Harry Potter 06 - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

him.’
    ‘Didn’t you tell them, sir, what he’d been like when you met him at the orphanage?’ asked Harry.
    ‘No, I did not. Though he had shown no hint of remorse, it was possible that he felt sorry for how he had behaved before and was resolved to turn over a fresh leaf. I chose to give him that chance.’
    Dumbledore paused and looked enquiringly at Harry, who had opened his mouth to speak. Here, again, was Dumbledore’s tendency to trust people in spite of overwhelming evidence that they did not deserve it! But then Harry remembered something …
    ‘But you didn’t really trust him, sir, did you? He told me … the Riddle who came out of that diary said “Dumbledore never seemed to like me as much as the other teachers did”.’
    ‘Let us say that I did not take it for granted that he was trustworthy,’ said Dumbledore. ‘I had, as I have already indicated, resolved to keep a close eye upon him, and so I did. I cannot pretend that I gleaned a great deal from my observations at first. He was very guarded with me; he felt, I am sure, that in the thrill of discovering his true identity he had told me a little too much. He was careful never to reveal as much again, but he could not take back what he had let slip in his excitement, nor what Mrs Cole had confided in me. However, he had the sense never to try and charm me as he charmed so many of my colleagues.
    ‘As he moved up the school, he gathered about him a group of dedicated friends; I call them that, for want of a better term, although as I have already indicated, Riddle undoubtedly felt no affection for any of them. This group had a kind of dark glamour within the castle. They were a motley collection; a mixture of the weak seeking protection, the ambitious seeking some shared glory, and the thuggish, gravitating towards a leader who could show them more refined forms of cruelty. In other words, they were the forerunners of the Death Eaters, and indeed some of them became the first Death Eaters after leaving Hogwarts.
    ‘Rigidly controlled by Riddle, they were never detected in open wrong-doing, although their seven years at Hogwarts were marked by a number of nasty incidents to which they were never satisfactorily linked, the most serious of which was, of course, the opening of the Chamber of Secrets, which resulted in the death of a girl. As you know, Hagrid was wrongly accused of that crime.
    ‘I have not been able to find many memories of Riddle at Hogwarts,’ said Dumbledore, placing his withered hand on the Pensieve. ‘Few who knew him then are prepared to talk about him; they are too terrified. What I know, I found out after he had left Hogwarts, after much painstaking effort, after tracing those few who could be tricked into speaking, after searching old records and questioning Muggle and wizard witnesses alike.
    ‘Those whom I could persuade to talk told me that Riddle was obsessed with his parentage. This is understandable, of course; he had grown up in an orphanage and naturally wished to know how he came to be there. It seems that he searched in vain for some trace of Tom Riddle Senior on the shields in the trophy room, on the lists of prefects in the old school records, even in the books of wizarding history. Finally he was forced to accept that his father had never set foot in Hogwarts. I believe that it was then that he dropped the name for ever, assumed the identity of Lord Voldemort, and began his investigations into his previously despised mother’s family – the woman whom, you will remember, he had thought could not be a witch if she had succumbed to the shameful human weakness of death.
    ‘All he had to go upon was the single name “Marvolo”, which he knew from those who ran the orphanage had been his mother’s father’s name. Finally, after painstaking research through old books of wizarding families, he discovered the existence of Slytherin’s surviving line. In the summer of his sixteenth year, he left the orphanage to which he returned annually and set off to find his Gaunt relatives. And now, Harry, if you will stand …’
    Dumbledore rose, and Harry saw that he was again holding a small crystal bottle filled with swirling, pearly memory.
    ‘I was very lucky to collect this,’ he said, as he poured the gleaming mass into the Pensieve. ‘As you will understand when we have experienced it. Shall we?’
    Harry stepped up to the stone basin and bowed obediently until his face sank through the surface of