The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2) (17 page)

“Smallest I’ve seen,” said Charles Capes.

Malcolm checked that it was dead and dropped it out of the window. “I thought it might be an idea to leave it there and let them waste time listening to it,” he said. “But then you’d always have to be careful what people said in here, and that would be a nuisance. Besides, it could move about, so you’d never be sure where it was. Better to let them think it just failed.”

“It’s the first I’ve heard of a Royal Institute of Ethnology,” said Capes. “And what about those papers? Where are they really?”

“In my office,” Lucy Arnold said. “There are some samples too—seeds, that sort of thing….”

“Well, they can’t stay there,” said Malcolm. “When those men come back, they’ll have a search warrant. Shall I take the papers away?”

“Why not let me?” said Capes. “I’m curious to read them, apart from anything else. And there are plenty of places to hide things in our cellars at Wykeham.”

“All right,” she said. “Yes. Thank you. I don’t know what to do.”

“If you don’t mind,” said Malcolm, “I’d like to take the book of Tajik poetry. There’s something I want to check. You know
Jahan and Rukhsana
?” he added to Capes.

“He was carrying a copy of that, was he? How odd.”

“Yes, and I want to find out why. As for the CCD, when they discover there’s no Ethnology Institute, they’ll come straight back to me,” said Malcolm. “But I’ll have thought of something else by then. Let’s go and get those things right now.”

Lyra walked along the river during the afternoon, with Pan in sullen attendance. From time to time he seemed to want to say something, but she was deep in a mood of wintry isolation, so in the end he slouched as far behind her as he could get without arousing suspicion and said nothing.

As the late-afternoon light thickened into gloom under the trees, and a mist that was almost a drizzle began to fill the air, she found herself hoping that Malcolm would be there when she got back to the Trout. She wanted to ask him about—oh, she couldn’t remember; it would come to her. And she wanted to watch Pauline with him, to see whether Pan’s crazy idea could be true.

But Malcolm didn’t come, and she didn’t want to ask where he was, in case—in case, she didn’t know what; so it was in a state of frustrated melancholy that she went to bed, and there wasn’t even anything she wanted to read. She took up
The Hyperchorasmians
and opened it at random, but the heroic intensity that had once intoxicated her now seemed out of reach.

And Pan wouldn’t settle. He prowled about the little room, leaping up to the windowsill, listening at the door, exploring the wardrobe, until finally she said, “Oh for God’s sake, just go to bloody sleep.”

“Not sleepy,” he said. “Neither are you.”

“Can’t you stop fidgeting?”

“Lyra, why are you so difficult to talk to?”

“Me?”

“I need to tell you something, but you make it difficult.”

“I’m listening.”

“No, you’re not. Not properly.”

“I don’t know what I’ve got to do to listen
properly.
Am I supposed to use the imagination that I haven’t got?”

“I didn’t mean that. Anyway—”

“Of course you meant it. You said it clearly enough.”

“Well, I’ve thought more since then. When I went out last night—”

“I don’t want to hear about it. I knew you were out, and I know you were talking to someone, and I’m just not interested.”

“Lyra, it’s important. Please listen.”

He sprang onto the bedside table. She said nothing, but subsided onto the pillow and looked up at the ceiling.

Finally she said, “Well?”

“I can’t talk to you if you’re in this mood.”

“Oh, this is impossible.”

“I’m trying to work out the best way to—”

“Just
say
it.”

Silence.

He sighed, and then he said, “You know in the rucksack, all those things we found in there…”

“Well?”

“One of them was a notebook with names and addresses in it.”

“What about it?”

“You didn’t see the name I saw in it.”

“Whose name?”

“Sebastian Makepeace.”

She sat up. “Where was it?”

“In the notebook, like I said. The only name and address in Oxford.”

“When did you see that?”

“When you were flicking through it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought you were bound to see it yourself. Anyway, you’re not easy to tell anything these days.”

“Oh, don’t be so stupid. You could have told me that. Where is it now? Has Malcolm got it?”

“No. I hid it.”

“Why? Where is it now?”

“Because I wanted to find out why he was in it. Mr. Makepeace. And last night I went out and took it to him.”

Lyra almost choked with rage. For a moment she couldn’t breathe. She found her entire body trembling. Pan saw it clearly and leapt off the bedside table and onto the armchair.

“Lyra, if you don’t listen, I can’t tell you what he said—”

“You filthy little rat,” she said. She was almost sobbing, and she couldn’t recognize her own voice or stop herself saying detestable things, or even know why she was saying them. “You cheat, you thief, you let me down the other night when you let her—his dæmon, the cat—you let her see you with the wallet, and now you do this, you go behind my back—”

“Because you wouldn’t listen! You’re not listening now!”

“No. Because I can’t trust you anymore. You’re a fucking stranger to me, Pan. I can’t tell you how much I
detest
it when you do this sort of thing—”

“If I hadn’t asked him, I’d never—”

“And I used to—oh, how much I used to trust you—you were everything, you were like a rock, I could have…
betraying
me like that—”

“
Betray!
Listen to yourself! You think I’ll ever forget you betraying
me
in the world of the dead?”

Lyra felt as if someone had kicked her in the heart. She fell back on the bed. “Don’t,” she whispered.

“It was the worst thing you ever did.”

She knew exactly what he meant, and her mind had flown back at once to the bank of the river in the world of the dead, and that terrible moment when she left him behind in order to go and find the ghost of her friend Roger.

“I know,” she said. She could hardly hear her own voice through the hammering of her heart. “I know it was. And you know why I did it.”

“You
knew
you were going to do it, and you didn’t tell me.”

“I didn’t know! How could I have known? We only heard you couldn’t come with us at the last minute. We were together, we’d always be together, that’s what I thought, what I wanted, always together forever. But then the old man told us that you couldn’t go any further—and Will didn’t even know he had a dæmon, he had to do the same thing, leave part of himself behind—oh, Pan, you can’t think I
planned
it like that? You can’t think I’m that cruel?”

“Then why haven’t you ever asked me about it? About what it felt like for me?”

“But we
have
talked about it.”

“Only because I brought it up. You never wanted to know.”

“Pan, that isn’t fair—”

“You just didn’t want to face it.”

“I was ashamed. I
had
to do it and I was bitterly ashamed to do it and I’d have been ashamed
not
to do it and I’ve felt guilty ever since, and if you haven’t been aware of that—”

“When the old man rowed you out into the dark, I felt torn open,” he said. His voice was shaking. “It nearly killed me. But the worst thing, worse than the pain, was the
abandonment.
That you should just leave me there alone. D’you realize how I gazed and stared and called out to you and tried so hard to keep you in sight as you moved off into the dark? The last thing I could see was your hair, the very last thing I could see till the dark swallowed it up. I’d have been willing just to have that, just a little gleam of your hair, just the faintest patch of light that was you, as long as it stayed there so I could see it. I’d have been waiting there still. Just to know you were there, and I could see you. I’d never have moved away as long as I could see that….”

He stopped. She was sobbing. “You think I…,” she tried to say, but her voice wouldn’t let her. “Roger,” she managed, but that was all. The sobbing overtook her completely.

Pan sat on the table and watched her for a few moments, and then with a convulsive movement he twisted away, as if he were weeping too; but neither of them said a word, or made any attempt to reach for the other.

She lay curled in a ball, her head in her arms, weeping till the passion subsided.

When she could sit up, she wiped the tears from her cheeks and saw him lying tense and trembling with his back to her. “Pan,” she said, her voice thick with weeping, “Pan, I do realize, and I hated myself then and I’ll always hate myself for as long as I live. I hate every part of me that isn’t you, and I’ll have to live with that. Sometimes I think if I could kill myself without killing you, I might do it, I’m so unhappy. I don’t deserve to be happy, I know that. I know the—the world of the dead—I know what I did was horrible, and to leave Roger there would have been wrong too, and I…It was the worst thing ever. You’re completely right, and I’m sorry, I really am, with all my heart.”

He didn’t move. In the silence of the night, she could hear him weeping too.

Then he said, “It’s not just what you did then. It’s what you’re doing now. I told you this the other day: you’re killing yourself, and me, with the way you’re thinking. You’re in a world full of color and you want to see it in black and white. As if Gottfried Brande was some kind of enchanter who made you forget everything you used to love, everything mysterious, all the places where the shadows are. Can’t you see the
emptiness
of the worlds they describe, him and Talbot? You don’t really think the universe is as arid as that. You
can’t.
You’re under a spell—you must be.”

“Pan, there aren’t any spells,” she said, but so quietly that she hoped he wouldn’t hear it.

“And no world of the dead, I suppose,” he said. “It was all just a childish dream. The other worlds. The subtle knife. The witches. There’s no room for them in the universe you want to believe in. How do you think the alethiometer works? I suppose the symbols have got so many meanings, you can read anything you want into them, so they don’t mean anything at all, really. As for me, I’m just a trick of the mind. The wind whistling through an empty skull. Lyra, I really think I’ve had enough.”

“What do you mean?”

“And stop breathing on me. You stink of garlic.”

She turned away in humiliation and misery. Each of them lay weeping in the darkness.

When she woke up in the morning, he wasn’t there.

Fog and cobwebs. Her mind was full of them, and so was the room, so was the dream she’d woken from.

“Pan,” she said, and hardly recognized her own voice. “Pan!”

No reply. No scuttle of claws on the floorboards, no featherlight leap onto the bed.

“Pan! What are you doing? Where are you?”

She ran to the window, flung back the curtain, saw the ruins of the priory in the pearly glimmer of dawn. The wide world was out there still, no fog, no cobwebs, and no Pan.

In here? Was he under the bed, in a cupboard, on top of the wardrobe? Of course not. This wasn’t a game.

Then she saw her rucksack on the floor beside the bed. She hadn’t left it there; and on top of it there was the little black notebook of Hassall’s that Pan had spoken about.

She picked it up. It was worn and stained and many of the pages had corners that had been folded back. She flicked through it, seeing now, as he had, how the addresses seemed to trace the course of a journey from a mysterious Khwarezm to a house in the Lawnmarket, Edinburgh. And there was Sebastian Makepeace, in Juxon Street, Oxford, just as he’d said. Why hadn’t the name caught her eye? Why hadn’t she noticed what Pan was doing when he hid it? How many thousands of other things had she failed to see?

And then a note fell out. She snatched up the scrap of paper with shaking hands.

Pan’s claws weren’t formed to hold a pencil, but he could write in a fashion by holding one in his mouth.

It said:

That was all. She sat down, feeling weightless, transparent, disembodied.

“How could you be so…,” she whispered, not knowing how to finish the question. “How can I live like…”

Her alarm clock showed the time to be half past six. The pub was quiet: Mr. and Mrs. Polstead would be getting up soon to make breakfast, to light fires, to do whatever else had to be done every morning. How could she tell them this? And Malcolm wasn’t there. She could have told him. When would he come? Surely he’d come soon. There was work to be done. He must come.

But then she thought: How
can
I tell them? How can I show myself to them like this? It would be shameful. It would be worse than mortifying. These people whom she hardly knew, who’d taken her in, whom she was growing to like so much—how could she inflict a monstrosity like herself now, a half person, on them? On Pauline? On Alice? On Malcolm? Only Malcolm would understand, and even he might find her loathsome now. And she stank of garlic.

She would have wept if she hadn’t been paralyzed with fear.

Hide,
she thought.
Run and hide.
Her mind flew here and there, into the past, into the future and back quickly, into the past again, and found a face she remembered and loved, and trusted: Farder Coram.

He was old now, and he never moved from the Fens, but he was still alive and alert. They wrote to each other from time to time. And above all, he’d understand her predicament now. But how could she get to him? Her memory, rushing from image to image like a bird trapped inside a room, fluttered against something from the White Horse a night or two before. Dick Orchard, and the gyptian knotted handkerchief around his neck. He’d said something about his grandfather—Giorgio something—he was in Oxford now, wasn’t that it? And Dick was working the night shift at the mail depot, so he’d be at home during the day….

Yes.

She dressed quickly in her warmest clothes, flung some others into the rucksack, together with the black notebook and a few other things, looked around the little room she’d come to feel so much at home in, and went downstairs in silence.

In the kitchen she found some paper and a pencil and left a note:
Sorry—so sorry—and thank you so much—but I’ve got to go. Can’t explain. Lyra.

Two minutes later she was walking along the riverbank again, and looking only at the path ahead of her, with the hood of her parka pulled up over her head. If she saw anyone, she’d have to take no notice. People often carried their dæmons, if they were small enough, in a pocket or buttoned inside their coats. She might be doing that. There was no need for anyone to suspect her if she walked on quickly, and it was still early.

But the journey to Botley, where Dick lived with his family, still took most of an hour, even walking fast, and she heard the bells of the city across the expanse of Port Meadow, striking unhelpfully—what? Half past seven? Half past eight? Surely not yet. She wondered what time his night shift finished. If he started work at ten, then he should be coming out sometime soon.

She slowed down as she came to Binsey Lane. It was going to be a rare clear day; the sun was bright now and the air was fresh. Binsey Lane led down from the meadow into the Botley Road, the main route into Oxford from the west. And people would be getting up now, and going to work. She hoped they’d be too busy to look at her, and had their own worries and preoccupations; she hoped that she looked uninteresting, as Will made himself look, as the witches did when they made themselves invisible, so that no one would give them more than a glance, and then forget them at once. She might be a witch herself, with her dæmon hundreds of miles away on the tundra.

That thought sustained her until she reached the Botley Road, where she had to look up to check the traffic before she could cross, and to look for the right little street going off the other side. She’d been to the Orchards’ house three or four times: she remembered the front door, even if she’d forgotten the number.

She knocked. Dick should be home by now…surely? But what if he wasn’t, and she had to explain herself to his mother or his father, who were nice enough, but…She almost turned and walked away, but then the door opened, and it was Dick.

“Lyra! What you doing here? You all right?” He looked tired, as if he’d just come home from work.

“Dick, are you on your own? Is there anyone else in?”

“What’s the matter? What’s happened? There’s only me and my gran. Come in. Hang on….” His vixen dæmon was backing away behind his legs and uttering a little cry. He picked her up, and then he saw what the matter was. “Where’s Pan? Lyra, what’s going on?”

“I’m in trouble,” she said, and she couldn’t hold her voice steady. “Please, can I come in?”

“Yeah, sure, course you can….”

He moved back to make room in the little hall, and she stepped inside quickly and shut the door behind her. She could see all kinds of consternation and anxiety in his eyes, but he hadn’t flinched for a moment.

“He’s gone, Dick. He’s just left me,” she said.

He put a finger to his lips and looked upstairs. “Come in the kitchen,” he said quietly. “Gran’s awake, and she’s easily frightened. She can’t make sense of things.”

He looked at her again, as if he were unsure who she was, and then led the way along the narrow corridor to the kitchen, which was warm and rich with the smell of fried bacon.

She said, “I’m sorry, Dick. I need some help, and I thought—”

“Sit down. You want some coffee?”

“Yes. Thanks.”

He filled a kettle and set it on the range. Lyra sat in the wooden armchair on one side of the fire, holding her rucksack tight against her chest. Dick sat in the other. His dæmon, Bindi, leapt up to his lap and sat close, trembling.

“I’m sorry, Bindi,” Lyra said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why he went. Or, I mean, I do, but it’s hard to explain. We—”

“We always wondered if you could do this,” said Dick.

“What do you mean?”

“Separate. We never seen you do it, but it just felt like if anyone could do it, you could. When did he go?”

“In the night.”

“No message or nothing?”

“Not exactly…We’d been arguing….It was difficult.”

“You didn’t want to wait in case he came back?”

“He won’t come back for a long time. Maybe never.”

“You don’t know.”

“I think I’ve got to go and look for him, Dick.”

A thin cry came from upstairs. Dick looked at the door. “Better go and see what she wants,” he said. “Won’t be a minute.”

Bindi was out of the door before he was. Lyra sat still and closed her eyes, trying to breathe calmly. When he came back, the kettle was boiling. A spoonful of coffee essence in each mug, a splash of milk, the offer of sugar, and he poured some water into two mugs and handed one to Lyra.

“Thanks. Is your gran all right?” she said.

“Just old and confused. She can’t sleep easy, so there’s got to be someone here with her in case she gets up and does herself some damage.”

“You know the grandfather you mentioned the other night at the White Horse…is she his wife?”

“No. This one’s Dad’s mother. The gyptians are on Mum’s side of the family.”

“And you said he was in Oxford now?”

“Yeah, he is. He had a delivery to the Castle Mill boatyard, but he’s off soon. Why?”

“Could he…D’you think I could meet him?”

“Yeah, if you want to. I’ll go there with you when Mum gets back.”

His mother worked as a cleaner in Worcester College, Lyra remembered. “When would that be?” she said.

“About eleven. But she might be a bit later. Do a bit of shopping or something. Why d’you want to meet my grandad?”

“I need to go to the Fens. There’s someone I have to see there. I need to ask the best way of getting there without being seen or caught or…I just want to ask his advice.”

He nodded. He didn’t look very gyptian himself at the moment; his hair was disheveled, his eyes red-rimmed with tiredness. He sipped his coffee.

“I don’t want to get you into trouble either,” she added.

“Is this something to do with what you told me the other night? Someone being killed near the river?”

“Probably. But I can’t see the connection yet.”

“Benny Morris is still away from work, by the way.”

“Oh, the man with the wounded leg. You haven’t told anyone about what I said?”

“Yeah, I put a great big notice up on the bloody canteen wall. What d’you take me for? I wouldn’t give you away, gal.”

“No. I know that.”

“But this is serious stuff, right?”

“Yes. It is.”

“Anyone else know about it?”

“Yeah. A man called Dr. Polstead. Malcolm Polstead. He’s a Scholar at Durham College, and he used to teach me a long time ago. But he knows about it all because…Oh, it’s complicated, Dick. But I trust him. He knows things that no one else…I can’t tell him about Pan leaving, though. I just can’t. Pan and me, we’d been quarreling. It was horrible. We just couldn’t agree about important things. It was like being split in half….And then this murder happened, and suddenly I was in danger. I think someone knows I saw it. I stayed at Dr. Polstead’s parents’ pub for a couple of nights, but—”

“Which pub’s that?”

“The Trout at Godstow.”

“Do they know Pan’s…disappeared?”

“No. I left before anyone got up this morning. I really need to get to the Fens, Dick. Can I see your grandad? Please?”

There was another cry from upstairs, and a thump, as if something heavy had fallen on the floor. Dick shook his head and hurried out.

Lyra was too restless to sit still. She got up and looked out of the kitchen window at the neat little yard with its cobblestones and bed of herbs, and at the calendar on the kitchen wall with a picture of Buckingham Palace and the changing of the guard, and at the frying pan on the draining board with the bacon fat already beginning to congeal. She felt like crying, but took three deep breaths and blinked hard.

The door opened, and Dick came back. “She’s woken up proper now, dammit,” he said. “I’ll have to take her some porridge. Sure you can’t stay here for a while? They’ll never know.”

“No. I’ve really got to keep moving.”

“Well, take this, then.” He held out his blue-and-white-spotted neckerchief, or one very similar, tied in a complicated knot.

“Thanks. But why?”

“The knot. It’s a gyptian thing. It means you’re asking for help. Show it to my grandad. His boat’s called the
Maid of Portugal.
He’s a big tough man, good-looking, like me. You won’t miss him. He’s called Giorgio Brabandt.”

“All right. And thanks, Dick. I hope your gran gets better.”

“There’s only one way that’ll end. Poor old girl.”

Lyra kissed him. She felt very fond of him. “See you…when I get back,” she said.

“How long you going to stay in the Fens?”

“As long as I need to, I hope.”

“And what was that name again? Doctor something.”

“Malcolm Polstead.”

“Oh, yeah.” He came to the door with her. “If you go up Binsey Lane, past the last house, there’s a path through some trees on the right that takes you to the river. Cross the old wooden bridge and keep going a little way and you come to the canal. Go left up the towpath and that’ll get you to Castle Mill. Good luck. Just keep bundled up, then maybe they’ll think he’s…you know.”

He gave her a kiss and embraced her briefly before seeing her out of the door. Lyra saw the compassion in Bindi’s eyes and wished that she could stroke the pretty little vixen, just for the sake of touching a dæmon again, but that was impossible.

Lyra could hear the old woman calling in a quavering voice from upstairs. Dick shut the door, and Lyra was out in the open again.