The Book of Dust, Volume 1 Page 9

  Malcolm went outside into the drizzle of the dark evening and saw a warm light glowing in the workshop. Mr. Taphouse, the carpenter, must still be there. He knocked on the door and went in.

  “What’re you making, Mr. Taphouse?” he said.

  “What’s it look like?”

  “Looks like windows. That one looks like the kitchen window. Except…No, they’re going to be shutters. Is that right?”

  “That’s it. Feel the weight of that, Malcolm.”

  The old man stood the kitchen-window-shaped frame upright in the middle of the floor, and Malcolm tried to lift it.

  “Blimey! That’s heavy!”

  “Two-inch oak all round. Add the weight of the shutter itself, and what’ll you have to be sure of?”

  Malcolm thought. “The fixing in the wall. It’ll have to be really strong. Is it going inside or out?”

  “Outside.”

  “There’s nothing but stone to fix it to there. How are you going to do that?”

  Mr. Taphouse winked and opened a cupboard. Inside, Malcolm saw a new piece of large machinery, surrounded by coils of heavy wire flex.

  “Anbaric drill,” said the carpenter. “You want to give me a hand? Sweep up for me.”

  He closed the cupboard and handed Malcolm a broom. The floor was thick with shavings and sawdust.

  “Why…,” Malcolm began, but Mr. Taphouse was too quick for him.

  “You may well ask,” he said. “Every window shuttered to that quality, and no one tells me why. I don’t ask. I never ask. Just do what I’m told. Doesn’t mean I don’t wonder.”

  The old man lifted the frame and stood it against the wall with several others.

  “The stained-glass windows too?” asked Malcolm.

  “Not them yet. I think the sisters believe they’re too precious. They reckon no one’d try and damage them.”

  “So these are for protection?” Malcolm sounded incredulous, and he felt it too: Who on earth would want to hurt the nuns, or break their windows?

  “That’s my best guess,” said Mr. Taphouse, putting a chisel back into its rack on the wall.

  “But…” Malcolm couldn’t think how to finish.

  “But who’d threaten the sisters? I know. That’s the question. I can’t answer it. There’s something up, though. They’re afraid of something.”

  “I thought it felt a bit funny in there just now,” said Malcolm.

  “Well, that’s it.”

  “Is it anything to do with the baby?”

  “Who knows? Her father’s made hisself a nuisance to the Church in his time.”

  “Lord Asriel?”

  “Thassit. But you want to keep your nose out of that sort of thing. There’s some things it’s dangerous to talk about.”

  “Why? I mean, in what way?”

  “That’s enough. When I say that’s enough, that’s enough. Don’t be cheeky.”

  Mr. Taphouse’s dæmon, a ragged-looking woodpecker, clacked her beak crossly. Malcolm said no more, but swept up the shavings and the sawdust and tipped them into the bin next to the offcuts, from which Mr. Taphouse would feed the old iron stove the next day.

  “Good night, Mr. Taphouse,” said Malcolm as he left.

  The old man grunted and said nothing.

  —

  Having finished The Body in the Library, Malcolm returned to A Brief History of Time. It was harder going, but he expected it to be, and the subject was exciting even if he didn’t understand everything the author said about it. He wanted to finish it before Saturday, and just about managed it.

  Dr. Relf was replacing a broken pane of glass in her back door when he arrived. Malcolm was interested at once.

  “How did that happen?” he said.

  “Someone broke it. I bolt the door top and bottom, so they wouldn’t have been able to get in anyway, but I think they were hoping the key was in the lock.”

  “Have you got some putty? And some glazing sprigs?”

  “What are they?”

  “Little nails without heads that hold the glass in place.”

  “I thought the putty did that.”

  “Not by itself. I can go and get some for you.”

  There was an ironmonger’s in Walton Street, about five minutes’ walk away, which was one of Malcolm’s favorite places after the chandlery. He’d cast a quick glance at Dr. Relf’s tools, and she had everything else necessary, so it wasn’t long before he returned with a little bag of glazing sprigs.

  “I seen—I saw—Mr. Taphouse doing this once at the priory. He’s the carpenter,” he explained. “What he did was— Look, I’ll show you.” To avoid bashing the glass with the hammer as he tapped the glazing sprig into the frame, he put the sprig along the glass with its point in the wood, then held the side of a chisel against the other end of it so he could tap the hammer against that to drive it home.

  “Oh, that’s clever,” said Dr. Relf. “Let me have a go.”

  When he was sure she wouldn’t break the glass, Malcolm let her finish while he softened and warmed the putty.

  “Should I have a putty knife?” she said.

  “No. An ordinary eating knife’ll do. One with a round end’s best.”

  He’d never actually done it himself, but he remembered what Mr. Taphouse had done, and the result was perfectly neat.

  “Wonderful,” she said.

  “You have to let it dry and get a bit of a skin before you can paint it,” he said. “Then it’ll be all weatherproof and everything.”

  “Well, I think we deserve a cup of chocolatl now,” she said. “Thank you very much, Malcolm.”

  “I’ll tidy up,” he said. That was what Mr. Taphouse would have expected. Malcolm imagined him watching, and giving a stern nod when everything was put away and swept up.

  “I’ve got two things to tell you,” he said when they were sitting down by the fire in the little sitting room.

  “Good!”

  “It might not be good. You know the priory, where they’re looking after the infant, the baby? Well, Mr. Taphouse’s making some heavy shutters to go over all their windows. He doesn’t know why—he doesn’t ask why anything—but they’re so heavy and strong. When I was there the other day, the sisters were kind of anxious, and then I found him making the shutters. You could do with some here. Mr. Taphouse said the nuns were probably afraid of something, but he couldn’t guess what it was. I don’t know if I asked him the right questions….Maybe I should’ve asked if one of the windows had been broken, but I didn’t think of that.”

  “Never mind. That is interesting. Do you think they were protecting the baby?”

  “Bound to be, partly. But they got all sorts of things to protect there, like crucifixes and statues and silver and stuff. If it was just burglars they were worried about, though, I dunno if they’d bother with the sort of shutters that Mr. Taphouse was making. So maybe they’re worried about the baby mostly.”

  “I’m sure they would be.”

  “Sister Benedicta told me that it was Lord Nugent, the ex–lord chancellor of England, who decided to put the baby there. She didn’t say why, and sometimes she gets cross if I keep on asking. And she said the baby was confidential as well. But so many people know about her already I thought it wouldn’t matter much.”

  “I expect you’re right. What was the other thing?”

  “Oh, yes…”

  Malcolm told her what Eric’s father, the clerk of the court, had passed on about the man in the canal. Her face grew pale.

  “Good God. That’s appalling,” she said.

  “D’you think it might be true?”

  “Oh. Well—don’t you?”

  “The thing is, Eric does exaggerate a bit.”

  “Oh?”

  “He likes to show off about what he knows, what his dad’s heard in court.”

  “I wonder if his dad would have told him that sort of thing.”

  “Yes, I think he would. I’ve heard him talk like that about things that have
happened, trials and that. I think he’d be telling the truth to Eric. But maybe Eric…I dunno, though. I just think that poor man—he looked so unhappy….”

  To Malcolm’s intense embarrassment, his voice shook, his throat tightened, and he found tears flowing from his eyes. When he’d been moved to tears at home, when he was much younger, his mother had known what to do: she gathered him into her arms and rocked him gently till the crying faded away. Malcolm realized that he’d wanted to cry about the dead man since the moment he’d heard about him, but of course he couldn’t possibly tell his mother about any of this.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “Malcolm! Don’t say sorry. I’m sorry that you’re mixed up in this. And actually, now I think we’d better stop. I’ve got no business asking you to—”

  “I don’t want to stop! I want to find out!”

  “It’s too dangerous. If anyone thinks you know anything about this, then you’re in real—”

  “I know. But I am anyway. I can’t help it. It certainly en’t your fault. I’d have seen all those things even if it weren’t for you. And at least I can talk to you. I couldn’t talk to anyone else, not even Sister Fenella. She wouldn’t understand at all.”

  He was still embarrassed, and he could tell that Dr. Relf was embarrassed too, because she hadn’t known what to do. He wouldn’t have wanted her to embrace him, so he was glad she hadn’t tried to do that, at least, but it was still an awkward little moment.

  “Well, promise me you won’t ask anything,” she said.

  “Yeah, all right, I can promise that,” he said, meaning it. “I won’t start any asking. But if someone else says something…”

  “Well, use your judgment. Try not to seem interested. And we’d better get on and do what our cover story says we’re doing, and talk about books. What did you think of these two?”

  Malcolm had never had a conversation like the one that followed. At school, in a class of forty, there was no time for such a thing, even if the curriculum allowed it, even if the teachers had been interested; at home it wouldn’t have happened, because neither his father nor his mother was a reader; in the bar he was a listener rather than a participant; and the only two friends with whom he might have spoken seriously about such things, Robbie and Tom, had none of the breadth of learning and the depth of understanding that he found when Dr. Relf spoke.

  At first, Asta sat close on his shoulder, where she’d gone as a little ferret when he had found himself crying; but little by little she felt easier, and before long she was sitting beside Jesper, the kind-faced marmoset, having their own quiet exchange while The Body in the Library was discussed and A Brief History of Time touched on with wary respect.

  “You said last time that you were a historian of ideas,” said Malcolm. “An historian. What sort of ideas did you mean? Like the ones in this book?”

  “Yes, largely,” she said. “Ideas about big things, such as the universe, and good and evil, and why things exist in the first place.”

  “I never thought about why they did,” said Malcolm, wondering. “I never thought you could think things like that. I thought things just were. So people thought different things about ’em in the past?”

  “Oh, yes. And there were times when it was very dangerous to think the wrong things, or at least to talk about them.”

  “It is now, sort of.”

  “Yes. I’m afraid you’re right. But as long as we keep to what’s been published, I don’t think you and I will get into much trouble.”

  Malcolm wanted to ask about the secret things she was involved with, and whether they were part of the history of ideas, but he felt that it was better to stick to books for now. So he asked if she had any more books about experimental theology, and she found him one called The Strange Story of the Quantum, and then she let him scan the shelves of murder stories, and he picked out another by the author of The Body in the Library.

  “You got lots of hers,” he said.

  “Not as many as she wrote.”

  “How many books have you read?”

  “Thousands. I couldn’t possibly guess.”

  “Do you remember them all?”

  “No. I remember the very good ones. Most of my murders and thrillers aren’t very good in that way, so if I let a little time go by, I find I’ve forgotten them and I can read them again.”

  “That’s a good idea,” he said. “I prob’ly better go now. If I hear anything else, I’ll save it up and tell you. And if you get another broken window—well, you can prob’ly mend it yourself, now I showed you about glazing sprigs.”

  “Thank you, Malcolm,” she said. “And please—once more—be careful.”

  —

  That evening, Hannah didn’t go into her college for dinner as usual. Instead, she took a note to the porter’s lodge at Jordan College and went home to make herself some scrambled eggs. Then she drank a glass of wine and waited.

  At twenty past nine, there was a knock at the door, and she opened it at once and let in the man who was waiting outside in the rain.

  “I’m sorry to bring you out on a night like this,” she said.

  “Sorry to be brought,” he said. “Never mind. What’s this about?”

  His name was George Papadimitriou, and he was the professor of Byzantine history who had first recruited her for Oakley Street two years before. He was also the tall scholarly-looking man who had had dinner with Lord Nugent at the Trout.

  She took his coat and shook off the worst of the rain before hanging it on the radiator.

  “I’ve done something stupid,” she said.

  “That’s not like you. I’ll have a glass of whatever that is. Go on, then, tell me.”

  His greenfinch dæmon touched noses courteously with Jesper and then perched on the back of his chair as he sat down by the fire with his wine. Hannah filled her own glass again and sat down in the other chair.

  She took a deep breath and told him about Malcolm: the acorn, her asking the alethiometer, the Trout, the books. She edited it very carefully, but she told him everything he needed to know.

  He listened in silence. His long, dark, heavy-eyed face was serious and still.

  “I read about the man in the canal,” he said. “Naturally, I didn’t know he was your insulator. I hadn’t heard about the strangling either. Any chance that this is just a child’s fantasy?”

  “It could be, of course, but not Malcolm’s. I believe him. If it’s a fantasy, it’s his friend’s.”

  “It won’t be reported in the press, of course.”

  “Unless it’s not the CCD behind it. Then they won’t be afraid and it won’t be censored.”

  He nodded. He hadn’t wasted time agreeing with her that she’d been stupid and chastising her for it and threatening reprisals; all his intellect was focused now on dealing with the situation, with this curious boy and the position she’d put him in.

  “Well, he could be useful, you know,” he said.

  “I know he could be useful. I saw that from the start. I’m just angry with myself for putting him at risk.”

  “As long as you cover it all, there won’t be much risk to him.”

  “Well…it’s affecting him. When he was telling me about the strangling, he found himself crying.”

  “Natural in a young child.”

  “He’s a sensitive boy….There’s something else. He’s very close to the nuns at Godstow Priory, just across the river from the Trout. And it seems that they’re looking after the child who was the subject of that court case, the daughter of Lord Asriel.”

  Papadimitriou nodded.

  “You knew about it?” she went on.

  “Yes. In fact, I was discussing the matter with two colleagues in a room at the Trout. And it was your Malcolm who was serving us. That’ll teach me a lesson.”

  “So it was you—and the lord chancellor? Was he right about that?”

  “What did he tell you?”

  She went over it briefly.

  �
��What an observant boy,” he said.

  “He’s an only child, and I think he was fascinated by the baby. She’s—I don’t know—six months old or thereabouts.”

  “Who else knows she’s there?”

  “The boy’s parents, I suppose. Presumably some of the customers of the pub, the villagers, servants…It didn’t seem to be a secret.”

  “Normally a child would be in the care of its mother, but in this case the woman didn’t want it and said so. Custody would then fall to the father, but the court forbade it, on the grounds that he was not a fit person. No, it’s not a secret, but it might become important.”

  “One more thing,” said Hannah. She told him about the CCD men who tried to arrest George Boatwright, and their interest in the men who had been in the Trout. “That must have been you and Lord Nugent,” she said. “But they were asking about another man.”

  “There were three of us,” said Papadimitriou. He finished the wine.

  “Another glass?” she said.

  “No, thank you. Don’t call me again like this. The porter at Jordan is a gossip. If you want to contact me, put a card on the notice board outside the History Faculty Library, saying simply ‘Candle.’ That will be a signal to go to the next Evensong at Wykeham. I shall be sitting alone. You will sit next to me and we can talk quietly under the music.”

  “Candle. I understand. And if you want to contact me?”

  “If I do, you will know about it. I think you did well to recruit this boy. Look after him.”

  The headquarters of the secret service that employed Hannah Relf was known to its agents as Oakley Street for the simple reason that that respectable Chelsea thoroughfare was nowhere near it and had nothing to do with it at all.

  That was not known to Hannah, though. She had never been to the headquarters of the service, and as far as she was aware, the words Oakley Street, wherever that was, meant no more than a straightforward address. Apart from Professor Papadimitriou, almost her only contact with the service was the acorn. She gathered it with its query, and left it with her reply, in one of a number of different hiding places that Oakley Street called left-luggage boxes. The person who left it for her and took it away again, the late Mr. Luckhurst, was known as an insulator: neither of them knew the other, which meant that they wouldn’t be able to reveal anything if questioned.