What did Snape know, and When did he know it?

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 169388

Dana wrote:
> I have been thinking about this and I know people already stated
that Karkaroff said LV kept the identity of his DEs hidden but there
is one problem I still have with this. And that is the Graveyard scene
in GoF. The DEs come in and they take a specific place in the circle,
they form around LV, leaving gaps that should contain DEs that are 
missing, like they were expecting more still to come. Of course one 
could state that people were just told were to stand without knowing
the identity of the people standing next to them but to me this still
gives a problem. If there is a specific place for each DE to stand,
this indicates to me that LV had these meetings often with all his 
DEs present because why else dedicate specific places to each DE if 
they never met in this way before or just once, how would they even 
know where to stand after 13 years if they only met like this once or
never had before or how would they know how much room to leave 
between them and the next person if they did not know how many people
 actually where DEs. 
> 
> Wormtail after receiving his new hand goes to his own place in the 
> circle too. <big snip 'cause your posts make mine look short!>
> 
Carol responds:

I've wondered about this, too, and also why the DEs didn't react to
the presence of Wormtail/Peter, whom they thought dead.

First, I think that only Bella and the Lestranges (IMO, the only DEs
arressted after Sirius Black) actually knew who Wormtail was (whether
or not they knew his nickname or that he was the spy, they knew that
he was the SK who, in their view, pretended to betray the Potters in
order to bring down Voldemort. They must have been the ones Black
heard screaming. Everyone else had been brought in before GH.

Second, we see that all the DEs except Wormtail are hooded, and they
don't react to him at all. You'd think they'd be almost as shocked to
see a "dead" man as to see LV, but they don't give him a thought as
far as I can tell. So maybe when LV refers to "Wormtail here," he's
introducing him (but still not revealing his identity, which he hints
at and which they may be able to piece together, but he gives similar
hints about his Horcruxes and it seems that the DEs don't ask
questions, except the one Lucius asks, craving to know the story of
the Dark Lord's miraculous return. Slippery Lucius knows an acceptable
question that will turn away the Dark Lord's wrath.)

So Wormtail would have been hooded and possibly unknown, like the DEs
that Voldemort passes by, at their meetings, which probably weren't
all that frequent during his one year as a spy. There would have been
no reason for LV to address him by name.

As for knowing where to stand, that doesn't depend on knowing who
you're standing next to. It's just knowing the spot in the circle,
which you could do by visualizing it as a clock and your spot is 9:15
or just short of 11;50. That, and you're by the tall guy with the evil
grey eyes. (Since Voldemort speaks openly to Lucius Malfoy, Wormtail
could easily know who Malfoy is without the reverse being true.)

Also, the narrator says that Wormtail took his place in the circle,
but that's Harry's perspective. He could merely have taken *a* place
in the circle, not necessarily one he had taken before. There are many
gaps, not just the ones that Voldemort refers to. Other DEs besides
Bellatrix and Rodolphus are in Azkaban. Poor Rabastan is forgotten as
usual. Dolohov isn't mentioned, or Mulciber, or any of the escapees
(other than two of the three Lestranges) who show up with Malfoy in
the MoM. BTW, I'm not sure that Rosier, Wilkes (not Wilkens), and the
third unnamed DE are the only ones "killed in my service." They're
just three who should be standing in that spot, along with Snape,
Karkaroff, and Barty Crouch Jr., all of whom LV alludes to without naming.

I'm not sure why you think that Rookwood isn't a DE. Snape's role as a
DE, at least post-GoF, is as a spy. Why can't Rookwood be a DE spy as
well? (Macnair, too, is a Ministry employee, though I think he'd
rather be killing people than chopping heads off beasts.)

Anyway, I'm trying to come up with a feasible explanation that answers
my own questions, which are similar to yours, without getting into
unprovable speculations about who recruited Wormtail.

Carol, who believes Karkaroff when he says that the Dark Lord operated
in the greatest secrecy and thinks that he would have revealed the
identity of his spy only to Bellatrix, who in turn revealed it to her
closest cronies (her fellow torturers of the Lestranges) after
Godric's Hollow