The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2) (28 page)

“What’s the secret of good stewed eels?”

“The secret…Well, I dunno if I should tell you.”

“Go on, child,” said Farder Coram. “You tell her.”

“Well, what my mum does, and my gran does it too, is…You know the flour you use for thickening the gravy?”

“Yes,” said Lyra.

“Well, you toast it a bit first. In a dry pan. Just to give it a bit of color. Not much. My mum says it makes all the difference.”

“Best stewed eels you’ll ever taste,” said the old man.

“Thanks,” said Lyra. “That must be it. I’ll be off now, Farder Coram. Thank you for everything. I’ll come again tomorrow.”

Darkness had fallen, and all around her the windows of the gyptian boats were lit, and wood smoke drifted from their chimneys. Lyra passed a group of gyptian boys smoking outside a liquor shop, her age or thereabouts, and they all fell silent as she approached and stared as she passed by. When she’d gone past, one of them spoke, and the others sniggered. She ignored it, but she was very conscious of the stick, and imagined how it would feel in her hand if she ever did wield it in anger.

It was too early for bed, and she still felt restless, so she went to pay a last call on Giorgio Brabandt before he left. There was a slight rain falling as she trod the muddy path to the
Maid of Portugal
’s mooring.

She found Brabandt working by lantern light to clear the weed trap, hauling up strands of dripping weed and cutting them clear of the propeller. Someone was bustling about inside: the lamp was alight in the galley, and she could hear the chink of crockery.

He looked up as she arrived. “How do, gal,” he said. “Want to clear some weeds?”

“It looks too difficult for me,” she said. “I’d rather watch you and make notes.”

“Well, that’s not on offer. Get in the galley and say hello to Betty and bring me a cup of tea.”

“Who’s Betty?” she began to ask, but his head was already down by the trap, his right arm working busily under the water.

Lyra stepped down into the cockpit and opened the door. The steam, the warmth, and the aroma told her that Betty (and Lyra had already guessed that she was Giorgio’s latest inamorata-cum-cook) was boiling some potatoes to go with the casserole that stood next to the stove.

“Hello,” she said. “I’m Lyra, and you must be Betty.”

Betty was plump and fortyish, and at the moment she was pink in the face and her blond hair was a little disheveled. She smiled immediately and held out a warm hand, which Lyra shook with pleasure.

“Giorgio told me all about you,” Betty said.

“Then I bet he told you I couldn’t stew eels to save my life. What’s the secret?”

“Oh, there en’t no secret. But did you put an apple in?”

“I never thought of doing that.”

“A cooking apple. It cuts the fat a little bit. It boils down so you don’t know it’s there, but it makes the gravy all silky and just a little bit tart.”

“Well, I’ll remember that. Thank you.”

“Where’s my tea?” Giorgio called.

“Oh Lord,” said Betty.

“I’ll take it out to him,” said Lyra.

Betty put three teaspoons of sugar in a big mug of tea, and Lyra carried it out to the cockpit. Giorgio was fitting the cover back on the trap.

“So what you been doing with yourself?” he said.

“Learning things. Betty’s just taught me how to stew eels properly.”

“High time you knew.”

“Ma Costa says only a real gyptian can stew eels. But I think there’s more to it than that.”

“Course there is. They got to be moon-caught eels, did she tell you that?”

“Moon-caught?”

“Caught at the full moon. What else could it mean? They’re the best. Nothing compares to moon-caught eels.”

“Well, you never told me that before. That’s something else I’ve learnt. And the secret commonwealth—you taught me about that too.”

His expression became serious, and he looked up and down the path. He lowered his voice and said, “Judgment, gal. There’s things you can talk about and things you better hold your tongue on. Eels is one of the first, and the secret commonwealth is one of the other.”

“I think I realized that.”

“Well, take it to heart. Out there on land you’ll meet all kinds of different opinions. Some people will hear talk about the secret commonwealth and take it literally, and think you do too, and that you’re stupid. Others just scoff, as if they already know it’s a lot of moonshine. Both stupid. Keep away from the literal-minded folk, and ignore the scoffers.”

“What’s the best way of thinking about the secret commonwealth, then, Master Brabandt?”

“You gotta think about it the same way as if you want to see it. You got to look at it sideways. Out the corner of your eye. So you gotta think about it out the corner of your mind. It’s there and it en’t, both at the same time. If you want to see them jacky lanterns, the absolute worst way is to go out on the marsh with a searchlight. You take a bloody great light, and all the will o’ the wykeses and the little sparkers, they’d stay right underwater. And if you want to think about them, it don’t do no good making lists and classifying and analyzing. You’ll just get a lot o’ dead rubbish what means nothing. The way to think about the secret commonwealth is with stories. Only stories’ll do.”

He blew on his tea to cool it.

“So thassit,” he said. “And what you learning all these things for, anyway?”

“Did I tell you about Karamakan?”

“I never heard that name before. What’s that?”

“It’s a desert in Central Asia. The thing is…Well, dæmons can’t go into it.”

“Why would anyone want to go where their dæmon can’t?”

“To find out what’s inside. They grow roses there.”

“What, in the desert?”

“There must be somewhere hidden where the roses grow. Special roses.”

“Ah, well, they would be.” He sipped his tea with a loud slurp and pulled out a blackened old smoke pipe.

“Master B, is the secret commonwealth only in Brytain, or all over the world?”

“Oh, it’s all over the world, naturally. But I ’spect there’s other names for it in other places. Like in Holland, they got a different name for the jacky lanterns. They call ’em
dwaallichts.
And in France they call ’em
feu follets.
”

Lyra thought about it. “When I was young,” she said, “when I went to the north with the gyptian families, I remember Tony Costa telling me about the phantoms they had in the northern forests, the Breathless Ones, and the Windsuckers….I suppose they must be part of the secret commonwealth of the north.”

“Stands to reason.”

“And later in another place I saw Specters….They were different again. And that was even in a different world altogether. So maybe there’s a secret commonwealth everywhere.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me a bit,” he said.

They sat there quietly for a minute or two, the gyptian packing his pipe with smokeleaf, Lyra helping herself to a sip of his tea.

“Where you going next, Master B?” she said.

“Up north. Nice peaceful work, hauling stone and bricks and cement for that railroad bridge as is going to put us all out of business.”

“What’ll you do then?”

“Come back here and catch eels. Time I settled down. I’m past me first youth, ye see.”

“Oh. I hadn’t realized.”

“No, I know it dun’t show.”

She laughed.

“What you laughing for?” he said.

“You take after your grandson.”

“Yes, I learnt a lot from young Dick. Or was it the other way round? I can’t remember. Did he treat you proper?”

“He treated me very proper.”

“Thass all right, then. Cheerio, Lyra. Good luck.”

They shook hands, and she looked in and said good night to Betty, and then she left.

Ma Costa was already asleep in the forward cabin of the
Persian Queen,
so Lyra moved carefully as she boarded the boat, treading lightly and making no noise as she prepared for bed.

And once she was tucked up warmly in her bunk, with the little naphtha lamp glowing on the bedside shelf, she found herself wide awake. She thought about writing to Malcolm again; she thought about writing to Hannah; and she thought about something that had never occurred to her before—why she so enjoyed the company of old men like Giorgio Brabandt and Farder Coram.

That caught her attention. She began to think it through. She liked them a lot, and she’d liked the old Master of Jordan, Dr. Carne, and she liked Mr. Cawson the Steward. And Sebastian Makepeace the alchemist. She liked them much more than most young men. It wasn’t because they were too old to be interested in her sexually, and didn’t make her feel threatened: Mr. Cawson was known to be a ladies’ man, and Giorgio Brabandt had been frank about his own girlfriends, though he’d said she didn’t have enough mileage on her to qualify as one herself.

It was something in that region of feelings. Then she had it: she liked being in their company not because they might be attracted to her, but because there was no danger of her being attracted to them. She didn’t want to be unfaithful to the memory of Will.

What about Dick Orchard, though? Why didn’t her brief romantic liaison with him count as being unfaithful? Probably because neither of them had once used the word
love.
He was frank about what he wanted, and he knew enough to make sure she enjoyed it as much as he did. And he liked her, and made that clear. And she liked the touch of his lips on her skin. There’d been nothing of the all-consuming, all-pervading intensity and ardent passion she and Will had felt together, each for the first time; she and Dick were simply two healthy young people under the spell of a golden summer, and that was quite enough to be.

That dream, though: the one in which she was playing with Will’s dæmon on the moonlit grass, stroking her, whispering together, in thrall to each other. The memory of it was still enough to make her body throb and melt and yearn for something impossible, unnameable, unreachable. Something like Will, or like the red building in the desert. Deliberately she let herself drift on a slow current of longing, but it didn’t last; she couldn’t bring it back; she lay awake with all the longing frustrated, the memory of that love dream fading, no nearer sleep than ever.

Finally, tired and exasperated, she took out her copy of Simon Talbot’s
The Constant Deceiver.

The chapter she was reading began:

ON THE NON-EXISTENCE OF DÆMONS

Dæmons don’t exist.

We might think they do; we might talk to them and hold them close and whisper our secrets to them; we might make judgments about other people whose dæmons we think we see, based on the form they seem to have and the attractiveness or repulsiveness they embody; but they don’t exist.

In few other areas of life does the human race display so great a capacity for self-deception. From our earliest childhoods we are encouraged to pretend that there exists an entity outside our bodies which is nevertheless part of ourselves. These wispy playmates are the finest device our minds have yet developed to instantiate the insubstantial. Every social pressure confirms us in our belief in them: habits and customs grow like stalagmites to fix the soft fur, the big brown eyes, the merry tricks in a behavioral cavern of stone.

And all the multitudinous forms this delusion takes are nothing more than random mutations of cells in the brain….

Lyra found herself reading on, though she wanted to deny every word. Talbot had an explanation for everything. The fact that children’s dæmons appeared to change form, for example, was no more than a representation of the greater malleability of the infant and juvenile mind. That they were usually, but not always, opposite in sex to their person was merely an unconscious projection of the sense of incompleteness felt by the human subject: yearning for its opposite, the mind embodied the complementary gender role in a sexually non-threatening creature, which could fulfill the part without evoking sexual desire or jealousy. The dæmon’s inability to move far from the person was simply a psychological expression of a sense of unity and wholeness. And so on.

Lyra yearned to tell Pan about this, and discuss the extraordinary sight of a clever mind attempting almost successfully to deny an obvious reality; but it was too late for that. She put the book down and tried to think like Talbot. His method consisted mainly of saying “X is [no more than, nothing but, only, merely, just, simply, etc.] Y”; and it was easy therefore to construct sentences such as “What we call reality is nothing but a gathering of flimsy similarities held together by habit.”

And that didn’t help at all, though no doubt Talbot’s explanation would have come with a multitude of examples and citations and arguments, each one perfectly reasonable and seemingly impossible to deny, by the end of which the reader would be a step nearer accepting his main argument, the preposterous idea that dæmons did not exist.

She felt unbalanced by his words, in a way that felt like reading the alethiometer with the new method. Things that had been steady were now unfixed; the very ground was shaky; she trembled on the edge of vertigo.

She put
The Constant Deceiver
down and thought about the other book that had made Pan angry, Gottfried Brande’s novel
The Hyperchorasmians.
For the first time she realized that the two writers had more in common than she’d thought. The famous sentence that ended
The Hyperchorasmians
—“It was nothing more than what it was”—was constructed exactly like a sentence of Talbot’s. Why hadn’t she seen that before? And then she remembered that Pan had tried to tell her.

She wanted to talk about it. She took a sheet of paper and started to write to Malcolm. But she must have been tired; her summary of Talbot’s arguments seemed both heavy-handed and thin, her description of
The Hyperchorasmians
confused and confusing; she couldn’t summon any confidence or ease, and her sentences lay inert on the page. She felt defeated even before she’d finished a single paragraph.

She thought, If there were such things as Specters, this is what it would feel like to be in a Specter’s power. The Specters she was thinking of were those dreadful parasites that fed on the inhabitants of Cittàgazze. Now that she was an adult, and Pan’s form was fixed, she would be as vulnerable to the Specters as the adults of that world had been. Simon Talbot could never have been to Cittàgazze, so Specters made no appearance in
The Constant Deceiver.
No doubt he’d have a fluent and persuasive argument for denying their existence as well.