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

by Philip Pullman

  “Do you know anything about J. Cross?” Malcolm said to the porter.

  “Never heard of them, sir.”

  They climbed the two flights of stairs to her room. Malcolm hadn’t set foot on this staircase since he was an undergraduate, but it didn’t seem to have changed much. There were two rooms on the top floor on either side of a little landing, and Lyra unlocked the one on the right and switched the light on.

  “Good God,” said Malcolm. “We should have got here five minutes ago.”

  The room was in utter confusion. Chairs were overturned, books pulled out of shelves and thrown on the floor, papers in a scattered mass on the desk. The rug was pulled back and thrown in a corner, and a floorboard had been taken out.

  “Well, they found it,” said Lyra, looking at the floor.

  “It was under there?”

  “My favorite hiding place. Don’t look so bitter. They were bound to search for a loose floorboard. I’d like to see their faces when they open the rucksack, though.”

  And now she was smiling. For the first time for days, her eyes were free of shadows.

  “What will they find?” Malcolm said.

  “Two books from the history faculty library, all my last year’s notes on economic history, a jersey that was too small for me, and two bottles of shampoo.”

  Malcolm laughed. She looked through the books on the floor before handing two of them up to him.

  “These were in the rucksack. I couldn’t read them.”

  “This one looks like Anatolian,” said Malcolm, “some kind of botanical text….And this one’s in Tajik. Well, well. What else?”

  From among the mass of papers spread all over the desktop and half across the floor, Lyra picked out a cardboard folder very similar to several others. Malcolm sat down to open it.

  “And I’ll just look in the bedroom,” Lyra said, and went across the landing.

  The folder was labeled in Lyra’s hand. Malcolm supposed that she’d taken her own papers out and put the dead man’s in, and so it proved: they seemed to be a sort of diary, written in pencil. But he’d got no further than that when Lyra came back with a battered old smokeleaf tin containing a dozen or so miniature cork-stoppered bottles and some little cardboard boxes.

  “This was in the rucksack too,” she said, “but I’ve no idea what’s in them. Specimens?”

  “Lyra, that was clever. But this is real danger you’re in. They already know who you are, somehow, and they know you know about the murder, at least, and they’ll soon know that you’ve got the contents of the rucksack. I’m not sure you should stay here.”

  “I’ve got nowhere else to go,” she said. “Except St. Sophia’s, and they probably know about that too.”

  She wasn’t looking for sympathy: it was said matter-of-factly. The look he remembered so well from when he taught her, that expression of blank insolent obstructiveness, was lurking somewhere at the back of her eyes.

  “Well, let’s think about that,” he said. “You could stay with Hannah.”

  “That would be dangerous for her, wouldn’t it? They must know we’re connected. In any case, I think her sister is coming to spend Christmas with her, and there wouldn’t be room.”

  “Have you got any friends you could stay with?”

  “There are people I’ve spent Christmas with before, but that was because they invited me. I’ve never asked. It would look wrong if I did it now. And…I don’t know. I just wouldn’t want to put anyone…”

  “Well, it’s clear that you can’t stay here.”

  “And this is where I used to feel safest of all.”

  She looked lost. She picked up a cushion and held it close with both arms around it, and Malcolm thought: Why isn’t she holding her dæmon like that? And that brought into focus something he’d noticed without seeing it clearly: Lyra and Pantalaimon didn’t like each other. He felt a sudden lurch, as of surprise, and pitied them both.

  “Look,” he said, “there’s my parents’ pub in Godstow. The Trout. I’m certain you could stay there, at least over the vacation.”

  “Could I work there?”

  “You mean—” Malcolm was a little nonplussed. “You mean, is it quiet enough to study?”

  “No,” she said, more scornfully than her eyes suggested she meant. “Work in the bar or the kitchen or something. To pay for my keep.”

  He saw how proud she was, and how shaken she’d been by the Master’s revelation about the money that was not there.

  “If you’d like to do that, I’m sure they’d love it,” he said.

  “Good, then,” she said.

  How stubborn she was he had more cause to know than most, but he wondered how many others had seen the loneliness in her expression when she wasn’t guarding it.

  “And let’s not waste time,” he said. “We’ll go there this evening. As soon as you’re ready.”

  “I’ve got to tidy…” She waved at everything in the room. “I can’t leave it like this.”

  “Just put the books on the shelves and the furniture back—is the bedroom turned over as well?”

  “Yes. All my clothes all over the floor, bed upside down…”

  There was a catch in her voice and a glitter in her eyes. This was an invasion, after all.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll put the books back and the papers on your desk and I can deal with the furniture in here. You go and put some clothes in a bag. Leave the bed. We’ll tell Bill that the removal men were a couple of opportunistic thieves and he should have had more sense than to let them in.” He took a cotton shopping bag from the coat hook behind the door. “Can I use this for the rucksack stuff?”

  “Yes, of course. I’ll go and get some clothes.”

  He picked up a book that lay on the floor. “Are you reading this?” he said.

  It was Simon Talbot’s The Constant Deceiver.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m not sure about it.”

  “That should please him.”

  He put the three folders, the two books, and the handful of small bottles and boxes in the bag. Later that night they’d be in Hannah’s safe. He’d have to contact Oakley Street, the obscure division of the secret service to which he and Hannah both belonged, and then go to the Botanic Garden, where they must have been expecting the unfortunate Dr. Hassall to have returned by now, with these specimens, whatever they were.

  He stood up and began putting the books on the shelves, and presently Lyra came through.

  “Ready?” he said. “I’ve just put the books anywhere. You’ll have to sort them out later, I’m afraid.”

  “Thanks. I’m glad you were with me when we came back. Fooling them with the rucksack trick is all very well, but I hadn’t understood how disgusting it would feel to—I don’t know. Their hands all over my clothes…”

  Pan had been talking quietly with Asta. No doubt she could tell him all about their conversation later, and no doubt Pan realized it; and no doubt Lyra did too.

  “Actually,” Malcolm said, “we won’t say a word to Bill. He’d want to call the police, and we’d have to explain why he mustn’t. So he’d remember it and wonder about it. Much better to say nothing. If he asks, they were removal men, but they had the wrong date.”

  “And if the police did get involved with this, they’d put two and two together. They’d know I know about the murder….But how did they trace the rucksack anyway? Nobody was following us….”

  “The other side’s got an alethiometer.”

  “They must have a good reader, then. This is a very specific address. It’s hard to get that sort of detail. I’ll have to assume I’m being watched all the time. How loathsome.”

  “Yes. It is. But now let’s get you up to Godstow.”

  She picked up The Constant Deceiver, made sure her bookmark was still in pla
ce, and put it in the rucksack to take with her.

  * * *

  * * *

  Mr. and Mrs. Polstead were not in the least put out when their son appeared with Lyra. They agreed at once to let her stay at the Trout, gave her a comfortable room, agreed that she could work in the bar or the kitchen, wherever she would be most useful, and altogether seemed the most agreeable parents in the world.

  “After all, he took you away,” said Mrs. Polstead, putting a dish of beef casserole in front of Lyra at the kitchen table. “Only right he should bring you back. Nearly twenty years!”

  She was a large woman with something of Malcolm’s warm coloring and eyes that were bright blue.

  “And I’ve only just heard about it,” said Lyra. “Being taken away, I mean. I was too young to remember anything. Where is the priory? Is it very close?”

  “Just across the river, but it’s a ruin now. The flood destroyed so much, and it was simply too expensive to repair. Besides, a number of the sisters died that night; there wouldn’t have been enough of them left to get it going again. You won’t remember Sister Fenella, or Sister Benedicta? No, you were far too young.”

  Lyra, mouth full, shook her head.

  “Sister Benedicta was in charge,” Mrs. Polstead went on. “Sister Fenella looked after you most of the time. She was the sweetest old lady you could ever meet. Malcolm loved her dearly—he was devastated when he came back and found she was gone. Oh, I thought I’d never forgive him for making me worry so much. Just vanishing like that…Of course, we thought he must be drowned, you too, and Alice. The one good thing was that his canoe was gone. He might have had time to get in that, we thought, and we clung to that hope till he came back, all knocked about and shot and bruised and exhausted….”

  “Shot?” said Lyra. The casserole was very good, and she was hungry, but she was even hungrier to hear everything Malcolm’s mother could tell her.

  “Shot in the arm. He’s still got the scar. And so worn out—completely drained. He slept for, ooh, three days. He was ill for a while, actually. All that filthy floodwater, I suppose. How’s that casserole? Like another potato?”

  “Thank you. It’s delicious. What I don’t understand is why I never knew about this. I mean, I wouldn’t remember anyway, but why didn’t anyone tell me?”

  “Good question. I suppose at first the problem was just looking after you—problem for the college, I mean. Moldy old place full of Scholars, never had a child running around, and none of them knew what had happened, and Alice wasn’t going to tell them. What did Mal tell you about when they took you to Jordan with Lord Asriel?”

  “I’ve only just heard for the first time this afternoon. And I’m trying to adjust….You see, I only ever knew Alice as Mrs. Lonsdale. She was always there when I was little, always keeping me clean and tidy and teaching me manners. I thought…Well, I don’t know what I thought. I suppose I thought she’d always been there.”

  “Lord, no. I’ll tell you how I know about it—the old Master of Jordan, old Dr. Carne, asked me and Reg to come in and see him: that would have been maybe six months after the flood. We didn’t know what it could be about, but we put on our best clothes and went there one afternoon. It was in the summer. He gave us tea in the garden and explained all about it. It seems that Mal and Alice had done what they set out to do, and taken you to Lord Asriel, where they thought you’d be safe. I never heard of anything so blooming reckless in all my life, and I let Mal know how senseless I thought he’d been, but I was proud of him, really, and I still am. Don’t you dare tell him, mind.

  “Anyway, it seems that Lord Asriel claimed that protection thing—sanctuary—”

  “Scholastic sanctuary.”

  “That’s it—on your behalf. And he told the Master he’d have to make you into a Scholar so you’d be properly entitled to it. Then Dr. Carne looked at Mal and Alice, half drowned, worn out, filthy, dirty, bleeding, and said, ‘What about these two?’ And Lord Asriel said, ‘Treasure them.’ And then he left.

  “So then Dr. Carne set about doing that. He arranged for Mal to go to Radcliffe School and paid for it, and then later on admitted him to Jordan as an undergraduate. Alice wasn’t a great one for education, but sharp as a tack, very bright, very quick. The Master offered her a place among the staff, and she soon took over looking after you. She married young—Roger Lonsdale, carpenter, lovely boy, decent, steady. He died in a building accident. She was widowed before she was twenty. I don’t know all that happened on that ruddy voyage to London in Malcolm’s old canoe—he’s never told me half of it, says I’d be too frightened—but one thing was, him and Alice came back fast friends. Inseparable, they were, as far as it could happen, him being at school and all.”

  “Weren’t they before?”

  “Deadly enemies. She sneered at him, and he ignored her. Hated each other. She could be a bully—she’s four years older, remember, and that’s a lot at that age. She used to tease him, pick on him—I had to tell her off once, but he never complained, though he used to set his lips—like this—when he took the dirty dishes in to her to be washed. Then that winter they gave her a bit of work at the priory, helping out with you, letting poor old Sister Fenella take it a little bit easier. Well, you made short work of that casserole. Like some more?”

  “No, thanks. It was just what I wanted.”

  “Baked plums? I put a bit of liqueur in with them.”

  “Sounds lovely. Yes, please.”

  Mrs. Polstead dished them up and poured double cream over them. Lyra looked to see if Pan had seen that—before their coldness, he used to tease her about her appetite—but he was sitting on the floor talking to Mrs. Polstead’s dæmon, a grizzled old badger.

  Mrs. Polstead sat down again. “Malcolm’s told me a bit about this new Master of Jordan,” she said. “He’s treated you badly.”

  “Well, you see, I really can’t tell if he has or not. I’m so confused. Things have been happening so quickly….I mean, if the money I was living on has run out, as he said, I can’t challenge that, because I don’t know anything apart from what he told me. Did, um, Malcolm tell you about the Master making me leave my rooms?”

  It was the first time she’d referred to him as Malcolm, and it felt awkward for a moment.

  “Yes. That was a wretched, shabby thing to do. That college is as rich as Ali Baba. They didn’t need your rooms for a ruddy student. Throwing you out of a place you’d lived in all your life!”

  “All the same, he is in charge, and I…I don’t know. There are so many complications. I’m sort of losing my grip. I thought I was more sure of things….”

  “You stay here as long as you like, Lyra. There’s plenty of room, and it’ll be useful to have an extra pair of hands. The girl I was expecting to work over Christmas has decided to work in Boswell’s instead, and good luck to her.”

  “I worked there two winters ago. It was nonstop.”

  “They think it’s glamorous at first, perfumes and lotions and whatnot, but it’s sheer hard work.”

  Lyra realized that she must have sold some of Miriam’s father’s products during her time at Boswell’s, but since she didn’t know Miriam then, she wouldn’t have noticed. Suddenly the world of undergraduate friendships, the calm and frugal life of St. Sophia’s, seemed a long way away.

  “Now, let me help you with these dishes,” she said, and soon she was up to her elbows in soapy water, and feeling very much at home.

  * * *

  * * *

  That night, Lyra had a dream about a cat on a moonlit lawn. At first, it didn’t interest her, but then, with a start that nearly woke her up (and certainly woke Pantalaimon), she recognized Will’s dæmon, Kirjava, who came directly across the grass and rubbed her head on the hand Lyra held out. Will had never known he had a dæmon until she was torn away from his heart on the shores of the world of the dead, just as Pan
was torn away from Lyra. And now Lyra seemed to her dreaming self to be recalling things she knew from another time, or perhaps from the future, whose significance was as overpowering as the joy she and Will had felt together. The red building in the journal came into it too: She knew what it contained! She saw why she had to go there! That knowledge was part of everything she knew, immovably. It seemed in her dream memory only yesterday when all four of them had wandered together in the world of the mulefa, and that time was surrounded, suffused, with such love that she found herself weeping in her dream, and woke with her pillow soaked with tears.

  Pan watched from close by and didn’t say a word.

  Lyra tried to recall every image from the dream, but it was vanishing by the second. All that was left was that intense, intoxicating, saturating love.

  * * *

  * * *

  Malcolm rang Hannah’s doorbell. Two minutes later they were sitting by her fireside, and he was telling her about the murder, the wallet, the rucksack, and Lyra at the Trout. She listened without interrupting: he was good at recounting events, giving each its due weight, putting them in the most effective order.

  “And what’s in the bag?” she said.

  “Aha,” he said, and set it between his feet. “These papers, to begin with. I haven’t had time to look, but I’ll photogram them tonight. These two books—an Anatolian book on botany, and this.”

  She took the other book. It was poorly bound and clumsily repaired, and the paper was coarse and fragile, and the typesetting amateurish. It bore the signs of much reading; the boards that covered it were greasy with handling, several pages were dog-eared, and many bore penciled annotations in the same language as the text.

  “It looks like poetry,” she said, “but I don’t know the language.”

  “It’s Tajik,” he told her, “and it’s an epic poem called Jahan and Rukhsana. I can’t read all of it, but I recognize that much.”

  “And what’s that other group of papers?”

  It was Dr. Strauss’s diary, the account of his journey into the desert of Karamakan.