After a short silence Strange said, “You advise me to read this book?”
“Yes, indeed. I think you should read it,” said Mr Norrell.
Strange waited, but Norrell continued to gaze at the book in his hand as though he were entirely at a loss as to how to proceed. “Then you must give it to me, sir,” said Strange gently.
“Yes, indeed,” said Mr Norrell. He approached Strange cautiously and held the book out for several moments, before suddenly tipping it up and off into Strange’s hand with an odd gesture, as though it was not a book at all, but a small bird which clung to him and would on no account go to any one else, so that he was obliged to trick it into leaving his hand. He was so intent upon this manoeuvre that fortunately he did not look up at Strange who was trying not to laugh.
Mr Norrell remained a moment, looking wistfully at his book in another magician’s hand.
But once he had parted with one book the painful part of his ordeal seemed to be over. Half an hour later he recommended another book to Strange and went and got it with scarcely any fuss. By midday he was pointing out books on the shelves to Strange and allowing him to fetch them down for himself. By the end of the day Mr Norrell had given Strange a quite extraordinary number of books to read, and said that he expected him to have read them by the end of the week.
A whole day of conversation and study was a luxury they could not often afford; generally they were obliged to spend some part of every day in attending to Mr Norrell’s visitors – whether these were the fashionable people whom Mr Norrell still believed it essential to cultivate or gentlemen from the various Government departments.
By the end of a fortnight Mr Norrell’s enthusiasm for his new pupil knew no bounds. “One has but to explain something to him once,” Norrell told Sir Walter, “and he understands it immediately! I well remember how many weeks I laboured to comprehend Pale’s Conjectures Concerning the Foreshadowing of Things To Come, yet Mr Strange was master of this exceptionally difficult theory in little more than four hours!”
Sir Walter smiled. “No doubt. But I think you rate your own achievements too low. Mr Strange has the advantage of a teacher to explain the difficult parts to him, whereas you had none – you have prepared the way for him and made everything smooth and easy.”
“Ah!” cried Mr Norrell. “But when Mr Strange and I sat down to talk of the Conjectures some more, I realized that they had a much wider application than I had supposed. It was his questions, you see, which led me to a new understanding of Dr Pale’s ideas!”
Sir Walter said, “Well, sir, I am glad that you have found a friend whose mind accords so well with your own – there is no greater comfort.”
“I agree with you, Sir Walter!” cried Mr Norrell. “Indeed I do!”
Strange’s admiration for Mr Norrell was of a more restrained nature. Norrell’s dull conversation and oddities of behaviour continued to grate upon his nerves; and at about the same time as Mr Norrell was praising Strange to Sir Walter, Strange was complaining of Norrell to Arabella.
“Even now I scarcely know what to make of him. He is, at one and the same time, the most remarkable man of the Age and the most tedious. Twice this morning our conversation was interrupted because he thought he heard a mouse in the room – mice are a particular aversion of his. Two footmen, two maids and I moved all the furniture about looking for the mouse, while he stood by the fireplace, rigid with fear.”
“Has he a cat?” suggested Arabella. “He should get a cat.”
“Oh, but that is quite impossible! He hates cats even more than mice. He told me that if he is ever so unlucky as to find himself in the same room as a cat, then he is sure to be all over red pimples within an hour.”
It was Mr Norrell’s sincere wish to educate his pupil thoroughly, but the habits of secrecy and dissimulation which he had cultivated all his life were not easily thrown off. On a day in December, when snow was falling in large, soft flakes from heavy, greenish-grey clouds, the two magicians were seated in Mr Norrell’s library. The slow drifting motion of the snow outside the windows, the heat of the fire and the effects of a large glass of sherry-wine which he had been so ill-advised as to accept when Mr Norrell offered it, all combined to make Strange very heavy and sleepy. His head was supported upon his hand and his eyes were almost closing.
Mr Norrell was speaking. “Many magicians,” he said, steepling his hands, “have attempted to confine magical powers in some physical object. It is not a difficult operation and the object can be any thing the magician wishes. Trees, jewels, books, bullets, hats have all been employed for this purpose at one time or another.” Mr Norrell frowned hard at his fingertips. “By placing some of his power in whatever object he chuses, the magician hopes to make himself secure from those wanings of power, which are the inevitable result of illness and old age. I myself have often been severely tempted to do it; my own skills can be quite overturned by a heavy cold or a bad sore throat. Yet after careful consideration I have concluded that such divisions of power are most ill-advised. Let us examine the case of rings. Rings have long been considered peculiarly suitable for this sort of magic by virtue of their small size. A man may keep a ring continually upon his finger for years, without exciting the smallest comment – which would not be the case if he shewed the same attachment to a book or a pebble – and yet there is scarcely a magician in history who, having once committed some of his skill and power to a magic ring, did not somehow lose that ring and was put to a world of trouble to get it back again. Take for example, the twelfth-century Master of Nottingham, whose daughter mistook his ring of power for a common bauble, put it on her finger, and went to St Matthew’s Fair. This negligent young woman …”
“What?” cried Strange, suddenly.
“What?” echoed Mr Norrell, startled.
Strange gave the other gentleman a sharp, questioning look. Mr Norrell gazed back at him, a little frightened.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said Strange, “but do I understand you aright? Are we speaking of magical powers that are got by some means into rings, stones, amulets – things of that sort?”
Mr Norrell nodded cautiously.
“But I thought you said,” said Strange. “That is,” he made some effort to speak more gently, “I thought that you told me some weeks ago that magic rings and stones were a fable.”
Mr Norrell stared at his pupil in alarm.
“But perhaps I was mistaken?” said Strange.
Mr Norrell said nothing at all.
“I was mistaken,” said Strange again. “I beg your pardon, sir, for interrupting you. Pray, continue.”
But Mr Norrell, though he appeared greatly relieved that Strange had resolved the matter, was no longer equal to continuing and instead proposed that they have some tea; to which Mr Strange agreed very readily.4
That evening Strange told Arabella all that Mr Norrell had said and all that he, Strange, had said in reply.
“It was the queerest thing in the world! He was so frightened at having been found out, that he could think of nothing to say. It fell to me to think of fresh lies for him to tell me. I was obliged to conspire with him against myself.”
“But I do not understand,” said Arabella. “Why should he contradict himself in this odd way?”
“Oh! He is determined to keep some things to himself. That much is obvious – and I suppose he cannot always remember what is to be a secret and what is not. You remember that I told you there are gaps among the books in his library? Well, it seems that the very day he accepted me as his pupil, he ordered five shelves to be emptied and the books sent back to Yorkshire, because they were too dangerous for me to read.”
“Good Lord! However did you find that out?” asked Arabella, much surprized.
“Drawlight and Lascelles told me. They took great pleasure in it.”
“Ill-natured wretches!”
Mr Norrell was most disappointed to learn that Strange’s education must be interrupted for a day or two while he
and Arabella sought for a house to live in. “It is his wife that is the problem,” Mr Norrell explained to Drawlight, with a sigh. “Had he been a single man, I dare say he would not have objected to coming and living here with me.”
Drawlight was most alarmed to hear that Mr Norrell had entertained such a notion and, in case it were ever revived, he took the precaution of saying, “Oh, but sir! Think of your work for the Admiralty and the War Office, so important and so confidential! The presence of another person in the house would impede it greatly.”
“Oh, but Mr Strange is going help me with that!” said Mr Norrell. “It would be very wrong of me to deprive the country of Mr Strange’s talents. Mr Strange and I went down to the Admiralty last Thursday to wait upon Lord Mulgrave. I believe that Lord Mulgrave was none too pleased at first to see that I had brought Mr Strange …”
“That is because his lordship is accustomed to your superior magic! I dare say he thinks that a mere amateur – however talented – has no business meddling with Admiralty matters.”
“… but when his lordship heard Mr Strange’s ideas for defeating the French by magic he turned to me with a great smile upon his face and said, ‘You and I, Mr Norrell, had grown stale. We wanted new blood to stir us up, did we not?’ ”
“Lord Mulgrave said that? To you?” said Drawlight. “That was abominably rude of him. I hope, sir, that you gave him one of your looks!”
“What?” Mr Norrell was engrossed in his own tale and had no attention to spare for whatever Mr Drawlight might be saying. “ ‘Oh!’ I said to him – I said, ‘I am quite of your mind, my lord. But only wait until you have heard the rest of what Mr Strange has to say. You have not heard the half of it!’ ”
It was not only the Admiralty – the War Office and all the other departments of Government had reason to rejoice at the advent of Jonathan Strange. Suddenly a good many things which had been difficult before were made easy. The King’s Ministers had long treasured a plan to send the enemies of Britain bad dreams. The Foreign Secretary had first proposed it in January 1808 and for over a year Mr Norrell had industriously sent the Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte a bad dream each night, as a result of which nothing had happened. Buonaparte’s empire had not foundered and Buonaparte himself had ridden into battle as coolly as ever. And so eventually Mr Norrell was instructed to leave off. Privately Sir Walter and Mr Canning thought that the plan had failed because Mr Norrell had no talent for creating horrors. Mr Canning complained that the nightmares Mr Norrell had sent the Emperor (which chiefly concerned a captain of Dragoons hiding in Buonaparte’s wardrobe) would scarcely frighten his children’s governess let alone the conqueror of half of Europe. For a while he had tried to persuade the other Ministers that they should commission Mr Beckford, Mr Lewis and Mrs Radcliffe to create dreams of vivid horror that Mr Norrell could then pop into Buonaparte’s head. But the other Ministers considered that to employ a magician was one thing, novelists were quite another and they would not stoop to it.
With Strange the plan was revived. Strange and Mr Canning suspected that the wicked French Emperor was proof against such insubstantial evils as dreams, and so they decided to begin this time with his ally, Alexander, the Emperor of Russia. They had the advantage of a great many friends at Alexander’s court: Russian nobles who had made a great deal of money selling timber to Britain and were anxious to do so again, and a brave and ingenious Scottish lady who was the wife of Alexander’s valet.
On learning that Alexander was a curiously impressionable person much given to mystical religion, Strange decided to send him a dream of eerie portents and symbols. For seven nights in succession Alexander dreamt a dream in which he sat down to a comfortable supper with Napoleon Buonaparte at which they were served some excellent venison soup. But no sooner had the Emperor tasted the soup, than he jumped up and cried, “J’ai une faim qui ne saurait se satisfaire de potage.”5 whereupon he turned into a she-wolf which ate first Alexander’s cat, then his dog, then his horse, then his pretty Turkish mistress. And as the she-wolf set to work to eat up more of Alexander’s friends and relations, her womb opened and disgorged the cat, dog, horse, Turkish mistress, friends, relations, etc. again, but in horrible misshapen forms. And as she ate she grew; and when she was as big as the Kremlin, she turned, heavy teats swaying and maw all bloody, intent on devouring all of Moscow.
“There can be nothing dishonourable in sending him a dream which tells him that he is wrong to trust Buonaparte and that Buonaparte will betray him in the end,” explained Strange to Arabella. “I might, after all, send him a letter to say as much. He is wrong and nothing is more certain than that Buonaparte will betray him in the end.”
Word soon came from the Scottish lady that the Russian Emperor had been exceedingly troubled by the dreams and that, like King Nebuchadnezzar in the Bible, he had sent for astrologers and soothsayers to interpret it for him – which they very soon did.
Strange then sent more dreams to the Russian Emperor. “And,” he told Mr Canning, “I have taken your advice and made them more obscure and difficult of interpretation that the Emperor’s sorcerers may have something to do.”
The indefatigable Mrs Janet Archibaldovna Barsukova was soon able to convey the satisfying news that Alexander neglected the business of government and war, and sat all day musing upon his dreams and discussing them with astrologers and sorcerers; and that whenever a letter came for him from the Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte he was seen to turn pale and shudder.
26
Orb, crown and sceptre
September 1809
Every night without fail Lady Pole and Stephen Black were summoned by the sad bell to dance in Lost-hope’s shadowy halls. For fashion and beauty these were, without a doubt, the most splendid balls Stephen had ever seen, but the fine clothes and smart appearance of the dancers made an odd contrast with the mansion itself which exhibited numerous signs of poverty and decay. The music never varied. The same handful of tunes were scraped out by a single violin, and tooted out by a single pipe. The greasy tallow-candles – Stephen could not help but observe with his butler’s eye how there were far too few of them for such a vast hall – cast up strange shadows that spun across the walls as the dancers went through their figures.
On other occasions Lady Pole and Stephen took part in long processions in which banners were carried through dusty, ill-lit halls (the gentleman with the thistle-down hair having a great fondness for such ceremonies). Some of the banners were ancient and decaying pieces of dense embroidery; others represented the gentleman’s victories over his enemies and were in fact made from the preserved skins of those enemies, their lips, eyes, hair and clothes having been embroidered on to their yellow skins by his female relations. The gentleman with the thistle-down hair never grew tired of these pleasures and he never appeared to entertain the slightest doubt that Stephen and Lady Pole were equally delighted with them.
Though changeable in all else, he remained constant in two things: his admiration of her ladyship and his affection for Stephen Black. The latter he continued to demonstrate by making Stephen extravagant gifts and by sending him strange pieces of good fortune. Some of the gifts were made, as before, to Mrs Brandy on Stephen’s behalf and some were sent directly to Stephen for, as the gentleman told Stephen cheerfully, “Your wicked enemy will know nothing about it!” (He meant Sir Walter.) “I have very cleverly blinded him with my magic and it will never occur to him to wonder about it. Why! You could be made Archbishop of Canterbury tomorrow and he would think nothing of it! No one would.” A thought appeared to strike him. “Would you like to be Archbishop of Canterbury tomorrow, Stephen?”
“No, thank you, sir.”
“Are you quite certain? It is scarcely any trouble and if the Church has any attraction for you … ?”
“I promise you, sir, it has none.”
“Your good taste as ever does you credit. A mitre is a wretchedly uncomfortable sort of thing to wear and not at all becoming.”
Poor St
ephen was assailed by miracles. Every few days something would occur to profit him in some way. Sometimes the actual value of what he gained was unremarkable – perhaps no more than a few shillings – but the means by which it came to him were always extraordinary. Once, for example, he received a visit from the overseer of a farm who insisted that, some years before, he had met Stephen at a cockfight near Richmond in the North Riding of Yorkshire and that Stephen had wagered him that the Prince of Wales would one day do something to bring disgrace upon the country. As this had now happened (the overseer cited the Prince’s desertion of his wife as the shameful deed) the overseer had come to London by the stagecoach to bring Stephen twenty-seven shillings and sixpence – which, he said, was the amount of the wager. It was useless for Stephen to insist that he had never been to a cockfight or to Richmond in Yorkshire; the overseer would not be content until Stephen had taken the money.
A few days after the overseer’s visit a large grey dog was discovered standing in the road opposite the house in Harley-street. The poor creature was drenched by the rain and splattered with mud and bore every sign of having travelled a great distance. More curious still, it had a document grasped between its jaws. The footmen, Robert and Geoffrey, and John Longridge, the cook, did their best to get rid of it by shouting and hurling bottles and stones at it, but the dog bore this treatment philosophically and declined to move until Stephen Black had come out in the rain and taken the document from its mouth. Then it went away with a quietly contented air, as if congratulating itself upon a difficult task well done. The document proved to be a map of a village in Derbyshire and shewed, among other surprizing things, a secret door let into the side of a hill.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell Page 29
