I nearly soiled myself on the spot, to be honest.
I mean; The Boreal Foundation! I might have guessed they were involved when we got paid so much for that first job we did for them. And holding that crisply typed letter, on paper that was so thick it felt like the parchment my indentures are inscribed on, with its polite wording – "pursuant" and "obliged" – I had the sort of feeling you might get if you were invited to a levée at the Palace of Westminster.
In other words, it was to all intents and purposes a Royal Command. Just because it didn't come from the Palace didn't mean you could choose not to obey it (or "oblige" them, as the note so respectfully put it). The Boreal Foundation is as big as they come.
Put it this way: if Master James had ignored or rejected the note he would have said goodbye to his business. The Boreals would have closed him down, either by telling all the people who depended on them (and that's a lot of people) not to use his services or buy from his shop any more; or they'd have set up another clockmaker's just down the road, selling at half Master James' prices. After six months of that sort of competition he'd have gone bankrupt.
From the other point of view, though, it was fine. Like I say, the Boreal Foundation is incredibly wealthy and they pay good money. Master James had done a good job for them and they wanted to employ him again. So long as he continued to do good work for them, he would continue to be well paid by them. It was very simple – play along with them and prosper. Oppose them, or fail to co-operate with them, and go bust.
It was a sort of slavery, I suppose, except that you could only feel the chains when you rattled them. Better not to, really.
It was a beautiful day in early summer when Master James and I got off the shaky old country autobus at its stop by the cross on the Cropredy village green. We were in good time. There was no sense in upsetting our employers by arriving late. Even so, the Boreal Foundation office was half a mile from the centre of the village, so we had a ten-minute walk along a gravel road, Master striding ahead and me following, carrying the small toolkit; the one we took out to jobs. We had received no further details of the work they wanted us to do.
The so-called office turned out to be a medium-sized country house, walled into its grounds on three sides. The fourth side sloped down to the Oxford-Banbury canal where there was a landing stage tucked in by the trees, visible from the entrance. We had to identify ourselves to a guard in blue-and-gold Boreal livery at the gate. He used a telephone (I'd seen very few telephones) to speak to someone in the house. I overheard one side of the conversation. It was to do with the fact that only Master James was expected, not me as well, so it took a bit of to-and-froing before the guard got the word to open the gate and let us through into the grounds.
'Follow that little path to the right. You'll get to a door round the far side of the house. There's a bell-push there. Press hard and wait.' The guard opened the gate and let us through. I could feel his eyes on the back of my neck, and hear his Doberman-daemon growling, as we walked down the path and around to the house's tradesman's entrance.
I noticed that the house had a very large conservatory built onto its northern wall, which seemed odd to me. Wouldn't you put a conservatory where it could catch the sun? There were a number of outbuildings, stables and staff accommodation and garages, I supposed (there was a private car of an unfamiliar make, quite big, parked at the front of the house).
Jim says that I should also tell you that the house was at least one hundred and fifty years old, ivy clad on the eastern wall, and built from creamy Cotswold limestone, which is, I suppose, all good stuff, and the kind of detail that an aspiring writer should include in his stories for his readers to chew on. You can't tell, by the way, what most of the buildings in Oxford are made of; the covering of soot is so thick.
Master pressed hard on the bell-push as instructed and we stood and waited for an answer. After a few minutes another uniformed flunky appeared and to my amazement put us though the same question-and-answer routine as we'd just gone though at the main gate. After he had shut the door on us, and gone back into the house and asked whatever questions he had to ask, he came back with a big ledger and told us to sign our names in it. Then he gave us paper badges to wear with our names at the bottom (where they belonged) and a big Boreal crest at the top (where it belonged).
We followed him down a short corridor and into an office, doing our best not to trip up on his terrier-daemon. Viola was in the pocket of my pea-jacket all this time. Nobody asked her to wear a paper badge.
The guard shut the office door behind us and the woman behind the desk pointed to a chair and told my master to sit down. There was no chair for me, so I stood behind him with my back against the wall.
'Good morning, Master James. I am Miss Morley.' The woman's voice was brisk and clipped, with a funny accent that I couldn't quite place; so that I had no idea what part of the country she had come from. She was the same sort of age as my master, in her early fifties, dressed in a neat suit of blue cloth (in a style that struck me as slightly unusual and unlike anything I'd seen. I decided then that she wasn't from Brytain at all, but maybe from the Antipodes, where they behave and dress differently from us in the mother Country), and with waved grey hair.
In all these ways she was unusual, but not actually different from Master James, or me, or you for that matter (unless you're from Malacandra, the Warlike Planet, after all). The difference, the real difference, lay in something else. Her cat-formed daemon was curled up on the desk in front of her, licking its paws and whisking its tail from time to time. At least, I supposed it was her daemon, and when I mentioned it to Master James on the autobus as we returned to Oxford that afternoon, he said, 'Of course it was her daemon, Peter. What else could it have been?'
I wasn't so sure. The cat-daemon behaved strangely, looking around and paying little attention to Miss Morley. I've seen something like this before, especially with cat-daemons. They behave like the animals whose form they've taken. Independent, like. Of course, they're as attached to their humans as any other form, when it comes down to it.
It was like this: I wouldn't have been surprised if Miss Morley's daemon had flicked his tail, jumped off the desk and wandered out of the door and into the well-kept gardens that we could see from the office window. And that Miss Morley wouldn't have noticed that this had happened. That cat-daemon wasn't part of her at all, not in the real way that you or I would understand.
As this sunk into me, I began to feel more frightened than I have ever felt in my life. This Miss Morley wasn't human at all. She was a monster; perverted and unclean. I wanted more than anything to get out of that office; to escape, to run down the newly-mown lawns and throw myself into the canal if needs be. Anything but stay in that stuffy office, where my master and this alien woman sat discussing terms and periods of contract and retainers and fees and service level agreements.
Miss Morley looked up from the desk where she was showing Master where to sign his name on the papers that she had prepared for him. 'Your boy looks unwell,' she said. True enough; I was sweating and shaking and fighting hard against an overwhelming urge to throw up all over the blue-and-gold carpet. At her direction I stood by the window, gulping in the fresh air from outside and trying not to think about the terrible feeling of wrongness that Miss Morley and her daemon were giving off, like a bad smell.
But, as I say, nobody else but me seemed to notice, or give any sign if they did. Was it because they were older than me? Or because whatever it was that allowed me to influence the needle of the alethiometer also made me more sensitive to things like that? Or because they were all loyal Boreal Foundation employees and used to burying their disgust and fear in her presence? Perhaps all three.
There was no actual work for us to do that day, so I'd carried Master's toolbag for nothing (except to prove that we could have done some work if we'd had to).
'That was a waste of time, Master,' I said, as we walked down the gravel road back to Cropredy. Master James looked around anxiously and smiled uneasily, as if he though we might be overheard and should be sure to say the right thing.
'Not at all, Peter,' he said in a falsely cheerful voice, a bit too loud. 'We have negotiated an excellent support contract with a respected corporation. They are paying us a handsome retainer. We are very fortunate.'
I was, I must say, slightly ashamed of him, and for him. Him, a master craftsman, well respected throughout the City of Oxford, and elsewhere too, having to watch his words as if he were a common worker, afraid of upsetting his employers and being sacked for saying the wrong thing. That was the sort of thing that used to happen in the days of the Magisterium, when people spied on each other and reported their enemies to the Consistory Court of Discipline, to be carried off and tortured. It was as if the old tyranny of the Church had been replaced by a new one, based on commerce. And when had Master James negotiated anything with the Boreal Foundation? He had signed ready-prepared papers. There had been no negotiations of any kind.
That Saturday, I saw Professor Belacqua as usual. My studies with her were going well – so well that she'd said that within the next month or two I might be ready to try my first simple reading with the alethiometer. Once the tutorial was over – and they always left me exhausted – and we were sitting in our usual places by the fire, I mentioned the visit Master James and I had made to the Boreal Foundation office. At once the Professor sat up in her chair, not even trying to hide her interest from me (although I was beginning to notice more and understand more of what was going on around me as my training proceeded).
'There was this strange woman there, Madam Professor. I've never seen anyone like her before.' I described the woman we had met and the way her daemon had seemed not to be part of her. As I spoke, Professor Belacqua grew pale. Pantalaimon looked at me with an intent stare.
'This daemon. It was cat-formed, you say?'
'Yes, Madam Professor.'
'And you think it wasn't her daemon?'
'I don't think it was anyone's daemon, Madam Professor. It was much more like an ordinary cat like a daemon.'
'Perhaps her real daemon was somewhere else. It could have been small; concealed in her clothes.' The Professor looked at Viola, where she sat in my lap.
'No, I don't think so. I'm positive there was only Viola and my master's daemon in that office.'
'You're quite sure of this?'
'Yes, Madam Professor.'
Her eyes searched my face. 'Yes, Peter, I think you are. Oh…' She leaned back in her chair and sighed deeply. 'Oh, Peter, if what I fear is true, we are coming into evil times. Did you happen to catch the woman's name?'
'Yes, Madam Professor. It was Miss Morley. Miss E. Morley. It said her name on the letter.'
'Miss Morley… Peter, you're sure?'
'No mistake, Madam Professor.'
'She shouldn't be here… She can't be here. Not in our world…' Professor Belacqua's eyes lost their focus. She was detached from the world, from the everyday reality of her rooms in Jordan College. She wasn't seeing me, I know.
There was a long pause, while she sat unmoving in her chair. Then she shook herself and seemed to notice me, as if for the first time.
'Peter, there are things that I must do, and people I must talk to.'
'Mr Shire?'
'Yes, him, and others too. Can you come here tomorrow evening? At eight?'
It would be tricky, but… 'Yes, of course, Madam Professor.' I'd have to slip out, make some excuse if I was caught, and be back in time for lock-up.
A crystalline tear glittered in the corner of her eye. I would have wiped it away if I'd dared.
