Chapter Seventeen The French Teacher
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 daemon.
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 daemon of a friend of mine, who’s now traveling with my daemon, 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 daemon, 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 daemon, 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 daemon, 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 daemon? I was told by someone that it’s not impolite to ask.”
“My wife and I were walking in the Alps,” he said.
“Our daemons 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 daemon out of the air, and my Bellissa flew up to defend him; but my wife died at once from the shock, and her daemon 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?”