Rufus Scrimgeour has two meetings in 1996. One is immortalized in public memory, the other remains a

Rufus Scrimgeour has two meetings in 1996. One is immortalized in public memory, the other remains a secret. Both are political, but one is irrevocably tinged with the personal. A meeting concerning an old colleague and even, he dares say it – a friend – can hardly be anything but personal.

There are facts that need not be known to anyone except him. There is, for example, the note that Amelia Bones left pinned to his desk a week before it happened: a plea to empty her desk before her successor could. The fact that he discovered a secret drawer and several very interesting papers bequeathed to several very interesting people. The will. The secret vault. The letter instructing him to deliver several things to her niece, Susan Bones. The letter which tells him in that strange elliptical way of speaking they’d developed – there were eyes and ears everywhere, all the time and they may not have been Moody, but they were all paranoid in their own ways – that there are two wars, three participants and a time when there will be only one war: choose wisely, Rufus is the last sentence.

There are allies and then there are allies, just like there are good people and people who think they are good. The trick is figuring who is whoand how much a compromise is worth – sleepless nights for the lives of mere pawns, a guiltless conscience and death or peace and blindness and decay. Amelia Bones chose one way. It got her killed. But Rufus, Rufus has always been a believer in other ways, middle grounds and the things that people miss altogether.

This is why he takes the letter and the last effects of Amelia Bones to her niece on a Saturday as Mr Rufus Scrimgeour, family friend of the Bones – and not as Minister Scrimgeour.

“Thank you,” says Susan, staring at her aunt’s untidy scrawl.

Scrimgeour is a distant name to her. A friend of her aunt, an acquaintance of her father’s. In the landscape of her childhood, he is a rare feature, a name brought into conversation every now and then, along with the odd visit during the hunting season when Pen Rhionydd rang with the sound of guns – a delightfully eccentric practice that only purebloodscan afford. All it does is keep them from lists. On anyone else, it would mean war. Two wars and a third one in the offing. Scrimgeour can afford it and so can she, if she didwhich she doesn’t, because it wouldn’t be right. But Scrimgeour is not herand he does, because he can, because there are no long shadows thrown over his life, because he believes in The Law. Minister Scrimgeour, she imagines, is precisely the sort of person the Student’s Resistance would disapprove of, even if her aunt trusted him.

The package itself is half mystery, half obvious; half sentiment, half something else that Susan can’t put a finger on, but is certain spells W-A-R : a badly made stuffed toy duck (made for Susan by Amelia, returned to Amelia when she outgrew it, now returned to Susan for old time’s sake), an old nursery rhyme (painstakingly illustrated, another relic of her childhood), an abbreviated history and compendium of wizarding law, a muggle book (a collection of cryptic crosswords from TheSunday Times ciphers) and a list.

“I’m sorry about your aunt,” says Scrimgeour, “She was a good friend.”

Scrimgeour’s name tops the list.

“Was he guilty?” she asks Scrimgeour, “The Knight Bus man.”

“Yes,” he says, which is a lie that he knows she can tell is a lie.

She is Amelia Bones’ niece, after all.

“My aunt trusted you,” she continues. Blunt and forthright, just like her aunt. Her father was just like her; it made Amelia interesting, but on a man it was merely boring. Her mother could have been exchanged with any of the other women – Cicely Smith, Yvaine Robards, Winifred Selwyn – and Susan wouldn’t have missed much, except for the red hair. Amelia Bones stuck out like a sore thumb: too sensible, too straightforward, too just, too kind, too unlike the rest of her cohort in Pen Rhionydd.  Susan was just like her aunt, but Tracey Davis and Zacharias Smith’s eccentricities outstrip her own and against them, she is just a faded brown, like her aunt.

Scrimgeour, she can tell, is dyingto know what is on the sheet of paper in her hand.

“Know Harry Potter, do you?” he asks her, instead.

“He’s in my year.”

“Your aunt said there was much more than that.”

“Plausible deniability,” says Susan, which is rude, but Scrimgeour is also MinisterScrimgeour.

“That wouldn’t stand if this was an Auror interview,” he tells her.

“But you’re here as a family friend,” she replies, “My aunt told me you were a good man too. A law-abidingcitizen.”

He snorts. “It depends on which angle you look at it from – or what the law states at any given moment.”

“But you’re going to fight.”

“That isn’t a question.”

“No,” says Susan thoughtfully, “I don’t suppose it is. I think you will.”

War, somehow, makes the package easier to understand. A stuffed toy serves two purposes – a memory to hold on to, and a means for smuggling. Nursery rhymes and crosswords are convenient when written messages are as good as death sentences.  The law, well –

The list has a simple meaning, but it is a double edged sword. From one angle it is a list of people who will die, so that the state will live – and be purged. From another, it is a third side to the war: people who love the spirit of the law and people who hate Voldemort. The trick is making them see that to defend the spirit of the law, sometimes the law itself must be broken.

– the book of wizarding law is that trick.

Rufus Scrimgeour dies in 1997, but he dies fighting.

Somehow, Susan finds herself stepping into the shoes her aunt laid out for her in the summer of 1996. This is better than lingering in the shadow of the death of an uncle, long dead before she was born. This is action, which they were both fond of in their own ways. Her father and mother cannot afford it; but she can. So she does.

Susan writes codes. She writes a letter entirely in code in ten minutes. Susan learns the law and knows which ones are worth sacrificing and which ones aren’t. She teaches Ernie and Hannah how to break the law along with her and they use Ernie’s pedigree to deliver letters. These letters travel across England. Some of them go to France and from France they travel all across Europe; some of them in the pockets of muggleborns, some of them in the pockets of Aurors and former Aurors.

Sometimes these letters are packages. Presents to friends from Durmstrang and Beauxbatons that are returned to England, with secrets worked into the stitching and the stuffing.

Things might have gone very differently, she thinks and they might have only had men and women following orders. Azkaban would have been fuller. Instead, there are men and women who point to the Declaration des Droits des Sorciers, adopted by the ICW in the autumn of 1945. Men and women who agree that the laws of a tyrant are not laws at all. Men and women – aurors– who fight.

In her own way, Susan’s eccentricity surpasses that of her blood traitor, muggle-loving uncle and her blood traitor aunt’s eccentricities. It’s only that hers are all secret. Faded brown when held up against the way Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, who sticks out like a sore thumb.

It’s not a bad way to live, or die, she thinks.