Jopari
This story contains elements and characters from HIS DARK MATERIALS, which is a copyright work of Philip Pullman. Other characters and situations are entirely mine and are Copyright © Peter Kendell 2001. Naturally I make no claim on anything that is Philip Pullman’s property. This story is offered for the enjoyment of readers of HIS DARK MATERIALS and is not intended for commercial distribution or gain.
For W, without whom I could never have written this story
Afterword – Philip Pullman, CS
Lewis and the Aristocrats
All right, I’ll put you out of your misery straight away. We didn’t take the money. Not all of it, anyway. But we was entitled to our reasonable share of the takings, wasn’t we?
Sorry? What does you mean – what is I going on about? Ain’t you been listening to a word we says?
You remembers how we, Sal my magpie-daemon and me that is, nearly got ourselves in very deep trouble indeed over the small matter of a certain religious object what that silly little bint Maggie the drab talked us into nicking from the Papal Legate’s house in Hampstead? The Reliquary? Ah – I can see the light dawning! Then you’ll remember too how the glossy woman, who was after saving her own skin and keeping her name out of the newssheets, did a runner and told us to put the five hundred pounds she was going to use to buy the kids off Lugg the Slug with somewhere safe.
Take the lot, Sal says, but I thinks of the workhouse kids who haven’t got much to wear and don’t get much to eat ‘cos of how that thieving bastard Lugg pocketed all the money the Parish gave him for running the Union for himself and his dirty little habits and I thinks that they deserves a bit of luck too, like we’ve just had.
Look; read the other story first if this isn’t making much sense, all right? It’s called The Reliquary.
So I scoops up about half the money off the office desk, trousers it, and follows the cops and Glossy out of the busted workhouse gates, leaving a respectable gap of course.
We makes our way down the Tottenham High Road and back home to Limehouse. It’s the small hours now and even quieter than before. Not to mention colder. There’s still the chance that we might get picked up by the rozzers as there’s no reason why a Penny Post delivery boy should be wandering the streets this late at night (or early in the morning) so we keeps our heads down.
When we gets back to Paradise Yard (did I say that’s the select address where we lives?) we has another shock. Our home wasn’t much – just half a basement room, small, with a sacking curtain to separate our bit from the other half – but it weren’t a tip, neither. It is now. We guesses that the Church police has been here and turned the place over looking for you-know-what. My bed has been ripped up and the straw thrown everywhere and my chair is all smashed. Sal says that’s what they does if they don’t find nothing. They messes it up just to prove they can and you’re nothing, so don’t bother complaining ‘cos if you does they messes you up too.
We can’t stay here, so we does what we always does when we’re in a jam – we goes over to Maggie’s. She’s a stupid little tart, but we likes her ‘cos – I don’t know, really. She don’t look down on us, that’s one thing in her favour. We knows she’ll be glad to see us.
She ain’t. She’s furious with us. First, ‘cos we’ve disturbed her and her daemon Jimmy’s beauty sleep. (We sniggers) Doesn’t we know what time it is? (No) Does we know how much trouble we’ve caused, what with the police and all? She’s lost money because of us, what with the cops searching everywhere and her customers scared off and her business ruined. We ain’t got no right to be showing our faces around here. And so on, and so on, until Sal and I is fed up to the back teeth with all this and tells her to shut up and shows her the money.
That changes her tune. She grabs all the dosh and heaps it up into lots of piles of ten sovereigns each. ‘Blimey, Arthur,’ she says, ‘There’s over two hundred quid here! Where did all this lot come from?’
We thinks it’s best if we doesn’t tell her the whole story about the Church Police and the Inspector and the shiny woman and the Zeppelin ‘cos she’ll only ask awkward questions so we spins them a yarn about selling the Reliquary to a rich dealer we finds in Barnet. So, she says, you has joined the ranks of the landed aristocracy now, have you?
I says yes, I is now a man of means. I expects that from now on I shall buy my suits in Savile Row and my cologne in Jermyn Street. Sal shall have an ermine-lined coat, as it is a little parky lately, doesn’t you think. Would you care for a glass of Burgundy, my dear?
‘Half’s mine,’ she replies, and before we can do anything she’s pinched the cash. ‘And before you even thinks about making a fuss, remember who put you on to this in the first place. There’s my sister’s friend in Hampstead wants her share too.’
It is in vain for us to protest about this. Instead, we takes off the Penny Post uniform we has borrowed and hands it over to Maggie and she gives us our old things back. Then we beds down on her floor and tries to catch up on our sleep. We needs it.
It’s late and freezing cold when Sal and me wakes up. As I does not bank at Coutts we is not able to deposit the cash in our current account. So we decides to invest it in something worthwhile and strolls down the road to Brown’s chop house where we has a great big breakfast with ham and bacon and sausages and black pudding and ketchup and fried bread and eggs and mushrooms and pickles and tomatoes and toast and marmalade and cups of India tea and after this we is feeling much warmer, though rather full. We does not invite Maggie and Jimmy to this repast as they can buy their own if they wants it.
Back at Maggie’s it is clear that she is now a lady of leisure as she and Jimmy is still asleep in bed. Sal pecks at Jimmy’s ear and they wakes up with much uncalled-for bad language. Why doesn’t we go up West I says and get ourselves some decent threads? The idea of spending the day buying instead of selling appeals to them, we can sees. ‘Perhaps we can come off the game for a while,’ says Maggie.
We takes a tram up the Highway to Tower Hill and then the Chthonic Railway to Oxford Street, where we hasn’t been since we gave up thieving for a living. All the shops here is huge, with lifts and restaurants and their very own privies, and they’ve got sweet-smelling perfume counters by the front doors and wide plate-glass windows full of nice things we can’t usually afford. But now we’ve got money – it’s all in Maggie’s purse – and we can do what we likes. True, the shop girls looks a bit snooty at us when we goes in and perhaps we’re not the cleanest customers they ever had, but when they sees our money they is all over us and very attentive to our needs. So we gets lots of good stuff; a fur coat and perfume and some pretty dresses and other things for Maggie and a suit and a white shirt and a silk tie for me, so I looks like the proper businessman, and a fabulous leather jacket like I only sees on pictures of aëronauts before – it’s lined with real whale-fur and it’s got polished brass buckles and buttons and leather straps and those fancy epaulette things on its shoulders – and proper leather boots for us both and a new gold anklet for Sal and a coat for Jimmy and then we has our dinner and in the afternoon we goes on a river cruise all the way up to Richemond and right down to Tower Bridge and come teatime we gets back home. The purse is feeling very much lighter now, but we is feeling just great. It’s been the best day of my life.
I suggests that we goes to Brown’s for supper and Maggie agrees. She tells me and Sal to look out of the window while she washes and changes but instead we goes back to our own place and puts on the suit and the tie and the dickie-front shirt and the leather jacket. I thinks we knots the tie properly. Maggie taps on the door, and we lets Jimmy and her in.
We scarcely recognises her. In her working clothes and slap she’s like this horrible slag, truly the repulsive little tart, but we supposes that’s what the punters likes. When she’s off duty, so to speak, she’s just dreary and tired. Now she’s brushed her hair and she’s wearing nice clothes, she’s like normal. She looks just like the sort of nice respectable girl you might see in a nice respectable part of Town. And there’s another thing too. We’ve been thinking all this time she’s really old, like twenty-five or something, but she ain’t. She’s no older than what we is.
‘Good evening, Mademoiselle Doyle,’ I says (that’s Frankish, that is.) ‘May we accompany you to the Savoi Grill? The carriage is waiting by the front entrance of our mansion and the horses is champing at the bit, ready for the off.’
‘Brown’s chop house, young man, if you doesn’t mind,’ she replies. ‘I feels like slumming it tonight.’
I offers her my left arm and she takes it and we saunters out of Paradise Yard and down the road where the pubs and shops is still open and doing a fair amount of business. We has this wonderful supper in Brown’s. Maggie has a steak and I has a meat pudding with oceans of gravy round it and then we has strawberry ice-cream and the waiters offers tit-bits to Sal and Jimmy and they doesn’t watch them with the drinks neither. You sees, some people has their daemons drink for them. Daemons, small ones anyway, doesn’t need to drink as much as a human so you can both get comfortably drunk on one glass of brandtwijn. Publicans hates this and they chucks you out if they catches you at it. We’re doing fine. Every now and then the waiters comes round just to look at us enjoying ourselves, and the pianist plays Roses of Picardy for Maggie.
When we finally leaves the air outside is freezing cold, especially as we has been so cosy inside Brown’s, and I puts my arm round Maggie’s shoulder to keep us warm as we staggers back to Paradise Yard. She puts her arm round my waist and I’m thinking that maybe we’re getting to be quite friendly now and maybe Sal and me won’t have to sleep on the floor tonight. Sal takes an accidental-on-purpose peck at Jimmy and that’s all right so we stops under a lamppost and I kisses Maggie and that’s all right too.
By the time we’re at Maggie’s door we’re getting on famously and I’m sure my luck is in. But it ain’t, ‘cos Big George has got there before us. Big George is a leading light in the revenue collection arm of the local forces of law and order. No, not the police. This is the real forces of law and order. They is here to look after the interests of the likes of me and Maggie, but naturally there is a tax to pay for this service. They calls it the Community Charge. Big George has come to collect our taxes. I should say that Big George does not get his name by accident. He is at least six foot three tall and he’s pretty large around the middle too. He is wearing a long black coat and a flat cap and by the expression on his ugly mug it does not look as if he is here to enquire about our health.
‘What do we have here,’ says Big George. ‘Effing Lord and Lady Muck? You is both looking very prosperous tonight, for a pair of dirty little slags.’ I does not say anything. It is clear we is in serious trouble with the law.
Big George says that it has been noted that Maggie has not been at work today and that we has been seen having a posh supper in Brown’s and that suddenly she and I appears to have joined the ranks of the newly rich. He says that for wealthy clients like us there is a premium service, but that we shall have to pay a premium rate for it. Maggie says we can’t afford no premium rate and, without looking at her or losing his temper at all, he slaps her hard around the face. I shouts at him to stop but all he does is get his Alsatian-daemon to bare her teeth at me and I shuts up. I’m not all that brave with dogs, see. Maggie’s face is red and she’s screaming the place down, so he slaps her again, across the mouth this time, to shut her up. I’m shaking all over. Nobody’s going to come and help us. Who cares about one stupid whore shrieking of a night in Paradise Yard?
Sal and me huddles down in a corner of the room, shaking and trembling. Big George rummages through the place, throwing Maggie’s stuff everywhere, while Jimmy hisses and spits at him and that evil daemon of his. Then he grabs hold of her, locks his left elbow around her throat and gropes though her things with his free hand until he finds the purse.
‘There we are,’ he says, letting her go. ‘That was easy, wasn’t it? You is both now fully paid-up members of the premium security plan. It has been a pleasure doing business with you. Good night, Sir and Madam, and sweet dreams.’ And the bastard leers at me.
When Big George has left with all our money, Sal and me gets up out of the corner, still trembling all over, and goes over to Maggie, who’s sitting in her chair staring blankly at the wall. I says not to worry, we’ll be all right, we’ve still got our nice things and she screams again louder than ever and throws herself at me and tries to claw my eyes out. She’s scratching my face and drawing blood and I’m just standing there and letting her do it, ‘cos I knows I’ve been a coward. And she’s calling us awful cruel things and using words we never hears, not even on the Ratcliffe Highway and that’s full of dockers and sailors, and we never says anything ‘cos we knows she’s right and we deserves every bit of it.
After a while she stops and slumps down in her chair and cries and only looks up once to tell me and Sal we can eff off now. We trudges across the yard and down the steps to our room and rolls ourself up in our fur-lined leather jacket and, though it’s colder than ever and we feels rotten, we drifts off to sleep.
The next two weeks is miserable. Maggie and me is avoiding each other as much as we can and I’m feeling guilty and I suppose she hates me for not standing up for her against Big George. I knows I’d have got a real kicking if I had done, but I can’t help thinking that it would have been worth it. I mean, we’d still have had no money but she’d have looked after me and we’d have become proper friends. Instead of which, I know she despises me.
You probably remembers that I only got mixed up in this whole Reliquary business in the first place because we was short of money because of, well, circumstances. So it’s not long before we has to go round to Uncle Joe’s to pop my nice new suit. The first thing we sees when I gets there is Maggie’s beautiful dresses hanging up in the window. This, as I am sure you can guess, makes us feel like the meanest scum that ever there was. We only gets a couple of quid for the suit ‘cos it needs cleaning, but I goes round to Maggie’s with the money anyway. She shouts through the bolted door that we can stuff our money, that she never wants to see us again and that we can eff off and do some other things I never heard of.
In desperation, Sal and me tries to snip a purse or two on the Highway and the streets round about. Our concentration is not of the best and we nearly gets caught twice. What makes it worse is that we sees Maggie all dressed up in her working gear going off with a mark and we thinks it’s all our fault she’s having to do this horrible job again. I can’t tell you how awful she looks or how bad it makes us feel.
One thing does cheer us up, though. We sees in the sheets all about Father Lugg and how he got the poor innocent lads under his care in the Tottenham Union to go about robbing things and how brave, loyal, efficient, etc. Inspector Hopkins had tracked him down and recovered the stolen Reliquary and avoided what could have been a very nasty international incident. It says as how he is undergoing “special counselling” at Court HQ and how his confession is being heard daily and how his soul is going to be saved. We can’t help laughing at this and wondering how many days he’s got left to live before his soul saves itself by leaving his disgusting body for ever.
There is other stories going the rounds that doesn’t get in the sheets. Kids keeps disappearing, one or two at a time. We’s hearing the word Gobblers a lot in connection with this. We knows a bit about it from what happened to us in Tottenham. We knows that the shiny woman is something to do with these Gobblers and that for some reason we doesn’t understand she is taking young kids away. We strongly suspects that some of the kids is being sold to her by their mums and dads ‘cos I hears it costs a lot of money to keep a kid – there’s clothes, boots, food, washing, doctor’s bills, burial insurance and all sorts to pay for. Truth be told, in some ways we was better off in the workhouse than if we’d been with our parents, whoever they was, if they’d had more than one or two kids, as most do around here on account of how they keeps dying off for some reason. We’d have been living eight to a room and sleeping four to a bed, even if our dad had been in regular work. That’s just how it is. We would have been free to play when we liked and we wouldn’t have had to pick no oakum or sew no mailbags, of course, so I suppose it’s all part of God’s plan, or whatever it was that they used to preach to us in the Union.
We supposes that the lost kids that aren’t sold to the Gobblers by their loving parents, or by vicious creeps like Lugg, is being stolen off the street by Glossy and her mates. Kids goes missing from places like Limehouse all the time – some runs away, some falls in the river and drowns, some is murdered or taken by Tartar slavers or snatched for the trade. What’s a few more going to matter, especially if it’s for the Church, like Glossy said it was? It’s not as if they was important. They’re only poor people’s kids, after all.
So it’s no surprise when we hears that some has gone missing from around our way. There’s Mrs Hemmings’ Brian and his Regan, little Mary Austin and her Harry and Tony Makarios and his Ratter what lives in Clarice Walk. That is the first time I notices really, ‘cos we knows Tony a bit. Rather, I knows his mum, who spends most of the time at home with a common ailment that’s quite a lot to do with the drinking of gin. She was very kind to us when we first came to London after jumping ship, taking us in and that. I sees her one day around the market shouting out for him, and the next day I pops in to say hello and she’s had even more to drink than usual, but the story we gets is that Tony has gone and that he was a good boy and he would never go off on his own but he was seen with this woman with a golden monkey-daemon. Then we guesses what has happened but we doesn’t say as we doesn’t think she’d understand and anyway we doesn’t want her to understand. We says we’re sure he’ll turn up and heads off to see if we can pinch something to eat. There’s shops and costerbarrows and restaurant back doors and dustbins and all sorts of other places we can try. We won’t starve.
We knows we’re safe from being taken by the Gobblers because Sal has settled and the woman only wanted kids whose daemons was still not fixed. We’re in no danger and of course we’ve got no brothers and sisters that we knows of so we sticks with scratching a living and minding our own business.
Only, one day it becomes our business.
We’re in our half of our basement room – it’s a Sunday evening and the smelly old couple and their mouse-daemons that has the other half is out down the boozer – when there’s a half-hearted knock on the door and Maggie shuffles in with Jimmy in her arms and looks for somewhere to sit down. There isn’t anywhere, of course, as the Church police broke the only chair we had so we both has to sit on the mattress, which I’ve mended as best I can. We sits side by side on it, two foot apart, both staring at the wall. Jimmy gives Sal an evil glare and she does her best to glare back at him, which isn’t easy, given that Jimmy’s much bigger than she is. I asks Maggie how she’s been doing and she says all right and then she asks me the same thing and I says we’ve been doing fine too and we tells each other more lies like this until we gets fed up with lying and we stops. Maggie starts crying then and I makes like I’m going to give her a hug or something but she turns and looks at us something fierce so I doesn’t. Then, slowly and between sniffles she tells us what’s up.
Does I know she has a little half-brother called Stanley? No, I replies, we does not know that. This is because he lives with her mum and her stepfather in Lambeth, she tells me. What about him, anyway, I asks. She says he is a dear little chap, only eight years old, and she loves him lots and sees him whenever she can, only now she can’t see him at all, ‘cos he ain’t at home any more. The Gobblers have taken him.
‘How does you know it’s Gobblers?’ I asks her.
‘Everybody knows. There’s this woman, see. She’s rich and she’s got this beautiful golden monkey-daemon and they can’t resist her, poor mites, and they does whatever she says and they goes off with her and nobody ever sees them again.’
‘Where does you hear all this?’
‘My mum told me.’
We decides it’s time we tells Maggie the whole truth about how we got the money. We tells her about Lugg and Glossy and the kids and how she was after buying them for the Church and how they was going to be very important. All the time we is telling Maggie about how clever we was and how lucky too she is being very quiet.
When we finishes our story she says ‘Has you quite finished?’ We says we has. Then she starts on us. We thought she was cross with us over Big George, but that was nothing compared with this. She don’t scream and shout this time, ‘cos she is short of breath because of how angry she is with us. She’s breathing funny, and not all the words is coming out right. She can’t believe how stupid we is. Doesn’t we know that families has been losing their kids, their own sons and daughters, to these Gobblers? Does we think that the shiny woman is their friend? Does we think that she is going to take them to a nice place in the country for an effing holiday in the sun? We could have let everyone know about her. We could have told everyone to look out for that evil bitch and her horrible monkey-daemon. What is we going to say to Mrs Makarios? Or Mary Austin’s mum? And what about her little brother Stan? What’s going to happen to him?
I doesn’t know what to say to this. It’s becoming very clear to us that we has been very stupid indeed. We could have been telling everyone in Limehouse about the Gobbler woman; warning them. The more we thinks about it, the worse it gets. Sal puts her head under her wing. She could be crying, or just ashamed of herself like I is.
‘You owes us one, Arthur,’ says Maggie, ‘and you’re going to make up for all the harm you’ve done. First thing we’re going to do is we’re going to tell everybody we know what you’ve just told me, and get them to pass the word round and get people looking out for each other. Then we’re going after Stan – me, Jimmy, Sal and your effing useless horrible ugly self are going to find him and settle those Gobblers if it’s the last thing we does. Or I’ll tell my mum all about you and then you’ll really be sorry.’
We has no choice and anyway, Maggie’s right. We does owe her one – and all the lost kids too. So we agrees to do what we can to help. Besides, it’s got Maggie and me talking again. I hated it when we was ignoring each other all the time.
Now, there’s one thing we wants to get straight right now before we goes on any further with this story. You knows, if you’ve been paying attention to what I’ve been saying, that is, that Maggie and me is not exactly on the top rung of society. Fact is, we’re not even on the ladder, if you sees what I mean. People like us doesn’t have a lot of choices when it comes to what we’re going to eat, or where we’re going to sleep, or how we’re going to make our living. Maggie makes her living as what they terms in the sheets a common street prostitute. Me, I’m a sneak thief who’s done a bit of renting now and again. There it is. We’re not proud – well, we is, but needs must.
When we was out looking for Stan, we still had to eat and drink and all that. Just ‘cos you’re on a quest, like, it don’t mean you don’t have to do all the ordinary things too, as well as all that questing stuff. So you’ll have to take it as read that, from time to time, we had to nick things, or do a bit of rough trade, to get some money or some food or a bed for the night. If you’re thinking that we’s going to tell you all about all those things in lots of exciting detail, then forget it. If you gets your jollies off reading about kids like us doing that sort of stuff, then you can eff off down the newsstand and ask for one of them yellow books they keeps under the counter. Get on with you – we doesn’t want anything to do with you. We’ve met enough of your sort already.
Still here? Then we’ve got a bargain.
‘Now,’ says Maggie the next day. ‘Here’s the plan.’
We’re all sitting on the Embankment, watching the posh people walking quickly up and down, with their daemons doing what they can to keep up, depending on what form they has. Birds has it easy, dogs too. Little ones lives in their human’s pockets. Every now and then you see someone panicking when their daemon gets too far away from them in the crowd. They is all in a terrific hurry so they doesn’t look twice at a couple of street kids and their scruffy daemons sitting on the railings. They’s all looking straight ahead and trying not to trip over the beggars, musicians, street artists and other dross what is lining the pavement. Carts and buses and one or two cars is driving up and down the Embankment. It is all very busy, and we is nice and inconspicuous.
‘First thing we’ve got to do is get some money. The reason we’ve got to do this is that we, you especially, has to look respectable, which means you has to get your suit back out of Uncle Joe’s.’
‘Why has we got to look so proper?’ I asks.
‘Because we is going in search of that woman and if we is looking like a couple of urchins we is not going to get within a mile of the sort of place where people like her lives. Then we is going to get some signs printed up and put them on lampposts everywhere to tell everyone what’s going on.’
‘That’s dangerous, that is. The Bill don’t like you doing that sort of thing. Who’s going to put them up?’
‘You are. So don’t get caught.’
We nods.
‘The other thing we is going to do is go down to Lambeth next Sunday and see my mum and let her know we’re doing something about our Stan. You’re coming too.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes. You’re going to be the private detective I’ve engaged to find him. So you’re going to have to pretend to be clever. Not easy for you, I knows.’
‘What, like that Sherlock Holmes?’
‘If only! Just don’t open your mouth too much in case you puts your foot in it.’
We turns around and watches the barges and lighters and pleasure steamers passing up and down the river. London is crowded and busy and there’s only the four of us. What can we do?
What we can do is what we usually does. We works hard and by Saturday I has made enough to get my suit back from Uncle Joe and some sailors has lost their pay. I has ordered up some notices from the printer’s with
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DANGER GOBBLERS ! BEWAER OF A WOMAN WITH A GOLDEN MONKIE DEAMON! MIND YORE KIDS |
printed on them.
Sunday morning we sets out for Lambeth. It’s a fair step from Limehouse. We walks up to Fleet Street and along the Strand and down to Whitehall, past the Sunday morning crowds all dressed up to go to the fashionable Oratories. I expects they’ll get to pray for their souls, and be invited to think of the poor people too. It’ll be comforting for them.
It’s a couple of miles walk and Maggie takes the opportunity to give me a talking-to. Her mum, it seems, thinks she’s a bachelor girl, with a secretarial job in the City, very proper and upright. I must remember this, and that she shares a flat in Crouch End with two other girls whose names is Ethel and Nancy and they is business administrators.
‘How,’ I asks, ‘is I supposed to know this, when I is a private detective and has never seen you before?’
‘Ah!’ says Maggie. ‘You’ll have said, when I comes in your office, which is in Whitechapel by the way, that you can tells all this because of the colour of the dust on my shoes and the type of blouse I wears. All detectives does that – it impresses their customers.’
I should say that Maggie has dressed herself up just like an office girl in a white blouse with a bow at the neck and a long navy-blue skirt and matching shoes. She has a hat and a cape too. She says this is the outfit she wears when she goes home to her mum’s. I is wearing the suit and tie, but I has left my lovely leather jacket at home because Maggie says that is not quite right for the part I is playing. She also says I must talk proper, and not like the bit of workhouse rubbish that I is. And just because we is working together it does not mean she thinks any better of me – I is still a stupid rotten coward but I is all she has at the moment.
We crosses the river at Westminster Bridge and heads south into Lambeth. The streets here is much straighter, cleaner and wider than they is in Limehouse and the houses all looks very neat with scrubbed doorsteps and curtains in the windows. ‘I never knew you was this posh.’ I says to Maggie. She points out that most of the houses has more than one family living in them and that the people who lives here tries their best to keep themselves clean and decent but it’s still very hard. She says that they only has round about a pound a week to feed and clothe and house their families.
I wonders aloud why Maggie has left her mum’s house and is pretending to be an office girl in the city. She mumbles something about her stepfather and I doesn’t quite get it and she blazes at me that he was fiddling around with her and can’t I just shut up? I remembers Lugg and I knows what she means, but somehow I can’t tell her about it. So we is silent for a while.
Maggie’s mum’s house is in the middle of a row of houses, all as neat as each other. Of course, there’s no gardens or trees or flowers or anything like that. She’s got the ground floor, which is good, Maggie says, because there’s no carrying water up and down stairs, but bad when them upstairs gets rowdy. Maggie’s mum is like an older version of Maggie, but looks very much more tired and red around the eyes as you would expect. She gives Maggie the big hug and the kiss and asks who her young man is. She blushes and says I’m not her young man, but a private detective who she has engaged at two shillings a day plus expenses to find their Stan and she introduces me and Sal, who she calls by her full name. At this, Maggie’s mum looks as if she is going to cry and then she pulls herself up straight, shakes my hand very formal-like and invites me in. The house is very tidy and clean inside, but bare and empty too. We notices that she has a cat-daemon, just like Maggie’s Jimmy, which is not uncommon, of course, daemon forms running in families as they does. If I had a family, I’d say noses ran in mine. Joke, see.
‘Now, Mr Shire,’ Maggie’s mum says, when we is sitting in her little front room, with all the kids shooed out into the street to play.
‘Please call me Arthur, Mrs Tulliver,’ I says, very respectfully.
‘Then you must call me Sarah,’ she replies and we is off to a good start with each other. I remembers all the things I has read in the penny-dreadfuls about detectives and robberies and murders, though I doesn’t use that word, and I talks about my underworld contacts and my promising leads and about how I expects that the case will soon be wound up in a satisfactory manner and be written up in the Times and the Chronicle. She laps all this up, and although I’m enjoying telling all these lies and making the story up as I goes along I’m also thinking that this is no way to treat a decent woman who’s had a lot of sorrow in her life. But Maggie is nodding from time to time and I can see that I is making a favourable impression so I keeps going and I doesn’t think I makes any stupid mistakes.
We drinks chai and eats cake – Maggie signals to me not to ask for more than one piece – and after an hour or so we is ready to leave. I says that I must pop in to Scotland Yard on the way back to my suite of offices to brief the Metropolitan Police Inspector in charge of the case and that we will be in touch shortly. Sarah thanks me, and presses another piece of cake on me. We departs with lots of smiles on both sides.
We gets around the corner, and Maggie stops, put her head on my shoulder and starts to bawl her eyes out. I asks, what’s wrong, didn’t I do it right? Wasn’t I a convincing detective? And she says, between tears, Arthur, you done your best, but she ain’t stupid. She knows what’s happened to Stan and we knows that even if you really was Sherlock Holmes you couldn’t find him ‘cos it’s the Church that has got him and when they’ve got you they doesn’t let go. And I thinks of Father Lugg, who gave up his soul last week, according to the sheets, and I has to agree.
It is a dreary walk back to Limehouse. Maggie is very quiet and Sal and me talks to each other about the things we could try to do to start looking for Stan, but we doesn’t have any good ideas.
When we is back in Paradise Yard, it is getting dark. I asks Maggie if she’d like some India tea and she says yes, so I brews up while she sits on the mattress. When the tea is ready I says, look, the posters is back from the printers. I holds one up and she looks at it. There’s just one thing, I says, I’m not all that sure about the spelling. Does you think it’s right?
‘I don’t know,’ she says.
‘But look, here it is,’ and I points to the word MONKIE. ‘What does you think? Is that the right way to spell “monkey”?’
‘What are you asking me for?’ she says. ‘You knows I can’t read.’
‘Can’t read?’ says I, and I laughs. ‘What’re you doing telling your mum you’re an office girl when you can’t even read?’
‘Arthur, you don’t understand anything, do you? Oh, why don’t you go to hell!’ And she storms out of the door. I gets up to follow her.
‘Let her be,’ says Sal. ‘She’s right. If I wasn’t yours, and you wasn’t mine, I sometimes think I’d walk out on you too.’
The next day we gets down to business. We decides not to put the posters up until night-time ‘cos of the danger of being seen. Meanwhile, Maggie has got some ideas about how we could set about tracking down the monkey woman. We could:
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Hang around all the posh places that Glossy is likely to frequent, like the Ritz and the Savoi Hotel and the Café Royale, and when we sees her, follow her home. |
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Go and see if Big George and the forces of law and order will help. |
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See if there are any pictures of her in the newssheets or society magazines. |
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Talk to the cabbies. They must drive her about sometimes, maybe they knows where she lives. |
We considers all these options. I says that if we is seen hanging around those posh joints very often we will be thrown in the Clink for loitering with intent, and Maggie agrees. We both shudders at the thought of going to Big George, and anyway, nobody can remember him ever catching a real villain. He’s strictly on the take.
I says that it is very unlikely that our shiny friend will allow her picture to get into the gossip sheets as she is a high-up in the Church, which doesn’t approve of that sort of thing at all. We is sure that if an editor has such a picture he will check with the Church Censor before he publishes it, and the Censor will say no. It still might be worth trying, though.
Then there’s the cabbies. We both thinks that this is the best idea so far, as cabbies has kids too and they is quite likely to be friendly to us, so long as we doesn’t get in their way and stop them from picking up fares, of course. So that’ll be the plan.
That night Sal and I puts up all the fifty posters I’ve had printed onto lampposts all up and down the East End and the docks. I would love to put them up all over London, or even all over Brytain, but we can’t afford to buy that many posters and I can’t walk that far in one night. It is foggy, which helps with not getting caught, and my teeth is chattering when I gets back, so Maggie gives me a nip of something she has in a bottle which is very nice and warming and which she says is old scotch whisky. I says haven’t you got any new stuff then, and she scowls for a moment, and then she gets the joke and she laughs and says she’s glad I got home safely, which is almost as warming as the nip.
The posters causes quite a stir in the neighbourhood the next morning and at last we feels as if we is doing something to help. We supposes that even if only one kid is saved by our warning from being taken by the Gobblers it will have been time and money well spent.
You won’t be surprised to hear that no cabbie will take a fare into Limehouse, so we has to go and find them. They generally hangs about on cab ranks outside railway stations and theatres and opera houses and big hotels and expensive shops and all those sorts of places where there’s a lot of money about and people who don’t like to dirty their feet walking the streets of London.
We doesn’t say it out loud, but it’s obviously no good Maggie looking through the sheets, not only ‘cos she can’t read but also she hasn’t never seen Glossy. So we decides that I will go to the library and look at the papers and she will start on the cab-drivers. It is no surprise, then, that the weather is really terrible the next few days. I goes in the reading-room in the morning and looks at all the sheets. The reading-room is a place that is full of fed-up old men come in from the rain and looking for the racing tips in the pink ‘uns. They is fed-up because the librarians cuts out all the racing stuff with scissors and all they has to read is boring articles about bowls and hockey and pelota. I bags a chair by the heaters and reads all the posh sheets. Oh, and the special magazines too, like Practical Theologian and Everyday Preachment and The Journal of Daemonic Research. I extends my education into areas it has never reached before, but I never sights Glossy in any of them.
Meanwhile, Maggie is having a much worse time of it. The weather is foul, as I says, and the streets is full of mud and worse and very clogged with traffic. Half the cabbies thinks she is trying to do business with them and either tells her to clear off or makes her insulting offers. As for the others; when she tells them her brother has been taken they is sympathetic, but they is frightened too. They knows that there is someone important behind the Gobblers, and they does not want to get mixed up in that kind of trouble. We has already decided not to mention the Church. That would put the kibosh on everything.
Day after day she tours the cab ranks that I mentions above and it’s no good at all. She and Jimmy comes home soaking wet every night and it does their temper no good at all, neither. After a week of this, we is still no better off. I has found nothing in the library. Maggie has found nobody to help on the cab ranks. And somebody has torn down all our posters and when I goes to the printer’s to order up some more it has been closed down very suddenly. This gives us the willies, as it means that the Gobblers might be on our trail and getting much closer than we would like. It is looking as if we may have to leave our cosy quarters in Limehouse and make ourselves scarce.
So I says I’ll go out with Maggie. Perhaps if there are two of us they won’t think she’s on the make. We goes to Charing Cross Station and asks at the cab-rank outside all the usual questions, but we is told to get lost in what Maggie says is the usual no uncertain terms. They is busy men with families to feed and they hasn’t got time to talk to a pair of ragamuffins like us. After we is told to eff off for the tenth time we gives up and heads east down the Strand. This is a wide street lined with hotels and theatres and shops. About half-way to the Aldwych we notices a wooden hut, dumped right in the middle of the roadway. I stops and thumps my forehead. ‘Maggie, we is an idiot,’ I says.
‘I know that,’ she replies. ‘What is particularly idiotic about you today, if we may ask?’
‘That hut,’ I says. ‘It’s a cab shelter. It’s where cabbies goes to get out of the rain and have a bite to eat.’
‘So how does that help us?’
‘So they might not talk to us in the open street. But they might talk to us in there.’
We goes up to the door of the cab shelter. Maggie looks at me and I looks at her and then I knocks on the door and we goes in. Inside it is warm and stuffy and full of smoke so we can’t see much to start off with. A voice from the far corner of the hut says ‘Hello. What has we here? The Babes In The Wood?’ All the other cabbies in there laughs, but not unkindly. ‘Come over here and have a warm,’ the first cabby says. We squashes into the corner with him.
‘You know you’re not supposed to be in here, don’t you?’ he says. ‘This is for licensed hackney carriage drivers only. If you want a cab you have to flag one down, or queue up at a proper cabstand, or whistle if it’s foggy. Though, looking at you two,’ he adds, ‘I don’t think you take taxis very often.’
We admits that we doesn’t. He seems like a decent bloke, so we stays and chats with him and after a while Maggie tells him about how Stan has disappeared and how she’s afraid that it’s Gobblers what has done it.
‘That’s bad, that is. There are mates of mine who know people that have lost a son or a daughter. They don’t like to talk about it. The police, you see. They suspect you first and you have to prove you didn’t do away with the child yourself before they’ll do anything about looking for it. It’s much too late by then, of course.’
Sal and me don’t know how much to say. The cabby looks friendly, and he’s being friendly to us, but does we dare tell him what we knows? We decides not to, for now.
‘Look,’ he says. ‘I’ve got to go and earn my living now, but you kids just stay where you are. If anyone complains, tell them Derrick says it’s all right.’
We are so tired, and the cab shelter is so warm, that we can’t face going out into the street again so we is very grateful and we leans against the wall of the shelter and goes straight off to sleep. Later, Derrick comes back and we goes out with him and he shows us his cab and introduces us to his horse, Diamond.
Diamond towers over us; dark-brown with beautiful eyes, and we can see that, although he is very strong, he is the gentlest creature there ever was. Derrick explains that all cabbies has to use real horses, not horse-daemons, to pull their cabs, because it wouldn’t be fair on the other drivers if your cab was drawn by a daemon that didn’t need feeding or stabling or anything. So there’s a law; in London at any rate. In other cities it’s different, he says. I shudders to think of my daemon being as big as a horse, and being bumped into by other people all the time and how awful that would feel. I holds Sal cupped in my hands when I thinks about this. Derrick’s mouse-daemon looks out from behind his collar and winks at us. I strokes Diamond’s great head and stares into his great eyes and Derrick shows me the proper way to give him a sugar-lump, which is to hold your hand out flat with the sugar in the palm so he can’t bite your fingers by mistake.
Seeing Diamond makes my mind up for us. I can’t believe that he would be so gentle and kind if Derrick wasn’t gentle and kind as well. I decides to tell him all I knows about Glossy and the Tottenham Union and the kids and how I’m sure that if she isn’t the Chief Gobbler herself, she’s a pretty important one. Derrick takes a bit of convincing about this and he asks us a lot of questions like he’s trying to catch me out in a lie, but I ain’t lying and after a while he realises this. He looks at us a bit amazed as if to say what’s a kid like you doing getting mixed up in nasty goings-on like this and I says; look that’s just what happened.
Derrick says that he’ll pass the word around and that maybe we’ll be luckier tomorrow. We certainly hopes so as we is afraid that the trail may be going cold and I can see that Maggie is getting more and more worried about her brother Stan. And every day she seems to lose a little more hope that she’ll ever see him again and she’s getting sadder and sadder and we can’t bear that. We doesn’t go back to her mum’s again, which is a relief. I’d hate to have to lie to her some more.
Every morning we looks in on the cab shelter. Sometimes Derrick is there, sometimes he’s on a fare. Either way, the answer is the same. Yes, the cabbies has seen a well-dressed woman, but there are lots of well-dressed women in London. Yes, they has seen a monkey-daemon. They’re not common, but they’re not rare neither. The rest of the day we tries to make a bob or two, or sits in the library until we’re chucked out, or just wanders about, trying not to be seen. We’re scared that the police will be waiting for us in Paradise Yard when we goes home.
‘This can’t go on,’ says Maggie every evening, and one day she’s proved right. We looks in on the cab shelter as usual, but it’s empty. It must be a busy day for taxis. Someone’s dumped a pile of magazines in the corner and so I passes the picture ones over to Maggie and leafs through the others myself. Maggie is looking at the fashion pages, just in case Glossy is in there, though how she’ll recognise her, unless her daemon is in the photogram with her, I don’t know. She shows me the pictures in case I sees her, but I doesn’t. Meanwhile, I is glancing through a pile of theological journals. We supposes the cabbies picks up stocks of old magazines of any old kind to look at in their leisure hours. We sits for an hour or so, keeping warm, looking at the mags, talking about this and that.
And then I sees her. There’s a picture in the National Geographic of a group of polar explorers being given medals at the Royal Arctic Institution. They’re looking brave and modest and all that, and shaking the hand of some big important-looking geezer and next to him is Glossy herself. Monkey-daemon and all. And – I can’t believe this – there’s a story next to the picture and some writing underneath it and they actually names her. She is Mrs Marisa Coulter. I goes very quiet. That’s her all right, Sal says.
‘Has you gone to sleep?’ Maggie asks me. I must be in a trance. I finds I can’t speak properly – the words won’t come. I points.
‘That’s her,’ I gulps. ‘Her – the Gobbler woman. Mrs Marisa Coulter. Honorary Life Member of the Royal Arctic Institution of London. That’s less than half an effing mile from here. We’ve found her, Maggie. We’ve found the evil cow!’
‘Are you sure?’ she says.
‘Of course I’m bloody sure! I was as close to her as you is to us. That’s her!’
I can hardly contain myself. At last we is moving again, like when the Chthonic gets stuck in the tunnels and you has to wait and wait and you’re not getting nowhere and it seems like forever before the train starts moving again. I gets up and walks around the shelter – we can’t sit down, we’re too excited. When Derrick comes back we shows him the picture and all and he asks me if I’m sure and I says yes, of course I am; I was as close to her as I is to you right now.
‘Right,’ he says, ‘then we know who we’re looking for at last. I’m going to make sure that there’s always one of us outside the Institute. Chances are she goes there quite often as there’s a library and a dining room, not to mention all the clubrooms and that.’
And he passes the word around and that night there’s a whole gang of his mates got together in the shelter, so I think the wooden walls must be bulging out into the Strand. I tells my story again to them all and I’m so nervous I’m shitting bricks, but I gets through it somehow. All the cabbies is fired up over this and promises that there will certainly be one of them near the Arctic Institute day and night. Maggie and me are to stay in the shelter during the day, ready for when the word comes in from the streets.
I’m not going to bore you to tears telling you all about the days we sat in the shelter, waiting to hear some news of Mrs C. It was a boring time for us, you may be sure, but I doesn’t see why you should have to suffer too. So let’s go ahead to the day when Joe, Derrick’s mate who usually works Agincourt Railway Station, comes in with news. Joe is clearly a smart bloke, because he has found out a load of useful stuff. He don’t tell his story very well – it’s all over the place and back to front – so I’ll put it to you in my own words, as the beak says in court.
It’s like this: Mrs Coulter lives in this really posh – I means it’s very expensive – flat in a serviced block overlooking the Embankment. Joe took her there. How does we know that’s her home? Her name’s on the anbaric bell push, that’s how. Ah, we sees. She’s got an assistant, so-called, who is a small girl who lives with her. This seems a bit odd. What use is a girl who’s apparently only eleven or twelve years old going to be to her? Joe doesn’t know. How does he know all this, anyway? Seems he’s been talking to one of the maids what works in the apartment block. We is impressed by Joe’s detective work and tells him we owes him a pint. Wait, there’s more. Mrs C knows all kinds of important people – this maid, whose name is Mildred, has seen them and recognises them from the gossip mags she reads – and Mildred is pretty sure that she – Mrs Coulter, that is – is planning some sort of bash. A party, see? There’s caterers and florists and decorators and all sorts going in and out of the flat all day and half the night and the Coulter is almost flustered, which is most unlike her. Oh, and Joe is seeing Mildred at the Palais de Varieties tonight, so he can’t hang about all day gassing to us as he is off home to have a bath and put on his smart gear.
There. That’s all nice and clear, isn’t it?
We decides that we will stake out the joint, like it says in the penny-dreadfuls. It’s no good one of the cabbies doing this, ‘cos he might get hailed and a cab has to take a fare. It’s the law. It’s down to us. We can watch everyone come and go, and if the Coulter takes a cab, then we’ll get a report from the driver.
Next day, Joe reports to Cab Shelter HQ, looking very pleased with himself. Looks like the bath was worth the trouble. According to Mildred, the party’s tonight. She’s seen the RSVPs on the hall table. Funny, isn’t it, how a maid can find out all Mrs C’s secrets when a copper would need a search warrant to get in the flat and wouldn’t discover anything if he did.
Half-past-seven that night, and Maggie and me has set ourselves up at a newssheet stand just down the street from Mrs C’s flat. Derrick has squared it with the usual vendor. He’s having a night in the pub, at our expense. Big cars and horse-drawn carriages has been pulling up outside the entrance to the block and expensive-looking people have been getting out of these expensive-looking vehicles and going in. We can see lights in the windows on the first floor and hear tinkley music wafting out. It’s not a very cold night, for a change, so the windows are open. Maggie has recognised some of the people. There’s Government Ministers, and High Clerics and Actors and Artists and we guesses that the ones we doesn’t know is just not important yet, but they will be one day. We sells some sheets to passers-by. Some of them is coppers, we suspects. You can easily spot a copper – it’s something about them. Something dishonest, ha-ha.
Around nine o’clock the first funny thing happens. A young woman, somehow a bit less posh-looking than the other guests, comes out of the entrance. Actually, she staggers out. She’s looking pretty sick. She stands by a lamppost – she’s hanging on to it, really – and we can see how pale she is and how shallow her breathing is. We supposes that she’s had too much to drink and half expects her to throw up all over the lamppost, but she doesn’t. Instead, she and her butterfly daemon lurches down the street and round the corner. Maggie and me looks at each other and shrugs. She’s hardly the sort of lead we were looking for.
The party is still in full swing at ten. We wouldn’t be surprised if it went on all night. One or two guests has left, and we has noted their descriptions to compare with Mildred tomorrow. Then the second funny thing happens. A small girl wearing a smart wolfskin coat and carrying a small bag slips out of the doorway, looks around in a suspicious manner and heads west. I looks at Maggie. ‘Let’s follow her,’ I says. ‘She’ll tell us all about the party, I bet. Mildred can keep an eye open for us.’
‘You sure?’ asks Maggie.
‘Yes. Look, that girl’s daemon ain’t settled, did you see? Mrs C might be holding her for her Gobbler business – she wanted kids with un-settled daemons. The girl must suspect something. Come on!’
So Maggie and me sets off after the girl, Jimmy and Sal following behind and above.
The girl obviously has no idea about London and how to survive here. We sees a pimp we knows nearly pick her up at a coffee stall with the old flask routine, but she dodges him. Perhaps she ain’t quite as daft as she looks. All the same, whatever she knows about wherever she comes from isn’t doing her any good here. She’s wandering about, going vaguely north and she might as well be wearing a placard round her neck, like they used to make you wear in the Union, only instead of saying LIAR or BLASPHEMER on it, it says VICTIM and MUG ME. We follows her at a safe distance, wondering where she’s going to end up.
We is nearing Camperdown Lock on the Grand Junction canal, when something happens that we can’t help her with at all. Two slavers jumps out at her with their sticky tarry nets and before she or her daemon can do anything, she is trapped. Maggie and I looks despairing at each other. There is this awful thing happening in front of us and there ain’t nothing we can do. We can’t fight slavers. But the girl must have a charmed life, because two blokes what looks like gyptians jumps out of the shadows and one of them kills one of the slavers and the other slaver runs off. The girl goes off with the gyptians. It’s an odd thing, but she seems to know them. We can’t imagine how this could be.
Well, that’s really messed things up. We’ve left Mrs Coulter’s party miles behind. We’ve tried to get in touch with the girl, only she’s slipped away from us the way she slipped away from Mrs C. We turns wearily round, ready to head back south to the Embankment and try to recover something from the ruin. And bumps right into the young woman we saw leaving the party earlier.
‘I’m Starminster of the Chronicle,’ she says. ‘Who the hell are you?’
‘Never you mind,’ says Maggie, before I can even open my mouth. ‘What is you doing here?’
‘I could ask you the same question. All right – I was following that girl. Is that what you were doing?’
‘Yes, obviously.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t think that’s any of your business. Come on Arthur, we’ve got things to do.’
‘Oh well, if you’re just going to waste my time.’ And she turns away from us both.
‘Wait,’ I says to her. ‘You’re not safe around here on your own. Why don’t we stick together for a while?’ Maggie doesn’t look too pleased at this, but I’m not going to let this Starmincer, or whatever her name is, go without finding out more about her. So we starts to walk towards Marialebone. The woman decides to ignore Maggie and talks to me.
‘You were outside the Coulter flat, weren’t you? At the newsstand?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you working for another sheet? Or are you freelance?’
‘Oh no, we ain’t reporters. We was watching out for Mrs Coulter ‘cos of the Gobblers. Did you see her or talk to her?’
‘Oh yes.’ She shudders. ‘I talked to her all right. And I hope I never have to again. She did something to me in there – something horrible and evil. I felt as if my soul had been turned inside out for inspection and found wanting. That woman is powerful and dangerous.’
‘You weren’t meant to be there, were you? And she caught you, didn’t she? What were you doing that upset her so much?’
‘I got in on a false invitation. It would have been all right if I’d just circulated, listened, noted. But I had to go too far. I was talking to that protégé of hers, the girl we saw taken away by those gyptians just now―’
‘“Gone with the raggle-taggle gyptians, oh”,’ I says. She looks at me oddly.
‘You’re a funny one to be singing a song like that.’ We is puzzled. What can she mean? It’s just what everyone says. She’s not going to tell us, though.
‘Anyway, I don’t understand the presence of the girl at all. Or why she should suddenly decide to run away. Why just then? Why not before?’ Her butterfly-daemon flaps its brilliantly coloured wings. She stops and thinks for a bit. ‘Look, we ought to talk. It’s late, so you’d better come back to my place. It’s in Swiss Cottage, not far from here.’
‘And Maggie?’ I asks.
‘Yes, her too; if you want.’
We walks past the Zoo – Sal doesn’t like this part much and hides under my leather coat – and up Abbey Road to Swiss Cottage, where this reporter’s flat is. It is rumoured that Swiss Cottage is a favourite place for rich businessmen to keep their mistresses as there is lots of blocks of flats there and it’s an easy Chthonic ride from the city. Whether this is true or not we doesn’t know. I tries to imagine all these women sitting around all day in their frilly things with nothing to do but wait for their boyfriends to call and we doesn’t see how they could stand the boredom. Perhaps the money helps.
We doesn’t think that our new friend, as she may be, has a rich boyfriend. She is a career woman, like Maggie was pretending to be to her mum. ‘Now do you see why Maggie doesn’t like her?’ whispers Sal in my ear. I sees what she means. We turns off the high street and into this neat and tidy looking brick-built apartment block above a row of shops, and up the neat and tidy stairs to her neat and tidy flat. It’s not very big, but it’s very clean and everything in it has its own place, if you sees what I mean. We is terrified of making the chairs dirty if we sits down on them or of moving something out of its place by accident and getting ourselves shouted at, so we stands by one of the walls and keeps our arms by our sides. Maggie don’t care. She flings herself onto the sofa, pushing it back a couple of inches, and we can swear we sees our hostess scowl.
She disappears into the kitchen and comes out a few minutes later with three mugs of Indian tea and a plate of biscuits. ‘Now then,’ she says, ‘Arthur is it? Well, sit down and let’s have a chat. I’m Adèle Starminster, and I’m a reporter on the Chronicle.’
I looks over to Maggie, who shrugs as if to say what the hell. She’s on her third biscuit already. I sips the tea – good, plenty of sugar – and plonks myself down on the floor, next to a bookcase which is full of books which is, as far as we knows, all sorted in alphabetical order. I wedges myself next to this bookcase, puts Sal on my shoulder and starts telling my story. Maggie sits and strokes Jimmy, and pretends to ignore us. Adèle glares at her, as if Jimmy may be moulting all over her spotless furniture.
So I tells her all about the Reliquary and the Tottenham Union Workhouse and its nasty Master, the Slug. I’m getting good at telling this story by now. Adèle takes a black notebook out from her bag and writes in it, looking up from time to time to tell me to keep going. I leaves out some of the stuff about Maggie, ‘cos it’s no business of Adèle’s how Maggie earns her crust, and I doesn’t mention the money neither. I leaves out Derrick and the cabbies too, in case she gets them into trouble. ‘And that’s it,’ I says, bluffing about how we tracked down Mrs C to her flat. ‘What about you, then?’
Adèle shuts up her notebook with a sharp snap. ‘There’s not much to tell,’ she says. ‘I’ve been writing a story about women succeeding in a man’s world. It is a man’s world, you know. The odds are stacked against us. We women have to be twice as good as a man to get half the pay and recognition. It’s an uphill struggle all the way. Anyway, Mrs Coulter was one of the women I wanted to talk to. She’s fought her way up the Church hierarchy into a position of real power. I was only doing a bit of background research, but the way she turned on me back there was absolutely terrifying. I’ve never felt so much cold hate in my life. When you’re a reporter you get used to being told to get lost, but this was far worse. It was tangible evil.’ Her butterfly-daemon has folded its wings and is clinging to her wrist. She’s trying not to look frightened, but she is really.
‘The party was full of the great and the good. I was picking up all sorts of interesting material. Politics, and the Church and Mrs Coulter’s special interest – the General Oblation Board. That’s a very mysterious organisation. It’s half official, half renegade. It’s financed by the Church, but I’m sure that Geneva would disclaim it if it were asked about it. And, Arthur; it’s concerned with children. Especially children whose daemons haven’t yet settled.
‘Then I saw the girl. Did you notice the resemblance between her and Mrs Coulter? It’s said that Mrs Coulter had an affair with Lord Asriel a few years ago. There was a big court case, because Lord Asriel had killed Mr Coulter in a duel, but nobody said anything in court about there having been a child. Now I’m not so sure. I asked her if she was Mrs Coulter’s daughter but she denied it. She said she was her personal assistant, but I find that very hard to believe. A real personal assistant would be older and more worldly-wise than she was. I was just getting comfortable with the girl; she said her name was Lyra, by the way, when Mrs Coulter pounced on me. She did something – I don’t know what – that made me feel sick and ill. Then she threatened to have me sacked from my job, and I’m sure she will. If she says she’s going to do something, she does it.
‘And it’s all wasted, if that’s what happens. No job, no story, no money, no flat. Everything I’ve worked for, gone. You probably saw me leave the party. I felt terrible – I wandered up and down the Embankment. I’d seen you and I wondered why there were the both of you on the newsstand; I thought that maybe I had competition. I was at the end of the block when the girl passed me. She was clearly running away and I thought; here’s my chance. So I followed her, and the rest you know. It’s a mystery to me why the girl should have gyptian friends.’ She gives me that strange look again.
‘Now – I’ve got the story of a lifetime, but I can’t do anything with it! I’m probably out of work, so I’ll have time on my hands. I don’t know what I’m going to do.’
‘There’s one thing you can do,’ I says. ‘The Church police has been getting a bit too close to us in Limehouse. How about you puts us up for a day or two? We can sleep on the floor. We’ve done worse.’
Both Adèle and Maggie looks startled. You can see what they’re thinking. But we means it. It makes sense. Perhaps this Adèle can help us. After all, we’ve traded stories. So, very reluctantly, Adèle gives Maggie her spare bedroom (pink and lilac floral patterns) and Sal and me gets her living-room floor (parquet, cold and rock-hard.)
‘You’re getting crafty,’ Sal says to me later, when we’s all gone to our beds (or floor, in our case.) ‘You think you can use her, don’t you? Well, mind you don’t lose Maggie at the same time.’
‘We won’t,’ I says. ‘Maggie’s too sensible. It’s all for Stan and the kids, and she knows it. Now let’s try to get to sleep.’
Maggie is very sensible. So very sensible she makes sure she grits her teeth and clenches her fists when she hopes it won’t be seen. Hanging around all that next day in Adèle’s flat is, if anything, worse than sitting in the cab shelter. We daren’t touch anything, or even breathe too loud. We doesn’t talk much to each other at all. When Adèle comes back that evening she spends at least half an hour tidying and dusting and clearing up the awful mess we’re supposed to have made. I’m starting to regret my clever idea. But the good news is that she hasn’t been kicked out of her job at the Chronicle after all, because something else has got Mrs C so upset that she’s forgotten all about it.
It’s the girl Lyra, who might or might not be related to Mrs Coulter. She’s disappeared completely and Mrs C, or is it Lord Asriel, wants her back very badly. No, it can’t be Lord A, ‘cos he’s apparently being held in prison in a place called Svalbard by the armoured bears. Yes, kiddies, there really is such things as armoured bears, just like Nursie used to tell you when she tucked you into your little bed at night. Wait and see.
Bears or no bears, the whole country is looking for this kid. In one way it’s good, ‘cos the heat is off us and also if Mrs C is busy looking for this maybe-her-daughter she won’t be stealing kids for the Gobblers. But we doesn’t much like the idea of the streets crawling with bad-tempered coppers who’re likely working unpaid overtime and not enjoying it. They’re probably taking their bad temper out on the general populace right now. Anyway, we’ve got to go back home, before Adèle and Maggie moves on from just snarling at each other and actually starts on the fisticuffs. We agrees to see Adèle once a week at this pub in the West End and compare notes. We stays one more not-very-cosy night and then we leaves her perfect little flat and goes back to grubby old Paradise Yard, which is much more like our sort of place, being more than a little scruffy and not smelling too good for most of the time. Maggie and I laughs at the idea of Adèle scouring her place for bugs and having everything fumigated after us.
When we gets back, I finds that my things, such as they were, has been thrown out of my room and dumped in the yard, very close to the drain. We has been evicted for non-payment of rent, we is told by the new tenant. He is a big bloke and we does not want to press our luck with him. I looks at Maggie. ‘Does you think that we could—’ I begins. We knows what Maggie wants to say. She wants to tell us to eff off to our precious Little Miss Perfect Career Woman Adèle Bloody Starminster and her lovely gracious home. But all she does is sigh and tell us we can effing sleep in the effing corner if we has to, but we mustn’t disturb her and we mustn’t put her customers off. And Sal better keep her beak shut. We loves her more than ever for it, but all we says is thank you Maggie, old girl, you’re a sport.
‘Arthur, what am I going to do with you?’ It’s a couple of days later. We is sitting in the King’s Arms, this big flashy noisy pub up West, waiting for Adèle. I is broke as usual, so Maggie has bought two half-pints and told us to make them last as long as possible. This pub is full of tourists – our natural prey, but we is behaving ourselves tonight – theatre-goers having a quick one before the show and the usual collection of pimps and whores, who stares at Maggie and me as if we is trying to take over their turf. We suspects it is not long before one of the burly blokes on the door comes over and chucks us out.
‘What does you mean?’ I asks very indignant. ‘I pays my way. I keeps my head down. I is doing very well, if you doesn’t mind.’ Sal agrees, sort of.
‘You is not. You is going nowhere. You is sleeping on my floor. You can’t make a dishonest living, let alone an honest one. Here we both are, in this horrible pub we can’t neither of us afford, waiting for this woman you’re panting after even though she thinks you’re rubbish. Does you really thinks she’s going to come here tonight? Do you really think she cares about us, or you, or the lost kids?’
‘I is not panting after Adèle!’
‘Oh no? So why is it Adèle this, and Adèle that, and what a nice daemon she’s got, and bloody Adèle’s our only effing chance now, eh?’
Me? I never said a thing.
‘Has you got any better ideas? Read something good in the sheets, has you? Do tell us about it, why don’t you?’ God, why did I say that? Maggie stands up, furious. Her eyes is red and puffy and I thinks she is going to throw her drink at us. Or maybe just kill us.
‘That is it, you bastard. I’ve had enough of you. Don’t bother coming back to my place any more. We never wants to see you again!’
‘Maggie, don’t. Please stop. We is sorry. We didn’t know what we was saying. We is tired and worried. Don’t leave us. We’ll die without you. We needs—’ I can’t say it. We is all trembley with the thought of losing her. We can feel the tears starting in our eyes.
‘What’s all this? A rift in the lute so soon?’ We looks up. It is our tame journalist, turned up after all.
‘No,’ says Maggie. ‘Nothing is wrong. Do sit down, Miss Starminster, and let us buy you a drink.’ Adèle asks for white wine and I gets it with a half-crown Maggie slips me under the table.
There is not much news. The search for the girl is still occupying Mrs C and the police. Paradise Yard has not been ransacked yet, but it is only a matter of days before it is, we is sure. What a waste of time this has all been. We leaves the pub after ten minutes and agrees, why we doesn’t know except that it’s all we can do, to meet again the next week. Maggie goes back to Paradise Yard, so we splits up and I sells myself for a quid to a bunch of Tartar tourists in the privies under Leicester Square and then we crosses the river at Crècy Bridge and beds down, sore and unhappy, underneath the arches.
For the next two weeks it’s the same story. We sees Maggie and Adèle every Wednesday evening in the loud pub and has a nice gloomy half-hour. There is still nothing doing and it is obvious that Mrs C has got clean away from us. The girl Lyra has not turned up, neither. She’s probably out of the country by now. We lives rough the rest of the time, as we is too ashamed to go back to Paradise Yard and too shy to ask Derrick and the cabbies for help. I looks in on the cab shelter from time to time and tells him what we knows. They can’t do much about Mrs Coulter either as she’s not at her flat any more – in fact she’s not even in London.
Especially now, after all that’s happened, I hates to think about this time. It is as if all our hopes had been stamped on, flat, by this great big angry God who wants us to have a really bad time because He is disgusted with us. We wanders aimlessly about the place and gets beaten up and robbed twice. This never happens before, because we didn’t look so helpless before. Now we’re the ones with the workhouse placard round our neck. RUBBISH, it says on the front and SCUM on the back.
When we meets in the pub, it’s Mister Shire and Miss Starminster and Miss Doyle; very polite we is. It’s obvious that we is all getting nowhere. Our heart isn’t in it any more. Stan is lost, probably dead. Mrs Coulter and the General Oblation Board – the Gobblers – have won. That’s it. Finished.
Except it isn’t. It’s our last meeting in the King’s Arms. I gets there first and buys myself a ginger ale. Maggie’s next. She asks me how we is doing in a voice that says very clearly that she doesn’t give a damn. We says we is doing fine, of course. Then Adèle comes in and I could swear she’s skipping, she’s so excited.
‘Listen, you two, I’ve got it! Pay attention, because this is important.
‘I know where the General Oblation Board has taken the children. It’s a place called Bolvangar. That’s in the north. They’ve set up a research base there and they’re conducting theological experiments of some kind on the children.’
Maggie and me looks at each other. This sounds bad. The experiments must be pretty nasty if they has to be hidden away like this.
‘I haven’t been wasting my time these past few weeks, you know. I’ve been following up my contacts in the Church. It’s cost the Chronicle a lot of money in bribes, but at last I’ve got a lead. There’s a regular service to Bolvangar and the next one leaves tomorrow. One of you is going to be on it. There’s a vacancy for a cleaner; a mop and bucket job. Normally, I’d follow up a lead like this myself, but could you really see someone like me posing as a cleaner?’
We can’t help it. Neither can Maggie. We bursts out laughing. We considers how all the dustballs and germs in this Bolvangar place would run away screaming if they saw Starminster the cleaner coming at them with her dusters and her mop and bucket and bleach. We feels better than we has done for ages. Adèle looks puzzled. We laughs again.
‘I don’t see what’s so funny. Anyway, which one of you is going?’
‘We both is,’ I says firmly. Maggie gasps, amazed.
‘There’s only one vacancy.’
‘We don’t care. We’re all going – me and Sal and Maggie and Jimmy. Maggie can have the job, ‘cos then she’ll be safe, and Sal and me’ll hide in the back of the wagon or whatever it is that takes us there.’
‘Wagon? Have you any idea where Bolvangar is?’
‘Somewhere near Brummagem? That’s in the north, isn’t it?’
‘Try again, clever boy. When I said north, I meant north. You’ll be leaving Brytain altogether. You’ll be stowing away on a Zeppelin! Do you still want to go?’
‘Yes,’ I says. ‘If Maggie’s going, I’m going too.’ And I means it.
We is staggered. We never dreamed this whole Gobbler thing went so far. Adèle gets us two stiff drinks to help cushion the shock. She’s enjoying this, we can tell.
‘If you’re sure you’re going to do this—’ We is scared rotten, but yes we is sure.
‘Then I’ll see you in the Vine in Fleet Street at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. I’ll have all the tickets and money you’ll need for the trip. You’ll need to pack some clothes and whatever personal belongings you want to take with you. Not more than one small bag each, mind.’
That’s not hard. How much stuff does she think we have?
‘We’ll be there,’ Maggie says. Adèle nods.
‘I must say, you kids have got some guts. It was bad enough for me at Mrs Coulter’s flat, but this will be much harder.’
‘We’ll be all right,’ I says. ‘We’ve got this far and we ain’t going to stop now. Have you got any brothers and sisters?’
‘No, none. My parents live in Scotland. I don’t see them much. I make my own way in the world.’
‘And so do we, with a bit of help when we can get it. One day, when you’ve got kids of your own, you might begin to understand how we feels.’
‘All right! I never thought I’d be lectured to by a pair of street kids. No offence.’
‘None taken. Now, are you going to buy us a drink, or what?’
We has a thoroughly decent time after this. It’s almost as if, now the waiting is nearly over, we can forget our own disagreements for a while and just enjoy ourselves. You can even see Maggie beginning to warm to Adèle, just a little, when she sees that she has had to struggle to get by, too. It’s not all been handed to her on a silver platter, neither.
That night we sleeps on Maggie’s floor, and washes under the pump in Paradise Yard and picks up our bundle of stuff, and all maybe for the very last time. ‘We could get ourselves killed doing this,’ I says to Maggie. ‘I know,’ she replies and squeezes my hand.
Adèle gives us railway tickets and a fiver each when we meets her in the Vine. She is looking anxious. I think she is realising herself what we has already realised ourselves; that this is a very dangerous thing that we is doing and that she may be sending us off to our deaths. ‘You take good care of each other, mind,’ she says, when it’s finally time for us to leave and catch the train. ‘If you don’t both come back safe and sound I shall be very cross with you. And bring me back a good story!’
We all laughs at this, and Adèle kisses us both and says farewell. We has enough money to take the Chthonic to King’s Cross station, so we dashes off out of the Vine before anyone can get too tearful and down the moving stairs to the station platform. A rumbley, bumpy tube ride later, and we’re at King’s Cross Station looking for the Bedford train and before we knows it we’re getting on the train and it’s pulling out of the station in great clouds of smoke and steam.
I can’t remember when we last had a trip on a real train – we’ve been on tubes lots of times, of course. I can’t remember when we last saw the real open countryside. Sal and I is so used to seeing nothing but buildings and streets that we cries out with joy to see a wide open sky, and green fields dotted with sheep and cows, and little towns and villages with space for people to live in and breathe properly, instead of being crammed together in the dirty grey city. We sees horses running on grass, like they’re meant to, instead of on horrible hard cobblestones. We sees woods and forests; lots of trees together with shade under them for you to lie down under when it’s hot. There’s long quiet roads with no need to hurry and no coppers chasing you down them. And, although the train is noisy, we can tell it’s blessed quiet out there. Peaceful it is; no awful shouting and bustle all the time. We feels like we has been given a glimpse of heaven.
This trip lasts less than an hour, but we doesn’t forget it ever. All too soon, though, we pulls into Bedford and has to get ourselves off the train, with our packages and our daemons. For one awful moment I thinks that Sal is still on the train. What if it left the station with her on board and me on the platform? And she was stuck in the train because the window was shut and she couldn’t get out? We’d die of the pain, we is sure. But the train people knows about this and we is all checked to make sure we all has our daemons with us before the train is allowed to leave the station.
There is a motor-omnibus to take us to the Zeppelin port, which is in a place called Cardington, not too far out of the town. It rattles along the dusty country roads for an hour or so, visiting every little village along the way. The people on the bus talks to each other, which never happens in London. We can see that things happen much more slowly out of the big city and you has more time for each other. Maggie sits by the window and I sits as close to her as I dares, because the danger we is in is making me fonder of her than ever and I hopes she hates me a little less than before, even though I keeps saying and doing such awful things to her.
We sees the Zeppelin sheds when we is still a mile or more away from them. In the city they’d be just another building but, stuck out there all by themselves in the middle of the fields, they first looks small and then we starts to realise, as we gets closer, how very huge they is. We gets off the bus at the main gate and walks through the entrance into the Departures building. A man behind a big desk wants to know what we is about. Maggie shows him the papers that Adèle gave her in the Vine that say she is a working passenger to Bolvangar. That means she travels with the crew and has to work her passage, instead of going in the paying passenger’s luxury quarters. As for me, I’m her brother Fred, come to see her off.
The man on the desk has a quick look at the papers, tells us to move along to Shed 3 and returns to his newssheet. We’re not very interesting. Secret of our success, see? We walks across the field to Shed 3 and in at the side door. Inside – what can I say? How can I describe it so you’ll know how what we sees inside strikes us?
Let’s see – has you ever been in St Paul’s? Big, isn’t it? Makes you feel small and unimportant and God’s a very big cheese indeed? Now; imagine you’re in an enormous building like that, but the space inside it is filled right up by this great silver ship that’s hundreds of feet long, with gondolas for the pilot and crew underneath and four pods on the sides for the gas-engines, each as big as a house. There are bright anbaric lights shining on the ship, making it shine as it looms over us, and a continuous sound of machinery working, pumps and things like that. It’s so overwhelming that you can’t – we can’t anyway – make you understand how it makes us feel. Of course we’ve seen Zeppelins in the sky – everyone has. And I saw one very close overhead in Tottenham. But, being inside a building makes this one look bigger than we ever could have thought.
She is the LZ-1290 Santa Maria, and she is one of the greatest passenger Zeppelins in the world.
Maggie waves her papers at a man in uniform and he shows us which ladder to climb to get on board and which cabin Maggie is to sleep in. It looks like she has a four-berth crew’s cabin all to herself, on account of being a girl, which is a bit of luck. It’s the middle of the afternoon by now and we knows the airship is due to leave at six o’clock. I stows Maggie’s things, and my own, and is just about to hide Sal and me under the opposite bunk when it all starts to go wrong.
There’s a knock on the door and this uniform comes in without waiting, the way uniforms does. He looks at us. ‘Margaret Doyle?’ he asks.
‘That’s me,’ says Maggie.
‘And who’s this?’
‘My brother, Fred. He’s come to see me off.’
‘Well he can’t stay here. We’re starting to load up now. Only bone-fide passengers are permitted on board during loading. Say your goodbyes and leave.’ This to me and Sal.
That’s done it. It’s a good thing Mr Uniform misunderstands our panicked faces. ‘Come on, now,’ he says. ‘It’s not as bad as all that. You’ll be seeing each other again soon, won’t you? You don’t want to miss the last bus, do you Fred?’
‘No,’ gulps Maggie. ‘You get along now, Fred. Say goodbye again for me to mum and dad and little Stan. There’s loads I wish I’d said to them. Loads, remember. I’ll see you again soon, like this kind gentleman says.’ She lets the uniform see the tears on her cheek.
‘Bye-bye then, Maggie.’ I kisses her on the cheek, tasting her tears, and gives her a brave smile and lets the uniform lead me out of the cabin, along the passage and down the ladder. ‘Bus stop is over there, son,’ says the uniform and sends me on my way, with a push on the shoulder. I walks across the field, out of the main gate and crosses the lane. There’s a fence there, so we climbs over it and sits down on the other side. There’s trees and fields and hedges; there’s cows and sheep and birds singing. There’s a bright blue sky with fluffy clouds in it. We doesn’t care. We doesn’t look at them. We looks down at our feet and sniffles.
Sal puts up with this for about five minutes. Then she’s had enough and she pecks me, hard, in the neck. ‘Finished?’
‘No.’
‘Yes you have. Listen to me. What did Maggie say?’
‘She said to say goodbye to her mum and dad and little Stan.’
‘What else?’
‘She said she had lots she wanted me to say to them.’
‘No, she didn’t. She said she had loads to say. Think, Arthur. Maggie’s a clever girl. She didn’t really mean that she wanted you to go to Lambeth and see her mum. And anyway, she doesn’t know where her dad is. That was all for the man on the airship.’
‘You mean . . . she was acting? Playing a part?’
‘Of course she was. She’s a whore, isn’t she?’
‘And when she said “loads” she meant—’
‘That we’re to smuggle ourselves back on board while they’re loading the airship. And don’t say you don’t know what you’d do without me. I know that already.’
‘You gets yourself up that tree, daemon. Keep an eye open for wagons.’
She does. An hour or so later, as it’s getting dark, a convoy of wagons comes roaring up the lane in clouds of dust and stops at the gate. It’s easy to slip into the back of one while the driver is talking to the uniforms. It’s just as easy to slip out and hide by the side of Shed 3. Things has changed while we waited. They has towed the Santa Maria out of the shed and she is tied to a mast, ready to cast off and leave. There is a sort of crane that is lifting the boxes of stuff that is being loaded into the hold of the Zeppelin. We reckons our best chance is to hang on to the back of a box and try not to be seen by the loaders. It’s a long shot, we knows. And it’s a good thing we doesn’t get to try it, ‘cos the stacker inside would have been bound to see us. Instead, something else happens.
An enormous car pulls into the gate without stopping. Has we seen that car before somewhere? Maybe we has, outside the Tottenham Union, ‘cos it stops by the passenger ramp and the driver leaps out, goes round to the back of the car, opens the door, bows very deeply and someone we know very well gets out.
Mrs Coulter! She’s going on the Zeppelin too! She strides up the ramp like she owns it (she probably does) and the driver opens the car’s boot to unload her things. Here’s my chance.
‘Need a hand, mate?’ I says, walking up to him jaunty as you likes, and grabs a pair of matching leather cases. In my aëronaut’s coat I looks just the part. The driver nods, takes two more cases and leads the way up the ramp onto the Zeppelin. We follows him to her cabin – much nicer than Maggie’s, we notes, but still not exactly plush. ‘Over there,’ she says, and doesn’t even look at us, while we puts her cases away. ‘Ta, mate,’ says the driver to me and I follows him back to the ramp, only I turns left instead of right and heads for the crew’s quarters. I knocks on Maggie’s door and goes in.
‘You took your bloody time,’ she says. And bursts into tears.
You probably thinks Zeppelin travel is dead glamorous. Sailing serenely above the clouds, glass of champagne by your armchair, lovely music playing, interesting people to talk to. And the views! You can stroll arm in arm with your beloved up and down the promenade deck, looking down out of the panoramic windows at your less fortunate countrymen as they goes about their daily tasks. Wonderful!
‘Course, if you’re going steerage, like we is, it’s different. Crew’s quarters is near the engines, so it’s noisy. There’s no promenade deck for the likes of us and anyway, the last thing we wants to do is to bump into Mrs Coulter. So during the day I hides in the cabin or, when Sal gets restless, we goes up the ladder to the central catwalk and she flies about while I keeps my eyes open for the crew. They does regular inspections of the gasbags – ballonets they calls them – and the rigging. I has taken my boots off so I can’t be heard walking about. This is a good thing, I learns, as boot-heels can strike sparks off the metal the catwalk is made of, which if they got mixed up with the gas they fills the airship with, would end our journey rather earlier than we would like, if you sees what I means. The crew wears special soft slippers and they creeps up on you so you has to keep your eyes peeled.
The inside of the airship is like nowhere I has ever been before. It’s vast, hundreds of yards long from end to end and sixty or seventy feet high from top to bottom. You wants to be careful not to slip on the ladders and catwalks that runs about inside the hull as they gets damp from the condensation. There’s two of these catwalks. One runs along the bottom of the hull, so it slopes down from one end to the middle of the airship and back up again to the other end. The other one runs straight through the centre, right through the heart of the vessel. This one’s my favourite. You is suspended there in this great dark space like a spider at the centre of her web. The only light comes from dim anbaric lamps spaced out along the catwalk railings. Sal is free to fly up and down there, flapping her way between the rows of gas-bags.
Besides the ballonets I already mentions, which is held apart from each other in nets, there is struts, girders and bracing wires. All the time you is inside the airship you can hear the gas-engines roaring on the outside, and also the air rushing over the outer fabric and the rustling of the gas-bags, the hissing and gurgling of the valves and pipes, the humming of the bracing wires, and the creaking and groaning of the joints. It is altogether a very strange and mysterious sort of place, but we likes it in a funny sort of way. It is certainly a lot different from Limehouse.
Maggie is working her passage, as we says, so she is doing cleaning and kitchen jobs and that. She brings me bits of food from the kitchen and I drinks from the tap in the privy. We chats that evening when she gets off work, in whispers of course as we doesn’t want to be heard by the others. I nearly finds myself saying wasn’t it clever of Adèle to get us on the Zeppelin, but I, or perhaps Sal, stops just in time. Instead, we chooses a safer subject.
‘What does you want to do when all this is over?’ I asks her. ‘Assuming we is still alive, that is?’
‘If I could just go back home to my mum’s, I’d be happy,’ she replies. ‘That bastard Tulliver, my stepfather, would have to leave first, of course. Thing is; mum loves him, I suppose. And he brings money into the house, but I could do that. I could work in a shop, or an office.’
We says nothing. We must be learning.
‘What about you, Arthur?’
‘I knows what we doesn’t want. We never wants to go back to London. It’s cruel, that place is. It makes people cruel too. All those bricks and stones and cobbles and slates – they’re hard. They makes us feel hard and do hard things. I’d like to live in the country; like we saw from the train. It must be kinder there. The people there must be kinder, too. I’m sure Sal and me would be happy in the country, on a farm with the cows and the lambs and the horses.’ We is thinking of Diamond and how gentle and kind he is.
‘I thinks there’s cruelty and hardship everywhere,’ says Maggie. ‘In the countryside people still has to work for other people. There’s bosses for all of us, whoever we are and wherever we lives.’
We has to agree. Even Mrs Coulter, sipping her champagne and nibbling her canapés in first class, is taking orders from somebody. We would not wish to meet that somebody ourselves, we is sure.
We doesn’t feel as if we can tell Maggie what we really wants to do, which is just to be with her all the time. We is afraid she will be cross with us. She is such a fierce person, sometimes. Fierce; yes, that’s how we always likes to think of her.
The trip on the Santa Maria only takes a night and a day. Zeppelins is not as fast as trains, but they doesn’t stop as often, neither. It is getting colder and colder, especially if you’re out of the cabins, as hour by hour we heads further north. I leans out by the forward port engine housing and looks around and it’s all white – the clouds overhead is white and the land below is covered with ice and snow. I is very glad of the fur-lined aëronaut’s jacket now, though we never guessed when we bought it that one day we’d be really flying in it.
When we looks back on that journey now, it is as if we was all suspended in time, the way we was suspended on the catwalk. Those two days don’t feel like a proper part of our real life, more like a holiday from life, or a gap in it. Perhaps all long journeys is like this, if you is not actually part of the crew of the train or the Zeppelin or whatever you’re travelling on. It was the same for us on the ship, later.
At the end of the second day there is a lot of bustle among the crew, Maggie says, and it looks as if we is going to land soon. The creaking and groaning in the rigging gets louder and Sal and me both gets anxious as it sounds like the airship might be going to come apart. But it’s probably just the air pressure changing or something theological like that, because after a lot of engine noises and banging and shouting we stops moving and it all goes quiet, apart from the sound of the wind. The airship sways a bit. We supposes that it has been moored to a tower, like it was at Cardington.
There is brilliant white light shining in from outside the Zeppelin – anbaric, we thinks. Mrs Coulter is first off the airship. Then us. Maggie says it’s best if I just leaves with her. Everyone is going to be much too busy with Mrs Coulter to bother about us. And it’s true; we is absolutely invisible, as if a witch has cast a spell on us. Nobody notices a pair of downtrodden cleaners trudging down the ramp out of the aft gondola of the LZ-1290 Santa Maria and following the others into the main entrance of Bolvangar.
It was Maggie’s idea that I should pretend to be a cleaner too, sent along with her to work at Bolvangar. ‘You see,’ she says, ‘cock-ups like that is always happening. They won’t be able to check up on what’s gone wrong until the next airship goes back home and the one after that comes back here. Meanwhile, we’ll be able to go anywhere we want round Bolvangar. Nobody ever pays any attention to the cleaners. Ask my mum – she knows.’
It’s not so surprising if you thinks about it. When did you last notice the postman, or the milkman, or the knife-grinder, or the lamplighter, or the man who sweeps out the gutter? I bets you can’t say.
Bolvangar is a cluster of modern flat-roofed buildings in the middle of this giant compound, surrounded by a wire fence with watchtowers spaced out along it. We can’t tell if the fence is to keep people in, or out. Or maybe there’s more than people, outside the fence. There is dazzling lights on the watchtowers, shining on the ground and lighting up the Santa Maria too.
We waits until Mrs Coulter has gone into the building and follows a few minutes later. Not a moment too soon; it’s desperately cold and Maggie is starting to shiver, despite wearing the thick coal-silk coat they gave her on the airship. There is a man in a uniform on the desk behind the door. Maggie gives him her papers, like she did at Cardington, and he picks up what we supposes must be a telephone – we has never seen one before, though we has heard of them – and speaks to somebody we can’t hear. This somebody turns out to be a Mrs Fawcett and she is the housekeeper of Bolvangar.
‘Let’s see,’ she says, ‘you’re Margaret Doyle, yes?’
‘That’s me,’ says Maggie.
‘So who are you?’
‘We is Arthur Shire. The agency sent us along with Maggie here.’
‘The agency sent you?’
‘Yes, ma’am. They said they had two vacancies for general cleaners. Special rates, overseas work.’
‘Where are your papers, then?’
‘We left them on the train. We is sorry, ma’am.’ We tries to look even dimmer than usual at this point, and a bit sheepish too.
‘Heavens above! What is the world coming to? I ask for two cleaners, so the nurses can do their proper jobs, and they say I can only have one. I say all right, one’s better than nothing, send me one. So then they send me two after all, but one of them’s an idiot who can’t even look after his own papers!’
‘We is sorry. We is a very good cleaner. Very thorough.’
‘Arthur – I’m sure you are. You must be good at something!’
This is not said unkindly. She tells us to follow her and we does, as she waddles plumply down the corridor with her terrier-daemon at her heels. She shows us the rooms we has to clean; the canteen, the kitchens, the hallways, the offices – Maggie and me looks at each other, there’ll be clues in them – and the dormitories.
‘Maggie, is it?’
‘Yes, ma’am’.
‘We’ve got a room for you in the nurse’s quarters. Arthur, you’d better find yourself a spare bed in the boys’ dormitory. We’ll see if we can’t sort things out in the morning. I’ll get the night nurse to give you both a call at four o’clock tomorrow so you can get off to a really good start.’ She gives us a broad smile. ‘There’s lots to do. I want this place looking spick-and-span, bright as a new pin! Oh, and by the way. Here’s the cupboard with all the things you’ll need.’ And with swelling pride she flings open yet another door. There’s a big cupboard behind it full of brooms and mops and dusters and bottles of bleach and dustpans and towels and lots of other things. We is going to be very busy people, I can tell.
Mrs Fawcett is a very busy person too, so she tells us to settle in ready for the off tomorrow and get something to eat at the canteen in the meantime. Then she trundles off back to the front desk. I expects that by now Mrs Coulter will have found something to complain to her about.
I says ‘Adèle―’ and Maggie adds ‘should be here now!’ and we both collapses against each other in a fit of the giggles.
‘Right,’ I says when we has sobered up a bit. ‘I’m off to the boys’ dorm to find a bed and have a wash. And . . . I’ll find your Stan for you, Maggie. I promise. You go to your room and we’ll see you in the canteen in half an hour or so.’
Maggie nods. ‘Good luck, Arthur.’ I knows how much this means to her.
It’s half-past five and the dorm is empty, or so I supposes. I walks down the rows of iron-framed beds, looking for an empty one that we can use. Each bed has a cabinet next to it and a label stuck onto the bar at the bottom of the bed with a name like Frederick Bloggs or Thomas Atkins written on it. Near the end of the row I finds a bed that is not in use. The old label has had the middle bit scratched off. The bit that’s left says Ant rios. We is starting to get a very bad feeling about this place. What’s happened to him, whoever he was? Why is his bed not needed any more? I plonks my bag down on the bed and sits down next to it.
‘Hello. Who are you?’ A voice, a very educated, very posh voice, comes from one of the beds opposite, one I thought was empty.
‘Who wants to know?’
‘Me; Harold. Harold Owen.’
‘Let’s have a look at you, Harold Owen.’
The boy sits up in his bed. He has a pink face, blue eyes and tousled curly blond hair. I can tell that he is not from Limehouse. We walks over and sits on the next bed to him, Sal perched on the rail at the top. His daemon is curled around his neck, mouse-formed. Only the tip of her nose is showing.
‘Why is you in here, Harold Owen?’
‘I was feeling unwell after the fire practice we had earlier. Matron told me to go and lie down for a while. Have you come on the Zeppelin?’
‘Yes, we has.’
‘Gosh, that must have been exciting. I’ve only been on an airship once, and that was only for a quick trip to Wulfrun and back. We went first class, of course. You’re very lucky, going on a real voyage.’
We is not sure we cares much for Harold Owen. He sounds like he was born with a silver spoon stuck up his gob. We has taken a lot of abuse from his kind. He takes a close look at Sal, and we doesn’t like that much, either.
‘Has your daemon settled?’
‘Yes, Harold Owen, she has, if it’s any of your business. Yours hasn’t yet, has she?’
‘It’s a he. His name’s Mike. And no, he hasn’t settled. None of ours have.’
Poor little sod. I remembers what we used to do to boys like him in the Tottenham Union.
‘Come out from there, Mike. We won’t hurt you. Harold, can you answer a few questions we has?’
‘Yes, if I can.’
‘How did you come to be here? Most of the kids that was taken by the Gobblers where we comes from was from poor homes. You’re not, are you?’
‘No, my people are quite comfortably off. Daddy’s a wine merchant.’
‘So how did they get you?’
‘I’d run away from boarding school – Ercall College in Salopshire. They were giving me a beastly time. Because of Mike, you know. They used to take him from me and lock him in a cupboard and drag me away from him, six or seven of them. It hurt horribly.’ The poor kid looks like he’s about to burst into tears.
‘It’s all right, mate. They used to do that to me, too.’
‘But you’re not . . . queer?’
‘It don’t matter. There’s bullies everywhere. I don’t suppose your teachers did anything to help?’
‘No, they didn’t. Anyway, I’d had enough, so I ran away during a school rugger match. I got as far as Oakengates, but I was awfully tired and hungry, so when this kind lady offered to buy me supper I was jolly grateful. She looked so nice – I trusted her.’
‘She had a golden monkey-daemon, didn’t she?’
‘Yes, she did. Her name’s Mrs Coulter and everyone here’s afraid of her.’
‘Me too, Harold. I’m afraid of her too. Now, does you know a boy called Stan? Might be called Stan Doyle or Stan Tulliver?’
‘Stanley? Yes, he’s two beds down from me.’
‘Is he all right?’
‘Yes, as much as any of us are.’
We sighs with relief. We has some good news for Maggie at last.
‘Harold, what’s going on in this place? What’s it for? What’s it called?’
‘It’s the Bolvangar Experimental Station. There are theologians and doctors here. They do experiments on us, and on our daemons.’
‘Experiments? What sort of experiments?’
‘Have you heard of intercision?’
‘No. What’s that?’
‘It’s a kind of cutting.’
‘Cutting what?’
‘Cutting away. When they intercise you, you become what they call a severed child. Then they take you away from here. We don’t know where they take you or what happens to you then.’
This is scaring us rigid. We is frightened out of our wits, but we must know what he means.
‘We talk about it in the dorm, after lights out. Some of us think it means they kill your daemon, but that can’t be right, I know, because you’d die immediately.
‘Two weeks ago, I overheard two of the theologians talking in the canteen. I don’t know why they didn’t notice me. They were having quite a heated argument, and that might be the reason, I suppose. I worked it all out from what they said.
‘Intercision means that they separate you from your daemon, with a silver blade. It’s to do with Dust and Original Sin. It’s supposed to free you from sin. Some of the children who are severed die straight away. Sometimes they live a little longer. Tony, the boy who had the bed you’ve got now, he lived for a while, I think’
‘This Tony. Was his full name Tony Makarios? Little kid – daemon name of Ratter?’
‘Yes, it was.’
This is terrible. We is crying and feeling very sick indeed. We is looking down into a deep pit of black horror and we can’t hardly breathe. Sal is making faint distressed sounds in her throat. I clasps her to my heart and holds her very tight. As we sits and shakes with terror and disgust so we wonders if we can ever be well again, a change starts to creep over us, very slowly but unstoppable just the same. There is a buzzing sound in our head and we can’t see properly – it’s as if we is seeing two things at the same time. There’s the dorm, and behind it, or in front of it, we sees, we sees – something else. It’s a dream, we thinks, or maybe the shock of what we has learned is killing us. We seems to be hanging above the top of the world, looking down on it spinning round, far below us. We can see the moon and the stars and the sun when we looks about us in the space where we is suspended.
We hears a whooshing sound and from over our left shoulder there is a rush of bright golden glittering sparks that go speeding past us and gathering themselves together into a shining river of brightness that flows down through the sky to the streaked white mass of the icy north. We is filled with a sensation of great joy – it’s the stream of golden light; it’s good, we knows it is. It’s alive and it loves us. We would like to throw ourselves into this stream, swim in it, wash ourselves in it, let it carry us where it wants. Never more be hungry and cold, never more suffer pain and fear. We leaps, we must, forward through space and dives into the flow, feeling it running over us, through us, shining inside us, lighting us up so we glows like angels. We is free! Free for ever! We cries out aloud in our delight. This is Heaven – Heaven at last.
We does not know how long we lives in Paradise. It may be for only two or three seconds or it may be for more than ten or twenty years. Time means very little there. But we is called back to earth. Back for a time, while there is still work for us to do.
‘Are you all right?’ Someone is shaking us by the shoulder. ‘I say, can you hear me?’
Our vision of joy splinters and falls away from us in pieces of broken light. We is back in the boys’ dorm in Bolvangar Experimental Station and we is still in very great danger. The peaceful feeling stays with us for a while, giving us strength. We has never had anything like this happen to us before – we can’t understand it at all. As the calm feeling fades, we finds that we has become different inside, somehow. We is no longer afraid. Our fear has been burned out of us by the golden fire and in its place we has a deep, strong anger. We will kill that Mrs Coulter and her evil Gobblers that have done this dreadful thing to these poor kids. We will destroy this awful Bolvangar Experimental Station if it’s the last thing we does.
‘You . . . went away.’ Harold looks worried. ‘For ages. We were afraid you were dying. Are you all right?’
‘Never better.’ And we means it. ‘Did you tell the other kids what you found out, Harold?’
‘Yes. Some of them believed me. The others didn’t. “Backs to the walls, boys, here comes Queer Harold,” they said.’ He caresses Mike, who has taken the form of an ocelot.
‘You’ve got guts, son. You really have. Now listen, my name’s Arthur Shire and this is Sal. I’ll tell you what me and my friend Maggie’re doing here.’
I tells him all my story, just as we’ve been telling it to you, except for the parts I’m ashamed of. As I speaks, I sees him beginning to think that there might be some hope for us after all. I doesn’t want to let him down so I says look, there’s only me and Sal and Maggie and Jimmy, and you of course, against all these Gobblers, but Maggie is very clever and very brave and if anyone can get us all out of here she can. I wishes we was as sure of this as we sounds.
Harold and me finds Maggie in the canteen and we grabs one of the round tables at the far end of the room. We notices that the tables, which are made of some white shiny stuff, ain’t all that clean. This Bolvangar is reminding me more and more of the Union, only it’s cruel in a modern experimental theological sort of way. They both does awful things to kids, that’s for sure.
‘There’s something wrong with this place,’ Maggie says, when the three of us, plus our daemons, has got our chai and buns from the counter and is sitting down. ‘The kids I’ve seen is all scared to death. The nurses is weird, somehow. Their daemons – they don’t seem to be a proper part of them. They’re more like tame animals than daemons. Why, one of the nurses was talking to me in the privy and her daemon wandered out of the door and she didn’t even notice!’
Harold and me looks at each other. ‘I’ll tell her,’ I says. So I does, and I can tell that Maggie and Jimmy is suffering the same pain and fear and horror that me and Sal was feeling in the boys’ dorm.
‘Maggie,’ I says. ‘Look, there’s good news. It’s Stan. He’s here, he really is, and they haven’t . . . done it to him yet.’
‘Not yet, but they will, won’t they?’ she replies, looking miserably down at the table. I reaches across and takes her hand.
‘Maggie – we needs you to be strong. Don’t let us down now. And look, the kids is coming in for their tea. You’ll see little Stan in a minute, just you wait. Be brave for him, Maggie. You and me together – we’ve got to be brave enough for everyone!’
‘Harold,’ I says. ‘Go and join the line of kids. Find Stan and bring him over here. Tell him you’ve got a nice surprise for him, but he’s got to be very calm and quiet about it. Maggie, don’t let him make too much fuss or we’ll be nabbed. Don’t you, neither.’
Harold does as he’s told. ‘What is we going to do?’ says Maggie.
‘Play it by ear. That’s all we can do. We can’t break out of here – there’s all that fencing and wires and miles of ice and snow, and we wouldn’t know where to go anyway. Somehow we’ve got to stop the Gobblers and their horrible experiments and stay alive as well. We might have to kill some of them, Maggie.’
‘I’ve never done that.’
‘Neither have I. Shush, here comes Harold. And look who’s with him!’
Harold comes back over to our table with a tray loaded with sausages and chips and pudding and lemonade. With him is a little fair-haired boy, carrying another tray. He sees Maggie and he nearly drops his tray. We catches it and puts it on the table in front of us.
Maggie and Stan is both looking so happy that Harold and me can’t help smiling too. Stan sits next to Maggie and they hugs each other tight, while Harold and I screens them from the grown-ups at the counter. They whispers to each other and little Stan’s eyes grows huge and round while his big sister tells him her adventures and how she’s come to take him away from this awful place just as soon as she can.
But how? I wishes we knew. It looks impossible, but we knows, we knows, that there must be a way. The river of golden light has told us.
We becomes aware that ours is not the only table where there is whispered conversations. Over at the girls’ tables there is heads put close together and every so often one of them goes and talks to the kids at one of the other tables. It’s as if they’re spreading the word about something.
A boy comes over to our table. ‘Hello Harold, Stan,’ he says, and stops short. He don’t know if he can say anything in front of me and Maggie.
‘Go on, Roger,’ says Stan. ‘This is my sister Maggie and her friend Arthur. They’re on our side.’
‘All, right. Now look,’ says Roger. He takes a chair and pulls it up close to our table and sits down. ‘You see that girl over there in the far corner? Fair hair, ermine-formed daemon?’
We looks across the canteen. There she is. Funny, we is sure we recognises her from somewhere.
‘Lizzie,’ says Harold. ‘The new girl.’
‘That’s her. Only her real name’s Lyra. I knew her in Oxford before I came here. She’s got friends, see. Close by. They’ve come to rescue us!’
‘How—’ says Stan, and ‘Where—’ says Harold, and ‘Lyra?’ says Maggie and me.
‘Very close, she says. There’s gyptians and an aëronaut from the Republic of Texas with a balloon. And an armoured bear!’
‘You’re pulling my plonker,’ I says. ‘There’s no such things as armoured bears. They’re just stories.’
‘If Lyra says it, it’s true. Sometimes, anyway,’ replies Roger, blushing for some reason. ‘I know she means it this time!’
‘When’s this marvellous rescue going to happen, then?’
‘Dunno. Soon. You’ll know, ‘cos the fire alarm’ll go off.’
‘It went off this afternoon. There was no rescue then.’
‘This is different, Harold. You’ll see. When the fire alarm goes off, you’ve got to grab all your warm things and run for the compound. Lyra’s friends’ll be coming in through the gates.’
‘Wait a minute,’ says Maggie. ‘Your precious Lyra, she’s all mixed up with Mrs Coulter, ain’t she? She was living in her flat in London. How do we know this ain’t a trap?’
‘She ran away from her, though, didn’t she? When she heard about the Gobblers.’
‘Yes, we supposes so.’
‘Just be ready for when the alarm goes off, that’s all.’
Roger leaves us and starts talking to the boys at the next table. The whole room is buzzing now; kids looking excited, talking loudly. We is afraid the grown-ups from behind the counter will notice and tell someone, but no, they is collecting trays and washing up and wiping tables and paying us no attention at all.
Maggie is looking at me in a curious way. ‘What’s got into you, Arthur? You’re different, somehow. What’s happened to your eyes? Has you been drinking or something?’
‘No Maggie, we has not been drinking. We has seen something, we can’t tell you now, and we is feeling better and stronger than we ever has before. We is all going to be all right. I knows it.’
We believes it when we says it, we really does.
When we has finished eating and talking and handed in our trays we all goes to the common room where there is a few books to read and some toys and games to play with. The younger kids is getting ready to go to their beds. Lizzie/Lyra is nowhere to be seen. Maggie sticks with Stan and they chats in the corner – all about Lambeth and home and that, we supposes. Sal and me hasn’t got a brother to talk to – we never had – so we sits in the corner and flicks through the pages of a book we finds. At the Back of the North Wind, it is called and it is a very weird and wonderful book indeed, but we likes it very much. You read it and you’ll see what we means. Harold and Mike has been sitting by themselves as well, so we goes over to their corner and talks to them, and shows him the book, and he says it’s one of his favourites and one of the older boys shuffles past us and mutters ‘queer bastards’ as loud as he dares and if things had been different I’d have decked him for his stupid big mouth. But the strong anger inside me knows that his ignorance doesn’t matter now. Only one thing matters – getting us and the kids safely out of here.
All this time we supposes that Mrs Coulter and the experimental theologians and the doctors are having meetings. She is probably scaring the living daylights out of them right now. We understands that the fire practice that afternoon, before we arrived, was a shambles, so they’ll probably want to have another one. We is worried that this will be a false alarm for the escape that is being planned and that if it does happen no one will believe it. We even finds it funny that we is slightly narked that this little Lyra kid has got an escape attempt set up before us, even though we is much older than she is and we should be the ones telling her what to do. Comes of being an aristo I expect – she’s used to being the one handing out the orders. She’s probably very good at it.
An hour or two later, sure enough, the fire alarm goes off. And from here on, if you gets confused by what I says, just remember how confusing it was for us. If I gets mixed up with our story, and all the things that happened, be gentle with us, won’t you? ‘Cos it was very confusing for us – so many things seemed to be going on at the same time and sometimes it was loud and bright, and then it was quiet and dark and there was shouting and panic and fear and cold and . . . we’ll do our best. That’s all I can say.
‘Harold, grab hold of Stan and don’t let go of him. Maggie, you and me’ll go to the dorms and get all the young kids dressed and ready to go. See you in the compound!’
Maggie nods and rushes out of the common room. I shouts to all the kids in there, ‘Come on, you lot. Move! That’s the fire alarm – shift yourselves, get your warm stuff and your daemons and get the hell out of here! Go!’ And I kicks the backside of the mouthy kid to get him moving.
When I is sure that they is all knowing what to do I dashes out into the corridor, Sal flying ahead of me. Down to the boys’ dorm and inside, where frightened kids in pyjamas are running around frantically looking for their things. I chooses the two most awake-looking ones and gets them to help us sort out the others and it’s not too long before we has them wrapped up in their warmest clothes and pouring out of the dorm and down the main corridor to the entrance of the Bolvangar buildings. As we passes the kitchen doors we smells smoke and sees a red flicker behind the glass. Has we made a terrible mistake? Is this a real fire and there’s no rescue coming at all?
We gets the first lot of kids out of the front door and into the compound and rushes back inside. There’s a bunch of girls wrapped up in coal-silk coats running out as we goes in. There is also a number of panicked grown-ups scuttling backwards and forwards, looking as if they could do with a bit of Arthur Shire style sorting out. ‘Fire!’ we shouts. ‘In the kitchens! Help!’ That should get them milling around nicely.
Meanwhile, we dashes through all the corridors we can see, looking for lost kids. We hasn’t seen that Lyra – perhaps Maggie has. There is a smell of smoke that is growing stronger and stronger and it is now very clear that there is a real fire in the place. Even as we looks around us we wonders about where we will all go if the building burns down and there’s no rescue. We will all die out there in the cold and dark. We even thinks about the LZ-1290 Santa Maria. She must have cast off by now. The captain won’t want to keep her here where there are flames and sparks, so there’s another escape route cut off.
The fire is spreading fast, we sees, and it seems to be jumping about randomly and starting up again somewhere else. The buildings is very modern, as we says, and they’re not made of brick or stone or anything we recognises. They has gaps in the ceilings and the flames is licking around them and leaping from one part of the building to the other. These theologians must be very clever people to make a building that burns down so easily and so quickly. They is running around with buckets of sand and shouting to each other and they really doesn’t seem to have the slightest idea what to do. We can’t see Mrs Coulter among them, which is funny. You’d think she’d be there, giving orders and that.
We sees no more kids in the building, so we goes back outside again, into the compound. There are lots of them there and we can see Roger and the girl Lyra trying to organise them and get them out of the gates, which is open. We can see things, people maybe, outside the gates, so something may be going on after all. Sal and me catches sight of Harold and Stan, but we can’t see Maggie anywhere. We runs up to them. ‘Where’s Maggie? Has you seen her?’
‘No. We thought she was with you.’ says Harold.
Oh no. Oh Christ, no. Not that. Don’t let it be that way.
‘Stick together! Go with Lyra and the others! I’m going to find Maggie!’
‘You’ll get yourself killed!’
‘I’ve got to find her!’
Sal leads the way, flying so far ahead of me that I can feel the link between us is stretched tight, as far as it will go. Back into the door, where smoke is billowing out. We can see that the flames have burned right through the roof now and are lighting up the clouds above us.
Down the main corridor, looking to left and right. Into the dorms – ‘Maggie! Maggie!’ Not there. Keep going. Work back along. The smoke is stinging in our eyes and we can hardly see. The sound of burning is growing louder and louder, roaring in our ears. She must be on the floor somewhere, maybe choking to death on the smoke and fumes.
Try all the doors. God! The flames shot out of that one. Be more careful. Open them slowly. That’s better. Wait; here’s a way we haven’t tried yet. Through the door. There’s a narrow passage with a turning at the end. It’s quieter in here and the air is clearer – the fire hasn’t got here yet. Maggie’s smart; perhaps she’s come in here. Wait, what’s that? Is that her voice? No; it’s―
‘Get out of my way, you filthy little slut!’ It’s Mrs Coulter. We runs round the corner at the end of the passage. And stops dead.
Mrs Coulter is standing there. She is blazing, furious. Her face is red and her teeth are bared and she looks like a wild animal. Her monkey-daemon is wrapped around her shoulders, glaring, howling with rage. Between her and me, with her back to us stands . . . Maggie. She’s holding a broom-handle in both hands and she’s blocking the way. ‘Maggie!’ I cries and she doesn’t turn round, but says ‘Arthur! We was wondering when you’d turn up. Got a spot of bother with this nasty old baggage here. Give us a hand?’ She’s trying to sound casual, bless her, but her voice is high and strained.
‘Maggie, the whole place is burning down! Get out of here! She ain’t worth it!’
‘Oh no?’ and she takes a swipe at Mrs Coulter with the broom-handle. ‘I’m going to kill this wicked woman. She stole our Stan away from us. She hurt all those poor kids and their daemons!’ We wonders why Maggie hasn’t smashed Mrs Coulter’s face in with the broom-handle yet. Perhaps it’s because she ain’t as cruel as her. She’s too good – she hasn’t got it in her to kill her. And then we feels it. A force – an evil force that’s pressing against Maggie, scorching her soul. This must be what Mrs Coulter did to Adèle in London. We only gets the backwash of it at first, but it makes us feel as ill as we felt in the dorm with Harold.
Maggie turns to us, and we can see the ferocious pain she is suffering in her face. ‘Arthur, get away now. Me and Jimmy’ll stay here and we’ll die with this foul bitch if we must. There’s no need for you to die too. Go back to Harold and Stan, Arthur!’
‘No! No, I’m staying with you!’
And for the first time, Mrs Coulter sees me properly. ‘I know you, boy,’ she snarls. ‘I let you go once before, in Tottenham. I was a bloody fool. I won’t be such a fool again.’ She turns the full force of her hatred onto me and my spirit is blasted by it. We can feel ourself melting away in our pain. We is dying. We don’t know how Maggie resisted it so long. She must be even fiercer and stronger than we thought.
As we feels our mind slipping away from us, and we falls to our knees in the passageway, we tries to say goodbye to Maggie, but it’s too late; we can’t speak any more. Darkness is falling across our eyes and a buzzing sound fills our ears. We sees a great pit of darkness. And in it there’s a figure, falling out of the light. Again and again, we see it fall and our dying eyes sees that it is three people, clinging together. We doesn’t know who two of them is, but the third is Mrs Coulter. Again and again and again, falling, falling, falling. We looks up, through the darkness and the falling people and a voice that is, and yet isn’t, ours calls to her:
‘Marisa Coulter! We see your death! The Void! You will fall, Marisa Coulter. You will fall out of the worlds for ever. There will be no end to your end and the torment of your fall and your death. Death, and Falling, forever and ever and ever! The Void! The Void will be your torment and your death!’
Mrs Coulter screams aloud, again and again. The volleys of hatred stops battering against Maggie and me. The darkness falls from my eyes and I can see again. The buzzing fades. Mrs Coulter is crawling on the floor; drool is slobbering from her mouth, she is staring wildly. She has become vile, ugly and disgusting. Maggie is gasping. ‘What did you do, Arthur? What did you do to her?’
‘We doesn’t properly know. We saw her dying, Maggie. She fell into a great dark pit.’
Maggie drops the piece of wood. ‘Leave her to die, the evil hag.’
We turns to go. And as we does, with an awful screech, the beautiful vicious golden monkey-daemon leaps up at Maggie and rakes its claws across her, ripping her right across her cheek; three deep bloody slashes. Maggie cries out in agony, a dreadful sound for us to hear, and falls fainting against us. Jimmy hisses and spits and cuffs the hideous monkey-thing hard against the back wall. We picks Maggie up and carries her, how I don’t remember, through the smoke and flames and out of the burning ruins of Bolvangar.
In the compound it is strangely quiet. There is the crackling of the burning buildings behind – their light casts shadows in front of us – and there are some grown-ups huddled together by the mooring mast, but there is no sign of any of the kids. We thinks they must have left by the gates, so we runs as fast as we can stagger up to the entrance. I looks up at the Santa Maria. There’s something wrong with her; she seems to have lost lift from the tail end and her nose is pointing up towards the sky.
There are many black humps by the gates and we stops to have a look at what they are. Maggie moans and shivers on my shoulder, so I takes off my leather coat, very carefully so as not to let her fall, and wraps it around her to keep out the cold, which is biting indeed.
The humps are dead men. They must be soldiers, ‘cos they has knives and swords and axes, but they are all lying on their fronts and each of them has an arrow in their back, piercing their heart. I has never been one to leave useful stuff lying about, so I lays Maggie on the ground as gently as I can and takes a knife, two fur hats and a fur coat from the bodies. I puts on the coat and the hat and pockets the knife. Maggie gets the other hat. Jimmy has been licking at her cuts and she has come to her senses a little.
I looks around to see what’s going on outside. Out towards the dark forest we can see a group of men like the soldiers, but they’re running away from us. The other way-
‘Who are you?’
Oh, good God. It’s a massive creature, looming above us, white-furred with a black nose, as big as an omnibus, covered with great black iron plates that clash together as it moves. Its claws are stained bright red against the snow.
‘Tell me who you are. Are you with Lyra?’
‘Ye- yes, we are.’
‘But you are neither children nor gyptians. I think you are trying to lie to me. Do not try to lie to me. Tell me the truth. You cannot deceive a bear.’
I’m shaking with fear. ‘I’m Arthur Shire and this is my friend Maggie. We came with the airship. We wanted to find Stan. Please, who are you?’
‘I am Iorek Byrnison. Who is Stan?’
‘Maggie’s brother. The Gobblers took him.’ This can’t be happening to us. Armoured bears aren’t real; they’re only in fairy stories.
‘Look at me, Arthur Shire.’
We can’t help it. We looks up into his iron-helmeted face. Two piercing round black eyes gazes down at us. We keeps absolutely still. We is petrified, stunned. The bear speaks our doom.
‘You are a liar and a thief, Arthur Shire, but you are telling me the truth. Now listen to me very carefully. The witches and I have killed the Tartar guards. The children have run away into the forest and you must follow them. If you do, you will find help. But you must hurry. Is the girl badly hurt?’
‘She was wounded by Mrs Coulter’s daemon, Iorek Byrnison. It tore her face up.’
‘Let me see.’
The bear tenderly lifts Maggie’s head with his terrifying mailed dagger-clawed paw.
‘She is in pain and she will be scarred forever; but if this wound is well looked after she will live. Arthur Shire, you and Maggie must follow the children now. I will see to your pursuers.’
He lays Maggie back on the ground with immense care and presses my shoulder.
‘Go, now, Arthur and Maggie. Good luck!’
And then he’s gone, vanished into the dimness that surrounds Bolvangar. I is sweating despite the cold. Maggie moans and stirs.
‘Where are we, Arthur?’
‘We’re safe. We’re outside Bolvangar. You’ve been badly hurt, Maggie, by that monkey-daemon.’
‘I sort of remember. I never saw a daemon attack a human before.’
‘Me neither. Does it hurt a lot?’
‘Not too bad. I think I can walk. Where are we going?’
I looks around. Sal takes off and flies as high as she dares, looking around.
‘There’s the trail of footprints, leading into the trees. Over there,’ she says, when she returns to our shoulder. And quietly, to me: ‘Arthur, I think there are some people coming after us out of Bolvangar.’
We looks back. The huddle is looking more organised. And, God help us, we thinks we can see Mrs Coulter among them. We’d hoped she’d died in the fire. I hope Iorek Byrnison knows about this.
‘Come on Maggie, let’s go, shall we? Let’s follow the kids.’
It is a desperate slog through the fir trees, in the dark and the cold. The lights of Bolvangar fade away behind us and soon we can hardly see where we is going. Only the footprints, many of them, guide the way. If it wasn’t for them we’d be lost long ago. How does we know that the kids that made the footprints knows where they’re going? Iorek Byrnison may be big and powerful, but is he right? We may find no more than a pile of small frozen bodies at the end of our hike.
We has no idea how far we trudges along in the forest, but it may not be all that much really. We sees lights in the trees ahead of us and hears voices and shots. There must be some sort of battle going on.
As we gets closer, there is a sudden loud rasping noise behind us. ‘Hide!’ Sal shouts from the branches above us. ‘It’s Her!’ We doesn’t need to ask who that is. We dives for the bushes at the base of the trees and crouches behind them. With a harsh rasping sound a sledge, powered by a gas-engine we guesses, crashes past us and pushes ahead towards the lights. We catches sight of Mrs Coulter, flushed and tense, at the controls. We is amazed that she has recovered so fast. We was sure she was dying in the passageway in Bolvangar.
‘Well!’ says Maggie. ‘At least she ain’t chasing us any more!’ We laughs, Heaven help us, we laughs. We must be desperate indeed if we can find anything funny in our present situation.
We follows the tracks her sledge-runners makes. The shouting ahead of us gets louder. We hears the banging of guns and the whooshing noise arrows makes. At one point we thinks there is a cloud passes low over our head and, remembering the Church Police Zeppelin in Tottenham, we looks up and sees a balloon flying above us, not the Santa Maria, as we fears.
It’s funny, ain’t it? We’ve been mixed up in all these important events, but we never exactly takes part in them. There is these big battles, for example, but we arrives after they’ve finished. There is ghastly experiments in Bolvangar, but we never sees them. We supposes that people like us is too unimportant to make a difference to what happens. Best we can do is to keep our heads down and stay alive. ‘Cept for Maggie, of course. She’s special. But by now you must know about Maggie, else I’ve been wasting my time, haven’t I?
So it is when we finally arrives at the clearing where the last fight took place. There’s kids and sledges and gyptians, lots of them, but we’ve missed all the exciting stuff. Roger and Lyra and Iorek have gone north in the balloon, towed by the witches. It must be a big balloon, we thinks, to be able to fly with two tons of armoured bear on board.
The plan is this: The gyptians has a ship, several days away by sledge, moored up at a place called Trollesund. We is all going to be taken there and then back to England. It don’t matter if we is gyptian kids or not – they’re here to save all of us. The chief gyptian is called Lord Faa. He is a big man and it is clear why he is the leader. Everybody listens to him and does just what he says. There is another one, an old man who trembles all the time as if he is ill, although his daemon is this big, beautiful cat called Sophonax. This old man, who shouldn’t be out on a cold dangerous journey like this if you asks us, is Farder Coram. He, we learns, is very wise and everybody listens to him, too.
They gets all of us to sit on the sledges and they wraps us up in furs. I sits next to Maggie and puts my arm around her, ‘cos I is worried about her. There is nobody that can look after her cuts, as Iorek Byrnison said there should be, and they is looking angry and red and as if they needs bandaging.
When we stops that night, I asks if anything can be done for Maggie. One of the gyptians looks at her and goes to fetch Lord Faa. I tells him what happened to her. He leaves the fireside and takes a look.
‘The girl’s wounds are deep. We can salve them and cover them, but that is all. There is a doctor on the ship – he will know what to do.’
I is very worried. That night Maggie has bad dreams and hardly sleeps. In the morning, her scratches is oozing white stuff when they checks the bandages. I washes them with melted snow.
The next day is worse. Harold and I takes turns to sit next to her. I talks to Stan, or some of the other kids. The journey to Trollesund should be magic – smooth sledge-runners over packed snow, blue skies and crisp air, wide snowfields and deep-green forests, but I can’t see them. All I can see is Maggie’s tired, hurting face. She cries out and hits me with her fists sometimes as if she thinks we is someone else. It breaks our heart.
She is starting to imagine things and sweating – the sweat turns to ice on her clothes. This is awful. This isn’t the way it should be. She saved all of us, by holding up Mrs Coulter and stopping her from organising the doctors and experimental theologians so they would keep us in Bolvangar and put the fire out properly. She’s the hero. It’s not fair at all. At one of our stops I tells Lord Faa what she did in the Bolvangar passage.
‘Arthur, we are doing all we can to get Maggie to safety. Be patient. Help her.’ And that’s all he says.
At last we reaches Trollesund. It’s not much of a town, but at last Maggie can be seen to. We all boards the ship and Maggie is given a cabin of her own, because she is so very ill. The ship’s doctor spends a lot of time with her and says that nobody is to see her, not even us. The kids and me goes in the hold. There are loads of boxes and mattresses and blankets and a big heater and, if things was different we’d have great fun playing games and just enjoying being free from fear.
But we is not free from fear.
We is going frantic with worry over Maggie. Every time we asks the doctor if we can see her he says not yet, she’s still very ill. And when we asks when she’s going to get better so we can see her he goes quiet and then he tells us to ask him again tomorrow.
We sticks this for three days and then we has had enough. We goes up to Lord Faa on the bridge of the ship, bold as you please, and tells him we must see Maggie.
‘Must?’ he replies.
‘Please, Lord Faa, we is desperate to see her, but the doctor won’t let us.’
‘That is because she is very ill.’
‘We knows that, but couldn’t you ask the doctor for us if we could see her? He’ll listen to you.’
Lord Faa stands silent and grim for a minute. Then he asks one of the gyptians to fetch the doctor. He tells us to wait outside while he talks to him.
I stands close to the door, but I doesn’t hear much, except at the end when their voices starts to rise and I hears the doctor saying that he’ll not take responsibility for the consequences if I see Maggie and Lord Faa firmly replying that, if the doctor won’t take responsibility then he, John Faa, will.
They calls me back in.
‘Arthur,’ says Lord Faa. ‘Maggie is indeed very unwell. There was a powerful poison in those cuts and it got into her blood, and she has been feverish and sick for many days, as you know. But she has been crying out for you in her sleep and I think you two have important things to say to one another.
‘Be kind to her. Treat her gently. Help her to get better. And tell her whatever your heart needs to say.’
I sees the doctor sadly shaking his head behind Lord Faa’s back.
‘Thank you, Lord Faa.’ And I rushes from the bridge and races down the stairway and skids along the freezing cold deck to the door of Maggie’s cabin, Sal flapping behind me. We knocks on the door and goes in. She is lying on the bunk wearing a pair of sailor’s pyjamas, with her white arms on the blankets and Jimmy curled up on top of her. I stands by the door, suddenly not knowing what to say to her.
‘Hello Arthur, how’s it going?’
‘It’s fine, Maggie, just fine. The kids are all having fun, learning to be sailors. Stan’s made himself the captain! Harold’s first mate.’ I tells her all about the kids and the ship and the crew and the gyptians,
‘That’s good.’ Her voice is quite faint. She is not very strong; this is clear.
‘Maggie―’ I says.
‘Yes, Arthur?’ She coughs into her pillow and I waits for her to stop.
‘I just wanted to say that―’ I is shaking uncontrollably.
‘What did you want to say, Arthur?’
‘I just wants to say that – oh Maggie, doesn’t you know?’
‘Come here, you berk,’ Maggie says, but she doesn’t sound cross with me. I sits on the end of the bunk. ‘It’s all right, I isn’t infectious. The doctor said.’ She coughs again and turns away for a moment. I can feel the heat rising up from her, even though a draught of cold air came into the cabin with us. She is lying there worn out on the white sheets and pillows with her face covered with sweat, and she’s drawn and gaunt and pale and blotchy with the fever, and the cuts on her cheek are still red and angry, and her hair is all damp and straggly, and she is altogether the most beautiful thing we ever sees. She looks up at us and gives me a lovely bright smile.
‘Yes, Arthur. Of course I know. I always have.’
I hesitates for an endless moment and then I does the thing I’ve been longing to do for, oh, ages and ages. I puts out my hand and I touches Jimmy just behind the ears and I strokes the fur of his soft, silky back again and again. Maggie sighs and shudders in the bunk and Sal hops down to her and she puts out her thin arm and lets her fingertips brush gently against her feathers and it’s like fingers of soft fire running up and down my spine and I can’t bear it and I never wants it to stop.
‘Please love me, Arthur,’ says Maggie, and I takes my things off and gets in the narrow bunk with her, trembling all over, and she touches me and I can’t believe how wonderful it makes me feel and I loves her so much. I kisses her and says ‘Maggie’ and she says ‘Arthur’ and the way she says my name makes it sound like it’s a brand-new word that’s just for me and her and it’s the same with her name. She presses herself up against me and she’s so hot, she’s burning up, but I has been chilly out on deck and perhaps I helps to cool her down a little. We kisses again and again, and each kiss is sweeter than the one before.
Then I loves her, and it’s my first time, and perhaps she knows it’s her last. She shows me what to do, smiling when I’m clumsy, but never making me feel stupid any more. She leads my hands to the places where she wants to be touched and when she runs her fingertips over me, leaving trails of goose-bumps behind them, it’s like heaven.
After a while we falls happily asleep and I dreams of grass and meadows and trees and all the things we sees from the train and the Santa Maria and when I wakes up in the middle of the night she’s still there and I holds her close to me and tells her I loves her and I’m happy just being near to her and all the arguing and fighting and misunderstandings are over now, and we can be together like this for ever. Jimmy and Sal are very gentle with each other and it’s a funny thing, for when I picks him up to stroke his fur again he seems to weigh nothing at all.
But when we wakes in the morning Maggie is lying cold in my arms and Jimmy has vanished, and Sal and I is bereft. We lies still for what seems like hours, with our arms wrapped around her, trying to warm her up a little. It does no good, and Sal has to tell me that, as Jimmy has disappeared, Maggie must have died while we were sleeping. We slowly climbs out of the bunk, puts our things back on, and goes up to the bridge and we tells the officer on duty that Maggie is gone and then we sits down by the compass-housing and we cries until we is all empty of tears. Somebody brings us a mug of hot sweet kaffee and I gulps it down somehow. There is much anxious going to and fro from Maggie’s cabin and the doctor looks closely at me and takes my temperature and looks serious, but I must be stronger than poor Maggie ‘cos I doesn’t get ill, though if I did get a fever and died of it right now I wouldn’t mind it in the least.
The next day they is going to bury her at sea. We sits up with her the night before the burial, me holding her dear worn hand and talking to her about the old days in Paradise Yard and laughing about all the times we rubbed each other up the wrong way and the silly things we said to each other. Sal and me comforts each other and I remembers that she has lost someone too, so we talks about how beautiful and loving Jimmy was and eventually we falls asleep.
In the morning they comes and wakes us and wraps my poor Maggie up in a canvas sheet and I kisses her on the lips for the last time as they seals it up and then I has to leave her cabin and stand, with Sal clutching my shoulder, by the railing on the main deck where the crew and the gyptians and the kids and little Stan has all come to say goodbye. I holds on very tight to the rail and looks out over the waves, though I can’t see anything through my tears, while the captain reads a prayer and we all sings a hymn, only I’m all choked up, so I can’t join in even though I knows the words and the tune from when I was in the Union; and they tips up the board her thin wasted body is resting on, and she slides, oh so gently, into the water and the sea takes her away from me for ever and ever. Suddenly, Sal and me can’t bear the pain in my heart any more and we breaks down sobbing and is tenderly led away to the saloon, where we sits and stares blindly out of the window at the waves rushing by.
As the ship carries us further south day by day and Sal and me wanders aimlessly round the deck or gazes at the sky or sits quietly in the saloon, the other people on board doesn’t know how to talk to us, excepting little Stan of course. They is a bit shy and awkward, I can see, but all I really wants to do is talk about Maggie and how I loved her and they doesn’t want to ask me to do this, because they’re afraid I’ll say or do something silly or embarrassing, we suppose. Stan keeps asking when he can see Maggie again. It’s as if he hadn’t seen her slip away into the sea. I tries not to get cross with him; after all she was his sister as well as being my love. In the end, the wisest man on board takes me to one side and asks me to tell him all about it, which I does at some length. I tells him about the Union and Lambeth and Limehouse and the Ratcliffe Highway and how we lived and how we had to cheat and steal and sell ourselves to get by. I tells him about the cabbies and Adèle and how we got to Bolvangar and how I saw the river of golden light in the boys’ dormitory and my vision of Mrs Coulter’s death. And especially, I tells him about Maggie.
‘You see, Farder Coram,’ I says, ‘I knows what they’ll all say about her. They’ll say she was a common slut; a liar and a prostitute. She spread disease, they’ll say, and her sort don’t deserve to live a full life like proper people do. They’ll say she was rubbish from the gutter, who ought to have been flushed back down to the sewers she came from. They’ll never know how bright and clever she was, how hard she had to work all her life, or how much she loved her mum, and her brothers and sisters, and me. There’s only us knows how brave she was when she stood all by herself in the passage at Bolvangar and faced Mrs Coulter. And now she’s gone, how am I ever going to find another one like her to look after me? ‘Cos she was right, you know. We needs looking after, Sal and me.’ I starts to cry again.
Farder Coram does an astonishing thing. He puts his arms around me, and hugs me tight and kisses me. ‘Arthur,’ he says, ‘It’s hard for you, I know. But this comes to all of us, in the end. When you fall in love with someone, and they with you, you both make a bargain with Fate. Sooner or later the two of you will have to part. You hope it’s going to be later, after many, many happy years. Sometimes, like it was with you and Maggie, it’s sooner, much sooner than it ought to be. Fate is stern; and she’s not always fair.
‘Me, I’m very old and perhaps I’ve not got very much longer left to live; but you’re still young, and there’s a Change coming; I can feel it in the air. The dreadful things that happened at Bolvangar weren’t the end of the story; far from it, they were just the beginning. There are great forces in motion, great deeds waiting to be done and many terrible sacrifices yet to be made. And, in the end, perhaps we’ll be no better off than we were before. But we’re human, you and me, and humans don’t give up ‘til the day they die. We’ve only brushed up against the fringes of the great things that have happened and that will happen, and perhaps that’s all that the likes of you and me can hope to do. We cannot all achieve great things, but we can make sure that the little things we can do really count. What Maggie and you did was important; make no mistake about it. You must see to it that everyone knows that, and you must keep on trying as long as you live to make life better for everyone, and make her proud of you.’
And that is how I comes to write down what you is reading now, ‘cos I wants everybody to know how good and brave and fierce Maggie was and how dear a heart she had.
‘Arthur,’ says Farder Coram, after a pause. ‘Have you thought about what you are going to do after we land?’
‘First we has to take little Stan home to Lambeth, to his mum’s. Then we has to tell her all about Maggie.’ I has to stop talking for a while. ‘Then, I don’t know. Talk to Adèle, I expect. I’m not going back to Limehouse again. We could try to find a job on a farm. I don’t know – I don’t know. We hasn’t thought about it much.’
‘Lord Faa and I have been talking about your future. It’s true, isn’t it, that you never knew who your parents were?’ We nods. ‘Well, Lord Faa and I can clearly see – any gyptian could – that there’s gyptian blood in you. Like me, you have the gyptian insight. It first manifested itself when you saw the golden sparks – the Dust-stream – in the boys’ dormitory. It was the shock of your discovery of the truth about Bolvangar that liberated that power in you. It was Dust that gave you your revelation of Mrs Coulter’s death-fall; Dust that gave you the strength to fight her in the passageway and turn her hatred back upon herself. It’s a rare power and only a very few of us are blessed – or cursed – with it. It lies latent in us and wakens only in exceptional circumstances, or when we learn to focus it ourselves. You have been given a great gift, Arthur. You must learn to use it well.
‘How it was that a gyptian, or half-gyptian, baby came to be left outside the Tottenham workhouse gates we may never know. That’s someone else’s story. But there’re two things you can be sure of. Firstly, that every gyptian in every boat in the land will hear at the next Roping about you and Sal and Maggie and Jimmy, and what you did at Bolvangar, and will honour you for it. And secondly, you’re a part of the great gyptian family now. Wherever you go, wherever there are gyptians, you will be welcomed as a son or a brother or a cousin. When you are ready, Arthur, Sal, come and join us.’
We is not able to say anything. We has a family at last. We needs never be all alone ever again. And at last we understands what Adèle meant about me and the raggle-taggle gyptians, and where my vision of Mrs Coulter’s fall into the endless darkness of the Void came from.
We is sitting in the stern of the ship, leaning out over the side and looking back at the bubbling wake flowing away towards the north, where the Northern Lights flicker and gleam and Maggie and all the kids what lost their daemons lies at rest. And as Farder Coram is speaking we suddenly sees a flare in the north and a great glowing radiance swelling brighter and brighter in the deep blue sky where the Aurora shines, and a brilliant answering beam flashes up to it from the white earth below. The light of it is thrown sparkling up into our eyes by the sea. ‘What is it, Farder Coram?’ we says, overawed. ‘Has the sun fallen down to the earth? Is it angels? Or is it the end of the world?’
‘It is the end,’ he replies, seeing far more than we can, and quivering with fear and joy. ‘Arthur; a dreadful thing has happened on the ice-fields of Svalbard, and there will be a fearful price to pay for it, but it is, finally, the end. The end of the beginning.’
‘A bridge,’ I cries out. ‘It’s a bridge between the worlds. A bridge of light! Farder Coram, there’s a Change coming. I can see it too!’ It’s like before, with Mrs Coulter. The Dust is speaking through me. I sees the truth, and I knows it’s true, but I doesn’t know yet what it means.
We weeps then, me for my poor lost Maggie and my terrible ignorance, and Farder Coram for his terrible knowledge, and for my loss too. We holds each other close and he kisses me again and Sal springs from my shoulder and flies high; high above our heads, calling ‘South! South! South!’ and I whispers ‘We’re going home, Maggie’; and at last, at long, long last, we can face the future unafraid and be at peace.
Philip Pullman has gone on record many times to express his strong dislike of CS Lewis' NARNIAN CHRONICLES. It's certainly easy to read HIS DARK MATERIALS as an anti-Narnian tract, vociferous in its objections to Lewis' use of children's fiction as a means of slipping a Christian message past the “Watchful Dragons” of a predominately secular society.
If HIS DARK MATERIALS is meant to be an antidote to the evangelism of the NARNIAN CHRONICLES then it's most definitely a homeopathic remedy, for it contains within itself many of the ingredients of the CHRONICLES. For example, Lyra finds herself to be of genuinely noble birth, and so does Shasta/Cor in THE HORSE AND HIS BOY, which is my favourite Narnian tale. Both Will and Lyra have previously unsuspected talents revealed in them, and in THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE Peter Pevensie emerges as a great warrior, able to kill Maugrim the wolf with his new sword at the very first attempt. To be fair to both authors, many of these elements are common to all fantasy fiction and fairy tales.
Let's not even consider that in both sagas the act of hiding among fur coats in a cupboard or wardrobe leads a young girl to adventures in other worlds.
No, what I wanted to talk about was this. In both series, most of the people who matter in the plot are already important persons in some way. For example, Lord Asriel, Lord Faa, the Master of Jordan. Or King Peter, Queen Susan, etc. Or Prince Caspian, or King Tirian or the Chevalier Reepicheep. Or King Ogunwe or the Gallivespians, who all seem to have titles of some kind. Even plain Mrs Coulter becomes the Lady Coulter in Asriel's world.
CS Lewis must have been aware of this problem, for in the fourth book in the series, THE SILVER CHAIR, which I consider to be the best of the Narnian tales, the main protagonists are more-or-less ordinary people. Jill, Eustace and Puddleglum the Marshwiggle have no titles, no noble birth or hidden talents, and spend much of the story making mistakes and quarrelling with one another. It's by far the most psychologically realistic of the Narnian stories with a beautiful overarching air of melancholy, which is echoed in the sublime first half of THE LAST BATTLE. And at the end of THE SILVER CHAIR, it’s Puddleglum, the practical, dull, phlegmatic Puddleglum, who commits the vital act which defeats the Green Lady.
There are some ordinary people in HIS DARK MATERIALS, true, but only two – Will Parry and Lee Scoresby – have any real effect on the progress of the story (Mary Malone's influence is debatable.) In writing the ARTHUR stories it was my intention to show how, given a good heart and a dash of courage, even the most downtrodden, flawed and insignificant of us can do something that matters; something that makes a difference.
Arthur’s transcendence and his death-vision of Mrs Coulter are in the tradition of the hero’s revealed hidden power which I mentioned above, but it’s Maggie’s act of courage in standing up to her formidable enemy armed with little more than her own sense of outrage that is the real point at which she – and by extension, all of us – comes to surpass her humble origins and become, if only for a moment, truly heroic. So may all we Puddleglums hope to find, in our own way, our own small share of greatness.
This, after all, is why we tell each other stories.
Jopari, September 2001
COUTTS – You don’t approach this bank to open a current account, they approach you. Or your family has banked with them for the last hundred years or so.
BROWN’S – There are branches in Oxford, Cambridge and Brighton, too.
OXFORD STREET – Arthur and Maggie made a wise choice. Two hundred or so sovereigns wouldn’t have gone very far in South Moulton Street, but Oxford Street is full of mid-priced department stores and they got decent value for their money.
COMMUNITY CHARGE – Also known as the Poll Tax.
WHITECHAPEL – Arthur isn’t posing as a very upmarket detective, then.
ROUND ABOUT A POUND A WEEK – Not long before the Great War, the Fabian Women’s Group surveyed working-class families in Lambeth. They published their results as a Fabian pamphlet in 1912 under the title of Family Life on a Pound a Week, later republished as Round About a Pound a Week. I have borrowed some details from their ground-breaking account of the lives of the labouring urban poor for this story.
MRS TULLIVER – There’s a good reason why Maggie uses her natural father’s surname… Why wasn’t Tulliver at home on a Sunday afternoon? Perhaps he was avoiding Maggie.
THE CLINK – In our world, the prison known as “The Clink”from the 15th century onwards was owned by successive Bishops of Winchester. From the 12th century until its destruction in 1780 its inmates ranged from priests to prostitutes.
CAB SHELTER – On the 6th February 1875, the first Shelter for London Cabmen (in Acacia Rd, St. Johns Wood, London NW8) was officially opened by the Hon Arthur Kinnaird, MP in the presence of one hundred spectators, thirty or forty of whom were cab drivers. The committee of the Cabmen's Shelter Fund reported that by 31st December 1875, thirteen shelters were opened in various parts of the metropolis.
THE BABES IN THE WOOD – Great! They have pantomimes in Lyra’s world. This one is based on the legend of Robin Hood.
DIAMOND – Look in the book Arthur reads in the common-room in Bolvangar.
MRS MARISA COULTER – This is incorrect, of course. The caption should have read Mrs Edward Coulter, as she is a widow. She would only be Mrs Marisa Coulter if she had been divorced.
CAMPERDOWN – We call it Camden.
STARMINSTER – The family may have originated in Starminster Newton, in Dorset.
MARIALEBONE – We call it Marylebone.
THE ZOO – Alas, poor Iorek!
SWISS COTTAGE – The same scurrilous rumours are associated with this harmless suburb in our world. Workaholic Beatle Paul McCartney used to have a flat there so he could put in a few extra hours at the Abbey Road Studios. Lyra’s world may not have had the Beatles. Secular music is not distributed commercially there.
BRUMMAGEM – Birmingham, West Midlands.
LZ-1290 SANTA
MARIA – a homage to, and based upon, the LZ-129 Hindenburg and
her sister ship, LZ-130 Graf Zeppelin II, of our world. I've tried to be faithful to the information
I have been able to discover about the giant airships of the 1930s and their
interior layout.
In our world, the Hindenburg
flew out of Frankfurt-am-Main. It
struck me that Mrs Coulter would prefer to avoid using Hownslow Field – too
public! – and would rather slip away to Bolvangar from Cardington. Cardington was the place in our world where
the ill-fated British airship R-101 was built. The sheds are still there and still in use, but not, alas, by
lighter-than-air craft.
FREDERICK BLOGGS OR
THOMAS ATKINS – Generic names, like John Doe or GI Joe. Thomas Atkins was the example name on
British soldiers’ documents in our world.
TOMMY
I went into a public-‘ouse to get a pint o’ beer,
The publican ‘e up an’ sez, “We serve no red-coats here.”
The girls be’ind the bar they laughed an’ giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an’ to myself sez I:
O it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, go away”;
But it’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins”, when the band begins to play,
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins”, when the band begins to play.
WULFRUN – Our
Wolverhampton, a manufacturing town in the Midlands.
ERCALL COLLEGE –
Geographically related to Wrekin College, a minor English Public School.
SALOPSHIRE – Our
Shropshire. Abbreviated to Salop.
AT THE BACK OF THE
NORTH WIND – By George
Macdonald. As Arthur says, a weird and
wonderful book, steeped in Victorian sentimentality. But I like it very much.
LOST LIFT FROM THE
TAIL – This is ridiculous, and it’s only here because it’s in Northern
Lights/The Golden Compass. It
beggars belief that Lee Scoresby would be able to drag his balloon over to
where the Santa Maria was moored, run a pipe up into the hull and
extract hydrogen from the gas cells without being stopped by the crew of the
airship, the guards or the staff of Bolvangar.
Has Philip Pullman any idea of how long this job would take? Balloons are normally filled from
high-pressure gas cylinders. The gas in
the ballonets in the Santa Maria would have been at or near to
atmospheric pressure. Lee would have
needed a pump, presumably gas-engine powered, to transfer it to his
balloon. And anyway, Arthur’s
right. The crew would have cast off at
the first sign of fire on the ground.
We know that Lee’s
balloon can carry Iorek Byrnison, who weighs two tons in his armour, plus Lee
and Hester, two children and a load of gear.
Estimating the total at 3 tons give us an approximate diameter of sixty
feet for his balloon and a gas capacity of around 110,000 cubic feet. That’s quite a lot of gas! Even so, the Hindenburg had a
capacity of 6,000,000 cubic feet and even a modest vessel, such as Philip
Pullman might have had in mind, may have been rated at, say, 1,000,000 cubic
feet. Filling Lee’s balloon would have
taken only11% of the gas of such an airship, or looking at it another way,
three tons of lift.