The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage: Chapters 1–5

Three miles up the river Thames from the center of Oxford, some distance from where the great colleges of Jordan, Gabriel, Balliol, and two dozen others contended for mastery in the boat races, out where the city was only a collection of towers and spires in the distance over the misty levels of Port Meadow, there stood the Priory of Godstow, where the gentle nuns went about their holy business; and on the opposite bank from the priory there was an inn called the Trout.

There was a saloon bar where the gentry, if college scholars count as gentry, took their ale and smoked their pipes...

He was eleven years old, with an inquisitive, kindly disposition, a stocky build, and ginger hair.

He ignored that for a long time, but finally rat-formed Asta leapt at Alice’s scrawny jackdaw dæmon, knocking him into the washing-up water and then biting and biting the sodden creature till Alice screamed for pity.

He especially enjoyed the conversations he overheard, whether they concerned the venal rascality of the River Board, the helpless idiocy of the government, or more philosophical matters, such as whether the stars were the same age as the earth.

He was known to many of the scholars and other visitors, and was generously tipped, but becoming rich was never an aim of his; he took tips to be the generosity of providence, and came to think of himself as lucky, which did him no harm in later life.

La Belle Sauvage was frequently employed in the service of the good nuns; more than once Malcolm had ferried Sister Benedicta to the Royal Mail zeppelin station with a precious parcel of stoles or copes or chasubles for the bishop of London, who seemed to wear his vestments very hard, for he got through them unusually quickly.

“I can bring a naphtha lamp for the table, if you like.”

“I ’spect you looked surprised when they asked me.”
“I never. I was inscrutable.”

These days the prevailing fashion in politics was one of obsequious submissiveness to the religious authorities, and ultimately to Geneva.

These days the prevailing fashion in politics was one of obsequious submissiveness to the religious authorities, and ultimately to Geneva.

As a consequence, some organizations of the favored religious kind found their power and influence greatly enhanced, while officials and ministers who had supported the secular line that was now out of favor had either to find other things to do, or to work surreptitiously, and at continuous risk of discovery.

As a consequence, some organizations of the favored religious kind found their power and influence greatly enhanced, while officials and ministers who had supported the secular line that was now out of favor had either to find other things to do, or to work surreptitiously, and at continuous risk of discovery.

"...She said in the old days, before there was inns like this, and hotels, and specially hospitals, people used to stay at monasteries and priories and suchlike, but nowadays it was mostly clergymen or maybe nuns from other places and they were convales—conva—”
“Convalescing,” said Lord Nugent.
“Yes, sir, that’s it. Getting better.”

“Sanctuary?” Malcolm liked the sound of the word, and he could see how to spell it already, in his imagination. “What’s that?”
“Well, if somebody broke the law and was being hunted by the authorities, they could go into an oratory and claim sanctuary. That means that they’d be safe from arrest as long as they stayed there.”

That afternoon, Malcolm went to the lean-to beside the house and hauled the tarpaulin off his canoe.

Sometimes he’d had to wait for an hour, trying to persuade Mr. Parsons to operate the lock just for him, but the lockkeeper was a stickler for the regulations, as well as for not doing more work than was necessary.

Malcolm’s dæmon, Asta, was a kingfisher just then, perching on the gunwale of the canoe.

Asta became a fly and flew as far as she could from Malcolm, stopping when it began to hurt, and settled at the very top of a bulrush so she could watch the man clearly.

He was trying to remain inconspicuous, but being so awkward and unhappy about it that he might as well have been waving a flag.

His cat dæmon hurried after them, abject and desperate.

He kept his expression stolid and bland.

The customer who’d spoken was called George Boatwright, a high-colored and truculent boatman whom Mr. Polstead had had to throw out of the Trout half a dozen times; but he was a fair man, and he’d never spoken roughly to Malcolm.

“It’s too thin. I want to make a lanyard, and it’s got to be a bit heavier than that.”

There would be an inquest in due course, but there were no signs that his death was anything other than an accident.

Asta became an owl and perched on the prow, her feathers shedding the water in a way she’d discovered when she was trying to become an animal that didn’t yet exist.

Malcolm rinsed his hands under the kitchen tap and wiped them perfunctorily on a tea towel.

Malcolm was enthralled by this tale, and plied his knife and fork with only half his attention.

All the baby’s dismay vanished at once, and she lay in Sister Fenella’s arms, looking around with a lordly complacency.

He was thin, taciturn but amiable, and his dæmon was a ferret.

But what matters is not the similarities your imagination finds, but the similarities that are implicit in the image, and they are not necessarily the same.

The convocation of the university, the governing body, ordered him to comply.

The officer was abashed, the story says, and would not give the order, and instead stood his men down and went to drink brantwijn with the librarian.

“In years gone by, Mr. Van Texel, he would hardly have noticed that she was a woman. But this time I think the dart of Cupid might actually have penetrated his carapace.”

Its discoverer, a Muscovite called Rusakov, was investigating the mystery of consciousness—human consciousness—that is, of why something entirely material, such as a human body—including the brain, of course—should be able to generate this impalpable, invisible thing, awareness.

...he finally arrived at the extraordinary idea that consciousness is a perfectly normal property of matter, like mass or anbaric charge; that there is a field of consciousness that pervades the entire universe, and that makes itself apparent most fully—we believe—in human beings.

If she was a really practiced reader, she thought, each of those ideas would be surrounded by a phalanx of qualifying detail, but there it was: that was all she had to go on.

That didn’t work either, but when she sat down again, there came into her mind the image of a peacock on a river terrace, and herself among a group of friends, and the peacock’s effrontery in snatching a sausage roll out of the very fingers of her neighbor and then trying to run away with it, encumbered by his ridiculous tail.

It was nothing to do with work: it was a thriller, of the sort she liked, with a mysterious death, skin-of-the-teeth escapes, and a haughty and beautiful heroine whose function was to fall in love with the saturnine but witty hero.

They were sitting on either side of the fire, and he was steaming prodigiously.