HoG/Rookwood

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 183971

Carol wrote in
> <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/183867>:
> 
> << I agree with the suggestion that Draco could have acquired [the
> Hand of Glory] by owl order (not in reaction to his father's
> treatment of him but out of practical necessity, as part of his scheme
> for bringing the DEs into Hogwarts once he fixed the Vanishing Cabin
> (long snip) He couldn't have brought it into Hogwarts himself because
> the students in HBP were probed with Filch's secrecy sensor (Filch
> confiscated a shrunken head from Crabbe or Goyle) and the owls were
> being searched, just as they had been in OoP (presumably because DD
> and Snape had some idea what Draco was up to). >>

Catlady: 
> This is a problem you created for yourself. If Draco bought the HoG
> during the CoS school year or during the summer holiday between CoS
> and PoA, then students and owls were not yet being searched when
> entering Hogwarts.
> 
Carol responds:
On the contrary. JKR created the problem by not having Lucius buy
Draco the Hand of Glory in CoS. He could not have taken it to Hogwarts
then because he canonically did not have it. Moreover, even if he
acquired it (offpage) in some other year, Ron would not have seen it,
and Draco would have had to take it home each school year. He couldn't
hide it at the school where the House-elves would find it over the
holidays, and he couldn't take it home because his father would have
regarded it as a tool for thieves and plunderers. Draco *must* have
bought it himself at the time he needed it (before or during HBP),
quite possibly hiding it in his trunk to get it past the increased
security measures that he'd be a fool not to anticipate, but Ron talks
about the hand as something Draco had before and that he himself has
apparently seen before the HBP school year.

I stand by my  position that JKR just forgot that Lucius hadn't
sneerinlr refused to buy his son a handy tool for thieves and
plunderers and that neither Ron nor Harry had ever seen him with it.
she also didn't consider how he could get it into the school under the
strict new security measures whether or not it had been there before.
She doesn't reread the books once they're published, and it's easy to
get a wrong idea as to what happened earlier into your head if you
don't go back and check your facts (as most of us on this list have
probably found out the hard way at one time or another).


> Carol wrote in
> <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/183895>:
> 
> << an Unspeakable (as Rookwood possibly was, or else Rookwood was
higher up the bureaucratic ladder) or he'd have known that Bode
couldn't touch the Prophecy. >>

> The Pensieve scene of Karkaroff's plea bargain: << "Augustus
Rookwood of the Department of Mysteries?" <snip>

Carol:
Thanks. I remembered that he was a spy, but I'd forgotten that
particular reference to the Department of Mysteries, which confirms my
suspicion that Rookwood was an Unspeakable like Croaker and Bode.
Wonder whatever happened to Croaker, whose last name, like Bode's,
bodes ill for him if "croak" means "die" in British slang as it does
in American slang. Also, Rookwood must have been indispensable in
planning the DoM raid. Maybe he provided the building plan that Snape
"borrowed" or more likely, magically duplicated (using the same spell
with which Hermione duplicated Slytherin's locket in DH) and presented
in his report to the Order early in OoP.

Carol, wondering irrelevantly whether Muggle men need a magical razor
like Harry's when they could probably do at least as good a job with a
shaving spell