Harry Potter: Master of Talismans

For the first few days at home, doing nothing was excellent. I slept late and ate food Emma had not posted to Scotland. The television was less accommodating: the programme I wanted was on at the wrong time, and changing channels did little to improve the alternatives. My other life had left me with unreasonable expectations about entertainment arriving whenever I asked for it.

By the end of the week, I was organising notes for amusement. Hermione was away with her parents, removing the person most likely to consider that a healthy use of the holidays. When she was home, we spoke on the telephone. She described places with enough detail that I began wondering whether she intended to revise them for an examination afterwards.

Harry rang too. At first he sounded surprised each time I answered, as though he expected the number to stop working between calls. We talked about the photographs, the coming year and almost anything that was not Privet Drive. I was glad to hear his voice without a hospital curtain between us, and did not hurry the conversations.

Ron’s first letter arrived with his family’s elderly owl. The bird misjudged its approach and struck the window frame with a noise that brought Emma running. She asked whether it was dead, and it shook itself before holding out its leg, apparently offended by the interruption to its work. I gave it water and waited until it had recovered before sending my reply.

It became a regular visitor over the following weeks, though its landings never inspired confidence. Hermione told me it had knocked over a vase at her house. When she complained that she had owned it for less than a day, I asked whether she meant the owl. She said my name in the tone usually reserved for a deliberately misread instruction.

I added an owl of my own to the list of things to buy before term. I also selected fresh treated Runebark from the reserve at home and packed it flat. Ken’s supply was smaller than it had been the previous summer; between schoolwork and experiments, I could see where some of it had gone. I set aside what I expected to need without pretending the remaining stack would last indefinitely.

The list acquired ordinary supplies, materials to ask about and questions for Ollivander. Dumbledore had suggested he might explain more about the brush-wand, and I had spent a year finding further questions to take him. There was another idea too, with very little connection to inscriptions. I brought that one to Emma over breakfast.

‘Shops,’ she repeated. She lowered her cup and looked at the pages I had put beside her plate. ‘You’ve been away at school for a year. Most children come home wanting a bicycle.’

‘I’ve got a broom.’ Her expression suggested that this did not count as a reply, so I opened the notes at the part I had actually prepared. ‘A few established businesses in Diagon Alley. I wouldn’t be starting them from nothing.’

A new shop would need customers, staff and somebody who understood what people in the magical world wanted to buy. Existing businesses already had those things. Their managers knew far more than I did about running them, which seemed a sensible reason to keep the managers. Emma listened until I had finished, then summarised my plan as buying businesses I did not know how to operate.

‘And keeping the people who do,’ I added. She turned a page and found the bookshop. I pointed out that people continued needing books, a proposition my first year had supported rather thoroughly.

She did not agree that morning. She asked what the purchases would cost, who would handle problems while I was at Hogwarts and what I expected to happen if a business spent more than it earned. By the time she put down the pages, my plan had acquired several large holes. I worked on the ones I could answer and took the rest to people who knew more.

The family’s advisers found somebody who dealt with transactions in the magical world. Meetings, valuations and papers followed, none as exciting as ownership had sounded at breakfast. Emma read them with me. The signatures required for a twelve-year-old beneficiary went through the estate; enthusiasm was not accepted in place of the proper arrangements.

I chose businesses whose managers would remain. Flourish and Blotts was one, with a restaurant and another small shop nearby completing the purchases we eventually agreed. Money left the accounts in amounts that mattered even when the projections suggested it might return. The sellers’ pleasure in receiving it was considerably easier to understand than some of the paperwork.

‘Busy doesn’t always mean profitable,’ Emma reminded me when I showed her the restaurant’s figures. I told her I knew, then admitted under her steady look that I knew now. She returned the papers and let me work through them again.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

The bookshop’s manager, Tom, seemed relieved that I did not intend to replace the staff or select every title myself. When I said I already had enough homework without rearranging the shelves, he smiled and suggested we might get along. I left the ordinary running of the shop with him. For a while I enjoyed having something that was neither a mystery Ken had left behind nor a problem Hogwarts had hidden beneath a dangerous animal.

Then Emma became ill, and the papers lost most of their interest. The doctor came to the house and told her to rest. I discovered that knowing somebody needed sleep did not stop me finding reasons to pass their bedroom every half-hour. On the fourth trip, she called through the door that she was sleeping.

‘You sound quite awake,’ I answered. She said I made sleeping difficult, which sent me downstairs without a convincing defence. I tried to read a business report and realised after ten minutes that I had reached the same paragraph three times.

Harry’s calls had already become less frequent. He wrote that the Dursleys had discovered the restrictions on magic outside school. Having a wizard in the house had apparently become less intimidating once they understood he could not demonstrate what that meant. Hedwig brought his next letters, allowing us to keep talking when the telephone became inconvenient.

Then those letters stopped too. I tried calling and sent replies, but neither produced an answer from him. Hermione asked whether I had heard anything; Ron began putting the same question in his letters. After two weeks, it no longer felt like a friend being busy. We knew enough about Vernon to imagine him restricting the post as well as the telephone, but imagining that did not tell us what was happening inside the house.

Ron invited me to the Burrow. The next lines explained that he wanted to discuss getting Harry out. I looked at the address in Devon, then towards the stairs, and wrote that I could not leave while Emma was ill. I asked him to tell me as soon as he heard anything and offered to help with arrangements I could manage from home. Staying meant missing the chance to see Harry, but going would have meant leaving somebody else I was worried about.

For a few days, nothing came back. When the reply finally arrived, I read it beside the window while the owl recovered from another ambitious landing. Ron, Fred and George had taken their father’s car to Privet Drive. The following sentence clarified that their father’s car could fly, which explained one part of the plan without improving its overall respectability.

They had found Harry shut in his room and brought him to the Burrow. Ron’s description involved bars, a narrow escape and Vernon making an unsuccessful attempt to stop them. I read it twice, suspecting that one of the twins had contributed to the more impressive phrases. At the bottom, Harry had added in his own handwriting that he was all right.

I sat down and kept looking at those words. They mattered more than the car, the escape or the possibility that Ron had embroidered the route home. Eventually I took the letter upstairs. Emma was sitting by the window with a book and looked much more like herself than she had for days.

‘They took a car?’ she asked when I finished. I said its ability to fly appeared to be the important part. She replied that this did not make it sound better, and I agreed, then pointed to Harry’s message. He was out of the house. She looked at the handwriting and stopped asking about the car.

Ron had invited me to meet them in Diagon Alley that afternoon. The school list had arrived a week earlier, but I had barely opened it while Emma was ill. Now I took it out beside her breakfast tray and found The Standard Book of Spells, Grade Two at the top. That seemed a reasonable beginning. The rest appeared to be one unusually confident traveller’s collected adventures.

There were banshees, ghouls, trolls and werewolves. Holidays with Hags sounded like something one should be allowed to decline politely. Every title returned to the same author, Gilderoy Lockhart. I read the list again in case some modest textbook had hidden itself among his accomplishments.

‘I’ve bought a bookshop in time to buy this man’s entire life,’ I told Emma. She took the list and suggested he might be our new teacher. That was precisely what I had begun to fear. After Quirrell, I had hoped Defence might become a class whose most memorable feature was the quality of its lessons.

I left early, with the doctor satisfied by Emma’s improvement and a neighbour due to call. Emma offered to come, but I persuaded her to rest instead and asked her not to attempt a full day’s housework merely because standing up felt better. She received the instructions with an expression I recognised from being told not to experiment. Apparently, neither of us enjoyed sensible advice delivered by the other.

Diagon Alley was busy when I arrived. My first stop was the owl shop, where choosing a bird took longer than adding one to the list had done. The one I settled on watched from a high perch with the intent stare of a creature deciding whether I deserved its time. Pale edges broke up the markings on its feathers, and the tufts above its head gave it an untidy dignity.

The shopkeeper called it an eagle-owl. I named it Leo, which produced no visible enthusiasm from the bird. He turned his head away while I paid and arranged the equipment he would need. His manner suggested that ownership would involve frequent opportunities to disappoint him.

I asked the shopkeeper to keep Leo until I finished my other errands. Outside, I checked the time and found plenty of morning left before meeting Ron and Harry. I folded the list into my pocket and headed towards Ollivanders, trying to decide which of a year’s unanswered questions should come first.