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  THE GOLDEN COMPASS, Philip Pullman

  THE SUBTLE KNIFE, Philip Pullman

  For three of my keenest readers:

  my daughter-in-law, Kathryn Waugh, née Hamill,

  my cousin, Patricia Charlton,

  and my friend, Elizabeth Victor

  1. The Fight

  2. At Home at Number 13 Merrivale 6

  3. Mrs. Dalrymple

  4. Belthorp Primary

  5. A Walk in the Snow

  6. Nothing but the Truth

  7. Conspirators

  8. End of Term

  9. The Journey to Casselton

  10. Walgate Hill

  11. The Accident

  12. In the Hospital

  13. Investigations Under Way

  14. Night Thoughts

  15. Saturday Morning

  16. What Happened to Patrick?

  17. Finding a Way

  18. Hitching a Lift

  19. Catching a Train

  20. A Visitor

  21. Gibson's Pharmacy

  22. The Scott Monument

  23. Sunday in Edinburgh

  24. “Little Boy Lost”

  25. At Dead of Night

  26. Six Days to Go

  27. Publicity

  28. A Buzz in Belthorp

  29. Visiting Time

  30. Secrets

  31. Who Is Thomas Derwent?

  32. What Mickey Knew

  33. Christmas Eve

  34. The Broadcast and After

  35. Christmas Day

  36. The Feast of Stephen

  37. The Last Chapter

  Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night

  Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to flight:

  And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught

  The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.

  The Rub áiy át of Omar Khayy ám

  translated by Edward Fitzgerald

  The village of Belthorp lay sleeping like the little town of Bethlehem under the dark December sky. In the streets, not a soul was stirring. The inn sign creaked as it swayed in a light breeze. A solitary cat stepped delicately along the stone wall in front of the Merrivale cottages. There were no watchers in the night, unless the twinkling stars were all gazing down on this little bit of England.

  Then, suddenly, the peace was shattered.

  A fire engine sped into the village from the south, hurtled along the main street, and shot out up the hillside to the north. Its siren, hee-hawing through the silent night, woke up most of the villagers. And some of them were none too pleased!

  “Three o'clock in the ruddy morning!” growled Sam Swanson, the newsagent, thinking of his own early start. “What a time to be making all that racket! Who do they think's goin' to get in their way? I've a mind to report them. I'm sure it's against the rules. And if it's not, it dang well should be!”

  His sons, Philip and Anthony, were hanging out of their bedroom window in the flat above the shop, eager to see whatever could be seen. Their mother came in and chased them back to bed after slamming down the window to shut out the freezing cold.

  Philip yawned but grumbled, “I bet Donnie's up watching. I bet his mam isn't sending him back to bed.”

  “Well, your mam is,” said Mrs. Swanson. “I don't want to hear another sound from this room.”

  Thomas Derwent must have been the only child in the village who slept through it all, though the engine passed right in front of his house, just below his window. Thomas had a time for sleeping and a time for waking, and nothing ever stood in the way of that routine. He had never been taught to wake up in the middle of the night. It had not been part of his training. By day he must observe. By night he was to sleep, as children do.

  Next day all of the village children, except Thomas, were tired at breakfast, but not too tired to perk up and gossip on their way to school. The fire of the night before was their only topic. Jackson's barn, the oldest for miles around, with a roof that had lasted three hundred years and housed many generations of owls and owlets, had gone up in flames.

  “I saw it all,” said Donald Justice triumphantly. “I put me coat on over me pajamas and made me dad take me up to see it on his motorbike. He didn't want to go at first, but I can talk him into anything. An' it was better than Bonfire Night. There was flames and smoke everywhere. An' we saw two owls flying out through the smoke.”

  Philip Swanson looked at his friend sourly.

  “You'll be saying next that you're glad it happened. You'll be saying next you done it.”

  But Donnie wasn't prepared to go as far as that. Young as he was, he had the sense to realize that what had happened was awful. His freckled face reddened to the roots of his pale ginger hair.

  “Don't you dare say I'd do anything like that, Phil Swanson,” he said. “Just don't you dare!”

  He glared at Philip and raised a threatening fist.

  “Yah!” said Philip. “Yah! Yah! Di yah! Yah!” while he thought of something nastier to say.

  By the time they reached the school gates, the quarrel was ready to turn to fisticuffs. They stood in the gateway facing each other. A crowd quickly gathered round.

  Thomas Derwent watched them all and wondered how it had started and what would happen next. He still didn't know what Donnie was supposed to have done. It was important to find out. Then he heard a shocked little girl on the outside of the crowd saying to her friend, “Donnie done the barn fire last night!”

  “If you didn't do it, Donnie,” said Philip, poking a finger into his friend's shoulder, “then I bet it was your dad. It was sparks from that old motorbike of his.”

  “Right!” roared Donnie. “That's done it! You'll get what you're asking for.”

  He lunged toward Philip, fists clenched and flying.

  But the fight got no further than that. Beside the gate was an iron manhole settled unevenly in the ground. It had always been there, but Donnie, in his temper, forgot to notice it. One toe stubbed against the rim. The boy lost his balance and went crashing forward, stretching out his hands to save himself.

  He fell full length. His nose started to bleed and his palms filled with grit. Then he began to cry, loudly and savagely, with pain and anger.

  At that moment Miss Kershaw came round the corner riding her bicycle. She heard the cries, stopped with a sigh, and thought ruefully, Thus beginneth another bright day!

  “Come along, Donnie,” she said after she'd got the boy to his feet and checked his injuries. “You're not dead yet, not by a long chalk. We'll soon get you put to rights.”

  She turned to the group standing there, selected Nigel, a trustworthy boy from the top class, and said, “Here, Nigel, take my bike round to the shed and padlock it. And you, Philip, had better come with Donnie and me. He'll be happier if you're with him.”

  The teacher led them both away to the main entrance, sacred to teachers and special dispensations.

  The other children dispersed by twos and threes, girls toward one side door, boys to the other.

 
Only Thomas Derwent lingered by the gate. He was waiting for his own best friend to arrive. Thomas was bewildered. What was true and what was lies? How could friends be so nasty to each other? Observing was all very well, but understanding was often much too difficult. Five years of watching and listening, growing older and wiser, still left areas beyond his grasp. People are so very peculiar.

  I'll have to ask Mickey, he thought. This is a bit I should really try to understand before I write it down.

  “How did the day go?” said Patrick Derwent. He sat back in his armchair, ready to read the evening paper. Outside, it was a crisp and chilly winter's evening. Inside, the fire glowed in the hearth and all was snug.

  His son, to whom this question was addressed, was sitting at the table by the window, an exercise book open in front of him, light from the Anglepoise lamp shining down onto the page. Thomas was chewing the end of his pen, thinking what he should write next. He looked across at his father impatiently.

  “I'm writing it all down,” he said. “It wasn't much different from any other day. Only Donald Justice fell down and made his nose bleed. Miss Kershaw mopped it up for him and got him to stop crying. And before that there was nearly a fight. And the boys woke up in the middle of the night when they heard the fire engine.”

  “But you,” said Patrick very deliberately, “how did the day go for you ? You may not realize this, but I have often thought it was unfair to make you see life as one long report. You've been so good about it, even from being a six-year-old, struggling to tell everything in a six-year-old's words. In all our time here, never a day missed, never a grumble. I'm proud of you.”

  Thomas looked at his father curiously. It seemed such an odd way to talk after all this time. Thomas was eleven years old and he and his father had lived together, just the two of them, in this comfy cottage for five years now. To be honest, Thomas could hardly remember the Other Place. He had been Thomas Derwent for such a long time. The face he saw in the mirror was a familiar one—straight, fine black hair; small, bright dark eyes; a mouth for smiling and a chin already firm. In stature, he was slight enough to be bullied, but nobody ever bullied him.

  “I don't mind writing it all down,” he said, gesturing with his slim hand toward the book in front of him. “I've always done it, haven't I? Mostly I quite like doing it. Though I still don't know what it's for. In a way I suppose I can guess, but it doesn't seem important enough.”

  Patrick smiled at his son.

  “You don't need to know,” he said, “but do believe me, what you are doing is very important. Think of it as part of an enormous jigsaw, your own special contribution. It is what you are here for. I'm just sorry you had to miss your childhood years in Ormingat. Someday I'll make it up to you.”

  He did not say “when we go home,” but his words kindled in Thomas an uneasy suspicion that that was what he meant. The Other Place might be home to Patrick, but Belthorp was the only home that Thomas knew—or wanted to know, if it came to that.

  Now all of that was to change. He knew nothing for sure, but his father's words sounded a warning.

  His suspicions made it hard to concentrate. The pen on the page struggled to tell the story of the day, that particular day, in every detail, including the playground fight, the mental arithmetic lesson, the mystery spelling test, and the fact that Mickey Trent was off “bad”—crossed out—no, “ill.”

  Patrick turned the pages in the local paper regretfully. For him, leaving Belthorp should have been just another move, but he too had become used to the place and the people, settled there, willing to take root. It was something he had been warned about at the very start. But warnings don't confer immunity. Patrick read details of the Christmas bazaar to be held in the village hall, then the story of a dog lost down a pothole … and he decided, uncomfortably, to put off for another day telling Thomas the news of their impending departure. It was not quite urgent yet.

  “I see Jackson's barn has burned down,” he said after reading a few more paragraphs. “We'll have a walk up there on Saturday to see the damage.”

  “I know about that,” said Thomas eagerly. “Phil Swanson said at school today that Donald Justice done it. They were fighting and that's when Donnie fell and bled his nose.”

  “Did it,” said Patrick automatically, “and made his nose bleed.”

  Then it came to him that such lessons were pointless. Soon he and Thomas would not need to speak any sort of English at all. He was weary and his weariness showed in his face, making him look younger and more vulnerable.

  “Write it down anyway,” he said. “It is all part of the account.”

  Thomas eyed his father quizzically. At that moment he felt suddenly afraid, as if his father knew something and was not telling. But no more was said.

  At bedtime Patrick came to tuck him up and put out the light.

  “Nallytan, Tonitheen ban,” he said, gently stroking the dark hair back from the boy's forehead.

  “Nallytan, Vateelin mesht,” said Thomas, using the one phrase he remembered from the language of the Other Place.

  It will all come back to him, thought Vateelin as he closed the bedroom door. There was much that, of necessity, Tonitheen had forgotten; but what is forgotten can soon be recalled. Till then, they would be Patrick and Thomas, ordinary, unnoticeable inhabitants of Earth.

  Without Mrs. Dalrymple life would not have been so comfortable for the Derwents.

  They had arrived in Belthorp five years before, later than expected and somewhat bewildered by delays and detours. This turned out to be for the best. In fact, a day later would have been even better. Whoever had arranged for their home to be furnished had failed to meet their deadline. So the Derwents had entered an empty house and spent their first night sleeping on the floor, the father hopefully reassuring his young son that the system would not fail them—the furniture would be there next day. And, surprisingly, it was.

  The Derwents first met their new neighbor as they passed each other in the doorway of the village post office. They introduced themselves and then stood talking on the pavement, just across the way from Merrivale, the terrace of stone cottages with tiny front gardens and white-framed windows that was now home to all of them.

  “I see you've moved in next door to me,” said Mrs. Dalrymple, nodding over toward her own house. A furniture van was still parked there, the removal men just closing up the tailboard and preparing to leave.

  Patrick smiled quite shyly. By his side stood Thomas, small, dark, and slightly built. Father and son did not resemble one another. Patrick was tall and broadshouldered. His eyes were blue-gray, his hair thick, springy, and very light brown.

  This lack of a resemblance was something that their new neighbor glancingly remarked upon.

  “He'll take after his mother, I think,” she said, smiling down at the six-year-old.

  Patrick realized what she meant and said softly, “His mother died when he was a baby, but, yes, there is a likeness.”

  “Oh, I am sorry,” said Mrs. Dalrymple in the same soft tone. “Had I thought, I would not have been so tactless.”

  Thomas was looking at the cobblestones beneath his feet, edging the toe of one sandal round the grooves and taking no notice of the grown-ups above him. It was only their third day in this place and everything was still a wonder to him.

  Patrick noted his son's lack of interest in their conversation and was glad of it.

  “You couldn't know, Mrs. Dalrymple,” he said. “It happened a long time ago. Please don't worry.”

  Stella Dalrymple found herself feeling sorry for them. A motherless child, a young widower, together in strange surroundings. Stella was a widow herself, childless and living alone. But she had been born in Belthorp and had lived in her cottage at number 12 Merrivale for over twenty years, ever since her husband's death had brought her home to the village of her birth. Life had left her neither poor nor lonely. That is the prize for being self-sufficient. Yet there is always something left over, a wish to
give.

  The newcomers at number 13 both seemed to her to be in need of mothering.

  “If I can be of any help,” she said, “you know where I am.”

  Thomas caught Mrs. Dalrymple's words and looked up doubtfully at his father. The expression seemed somehow useful. Things that were possible to know must also be possible not to know.

  “I don't know where I am,” he said, as if trying out the words for size.

  He looked so serious and so sweet as he spoke that both the grown-ups laughed lightly, and Patrick stooped to take one hand in his.

  “You'll soon get used to us,” said their new neighbor. “This is Belthorp, not Timbuctu.”

  Patrick and Mrs. Dalrymple went on talking for what seemed ages. Thomas grew impatient and then had a real need to go indoors. He looked up at his father and wondered shyly what to say, then settled on what he thought best.

  “Say goodbye to the lady,” he whispered urgently, hitching on one foot and squeezing his father's hand tightly.

  Mrs. Dalrymple heard him and laughed.

  “I think your son's trying to tell you something,” she said. “We'll have to talk again.”

  “I'm sure we will,” said Patrick. “I look forward to it.”

  Over the next five years, Belthorp was Thomas Derwent's whole world and Stella Dalrymple became one of the most loved and most important people in it. She was older than his father but not grandmotherly. Her coppery, wavy hair had little trace of gray in it and her kind face was no more than lightly lined.

  Within a fortnight of the Derwents' moving into number 13 Merrivale, she had become child minder and home help to the family next door; for a family is a family even if there are only two persons in it. It was she who turned their house into a warm and friendly home.

  Her new job suited her very well. It did not interfere with her part-time job at Shotten Plastics, where she worked in the office, mornings only. The Derwents needed her in the afternoons and early evening. The arrangement, at Patrick's insistence, was formalized. “Fair's fair,” he had said with his usual shy smile.

  So Mrs. Dalrymple acquired an extra income, though that was not a prime concern. Above all, she found joy in the work. The Derwents in turn could not but appreciate the treasure that they had found. Mrs. Dalrymple was no fussy-body, harassing and disturbing them. She was cool, calm, and very efficient.