Start, and perhaps Disillusionment Charms would be sensible too, unless you think we

should go the whole hog and use Polyjuice Potion? In that case we’ll need to collect hair

from somebody. I actually think we’d better do that, Harry, the thicker our disguises the

better. . . .”

Harry let her talk, nodding and agreeing whenever there was a pause, but his mind

Had left the conversation. For the first time since he had discovered that the sword in

Gringotts was a fake, he felt excited.

He was about to go home, about to return to the place where he had had a family.

It was in Godric’s Hollow that, but for Voldemort, he would have grown up and spent

Every school holiday. He could have invited friends to his house. . . . He might even have

Had brothers and sisters. . . . It would have been his mother who had made his

Seventeenth birthday cake. The life he had lost had hardly ever seemed so real to him as

At this moment, when he knew he was about to see the place where it had been taken

From him. After Hermione had gone to bed that night, Harry quietly extracted his

rucksack from Hermione’s beaded bag, and from inside it, the photograph album Hagrid

Had given him so long ago. For the first time in months, he perused the old pictures of his

Parents, smiling and waving up at him from the images, which were all he had left of

Them now.

Harry would gladly have set out for Godric’s Hollow the following day, but

Hermione had other ideas. Convinced as she was that Voldemort would expect Harry to

return to the scene of his parents’ deaths, she was determined that they would set off only

After they had ensured that they had the best disguises possible. It was therefore a full

week later – once they had surreptitiously obtained hairs from innocent Muggles who

Were Christmas shopping, and had practiced Apparating and Disapparating while

underneath the Invisibility Cloak together – that Hermione agreed to make the journey.

They were to Apparate to the village under cover of darkness, so it was late

Afternoon when they finally swallowed Polyjuice Potion, Harry transforming into a

Balding, middle-aged Muggle man, Hermione into his small and rather mousy wife. The

Beaded bag containing all of their possessions (apart from the Horcrux, which Harry was

wearing around his neck) was tucked into an inside pocket of Hermione’s buttoned-up

Coat. Harry lowered the Invisibility Cloak over them, then they turned into the

Suffocating darkness once again.

Heart beating in his throat, Harry opened his eyes. They were standing hand in

hand in a snowy lane under a dark blue sky, in which the night’s first stars were already

Glimmering feebly. Cottages stood on either side of the narrow road, Christmas

Decorations twinkling in their windows. A short way ahead of them, a glow of golden

Streetlights indicated the center of the village.

“All this snow!” Hermione whispered beneath the cloak. “Why didn’t we think of

snow? After all our precautions, we’ll leave prints! We’ll just have to get rid of them –

you go in front, I’ll do it –“

Harry did not want to enter the village like a pantomime horse, trying to keep

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 792