Головна |
"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 beat faster upon his chest.
"Who is this person?" Harry asked her, pushing the picture forward.
She peered at it solemnly, then up at Harry.
"Do you know who this is?" he repeated in a much slower and louder voice than usual. "This man? Do you know him? What's he called?"
Bathilda merely looked vague. Harry felt an awful frustration. How had Rita Skeeter unlocked Bathilda's memories?
"Who is this man?" he repeated loudly.
"Harry, what are you doing?" asked Hermione.
"This picture. Hermione, it's the thief, the thief who stole from Gregorovitch! Please!" he said to Bathilda. "Who is this?"
But she only stared at him.
"Why did you ask us to come with you, Mrs.-Miss-Bagshot?" asked Hermione, raising her own voice. "Was there something you wanted to tell us?"
Giving no sign that she had heard Hermione, Bathilda now shuffled a few steps closer to Harry. With a little jerk of her head she looked back into the hall.
"You want us to leave?" he asked.
She repeated the gesture, this time pointing firstly at him, then at herself, then at the ceiling.
"Oh, right... Hermione, I think she wants me to go upstairs with her."
"All right," said Hermione, "let's go."
She threw herself into a chair, curled up, and started to cry. | At that, she looked just as bewildered as he felt. | Harry did not want to enter the village like a pantomime horse, trying to keep themselves concealed while magically covering their traces. | He had lost track of the date; they had not seen a newspaper for weeks. | Hermione was two rows of tombstones away; he had to wade back to her, his heart positively banging in his chest. | She was rubbing at a crumbling, mossy stone, gazing down at it, a little frown on her face. | Harry read the words slowly, as though he would have only one chance to take in their meaning, and he read the last of them aloud. | She broke from him to free her wand arm. | He slipped a hand from beneath the Cloak and grasped the snowy and thickly rusted gate, not wishing to open it, but simply to hold some part of the house. | Hermione moved closer to him under the Cloak, her arm pressed against his. |