Roman Holiday

Chapter Sixty-Two

She raced down to the Great Hall, leaving the bag of books forgotten on her bed, and bolted her cereal in two minutes flat - after which she was reduced to worrying at the corners of a scone for which she had no appetite and staring a hole in the Head Table while time slowed down to a crawl. Naturally, Ron noticed.

“Christ, you’re jittery this morning,” he said, yawning and helping himself to more bacon. “What did poor old Dumbledore do to you, anyway? Cancel exams?”

Hermione was not amused.

“I just need to talk to him,” she said. “About something important. And before you ask,” she added, noting the expectant look on his face, “I’m not about to tell you, until I’ve spoken to him.”

“Spoilsport,” Ron muttered.

Hermione didn’t answer.

The minute Dumbledore rose to leave, she was after him like a wolverine on a wounded rabbit. “Professor,” she said breathlessly, noting in the still-logical corner of her mind that he had yet to wipe off his chocolate-milk moustache, “I need to speak with you, if it’s not an imposition. I’ve had an urgent owl …”

“Ah, Miss Granger.” Dumbledore, from all appearances delighted that she’d accosted him before he’d had a chance to dust the muffin crumbs from the front of his robes, beamed at her from behind his napkin. “A fascinating coincidence - I was just telling Professor McGonagall here that I’ve had some correspondence concerning you myself, not twenty-four hours ago. I’ve been meaning to find you ever since.”

“If you don’t mind, Professor,” Hermione repeated - a little more insistently - “I was wondering if we could meet today.” She glanced at her watch. “I don’t know if this is a good time for you, but …” She trailed off meaningfully. Dumbledore twinkled with understanding.

“Of course,” he said. “My office, then? Minerva, I’ll catch up with you later.”

With a distracted, half-apologetic nod to Professor McGonagall, Hermione sprinted after him.

She followed him out of the Great Hall and through the corridors, nearly stepping on his heels in her haste and trying not to look too impatient as he stopped to inquire after Filch’s health, spoke to Professor Sprout at length about the alarming moulting rate of the Scabrous Yucca seedlings in Greenhouse Five, and paused momentarily to offer a Pepper Imp apiece to two of the Ravenclaw second-years.

And then finally, finally they were there; past the gargoyle (“Candy apple!”), up the moving staircase, into his cheerfully cluttered office and safely behind the closed door at last. Dumbledore sat down, taking entirely too much time - in Hermione’s opinion, at least - to adjust the drape of his robes, and at length turned amiably to face her.

“All right, Hermione,” he said. “What is it you needed to discuss with me?”

Instantly, her mind went blank.

She opened and shut her mouth a few times, stammered and aborted the beginnings of an unintelligible sentence, then finally forewent speech altogether and simply dug in her pocket for the letter.

“You need to explain this,” she said baldly as she slapped it down on the desk. Her heart was beating fast and shallow. “I don’t understand it.”

That irrepressible, infuriating spark of humour lit Dumbledore’s Wedgwood eyes. “What don’t you understand?” he asked - in such a reasonable tone that Hermione thought she might throw something at him.

Damn it all, why did such a brilliant man get such a kick out of playing dumb?

“This!” she said, nudging the parchment a little nearer to him. “This whole thing. Every word of it’s a mystery.”

She stabbed a shaking, accusatory finger at the parchment’s letterhead, which proclaimed it to have originated with the Cairo Consortium for the Preponderance of Magical Study, Department of Alternative Thought, School of Anthropology, University of Cairo. “These people,” she said unsteadily, “are offering me a full scholarship. And I don’t see how that’s possible.” She looked appealingly at Dumbledore, as if asking him to negate the letter’s contents. “I have a whole year of school left! I haven’t even taken my NEWTs!”

**

“True,” Dumbledore said calmly. “But I think you’ll find the magical world, Hermione, to be quite lax about quibbles like exam scores, under the right circumstances. The NEWTs are a fairly recent development in our educational system, and tend to be most valued within Britain; the world is full of places of higher learning who don’t require those tests at all.”

He picked up the letter and examined it briefly, ignoring her open mouth. “Ah, yes, it’s all in order,” he said, and returned her look of disbelief with a cheeky twinkle. “I was expecting you’d hear from her soon. Areli Ben-Nadir” - here, his forefinger traced the signature at the bottom of the letter - “is a former student of mine at Hogwarts, and the founder of the Consortium.”

He gazed dreamily at the wall behind Hermione’s head. “Your classic Ravenclaw, really. Devoted to higher levels of thought - quite a Wunderkind in her own right - and of part-Muggle parentage, which has proven to be quite useful to her. Her father is an Israeli-born biochemist and a tenured professor at the University of Cairo; I suspect that Areli has found his contacts most useful in establishing and funding her study group under their umbrella.”

He tapped the parchment thoughtfully. “She did her advanced study in the areas of Transfiguration and Charms, but I happen to know she also has an interest in hybrid Potions and is hoping to use the Consortium to spearhead research in that field. Being aware of this, I naturally took the liberty of sending her a sample of your Protection Potion, shortly after Algie was here to administer the patent.”

He beamed. “Judging from the enthusiasm of the owl she sent in return, she’s quite anxious to have you, Hermione - NEWTs or no.”

“But -” Hermione swallowed hard. Fucking surreal. “You mean - leave Hogwarts? A whole year early? To go to -“

“College,” the Headmaster supplied serenely. At her look of patent astonishment, he shrugged.

“Well, not college in its strictest sense,” he corrected himself. “More an apprenticeship, really; Areli’s a great believer in independent study, and for most of it you’d be one-on-one with her, or with other mentors within the Consortium. After all, it’s a rather elite group as academics go. Though I believe,” he added, frowning thoughtfully, “that the University is prepared to grant you a Muggle degree, on the completion of your coursework.”

He rummaged haphazardly among the documents on his overflowing desk. “She sent me all the particulars of that - and also your housing allowance, your stipend - though I can’t seem to locate them at the moment …”

“Wait a minute,” Hermione said. Her ears were buzzing, and she thought she might faint. “I don’t think I heard you correctly. Did you say there was a stipend?”

Dumbledore nodded cheerfully.

“Oh, yes, it’s salaried - I’m quite sure of it,” he said. “Like I said before, Areli is quite eager to work with you. She’s been looking for a suitable acolyte with your particular qualifications for several years now.” He shifted another precariously leaning stack of parchment and triumphantly produced a piece of letterhead identical to Hermione’s.

“Here we are,” he said, searching through the lines of text with the tip of his quill, and named a figure that made Hermione’s eyes roll back in her head. (She wasn’t her parents’ child for nothing - she’d grown up on stories of graduate-school penury, of boxed macaroni and peanut-butter sandwiches ad nauseum at the end of the month, and she knew: assistantships just didn’t pay this well.) With considerable difficulty, she pulled herself away from the thought of that magical number and concentrated on what Dumbledore was saying.

“ … says there’s a very suitable apartment coming available in June - close to the university, and the building is wizard-owned.” He looked wickedly at her over the edge of the paper. “As you’ve probably ascertained simply through observation, our world is a tightly-knit one. In fact, you would already know your next-door neighbour; I understand young William Weasley’s been a tenant in good standing for several years now.”

“Wait,” Hermione said again, and she meant it - there was too much happening here to process, at the speed he was saying it. “I can’t quite believe this,” she said slowly. “You’re telling me that this scholar, this” - she glanced down at her letter - “Areli Ben-Nadir - wants to pay me, to come to her school and study with her? That she’s already found me an apartment?”

“Hermione,” Dumbledore said - and he’d dropped the Santa act for the moment, he was deadly serious - “this is nothing.”

She pried her jaw out of her chest and coaxed her eyebrows down from her hairline. That was the last thing she’d expected him to say.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing,” he repeated with an emphatic nod. “After the inquest is over and the truth told - after the Daily Prophet prints the story and makes the news of your discovery public - you’ll be writing your own ticket; the recruitment owls will be coming down on you like hail.” There was still no humour in his voice; he wasn’t joking, Hermione realised, and felt a little shiver work its way up her spine.

“Your hard work and persistence is about to pay off,” Dumbledore said, with as fatherly a look on his old face as she’d ever seen, “so don’t feel you have to make any decisions now. Take your time - they’ll wait for you to make the choice you feel is right.”

Hermione nodded mutely, barely hearing his words. She’d stopped listening about three sentences ago.

The excited butterflies in her stomach had compacted abruptly into a fist-sized, leaden mass, and she could find no joy - right now, anyway - in her extraordinary good fortune.

The inquest was coming up.

How could she have forgotten about that?

**

Albus Dumbledore was a kindly man, but he was also a shrewd one. As slippery as Lucius Malfoy had been in the past about his involvement with the Dark Side, he was backed into a corner now - and Albus intended to take full advantage of that fact.

Cornelius Fudge might be a shortsighted dimwit with his head in the sand, but even he couldn’t ignore this.

Hermione, despite her lower profile in the wizarding community - or perhaps because of it - made a far more credible witness, in Fudge’s eyes anyway, than Harry. And Rita Skeeter’s confession in the presence of the Ministry Auror, while not on its own a clear implication of Lucius, was certainly a convincing enough piece of circumstantial evidence to merit full Ministry investigation of the affair.

Not to mention the Angry Evil Wizard in the paperweight; for all his flippancy to Hermione in the infirmary, Albus was taking more precautions with that little jewel than he let on. After all, it was his trump card. Should Fudge prove to be stubborn - and when wasn’t he, really? - they’d simply have to Liberate their one piece of incontrovertible evidence and let the chips fall where they would.

Rita, for her part, was awaiting wizard trial in Azkaban. Lucius, on the other hand, had played his money-and-influence card yet again - for the last time, if Albus had anything to say about it - and had been granted a ‘more humane confinement’, pending trial, by direct order of Fudge.

The idiot.

Albus smiled to himself. ‘Humane’, he thought, was a very relative word.

Going along with Fudge, he’d requested that Malfoy be held at Hogwarts, and indeed that’s where he was now - wandless and Bound in a doubly- and triply-enchanted subdungeon cell not far from Salazar Slytherin’s apartments. To round off the already impressive security on the room, Slytherin himself, along with Professor Snape, had volunteered himself for round-the-clock guard duty.

Dumbledore’s lips twitched. Given the look on Severus’ face when Hermione went missing, and the sleepless night he’d spent in the infirmary, keeping fierce, implacable watch next to her bed, he wasn’t at all sure Lucius wouldn’t have preferred the company of the dementors, after all. What was that saying the Muggles had again?

He crunched thoughtfully on his Pepper Imp, ignoring the puffs of steam emanating from his ears, and smiled in sudden recollection.

Ah, yes. How could he have forgotten?

Paybacks are hell.

**