Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (72 page)

Strange, with his nose still deep in the letter, saw and heard none of this. He took up the little box and opened it.

“Is there any thing inside, Mr Strange?” asked Aunt Greysteel.

Strange shut the box quickly again. “No, madam, nothing at all.” He put the box in his pocket and immediately summoned Frank and asked for a glass of water.

He left the Greysteels very soon after dinner and went straight to the coffee-house on the corner of the Calle de la Cortesia. The first glimpse of the contents of the box had been very shocking and he had a strong desire to be among people when he opened it again.

The waiter brought his brandy. He took a sip and opened the box.

At first he supposed that the fairy had sent him a replica of a small, white, amputated finger, made of wax or some such material and very lifelike. It was so pale, so drained of blood, that it seemed almost to be tinged with green, with a suggestion of pink in the grooves around the fingernail. He wondered that any one should labour so long to produce any thing quite so horrible.

But the moment he touched it he realized it was not wax at all. It was icy cold, and yet the skin moved in the same way as the skin moved upon his own finger and the muscles could be detected beneath the skin, both by touch and sight. It was, without a doubt, a human finger. From the size of it he thought it was probably a child’s finger or perhaps the smallest finger of a woman with rather delicate hands.

“But why would the magician give him a finger?” he wondered. “Perhaps it was the magician’s finger? But I do not see how that can be, unless the magician were either a child or a woman.” It occurred to him that he had heard something about a finger once, but for the moment he could not remember what it was. Oddly enough although he did not remember
what
he had been told, he thought he remembered
who
had told him. It had been Drawlight. “… which explains why I did not pay a great deal of attention. But why would Drawlight have been talking of magic? He knew little and cared less.”

He drank some more brandy. “I thought that if I had a fairy to explain everything to me, then all the mysteries would become clear. But all that has happened is that I have acquired another mystery!”

He fell to musing upon the various stories he had heard concerning the great English magicians and their fairy-servants. Martin Pale with Master Witcherley, Master Fallowthought and all the rest. Thomas Godbless with Dick-come-Tuesday; Meraud with Coleman Gray; and most famous of all, Ralph Stokesey and Col Tom Blue.

When Stokesey first saw Col Tom Blue, he was a wild, unruly person — the last fairy in the world to ally himself to an English magician. So Stokesey had followed him into Faerie, to Col Tom Blue’s own castle
⁴
and had gone about invisibly and discovered many interesting things.
⁵
Strange was not so naive as to suppose that the story as it had come down to children and magio-historians was an accurate description of what had happened. “Yet there is probably some truth in it somewhere,” he thought. “Perhaps Stokesey managed to penetrate Col Tom Blue’s castle and that proved to Col Tom Blue that he was a magician to be reckoned with. There is no reason that I could not do something similar. After all this fairy knows nothing of my skills or achievements. If Iwere to pay him an unexpected visit, it would prove to him the extent of my power.”

He thought back to the misty, snowy day at Windsor when he and the King had almost stumbled into Faerie, lured by the gentleman’s magic. He thought of the wood and the tiny lights within it that had suggested an ancient house. The King’s Roads could certainly take him there, but — leaving aside his promise to Arabella — he had no desire to find the gentleman by magic he had already done. He wanted this to be something new and startling. When he next saw the gentleman he wanted to be full of the confidence and exhilaration that a successful new spell always bestowed on him.

“Faerie is never very far away,” he thought, “and there are a thousand ways of getting there. Surely I ought to be able to find one of them?”

There was a spell he knew of that could make a path between any two beings the magician named. It was an old spell — just a step away from fairy magic. The paths it would make could certainly cross the boundaries between worlds. Strange had never used it before and he had no idea of what the path would like look or how he would follow it. Still he believed he could do it. He muttered the words to himself, made a few gestures, and named himself and the gentleman as the two beings between whom the path should be drawn.

There was a shift as sometimes happened at the start of magic. It was as if an invisible door had opened and closed, leaving him upon the other side of it. Or as if all the buildings in the city had turned round and everything was now facing in another direction. The magic appeared to have worked perfectly — something had certainly happened — but he could see no result. He considered what to do next.

“It is probably only a matter of perception — and I know how to cure that.” He paused. “It is vexatious. I had much rather not use it again, but still, once more is not likely to hurt.”

He reached into the breast of his coat and brought out the tincture of madness. The waiter brought him a glass of water and he carefully tipped in one tiny drop. He drank it down.

He looked around and perceived for the first time the line of glittering light which began at his foot, crossed the tiled floor of the coffee-house and led out of the door. It was very like those lines which he had often made to appear upon the silver dish of water. He found that if he looked directly at it, it disappeared. But if he kept it in the corner of his eye he could see it very well.

He paid the waiter and stepped out into the street. “Well,” he said, “that is truly remarkable.”

55
The second shall see his
dearest possession in his enemy’s hand

Night of 2nd/3rd December 1816

It was as if that fate which had always seemed to threaten the city of Venice had overtaken her in an instant; but instead of being drowned in water, she was drowned in trees. Dark, ghostly trees crowded the alleys and squares, and filled the canals. Walls were no obstacle to them. Their branches pierced stone and glass. Their roots plunged deep beneath paving stones. Statues and pillars were sheathed in ivy. It was suddenly — to Strange’s senses at any rate — a great deal quieter and darker. Trailing beards of mistletoe hid lamps and candles and the dense canopy of branches blocked out the moon.

Yet none of Venice’s inhabitants appeared to notice the least change. Strange had often read how men and women could be cheerfully oblivious to magic going on around them, but never before had he seen an example of it. A baker’s apprentice was carrying a tray of bread on his head. As Strange watched, the man neatly circumvented all the trees he did not know were there and ducking this way and that to avoid branches which would have poked his eye out. A man and a woman dressed for the ballroom or the
Ridotto
, with cloaks and masks, came down the Salizzada San Moisé together, arm in arm, heads together, whispering. A great tree stood in their way. They parted quite naturally, passed one on each side of the tree and joined arms again on the other side.

Strange followed the line of glittering light down an alley to the quayside. The trees went on where the city stopped, and the line of light led through the trees.

He did not much care for the idea of stepping into the sea. At Venice there is no gently sloping beach to lead one inch by inch into the water; the stone world of the city ends at the quayside and the Adriatic begins immediately. Strange had no notion how deep the water might be just here, but he was tolerably certain that it was deep enough to drown in. All he could do was hope that the glittering path which led him through the wood would also prevent him from drowning.

Yet at the same time it pleased his vanity to think how much better suited he was to this adventure than Norrell. “He could never be persuaded to step into the sea. He hates getting wet. Who was it that said a magician needs the subtlety of a Jesuit, the daring of a soldier and the wits of a thief? I believe it was meant for a insult, but it has some truth in it.”

He stepped off the quayside.

Instantly the sea became more ethereal and dreamlike, and the wood became more solid. Soon the sea was scarcely more than a faint silver shimmer among the dark trees and a salty tang mingling with the usual scents of a night-time wood.

“I am,” thought Strange, “the first English magician to enter Faerie in almost three hundred years.”
¹
He felt excessively pleased at the thought and rather wished there were someone there to see him do it and be astonished. He realized how tired he was of books and silence, how he longed for the times when to be a magician meant journeys into places no Englishman had ever seen. For the first time since Waterloo he was actually doing something. Then it occurred to him that, rather than congratulating himself, he ought to be looking about him and seeing if there were any thing he could learn. He applied himself to studying his surroundings.

The wood was not quite an English wood, though it was very like it. The trees were a little too ancient, a little too vast and a little too fantastic in shape. Strange had the strong impression that they possessed fully formed characters, with loves, hates and desires of their own. They looked as if they were accustomed to being treated equally with men and women, and expected to be consulted in matters that concerned them.

“This,” he thought, “is just as I would have expected, but it ought to stand as a warning to me of how different this world is from my own. The people I meet here are sure to ask me questions. They will want to trick me.” He began to imagine the sorts of questions they might ask him and to prepare a variety of clever answers. He felt no fear; a dragon might appear for all he cared. He had come so far in the last two days; he felt as if there was nothing he could not do if he tried.

After twenty minutes or so of walking the glittering line led him to the house. He recognized it immediately; its image had been so sharp and clear before him that day in Windsor. Yet at the same time it was different. In Windsor it had appeared bright and welcoming. Now he was struck by its overwhelming air of poverty and desolation. The windows were many, but very small and most of them were dark. It was much bigger than he expected — far larger than any earthly dwelling. “The Czar of Russia may have a house as large as this,” he thought, “or perhaps the Pope in Rome. I do not know. I have never been to those places.”

It was surrounded by a high wall. The glittering line seemed to stop at the wall. He could not see any opening. He muttered Ormskirk’s Spell of Revelation, followed immediately by Taillemache’s Shield, a charm to ensure safe passage through enchanted places. His luck held and immediately a mean little gate appeared. He passed through it and found himself in a wide grey courtyard. It was full of bones that glimmered whitely in the starlight. Some skeletons were clad in rusting armour; the weapons that had destroyed them were still tangled with their ribs or poking out of an eye-socket.

Strange had seen the battlefields of Badajoz and Waterloo; he was scarcely perturbed by a few ancient skeletons. Still it was interesting. He felt as if he really were in Faerie now.

Despite the dilapidation of the house he had the strongest suspicion that there was something magical about its appearance. He tried Ormskirk’s Revelation again. Immediately the house shifted and changed and he could see that it was only partly built of stone. Some of what had appeared to be walls, buttresses and towers was now revealed as a great mound of earth — a hillside in fact.

“
It is a brugh
!” he thought in great excitement.
²

He passed under a low doorway and found himself immediately in a vast room filled with people dancing. The dancers were dressed in the finest clothes imaginable, but the room itself seemed in the very worst state of repair. Indeed at one end, part of a wall had collapsed and lay in a heap of rubble. The furnishings were few and shabby, the candles were of the poorest sort and there was only one fiddler and one piper to provide the music.

No one appeared to be paying Strange the least attention and so he stood among the people near the wall and watched the dance. In many ways the entertainment here was less foreign to him than, say, a
conversazione
³
in Venice. The manners of the guests seemed more English and the dance itself was very like the country dances that are enjoyed by ladies and gentlemen from Newcastle to Penzance every week of the year.

It occurred to him that once upon a time he had been fond of dancing, and so had Arabella. But after the war in Spain he had hardly danced with her — or indeed with any one else. Wherever he had gone in London — whether to a ballroom or Government office — there had always been too many people to talk to about magic. He wondered if Arabella had danced with other people. He wondered if he had asked her. “Though if I did think to ask her,” he thought with a sigh, “I clearly did not listen to her answers — I cannot remember any thing about it.”

“Good God, sir! What are you doing here?”

Strange turned to see who spoke. The one thing he was not prepared for was that the first person he should meet should be Sir Walter Pole’s butler. He could not remember the fellow’s name, though he had heard Sir Walter speak it a hundred times. Simon? Samuel?

The man grasped Strange by the arm and shook him. He seemed highly agitated. “For God’s sake, sir, what are you doing here? Don’t you know that he hates you?”

Strange opened his mouth to deliver one of the clever ripostes but then hesitated. Who hated him? Norrell?

In the complexity of the dance the man was whisked away. Strange looked for him again and caught sight of him on the other side of the room. The man glared furiously at Strange as if he were angry at him for not leaving.

“How odd,” thought Strange. “And yet of course they would do that. They would do the thing you least expected. Probably it is not Pole’s butler at all. Probably it is only a fairy in his likeness. Or a magical illusion.” He began to look around for his own fairy.

"Stephen! Stephen!”

“I am here, sir!” Stephen turned and found the gentleman with the thistle-down hair at his elbow.

“The magician is here! He is here! What can he want?”

“I do not know, sir.”

“Oh! He has come here to destroy me! I know he has!”

Stephen was astonished. For a long time he had imagined that the gentleman was proof against any injury. Yet here he was in a condition of the utmost anxiety and fright.

“But why would he want to do that, sir?” asked Stephen in a soothing tone. “I think it far more likely that he has come here to rescue … to take home his wife. Perhaps we should release Mrs Strange from her enchantment and permit her to return home with her husband? And Lady Pole too. Let Mrs Strange and Lady Pole return to England with the magician, sir. I am sure that will be enough to mollify his anger against you. I am sure I can persuade him.”

“What? What are you talking about? Mrs Strange? No, no, Stephen! You are quite mistaken! Indeed you are! He has not so much as mentioned our dear Mrs Strange. You and I, Stephen, know how to appreciate the society of such a woman. He does not. He has forgotten all about her. He has a new sweetheart now — a bewitching young woman whose lovely presence I hope one day will add lustre to our own balls! There is naught so fickle as an Englishman! Oh, believe me! He has come to destroy me! From the moment he asked me for Lady Pole’s finger I knew that he was far, far cleverer than I had ever guessed before. Advise me, Stephen. You have lived among these Englishmen for years. What ought I to do? How can I protect myself? How can I punish such wickedness?”

Through all the dullness and heaviness of his enchantment Stephen struggled to think clearly. A great crisis was upon him, he was sure of it. Never before had the gentleman asked for his help so openly. Surely he ought to be able to turn the situation to his advantage? But how? And he knew from long experience that none of the gentleman’s moods lasted long; he was the most mercurial being in the world. The smallest word could turn his fear into a blazing rage and hatred — if Stephen misspoke now, then far from freeing himself and the others, he might goad the gentleman into destroying them all. He gazed about the room in search of inspiration.

“What shall I do, Stephen?” moaned the gentleman. “What shall I do?”

Something caught Stephen’s eye. Beneath a black arch stood a familiar figure: a fairy woman who habitually wore a black veil that went from the crown of her head to the tips of her fingers. She never joined in the dancing; she half-walked, half-floated among the dancers and the standers-by. Stephen had never seen her speak to any one, but when she passed by there was a faint smell of graveyards, earth and charnel houses. He could never look upon her without feeling a shiver of apprehension, but whether she was malignant, cursed, or both, he did not know.

“There are people in this world,” he began, “whose lives are nothing but a burden to them. A black veil stands between them and the world. They are utterly alone. They are like shadows in the night, shut off from joy and love and all gentle human emotions, unable even to give comfort to each other. Their days are full of nothing but darkness, misery and solitude. You know whom I mean, sir. I … I do not speak of blame …” The gentleman was gazing at him with fierce intensity. “But I am sure we can turn the magician’s wrath away from you, if you will only release …”

“Ah!” exclaimed the gentleman and his eyes widened with understanding. He held up his hand as a sign for Stephen to be silent.

Stephen was certain that he had gone too far. “Forgive me,” he whispered.

“Forgive?” said the gentleman in a tone of surprize. “Why, there is nothing to forgive! It is long centuries since any one spoke to me with such forthrightness and I honour you for it! Darkness, yes! Darkness, misery and solitude!” He turned upon his heel and walked away into the crowd.

Strange was enjoying himself immensely. The eerie contradictions of the ball did not disturb him in the least; they were just what he would have expected. Despite the poverty of the great hall, it was still in part an illusion. His magician’s eye perceived that at least part of the room was beneath the earth.

A little way off a fairy woman was regarding him steadily. She was dressed in a gown the colour of a winter sunset and carried a delicate, glittering fan strung with something which might have been crystal beads — but which more resembled frost upon leaves and the fragile pendants of ice that hang from twigs.

A dance was at that moment starting up. No one appeared to claim the fairy woman’s hand, so upon an impulse Strange smiled and bowed and said, “There is scarcely any one here who knows me. So we cannot be introduced. Nevertheless, madam, I should be greatly honoured if you would dance with me.”

She did not answer him or smile in return, but she took his proffered hand and allowed him to lead her to the dance. They took their places in the set and stood for a moment without saying a word.

“You are wrong to say no one knows you,” she said suddenly. “I know you. You are one of the two magicians who is destined to return magic to England.” Then she said, as if reciting a prophecy or something that was commonly known, “
And the name of one shall be Fearfulness. And the name of the other shall be Arrogance
… Well, clearly you are not Fearfulness, so I suppose you must be Arrogance.”

This was not very polite.

“That is indeed my destiny,” Strange agreed. “And an excellent one it is!”

“Oh, you think so, do you?” she said, giving him a sideways look. “Then why haven’t you done it yet?”

Strange smiled. “And what makes you think, madam, that I have not?”