Chapters 11-20

Experiments

Three days later, Hermione sat cross-legged on the sofa in the Gryffindor common room. On her lap rested a fat, leather-bound tome, the parchment brittle with age. Crookshanks, who was enjoying the emptiness of the tower sprawled out magnificently in one of the squashy armchairs near the fireplace.

It was almost midnight, but Pliny’s ‘The Natural History’ was not only part of the reading list provided for her by Professor Slughorn—it was actually very interesting.

There is a wild purslain, she read, of which remarkable properties are mentioned. It neutralizes the effects, it is said, of poisoned arrows, and the venom of snakes…

She closed the book. Snakes. Venom. She really didn’t want to read about that. She didn’t want to think about that. A glance at the clock told her that it was already midnight, but in spite of the fact that she had an early lesson at the greenhouses in the morning—herbs had to be harvested before the sun grew warm—she didn’t want to go to bed. She was not nearly tired enough to be able to sleep without nightmares. Briefly she contemplated Dreamless Sleep Potion. She shook her head. It was strong, it was habit-forming, and she knew she’d taken too much of it in the last months.

Better to do something constructive, she thought. Something to advance the plan of turning herself into an apprentice Snape would appreciate.

‘Crooks, I’m off to the dungeons to do some brewing. Are you coming?’

The cat turned its back, curling curled up into a tight ball. Hermione raised an eyebrow. Well, that was a clear answer at least.

oooOooo

Her footfalls echoed in the empty corridors and staircases. With no students in residence, the teachers didn’t patrol the castle at night. Only Filch did his usual round at ten o’clock, making sure that all windows were shut and all candles extinguished. As Hermione was about to enter the narrow staircase that led from the Entrance Hall down to the dungeons, one of the new epitaphs engraved in the castle’s walls caught her eye. The stones for the epitaphs had been sandblasted. They stood out bright and cream-coloured against the age-darkened walls of the castle. She knew that the castle itself had chosen the verse for each marker. This one read:

She must have been one of the students who slipped back into Hogwarts with Colin Creevey, Hermione realised. She’d heard that name before but where? Montgomery…oh, of course. The Montgomery sisters. Morgaine and Madeleine. Their little brother had been killed by Fenrir Greyback. Now there was only Madeleine left. Hermione tried to call up a face to go with the name, but nothing would come to mind. Morgaine had been a Fourth Year when she was killed, likely in another house, so it was not really surprising that Hermione didn’t know her.

But as she stood in the twilight of the Entrance Hall, staring at the marker, she couldn’t help feeling that she ought to have known her.

oooOooo

The door of the Potions Master’s office was closed and Hermione hurried past it. The castle was cold in April, the dungeons positively icy. Once inside the Potions classroom, the first thing she did was light up a roaring fire and call up enough witch lights to illuminate the room brighter than she had ever seen it before. Without thinking, she went to her usual seat, a routine formed in six years of Potions lessons twice a week and a fair number of detentions served in that very same place. But when she was about to place her books on the desk, she hesitated. She wasn’t a pupil any longer, for all that she was still studying for her NEWTs right now. She would never sit there again in a Potions Class, while her teacher stalked the room, glaring at her for her eagerness to get on with the discussion.Hermione inhaled deeply and deliberately moved to the next desk. That one had been Neville’s. She was reasonably sure that the desk wasn’t cursed, as her friend had once claimed. Only his fear of the professor had made him so nervous and clumsy in class.

‘All right,’ she muttered. ‘Now let’s try something completely new.’

Reading the Half-Blood Prince’s notes along with Lily’s Potions Diary had given her some ideas her fingers were itching to try out.

Maybe because she had such trouble sleeping, she had been thinking about sleeping potions and their dangers a lot lately. She had even drawn up a chart to compare the various elixirs and philtres, and discovered a strange similarity: all of them relied rather heavily on magic for such natural effects as sleep and rest.

Her father had been very interested in homeopathy, and somehow the common factor among popular sleeping draughts had reminded Hermione of a discussion they had once had.

‘We have become so used to taking Aspirin and Tylenol that we never think about alternatives anymore. A bias. Of course there are situations when you need all those drugs, but very often a natural remedy would suffice, or even work better. It’s like this—when all you use is a hammer, eventually all your problems start looking like nails …’

She sighed. She missed her father’s wry humour so much.

‘Magic’s definitely the hammer here,’ she mused, setting out Valerian roots, skullcap, California poppy, hops, passion flower, chamomile and nutmeg on the desk. ‘If I treat magic only as the very last and minor ingredient, used at just the right time, in just the right way to turn this into something more than a simple tea, the result should be quite different from the regular sleeping draughts. Much milder, but still efficacious. Of course, if I’m wrong I might be cooking up a pot of poison …’

Hermione grinned, when an irreverent thought struck her: Snape would likely approve either way.