Sirius, The Fidelius Charm, and You-Know-Who

[lipglossusa]

No: HPFGUIDX 33716



Cindy says,

> The only thing I can think of to help the Fidelius Charm make sense 
> is to introduce a time element.  In other words, if the backstory 
> contains some time constraint JKR hasn't told us about, then it 
would 
> make sense to have as many decoy secretkeepers as you could find.  
> Imagine that the backstory is that Voldemort has to kill Harry by a 
> particular date, say Halloween.  Then Sirius' decoy plan makes a 
lot 
> of sense, because the decoy plan requires Voldemort to catch 
Sirius, 
> discern that Sirius is not the secret-keeper, kill Sirius out of 
> frustration and spite, and then track down Pettigrew.



Okay, so if Voldemort had to kill the Potters by Halloween, was 
Sirius the original secret-keeper, and did he then "delete" himself 
from the charm and insert Peter to buy the Potters more time?  In 
PoA, Sirius tells Harry that he went to check on Peter that night, 
and when he couldn't find him, Sirius went to Godric's Hollow, where 
the Potters were hiding, only to find he was too late.  So Sirius 
knew where the Potters were all along.  For the big secret it was 
supposed to be, it seems like an awful lot of people knew where the 
Potters were.  Besides Peter and Sirius, Dumbledore knew, because he 
sent Hagrid there to get Harry.  (By the way, how did Dumbledore know 
James and Lily were dead?  Some kind of magical video monitoring?) 

I'm starting to think that the Fidelius Charm was doomed from the 
beginning; even if Peter had not been the traitor, Voldemort could've 
caught up with Sirius eventually, and by not being the keeper, Sirius 
was unprotected by the charm and could've slipped up the information 
to Voldemort.  UNLESS, the charm calls for a person (i.e. Voldemort) 
to be specified as *the* person that the secret is being held from. 
It seems that the Potters' hideout wasn't supposed to be a secret 
from everyone, just Voldemort. Flitwick says that Voldemort could be 
looking through the house window and still not see the Potters 
because of the charm. Perhaps Voldemort would go temporarily deaf if 
he ever questioned someone who knew where the Potters were, but was 
not the actual secret-keeper.  So, even if Sirius was not the keeper 
but still knew where the Potters were hiding, he could scream out the 
Potters' whereabouts until he was blue in the face and Voldemort 
would never hear him!

Marina