La Belle Sauvage
Chapters - Philip Pullman
Part 1: The Trout
Chapter 1: The Terrace Room
Eleven-year-old Malcolm Polstead helps at his parents' inn, the Trout, when three strangers take the Terrace Room for a private supper. Serving them, he overhears talk of a baby girl recently placed with the nuns at Godstow Priory across the river. The visitors are guarded but interested in the child, and Malcolm tucks the detail away.
POV: Malcolm Polstead·On page: Sister Benedicta·Mentioned: Lyra Belacqua, Pantalaimon
Chapter 2: The Acorn
Walking the towpath, Malcolm picks up a hollow wooden acorn that a stranger has just dropped, and finds a slip of coded paper hidden inside it. After a brief cutaway to Lord Nugent's secret circle planning the protection of a child, Malcolm carries the acorn to the Bodleian and presses it on Dr Hannah Relf, who quietly realises he has stumbled into something larger than he knows.
POV: Malcolm Polstead·On page: Hannah Relf, Lord Nugent·Mentioned: Lyra Belacqua, Pantalaimon
Chapter 3: Lyra
Malcolm crosses the river to Godstow Priory and is allowed by Sister Fenella to meet the baby in her care. He holds Lyra for the first time and is immediately captivated by her. The nuns are warm but tired, and Malcolm resolves to help wherever he can.
POV: Malcolm Polstead·On page: Lyra Belacqua, Sister Fenella, Sister Benedicta, Pantalaimon
Chapter 4: Uppsala
In Uppsala, the gyptian traveller Coram van Texel calls on the alethiometrist Professor Hallgrimsson to gather news for his Oxford allies. He learns of a dangerous scholar named Gerard Bonneville, recently released from prison, who has already begun shadowing him from Novgorod. The Oxford strands of the story are being pulled into a wider, colder pattern.
POV: Malcolm Polstead·On page: Gerard Bonneville, Farder Coram
Chapter 5: The Scholar
Malcolm returns to Dr Hannah Relf, who gently introduces him to the alethiometer and the work of reading it. She does not tell him everything, but she trusts him enough to ask him to keep his ears open at the Trout and to bring her anything unusual. Malcolm accepts, proud to be useful to a scholar.
POV: Malcolm Polstead·On page: Hannah Relf
Chapter 6: Glazing Sprigs
Mr Taphouse, the priory's carpenter, fits heavy oak shutters to every ground-floor window, hammering in the small glazing sprigs that give the chapter its name. Malcolm asks Sister Benedicta why the nuns suddenly need to fortify the house, and gets only careful, unsatisfying answers. The Magisterium's presence in Oxford is felt at the edges of every conversation.
POV: Malcolm Polstead·On page: Lyra Belacqua, Sister Benedicta, Pantalaimon
Chapter 7: Too Soon
Dr Relf learns that her insulator, Mr Luckhurst, has been murdered, and she turns to the cataloguer Harry Dibdin for help keeping her work hidden. At the priory, Malcolm presents Lyra with a wooden teether he has carved for her, only to be hustled out by a stern uniformed visitor, Miss Carmichael of the League of St Alexander, who has come to inspect the baby. Something has shifted, and the nuns will not say what.
POV: Malcolm Polstead·On page: Lyra Belacqua, Sister Benedicta, Pantalaimon
Chapter 8: The League of St Alexander
Miss Carmichael comes to Malcolm's school to recruit children into the League of St Alexander, urging them to report any irreverent talk by their elders. Most of his classmates sign up at once; Malcolm, uneasy, refuses. He sees clearly for the first time how the Magisterium reaches into ordinary life.
POV: Malcolm Polstead·Mentioned: Lyra Belacqua, Pantalaimon
Chapter 9: Counterclockwise
Malcolm reports to Hannah on the League's arrival in Oxford, and on the headmaster Mr Willis being abruptly sacked along with other teachers. He visits the priory to ask the nuns what Miss Carmichael wanted with Lyra. Hannah confides that the League of St Alexander is the project of a woman named Mrs Coulter, and warns Malcolm to be careful what he says aloud.
POV: Malcolm Polstead·On page: Hannah Relf, Lyra Belacqua, Sister Benedicta, Pantalaimon·Mentioned: Gerard Bonneville
Chapter 10: Lord Asriel
Lord Asriel arrives unannounced at the Trout and Malcolm serves him Tokay in the Terrace Room before being asked to row him across to the priory in La Belle Sauvage. Sister Fenella opens a shuttered window so Asriel can hold his daughter for a few quiet minutes. Malcolm sees that even great lords come to this baby in secret.
POV: Malcolm Polstead·On page: Lord Asriel, Lyra Belacqua, Sister Fenella, Sister Benedicta, Pantalaimon, Stelmaria
Chapter 11: Three Legs
Malcolm tells Hannah about Lord Asriel's visit, and on his next trip to the priory he glimpses a sinister three-legged hyena prowling near Mr Taphouse's workshop. The same evening Gerard Bonneville turns up in the Trout's public bar, charming and watchful but not yet speaking to Malcolm. Hannah, hearing of the hyena, explains the old symbolism of the creature and what it suggests about its owner.
POV: Malcolm Polstead·On page: Gerard Bonneville, Hannah Relf·Mentioned: Lyra Belacqua, Pantalaimon
Chapter 12: Alice Talks
Coram van Texel arrives at the Trout after dark to return Malcolm's canoe, now rebuilt and reinforced by gyptian hands, and warns him that a great flood is coming and that Bonneville is dangerous. Later, Alice Parslow, the surly potwasher, drops her guard with Malcolm and tells him that Bonneville has approached her, claiming to be Lyra's father and trying to befriend her. For the first time Malcolm and Alice are quietly on the same side.
POV: Malcolm Polstead·On page: Alice Parslow, Lyra Belacqua, Farder Coram, Pantalaimon
Chapter 13: The Bologna Instrument
Malcolm passes the Bonneville-and-Alice incident to Hannah, who is summoned that night to a clandestine Oakley Street meeting at the Al-Kaisys' house in Chelsea. Lord Nugent, George Papadimitriou and others brief her on Rusakov particles, Dust, and the family of alethiometers of which the Bologna instrument is one. The picture she is given of Mrs Coulter and Lord Asriel is far larger and darker than anything Malcolm has guessed.
POV: Malcolm Polstead·On page: Hannah Relf, Lord Nugent·Mentioned: Lyra Belacqua, Mrs Coulter, Lord Asriel, Farder Coram, Pantalaimon
Chapter 14: Lady with Monkey
The Feast of St Scholastica is kept at the priory, with Sister Fenella feeding Lyra in the warm kitchen. Later, in Jericho, Malcolm calls on Hannah and walks in on a tense visit from Mrs Coulter and her golden monkey daemon. Mrs Coulter is gracious, but her questions are pointed, and Malcolm leaves shaken by what her daemon does to Hannah's.
POV: Malcolm Polstead·On page: Mrs Coulter, Lyra Belacqua, Hannah Relf, Sister Fenella, Sister Benedicta, Pantalaimon, Ozymandias
Chapter 15: The Potting Shed
Sister Fenella collapses while tending Lyra, and Malcolm and Alice, helping in the priory, slip out to spy through the potting-shed wall, where they witness Bonneville with Sister Katarina, who has been letting him onto the grounds. As they watch, the long-feared flood breaks over the priory walls; Bonneville bursts into the kitchen after Lyra, Alice fells him with a chair, and the three of them escape into the rising water in La Belle Sauvage as the bridge gives way.
POV: Malcolm Polstead·On page: Sister Fenella, Alice Parslow, Sister Benedicta·Mentioned: Lyra Belacqua, Gerard Bonneville, Mrs Coulter, Pantalaimon
Part 2: The Flood
Chapter 16: The Pharmacy
Swept downstream through that first wild night, Malcolm fights to keep the canoe upright with Alice and Lyra aboard. In the morning they paddle into a drowned Oxford and break into a flooded pharmacy on the Banbury Road, taking milk, food, candles and bandages. They argue about whether to try for scholastic sanctuary at Jordan College, and decide they cannot reach it through the flood.
POV: Malcolm Polstead·On page: Alice Parslow
Chapter 17: Pilgrims' Tower
In a Pilgrims' Tower room at Jordan College, Lord Nugent, Papadimitriou, Hannah Relf and Bud Schlesinger meet in secret to discuss the flood, the prophecy around Lyra, Mrs Coulter's manoeuvring and the loose threat of Bonneville. On the water, Malcolm and Alice quarrel about whether to risk Jordan at all, and turn instead further downstream. The two scenes pull against each other across the same drowned city.
POV: Malcolm Polstead·On page: Alice Parslow, Lyra Belacqua, Gerard Bonneville, Hannah Relf, Lord Nugent, Pantalaimon·Mentioned: Lord Asriel, Mrs Coulter
Chapter 18: Lord Murderer
Camping on a hillside, Malcolm and Alice are ambushed by Bonneville and his three-legged hyena, and in the struggle Malcolm stabs Bonneville in the thigh with his pocket knife before they get the canoe back into the water. Further downstream they stumble on a refugee camp in a cave run by the Trout poacher George Boatwright and his family. There they hear the rumour that someone called Lord Murderer has killed a nun at Godstow Priory, and understand from the description that Sister Fenella is dead.
POV: Malcolm Polstead·On page: Alice Parslow, Lyra Belacqua, Gerard Bonneville, Pantalaimon·Mentioned: Sister Fenella