Leo frowned. "That's a really long shot, Rose. If you're thinking about advertising to this person that we have the diary just for the reason of checking whether he was the one who also opened the Chamber and killed the basilisk, please remember that if Pettigrew or Voldemort or somebody else figures out that we have the diary, we're in deep trouble."
"That's why we'd have to be careful," Rose said lamely, suddenly realizing that her plan was flawed.
"Further," Leo reasoned, "the chances are that this mysterious person knows nothing about the Chamber. How will writing a letter to them about it be a bribe?"
Rose shook her head and paced around the room for a bit, looking rather unhappy. Abruptly, she stopped and her face brightened.
"You've got it figured out, haven't you?" Leo said resignedly.
"Yes," Rose said. "We can send an extremely cryptic letter. If they know about the diary, or are even wondering about the diary, they will probably pick it out of what we say."
"And if they know nothing about the diary or the letter is too cryptic?"
Rose grinned widely. "The cryptic nature of the letter will rouse their curiosity and draw them out from hiding!"
"Maybe," Leo said.
.....
A sheen of sweat shined on Bellatrix's face as she leaned over a table in her library-laboratory loft and made a number of small notations on a sheet of parchment. She picked up her wand and proceeded to the center of the room. Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath before opening them again. She drew her wand in a flash of motion.
"Strike, strike, shield, step left, strike, strike, strike, step right, shield," she said tersely as she sped through the exercise, motioning with her wand as if actually casting spells and dueling another combatant.
Frowning, she returned to the table and examined her notes on the parchment. She made another set of notations and returned to the center of the room.
"Strike, strike, step left, strike, major strike, step right, strike, strike, strike, step right, strike," she intoned, moving quickly and smoothly enough to make it look as though she was dancing. She repeated the pattern again, inverting the steps. After that, she started from the beginning repeating the pattern and its inversion nearly a dozen times before stopping to take a breath.
Feeling rather satisfied with the pattern and inversion, Bellatrix returned to the parchment on her worktable and used a quill to circle the set of directions on the parchment. She folded the parchment in half and slipped it into her dueling manual between the pages that detailed drills for standing ground in a duel. The drills in the book were good and Bellatrix had already mastered them, but she had long ago concluded that she needed to introduce her own patterns or else run the risk of having an opponent recognize the strategies from the well-known book-at least the book that had been well-known over twenty years ago.
She had just flipped to the drills for forcing an opponent back and gaining ground when a popping noise announced the arrival of Kreacher. Bellatrix glanced at the house elf and quickly saw that he was holding a parchment envelope in his hands.
"Not twice in the same day," she growled.
"Kreacher received the letter from someone else," the house elf announced. "Not Master Sirius."
"That makes it so much better," Bellatrix said sarcastically, accepting the letter from the house elf. She performed a number of charms to ascertain that nothing was amiss with the parchment envelope before opening it.
Inside, Bellatrix found a number of clippings from the Daily Prophet. She pushed aside her dueling manual and laid the clippings on the table, organizing them chronologically as she read them, one by one. Ostensibly, the articles reported on a series of unfortunate events that had occurred at Hogwarts between the start of term and the beginning of the Christmas holiday. Howbeit, the articles were rather short on details about the events and rather heavy on political rhetoric, apparently engineered by Minister Prewitt. The first article did not even describe the crime that had supposedly taken place to ignite the outrage.
"We will take any steps necessary to get to the bottom of this matter," Minister Prewitt was quoted as saying. "Director Crouch and I shall personally lead the investigation. Truth serums will be administered to each and every student. Not only will we root out the culprit, but we will root out anyone who has sympathies toward the dark lord."
Another article went so far as to admit that students had been attacked by a person or creature unknown, but implied that Minister Prewitt and his trusty aurors had personally discovered the occurrence of the attacks through their dutiful actions-almost as if students and teachers would not have known the crimes had occurred without the Ministry discovering them.
Thanks to the diligence of the aurors, the article claimed, it appeared that no students had died, though someone purporting to be the Heir of Slytherin had terrorized the school, injured students, and committed acts of extreme vandalism.
By the fourth article, Bellatrix realized that the Chamber of Secrets had apparently been opened. She grinned slyly as she contemplated how Voldemort must have felt when he or whomever he sent had discovered that the basilisk was already dead.
Eventually, Bellatrix got to the final article. It was very short and briefly informed readers that Professor Dumbledore and his associates had resolved the situation. At the bottom of the stack of newspaper clippings was a short note.
Peter Pettigrew was exposed as being a Death Eater. He escaped, but he lost something in the process.
Bellatrix frowned thoughtfully, staring at the note. So what? Bellatrix mused.
....
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