The Book of Dust, Volume 1 Page 7

  She pulled a clean piece of paper towards herself and drew lines downwards to divide it into three columns. The first one, Boy, she left blank. She knew no boys, except her sister’s four-year-old son, and it wasn’t going to be him. She left the Inn column empty too. How many inns did she know? Not many, actually. She liked to sit in a beer garden with a companion and a glass of wine, but only in good weather. Fish: that was probably the easiest to start with. She wrote down as many names of fish as she could think of: herring, cod, stingray, salmon, mackerel, haddock, shark, trout, perch, pike…What else was there? Sunfish—flying fish—stickleback—barracuda…

  “Chub,” said her dæmon, who was a marmoset.

  Down it went, though it didn’t help. Her dæmon knew no more than she did, of course, though each sometimes remembered things the other had forgotten.

  “Tench,” he said.

  As far as her official work went—the extension of the hourglass range—she could discuss it with five or six other scholars, but her secret work was secret, and not a word about it passed her lips, except to her dæmon. This question was a part of that, so silence had to reign here too.

  She yawned, stretched again, stood up, and walked slowly down the length of the library and back again, thinking as strongly as she could of absolutely nothing. That didn’t work either, but when she sat down again, there came into her mind the image of a peacock on a river terrace, and herself among a group of friends, and the peacock’s effrontery in snatching a sausage roll out of the very fingers of her neighbor and then trying to run away with it, encumbered by his ridiculous tail. That had happened years ago, when she was an undergraduate. Where had that happened? What was the name of the inn? Was it an inn, or a restaurant, or what?

  She looked up at the staff desk. The assistant was checking some request slips, and there was no one else around.

  Hannah got up and walked along to her without hesitation, because if she’d hesitated, she wouldn’t have done it.

  “Anne,” she said, “I think I’m going gaga. What’s the name of that pub with the river terrace and the peacocks? Where is it?”

  “The Trout?” said the assistant. “It’s at Godstow.”

  “Of course! Thanks. Stupid of me.”

  Hannah tapped her forehead and went back to her desk. She carefully folded up the paper she’d begun to make the list on and put it in an inside pocket. She’d destroy it later. Her trainers had been very severe about not leaving behind any written clues to what you were doing, but she had to have paper to think with, and so far she’d been meticulous about burning it.

  She worked for another half an hour and then returned her books and the alethiometer to the desk. Anne put the books on the reserved shelf and pressed a buzzer, which would sound in the senior assistant’s office. The alethiometer was kept in a safe in there, and the senior assistant had to put it away himself, which he did with an air of solemnity that Hannah enjoyed very much.

  But she didn’t stay to watch this time. She gathered her papers together, put them in her bag, and left the library.

  The Trout, she thought. Tomorrow.

  —

  The next day was a Saturday, and a rare dry day with occasional bursts of sunlight. Towards midday, Hannah found her bicycle, and having pumped up the tires, she rode up the Woodstock Road and turned left at the top for Wolvercote and Godstow. She rode briskly, her dæmon sitting in the basket on the handlebars, and arrived at the Trout feeling a little out of breath and warm enough to take her coat off at once.

  She ordered a cheese sandwich and a glass of pale ale and sat outside on the terrace, which wasn’t crowded by any means but wasn’t deserted either. Most people had probably decided to play it safe with the weather and stay indoors.

  Hannah ate her sandwich slowly, ignoring the attentions of Norman (or Barry) and reading a book. It was nothing to do with work: it was a thriller, of the sort she liked, with a mysterious death, skin-of-the-teeth escapes, and a haughty and beautiful heroine whose function was to fall in love with the saturnine but witty hero.

  She had finished her sandwich, to Norman’s disgust, and was just draining the last of her beer when, as she’d hoped, a boy appeared.

  “Can I bring you any more to eat or drink, miss?” he said.

  His tone was polite and interested, slightly to her surprise, as if he really wanted to help. He was about eleven, she guessed, a stocky, strong-looking boy, ginger-haired. A nice boy, friendly, intelligent.

  “No, thanks. But…” How should she say it? She’d rehearsed it often enough, but now her voice sounded thin and nervous. Quiet, she thought, quiet.

  “Yes, miss?”

  “Do you know anything about an acorn?”

  It had an extraordinary effect. The color drained out of his face, and his eyes seemed to flash with understanding, and then fear, and then determination. He nodded.

  “Don’t say anything now,” Hannah said quietly. “In a minute I’m going to leave, but I’ll forget this book and leave it on my chair. You’ll find it and look for me, but I’ll be gone. My address is inside the cover. Tomorrow, if you can, bring it to my house in Jericho. And…and the acorn. Can you do that? We can talk there.”

  He nodded again.

  “Tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “I can do it then.”

  He had recovered his color: ruddy, or even lionlike, she thought. She smiled and went back to reading as he gathered up her plate and glass, and then she went through a pantomime of putting on her coat, looking for her purse, leaving a tip, gathering her bag, and going out, leaving her book on the chair pushed under the table.

  —

  The next day, she could hardly settle to anything. In the morning she fussed with her little garden, pruning this, repotting that, but her mind wasn’t on it. Then it started to rain, so she went inside and made some coffee and did what she had never done in her life: tried the newspaper crossword.

  “What a stupid exercise,” said her dæmon after five minutes. “Words belong in contexts, not pegged out like biological specimens.”

  She threw the paper aside and lit a fire in the little hearth, and then found that she’d forgotten her coffee.

  “Why didn’t you remind me?” she asked her dæmon.

  “Because I’d forgotten it too, of course,” he said. “Settle down, for goodness’ sake.”

  “I’m trying,” she said. “I seem to have forgotten how.”

  “It’s stopped raining. Go and finish pruning the clematis.”

  “Everything will be drenched.”

  “Do the ironing.”

  “There’s only one blouse to do.”

  “Write some letters.”

  “Don’t want to.”

  “Bake a cake to give that boy a slice of.”

  “He might come while I’m still making it, and then we’d have to make conversation for an hour and a half till it was ready. Anyway, we’ve got some biscuits.”

  “Well, I give up,” he said.

  At midday, she toasted a cheese sandwich in her mother’s blackened old device that hung by the fire. Then she made some more coffee and drank it this time, and then she felt a little more on top of things and managed to read for an hour or so. The rain had started up again.

  “He might not come at all if it’s pouring like this,” she said.

  “Yes, he will. He’ll be too curious not to.”

  “You think so?”

  “His dæmon changed four times while we were speaking to him.”

  “Hmm,” she said, but there was something in what Jesper had observed. Frequent changes of shape in a child’s dæmon, and a wide variety of forms to assume, were a good indicator of intelligence and curiosity. “And you think…”

  “He’ll want to know what it means.”

  “He was frightened. He went pale.”

  “Only for a moment. Then his color came back, didn’t you see? Sort of ruddy.”

  “Well, we’ll know in a few minutes,” she said, seeing hi
m at the gate. “Here he comes now.”

  She stood up even before the door knocker rapped, and put her book down on the little side table before smoothing her skirt and touching her hair. For heaven’s sake, what was there to be nervous about? Well, quite a lot, actually. She opened the door.

  “You must be soaking wet,” she said.

  “Well, I am a bit,” said the boy, shaking his waterproof coat outside before letting her take it. He looked at the neat carpet, the polished floorboards, and took his shoes off too.

  “Come in and get warm,” she said. “How did you get here? You didn’t walk?”

  “In my boat,” he said.

  “Your boat? Where is it?”

  “She’s tied up at the boatyard. They let me leave her there. I thought I better bring her up on the bank and turn her upside down, because if she gets full of water, it takes ages to bail her out. She’s called La Belle Sauvage.”

  “Why?”

  “That was the name of my uncle’s pub. My dad’s brother was an innkeeper too, and he had a pub at Richmond and I liked the name.”

  “Was there a nice sign?”

  “Yes, it was a beautiful lady, and she’d done something brave, only I don’t know what that was. Oh—here’s your book. Sorry it’s a bit wet.”

  They were sitting on either side of the fire, and he was steaming prodigiously.

  “Thank you. Perhaps you’d better put it on the hearth.”

  “It was a good idea to leave it like that so I knew where to come.”

  “Tradecraft,” she said.

  “Tradecraft? What’s that?”

  “A way of…oh, passing messages, that kind of thing. By the way, what’s your name?”

  “Malcolm Polstead.”

  “And…the acorn?”

  “How did you know to ask me?” he said, not moving.

  “There’s a way of…There’s an instrument….Well, I found out by myself. No one else knows. What can you tell me about the acorn?”

  He reached into an inside pocket. Then he held out his hand, and the acorn was resting in his palm.

  She took it tentatively, thinking he might snatch it back, but he didn’t move. What he did was watch closely as she unscrewed it. Then he nodded.

  “I was watching,” he said, “to see if you knew which way it unscrewed. It fooled me at first because I never came across anything that unscrewed clockwise. But you knew straightaway, so I reckon this must be for you.”

  And he brought out the tightly folded sheet of India paper just as the two halves of the acorn fell apart in her hands, showing it to be empty.

  “If I’d tried to unscrew it the wrong way…,” she said.

  “Then I wouldn’t have given you the paper.”

  He handed it to her, and she unfolded it, scanned it quickly, and tucked it in the pocket of her cardigan. Somehow the boy seemed to be in charge, which hadn’t been her intention. Now she had to decide what to do about it.

  “How did you come across this?” she said.

  He told her the whole story, from the moment Asta had spotted the man under the oak tree to the story Mrs. Carpenter in the chandlery had shown him in the Oxford Times.

  “My God,” she said. She had gone pale. “Robert Luckhurst?”

  “Yes, from Magdalen. Did you know him?”

  “Slightly. I had no idea he was the one who…We’re not supposed to know each other, and I’m certainly not supposed to tell you this. What happened usually was that he’d put the acorn in a dead-letter drop and I’d collect it from there, and then put it back in another place when I’d written a reply. I never knew who put it there or collected it.”

  “That’s a good system,” he said.

  She wondered if she’d already said more than she should. She hadn’t expected to tell him anything, but then she hadn’t expected him to know so much.

  “Have you told anyone else about this?” she said.

  “No. I don’t think it’s safe.”

  “Well, you’re right.” She hesitated. She could thank him and send him away now, or…“Would you like something hot to drink? Some chocolatl?”

  “Oh, yes, please,” he said.

  In the little kitchen she put some milk on to boil and then looked at the message again. Was there anything compromising in it? It was quite clear that the alethiometer was involved, and the identities of the alethiometer specialists in Oxford were no secret. As for Dust, it meant big trouble.

  She mixed the cocoa powder with a little sugar and poured in the hot milk, making some for herself as well. The boy knew so much already that she had to trust him. There was little choice.

  “You got a lot of books,” he said as she came back. “Are you a scholar?”

  “Yes, I am. At St. Sophia’s.”

  “Are you an historian?”

  “Sort of. A historian of ideas, I suppose. An historian.” She switched on the standard lamp beside the fire, and instantly the room became warmer, the weather outside darker and colder. “Malcolm, this message…”

  “Yeah? Yes?”

  “Have you made a copy of it?”

  He blushed. “Yes. But I’ve hidden it,” he said, “under a floorboard in my bedroom. No one knows that space is there.”

  “Will you do something? Will you burn your copy?”

  “Yes. I promise.”

  His dæmon and hers had established a friendship already, it seemed: Jesper was sitting on top of a glass case of ornaments and curiosities, and Asta, in the form of a goldfinch, was perching there too as he quietly explained about the Babylonian seal, the Roman coin, the harlequin.

  “Is there anything you want to ask me?” she said.

  “Yes. Lots. Who made the acorn?”

  “Well, that I don’t know. I think they’re sort of standard issue.”

  “What’s the instrument? When I asked how you knew it was me that had the acorn, you said there was an instrument. Is that the althee—almeth—”

  “The alethiometer…yes.”

  She explained what it was and how it worked, and he followed closely.

  “A-lee-thee-ometer…Is that the only one there is?”

  “No. There were six originally. The others are all in other universities. Except one, anyway, which is lost.”

  “Why don’t they make another one? Or lots of them?”

  “They don’t know how to anymore.”

  “They could take it apart and look. If they didn’t know how to make a clock, and they had one that worked, they could take it apart very carefully and make a drawing of every separate part and how they joined up, and then make more parts like that and make another clock. It’d be complicated, but it wouldn’t be hard.”

  This was all safe. If she could keep him on this subject, she’d have nothing to worry about.

  “I think there’s more to it than that,” she said. “I think parts of it are made of an alloy that can’t be made anymore. Perhaps the metal’s very rare—I don’t know. Anyway, nobody has.”

  “Oh. That’s interesting. I’d like to have a look at it someday. How things fit together—I love looking at that.”

  “Where do you go to school, Malcolm?”

  “Ulvercote Elementary. That’s the old name for Wolvercote.”

  “Where will you go when you leave that school?”

  “What school, you mean? I dunno if I will. Prob’ly if I get an apprenticeship…Maybe my dad would like me just to work at the Trout.”

  “What about going to a senior school?”

  “I don’t think they’ve thought of that.”

  “Would you like to? Do you like school?”

  “Yes, I prob’ly would. Yes, I would. But it’s not very likely.”

  His dæmon was listening closely. She flew to his shoulder and whispered something, and he very slightly shook his head. Hannah pretended not to see and bent to put a log on the fire.

  “What did the message mean by the ‘Rusakov field’?” said Malcolm.

  “Ah.
Well, I don’t really know. It’s not necessary for me to know everything when I consult the alethiometer. It seems to know what it needs to.”

  “ ’Cause the message said, ‘When we try measuring one way, our substance evades it and seems to prefer another, but when we try a different way, we have no more success.’ ”

  “Have you memorized the whole message?”

  “I didn’t set out to. I’ve just read it so much, it memorized itself. Anyway, what I was going to say was, that sounds a bit like the uncertainty principle.”

  She felt as if she was walking downstairs in the dark and had just missed a step.

  “How do you know about that?”

  “Well, there’s lots of scholars come to the Trout, and they tell me things. Like the uncertainty principle, where you can know some things about a particle, but you can’t know everything. If you know this thing, you can’t know that thing, so you’re always going to be uncertain. It sounds like that. And the other thing it says, about Dust. What’s Dust?”

  Hannah hastily tried to recall what was public knowledge and what was Oakley Street knowledge, and said, “It’s a kind of elementary particle that we don’t know much about. It’s not easy to examine, not just because of what it says in this message, but because the Magisterium…D’you know what I mean by the Magisterium?”

  “The sort of chief authority of the Church.”

  “That’s right. Well, they strongly disapprove of any investigations into Dust. They think it’s sinful. I don’t know why. That’s one of the mysteries that we’re trying to solve.”

  “How can knowing something be sinful?”

  “A very good question. Do you talk to anyone at school about this sort of thing?”

  “Only my friend Robbie. He doesn’t say very much, but I know he’s interested.”

  “Not to the teachers?”

  “I don’t think they’d understand. It’s just that being at the Trout, I can talk to all kinds of people.”

  “Very useful too,” Hannah said. An idea was beginning to form in her mind, but she tried to push it away.

  “So you think when he mentions Dust, he’s talking about elementary particles?” said Malcolm.