school, for dinner at seven was compulsory for all the pupils, and it was already twenty minutes to.
But on the way through the lodge she was struck by a thought, and said to the Porter:
“Mr. Shuter, have you got an Oxford directory?”
“Trade, or residential, Miss Lyra?”
“I don't know. Both. One that covers Jericho.”
“What are you looking up?” said the old man, handing her a couple of battered reference books.
The Porter was a friend; he wasn't being nosy.
“Someone called Makepeace,” she said, turning to the Jericho section of the residential one. “Is there a firm or a shop called Makepeace that you know of?”
“Not to my knowledge,” he said.
The Porter sat in his small room, and dealt with visitors and inquiries and students through the window that opened into the lodge. Behind him and out of sight was a rack of pigeonholes for the use of Scholars, and for Lyra too, and as she was running her finger quickly down the list of residents in Jericho she heard a cheery voice from inside.
“Are you after the alchemist, Lyra?”
And Dr. Polstead's ginger face leaned out of the Porter's window, beaming at her curiously.
“The alchemist?” she said.
“The only Makepeace I've ever heard of is a chap called Sebastian,” he said, fumbling with some papers. “Used to be a Scholar of Merton, till he went mad. Don't know how they managed to tell, in that place. He devoted himself to alchemy—in this day and age! Spends his time changing lead into gold, or trying to. You can see him in Bodley, sometimes. Talks to himself— they have to put him outside, but he goes mildly enough. Daemon's a black cat. What are you after him for?”
Lyra had found the name: a house in Juxon Street.
“Miss Parker was telling us about when she was a girl,” she said, with a bright, open candor, “and she said there was a William Makepeace who used to make treacle toffee better than anyone, and I wondered if he was still there somewhere, because I was going to get some for her. I think Miss Parker's the best teacher I ever had,” she went on earnestly, “and she's so pretty too, she's not just dull like most teachers. Maybe I'll make her some toffee myself….”
There was no such person as Miss Parker, and Dr. Polstead had been Lyra's unwilling teacher himself for a difficult six weeks, two or three years before.
“Jolly good idea,” he said. “Treacle toffee. Mmm.”
“Thank you, Mr. Shuter,” said Lyra, and she laid the books on the shelf before darting out into Turl Street, with Pan at her heels, and made for the Parks and St. Sophia's.
Fifteen minutes later, breathless, she sat down to dinner in the hall, trying to keep her grubby hands from view. It was the way in that college not to use the high table every day; instead, the Scholars were encouraged to sit among the students, and the teachers and older pupils from the school, of whom Lyra was one, did the same. It was a point of good manners not to sit with a clique of the same friends all the time, and it meant that conversation at dinner had to be open and general rather than close and gossipy.
Tonight Lyra found herself sitting between an elderly Scholar, a historian called Miss Greenwood, and a girl at the head of the school, four years older than Lyra was. As they ate their minced lamb and boiled potatoes, Lyra said:
“Miss Greenwood, when did they stop doing alchemy?”
“They? Which they, Lyra?”
“The people who… I suppose the people who think about things. It used to be part of experimental theology, didn't it?”
“That's right. And in fact the alchemists made many discoveries, about the action of acids and so on. But they had a basic idea about the universe that didn't hold up, and when a better one came along, the structure that kept their ideas in place just fell apart. The people who think about things, as you call them, discovered that chemistry had a stronger and more coherent conceptual framework. It explained things, you see, more fully, more accurately.”
“But when?”
“I don't think there've been any serious alchemists for two hundred and fifty years. Apart from the famous Oxford alchemist.”
“Who was that?”
“I forget his name. Irony—why do I say that? … He's still alive—an eccentric ex-scholar. You find people like that on the fringes of scholarship—genuinely brilliant, sometimes— but cracked, you know, possessed by some crazy idea that has no basis in reality, but which seems to them to hold the key to understanding the whole cosmos. I've seen it more than once— tragic, really.”
Miss Greenwood's daemon, a marmoset, said from the back of her chair:
“Makepeace. That was his name.”
“Of course! I knew it was ironic.”
“Why?” said Lyra.
“Because he was said to be very violent. There was a court case—manslaughter, I think—he got off, as far as I remember. Years ago. But I mustn't gossip.”
“Lyra,” said the girl on her left, “would you like to come to the Musical Society this evening? There's a
