"I bet it is a dream," Asta said.
"Who's that?" said Alice sharply.
She was pointing past Malcolm's shoulder, looking some distance back. He turned to look and saw, only just visible through the wet gray air, a man in a dinghy rowing hard towards them.
"Can't see for sure," Malcolm said. "It might be..."
"It is," she said. "That daemon's in the front. Go faster."
Malcolm could see that the dinghy was an unhandy vessel, by no means as swift and easy through the water as La Belle Sauvage. Still, the man had adult muscles and was plying the oars with determination.
So Malcolm dug the paddle in and urged the canoe forward. But he couldn't do it for long, because his shoulders and arms, his whole torso and waist, were aching.
"What's he doing? Where is he?" he said.
"He's dropping back. Can't see him--he's behind that hill--keep going!"
"I'm going as fast as I can. But I'll have to stop soon. Besides..."
The change in motion had woken Lyra, and she began to cry quietly. They'd have to feed her before long, and that meant tying up the canoe, building a fire, heating the saucepan. And before that, finding somewhere to hide.
Malcolm looked all around while paddling as steadily as he could. They were in a broad valley, probably far above the riverbed, with a wooded slope rising out of the water to the left, and to the right a large house, classical in shape and white in color, on the breast of a green hill on which were more trees. Each side was some way off; it was likely that the man in the dinghy would see them long before they reached a hiding place.
"Make for the house," said Alice.
Malcolm thought that was the better option too, so he paddled the canoe as fast as he could in that direction. As they got closer, he could see a thin column of smoke rising from one of the many chimneys, before being blown away.
"There's people there," he said.
"Good" was all she said.
"If there's people around," said Asta, "he's less likely to..."
"Suppose he's already here, and he's one of them?" said Malcolm.
"But that was him back there in the boat," she said. "Wasn't it?"
"Maybe. Too far away to see."
Malcolm was realizing how tired he was. He had no idea how long he'd been paddling, but as he slowed down, nearing the house, he felt more and more hungry and weary and cold. He could barely hold his head up.
Ahead of them a sloping lawn rose directly out of the floodwater and led smoothly up to the white facade of the house, the columns and the pediment. Someone was moving there, behind the columns, but the light was too gloomy to see anything more than the movement. The smoke was rising from a chimney somewhere at the back.
Malcolm brought the canoe to rest against the grass of the lawn.
"Well, what are we s'posed to do now?" said Alice.
The slope was a gentle one, and the edge of the water was some feet further than the canoe could reach.
"Take your shoes and socks off," said Malcolm, hauling off his boots. "We'll pull the canoe up out of the water. It'll slide over the grass easy enough."
There was a shout from the house. A man came out from between the columns and gestured to them to go away. He shouted again, but they couldn't hear what he said.
"You better go up and tell him we got to feed a baby and rest for a while," said Malcolm.
"Why me?"
" 'Cause he'll take more notice of you."
They got the canoe out of the water, and then Alice sulkily picked her way up the lawn towards the man, who was shouting again.
Malcolm pulled the canoe away from the water and into ragged shrubbery at the edge of the lawn, and then slumped down beside it. He said to Lyra, "I suppose you're just waking up, are you? It's all right for some. It's a nice life being a baby."
She wasn't happy. Malcolm took her out of the canoe and cuddled her on his lap, ignoring the smell that meant she needed changing, ignoring the heavy gray sky and the cold wind and the distant man in the dinghy, who had come into sight again. He held the little child against his chest and self-consciously kissed her forehead.
"We'll keep you safe," he said. "See, Alice is talking to the man up there. Soon we'll take you there and make a fire and warm some milk. Course, if your mummy was here...You never had a mummy, did you? You were just found somewhere. The lord chancellor found you under a bush. And he thought, Blimey, I can't look after a baby, I better take her to the sisters at Godstow. So then it was Sister Fenella who looked after you. I bet you remember her. She's a nice old lady, isn't she? And then the flood came and we had to take you away in La Belle Sauvage to keep you safe. I wonder if you'll remember any of this. Prob'ly not. I can't remember anything from when I was a baby. Look, here comes Alice. Let's see what she says."
"He says we can't stay long," she told him. "I says we got to make a fire and feed the baby and we don't want to stay long anyway. I think summing funny's going on. He had a strange look about him."
"Was there anyone else there?" said Malcolm, getting to his feet.
"No. At least I didn't see no one."
"Take Lyra, then, and I'll hide the canoe a bit more," he said, handing over the child. His arms were trembling with fatigue.
Once he had the canoe concealed, he gathered the things they needed for Lyra and made his way up to the house. The great door was open behind the columns, and lingering beside it was the man: a sour-faced individual in rough clothes, whose mastiff daemon stood close by, watching without moving.
"You en't staying long," the man said.
"Not very long, no," Malcolm agreed. And he recognized something: the man was a little drunk. Malcolm knew how to deal with drunks.
"Lovely house," he said.
"So it may be. It en't yours."
"Is it yours?"
" 'Tis now."
"Did you buy it, or did you fight for it?"
"You being cheeky?"
The mastiff daemon growled.
"No," said Malcolm easily. "It's just with everything changed by the flood, I wouldn't be surprised if you had to fight for it. Everything's different now. And if you fought for it, then it belongs to you, no doubt about it."
He looked down the lawn towards the turbid flood. In the heavy twilight he couldn't see the rowing boat at all.
"It's like a castle," he went on. "You could defend this easy, if you were attacked."
"Who's going to attack it?"
"No one. I'm just saying. You made a good choice."
The man turned and followed his gaze out over the water.
"Has it got a name, this house?" said Malcolm.
"Why?"
"It looks important. It looks like a manor or a palace or something. You could call it after yourself."
The man snorted. It might have been with laughter.
"You could put a notice up at the edge of the water," Malcolm said. "Saying keep out, or trespassers will be prosecuted. You'd have every right to. Like that man over there in the dinghy," he said, because now he could see the boat, still some way off, still moving steadily towards them.
"What's the matter with him?"
"Nothing, till he tries to land and take this house away from you."
"D'you know him?"
"I think I know who he is. And he prob'ly would try and do that."
"I got a shotgun."
"Well, he wouldn't dare land if you threatened him with that."
The man seemed to be thinking about it.
"I got to defend my property," he said.
"Course you have. You got every right to."
"Who is he, anyway?"
"If it's who I think it is, his name's Bonneville. He's not long out of prison."
The mastiff daemon, following the man's line of sight, growled again.
"Is he after you?"
"Yeah. He's been following us from Oxford."
"What's he want?"
"He wants the baby."
"Is it hi
s kid, then?"
The man's blurred eyes swam towards focus on Malcolm's face.
"No. She's our sister. He just wants her."
"Get away!"
"I'm afraid so," Malcolm said.
"Bastard."
The man in the boat was getting closer, making quite clearly for the lawn, and now Malcolm had no doubt who he was.
"I better get inside, in case he sees me," he said. "We won't make any trouble for you. We'll get away as soon as we can."
"Don't you worry, son," the man said. "What's your name?"
Malcolm had to think.
"Richard," he said. "And my sister's Sandra, and the baby's Ellie."
"Get inside. Keep out the way. Leave him to me."
"Thank you," said Malcolm, and he slipped inside.
The man came inside too, and took a shotgun from a cabinet in a room just off the hall.
"Be careful," said Malcolm. "He might be dangerous."
"I'm dangerous."
The man went unsteadily outside. Malcolm looked around quickly. The hall was decorated with ornate plasterwork, cabinets in precious woods and tortoiseshell and gold, statues of marble. The huge chimneypiece was cracked, though, and the hearth was empty. Alice must have found the fire in another room.
Afraid to call out for her, he hurried from room to room, listening hard for the sound of a gunshot; but there was no sound from outside except the wind and the rush of the water.
He found Alice in the kitchen. There was a fire in an iron range, and Lyra sat freshly changed in the center of a large pine table.
"What'd he say?" Alice demanded.
"He said we can stay here and do what we need to. And he's got a shotgun and he's going to defend the house against Bonneville."
"Is he coming? It was him in the boat, wannit?"
"Yeah."
The water in the saucepan had been boiling when Malcolm came in. Alice took it off to cool. Malcolm picked up the biscuit that had fallen from Lyra's hand and gave it to her again. She gurgled her appreciation.
"If she drops her biscuit, you ought to tell her where it's gone," he said to Pantalaimon, who instantly became a bush baby and gazed at him with enormous eyes, unmoving and silent.
"Look at Pan," Malcolm said to Alice.
She cast a quick glance, not interested.
"How does he know how to be one of them?" Malcolm went on. "They can't ever have seen a whatever-it-is. So how does he know--"
"What we gonna do if Bonneville gets past the man?" said Alice, her voice sharp and high.
"Hide. Then run out and get away."
Her face showed what she thought of that.
"Go and find out what's going on," she told him. "And don't let him see you."
Malcolm went out and tiptoed along the corridor to the main hall. Pressing himself into the shadows beside the door, he listened hard, and hearing nothing, he looked around carefully. The hall was empty. What now?
There was no sound but the wind and the water, no voices, certainly no gunshots. They might be talking at the water's edge, he thought, and keeping to the wall, he moved silently across the marble floor towards the great windows.
But Asta, moth-formed, got there first, and Malcolm felt a horrible shock as she saw something outside and fell off the curtain into his hand.
The man from the house was lying on the grass, with his head and arms in the water beside Bonneville's dinghy, not moving. There was no sign of Bonneville, and no sign of the gun.
In his alarm, Malcolm recklessly went close to the window, peering out to left and right. The only movements were the bobbing of the dinghy, which was tied to a stick Bonneville had driven into the soft lawn, and the swaying this way and that of the top half of the man's body. The light was too gray and dim for him to be sure, but Malcolm thought he could see a current of scarlet trailing away from the man's throat.
He pressed himself against the glass, trying to see where he'd hidden La Belle Sauvage. As far as he could tell, the bushes were undisturbed.
Which was the cabinet the man had opened to get the gun? In that room at the other end of the great hall...
But Malcolm didn't know how to load and fire one, even if...
He ran back to the kitchen. Alice was just pouring the milk into Lyra's bottle.
"What is it?"
"Shh. Bonneville's killed the man and taken his gun, and I can't see him anywhere."
"What gun?" she said, alarmed.
"He had a shotgun. I told you. He was going to defend the place. And now Bonneville's got it and killed him. He's lying in the water...."
Malcolm was looking around, almost panting with fear. He saw an iron ring in a wooden trapdoor, and his panic-strengthened muscles lifted it at once. A flight of steps led down into profound darkness.
"Candles--on the shelf over there," said Alice, scooping up Lyra and the bottle and looking around for anything that would give them away, but there was too much to pick up.
Malcolm ran to the shelf and found a box of matches there as well.
"You go down first. I'll pull the trapdoor after me," he said.
Alice moved cautiously into the dark. Lyra was twisting and struggling, and Pantalaimon was chirruping like a frightened bird. Asta flew to him, perching on Lyra's blanket, and made soft cooing noises.
Malcolm was struggling with the trapdoor. There was a rope handle on the inside, but the hinges were stiff and it was very heavy. Finally he managed to haul it over and let it down as quietly as he could.
The strain of being at a distance from his daemon was beginning to tell. His hands were trembling and his heart was lurching painfully.
"Don't move any further away," he whispered to Alice.
"Why--"
"Daemon."
She understood and moved back a step, crowding him slightly as he tried to strike a match. He got a candle lit, and Asta flew back to him, for the little flame itself was enough to distract Lyra. In its light, Alice trod carefully down to the cellar floor.
"All right, Lyra, hush, gal," she whispered, and settled on the cold earth floor with her back against the wall. A noisy sound of sucking came almost at once, and Alice's daemon settled near the chick-shaped Pan as a crow. The little daemon's anxious chirruping stopped.
Malcolm sat on the bottom step, looking around. This was a storeroom for vegetables and sacks of rice and other such things: dry enough, but bitterly cold. A low archway led through into a further cellar.
"All he's got to do," said Alice shakily, "is move summing heavy onto the trapdoor and--"
"Don't think about it. There's no point in thinking like that. In a minute I'll go through that archway and see where it leads. There's bound to be another entrance."
"Why?"
"Because a cellar is where they keep wine. And when they send the butler down to fetch up some bottles of claret or whatever, he en't going to struggle with the trapdoor and stumble down the steps, like we did. There'll be a proper staircase somewhere--"
"Shh!"
He sat still, tense and fearful, trying not to let his fear show. Leisurely footsteps moved across the floor above. They stopped at the end of the kitchen and paused, and then crossed the floor again. The steps paused once more, close to the trapdoor.
Nothing happened for a minute. Then there was a sound, as of a wooden chair being pulled out from the table, just that; but they couldn't tell whether Bonneville had put it over the trapdoor, or whether he'd simply moved it and gone out.
Another minute went past, and then another.
With the greatest of care, Malcolm stood up and stepped down to the earth floor. He set the lit candle on the ground near Alice, screwing it into the soil so as to stand securely, and tiptoed under the low archway into the next part of the cellar. Once he was there, he lit another candle. This was a second storeroom, but for unwanted furniture rather than food, so he looked around quickly and moved on through the next archway.
At the other end of this room, there was a he
avy wooden door with great iron hinges and a lock as big as a large book. There was no key hanging nearby, and he couldn't tell whether the door was locked, even by looking closely.
And then a quiet voice spoke on the other side. It was Bonneville. Asta, on his shoulder as a lemur, nearly fainted; he caught her and held her close.
"Well, Malcolm," said Bonneville, his voice low and confiding. "Here we are on either side of a locked door, and neither of us has the key. At least I haven't, and I assume you haven't either, because you'd have unlocked it and come through, wouldn't you? That would have been unfortunate for you."
Malcolm had nearly dropped the candle. His heart was beating like the wings of a captured bird, and Asta changed rapidly from lemur to butterfly to crow before becoming a lemur again, crouching on Malcolm's shoulder, her enormous eyes fixed on the lock.
"Don't say a word," she murmured into his ear.
"Oh, I know you're there," said Bonneville. "I can see the light of your candle. I saw you on the terrace talking to our late host--did you know this is an island, by the way? If your canoe should meet with an accident, you'd be marooned. How would you like that?"
Again Malcolm held his tongue.
"I know it's you because it must be you," Bonneville went on. He was speaking confidentially, his voice just loud enough to penetrate the door. "It couldn't be anyone else. That girl is feeding the baby--she wouldn't be prowling around with a candle. And I know you're listening. It won't be long before we're face to face. You won't escape me now. Can you see them, by the way?"
"See who?" Malcolm cursed himself as soon as he spoke. "There's no one here but me," he went on.
"Oh, don't ever think that, Malcolm. You're never alone."
"Well, there's my daemon--"
"I don't mean her. You and she are the same being, naturally. I mean someone besides you."
"Who d'you mean, then?"
"I hardly know where to start. There are spirits of the air and the earth, to begin with. Once you learn to see them, you'll realize that the world is thronged with them. And then in wicked places like this, there are night-ghasts of many kinds. Do you know what used to go on here, Malcolm?"
"No," said Malcolm, who didn't want to know in the least.
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