Oh, no.  No, not Arthur.  Not him.

'She's hiding.  I bet she is.  Look under the bed.'

She wasn't under the bed.  Sarastus, who we all called Sal, wasn't anywhere.  She was gone, and Arthur with her.

Lyra stood up.  'Peter, take Davey and Miranda downstairs.  They're hungry, I expect.'

Her eyes were so full of pain I couldn't bear to look at them.  I took Davey's hand and helped him to get off the bed and onto his feet.  With his left arm wrapped around my shoulder and Miranda fussing by our feet and threatening at any moment to trip us up, we made our way carefully down the stairs and into the kitchen.

'Is everything all right?  Why is everybody looking so sad?  What's been happening?  Have you got anything to eat?  I'm starving!'

I wasn't in the mood to answer all his questions.  I lit a candle and sat Davey down by the scrubbed wooden table that stood in the middle of the kitchen floor while I hunted down a loaf of bread and some butter, cheese and milk.  He sat and played with his daemon (I think he was no more than six years old) while I made us tea and thick doorstop cheese sandwiches for us both.  I think that he realised that something was badly wrong, for he stopped talking after a while.  I wasn't listening to him anyway.  I was staring into the darkness outside the kitchen window, not bothering to wipe away the tears that were leaving salty white trails on my sooty black cheeks.

Arthur Shire.  I knew so little about him, except that he had been at Bolvangar, he owned two canal narrowboats ('Never, ever, call them barges!' he'd told me), and that the people who met him, once they saw past his grumpy manner and got to know him a little, became devoted to him.  Who were his parents?  Had he ever married – did he have a sweetheart anywhere?  How did he come to know Lyra?  I resolved that, one day, I would try to find out more about him and maybe write his story so that I, and the other people who'd never had the chance to meet him themselves, might be able to get some idea of what sort of man he really was.

Presently Harry and Lyra joined us in the kitchen.  I passed them a mug of sweet milky tea each and they sat at the table with Davey and me and drank in silence.  None of us wanted to talk very much.  I supposed that they had been laying Arthur out on the bed which Davey had so recently left.

Then there was nothing left for us to do but go to bed too.  Harry, Davey and I took the chairs and couches downstairs, covering ourselves with the blankets which we took from the press in the hall.  Lyra slept upstairs, in the second bedroom.  None of us slept very well, to be honest with you.  In the end, and it was as the beginnings of the light of dawn were starting to show on the ceiling, I drifted off to sleep for an hour or two.

Then I woke, and it was if I hadn't slept at all, I felt so tired and ill.  Harry and Davey were snoring gently in their chairs and I didn't want to disturb them, so I slipped quietly out of the room by a door I hadn't used before and found myself standing in the cottage's back garden, with the sun's rays shining across from left to right, making every drop of dew that rested on the grass of the lawn and leaves and flowers of the herbs and flowers sparkle like a watch-jewel.  The air was clean and fresh and the sun was already warm, with the promise of a beautiful early summer's day to come.  At any other time, I'd have stretched myself up to my full height, yawned, and started making plans for the day's business.  But not today…  You know how, when something awful has happened, or it's going to happen today – like having a tooth pulled out – when you wake up it takes a while before you realise how bad things are; and for that short while you're happy, especially if you and your daemon have been having good dreams?  You do?  All I can say is that I envied you, as I stood with my back to the warm brick wall of the cottage, feeling the sun's heat beginning to soak into me, for I'd had no such respite when I woke.  It had all come back to me straight away; the wrenching despair I had felt when Sal had disappeared and I knew that my friend Arthur had died.  Died to save Davey's life – a boy that he had only just met.

I crouched down and gazed over the garden, which ran down to a rough stone wall, with a field of sheep beyond it.  The air was full of the sound of their bleating, mingled with birdsong from the trees round about.  As I watched, a flock of blackbirds flew overhead and settled on the roof behind me.  By my feet a robin was hopping, its head moving sharply from side to side as it searched for worms and insects to eat.

There was a black and white magpie there too.  Just one (one for sorrow, I thought).  I stretched out my left hand and it flew to me, wings flapping, and settled in the palm.  I put out my other hand, greatly daring, to stroke its feathers.  It turned its head to acknowledge the attention I was paying it, and in return I ran my hand up and down its back.  'I know you're not Sal,' I said to it, 'Just an ordinary magpie.  I know.'  But I wanted to keep it with me just the same.  For his sake.

I've said that the sun was slanting sideways across the garden, but falling onto me as well as I sat on my haunches next to the wall.  It was in my eyes somewhat, so I looked downward to the magpie where it sat, its own eyes blinking, in my hand.  So it was that when I looked up again, the sun half blinding me, I was confused by what I saw.

There was a figure – no, there were two figures, a man and a woman, wearing old-fashioned clothes, long and gauzy, walking together hand in hand on the dewy grass, outlined in hazy morning light, their faces hidden and turned towards one another, speaking hushed words whose meaning I could not quite catch, seeming almost to float across the lawn, so slow and stately were their movements.  I thought that they must be dream-people.  I wondered if I was still asleep and dreaming that I was dreaming.

I pinched myself hard – that's supposed to work if you think you're having a dream – but they were still there, standing close to each other and murmuring in each other's ears.  Perhaps they were ghosts?  The cottage was old, I could tell, and many folk must have lived and died within its walls over the centuries. Perhaps these two were the shades of a pair of lovers who had lived, and died, many years ago. But yet there was something about the ghost-people, if that's what they were, that pressed against my memory.  I was sure I knew them.  I put the magpie carefully down onto the ground and stood up, ready to climb over the flowerbeds of the cottage garden and greet these familiar strangers.  I wanted to speak to them and find out who they were.  But when I looked up again after letting go of the magpie, I saw that they had vanished.  I looked around, but they were nowhere to be seen.  I shook my head to clear it.

'Come inside now,' said Viola, and we turned away from the sunlit garden where I had seen my vision and stumbled back into the darkness of the cottage.  I thought that I would go into the kitchen and make breakfast for us all.  Life had to go on, I told myself.  We had to get back to Oxford somehow and find Davey's family, if he had one.

It was dark in the house after the brightness of the morning sun outside, so I felt my way to the kitchen, trying not to trip over Harold or Davey where they lay asleep.  My eyes were still not focussing properly when I pushed open the kitchen door, and at first I thought that the vision I had seen outside had followed me into the cottage.

There, sitting at the kitchen table, their hands resting on each other's, were Lyra and Arthur, Sal and Pantalaimon beside them.  Lyra gave me a look of purest delight.

'Hello Peter.  Would you like a cup of chai?  Oh!  You should see your face!'

I got little more from Arthur, then or at any other time, than, 'The bastards!  They sent us back, the rotten sods!  Just when we was getting used to the idea of being there.  We was going to enjoy it, we knows!'  Sal would wink at me, and say nothing.  Lyra never said much, either.  So it's a mystery to me; what happened there in the garden, and the rooms upstairs and, for there are many worlds and I only ever saw one other apart from our own, whatever world it was that Arthur went to, and Lyra followed, and persuaded the Authorities there to let her take him back with her to the worlds of life.  She must have had good friends there, or greater powers of persuasion than I ever knew.

Is there a World of the Dead?  Had Lyra really travelled there, in some way that I can only guess at, and brought Arthur back with her?  Sometimes I have dreams of such a place; a great wide dusty plain full of shadow-people, where the iron-grey skies hang overhead like an upside-down bowl.  Is that where she went that night, in search of him?

'We has work to do here, in this world,' were the only other words he ever said to me about it.

We ate and drank, and presently Davey joined us, rubbing his eyes while Miranda, butterfly-formed, hovered about his head, and asking what we were going to do today, and was there any orange squash he could drink and would Lyra please boil him some eggs.  There are times when I wish I was six years old too.

Lyra herself woke Harry, while we stayed in the kitchen.  I heard their voices in the other room, and then the sound of furniture falling over, and Harry burst through the door, his daemon in his wake, and embraced Arthur where he sat.  He was bawling like a baby, Harry was – I've never in my life seen anyone so badly upset by good news.

Jim, I'm going to annoy you here.  Yes, we got back to Oxford, but the details of our journey would bore you, or anyone else for that matter, to tears.  What's the point of going into long descriptions of how we avoided the patrols of Boreal police (for that is what they were, in all but name) who were combing the countryside to find the criminals who had attacked and destroyed the Boreal Foundation offices in Cropredy?  Lyra and I had to go further north to Brummagem before we dared to turn back and approach Oxford from another direction.  Harry had hidden the Maggie in the canal basin in Banbury by the simple means of painting over her name (she was called the Molly for the next few months until all the fuss died down).  Harry, Arthur and Davey stayed in the cottage, lying low.

When we got off the Aylesbury autobus at Gloucester Green, Lyra insisted on accompanying me to Shoe Lane and Master James' shop.  You see, I was in dead trouble.  I'd left there on Saturday morning, telling everyone that I was going to see my parents for the weekend.  I'd been expected back before curfew on Sunday night.  Instead, it was Wednesday afternoon, and where the hell had I been?  Master would have been completely within his rights to have given me a serious thrashing or even to have voided my indentures and sent me packing.

Lyra was marvellous.  She swept into the front shop, ignored the protests of the obnoxious Mr Cholmondley and cornered Master James at his own workbench.  She gave him a long story about lost tickets, and anbarograms, and broken-down trains, and emergency measures, and all so quickly that the poor man must have had the greatest trouble following her, let alone understanding what she said.  I don't suppose that even the famous detective Sherlock Holmes would have understood what she said, either.  ('I met him, once,' she told me afterwards.  'I wasn't much older than you at the time.  Such a nice man, though Doctor Watson was much easier to talk to.')

'Got away with it, then, didn't you?' said Carrie to me that evening.  'I don't know how you do it, I really don't.'

'It's not what you know,' I replied.

'It's who you know!' Carrie finished, and we laughed.

There was no reason not to, so the next Saturday I set off for Jordan College as usual, for my alethiometry lesson with Lyra (or Professor Belacqua, as I had to get used to calling her again).

I am sure that, that time at least, I was followed.