Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (74 page)

“No," said Arabella, “I will not tell you. You will only laugh at me again."

“Probably."

“Well, then," said Arabella after a moment, “I believe he is a prince. Or a king. He is certainly of royal blood."

“What in the world should make you think that?"

“Because he has told me a great deal of his kingdoms and his castles and his mansions - though I confess they all have very odd names and I never heard of a single one before. I think he must be one of the princes that Buonaparte deposed in Germany or Swisserland."

“Indeed?" said Strange, with some irritation. “Well, now that Buonaparte has been defeated, perhaps he would like to go home again."

None of these half-explanations and guesses concerning the gentleman with the thistle-down hair quite satisfied him and he continued to wonder about Arabella's friend. The following day (which was to be the Stranges' last in London) he walked to Sir Walter's office in Whitehall with the express intention of discover- ing who the fellow was.

But when Strange arrived, he found only Sir Walter's private secretary hard at work.

“Oh! Moorcock! Good morning! Has Sir Walter gone?"

“He has just gone to Fife House,
⁵
Mr Strange. Is there any thing I can do for you?"

“No, I do not . . . Well, perhaps. There is something I always mean to ask Sir Walter and I never remember. I don't suppose that you are at all acquainted with the gentleman who lives at his house?"

“Whose house, sir?"

“Sir Walter's."

Mr Moorcock frowned. “A gentleman at Sir Walter's house? I cannot think whom you mean. What is his name?"

“That is what I wish to know. I have never seen the fellow, but Mrs Strange always seems to meet him the moment she steps out of the house. She has known him for years yet she has never been able to discover his name. He must be a very eccentric sort of person to make such a secret of it. Mrs Strange always calls him the gentleman with the silvery nose or the gentleman with the snow-white complexion. Or some odd name of that sort."

But Mr Moorcock only looked even more bewildered at this information. “I am very sorry, sir. I do not think I can ever have seen him."

1 In the late seventeenth century there was a glovemaker in the King's city of Newcastle who had a daughter - a bold little thing. One day this child, whom everyone supposed to be playing in some corner of her father's house, was missed. Her mother and father and brothers searched for her. The neighbours searched, but she was nowhere to be found. Then in the late afternoon they looked up and saw her coming down the muddy, cobbled hill. Some of them thought for a moment that they saw someone beside her in the dark winter street, but she came on alone. She was quite unharmed and her story, when they had pieced it together, was this:

She had left her father's house to go wandering in the city and had quickly come upon a street she had never seen before. This street was wide and well- paved and led her straight up, higher than she had ever been before, to the gate and courtyard of a great stone house. She had gone into the house and looked into many rooms, but all were silent, empty, full of dust and spiders. On one side of the house there was a suite of rooms where the shadows of leaves fell ceaselessly over walls and floor as if there were summer trees outside the windows, but there were no trees (and it was, in any case, winter). One room contained nothing but a high mirror. Room and mirror seemed to have quarrelled at some time for the mirror shewed the room to be filled with birds but the room was empty. Yet the glovemaker's child could hear birdsong all around her. There was a long dark corridor with a sound of rushing water as if some dark sea or river lay at the end of it. From the windows of some rooms she saw the city of Newcastle, but from others she saw a different city entirely and others shewed only high, wild moors and a cold blue sky.

She saw many staircases winding up inside the house, great staircases at first, which grew rapidly narrower and more twisting as she mounted higher in the house, until at the top they were only such chinks and gaps in the masonry that a child might notice and a child could slip through. The last of these led to a little door of plain wood.

Having no reason to fear she pushed it open but what she found on the other side made her cry out. It seemed to her that a thousand, thousand birds thronged the air, so that there was neither daylight nor darkness but only a great confusion of black wings. A wind seemed to come to her from far away and she had the impression of immense space as if she had climbed up to the sky and found it full of ravens. The glovemaker's child began to be very much afraid, but then she heard someone say her name. Instantly the birds disappeared and she found herself in a small room with bare stone walls and a bare stone floor. There was no furniture of any kind but, seated upon the floor, was a man who beckoned to her and called her by her name again and told her not to be afraid. He had long, ragged black hair and strange, ragged black clothes. There was nothing about him that suggested a king and the only symbol of his magicianship was the great silver dish of water at his side. The glovemaker's daughter stayed by the man's side for some hours until dusk, when he led her down through the house into the city to her home.

2 See Chapter 33, footnote 3.

3 Perhaps the eeriest tale told of John Uskglass's return was that told by a Basque sailor, a survivor of the Spanish king's great Armada. After his ship was destroyed by storms on the far northern coasts of England, the sailor and two companions had fled inland. They dared not go near villages, but it was winter and the frost was thick upon the ground; they feared they would die of the cold. As night came on they found an empty stone building on a high hillside of bare frozen earth. It was almost dark inside, but there were openings high in the wall that let in starlight. They lay down upon the earth floor and slept.

The Basque sailor dreamt that there was a king who watched him.

He woke. Above him dim shafts of grey light pierced the winter dark. In the shadows at the farthest end of the building he thought he saw a raised stone dais. As the light grew he saw something upon the dais: a chair or throne. A man sat upon the throne; a pale man with long black hair, wrapped in a black robe. Terrified, the man woke his fellows and shewed them the uncanny sight of the man who sat upon the throne. He seemed to watch them but he never moved, not so much as a finger; yet it did not occur to them to doubt that he was a living man. They stumbled to the door and ran away across the frozen fields.

The Basque sailor soon lost his companions: one man died of cold and heartbreak within the week; the other, determined to try and make his way back to the Bay of Biscay, began to walk south, and what became of him no one knows. But the Basque sailor stayed in Cumbria and was taken in by some farm people. He became a servant at that same farm and married a young girl from a neighbouring farm. All his life he told the story of the stone barn upon the high hills, and he was taught by his new friends and neighbours to believe that the man upon the black throne was the Raven King. The Basque sailor never found the stone barn again, and neither did his friends nor any of his children.

And all his life whenever he went into dark places he said, “I greet thee, Lord, and bid thee welcome to my heart" - in case the pale king with the long black hair should be seated in the darkness waiting for him. Across the expanses of northern England a thousand, thousand darknesses, a thousand, thousand places for the King to be. “I greet thee, Lord, and bid thee welcome to my heart."

4
A Faire Wood Withering
(1444) by Peter Watershippe. This is a remarkably detailed description by a contemporary magician of how English magic declined after John Uskglass left England. In 1434 (the year of Uskglass's departure) Watershippe was twenty-five, a young man just beginning to practise magic in Norwich.
A Faire Wood Withering
contains precise accounts of spells which were perfectly practicable as long as Uskglass and his fairy subjects remained in England but which no longer had any effect after their departure. Indeed it is remarkable how much of our knowledge of
Aureate
English magic comes from Watershippe.
A Faire Wood Withering
seems an angry book until one compares it with two of Watershippe's later books:
A Defence of my Deeds Written while Wrongly Imprisoned by my Enemies in Newark Castle
(1459/60) and
Crimes of the False King
(written 1461?, published 1697, Penzance).

5 Lord Liverpool's London home, a quaint, old, rambling mansion which stood by the Thames.

40
“Depend upon it; there is no such place."

June 1815

T
HE EMPEROR NAPOLEON Buonaparte had been banished to the island of Elba. However His Imperial Majesty had some doubts whether a quiet island life would suit him - he was, after all, accustomed to governing a large proportion of the known world. And so before he left France he told several people that when violets bloomed again in spring he would return. This promise he kept.

The moment he arrived upon French soil he gathered an army and marched north to Paris in further pursuit of his destiny, which was to make war upon all the peoples of the world. Naturally he was eager to re-establish himself as
Emperor
, but it was not yet nown where he would chuse to be Emperor
of
. He had always yearned to emulate Alexander the Great and so it was thought that he might go east. He had invaded Egypt once before and had some success there. Or he might go west: there were rumours of a fleet of ships at Cherbourg ready and waiting to take him to America to begin the conquest of a fresh, new world.

But wherever he chose, everyone agreed that he was sure to begin by invading Belgium and so the Duke of Wellington went to Brussels to await the arrival of Europe's Great Enemy.

The English newspapers were full of rumours: Buonaparte had assembled his army; he was advancing with appalling swiftness upon Belgium; he was there; he was victorious! Then the next day it would appear that he was still in his palace in Paris, never having stirred from there in the first place.

At the end of May, Jonathan Strange followed Wellington and the Army to Brussels. He had spent the past three months quietly in Shropshire thinking about magic and so it was hardly surprizing that he should feel a little bewildered at first. However after he had walked about for an hour or two he came to the conclusion that the fault was not in him, but in Brussels itself. He knew what a city at war looked like, and this was not it. There ought to have been companies of soldiers passing up and down, carts with supplies, anxious-looking faces. Instead he saw fashionable-looking shops and ladies lounging in smart carriages. True, there were groups of officers everywhere, but none of them appeared to have any idea of pursuing military business (one was expending a great deal of concentration and effort in mending a toy parasol for a little girl). There was a great deal more laughter and gaiety than seemed quite consistent with an imminent invasion by Napoleon Buona-parte.

A voice called out his name. He turned and found Colonel Manningham, an acquaintance of his, who immediately invited Strange to go with him to Lady Charlotte Greville's house. (This was an English lady who was living in Brussels.) Strange protested that he had no invitation and anyway he ought to go and look for the Duke. But Manningham declared that the lack of an invitation could not possibly matter - he was sure to be welcome - and the Duke was just as likely to be in Lady Charlotte Greville's drawing- room as anywhere else.

Ten minutes later Strange found himself in a luxurious apartment filled with people, many of whom he already knew. There were officers; beautiful ladies; fashionable gentlemen; British politicians; and representatives, so it seemed, of every rank and degree of British peer. All of them were loudly discussing the war and making jokes about it. It was quite a new idea to Strange: war as a fashionable amusement. In Spain and Portugal it had been customary for the soldiers to regard themselves as martyred, maligned and forgotten. Reports in the British newspapers had always endeavoured to make the situation sound as gloomy as possible. But here in Brussels it was the noblest thing in the world to be one of his Grace's officers - and the second noblest to be his Grace's magician.

“Does Wellington really want all these people here?" whispered Strange to Manningham in amazement. “What will happen if the French attack? I wish I had not come. Someone is sure to begin asking me about my disagreement with Norrell, and I really do not want to talk about it."

“Nonsense!" Manningham whispered back. “No one cares about that here! And anyway here is the Duke!"

There was a little bustle and the Duke appeared. “Ah, Merlin!" he cried as his eye lighted upon Strange. “I am very glad to see you! Shake hands with me! You are acquainted with the Duke of Richmond, of course. No? Then allow me to make the introduction!"

If the assembly had been lively before, how much more spirited it became now his Grace was here! All eyes turned in his direction to discover whom he was talking to and (more interesting still) whom he was flirting with. One would not have supposed to look at him that he had come to Brussels for any other reason than to enjoy himself. But every time Strange tried to move away, the Duke fixed him with a look, as if to say, “No,
you
must stay. I have need of you!" Eventually, still smiling, he inclined his head and murmured in Strange's ear, “There, I believe that will do. Come! There is a conservatory at the other end of the room. We will be out of the crowd there."