Goblins Run the Banks

When Harry woke, the storm had blown itself out. He lay still with his eyes shut, holding on to a dream: a giant knocking the door down at midnight, a squashed cake, and, from somewhere inside all that hair, a letter.

He opened his eyes. There was a hole in the roof with sunlight coming through it, and the giant was asleep on the collapsed sofa with his boots sticking off the end.

It hadn’t been a dream. One of the three wishes had come true. Thank you, he whispered, to nobody in particular, and hoped very hard that it wasn’t all some enormous joke. He decided not to think too hard about the other wishes, just in case of disappointment.

The sofa groaned. A minute later Hagrid was up, and filling the doorway. “Best be off, Harry.”

Harry smiled and got up. “Just a moment.”

He found the coin under the sofa, where it had rolled in the night, put it back in his pocket with the cards, and hurried out after Hagrid.

The sea was flat and bright, and the Dursleys’ rowing boat sat at the foot of the rock, half full of rainwater.

“How did you get here?” Harry asked. There was no other boat.

“Flew,” said Hagrid.

“Flew?”

“Yeah. Fine beast, it was. We’ll go back in this.” He lowered himself into the boat, which sank several inches, and looked at the oars without enthusiasm. “I’m meant ter do things the slow way, now I’ve got yeh with me. But it’s a long pull fer two oars. Yeh’d not tell on me, would yeh?”

“Of course not,” said Harry, who wouldn’t have minded anything at all this morning.

Hagrid tapped the side of the boat twice with his pink umbrella, and off it went.

They hadn’t gone twenty yards when the door of the shack banged open.

“Wait! Wait!”

It was Aunt Petunia, out on the rock in her dressing gown with her hair on end. Behind her stood Uncle Vernon, a deep, even purple, his mouth opening and shutting with nothing coming out; Harry could see that he would rather have swum than asked. Behind him, half hidden by the door, was Dudley, still holding on to his trousers.

“At least send it back! Don’t leave us here! Please! He has to see a doctor!”

And then, to Harry’s astonishment, Aunt Petunia burst into tears. He had never once seen her cry. She stood on the rock with her hands over her face and sobbed, and got smaller and smaller.

Hagrid said something into his beard that Harry probably wasn’t meant to hear, and didn’t turn round. Harry watched the three figures on the rock until he couldn’t tell which was which.

At the harbour wall they both climbed out, and Hagrid stood for a moment looking down at the empty boat, and then back across the water.

“Ah, go on, then,” he said gruffly.

One tap of the umbrella, and the little boat turned itself round, quite neatly, and set off across the bay on its own.

“You’re sending it back?” said Harry. “I thought you couldn’t stand them, either.”

“Can’t,” said Hagrid. “Don’ mean I’d leave a family sat on a rock.” He put the umbrella away inside his coat. “Come on. Lots ter do today.”

Harry looked back once. The boat was already a long way out, a small dark speck making steadily for three people who had never been kind to him. Then he followed Hagrid into the town.

“Hagrid,” said Harry, when they had gone a little way, “I haven’t got any money. And Uncle Vernon said he won’t pay for me to go.”

“He needn’ trouble himself,” said Hagrid. “Yeh didn’ think yer mum an’ dad left yeh with nothin’?”

“I didn’t know they’d left me anything.”

“Well, they did. It’s in a vault at Gringotts, an’ it’s sat there ten years with nobody touchin’ it. That’s our bank. The goblins see ter that.”

Harry looked up at Hagrid. “Goblins run the banks?”

“Well, yeah,” said Hagrid, and said nothing more.

A little further on he said, “I’ve a job ter do there meself anyway. Fer Dumbledore.” He wouldn’t say what it was, but he stood up a little straighter as he said it.

People stared at them on the train. Hagrid took up two seats.

“Still got yer letter, Harry?”

Harry had, and he took out the second page. He nearly knew it by heart: three sets of plain black robes, one pointed hat, a wand, a pewter cauldron, a telescope, brass scales. At the bottom it said that students might bring an owl or a cat or a toad, and that first-years were not allowed their own broomsticks.

He read that line again.

Broomsticks. Nobody put a rule in a letter about a thing unless the thing could be done. He sat looking out at the fields going by, and couldn’t keep the grin off his face.

Hagrid knew where to go in London. What he didn’t seem to know was how you got there in the ordinary way, and Harry, who had never been to London in his life, found himself doing the leading.

“This is it,” said Hagrid, and stopped. “The Leaky Cauldron.”

It was a tiny, grubby pub squeezed in between a big bookshop and a record shop, and if Hagrid hadn’t been pointing at it, Harry would have walked straight past. Everybody else was doing just that. He watched their eyes. They went from the bookshop to the record shop without a flicker, the way an audience’s eyes go straight past the hand that’s doing the work. Harry knew that look. He’d been putting it on people’s faces for years.

Inside it was dark and shabby, and the barman was bald and hadn’t many teeth.

“The usual, Hagrid?”

“Can’t, Tom. Hogwarts business.” Hagrid clapped a hand on Harry’s shoulder, and Harry nearly fell down.

The barman looked at Harry, and then at Harry’s forehead, and the glass he was polishing stopped moving.

“Well, I never,” he whispered. “Is it? It is. Harry Potter. In my pub.”

The whole room went silent. Then there was a great scraping of chairs, and Harry found himself shaking hands with everybody in the Leaky Cauldron.

“Welcome back, Mr Potter. Welcome back.”

“I told my husband it would be this summer. I said, he’s eleven this summer!”

“Sixty years I’ve been coming in here,” said a very old man with a wrinkly voice, holding on to Harry’s hand with both of his, “and I never thought to see it.”

A woman thanked him, twice, and didn’t say what for. Harry had no idea what to say to any of them, so he smiled.

The last to come forward was a pale young man with a twitch in one eye.

“This is Professor Quirrell, Harry,” said Hagrid. “He’s the Defence teacher at Hogwarts.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Harry, and shook his hand.

It was a damp hand, and Harry got an electric shock as he took hold of it. Professor Quirrell stammered that it was an honour, went back to his table, and held his glass in the other hand.

It was ten minutes before Hagrid could get Harry out through the crowd and into a little walled yard at the back, where there was nothing but a dustbin and some weeds.

Hagrid looked down at him. Then he put out one enormous finger and pressed the front of Harry’s hair flat over the scar on his forehead.

“Best keep that covered,” he said. “Else we’ll never get yer shoppin’ done.”

It stayed down. Nothing Aunt Petunia had ever done to it had managed that.

Hagrid counted bricks along the wall above the bin, muttering. “Three up. Two along. Stand back, Harry.” He tapped the wall three times with the point of his umbrella.

The brick shivered. A hole opened in the middle of it and grew, the bricks folding away from one another, until there was an archway big enough even for Hagrid, and a cobbled street twisting away beyond it.

“Welcome ter Diagon Alley,” said Hagrid proudly.

When Harry glanced back over his shoulder, the wall was closing up behind them.

Harry turned his head every way at once and still missed half of it: cauldrons stacked in the sun, a dark shop full of soft hooting, boys with their noses flat against a window full of broomsticks, ice-creams in very tall glasses outside a café. It was the opposite of a trick. Nothing here was hidden at all.

“Gringotts,” said Hagrid.

It was a snow-white building that towered over the little shops, and the creature in scarlet and gold beside its bronze doors was, Harry realised with a start, a goblin. Words were cut into the inner doors, in Latin: Tuum cape. Cetera cave.

As he walked in, he heard a voice in his ear.

Come in and welcome, if you’re owed;
Count what is yours, and take the road.
But if you came for more than’s due,
Be sure that something’s counting you.
It keeps our floors, and it is old,
And has no use at all for gold.

Harry looked round. There was nobody there.

“Heard the rhyme, did yeh?” said Hagrid. “Everybody does, first time in.”

Inside was a great marble hall, where a hundred more goblins in black and gold sat on high stools behind a long counter, weighing coins and writing in ledgers and holding jewels up to the light. They had very long fingers. It occurred to Harry that a goblin would be very hard to beat at cards.

Hagrid walked up to one that was free.

“Afternoon,” said Hagrid. “This is Mr Harry Potter, an’ we’ve come ter —”

“Key,” said the goblin, holding out his hand without looking up.

“Got it here somewhere.” Hagrid began to turn out his pockets on to the counter. A handful of dog biscuits went across the goblin’s ledger, and the goblin moved the ledger, scowling. More biscuits followed, and a ball of string, and a large spider, which climbed down off the ledger and walked away along the counter. The goblin watched it go. At last there was a small gold key.

The goblin held it up between two long fingers, turned it over, and wrote something down.

“Ten years,” he said. He didn’t say ten years of what.

“An’ I’ve a letter here from Professor Dumbledore,” said Hagrid. “It’s about the You-Know-What. In vault seven hundred an’ thirteen.”

The goblin read the letter twice and handed it back.

“Griphook!”

Another goblin came round the end of the counter. Hagrid swept the dog biscuits back into his pocket, and they followed Griphook towards one of the doors.

“What’s the You-Know-What?” Harry asked.

“That’s not fer yeh ter know, Harry,” said Hagrid apologetically.

Past the innermost doors the marble stopped. A narrow stone passage lit by torches sloped steeply down into the dark, with a pair of small rails along its floor. Griphook whistled, and a cart came rattling up out of the dark by itself and stopped at their feet. They climbed in, Hagrid with some difficulty, and it set off before he’d finished sitting down.

Nobody steered. Griphook sat in the front with his long hands folded, and the cart took every fork without slowing; Harry lost count of the turnings after twelve.

The air grew cold and wet. The torches came further and further apart, and between them things went by too quickly to be sure of: a wall streaming with water, the mouth of another tunnel, a door with no handle. Once, a long way off down a side passage, there was a flare of orange light, and a warmth on Harry’s face that was gone before he could turn his head. Then the walls fell away altogether, and they were rattling along the edge of a black lake, under a roof hung with points of stone as long as a man.

Hagrid had gone green and shut his eyes. Harry, eyes wide, imagined this was what a rollercoaster ride felt like. He leaned out as far as he dared, with the wind tearing at his hair, and he wanted it never to stop.

The cart stopped beside a small door in the wall of the passage. Hagrid got out and had to lean on the stone until his knees stopped shaking.

“Do all goblin banks have rollercoaster rides?” Harry asked.

“Well, yes,” said Griphook, and said nothing more.

He unlocked the door, and green smoke came billowing out. As it cleared, Harry saw mounds of gold coins, columns of silver, and heaps of little bronze ones.

“Yer mum an’ dad’s,” said Hagrid. “Yours now.”

“I’m rich?” said Harry.

“Yeh’ll not go short,” said Hagrid.

The Dursleys couldn’t have known, or there’d have been none of it left. Ten years of hearing what he cost them in bread and bath-water, and the whole time this had been sitting down here in the dark, with his name on it.

Hagrid gave him a bag, and Harry began to fill it. Nobody had ever told him how much money a person was supposed to carry.

“No, yeh don’ need ter take all of it, Harry,” said Hagrid. “Jus’ a few.”

Harry tipped most of it back out again.

“The gold ones are Galleons. Seventeen silver Sickles ter a Galleon, an’ twenty-nine Knuts ter a Sickle. Simple enough. That’s plenty ter be goin’ on with. The rest’ll still be here at Christmas.”

Harry picked up a Sickle. It was heavier than a ten-pence piece, and thicker at the rim. Without thinking, he set it on his first knuckle and walked it across the back of his hand and back again, just once. It went more slowly than the coin he was used to, and more smoothly.

He looked up. Griphook was watching his hand. It was the only time all day that a goblin had looked at him with anything like interest.

Harry put that Sickle in his pocket, and climbed back into the cart.

Vault seven hundred and thirteen was deeper still, and had no keyhole. Griphook drew one finger down the door, muttering, and it melted away. Inside there was nothing but a grubby little package wrapped in brown paper. Hagrid picked it up and pushed it deep inside his coat. Harry longed to know what it was, and didn’t ask.

One wild ride later they came back out past the inner doors, and Harry looked again at the words cut into them.

“Hagrid, what does the Latin say?”

“Take what’s yours, an’ watch out fer the rest,” said Hagrid. “That’s goblin fer don’ steal from us.” He thought about it. “Or if yeh do, don’ get caught.”

They stood blinking in the sunlight outside Gringotts. Harry had a bag full of money. He didn’t know how many Galleons there were to the pound, and he didn’t need to. He had more than he’d ever had in his life. He had more than Dudley had ever had. And the first thing a boy of eleven does, on finding out that he is secretly rich, is go and buy a large ice-cream. Harry thought of those tall glasses outside the café and turned to Hagrid.

“Might as well start with yer uniform,” said Hagrid. He nodded towards a shop across the street: Madam Malkin’s Robes for All Occasions.

“Oh. I was thinking of buying an ice-cream first,” said Harry sheepishly. “Sorry.”

The giant snorted lightly. He was still rather pale. “Yeh’ll manage in the shop on yer own a minute, won’ yeh? Me stomach’s still down in that vault. I need ter sit down somewhere with a glass for a bit.”

Harry nodded. Hagrid told him not to spend his money on anything that wasn’t on the list, and went off. Harry crossed the street alone, pushed open the door, and the bell rang.