His Dark Materials Omnibus (9 page)

“Lyra! Lyra! You come in this instant!”

There was a banging on the window frame. Lyra knew the voice and the impatience: it was Mrs. Lonsdale, the Housekeeper. There was no hiding from her.

Tight-faced, Lyra slid down the roof and into the gutter, and then climbed in through the window again. Mrs. Lonsdale was running some water into the little chipped basin, to the accompaniment of a great groaning and hammering from the pipes.

“The number of times you been told about going out there … Look at you! Just look at your skirt—it’s filthy! Take it off at once and wash yourself while I look for something decent that en’t torn. Why you can’t keep yourself clean and tidy …”

Lyra was too sulky even to ask why she was having to wash and dress, and no grownup ever gave reasons of their own accord. She dragged the dress over her head and dropped it on the narrow bed, and began to wash desultorily while Pantalaimon, a canary now, hopped closer and closer to Mrs. Lonsdale’s dæmon, a stolid retriever, trying in vain to annoy him.

“Look at the state of this wardrobe! You en’t hung nothing up for weeks! Look at the creases in this—”

Look at this, look at that … Lyra didn’t want to look. She shut her eyes as she rubbed at her face with the thin towel.

“You’ll just have to wear it as it is. There en’t time to take an iron to it. God bless me, girl, your
knees
—look at the state of them.…”

“Don’t want to look at nothing,” Lyra muttered.

Mrs. Lonsdale smacked her leg. “Wash,” she said ferociously. “You get all that dirt off.”

“Why?” Lyra said at last. “I never wash my knees usually. No one’s going to look at my knees. What’ve I got to do all this for? You don’t care about Roger neither, any more than Chef does. I’m the only one that—”

Another smack, on the other leg.

“None of that nonsense. I’m a Parslow, same as Roger’s father. He’s my second cousin. I bet you didn’t know that, ’cause I bet you never asked, Miss Lyra. I bet it never occurred to you. Don’t you chide me with not caring about the boy. God knows, I even care about you, and you give me little enough reason and no thanks.”

She seized the flannel and rubbed Lyra’s knees so hard she left the skin bright pink and sore, but clean.

“The reason for this is you’re going to have dinner with the Master and his guests. I hope to God you behave. Speak when you’re spoken to, be quiet and polite, smile nicely and don’t you ever say
Dunno
when someone asks you a question.”

She dragged the best dress onto Lyra’s skinny frame, tugged it straight, fished a bit of red ribbon out of the tangle in a drawer, and brushed Lyra’s hair with a coarse brush.

“If they’d let me know earlier, I could’ve given your hair a proper wash. Well, that’s too bad. As long as they don’t look too close … There. Now stand up straight. Where’s those best patent-leather shoes?”

Five minutes later Lyra was knocking on the door of the Master’s lodging, the grand and slightly gloomy house that opened into the Yaxley Quadrangle and backed onto the Library Garden. Pantalaimon, an ermine now for politeness, rubbed himself against her leg. The door was opened by the Master’s manservant Cousins, an old enemy of Lyra’s; but both knew that this was a state of truce.

“Mrs. Lonsdale said I was to come,” said Lyra.

“Yes,” said Cousins, stepping aside. “The Master’s in the drawing room.”

He showed her into the large room that overlooked the Library Garden. The last of the sun shone into it, through the gap between the library and Palmer’s Tower, and lit up the heavy pictures and the glum silver the Master collected. It also lit up the guests, and Lyra realized why they weren’t going to dine in Hall: three of the guests were women.

“Ah, Lyra,” said the Master. “I’m so glad you could come. Cousins, could you find some sort of soft drink? Dame Hannah, I don’t think you’ve met Lyra … Lord Asriel’s niece, you know.”

Dame Hannah Relf was the head of one of the women’s colleges, an elderly
gray-haired lady whose dæmon was a marmoset. Lyra shook hands as politely as she could, and was then introduced to the other guests, who were, like Dame Hannah, Scholars from other colleges and quite uninteresting. Then the Master came to the final guest.

“Mrs. Coulter,” he said, “this is our Lyra. Lyra, come and say hello to Mrs. Coulter.”

“Hello, Lyra,” said Mrs. Coulter.

She was beautiful and young. Her sleek black hair framed her cheeks, and her dæmon was a golden monkey.

“I hope you’ll sit next to me at dinner,” said Mrs. Coulter, making room for Lyra on the sofa. “I’m not used to the grandeur of a Master’s lodging. You’ll have to show me which knife and fork to use.”

“Are you a female Scholar?” said Lyra. She regarded female Scholars with a proper Jordan disdain: there
were
such people, but, poor things, they could never be taken more seriously than animals dressed up and acting a play. Mrs. Coulter, on the other hand, was not like any female Scholar Lyra had seen, and certainly not like the two serious elderly ladies who were the other female guests. Lyra had asked the question expecting the answer No, in fact, for Mrs. Coulter had such an air of glamour that Lyra was entranced. She could hardly take her eyes off her.

“Not really,” Mrs. Coulter said. “I’m a member of Dame Hannah’s college, but most of my work takes place outside Oxford.… Tell me about yourself, Lyra. Have you always lived at Jordan College?”

Within five minutes Lyra had told her everything about her half-wild life: her favorite routes over the rooftops, the battle of the claybeds, the time she and Roger had caught and roasted a rook, her intention to capture a narrowboat from the gyptians and sail it to Abingdon, and so on. She even (looking around and lowering her voice) told her about the trick she and Roger had played on the skulls in the crypt.

“And these ghosts came, right, they came to my bedroom without their heads! They couldn’t talk except for making sort of gurgling noises, but I knew what they wanted all right. So I went down next day and put their coins back. They’d probably have killed me else.”

“You’re not afraid of danger, then?” said Mrs. Coulter admiringly. They were at dinner by this time, and as Lyra had hoped, sitting next to each other. Lyra ignored completely the Librarian on her other side and spent the whole meal talking to Mrs. Coulter.

When the ladies withdrew for coffee, Dame Hannah said, “Tell me, Lyra—are they going to send you to school?”

Lyra looked blank. “I dun—I don’t know,” she said. “Probably not,” she added for safety. “I wouldn’t want to put them to any trouble,” she went on piously. “Or expense. It’s probably better if I just go on living at Jordan and getting educated by the Scholars here when they’ve got a bit of spare time. Being as they’re here already, they’re probably free.”

“And does your uncle Lord Asriel have any plans for you?” said the other lady, who was a Scholar at the other women’s college.

“Yes,” said Lyra. “I expect so. Not school, though. He’s going to take me to the North next time he goes.”

“I remember him telling me,” said Mrs. Coulter.

Lyra blinked. The two female Scholars sat up very slightly, though their dæmons, either well behaved or torpid, did no more than flick their eyes at each other.

“I met him at the Royal Arctic Institute,” Mrs. Coulter went on. “As a matter of fact, it’s partly because of that meeting that I’m here today.”

“Are you an explorer too?” said Lyra.

“In a kind of way. I’ve been to the North several times. Last year I spent three months in Greenland making observations of the Aurora.”

That was it; nothing and no one else existed now for Lyra. She gazed at Mrs. Coulter with awe, and listened rapt and silent to her tales of igloo building, of seal hunting, of negotiating with the Lapland witches. The two female Scholars had nothing so exciting to tell, and sat in silence until the men came in.

Later, when the guests were preparing to leave, the Master said, “Stay behind, Lyra. I’d like to talk to you for a minute or two. Go to my study, child; sit down there and wait for me.”

Puzzled, tired, exhilarated, Lyra did as he told her. Cousins the manservant showed her in, and pointedly left the door open so that he could see what she was up to from the hall, where he was helping people on with their coats. Lyra watched for Mrs. Coulter, but she didn’t see her, and then the Master came into the study and shut the door.

He sat down heavily in the armchair by the fireplace. His dæmon flapped up to the chair back and sat by his head, her old hooded eyes on Lyra. The lamp hissed gently as the Master said:

“So, Lyra. You’ve been talking to Mrs. Coulter. Did you enjoy hearing what she said?”

“Yes!”

“She is a remarkable lady.”

“She’s wonderful. She’s the most wonderful person I’ve ever met.”

The Master sighed. In his black suit and black tie he looked as much like his dæmon as anyone could, and suddenly Lyra thought that one day, quite soon, he would be buried in the crypt under the oratory, and an artist would engrave a picture of his dæmon on the brass plate for his coffin, and her name would share the space with his.

“I should have made time before now for a talk with you, Lyra,” he said after a few moments. “I was intending to do so in any case, but it seems that time is further on than I thought. You have been safe here in Jordan, my dear. I think you’ve been happy. You haven’t found it easy to obey us, but we are very fond of you, and you’ve never been a bad child. There’s a lot of goodness and sweetness in your nature, and a lot of determination. You’re going to need all of that. Things are going on in the wide world I would have liked to protect you from—by keeping you here in Jordan, I mean—but that’s no longer possible.”

She merely stared. Were they going to send her away?

“You knew that sometime you’d have to go to school,” the Master went on. “We have taught you some things here, but not well or systematically. Our knowledge is of a different kind. You need to know things that elderly men are not able to teach you, especially at the age you are now. You must have been aware of that. You’re not a servant’s child either; we couldn’t put you out to be fostered by a town family. They might have cared for you in some ways, but your needs are different. You see, what I’m saying to you, Lyra, is that the part of your life that belongs to Jordan College is coming to an end.”

“No,” she said, “no, I don’t want to leave Jordan. I like it here. I want to stay here forever.”

“When you’re young, you do think that things last forever. Unfortunately, they don’t. Lyra, it won’t be long—a couple of years at most—before you will be a young woman, and not a child anymore. A young lady. And believe me, you’ll find Jordan College a far from easy place to live in then.”

“But it’s my home!”

“It has been your home. But now you need something else.”

“Not school. I’m not going to school.”

“You need female company. Female guidance.”

The word female only suggested female Scholars to Lyra, and she involuntarily made a face. To be exiled from the grandeur of Jordan, the splendor and
fame of its scholarship, to a dingy brick-built boardinghouse of a college at the northern end of Oxford, with dowdy female Scholars who smelled of cabbage and mothballs like those two at dinner!

The Master saw her expression, and saw Pantalaimon’s polecat eyes flash red.

He said, “But suppose it were Mrs. Coulter?”

Instantly Pantalaimon’s fur changed from coarse brown to downy white. Lyra’s eyes widened.

“Really?”

“She is by way of being acquainted with Lord Asriel. Your uncle, of course, is very concerned with your welfare, and when Mrs. Coulter heard about you, she offered at once to help. There is no Mr. Coulter, by the way; she is a widow. Her husband died very sadly in an accident some years ago; so you might bear that in mind before you ask.”

Lyra nodded eagerly, and said, “And she’s really going to … look after me?”

“Would you like that?”

“Yes!”

She could hardly sit still. The Master smiled. He smiled so rarely that he was out of practice, and anyone watching (Lyra wasn’t in a state to notice) would have said it was a grimace of sadness.

“Well, we had better ask her in to talk about it,” he said.

He left the room, and when he came back a minute later with Mrs. Coulter, Lyra was on her feet, too excited to sit. Mrs. Coulter smiled, and her dæmon bared his white teeth in a grin of implike pleasure. As she passed her on the way to the armchair, Mrs. Coulter touched Lyra’s hair briefly, and Lyra felt a current of warmth flow into her, and blushed.

When the Master had poured some brantwijn for her, Mrs. Coulter said, “So, Lyra, I’m to have an assistant, am I?”

“Yes,” said Lyra simply. She would have said yes to anything.

“There’s a lot of work I need help with.”

“I can work!”

“And we might have to travel.”

“I don’t mind. I’d go anywhere.”

“But it might be dangerous. We might have to go to the North.”

Lyra was speechless. Then she found her voice: “Soon?”