Excerpt from The Book of Dust ...
Eleven-year-old Malcolm lives with his parents at the Trout Inn near Oxford, across the river Thames from Godstow Priory, where the nuns are looking after a special guest. One night his father comes to Malcolm’s bedroom.
“Malcolm, you en’t in bed yet—good. Come downstairs for a minute. There’s a gentleman wants a word with you.”
“Who is it?” said Malcolm eagerly, jumping up and following his father out.
“Keep your voice down. He’ll tell you who he is if he wants to.”
“Where is he?”
“In the Terrace Room. Take him a glass of Tokay.”
“What’s that?”
“Hungarian wine. Come on, hurry up. Mind your manners and tell the truth.”
“I always do,” said Malcolm automatically.
“News to me,” said his father. But he ruffled Malcolm’s hair before they entered the bar.
The gentleman waiting gave him a start, though all he was doing was sitting still by the cold fireplace. Perhaps it was his dæmon, a beautiful silvery spotted leopard, or perhaps it was his dark, saturnine expression; in any event, Malcolm felt daunted, and very young and small. His dæmon, Asta, became a moth.
“Good evening, sir,” he said. “Your Tokay what you ordered. Would you like me to make up the fire? It’s ever so cold in here.”
“Is your name Malcolm?” The man’s voice was harsh and deep.
“Yes, sir. Malcolm Polstead.”
“I’m a friend of Dr. Relf,” said the man. “My name is Asriel.”
“Oh. Er—she hasn’t told me about you,” Malcolm said.
“Why did you say that?”
“Because if she had, I’d know it was true.”
Asriel gave a short laugh.
“I understand,” he said. “You want another reference? I’m the father of that baby in the priory.”
“Oh! You’re Lord Asriel!”
“That’s right. But how are you going to test the truth of that claim?”
“What’s the baby’s name?”
“Lyra.”
“And what’s her dæmon called?”
“Pantalaimon.”
“All right,” said Malcolm.
“All right now? You sure?”
“No, I en’t sure. But I’m more sure than I was.”
“Good. Can you tell me what happened earlier this evening?”
Malcolm went through it as fully as he could remember.
“These men came from the Office of Child Protection, and they wanted to take her away. Take Lyra. But Sister Benedicta wouldn’t let ’em.”
“What did they look like?”
Malcolm described their uniforms. “The one who took his cap off, he seemed like he was in charge. He was more polite than the others, more sort of smooth and smiling. But it was a real smile, not a fake one. I think I’d even’ve liked him if he’d come in here as a customer—that sort of thing. The other two were just dull and threatening. Most people would’ve been dead scared, but Sister Benedicta wasn’t. She faced ’em off all by herself.”
The man sipped his Tokay. His dæmon lay with her head up and her front paws stretched out ahead of her, like the picture of the Sphinx in Malcolm’s encyclopedia. The black-and-silver patterns on her back seemed to flicker and shimmer for a moment, and then Lord Asriel spoke suddenly.
“Do you know why I haven’t been to see my daughter?”
“I thought you were busy. You probably had important things to do.”
“I haven’t been to see her because if I do, she’ll be taken away from there and put in a much less congenial place. There’ll be no Sister Benedicta to stand up for her there. But now they’re trying to take her anyway. . . .”
“Excuse me, sir, but I told Dr. Relf about all this. Didn’t she tell you?”
“Still not quite sure about me?”
“Well . . . no,” said Malcolm.
“Don’t blame you. You going to go on visiting Dr. Relf?”
“Yes. Because she lends me books as well as listening to what’s happened.”
“Does she? Good for her. But tell me, the baby—is she being well looked after?”
“Oh, yes. Sister Fenella, she loves her a lot. We all— They all do. She’s very happy—Lyra, I mean. She talks to her dæmon all the time, just jabber jabber jabber, and he jabbers back. Sister Fenella says they’re teaching each other to talk.”
“Does she eat properly? Does she laugh? Is she active and curious?”
“Oh, yeah. The nuns are really good to her.”
“But now they’re being threatened. . . .”
Asriel got up and went to the window to look at the few lights from the priory across the river.
“Seems like it, sir. I mean, Your Lordship.”
“‘Sir’ will do. You know them well, these nuns?”
“I’ve known ’em all my life, sir.”
“And they’d listen to you?”
“I suppose they would, yes.”
“Could you tell them I’m here and I’d like to see my daughter?”
“When?”
“Right now. I’m being pursued. The High Court has ordered me not to go within fifty miles of her, and if I’m found here, they’ll take her away and put her somewhere else where they aren’t so careful.”
Malcolm was torn between saying, “Well, you ought not to risk it, then,” and simple admiration and understanding: of course the man would want to see his daughter, and it was wicked to try to prevent him.
“Well . . . ,” Malcolm thought, then said, “I don’t think you could see her right now, sir. They go to bed ever so early. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were all fast asleep. In the morning they get up ever so early too. Maybe—”
“I haven’t got that long. Which room have they made into a nursery?”
“Round the other side, sir, facing the orchard.”
“Which floor?”
“All their bedrooms are on the ground floor, and hers is too.”
“And you know which one?”
“Yes, I do, but—”
“You could show me, then. Come on.”
There was no refusing this man. Malcolm led him out of the Terrace Room and along the corridor, and out onto the terrace before his father could see them. He closed the door very quietly behind them and found the garden brilliantly lit by the clearest full moon there’d been for months. It felt as if they were being lit by a floodlight.
“Did you say there was someone pursuing you?” said Malcolm quietly.
“Yes. There’s someone watching the bridge. Is there any other way across the river?”
“There’s my canoe. It’s down this way, sir. Let’s get off the terrace before anyone sees us.”
Lord Asriel went beside him across the grass and into the lean-to where the canoe was kept.
“Ah, it’s a proper canoe,” said Lord Asriel, as if he’d been expecting a toy. Malcolm felt a little affronted on behalf of La Belle Sauvage and said nothing as he turned her over and let her slip quietly down the grass and onto the water.
“First thing,” he said, “is we’ll go downstream a short way, so’s no one can see us from the bridge. There’s a way into the priory garden on that side. You get in first, sir.”
Asriel did so, much more capably than Malcolm had anticipated, and his leopard dæmon followed, with no more weight than a shadow. The canoe hardly moved at all, and Asriel sat down lightly and kept still as Malcolm got in after him.
“You been in a canoe before,” Malcolm whispered.
“Yes. This is a good one.”
“Quiet, now . . .”
Malcolm pushed off and began to paddle, staying close to the bank under the trees and making no noise at all. If there was one thing he was good at, this was it. Once they were out of sight of the bridge, he turned the boat to starboard and made for the other shore.
La Belle Sauvage, the first volume of Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust, will be published on 19 October 2017 in hardback, ebook and audio by Penguin Random House Children’s UK and David Fickling Books
