The Potter Twins and the Deathly Hallows {7}

19. The Greater Good

Hermione reads the few lines of spiky, acid-green writing aloud. "'Dear Batty, Thanks for your help. Here's a copy of the book, hope you like it. You said everything, even if you don't remember it. Rita.' I think it must have arrived while the real Bathilda was alive, but perhaps she wasn't in any fit state to read it?"

"No, she probably wasn't."

I look down upon Dumbledore's face and experience a surge of savage pleasure: Now that I will know all the things that Dumbledore never thought it worth telling us, whether Dumbledore wanted us to or not. 

"You're still really angry with me, aren't you?" Hermione says; I look up to see fresh tears leaking out of her eyes. Though I wasn't looking at him, I know he must have shown anger in his face. 

"No," he says quietly. "No, Hermione, I know it was an accident. You were trying to get us out of there alive, and you were incredible. We'd be dead if you hadn't been there to help us."

I try to return her watery smile, then turn my attention to the book. Its spine is stiff; it has clearly never been opened before. I riffle through the pages, looking for photographs. I come across the one I'm seeking almost at once, the young Dumbledore and his handsome companion, roaring with laughter at some long forgotten joke. I drop my eyes to the caption.

Albus Dumbledore, shortly after his mother's death, with his friend Gellert Grindelwald. 

I gape at the last word for several long moments. Grindelwald. His friend Grindelwald. I feel numb, and Dumbledore's words echo in my head: Oh, we were closer than brothers. I look sideways at the others; Harry has reached the same conclusion as me, but Hermione still appears to be contemplating the name as though she cannot believe her eyes. Slowly, she looks up at us. 

"Grindelwald?"

Ignoring the rest of the photographs, I search the pages around them for a recurrence of that fatal name. I soon discover it and read it greedily, but become lost: It is necessary for me to go back to make sense of it all, and eventually I find myself at the start of a chapter entitled "The Greater Good". Together, we begin to read:

Now approaching his eighteenth birthday, Dumbledore left Hogwarts in a blaze of glory -- Head Boy, Prefect, Winner of the Barnabas Finkley Prize for Exceptional Spell-Casting, British Youth Representative to the Wizengamot, Gold Medal-Winner for Ground Breaking Contribution to the International Alchemical Conference in Cairo. Dumbledore intended, next, to take a Grand Tour with Elphias "Dogbreath" Doge, the dim-witted but devoted sidekick he had picked up at school. 
The two young men were staying at the Leaky Cauldron in London, preparing to depart for Greece the following morning, when an owl arrived bearing news of Dumbledore's mother's death. "Dogbreath" doge, who refused to be interviewed for this book, has given his the public his own sentimental version of what happened next. He represents Kendra's death as a tragic blow, and Dumbledore's decision to give up his expedition as an act of noble self-sacrifice. 

Certainly Dumbledore returned to Godric's Hollow at once, supposedly to "care" for his younger brother and sister. But how much care did he actually give them?

"He were a head case, that Aberforth," says Enid Smeek, whose family lived on the outskirts of Godric's Hollow at the time. "Ran wild. 'Course, with his mum and dad gone you'd have felt sorry for him, only he kept chucking goat dung at my head. I don't thin Albus was fussed about him, I never saw them together, anyway."

So what was Albus doing, if not comforting his wild young brother? The answer, it seems, is ensuring the continued imprisonment of his sister. For, though her first jailer had died, there was no change in the pitiful condition of Ariana Dumbledore. Her very existence continued to be known only to those few outsiders who, like "Dogbreath" Doge, could be counted upon to believe in the story of her "ill health."