Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (77 page)

An
aide-de-camp
flew up with impossible velocity and thrust a strip of goatskin into Strange's hand with a shout of, “Message from his Grace!" In an instant he was off again.

French shells have set the Chaâteau of Hougoumont on fire. Put out the flames.

Wellington

Strange summoned another vision of Hougoumont. The men there had suffered greatly since he had last seen the Château . The wounded of both sides lay in every room. The haystack, outbuildings and Château were all on fire. Black, choking smoke was everywhere. Horses screamed and wounded men tried to crawl away - but there was hardly anywhere to go. Meanwhile the battle raged on around them. In the chapel Strange found half a dozen images of saints painted on the walls. They were seven or eight feet tall and oddly proportioned - the work, it seemed, of an enthusiastic
mateur
. They had long, brown beards and large, melancholy eyes.

“They'll do!" he muttered. At his command the saints stepped down from the walls. They moved in a series of jerks, like marionettes, but they had a certain lightness and grace. They stalked through the ranks of wounded men to a well in one of the courtyards. Here they drew buckets of water which they carried to the flames. All seemed to be going well until two of them (possibly Saint Peter and Saint Jerome) caught fire and burnt up - being composed of nothing but paint and magic they burnt rather easily. Strange was trying to think how to remedy this situation when part of an exploded French shell hit the side of his silver dish, sending it spinning fifty yards to the right. By the time he had retrieved it, knocked out a large dent in its side and set it to rights, all the painted saints had succumbed to the flames. Wounded men and horses were burning. There were no more paintings upon the walls. Almost brought to tears by his frustration, Strange cursed the unknown artist for his idleness.

What else was there? What else did he know? He thought hard. Long ago John Uskglass would sometimes make a champion for himself out of ravens - birds would flock together to become a black, bristling, shifting giant who could perform any task with ease. On other occasions Uskglass would make servants out of earth.

Strange conjured a vision of Hougoumont's well. He drew the water out of the well in a sort of fountain; and then, before the fountain could spill on the ground, he forced it to take on the clumsy semblance of a man. Next he commanded the water-man to hurry to the flames and cast himself down upon them. In this way a stall in the stables was successfully doused and three men were saved. Strange made more as quickly as he could, but water is not an element that holds a coherent form easily; after an hour or so of this labour his head was spinning and his hands were shaking uncontroulably.

Between four and five o'clock something entirely unexpected happened. Strange looked up to see a brilliant mass of French cavalry approaching. Five hundred abreast they rode and twelve deep - yet the thunder of the guns was such that they made no sound that any one could hear; they seemed to come silently. “Surely," thought Strange, “they must realize that Wellington's infantry is unbroken. They will be cut to pieces." Behind him the infantry regiments were forming squares; some of the men called to Strange to come and shelter inside their square. This seemed like good advice and so he went.

From the relative safety of the square Strange watched the cavalry's approach; the cuirassiers wore shining breast-plates and tall crested helmets; the lancers' weapons were embellished with fluttering pennants of red and white. They seemed scarcely to belong to this dull age. Theirs was the glory of ancient days - but Strange was determined to match it with an ancient glory of his own. The images of John Uskglass's servants burnt in his mind - servants made of ravens, servants made of earth. Beneath the French horsemen the mud began to swell and bubble. It shaped itself into gigantic hands; the hands reached up and pulled down men and horses. The ones who fell were trampled by their comrades. The rest endured a storm of musket-fire from the Allied infantry. Strange watched impassively.

When the French had been beaten back, he returned to his silver dish.

“Are you the magician?" said someone.

He spun round and was astonished to find a little, round, soft- looking person in civilian clothes who smiled at him. “Who in God's name are you?" he demanded.

“My name is Pink," explained the man. “I am a commercial traveller for Welbeck's Superior Buttons of Birmingham. I have a message from the Duke for you."

Strange, who was covered in mud and more tired than he had ever been in his life, took a moment to comprehend this. “Where are all the Duke's
aides-de-camp
?"

“He says that they are dead."

“What? Hadley-Bright is dead? What about Colonel Canning?"

“Alas," smiled Mr Pink, “I can offer no precise information. I came out from Antwerp yesterday to see the battle and when I espied the Duke I took the opportunity to introduce myself and to mention in passing the excellent qualities of Welbeck's Superior Buttons. He asked me as a particular favour to come and tell you that the Prussian army is on their way here and have reached Paris Wood, but, says his Grace, they are having the devil of a time . . ." (Mr Pink smiled and blinked to hear himself say such a soldierly word.) “. . . the devil of a time in the little lanes and the mud, and would you be so good as to make a road for them between the wood and the battlefield?"

“Certainly," said Strange, rubbing some of the mud from his face.

“I will tell his Grace." He paused and asked wistfully, “Do you think his Grace would like to order some buttons?"

“I do not see why not. He is as fond of buttons as most men."

“Then, you know, we could put `Supplier of Buttons to his Grace the Duke of Wellington' in all our advertisements." Mr Pink beamed happily. “Off I go then!"

“Yes, yes. Off you go." Strange created the road for the Prussians, but in later times he was always inclined to suppose he must have dreamt Mr Pink of Welbeck's Superior Buttons.
⁶

Events seemed to repeat themselves. Again and again the French cavalry charged and Strange took refuge within the infantry square. Again the deadly horsemen swirled against the sides of the square like waves. Again Strange drew monstrous hands from the earth to pull them down. Whenever the cavalry withdrew the cannonade began again; he returned to his silver dish and made men out of water to put out the flames and succour the dying in ruined, desperate Hougoumont. Everything happened over and over, again and again; it was inconceivable that the fighting would ever end. He began to think it had always been like this.

“There must come a time when the musket-balls and cannon- shot run out," he thought. “And what will we do then? Hack at each other with sabres and bayonets? And if we all die, every one of us, who will they say has won?"

The smoke rolled back revealing frozen moments like tableaux in a ghostly theatre: at the farmhouse called La Haye Sainte the French were climbing a mountain of their own dead to get over the wall and kill the German defenders.

Once Strange was caught outside the square when the French arrived. Suddenly, directly in front of him, was an enormous French cuirassier upon an equally enormous horse. His first thought was to wonder if the fellow knew who he was. (He had been told the entire French Army hated the English magician with a vivid, Latin passion.) His second thought was that he had left his pistols inside the infantry square.

The cuirassier raised his sabre. Without thinking, Strange muttered Stokesey's
Animam Evocare
. Something like a bee flew out of the breast of the cuirassier and settled in the palm of Strange's hand. But it was not a bee; it was a bead of pearly blue light. A second light flew out of the cuirassier's horse. The horse screamed and reared up. The cuirassier stared, puzzled.

Strange raised his other hand to smash horse and horseman out of existence. Then he froze.

"And can a magician kill a man by magic?" the Duke had asked.

And he had answered, "A magician might, but a gentleman never could."

While he was hesitating a British cavalry officer - a Scots Grey - swung round out of nowhere. He slashed the cuirassier's head open, from his chin, upwards through his teeth. The man toppled like a tree. The Scots Grey rode on.

Strange could never quite remember what happened after this. He believed that he wandered about in a dazed condition. He did not know for how long.

The sound of cheering brought him to himself. He looked up and saw Wellington upon Copenhagen. He was waving his hat - the signal that the Allies were to advance upon the French. But the smoke wreathed itself so thickly about the Duke that only the soldiers nearest to him could share in this moment of victory.

So Strange whispered a word and a little gap appeared in the billows. A single ray of evening sunlight shone down upon Wellington. All along the ridge the faces of the soldiers turned towards him. The cheering grew louder.

“There," thought Strange, “that is the proper use of English magic."

He followed the soldiers and the retreating French down through the battlefield. Scattered about among the dead and the dying were the great earthen hands he had created. They seemed frozen in gestures of outrage and horror as if the land itself despaired. When he came level with the French guns that had done the Allied soldiers such profound injury, he did one last act of magic. He drew more hands out of the earth. The hands grasped the cannons and pulled them under.

At the Inn of Belle Alliance on the far side of the battlefield, he found the Duke with the Prussian General, Prince Blücher. The Duke nodded to him and said, “Come to dinner with me."

Prince Blücher shook his hand warmly and said a great many things in German (none of which Strange understood). Then the old gentleman pointed to his stomach wherein lay the illusory elephant and made a wry face as if to say, “What can one do?"

Strange stepped outside and immediately he almost walked into Captain Hadley-Bright. “I was told you were dead!" he cried.

“I was sure you would be," replied Hadley-Bright.

There was a pause. Both men felt faintly embarrassed. The ranks of dead and wounded stretched away upon all sides as far as the eye could see. Simply being alive at that moment seemed, in some indefinable way, ungentlemanly.

“Who else survived? Do you know?" asked Hadley-Bright.

Strange shook his head. “No."

They parted.

At Wellington's Headquarters in Waterloo that night the table was laid for forty or fifty people. But when the dinner-hour came, only three men were there: the Duke, General Alava (his Spanish attaché ) and Strange. Whenever the door opened the Duke turned his head to see if it was one of his friends, alive and well; but no one came.

Many places at that table had been laid for gentlemen who were either dead or dying: Colonel Canning, Lieutenant-Colonel Gor- don, Major-General Picton, Colonel De Lancey. The list would grow longer as the night progressed.

The Duke, General Alava and Mr Strange sat down in silence.

1 The citizens of Brussels and the various armies occupying the city were intrigued to learn that they were now situated in a far-away country. Unfortunately they were much occupied in preparing for the coming battle (or in the case of the richer and more frivolous part of the population in preparing for the Duchess of Richmond's ball that evening) and hardly any one had leisure just then to go and discover what the country was like or who its inhabitants were. Consequently for a long time it was unclear where precisely Strange had put Brussels on that June afternoon.

In 1830 a trader and trapper named Pearson Denby was travelling through the Plains country. He was approached by a Lakota chief of his acquaintance, Man-afraid-of-the-Water. Man-afraid-of-the-Water asked if Denby could acquire for him some black lightning balls. Man-afraid-of-the-Water explained that he was intending to make war upon his enemies and had urgent need of the balls. He said that at one time he had had about fifty of the balls and he had always used them sparingly, but now they were all gone. Denby did not understand. He asked if Man-afraid-of-the-Water meant ammunition. No, said Man-afraid-of-the-Water. Like ammunition, but much bigger. He took Denby back to his camp and showed him a brass5½.-inch howitzer made by the Carron Company of Falkirk in Scotland. Denby was astonished and asked how Man-afraid-of-the-Water had acquired the gun in the first place. Man-afraid- of-the-Water explained that in some nearby hills lived a tribe called the Half- Finished People. They had been created very suddenly one summer, but their Creator had only given them one of the skills men need to live: that of fighting. All other skills they lacked; they did not know how to hunt buffalo or antelope, how to tame horses or how to make houses for themselves. They could not even understand each other since their crazy Creator had given them four or five different languages. But they had had this gun, which they had traded to Man- afraid-of-the-Water in exchange for food.