Seventeen

The French Teacher

The Villa Victor Hugo in Hüseyn Javid Prospekt was a grand building with an ornate marble facade, which might once have housed a government ministry or the embassy of some imperial power, but which had clearly fallen on smaller times; it had been divided into apartments and offices, and it shared its grounds with a nursery school.

“Who is this man Horace Green?” Ionides asked as they stood looking up at the slightly dingy entrance. “How you know him?”

“I saw his name in someone’s address book. We have something in common, and I thought he might help. But I ought to go alone, just me and Asta. Can you wait for us? Look, there’s a café over there.”

“You need help, you come running out and I finish my coffee briskly. Or briskish, anyway.”

A concierge directed Lyra to the second floor, by way of the oak-paneled lift. Number 23 was one of four doors on that landing. It was ten o’clock, which Lyra thought would be a respectable time to call on anyone.

She rang the bell. Half a minute went by, and then the door opened a little way. A man’s face, bespectacled, middle-aged, bald, cautious, looked at her for a few moments, then down at Asta; he looked at Lyra again, and his eyes widened. He took a deep breath and nodded slowly before taking off the security chain and opening the door fully. He had no dæmon.

He said something in Persian, Lyra thought, and she said in English, “Sorry. You have an English name, and I thought…”

He nodded. “You’re English too? Are you looking for French lessons?”

“No. Is that what you do?”

“I teach French, yes. But most of my students are Azerbaijani or Persian. I…I think I can guess why you’re here. Come in, come in.”

She followed him into the living room, Asta at her heels.

“The clavicula, yes,” she said, holding up the little black book. “Do you remember a man called Roderick Hassall? He would have come this way…oh, last year sometime.”

“Yes, indeed. Is that his?”

She let him flick through. He found his own name, and looked at several others.

Then he said, “Oh, do forgive me. Please. Sit down—let me make you some coffee—or tea?”

“That’s kind of you. Coffee, please. My name is Lyra Silvertongue, by the way.”

“Lyra Silvertongue. Interesting name. And…” He looked at Asta.

“This is Asta. It’s a bit complicated. She’s the dæmon of a friend of mine, who’s now traveling with my dæmon, Pantalaimon. I…Are you busy at the moment? I don’t want to interrupt if you have a student coming. But it’s not easy to explain quickly.”

“No students today,” he said with what might have been a sigh. “I’ve got time.”

He busied himself with water and coffee and cups in the kitchen while Lyra and Asta looked around. It was the apartment of a reading man, probably single; just on the decent side of shabby, just on the friendly side of untidy. Bookshelves overflowed; a table by the window carried papers and dictionaries; a mandolin hung from a peg on a red ribbon. There were some photograms on the mantelpiece, showing a young woman, then the same woman a little older, but there was no sign of her presence elsewhere in the room.

Asta jumped up beside Lyra on the sofa and murmured, “Nice man. Romantic.”

“The photograms?”

“The mandolin.”

Green came back with a tray and set it down on the low table between the sofa and an armchair.

“Mr…. er, Dr. Hassall,” he said, “did he give you that book, his clavicula?”

“No. He was murdered. It was with other things in his rucksack.”

“Murdered…?” He was genuinely shocked. “Where…how…?”

“It’s probably best if I tell you everything in order,” Lyra said.

“Yes. Yes. How awful…My God.”

“I think I ought to begin by explaining how Pan, he’s my dæmon, got separated from me in the first place. I had to go somewhere to…to keep a promise, and it was somewhere he couldn’t go, so there was nothing I could do, but…I hated doing it.”

“I understand. Go on.”

And Asta said, “I was separated in the same kind of way. I mean, my person, Malcolm Polstead, had rescued Lyra in a flood, when she was a baby, and he had to do something dangerous while I stayed to look after her. And since then we’ve been separated. It was horrible but we had to.”

Horace Green was a good listener. Lyra took a few moments to sort it out in her mind, and then began with Hassall’s death. As the story unfolded she felt like a musician, playing a piece that she knew by heart, knowing both where she was and where she was going, and holding back a little here to make a more effective change in pace there, seeing the span of music to come, taking her time but wasting none, including a detail at this point so it would make its effect more strongly later, cutting out a detail that wouldn’t help. It was the first time she’d ever experienced that about herself—except that of course there were all those childish years of tale-telling and lying and making things up that had gone into the making of this new and entirely adult sense of herself as an artist.

It took over an hour, and two refillings of the coffeepot, and Horace Green listened intently to everything.

“Well,” he said when she came to the moment she rang the bell of the Villa Victor Hugo. “Poor Hassall. I shall have to cross his name out of my clavicula. I liked him; he’d clearly been through a lot, though he didn’t tell me much.”

“Sebastian Makepeace the alchemist never explained to Pan, to my dæmon, what clavicula means, or the other word: adiumenti. I just had to find out on the way.”

“It means a little key to help, or to assist, that sort of thing. Every name in here is someone who’s lost their dæmon, or is able to separate: someone who understands. You’re lucky to have this one,” he said, taking up the little book from the table and flicking through it.

“How did you lose your dæmon? I was told by someone that it’s not impolite to ask.”

“My wife and I were walking in the Alps,” he said. “Our dæmons were both birds. We thought no one had ever been happier. Then one day a hawk—some kind of sparrowhawk, something we’d never seen before—snatched her dæmon out of the air, and my Bellissa flew up to defend him; but my wife died at once from the shock, and her dæmon vanished, and Bellissa was torn out of my heart as the hawk took her instead. She must be alive, because I am, but I’ve never managed to find her, and my wife is dead.”

“Both gone at once,” Lyra said quietly.

They sat for a few moments without speaking.

Then he said, “What is it that you came to ask? How can I help you?”

“With anything you know. Anything you’ve heard about the desert of Karamakan, or about a group called the ‘men from the mountains.’ Or…anything about Oakley Street.”

Lyra hadn’t mentioned Oakley Street in her story: it was one of the things that would have got in the way. There was no reason why Horace Green would have heard of it, but when she said the name, he raised his head sharply. Asta moved to the arm of the sofa and sat upright.

“Oakley Street?” he said.

“Do you know the name?”

“It rings a bell, but…” He shook his head. “Where is it?”

“In London. Chelsea.”

“Someone spoke of it once, but I only overheard it; he was talking to someone else. But I don’t think it had anything to do with Chelsea. Perhaps there’s an Oakley Street somewhere else. What’s your interest in it?”

“I think…It probably means something apart from the address. You know, as if there was a famous oratory or something there, and when people said ‘Oakley Street’ you knew they were referring to ‘St. Benedict’s’ or whatever it was. Or like ‘Whitehall’ meaning ‘the civil service.’ But I don’t know what it could be. Maybe it’s not important at all. I just heard someone mention it once. Like you.”

“Yes,” he said. “Curious, though. It was someone at an embassy party, not that I get invited to many of those. There was a man who was asking about the poste restante, because he was expecting a message from Oakley Street, and the man he was talking to pursed his lips and shook his head, very slightly. I couldn’t help noticing. And from what I’d heard about that man, the second one, I think he might have had something to do with intelligence. You know: spying. But I didn’t know for certain, and it was all over in a second. But…” He shrugged. “What was the other thing…the men in the mountains?”

“From the mountains. Some sort of religious group.”

“No, sorry,” he said, sighing. “Not much help, I’m afraid. I live a quiet life here. I read the papers, but I seem to read them less and less these days.”

“Oh, and there was one more thing. Have you heard the word alkahest?”

“Interesting word…Is it Arabic?”

“I don’t know. ‘The destroyer of bonds’…That was a phrase that came with it.”

“I’m intrigued. Let me look it up.”

He took down one of a number of large and shabby volumes from an old encyclopedia.

“ ‘Alkahest’…Here we are. It’s a term from alchemy: ‘the universal solvent imagined by the alchemists…A material sought by the alchemists, which would dissolve every other.’ There’s more here, but it doesn’t add much. Perhaps because they never actually discovered it. That’s your destroyer of bonds. Atomic bonds, I expect, among others.”

“Thank you,” said Lyra. “I’m not sure I understand, really, but…Anyway, at least I know a bit more.”

“Is it something you’re looking for?” he said, replacing the volume on the shelf.

“I suppose I am. But I don’t know why.”

“Where are you off to next?”

“East, and further east. But the sea’s in the way, so…”

“There are regular ferries. Three times a week. To Krasnovodsk, I believe, and further if the captain feels like it, or someone pays him. And then?”

“Oh, then—just further on. Do you know about Mustafa Bey? Have you heard that name?”

“Goodness, yes. He’s an important man. Never met him. Mind you, I don’t suppose he’s interested in learning French. Probably speaks it already. Very rich, very influential. Why do you ask about him?”

“We came here from Aleppo on a bus owned by his company. It was very comfortable. I was wondering if his buses went further east.”

“I don’t know,” said Green. “Sorry.”

“Can I ask you something?” said Asta, from the arm of the sofa. Lyra had noticed her moving there when she mentioned Oakley Street, and she was aware of the dæmon’s attention. So was Green.

“Of course,” he said. “I don’t know if I’ll know the answer, but I can try.”

“Gryphons. What do you know about them?”

He was surprised by that. He blinked and passed his hand over his head. “Well…Hardly anything. They do exist, I suppose, but they have very little to do with human beings…You can see them occasionally in the high mountains, I understand, though I never have. They belong to that class of things in the wild parts of the world that are half myth and half verifiable. But they belong to a different realm really, a different kind of being, different order of things…I don’t know who would have any knowledge of them. Most people, most educated people, wouldn’t talk about them, in the way people don’t talk about ghosts or apparitions. You’d be thought a bit odd.”

“Thank you,” said Asta.

“Why do you ask?”

“We saw one.”

“Ah,” he said. He smiled politely.

Lyra said, “I think it’s time we left you to your work. I’m sure you’ve got lessons to prepare. Are your students young, mostly, or sort of university age?”

“Some schoolchildren being prepared for exams. A few adults with time on their hands taking an interest in French culture. A number of businesspeople eager to trade in French-speaking countries. A mixture.”

She stood up and shook his hand. A melancholy man, she thought, and Pan would have agreed.

Green showed them out, and on the way downstairs Asta said, “A kindly man, haunted by his loss. Courageous. Pity he couldn’t tell us very much.”

“Oh, I think he did,” said Lyra.

Outside, they waited to cross the busy road and found Ionides reading a Persian-language newspaper on the café terrace. He saw her coming but didn’t look up.

“Take no notice of me,” he said quietly as she came close. “Go inside. Stay for five minutes and then come out and meet me further down that way.”

A brief nod indicated the direction of the city center. She made no sign but walked straight past and into the café, which was also a boulangerie and sweetshop. She pretended to take a great deal of time choosing what she wanted, and finally paid for a small pastry and left unhurriedly to stroll down the Hüseyn Javid Prospekt.

“He saw someone watching,” said Asta.

“I couldn’t look around, though. Did you notice anyone hanging about?”

“From where I am, no. It’s too busy to tell.”

Lyra kept looking ahead and across the road to her left, moving her head as little as possible. Once she stopped to look into a dress shop window, though she was really studying the reflection of people behind her. Then she walked on slowly. About a quarter of a mile down the street, she saw a crossing with traffic lights. The light was green, and the road was busy, so there were four or five people waiting to cross.

One of them was Ionides. Lyra and Asta got to the light just before it changed. He didn’t look around, and they followed him across and down the narrow street on the other side.

He stopped outside a bookshop and looked at the display in the window. Lyra did the same.

“Your Green man any good, this French professor?” he said.

“Interesting, but indirectly. Is there someone following us?”

“Yes. Watching the house. When you go in, he make a note and waited. A long time, Miss Silver.”

“Was he still there when we came out?”

“Yes. He make another note. But he didn’t follow you or me to here. He stay there. Maybe watching your Green man.”

“I hope he’s safe…Mr. Ionides, where should we go for the poste restante? Do you think there’d be one main post office?”

“Best place to start. You think there would be something for you?”

“No harm in asking.”

“As Miss Silver, or as Queen Tatiana?”

Lyra looked at him, and laughed. “I hadn’t thought of that. I’d better be both.”

“You need papers, whatever name you say.”

“I’ve got Mustafa Bey’s laissez-passer for Queen Tatiana, but I’ve only been a queen since then.”

“You’ll only have one chance,” Asta pointed out. “You can’t go on giving different names till you get the right one. Anyway, who would possibly send you anything here in Baku?”

“Hmm,” she said. “You never know. Worth a try, though. Let’s find the post office. Then we’ll get tickets for the ferry.”

“Ferry to where?” said Ionides.

“Wherever it goes. Across the sea, that’s the main thing. Krasnovodsk, said Mr. Green. What would you advise?”

“Let me think. We go to post office first, then we decide.”

How could anyone have sent her a letter? Lyra thought. It was a silly idea. But the mention of Oakley Street kept coming back to her, and the sense that things were connected in a secret commonwealth way, a way that wasn’t simply cause and effect. As they walked through the busy streets on the way to where Ionides thought the post office was, she was simultaneously anxious and excited. It felt as if she’d been working through some complicated problem in mathematics, and sensed that the answer was close, but she wasn’t able to see it yet. Or imagine it, she thought; and she wanted very badly to talk to Pan again about imagining things.

But if she let herself dwell on her missing dæmon, and his quest for her imagination, she’d sink into a whirlpool of self-reproach and fear and unhappiness. Swim clear, she thought. Move away from that pull in the water. Trust the world, but swim clear.

The main post office stood at the edge of a large square where the traffic was heavy. They had to wait for the lights to change before they could cross the street.

“Well?” said Asta as they stood at the entrance. “Who are you going to be?”

“Actually I’d better be the queen. She’s the only one I’ve got papers for.”

“I wait over there,” said Ionides, and went to a nearby newsstand.

If they had the time, Lyra was sure that Ionides could find someone to forge new papers in whatever name she chose. But for now she had to be the queen and accept all the difficulties that brought, such as the problem now of finding the right counter in the main hall among the welter of signs in three different scripts.

She crouched down and said to Asta, “I’ll have to lift you up again because I can’t read the signs…I’m sorry.”

Asta leapt up to her shoulder and Lyra stood. It still felt strange to have another person’s dæmon so close, like an intimacy; it made her feel almost shy. But Asta, who had Malcolm’s knowledge of languages, simply looked around for a moment or two and then said, “Over to the left—the counter where the woman in the red coat’s waiting.”

“Thanks,” said Lyra, and crouched to let her down again.

She went to stand in line behind the woman, whose dæmon was a greenfinch, staring down curiously at Asta and whispering something into the woman’s ear. The woman was about to turn, but the assistant came back to the counter with a handful of letters for her. She took them and signed a receipt and then left, ignoring the chirping of her dæmon, who was plainly agitated by the idea that Lyra and Asta were not one person.

But Lyra moved to take her place and put her laissez-passer from Mustafa Bey on the counter. The assistant adjusted his glasses and bent to read it, and then looked up at Lyra, who put a lifetime of effrontery into the calm assurance with which she gazed back.

“Ah,” the assistant said, and inclined his head uncertainly, so she rewarded him with an inquiring smile and spread her hands.

He murmured something she couldn’t hear and turned to ask a supervisor. Lyra took the paper and folded it away into her pocket, and then had to take it out again and show it to the older man who came back with him. He spoke to her, but Lyra didn’t have to understand; it was clear what he wanted. He read Mustafa Bey’s words reverentially and then said something sharp to the assistant, who hurried away.

The supervisor, half bowing, uttered a sentence or two to Lyra, who nodded and smiled with kindly understanding. Then she withdrew her attention from him and gazed around at the architecture, the marble columns, the arched windows, the mosaics on the ceiling illustrating the speed and reliability of the Azerbaijani postal service.

The assistant came back, and he was carrying a small parcel, to Lyra’s astonishment. But she showed no expression, and bent to sign the bottom of the form the supervisor laid on the counter, and then took the parcel from him. She checked the name: it was certainly addressed to Her Majesty Queen Tatiana Iorekova, in a clear and practiced hand. It was surprisingly heavy, and it had been packaged with professional care and sealed with string and sealing wax.

“Merci, messieurs,” she said, and accepted the bows of the assistant and the supervisor. The man behind her in the queue watched curiously. Lyra ignored them all and sauntered elegantly to the big door, where a man was bowing as he held it open.

“Well,” said Asta as they went to join Ionides at the newsstand. “I’m impressed.”

“Wonderful what you can get away with if you’ve got a piece of paper from Mustafa Bey.”

“They have something for the queen?” said Ionides quietly. “Very good. You got a pocket? Put it in without showing anyone what you doing. Now I walk on that side and keep close.”

“Is there someone following us?” Lyra said, and slipped the package unobtrusively, she hoped, into the left pocket of her skirt. She couldn’t begin to guess what it was, or who had sent it, or why, but they had to move now, because Ionides said, “Two men. They watch you go in, they wait for you to come out. Stay close.”

He moved forward at a leisurely pace and she went with him, Asta close by her heels, and Ionides’s own gecko dæmon on his shoulders, facing behind. Lyra could feel the weight of the little package against her thigh.

In the center of the square was a statue of a warrior on horseback, which seemed to be an established meeting place for the citizens of Baku. There were benches on an area of grass, and flower beds, and a kiosk selling drinks and food. Ionides pointed across the road to it.

“If we sit there we can look all around,” he said. “You hungry, Miss Silver?”

“I had a pastry, but it was insubstantial. Wispy.”

Lyra stopped at the first traffic light, Ionides close on her left, and waited with half a dozen other pedestrians.

“Are they anywhere near?” she murmured.

The gecko dæmon said, “They are close by, watching. They will cross with us when the light changes.”

Lyra said, just loudly enough for Ionides and Asta to hear, “Then we’ll walk more slowly than these other people and partway across we’ll change our minds and suddenly turn and run back. On my signal. They don’t stay red for long.”

“Miss Silver…” Ionides began, but the lights changed at that moment, and the small group of pedestrians began to move off the pavement.

Lyra went with them, Ionides close at her side, and the two men came with the rest. When they were three-quarters of the way across she said “Now!” and turned and ran back. Asta darted ahead of her. Ionides followed without hesitating.

The two men, though, were caught by surprise. At first they stood still, and made as if to follow Lyra, but then seemed to realize that they’d give themselves away by doing so, and hesitated; and by then the lights had changed, and the traffic was already surging forward, and they had to rush for the nearest sidewalk—and found themselves cut off from their quarry.

“Very good, Miss Silver,” said Ionides. “Now we get away before they can cross back.”

They turned down the nearest street out of the square, and then turned right into a smaller street, and then left into another busy shopping street, where a bus was pulling into a stop.

“Let’s get on,” said Lyra.

So they did, together with three other people. Ionides asked the driver something, and paid for them both, and then they found seats near the door.

“Queen Silver, you very lucky,” he said. “You know where this is going? The Marine Passenger Terminal.”

“Couldn’t be better,” she said.

“You still got your package from the post?”

“Of course.”

As the bus pulled away, she and Ionides, and Asta, and the gecko dæmon all looked around to see if there was anyone who might have been following them, but there was no one who looked in the slightest bit suspicious.

Lyra took out the little package, with its string and sealing wax. She was intensely curious.

“You know who send it?” said Ionides.

“No idea. It’s addressed to the queen, so I suppose it can only be Mustafa Bey, really.”

She looked closely at the impression on the sealing wax, and then compared it with the mark he’d made with his ring on her laissez-passer. It was the same: two Arabic letters elegantly entwined.

“Same, huh?”

“Yes. I’ll have to break the seal to open it, but that’s the point, I suppose. Pity. It’s so neatly done.”

The bus was moving through the heavy traffic. Lyra cracked the sealing wax and peeled it away, and found a complicated knot in the string underneath it. As she prized one strand away from another with her nails, Ionides watched the street, and the passengers who got on, and the buildings nearby, and the progress she was making.

“You want to cut it?” he said.

“No. Might need the string. Nearly got it.”

“Malcolm would keep it too,” said Asta.

The last loop in the knot came undone, and she pulled it apart and tucked the string in her shirt pocket. She unfolded the brown paper and found another package inside, which had been addressed to Miss Lyra Silvertongue, c/o Mustafa Bey, Marletto’s Café, Aleppo.

The bus came to a halt. Four passengers got off, and three got on. Lyra found a note with the inner package, marked in red ink with Mustafa Bey’s seal:

Your Majesty, Whoever sent this package to you in my care is a person of great ingenuity and faith, which I trust will be rewarded when you open it. I hope your journey to Baku was comfortable. With solemn regards, Mustafa Bey

“I must write him a report,” Lyra said. “As soon as we’re safely on the ferry.”

The inner package was sealed with tape, not sealing wax, and the address was written in heavy black ink. There was no return address. Something about the way it had been wrapped and addressed made Lyra think it had been done in haste. It took her so long to peel back the tape that the bus came to a halt before she had unwrapped the paper, and Ionides said quietly, “Better put it away. This is the ferry terminal.”

The other passengers were all getting to their feet and gathering their possessions. Several of them seemed to be going to the ferry, because they had suitcases or rucksacks, and there was a mother with two small children who had to edge her way towards the door carrying a folded pushchair as well as a heavy case. A man offered to help carry the case, but she shook her head nervously. One of the children was crying, and the man spoke again, and the mother, anxious and flustered, unwillingly let him carry the pushchair. The passengers behind were jostling impatiently; the driver was looking back to see what the holdup was; Lyra tucked the package into her rucksack and sat back to wait till they could move.

Two minutes later all the other passengers had left, and Lyra and Asta and Ionides were standing outside the terminal of the Transcaspian Modern Ferry Company, and the unopened package lay safely in her rucksack.