Shared secrets

Will and Lyra peer in to the window that separates their two worlds. They see and hear Will’s Oxford ring–road. They jump through into Will’s Oxford. They wander along the Oxford streets but Will is worried about how conspicuous they look. They go into the Botanic Gardens.

As they wander through the gardens Will tells Lyra he is looking for his father who went to the arctic on an expedition when he was a baby and has never returned. He tells Lyra how secret service people were always hounding his mother, trying to get her to tell them things about his father. One day they broke in to the house where he and his mother were staying and tried to steal letters from Will’s father. In self defence Will had killed one of the men who accidentally fell down some stairs. That night Will ran away from home with his father’s letters. He decided to come to Oxford because there were lots of libraries and he wanted to research his father.

His father’s final letter spoke of an ‘anomaly’, which his father had discovered in the arctic. It contained specific directions as to where to find it.

To show how much they trust each other with their secrets Lyra gives Will the alethiometer to look after and he gives her his father’s letters.