Malcolm decided to tell his parents about the scholar whose book he’d returned, and about her offer to lend him others, so that he wouldn’t be hiding anything except the most important thing of all. He showed his mother the first two books as she dished up the lamb stew that was his supper.
“The Body in the Library,” she read, “and A Brief History of Time. Don’t bring ’em in the kitchen, though. They’ll get all spotted with grease and gravy. If someone lends you something, you have to look after it.”
“I’ll keep ’em in my bedroom,” said Malcolm, tucking them back in the knapsack.
“Good. Now hurry up—it’s busy tonight.”
Malcolm sat down to his supper.
“Mum,” he said, “when I leave Ulvercote Elementary, am I going to senior school?”
“Depends what your dad says.”
“What d’you think he’d say?”
“I think he’d say eat your supper.”
“I can eat and listen at the same time.”
“Pity I can’t talk and cook, then.”
The next day, the nuns were busy and Mr. Taphouse was at home, so Malcolm had no excuse to go to the priory. Instead, he lay in his bedroom reading the books one after the other, and then when it stopped raining, he went out to see if it was dry enough to paint the boat’s name in his new red paint, but it wasn’t. So he went moodily back to his bedroom and set about making a lanyard with his cotton cord.
During lunchtime he carried drinks and food to customers in the bar as usual, and when he was attending to the fire, he happened to see something that surprised him. Alice, the washer-up, came into the bar with two handfuls of clean tankards and was leaning forward to put them on the bar when one of the men sitting nearby reached out and pinched her bottom.
Malcolm held his breath. Alice didn’t show the slightest reaction at first, but made sure the glasses were safely on the bar before she turned round.
“Who done that?” she said calmly, but Malcolm could see that her nostrils were flared and her eyes narrowed.
None of the men moved or spoke. The man who had pinched her was a plump middle-aged farmer called Arnold Hemsley, whose dæmon was a ferret. Alice’s dæmon, Ben, had become a bulldog, and Malcolm could hear his quiet growl, and saw the ferret trying to hide in the man’s sleeve.
“Next time that happens,” Alice said, “I won’t even try and find out who done it; I’ll just glass the nearest one of yer.” And she took a tankard by the handle and smashed it on the bar, leaving a jagged edge of handle in her bony fist. The shards of glass fell on the stone floor in the silence.
“What happened here?” said Malcolm’s father, arriving from the kitchen.
“Someone made a mistake,” said Alice, and she tossed the broken handle into Hemsley’s lap. He pulled away in alarm, tried to catch it, and cut himself. Alice walked away indifferently.
Malcolm, crouching in the fireplace with the poker in his hand, heard Hemsley and his friends muttering together. “She’s too young, you bloody fool— She wants to watch herself— It was a stupid thing to do; she en’t old enough— Deliberately provoking me— She wasn’t, en’t you got no sense?— Leave her alone, she’s old Tony Parslow’s girl….”
But his father told him to sweep up the broken glass before he could hear any more, and the men soon stopped talking about it anyway, because all anyone really wanted to talk about was the rain and what it had been doing to the water levels. The reservoirs were full, and the River Board had had to release a lot of water into the river and keep the sluice gates open. Several meadows were flooded around Oxford and Abingdon, but that was nothing unusual; the trouble was that the water wasn’t draining away, and further down the river a number of villages were under threat.
Malcolm wondered whether to make notes of all this in case it was important, but decided not to. There’d be conversations like this in every pub on every river in the kingdom. It was strange, though.
“Mr. Anscombe?” he said to one of the watermen.
“What’s that, Malcolm?”
“Has it ever been as wet as this before?”
“Oh, yeah. You look at the lockkeeper’s house at Duke’s Cut. On the wall there they’ve got a board showing how high the water came in the floods of— When was it, Dougie?”
“It was 1883,” said his companion.
“No, more recent than that.”
“Then ’52, was it? Or ’53?”
“Summin’ like that. Every forty, fifty years or so there’s a monstrous flood. They oughter get it sorted out by now.”
“What could they do, though?” said Malcolm.
“Dig more reservoirs,” said Dougie. “There’s always a demand for water.”
“No, no,” said Mr. Anscombe, “the problem is the river. They oughter dredge it proper. You seen them dredgers at work down by Wallingford—little flimsy things. They en’t man enough for the job. They’d be swep’ away theirselves if a really big flood come along. The problem is when you get a big mass of water coming down off the hills, it’s held up by the riverbed not being deep enough, and it spreads out instead.”
“If they en’t taking precautions past Abingdon already,” said Dougie, “they bloody oughter be. All them villages down there—they’re all vulnerable. See, if they’d dug two or three big reservoirs higher up, the water wouldn’t be wasted either. It’s a precious resource, water.”
“Yeah, it would be in the Sahara Desert,” said Mr. Anscombe, “but what’re you going to do? Send it there by post? There’s no shortage of water in England. It’s the river depth that’s the problem. Dredge it all out proper, and it’ll flow down to the sea good as gold.”
“The land’s too level this side the Chilterns,” said someone else, and began to explain more, but Malcolm was called away to take some beer to the Conservatory Room.
The first thing Malcolm heard that was worth reporting came not from the Trout but from Ulvercote Elementary School. Long periods of rain were the teachers’ despair, as the children couldn’t go out and the teachers had to supervise indoor play, and everybody became frustrated and fretful.
In the crowded, noisy, stuffy playtime classroom, Malcolm and three friends had turned two desks around back to back and were playing a form of table football, but Eric’s dæmon had some exciting and mysterious news that Eric wasn’t trying very hard to suppress.
“What? What? What?” said Robbie.
“I’m not supposed to say,” said Eric virtuously.
“Well, just say it quietly,” said Tom.
“It’s not legal to say it. It’s against the law.”
“Who told you, then?”
“My dad. But he told me not to repeat it.”
Eric’s father was the clerk of the county court and often passed on news of particularly juicy trials to Eric, whose popularity increased in proportion.
“Your dad’s always saying that,” Malcolm pointed out, “but you always tell us anyway.”
“No, this is different. This is really secret.”
“He shouldn’t have told you, then,” said Tom.
“He knows he can trust me,” said Eric, to a chorus of jeers.
“You know you are going to tell us,” said Malcolm, “so you might as well do it before the bell goes.”
Eric made a great performance of looking around and leaning in close. They all leaned in too.
“You know there was that man who fell in the canal and drowned?” he said.
Robbie had heard about it, Tom hadn’t, and Malcolm just nodded.
“Well, there was his inquest on Friday,” Eric went on. “And everyone thought he’d drowned, but it turned out he was strangled before his body entered the water. So he never fell in. He was murdered first, and then the murderer chucked him in the canal.”
“Wow,” said Robbie.
“How’d they know that?” said Tom.
“There was no water in his lungs. And there was marks on his neck where the rope had been.”
“So what’s going to happen next?” said Malcolm.
“Well, it’s a police case now,” said Eric. “I don’t suppose we’ll hear any more till they catch the murderer and he goes on trial.”
At that point, the bell went, and they had to put their game away and turn the desks around and settle down, sighing heavily, to French.
Malcolm made straight for the newspaper when he got home, but there was no mention of the body in the canal. The Body in the Library, however, was gripping, and he finished it after he was supposed to put his light out. It was a good deal less horrible, somehow, despite the violence done to the victim in the book, than the thought of that poor man who’d lost the acorn: unhappy, frightened, and, finally, strangled to death.
Once that thought had got hold of Malcolm, he found it hard to struggle loose. If only he and Asta had offered to help at once! They would have found the acorn, the man would have got away quickly, the CCD men wouldn’t have arrested him, he’d still be alive….
On the other hand, the CCD men might have been watching all the time. They might have been going to arrest him whatever happened. It was the loneliness of his death that upset Malcolm most.
After school the next day, Malcolm went to the priory to see how the baby was. The answer was that she was fine, and currently asleep, and no, he couldn’t see her.
“But I’ve got a present for her,” said Malcolm to Sister Benedicta, who was working in the office. Sister Fenella was busy elsewhere, apparently, and couldn’t see him.
“Well, that’s very kind of you, Malcolm,” said the nun, “and if you give it to me, I’ll make sure she gets it.”
“Thank you,” said Malcolm. “But maybe I’ll leave it till I can give it to her myself.”
“As you please.”
“Is there anything I can do while I’m here?”
“No, not today, thank you, Malcolm. Everything’s fine.”
“Sister Benedicta,” he persisted, “when they were deciding whether to put the baby here, was it the ex–lord chancellor who decided? Lord Nugent?”
“He had a part in the decision, yes,” she said. “Now, if—”
“What’s the lord chancellor’s job?”
“He’s one of the chief law officers of the Crown. He’s the Speaker of the House of Lords.”
“Why was it his job to decide about this baby, then? There must be loads of babies. If he had to decide where each of them should go, he wouldn’t have time to do anything else.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” she said, “but that’s the way it was. Her parents are important people, mind you. That had something to do with it. And I hope you haven’t been talking about it. It’s supposed to be confidential. It’s certainly private. Now, Malcolm, I really must get these accounts in order before Vespers. Off you go. We’ll talk another day.”
She’d said “Everything’s fine,” but it wasn’t. Sister Fenella should have been cooking by now, and there were sisters he didn’t know very well hurrying along the corridors, looking anxious. He’d have worried about the baby, but Sister Benedicta always told the truth; all the same, it was troubling.
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.”