Disclaimer: I do not own the His Dark Materials Series.
A/N: And our next installment! I've taken a tiny break from writing to read as much as I could about these characters in all the other great fanfic out here on the web. I'm always so impressed at how deeply people can delve into Mrs. Coulter's psyche. And after seeing the show's adaptation of her character, I've developed even more ideas about how to progress with her character here, which feels like it's not only moving forward but, in some ways due to the varying circumstances, might be moving backwards as well. Anyway, thanks for reading!
Luxurious Lies
53.
In the Dark
Sometimes Mrs. Coulter awoke in a cold sweat, screaming.
She was back at Bolvangar. The children pressed against her soft furs, their pitiful bodies clinging to every inch of her to grasp at some sense of worth. Their daemons circled around the golden monkey, some flying above him as birds and others leaning against him or even mimicking his form. Above all the children, however, was the noise—the machine whirling up, its frequency and intensity increasing, all as a small child cowered in the mesh cage to the left. Her face was flush with fear and her hair plastered to her forehead as she glanced wildly around, her dark eyes finding Mrs. Coulter's and her mouth opening to shriek that one, startling word: mother.
She was always quick to gather herself as she woke, clutching her heart and then feeling the golden monkey stir at her feet. Mrs. Coulter allowed herself to calm down, focusing on her breathing. In and out. In, and then out.
"It was just a dream," her daemon murmured to her, softly.
But Mrs. Coulter's eyes felt hot and tight as she shifted her body so that she could lay on her side and clutch her the top of her knees. "But it wasn't just a dream. Part of that had happened."
The mind was a fickle, mysterious thing. In another world, as Mrs. Coulter had often dreamed about, she might have been a psychologist. Women didn't often amount to such work here, of course, but the thought was appealing. To learn more about the inner workings of the mind, about the way the subconscious worked and sometimes contrasted with the waking and working mind. It was intriguing. She liked to think of herself as cold and detached, but dreams, no, memories like this reminded her that, no matter how hard she resisted, she wasn't. She was human. She was flawed. She was pained.
After thirty minutes Mrs. Coulter gave up on trying to fall back asleep and so got up, wandering over to the kitchen to make some tea. It'd been a week since her last encounter with the mysterious man from the bar. She still didn't know his name, she realized with yet another smirk, but she had learned more about him that day. Closing her eyes, she could remember it with almost perfect clarity.
It was getting dark as Mrs. Coulter followed the man, keeping her respectable distance. She was gazing to the upper right of the sky, pretending to watch the sun fading and leaving its last traces on the water. The man moved slowly, quietly. Confidently. The golden monkey resented the way the man could do that in a way they never could. Mrs. Coulter did, too. To be a woman in a man's world was a constant uphill battle, but one she'd never quite given up on. Still, it annoyed her, that this man didn't even need to fight for it.
After a solid twenty minutes of walking straight ahead with only a couple of turns, the man entered a small, shabby-looking building. It definitely wasn't a home, and it frankly wasn't much unlike the Rabbit's Den bar, except it had no such sign indicating the type of business it was. It could be a clothes shop, or a bakery, or an insurance company.
"Or an underground drug organization," the golden monkey added, his thoughts not entirely sarcastic or without warrant.
They really had no idea what they were getting themselves into. All Mrs. Coulter knew about the man was that he wore a cap, had a mountain lion daemon, and liked whisky and strong, stout beer. So nothing, essentially, even as they had spent several hours drinking next to one another and bantering. All that empty banter that normally irritated her beyond expression. Except, there was something in his movements and in his eyes. There was a darkness nestled there, behind something resembling conviction. Conviction for what she didn't know, but that passion and that drive was there. He didn't fit in with the rest of the idiots in this wretched town. She had to trust that this was an important lead.
And, she reckoned, had to hope it really wasn't just a dramatic drug cartel.
After a few minutes had passed, Mrs. Coulter took a deep breath and then approached the door. She considered what the best way to proceed from here was. Knock? Wait to see if someone would check for her? Just walk in? They decided it was best and less conspicuous to just walk in, even if doing so also felt entirely wrong and ill-advised.
It was dimly-lit inside the house with a dank smell of tobacco, alcohol, and something…else. Mrs. Coulter couldn't quite identify the smell, with the golden monkey not sure if they even wanted to. Especially if it was drugs after all. The door had opened up to a narrow hallway, which Mrs. Coulter had no choice but to follow along, hearing only the click of her own heels against the wooden floor as a chorus of voices slowly started to pick up as she moved along. Male voices.
"And there she is," said one male voice in particular that, in spite of herself, she recognized immediately. His hat was off, and his blue and green eyes sparkled at her from his seat at a roundtable filled with four other men who all nodded to her. "Our little Magisterium spy."
Mrs. Coulter sighed as she placed the kettle on the burner, watching the coils grow red as anbaric energy shifted to fuel it. She sighed lightly, the golden monkey letting out a puff of air as well as he crawled over to the kitchen table and began intertwining his fingers through the metal spirals. They'd made quite a mess of things this time, it seemed. They were in uncharted territory. They didn't know exactly what to do, which was not a situation they often found themselves in.
"I wonder what Lyra would do?" she mused aloud. Exchanging a glance with the monkey, she let out a laugh—a genuine laugh from her diaphragm. She knew more than anyone else how excited her daughter would be, getting involved with an anti-Magisterium resistance group while working under Magisterium orders. There wouldn't be anything to question if it were Lyra. There would be nothing to fear, nothing to lose. Nothing but excitement and adventure.
Again, Mrs. Coulter wondered how Lyra was, and what she was doing. At this hour, she realized, checking to see it was 2am, she could guess that she was sleeping. Probably under a warm, hand-stitched quilt Madame Bisset had made for her. But she wondered how long it had taken her to fall asleep, and if she still suffered from the nightmares she had after they'd first left the station. She wondered if she was hot under the quilt, and if she'd opened a window to cool down. Or if she'd escape out her window to go explore at night, without her caretaker even realizing.
"You have to stop this," the monkey finally told her, voice stern, as several minutes passed of this excessive daydreaming.
Mrs. Coulter knew that she really should stop. It would be the wisest thing to do, to shut her mind from Lyra completely and carry on with her life as it was before her arrival. It would prevent her from feeling the hurt that overcame her heart every time she saw Lyra out and about with that old woman, who had the nerve to keep her daughter away from her. It would prevent her from seething now at the thought of her daughter sleeping one mile away in someone else's house and in someone else's care. Simply not caring would, truly, solve so many of Mrs. Coulter's problems.
But, as the psychologists would probably say, caring was a condition of being human. Not all humans care the same, but they do, for the most part, care. And despite every effort she has ever taken over the past 12 years of her life, Mrs. Coulter could not stop caring. At least not completely.
So she went back to bed after sipping her chamomile tea, which her mother had always fed her when she'd been upset and which still after all these years did help her feel better. Even if feeling "better" still meant feeling quite awful.
o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o
It'd been a long time since Lord Asriel had stood outside of Jordan College.
His tattered suitcase sat next to his feet while his rucksack was slung halfway across his shoulder. Stelmaria was sitting on the other side of his suitcase, her eyes narrowed and her tail curled delicately around her large paws.
"The one place we have left," she mused aloud to him, her eyes raking over the tall towers and the high brick walls that lined as far as their eye could see. They'd always appreciated the sheer vastness of Jordan, as the oldest and tallest of all Oxford's scholastic institutions. Lyra had loved the architecture, scrambling up and around them as much and whenever she could. He'd caught her on more than one occasion climbing the roof and sliding down a gutter, her dress catching and ripping in the cracks and her daemon laughing and diving before her as his bird form du jour.
"The one place we actually wish to return," he offered, meeting his daemon's eyes before picking up his suitcase and heading over to the entrance hall.
The other Scholars were as boring and stuffy as he'd remembered them. A few new faces caught his eye, mostly because they didn't look up at him or even recognize him. The majority, however, stopped straight in their tracks to gape at him, in his baggy canvas explorer clothes with his months-long beard and major scratch across his left calf.
"Charles," Lord Asriel said cheerfully as a tall, gray-haired man buried in a book happened to cross his path. The man looked up and then tripped to a halt, book crashing to the floor and glasses slipping down his nose.
"L-Lord Asriel!" he stammered, struggling to both pick up the book he'd dropped and gawk at the man, as if he weren't believing what was in front of him. "You, uh, I—we didn't know that you would be arriving here? Um, well—"
"Because I never announced it," Lord Asriel laughed, clapping the man on the back as if he were an old friend and not one of the men who had conspired to poison him all those months ago. "Now, I believe you, Dr. Carne, and I should consult in the Retiring Room. Although I'll ask that this time you kindly refrain from serving any Tokay."
o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o
Mrs. Coulter had awakened faster than she would have liked, given all the trouble she took to fall back asleep. Feeling the golden monkey's pangs of alarm, Mrs. Coulter sat up from her bed, eyes still heavy with sleep. It was then that she heard what the golden monkey heard: the light yet steady pounding at her front door.
Her body stiffened then, as she immediately reached over to the wooden nightstand next to her bed. The golden monkey was both angry and nervous, pacing at the bedroom door with his hackles raised. He didn't like this. He didn't trust this. He'd known from that meeting with those men and those stares that they were walking into trouble. He regretted their decision as soon as they'd made it, and here they were now, about to welcome company at four o'clock in the morning.
Mrs. Coulter grabbed the pistol and loaded a round, the small click of the revolver filling the uncomfortable silence. She moved the covers away and then got on her feet, sliding into her slippers as she crept toward the door. In an instant the monkey was on her shoulders as she gently touched the doorknob and opened it very gradually, as silent as the night itself.
Careful now, her daemon thought to her, his breath quick and warm in her ear. She'd wished he'd have chosen a different part of her body to cling to as they moved forward like this. His anxiety started to affect her, too, and she felt her own heart begin to race.
When they reached the front door, they stopped again to listen. There was nothing at first, but then a shuffle and another short series of knocks—light and easy to miss, almost as if they were intended to be.
This is it, she said, to steel themselves, before she swung open the door with her gun pointed directly at the person standing at her front door.
Instead of the man from the bar or one of his cronies, however, was the small, robe-clothed figure of Lyra, her dark eyes wide and mouth drawn into an o as her mother stared her down with the silver pistol pointed at her head.