Epilogue: The Historian’s Verdict

Epilogue: The Historian’s Verdict

The Board chamber had been polished to a shine that made Miranda think of ice. Chairs stood in ranks as if they had been drilled there, their backs straight, their feet aligned with the runner. The windows had the look of a reprimand: narrow, high, and letting in a watery spring light that did not warm anything. Rain tried the glass in small, careful taps, withdrew, and came again.

Miranda set her case on the table and released the latches one by one to keep her hands from clicking. Ink stains had worked into the web of her thumb; she did not bother to hide them. She had slept badly and had woken with the taste of old paper on her tongue, the sour tang of preservatives in the back of her throat. That had passed by breakfast. The paper taste had come back on the walk across the courtyard.

“Dr Goshawk,” said Griselda Marchbanks, taking her place at the head of the table. She stood a moment before she sat, letting the room see her. Her hair had been pinned with severity and there were the crumbs of snow in it from where she had been foolish enough to step outside and sensible enough not to fuss. She set a leather folder in front of her, tapped it once with a forefinger with a small iron ring, and looked to her left. “Professor Vector. Miss Bletchley. Mr Prentiss.” Her nod to the last was thinner.

Professor Vector had already arranged two pencils in a neat V in front of her and was leaning over a pad of squared paper as if she were waiting to see whether the lines would do their duty. Euphemia Vector; Head of Arithmancy since the year Miranda had been given her first examination marking. Her hair was the colour of iron and her mouth understood angles in a way most mouths did not.

Ina Bletchley had brought a little desk of her own. It folded out of a black case and gave her somewhere to perch between her papers and the Board’s, as if the difference were important and must be maintained. The Departmental seal looked glad to be the brightest thing in the room.

Mr Prentiss from the Ministry had a way of setting his elbows that tried to make more space for him than the wood would allow. His coat knew more about pressing than he did about being pressed. He smiled at no one in particular, as if he had a good nature and hoped it would be noticed.

"Albus?" Marchbanks said without looking round.

"I shall observe," said the portrait of Dumbledore from the second row, where it had been hung for the occasion—a courtesy to history, or perhaps a warning. The painted figure had chosen an unpromising chair within the frame and made it look well disposed towards him. His hands were quiet. The artist had captured something essential: the way he could be present without pressing, watchful without weighing.

Miranda unwrapped the thing on which the room’s arrangements turned. Brown cloth first. Then the two boards with their threads stitched across, to keep the object from slipping when she had to turn it. A thin layer of stasis gauze that had the trick of clinging to the hairs on her wrist. Then the diary itself.

It did not look like a thing to concern a Board. A common exercise-book of the sort schools had bought in lots, the cheap kind that stained when someone spilled tea near it. A spine mended with brown tape that had dried to a crackle. The ink that showed through had gone the flat purple of iron gall when it aged.

“You will be quick on authentication,” Marchbanks said. “We have your submission.”

“I will,” Miranda said, and put one finger to the top corner of the first page because it calmed her to feel the small resistance of the paper.

“The iron-gall oxidation aligns with the moon-phase record for the first half of 1938,” she said, keeping the sentence straight. “We tested eight pages against the Archive’s chart. The drift on the preservation net is two degrees, consistent with a Hogwarts application from that same year. The spine glue is salamander—there was a war shortage; wizarding schools used it where Muggle bookbinders did not. I have the numbers and signatures in my written submission.” She tapped the folder to show where they were. She did not look at Mr Prentiss when she did it.

“Hand,” said Vector, without looking up.

“The same hand as the Prefects’ detention book from April to June of ’38,” Miranda said. “There is a little left-handed pull on the long stems when he is tired, and it returns when he’s ill and goes again when he isn’t. It matches. I have the overlays.”

Vector nodded once. The pencil lines in front of her permitted themselves to be pencils.

“In order, Dr Goshawk,” Marchbanks said, opening her folder as if the pages inside had been told beforehand how to behave. “Your three questions as you gave them in our last, and our three questions as you will answer them now. The first: Is it his?”

“Yes,” said Miranda, and was relieved to feel no heat rise to her face with the word. “There will be challenges. They will not stand.”

“The second,” Vector said, and this time her eyes lifted. “If it is his, what is your aim in making it ours? Not for your monograph. For our canon—by which I do not mean vaults.” Her tone made Mona Bletchley’s mouth twitch. “What enters schoolrooms. What we set beside those names we ask our students to learn.”

Miranda’s fingers flattened on the page. There was a little curl at the edge where it had been turned and turned again by a boy who could not keep from touching what he had done. A flat boy’s nail had pressed there. She put her own nail to the place and left it unmarked.

“How he began,” she said. “Not the Salazar myths, not the thing with teeth later, not the part where we make ourselves comfortable with him as a story. If we teach the other names as if they were men and women first, we do it with this one.”

“The third,” Marchbanks said. There was nothing indulgent in her voice now. “Our culpability. You ask to name what we did and did not do, and to do it under our seal. You see the difficulty.”

Miranda breathed through her nose. The paper smell of the room was a safe smell. The rain worried the glass and gave up again.

“I will not soften it,” she said. “I will not make the staff room into a comforting parlour to sit in and sigh. I will name what we missed, and where we were looking instead.”

“Very good,” said Marchbanks, and closed her folder with a flat hand. “Show us the hinge.”

Miranda had known the word would do it. It was not her word. The Archivists had used it first. She had borrowed it because it helped.

She turned three pages. The handwriting was smaller here, as if the boy had pulled it in, as if he were trying to keep his words from being overheard by a desk or a bedstead. She set the book on its cradle so the spine did not have to carry the weight. Altogether, her hands knew what to do. She had told them beforehand the order of each step, so that when she came to reading she would have nothing else to think about.

“Ink analysis will confirm this entry to the night before the second-floor incident,” she said, and heard her own voice as if it were someone else’s reading a list. She let that pass. She put her finger under the first line as if she were twelve and needed a guide.

He had written:

I did not tell them I could make it look at me. They think it is a trick in the pipes. I think it is mine because I can think of it and then I hear it. They get small when they are near it and I do not. If you are still you can feel your blood being warm and you will not be afraid when you look down the hole.

A small shift in the room, the way cloth sounds when people move in it and try not to.

Miranda kept reading.

I gave D a thing today and I made him think he gave it to me. He was very proud. He is friendly like a dog. I told him you can teach a dog to do anything if you do not hit it too early. I want the stone under the third stair. I want a door that is not made for anyone else.

Vector’s pencil made a single mark, the smallest possible gesture of assent: that is the line.

“Continue,” Marchbanks said.

Miranda turned the page. The edges were rough where the paper had been pulled out of a stack. She thought of a boy taking what was given and finding the wrong in the standard supply: too thin, too limp, too wide a ruling. He would have made do and been angry and made that useful.

They do not think I know what I am. They say I am a clever boy. They like that I say sir. I like it too because then I am the only one who knows what I am. When I go down I will go alone. It is good to be first.

The pencil in Vector’s hand paused above the page. Ina Bletchley beneath her little desk had opened her lips as if to say something sensible and had not said it yet. Mr Prentiss looked at the ceiling as if the ceiling belonged, at present, to the Ministry.

Miranda closed the diary as carefully as she had opened it and lay her palm on the cloth. She did not want to read the last line in the set aloud. She had chosen not to read it in full to the Board; that was a choice she would have to defend now or later.

Marchbanks nodded. “Your hinge holds,” she said. “On the narrow question, at least.” She turned the folder and found another page in it. “What will you print in a student edition of this?”

“Names redacted where it touches the living,” Miranda said. “Locations altered to avoid copycat descents. Spellwork omitted; hints left intact. We keep the cadences; we keep the head. We do not teach a method.”

“You say cadences,” said Ina Bletchley, and she leaned forward as if a new scent had come under a door. “You want to teach voice.”

Miranda did not trust her with the words. She let the silence do the work first.

“If we give them a monster,” she said, when the quiet had done enough, “they will know what to do with monsters. If we give them a boy who writes like that—”

“They will recognise it,” Vector said. “In others and in themselves, if they have the honesty. Yes.”

Mr Prentiss made a noise that was nearly a laugh but knew its place enough not to be one. “Honesty,” he said. “In schoolchildren. Charming.”

Marchbanks did not trouble to look at him. “We will answer our own questions now,” she said, and put on her glasses though she did not need them to see. It was a courtesy to age and to paperwork.

“Point one,” she said. “Authentication: we accept Dr Goshawk’s findings pending the arrival of the Ministry’s independent report, which we are told will arrive ‘in due course’.” Her voice did not change on the phrase. Mr Prentiss’s smile tightened by an eighth of an inch. “Point two: Canon admission. We have a duty to truth; we are also the custodians of a thousand children at a time. We will approve an edited edition for upper schoolrooms—NEWTs and seventh year—on request of the teacher and with the child’s Head of House in assent. We will lodge three complete copies in the Restricted Section with Board oversight.”

Miranda had expected it and still felt the small lift behind her ribs that comes when a door you feared would not open does. She did not let that breathe all the way.

“Point three,” Marchbanks said. “Culpability. We cannot be jury and defendant and executioner all at once. But we can say what we did not do and should have done. We can make it our business not to be loved for saying it.”

Vector lifted her head at that. There was something like pride in her mouth that she did not show elsewhere.

“I propose,” Vector said, “we write our own preface to Dr Goshawk’s work and that it appears ahead of any line of his. We will not soften. I will draft it and circulate for signatures today. It will say: We saw him; we congratulated him; we missed our moment; we will not ask you to forgive us.”

Ina Bletchley’s pencil ticked twice on her desktop and then was still. “You will invite suit,” she said.

“You cannot sue a school for telling the truth,” Marchbanks said, and then, before Mr Prentiss could speak, “No, Mr Prentiss; do not educate me on the subject of libel. Not this morning.”

He produced an envelope anyway. It sat there in his hand trying to look official enough to make up for itself. He set it down on the table in the exact centre of his reach. It had three red strings. They had been pulled very tight.

“The Department of Magical Education,” he said, and there was a little pride in it, which was interesting in a man who had not founded the department, “wishes to be understood. The Under-Secretary has grave concerns about publication. There is a view that the very existence of this object represents a cursed artefact within the purview of—”

"It is not cursed," Miranda said, before she had given herself permission to open her mouth. She did not look at the portrait for help. The word had been too often used to make schools stop.

“You are not the arbiter,” Mr Prentiss said, and although he did not smile the corners of his mouth behaved badly. “There is an injunction pending. The owl was delayed by rain, so I have taken the liberty of bringing a copy.”

“And when is it filed?” Marchbanks asked, peeling the red string with the clean boredom of a woman who has known red string since it first came into fashion.

“By noon,” Mr Prentiss said. “Of course.”

“Then we have an hour,” Marchbanks said, and she slid the letter back across to him as if it had been a sandwich she declined. “We will vote within the hour and minute-seal our result. Mr Prentiss, you will take note that the Ministry’s concerns have been heard and that we have acted with all due speed.”

“You will be stayed,” he said, and his fingers tapped the envelope as if he could make it thick enough to do the job with tapping.

Vector’s pencil laid itself flat. “Even a stay can be used,” she said. “You know what the children are: they do not love most things we approve. If we approve with the correct language, you will find more caution in classrooms than if you make a fuss and send owls.”

Ina Bletchley’s mouth again shaped something sensible and then, surprisingly, said it. “Your danger,” she said to Miranda, as if the two of them had met privately to confer on hazards and now resumed the conversation, “is that you make him too easy to despise early and too easy to admire late. You will flatter yourself that you are balanced. You will not be. You are not immune to him.”

Miranda looked down at the cloth and the book on it and let her hand find the spine without tracing it. There had been nights when she had carried the ink with her to bed and caught herself listening to the sound as she turned off the lamp, as if a boy might breathe once, fast, before quiet. She did not intend to share that with Ina Bletchley.

“I trust my redundancies,” she said. “The numbers are in the footnotes; the voice is in the body. If I fail to be balanced, you will cut me. That is why you are here.”

“We are here,” Marchbanks said, taking back the room—not unkindly; just setting it upright—“because the school’s business is to teach children and to make our failures available to their use. Vote on the three points.”

The vote had the weight of things already decided. Hands went up. The portrait of Dumbledore did not lift its painted hands; it had no vote at this table, and kept them where a boy would think a good teacher put them, visible and quiet.

“Four to approve with redactions and restrictions,” Marchbanks said. “Zero against. The Ministry’s letter notes its objection. The Chair will write to the Under-Secretary with our preface, which Professor Vector will draft by supper, and Dr Goshawk will provide to the Board a student edition for review within the month.”

Mr Prentiss folded his envelope again as if something useful might still come of it if he kept the corners square. Ina Bletchley took her pencil up and wrote two lines with it so fine that the wood must have been jealous.

“You said there was an omitted line,” Vector said to Miranda. “In your hinge. Read it to the Board or justify its absence here.”

Miranda had known she would be asked. She had made herself decide in the early hours when waking and sleeping swapped places like mice. She reached and opened the book again to the page that had made the edges of her stomach feel dumb.

He had written, after the part about going down alone:

I will go and I will not be late.

The words had been darker, as if he had sat on them and then pushed them out with more ink on the nib.

Silence made itself comfortable in the room again. Mr Prentiss cleared his throat as if the comfort offended him. No one said the obvious—that a boy who was never late to his own harm is a boy a school ought to have stopped.

Miranda closed the book and found she was angry with him, the way one is angry with a child who has run between horses. It did not make any difference to what she would write. It made a difference to the colour of her face.

“It will stand in the full edition,” she said. “In the student edition I will remove the word ‘alone’. We can teach resolve without placing it on the page like a challenge.”

Vector turned the pencil under her index finger thoughtfully. “And make the clever ones go to the rest to see what you have taken out,” she said. “You keep forgetting they are made like that.”

"I am relying on it," Miranda said. She saw the small set of the portrait's painted hand where it rested on the chair arm within the frame. The figure did not look up.

“I will say this much,” he said then, as if the words had been put on the table in front of him and had waited until it was decent to speak. “Endings are poor teachers; beginnings are better.”

Mr Prentiss smiled in a way that would serve a dinner table. “And yet we come to an end, Professor,” he said.

"That is why we have to think very hard about where we choose to stop," the portrait said, and the painted eyes looked at Miranda only long enough to let her know that she was the one now charged with the line to be drawn.

“Very good,” Marchbanks said briskly, as if briskness would make it true. “Dr Goshawk, your material will be escorted to the Restricted Section. Miss Bletchley, you will prepare a set of the Archive’s stamps. Mr Prentiss, you will take this minute-book to your Under-Secretary with our respects and the accuracy it deserves.”

They rose. Chairs made the small complaining noises of chair legs on old floorboards. The air of the room let go of its waiting. Marchbanks came to the head of the table and set both palms on the wood; her hands were broad and the knuckles had known cold. “You will write the truth,” she said to Miranda, without lowering her voice, and nodded once to Vector. “And you will make sure we do not forgive ourselves in the writing.”

“I will write, and you will sign,” Vector said, with satisfaction. “This will be an education.”

The door opened for them as if a pupil had pushed it and held it because it was proper. In the corridor outside, the portraits were doing their best to pretend they had not been listening. One man in a ruff looked injured by the idea that anyone would say what had been said in there and expect a frame to keep it still.

Miranda packed the book into its wrappings with the slow neatness that made things fit. Cloth. Boards. Gauze. The case shut with a steady sound like a breath let out.

Dumbledore's portrait had moved to the frame by the door—portraits did that at Hogwarts, slipping from canvas to canvas when they had something to say. His hands were behind him, his painted head tilted as if listening to a clock that existed only in the frame's world.

"Dr Goshawk," he said.

"Professor," she said.

"You will be called brave," he said. "That will not be accurate."

"I do not require it to be," she said. She walked, and the portrait followed her through a succession of frames along the corridor—slipping from a pastoral scene into an empty drawing room, from there into a seascape where he looked peculiarly out of place against the waves. The rain had given up on the windows and set its attention on the gutters instead.

"I like that you are ungenerous," he said from a frame showing an ornate fireplace. There was a little smile with no warmth in it; it was friendly to the idea, not to her. "With yourself. With us. I do not like it; I admire it. The effect is similar to liking."

She did not trust the answer that rose—something sharp; something about men who admired qualities in women they had not felt on their own faces. She let her lift of a shoulder do the work and said, "Vector will have it drafted before supper. It will bite."

"She has the teeth for it," he said, now occupying a gilt frame that had probably held someone's grandmother. "We have been too fond of keeping our mouths closed at the interesting moments."

They came out into the side corridor where the light did not know whether to be grey or gold. A boy in fifth-year robes skidded to a halt when he saw her and the portrait keeping pace along the wall, as if his speed had been borrowed and now presented for inspection. He looked at the painted Dumbledore the way boys look at a desk that sometimes has surprises in it. He looked at Miranda with blank curiosity, as if she had been taken out of a cupboard he had not known the school possessed.

"Do not run," the portrait said gently. The boy did not. He shot away at a walk that was nearly a run and did not know the difference.

"Beginnings are better," Miranda said, and then stopped because the words had sounded like agreement and were not intended to be. "I will make the cuts. They will not remove the harm. They will not remove the use."

"You will be surprised," the portrait said from behind a potted fern someone had placed too close to the frame. "Sometimes they are the same."

She was tired of him—tired of the way even a painting of him could put down something neat on the table and leave her to go away with the crumbs. "Professor," she said again, which was the sound one makes when one is done being spoken to and is too educated to show it.

The portrait inclined its head and did not follow her further. The case was heavier than it had been in the room because the hall did not have the same attention to carry it. She kept it close to her ribs in the way she kept dangerous things without needing to be told.

Ina Bletchley caught up with her at the stairs. She had packed her little desk back into its case and looked like a woman who had remembered a chore she disliked and had decided to do it properly anyway.

“A word,” she said, with a smile so clean it could have been wiped.

Miranda did not stop walking. “You may have one,” she said. “No more; we are under threat of injunction.”

“Two, then,” Ina said, and said them quickly. “Be unkind.”

Miranda glanced at her. “To whom?”

“In your footnotes,” Ina said. “Be exacting and cold where you name the places the school failed. Do not do that thing historians do when they worry the wrong people will fancy themselves brave for reading the right paragraph. If your cuts are artful, your preface will matter. If your footnotes are kind, your art will be worse than a lie.”

It was the second sensible thing Ina had said that morning. Miranda nodded once, sharp. “Thank you,” she said.

Ina tilted her chin like a salute and went away towards whatever office enjoyed her pencil more.

By the time Miranda reached the door that went down to the library, the rain had become committed to itself. It had a way of drumming on the stone outside that reminded her of fists on a table at a meeting where a man thought he had discovered a new kind of emphasis. Down the stairs the smell changed. Dust changed from smell to texture; air changed from space to held breath. The Restricted Section gate was shut. Mrs Pince met her with dignity and a pair of keys that had opinions about who ought to possess them.

“Board of Governors,” Miranda said, and Mrs Pince’s eyebrows did the rest.

“Sign,” Mrs Pince said. Miranda did. The iron grate swung back, made a sound like an old thing pleased to be relevant. On the shelf behind the lowest row of chained volumes there was a gap where it had been made ready to receive what she carried.

“Three copies,” Mrs Pince said without looking at the case. “Two on shelf, one in vault. Vector’s orders.”

“They will need guarding,” Miranda said, and Mrs Pince did the smallest possible lift of the head that meant Do not teach me my trade.

Miranda set the case on the table and unfastened it, not because she was ready to part with it, but because the act had been written in the minutes and would take place whether she liked it or not. She took the diary out, twice the caution she had used before. The air back here made her bones feel as if they had been shelved.

Two students stood with books they could not check out in their hands and tried to look as if this were ordinary. One of them had a face that would be handsome when it had grown out of its sulk. The other had bitten his nails to the quick.

“Do you love school?” Miranda asked, because she had a perverse streak and because the question would be more useful to them than silence.

The handsome one shrugged without lowering his eyes. “Sometimes,” he said.

“Do not,” she said, very mild.

The bitten one looked as if he had expected a trick and had received a trick of a different sort. “What then?” he asked.

“Work,” she said, and set the book on the emptied shelf. The chain came through its mount with a tired jingle and lay across the spine as if it were only the next small thing to do.

She signed again in Mrs Pince’s book. The librarian blotted the ink as if to keep it from running away.

Vector would write by supper. Marchbanks would sign, her hand heavy. Mr Prentiss would carry his envelope to his Under-Secretary and make it sound as if he had fought like a lion. The injunction would come. The stay would make their decision louder. The students would find the cuts and then find the places where the cuts had been made, because they were what they were.

On the way back up the stairs she met Dippet, who had a face that looked as if it believed it owed good service and was doing sums to see if it had given enough. He took off his hat in the corridor because he did that sort of thing.

“Dr Goshawk,” he said. “My congratulations.”

“For what?” she said. The banister under her hand had been polished with something that smelled faintly of oranges, as if the castle were a place that might—once, in an optimistic afternoon—have smelled like a kitchen.

“On being permitted to do good work,” he said earnestly, and would have put a hand to his heart if he had been a man who knew where that was in public. It was not unkind, and it was not helpful. He looked past her as if the question might be coming along behind.

“Headmaster,” she said, and kept going.

In her room in the guest corridor there was a desk that had been a student desk once and had the dents to prove it. She sat. She took from her case the Board’s copy of her preface and laid it flat. She did not write yet.

She washed her hands at the basin with the thin soap that lodging rooms are given. There were small smears of black that took trouble to go. When they had gone she looked at her hands in the light. They had not become anyone else’s in the last hour. The lines were her own lines.

She took up her pen and wrote the first sentence she had meant to write and had not said aloud in the room.

Do not forgive us.

She waited with the sentence there and did not soften it. She did not make it clever. The rest would be clever where it needed to be. This would be plain.

Then, underneath, the simple thing that would fix the date to the page when someone who had not yet been born read it and wanted to decide whether to trust it.

Hogwarts, March 2020.

Outside, the rain found a way to sound less like a fist and more like a hand on a door. She wrote two more lines, then stopped. There were hours yet. The Ministry would arrive with its strings. Vector would send a boy with a draft and a red pencil tucked into it like a knife. The portrait of Dumbledore would make a remark from some corridor frame and then settle back into painted stillness, feeling it had done what it could.

The pen balanced on her finger. She put it down. She looked at the words she had written and did not try to love them. They would do what they needed to do without being loved.

She read the first sentence again, and she did not ask anyone, not even herself, to forgive it.