of obligation - not only to Albus's memory, but to his, I mean Harry's own, particular vision of what our world wants to be. Besides, there's more than enough in the way of crisis, risk, danger, and sudden alarms and excursion at Hogwarts and at Domdaniel for Harry to enjoy teaching: it's not precisely the placid backwater that, say, Eton and Oxford would be. But of course it's field work, a chance to return to the great days of the War, that causes the old warhorse to neigh. Give him the chance to indulge a trick of the old rage and he's in his element, more gallant than Godric and more cunning than any Slytherin.'

'And Draco? And Ron?'

Hermione smiled. 'Yes, of course, they're of the same kidney. So is Neville. So am I, at the end of the day. Draco doesn't mind teaching and glories in taking his turn as Minister precisely because he approaches both tasks as "warfare by other means', as intelligence work, as a chance to engage in his vaunted tradecraft. You couldn't get Ron to teach a class or give a lecture if you held a wand to his head - I couldn't, and I do manage my husband rather ruthlessly, you know. But a chance to get back into the field? My dear. For that, he'll gladly hand off the editorship of Wizden's to assistants. I suppose there are scores of old retired colonels in the shires who feel the same way, spending their days running the village cricket and straining at the leash to be called in to consult at the MoD.'

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'What are you playing at, Malfoy?'

'What?'

'I understand that you've been at yet another of Pansy Nott's dos. You and the rest of the so-called heroes of the War. And a number of middling-grade Ministry workers, who are no doubt properly flattered by the attention. Including, I may add, members of my department. I've my eye on you, Malfoy.'

'You read the court-and-social circular, then? How splendid, I was wondering if you'd conquered your illiteracy, McLaggen. You can't surely think that Parkinson-as-was is having old school friends to dinner and serving conspiracy, party political scheming, and a political stitch-up as the soup course.'

'That's exactly what I see.'

'My dear McLaggen! Pansy is married to Theo, old boy. And Theo's a judge, you know.'

'He's a damned Slytherin - just as you are.'

'Oh, do grow up, McLaggen. This is Britain. Our judges aren't political.'

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'Simply because you did good enough service in the War, Potter, doesn't mean you're entitled to run the world, you and your friends.'

'Yes? I don't recall seeing you at the sharp end, McLaggen - I assume not, at least, as the only ones wearing masks were on the other side.'

'You bastard -'

'As for your suggestion that those of us who won the victory are trying improperly to secure the peace.... My dear Cormac, this isn't Spain.'

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'Pansy, darling. Of all your superb soirees, this may be your best to date.'

'Harry, darling! You and Draco are growing far too much alike for comfort. We're awfully pleased you were able to make it, the both of you. Draco, my lovely, Theo's champing at the bit to introduce you to a clever young spark who's just signing on with the DMLE. Harry, Penelope was asking after you - she and Percy are I believe over there somewhere where darling Blaise and his Gringotts friends are holding court.

'Oh, super - Hermione, Ron, I'm so pleased that you came along with Draco and dear Harry: Hermione, you come with me, darling, I want your opinion on my herbaceous borders, Justin will look after Ron, won't you, Justin, dear, I know that Fleur and Bill and Gabrielle were asking after him, do take him in hand, darling, won't you? Ah! Professor! Just who I was hoping for, Hermione and I were just stepping outside to examine a very perplexing gardening problem....'

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''Allo, Rrrron, Justin.'

'B'soir, beau-frère. Justin.'

'Ronniekins! Hullo, Flinch.'

'Fleur. Gabrielle. Bill, call me that again and I'll tell Gred and Forge you've volunteered for a test subject.'

'Gabrielle; Weasleys all. Lookin' for us, I gather?'

'Right you are, Justin, old man. Ron, if you and Flinch would join us for a spot or two of the good stuff, Fleur and our charming sister-in-law have some news....'

'Oh, zese English! Beeell, zat is no way to offer an aperitif -'

'Justin and Ron are family alike, dear, no need to stand upon ceremony. Ah, ah, my enchanting wench, none of your Veela eye-batting, come along now, all of you....'

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'Ah. Mister Zabini. I understand from the popular press that the social season is in full swing.'

'Tiberius. Morning. Your family distillery should be raking it in, then. The Season is good for your, ah, "bottom line", is it not.'

'I'm rather more concerned with my public duties, Mr Zabini. Curiously, one hears that more official business is transacted at one of Pansy Parkinson's - sorry, Nott's - little gatherings than at the Moot.'

'One does, I suppose, move in much the same set at both, but I don't know that I take your point.'

'I rather think that you do, young Zabini.'

Blaise had long since perfected the literal superciliousness of the raised brow. 'Do I? You cannot, surely, be tortured by visions of some vast conspiracy over the indifferent claret cup.'

'Can't I?'

'My dear Ogden. This isn't Spain.'

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'Penny, my dear, you look super. Percy. Ragnok, an honour, sir. Blaise. Griphook, always good to see you. Den? Is that your wife I see with her sister, Bill, Ron, and Flinch, having private converse? Dennis Creevey, you dog: are you keeping something from us? A new part-Veela Creevey on order, is there?'

'Harry!'

Blaise laughed. 'You've finally made the fearless Den Creevey blush, Harry. And no, you ass, I've not managed somehow to knock Justin up -'

'Although not for want of trying,' said Penny, slyly, causing her prim husband to turn a truly Weasley shade of red. His blushes only deepened when Harry winked at him and said, 'Almost Weasley-like, eh, Percy? Although you two are lagging rather compared to your parents. Still, as we've a quorum of Gringotts directors, it's never too early to start planning for school fees, is it, Dennis? And I'm sure Penny and Percy have some parenting tips. Here: let's step into Theo's study and raid his decanter whilst we talk.'

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'A word in your shell-like, young Harry?'

'Robards.'

'There's a bit of concern, not to say resentment, in certain quarters, my boy, anent the giddy social whirl you young warriors are enjoying. And the way in which it seems to result in radical changes in the law every time the Wizengamot sits.'

'Is there? And why, pray, are my social engagements the business of anyone at all?'

'Precisely because they lend themselves to, shall we say, alarm.'

'My dear Gawain. This isn't Spain.'

'Don't look at me, young Harry. Just a word to the wise on my part, as between friends.'

'I make no particular claim to wisdom, Robards, but I'm wise enough to know that any conversation between us is hardly "between friends". So you may as well go and tell your master Rufus to sod off. My social life isn't his business, and, insofar as I and my friends do happen also to form a portion of the majority in the Moot, and, therefore, of the government of the day, our dining together is hardly a conspiracy against the government, now, is it? Good day to you, Robards.'

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'Weeeell, Miss Parkinson - Mrs Nott, I should say? If it were your borders you were truly interested in, you'd hae called upon Pomona, no' me. Better still, upon the Rt Hon Neville Longbottom, oor guid Minister. What is it, then, that you maun turn to me and Hermione?'

'Why, Headmistress. With whom else would I discuss pruning and cultivation?'

Hermione snorted. Slytherins. They can't even approach schools reform, save obliquely.

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'And what will you be doing in the Journal Office, er - Nigel, is it?'

'I was thinking you might tell me that, Mr Malfoy? Quite unofficially, of course, I do know already how the written word of my duties runs.'

'My dear Nigel! I am but a member of the Moot in these quiet days, a humble instrument of my constituency's will, and quite happily put out to pasture until called upon by the Minister if he should so choose.'

'With respect, Mr Malfoy, pull the other one.'

'Ah, I can tell already that I'm going to take a very great interest in your career, my perceptive young friend.'

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'Ah. Harry.'

'Scrimgeour.'

'You were quite rude to poor Gawain, you know.'

'In light of past precedent, you cannot plausibly claim to be surprised.'

'And, through him, to me.'

'I refer the right honourable gentleman to my previous answer.'

'We could have been your allies, you know - quite valuable ones.'

'Odd. That's much the same thing that Northumberland and the Stanleys swore to Richard 3d before Bosworth.'

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'McLaggen ... you really want not to be let abroad without a keeper.'

McLaggen glared at Harry. 'I was a Keeper.'

'And a very poor one, at that. Get out, McLaggen. And do not slam my door in your petulance.'

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'Yes,' said Harry to the rather empurpled Horace Slughorn. 'Looking back over the time since the Great Victory, I can quite imagine that the Scrimmy-Robardy faction have been waiting to strike in this fashion. But how the devil do they expect to make this stick?'

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'"... continuing coverage of the crisis in the Wizengamot. Amongst the reasons stated in debate for withdrawing supply from the Government budget, was, that the Cabinet and the Minister for Magic were, as it was put, 'gallivanting abroad' pursuing personal vendettas arising from the Great Rebellion, whilst ignoring the security threat at home - this last being generally regarded as an implicit condemnation of the dismantling of the former secrecy regime, undertaken under the successive post-war governments. The Rt Hon Rufus Scrimgeour, late Leader of the Opposition, has stated that it is the policy of his party, when it shall have come to office, to increase border security and to restrict travel into and out of the Three Kingdoms, and it is being reported tonight that his party in the Moot are preparing to do just that. As the Minister for Magic is in fact currently in Italy, it is being suggested in some quarters that Mr Scrimgeour's plans are to keep the outgoing government from being able to return to this country: a very grave accusation that, if true, is a still more grave proposition. One moment, please: this just in: Mr Scrimgeour has, we are advised by a senior source within the Moot, departed Thornminster to seek an audience of Her Majesty the Queen. It is suggested that the Minister for Magic, the Rt Hon Neville Longbottom, is to be presented with a fait accompli before he can possibly have the news of his government's defeat, much less return to Thornminster from abroad. In this connection, we should recall that the Minister is in Italy for reasons related to a reported attack upon one or more British subjects by Italian Muggles. One moment, please. I am being told that there is breaking news. Please be patient as we determine what is now occurring on this day of sudden shocks...."'

___________________________________

Bredon Hill broods over the Vale, and is veiled in history: history both magical and Muggle. The ancient camps and hill-forts of the Britons - and the Legions that overthrew them - stand yet, although time and treason have long brought low the fortifications of the ancient Earls of Warwick. Old Queen Bess gladly traded certain manors to the See of Worcester that she might obtain Bredon, and antique courts-leet - even the inquest into the death of Maud, Dowager Countess of Warwick, in 1301 - were held before the King and Queen Stones in misty years long gone, the stones lustrated and whitewashed before the law-deemings began. The Holy Well of St Katherine yet flows with sacredness, and from atop the great summit, England and the Marches unfurl like a tapestry of great price, woven of myth and history, of magic and poetry, warp and woof of Housman and of Archer, spun and threaded by John Moore. Severn and Avon bow their heads beneath its far, remote, imperious gaze, the nymph Sabrina unwontendly grave, bold Shakespeare's Avon mute as a swan. Nonjuring conjurers, Cunning Folk who stayed on to aid their Muggle neighbours, have long lived in Bredon's shadow.

It was an altogether fit and proper place for the meeting, far from Muggle eyes, on the morrow of the final battle and defeat of Tom Riddle, of the Sovereign and 'her General Monck': the new Minister for Magic, Kingsley Shacklebolt.

______________________________________________

It is a testament to the innate contrariness of human nature that, almost before the news of Voldemort's defeat had reached the Wizarding public, new factions formed, nascent political parties. Those who wished to preserve the heart of the secrecy regime - although denying, in perhaps not very convincing accents, any prejudice towards the 'half-blood' and 'Muggle-born' members of the community - first chose to name themselves 'Ordainers', and derided their opponents as 'Levellers'. What their opponents called them in return, was not generally proper to be repeated.

It was left to Luna, naturally, to give the parties the names that would ever after stick: the Hedgers, who represented the old ways, and the Ditchers, whose song of battle was the strains of the new.

______________________________________________

The Declaration of Bredon 1997

Elizabeth, by the Grace of God, Queen of England, Scotland, and Magical Ireland, Lady of the Isles, Duke of Lancaster and Normandy, Lady of Mann, Empress-Magical of Wizarding and Princely India and of Her other Realms and Territories beyond the seas, Defender of the Faith, &c, to all our loving magical subjects, of what race, status, magic, degree, or quality soever, greeting.

If the general distraction and confusion which is spread over the whole kingdom doth not awaken all peoples-magical to a desire and longing that those wounds, which have so many years together been kept bleeding, may be bound up, all We can say will be to no purpose. However, after this long silence We have thought it Our duty to declare how much We desire to contribute thereunto, and that, as We can never give over the hope in good time to defend the right and ameliorate the sufferings of Our Wizarding and Muggle subjects alike, which God and Nature hath made Our bounden duty, so We do make it our daily suit to the Divine Providence that He will, in compassion to Us and Our subjects, after so long misery and sufferings, remit and put Us into a quiet and peaceable possession of the Light, with as little blood and damage to Our people as is possible. Nor do We desire more to enjoy what is Ours, than that all Our subjects may enjoy what by law is theirs, by a full and entire administration of justice throughout the land, and by extending Our mercy where it is wanted and deserved.

And to the end that the fear of punishment may not engage any, conscious to themselves of what is passed, to a perseverance in guilt for the future, by opposing the quiet and happiness of their country in the restoration both of Crown and people to their just, ancient and fundamental rights, We do by these presents declare, that We do grant a free and general pardon, which We are ready upon demand to pass under Our Great Seal Magical, to all Our subjects, of what race, status, magic, degree, or quality soever, who within forty days after the publishing hereof shall lay hold upon this Our grace and favour, and shall by any public act declare their doing so, and that they return to the loyalty and obedience of good subjects (excepting only such persons as shall hereafter be excepted by the Wizengamot). Those only excepted, let all Our loving subjects, how faulty soever, rely upon the word of a Queen, solemnly given by this present Declaration, that no crime whatsoever committed against Us before the publication of this shall ever rise in judgement or be brought in question against any of them, to the least endamagement of them either in their lives, liberties or estates, or (as far forth as lies in Our power) so much as to the prejudice of their reputations by any reproach or term of distinction from the rest of Our best magical subjects, We desiring and ordaining that henceforward all notes of discord, separation, and difference of parties be utterly abolished among all Our subjects, Wizarding and Muggle alike, whom We invite and conjure to a perfect union among themselves, under Our protection, for the resettlement of Our just rights and theirs in a free Moot, by which, upon the word of a Queen, we will be advised.

And because the passion and uncharitableness of the times have produced several opinions of faction, by which magical beings and Muggles are engaged in parties and animosities against each other, which, when they shall hereafter unite in a freedom of conversation, will be composed and better understood, We do declare a liberty to tender consciences, and that no man shall be disquieted or called in question for differences of opinion in matters of faction which do not disturb the peace of the kingdom; and that We shall be ready to consent to such an act of the Moot as, upon mature deliberation, shall be offered to Us, for the full granting that indulgence.

And because, in the continued distractions of so many years and so many and great revolutions, many losses of estates have been made, for which reparations are most justly due, We are likewise willing that all such reparations, and all things relating to such damages, shall be determined in the Moot, which can best provide for the just satisfaction of all magical beings who are concerned.

And We do further declare, that We will be ready to consent to any act or acts of the Wizengamot to the purposes aforesaid, and for the full satisfaction of all arrears due to those serving under the command of the late lamented Albus Dumbledore, of the Right Honourable Kingsley Shacklebolt, Our Minister for Magic, and of Our right trusty and well-beloved Harry Potter, and that they shall be received into Our service upon as good pay and conditions as they now enjoy.

Given under Our Sign Manual and Privy Signet-Magical, at Our Court-Magical in Eyre at Bredon-Hill, in the Octave of Roodmas, in the six-and-fortieth year of Our reign.

Elizabeth RI

______________________________________________

The Crown and Wizengamot Act 1997, the Claim of Right (Scotland and the Isles) 1997, the Bill of Rights 1997, the Indemnity and Obliviation Act 1997, the Act of Settlement 1997, the Treason Act 1997, the Test Act 1997, the Wizengamot (Constituencies and Elections) Act 1997, the Magical Education Act 1997: all these and more were speedily passed by the Convention Moot and its successor, the 'Phoenix Moot' as it came to be called (as much for its character as having risen from the ashes as from the loyalties of its majority). The Hedgers had held out hope that, at the very least, the Great Rebellion that Tom Riddle had led, and Riddle's personal history, now revealed, would redound, in the end, to a revulsion against exposure to the Muggles; yet the result was not precisely as they would have wished. It was true that there was no formal repudiation of what Hermione, cleverly, named 'the principle of discretion'; yet the worst excesses of the old secrecy regime simply melted away like snow in the sun. Muggle family members were expected to be discreet about Wizards in the household, of course, and the existence of the Wizarding world was hardly spread across the pages of The Times; still, there was no persisting in blood-prejudice and draconian segregation when Magic itself seemed to reject these follies.

And so it had done. Even as the Convention Moot was sitting, the near-sentient magical buildings of the ancient Wizarding world had reappeared after centuries of concealment: in the countryside, of course, as at the Royal Wizarding Agricultural Society's HQ at Bubbenhall Abbey; at Hogsmeade, where the ancient Wizarding university of Domdaniel, closed since 1692, re-emerged from the fabric it had ever shared with Hogwarts (and whose fellows, thus entitled to be called 'professor', had always staffed the school), in all its ancient pomp; and in London most of all.

Restoration London in all its restored glory: the Duke of Kent's Steps running down to Merlin Walk, all around the green and ever-flowering glories, charmed and charming, of Mungo's Park, the grave, chaste, Palladian frontages of Mercia Square and the Classical proportions, trim as a Wren's nest, of St Cuthbert's, Mercia Square, the elegant arch of Crutchedfriars Bridge and the mix of Queen Anne and Georgian graces in the houses of Fore Square; the industry of Dye Urn Alley, the crowded shipping of the Isle of Crups and the Fleet Basin, down the docklands; the galleries and the theatres and the concert halls, and the jolly, vulgar music halls as well, all the vibrant culture, high and low alike, of Friary Garden, Dreary Lane, and the West Bar. The ever-flowering glories, charmed and charming, of Chiswick - the Royal Herbologic Garden - and its satellite in the country, Balcombe Court. All the effervescent life of peacetime London, after the vanquishing of the long Dark, sprung anew from long wintering.

Restoration London. The old institutions had, like princesses in an enchanted sleep, been kissed by peace and righteousness, wakened and brought back to life by that kiss. Upping Street was no longer under Fidelius, though properly secure, and its fabled Number Twelve was once more to be the home and office of successive Ministers. The rule of law was being rapidly re-established, in justice and in truth, truth mighty above all things and prevailing, and, once past Plea Inn Bar, all along Ess Street and into Inn-Chancery, the lawyers already hummed and bustled like a hive of happy, golden bees. The RWCJ stood proud and tall again over its fabled gardens, the Stern Street Magistrates Court was again waiting briskly to handle the jollifications and sleeping-it-offs of Boat Race and Fair, and the Old Donjon, built on the relics of earlier minatory structures at Oldgate, by its very presence and the awful majesty of its high halls and sounding courtrooms, where even in Summer there was coolth, stood ready once more to deter the most solemn crimes, the crimes it was built to try and to assess. From Wynd Row, strait ways led to the halls of exercised power, in this Restoration world. Law and liberty, the power and the glory, the arms that secured peace, the knowledge that directed them: all were once again to be deployed honestly and fairly, for the common weal, by the common consent, the people's will. Liberty under law, force bridled by freedom's foundation and the ancient laws, in a world made new. The institutional memory of the Wizarding world was in hand to be restored, and the Moot again sat in due pomp and presence, in the Palace of Thornminster, its Dial Tower looming over all and Long George sounding the hours, its answering Boudicca Tower anchoring the other end of the palace, housing the Moot Records Office and all the history and precedent of Wizardry: history that must be learnt from, lest it be repeated. The great ministers of state would return now to their ancient seats, King John's Gate for the Gnome Office, Kinghorn House for the Scottish Office; Hit Wizards and Hit Wizards Parade; Auroralty House. Daysbridge Barracks and the Ordnance Warren brimmed already with quiet confidence, alert, ever ready, power defensive and defending, leashed by law, the watch-Crups of the Constitution. An honest and accepted excise and scheme of taxation was in hand, represented by Wiltshire House, which also housed as it had ever done the General Records Office alongside the Department of Outlandish Revenue. Its eyes to the heavens, the Nephomantic Office once more watched cloud and weather and sky for the benefit of all, shipper and farmer and all who depended upon these. Severn Street House and Furness House proclaimed, respectively, the sleepless guard of the Unspeakables and the restoration of honest and open government and of relations with the wider world, and foreign Wizard-dom would now once more send its envoys, accredited to the Court of St Aldhelm's: the American ambassador, openhandedly magnificent at the embassy on Square Nore Grove and at his country seat of Walker House, had already arrived. The Home Counties now anew concealed the graces and favours of Hawtreys and Thorneygrove and Chivenoaks.

The outward and visible sign of their triumph was to be seen in the reopened Fortescue's and the refounded Ollivander's, in Madam Malkin's shop front and the shelves of Flourish and Blott; to be scented in the flower stalls and fruit stalls and heard in the costermongers's cries all along Hedge Row; to be breathed-in with the sharp scent of printer's ink and law calf, the crispness of vellum and parchment, on Polygon Alley, hard by the ancient Church of SS Peter & Paul Agonistes, which, abraded by the vulgar tongue of centuries, had given Polygon Alley its name. One found it all along Boyle Row, at Twillfit and at Peeves & Fawkes, at Peakes & Ravenclaw and Scrimgeour Filch Avebury and Figg & Wimple. One found it in the oysters and the mixed grill at Somerton's, in the chops at Timson's in the Mere, in the leather and varnish of Geo Aracobb & Sons, Bootmakers, and in the reverent bustling-about and aromatic lather of a trim and a shave at Jno F Deemster's palatial tonsorial establishment. And, most of all, in chains of office and casual pomp, one saw these monuments of victory embodied in the pitched roof of Livery Hall and the banquets of Burgage House, in the ealdormen pacing gravely along the halls of Corporation Hall, and in the restoration of the proud and ancient guilds, from The Master and Wardens and Brethren of the Guild or Fraternity of the Blessed Mary the Virgin and of St Catherine of the Mistery of Potters and Crockers and of Basketmakers of the Wizarding Realm of the Three Kingdoms, to the Worshipful and Ancient Company of the Art-magical and Mystery of Navigators and Pilots of the Blessed Fraternity of SS Christopher & Brendan. Even in the swiftly resumed pop concerts of Brentside Stadium: the Weird Sisters, the Rollright Stones ('You can't always scry what you're wanting ... But sometimes, you scry what you need'): one found the daily, common evidence of victory and peace. Of liberty.

And to the Wizarding world, even as the Convention Moot deliberated, the Lords Spiritual returned, and the non-juring folk, and the Cunning Folk who had rejected the secrecy regime of '92 in favour of remaining with their Muggle neighbours in peace and charity. New blood, old ways made new again, old prejudices destroyed.

Yet the old prejudices remained in the ground, to spring up again like weeds and poisonous fungi when the climate allowed.

______________________________________________

'Mr Scrimgeour.'

'Ma'am.'

'For what reason, pray, is the Leader of Our Loyal Opposition here at this hour, seeking audience?'

'Ma'am. The Government have been defeated on a supply bill. I am here to receive Your Majesty's commission to form a government.'

'Are you really, Mr Scrimgeour.'

'Yes, ma'am. The Government having been defeated.'

'We do not recall that you thought to kiss hands and receive the seals of office from Us when you were Minister after Mr Fudge's ministry fell. In any event, one does rather feel that you've the wrong end of the wand, Mr Scrimgeour. One is impelled to recall to your memory that, at the time of that iniquitous Statute of Secrecy, in 1692, even one's Muggle subjects had not dispensed with the Royal Veto. One might also advert you to the terms of the Declaration of Bredon and of the Crown and Wizengamot Act 1997, the Claim of Right (Scotland and the Isles) 1997, the Bill of Rights 1997, the Indemnity and Obliviation Act 1997, the Act of Settlement 1997, and the Wizengamot (Constituencies and Elections) Act 1997. Finally, one might call to your attention the rather simple and fundamental fact that it is the Crown who grants a defeated Minister an audience, determines with that Minister whether he shall resign or shall call an election and go to the country, and, should the Minister resign the seals of office, summons the Opposition and commissions one of its senior members to form a government. We do not participate in the sharp practise of commissioning a new government without the courtesy of an audience of the prior Minister of the day and without determining whether or not a General Election shall be called, Mr Scrimgeour, and as pertaining to Our Wizarding subjects, We retain the rights to prorogue the Moot and, in emergency, to refuse the Royal Assent to its doings. We are also in no wise bound to accept any particular Member of the Wizengamot as suitable to form and lead a new government, and We are particularly disinclined, in light of this evening's shabby proceedings, to consider you in that light, Mr Scrimgeour, now or in future.'

The suddenly formidable old lady looked past the now trembling Rufus Scrimgeour, towards a window, and smiled, grimly. 'Ah. Also, there does after all remain to add, one might note that there is even now a division owl at the window, and it is certainly not here for Us. Might one remind you, Mr Scrimgeour, that your party was very much supportive, in the Convention Moot and after, of retaining University seats, and seats elected from the professions, and hereditaries and the Wizarding Lords Spiritual, all as members of the Moot? It appears, Mr Scrimgeour, that you are rather hoist with your own petard: one confides that the vote to which you are thus summonsed, is the result of there having arrived at the Moot a full House in place of the bare quorum you manipulated earlier. Far be it from Us to stand in the way of legislative duty: you have Our leave to withdraw, and one submits that it might be best that you hurry, rather.'

As a yawning equerry hastened him to the Apparating point, Rufus Scrimgeour could have sworn that he heard, as the door swung to behind him, that best-known of all voices say, 'What an appalling little man.'

______________________________________________

'"... continuing coverage. The Moot has reconvened its sitting, and the house is as full as it has been at any time since the Convention Moot that sat after the defeat of Tom Riddle, the so-called 'Lord Voldemort'; it is apparent that the consolidated fund debates are to be revisited by the whole of the Moot, sitting as a Grand Committee of the whole, and thus including the Lords Spiritual and the hereditaries. When the Convention Moot accepted that the hereditaries should remain, and the Great Ledger magically updated itself to summons by writ the long-lost Lords Spiritual to sit in the Moot, it was thought in some quarters that the more reactionary tendencies within Wizard-dom had secured a permanent majority. As is now universally accepted, however, the hereditaries - whose ranks include Harry Potter, Draco Malfoy, and Andromeda Black - and the Lords Spiritual are Ditchers almost to a Wizard, and indeed, in the case of the latter, without dissent. I have just been informed - one moment - I have just been informed that Her Majesty the Queen has in no uncertain terms dismissed the proposal by the Rt Hon the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Scrimgeour, that he be called upon to form a government. An unprecedented attempt by the Opposition. Our lobby correspondent has just advised that the Speaker, Madam Bones, and the Lord Enchantellor, for the hereditaries and the Lords Spiritual, have allowed what amounts to a third reading of the Consolidated Fund Bill, which is certain to pass in a full Moot. We are being told that Madam Speaker has ruled that this third reading, although the second reading was rejected and there is no amended text to consider, is required and mandated by Speaker Potter's Rule, dating from the Moot of 1337. One moment, please. We can now report that the Bill has passed by a considerable majority, and, upon the granting of the Royal Assent, will be enacted as an Appropriation Act. The Government has not only survived, but appears to be riding high with what must surely be the consequences that will certainly follow the Opposition's failed and extraordinary ploy. The question now is whether Rufus Scrimgeour can survive this debacle as leader of his party.'"

'Not if I've t'do with it,' said Nev, clearly annoyed.

'Well,' said Hermione, 'I call that an unqualified success.'

Harry, Draco, Nev, Ron, and Narcissa exchanged glances.

'I shouldn't be quite certain of that,' said Andromeda, with some reluctance.

Nev swiftly took pity on Hermione. 'Happen it's a victory for us, for now. But, lass! Happen it's a victory for others with it.'

'After all,' said Harry, 'what has really been accomplished? Yes, I've no brief for Rufus Scrimgeour, and he chanced his arm and had it cut off at the shoulder. Daft, really. But for all that, and despite his overweening ambition and folly, he does lead what is, at the end of the day, a reasonably loyal opposition. I don't care to imagine who might now replace him, not in light of Luna's earlier prophecy.'

'Because, look,' said Ron. 'What's really come of this? Not Rufie only, but the whole sodding Opposition frontbench, is tarred with this, and must go. We're in the middle of what is now no longer a discreet investigation - bleeding WWN's just told the whole of Wizardry that there's been an incident in which it looks as if the Muggles are starting up persecutions. And in the middle of a blown investigation, Nev at the very least has now to go back to Thornminster and deal with a crisis in the Moot.'

'I should say,' said Draco, 'that whoever wished to manufacture this incident and smear the Muggles here in Italy, could not have hoped - or planned - for a better result than this. So, I'm afraid, rather, that this is hardly an unalloyed triumph, Hermione, dear. You, my good doctor, are a trifle too honest at times for your parliamentary career.'

Hermione shook her head. 'I hope to remain so, if this sort of thing becomes at all common. I'm not fit for this.'

'You're a brilliant MW and a genius in committee and in debate, my dear. You just don't do conspiracy as well as you might do.'

'And what do we do now?'

'We go on. And Nev here goes back and starts blasting away the Bundimuns in the foundations, if it brings down the entire House with it.'

'Let it,' said Nev, with a feral grin. 'We'll build it oop anew and better.'

'What may I do to assist?' Slughorn was unwontedly resolute.

'Stay with us,' said Harry. 'There's more reasons than one that you were the only possible choice as Albion King of Arms, chief herald of the realm. You know everything about everyone, my dear Horace, not where the bodies are - in some cases literally - buried only, nor yet merely in which closets both metaphorical and actual skeletons are stored. You know everyone's affinity and pedigree.'

'Fighting dirty, are we?' Hermione looked rather eager than disapproving.

'I see Harry is taking me seriously,' said Theo. 'This goes beyond this investigation, or this political incident, after all. Remus and Draco and you, Hermione, have already established that Muggles, Squibs, and Wizards are one people, divided simply into those who possess and those who simply carry the genes for magic. But that was something that could be accepted as science, with a few social and political implications, naturally, but, still, accepted simply as an interesting bit of news from boffins. But if we are right in finding, in this investigation, firstly that there are those seeking to use Muggles as cat's-paws in starting a new Wizarding war and new persecutions, and, secondly, that no actual Wizards or Witches were ever hanged or burnt or put to death unless it was at the hands of other Wizards and Witches using confund-ed Muggles as tools ... the last war will be nothing in it. So, yes, the sort of intel, not to say scandal, that Sluggers can provide and has at his fingertips, is very much needed. And, yes, we will be fighting dirty, Hermione, so rein in your bloodlust, you'll have your chance to get stuck in, and sate it.'

Hermione nodded, once, sharply. 'Good. My - our - children are not going to dwell in a world in which these things continue to be allowed to happen.'

'Come not,' said Ron, philosophically quoting his father, 'betwixt the mother dragon and her egg.'

'Wise advice,' drawled Narcissa. 'Very wise indeed.'

______________________________________________

Harry thought back to the days of the war, before the Great Victory. Remus had saved him from the despair that had engulfed him.

'Actually, Harry, most - well, most civilised werewolves: not Greyback's deluded lot - do quite like Chinese food, and would prefer to eat at a Chinese restaurant than at, oh, Wilton's or Simpson's or Lindsay House - or our equivalents, Somerton's, Timson's in the Mere, Panmure House. Mind you, I do think Lee Ho Fook's is rather overrated, but, then, I've never been one for the Soho style....'

'Why?'

'Soho? Well -'

'No, Remus, why Chinese restaurants rather than a saddle of mutton or a cut off the joint at those posh places?'

'Chopsticks, Harry. No one hands you silver cutlery at a Chinese restaurant.'

And so they had found themselves, Remus and Harry, at the Flying Artichoke, just off Diagon Alley, meanly huddled amidst the shop fronts of Bee Mews: the tattiest and, naturally, the best Wizarding Chinese restaurant in Wizarding London, where the quality of the food and the service was matched only by the squalor of the surroundings and the indifference of the proprietors to décor. Known casually as the House of the Dolorous Eats, it was an institution, a stray bit of Limehouse in Diagon, and at luncheon, the queue stretched for half a mile.

Remus, however, was a welcome and treasured figure, and Harry found himself amused to see his companion rather than himself made much of and taken in hand by the owner, personally, shooed paternally to the best table, and catered to with profound respect. They did not order: Mr Huang personally dictated their menu and left them to it.

Remus had casually cast a series of wards that Bellatrix herself could not have breached, and spoke with rather more than his accustomed frankness.

'Harry.... D'you recall the young fellow who was in hospital what time Arthur had been bitten by Tom Riddle's pet adder?'

'The - oh, the newly-infected werewolf? I remember you spoke with him.'

'Yes. I happened to catch sight of him last month, in Muggle London.'

'Don't tell me, he was drinking a piña colada at Trader Vic's -'

'--And his hair was perfect, yes, Harry, most amusing.'

'Sorry.'

'He's working on becoming an entertainer, I understand. Well, it's one of the few careers open to a werewolf, really: irregular hours, dodgy financial arrangements, and a flexible schedule. He's experimenting with that new genre - "rap", is it? Calls himself Thomas the Rhymer on stage.'

'Um....'

'No matter,' said Remus, briskly. 'My point is simply that, although there are a very few means of making a living whilst avoiding the worst of the Ministry's absurd regulations, so long as those regulations exist, Greyback will continue to exert influence, and the promises - however false - made by the Death Eaters and their master, will naturally tempt werewolves. They certainly owe no particular loyalty to the Ministry, or to Wizarding society as a whole.'

'Ah.'

'Oh, come now, Harry. You needn't treat this as a Binns lecture, you know. The point is, simply, that the Order - for which read, frankly, you - wants to bid higher for the support of oppressed magical beings and creatures. It is important to the war effort; more to the point, it's the right thing to do. I quite realise that you quite likely feel that you've enough to be going on with, but you must begin to plan for the future, after the war.'

'But, Prof- - I mean, Remus. Why would a promise from the Order -'

'Not from the Order, Harry. From you.'

'Why would a promise from anyone on our side neutralise, much less recruit, werewolves, and vampires, and all sorts?'

'And the goblins, let us not forget, Harry. The majority of the goblins distrust the Ministry, and with cause, and Voldemort, also with cause. No, or very few, werewolves trust the Ministry; at least a strong minority do not trust Voldemort. Of the vampires, I can say little, and the giants are probably largely in Voldemort's pocket already, if he has pockets. Yet so long as the choices are the Ministry or Voldemort, Voldemort has a sporting chance of gaining adherents amongst these groups. There must be a third way, and that requires a third locus of allegiance, or at the very least, of cooperation or neutrality. Harry? Do you believe, truly, that you can and will defeat Voldemort, and win this war?'

'I. I'm not certain.'

'Well, until you are, we've nothing really to discuss. More rice, Harry?'

_______________________________________

'... Barbara Celerant with the news. Wizengamot member George Girvan sat down with WWN Four in our studios at Spellcast House for a wide-ranging interview today with Veronica Speedwell. The fiery backbencher's demands for a negotiated peace with You-Know-Who will be heard in full on the Today programme tomorrow at 6.0. Already, his statements are making headlines; Alaric Dunstable was at the Ministry today as the news broke....'

_______________________________________

'Remus?'

'Yes, Harry? Do come in and stop fidgeting in the doorway, you're worse than Sirius was. Now. Tea?'

'No. Thanks, but no. I. You asked me if I thought I could win.'

'Yes, I did. Do you? Can you?'

'I must do, mustn't I?'

'That was not my question.'

Harry look determined. 'I can and I will. I shall. Because I must.'

'And why must you? To avenge your parents? To avenge Albus? Sirius? Because of a prophecy? Because everyone else expects it of you? Because defeating Voldemort will allow you to execute Snape and Lucius Malfoy and Bellatrix at wand-point?'

Harry exploded. 'NO, DAMN IT! WHAT? YOU THINK I'M MOTIVATED BY THE SAME RUBBISH "GORGEOUS GEORGE" GIRVAN SAYS MOTIVATES ME? I'VE NO CHOICE BUT TO DEFEAT VOLDEMORT! IT'S NOT JUST THAT HE WANTS ME DEAD, HE'LL KILL DEAN AND THE WEASLEYS AND SEAMUS AND HERMIONE AND YOU AND DRACO, EVEN, AND -'

'Ah.'

'"AH"? ALL YOU HAVE TO SAY FOR YOURSELF IS, "AH"?'

'Well, you have answered the question, you know. You've realised that he wants stopping, not for reasons of vengeance, not even because he would happily kill you, but because if he isn't stopped, all those for whom you care will be killed. And that, of course, is the right answer - or a goodish part of it.'

'A part -'

'It's a quest, Harry, you want clean hands for a quest. A year ago, I should have said that you wanted to forgive Draco, and Snape, for that matter: that your love for Ginny and Ron and Hermione and your friends was not, quite, enough. Now, of course, you want to forgive Ginny, a trifle, and you want to proceed with more than love for Draco, and Ron, and Hermione, and all the rest -'

'Now, look here, damn it, Remus -'

'It's very difficult to forgive those who injure us. It's still more difficult to forgive those whom we have injured. Such as Ginny. Such as Albus. Harry, you know very well that the only thing that can defeat Voldemort is love. It is a power he can neither understand, nor withstand. That does not mean that Lucius Malfoy, and Bellatrix, and perhaps Professor Snape - although I've still my own ideas about that - are not to be held accountable. Yes, and the Dursleys, as well. Even Kreacher. Yet there is a fine, but very distinct, line between justice and vengeance. You must seek the former, not the latter: otherwise, you are no better than Barty Crouch the Elder. Or Fudge, or Scrimgeour, or a long and undistinguished line of Ministry types and useless ministers. It was the failure to seek justice, after all, that led to the unjust imprisonment of Stan Shunpike, and of Sirius; it is the failure to seek justice, and to do justice, that costs the Ministry today the support of goblins and centaurs, giants and vampires, werewolves and many Slytherins.'

_______________________________________

'... in thirty minutes. But first, Stubby Boardman is in the chair for another infuriating episode of I'm Sorry, I'm Not on the Floo.'

_______________________________________

'Harry. Albus hurt you deeply by leaving you. Sirius also. And your parents. You resent them for that - and that's perfectly valid - even though you understand why they did do, and that it was their love for you that led them to die for you - and not for you only. You can, you know, resent their actions yet forgive them, and I trust that you have done. You really must, you know. You and Ginny have hurt one another; you and Draco have done; you and Ron and Hermione hurt one another deeply on a regular basis. Yet your bonds of friendship and affection heal those hurts as regularly as you inflict them on one another. You and I have caused hurt to one another as well, yet we manage always to heal those hurts: very much in the way that you and Neville do, brothers in fate that you are. The key, to all things, is forgiveness, and honesty, and fairness: simple, British fair play. And these come of love, and respect. So long as these emotions move you, they will also guide you, move you forrards: even to final victory over the Dark. And you must do the same for our world, for our society - because, Harry, when you shall have won, you and those who stood with you will be our world, our society. The Ministry will be in your hands, the future will be yours to decree. You will have it in your power, you and your friends and allies, to make the world over anew, a world more just and more free. There is but one thing you must first do, to assure your victory and set the foundations of that future, and it also is a matter of forgiveness.'

'And what is that, Remus?'

'You must finally do that that you've put off for years, Harry. You must forgive yourself. Now, if you will excuse me, I have an engagement with a Metamorphmagus, and I'm very eager to see who she is today.'

As Remus loped out at a wolf's jog, he could hear Harry recovering from his gob-smacked silence: 'Bloody, infuriating, Albus-like, twinkling-eyed werewolf father-figure.'

Remus smiled, wolfishly, and walked on.

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Herefordshire is the sleepiest county in England.

Its name derives from that most unsleeping of activities, warfare: the Here Ford is the Heer ford, the army ford, the place where a body of armed men could cross the river. And quite often did men ford the river in arms, from the days before Offa built his Dyke, even unto the days of the Civil War. After all, Herefordshire is a county of the Welsh Marches, with all that that implied in the distant days of blood and battle.

Yet Herefordshire is now the sleepiest county in England.

Its shape upon the map is vaguely oval, like an apple, like a pear. Celia Fiennes would have concurred:

Here we Enter into Worcestershire and ascend Manborn hills or as some term them y^e English Alps, a Ridge of hills Divideing Worcestershire and Heriforshire and was formerly Esteemed the divideing England and Wales, Herriford Shropshire &. were Weltch Countys. They are at least 2 or 3 miles up and are in a Pirramidy fashion on y^e top. I rode up upon y^e top of one of y^e highest from whence Could discern the Country above 40 miles round and noe hills but what appeared Like Burrows or Mole hills, these being so high Nothing Could Limitt y^e Eye but distance. Just at y^e Bottom stands Worcester town which Looks like a Large well built town of Brick and Stone - I was not in it. On the one Side of this high Ridge of hills Lies Worcester: Oxford Glocestershire &. appears in plaines, enclosures, Woods and Rivers and many Great hills tho' to this they appeare Low: on the other Side is Herriforshire w^ch appears Like a Country off Gardens and Orchards the whole Country being very full of fruite trees &. it lookes like nothing else - the apple and pear trees &. are so thick even in their Corn fields and hedgerows.

It is famous for cattle, and more famous still, perhaps, for cider and perry, for slow growth and slow speech, for full tankards and full bellies, the sleepiest county in England - as Defoe observed:

We were now on the borders of Wales, properly so call'd; for from the windows of Brampton-Castle, you have a fair prospect into the county of Radnor, which is, as it were, under its walls; nay, even this whole county of Hereford, was, if we may believe antiquity, a part of Wales, and was so esteem'd for many ages. The people of this county too, boast that they were a part of the antient Silures, who for so many ages withstood the Roman arms, and who could never be entirely conquer'd. But that's an affair quite beyond my enquiry. I observ'd they are a diligent and laborious people, chiefly addicted to husbandry, and they boast, perhaps, not without reason, that they have the finest wool, and best hops, and the richest cyder in all Britain.

Indeed the wool about Leominster, and in the Hundred of Wigmore observ'd above, and the Golden Vale as 'tis call'd, for its richness on the banks of the river Dove, (all in this county) is the finest without exception, of any in England, the South Down wool not excepted: As for hops, they plant abundance indeed all over this county, and they are very good. And as for cyder, here it was, that several times for 20 miles together, we could get no beer or ale in their publick houses, only cyder; and that so very good, so fine, and so cheap, that we never found fault with the exchange; great quantities of this cyder are sent to London, even by land carriage tho' so very remote, which is an evidence for the goodness of it, beyond contradiction.

One would hardly expect so pleasant, and fruitful a country as this, so near the barren mountains of Wales; but 'tis certain, that not any of our southern counties, the neighbourhood of London excepted, comes up to the fertility of this county, as Gloucester furnishes London with great quantities of cheese, so this county furnishes the same city with bacon in great quantities, and also with cyder as above.

It is the county of apples and pears, cider and perry - 'No wonder,' said Cobbett, observing the soil and the climate, 'that this is a country of cider and perry' - this, the sleepiest county in England; and it is not only a county of the Marches where England fronts Wales, and Wales, England, but is also where the last, cider-scented influence of the West County, of its Gloucestershire neighbours and their kith and kin, fades gently into the fat West Midlands.

The more ignorant purebloods and the blood-supremacists - and there is nothing more ignorant than a pureblood supremacist - had liked to imagine that, there being no exclusively Wizarding village in the Three Kingdoms save Hogsmeade, the Wizarding world lived in seclusion and isolation, perhaps in the country somewhere. But even they knew, in their hearts, that this was silly, ill-reasoned, false. Hogsmeade, it was true, was the only all-Wizarding village in Britain, but even in the midst of the secrecy regime, that in no wise meant that there were not Wizarding hamlets, or mixed towns, hamlets, and villages. And although Malfoys and Longbottoms alike, for example, lived deep in the countryside, away from villages Muggle or magical, they were not typical. OSC, as its residents rather jauntily called Ottery St Catchpole, boasted the Weasleys, Lovegoods, Fawcetts, and Diggorys, and the district as a whole had its Notts and Fawcetts as well; and as for Godric's Hollow, what more need be said, but to note that Potters and Wrights have time out of mind had their seats there where Gryffindor once dwelt. Even the House of Black, after all, had a town place cheek by jowl with Muggles, in London's very heart.

Nor have Wizards avoided Muggles as much as they might, even during the years of secrecy. It was Muggle politicians and jobbing brokers who dreamt up the South Sea Company, for instance; yet it was clearly a Slytherin who, in the midst of the Bubble that went with that popular madness, 'showed, more completely than any other, the utter madness of the people, [by forming a company] started by an unknown adventurer, entitled "company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is." Were not the fact stated by scores of credible witnesses, it would be impossible to believe that any person could have been duped by such a project. The man of genius who essayed this bold and successful inroad upon public credulity, merely stated in his prospectus that the required capital was half a million, in five thousand shares of 100 pounds each, deposit 2 pounds per share. Each subscriber, paying his deposit, would be entitled to 100 pounds per annum per share. How this immense profit was to be obtained, he did not condescend to inform them at that time, but promised, that in a month full particulars should be duly announced, and a call made for the remaining 98 pounds of the subscription. Next morning, at nine o'clock, this great man opened an office in Cornhill. Crowds of people beset his door, and when he shut up at three o'clock, he found that no less than one thousand shares had been subscribed for, and the deposits paid. He was thus, in five hours, the winner of 2,000 pounds. He was philosopher enough to be contented with his venture, and set off the same evening for the Continent. He was never heard of again.'

The fact of the matter was that there were towns, hamlets, and villages scattered up and down the Three Kingdoms, in which Muggle and Wizard dwelt discreetly - in most cases, surreptitiously, even after the post-War liberalisation of the secrecy regime - as neighbours, with no less harmony and no worse jars than either would find in any community of their own folk. In Dorset, for example, Witchampton and Manswood, with typically English perversity, were wholly Muggle and had ever been so, but there were mixed communities at Alton Aldhelm and Barton Pancras, at Beer Valence and Bishops Lanthorn, at Buckhorn Wipers, Caundle Herring, and Fifehead Abbas, at Forepiddle and Langton Minster and Stour Porcorum, at Wimbourne Canonicorum and at Yetbury Regis. Not even the Home Counties were exempt - much as it strains credulity to imagine Wizards within reach of a Green Line Bus; indeed, Kent alone hosts mixed communities at Boughton Gimmel and Hoo St Walburga, Nettleton Malherbe, Shepsham Without, and Shirtinghanger, amongst others. In Oxon, the occasional battiness of Wizards goes unnoticed amidst the daily battiness of dons and undergraduates, and there are ancient Wizarding-Muggle communities at Hatch Norton and Hookredy, St Johns Salome, Trench Eaton, and Wescott sub Witchwood, all of which are centres of the ancient Wizarding tradition of Nine-Men's-Morris-dancing.

And in sleepy Herefordshire, the sleepiest county in England, Wizard and Muggle lived in fair harmony in the drowsy hamlets of the sunken lanes and overgrown orchards. At Ocle Pychard, Felton, Maund Bryan, and The Vauld, Wizards lived quietly amidst the Muggles. At the centres of the Potter family interests in Herefordshire, where the Wizarding cider and perry came from - for who but the Potter, the maker of vessels, the eldest magician, should govern this craft? - in the Wizarding orchards, Muggles lived amicably amidst Wizards: at Stoke Grievance and Much Mickle, in the market town of Ham on Wye, at Weobring and Much Muchness, from Weobmeole to the 'black-and-white village' of Mage's Pyon, its local Quidditch time known from time immemorial as the Magpyes and its civic pride boasting that the Montrose Magpies, away in Scotland far, took their name from that of the village side.

Harry had been surprised, after the War, to find how greatly his family interests had spread, from Cornwall to the Midlands (even beyond Herefordshire: for example, there were Potter properties in Salop as well, at Church Craven and High Dudgeon, from Much Warlock over to Smirkshill), although he oughtn't to have been: it certainly helped explain the Potter potteries in the Black Country, and to explain as well the lengthy intermarriages between the Blacks of that country and the West-Country-birthed Potters. But Harry's surprise had proceeded from his merely discovering something else he'd not known of his heritage. Draco had been equally surprised to find Potter-Black holdings as far a-field as Hamble Turgis in Hants; Earls Froting, Bumpstead Peverel, and Steeple Wandwood in Essex; Pigginghoe, Toad Firle, and Witch Cross in East Sussex, and Crawling Down, Diddling-and-Fulking, Great Dole, Matronbower, and Upper Breeding, in West; Ayot St Godric and Much Potheredham in Herts; Cockayne Conquest and Pepperhanger in Beds; Godamning, Belcham, and Thursday Street in Surrey itself, the site of Harry's childhood misery; Aston Mandeville, Farrowstall, Hogsbrook with Fulshaw, and Maids Marish in Bucks; Sheriffmaston, Spleenham, and Stratfield Dingley in Berks; Fawkesham Green and Sterncorn and Wycheswold in Kent; and, in ancient Cheshire, Belpas, Bentley juxta Doldrum, Cranford, Hantwich, Thrashwood, and Wrongcorn. It made no sense to Draco, knowing what he knew of the old magics.

He knew, having been trained a pureblood of the purebloods, that Wizards and their country were bound in curious ways. (His mother had always ignored Lucius's wilder claims, now that he thought of it, and the Blacks had treated Grimmauld Place rather than Atrum as if it were the caput of their family, and that was odd, indeed. Could Lucius have been wrong?) Wizards and their country, their holdings, had a magical bond, did they not? (Yet the Blacks, who were, after all, the next thing to royalty as Wizard-dom counted these things ... had Lucius once again been lying?)

It was to Lupin that he eventually betook himself, perplexed enough to admit defeat. And Lupin - who, in order to give Harry his inheritance in proper form, had made himself master of the Potter muniments and a rather formidable historian - was kind to Draco, and carefully did not smile when he heard Draco's frustrated questions.

'You forget,' said he, mildly, 'just who the Malfoys were, and who, the Blacks; and you forget that your Harry is a god.'

'I - what did you say, Lupin?'

Remus laughed. 'Nothing to get possessive over, Draco, and nothing at all blasphemous. I mean simply that the particular tie that the Potters have to the natural world and its magic, is one that, in the past, caused some Muggles to deify them - rather to their embarrassment, I should imagine.'

The term for the artifex who makes vessels, the figulus, can be Englished in one of two ways, and the West indifferently used both, with some regional variations in preference. 'Crocker' is the more Celtic, Dumnonian, Cornish, cognate to the Welsh crochenydd. The other form, of course, for this eldest of magicians, wielder of earth and water, kilning air and fire, is 'Potter', and Wizarding surnames do not derive by accident.

It is the maker of the vessels who drives the craft of cider-making, it is the potter, the crocker, who transmutes the Hesperides's apples, the apples of Avalon, into cider, by creating the vessels that allow its fermentation and its serving.

Afallach was a Celtic godling, ruler of Avalon, the paradisal Place of Apples, and the Celtic heaven was apple-scented and cider-washed.

But the Potters, like Godric before them, their great founder and lord, chose the Hallowed Places of the true religion, for all their roots upon Dartmoor and Exmoor and the barren places of old paganry. It was thence that they came into England, into Somerset and Dorset, into Gloucester and West Wilts, into Herefordshire and beyond. They were the vessel-makers and the masters of cider-making, and they followed the apples, and the apples followed them.

Yet deep and away in the cold, cruel heart of Dartmoor, Old Dartymoor, where the stunted dwarf-trees of Wistman's Wood shelter adders and kennel the Wisht Hounds of the Wild Hunt, the Spirit of the Moor yet lingers in the minds of men: Old Crockern, the moorland god, the very spirit of 'wild moor' where Golden Godric was engendered and whence the Potters sprang (and the tinning smiths with them, after). Had the Potters remained upon the moors, perhaps their magics would have become bound up in the spirit of the place. But they, like Great Godric their forerunner, they went into England, with the apples, with tilth and orchard, hallowed lands and deer forests all preserved, and their magic is that of the hive and the cider-press, the kiln and the grange, the stag in his forest and the grazing kine.

Like the Blacks, they were tied, not to a place, but to a vision, an ideal, and to a craft or twain.

But Draco could not have been expected to realise this. His mother had been prevented in any hopes she had had of teaching him, when he was young, the true Black traditions. And Lucius, the parvenu, of a collateral line brought in to take on the headship of the family, had taught him - as he had himself been taught by his appalling grandfather - rather what the Malfoys wished to believe, and to have believed, of themselves, than what they knew or ought to have known of their origins.

It was no accident that the Weasleys - in whose line the name 'Arthur' recurred with astounding regularity - should live in the Vale of the River Otter, in ancient Dumnonia.

It was likewise no accident that the Malfoys lived in Wiltshire.

Lucius would have had it that their living in Wiltshire - with its high concentration of country houses and peers even amongst the mere Muggles - had to do with ancient and prideful connexions, with traditions going back to Stonehenge and Avebury, to Woodhenge and Silbury Hill.

Rubbish.

The Forest of Sarpenic was once home to Maduc the Black, and it was there that Gawain captured Lot of Orkney and forced him to accept Arthur and enter into the king's peace.

'After the Battle of Camlann,' writes Giraldus Cambrensis, 'a noblewoman called Morgan, who was the ruler and patroness of these parts as well as being a close blood-relation of King Arthur, carried him off to the island, now known as Glastonbury, so that his wounds could be cared for'; or, in his Speculum Ecclesiæ, 'the sequel was that the body of Arthur, who had been mortally wounded, was carried off by a certain noble matron, called Morgan, who was his cousin, to the Isle of Avalon, which is now known as Glastonbury. Under Morgan's supervision the corpse was buried in the churchyard there. As a result, the credulous Britons and their bards invented the legend that a fantastic sorceress called Morgan had removed Arthur's body to the Isle of Avalon, so that she might cure his wounds there. According to them, once he has recovered from his wounds this strong and all-powerful King will return to rule over the Britons in the normal way. The result of all this is that they really expect him to come back....'

Just over in Hants, at Nether Wallop, is the site of the Battle of Guoluph, as recorded by Nennius, where Ambrosius Aurelianus thrashed the forces of Vortigern under the command of the younger Vitalinus.

And the Forest of Sarpenic is the Forest of Savernake, in Wilts, and between Redlynch and Downton, on the border with Hants, is the place that the Victorians prudishly renamed 'Morgan's Vale', but which is and has been time out of mind 'Morgan's Bottom'; and the ancient forest lands of Morgan's bottomland, with the Savernake Forest and the Wallops, form a triangle to the dawn's side of the ancient sacred landscapes of the Henges and the Plain, and south and east of Marlborough: Merlin's Barrow.

No, it is no accident that ties the Malfoys - long haters of various Arthurs, Weasley and otherwise - to Wiltshire. Morgan was there, in the deeps of time, healer and simpler and potions-maker, close kinswoman to Arthur yet long his enemy, dabbler in the Dark yet healer or mourner of Arthur after the Last Battle, princess and sorceress, mistress of Avalon, a witch of great learning and power and equivocal reputation. Morgan was there first: before Malfoy was Morgan le Fay.

____________________________________________________

'My ... predecessor ... was wont to give a set speech to his First Years. He claimed to be able to "teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death". I shan't do, I haven't the thespian talents to bring it off. I will tell you only this - and it is the same thing I will tell any Head of House who believes that my academic discipline is amenable to the slipshod, or that my disciplinary measures are over-harsh - a mistake, a prank, an idiocy, or an act of childishness in Charms requires only reversal. A folly, a lack of preparation, or simple stupidity in Transfiguration may lead to a painful result. Inattention or misbehaviour in most of your lessons can be risky, but is reversible. In my lessons, perhaps even more than in Care of Magical Creatures or Defence Against the Dark Arts, the slightest foolery or the slightest deviation from what I expect could result in your death and the deaths of those around you, too swiftly for any attempts at aid to matter. In other words, if you act the goat or fail to follow instructions in this class, people die.

'I therefore expect and will assure by all means in my power, including the harshest available disciplinary measures, that you will conduct yourselves properly in my Potions lessons. Or may God Almighty have mercy upon your souls.'

___________________________________________________

'... there are warnings of gales in all areas.'

___________________________________________________

Old Mr Sherman of Number 3, Pinchin Lane, Lambeth, now well into his second century, who was the primary supplier of magical livestock to Eeylops's and the Magical Menagerie, had always been rather ambivalent about the means he'd assented to employ so as to pass in the Muggle world. The two medical gentlemen turned, respectively, author (and 'fictional character') and literary agent (and 'author'), had, he admitted, done him a service, yet it rankled. He was on occasion heard to observe, in echo of a line from one of the fictions that had helped obscure his real presence amongst the Muggles, that, 'When a doctor does go writing, he is the first of scoundrels', and had at least once admitted that he rather wished that his badger of the time had bit the pawky Scots medico. Either of 'em.

______________________________________________

Hermione had observed - and, as usual, her observation was perfectly logical, and, on this occasion, true in fact as well - Hermione had observed, and British Wizard-dom had accepted, that, 'One you postulate the existence of magic, of Wizards and Witches, English history -' she meant, 'British history', but let that pass - 'English history finally becomes comprehensible.' And, as was so for most of Dr Granger-Weasley's public pronouncements, the Wizarding world agreed.

In the year of Our Lord the 410th, and since the founding of the City the 1163d, the usurper Priscus Attalus having been deposed and the Visigoth, Alaric, having died, the Emperor Flavius Honorius Augustus, then in the seventeenth year of his reign, sent his imperial rescript to the civil authorities remaining in the Province and Diocese of Britannia, advising them to look to their own defences and internal governance. The Emperor wrote from his court at Ravenna, for, if this was the 1163d year from that of Rome's founding, it was also the year in which, as his last, worst act before he died, Alaric had sacked the Sacred and Eternal City, a Roma no longer Invicta, the shock and reverberation of whose fall and plundering was then moving the Bishop of Hippo, one Augustine, to pick up his stylus and pen The City of God, even as Honorius dictated his rescript to a bored secretary for sending to the half-civilised Britons. A certain impatience may be detected in the imperial tone, and not without reason, for the Legions in Britain had thrice challenged the Emperor with their own candidates for the purple, the last of whom, Constantine 3d, had forced himself upon Honorius as co-emperor in the year 409 and would not be finally despatched until 411. The Constantinian rebellion had denuded Britannia of the last of its Eagles, and, in the absence of the Legions, the Saxons were descending already upon the shores of Roman Britain like wolves upon a pinfold.

It was then, in a loosely independent Britannia - 'sub-Roman', some call it, yet still discernibly Latinised, Roman, and Christian, rejoicing yet in fora and baths, cities and villas, snug with hypocaust heating and tiled in rich mosaic floorings - that the Wizards of Britain took the fore.

Domesday Book tells us that, of the manors of Over Wallop, Hants, one had been held allodially - without a feudal superior, 'holding title directly of God' - before the Conquest by one Godric, answerable only to King Edward the Confessor. Potrey or Pottrie Court, nearby, took its name from a Norman - or Normanised - holder after the Conquest, of the not-at-all Norman name and house of 'de Pot(t)eria'. These things are no accident.

History does not repeat itself; yet it does rhyme.

By the Year of Our Lord 425, ab urbe condita 1178, Valentinian 3d being Emperor in the West, the same being the year of the death of the Nasi Gamaliel 6th and of the dissolution of the Sanhedrin upon the death of its head, the Council of the British had acceded to the policy of that faction based in Wroxeter, Viroconium Cornoviorum, and of its head, 'Gwrtheyrn' Vitalis Vitalinus. Not only had the Legions abandoned Britannia by 410; so also had the Classis, the Fleet, that had long held the Narrow Seas. The Watchers of the Shore were long since disbanded; Coel Hen: the last dux, father-in-law of the great Cunedda ap Edern Wledig, Kenneth, king of Gwynned and father of the later royal house of Powys as well, imperator, son of Æturnus son of Paternus of the Scarlet Cloak: Coel the Old had secured to himself the rule of what had been Britannia Inferior, North Britain, Yr Hen Ogledd, basing himself at the ancient headquarters of his command at Eboracum - York - and had left the southlands, Britannia Superior, largely to their fate. Of the Gwyr y Gogledd, the Men of the Old North, only Cunedda, in his commander's and father-in-law's behalf and in his own interest, intervened from time to time, taking his Votadini, his Gododdin warriors, into Wales, leaving what would become Cumbria, the North of England, and Strathclyde, to the governance of Coel the Dux and his successors.

Kenneth of Gododdin had but little use for Vitalis Vitalinus, 'Gwrtheyrn', whom later Latinists would better know as Vortigern, and for his Wroxeter party, the men of Caer Gurion that would be after, first as the capital of the future Powys and later as a part of the English marches, in Salop: his primary concern was Wales and the North, reaching into the future Scottish Lowlands; but he was a man of his salt, answerable to Old Coel the Dux who yet held a just authority in the reunited Flavia Cæsariensis and Britannia Secunda, the old provincial subdivision of Lower Britain. And he was a man under authority, and answerable to the Council.

Therefore did he not rebel against the fœderative role he was assigned; and therefore did Vortigern and the Council fatally believe that the same wiles, the same techniques of making the poacher the gamekeeper, could be employed, as Rome had long if not always successfully employed them, upon the Saxons.

And in all these events there was no division between Wizards and Muggles, and no concept of blood status in the Wizarding world.

Nor can it be contended that Vortigern or the Council were Dark in the sense in which Voldemort was Dark. Rather, like not a few Ministers and Wizengamots that came after, Vortigern and the Council were simply fallen into folly.

History does not repeat; it rhymes.

In the Year of Our Lord 428, AUC 1181, being three years since Vortigern had been entrusted by the Council with the powers of the old Comes Britanniarum and the Comes Litoris Saxonici per Britannias, the Count of the Saxon Shore - at least in Britannia Superior, the reunited Britannia Prima and Maxima Cæsariensis - the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes descended upon Britain in force.

There were three courses open to the Council and their head. The first was resistance. The second, which would later be chosen by Cerdic, was co-option and adhesion, whereby Cerdic and Cynric, Britons both and survivors of the upheavals of the 5th Century, transformed themselves from Romano-British officers to leaders of Saxon warbands, and founded the Kingdom of Wessex. The last, fatally chosen by Vortigern and the majority of his council, was to make the Saxons the fœderati of the government of the day. They bound the Saxons by the most impressive oaths, Muggle and magical alike.

It worked approximately as well as the recruiting of Dementors to guard Azkaban.

History does not repeat: it rhymes.

In the Year of Our Lord 437, and from the City's founding the 1190th, Valentinian 3d being the Emperor of the West and in that year taking to wife the Empress Licinia Eudoxia, sister of the Eastern Emperor Theodosius 2d, it being also the year in which Childeric, the future king of the Salian Franks, was born, it had come to open warfare between Vortigern and the rump of his Council, upon the one hand, and Ambrosius Aurelianus and his party - including the sons of Vortigern's first marriage, to Severa, daughter of the imperator Magnus Maximus - on the other.

Vortigern had come far from his origins by that time. The scion of a Roman-British kinship that held lands from Gloucester to Hereford and Shropshire, where he made his personal powerbase at Wroxeter, with connexions in what was later to become Wales - connexions that included a marriage into the family of the upstart imperator Macsen Wledig, Magnus Maximus - he had begun his life as a trimmer and a high-flyer in the civil service of Roman Britain. Like not a few such, then or after, he had combined lay and ecclesiastical office, a tack much easier to take, for one who would found a dynasty, in the years before the Church of Rome began to prescribe priestly celibacy. When the Britons found themselves beset by barbarian tribes and deserted, as they saw it, by Rome (forgetting how often Britannia had itself sent the home Legions off to struggle for the imperial diadem under a pretender to the imperium), and a sort of reactionary nationalism was nascent, he reinvented himself as the leader of the British nationalist party, and, rather than continue as the Roman Briton, son of the Vitalini, took on the Britannic name of Vortigern, Gwrtheyrn: a personal name in the Brythonic tradition, to be sure, yet one that also meant, simply, 'over-lord', the high king, what the Saxons would come to call the Bretwalda. It was his own Octavian moment, when, in effect, he made himself the British Augustus.

His sons, remembering their mother Severa, recalling their grandfather's imperial pretensions, mindful of what Roman Britain owed to them and they to it, rose in wrath when their father, trimming still, acceded to the overweening might of the Saxon fœderati, and disgraced himself by marrying the pagan daughter of Hengist, the maid of Kent, Rowena, Ronnwenn, Bright-Spear, the slim, icy blond Valkyrie whose bride-piece was Kent and whose dowry was death. The chroniclers of all parties are agreed that it was Rowena's charms - quite literally - that enthralled Vortigern, and caused him to become first a miserable quisling to his people, and, by the end, the contemptible and universally despised puppet and collaborator of the Germans, their British gauleiter. And the chroniclers of all parties are agreed that it was upon Vortigern's imbibing of a potion prepared by Ronwen that he ceased to possess his old powers, never again able to trim and scheme, never again able to turn his coat, forever besotted and bereft of will: a man equally ensorcelled by Amortentia and Imperio.

And in all these days there was no division between Wizards and Muggles, and no concept of blood status in the Wizarding world.

History does not repeat; it rhymes.

______________________________________________

As Neville had left for Thornminster, so had Harry returned to his interrupted meeting with Signor Unterperger, who had evidently followed the news from Britain closely.

'Signor. I imagine that Minister Longbottom has departed. It is a very creditable thing in a minister to be able to triumph so completely at such a distance, and cause his enemies to fall into their own traps. Obviously, my government will be all the more inclined to have me to assist you now.'

Harry made a snap judgement, relying on a very sure instinct. 'Yes. About that - and this investigation, and the political crisis. My dear Signor Unterperger, I trust we will neither of us live to regret this, but I am going to take you, as fully as I can, into my confidence. Let me tell you what I think is occurring here - the more so in light of what has just occurred in London.'

Signor Unterperger listened attentively, and with growing dismay.

'Signor Potter!'

'Do call me "Harry", please. I anticipate that we will be working closely together.'

'Then do you call me "Pietro", honoured Signor Harry. This - all this! It is infamous! And cunning, both in your enemies and in your own - team, is it? Yes. Team - cunning that you have anticipated it and will, surely, defeat it, no? There is upon either side a fine hand at work. Are you by any chance even in part Italian?'

'Oh, very distantly,' said Harry, with great casualness. 'Or Roman, at least. Publius Nigidius Figulus, Cicero's friend, whom St Jerome called "Pythagoricus et magus", was a kinsman, as was Vergil's - your namesake's - father, oh, and Caius Marcius Figulus, twice consul, of course, and St Ambrose of Milan and his kinsmen, Aurelius Ambrosius Aurelianus and Emrys, whom some called Emrys Myrddin.'

___________________________________________________

'YOU BLOODY FOOL! You - you little bastard, you've -'

'Mister Scrimgeour! Whatever can be the matter?'

'Take that smirk off your spotty face, McLaggen, or I'll bloody well hex it off! This is all your doing. Either you gave me deliberately bad advice, or you don't know balls about our damned, new, Muggle-inspired constitution for all your claims! I'll have your -'

'Come, come, Scrimgeour. And you my senior in age and experience alike, once Minister for Magic, leader of your party. Why, I only crossed the aisle last night. Surely you cannot be suggesting that your failed ploy to bring down the ministry of the day on a confidence vote was my doing: I cannot imagine how, let us say, Mr Robards would take the claim that his party leader, a former Minister of great experience, was doing the bidding of a stripling whose maiden speech in the Moot was but a year ago and who was, at the time you made your miscalculation, still a member of the other party. I certainly shouldn't care to put up that excuse to my party if I were in your regrettable position. I don't know whether it would be worse that they disbelieved the excuse, or that they didn't do.'

'You cunning wee bastard.'

'You played the game well enough in your time, Scrimgeour. But you're clearly past it now, and all your pieces are off the board. It is a new game, with new rules, as you just complained of its being. And it wants a new player, one of the same generation as Lardbottom and Potty and the Weasels and the Ferret. Old house and school ties aren't at issue now, nor generations and affinities. It's a new game with new rules, and played for the highest stakes. I'm afraid you're being relegated to the touchline, where I expect you'll cheer on your side with proper public enthusiasm.'

'And I suppose you think you can swan in - having just crossed the floor, as you have just noted - and become the Leader of the Opposition?'

'Me? I'm a backroom boy, my dear Scrimgeour.'

'You -. You contemptible sod. I see why they christened you as they did. You really are a bastard, corb-mac, the Son of Defilement. Well, by Merlin, we'll -'

'Sir?' A junior from the Whip's Office had knocked and entered. 'Mr Scrimgeour. I am to advise you that the Minister for Magic presents his compliments, and wishes you to call at Upping Street as soon as magically practicable.'

'He'll have his wish,' said Scrimgeour, grimly. 'Go away. No, not you, McLaggen. I'll say this once. I'll be watching you. I'll be dogging your footsteps like a Grim. And you will come a cropper. You're up to no good, and you'll pay. You're going Dark, McLaggen, and there will be a reckoning.'

'You might think that. I couldn't possibly comment.'

______________________________________________

'Ah. Rufus. Do pull up a chair - we'll not break out the ducking stool just yet. Now. What t'hummer wast thinking, mon? No oil in thi lamp? You've been eight sorts of damned fool, Rufus, and as t' leader of a presumably loyal opposition, and sworn to Privy Council as well, sithee, it passes my understanding, what possessed you to chance your arm this way.'

'Minister.'

'Ah, now, it's "Neville" yet to you, fool though you've been this week. We're meeting on Privy Council terms, Rufus, and amicably despite it all. Now, once more: what the devil were you playing at, damn it?'

'Well. Neville. The fact is, I doubt me but that I'm too auld for this. As has been thrown in my face quite recently. A new game with new rules, and rules I don't ken.'

'Ahhhh. And would a certain clotyead who's just resigned government whip be t'one as addled you into acting the barmpot? Ah. So I did think. Owdonabit, now, and don't cut up. No reason either of us to be kind to errant lad, is there. So. When it cooms to ey-lad-ey, t'booger's bin catched, and t'booger'll be sauced, and us to do for him. Formally, I must tell you,' said Nev, switching into parliamentary language, 'as one party leader to another, that your honourable friend - don't snort, Rufus - is very much on our list. Persona non grata. Permanent black mark. As his leader, you want to -'

'Och, man. And do you think I'll long be leader, now yon dirty wee bastard has crossed the aisle?'

'And that's his game, is it? Well. There's two can play that game. I wondered why he was so quick to spit his dummy out. Well, if there's a leadership contest ... pigs wain't follow empty bucket, lad. And the Queen's government must be carried on. I have, sithee, no opinion as to any leadership contest that may occur. But mind thee, there's always a place on government benches for any of good will and loyalty, two characteristics in which the member for Arrochar is sadly lacking, aye, even if a member crossing over has made mistakes in past.'

'Mphm.'

Nev grinned, savagely. 'Wi' Lancashire and Scoat-land boath up-agin t'bugger, he'll yit coom to his cake and milk, will McLaggen.'

______________________________________________

Wiltshire, possessing the oldest County Constabulary in England - the first to organize under the County Police Act 1839 - rejoiced also, in these times, in a Chief Constable who could properly be addressed as 'Colonel'.

This was not the result of some unlikely throwback to the old way of appointing CCs. Colonel Gunstone was indeed an eminently qualified copper, not a gentleman appointed to learn the job on the job. Wiltshire takes its policing seriously, as evidenced by the intensive interest successive Lords Lieutenant have taken in the bench of magistrates and by their seeing that the Police Authority at all times had a Deputy Lieutenant on it, or was at the least quite close to the ear of one. However, Wiltshire also, of course, houses a goodly portion of the defence establishment, which was why and how Colonel Gunstone, late Royal Military Police, had become, after a brief retirement, the - utterly civilian, wholly mufti-clad, resolutely un-regimental - Chief Constable for the county force.

Unlike the Brigadier, Colonel Gunstone, qua Chief Constable, did not care for or approve of Harry and Draco. He would grant that they had done a bang-up job of reconciling Lady P to DI Maidment's appointment. He applauded whatever it was that they had done to gain the OMs that they never referred to and the record of which was so curiously elusive (there was, of course, no question but that they had merited appointment, and been duly appointed OM: they weren't playing that form of fraudulent game, the Brigadier had seen official correspondence so denominating them, and they were thus addressed on letters from the MoD, to Colonel Gunstone's personal knowledge. The Chief Constable's distaste for the two was not based upon a suspicion that they were impostors of some sort: on the contrary). He was willing to accept that they had almost certainly given some useful advice to the lads - wholly off the books, of course, no names, no pack drill - on various local villains and their doings.

But Colonel Gunstone was very much aware that the two were indeed the ludicrously youthful recipients of dignities, honours, and awards for services that were carefully not specified. And that meant that they were of a breed that neither soldier nor policeman - and the Chief Constable was, of course, both at once - at all cared for. They were spooks. Ghosts. Int Corps, MI, God and the Crown alone knew what, it didn't matter. They were Those Buggers. And Colonel Gunstone, unlike Maidment, unlike the Brigadier, was not willing to allow his judicious approbation of their personal merits and qualities to overcome his adamant refusal to allow That Sort, spooks and spymasters, to have any hand in how his manor was run. It was not in his power, nor, really, was it his desire, to keep them, say, off of the bench; but the suggestion, casually dropped from On High, that it might be rather nice to have one or the other take up the next billet to fall open on the Police Authority, was Not On, not if he could help.

That languid, drawling sod, Malfoy, had been as unenthused as had been the Chief Constable: he had smiled politely upon the Deputy Lieutenant who had insinuated the hint of the outline of the broaching of the possibility at a dinner where they'd all been thrown together, and murmured that he was already on too many commissions and committees, and had just taken up one that would simply devour his time.... Colonel Gunstone had been equally amused and affronted when it emerged, thereafter, that the more important and time-consuming duty to which Malfoy had alluded, was his becoming chairman of the Wine Committee at one of his clubs.

And that left young Potter as the threat.

___________________________________________________

'- And let Death Eaters and werewolves into the school! Bill might have died! I mean, werewolves -'

Remus rose to his feet as the Order members, now including Ron and Hermione as well as Harry, fell silent, not that Harry had joined in the uproar.

'Yes. Because we all know that all werewolves are naturally quite like Greyback. And we all know that no Gryffindor ever became a traitorous rat. And we all know that all Slytherins are inherently evil. And we all know that all Purebloods are Dark. And we all know that all children are mere clones of their parents, right down to their politics - and in their capacity, or lack of capacity, to reform, their ability to achieve redemption. And we all know that these sorts of traits - and taints - are in the blood, do we not, and that free will does not exist. That is what you were saying, I believe, Miss Granger? Weasley Minimus and Weasley Minima? Mr Moody, Mr Shacklebolt, Mrs Weasley? Here, in Sirius's very house, in Albus's own Order, in Harry's hearing?

'It was not for Snape's sake, for example, that Albus extended him his trust, but for Albus's own. And if, as it appears, he was betrayed, that in no way changes the moral calculus. For the first time since his death, I am glad that Albus is not here to see this. For the first time since the cock-up at Department of Mysteries, I am glad that Sirius is not here to listen to this. For the first time since that appalling All Hallows's Eve, I am glad that James and Lily are not present to experience this: that Albus's selected Order, meeting in Sirius's old house, baying at Harry like a pack, would have made such perfect Death Eaters.

'If you don't mind, I am leaving now.'

'No,' said Harry, in the silence. 'If you go, you will not go alone. But I see no reason either of us want to leave: this is my house, and you, Remus, have a life estate in an interest in it. Our guests will be departing now. The Order of the Phoenix is dissol- -'

'WAIT! Harry!'

'Neville -'

'No, it's just that I'm with you and Professor Lupin.'

'I think we can find you a toothbrush, then, if you're stopping here.'

'Harry,' said Kingsley, hesitantly, 'we.... Oh, sod it. If -'

'You - you really think that we're as bad as, as, as the Death Eaters?' Even Ron interrupted Kingsley but rarely, but the horror of what Remus had accused them of was too great for him to refrain.

'Potentially,' said Remus, coolly, even as Harry replied, 'In your prejudices? Too right, mate,' with no small distaste.

'Heedzamarley! And would you dissolve the Order, then, boy, over th' wee Ferret - oh, o' course, f'r your principles, then, would ye? Ask me bollocks!'

'For our principles, yes,' said Lupin. His voice was steely. 'And for Albus's word and promise that Harry now must redeem in his stead.'

Hermione didn't so much as pause to barrack Moody for his language. 'But - but, let aside that he's been so awful, to dissolve the Order over anyone, you can't! Harry! Professor! That would lose the war!'

'And if we act in this way, Hermione? Would we really win? Would it be worth winning?'

___________________________________________________

'And you, Mr Potter?'

Harry smiled. 'Oh, I can't imagine ever contemplating serving on the police authority. I quite like and admire our peelers and wish the work well, but I can't see myself overseeing it.'

The Chief Constable chose to nail Potter down. If the Deputy Lieutenant, disappointed of recruiting Malfoy, was so foolish as to turn immediately to Potter, and Potter were in a demurring mood, it was all to the good to get him committed to staying out of police business. A good man, Potter, no doubt, and deserving, no doubt, but, as Colonel Gunstone may have observed before, he'd be damned if any retired Funnies were getting their fingers in his police pie. 'Why not, then?'

___________________________________________________

'HARRY! If you just throw all of this away, if you decide the war's not worth winning - HARRY, PEOPLE WILL DIE! MY PARENTS, RON'S FAMILY, DON'T YOU SEE WHAT'S AT STAKE?'

'Why, yes, Hermione, I do. Even without being screamed at by a harpy. Do YOU? If you do, as you claim, then you should all of you be mature enough to put aside your problems with Malfoy for at least so long as it takes to win the FUCKING war. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?'

Remus interrupted, still icy. 'You lot have five minutes to decide whether or not the end and objective of defeating Riddle and his followers is more important than your prejudices. Harry and I - Nev, you come along, if you like - have something to attend to before we decide whether or not you stay on and whether or not we dispense with your services in Harry's task. For my part, I strongly suggest you think damned carefully about your own ... principles.'

___________________________________________________

Colonel Gunstone had been a redcap, not an ALS lawyer (although, had he been, he should have been right at home: Trenchard Lines, Upavon). He might yet make an excellent Chief Constable for the County, if ever he learnt the advocate's trick of not asking questions that he didn't know the answer to - and that could, if answered in the 'wrong' way, blow up in his face.

Still, the question had been asked, and asked at table, at a dinner graced by the presence of half the current police authority, a brace of Deputy Lieutenants, and various worthies.

'Why not, then, Mr Potter? You'll not consider participating. Why not?' Colonel Gunstone was determined to coax Potter into ruling himself right out - permanently.

'Oh, I suppose I haven't the necessary intellectual dishonesty.'

There was a great stillness. When the Chief Constable broke it, it was in tones that could be described only as Icelandic: glacial, but with a volcano imminently to erupt explosively beneath and through the ice. 'Are you suggesting that the officers and men of my force are corrupt, Potter?'

'Not at all. I'm asserting that they are honest men - and women, nowadays, of course - engaged in important work, but work that can become intellectually dishonest. Look, the object of a police investigation is, in theory, to determine the facts. In practise, it's to create a sustainable prosecution that can be handed off to the Crown's lawyers to bring or not bring. As such, it's not enough to hand up the sums: the steps, the calculations, are wanted. Therefore, the police are required to plod. I admire, applaud, and appreciate routine. It solves crimes. It works, and works well. However - the routine of plod, the necessity of making cases, tends over time to mean that truth, as such, ceases to be kept sight of. Instead, routine becomes its own end, and once a plausible case is constructed against, oh, anyone, the investigation ends. It's a very blunt instrument for seeking actual truth or finding the actual guilty party - although I'll admit that what I've, er, seen and heard of intelligence work is equally removed from philosophical epistemology and the Search for Ultimate Truth.'

The elderly gentleman who was sat to the left of Geoff Sloper - Mr Sloper being, the Chief Constable recalled, the Head Teacher at the village C of E voluntary-aided school, and churchwarden, and quite a Big Pot locally, as well as being, as only Harry and Draco there were aware, Old Gryffindor Jack Sloper's Muggle uncle - the elderly gentleman beside Mr Sloper chuckled, dryly. 'Quite right, young man. Quite right.'

Colonel Gunstone looked coldly in the old bugger's direction, but was silent as Mr Sloper made the introduction. The old bugger, it transpired, was Mr Sloper's uncle in turn, and namesake, and indeed predecessor: Geoffrey Shergold-Furnell, late Headmaster of what was now the selfsame village C of E voluntary-aided school of Geoff Sloper's cure.

'Quite right,' said Mr Shergold-Furnell again. The Brigadier, who had been watching keenly the polite duel between Harry and the Chief Constable, grinned.

'Well,' said the Brigadier, 'you'd know, sir.'

Old Mr Shergold-Furnell chuckled: a dry rasp, as of leaves on gravel. 'Curious how a sound grounding in the grand old fortifying Classical curriculum affects one's after life. I never could get that across to you, Heskith-Wentworth, of course, even with the cane.'

'In fact,' said the Brigadier, 'your MA led to your MC. When I was boy,' he went on, turning to the others at table, 'we'd any number of names for our esteemed headmaster, but what we didn't realise - rumours notwithstanding - was that, in the Hitler War and then after, in the Cold War's icier early phases, he'd been a spymaster rather than a schoolmaster. And, as that MC attests, rather more than a spymaster, in the sense of the traditional spider at the centre of the web: he was at the sharp end. Long before he was "Old-Fleece"-the-Headmaster, MA Oxon, he was Major Shergold-Furnell, MC. I think you and young Harry, sir, might have a good deal to talk over.'

'So our young Jack tells me,' said the aged scholar, with a meaningful grin. 'Potter and Malfoy both, in fact. At least, Gunstone, though you mayn't like the way it fell out, you can rest easy, knowing that the Funnies won't and don't wish to interfere on your patch, eh?'

'Quite,' said the Chief Constable, curtly, implicitly admitting the charge. Harry and Draco, for their parts, were speculating as to what extent the ageing beak might be a Legilimens.

______________________________________________

Upon Vortigern's fall from mere appeasement - though appeasement itself they had opposed - into outright treason, his sons, inflamed with that fury that only the treachery of a loved and trusted parent can kindle, turned and offered their swords, their wealth, wits, and wands, to the service of that party who had long opposed the policy of co-opting the Saxons - and then, when they would not be co-opted, of truckling to them. The annonæ, hospites, and epimenia due to faithful fœderati had become mere Danegeld. The chief of that party that resisted the Saxons and their creature Vortigern, was the elder Aurelius Ambrosius Aurelianus, beloved of the people for his wisdom and moderation; a gentleman of Amesbury, his British wife's ancestral villa, Senator, vir consularius, consular governor of Maxima Cæsariensis, descended of consuls and senators, kinsman and protégé of St Ambrose of Milan, a Roman British officer to whom Duty was the stern daughter of his orthodox Christian God. He was not the Last of the Romans: those would be his sons, Ambrosius Aurelianus and Emrys Myrddin, called Merlin: but he was the last regularly appointed Roman official in Britannia, refusing to leave although the Eagles had flown, preserving in the face of Vitalinian and conciliar opposition the ancient virtues of the Senate and People and of Roman Britain, Catholic and free.

These were the leaders of the forces that would meet, in the shock of a purely civil war, at the Wallops, Hampshire, where later Godric and de Poteria would hold manors, in the Battle of Guoluph.

History does not repeat. It rhymes.

______________________________________________

'- It will make it a Socialist satrapy for a hundred years -'

'As will our opposition to the suggestion, we'll lose every seat we have in Scotland, the Conservative Party in Scotland will sink like a stone -'

'This government,' said the Prime Minister, coolly, 'will not permit the disunion of the United Kingdom.' She glared at them in a fashion that reminded John Nott, at least, of Minerva McGonagall (and thank Merlin he'd left Hogwarts before she'd joined the staff).

This idle reminiscence was recalled to his mind after the Cabinet session broke up. If not before - she had, after all, been sworn to the Privy Council so long ago as 1970 - Mrs Thatcher (Prime Minister, now, I must remember always that she is the PM now) had certainly by now been briefed on the existence of the Wizarding world, and she referred to it when she drew him aside as its effective liaison.

'Scottish devolution,' she said, crisply, 'is right out of court. I cannot, of course, tell the whole of the Cabinet my thinking. I can tell you, quite plainly. There is not a trades union in this country, there is not a Socialist local council, I rather think there is not a Communist cell, that is as opaque, as un-free, as undemocratic, and as ossified as is that miserable excuse for government that is the Ministry of Magic. It is ideologically, politically, and morally bankrupt. No government of which I am a member will ever consent to the creation of another such closed state within a state: such "devolution" would not devolve power, it would concentrate power in the hands of a few. Liberty rests upon the broadest possible extension of the franchise to persons representing the broadest possible number of competing interests. A "blood and soil" state within a state,' she repeated, 'an ethnic state whose numbers are too small to encourage a broad base of interests, would far too much resemble that lineage-obsessed oligarchy, with no sort of rule of law, that misgoverns Her Majesty's Wizarding subjects. I cannot, at present, at least, do anything about the Wizarding world and its appalling Ministry. But I can certainly make certain that nothing resembling it is created in our own nation: a small and segregated section of the population, able to interfere in the affairs of others yet not amenable to any legislation but their own. That is simply a preposterous state of affairs when we are all subjects alike: one nation. The Union, precisely because it is not devolved into a collection of mutually hostile groups each possessed of a measure of sovereignty, is a bulwark of liberty. This claim that devolution would return more power to the people: it really means power over people, power to the State. It is the awful, the minatory, example of your world, John, that confirms me in my determination: there will be no such derogation from the sovereignty of the United Kingdom, its Parliament and its Crown. No. No. No. It's simply not on.'

And that had been that.

______________________________________________

Vortigern, the son of Gloucester and lord of Wroxeter, held Bradford-on-Avon as a fortified place, Wirtgernesburh in the tongue of his new puppet-masters, controlling the Broad Ford of the Avon between the East and West wings of the Wansdyke fortification system, the linear defensive earthwork that runs from Maes Knoll to Savernake Forest. Aurelius Ambrosius the Elder, of Londinium and Amesbury, consular governor of Roman Britain, the Roman British officer whose wife's longfathers had built Stonehenge, men native to the soil and men drawn thither from as far away as the Alps, three thousand years before, had drawn the former Vitalis Vitalinus out from his holt, his bolt-hole, and lured him by stages into the wood and the streams of Wallop.

Vortimer the Blessed, eldest of Vortigern's sons, father of Modrun of Gwent, who like her foremothers passed that realm to a new dynasty as her dowry, even as had the daughter of Octavius who wed Maximus and as had Severa, daughter of Maximus, who married Vortigern, had been foremost in rejecting the employment of mercenaries, as he would be foremost in after years in rejecting his father's treason and his stepmother's wiles. He it was who would lead four battles against the Saxons, in the face of his father, who cowered amidst the pagans and sought the destruction of his own people, and it was no wonder that he came to reject his father's nationalist naming and reclaimed his baptismal name of Theodosius as symbol of his adherence to the cause of Roman Britain. He stood with the consul Aurelius Ambrosius at Wallop on that day, prepared to sell his life for his people and die gloriously for their freedom, not knowing that his end would be a lesser and debased one, foully poisoned by the cunning arts of his new stepmother Rowena Hengistdaughter, mistress of potions, Dark witch and death-dealer.

Vortigern had always feared the elder Ambrosius, the consul who stood firm for the old and tried ways of Rome, seeing him, and rightly, as the great focus of opposition to his British nationalist party and their Pelagian adherents. Moreover, it had been Ambrose the bishop of Milan, the patron and patriarch of these Ambrosii, who had stood against Macsen Wledig, the would-be Emperor Magnus Maximus, father of Severa, father-in-law to Vortigern: there was private feud between his house and the house of the Ambrosii. No Saxon raider had been as affrighted, as diminished, as defeated, and as enraged by Ambrosius and Bishop Germanus and the Alleluia Battle, as had been Vortigern. It was this as much as any matter of Machiavellian policy that induced Vortigern to quarter his Saxon fœderati in the lands and right dominion of the governor Aurelius Ambrosius Aurelianus, in Maxima Cæsariensis. It was this as much as any hopes of provoking a political situation in his favour that caused him to place the Saxons there with promises of annonæ, hospites, and epimenia for their quartering and provision, without consulting the consul, hoping for the all but inevitable crisis when Ambrosius refused to pay the mercenaries whom he had never agreed to host. And it was this as much as any involuted machination or mind-snaring potion that prompted Vortigern to promise the Saxons, as the price of Rowen's bewitching body, the possession of Kent, the keystone of Ambrosius's Maxima Cæsariensis and the territory that commanded the approaches to Ambrosius's capital.

Now they were met at Wallop, near Calleva Atrebatum, Silchester, hard by the Roman roads to London and to Old Sarum - to everywhere in Britannia, truly, such being the finely wrought net of Roman road-building.

History, although it does not repeat itself, rhymes.

___________________________________________________

'The first thing we want to do,' said Slughorn, 'if it is indeed certain that the coup has failed and that we are free to return to Blighty, eh, is to send one or two of us to Clifford Castle. Yes, yes, Clifford Castle in sleepy Herefordshire, that ancient home of Ralph de Tosny and his heirs, and of his great-granddaughter Fair Rosamund. It has always been rumoured that there is a book there of immense significance, one that would aid us now. So. Who will go, and weasel their way in, and ferret it out, hmm?'

___________________________________________________

The battle was inconclusive. Vortigern was weakened: the snake was scotched, but not killed. The Elder Ambrosius had spent much of his strength and power; he would die soon after, yet not without having trained up sons of his body and of his influence alike in the stern ways of Rome and the military virtues; not without having created, at 'Ambrosius's burh', a site of learning and faith, the cloister at Amesbury.

Weakened, the Council ceded yet further powers to Vortigern. Himself weakened, Vortigern took his powers in both hands, now the more determined to make an end of his enemies, whom he saw in the Ambrosian party, not in the waiting Saxons, even then planning their revolt.

History eschews repetition in favour of rhyme.

___________________________________________________

'Well,' said Draco. 'I call that a very plain hint indeed, Professor. Cousin Weasel?'

'Even I'm not thick enough to have missed that one, Cousin Ferret. Herefordshire it is.'

'Not,' said Harry, walking in with Signor Unterperger beside him, 'quite yet.'

___________________________________________________

The weakened Vortigern, obsessed with avenging himself upon the partisans and very family of Ambrosius, called upon his Saxon mercenaries to send for yet more warriors from their barbaric homeland. They obliged readily. Eagerly.

In all these things there was no division between Wizards and Muggles, no concept of blood status in the Wizarding world.

___________________________________________________

'Cormac.'

'Uncle Tiberius.'

'You've blotted your copybook very severely, nephew. And now you've to start over, on the very bottom rung of the ladder. And show that you can, after all, keep a still tongue and a clean nose. I'm very disappointed in you, Cormac, very disappointed in you indeed.'

McLaggen's expression was one of curious and equivocal portent, as equivocal as his seeming-submissive reply. 'Why, I shall strive to give you reason to become proud again, Uncle.'

___________________________________________________

In the Year of Our Lord 439, and of the founding of Rome the 1192d, the Empress Licinia Eudoxia was named Augusta by Valentinian 3d upon the birth of their imperial daughter, Eudocia, and Carthage fell to the Vandals under Gaiseric. The Saxons in Britain openly rebelled, secure in the knowledge that Vortigern was in their thrall, Ambrosius wounded and weakened, and their cousins on the Continent so great a threat that even if he and Rome had wished, as they did not, to send aid to Britannia, Aëtius could not spare men or attention to do.

Now disaster comes, not in single spies, but by battalions. By 441, most of the South is in Saxon hands. By 443, the Elder Ambrosius is dead, his sons hidden away under Fidelius. The sons of Vortigern lead the fights against the German hordes, and Horsa is slain in the same battle as is Categirn. Ælle and his men fight on under the Hengistian banner.

By 447, the Saxons are in part driven back and contained; yet in four years more, Ronnwein has compassed the death of Vortimer by her art, and the reconquest of Britain falters.

In the Year of Our Lord 455, AUC 1208, the Emperor Valentinian 3d met the fate that he brought upon himself by his murder, the year prior, of the sole bulwark of Roman arms in the West, the patrician Aëtius. The man who procured the deed, Petronius Maximus, seized the purple, but was assassinated in his turn by an angry mob, who had learnt that Gaiseric and his Vandals were marching upon Rome. Within a few short days, the Vandals sacked the City; the magister militum, Avitus, was then set up as emperor by the Visigothic king, Theodoric 2d, to whom he had been sent by Petronius Maximus as an envoy seeking aid. And in Ireland, Niall of the Nine Hostages breathed his last.

In Britain, at Stonehenge, the original Night of the Long Knives falls swiftly. A meeting to set the terms of a truce or armistice becomes a slaughter when the Saxons, ostentatiously disarmed, draw knives from their boots and fall upon the British government. Only the contemptible Vortigern, seated with his German masters, survives, a pliable puppet for their rule, despised by all and wholly enchanted by Rowena's dark arts, carted about as a show and a mockery, a tinsel and trumpery king, to leave to the contemporaries of Henry 6th a dire example.

History does not repeat itself, but, rather, rhymes.

___________________________________________________

'In light,' said Signor Unterperger, carefully, 'of certain matters that the good Harry has brought to my attention, I am of the advice that there is indeed an attempt to set flame to a new war between Wizards and, what is it, ah, yes, Muggles, as you call the non-magical. And to cause Signor F-, Signor Giustino, as a Muggle-born, to be blamed. I now call to mind several recent incidents that did not at the time seem so grave....'

___________________________________________________

The price of his show of freedom has broken Vortigern at last. Despised by Saxon and Briton alike, he dies; and the Saxons, unchecked now by even the shadow of pretence of British legitimacy, overrun the South and West, even unto the Severn whose long length had been the lifeblood of the Vitalini and their influence, from mouth to source. The Britons flee, into the fastnesses of Wales and over the Narrow Seas to Brittany, Armorica, the Lesser Britain.

It is in Wales that Emrys Myrddin, Merlin the Prince of Enchanters and son of the House of Ambrosius, has been hidden away. It was there that he had been brought before the collaborator-king, Vortigern, who, thinking to kill him for to use his death in rites magical, demanded of him his parentage, and had been answered: 'I am named Ambrose, Emrys, son of the Roman consul': the son of him who had more than thrice defied Vortigern, unbowing and unbowed, defiant before death. And Emrys Myrddin, Merlin of the later stories, escaped Vortigern unharmed.

History does not repeat itself. It rhymes.

___________________________________________________

'"... yet another stunning reversal. The shocks of yesterday's crisis in the Wizengamot continue to spread. Having newly crossed from the Ditchers to the Hedgers, Mr McLaggen is now mounting a leadership challenge to the Rt Hon Rufus Scrimgeour, the current Leader of the Opposition. One observer at Thornminster has remarked that Mr McLaggen's having secured the necessary signatures to call such a challenge is itself a measure of just how much danger to his post Mr Scrimgeour is in. Another has remarked, meaningfully, that the last time that she ever saw so many signatures collected so swiftly to oust someone, was when Lucius Malfoy briefly secured the assent of his then fellow governors for the removal of Albus Dumbledore as Headmaster at Hogwarts. If that is Mr McLaggen's precedent, it is an ominous one. Ongoing WWN coverage will continue; now, it is time for the news summary."'

___________________________________________________

In Armorica, the Lesser Britain, Brittany, Aurelius Ambrosius Aurelianus, the younger Ambrosius, is now come to man's estate, being some twenty-seven years in age. As the decade of the 460s begin, he gathers around him the shattered remnants of his people and of the Roman-British limitanei, the old Home Guard of Roman Britannia. Advancing the draco, the red dragon standard associated with the last of the Roman British forces, he begins the reconquest of his homeland, across the Narrow Seas.

It will be a lengthy war, a war of attrition, of securing fortified points, of choking off resources and ambushing isolated or unwary Saxon bands, and it will be a war of movement as well. For this, he needs cavalry and cavalrymen, alari, and a dashing commander of light horse.

But Merlin Ambrosius, the client and distant Romano-British sprig of the Ambrosii, has not been idle. Far from the scenes of his parents's deaths, in a foster family well-hidden from the malice of the Vitalini and the bloodlust of the German invaders, he has placed another young man of the House of Ambrosius, and trained him well in arms and in magic. Now he presents Ambrosius Aurelianus with the youth who will be his cavalry commander and, in the end, his successor as dux bellorum. The young man's name is known to the English as 'Arthur'.

History never repeats itself: it rhymes.

___________________________________________________

'"... by agreement, this year's Quidditch World Cup has been set to begin in the last week in January. It will be held in Croatia, under the strongest of weather charms, in an area hidden away in the Plitvice Lakes National Park. Despite considerable British opposition, this unprecedently early Cup date has been chosen in consequence of the success of the Balkan League of Wizarding States in being selected as hosts to the Final, a part of their campaign to reintegrate with the Wizarding world and to purge them of an unsavoury international reputation, tarnished by their complicity in and support of the designs of Gellert Grindelwald and Tom Marvolo Riddle. An early favourite, in light of the Cup's being moved forward by several months, is the Uganda side, coached by Giles Whitsun, former England and Appleby captain, and previously the innovative coach of the Karasjok Kites and then of the Patonga Proudsticks....'

___________________________________________________

The war grinds on, with intervals of seeming peace. By 480, there is a tentative peace and a tenuous victory for the British; the dying Ambrosius Aurelius has been able to give kingdoms to the sons of Vortigern who followed the Ambrosians rather than bend their knees to the Saxon invaders.

In the Year of Our Lord 497 and of the City's founding the 1250th, in which Clovis 1st defeated the Alemanni near Bonn, Theodoric the Ostrogoth reigning in Italy and the Emperor in the East being Anastasius 1st, and the Saxons in Britain being led by Ælle, the crowning mercy of Arthur's victory at Mount Badon secured the peace for fifty years.

History does not repeat. No: it rhymes.

___________________________________________________

Trevize - and its traffic - exemplified a Hobbesian state of nature. It tended rather to do, the whole of the year 'round; yet Trinity Term was by far the worst. To the usual pandemonic crush was added, in Trinity Term, the tourists, in Thestral-drawn charabancs, or waddling, striding, titupping, and dawdling in great sheep-flocks, gawping and gawking and bollixing everything: clogging Trevize, corking St Machar's, blocking King Street, and plugging the High. Yet even without the tourists, Trevize was ever a scene of confusion and congestion, where brooms - by immemorial custom and almost as immemorial law, restricted to fly no higher than Trevize Tower, and by ancient usage as essential to Hogwarts Sixth Years and Domdaniel undergraduates as the equivalent bicycles of Oxford, numberless as leaves in Vallombrosa - filled the air; ancient and dustily decrepit dons tottered, blocking the progress of harried and tardy undergraduates; shoppers from Sharkington and Shotunder and Shiloh jostled; and the three ways that gave Trevize its name, St Machar's, King Street, and the High, carelessly disgorged unwary pedestrians into the paths of beer-waggons drawn by Aethonans; under the hooves of the more gorgeous junior members of Merlin, Blaise, and Godric, pink-coated, booted, and spurred; or into the stampeding hordes of Hogwarts's lower years racing to Honeydukes for tuck. It was so crowded, in all conscience, that it could not be made otherwise: Apparition into or indeed through the congested space would have been suicidal. Against this riotous background of risk to life, limb, and sanity, the Trinity Term tourists and trippers stood out discordantly, and against both background and middle ground the Trinity Term undergraduates of Domdaniel preened in Springtide plumage, sauntering negligently to river and lake, strolling carelessly to meadow or pitch, dawdling, crisp in flannels, to boathouses, preparatory to punting casually to picnic or to inn; the male of the species rejoicing in the white-warp ties of the season, Summer ties and Summer amalgamated ties signalling like flags the loyalties and accomplishments of their wearers. Female undergraduates, who with an eye to practicality and warmth would swathe themselves, in Hilary or late in Michaelmas Term, as readily in college or club colours as in any other pattern, possessed no such vernal livery, but, in their superior fashion, unmoved by the atavistic and puerile impulses of the male that made the Domdaniel college rivalries a sort of Hogwarts house system writ large, they didn't care to do, either, such that the lack moved them not. They simply dressed as coolly as the lurking menace of proctor, regulation, and the fickleness of Scots weather allowed, and moved on their diurnal rounds of scholarship indifferent to the masculine distractions of games and foolery.

With the end of the War and of the long secrecy regime, and the re-opening after three centuries of the University of Domdaniel, that large part of Hogsmeade that had long been hidden and in stasis had been reawakened to teeming life, Town in service to Gown, from North Hogsmeade to Trevize to Shotunder, from Rewley to Shiloh to Carpington to Blicester. Once more, Hogsmeade knew the tread of scholars - and its inns, notably the Hog's Head, the intrusions of bowler-hatted bulldogs standing minatory in the doorway behind the officiously entering Proggins, and the challenge, 'Your name and college, sir' - and was rocked to its foundations by hourly brazen peals, bell upon bell challenging and failing to equal the bawling metal of Grand Gryff when, nightly at 9.5, it proclaimed with one hundred strokes and one the masterful and ordained primacy of the Dean and Chapter of the Cathedral Church of SS Columba and Giles in Hogsmeade of the Founding of Godric, Called the Gryphon d'Or. Once more the Merkat and the Stylegait felt the tread and traffic of donnish commerce, and the bonded warehouse of all knowledge that was Whitstead's the booksellers rang changes upon its till; once more the rout and riot of the Cuddesdon Club smashed through pubs and the proprieties, scattering Galleons in its wake as condescending payment; once more, the Backhousian Museum preserved and presented in the most offhand and amateurish of ways the curiosities of the Wizarding world.

As the most humane and approachable of Domdaniel worthies, Professor Flitwick, was wont to remark - looking whimsically upon Felton Camera's wild façade, or surveying with a gently proprietary air the grave and measured passage of Cobham's Librarian through his demesne from the Cotton End and Duke Thomas's to the Tower of the Four Elements, or, perhaps, smiling at the architectural incongruities of the Juxonian Theatre or Falkland Buildings - as that most humane and approachable of Domdaniel worthies, Professor Flitwick, was wont to remark, Domdaniel, and Hogsmeade with it, comprised the Platonic ideals of which Oxford, university and town together, were but the wan, sublunary approximations.

This also, in all its madcap variety and eccentricity, had been what they had fought for, the Order, the Victors, in the late War.

___________________________________________________

When it ended, it ended not in open war so much as in cunning. The new irruption of Saxons claiming kingship in British lands occurred in Wessex, and the putative Saxons who claimed to be these kings, from Dorchester-on-Thames to Southampton, were men of British names and ancestry, trained in the Roman British school of warfare and administration: Cerdic and Cynric. So late as the end of the 7th Century, Cenwalh of Wessex was engaged in diplomacy and battle alike with the Britons, from the River Parret to Vortigern's ancient hold at Bardford on Avon, Wirtgernesburh.

Perhaps fifty years of peace before the next episode of war or treachery is the most that can be asked.

History does not repeat, yet it does indeed rhyme.

In all these events, at least, there was no conflict between Muggle and Wizard, nor any doctrine of blood status within Wizard-dom.

Cerdic and Cynric had been crafty men, if of dubious morality. Themselves Roman Britons, established in the area that is now shared between southern Oxon, western Berks, and northern Wilts (indeed, Swindon), in lands long debatable between the Vitalini and the Ambrosians, north of the Wansdyke that Vortigern had had erected to fend off Ambrosius, they saw, and perhaps rightly and honestly, that the future would belong to the Saxons unless they and others like them took charge of those Saxons and made them instruments of and successors to the fading Roman Britons and their folkways. 'Where is the mob? I am its leader.' They were already the commanders of thitherto-faithful Saxon federates, the 'Trusty' battalion, the 'Gewissæ', and they thus possessed the means to accomplish their ends. Coordinating a rising near Dorchester-on-Thames with an amphibious assault by co-opted Saxons upon the Isle of Wight and Southampton, they created a pincer that seized for them a new kingdom: Wessex.

For some generations, the House of Wessex was carried upon the shoulders of pagan Saxonry, yet by the time of Cynegils the West Saxons and their royal house were unequivocally Christian once more; and from that lineage came the only king in English history to be given, and to merit, the epithet, 'the Great': Alfred.

In the Year of Grace 975, Edgar 1st, the Peaceful, King of all England, Bretwalda, of Great Alfred's line, died. From his death to the end of the Saxon kingdom and the conquest of England by William the Bastard of Normandy, no accession would be peaceful and uncontested. Edgar's queen, his second wife, Elfrida, within three years compassed the death of Edgar's successor, the son of his first marriage, St Edward the Martyr. It was not merely that she sought to place her own son, Ethelred the Unready, the Ill-Counselled, upon the throne. In the teeth of the decisions of St Dunstan, King Edgar, and the Witan - which at that time still included without distinction the Wizengamot - she held to a doctrine of purity of blood. The son of Ethelfleda, she contended, was not fit to rule, by reason of the first queen's Muggle blood.

Here begins the sad and sorry tale of the doctrine of blood purity. In all the events that come after, there is there was division between Wizards and Muggles, and the dire fetish of blood status in the Wizarding world.

The martyr king Edward was set upon by his stepmother's retainers, even as had been Vortimer by the kith of Rowena. She herself handed him in courtesy a horn, ostensibly of mead, but poisoned with the darkest of potions; and as he reeled in the saddle, her henchmen stabbed him in the back with an enchanted blade. Dying, he fell, one foot caught in the stirrup, and was dragged by his terrified mount into the River Corfe that runs at the base of Corfe Castle's hill.

Immediately, the river became a source of healing waters, restoring the leper, the cripple, and the blind. Further attempts by the queen dowager to hide the martyr's corse resulted only in its discovery, and further miracles followed in its wake, from Wareham to the eventual translation of St Edward's relics to Shaftesbury.

Shaken, Elfrida repented, and disavowed her pernicious doctrines. She first endowed the Benedictine abbey of SS Mary and Melor at Amesbury, where a cloister had been founded long before by Ambrosius the Elder, and thereafter took the veil herself, founding the nunnery at Wherwell and by the end having become its abbess.

But the doctrine of blood purity was now loosed upon the world.

History does not repeat. It rhymes.

___________________________________________________

Clifford Castle had been granted, but nine years after the Conquest, to Ralph de Tosny, an Anglo-Norman magnate and companion of the Conqueror. Into his hands was committed not only the castle and its lands, but the service of a young slip of the Conqueror's stock, one of the Peverel lads. Ralph possessed many lands and holdings, and the king's confidence, but his most cherished possession was his daughter, who bore the name of Godehilde, and who married in due course Baldwin of Boulogne, the younger brother of the great Godfrey de Bouillon. Godehilde and some of her suite travelled with Godfrey and Baldwin even unto the battles of the First Crusade, where she died before her husband ever rose to become the first Crusader king of Jerusalem. Her knight and mage, the young Peverell, survived, having served with great distinction under Godfrey and Baldwin at the Siege of Antioch and of the fortress of Qadmous in the campaign that led to the fall of the city of Tartus. He married a Byzantine bride, a distant descendant of the Phocid emperor Michael Rangabe: a veteran of the war against Krum of Bulgaria, whose son Ignatius or Ignotus - christened Niketas, but denied the throne - was afterwards Patriarch of Constantinople.

With the death of Baldwin, the three Peverell brothers, the two elder named for their father's victories and the youngest for the eight century patriarch, returned to England from Outremer, with the assistance of the English corsair captain who had once rescued Baldwin: Godric of Finchale, the later saint and hermit of Durham and counsellor both the St Thomas Becket and Pope Alexander 3d. Thus it was that the sons, at some removes, of a Peverell of Clifford Castle returned from the Crusader states: Antioch, Cadmus, and the youngest, Ignotus.

___________________________________________________

In the Year of Grace 978, Ethelred the Unready succeeded the martyred Edward. His reign would see a long struggle with the recrescent Danes, dire troubles in the Fens, uncertainty in Wales, and the cunning dispositions of the beleaguered Kenneth 2d in Scotland. Not all that befell in the reign of Ethelred was ill: the coinage was restored and reformed and the seeds of the grand jury system and the coroner's court were planted. These achievements, and the extension of ties with Normandy - ties that fatally, if unforeseeably even by the best of Seers, would result in the Conquest - were reforged, Emma of Normandy, great-aunt of the future William, becoming the second queen consort of Ethelred.

Credit for these achievements is largely owed to one man: Godric, whom the Normans named the Golden Gryphon. And it is still more to his credit that he, seeing the storms upon the horizon, and recalling the dangers that gathered around blood status and the increasing distance between the Wizarding and Muggle population that resulted, gathered a refugee from the Danelaw, a half-Viking Welshwoman, and the Anglo-Scots Rowena, born to the refugees who already, a generation and more before, left Woodcroft and the Severn's mouth to found a village in the Highlands, in the remote marches where Gael and Scot and Viking met and came the tug of war. There, at Hogsmeade, he and Fenland Slytherin, Helga of the Vales, and the Claw of the Raven, Rowena, built them a keep with licence of King Kenneth, to ward and guard, to front the Norsemen and the wild Gael, and to train the Wizarding young throughout the isles.

Well it was that they had not delayed. Disaster followed in disaster's course, in England; the House of Wessex, the House of Cerdic, had run its course, to be displaced and restored until it ended in a lake of blood, in Battle.

___________________________________________________

'I am persuaded,' said Signor Unterperger, 'of this truth that you have discovered. It is not possible that a wizard or witch should be captured and burnt without the presence and the compass of another magical person to prevent them Apparating away or casting flame-freezing charms or otherwise defending themselves. And so I shall tell my superiors.'

'You'll be placing a target on your own back if you do,' warned Theo.

'Ah. The judge, yes? You are a magistrate? I thank you for your concern. My duty, however, is clear, and I must always do my duty.'

Sluggers beamed upon him. 'Quite so, my dear man! Why, you would almost have made a good Englishman.'

Signor Unterperger paused a moment, and decided to treat this as a compliment in intention. 'Thank you, illustrious professor,' said he, dryly.

___________________________________________________

In the Year of Grace 1066, other candidates being too young and not yet trained in war, statecraft, or wizardry - amongst these, the Confessor's great-nephew, Edgar Atheling, who would complete his education at Hogwarts after 1068, travel the Continent, and late in life return once more to Scotland and be lost to history and Muggle ken, settling in Hogsmeade and teaching at Hogwarts - the Witenagemot and Wizengamot chose Harold, son of Godwin, son of Wulfnoth Cild, descendant in right line of Ethelred of Wessex, brother and predecessor of Great Alfred, as King. What followed after, all men know, whether magical or Muggle: the miracle at Stamford Bridge, the enchanted wind that carried the Normans so unexpectedly across the Channel, the spellcasting of Taillefer, the Confundus that caused the English to pursue a Norman feint and lose cohesion....

History does not deal in repetition, but in rhyme.

___________________________________________________

'Er, Mr Scrimgeour? The tally is complete, sir, for the leadership contest. The canvassers asked me to ask you to stop by Central House, if you would. Mr Ogden is on his way to Mr McLaggen's office to ask him to attend as well.'

___________________________________________________

It had been William's intention to take over England as a going concern. To recruit his force, he had instead been forced to promise plunder. To quell resistance, he had been forced to dispossess the recalcitrant and hand great estates to barons who were only too likely to erect petty principalities upon that base. Yet there were those whose interests he dared not disturb and whose homage he knew better than to demand: Godric, the Potters either side the Channel, Godric's thegns at Weasel Lea.... The Witenagemot, that proto-parliament, was no more, a Norman curia regis in its stead and many generations to pass before the people in parliament would again be heard; but the Wizengamot persisted, and the Norman kings and the Angevins after, and all monarchs until the Restoration after Riddle's Great Rebellion, learnt swiftly to leave it strictly alone. And why not? The kings were kings because they were Wizards, until the line failed into Squibs with the accession of William and Mary, upon which the secrecy regime took hold; the Wizengamot was their prop and support in their unseen realm.

History does not repeat itself. Instead, it rhymes.

___________________________________________________

'"... unprecedented. By a margin of three votes, Mr Cormac McLaggen, MW, has defeated the former Opposition Leader, the Rt Hon Rufus Scrimgeour, and is now the leader of the Opposition as head of the Preservative Party, the Hedgers. Our lobby correspondent is at Thornminster now...."'

___________________________________________________

In the Year of Grace 1100, on the morrow of the Feast of Lammas, the Conqueror's son, William Rufus, was slain in the New Forest. An enemy of the Church, a heretic and a Dark wizard, he died under circumstances that matched the darkness of his life. Walter Tirel or Tyrell is said to have shot the arrow that slew the king.

History does not repeat: it rhymes.

Holy Mother Church had a very clear teaching regarding magic, as had had Israel in the ages before the Incarnation. Seers and diviners who presumed to interact with the Muggle world were reprehended, whether they dealt in fateful warnings, Delphic ambiguities and snares, or chiliastic speculation. Makers of potions were suspect; those who supplied their wares to unsuspecting Muggles were warned off; those who turned their art to Dark purposes were given over to the justice of the secular arm. Necromancers were mad, bad, and dangerous to know, and were dealt with accordingly, forcibly, and through the ultimate penalty. The sixth canon of the Council of Elvira refused the last rites to those who had cast the Unforgivables, and especially to those who had been guilty of casting Avada Kedavra; the four-and-twentieth canon of the Council of Ancyra established a five-year penance upon Muggles who incontinently consulted Wizards. For the rest, St Augustine, who had so memorably turned the Sack of Rome, in the year in which the Legions were recalled from Britain, into the occasion of his writing Civitas Dei, established as dogma, and St Agobard, the archbishop of Lyon, reiterated - as did the Canon Episcopi, the Council of Paderborn, Pope Nicholas 1st, Burchard the bishop of Worms, the authors of the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, and a host of other canon authorities - that the belief that Muggles could practise magic was not only, by definition, false: a Muggle being after all a person who is not a Wizard or Witch: but sinful - and the sin in question was that of superstition. Those who challenged this dogma and persisted in the superstition, believing in Muggle 'magic', were, simply, therefore heretics, and dealt with in that capacity solely, quâ heretics.

It was only with the rise of the shattering uncertainties that rove Christendom and sparked the Reformation (and the Counter-Reformation) upon the Continent that this dogma was twisted into the basis of the fabled - and in many cases, perfectly fabulous, fictional - witch-hunts. The 'witch craze', the great European panic over factitious magical threats against Muggles, was not something that began in the elite and spread to the populace: it was a popular delusion, a madness of crowds, that began amongst the people and stormed the palaces and cathedrals. Like so many politico-religious fanaticisms, it began, naturally, in the Germanies and Middle Europe, spreading thence to Scotland, and its similarities to later and generally totalitarian convulsions, particularly those of the Twentieth Century, are marked.

It is only these irruptions of the irrational, coupled with the unfortunate poetasting and naïve parade of Classical reference on the part of the author of the Canon Episcopi - who used the goddess Diana as a synecdoche for the night even as he derided the Muggle women who retailed mangled stories, gleaned from overheard Witches, of nocturnal flight and revels - and his annotators such as Burchard and Hugues de Saint-Victor, who added the glosses of 'Herodias', 'Holda', and 'Diana Minerva', to the text in Diana's stead, that allowed fakelorists and charlatans such as Leland, Gardner, Michelet, and the appalling Margaret Murray to create from whole cloth a myth of a Muggle witch-cult, religious in nature, that had survived intact from pagan antiquity as an underground rival to Christianity. This intellectual - or pseudo-intellectual - imposture stands second, if at all, only to the discredited ravings of Marija Gimbutas, whom no scholar can fail to disdain, and serves to remind us that, of all the charges upon which Muggles professing to be magicians have been taken up, the most common has been simply that of fraud, charlatanry.

___________________________________________________

'Rufus.'

'Neville. Privy Council terms?'

'Aye. What's this I hear about a party split?'

'Robards and I - yes, and Tiberius Ogden, for that matter, who is fu' disgusted with his nephew - have been approached by everyone, to a Wizard, who voted against McLaggen as leader, with a view to just that thing.'

'I can tell you, on Privy Council terms, that I would be more than happy to enter into a coalition, or even to merge the parties. But it's not on.'

'I thought - when we last spoke - Neville, you're not the man to renege on a promise, even an unspoken one.'

'Owdonabit, lad. Consider this. Happen you bolt. Who then becomes the leader of the next most numerous party in the Moot that is not in government? That's right. The bastard McLaggen. And what does that make him?'

'The Leader of the Opposition, of course.'

'Aye. That it does. And what else befalls a member who finds himself the Leader of the Opposition?'

'Wh- - oh. He maun be sworn to the Magical Privy Council, ex officio.'

'Aye. And I can tell you in no uncertain terms that I won't have that, I can't imagine that you wish that, and Her Majesty won't have that at any price. It would be next akin to Fudge's having put Voldemort, may he roast on in Hell, in t'Cabinet. I've been on t'Floo to Sluggers and Hermione -'

'Och, aye.'

'And there's a precedent. I've sounded Seamus as well, and the Irish members are willing to make a formal coalition with you. That leaves you as the Leader of t'Opposition, sithee, and it doesn't affect my majority. Mister McLaggen's a bit too sharp, and happen he's gone and cut himself. You and yours stay sat on the Opposition frontbench, just as Hartington and his stayed on the Muggle opposition benches next Gladstone after the split of the Liberals, and vote with us when your conscience advises. The Liberal Unionists did, they tell me, in informal coalition with Tories, on every vote, as Gladstone fumed and the Home Rulers howled. It's not pretty, but it's a damned sight less ugly than having McLaggen on Council. So. What are you and yours to call yourself?'

'Why not ... oh, the National Preservationists?'

'Then,' said Neville, picking up the decanter, 'here's to the National Preservationists and their alliance with the Moderates and the Irish members, and confusion to McLaggen and all his works.'

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It is curious, too, that the myth of the 'Burning Times', deriving from such intellectually tainted - and, what is more, Muggle - sources as Gardner and Murray, should have been adopted by the advocates of 'blood status' as an excuse for the secrecy regime, but politically useful falsehoods have never borne much examination.

Nevertheless, there were occasions upon which Wizards, not all of them Muggle-born, fell into apostasy and paganism, and William Rufus was one of the first of these of whom we have record. It is of course nonsense to pretend that this son of William the Bastard was a worshipper of Mithras or of some Margaret-Murrain-pestilential Old Horned God, but it is a matter of record that he had an unhealthy interest in the smuttier bits of such Greek learning as had been then preserved, and a sort of Cathar, Bogomil, Waldensian, Ur-Lollard disbelief in saints and sacraments: but, then, his boon companions included William the Troubador, duke of Aquitaine and Count of Poitou. His fateful dreams upon the night of his death, Greek, blood-boltered, ominous, premonitory, and deeply homoerotic, were of a pattern with his life. It is utter rubbish to maintain that his position as king was that of a priest-king destined to be sacrificed upon the Feast of Lammas, but it is a matter of record that he seems to have believed - through what Dark influence we know not: there were those in his court interested in carving out their own, ah, imperio in imperium, as it were, upon his death - that he was one such. And so he died in the mythic greenwood, by arrangement, at the hand - or bow - of Walter Tyrell, in a welter of blood, in an act at once pseudo-pagan and heavily influenced by the Petrobrusians, Henricians, and Cathars - and one very convenient for his brother Henry 1st, Beauclerc, king of the English and duke of the Normans, who without delay or apparent surprise seized the crown, the throne, the treasury, the city of Winchester, and the princess Edith Matilda of Scotland, niece of Edgar Atheling and descendant of the House of Wessex. Clever sod, our Henry - and cunning with it.

History does not repeat. It does, however, rhyme. Fear and hatred were ever the two faces of one base coin.

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'"... by the hour. It has now been announced that every MW who had voted against the leadership challenge mounted by Mr Cormac McLaggen, the Member for Arrochar, including his uncle, the Rt Hon Tiberius Ogden, has agreed unanimously to continue in opposition under the banner of the newly-christened "National Preservationist Party", whilst Mr McLaggen and his supporters retain the title of the Preservationist Party, commonly called the Hedgers. Nor does Mr McLaggen see his hopes realised of becoming the Leader of the Opposition, a title that will, it appears, remain with Mr Scrimgeour. The Rt Hon Seamus Finnegan announced today a coalition of the Irish members with the National Preservationists under Mr Scrimgeour, giving Mr Scrimgeour the leadership of the second largest bloc of MWs in the Moot. This does not deprive the Ditchers - the Moderate Reform Party - of a working majority, even without the Irish members, and it is being whispered 'round Thornminster that the National Preservationists and the Irish members will be in opposition in name only, and will vote with the government on most or all measures. In other news...."'

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Harold the King had been the offshoot of a very cadet branch of Cerdic's line, a line that, for all its claims upon the Saxons, perhaps traced back to the Ambrosians. William the Bastard took the crown by right of conquest and a claim of Edward the Confessor's alleged choosing, and a still more tenuous claim of blood - yet one that harked back, if only by marriage, to Elfrida, the slayer of Edward the Martyr and mother of Ethelred the Ill-Counselled, the first known proponent of blood purity. Henry, in marrying the king's daughter of Scotland and heiress of the House of Wessex, was marrying the descendant in right line of Elfrida.

All things were increasingly reduced to a matter of blood.

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'Uncle.'

'Do I know you, McLaggen? Go away.'

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Duke William, the tanner's grandson of Falaise, had like all his line recked naught of bastardy; what mattered was power, and that one was not too weak to seek it. Blood mattered: power mattered, and being bred to it.

William Peverel so believed, for this belief was not exclusive to the legitimate issue of the Conqueror: the Bastard's bastard could as easily hold it, and did do. Peverel came seemingly from nowhere to stand as 'early as 1068 in charge of the newly-built Castle of Nottingham, and at the time of the compilation of Domesday the lord of one hundred and sixty-two manors in England, and possessing in Nottingham alone forty-eight merchants' or traders' houses, thirteen knights' houses, and eight bondsmen's cottages, besides ten acres of land granted to him by the King to make an orchard, and the churches of St. Mary, St. Peter, and St. Nicholas, all three of which we find he gave with their land, tithe, and appurtenances by his charter to the Priory of Lenton', as Somerset Herald wrote in 1874.

This William Peverel seems at first glance to have been filius nullius, filius terræ, a bastard of obscurity: his very surname, or what passed for one in those days, is nothing more than 'Puerulus' corrupted: 'the boy, William': yet he - half-Norman and half-Saxon - rises rapidly and high upon the Conquest. The explanation is simple enough: like Thomas of Bayeux, the Conqueror's new and Norman archbishop of York, he is, as the contemporary charters put it, Regis filius, the son of William of Normandy, now king in England. Yet there is more to the explanation than this, for there is his mother's family to consider as well, the Saxons - or at least the English, if only by long residence. Eighty years before William Peverel was conceived in 1050, an East Anglian Wizard, a Fenlands Wizard, had left England, never to return, bound for what was not yet fully Scotland - and for his destiny. The Peverels who sprung of William Peverel, first of that name, dispersed, to Northants, to Salop, to the Marches and to East Anglia and to the West Country, yet the family had a long relationship with what was not yet the County of Lancaster, the nascent Lancashire, beginning with this first Peverel's marriage to the daughter and heiress of Roger of Poitou, sometimes styled earl of Lancaster: the same earldom, by then raised to a dukedom, that would be acquired by John of Gaunt in right of his wife. There can be little doubt that in the getting of William the Boy, Peverel, William of Normandy mingled his blood with that of Salazar Slytherin, and that the Peverell-Gaunt connexion, with its obsessions of blood and power, was thus born.

History does not repeat; yet it rhymes. And hatred and fear were aye twa faces of ane clippit groat.

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'"... the investigation into the attempted murder of Mrs Zabini, mother of the Rt Hon Blaise Zabini and mother-in-law of the Rt Hon Justin Finch-Fletchley. An 'M' Notice was withdrawn after the investigation was openly referenced in the Moot by Mr Cormac McLaggen, MW, who now heads the remnant of the Hedgers...."'

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In the Year of Grace 1399, John of Gaunt, son of Edward 3d, duke of Lancaster, king in pretence to Castile and Leon in right of his second wife, Lord High Steward of England, protector and patron of John Wyclif and the Lollards, died. His nephew, Richard 2d, was swiftly deposed by John's son Henry of Bolingbroke, who returned from exile and usurped the throne. Bolingbroke, now styling himself Henry 4th, was not a man to waste time, and he had an old quarrel with his father to pursue - even beyond the grave. Edward 3d had left a numerous and quarrelling progeny. The deposition and murder of Richard 2d had not settled the matter: the Mortimer heirs, progenitors of the House of York, had to be dealt with, and the rebellions (as Bolingbroke put it) of Hotspur and Glendower to be put down. But the dead John of Gaunt remained even now the focus of Bolingbroke's animus. John had betrayed the young Henry and Henry's mother, John's first wife, herself a proud Plantagenet of right descent, with the low-born Katherine Swynford, whom John married as his third wife and upon whom he fathered the brood of the Beauforts, bastards in their getting and debarred from the throne even in their legitimising. And John had concurred with King Richard in Bolingbroke's banishment, his exile, his humiliation. Henry revenged himself upon the Beauforts and his dead father with forfeitures and degradations. It was a matter of blood, and power.

And in the Year of Grace 1401, even amidst the threats to a throne by no means yet secure, the son of Wyclif's patron summonsed his parliament to pass the statute, De hæretico comburendo, for the burning at the stake of heretics. The stage was set. If a charge of witchcraft could be made now in such terms as to place the accused within the ambit of the heresy statute, the secular arm, not the Church, would have the burning of the Wizard or Witch.

History does not repeat: it rhymes. Fear and hatred are the faces of but one coin.

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'"... Zabini. Initial reports are that escaped Death Eaters hiding away on the Continent attempted, and failed, to Confund a crowd of Muggles...."'

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Richard 2d, whom Bolingbroke deposed, was possessed of an exalted concept of kingship: he it was who asserted the royal prerogative with such force and commanded such ceremonious protocol that he may be considered the re-founder in England of the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings. Richard's exactions and imperiousness gave Bolingbroke a pretext for Richard's deposition and privy murder; yet Henry of Bolingbroke was no less anxious to rule unchallenged, over his Muggle and his magical subjects alike. It was not to be: from the beginning, matters of power and blood disturbed the peace of his reign and of the realm, and his son and successor Henry 5th was not the hindmost in challenging him.

And when Henry 5th died, leaving an infant son of the House of Lancaster to succeed him as Henry 6th, blood and power became the pretext for intestine war.

History does not repeat; rather, it rhymes. Fear and hatred are two faces of a single coin.

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'"... in good hands, as Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, Hermione Weasley, and Draco Malfoy are all reported to be involved in the investigation. A palpable sense of relief has...."'

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The senior and legitimate line of descent from Edward 3d rested, upon the death of Richard 2d without heirs, in the House of York, descended of Lionel of Antwerp, duke of Clarence, second son of Edward and junior only to the Black Prince, whose only son Richard 2d was, and descended also of Edmund of Langley, duke of York, Edward 3d's fifth son. The junior-most line was that derived of Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester, eighth and last son of Edward 3d, whose daughter Anne married into the Staffords and became the progenitrix of the dukes of Buckingham of the first creation. With the death of Henry 6th's son Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales, in May of 1471 at the Battle of Tewkesbury, the line from John of Gaunt, the House of Lancaster, the usurpers, never the senior line in any event, became extinct.

This stark fact was wished away, and eventually washed away in rivers of blood, by the remaining descendants of John of Gaunt, the legitimised - yet still debarred from the succession - Beauforts. Henry Bolingbroke was, admittedly, the son of John of Gaunt by his first marriage, and Bolingbroke's mother was confessedly Blanche of Lancaster, great-granddaughter of that crusading Edmund, 'Crouchback', earl of Lancaster and Leicester, who was the second son of Henry 3d and younger brother of Edward 1st. Yet - argued the Beaumonts - if Blanche of Lancaster had been the better-born, why, Katherine Roet, later Swynford, had been the better and more pureblooded Witch. And when the Beauforts at last dwindled to a single claimant, Henry Tudor, they were swift to point to his descent from Catherine of Valois, widow of Henry 5th, and, through Owain ap Maredudd ap Tewdur, from the Lord Rhys, Prince of Deheubarth in South Wales: purebloods all.

It was against this welter of blood, blood status, and power, that Edward 4th, that prince of the Renascence dawn, achieved the throne, displacing the usurping Lancastrians and restoring the House of York over the feeble falterings of the mazed Henry 6th.

And it was against this welter of blood, blood status, and power, in a world in which the distinction between Wizard and Muggle was increasingly sharply drawn, a world in which kings - even of a house whose emblem was the broom-plant - no longer dared reveal their wizardry: a world in which magic was now seen increasingly as heresy, to be burnt out at the stake as Bolingbroke had commanded in De hæretico comburendo: that the last desperate blood-feud of the Wars of the Roses began.

History does not repeat. It rhymes. Fear and hatred are the faces of the selfsame coin.

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'"... in other news, early preparations for the Quidditch World Cup...."'

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In the Year of Grace 1437, Jacquetta de Luxembourg, a descendant of John Lackland, king of England, a daughter of the count of St Pol, and the widow of John, duke of Bedford, the third son of Henry 4th and captor and judicial murderer of Joan of Arc, remarried, scandalously and in secret, her new husband being an obscure knight in Bedford's service. Obscure he may have been - his surname was itself a matter of disagreement - but Richard Wydevill, later Woodville, was by common consent the most handsome man in England, and a veteran of Agincourt. He was also a cunning man - in both senses - and had timely changed his coat to support the White Rose over the Red when it seemed wise to do so. His son Lionel would become the bishop of Salisbury (and thus, ex officio, primate of the Wizarding church). His wife, Jacquetta, was twice accused of witchcraft, and exonerated only by the influence of the sun of York, Edward 4th. Woodville himself was raised to the peerage by Edward, as Earl Rivers. And the daughter of Jacquetta and Richard would bring down a kingdom and a dynasty in ruin.

Elizabeth Woodville was as universally credited with beauty as had her father been with handsomeness: she was the most alluring woman in England, and the most roundly hated. She was famed for her 'heavy-lidded eyes, like those of a dragon', and her enchantment of beauty; she was famed equally for her silver-gilt hair, so evocative of the rare blondes that emerged, as sports and as omens, every few generations in the Black line, and of the much less prominent Malfoys. She was famed most of all for her greed, her grasping determination to secure place and preferment for all her extended and extensive family. Blood and power were all in all to her.

She was widowed by the fortunes of war in 1461, when her husband, Lord Ferrers of Groby, was killed fighting for the Lancastrian cause at the Second Battle of St Albans. Her attempts to secure a reversal of the attainder of Ferrer's estates on behalf of the children of her first marriage forced her to make suit of the new king, Edward 4th. Her famous and fearsome chastity - and, it was whispered, and then shouted, her arts magical - forced the enamoured king to marry her when he found he could have her in no other wise.

In the same year in which Lord Ferrers had died, Sir Thomas Butler, the son of Lord Sudeley, had died likewise, and his widow, Lady Eleanor Butler, the daughter of the great Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, sought justice of the new king for restoration of her estates that her former father-in-law had seized upon his son's death. Edward's chaplain, Robert Stillington, later created bishop of Bath and Wells and Lord Chancellor of England, found himself suddenly summonsed to officiate at a binding precontract of marriage between Talbot's daughter and the King's Grace.

On May Day, in the Year of Grace 1464, as the Wizengamot, the Privy Council, the Parliament, and the Earl of Warwick were deeply engaged in the final negotiations for Edward's marriage to a French princess and for an alliance as her dowry, Edward the King, in the teeth of his advisors and of his precontract of marriage to the Lady Eleanor, secretly - and, under canon law, bigamously - wed Elizabeth Grey, Dowager Lady Ferrers, neé Woodville, at her family's Northants estate. No banns had been published and no parliamentary or conciliar assent granted, and the marriage was, even without the existing precontract, illegal and invalid. (The same was precisely the precedent as regarded the alleged secret marriage of Henry 5th's widow to a Welshman, whence was sprung Jasper Tudor and all his getting.) Worse still, a widow was by all English precedent considered unfit as such to be queen. Edward's own mother, the redoubtable Cecily Neville, 'Proud Cis', dowager duchess of York, was so incensed by the marriage that she told him to his face that 'it were a high disparagement to the sacred majesty of a prince, that ought as nigh approach priesthood in cleanness as he doth in dignity, to be defiled with bigamy in his marriage', and said Edward was by his actions no son of hers or her husband's. Uneasily defiant, the king faced down his mother, his council, and the lords and commons of the realm; and on the Feast of the Ascension, in that Year of Grace 1465, Elizabeth Woodville was crowned queen consort in Westminster Abbey.

That would have been scandal enough; worse scandal followed. On the day of the queen consort's coronation, her mother's kinsmen from Luxembourg appeared in London and began to march towards the Abbey. Each man's shield bore as a charge the lamia, Melusine, half Witch and half bicorporate serpent, and the face of Melusine was so painted as to be unmistakeably the face of Elizabeth Woodville. Her brother Anthony and his men raced to intercept the Luxembourgers and forced them back to their ship, but the damage was done. No clearer accusation of witchcraft attaching to the Lancastrian woman now married to the Yorkist monarch could have been made; no greater arrogance than this defiant proclamation of her status and part-nonhuman ancestry could have been devised even by a Woodville - or by the vengeful Jacquetta, who had broken irretrievably with her daughter.

It would be remembered; and in 1483, Elizabeth, no longer queen, would face an ecclesiastical court on charges, formally, of witchcraft, and, informally, of breaking the pact that kept the Wizarding world hidden from Muggle eyes.

History does not repeat; no. It rhymes. Hatred and fear are obverse and reverse of a single coin.

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'"... the Uganda side, under Giles Whitsun. England coach Oliver Wood said today that...."'

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In the Year of Grace 1468, Elizabeth, consort of the king, compassed the death of Thomas Fitzgerald, earl of Desmond. Ireland was always a stronghold for the cause of York. This would be remembered against her, not least by Richard of Gloucester, who when he came to the throne would launch a prosecution in the matter, and assure Desmond's son and heir that he empathised with the youth, having experienced in his own time the contrived judicial murders at the Woodville's hands '... of his brother the duc of Clarence, as other his nighe kynnesmen and gret frendes'. Power and blood were all in all to the Woodvilles.

In the Year of Grace 1469, Warwick, the Kingmaker, had had enough of the Woodvilles, and their impertinent control of Edward 4th. So too had George, duke of Clarence, the king's feckless, ambitious, and sottish brother. Edward's brother and his closest advisor had laboured for many years and in many desperate battles to restore the House of York. Now they rebelled; and, incredibly, after reverses, returned in triumph with French aid, and seized the aged, decrepit, and imbecile Henry 6th and placed him once more upon the throne. Loyal as the Old Hufflepuff that he was, Richard, duke of Gloucester, stood by his royal brother, and with him went into exile in Burgundy. By 1471, Richard and the Burgundians had re-established Edward upon his throne, with the aid of the almost predictable re-defection of Clarence, Warwick was dead, Henry 6th was slated to die, and Henry's heir, Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales, was slain, with the cream of the last Lancastrian resistance, at Tewkesbury.

Surely the cause of York had triumphed.

It had not. The next years would see the disaster that was the final breakdown of false, fleeting, perjur'd Clarence, and all its consequences.

During the Readeption of Henry 6th, whilst Edward and Richard were in exile and Warwick and Clarence in the saddle, the Lancastrian parliament, so Edward 4th later claimed, had decreed that Henry's next heir after Edward of Westminster was, astonishingly, George of Clarence. False, fleeting, perjur'd Clarence.

There is no evidence of such an Act. Yet this was amongst the charges, and first amongst the public charges, that Clarence was to face.

The truth lies elsewhere.

George of Clarence and Richard of Gloucester married the daughters and co-heiresses of Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, their elder cousin. Richard's marriage to Anne Neville, widow of Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales, to whom she had been wed during the Readeption as one of Warwick's machinations, was a love match; George did not see it that way. George carried Anne off and attempted to hide her in the character of a scullery maid at a friend's house: if she married anyone, much less his youngest brother, George's share of the Warwick spoils was in that instant halved.

The king put the boot in. Richard found and rescued his bride, and made it clear that he would take the lass without her dowry, which was the reverse of what George should have done had the boot been on his foot. The king compromised, Richard gave up a portion of his claims and resigned the office of Great Chamberlain, and George accepted his victory with incredibly poor grace. His disaffection was growing. Blood and power were all that mattered to George.

In the Season of Advent, in the Year of Grace 1476, Isabel, duchess of Clarence, died of consumption, complicated by a difficult parturition. She left behind an infant son, Edward, who would become Earl of Warwick despite George's attainder; a newborn who preceded her to the grave; and a husband now utterly unhinged.

George's first wild action was to seek a Burgundian marriage - to his own sister's stepdaughter, Margaret of York then being duchess of Burgundy - in defiance of the king and parliament. Thwarted, he retired to his estates in high dudgeon, returning to Court only when commanded, and then ostentatiously refusing food and drink, whilst leaking against the king and the Woodvilles as being a gang of poisoners and sorcerers. In the Year of Grace 1477, George of Clarence summarily tried and executed two members of his household, his late wife's servant Ankaret Twynho and John Thursby, on charges of poisoning the duchess and the son she bore as she was dying. The king countered by charging, trying, and executing for necromancy and Dark wizardry another member of Clarence's household, John Stacey, along with that infamous practitioner of the Black Arts, Thomas Burdett, who threatened the king whilst on a hunting expedition: a parallel with the death of William Rufus too pointed to ignore. Clarence descended upon London and decried the king's justice, maintaining Dr Stacey's innocence; he then immured himself in his estates, raised an army, and publicly accused the king and the Woodvilles of sorcery, labelled Edward 4th a bastard, and hinted quite openly at his knowledge of the precontract with Talbot's daughter and the consequent bigamy of the Woodville marriage and illegitimacy of the princes born to it.

Somehow, it matters not by what means - although Dr Stacey and Thomas Burdett seem implicated - poor, meek Stillington had been induced to give up to George of Clarence the secret of the precontract. As the year waned, Edward acted at last, and both Clarence and Stillington were imprisoned.

The charges upon which Clarence could be tried in the light of common day were precisely those of which he was innocent, not least the claim that he had accepted the reversion of the crown from the Lancastrians. Those for which he was going to be executed, trial or no trial, and of which he was guilty, could not be spoken of openly. The magical issues were not for public knowledge; and the bigamy of the royal marriage, at which he had darkly hinted, required to be hidden, even from an unaware and uncomprehending Richard of Gloucester. Loyal as ever, Richard spent the first months of 1478 pleading for some reconciliation between his brothers and for the sparing of Clarence's life; it were impossible that Edward could accede to Richard's pleas - even were the Woodvilles to allow him to do, as they assuredly would not.

Stillington, cowed into silence by the salutary shock of imprisonment, was released. George was convicted, attainted, and executed, leaving behind only confusion, disunion, and a Londoner's joke that the drunkard duke had drowned in a butt of his favourite Malmsey.

Richard blamed the Woodvilles, and swore vengeance.

History does not repeat. It rhymes. Fear and hatred are but faces of a single coin.

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'"... and now, the Apparating Forecast."'

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In the Year of Grace 1483, as the dead and buried grain sprung forth in resurrection from the soil, as all the earth greened to greet the Risen Son and the days lengthened, Edward 4th's sun in splendour set. As he cast off the shackles of the flesh, and cast off also the shackles of his secret bigamy and his hectoring queen, he made his final dispositions before dying on that fateful 9th April. In his last act, he named as Lord Protector of the Realm, and of his sons and daughter, not yet of age to take on the burdens of state, the one man on whose utter loyalty he was ever able to rely, his brother Richard, duke of Gloucester, the noblest of Hufflepuffs.

The presumed queen and her raft of Woodville relations and dubious Old Lancastrians had been deprived at a stroke, by the king's Will, of all influence. The descendant of Melusine and her kith were not disposed to accept this. Using the Witch, Mistress Shore, one of the late king's numerous Wizarding mistresses (whom the queen had not only tolerated, but encouraged), to monitor and, by any means, neutralise or seduce the dangerous enemy of their cause, Lord Hastings, the Woodville faction began their putsch attempt. They were determined that the sons of Edward 4th should be the puppets of the Woodvilles, and they had physical possession of the boys. Richard, the Lord Protector, was keeping his watch and ward upon the Marches of the North and the Scots border - Scotland being after all the partner of France in the Auld Alliance against the Sassenach, and France under the Spider King, the Royal Acromantula, Lewis 11th, supporting as a matter of policy the dubious demi-Lancastrian claims of Henry Tudor (any stick to beat the English dog ... and the Yorkist Burgundians) - and was just now receiving the news of the king his brother's death and his own appointment to the Guardianship. The news did not come from the Woodville court: they had no intention of alerting Richard to his brother's death, much less to his being named Protector, before they could present him with the fait accompli of the crowning of Edward's son. No: the Woodvilles were already on the move, the uncles and half-brothers of the princes being sent to bring them to London, an array being fielded against the Lord Protector, councils being held without warrant - for in that age, the death of the monarch dissolved all councils and parliaments, and suspended all offices of state clear to the very administration of justice by the JPs, who were without authority until the new king reconfirmed them - and plans evolved for the Protector Richard's assassination.

Richard called together the nobility and commons of the North, at York, and exacted their oaths of fealty to the presumed new king, his nephew Edward, and then, with a small escort all in mourning, set forth to meet the princes and the Woodvilles who were conducting them, at Northampton, thence to escort the royal party to the capital.

It was a trap the Woodvilles were waiting to spring. Richard had some six hundred men with him, in mourning, not in armour. Lord Rivers and Sir Richard Grey, escorting the princes, had some two thousand men at arms, armed cap à pie. In London, Dorset had seized the Tower and the Treasury and was fitting out a fleet to command the Channel. Rivers and Dorset were issuing Orders in Council in their own names, and omitting any reference to Duke Richard - or his appointment as Guardian and Protector. Blood and power alone mattered to the Woodvilles.

The jaws of the trap closed at Northampton: but not around Richard Gloucester. In a textbook operation, the tried commander arrested Rivers and Grey, arraigned them of treason, took control of their two thousand men, and proceeded to London, to make arrangements for the trial and execution of the traitors Rivers, Grey, and Dorset, and for the coronation of Prince Edward and the summonsing of a regency parliament.

In all these lightning-strike events, the prop and support of the Protector was the representative of the next most senior line of the Plantagenets after the House of York: the young Henry, duke of Buckingham of the line of Stafford, descendant of Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester, who was the youngest child of Edward 3d, grandson of a Lancastrian, son of a Beaufort mother, cousin alike to the Yorks and to Henry Tudor, High Steward of England for the trial of George of Clarence, brother-in-law of Elizabeth Woodville and reluctant husband of her sister Kate, and hater of all Woodvilles with a white heat. He was also, in the eyes of not a few Lancastrians, the last legitimate claimant of the Red Rose, far senior to the dubious and besmirched Tudors.

On 4 May, 1483, Richard, duke of Gloucester, Regent, Lord Protector, and Guardian, with his nephews, entered London, and preparations were put in train for the coronation of the eldest son of Edward 4th on 22 June and the first Parliament of the reign on 25 June. The princes were given the royal residence - the Tower, then a palace rather than a gaol - and Richard went to stay with his mother at Crosby Place.

Events spun rapidly out of control. Proud Cis took her son aside and shattered all his certainties by revealing the secret of the precontract and Edward's bigamous marriage to Elizabeth Whydevil, the Melusine, the Lamia. Stillington was sent for and confessed to Richard what Edward had forbidden him to reveal and what George of Clarence had held over the late king. The princes were illegitimate. George's son was Earl of Warwick by courtesy, and Richard had intended to reverse his father's attainder, but he too was a minor and parliament could not be counted upon to restore his rights to the succession unless a crowned king so insisted. The House of Lancaster was no more: at best, the dubious Henry Tudor, of bastard slip, was its sole remaining standard-bearer. Lewis of France was poised to strike through the Tudor faction. The House of York was alone the legitimate royal house, and of its sons in right decent, only Richard - senior by far to Buckingham - could be king.

The duke of Gloucester was stricken by these revelations. His loyalty was outraged. His notoriously high sense of justice was affronted - and equally could not countenance being the judge in his own cause. He resolved to refer the matter to the Council and the Wizengamot, the more so as there was an overpowering stench of witchcraft about it all.

On 8 June, the Council met, and Stillington laid out the scandal of the precontract and Elizabeth Wydevill's secret and invalid marriage to the bigamous king Edward. On 10 June, Richard of Gloucester sent to his faithful allies, the Corporation of York, for assistance 'against the queen, her blood adherents and affinity, which have intended and daily doeth intend, to murder and utterly destroy us and our cousin ... by their damnable ways....'

The Council and the Wizengamot pressed Richard to assume the throne, as the former princes, Edward 4th's sons, now the elder and younger Lords Bastard, were clearly illegitimate under the law of England and of Holy Church. Richard temporised: playing for time, he issued a supersedeas of the coronation and the parliament, and rescheduled the coronation of Edward's son to 9 November. He also sent for aid to Lord Neville, in much the same terms as to the City of York.

But the storm did not abate: it rose higher, and lightning struck again and yet again.

William, Lord Hastings, had served Edward 4th with conspicuous loyalty - a loyalty rivalled only if at all by that of Richard Gloucester. He was also the brother-in-law of Warwick the Kingmaker; a direct descendant of the Mortimer earls of March and of Lionel of Antwerp, duke of Clarence, second son of Edward 3d, and cousin alike to Edward 4th and to Hotspur. He it was who had first warned Richard of the Woodville plot, and he had crowed over the Northampton result as having preserved the state with no more blood spilt than 'from a cut finger'.

However, he was also married to Dorset's step-daughter, and he and most of the Woodville males, for all their political quarrels, had shared the indiscriminate favours - sometimes together - of Mistress Shore. Fatefully, he was the enemy of the rising Buckingham. Fatally, he knew of the precontract, ignored it, hid his guilty knowledge, and was determined to protect the memory of Edward 4th by conniving in the coronation of Edward's bastard son as Edward 5th.

There was no other way to effect his designs, protect Edward's memory, hide his own guilty knowledge, and destroy his sudden rival Buckingham, save by a rapprochement with the Woodvilles. Dorset, like Elizabeth Woodville and the Lords Bastard, had raced for sanctuary, and attained it. Lady Hastings was inevitably a conduit between her stepfather and her husband. By 13 June, Hastings, for fear of his own exposure and from a loyalty to the late bigamous king that he allowed to supersede his duty to the realm, had been drawn in to the Woodvilles's latest conspiracy.

Inevitably, he was found out. The Council meeting of 13 June began in concord, until Richard of Gloucester was called away to receive a message. When he returned, it was in a towering rage at the betrayal of his old friend and colleague, the prop and support with him of Edward's reign. Hastings had known - known - of the bigamy of the royal marriage, known and attempted to conceal it. And he was clearly implicated in a conspiracy with the former putative queen, with the contemptible John Morton, bishop of Ely, with Thomas Rotherham, archbishop of York - York and the North: Richard's very powerbase - and with the late king's secretary, Oliver King, and with John Forster, Hastings's co-steward of the abbey of St Albans. All were arrested; and in a state of national emergency both Muggle and magical, Richard ordered Hastings's immediate execution, at least in part because he sensed that if he allowed himself to act later in coolness, he would not be able to summon the resolution to act at all. The tenor of his mind in these straits may be measured by his refusal to add attainder to the execution, his pledge to Kate Hastings that she would not suffer for her husband's folly, and his ensuring that Hastings was buried, as he had wished, beside Edward 4th at Windsor, whose man he had been, through and through.

His own obsessions of blood and power had led Hastings to the block. With his death, another sprig of the Plantagenet and Yorkist root was cut off.

Morton and the Lancastrians - Tudors, now, the House of Lancaster being died out in all its legitimate sons - had another string to their bow.

History does not repeat: it rhymes. Fear and hatred are the faces of a single coin.

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'"... Derwent Shimpling as dame. The Christmas panto season was regarded as roaringly successful...."'

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In the Year of Grace 1483, Rivers having been executed after due trial and Hastings and Grey having been executed in a state of emergency on 13 June, Richard, duke of Gloucester, was acclaimed king on 22 June, began his reign on 25 June (the day on which Rivers was executed), and was crowned on 6 July. His nephews, the Lords Bastard, soon to be so adjudged by Act of Parliament (Titulus Regius 1484), were secure, and during the mayoralty of Sir Edmund Shaa as Lord Mayor of London, were often seen practising their archery and playing games and sports in the Tower demesne. Bills were being prepared for enactment by the 1484 parliament: the Statute of Uses, measures against corruption and bribery - particularly in the courts - a tariff, and the first copyright act. That Tudor man of law, Francis Bacon, would later call the Ricardian parliament wise and name Richard 3d 'a good lawmaker for the ease and solace of the common people', with notable approbation.

Yet the storm was not abated. Elizabeth Woodville - now no longer queen dowager, but merely Dame Elizabeth Grey, widow of Grey of Groby, the late Lord Ferrers - was in contact with Margaret Beaufort, Lady Stanley, mother of one Henry Tudor who was now in exile in France. So also was the duke of Buckingham, who, inflamed by Richard's success in succeeding Edward bloodlessly, and inflated with his own importance in the coup, now began to meditate his own, superior Lancastrian claim to the throne through the Beauforts twice over, a claim far superior in Lancastrian eyes than that of Henry Tudor.

After Halloween of 1483, the former princes, the sons of Edward 4th, were seen no more at the Tower.

History does not repeat. It rhymes. Fear and hatred are but faces of a single coin.

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'"... shoppers in Diagon Alley. Our business correspondent, Filbert Figg, has the figures on this past Christmas in retail...."'

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In the Year of Grace 1483, on the 11th September, King Richard, stopping at York on his royal progress of the realm, sent in haste to the Lord Chancellor, in London. 'Here, loved be God, all is well and truly determined for to resist the malice of him that had best cause to be true, the duke of Buckingham, the most untrue creature living; whom, with God's grace, we shall not be long till that we will be in that parts and subdue his malice. We assure you there never was falser traitor purveyed for....'

Ely, sinuous and serpentine, and the Livia of England, Margaret Beaufort, had seduced Buckingham to the Lancastrian cause, even as Buckingham had believed that he was seducing them to his own, superior Lancastrian claim. Buckingham's rebellion was timed to coincide with an invasion, from France, by Henry Tudor - to whom, it appears, Elizabeth Woodville, still ostentatiously in sanctuary and professing to fear for her life at Richard's hands, had promised the hand of her daughter by Edward 4th, the princess Elizabeth of York.

Tudor never arrived. Ostensibly, bad weather had prevented his sailing. The sons of Edward 4th were now missing, and neither Good King Richard nor Henry Tudor could ever say then or after what had become of them. Yet this much is known. Amongst the rebels was Giles Daubenay, whose price had been a promise that the new regime would resolve in his favour an inheritance dispute concerning his sister-in-law, one Anne Tyrell. And when Buckingham was captured in Salisbury, he sought desperately to speak with the king, who would not see him. Whatever 'the most untrue creature living' sought to tell Richard, it died with him in the market square of Salisbury on 2 November, 1483, a few scant days after the 'princes in the Tower' vanished from Muggle ken.

The other possible Lancastrian claimant was dead, leaving only Henry Tudor, whose battles were ever fought by others, as the alternate to Richard and the House of York. In the next months, a whispering campaign would blacken Richard's character in the minds of his subjects, accusing him by rumour of the murder of his nephews. And Buckingham's widow, Kate Woodville, would soon wed Jasper Tudor, Henry's uncle, formerly the earl of Pembroke and later the first duke of Bedford in the Tudor creation. Margaret Beaufort and John Morton had reason to be satisfied indeed. They had at once eliminated a potent rival and destabilised the realm, ripening it for usurpation.

History does not repeat; yet does it rhyme. Hatred and fear are the faces of one coin.

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'"... a special presentation on England's chances in the Cup...."'

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Much had befallen the Tyrells since Walter of that name had slain William Rufus in a forest glade. Anne Tyrell's lands had played a part in Buckingham's rebellion. Sir James Tyrell, by contrast, was believed, until after Bosworth, to be Richard's most trusted lieutenant, a 'knight of the body' and Richard's confidential agent. He held Gipping Hall near Stowmarket, Suffolk, and it was at Gipping that - after Elizabeth Woodville had learnt that her sons were alive and well and that Margaret Beaufort had manipulated her and lied to her: whereupon she reconciled with Richard, accepted him as her good lord, and emerged with her daughter Elizabeth from sanctuary having Richard's pledge to protect her children - 'the princes and their mother Elizabeth Woodville lived in the hall by permission of the uncle': King Richard.

Yet the rumours that the Lords Bastard had been murdered by Richard continued to flare and flame, fanned by Lancastrian malice and the determined efforts of Margaret Beaufort and John Morton of Ely. Richard never answered the charge and never produced the boys, alive or dead. Henry Tudor, when he usurped the throne, repealed Titulus Regius and actually ordered that every copy be destroyed, thus legitimising the princes and granting them a better claim than his own; yet Henry was never able to account for them or produce them, and was plagued throughout his reign by rebellions in their name - and perhaps led by them. Nor did Henry ever charge Richard with their murder until all who could have spoken on the matter were long dead; and amongst his first and meanest acts was to imprison Dorset and shut up Elizabeth Woodville in a nunnery, forbid her from communicating with the world, and, when she died, to have her buried without ceremony or honour.

All that remains are the Tudor propaganda, much of it emanating from John Morton - a man so vile that he met regularly with the successful usurper to pass on the secrets of the confessional as political intelligence to his master - and two rumours: that James Tyrell, who somehow survived the fall of the Yorkist cause and served Henry Tudor until his judicial murder by that usurper in 1502, murdered the princes either in 1483 on Richard's orders or in Henry Tudor's interest in 1486; or that the Lords Bastard were slain in 1483, before the collapse of the rebellion, by the devise of the duke of Buckingham, either in his own interest, in Richard's (if this were before he rebelled), or in Henry's, at the behest of Margaret Beaufort.

In the Year of Grace 1484, upon the Feast of Easter, Elizabeth Woodville and her daughters emerged from sanctuary, reconciled with Richard, received pensions, and were granted leave to retire to a country estate in East Anglia - one whence the family could escape readily to Margaret of York's Low Country Burgundian ports if the outlook became threatening. Later that year, Richard ordered that two agents from his sister Margaret's Burgundy be allowed to pass in to the realm, '1 without any Serche', and in the latter part of 1484, Richard's 'right trusty knight for our body and counsaillour', Sir James Tyrell was sent 'over the See into the parties of Flaundres for diverse maters concernyng gretely oure wele', without further elaboration.

In the Year of Grace 1485, Sir James Tyrell, the trusted servitor of the House of York although son of a Lancastrian who died in battle for the Red Rose, was granted, as Lieutenant of Guisnes and Constable of English Calais, the sum of £3000, an amount equivalent to the annual budget of the realm, to expend upon secret service to the Crown; and even as the Tudor invasion threatened, he remained at his post, and Richard kept him there.

After the usurpation, there were risings against the Tudor. Ireland rallied to the standard of a youth claiming to be Edward 5th, who was afterwards dismissed as having been an imposter with the improbable name of Lambert Simnel; after, there came the rising in favour of Richard, duke of York, Richard 4th, who was claimed by the Tudor to be merely a boatman's son of Tournai, Perkin Warbeck, despite his having been acknowledged as the younger of Edward 4th's sons by Margaret of Burgundy, the King of Scots, the Woodvilles, and the Stanleys who had so fatally deserted Richard 3d at Bosworth. Like all potential Yorkist claimants, they were judicially murdered by the Tudor, in cold blood, even as Sir James Tyrell, after having first been reconciled with the new regime, had at last been lured from Calais by a royal safe conduct under the Tudor's Great Seal and then executed - after which it was claimed that he had confessed to having murdered the sons of Edward 4th twenty years before.

There is only one explanation that fits the facts and the rumours alike, ranging from the desperate attempt of Buckingham to secure a last audience with Richard before being executed, even as the first rumours of the boys's deaths blazed up, to the actions of Tyrell and of the Tudor. There is but one explanation that reconciles Richard's inability to defend himself with Henry Tudor's inability to charge him until those with personal knowledge of the time were safely dead. There is one sole explanation for the accusations against both Buckingham and Tyrell, and for Elizabeth Woodville's reconciliation with Richard and blazing row with the Tudor.

The sons of Edward 4th were removed from the Tower for their better safety in the days of the first rebellion against Richard; removed, and secured by Fidelius. What Buckingham failed to tell Richard before he was turned off by the headsman in the market square of Salisbury was that the Secret Keeper had been, not Buckingham, but Tyrell: a fatal switching of roles. What Richard was then able to have Tyrell tell Elizabeth Woodville was where it was that her sons were hidden in safety: Gipping Hall. What Richard could not do was to reveal their secret or produce them, the more so after the pope, Innocent 8th, had issued a bull relating to magic on 5th December 1484, Summis desiderantes, that threatened the judicious secrecy that had hidden away the Wizarding world for so long and that might have been used against Richard and the Wizengamot had he revealed, if he could have revealed, the measures taken to keep his nephews safe - or what fateful consequences a switch of Secret Keepers had had.

History does not repeat; rather, it rhymes. Hatred and fear are two faces of one coin.

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'... the Weird Sisters have announced the imminent release of a new album, of which the proceeds will go to support St Mungo's War Victims Unit. The title track and first single, "Les Violons de L'Automne"....'

Harry waved his wand and silenced the wireless. 'Well. That's the signal. Enjoy snowy and sleepy Herefordshire, you two. And be damned careful. You are both too important to me - and the nation - to lose.'

Ron grinned, and Draco took his leave of Harry with a kiss.

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END

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