Order Only: The Letter

[alt_hermione]

We reconstructed the letter, we think. Draco and Mr Snape and a little help from Sirius. Anything in brackets was something we decided from context, but there are places we just couldn't make out what it said.

Father,

I don't know if [you'll] ever come back, but if you do, I [will] be gone. I [made] a mistake and tried to make Tom (?) love me. But he'll never love [me] the way I love him. I [ ] him about the baby and he [laughed]. LAUGHED. I thought if I [shifted the] (Mr Snape thinks it's lifted) spell, he would remember something of the way [we fell] (? (Sirius thinks it's felt.). But it wasn't [right?]. He doesn't love me.

But you never loved me, either.

You've always wanted the [Grant] line to continue. It will, but it won't be pure. If it's a boy, I'm naming him [Tom Marvolo], to honour our ancestors, but all I'll tell him is about a [muggle] father who had [grateful], and [king], and [winsome]. And he's going to know love.

Don't try to find me. Not that you will.

Mercre (still not sure about that?)

We're still working on it but that's at least enough to figure out what the letter was about. I've never heard of anyone named Mercre, though. Maybe it was Mercure? But that doesn't make any better sense.

Comments

[alt_daphne]

How fascinating.

And if I'm understanding Draco, this letter was written by the Lord Protector's mother (who was a witch) to her father (the Lord Protector's grandfather!), more or less disclosing that she was pregnant with a muggle's child. So, it sounds as if her family wouldn't have approved, but she didn't care that the father-to-be was a muggle and loved him anyway? Only enchanting a muggle to love you hardly denotes respect, does it?

It's so strange to think of where Voldemort might have come from, and to picture him as a baby. Who was loved by his mother. What happened to her, I wonder?

[alt_hydra]

Well he told me that he didn't grow up with any parents and came from an orphanage, but that it didn't matter because Hogwarts was his real home.

I mean, that's what Tom told me in the diary. He said it to cheer me up, because I was feeling sorry for myself about Mummy. I don't think he was lying, either. He didn't always lie.

[alt_hermione]

Hydra, did he ever tell you which orphanage? Or where it was?

Or did you ever see anything that might give us a clue? I think by retracing his life we'll have our best chances to find where he's hidden these horcrux things.

[alt_hydra]

He said he grew up in London in the time between the wars.

The two great wars the muggles had, I suppose? I don't know the name of the orphanage, though.

[alt_ron]

Voldemort probably ate her as soon as he was born. Came out with vicious fangs and killed her on the spot.

I mean, that seems like the sort of baby he'd be, doesn't it?

You're right. It's hard to imagine him a baby.

[alt_daphne]

Oh, now babies can't come out evil and vicious, Ron. Something makes them that way, either they're mistreated or have horrible adults around them. Not that it's any excuse, mind you, but there's always an explanation.

If Hydra's right and he grew up in an orphanage, well, that's not any sort of real home, is it?

[alt_sally_anne]

Megan Jones got raised by a horrid old lady and didn't have any sort of real home.

She didn't exactly turn out brilliantly but she's not the Lord Protector, either.

Hydra grew up with a real home but she had Bellatrix Lestrange as a mother. And she's brave and kind and decent.

I mean yeah, it's easier to grow up into a good person when you're being raised by good people but at some point you're not tragic, you're just awful.

[alt_daphne]

Certainly, but it's hard to determine where tragic ends and awful begins, isn't it? I mean, yes, I see that in the case of the Lord Protector he wouldn't have turned out decent no matter how he was raised, or by who, but he may have been far less dangerous, if things had been different.

But I suppose there's no point in speculating, since we'll never know.