The Prime Minister, again, sat upright in his chair before spluttering,"But!... How?... What?... But that makes no sense ! How can you be this... Earl of Slytherin... if the title has not been active for so long? It would be impossible!"
Harry raised his hand in a gesture of calming towards the Prime Minister while smiling towards the somewhat excited man.
Once he was sure the Prime Minister had recovered from his initial shock, Harry said, "Your... concern... was anticipated, Sir."
Harry turned slightly in his seat and gestured over to a painting mounted on the wall above the small office fireplace.
"That painting, Sir," asked Harry. "What do you know about it?"
The Prime Minister frowned at the young man sitting across from him... the young maybe-lord, he thought... wondering about the sudden shift in the conversation to a rather poor work of art.
"What has a shabby painting to do with this?" asked the Prime Minister.
"If you would humour me for a moment, Sir; you will soon discover the answer to your question," responded Harry quite calmly.
The Prime Minister hesitated for a few moments before he answered.
"'Fruit in a Bowl' by an unknown artist," he said. "Nobody can get the damned thing off the wall. My predecessors have tried, I've tried; we've had art historians, carpenters, all sorts of people in here trying to remove it."
Harry just gently smiled as he listened to the Prime Minister grumble about it.
"I tried to convince the maintenance staff here to just remove the whole damned wall atop the fireplace and replace it," the Prime Minister went on, grumbling. "But, nooo; the building - including all the original walls within it - are protected under the British Heritage Act. And not even the Prime Minister is allowed to do that. Plus, the wall is a 'load bearing' wall and would destabilise the whole facade if it was tampered with."
Gathering himself the Prime Minister asked, "But, what of it, Sir?"
Harry grinned back at the Prime Minister for a moment, turned to look directly at the painting, and called out, "Myrrdin's Hand!"
Suddenly, there was a distinct click sound from the painting and the edge closest to the desk popped off the wall.
Harry then turned back to face the Prime Minister and, with a gesture to the painting, quietly said, "You'll need to look in there for your answers, Sir."
Astonished, the Prime Minister was beginning to wonder if this well dressed young man was intent on giving him some sort of coronary before his unanticipated meeting was over. He was glad that, during his last visit to his personal physician, the doctor told him his heart was fine (though, he could do with some exercise).
The Prime Minister waited a few moments to make sure he was calm enough before rising, walking around his desk and crossing to the painting.
Grabbing the edge of the painting's frame that had come loose, he pulled. The whole side came away from the wall and swung on hidden hinges on the opposite side.
Behind the painting, he found a small box-shaped cubby-hole. And inside he saw a small stack of what seemed to be old documents with a crystal cube-shaped paperweight on them holding them down.
"You'll want to be very careful with those parchments, Sir," said Harry. "They're very old."
The Prime Minister looked back at Harry for a moment and nodded. He turned back to the cubby-hole, reached in with both hands and gently lifted out the documents in one pile with the cube on top.
'Thank you, Myrrdin!' Harry thought to himself.
Turning, the Prime Minister walked back to and around the desk, and gently placed the documents on his blotter - knocking the dead trinket aside as he did so - before retaking his seat.
"Careful, please, Sir," said Harry. "The space from which you took them had strong protection charms placed on it to drastically slow down the aging process of what was inside. But those documents are still almost one thousand years old."
The Prime Minister had been looking down at the documents, and was just about to move the paperweight out of the way, when Harry said that. But as soon as Harry mentioned how old the documents were his head snapped back up to stare at Harry in shock, yet again.
Harry was still calmly smiling back at him from where he was sitting back and relaxed in his chair on the other side of the desk.
The Prime Minister placed his elbows on his desk blotter either side of the stack of documents, dropped his forehead into his hands and said near plaintively with his eyes closed, "Earl... My Lord... Mister..."
"Call me 'Harry', Sir," Harry calmly interrupted.
Lifting his head to look over his hands, at what he now thought of as the most astonishing young man he'd ever met across the desk from him he said, "Harry, then." And then sighed before asking, "And these documents are?"
"They will inform you about the Earldom of Slytherin, plus three others, and how and why they were established at the beginning of the eleventh century."
The Prime Minister stared at Harry for a few moments before looking down at the documents again.
After a few moments, and carefully moving each top document aside to see the one beneath, he then said, "I do not recognise the writing, or the individual letters. How am I supposed to read them?"
"They're written in Anglo-Saxon runic script. It was the language of the day of kings, scholars and the clergy," replied Harry.
The Prime Minister, recalling his days in High School studying English History, realised the script was, indeed, Anglo-Saxon script.
"Well, I can't read this... Harry," he said. "But I suppose you have a solution?"
"Of course, Sir," responded Harry, still smiling.
As Harry brought his satchel around in front of himself the Prime Minister sighed, "Why am I not surprised?"
Pausing in what he was doing Harry replied with a grin, "Because you've already had more than enough surprises for one day?" Before returning to opening his satchel and reaching inside.
The Prime Minister only snorted with amusement in response.