The Girl Who Lived
Albus Dumbledore apparated onto Privet Drive. He searched for something in his purple cloak until he realized that he was being watched. Looking up, he saw a tabby cat staring at him from the other end of the street. “I should have known,” he muttered, slightly put out.
He found what he was looking for in his inside pocket. He clicked what looked like a silver cigarette lighter until all the street lamps were in darkness. If anyone were to look out their windows they wouldn’t be able to see anything happening in the street. Dumbledore slipped the Put-Outer back inside his cloak and set off down the street toward number four. There he sat down on the wall next to the cat. He didn’t look at it, but after a minute he spoke to it.
“Fancy seeing you here, Professor McGonagall.”
He turned to smile at the tabby, but it had gone. Instead he was smiling at a rather severe-looking woman who was wearing square glasses exactly the shape of the markings the cat had had around its eyes. She, too, was wearing a cloak, an emerald one. Her black hair was drawn into a tight bun. She looked distinctly ruffled.
“How did you know it was me?” she asked.
“My dear Professor, I’ve never seen a cat sit so stiffly.”
“You’d be stiff if you’d been sitting on a brick wall all day,” said Professor McGonagall.
“All day? When you could have been celebrating? I must have passed a dozen feasts and parties on my way here.”
Professor McGonagall sniffed angrily.
“Oh yes, everyone’s celebrating, all right,” she said impatiently. “You’d think they’d be a bit more careful, but no – even the Muggles have noticed something’s going on. It was on their news.” She jerked her head back at the Dursleys’ dark living room window. “I heard it. Flocks of owls… shooting stars…. Well, they’re not completely stupid. They were bound to notice something.”
“You can’t blame them,” said Dumbledore. “We’ve had precious little to celebrate for eleven years.”
“I know that,” said Professor McGonagall irritably. “But that’s no reason to lose our heads over a rumor. People are being downright careless, out on the streets in broad daylight, not even dressed in Muggle clothes, swapping rumors.”
She threw a sharp, sideways glance at Dumbledore here, as though hoping he was going to tell her something, but he didn’t, so she went on. “A fine thing it would be if on the very day You-Know-Who seems to have disappeared at last, the Muggles found out about us all. I suppose he really has gone, Dumbledore?”
“It certainly seems so,” said Dumbledore. “We have much to be thankful for. Would you care for a lemon drop?”
“A what?”
“A lemon drop. They’re a kind of Muggle sweet I’m rather fond of.”
“No, thank you,” said Professor McGonagall coldly. She didn’t think this was the moment for lemon drops. “As I say, even if You-Know-Who has gone-”
“My dear Professor, surely a sensible person like yourself can call him by his name? All this ‘You-Know-Who’ nonsense – for eleven years I have been trying to persuade people to call him by his proper name: Voldemort. It all gets so confusing if we keep saying ‘You-Know-Who.’ I have never seen any reason to be frightened of saying Voldemort’s name.”
“I know you haven’t,” said Professor McGonagall, sounding slightly exasperated.
She shot a sharp look at Dumbledore and said, “The owls are nothing next to the rumors that are flying around. You know what everyone’s saying? About why he’s disappeared? About what finally stopped him?”
Professor McGonagall had reached the point she was most anxious to discuss, the real reason she had been waiting on a cold, hard wall all day, for neither as a cat not as a woman had she fixed Dumbledore with such a piercing stare as she did now. It was plain that whatever “everyone” was saying, she was not going to believe it she was given confirmation. Dumbledore, however, was choosing another lemon drop and did not answer.
“What they’re saying,” she pressed on, “is that last night Voldemort turned up in Godric’s Hollow. He went to find the Potters. The rumor is that lily and James Potter are – are – that they’re – dead.”
Dumbledore bowed his head. Professor McGonagall gasped.
“Lily and James… I can’t believe it… I didn’t want to believe it… Oh, Albus…”
Dumbledore reached out and patted her on the shoulder. “I know… I know…” he said heavily.
Professor McGonagall’s voice trembled as she went on. “That’s not all. They’re saying he tried to kill the Potters’ daughter, Anastasia. But – he couldn’t. He couldn’t kill that little girl. No one knows why, or how, but they’re saying that when he couldn’t kill Anastasia Potter, Voldemort’s power somehow broke – and that’s why he’s gone.”
Dumbledore nodded glumly.
“It’s – it’s true?” faltered Professor McGonagall. “After all he’s done… all the people he’s killed… he couldn’t kill a little girl? It’s just astounding… of all the things to stop him… but how in the name of heaven did Anastasia survive?”
“We can only guess,” said Dumbledore. “We may never know.”
Professor McGonagall pulled out a lace handkerchief and dabbed at her eyes beneath her spectacles. Dumbledore’s vagueness would often make her wonder what he was holding back. Dumbledore put his watch back in his pocket and said, “Hagrid’s late. I suppose it was he who told you I’d be here, by the way?”
“Yes,” said Professor McGonagall. “And I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me why you’re here, of all places?”
“I’ve come to bring Anastasia to her aunt and uncle. They’re the only family she has left now.”
“You don’t mean – you can’t mean the people who live here?” cried Professor McGonagall, jumping to her feet and pointing at number four. “Dumbledore – you can’t. I’ve been watching them all day. You couldn’t find two people who are less like us. And they’ve got this son – I saw him kicking his mother all the way up the street, screaming for sweets. Anastasia Potter come and live here! And they aren’t her only family! Lily has another sister.”
“It’s the best place for her,” said Dumbledore firmly. “It’s stable and her aunt and uncle will be able to explain everything to her when she’s older. I’ve written them a letter.”
“A letter?” repeated Professor McGonagall faintly, sitting back down on the wall. “Really, Dumbledore, you think you can explain all this in a letter? These people will never understand her! She’ll be famous – a legend – I wouldn’t be surprised if today was known as Anastasia Potter Day in the future there will be books written about Anastasia – every child in our world will know her name!”
“Exactly,” said Dumbledore, looking very seriously over the top of his half-moon glasses. “It would be enough to turn any girl’s head. Famous before she can walk and talk! Famous for something she won’t even remember! Can’t you see how much better off she’ll be, growing up away from all that until she’s ready to take it?”
Professor McGonagall opened her mouth, changed her mind, swallowed, and then said, “Yes – yes, you’re right, of course,” which was in complete contrast to how she actually felt. “But how is Anastasia getting here, Dumbledore?”
“Hagrid’s bringing her.”
“You think it – wise – to trust Hagrid with something as important as this?”
“I would trust Hagrid with my life,” said Dumbledore.
“I’m not saying his heart isn’t in the right place,” said Professor McGonagall grudgingly, “but you can’t pretend he’s not carless. He does tend to – what was that?”
A low rumbling sound had broken the silence around them. It grew steadily louder as they looked up and down the street for some sign of a headlight; it swelled to a roar as they both looked up at the sky – and a huge motorcycle fell out of the air and landed on the road in front of them.
If the motorcycle was huge, it was nothing to the man sitting astride it. He was almost twice as tall as a normal man and at least five times as wide. He looked simply too big to be allowed, and so wild – long tangles of bushy black hair and beard hid most of his face, he had hands the size of trash can lids, and his feet in their leather boots were like baby dolphins. In his vast, muscular arms he was holding a bundle of blankets.
“Hagrid,” said Dumbledore, sounding relived. “At last. And where did you get that motorcycle?”
“Borrowed it, Professor Dumbledore, sir,” said the giant climbing carefully off the motorcycle as he spoke. “Young Sirius Black lent it to me. I’ve got her, sire.”
“No problems, were there?”
“No, sir – she fell asleep on the flight down.”
Dumbledore and Professor McGonagall bent forward over the bundle of blankets. Inside, just visible, was a baby girl, fast asleep. Under a tuft of jet-black hair over her forehead they could see a curiously shaped cut, like a bolt of lightning.
“Is that where - ?” whispered Professor McGonagall.
“Yes,” said Dumbledore. “She’ll have that scar forever.”
“Couldn’t you do something about it Dumbledore?”
“Even if I could, I wouldn’t. Scars can come in handy. Well – give her here, Hagrid – we’d better get this over with.”
Dumbledore took Anastasia in his arms and turned toward the Dursleys’ house.
Professor McGonagall gingerly patted a sobbing Hagrid on the arm as Dumbledore stepped over the low garden wall and walked to the front door. He laid Anastasia gently on the doorstep, took a letter out of his cloak, tucked it inside Anastasia’s blankets, and then came back to the other two, to the fury of Professor McGonagall. He could knock on the door and actually hand Anastasia to her aunt or at the least put some warming and protective charms around her.
For a full minute the three of them stood and looked at the little bundle; Hagrid’s shoulders shook, Professor McGonagall blinked furiously, and the twinkling light that usually shone from Dumbledore’s eyes was faint but still there.
“Well,” said Dumbledore finally, “that’s that. We’ve no business staying here. We may as well go and join the celebrations.”
“Yeah,” said Hagrid in a very muffled voice, “I’d best get this bike away. G’night, Professor McGonagall – Professor Dumbledore, sir.”
Wiping his streaming eyes on his jacket sleeve, Hagrid swung himself onto the motorcycle and kicked the engine into life; with a roar it rose into the air and off into the night.
“I shall see you soon, I expect, Professor McGonagall,” said Dumbledore, nodding to her. Professor McGonagall blew her nose in reply.
Dumbledore turned and walked back down the street. On the corner he stopped and took out the silver Put-Outer. He clicked it once, and twelve balls of light sped back to their street lamps so that Privet Drive glowed suddenly orange and he could make out a tabby cat slinking around the corner at the other end of the street. He could just see the bundle of blankets on the step of number four.
“Good luck, Anastasia,” he murmured. “You’ll need it.” He turned on his heel and with a swish of his cloak, he was gone.
A tabby cat slipped back down Privet Drive to number four. Professor McGonagall curled up next to the infant Anastasia to keep her warm and safe through the night. She wasn’t sure how she was going to do it, yet, but she was going to make it so her goddaughter would grow up with Lily’s sister Mary, not Petunia.
Anastasia Potter rolled over inside her blankets without waking up. One small hand closed on the letter beside her and she slept on, not knowing she was special, not knowing she was famous, not knowing she would be woken in a few hours’ time by Mrs. Dursley’s scream as she opened the front door to put out the milk bottles, nor everything that she’d end up going through… She couldn’t know that at this very moment, people meeting in secret all over the country were holding up their glasses and saying in hushed voices: “To Anastasia Potter – the girl who lived!”