“The changes Dr. Hammond told you about last night are part of a bigger pattern,” said Hannah. “It makes you even more vulnerable.”
Lyra couldn’t speak. She held Pantalaimon close and looked into the fire. “But he did say…,” she began very quietly, and then spoke up: “He did say the college would pay for the rest of my education…my time at St. Sophia’s….So what does he want? Does he want me to finish and get my degree, or—or what? I just don’t understand—I can’t take this in.”
“I’m afraid there’s more,” said Hannah. “The money that was left you by Dr. Carne—the money Hammond said was all used up—Malcolm can tell you about that.”
“In his old age, Dr. Carne was easily confused,” said Dr. Polstead, “and money and figures weren’t his strong point, in any case. What seems to have happened is that he did put a considerable sum aside—we don’t know how much, but there would have been plenty left still—only he was persuaded to invest it in a fund that crashed. It simply failed—very badly managed or deliberately ruined. The money wasn’t in the hands of the college solicitor, no matter what Dr. Hammond told you; in fact, the solicitor tried hard to prevent the old Master from investing in that fund, but of course, he had to do what his client wanted. You might know the college solicitor: a very tall man, quite old now. His dæmon is a kestrel.”
“Oh yes!” Lyra remembered him: she had never known exactly who he was, but he had always been kind and courteous to her and genuinely interested in her progress.
“They timed it well,” Alice put in. “It wasn’t long before the old Master began to lose his way, poor old boy. Forgetting things…”
“I remember,” Lyra said. “It was so sad…I loved him.”
“Many people did,” said Hannah. “But once he’d become unable to manage his affairs, the solicitor had to take power of attorney. If Dr. Carne had wanted to invest the money in the bad fund at that stage, it could have been prevented.”
“Just a minute,” Lyra said. “Alice said, ‘They timed it well.’ You don’t mean it was intentional—you don’t mean they, the other side—they lost his money on purpose?”
“It looks very like it,” said Dr. Polstead.
“But why?”
“To damage you. You wouldn’t even have been aware of it till—well, till now.”
“They were—while the old Master was still alive—they were deliberately trying to hurt…”
“Yes. We’ve only just found that out, and it was the thing that prompted us to call you here and tell you about this.”
Now she really couldn’t speak. It was Pantalaimon who spoke for her.
“But why?” he said.
“We have no idea,” said Hannah. “For some reason the other side needs you vulnerable, and for the sake of everything good and valuable, we need you safe. But you’re not the only one. There are other Scholars protected by scholastic sanctuary. It’s been a guarantee of intellectual freedom, and it looks as if it’s being torn down.”
Lyra ran her hands through her hair. She kept thinking about the man she’d never heard of till then, the man with the three-legged hyena dæmon who had been so determined to get her into his power when she was less than a year old.
“That Bonneville man,” she said. “Was he part of the other side too? Is that why he wanted me?”
An expression of contempt and disgust passed over Alice’s face, just for a moment.
“He was a complicated man, in a complicated situation,” said Hannah. “He seems to have been a spy, but an independent one, like an independent scholar. He was originally an experimental theologian, a physicist, and entirely on his own, he’d penetrated to the heart of the Magisterium’s Geneva headquarters and discovered all kinds of things—an extraordinary amount of material. It was in the rucksack that Malcolm rescued—”
“Stole,” he said.
“All right, stole. And Malcolm brought it all back to Oxford. But Bonneville had become a sort of renegade; he was psychotic, or obsessed, or something….He was obsessed with you, with you as a baby, for some reason.”
“I think he wanted to use you as a bargaining chip,” said Dr. Polstead. “But then—well, at the end he just seemed mad. Deranged. He…”
Lyra was astonished at the depth of pain in his face. He was looking directly at Alice, who was returning his gaze with a similar expression. Dr. Polstead seemed unable to speak for a moment. He looked down at the carpet.
Alice said huskily, “This is another reason it’s been hard to tell you, dear. You see, Bonneville raped me. He might have done more, but Malcolm…Malcolm came to my rescue and…well, he did the only thing he could do. We was at the end of our strength, we thought we was at the end of our lives, everything was so horrible and…”
She couldn’t say any more. Her dæmon, Ben, put his head on her lap and she stroked his ears with a trembling hand. Lyra wanted to put her arms around her, but she couldn’t move. Pan was stock-still by her feet.
“The only thing he could do?” she whispered.
Malcolm’s dæmon, Asta, said, “Malcolm killed him.”
Lyra couldn’t speak. Dr. Polstead was still looking down at the floor. He rubbed the heel of his hand across his eyes.
Alice said, “You was bundled up in the boat and he didn’t want to leave you there alone, so Asta stayed with you and Malcolm came up to the place where Bonneville was…attacking me, and Asta stayed to look after you.”
“You separated?” Lyra said. “And you killed him?”
“I hated every second of it.”
“How old were you?”
“Eleven.”
Just a little younger than Will, she thought, when the alethiometer had told her that he was a murderer. She looked at Dr. Polstead now with eyes that seemed never to have seen him before. She imagined a stocky ginger-haired boy killing an experienced secret agent, and then she saw another pattern too: the man Will had killed had been a member of the secret service of his country. Were there other correspondences and echoes waiting to be discovered? The alethiometer could tell her, but oh, how long it would take! How quickly she would have done it once, her fingers racing her mind as she flicked the hands around the dial and stepped unhesitatingly down the rungs of linked meanings into the darkness where the truth lay!
Hannah said, “And we must think about keeping that safe too.”
Lyra blinked. “The alethiometer? How did you know I was thinking about that?”
“Your fingers were moving.”
“Oh,” she said. “I’ll have to hide everything. I’ll have to suppress every movement, every word…I had no idea. Not the slightest flicker of an idea about all this. I don’t know what to say….”
“Pantalaimon will help you.”
But Hannah didn’t know about the strain that existed between them these days. Lyra had told no one about that; who would understand it, after all?
“It’s getting late,” said Dr. Polstead. “If we want any dinner, we’d better be getting back into town.”
Lyra felt as if a week had passed. She stood up slowly and embraced Alice, who held her tightly and kissed her. Hannah stood up and did the same, and Lyra kissed her in return.
“This is an alliance now,” said Hannah. “Don’t ever forget that.”
“I won’t,” said Lyra. “Thank you. I’m still reeling, frankly. There’s so much I just didn’t know.”
“And that’s our fault,” said Dr. Polstead, “and we’ll have to make it up to you. But we will. Are you dining in Hall tonight?”
“No, I must eat with the servants. The Master made that very clear.”
Alice muttered, “Bastard,” which made Lyra smile a bit. But then she said, “I’m going to the Trout. I’ll see you both later.”
She set off towards Godstow, and then Lyra and Dr. Polstead began to head back towards the
city center, through the streets of Jericho, still busy with shoppers, where the well-lit shop fronts shone warm and safe.
“Lyra,” he said, “I hope you won’t forget that my name is Malcolm. And Mrs. Lonsdale is Alice.”
“That’ll take some getting used to.”
“I expect many things will. This servant business—it’s deliberately designed to humiliate you. There isn’t a single Scholar who doesn’t value your presence among them. Even though I’m part of Durham now, I know that full well.”
“He said that several voices had told him that my dining in Hall, and so on, was no longer appropriate.”
“He’s lying. If anybody did say that to him, it wasn’t one of the Scholars.”
“Anyway, if what he wants to do is humiliate me,” she said, “it’ll fail. It’s no humiliation at all to eat with my friends. They’re as much family as anything else. If that’s what he thinks of my family, so much the worse for him.”
“Good.”
They said nothing for a minute or so. Lyra thought she would never feel easy in the presence of this Malcolm, no matter what he’d done nineteen years before.
Then he said something that made her feel even more awkward.
“Er—Lyra, I think you and I have something else to discuss, haven’t we?”
“Dæmons,” she said quietly. He could hardly hear her.
“Yes,” he said. “Did you have as big a shock as I did the other night?”
“I think I must have done.”
“Does anyone know you and Pantalaimon can separate?”
“No one in this world,” she said. Then she swallowed hard and said, “The witches of the north. They can separate from their dæmons. There was a witch called Serafina Pekkala, who was the first I knew about. I saw her dæmon and spoke to him a long time before I saw her.”
“I met a witch once, with her dæmon, during the flood.”
“And there’s a city with an Arabic name…a ruined city. Inhabited by dæmons without people.”
“I think I’ve heard of that too. I wasn’t sure whether to believe it.”
They walked on a little further.
“But there’s something else,” Lyra began to say, and at the same moment he said, “I think there’s—”
“Sorry,” she said.
“You go first.”
“Your dæmon saw Pantalaimon, and he saw her, only he wasn’t sure who she was till yesterday.”
“In Alice’s room.”
“Yes. Only…Oh, this is so difficult.”
“Look behind,” he said.
She turned and saw what he’d already felt: both dæmons walking along together, heads close, talking intensely.
“Well…,” she said.
They were at the corner of Little Clarendon Street, which led after a couple of hundred yards to the broad avenue of St. Giles. Jordan College was no more than ten minutes away.
Malcolm said, “Have you got time for a drink? I think we need to talk a bit more easily than we can in the street.”
“Yes,” she said, “all right.”
Little Clarendon Street had been adopted by Oxford’s jeunesse dorée as a fashionable destination. Expensive clothes shops, chic coffeehouses, cocktail bars, and colored anbaric lights strung overhead made it seem like a corner of another city altogether—Malcolm couldn’t have known what made tears come to Lyra’s eyes at that point, though he did notice the tears: it was her memory of the deserted Cittàgazze, all the lights blazing, empty, silent, magical, where she had first met Will. She brushed them away and said nothing.
He led the way to a mock-Italian café with candles in straw-wrapped wine bottles and red-checked tablecloths and travel posters in splashy colors. Lyra looked around warily.
“It’s safe here,” Malcolm said quietly. “There are other places where it’s risky to talk, but there’s no danger in La Luna Caprese.”
He ordered a bottle of Chianti, asking Lyra first if that was what she’d like, and she nodded.
When the wine was tried and poured, she said, “I’ve got to tell you something. I’ll try and keep it clear in my head. And now I know about you and your dæmon, it’s something I can tell you, but no one else. Only I’ve heard so many things in the last couple of days and my mind’s in a whirl, so please, if I don’t make sense, just stop me and I’ll go over it again.”
“Of course.”
She began with Pan’s experience on the Monday night, the attack, the murder, the man giving him the wallet to take to Lyra. Malcolm listened in astonishment, though he felt no skepticism: such things happened, as he knew well. But one thing seemed odd.
“The victim and his dæmon knew about separating?” he said.
“Yes,” said Pan at Lyra’s elbow. “They weren’t shocked, like most people would be. In fact, they could separate too. She must have seen me up the tree when he was being attacked, and thought it would be all right to trust me, I suppose.”
“So Pan brought the wallet back to me at St. Sophia’s…,” Lyra went on.
“And that was when Asta saw me,” Pan put in.
“…but other things got in the way, and we didn’t have a chance to look at it till the next morning.”
She pulled her bag up to her lap and took out the wallet, passing it to him unobtrusively. He noticed Pan’s tooth marks, and noticed the smell too, which Pan had called cheap cologne, though it seemed to Malcolm something other than that, something wilder. He opened the wallet and took out the contents one by one as she spoke. The Bodleian card, the university staff card, the diplomatic papers, all so familiar; his own wallet had held very similar papers in its time.
“He was coming back to Oxford, I think,” Lyra said, “because if you look at the laissez-passers, you can trace his journey from Sin Kiang to here. He’d probably have gone on to the Botanic Garden, if they hadn’t attacked him.”
Malcolm caught another faint trace of the scent on the wallet. He raised it to his nose, and something distant rang like a bell, or gleamed like the sun on a snowy mountaintop, just for the fraction of a second, and then it was gone.
“Did he say anything else, the man who was killed?”
He addressed the question to Pan, and Pan thought hard before saying, “No. He couldn’t. He was nearly dead. He made me take the wallet out of his pocket and told me to take it to Lyra—I mean, he didn’t know her name, but he said to take it to your…I think he thought we could be trusted because he knew about separating.”
“Have you taken this to the police?”
“Of course. That was almost the first thing we did next morning,” Lyra said. “But when we were waiting in the police station, Pan heard one of the policemen speak.”
“He was the first killer, the one who wasn’t wounded,” said Pan. “I recognized his voice. It was very distinctive.”
“So we asked about something quite different and then left,” Lyra went on. “We just thought we shouldn’t give the wallet to the very man who’d killed him.”
“Sensible,” said Malcolm.
“Oh, and there’s another thing. The man who was cut on the leg. He’s called Benny Morris.”
“How d’you know that?”
“I know someone who works at the mail depot, and I asked him if there was anyone there who’d hurt his leg. He said yes, there was a big ugly man called Benny Morris, who sounds just like the man we saw.”
“And what then?”
“In the wallet,” Lyra said carefully, “there was a left-luggage key—you know, the sort you get with those lockers at the station.”
“What did you do with that?”
“I thought we ought to go and get whatever was in it. So—”
“Don’t tell me you did?”
“Yes. Because he’d sort of entrusted it to us, the wallet,
and what was in it. So we thought we ought to go and look after it before the men who killed him realized and went to look for it themselves.”
“The killers knew he had some sort of luggage,” said Pan, “because they kept asking each other if he’d had a bag, if he’d dropped it, were they sure they hadn’t seen it, and so on. As if they’d been told to expect one.”
“And what was in the locker?” said Malcolm.
“A rucksack,” Lyra said. “Which is under the floorboards in my room in Jordan.”
“It’s there now?”
She nodded.
He picked up his glass and drained it in one, and then stood up. “Let’s go and get it. While it’s there, you’re in great danger, Lyra, and that’s no exaggeration. Come on.”
* * *
* * *
Five minutes later, Lyra and Malcolm turned out of the Broad into Turl Street, the narrow thoroughfare where the main entrance to Jordan College stood under the lodge tower. They were halfway to the lodge when two men, dressed in anonymous workers’ clothing, stepped out of the gate and moved away towards the High Street. One of them had a rucksack slung over his shoulder.
“That’s it,” said Lyra quietly.
Malcolm started to run after them, but Lyra instantly caught his arm. Her grip was strong.
“Wait,” she said, “keep quiet. Don’t make them turn round. Just let’s go inside.”
“I could catch them!”
“No need.”
The men were walking quickly away. Malcolm wanted to say several things but held his tongue. Lyra was quite calm and in fact seemed quietly satisfied about something. He looked again at the men and followed her into the lodge, where she was talking to the porter.
“Yes, they said they were going to move your furniture, Lyra, but I just saw ’em go out. One of ’em was carrying something.”
“Thanks, Bill,” she said. “Did they say where they were from?”
“They gave me a card—here it is.”
She showed Malcolm the card. It said J. Cross Removals, with an address in Kidlington, a few miles north of Oxford.
The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2) Page 11
