“Flora, my love,” she called out in a voice that quavered slightly, “I hope you are not frightened. It is a very horrid storm.”
Flora came to the window and took her aunt’s hand and told her that it was sure to be over very soon. Another stroke of lightning illuminated the town. Flora dropped her aunt’s hand, undid the window-fastening and stepped eagerly out on to the balcony.
“Flora!” exclaimed Aunt Greysteel.
She was leaning into the howling darkness with both hands upon the balustrade, quite oblivious of the rain that soaked her gown or of the wind that pulled at her hair.
“My love! Flora! Flora! Come out of the rain!”
Flora turned and said something to her aunt, but what it was they could not hear.
Minichello followed her on to the balcony and, with a surprizing delicacy (though without relinquishing for a moment his native gloominess), he managed to herd her inside again, using his large, flat hands to guide her, in the same way shepherds use hurdles to direct sheep.
“Can you not see?” exclaimed Flora. “There is someone there! There, at the corner! Can you tell who it is? I thought …” She fell silent abruptly and whatever it was that she thought, she did not say.
“Well, my love, I hope you are mistaken. I pity any one who is in the street at this moment. I hope they will find some shelter as soon as they can. Oh, Flora! How wet you are!”
Bonifazia fetched towels and then she and Aunt Greysteel immediately set about drying Flora’s gown, turning her round and round between them, and sometimes trying to give her a turn in contrary directions. At the same time both were giving Minichello urgent instructions, Aunt Greysteel in stumbling, yet insistent Italian, and Bonifazia in rapid Veneto dialect. The instructions, like the turns, may well have been at odds with each other, because Minichello did nothing, except regard them with a baleful expression.
Flora gazed over the bowed heads of the two women into the street. Another stroke of lightning. She stiffened, as if she had been electrified, and the next moment she wriggled out of the clutches of aunt and maid, and ran out of the room.
They had no time to wonder where she was going. The next half hour was one of titanic domestic struggle: of Minichello trying to close shutters in the teeth of the storm; of Bonifazia stumbling about in the dark, looking for candles; of Aunt Greysteel discovering that the Italian word she had been using to mean “shutter” actually meant “parchment”. Each of them in turn lost his or her temper. Nor did Aunt Greysteel feel that the situation was much improved when all the bells in the town began to ring at once, in accordance with the belief that bells (being blessed objects) can dispel storms and thunder (which are clearly works of the Devil).
At last the house was secured – or very nearly. Aunt Greysteel left Bonifazia and Minichello to complete the work and, forgetting that she had seen Flora leave the sitting-room, she returned thither with a candle for her niece. Flora was not there, but Aunt Greysteel observed that Minichello still had not closed the shutters in that room.
She mounted the stairs to Flora’s bed-chamber: Flora was not there either. Nor was she in the little dining-parlour, nor in Aunt Greysteel’s own bed-chamber, nor in the other, smaller sitting-room which they sometimes used after dinner. The kitchen, the vestibule and the gardener’s room were tried next; she was not in any of those places.
Aunt Greysteel began to be seriously frightened. A cruel little voice whispered in her ear that whatever mysterious fate had befallen Jonathan Strange’s wife, it had begun when she had disappeared very unexpectedly in bad weather.
“But that was snow, not rain,” she told herself. As she went about the house, looking for Flora, she kept repeating to herself, “Snow, not rain. Snow, not rain.” Then she thought, “Perhaps she was in the sitting-room all along. It was so dark and she is so quiet, I may well not have perceived her.”
She returned to the room. Another stroke of lightning gave it an unnatural aspect. The walls became white and ghastly; the furniture and other objects became grey, as if they had all been turned to stone. With a horrible jolt, Aunt Greysteel realized that there was indeed a second person in the room – a woman, but not Flora – a woman in a dark, old-fashioned gown, standing with a candle in a candlestick, looking at her – a woman whose face was entirely in shadow, whose features could not be seen.
Aunt Greysteel grew cold all over.
There was a crack of thunder: then pitch-black darkness, except for the two candle flames. But somehow the unknown woman’s candle seemed to illuminate nothing at all. Queerer still the room seemed to have grown larger in some mysterious way; the woman and her candle were strangely distant from Aunt Greysteel.
Aunt Greysteel cried out, “Who is there?”
No one answered.
“Of course,” she thought, “she is Italian. I must ask her again in Italian. Perhaps she has wandered into the wrong house in the confusion of the storm.” But try as she might, she could not at that moment think of a single Italian word.
Another flash of lightning. There was the woman, standing just as she had been before, facing Aunt Greysteel. “It is the ghost of Jonathan Strange’s wife!” she thought. She took a step forward, and so did the unknown woman. Suddenly realization and relief came upon her in equal measures; “It is a mirror! Oh! How foolish! How foolish! To be afraid of my own reflection!” She was so relieved she almost laughed out loud, but then she paused; it had not been foolish to be frightened, not foolish at all; there had been no mirror in that corner until now.
The next flash of lightning shewed the mirror to her. It was ugly and much too large for the room; she knew she had never seen it before in her life.
She hurried out of the room. She felt she would be able to think more clearly away from the sight of the baleful mirror. She was halfway up the stairs when some sounds that seemed to originate in Flora’s bed-chamber made her open the door and look inside.
There was Flora. She had lit the candles they had placed for her and was in the middle of pulling her gown over her head. The gown was sopping wet. Her petticoat and stockings were no better. Her shoes were tumbled on the floor at the side of the bed; they were quite soaked and spoilt with rain.
Flora looked at her aunt with an expression in which guilt, embarrassment, defiance and several other things more difficult of interpretation were mixed together. “Nothing! Nothing!” she cried.
This, presumably, was the answer to some question she expected her aunt to put to her, but all that Aunt Greysteel said was: “Oh, my dear! Where have you been? Whatever made you go out in such weather?”
“I … I went out to buy some embroidery silk.”
Aunt Greysteel must have looked a good deal astonished at this, because Flora added doubtfully, “I did not think the rain would last so long.”
“Well, my love, I must say I think you acted rather foolishly, but you must have been a good deal frightened! Was it that that made you cry?”
“Cry! No, no! You are mistaken, aunt. I have not been crying. It is rain, that is all.”
“But you are …” Aunt Greysteel stopped. She had been going to say, you are crying now, but Flora shook her head and turned away. For some reason she had wrapped her shawl into a bundle and Aunt Greysteel could not help thinking that if she had not done that the shawl would have given her some protection from the rain and she would not now be so wet. From out of the bundle she took a little bottle half full of an amber-coloured liquid. She opened a drawer, and put it inside.
“Flora! Something very peculiar has happened. I do not know quite how to tell you, but there is a mirror …”
“Yes, I know,” said Flora, quickly. “It belongs to me.”
“Belongs to you!” Aunt Greysteel was more perplexed than ever. A pause of some moments’ duration. “Where did you buy it?” she asked. It was all she could think of to say.
“I do not remember exactly. It must have been delivered just now.”
“But surely no one would delive
r any thing in the middle of a storm! And even if any body had been so foolish as to do such a thing, they would have knocked upon the door – and not done it in this strange, secret way.”
To these very reasonable arguments Flora made no reply.
Aunt Greysteel was not sorry to let the subject drop. She was quite sick of storms and frights and unexpected mirrors. The question of why the mirror had appeared was now resolved and so, for the present, she put aside the question of how it had appeared. She was glad to fall back upon the more soothing subjects of Flora’s gown and Flora’s shoes and the likelihood of Flora’s catching cold and the necessity for Flora drying herself immediately and putting on her dressing-gown and coming and sitting by the fire in the sitting-room and eating something hot.
When they were both in the sitting-room again, Aunt Greysteel said, “See! The storm is almost passed. It seems to be going back towards the coast. How odd! I thought that was the direction it came from. I suppose your embroidery silks were ruined by the rain along with everything else.”
“Embroidery silks?” said Flora. Then, remembering, “Oh! I did not get so far as the shop. It was, as you say, a foolish undertaking.”
“Well, we can go out later and get whatever you need. How sorry I am for the poor market people! Everything on the stalls will have been spoilt. Bonifazia is making your gruel, my love. I wonder if I told her to use the new milk?”
“I do not remember, aunt.”
“I had better go and just mention it.”
“I can go, aunt,” said Flora, proposing to stand up.
But her aunt would not hear of it. Flora must remain exactly where she was, at the fire-side, with her feet upon a footstool.
It was becoming lighter by the moment. Before proceeding to the kitchen, Aunt Greysteel surveyed the mirror. It was very large and ornate; the sort of mirror, in fact, that is made on the island of Murano in the Venetian Lagoon. “I confess I am surprized at you liking this mirror, Flora. It has so many scrolls and curlicues and glass flowers. Generally you prefer simple things.”
Flora sighed and said she supposed she had acquired a taste for what was sumptuous and elaborate since she had been in Italy.
“Was it expensive?” asked Aunt Greysteel. “It looks expensive.”
“No. Not expensive at all.”
“Well, that is something, is it not?”
Aunt Greysteel went down the stairs to the kitchen. She was feeling a good deal recovered, and felt confident that the train of shocks and alarms of which the morning seemed to have been composed was now at an end. But in this she was quite wrong.
Standing in the kitchen with Bonifazia and Minichello were two men she had never seen before. Bonifazia did not appear to have begun making Flora’s gruel. She had not even fetched the oatmeal and milk out of the pantry.
The moment Bonifazia laid eyes upon Aunt Greysteel, she took her by the arm and unleashed a flood of eager dialect words upon her. She was speaking of the storm – that much was clear – and saying it was evil, but beyond that Aunt Greysteel understood very little. To her absolute astonishment it was Minichello who helped her comprehend it. In a very reasonable counterfeit of the English language he said, “The magician Engliss makes it. The magician Engliss makes the tempesta.”
“I beg your pardon?”
With frequent interruptions from Bonifazia and the two men, Minichello informed her that in the midst of the storm several people had looked up and seen a cleft in the black clouds. But what they had seen through the cleft had astonished and terrified them; it had not been the clear azure they were expecting, but a black, midnight sky full of stars. The storm had not been natural at all; it had been contrived in order to hide the approach of Strange’s Pillar of Darkness.
This news was soon known all over the town and the citizens were greatly disturbed by it. Until now the Pillar of Darkness had been a horror confined to Venice, which seemed – to the Paduans at least – a natural setting for horrors. Now it was clear that Strange had stayed in Venice by choice rather than enchantment. Any city in Italy – any city in the world might suddenly find itself visited by Eternal Darkness. This was bad enough, but for Aunt Greysteel it was much worse; to all her fear of Strange was added the unwelcome conviction that Flora had lied. She debated with herself whether it was more likely that her niece had lied because she was under the influence of a spell, or because her attachment to Strange had weakened her principles. She did not know which would be worse.
She wrote to her brother in Venice, begging him to come. In the meantime she determined to say nothing. For the rest of the day she observed Flora closely. Flora was much as usual, except that there sometimes seemed to be a tinge of penitence in her behaviour to her aunt, where no tinge ought to have been.
At one o’clock on the next day – some hours before Aunt Greysteel’s letter could have reached him – Dr Greysteel arrived with Frank from Venice. They told her that it had been no secret in Venice when Strange left the parish of Santa Maria Zobenigo and went to terrafirma. The Pillar of Darkness had been seen from many parts of the city, moving across the face of the sea. Its surface had flickered and twists and spirals of Darkness had darted in and out, so that it appeared to be made of black flames. How Strange had contrived to cross over the water – whether he had travelled in a boat, or whether his passage had been purely magical – was not known. The storm by which he had tried to hide his approach had not been conjured up until he got to Strà, eight miles from Padua.
“I tell you, Louisa,” said Dr Greysteel, “I would not exchange with him now upon any consideration. Everyone fled at his approach. From Mestre to Strà he could not have seen another living creature – nothing but silent streets and abandoned fields. Henceforth the world is an empty place to him.”
A few moments before, Aunt Greysteel had been thinking of Strange with no very tender feelings, but the picture that her brother conjured up was so shocking that tears started into her eyes. “And where is he now?” she asked in a softened tone.
“He has gone back to his rooms in Santa Maria Zobenigo,” said Dr Greysteel. “All is just as it was. As soon as we heard he had been in Padua, I guessed what his object was. We came as soon as we could. How is Flora?”
Flora was in the drawing-room. She had been expecting her father – indeed she seemed relieved that the interview had come at last. Dr Greysteel had scarcely got out his first question when she burst forth with her confession. It was the release of an overcharged heart. Her tears fell abundantly and she admitted that she had seen Strange. She had seen him in the street below and known that he was waiting for her and so she had run out of the house to meet him.
“I will tell you everything, I promise,” she said. “But not yet. I have done nothing wrong. I mean …” She blushed. “… apart from the falsehoods I told my aunt – for which I am very sorry. But these secrets are not mine to tell.”
“But why must there be secrets at all, Flora?” asked her father. “Does that not tell you that there is something wrong? People whose intentions are honourable do not have secrets. They act openly.”
“Yes, I suppose … Oh, but that does not apply to magicians! Mr Strange has enemies – that terrible old man in London and others besides! But you must not scold me for doing wrong. I have tried so hard to do good and I believe I have! You see, there is a sort of magic which he has been practising and which is destroying him – and yesterday I persuaded him to give it up! He made me a promise to abandon it completely.”
“But, Flora!” said her father, sadly. “This distresses me more than all the rest. That you should regard yourself as entitled to exact promises from him is something which requires explanation. Surely you must see that? My dear, are you engaged to him?”
“No, papa!” Another burst of tears. It took a great many caresses from her aunt to restore her to tolerable calm. When she could speak again, she said, “There is no engagement. It is true that I was attached to him once. But that is all over and done
with. You must not suspect me of it! It was for friendship’s sake that I asked him to promise me. And for his wife’s sake. He thinks he is doing it for her, but I know that she would not want him to do magic so destructive of his health and reason – whatever the object, however desperate the circumstances! She is no longer able to guide his actions – and so it fell to me to speak on her behalf.”
Dr Greysteel was silent. “Flora,” he said after a minute or two, “you forget, my dear, that I have seen him often in Venice. He is in no condition to keep promises. He will not even remember what promise he has made.”
“Oh! But he will! I have arranged matters so that he must!”
A fresh return of tears seemed to shew that she was not quite as free of love as she claimed. But she had said enough to make her father and aunt a little easier in their minds. They were convinced that her attachment to Jonathan Strange must come to a natural close sooner or later. As Aunt Greysteel said later that evening, Flora was not the sort of girl to spend years in longing for an impossible love; she was too rational a creature.
Now that they were all together again Dr Greysteel and Aunt Greysteel were eager to continue their travels. Aunt Greysteel wished to go to Rome to see the ancient buildings and artefacts which they had heard were so remarkable. But Flora no longer had any interest in remains or works of art. She was happiest, she said, where she was. Most of the time she would not even leave the house unless absolutely forced to it. When they proposed a walk or a visit to a church with a Renaissance altarpiece, she declined to accompany them. She would complain that it was raining or that the streets were wet – all of which was true; there was a great deal of rain in Padua that winter, but the rain had never troubled her before.
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