The Locket Horcrux - When Was It Swapped?

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 165750

Mike wrote:
<snip>
> Reggie is a wet behind the ears DE. I don't imagine he's much
farther along the path to magical wisdom than Harry is right now.
Could Harry have retreived that locket from the basin on his own, or
even with help from a loyal Kreacher? I seriously doubt Reggie was
capable of it either. And how did Reggie know it was a locket that was
at the bottom of the basin? In fact, what makes anyone believe someone
of Reggie's caliber could have found out about LV's Horcruxes, where
the cave is, where the blood door is and how to open it, how to find
LV's boat, and how to defeat the green liquid?

Carol:
How did he know any of those things? He ordered Kreacher to tell him<
IMO. Kreacher would have told him, for example, what spell Bella put
on the cave entrance to make it demand blood. Or, better yet, LV would
already have put that spell on the cave entrance and Bella would
supply the blood. Maybe that's why she brought Kreacher along, so he
could supply it and do anything else that might be unpleasant.
>
Mike:
> Carol made a suggestion that Bella borrowed Kreacher (which I don't
think Wolfburga would allow and can't understand why Bella would ask.
Doesn't Bella have a house elf in her family, or better yet, wouldn't
> she borrow Dobby from her sister before she goes beggaring to her
> aunt?). <snip>

Carol:

There's no evidence of any house-elf in Bellatrix's own household, and
she certainly wouldn't borrow Dobby, whose loyalties are suspect, when
she could borrow Kreacher, who dotes on her. I don't know why she
would need a house-elf to accompany her if she didn't need someone to
drink the poison, but if she did, it makes absolute sense to me that
she'd borrow one who worships the ground she walks on.

Mike:
> But if Reggie learned about the Horcrux from Bella's bragging at his
house, before she made the deposit, that changes everything.

Carol:
This part I agree with. The bragging probably occurred before she hid
the locket, when (IMO) she came to borrow Kreacher (who, BTW, is still
loyal to the Dark Lord, a point I'll support later). And I can't see
Bella letting the real Horcrux out of her possession for a second. She
would just tell Aunt Walburga (who thinks enough of her to have her
photo inthe house)  that she had an important mission for the Dark
Lord and needed to borrow Kreacher, who would have been delighted to
oblige, and Reggie would have questioned Kreacher later. (How he knew
that the locket was a Horcrux, or the Horcrux was a locket, I'm not
sure. Surely, Bella isn't crazy enough to reveal her master's most
important secret. Or maybe she bragged again after she'd accomplished
her mission, directly to DE!Reggie under the delusion that he was
loyal. Regardless of whether he swapped the lockets in the cave or
before, that's the sticking point for me. How did Regulus find out
that the Slytherin locket was a Horcrux?)

Mike:
Then, Reggie would be capable of transforming one of his mother's
lockets into looking like the Slytherin Locket well enough to fool Bella.

Carol:
Again, the locket looks *nothing* like the one that Harry saw in the
Pensieve memory. If Reggie can do Transfiguration at all, surely he's
capable of adding a Slytherin symbol to an ordinary locket? Heck,
everything in the Black house has Slytherin symbols on it--snakes on
the chandeliers and the doorknobs. Surely, his mother had a locket
that would look more like the real one than the plain locket Harry
found with Dumbledore's body. Surely, he could Transfigure a snake
into a Slytherin "S." To leave the locket plain and unadorned is a
dead giveaway, and Bella would not be fooled. It also *feels*
different, lighter than the original locket. And Bella may be crazy,
but she isn't an idiot. She can tell a locket with a symbol on it from
a plain locket just as she can tell Sirius Black from Severus Snape,
two wizards of the same age both of whom have long black hair.
>
Mike:
And I doubt that she was ever going to open it to find that note.
> Besides, he could easily have charmed it shut without having to put
a curse on it. <snip>

Carol:
But it *isn't* charmed shut. It falls right open when DD falls from
the tower. And the idea that "maybe the charm would wear off" is just
grabbed out of the air. (Sorry, Mike, but even Jelly-Legs requires a
countercurse, and "Stupefy" requires "Ennervate." Imperius requires a
mental effort on the caster to be sustained, as does Crucio, but most
hexes, charms, and jinxes don't operate that way as far as I can see.)
If he wanted the locket to stay closed, he'd put something like a
Permanent Sticking Charm on it--whatever spell is on the real Horcrux
(the 12 GP locket) to make it unopenable. But he doesn't want that. He
wants it to be easily openable so that Voldemort can read the note and
see that he's been had. And it would be counterproductive to make it
unopenable for Bella because it would then be unopenable for LV as well.

Mike:
> I like the second version :D As I said on another post, it makes
sense to me that Bella was the one that deposited the (fake) locket
into the basin. Also, as I've postulated before, I can easily see
Bella showing up at her Aunt Wolfburga's house and bragging about
what an honour that the Dark Lord bestowed upon her, making her
responsible for hiding one of his Horc... oops, I'm not suppose to
tell you that.
>
Carol:
Yes, she must have shown up at Aunt Walburga's or Reggie couldn't have
learned about the Horcrux. But she wouldn't have stayed long enough
for Reggie to find a substitute locket (not Transfiguration necessary
to make a plain locket into a plain locket) and somehow sneak the real
Horcrux out of her pocket and substitute the real one. She's not going
to spend the night at Aunt Walburga's and let Reggie or anyone else
sneak into her room. I think that she simply wanted to borrow the
house-elf. And, of course, she would have needed a very good reason
for doing so--a dangerous and difficult mission for the Dark Lord.

Mike:
> I can also see all of this happening *after* the Blacks have come to
the revelation that Voldemort is not who or what he says he is.
Sirius told us it did happen, just not when. "They got cold feet when
they saw what he was prepared to do to get power, though. But I bet
my parents thought Regelus was a right little hero for joining up at
first." (Ootp p.112, US ed.) Since it was Sirius' "parents", plural,
and his father died in the same year as Reggie, this revelation must
have come pretty close to the time of Reggie swapping the lockets.
That would mean that although they might have put up a good front for
their neice Bella (knowing her loyalties), they would secretly be in
opposition to Voldemort around this time. <snip>
>
Carol:
They must have put up a pretty good front for Kreacher, too, if that's
the case. He remains devoted to both his master ("snogging" his
unwizardly trousers, crying over his ring) and his mistress ("Oh, what
would my poor mistress think?"), especially his mistress, *and* to
"Miss Bellatrix": "By the looks of it, hers was Kreacher's favorite
photograph; he had placed it to the fore of all the others and had
mended the glass clumsily with Spellotape" (504).

Moreover, Kreacher disapproves not only of "Mudbloods" (Hermione) and
"blood traitors" (the Weasleys) but of the Order, with its "werewolves
(Lupin) and traitors (Snape?) and thieves (Mundungus)" (OoP Am. ed.
(107-08). When Sirius threatens him with clothes, he retorts, "Master
must do as Master wishes, but Master will not turn Kreacher away, no,
because Kreacher knows what they are up to, oh, yes, he is *plotting
against the Dark Lord*, yes, with these traitors and Mudbloods and
scum" (118). So even if Sirius is right that the adult Blacks came to
disapprove of Voldemort's methods (perhaps after Reggie's death?),
Kreacher has had no such conversion, nor does he think that Mrs. Black
would approve of having Order meetings in her house. And we know where
Kreacher went after Sirius ordered him out of the house. He couldn't
go to Bellatrix, but he did the next best (or worst) thing--he went to
her sister Narcissa, a loyal follower of the Dark Lord and the wife of
a Death Eater, who in turn passed Kreacher's information on to
Voldemort. If your view of the Blacks' loyalties is accurate, why
would Kreacher, their devoted servant, still be loyal to the Dark Lord
and his most fanatical follower, Bellatrix Black Lestrange?


Mike:

And why did Reggie expect to be dead by the time Voldemort read the
note? I have wild theory about this, but it might make the Horcrux
problem not as overburdening as it seems to be at this point of the story.
>
> If Reggie was made "dead" by DD and Snape, he could now be hidden by
a Fidelius. But what I like better is that the Metamorphmagus gene
runs in the Black family. And Tonks isn't the only one. We've all
been wondering why JKR introduced us to the concept without taking it
somewhere. Maybe Reggie is where. Maybe Reggie is out there right
now, disguised as someone else, and doing Dumbledore's bidding. If
Reggie has taken up the Horcrux hunt from a long time ago, maybe
Harry doesn't have that many to find and destroy after all.
>
Carol:
JKR has taken pains to establish that Sirius was the last of the
direct male line. And there's no hint of Reggie's being a
Metamorphmagus. Sirius himself calls him an "idiot." Surely, he'd have
made some contemptuous remark about his not even being able to put his
Metamorhmagus talents to good use if he were one. And JKR herself has
said that he's dead. What she actually said: "He's dead, so he's
pretty quiet these days" is different from what she's been misquoted
as saying: "He's dead these days so he's pretty quiet." Dead is
dead; clearly, Regulus expected his disloyalty to be discovered and to
be killed for it. Sirius says that he was murdered, presumably by
Death Eaters, which indicates that Regulus was right. 

Now, granted, there are hints that the Order has hidden people after
faking their deaths, but for sixteen years? I think the faked death
we'll find out about in DH is Emmeline Vance's and it will involve
Snape's use of the Draught of Living Death to fake an AK; otherwise,
I see no point in introducing her into the plot.

As for Harry not having to find so many Horcruxes after all, he
doesn't need Reggie to find the unopenable locket from OoP. If
Kreacher didn't hide it, Mundungus stole it. And he should be out of
Azkaban fairly quickly. If not, there's Aberforth, who may be
operating as a fence for Mundungus. That Horcrux will be easy to track
down. And as for destroying it, surely that's why curse-breaker Bill
is part of the story. Who'll reveal the backstory? Kreacher, of
course--a living character who has not yet played his full part.
There's a reason JKR had Harry inherit him, after all.

Mike:
> As to why Dumbledore didn't tell Harry all this? I'll answer that
with another question: why didn't Dumbledore tell Harry the real
reason he trusts Snape? <snip>

Carol:
But asking that question doesn't answer the first one. Snape is a
central mystery in the books; hiding Regulus would be a minor matter,
not worth lying about or concealing. And surely Dumbledore wouldn't
fear Bellatrix's inheriting Kreacher or consider Harry to be
Kreacher's master if Regulus were alive. The magic doesn't work that
way, AFAIK.

Mike:
> Of course this beggars the question, why did DD take Harry to the
cave if he already knew there was no Horcrux there?

Carol:
Surely he wouldn't have done so, drinking that horrible poison "for
nothing" (as Harry thinks when he finds the fake Horcrux), weakening
himself to the point that he can't even defend himself against Draco,
making it almost inevitable that Snape's UV would be triggered, and,
most important, needlessly exposing Harry to the danger of the Inferi,
which he knew were in the water because of Harry's Accio, if he didn't
expect it before. If DD knew that the Horcrux was a fake, he would not
have gone to all that trouble and endured all that suffering. He would
have told Harry to go to Regulus, who had the Horcrux. Or, more
likely, he'd have obtained the Horcrux from Reggie and destroyed it
himself a long time ago.

Dumbledore seems to have started suspecting multiple Horcruxes around
the time of CoS. Why, if Regulus were alive and had the Horcrux in his
possession, wouldn't DD have known about the Horcruxes--and destroyed
that one--long before? Sorry, but it makes no sense.

Mike:
> There may be a couple of real simple answers to the cave trip.
Reggie never told Dumbledore that he got that Horcrux out, and there
is sparse to no communication between them now. Or, Dumbledore knew
that the locket was at 12 GP, but it went missing back during OotP. So
he takes Harry to recover the fake locket, knowing that Harry will now
take up the hunt for the real one. And Dumbledore knows that Reggie
can't return to 12 GP, but Harry can, he owns the place now.

Carol:
I can't imagine Regulus not confiding something so important to
Dumbledore, who has gone to all this trouble to locate the cave when
it would have been so much easier to question Reggie. And DD was not
present when HRH, the Weasley, Sirius Black, and Lupin were
house-cleaning, or he'd have recognized that locket immediately from
Bob Ogden's memory. He doesn't know it's there or he'd have destroyed
it immediately--no disastrous cave expedition necessary.
>
Mike:
> I know it's not foolproof theory, but it does cut JKR's on-page
> workload way down. And it keeps DH from becoming a wall to wall
> Horcrux hunt, not something anybody would want.
>
> Mike, waiting for the lumberjacks to chop this one down :)
>
Carol:
I did my best! I agree with you that JKR should have made it clearer
why DD thought it was necessary to drink the potion (aside from the
fact that potions are usually drunk), and I don't think his claim that
LV would have wanted to question the drinker is plausible. I also
think that the need for a person whose magic wouldn't be detected by
the boat is an important clue, and Kreacher fits the bill.

Carol, who absolutely does not want Dumbledore to have drunk that
poison for nothing, knowing that the Horcrux was a fake

P.S. Quick question for Marion: If DD was faking the torture in the
cave, was he also faking the weakness that allowed Draco to disarm
him? He could fake weakness, possibly, but how do you fake a deathlike
pallor? Not buying it at all. C.