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

by Philip Pullman

“Well, good for them. We’re different. Always have been. You know that. But what we’re not going to do, not for a single second, you hear me, is make a fuss. Or complain. Or whine that we’re not being treated fairly. It is fair. He’s going to let us stay for another year and a bit, even though the money’s run out. He’s going to pay for St. Sophia’s. That’s more than fair. The rest is—well, it’s up to us. As it would have been, anyway. We weren’t going to live here forever, were we?”

  “I don’t see why not. We’re an ornament to the college. They should be proud to have us.”

  That made her smile, anyway, for a moment.

  “But maybe you’re right about the room, Pan. I mean, locking it.”

  “Ah.”

  “The alethiometer…”

  “That’s one of the things I meant. We’re not at home anymore; we’ve got to remember that.”

  “One of the things? What are the others?”

  “The rucksack,” Pan said firmly.

  “Yes. Of course!”

  “Suppose someone went in there looking around, and found it….”

  “They’d think we’d stolen it.”

  “Or worse. If they knew about the murder…”

  “We need somewhere better than that. A proper safe.”

  “Hannah’s got one. A safe, I mean.”

  “Yes. But are we going to tell her?”

  He said nothing for a few moments. Then he said, “Mrs. Lonsdale.”

  “Alice. That’s another odd thing. All these things that are changing…like ice breaking under your feet.”

  “We must have known her name was Alice.”

  “Yes, but to hear him calling her Alice…”

  “Perhaps they’re lovers.”

  That was too silly to deserve a response.

  They sat there for a few more minutes, and then Lyra stood up.

  “Let’s go and make things a bit safer, then,” she said, and they set off back to their rooms.

  * * *

  * * *

  When Lyra visited Hannah Relf, as she did every week during term and quite often during the vacation, she normally took the alethiometer with her, since that was the subject of their study. When she thought of the carefree way she’d carried it with her to the Arctic and out into other worlds, of how she’d thoughtlessly let it be stolen and how she and Will had stolen it back with such care and at such risk, she was amazed at her own confidence, her own luck. Her stock of those qualities felt low at the moment.

  So, having made a few changes to the rucksack’s hiding place, and having pulled the table over the rug to discourage any search, she made sure the alethiometer was stowed away safely in her bag along with Hassall’s wallet before she set off to walk to Dame Hannah’s little house in Jericho.

  “She can’t be wanting to give us another lesson,” Lyra said.

  “And we can’t be in trouble. At least, I hope not.”

  Although it was still early in the afternoon, Dr. Relf had lit the lamps in her little sitting room, giving it an air of welcoming cheer against the darkening gray outside. Lyra couldn’t even guess how many times she’d sat in this room, with Pan and Hannah’s dæmon, Jesper, talking quietly on the hearth while she and Dr. Relf pored over a dozen or more ancient books, and tried the alethiometer again, or simply sat and chatted….She loved this mild and learned lady, she realized, loved everything about her and her way of life.

  “Sit down, dear. Stop fretting,” Hannah said. “There’s no reason to fret. But we do have something to talk about.”

  “It’s been worrying me,” Lyra said.

  “I can see. But now tell me about the Master—Werner Hammond. I know you had dinner with him last night. What did he say to you?”

  Lyra shouldn’t have been surprised; the lady’s perceptions were so quick and accurate as to seem uncanny, or they would have done if Lyra hadn’t known of Hannah’s skill with the alethiometer. Nevertheless, this did shake her a little.

  She gave an account, as full as she could make it, of her dinner with the Master. Hannah listened closely, saying nothing till Lyra had finished.

  “But he said one thing I forgot till just now,” Lyra concluded. “He said he knew you. He’d met you in some diplomatic context. He wasn’t specific about it—he just said how clever you were. Do you know him?”

  “Oh, yes, we’ve met. I saw enough of him to be very careful.”

  “Why? Is he dishonest? Or dangerous, or something? I’m lost, really,” Lyra confessed. “I feel as if the floor has given way. I couldn’t argue with what he said; it was just such a shock….Anyway, what do you know about him?”

  “I’m going to tell you some things I really ought to keep secret. But because I know you so well, and because I trust you to keep things secret if I ask you to, and because you’re in some danger…Ah—here’s someone I was expecting.”

  She got up as the doorbell rang. Lyra sat back, feeling light-headed and shaky. Voices came from the little hall, and then Dame Hannah came back with—

  “Dr. Polstead,” said Lyra. “And…Mrs. Lonsdale? You too?”

  “Alice, you goose,” said that lady. “Things are changing, Lyra.”

  “Hello, Lyra,” said Dr. Polstead. “Don’t move. I’ll perch here.”

  Pan crept behind Lyra’s legs as Dr. Polstead sat on the sofa next to Alice, looking too large for the little room; his broad ruddy face, a farmer’s face, she thought, smiling warmly; his red-gold hair, the exact color of his cat dæmon; his big hands, fingers interlaced, as he leant forward with his elbows on his knees—she felt as if she were catching clumsiness from him, although he had never done anything clumsy. And she recalled the brief period a few years before when he’d been given the task of tutoring her in geography and economic history, and how it had been an embarrassing failure, with each of them clearly resenting this unsuccessful enterprise but neither wanting to say it. He should have acted sooner to bring it to an end, because he was the adult, after all, but she knew she’d been difficult and sometimes insolent, and that much of the blame was hers; they’d just rubbed each other the wrong way, and there was nothing to be done but call an end to it. Since then, they’d both been scrupulously polite and outwardly friendly, while being relieved to see each other for not a moment more than was necessary.

  But what Alice had said about him the day before—and now, to see them both on terms of warm friendship with Dame Hannah, when none of them had ever seemed even to know about the others’ existence…Well, these last few days had exposed a lot of strange links and connections.

  “I didn’t know you three knew one another,” she said.

  “We’ve been friends for—oh, nineteen years,” he said.

  “It was the alethiometer that told me how to find Malcolm,” said Hannah, coming into the room with a tray of tea and biscuits. “He must have been about eleven years old.”

  “To find him? Were you looking for him, then?”

  “I was looking for something that was lost, and it pointed me to Malcolm, who’d found it. We just fell into a sort of friendship.”

  “I see,” said Lyra.

  “It was very lucky for me,” he said. “Now, what have you said so far?”

  “Lyra told me what the Master said to her last night. He told her that she’d been living not on her father’s money, as she’d thought, but on Dr. Carne’s. Lyra, that is true. The old Master didn’t want you to know, but he’d paid for everything. Your father didn’t leave a penny.”

  “And did you know that?” said Lyra. “Have you always known that?”

  “Yes, I have,” said Hannah. “I didn’t tell you because he didn’t want me to. Besides—”

  “You see, I rather kind of hate this,” Lyra burst out. “All my life people have hidden things from me. They didn’t tell me that Asriel was my fat
her and Mrs. Coulter was my mother. Imagine finding that out, and feeling that everyone in the world knew it and I was the only fool who didn’t. Hannah, whatever Dr. Carne said to you, whatever promise you made, it wasn’t a good thing to keep it from me. It wasn’t. I should have known. It would have woken me up. It would have made me think about the money and ask questions about it and find out that there was only a little left. Then I wouldn’t have been so shocked yesterday evening.”

  She’d never spoken like that to her old friend before, but she knew she was right, and so did Hannah, who bowed her head and nodded.

  Dr. Polstead said, “In Hannah’s defense, Lyra, we didn’t know what the new Master was going to do.”

  “He shouldn’t’ve done that, though,” said Alice. “I never trusted him from the moment he arrived.”

  “No, he shouldn’t,” said Hannah. “And in fact, Lyra, Alice was keen to tell you about all this while the old Master was still alive. She’s not to blame.”

  “After your twenty-first birthday,” said Dr. Polstead, “when you’ll be legally able to manage your own affairs, it would have had to come out, and I know that Hannah was planning to speak to you in time for that. He forestalled us.”

  “Us?” said Lyra. “And all this—what is all this? I’m sorry, Dr. Polstead, but I don’t understand. Are you involved in this somehow? And the other day—what Mrs. Lonsdale, Alice, what she said about you—that took me by surprise too, and for the same reason. You know something about me that I don’t, and that’s not right. So how are you involved?”

  “That’s one of the things we’re going to tell you this afternoon,” he said. “It’s why Hannah asked me to come. Shall I start?” he asked, turning to the lady, who nodded. “If I leave out anything important, I know Hannah will remind me.”

  Lyra leant back, feeling tense. Pan climbed onto her lap. Alice was watching them both seriously.

  “It began around the time Hannah mentioned just now,” Dr. Polstead began, “when I found something that was meant for her, and she found me. I was about eleven, and I was living with my parents at the Trout in Godstow….”

  The story that unfolded was stranger than Lyra could have guessed, and listening to it felt like standing on a mountaintop as a wind blew away clouds of fog and mist and disclosed a panorama completely unsuspected only a few minutes before. There were parts of it that were utterly new and unknown, but also there were other parts that had been visible through the fog in a phantasmagoria, and now stood clearly in the sunlight. There was a memory of a night when someone was walking up and down in a moonlit garden, whispering as he held her close, with a great quiet leopard walking alongside. And another memory of a different nighttime garden, with lights in all the trees, and of laughing and laughing for pure happiness, and a little boat. And of a storm and a thunderous knocking at a door in the darkness, but in Dr. Polstead’s account there was no horse….

  “I thought there was a horse,” Lyra said.

  “No horse,” said Alice.

  “Asriel flew us here in a gyropter and landed in Radcliffe Square,” Malcolm went on. “And then he put you in the Master’s arms and invoked the law of scholastic sanctuary. That law had never been repealed.”

  “What’s scholastic sanctuary? Is it what it sounds like?”

  “It was a law that protected Scholars from persecution.”

  “But I wasn’t a Scholar!”

  “Oddly enough, that was just what the Master said. So your father said, ‘You’ll have to make her into one, then, won’t you?’ And then he left.”

  Lyra sat back, her heart full, her mind whirling. So much to understand! She hardly knew what to ask about first.

  Hannah, who had been listening quietly, leant forward to put another log on the fire. Then she got up to draw the curtains against the darkness outside.

  “Well,” said Lyra, “I suppose…Thank you. I don’t mean to sound ungracious or anything. Thank you for saving me from the flood, and everything. This is all so strange. And the alethiometer—this one—”

  She reached into her bag and tugged it out, unfolding the black velvet to let it rest on her knee. It glowed in the lamplight.

  “The man Bonneville, the one with the hyena dæmon who was chasing you, had it?” she said. “It’s so much to take in. Where did he get it from?”

  “We found out much later,” said Hannah. “He stole it from a monastery in Bohemia.”

  “Then—shouldn’t it go back there?” Lyra said, but her heart sank at the thought of losing this most precious thing, this instrument that had helped her find her way into and out of the world of the dead, that had told her the truth about Will (“He is a murderer”) in the only way that would have let her trust him, that had saved their lives and restored the bear king’s armor and done a hundred other extraordinary things. Her hands involuntarily tightened around it, and she returned it to the safety of her bag.

  “No,” said Hannah. “The monks had stolen it themselves from a traveler who made the mistake of taking shelter with them. I took a month once to investigate the provenance of your alethiometer, and it seems to have passed from one set of thieves to another for centuries. When Malcolm pushed it in among your blankets, it was the first time it had changed hands honestly for hundreds of years. And I think that broke the pattern.”

  “It was stolen from me, once,” said Lyra. “And we had to steal it back.”

  “It’s yours, and unless you choose to give it away, it’ll be yours for life,” said Dr. Polstead.

  “And all those other things you told me…that fairy: Did you really mean a fairy? Or was it that you imagined…It can’t have been true?”

  “It was,” said Alice. “She was called Diania. She put you to the breast and suckled you. You’ve drunk fairy milk, and you’d be with her still if Malcolm hadn’t fooled her and got us away.”

  “The flood brought a lot of strange things to light,” said Malcolm.

  “But why didn’t you tell me before?”

  He looked a little abashed. How mobile his face was, Lyra thought. He looked like a stranger; it was as if she’d never seen him before.

  “We—Alice and I—always said to each other that we would,” he said, “but the time never seemed to be right. Besides, Dr. Carne made us both promise never to talk to you about Bonneville or anything connected with him. It was part of the sanctuary business. We didn’t understand then, but we did later. It was to protect you. But things are changing fast. Now I’ll hand over to Hannah.”

  “When I first met Malcolm,” the lady said, “I did something rather reckless. It turned out that he was very well placed to pick up the kind of information I was interested in, and I encouraged him to do that. He sometimes overheard things in his parents’ pub, or elsewhere, that were worth noting. He took messages for me, or collected them from other places. He was able to tell me about an abominable organization called the League of St. Alexander, which recruited schoolchildren to inform on their parents to the Magisterium.”

  “It sounds like…,” Lyra said. “I don’t know. A spy story or something. It’s not very easy to believe.”

  “I suppose it does. The point was that a lot of the political arguments and struggles that were going on then had to be carried out surreptitiously, anonymously. It was a dangerous time.”

  “Was that what you were doing? Political things?”

  “That sort of thing. It didn’t stop. It hasn’t stopped. And in some ways things are even more difficult now. For example, there’s a bill before Parliament at the moment called the Rectification of Historical Anomalies Bill. It’s portrayed as a simple tidying-up measure, to do away with a lot of old statutes that don’t make sense anymore or are irrelevant to modern life, such as benefit of clergy, or the right of certain livery companies to catch and eat herons and swans, or the gathering of tithes by monastic bodies that are long
gone—ancient privileges that no one’s used for years. But tucked away among the obsolete provisions to be abolished is the right of scholastic sanctuary, which is what still protects you.”

  “Protects me from what?” Lyra found that her voice was shaky.

  “From the Magisterium.”

  “But why would they want to hurt me?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “But why hasn’t anyone in Parliament noticed this? Isn’t anyone arguing against it?”

  “It’s a very complicated and long-winded piece of legislation—my sources tell me that it was introduced on the urging of an organization gaining power in Geneva: La Maison Juste. More to them than you’d think at first, but they’re connected to the CCD, I believe. Anyway, it was cleverly done, and you need the eyes of an eagle and the patience of a snail to fight something like that. There was an MP called Bernard Crombie leading the fight against it, but he was killed recently, supposedly in a road accident.”

  “I read about it,” said Lyra. “It was here in Oxford. He was knocked down, and the driver didn’t stop. You don’t mean he was murdered?”

  “I’m afraid so,” said Dr. Polstead. “We know what happened, but we can’t prove it in court. The point is that the protection that’s been around you since Lord Asriel put you in the Master’s arms is now, slowly and deliberately, being dismantled.”

  “And what the new Master said to you last night,” said Hannah, “just confirms it.”

  “So he—Dr. Hammond—he’s on the other side? Whatever that is?”

  “He’s no Scholar,” said Alice decisively. “He’s only a businessman.”

  “Yes,” said Dr. Polstead. “His background is relevant. We’re not sure yet how it all connects, but if that law’s passed, it’ll give business corporations the chance to help themselves to a good deal of property, for example, whose ownership was never clearly established. If there’s any dispute, it’ll be resolved in favor of money and power. Even the ruins of Godstow Priory will be up for sale.”

  “There were men there just the other day measuring things,” said Alice.