What Lucius Knew About the Diary
...and when he knew it.
I was reading through the comments to one of Terri’s old fics, and got sucked back into the probably-irresolvable tangle of questions about what Lucius was really planning during Chamber of Secrets. Piecing together some of the comments and one or two of my old speculations, we might at least be able to come up with a mostly-coherent hypothesis for one of those questions: what exactly did Lucius think the Diary was, and what did he think it would do?
It’s easy to assume that Lucius must have known what we know by the end of the book: that Tom Riddle was Voldemort’s original name, that he really had opened the Chamber of Secrets, that there really was a monster and the monster was a basilisk, and so forth. Lucius must have been a very important and trusted Death Eater to know all that!
But imagine it’s 1981, and you’re Voldemort. Just how much of that would you tell your slippery friend? Remember, Lucius doesn’t have to actually do anything except pass the Diary on to someone else. Maybe not even to a chosen victim, in the original plan; he might have been told to give it to Severus some weekend and let Severus plant it on a kid. If Lucius is just the delivery boy, how much does he really need to know?
By 1992, he clearly knows that it will at least seem that there is an Heir of Slytherin who has opened the Chamber of Secrets and released a monster. He knows this appeared to happen back in 1943, and told Draco as much. If he knows Hagrid was a suspect then, he didn’t tell Draco that part. (It’s possible that Fudge learned this from old Ministry records and told Lucius after the 1992 attacks started rather Lucius knowing all along.)
He doesn’t let on whether he knew from the start that the monster was a basilisk. And if he did, he was awfully reckless letting his only son and heir go to school with a basilisk roaming the halls. We know he strongly prefers that Draco stay alive, and basilisks don’t distinguish their victims based on blood status. But Draco doesn’t act like he’s been warned to keep safely in the middle of a crowd at all times and carry a mirror, does he? Well, maybe Lucius did warn him, and Draco ignored it… which Lucius could have predicted, easily, taking us back to Lucius being extraordinarily reckless. And Narcissa, if she also knew, because Draco says that his mother talked his father out of sending him to Durmstrang. Would she have done that if she thought Draco might run into a basilisk? Would Lucius have let her talk him out of it if he knew?
Also, if Lucius did know, what was his plan once he got the Board of Governors to oust Dumbledore? Was he going to tell Fudge, “Incidentally, I think the monster’s a basilisk-don’t ask me how I figured it out when no one else has-and I have also intuited who is controlling it based on no evidence whatsoever.” Somehow, I can’t see even Lucius thinking that was a good plan. He seems to have believed that he could appear to solve the problem once Dumbledore was gone without sounding as fishy as a seafood market.
So I’m inclined to think that he didn’t know it was a basilisk. What did he think it was, then?
And here’s where I think we should back up and ask whether Lucius thought there really was a monster at all. He knows the Diary is cursed somehow, yes. But we know there are books in the Potterverse which do things like compelling you to keep reading. Maybe he thought the curse was more on the order of Imperius-in-a-Book: the Diary would make the child write messages on the walls and curse other students (the Diary would impart the knowledge of whatever curses were required).
That would be a much easier problem for Lucius to handle. Draco would be safe, since the cursed student would know Draco was a pureblood. Lucius could arrange for an inquiry, make sure he was involved, and contrive to find something suspicious about Ginny which would “warrant further investigation.” They’d find a cursed Muggle diary in her belongings, and problem solved! Such a simple solution, and gosh, why didn’t Dumbledore figure this out if he’s so brilliant? Perhaps removing him from his position was an even better decision that we realized… old man’s obviously lost his touch…
What about the Heir business and the previous time the Chamber was supposedly opened? Dumbledore says that Voldemort acted through an intermediary “this time” as if everyone knows the Heir was on the spot last time, but is everyone sure the Heir didn't act through an intermediary last time too? If Lucius thinks the Diary is Imperius-in-a-Book, presumably it was enchanted back then and made some child (perhaps it was Hagrid after all!) curse their classmates. The person behind it used the legends of Slytherin’s monster waiting in the Chamber of Secrets to purge the school as symbols of the noble cause, but that doesn’t mean that the Chamber really was opened or that the monster was real. Intelligent people recognize that it’s a metaphor, Lucius might have nodded sagely to himself.
Or maybe he thought there was some non-basilisk monster in a real secret chamber which the book could Imperius the child into releasing and controlling. But that raises awkward questions about what Lucius thought the monster was and why he was so confident that it wouldn’t hurt purebloods even by accident.
And the Heir? Voldemort might have told Lucius that he was the Heir of Slytherin. But that doesn’t mean he also revealed that he was Tom Riddle. In fact, he might have implied the story I once posited he spread to the rest of the wizarding public: that he killed Tom Riddle because the boy was a potential enemy. (And Voldemort did kill Tom… from a certain point of view.) The Heir of Slytherin was behind the plot, yes… but from a distance, through an intermediary.
What Lucius might have gathered from Voldemort’s explanation was this: back in 1943, Voldemort took his first step in his rise to power by enchanting the Diary and giving it to Tom Riddle. Perhaps Tom was initially on board with the plan, and Voldemort hoped to recruit him. Tom, controlled by the Diary, put up a message that the Heir of Slytherin had arrived to cleanse the school, cursed several students, and set up Hagrid as a fall guy. If no one bought Hagrid as the culprit, Tom would be the backup fall guy (not that Voldemort told him that, but the boy was bright enough to work it out). That turned out not to be necessary. The test run frightened the school and killed a Muggle-born, but the time wasn’t ripe for a full-on takeover attempt-this was just the opening salvo. Voldemort retrieved the Diary to use again at a later date. He asked Tom which students were most supportive of the Heir’s campaign of terror, and recruited them a few years later. But the incident was too much for Tom, who refused to be involved in any further plots. Voldemort eventually killed Tom when Tom not only firmly refused to be recruited, but threatened to tell someone what he knew.
Whatever discussion Lucius and Narcissa had, and the incomplete scraps Lucius passed to Draco, might not make it clear to an eavesdropping Dobby that the Heir wasn’t actually around this time and that Lucius didn’t believe the Chamber held a real monster. Or maybe Dobby figured a student cursed to attack their schoolmates was just as dangerous to the Great Harry Potter (a half-blood, don’t forget) as a monster. As for his clue about the Dark Lord before he could be freely named… well, if Dobby knew that Voldemort originally gave Lucius the Diary, he might originally have meant that yes, Voldemort was connected to the plot, but no, he wasn’t behind it-one of his followers was. Once Dumbledore referred to the Diary as one of Voldemort’s old school things, Dobby figured out that Voldemort was Tom and revised accordingly in his explanation to Harry. Luckily the warning was still accurate, even if not the way he thought originally.
Whatever Voldemort told Lucius originally, Lucius might have worked out more during the decade he had the Diary and Voldemort was gone. Maybe he did float the idea to Narcissa that the Dark Lord hadn’t used and killed Tom Riddle, but had been Tom, and Dobby ran with that.
I still don’t think Lucius knew about the basilisk, though. That was probably a nasty surprise.
I was reading through the comments to one of Terri’s old fics, and got sucked back into the probably-irresolvable tangle of questions about what Lucius was really planning during Chamber of Secrets. Piecing together some of the comments and one or two of my old speculations, we might at least be able to come up with a mostly-coherent hypothesis for one of those questions: what exactly did Lucius think the Diary was, and what did he think it would do?
It’s easy to assume that Lucius must have known what we know by the end of the book: that Tom Riddle was Voldemort’s original name, that he really had opened the Chamber of Secrets, that there really was a monster and the monster was a basilisk, and so forth. Lucius must have been a very important and trusted Death Eater to know all that!
But imagine it’s 1981, and you’re Voldemort. Just how much of that would you tell your slippery friend? Remember, Lucius doesn’t have to actually do anything except pass the Diary on to someone else. Maybe not even to a chosen victim, in the original plan; he might have been told to give it to Severus some weekend and let Severus plant it on a kid. If Lucius is just the delivery boy, how much does he really need to know?
By 1992, he clearly knows that it will at least seem that there is an Heir of Slytherin who has opened the Chamber of Secrets and released a monster. He knows this appeared to happen back in 1943, and told Draco as much. If he knows Hagrid was a suspect then, he didn’t tell Draco that part. (It’s possible that Fudge learned this from old Ministry records and told Lucius after the 1992 attacks started rather Lucius knowing all along.)
He doesn’t let on whether he knew from the start that the monster was a basilisk. And if he did, he was awfully reckless letting his only son and heir go to school with a basilisk roaming the halls. We know he strongly prefers that Draco stay alive, and basilisks don’t distinguish their victims based on blood status. But Draco doesn’t act like he’s been warned to keep safely in the middle of a crowd at all times and carry a mirror, does he? Well, maybe Lucius did warn him, and Draco ignored it… which Lucius could have predicted, easily, taking us back to Lucius being extraordinarily reckless. And Narcissa, if she also knew, because Draco says that his mother talked his father out of sending him to Durmstrang. Would she have done that if she thought Draco might run into a basilisk? Would Lucius have let her talk him out of it if he knew?
Also, if Lucius did know, what was his plan once he got the Board of Governors to oust Dumbledore? Was he going to tell Fudge, “Incidentally, I think the monster’s a basilisk-don’t ask me how I figured it out when no one else has-and I have also intuited who is controlling it based on no evidence whatsoever.” Somehow, I can’t see even Lucius thinking that was a good plan. He seems to have believed that he could appear to solve the problem once Dumbledore was gone without sounding as fishy as a seafood market.
So I’m inclined to think that he didn’t know it was a basilisk. What did he think it was, then?
And here’s where I think we should back up and ask whether Lucius thought there really was a monster at all. He knows the Diary is cursed somehow, yes. But we know there are books in the Potterverse which do things like compelling you to keep reading. Maybe he thought the curse was more on the order of Imperius-in-a-Book: the Diary would make the child write messages on the walls and curse other students (the Diary would impart the knowledge of whatever curses were required).
That would be a much easier problem for Lucius to handle. Draco would be safe, since the cursed student would know Draco was a pureblood. Lucius could arrange for an inquiry, make sure he was involved, and contrive to find something suspicious about Ginny which would “warrant further investigation.” They’d find a cursed Muggle diary in her belongings, and problem solved! Such a simple solution, and gosh, why didn’t Dumbledore figure this out if he’s so brilliant? Perhaps removing him from his position was an even better decision that we realized… old man’s obviously lost his touch…
What about the Heir business and the previous time the Chamber was supposedly opened? Dumbledore says that Voldemort acted through an intermediary “this time” as if everyone knows the Heir was on the spot last time, but is everyone sure the Heir didn't act through an intermediary last time too? If Lucius thinks the Diary is Imperius-in-a-Book, presumably it was enchanted back then and made some child (perhaps it was Hagrid after all!) curse their classmates. The person behind it used the legends of Slytherin’s monster waiting in the Chamber of Secrets to purge the school as symbols of the noble cause, but that doesn’t mean that the Chamber really was opened or that the monster was real. Intelligent people recognize that it’s a metaphor, Lucius might have nodded sagely to himself.
Or maybe he thought there was some non-basilisk monster in a real secret chamber which the book could Imperius the child into releasing and controlling. But that raises awkward questions about what Lucius thought the monster was and why he was so confident that it wouldn’t hurt purebloods even by accident.
And the Heir? Voldemort might have told Lucius that he was the Heir of Slytherin. But that doesn’t mean he also revealed that he was Tom Riddle. In fact, he might have implied the story I once posited he spread to the rest of the wizarding public: that he killed Tom Riddle because the boy was a potential enemy. (And Voldemort did kill Tom… from a certain point of view.) The Heir of Slytherin was behind the plot, yes… but from a distance, through an intermediary.
What Lucius might have gathered from Voldemort’s explanation was this: back in 1943, Voldemort took his first step in his rise to power by enchanting the Diary and giving it to Tom Riddle. Perhaps Tom was initially on board with the plan, and Voldemort hoped to recruit him. Tom, controlled by the Diary, put up a message that the Heir of Slytherin had arrived to cleanse the school, cursed several students, and set up Hagrid as a fall guy. If no one bought Hagrid as the culprit, Tom would be the backup fall guy (not that Voldemort told him that, but the boy was bright enough to work it out). That turned out not to be necessary. The test run frightened the school and killed a Muggle-born, but the time wasn’t ripe for a full-on takeover attempt-this was just the opening salvo. Voldemort retrieved the Diary to use again at a later date. He asked Tom which students were most supportive of the Heir’s campaign of terror, and recruited them a few years later. But the incident was too much for Tom, who refused to be involved in any further plots. Voldemort eventually killed Tom when Tom not only firmly refused to be recruited, but threatened to tell someone what he knew.
Whatever discussion Lucius and Narcissa had, and the incomplete scraps Lucius passed to Draco, might not make it clear to an eavesdropping Dobby that the Heir wasn’t actually around this time and that Lucius didn’t believe the Chamber held a real monster. Or maybe Dobby figured a student cursed to attack their schoolmates was just as dangerous to the Great Harry Potter (a half-blood, don’t forget) as a monster. As for his clue about the Dark Lord before he could be freely named… well, if Dobby knew that Voldemort originally gave Lucius the Diary, he might originally have meant that yes, Voldemort was connected to the plot, but no, he wasn’t behind it-one of his followers was. Once Dumbledore referred to the Diary as one of Voldemort’s old school things, Dobby figured out that Voldemort was Tom and revised accordingly in his explanation to Harry. Luckily the warning was still accurate, even if not the way he thought originally.
Whatever Voldemort told Lucius originally, Lucius might have worked out more during the decade he had the Diary and Voldemort was gone. Maybe he did float the idea to Narcissa that the Dark Lord hadn’t used and killed Tom Riddle, but had been Tom, and Dobby ran with that.
I still don’t think Lucius knew about the basilisk, though. That was probably a nasty surprise.