«She's never going to the North! She's going to keep us here forever. When are we going to run away?»
«She is,» Lyra whispered back. «You just don't like her. Well, that's hard luck. I like her. And why would she be teaching us navigation and all that if she wasn't going to take us north?»
«To stop you getting impatient, that's why. You don't really want to stand around at the cocktail party being all sweet and pretty. She's just making a pet out of you.»
Lyra turned her back and closed her eyes. But what Pantalaimon said was true. She had been feeling confined and cramped by this polite life, however luxurious it was. She would have given anything for a day with Roger and her Oxford ragamuffin friends, with a battle in the claybeds and a race along the canal. The one thing that kept her polite and attentive to Mrs. Coulter was that tantalizing hope of going north. Perhaps they would meet Lord Asriel. Perhaps he and Mrs. Coulter would fall in love, and they would get married and adopt Lyra, and go and rescue Roger from the Gobblers.
On the afternoon of the cocktail party, Mrs. Coulter took Lyra to a fashionable hairdresser's, where her stiff dark blond hair was softened and waved, and her nails were filed and polished, and where they even applied a little makeup to her eyes and lips to show her how to do it. Then they went to collect the new dress Mrs. Coulter had ordered for her, and to buy some patent-leather shoes, and then it was time to go back to the flat and check the flowers and get dressed.
«Not the shoulder bag, dear,» said Mrs. Coulter as Lyra came out of her bedroom, glowing with a sense of her own prettiness.
Lyra had taken to wearing a little white leather shoulder bag everywhere, so as to keep the alethiometer close at hand. Mrs. Coulter, loosening the cramped way some roses had been bunched into a vase, saw that Lyra wasn't moving and glanced pointedly at the door.
«Oh, please, Mrs. Coulter, I do love this bag!»
«Not indoors, Lyra. It looks absurd to be carrying a shoulder bag in your own home. Take it off at once, and come and help check these glasses….»
It wasn't so much her snappish tone as the words «in your own home» that made Lyra resist stubbornly. Pantalaimon flew to the floor and instantly became a polecat, arching his back against her little white ankle socks. Encouraged by this, Lyra said:
«But it won't be in the way. And it's the only thing I really like wearing. I think it really suits—»
She didn't finish the sentence, because Mrs. Coulter's daemon sprang off the sofa in a blur of golden fur and pinned Pantalaimon to the carpet before he could move. Lyra cried out in alarm, and then in fear and pain, as Pantalaimon twisted this way and that, shrieking and snarling, unable to loosen the golden monkey's grip. Only a few seconds, and the monkey had overmastered him: with one fierce black paw around his throat and his black paws gripping the polecat's lower limbs, he took one of Pantalaimon's ears in his other paw and pulled as if he intended to tear it off. Not angrily, either, but with a cold curious force that was horrifying to see and even worse to feel.
Lyra sobbed in terror.
«Don't! Please! Stop hurting us!»
Mrs. Coulter looked up from her flowers.
«Do as I tell you, then,» she said.
«I promise!»
The golden monkey stepped away from Pantalaimon as if he were suddenly bored. Pantalaimon fled to Lyra at once, and she scooped him up to her face to kiss and gentle.
«Now, Lyra,» said Mrs. Coulter.
Lyra turned her back abruptly and slammed into her bedroom, but no sooner had she banged the door shut behind her than it opened again. Mrs. Coulter was standing there only a foot or two away.
«Lyra, if you behave in this coarse and vulgar way, we shall have a confrontation, which I will win. Take off that bag this instant. Control that unpleasant frown. Never slam a door again in my hearing or out of it. Now, the first guests will be arriving in a few minutes, and they are going to find you perfectly behaved, sweet, charming, innocent, attentive, delightful in every way. I particularly wish for that, Lyra, do you understand me?»
«Yes, Mrs. Coulter.»
«Then kiss me.»
She bent a little and offered her cheek. Lyra had to stand on tiptoe to kiss it. She noticed how smooth it was, and the slight perplexing smell of Mrs. Coulter's flesh: scented, but somehow metallic. She drew away and laid the shoulder bag on her dressing table before following Mrs. Coulter back to the drawing room.
«What do you think of the flowers, dear?» said Mrs. Coulter as sweetly as if nothing had happened. «I suppose one can't go wrong with roses, but you can have too much of a good thing….Have the caterers brought enough ice? Be a dear and go and ask. Warm drinks are horrid…»
Lyra found it was quite easy to pretend to be lighthearted and charming, though she was conscious every second of Pantalaimon's disgust, and of his hatred for the golden monkey. Presently the doorbell rang, and soon the room was filling up with fashionably dressed ladies and handsome or distinguished men. Lyra moved among them offering canapes or smiling sweetly and making pretty answers when they spoke to her. She felt like a universal pet, and the second she voiced that thought to herself, Pantalaimon stretched his goldfinch wings and chirruped loudly.
She sensed his glee at having proved her right, and became a little more retiring.
«And where do you go to school, my dear?» said an elderly lady, inspecting Lyra through a lorgnette.
«I don't go to school,» Lyra told her.
«Really? I thought your mother would have sent you to her old school. A very good place…»
Lyra was mystified until she realized the old lady's mistake.
«Oh! She's not my mother! I'm just here helping her. I'm her personal assistant,» she said importantly.
«I see. And who are your people?»
Again Lyra had to wonder what she meant before replying.
«They were a count and countess,» she said. «They both died in an aeronautical accident in the North.»
«Which count?»
«Count Belacqua. He was Lord Asriel's brother.»
The old lady's daemon, a scarlet macaw, shifted as if in irritation from one foot to another. The old lady was beginning to frown with curiosity, so Lyra smiled sweetly and moved on.
She was going past a group of men and one young woman near the large sofa when she heard the word Dust. She had seen enough of society now to understand when men and women were flirting, and she watched the process with fascination, though she was more fascinated by the mention of Dust, and she hung back to listen. The men seemed to be Scholars; from the way the young woman was questioning them, Lyra took her to be a student of some kind.
«It was discovered by a Muscovite—stop me if you know this already—» a middle-aged man was saying, as the young woman gazed at him in admiration, «a man called Rusakov, and they're usually called Rusakov Particles after him. Elementary particles that don't interact in any way with others—very hard to detect, but the extraordinary thing is that they seem to be attracted to human beings.»
«Really?» said the young woman, wide-eyed.
«And even more extraordinary,» he went on, «some human beings more than others. Adults attract it, but not children. At least, not much, and not until adolescence. In fact, that's the very reason—» His voice dropped, and he moved closer to the young woman, putting his hand confidentially on her shoulder. «—that's the very reason the Oblation Board was set up. As our good hostess here could tell you.»
«Really? Is she involved with the Oblation Board?»
«My dear, she is the Oblation Board. It's entirely her own project—»
The man was about to tell her more when he caught sight of Lyra. She stared back at him unblinkingly, and perhaps he had had a little too much to drink, or perhaps he was keen to impress the young woman, for he said: