Exotic Matter | Harry Potter for Grownups

Chapter One

Well, here we are, Mr Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Time's a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?
~ Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad

The smell of old parchment and ink sends a thrill of nostalgia through Hermione. It's been a long time since she's sat in an office like this one, with its antique mahogany desk and shelves of leather-bound books.

"You were the first person we considered for the job," Mr Babcock says when they exchange the necessary pleasantries and get down to discussing the matter at hand.

Hermione can't quite believe that, but she lets him go on.

"Your edition of Hogwarts: A History was masterful."

"That was twenty years ago, Mr Babcock. I've retired from editing."

"Yes, but we thought we could tempt you out of retirement for this project. We're prepared to offer you a substantial advance."

Hermione has little interest in the advance, although a bit of extra money wouldn't hurt now that Ron has taken his retirement from the Aurors. What stayed Hermione's initial impulse to decline the meeting with Diagon Alley's oldest publisher was the project Mr Babcock dangled in front of her: a complete revision of his company's flagship property, the National Dictionary of Wizarding Biography.

"No one is as qualified as you for the modernisation of important reference works, Madam Granger-Weasley," Babcock says.

What he means is that no one is as likely to quell complaints that the book leans heavily towards pure-bloods and wizards. He wants her for her name, not her editorial skills. Nevertheless, she knew before she even met Mauritius Babcock that she'd take the job.

"I have a few conditions," she says.

"Name them."

"One, I get approval on all writers for the project. Two, I control the editorial budget. Three, I write the entries of my choosing."

Babcock adjusts his collar and says, "Done."

~oOo~

Childress's office is a welcome oasis in an edifice that is, given its purpose, peculiarly modern. Or "modern", Hermione thinks, adding the editorial quotation marks in her head.

The National Museum of Wizarding History has that sleek, airy look, at the same time brightly optimistic and grimly industrial, that was so popular in the first decades of the twenty-first century. It's meant to evoke the clean, uncluttered future everyone hoped would be forthcoming after the upheavals of the previous century, but it just depresses Hermione.

Like everything else, this shiny new building will eventually become a relic, a fixed point in a transient story, representing nothing more than the particular anxieties of its era.

The curator of the museum's rare manuscripts division has attempted to mitigate the unrelenting glare of the glass, cement, and metal of his surroundings with reassuring materials from a bygone era, and Hermione's shoulders relax as she sits in a chair upholstered in cracked cognac-coloured leather.

"You have your work cut out for you, Madam Granger-Weasley," Childress is saying. "There's an enormous amount there. We accessioned all the books and papers after the Ministry finally released McGonagall's estate from probate last year, but we simply haven't had time to go through it all, what with the modernisation project.

"Modernisation?"

"We're Transfiguring all the museum's books and papers from parchment to digital format."

The shadow that passes across his face is gone as quickly as it has come, and Hermione feels a glimmer of sympathy. She sometimes imagines that she is suspended in the ether, watching helplessly as time strips away the familiar and the dear.

"I quite understand," she says.

What she does not voice aloud is her suspicion that the proper archiving of Minerva McGonagall's papers will never be a priority. Minerva, to Hermione's everlasting annoyance, is generally treated as a footnote in the Dumbledore hagiography.

She suppresses an urge to sigh when Childress smiles across the desk at her and asks the only question anyone ever seems to have about Minerva.

"So, are you going to solve the mystery about where she went after the war?"

~oOo~

Twenty minutes later, she's seated at one of the pristine cement-slab desks in a chilly reading room and tries not to think about how much she'd rather be in a dusty carrel in the bowels of the Bodleian.

As Childress implied, Minerva's papers are a disorganised mess. At least they're well cared-for: the protective spells are all in place, a Bubble Charm around the boxes to keep moisture out and oxidisation to a minimum. And Childress's young assistant goes through proper handling procedure with her. She doesn't have the heart to tell him that she was doing this decades before he was born, so she lets him show her the variation of the Impervious for her fingers and the correct way to turn pages with her wand so as to flex the leaves as little as possible.

She takes an hour or so to organise everything into vaguely chronological order, then begins looking at letters, surprisingly affectionate, from Lachlan McGonagall to his daughter, apparently the only personal things from her Hogwarts years that she kept. They shed little light on Minerva's life at the time, although Hermione gathers that young Minerva had trouble making friends.

A crinkled Muggle photo is enclosed with one of the letters. On the back is written in faded script: Moorehead, 1934.

Scanning the faces of pinafored little girls, she homes in on one in the second row from the top. The girl has long plaits and wears a serious expression that Hermione thinks she recognises. Of course, all the girls in the picture look sombre, and she supposes that life in the upper reaches of Caithness circa 1934 gave them little to smile about.

Making a note of the school's name and the date, she replaces the photo with the letter and puts them back into the envelope.