Unwound a moth-eaten black shawl, revealing a head of scant white hair through which

The scalp showed clearly.

"Bathilda?" Harry repeated.

She nodded again. Harry became aware of the locket against his skin; the thing inside it

That sometimes ticked or beat had woken; he could feel it pulsing through the cold gold.

Did it know, could it sense, that the thing that would destroy it was near?

Bathilda shuffled past them, pushing Hermione aside as though she had not seen her, and

Vanished into what seemed to be a sitting room.

"Harry, I'm not sure about this," breathed Hermione.

"Look at the size of her, I think we could overpower her if we had to," said Harry. "Listen,

I should have told you, I knew she wasn't all there. Muriel called her 'gaga.'"

"Come!" called Bathilda from the next room.

Hermione jumped and clutched Harry's arm.

"It's okay," said Harry reassuringly, and he led the way into the sitting room.

Bathilda was tottering around the place lighting candles, but it was still very dark, not to

mention extremely dirty. Thick dust crunched beneath their feet, and Harry's nose

Detected, underneath the dank and mildewed smell, something worse, like meat gone bad.

He wondered when was the last time anyone had been inside Bathilda's house to check

Whether she was coping. She seemed to have forgotten that she could do magic, too, for

She lit the candles clumsily by hand, her trailing lace cuff in constant danger of catching

Fire.

"Let me do that," offered Harry, and he took the matches from her. She stood watching

Him as he finished lighting the candle stubs that stood on saucers around the room,

Perched precariously on stacks of books and on side tables crammed with cracked and

Moldy cups.

The last surface on which Harry spotted a candle was a bow-fronted chest of drawers on

Which there stood a large number of photographs. When the flame danced into life, its

Reflection wavered on their dusty glass and silver. He saw a few tiny movements from the

pictures. As Bathilda fumbled with logs for the fire, he muttered "Tergeo": The dust

Vanished from the photographs, and he saw at once that half a dozen were missing from

The largest and most ornate frames. He wondered whether Bathilda or somebody else had

Removed them. Then the sight of a photograph near the back of the collection caught his

Eye, and he snatched it up.

It was the golden-haired, merry-faced thief, the young man who had perched on

Gregorovitch's windowsill, smiling lazily up at Harry out of the silver frame. And it came

to Harry instantly where he had seen the boy before: in The Life and Lies of Albus

Dumbledore, arm in arm with the teenage Dumbledore, and that must be where all the

missing photographs were: in Rita's book.

"Mrs. -- Miss -- Bagshot?" he said, and his voice shook slightly. "Who is this?"

Bathilda was standing in the middle of the room watching Hermione light the fire for her.

"Miss Bagshot?" Harry repeated, and he advanced with the picture in his hands as the

Flames burst into life in the fireplace. Bathilda looked up at his voice, and the Horcrux

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 674