Summary: Chapter Ten: Kreacher’s Tale
Harry wakes up early and explores the house. He goes into
Sirius’s room, with its Gryffindor banners and photographs of Muggle women
in bikinis, demonstrating his rebelliousness toward his own family.
In the room, Harry finds the first page of a letter to Sirius from
Harry’s mother, Lily Potter. The letter reveals that Sirius had given
Harry his first broomstick, for his first birthday; that Harry’s parents
had known Bathilda Bagshot; and that Dumbledore had, for some unmentioned
reason, borrowed James Potter’s Invisibility Cloak around the time
the letter was written (soon after Harry had turned one and thus
very near the time of James and Lily Potter’s murder).
Harry searches further and finds a torn piece of a photograph referred
to in the letter, showing himself at one year old, riding a broomstick
near his father’s legs. The other parts of the letter, and of the
photograph, are missing.
Harry makes up his mind that he wants to go to Godric’s
Hollow to meet Bathilda Bagshot and visit his parents’ graves, hoping
to find information about his own parents and about Dumbledore’s
past. When he tells this to Hermione, however, she tells him it’s
a waste of valuable time, and that he knew Dumbledore better than
Aunt Muriel or Rita Skeeter, and thus shouldn’t be bothered by the rumors.
Hermione reminds him that their urgent task is to find the Horcruxes,
the destruction of which will enable them to defeat Voldemort.
Harry and Hermione notice the room belonging to Sirius’s deceased
younger brother, Regulus Arcturus Black, who had been a Death Eater.
Seeing his name on the door, they realize he may be the R.A.B. who
signed his name to the false locket that Harry and Dumbledore recovered
from the cave in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince—the
R.A.B. who must have stolen the real locket Horcrux, which they
need to find.
Hermione remembers with a shock that there had been a
locket in the cabinet in the drawing room of the house the last
time she’d been there—a locket that everyone had passed around and
no one could open. Unfortunately, the locket is no longer there.
The only hope Harry and his friends have is that Kreacher,
the bilious house-elf he inherited with the house, may have stolen
the locket, as he used to steal back trinkets associated with the
house whenever Sirius would try to throw them out, out of a sense
of loyalty to his former masters and a desire to preserve the house
as it was. Accordingly, they summon Kreacher.
