9

The Alchemist

As soon as she’d read Strauss’s journal, Hannah agreed with Malcolm that Oakley Street needed to see it as soon as possible. Accordingly he spent much of the night photogramming every one of the papers from Hassall’s rucksack, together with the title page of each of the books. He put the rolls of film in his refrigerator and went to bed nearer five o’clock than four.

Before they fell asleep, Asta said, ‘Has she still got her gun?’

Every Oakley Street agent of Hannah’s rank had to take an unarmed combat course, and pass a test on their marksmanship with a pistol once a year. Hannah looked like a mild grey-haired academic, which is what she was; but she was armed, and she could defend herself.

‘She keeps it in that safe of hers,’ said Malcolm. ‘I’m sure she’d prefer not to take it out.’

‘It should be closer at hand than that.’

‘Well, you tell her. I’ve tried.’

‘And what are we going to do about Olivier Bonneville?’

‘Can’t do anything but speculate at the moment. A son? Bonneville might have had a son. One more thing to find out. We’ll see what Oakley Street knows.’

After breakfast Malcolm delivered the rolls of film to a trusty technician for developing, and walked along the High Street to the Botanic Garden. It was a sombre grey day with the taste of rain in the air, and the lit windows of the administrative building glowed brightly against the bulk of a large yew behind it.

A secretary told him at first that the Director was busy, and that he’d need an appointment, but as soon as he said that his visit concerned Dr Roderick Hassall, her attitude changed. In fact, she looked shocked.

‘D’you know where he is?’ she said, and her dæmon, a little Boston terrier, stood with hackles raised, uttering a hardly audible whine.

‘That’s what I’ve come to discuss with the Director.’

‘Of course. Sorry. Excuse me.’

She left her desk and entered an inner room, the dæmon scampering at her heels. A few moments later she came out and said, ‘Professor Arnold will see you now.’

‘Thanks,’ said Malcolm, and went in. The secretary closed the door behind him.

The Director was a woman of forty or so, blonde, slender, and fierce-looking. She was standing. Her hummingbird-dæmon hovered in the air over her shoulder before settling there.

‘What do you know about Roderick Hassall?’ she said at once.

‘I was hoping you could tell me something about him. All I know is what’s in here,’ said Malcolm, and laid the shopping bag on the neatly ordered desk. ‘I found it at a bus stop, as if someone had forgotten it. There was no one nearby, and I waited for a few minutes to see if anyone would come back and claim it, but no one did. So I thought I’d better see who it belonged to. There’s a wallet in there.’

Professor Arnold found the wallet, and looked at it briefly.

‘And seeing that he’s a member of your staff,’ Malcolm went on, ‘I thought I’d bring it here.’

‘A bus stop, you said? Where?’

‘On the Abingdon Road, the side heading into town.’

‘When?’

‘Yesterday morning.’

She put the wallet down and took out one of the folders. After a quick glance at the contents she did the same with the other two. Malcolm stood waiting for her to speak. Finally she looked at him. She seemed to be weighing him up.

‘I’m sorry, my secretary didn’t tell me your name,’ she said.

‘She didn’t ask me for it. My name’s Malcolm Polstead. I’m a Scholar of Durham College. When I mentioned Dr Hassall’s name, though, she looked shocked, and now I have to say that you look the same. It is genuine, I take it, all this? The university cards are real? There is a Dr Hassall, and he is on your staff?’

‘I’m sorry, Dr – Dr?’ He nodded. ‘Dr Polstead, but this has taken me aback. Please – sit down.’

He sat in the chair facing the desk. She sat too and lifted the telephone. ‘I need some coffee,’ she said, and raised her eyebrows at Malcolm, who nodded. ‘Could you bring us coffee for two, Joan, please.’

She picked up the wallet again and took out cards, papers, money, and laid them all neatly on her blotter.

‘Why didn’t you—’ she began, and stopped, and began again: ‘Did you think of taking this to the police?’

‘The first thing I did was look in the wallet, to find a name, and when I saw the card saying he worked here I thought it would save time all round if I brought it here directly. Besides, I couldn’t help being curious, because when I was looking through the wallet I caught sight of the name of a place where I spent a little time myself, and I wondered what Dr Hassall was researching.’

‘Which place?’

‘Lop Nor.’

Now she was more than interested. In fact, she was suspicious, even alarmed. ‘What were you doing there?’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, that sounded like an accusation.’

‘I was looking for a tomb. I’m an historian, and the Silk Road has been one of my interests for a long time. I didn’t find the tomb, but I did find some other things that made the journey worthwhile. May I ask what Dr Hassall was doing in Central Asia?’

‘Well, he’s a botanist, of course, so … There’s a research institute there – we support it together with the universities of Edinburgh and Leiden. He was working there.’

‘Why there? I don’t remember much in the way of plant life around Lop Nor – a few poplars, some grass – tamarisks, I think …’

‘For one thing, the climatic conditions – thank you, Joan, just leave it there – aren’t easy to replicate further north and west, especially here on the edge of a large ocean. Then there’s the soil – there are some unusual minerals in it – and there’s local knowledge. They grow flowers that just … can’t be grown anywhere else.’

‘And Dr Hassall? Is he back in Oxford now? I’m just wondering – and it’s none of my business, I know – why you’re so alarmed.’

‘I’m alarmed for him,’ she said. ‘The fact is that he’s missing. We thought he was dead.’

‘Really? When did you begin to think that?’

‘Some weeks ago. He vanished from the Station.’

‘The Station?’

‘We call it the Station. The research institute at Tashbulak.’

‘The place near Lop Nor? And he vanished?’

She was looking more and more uncomfortable. She tapped her fingers on the desk: short nails, he noticed, and even a touch of dirt in them, as if she’d been botanising when he arrived.

‘Look, Dr Polstead,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry to seem evasive. The thing is, communications with the Station aren’t quick or reliable. Obviously our information about Dr Hassall was wrong. It’s good to have this – these things – very good – because it might mean that he’s alive after all, but I’d have expected – if it was him that brought them to Oxford, of course – it would have been wonderful if he’d come here in person … I just can’t imagine what anyone was doing leaving them at a bus stop. I’m sure he wouldn’t do that. Someone else must have … I’m utterly perplexed. I hope he wasn’t … Thank you very much, Dr Polstead, for, for bringing this in.’

‘What will you do now?’

‘You mean, about this? These things?’

She was frightened of something, and frightened separately of betraying the fact to him, a stranger. Her dæmon had not moved from her shoulder, or closed his eyes, which gazed at Malcolm solemnly. Malcolm looked back, trying to seem bland and harmless and helpful.

‘It’s about roses, isn’t it?’ he said.

She blinked. Her dæmon turned away and buried his face in her hair.

‘Why do you ask that?’

‘Two things. One is the specimens, the seeds and the rose oil. The other is that battered book in the red cover. It’s an epic poem in the Tajik language called Jahan and Rukhsana. It’s about two lovers who search for a rose garden. Was Dr Hassall investigating something to do with roses?’

‘Yes, he was,’ she said. ‘I can’t tell you any more because, well, I have to supervise dozens of projects – postgraduate theses, the work done here as well as what they do at Tashbulak, and my own research as well …’

She was one of the worst liars he’d ever met. He felt sorry for her; she was having to improvise a defence when she was in a state of shock.

‘I won’t bother you any more,’ he said. ‘Thanks for explaining what you could. If for any reason you need to get in touch with me …’ He laid one of his cards on the desk.

‘Thank you, Dr Polstead,’ she said, and shook his hand.

‘Do let me know if you have any news. I feel as if I’ve got shares in Dr Hassall now.’

He left the building and went to sit in the garden, where a little weak sunshine was gilding the bare stems of the shrubs, and where two young men were doing something horticultural near the glasshouses.

‘Should have told her,’ said Asta.

‘I know. But that would drag Lyra into it. And involve the police, and it was one of them who killed him.’

‘But the policeman wasn’t acting officially, Mal, come on. The one Pan saw is corrupt. The police need to know what happened, and know about him.’

‘You’re absolutely right, and I feel very bad about it.’

‘But?’

‘We’ll tell her soon. Tell them soon.’

‘When?’

‘When we’ve learned a little more.’

‘And how are we going to do that?’

‘Not sure yet.’

Asta closed her eyes. Malcolm wished that Lyra hadn’t taken the risk of getting the rucksack from the station alone; but who’d have been able to help her? Not him, clearly. Not then. Once you’ve witnessed a murder and decided against telling the police, you’re really on your own.

And that set him thinking about her again. While Asta lay sphinx-like on the wooden seat beside him, eyes half closed, Malcolm wondered how Lyra was getting on at the Trout, and how safe she’d be there, and a dozen other questions gathered around one central one that he didn’t want to look at yet. Had she completely changed from the sullen, contemptuous girl whose manner and tone had been so difficult to deal with when he was teaching her a few years before? She seemed to be much more hesitant, reticent, uncertain of herself. She looked lonely and unhappy, not to make too much of it. And there was her strange, cold relationship with her dæmon … But when they’d spoken in the little restaurant she’d been almost confiding, almost friendly; and her pleasure in having concealed the things from the rucksack was like a little ripple of laughter, something almost carefree; delightful, anyway.

That central question wouldn’t go away. He came back to it helplessly.

He was conscious of his own ox-like clumsiness. He was conscious of all kinds of contrasts – his maturity and her youth, his bulk and her slenderness, his stolidity and her quickness … He could watch her for hours. Her eyes, large and long-lashed and a gloriously vivid blue, more expressive than anyone’s he’d known; she was so young, but already he could see where the laughter lines, the lines of sympathy, the lines of concentration would gather in the years to come and make her face even richer and more full of life. Already, on each side of her mouth, there was a tiny crease made by the smile that seemed to hover just under the surface, ready to flower into being. Her hair, dark straw-coloured, shortish and untidyish but always soft and shining: once or twice when he was teaching her, bending to look over her shoulder at a piece of written work, he’d caught a faint scent from that hair, not of shampoo but of young warm girl, and drawn away at once. At that time, when they were teacher and pupil, anything like that was so wrong his mind shut it out before it had even fully formed.

But four years later, was it still wrong to think about it? About Lyra now? Wrong to yearn to put his hands on either side of her face, on those warm cheeks, and bring it gently towards his?

He’d been in love before; he knew what was happening to him. But the girls and women he’d loved in the past had been roughly his own age. Mostly. In the one exception, the difference went the other way. Nothing he knew was any help in this situation, and she was in such danger and difficulty at the moment that bothering her with his own feelings would be unforgivable. But there it was. He, Malcolm Polstead, aged thirty-one, was in love with her. It was impossible to think that she could ever love him.

The quiet of the large garden, the distant conversation of the two young botanists, the regular scraping of their hoes, the purring of his dæmon, all combined with his lack of sleep and his troubled heart to make it tempting to close his eyes and hope to dream of Lyra; so he stood up and said to Asta, ‘Come on. Let’s go and do some work.’

At eleven that night, Mr and Mrs Polstead were talking quietly in bed. It was the second evening of Lyra’s stay at the Trout. She was in her bedroom; the girl who helped in the kitchen, the potboy, the assistant barman had all gone home; there were no guests.

‘I can’t make her out,’ said Reg Polstead.

‘Lyra? What d’you mean?’

‘She seems perfectly cheerful on the surface. Full of, you know, chatter, friendliness. Then sometimes she’ll fall quiet and her whole face changes. It’s as if she’s just had some bad news.’

‘No,’ said his wife, ‘it’s not like that. She doesn’t look shocked. She looks lonely. She looks as if she’s used to it and doesn’t expect anything else, but that’s what she is. Melancholy.’

‘She doesn’t hardly ever speak to that dæmon, either,’ he said. ‘It’s as if they’re two separate people.’

‘She was such a happy baby. Laughing, singing, full of fun … Mind you, that was before, you know.’

‘Before Malcolm’s voyage. Well, he was different after that. So was Alice.’

‘But you’d expect them to be more affected, seeing as they were older. She was just a baby. They don’t remember things. And she is being badly treated by that college. It’s her home – you’d think they’d take better care. Not surprising she’s a bit subdued.’

‘I wonder if she’s got any relatives? Malcolm says her father and mother are both long dead.’

‘If she’s got any uncles or aunts or cousins, I don’t think much of them,’ said Mrs Polstead.

‘Why?’

‘They should have got in touch. A long time ago. It’s an unnatural life for a young girl, cooped up with a lot of old scholars.’

‘Maybe she has got relatives, and they don’t care about her. She’d be better off without ’em in that case.’

‘Possibly. Tell you one thing, though – she’s a hard worker. I’ll have to find something particular for her to do. She does Pauline’s couple of jobs quicker and better than Pauline, and Pauline’s going to feel shoved aside unless I give Lyra something different.’

‘We don’t need her to work. She could stay as a guest, welcome, far as I’m concerned.’

‘Me too, love, but it’s not for us, it’s for her. She’s got her college work, but she needs to feel useful. I’m trying to think of something extra, something that wouldn’t get done at all if she didn’t do it.’

‘Yeah, maybe you’re right. I’ll have a think. Night, sweetheart.’

He turned over. She read a detective story for five minutes, found her eyelids drooping, and put the light out.

Hannah Relf didn’t know it, but Lyra had been experimenting with the new method of reading the alethiometer. This new method wasn’t a matter of public knowledge, because there was little public discussion of the alethiometer, but among the small groups of experts it was a topic of excited speculation.

The instrument in her possession was the one Malcolm had found in Gerard Bonneville’s rucksack, and then thrust in among the baby Lyra’s blankets when Lord Asriel had handed her to the Master of Jordan. The Master had given it to Lyra when she was eleven, and she’d taken it with her on the great adventure in the Arctic and beyond. At first she learned to read it intuitively, as if it was the most natural thing in the world; but before very long she lost the power to do that, and she was left unable to see all the connections and similarities that had once been so clear beneath the symbols on the dial.

The loss of that power was painful. It was a consolation, though a poor thin one, to know that by diligent study she’d be able to regain some of the ability to read it; but she’d always need the books in which generations of scholars had set down their discoveries about the symbols and the links between them. The contrast, though! It was like losing the power to fly through the air like a swift, and being compensated with a crutch to help her limp along the ground.

And that contributed to her melancholy. Mrs Polstead was right: melancholy was Lyra’s state of mind these days, and since her rift with Pan, she’d had no one to talk to about it. How absurd it was, that the two of them were one person, and yet they found it so hard to talk together or even endure each other’s company in silence. More and more she found herself whispering to a phantom, to her idea of what Will was like now in that unreachable world of his.

So the new style of alethiometric technique had come as a welcome distraction. It had spread by rumour, no one knew from whom or from where; but there were stories about dramatic advances in understanding, of a revolution in theory, of sensational feats of readership where the books were simply redundant, superfluous. And Lyra privately began to experiment.

On their second night at the Trout, she was sitting in bed, knees drawn up, blankets around her against the cold, the alethiometer in her loosely cupped hands. The low sloping ceiling of the bedroom, the wallpaper with its pattern of little flowers, the old worn rug beside the bed – they felt comfortably familiar already, and the gentle yellow light from the naphtha lamp beside her made the room feel warmer than a thermometer would have shown. Pan was sitting beneath the lamp; in the old days, he would have been curled up warmly between her breasts.

‘What are you doing?’ he said. His tone was hostile.

‘I’m going to try the new method again.’

‘Why? Last time it made you sick.’

‘I’m exploring. Trying things out.’

‘I don’t like the new method, Lyra.’

‘But why?’

‘Because when you do it you look as if you’re lost. I can’t tell where you are. And I don’t think you know where you are. You need more imagination.’

‘What?’

‘If you had more imagination it would be better. But—’

‘What are you saying? You’re saying I haven’t got any imagination?’

‘You’re trying to live without it, that’s what I’m saying. It’s those books again. One of them saying it doesn’t exist, the other saying it doesn’t matter anyway.’

‘No, no …’

‘Well, if you don’t want my opinion, don’t ask me about it.’

‘But I didn’t …’ She didn’t know what to say. She felt powerfully upset. He was just looking at her expressionlessly. ‘What should I do?’ she said.

She meant about us. But in response he said, ‘Well, you have to be able to imagine. But in your case, that’s not easy, is it?’

‘I don’t … I really have no … Pan, I just don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s as if we’re speaking different languages. It doesn’t connect with …’

‘What were you going to look up anyway?’

‘I’m not sure any more. You’ve confused me. But something’s wrong with things. I suppose I was going to see if I could find out what it is.’

He looked away, and slowly moved his tail from side to side, and then he turned away altogether and sprang on to the old chintz-covered armchair and curled up to sleep.

No imagination? Trying to live without imagination? She had never in her life thought about what her imagination might be. If she had, she might have supposed that that aspect of her self resided more in Pan, because she was practical, matter-of-fact, down-to-earth … But how did she know that? Other people seemed to regard her as being those things, or at least they treated her as if they did. She had friends she would have called imaginative: they were witty, or they said surprising things, or they daydreamed a lot. Wasn’t she like that? Evidently not. She had no idea it would hurt so much to be told she had no imagination.

But Pan had said it was because of those books. It was true, the narrative of The Hyperchorasmians treated with contempt the characters who were artistic, or who wrote poetry, or who spoke about ‘the spiritual’. Did Gottfried Brande mean that imagination itself was worthless? Lyra couldn’t remember if he ever mentioned it directly: she’d have to look through the book and see. As for Simon Talbot, in The Constant Deceiver his own imagination was on display throughout, in a kind of charming but heartless play with the truth. The effect was dazzling, dizzying, as if there were no responsibilities, no consequences, no facts.

She sighed. She was holding the alethiometer loosely in both hands, letting her thumbs move across the knurled wheels, sensing the familiar weight, half watching the reflection of the lamplight move as she turned it this way and that.

‘Well, Pan, I tried,’ she said, but very quietly. ‘And so did you, for a bit. You just couldn’t keep going. You’re not really interested. What are we going to do? We can’t go on like this. Why do you hate me so much? Why do I hate you? Why can’t we stand being with each other?’

She was no longer sleepy, just wide awake and unhappy.

‘Well,’ she whispered, ‘it won’t make any difference now.’

She sat up a little, held the alethiometer more purposefully. There were two points of difference between the new method and the classical one. The first had to do with the placing of the hands on the dial. The classical method required the reader to frame a question by pointing each of the hands at a different symbol, and thus define precisely what it was they wanted to know. But with the new method, all three hands were pointed at one symbol, chosen by the reader. This was felt by classically trained readers to be grossly unorthodox and disrespectful of tradition, besides being unstable; instead of the steady and methodical enquiry made possible by the firmly based triangle of the three hands, the single anchor-hold of the new method allowed a wild and unpredictable chaos of meanings to emerge as the needle darted rapidly from place to place.

The second point of difference had to do with the attitude of the reader. The classical method required a careful, watchful but relaxed state of mind, which took a good deal of practice to manage. After all, part of the reader’s attention had to be available for consulting the books which laid out the multiple meanings of each symbol. The new method, on the other hand, didn’t need the books at all. The reader had to abandon control and enter a state of passive vision where nothing was fixed and everything was equally possible. This was the reason why both Hannah and Lyra had had to stop soon after beginning their experiments with it: they’d felt horribly seasick.

Now, sitting in bed and thinking about it, Lyra felt apprehensive.

‘Could it go wrong?’ she whispered, and, ‘I could get lost and never come back …’

Yes, that was a risk. Without a fixed perspective or a solid place to stand, it might be like drowning in a wild sea.

In a spirit of mingled desperation and reluctance, she turned the wheels until all three hands pointed to the horse. She didn’t know why. Then she held the alethiometer and closed her eyes, letting her mind fall forward like a diver off a high cliff.

‘Don’t look for a firm place – go into the flow – be with it – let it surge through me – in and out again – there’s nothing firm – no perspective …’ she muttered to herself.

Images from the dial swung at her and past her, and swung away again. Now she was upside down, now she was soaring, now plummeting into a terrible depth. Images she had known well for almost half her life loured at her with an alien glare or hid themselves in mist. She let herself drift, float, tumble, holding on to nothing. It was dark and then it was dazzling. She was on an endless plain studded with fossilised emblems under a vast moon. She was in a forest resounding with animal cries and human screams and the whisper of terrified ghosts. Ivy climbed up to envelop the sun and pull it down into a meadow where an angry black bull snorted and stamped.

Through it all she drifted, intentionless, free from any human feeling. Scene after scene unfolded, banal, tender, horrible, and she watched them all, interested but detached. She wondered if she was dreaming, and whether it mattered, and how she could tell what was significant from what was trivial and accidental.

‘I don’t know!’ she whispered.

She had begun to feel that horrible sickness which seemed to be the inevitable consequence of using the new method. She put the instrument down at once and breathed deeply till the nausea passed.

There must be a better way, she thought. Clearly something was happening, though it was hard to tell what it was. She wondered what she’d ask if she had some of the books with her, and could consult the old authorities about framing a question and interpreting the answer, and at once she knew: she’d ask about the cat in the dream. Was she Will’s dæmon, and if so, what did that mean?

She felt uncomfortable to think that, though. The universal scepticism that she’d learned from Brande and Talbot, in their different ways, made her sternly reject the world of dreams and occult significances. They were childish things, worthless rubbish.

But what was the alethiometer itself if not a way into that very world? She was horribly divided.

Nevertheless, that shadow-coloured cat on the moonlit lawn …

She took it up again and turned all three hands to point to the bird, which stood for dæmons in general. She closed her eyes again and cradled the instrument in her lap, holding it without any tension. She tried to summon the mood of the dream, which wasn’t hard, in fact: it clung to her mind like a delicate perfume. How the dæmon had come towards her, confident and happy, offering her head for Lyra’s knuckles to rub; how her fur had felt almost charged with adoration; how she knew the dæmon was Kirjava, and she was allowed to touch her because she loved Will, and how Will must be nearby …

At once the scene changed. Still entranced, she found herself in an elegant building, in a corridor, with windows opening on to a narrow courtyard below, where a large limousine gleamed in the winter sunshine. The walls of the corridor were painted or distempered a pale chalky green in the pale sunshine of a winter afternoon.

And there was the cat-dæmon again!

Or … just a cat, sitting calmly this time, watching her. Not Kirjava. As Lyra in a fire of hope and disappointment moved towards her, the cat turned and stalked away towards an open door. Lyra followed. Through the doorway she saw a book-lined room where a young man was holding an alethiometer, and it was—

‘Will!’ she said aloud.

She couldn’t help it. His black hair, his strong jaw, the tense way he held his shoulders – and then he looked up at her, and it wasn’t Will but someone else, about her age, slim, fierce, arrogant. And he had a dæmon who wasn’t a cat: she was a sparrowhawk, perching on the back of his chair, staring at her with yellow eyes. Where was Kirjava now? Lyra looked around: the cat had vanished. A flicker of suspicious recognition passed between Lyra and the young man, but they were recognising different things: he knew her to be the girl his employer Marcel Delamare wanted so badly for some reason, the girl who had his own father’s alethiometer, and she knew him to be the inventor of the new method.

Before he could move she reached in and pulled the door shut between them.

Then she blinked and shook her head, and found herself in the warm bed at the Trout. She was weak from wonder, and giddy with shock. He had been so like Will – that first moment, what a burst of joy in her breast! And then what a sickening disappointment, followed at once by an uneasy lurch of surprise, that she knew where that place was, and what he was doing, and who he was. And where had the cat gone? Why had she been there anyway? Was she leading Lyra to the young man?

She didn’t notice Pan sitting up tensely, watching her, in the chair beside the bed.

She put the alethiometer on the bedside table and reached for paper and pencil. Working quickly, while the vision was already fading from her mind, she wrote down everything she could.

Pan watched her for a minute or two and then quietly curled up again in the armchair. He hadn’t shared her pillow for several nights.

He didn’t move till Lyra finished writing and turned out the light, and then he waited a little longer till her steady breathing told him she was asleep. Then he recovered a tattered little notebook from the larger book in which he’d hidden it, and held it firmly in his teeth as he jumped up to the window sill.

He had already inspected the window, which was not a sash but a casement with a simple iron catch, so he didn’t need Lyra’s help to open it. A moment later he was outside on the old stone tiles, and then a leap into an apple tree, a dart across a lawn, a scamper across the bridge, and soon he was running freely in the wide expanse of Port Meadow towards the distant campanile of St Barnabas’s oratory, pale against the night sky. He darted through a group of sleeping ponies, making them shift uneasily: perhaps one of them was the animal whose back he’d leaped on the year before, digging his claws in till the poor creature galloped in frenzy and finally threw him off, and he’d landed on the grass laughing with delight. That was something Lyra knew nothing about.

Just as she knew nothing about the little notebook he was carrying in his teeth. It was the one from Dr Hassall’s rucksack, the one filled with names and addresses, and he’d hidden it away because he’d seen something in it that she hadn’t noticed; and having hidden it, he found that the best time to tell her about it hadn’t yet arrived.

He ran on, light and tireless and silent, until he reached the canal that ran along the eastern edge of the meadow. Rather than swim across and risk the notebook, he slipped through the grass until he came to the little bridge across to Walton Well Road and the streets of Jericho. He’d have to be very careful from now on; it wasn’t yet midnight, there were several pubs still open, and the yellow streetlights at each corner would have made it impossible to hide if he’d gone that way.

Instead he kept to the towpath, moving swiftly and stopping frequently to look and listen, until he came to an iron-barred gate on the left. He was through it in a moment, into the grounds of the Eagle Ironworks, whose great buildings loomed high above him. A narrow path led to a similar gate that opened next to the end of Juxon Street, which consisted of a terrace of small brick houses built for the workers at the ironworks or the Fell Press nearby. Pan stayed inside the gate, in the shadow of the buildings, because two men were talking in the street.

Finally one of them opened a door, and they said goodnight, and the other’s footsteps moved away unsteadily towards Walton Street. Pan waited for another minute, and then slipped through the gate and over the low wall in front of the last house.

He crouched beside the little window of the basement, which was dimly lit, and so smoke-covered and dusty that it was impossible to see through. He was listening for the sound of a man’s voice, and presently he heard it, a sentence or two in a hoarse conversational tone, answered by a lighter and more musical one.

They were there, and they were working: that was all he needed to know. He tapped on the window and the voices stopped at once. A dark shape leaped up on to the narrow window sill, peered out, and a moment later moved out of the way to let the man unlatch the window.

Pan slipped inside and jumped down on to the stone floor of the basement to greet the cat-dæmon, whose black fur actually seemed to absorb light. A great furnace was blazing in the centre of the room, and the heat was fierce. The place seemed like a combination of blacksmith’s forge and chemical laboratory, dark with soot and thick with cobwebs.

‘Pantalaimon,’ said the man. ‘Welcome. We haven’t seen you for a while.’

‘Mr Makepeace,’ said Pan, dropping the notebook in order to speak. ‘How are you?’

‘Active, at least,’ said Makepeace. ‘You’re alone?’

He was aged about seventy, and deeply wrinkled. His skin was mottled either by age or by the smoke that filled the air. Pan and Lyra had first encountered Sebastian Makepeace a few years before, in a strange little episode involving a witch and her dæmon. They had visited him a number of times since then, becoming familiar with his ironic manner, the indescribable clutter of his laboratory, his knowledge of curious things, and the kindly patience of his dæmon, Mary. She and Makepeace knew that Lyra and Pan could separate: the witch whose deceit had brought them together had once been his lover, and he knew about the power the witches had.

‘Yes,’ said Pan. ‘Lyra is … well, she’s asleep. I wanted to ask you about something. I don’t want to interrupt you.’

Makepeace put on a battered gauntlet and adjusted the position of an iron vessel at the edge of the furnace. ‘That can go on heating for a while,’ he said. ‘Sit down, my boy. I’ll smoke while we talk.’ He took a small cheroot from a drawer and lit it. Pan liked the scent of smokeleaf, but wondered if he’d smell it at all in this atmosphere. The alchemist sat on a stool and looked at him directly. ‘Very well, what’s in that notebook?’

Pan picked it up and held it for him to take, and then told him about the murder and the events that had followed. Makepeace listened closely, and Mary sat at his feet, eyes on Pan as he spoke.

‘And the reason I hid it,’ Pan finished, ‘and the reason I brought it here, is that your name’s in it. It’s a sort of address book. Lyra didn’t notice that, but I did.’

‘Let me have a look,’ said Makepeace. He put on his spectacles. His dæmon sprang up to his lap, and they both looked closely at the list of names of people and their dæmons, and their addresses, in the little book. Each name and address was written in a different hand. They weren’t in alphabetical order; in fact, they seemed to Pan to be ordered geographically, east to west, starting from somewhere called Khwarezm and ending in Edinburgh, taking in cities and towns in most European countries. Pan had studied it secretly three or four times, and could find nothing to hint at the connection between them.

The alchemist seemed to be searching for some names in particular.

‘Your name’s the only one in Oxford,’ Pan said. ‘I just wondered if you knew about this list. And why he might have been carrying it.’

‘You said he could separate from his dæmon?’

‘Just before he died. Yes. She flew up to the tree and asked me to help.’

‘And why haven’t you told Lyra about this?’

‘I … It just never seemed to be the right time.’

‘That’s unfortunate,’ said Makepeace. ‘Well, you should give it to her. It’s very valuable. There’s a name for this kind of list: it’s known as a clavicula adiumenti.’

He pointed to a small pair of embossed letters inside the back cover, at the foot next to the spine: C.A. The little book was so rubbed and battered that they were hardly visible. Then he flicked through the pages to about halfway through, took a short pencil out of his waistcoat pocket and turned the notebook sideways before writing something in it.

‘What does that mean?’ said Pan. ‘Clavicula … And who are these people? Do you know them all? I couldn’t see any connection between the names.’

‘No, you wouldn’t.’

‘What did you write?’

‘A name that was missing.’

‘Why did you turn it sideways?’

‘To fit it on the page, of course. I say this again: give it to Lyra, and come back here with her. Then I’ll tell you what it means. Not until you’re both here together.’

‘That won’t be easy,’ said Pan. ‘We hardly talk nowadays. We keep quarrelling. It’s horrible and we just can’t stop it.’

‘What do you quarrel about?’

‘Last time – earlier this evening – it was imagination. I said she had no imagination and she was upset.’

‘Are you surprised?’

‘No. I suppose not.’

‘Why were you arguing about imagination?’

‘I don’t even know any more. We probably didn’t mean the same thing by it.’

‘You won’t understand anything about the imagination until you realise that it’s not about making things up, it’s about perception. What else have you been quarrelling about?’

‘All kinds of things. She’s changed. She’s been reading books that … Have you heard of Gottfried Brande?’

‘No. But don’t tell me what you think about him. Tell me what Lyra would say.’

‘H’mm. All right, I’ll try … Brande is a philosopher. They call him the Sage of Wittenberg. Or some people do. He wrote an enormous novel called The Hyperchorasmians. I don’t even know what that means: he doesn’t refer to it in the text.’

‘It would mean those who live beyond Chorasmia, which is to say the region to the east of the Caspian Sea. It’s now known as Khwarezm. And—’

‘Khwa— what? I think that name’s on the list.’

Makepeace opened the notebook again, and nodded. ‘Yes, here it is. And what does Lyra think of this novel?’

‘She’s been sort of hypnotised by it. Ever since she—’

‘You’re telling me what you think. Tell me what she would say if I asked her about it.’

‘Well. She’d say it was a work of enormous – um – scope and power … A completely convincing world … Unlike anything else she’d ever read … A – a – a new view of human nature that shattered all her previous convictions and … showed her life in a completely new perspective … Something like that, probably.’

‘You’re being satirical.’

‘I can’t help it. I hate it. The characters are monstrously selfish and blind to every human feeling – they’re either arrogant and dominating or cringing and deceitful, or else foppish and artistic and useless … There’s only one value in his world, which is reason. The author’s so rational he’s insane. Nothing else has any importance at all. To him, the imagination is just meaningless and contemptible. The whole universe he describes, it’s just arid.’

‘If he’s a philosopher, why did he write a novel? Does he think the novel is a good form for philosophy?’

‘He’s written various other books, but this is the only one he’s famous for. We haven’t – Lyra hasn’t read any of the others.’

The alchemist flicked the ash from his cheroot into the furnace, and gazed at the fire. His dæmon Mary sat beside his feet, eyes half closed, purring steadily.

‘Have you ever known anyone and their dæmon who hated each other?’ Pan said after a minute had gone by.

‘It’s more common than you might think.’

‘Even among people who can’t separate?’

‘It might be worse for them.’

Pan thought: yes, it would be. Steam was rising from the iron vessel on the fire.

‘Mr Makepeace,’ he said, ‘what are you working at now?’

‘I’m making some soup,’ said the alchemist.

‘Oh,’ said Pan, and then realised the old man was joking. ‘No, what really?’

‘You know what I mean by a field?’

‘Like a magnetic field?’

‘Yes. But this one is very hard to detect.’

‘What does it do?’

‘I’m trying to imagine.’

‘But if you— Oh, I see. You mean you’re trying to perceive it.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Do you need special equipment?’

‘You could probably do it with immensely expensive instruments that used colossal amounts of power and took up acres of space. I’m limited to what’s here in my laboratory. Some gold leaf, several mirrors, a bright light, various bits and pieces I’ve had to invent.’

‘Does it work?’

‘Of course it works.’

‘I remember the first time we met you, you told Lyra that if people think you’re trying to make gold out of lead, they think you’re wasting time and they don’t bother to find out what you’re really doing.’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Were you trying to find this field then?’

‘Yes. Now I’ve found it, I’m trying to discover whether it’s the same everywhere, or whether it varies.’

‘Do you use all the things you’ve got down here?’

‘They all have a use.’

‘And what are you making in the iron pot?’

‘Soup, as I told you.’

He got up to stir it. Pan suddenly felt tired. He’d learned some things, but they weren’t necessarily helpful; and now he had to go all the way back across Port Meadow, and hide the notebook again, and – sometime – tell Lyra about it.

‘Clavicula …’ he said, trying to remember, and Makepeace added, ‘Adiumenti.’

‘Adiumenti. I’m going to go now. Thank you for explaining this. Enjoy your soup.’

‘Tell Lyra, and tell her soon, and come here with her.’

The black cat-dæmon stood to touch noses with him, and Pan left.