Cook's Journal

My heart must have been stronger than I'd been led to believe by the medicos.  Here I was, having seen the pain-contorted visage of Albus Dumbledore in the Pensieve a few bare hours before, and now I was seeing him again, lively and pink-cheeked albeit without his third dimension, having a natter with my spouse of record, and my mitral valve gave not so much as a flutter.

Nevertheless, there was a test I had to make.

"Hilda dearest," I said, in a voice perhaps a shade higher than usual, "could you pinch my arm for me?"

Hilda gave me a sigh and one of her looks.  "Ah, Rumpole," she said, and took the thickest part of my upper arm into her fingers, making herself felt even through jacket and all. 

"Thank you."  I then turned to Dumbledore, who was watching with a sort of placid amusement written on his angular, white-bearded features.  "Well, Professor," I said, forcing my voice back into its usual register, "the last I saw of you, you had just been killed by your Dark Arts master."

Dumbledore's eyes, blue as the June sky, danced with a surprising amount of energy for the orbs of a dead man.  "Yes, Severus and Hermione told me that they'd showed you his memories.  But I'm not really alive, as you can see."  He waved a purple-sleeved hand about his surroundings, an oil painting of a pastoral scene to which Dumbledore had added a Chippendale chair with matching table and silver tea things.  "I am, however, prepared to assist you in going before the Wizengamot to plead Severus' case."  He paused and gave a brief smile.  "This will be necessary, since Severus himself will not be able to meet with you very often, for your own safety and his."

"The Wizengamot," I repeated.

"It is the high court of wizarding law for England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales," Dumbledore replied.  "I was Chief Warlock of it for many years before my death, a position roughly analogous to that of Lord Chief Justice in Her Majesty's High Court of Justice."

"Ah."  So that was why Hilda was so amenable to talking with a dead man from a world she had no idea existed when she got up that morning.   She was C. H. Wystan's daughter, after all, and a bigger legal snob did not exist.  She would have given her eyeteeth, if she still had them, to have had the Lord Chief Justice nod civilly to her in the street; now here she was, chatting away with the wizarding world's equivalent thereof, a man with the manners and grace that actually befit his exalted station.  "So you know the ins and outs of that august body?"

Dumbledore's eyes danced yet again behind his gold-rimmed spectacles.  "Well, you know what they say -- 'A good lawyer knows the law.  A really good lawyer knows the judge.'   In my time as Chief Warlock I got to know all of the judges on the Wizengamot, their biases and idiosyncrasies, in intimate detail."

"In intimate detail?"

Dumbledore smiled.  "In intimate detail."

I was warming to this Dumbledore fellow.  "So which ones can be readily blackmailed, and which ones are best dealt with through more subtle persuasion?"

Dumbledore's smile broke into a broad grin.  "We'll come to that in a moment.  But first -- I haven't even let you take off your coat..."


(...to be continued...)