The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2) (15 page)

She didn’t notice Pan sitting up tensely, watching her, in the chair beside the bed.

She put the alethiometer on the bedside table and reached for paper and pencil. Working quickly, while the vision was already fading from her mind, she wrote down everything she could.

Pan watched her for a minute or two and then quietly curled up again in the armchair. He hadn’t shared her pillow for several nights.

He didn’t move till Lyra finished writing and turned out the light, and then he waited a little longer till her steady breathing told him she was asleep. Then he recovered a tattered little notebook from the larger book in which he’d hidden it, and held it firmly in his teeth as he jumped up to the windowsill.

He had already inspected the window, which was not a sash but a casement with a simple iron catch, so he didn’t need Lyra’s help to open it. A moment later he was outside on the old stone tiles, and then a leap into an apple tree, a dart across a lawn, a scamper across the bridge, and soon he was running freely in the wide expanse of Port Meadow towards the distant campanile of St. Barnabas’s Oratory, pale against the night sky. He darted through a group of sleeping ponies, making them shift uneasily: perhaps one of them was the animal whose back he’d leapt on the year before, digging his claws in till the poor creature galloped in a frenzy and finally threw him off, and he’d landed on the grass laughing with delight. That was something Lyra knew nothing about.

Just as she knew nothing about the little notebook he was carrying in his teeth. It was the one from Dr. Hassall’s rucksack, the one filled with names and addresses, and he’d hidden it away because he’d seen something in it that she hadn’t noticed; and having hidden it, he found that the best time to tell her about it hadn’t yet arrived.

He ran on, light and tireless and silent, until he reached the canal that ran along the eastern edge of the meadow. Rather than swim across and risk the notebook, he slipped through the grass until he came to the little bridge across to Walton Well Road and the streets of Jericho. He’d have to be very careful from now on; it wasn’t yet midnight, there were several pubs still open, and the yellow streetlights at each corner would have made it impossible to hide if he’d gone that way.

Instead, he kept to the towpath, moving swiftly and stopping frequently to look and listen, until he came to an iron-barred gate on the left. He was through it in a moment, into the grounds of the Eagle Ironworks, whose great buildings loomed high above him. A narrow path led to a similar gate that opened next to the end of Juxon Street, which consisted of a terrace of small brick houses built for the workers at the ironworks or the Fell Press nearby. Pan stayed inside the gate, in the shadow of the buildings, because two men were talking in the street.

Finally one of them opened a door, and they said good night, and the other’s footsteps moved away unsteadily towards Walton Street. Pan waited for another minute, and then slipped through the gate and over the low wall in front of the last house.

He crouched beside the little window of the basement, which was dimly lit, and so smoke-covered and dusty that it was impossible to see through. He was listening for the sound of a man’s voice, and presently he heard it, a sentence or two in a hoarse conversational tone, answered by a lighter and more musical one.

They were there, and they were working: that was all he needed to know. He tapped on the window, and the voices stopped at once. A dark shape leapt up onto the narrow windowsill, peered out, and a moment later moved out of the way to let the man unlatch the window.

Pan slipped inside and jumped down onto the stone floor of the basement to greet the cat dæmon, whose black fur actually seemed to absorb light. A great furnace was blazing in the center of the room, and the heat was fierce. The place seemed like a combination of blacksmith’s forge and chemical laboratory, dark with soot and thick with cobwebs.

“Pantalaimon,” said the man. “Welcome. We haven’t seen you for a while.”

“Mr. Makepeace,” said Pan, dropping the notebook in order to speak. “How are you?”

“Active, at least,” said Makepeace. “You’re alone?”

He was aged about seventy, and deeply wrinkled. His skin was mottled either by age or by the smoke that filled the air. Pan and Lyra had first encountered Sebastian Makepeace a few years before, in a strange little episode involving a witch and her dæmon. They had visited him a number of times since then, becoming familiar with his ironic manner, the indescribable clutter of his laboratory, his knowledge of curious things, and the kindly patience of his dæmon, Mary. She and Makepeace knew that Lyra and Pan could separate: the witch whose deceit had brought them together had once been his lover, and he knew about the power the witches had.

“Yes,” said Pan. “Lyra is…well, she’s asleep. I wanted to ask you about something. I don’t want to interrupt you.”

Makepeace put on a battered gauntlet and adjusted the position of an iron vessel at the edge of the furnace. “That can go on heating for a while,” he said. “Sit down, my boy. I’ll smoke while we talk.” He took a small cheroot from a drawer and lit it. Pan liked the scent of smokeleaf, but wondered if he’d smell it at all in this atmosphere. The alchemist sat on a stool and looked at him directly. “Very well, what’s in that notebook?”

Pan picked it up and held it for him to take, and then told him about the murder and the events that had followed. Makepeace listened closely, and Mary sat at his feet, eyes on Pan as he spoke.

“And the reason I hid it,” Pan finished, “and the reason I brought it here, is that your name’s in it. It’s a sort of address book. Lyra didn’t notice that, but I did.”

“Let me have a look,” said Makepeace. He put on his spectacles. His dæmon sprang up to his lap, and they both looked closely at the list of names of people and their dæmons, and their addresses, in the little book. Each name and address was written in a different hand. They weren’t in alphabetical order; in fact, they seemed to Pan to be ordered geographically, east to west, starting from somewhere called Khwarezm and ending in Edinburgh, taking in cities and towns in most European countries. Pan had studied it secretly three or four times, and could find nothing to hint at the connection between them.

The alchemist seemed to be searching for some names in particular.

“Your name’s the only one in Oxford,” Pan said. “I just wondered if you knew about this list. And why he might have been carrying it.”

“You said he could separate from his dæmon?”

“Just before he died. Yes. She flew up to the tree and asked me to help.”

“And why haven’t you told Lyra about this?”

“I…It just never seemed to be the right time.”

“That’s unfortunate,” said Makepeace. “Well, you should give it to her. It’s very valuable. There’s a name for this kind of list: it’s known as a
clavicula adiumenti.
”

He pointed to a small pair of embossed letters inside the back cover, at the foot next to the spine:
C.A.
The little book was so rubbed and battered that they were hardly visible. Then he flicked through the pages to about halfway through, took a short pencil out of his waistcoat pocket, and turned the notebook sideways before writing something in it.

“What does that mean?” said Pan. “
Clavicula
…And who are these people? Do you know them all? I couldn’t see any connection between the names.”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

“What did you write?”

“A name that was missing.”

“Why did you turn it sideways?”

“To fit it on the page, of course. I say this again: give it to Lyra, and come back here with her. Then I’ll tell you what it means. Not until you’re both here together.”

“That won’t be easy,” said Pan. “We hardly talk nowadays. We keep quarreling. It’s horrible, and we just can’t stop it.”

“What do you quarrel about?”

“Last time—earlier this evening—it was imagination. I said she had no imagination, and she was upset.”

“Are you surprised?”

“No. I suppose not.”

“Why were you arguing about imagination?”

“I don’t even know anymore. We probably didn’t mean the same thing by it.”

“You won’t understand anything about the imagination until you realize that it’s not about making things up, it’s about perception. What else have you been quarreling about?”

“All kinds of things. She’s changed. She’s been reading books that…Have you heard of Gottfried Brande?”

“No. But don’t tell me what you think about him. Tell me what Lyra would say.”

“Hmm. All right, I’ll try….Brande is a philosopher. They call him the Sage of Wittenberg. Or some people do. He wrote an enormous novel called
The Hyperchorasmians.
I don’t even know what that means: he doesn’t refer to it in the text.”

“It would mean those who live beyond Chorasmia, which is to say, the region to the east of the Caspian Sea. It’s now known as Khwarezm. And—”

“Khwa—what? I think that name’s on the list.”

Makepeace opened the notebook again and nodded. “Yes, here it is. And what does Lyra think of this novel?”

“She’s been sort of hypnotized by it. Ever since she—”

“You’re telling me what
you
think. Tell me what she would say if I asked her about it.”

“Well. She’d say it was a work of enormous—um—scope and power…A completely convincing world…Unlike anything else she’d ever read…A—a—a new view of human nature that shattered all her previous convictions and…showed her life in a completely new perspective….Something like that, probably.”

“You’re being satirical.”

“I can’t help it. I hate it. The characters are monstrously selfish and blind to every human feeling—they’re either arrogant and dominating or cringing and deceitful, or else foppish and artistic and useless….There’s only one value in his world, which is reason. The author’s so rational, he’s insane. Nothing else has any importance at all. To him, the imagination is just meaningless and contemptible. The whole universe he describes, it’s just
arid.
”

“If he’s a philosopher, why did he write a novel? Does he think the novel is a good form for philosophy?”

“He’s written various other books, but this is the only one he’s famous for. We haven’t—Lyra hasn’t read any of the others.”

The alchemist flicked the ash from his cheroot into the furnace and gazed at the fire. His dæmon, Mary, sat beside his feet, eyes half closed, purring steadily.

“Have you ever known anyone and their dæmon who hated each other?” Pan said after a minute had gone by.

“It’s more common than you might think.”

“Even among people who can’t separate?”

“It might be worse for them.”

Pan thought: Yes, it would be. Steam was rising from the iron vessel on the fire.

“Mr. Makepeace,” he said, “what are you working at now?”

“I’m making some soup,” said the alchemist.

“Oh,” said Pan, and then realized the old man was joking. “No, what really?”

“You know what I mean by a field?”

“Like a magnetic field?”

“Yes. But this one is very hard to detect.”

“What does it do?”

“I’m trying to imagine.”

“But if you— Oh, I see. You mean you’re trying to perceive it.”

“That’s right.”

“Do you need special equipment?”

“You could probably do it with immensely expensive instruments that used colossal amounts of power and took up acres of space. I’m limited to what’s here in my laboratory. Some gold leaf, several mirrors, a bright light, various bits and pieces I’ve had to invent.”

“Does it work?”

“Of course it works.”

“I remember the first time we met you, you told Lyra that if people think you’re trying to make gold out of lead, they think you’re wasting time and they don’t bother to find out what you’re really doing.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Were you trying to find this field then?”

“Yes. Now I’ve found it, I’m trying to discover whether it’s the same everywhere, or whether it varies.”

“Do you use all the things you’ve got down here?”

“They all have a use.”

“And what are you making in the iron pot?”

“Soup, as I told you.”

He got up to stir it. Pan suddenly felt tired. He’d learnt some things, but they weren’t necessarily helpful; and now he had to go all the way back across Port Meadow and hide the notebook again, and—sometime—tell Lyra about it.

“Clavicula…,”
he said, trying to remember, and Makepeace added,
“Adiumenti.”

“
Adiumenti.
I’m going to go now. Thank you for explaining this. Enjoy your soup.”

“Tell Lyra, and tell her soon, and come here with her.”

The black cat dæmon stood to touch noses with him, and Pan left.

Next morning, a letter arrived by hand at Durham College for Malcolm. He opened it in the porter’s lodge and saw that the paper was headed
Director’s Office, Botanic Garden, Oxford,
and read:

Dear Dr. Polstead,

I feel I should have been more frank with you yesterday about Dr. Hassall and his research. The fact is that circumstances are changing rapidly, and the matter is more urgent than it might seem. We have been organizing a small meeting between various parties who have an interest in the case, and I wondered if you could possibly attend. Your knowledge of the area and of the items you found means that you might be able to contribute to our discussion. I wouldn’t ask, but it’s both serious and urgent.

We are meeting this evening at six, here at the Garden. If you can come (and I very much hope you will), please ask at the gate for the Linnaeus Room.

Yours sincerely,

Lucy Arnold

He looked at the date on the letter: it had been written that same morning. Asta, on reading it with him from the counter of the porter’s window, said, “We should tell Hannah.”

“Is there time?”

He had a college meeting at midmorning. He peered into the lodge and read the time from the porter’s clock: five past nine.

“Yes, we can do it,” he said.

“I meant for her,” Asta said. “She’s going to London this morning.”

“So she is. Better hurry, then,” Malcolm said, and Asta leapt down and padded after him.

Ten minutes later he was ringing Hannah Relf’s doorbell, and thirty seconds after that she was letting him in and saying, “So you’ve seen the
Oxford Times
?”

“No. What’s that about?”

She held out the newspaper. It was the evening edition from the day before, and she’d turned it to page five, where a headline read, “Body Found at Iffley Lock. Not Drowned, Say Police.”

He scanned the story quickly. Iffley Lock was about a mile down the river from where Pan had seen the attack, and the lockkeeper had found the body of a man of about forty, who had been brutally beaten and who appeared to have died before his body entered the water. The police had opened a murder inquiry.

“Must be him,” said Malcolm. “Poor man. Well, Lucy Arnold might know by now. Perhaps that’s what she’s referring to.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I came to show you this,” he said, and handed her the letter.

“Circumstances are changing rapidly,”
Hannah read. “Yes. Could well be. She’s very cautious.”

“Doesn’t mention the police. If there was nothing on the body to identify him, they wouldn’t know who he was, and she still might not know about it. Do you know anything about her? Ever met her?”

“I know her slightly. Intense, passionate woman—almost tragic, I’ve sometimes thought. Or felt, rather. I’ve got no reason for thinking it.”

“That doesn’t matter. It’s part of the picture. Anyway, I’m going to go to this meeting of hers. Will you see Glenys in London, d’you think?”

“Yes. She’ll certainly be there. I’ll make sure she knows.”

She took her overcoat from the hat stand. “How’s Lyra getting on?” she said as he held the coat for her.

“Subdued. Not surprising, really.”

“Tell her to come and see me when she has an hour or so. Oh, Malcolm—Dr. Strauss’s journey through the desert, and the red building…”

“What about it?”

“That word
akterrakeh
—any idea what it could mean?”

“None, I’m afraid. It’s not a Tajik word, as far as I can tell.”

“Oh well. I wonder if the alethiometer could clarify it. See you later.”

“Give my regards to Glenys.”

Glenys Godwin was the current Director of Oakley Street. Thomas Nugent, who had been Director when Hannah joined the organization, had died earlier in the year, and Hannah was going to his memorial service. Mrs. Godwin had had to retire as a field officer some years before when she contracted a tropical fever which had had the effect of paralyzing her dæmon, but her judgment was both sound and daring, and her dæmon’s memory was fine-grained and extensive. Malcolm admired her greatly. She was a widow whose only child had died of the same fever that had infected her, and she was the first woman to head Oakley Street; her political enemies had been waiting in vain for her to make a mistake.

After the memorial service, Hannah managed to speak to her for ten minutes. They were sitting in a quiet corner of the hotel lounge where several other Oakley Street people were having drinks. She briskly summarized everything she knew about the murder, the rucksack, Strauss’s journal, and Malcolm’s invitation to this hastily summoned meeting.

Glenys Godwin was in her fifties, small and stocky, her dark gray hair neatly and plainly styled. Her face was quick with feeling and movement—too expressive, Hannah had often thought, to be helpful to someone in her position, where a steely inscrutability might have been preferable. Her left hand moved gently over her dæmon, a small civet cat, who lay in her lap, listening closely. When Hannah had finished, she said, “The young woman, Lyra Silvertongue, was it? Unusual name. Where is she now?”

“Staying with Malcolm’s parents. They have a pub on the river.”

“Does she need protection?”

“Yes, I think she does. She’s…Do you know about her background?”

“No. Tell me sometime, but not now. Clearly Malcolm must go to this meeting—it’s very much Oakley Street business. There’s an experimental theology connection; we know that much. A man called…”

“Brewster Napier,” said the ghostlike voice of her dæmon.

“That’s the one. He published a paper a couple of years ago, which first drew our attention to it. What was it called?”

“ ‘Some effects of rose oil in polarized light microscopy,’ ” said Godwin’s dæmon. “In
Proceedings of the Microscopical Institute of Leiden.
Napier and Stevenson, two years ago.”

His words were quiet and strained, but perfectly clear. Not for the first time, Hannah marveled at his memory.

“Have you been in contact with this Napier?” Hannah asked.

“Not directly. We checked his background very carefully and quietly, and he’s perfectly sound. As far as we know, the implications of his paper haven’t been noticed by the Magisterium, and we don’t want to prompt them by taking an overt interest ourselves. This business that Malcolm’s come across is just another indication that something’s stirring. I’m glad you told me about it. You say he’s copied all the papers from the rucksack?”

“Everything. I imagine he’ll get them to you by Monday.”

“I look forward to it.”

At about the same time, Lyra was talking to the kitchen helper at the Trout. Pauline was seventeen years old, pretty and shy, inclined to blush easily. While Pan was talking under the kitchen table with her mouse dæmon, Pauline chopped up some onions and Lyra peeled potatoes.

“Well, he used to teach me a bit,” Lyra said in answer to a question about how she knew Malcolm. “But I was being horrible to everyone in those days. I never thought of him having a life at all apart from college. I used to think they put him away in a cupboard at night. How long have you been working here?”

“I started last year, just part-time, like. Then Brenda asked me to do a few more hours, and…I work at Boswell’s too, Mondays and Thursdays.”

“Do you? I worked at Boswell’s for a bit. Kitchenware. It was hard work.”

“I’m in Haberdashery.”

She finished the onions and put them in a large casserole on the range.

“What are you making?” said Lyra.

“Just starting a venison casserole. Brenda’ll do most of it. She’s got some special spices she puts in, I don’t know what they are. I’m just learning, really.”

“Does she cook one big dish every day?”

“She used to. Mainly roasts and that, joints on the spit. Then Malcolm suggested varying it a bit. He had some really good ideas.” She was blushing again. She turned away to stir the onions, which were spitting in the fat.

“Have you known Malcolm for a long time?” Lyra said.

“Yeah. I s’pose. When I was little, he…I thought he was…I dunno, really. He was always nice to me. I used to think he’d take over the pub when Reg retired, but somehow I can’t see that anymore, really. He’s more of a professor now. I don’t see him so much.”

“Would you like to run a pub?”

“Oh, I couldn’t.”

“It’d be fun, though.”

Pauline’s dæmon scampered up to her shoulder and whispered in her ear, and the girl bowed her head and shook it slightly to let her dark curls swing down and hide her flaming cheeks. She gave the onions a final stir and put the lid on the casserole before moving it a little away from the heat. Lyra watched without seeming to; she found herself fascinated by the girl’s embarrassment, and was sorry to have caused it, without knowing why.

A little later, when they were sitting on the terrace, watching the river flow past, Pan told her.

“She’s in love with him,” he said.

“What? With
Malcolm
?” Lyra was incredulous.

“And if you hadn’t been so wrapped up in yourself, you’d have seen that straightaway.”

“I’m not,” she said, but she sounded unconvinced, even to herself. “But…Surely he’s too old?”

“She doesn’t think so, obviously. Anyway, I don’t suppose he’s in love with her.”

“Did her dæmon tell you that?”

“He didn’t have to.”

Lyra was shocked, and she had no idea why. It wasn’t shocking: it was just…Well, it was
Dr. Polstead.
But then, he was different now. He was even dressing differently. At home in the Trout, Malcolm wore a checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up, showing the golden hair on his forearms, a moleskin waistcoat, and corduroy trousers. He looked like a farmer, she thought, and very little like a scholar. He appeared to be perfectly at home in this world of watermen and farm laborers, of poachers and traveling salesmen; calm and burly and good-natured, he seemed to have been part of this place all his life.

Which of course he had. It was no wonder that he served drinks so expertly, talked so easily with strangers as well as regulars, dealt with problems so efficiently. The evening before, two customers had nearly come to blows over a game of cards, and Malcolm had them outside almost before Lyra had noticed. She wasn’t sure that she felt at ease with this new Malcolm any more than with the old Dr. Polstead, but she could see that he was someone to be respected. To fall in love with, though…She resolved to avoid talking about him again. She liked Pauline and didn’t want to think she’d embarrassed her.

When Malcolm arrived at the Botanic Garden just before six, he saw a light in one window of the administrative building; apart from that, the place was dark. The porter’s shutter was closed, and he tapped on it gently.

He heard a movement inside and saw a glow forming at the edge of the shutter, as if someone had arrived with a lamp.

“Garden’s closed,” said a voice from inside.

“Yes. But I’ve come for a meeting with Professor Arnold. She told me to ask for the Linnaeus Room.”

“Name, sir?”

“Polstead. Malcolm Polstead.”

“Right…Got it. Main door’s open, and the Linnaeus Room is one floor up, second on the right.”

The main door of the administrative building faced into the garden. It was faintly lit by a light at the top of the stairs, and Malcolm found the Linnaeus Room just along the corridor from the Director’s office, where he’d seen Professor Arnold the day before. He knocked on the door and heard a murmur of conversation come to a stop.

The door opened, and Lucy Arnold stood there. Malcolm remembered Hannah’s word:
tragic.
That was her expression, and he knew at once that she’d heard of the discovery of Hassall’s body.

“I hope I’m not late,” he said.

“No. Please, do come in. We haven’t started yet, but there’s no one else to come….”

Apart from her, there were five people sitting at the conference table in the light of two low-hanging anbaric lamps that left the corners of the room in semi-darkness. He knew two of them slightly: one was an expert on Asian politics from St. Edmund Hall, and the other was a clergyman called Charles Capes. Malcolm knew him to be a theologian, but Hannah had told him that Capes was in fact a secret friend of Oakley Street.

Malcolm took his place at the table as Lucy Arnold sat down.

“We’re all here,” she said. “Let’s begin. For those who haven’t already heard, the police found a body in the river yesterday, and it’s been identified as that of Roderick Hassall.”

She was speaking with a stern self-control, but Malcolm thought he could hear a tremor in her voice. One or two of the others around the table uttered a murmur of shock, or of sympathy. She went on:

“I’ve asked you all here because I think we need to share our knowledge about this matter and decide what to do next. I don’t think you all know one another, so I’ll ask you to introduce yourselves briefly. Charles, could you start?”

Charles Capes was a small, tidy man of sixty or so who wore a clerical collar. His dæmon was a lemur. “Charles Capes, Thackeray Professor of Divinity,” he said. “But I’m here because I knew Roderick Hassall, and I’ve spent some time in the region where he was working.”