Roman Holiday

Chapter Thirty-One

Salazar Slytherin?

Hermione sank wordlessly into the empty chair, wide-eyed with shock. Slytherin, looking quite pleased with himself at her reaction, chuckled and propped his transparently stockinged feet on the ottoman in front of his chair.

“My reputation precedes me, I see,” he said, beaming. “Hogwash, of course - most of it, anyway. I’m afraid Godric was quite put out with me at the end … and, as I’m sure you know, it’s the victors who write the history books.”

“Gryffindor … killed you?” Hermione croaked. Slytherin chuckled again.

“Goodness me, no. Forced me into retirement, though. The young hothead.”

He sounded remarkably cheery about this. Hermione guessed that being dead for a thousand years would tend to take the sting out of old quarrels, particularly if they didn’t end in bloodshed.

“No, I died in my sleep,” Slytherin continued. “1303, to be exact. Though you won’t find that in any of the history books, mind.” He winked at her. “I’ve been walking through doors ever since.”

Hermione looked him over; apart from the fact that you could see through him, he looked like someone’s grandpa, right down to the stockinged feet and the avuncular twinkle in his eyes.

Could this really be Salazar Slytherin? She was finding it hard to reconcile the kindly old gent in front of her with the ambitious, hard-headed tyrant with a taste for the Dark Arts that she’d read so much about.

“You don’t sound very … Chaucerian,” she said, frowning. Slytherin looked half-offended.

“Of course not,” he said indignantly. “I read, don’t I?”

He gestured at the walls of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. “I get a new shipment every month,” he confided. “Endowed the library anonymously, before I died. Worded the bequest so that they’d order whatever I requested and not ask questions. That dried-up spider of a librarian doesn’t like it, but it’s enough money that she does what she’s told. Leaves the box on her desk, unopened, and lets it disappear overnight.”

He sent Hermione a sly look and patted the paperback copy of Tropic of Cancer that was lying dog-eared on his lamp table. “Change with the times, that’s what I always say.”

Okay, that was over the line. She’d read that book; for a ghost, he was a hell of a flirt.

Still, Hermione was beginning, albeit warily, to enjoy herself. “Does … does anyone know you’re here?”

Slytherin laughed. “Not on your life, dearie. I’m retired, after all, and I’m a solitary old geezer. Don’t need the pressure, don’t want the publicity. And that young pup, Dumbledore, has things pretty well in hand, all told.” He beamed at her. “No, I’m content to read my books, write my memoirs, and wait for the occasional young beauty to drop in. Can I offer you some tea?”

Hermione hoped her stomach hadn’t been growling too loudly. “Tea,” she said fervently, “would be marvellous.” Her forehead creased. “But I do have some questions for you, Mr. Slytherin. If you don’t mind.”

“Call me Salazar,” said the ghost, who was casually Summoning a teapot from the sideboard next to the fireplace. (Hermione, who had always wondered if wizard ghosts retained their magical powers, but hadn’t asked Sir Nicholas about it for fear of seeming rude, tried not to stare.) “As for your questions, I’d be happy to answer them. But may I propose a bit of a trade?”

The casual way in which he asked this was a bit too elaborate; Hermione eyed him with suspicion.

“What sort of trade?” she asked cautiously.

Salazar looked pensive. “Music,” he said, “is a hobby of mine. Unlike the books, though, I wasn’t able to provide for my retirement with regular infusions of scores - Hogwarts deals mostly with Flourish and Blotts, and their musical selection is meager, to put it kindly. So, unfortunately, I’ve not been able to keep up with the times.”

He picked up his ghostly recorder and turned it over and over in his hands. “On the rare occasions that I get company,” he said, “I like to do a little bartering … when you’re as cloistered as I am, such machinations are necessary. I’m sure you understand.”

Hermione, who frankly didn’t know what he was talking about, nodded anyway.

“Those redheaded twins, for example,” said Slytherin, “traded me a tune in exchange for some information they wanted. They were quite upset with me, until we got the misunderstanding cleared up. Pesky little matter of a basilisk.” He piped a couple of bars. “Nice little melody, eh? I didn’t catch the name, though.”

Hermione’s lips twitched. “’Yesterday’,” she supplied.

“Ah, yes. I remember now. Composer?”

“Um. John Lennon.”

“Lemon,” Salazar muttered, scrawling the word in silvery ink across the top of a page of ghostly manuscript. “Much obliged.”

Hermione considered correcting him, then decided it wasn’t worth the effort. The teapot was whistling, and she desperately wanted her tea. “No problem,” she said, getting up from her chair and pouring the hissing water into a cup from the sideboard. “So - that’s the trade you want to make? Your information for my tune?”

“Exactly,” Slytherin said. He picked up a blank sheet of manuscript paper and a quill, and looked expectantly at Hermione. She thought fast.

“Um …” she said, trying to guess at what a thousand-year-old ghost who liked Henry James would consider to be a ‘good tune’. “Do you know ‘Greensleeves’?”

He nodded. Hermione tried again.

“’Scarborough Fair’?”

“My dear girl,” Salazar said with a hint of impatience, “I’m not so out of date that I don’t know my British Isles folk songs! Can’t you come up with something a bit more modern? Nineteenth-century, perhaps?”

Hermione gulped. “Sorry.” She thought for a minute. “Okay - how about Brahms?”

Her mum had used to sing her to sleep with the famous Lullaby, and she thought she could remember all the words. In English, of course, not the original German - hopefully, Slytherin had been out of circulation long enough that he wouldn’t know the difference.

The ghost brightened. “Brahms, you say? Never heard of him.” Quill poised, he raised his eyebrows. “Well? Go on then.”

“You want me to sing it?” Okay, Hermione thought, this afternoon had now officially moved waaaaay beyond ‘odd’, and was turning left at the signpost marked ‘Salvador Dalí’.

Slytherin tipped his head to one side.

“You could hum, I suppose,” he said. “But if there are words, I’d rather like to hear them.”

“And afterwards, you’ll answer my question?”

“You have my word,” he said, looking a bit reproachful at her skepticism.

Hermione took a sip of tea - musty, but potable - and began.

**

She had to sing it through four times before he was satisfied with his notation of the melody. “Very pretty,” he said, trying out the first phrase on the recorder. “Charming, in fact. And you’ve a lovely voice, my dear.” He looked suddenly hopeful. “You haven’t studied the harpsichord, by chance, have you?”

Hermione followed his gaze to a dark corner of the room - sure enough, there was a museum-quality harpsichord set up, gilded on every surface and covered with painted cherubim. “No,” she said firmly, tamping down her initial instinct to go touch it. “And what are you doing with a harpsichord, anyway? They weren’t invented until hundreds of years after you died.”

“Even a solitary old retiree is entitled to a vacation or two,” Slytherin said testily. “I daresay I’ve collected a few souvenirs along the way. It’s only since 1750 or so that I’ve become a total recluse.”

Hermione had a sudden thought. “You didn’t ever hear anything by Palestrina, by any chance - did you?” Slytherin looked suddenly pained.

“Palestrina. Nice kid named Giovanni, right? No. Listening to his music would have involved setting foot in a Muggle cathedral,” he said, and sighed at the suddenly closed look on Hermione’s face. “I know, I know. We’re in the Age of Reason now, or maybe even the Age of Unbelief, and I’ve gotten untold bad press over this issue. But when you’re as old as I am, my girl, you can still remember when the world wasn’t quite so enlightened. Torture - burnings - the auto-da-fé - “ He shook his head sadly. “It was a bad time to set yourself against the Church of Rome, I’ll tell you.”

Hermione set her teacup aside and leaned forward in her chair, struck with sudden realization. “That’s why you didn’t want to admit Muggle-borns to Hogwarts,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

Slytherin sighed. “The worst of the atrocities didn’t happen until after I was dead,” he said. “I saw it coming, though.” He pinned her with a penetrating glance. “It’s a long story, young lady, and not a pretty one. Are you sure you want to hear it?”

Hermione nodded. “If it’s not too much trouble,” she said. Slytherin laughed.

“Trouble? When I haven’t spoken to another soul since your friends the Weasleys tracked me down? No, no trouble.”

He shifted his position so he was facing her full-on. “We in the wizarding world didn’t remove ourselves from Muggle society until the rise of Christianity under Constantine - until then, it wasn’t necessary,” he began. “Religion under the Greeks and Romans was a bit of a buffet - you took a bit of every god you liked, and the supernatural was accepted as a matter of course. Young wizards and witches studied under Socrates and Plato, right along with the Muggles. And of course there were no organized schools of witchcraft - we passed our magical arts down through our families, or hired tutors.”

“So, then,” Hermione said slowly, “there were no Muggle-born witches and wizards - at least not trained ones.”

“Right in one,” Salazar said. “You’re a sharp little cookie, aren’t you?” He stared into the fire pensively. “Of course, when the Church came to power, it ushered in five hundred years of utter artistic and educational poverty for the Muggles. We were all right, of course, but none of them were educated at all, unless they were involved with the Church. And even in those cases, they were taught as little as possible. Theological argument was declared to be heresy; philosophy and art were considered useless at best and corrupting at worst.” He grinned at her. “This was before my time, of course. I arrived on the scene just after the turn of the century - in 1075, to be exact - just when things were starting to change.”

“For the better?” Hermione asked. Salazar shrugged.

“In some ways. The Muggles were tired of being downtrodden and uneducated. New trade routes - new translations of the old books - a newly-formed middle class of merchants and skilled artisans that just hadn’t existed since the glory days of Rome. Universities started springing up - Cambridge, Oxford, all the old schools that are still around now were founded back then. Art, music, poetry, literature - they all started to blossom into full flower around 1150 or so.” He paused for breath. “That’s when Godric and Rowena and Helga and I got together and started to talk about opening an academy of magical arts. It seemed a good time for it.”

“Sounds exciting,” Hermione said, dreamily. “I’ve always liked to read about the Renaissance.” Slytherin shot her a sharp look.

“Exciting, yes,” he said drily. “And to some, alarming. The Church wasn’t any too happy about the break in its stranglehold, I’ll tell you. That’s when the trouble really started.”

“You mean the witch hunts,” Hermione said. Salazar shook his head.

“They hunted everybody,” he said. “Heretics, Jews, witches, wizards, folk healers, you name it. They burned books and paintings in the town squares. They killed children.” He crossed his arms over his chest, looking cold and drawn despite the warmth of the fire. “It was the Muggle-borns that got the worst of it,” he said. “We’d recruited some of them for Hogwarts from the very beginning - it was Helga’s idea, though Godric’s gotten most of the credit for it.”

He gave Hermione a sideways glance. “I suppose your history books tell you that no real witches or wizards burned, during the hunts,” he said. “That they escaped the fires with Cooling Charms, and the drownings with gillyweed, and so on. Am I right?”

Hermione nodded, and Slytherin gave a short sharp bark of a laugh.

“Lies,” he said softly. “We suffered more losses than I care to think about. Not fully-trained witches and wizards, of course,” he said in answer to Hermione’s gasp. “Except for the few who got surprised without their wands. But the children …” He trailed off. Hermione had to look away from the grief on his silvery old face.

“A girl could be burned for a witch at nine,” he finally said. “A boy at ten. In one summer holiday, we could lose half of our first-years, almost all of them Muggle-borns. In some cases, their own parents turned them over to the Inquisition.”

“You lived to see this,” Hermione said, horrified. Slytherin shook his head.

“No, but I predicted it,” he said bitterly. “I advised against the acceptance of Muggle-born and half-blood wizards and witches into the school, because I foresaw conflict between their old communities and their new knowledge, and because Hogwarts was not at that point set up to protect them year-round. And I was voted down and dismissed in the history books as a racist.”

He shrugged. “Maybe I was wrong, for that matter - certainly in the following centuries, Muggle-borns adapted and thrived despite their setbacks. But by then, I was an old man - I saw only the danger, and missed the opportunity.”

“Is that why you’re a ghost?” Hermione asked.

Slytherin nodded. “Ghosts,” he said, “are people with unfinished business. Those who don’t feel they’ve yet done what they can.”

Having said this, he lapsed into silence, leaving Hermione to nurse her stone-cold tea and stare into the flames. When she finally spoke, it was more to lift the somber mood than for any other reason.

“Can I ask you my question now?”

Salazar’s bushy white eyebrows shot up.

“My dear Miss Granger,” he said, “you’ve been doing nothing but asking questions for the last thirty minutes. But -“ and here his eyes began to twinkle with a shadow of their former calculation - “if you need to know something else, I might let it go for a song.”

Why, you old chiseler, Hermione thought, torn between outrage and amusement. This afternoon was proving to be most interesting, however, and she supposed she couldn’t blame him for prolonging the first social visit he’d had in three years.

“Okay,” she said, and launched into an uptempo version of ‘Pop, Goes the Weasel.’

**

“Oh, I like that,” Slytherin said happily, after he’d finally laid down his quill. “Very peppy - and considerable room for variation.” He looked at her enquiringly. “All right, girlie. Ask away.”

Hermione’s hands were clammy. She wiped them on her robes, braced herself, and looked the mighty Salazar Slytherin straight in the eyes.

“All right,” she said. “Tell me everything you know about the Fils du Couteau.”

**