Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (10 page)

10
The difficulty of finding
employment for a magician

October 1807

Sir walter intended to introduce the subject of magic among the other Ministers by degrees, allowing them to grow gradually accustomed to the idea before proposing that they make trial of Mr Norrell in the war. He was afraid that they would oppose him; he was sure that Mr Canning would be sarcastic, that Lord Castlereagh would be uncooperative, and the Earl of Chatham merely bemused.

But all of these fears were entirely unfounded. The Ministers, he soon discovered, were quite as alive to the novelty of the situation as any one else in London. The next time the cabinet met at Burlington House
¹
they declared themselves eager to employ England’s only magician. But it was by no means clear what ought to be done with him. It had been two hundred years since the English Government had last commissioned a magician and they were a little out of the habit of it.

“
My
chief problem,” explained Lord Castlereagh, “is in finding men for the Army — a quite impossible task, I assure you; the British are a peculiarly unmilitary race. But I have my eye on Lincolnshire; I am told that the pigs in Lincolnshire are particularly fine and by eating them the population grows very stout and strong. Now what would suit me best would be a general spell cast over Lincolnshire so that three or four thousand young men would all at once be filled with a lively desire to become soldiers and fight the French.” He looked at Sir Walter rather wistfully. “Would your friend know of such a spell, Sir Walter, do you think?”

Sir Walter did not know but he said he would ask Mr Norrell.

Later that same day Sir Walter called upon Mr Norrell and put the question to him. Mr Norrell was delighted. He did not believe that anyone had ever proposed such a piece of magic before and begged Sir Walter to convey his compliments to Lord Castlereagh as the possessor of a most original brain. As to whether or not it were possible; “The difficulty lies in confining the application of the spell to Lincolnshire — and to young men. There is a danger that if we were successful — which I flatter myself we would be — then Lincolnshire — and several of the neighbouring counties — might be entirely emptied of people.”

Sir Walter went back to Lord Castlereagh and told him no.

The next magic which the Ministers proposed pleased Mr Norrell a great deal less. The resurrection of Lady Pole engrossed the thoughts of everyone in London and the Ministers were by no means exempt from the general fascination. Lord Castlereagh began it when he asked the other Ministers who was it that Napoleon Buonaparte had feared most in all the world? Who had always seemed to know what the wicked French emperor would do next? Who had inflicted so resounding a defeat upon the French that they dare not stick their French noses out of their ports? Who had united in one person all the virtues that make up an Englishman? Who else, said Lord Castlereagh, but Lord Nelson? Clearly the first thing to be done was to bring back Lord Nelson from the dead. Lord Castlereagh begged Sir Walter’s pardon — perhaps he had not understood something — but why they were wasting time talking about it?

Whereupon Mr Canning, an energetic and quarrelsome person, replied quickly that of course Lord Nelson was sadly missed, Nelson had been the Nation’s hero, Nelson had done everything Lord Castlereagh said he did. But when all was said and done — and Mr Canning meant no disrespect to the Navy, that most glorious of British institutions — Nelson had only been a sailor, whereas the late Mr Pitt had been everything.
²
If anyone dead was going to be brought back to life then really there was no choice — it must be Pitt.

Lord Chatham (who was also the late Mr Pitt’s brother) naturally seconded this proposal but he wondered why they had to make a choice — why not resurrect both Pitt and Nelson? It would only be a question of paying the magician twice and there could not be any objection to that, he supposed?

Then other Ministers proposed other dead gentlemen as candidates for restoration until it seemed that half the vaults in England might be emptied. Very soon they had quite a long list and were, as usual, starting to argue about it.

“This will not do,” said Sir Walter. “We must begin somewhere and it seems to me that every one of us was helped to his present position by the friendship of Mr Pitt. We would do very wrong to give some other gentleman the preference.”

A messenger was sent to fetch Mr Norrell from Hanover-square to Burlington House. Mr Norrell was led into the magnificent painted saloon where the Ministers were sitting. Sir Walter told him that they were contemplating another resurrection.

Mr Norrell turned very pale and muttered something of how his special regard for Sir Walter had compelled him to undertake a sort of magic which otherwise he would not have attempted — he really had no wish to make a second attempt — the Ministers did not know what they were asking.

But when Mr Norrell understood better
who
it was that they proposed as a candidate, he looked a great deal relieved and was heard to say something about the condition of the
body
.

Then the Ministers thought how Mr Pitt had been dead for almost two years, and that, devoted as they had been to Pitt in his life, they really had very little desire to see him in his present condition. Lord Chatham (Mr Pitt’s brother) remarked sadly that poor William would certainly have come a good deal unravelled by now.

The subject was not mentioned again.

A week or so later Lord Castlereagh proposed sending Mr Norrell to the Netherlands or possibly Portugal — places where the Ministers entertained faint hopes of gaining some foothold against Buonaparte — where Mr Norrell might do magic under the direction of the generals and the admirals. So Admiral Paycocke, an ancient red-faced seaman, and Captain Harcourt-Bruce of the 20th Light Dragoons were dispatched as a joint military and naval expedition to Hanover-square to take an observation of Mr Norrell.

Captain Harcourt-Bruce was not only dashing, handsome and brave, he was also rather romantic. The reappearance of magic in England thrilled him immensely. He was a great reader of the more exciting sort of history — and his head was full of ancient battles in which the English were outnumbered by the French and doomed to die, when all at once would be heard the sound of strange, unearthly music, and upon a hilltop would appear the Raven King in his tall, black helmet with its mantling of raven-feathers streaming in the wind; and he would gallop down the hillside on his tall, black horse with a hundred human knights and a hundred fairy knights at his back, and he would defeat the French by magic.

That
was Captain Harcourt-Bruce’s idea of a magician.
That
was the sort of thing which he now expected to see reproduced on every battlefield on the Continent. So when he saw Mr Norrell in his drawing-room in Hanover-square, and after he had sat and watched Mr Norrell peevishly complain to his footman, first that the cream in his tea was too creamy, and next that it was too watery — well, I shall not surprize you when I say he was somewhat disappointed. In fact he was so downcast by the whole undertaking that Admiral Paycocke, a bluff old gentleman, felt rather sorry for him and only had the heart to laugh at him and tease him very moderately about it.

Admiral Paycocke and Captain Harcourt-Bruce went back to the Ministers and said it was absolutely out of the question to send Mr Norrell anywhere; the admirals and the generals would never forgive the Government if they did it. For some weeks that autumn it seemed the Ministers would never be able to find employment for their only magician.

11
Brest

November 1807

In the first week of November a squadron of French ships was preparing to leave the port of Brest which lies on the west coast of Brittany in France. The intention of the French was to cruise about the Bay of Biscay looking for British ships to capture or, if they were unable to do that, to prevent the British from doing any thing which they appeared to want to do.

The wind blew steadily off the land. The French sailors made their preparations quickly and efficiently and the ships were almost ready when heavy black clouds appeared suddenly and a rain began to fall.

Now it was only natural that such an important port as Brest should contain a great number of people who studied the winds and the weather. Just as the ships were about to set sail several of these persons hurried down to the docks in great excitement to warn the sailors that there was something very queer about the rain: the clouds, they said, had come from the north, whereas the wind was blowing from the east. The thing was impossible, but it had happened. The captains of the ships just had time to be astonished, incredulous or unnerved — as their characters dictated — when another piece of news reached them.

Brest harbour consists of an inner bay and an outer, the inner bay being separated from the open sea by a long thin peninsula. As the rain grew heavier the French officers in charge of the ships learnt that a great fleet of British ships had appeared in the outer bay.

How many ships were there? The officers’ informants did not know. More than could be easily counted — perhaps as many as a hundred. Like the rain, the ships had seemingly arrived in a single instant out of an empty sea. What sort of ships were they? Ah! That was the strangest thing of all! The ships were all ships of the line, heavily armed two-and three-decked warships.

This was astonishing news. The ships’ great number and their great size was, in truth, more puzzling than their sudden appearance. The British Navy blockaded Brest continually, but never with more than twenty-five ships at a time, of which only ten or twelve were ships of the line, the remainder being agile little frigates, sloops and brigs.

So peculiar was this tale of a hundred ships that the French captains did not believe it until they had ridden or rowed to Lochrist or Camaret Saint-Julien or other places where they could stand upon the clifftops and see the ships for themselves.

Days went by. The sky was the colour of lead and the rain continued to fall. The British ships remained stubbornly where they were. The people of Brest were in great dread lest some of the ships might attempt to come up to the town and bombard it. But the British ships did nothing.

Stranger still was the news that came from other ports in the French Empire, from Rochefort, Toulon, Marseilles, Genoa, Venice, Flushing, Lorient, Antwerp and a hundred other towns of lesser importance. They too were blockaded by British fleets of a hundred or so warships. It was impossible to comprehend. Added together these fleets contained more warships than the British possessed. Indeed they contained more warships than there were upon the face of the earth.

The most senior officer at Brest at that time was Admiral Desmoulins. He had a servant, a very small man no bigger than an eight-year-old child, and as dark as a European can be. He looked as if he had been put into the oven and baked for too long and was now rather overdone. His skin was the colour of a coffee-bean and the texture of a dried-up rice-pudding. His hair was black, twisted and greasy like the spines and quills you may observe on the less succulent parts of roasted chickens. His name was Perroquet (which means parrot). Admiral Desmoulins was very proud of Perroquet; proud of his size, proud of his cleverness, proud of his agility and most of all, proud of his colour. Admiral Desmoulins often boasted that he had seen blacks who would appear fair next to Perroquet.

It was Perroquet who sat in the rain for four days studying the ships through his eye-glass. Rain spurted from his child-size bicorn hat as if from two little rainspouts; it sank into the capes of his child-size coat, making the coat fearfully heavy and turning the wool into felt; and it ran in little streams down his baked, greasy skin; but he paid it not the slightest attention.

After four days Perroquet sighed, jumped to his feet, stretched himself, took off his hat, gave his head a good scratch, yawned and said, “Well, my Admiral, they are the queerest ships I have ever seen and I do not understand them.”

“In what way, Perroquet?” asked the Admiral.

Gathered on the cliffs near Camaret Saint-Julien with Perroquet were Admiral Desmoulins and Captain Jumeau, and rain spurted from
their
bicorn hats and turned the wool of
their
coats into felt and filled their boots with half an inch of water.

“Well,” said Perroquet, “the ships sit upon the sea as if they were becalmed and yet they are not becalmed. There is a strong westerly wind which ought by rights to blow them on to these rocks, but does it? No. Do the ships beat off? No. Do they reduce sail? No. I cannot count the number of times the wind has changed since I have sat here, but what have the men on those ships done? Nothing.”

Captain Jumeau, who disliked Perroquet and was jealous of his influence with the Admiral, laughed. “He is mad, my Admiral. If the British were really as idle or ignorant as he says, their ships would all be heaps of broken spars by now.”

“They are more like pictures of ships,” mused Perroquet, paying the Captain no attention, “than the ships themselves. But a queerer thing still, my Admiral, is that ship, the three-decker at the northernmost tip of the line. On Monday it was just like the others but now its sails are all in tatters, its mizzen mast is gone and there is a ragged hole in its side.”

“Huzza!” cried Captain Jumeau. “Some brave French crew has inflicted this damage while we stand here talking.”

Perroquet grinned. “And do you think, Captain, that the British would permit one French ship to go up to their hundred ships and blow one of them to bits and then sail calmly away again? Ha! I should like to see you do it, Captain, in your little boat. No, my Admiral, it is my opinion that the British ship is melting.”

“Melting!” declared the Admiral in surprize.

“The hull bulges like an old woman’s knitting bag,” said Perroquet. “And the bowsprit and the spritsail yard are drooping into the water.”

“What idiotic nonsense!” declared Captain Jumeau. “How can a ship melt?”

“I do not know,” said Perroquet, thoughtfully. “It depends upon what it is made of.”

“Jumeau, Perroquet,” said Admiral Desmoulins, “I believe that our best course will be to sail out and examine those ships. If the British fleet seems likely to attack, we will turn back, but in the meantime perhaps we may learn something.”

So Perroquet and the Admiral and Captain Jumeau set sail in the rain with a few brave men; for sailors, though they face hardship with equanimity, are superstitious, and Perroquet was not the only person in Brest who had noticed the queerness of the British ships.

After they had gone some way, our adventurers could see that the strange ships were entirely grey and that they glittered; even under that dark sky, even in all that drenching rain they shone. Once, for a moment, the clouds parted and a ray of sunlight struck the sea. The ships disappeared. Then the clouds closed and the ships were there again.

“Dear God!” cried the Admiral. “What does all this mean?”

“Perhaps,” said Perroquet uneasily, “the British ships have all been sunk and these are their ghosts.”

Still the strange ships glittered and shone, and this led to some discussion as to what they might be made of. The Admiral thought perhaps iron or steel. (Metal ships indeed! The French are, as I have often supposed, a very whimsical nation.)

Captain Jumeau wondered if they might not be of silver paper.

“Silver paper!” exclaimed the Admiral.

“Oh, yes!” said Captain Jumeau. “Ladies, you know, take silver paper and roll it into quills and make little baskets of it, which they then decorate with flowers and fill with sugar plums.”

The Admiral and Perroquet were surprized to hear this, but Captain Jumeau was a handsome man, and clearly knew more of the ways of ladies than they did.

But if it took one lady an evening to make a basket, how many ladies would it take to make a fleet? The Admiral said it made his head hurt to think of it.

The sun came out again. This time, since they were closer to ships, they could see how the sunlight shone
through
them and made them colourless until they were just a faint sparkle upon the water.

“Glass,” said the Admiral, and he was near to the mark, but it was clever Perroquet who finally hit upon the truth.

“No, my Admiral, it is the rain. They are made of rain.”

As the rain fell from the heavens the drops were made to flow together to form solid masses — pillars and beams and sheets, which someone had shaped into the likeness of a hundred ships.

Perroquet and the Admiral and Captain Jumeau were consumed with curiosity to know who could have made such a thing and they agreed he must be a master-rainsmith.

“But not only a master-rainsmith!” exclaimed the Admiral, “A master-puppeteer! See how they bob up and down upon the water! How the sails billow and fall!”

“They are certainly the prettiest things that ever I saw, my Admiral,” agreed Perroquet, “but I repeat what I said before; he knows nothing of sailing or seamanship, whoever he is.”

For two hours the Admiral’s wooden ship sailed in and out of the rain-ships. Being ships of rain they made no sound at all — no creaking of timber, no slap of sail in the wind, no call of sailor to his mate. Several times groups of smooth-faced men of rain came to the ship’s rail to gaze out at the wooden ship with its crew of flesh-and-blood men, but what the rain-sailors were thinking, no one could tell. Yet the Admiral, the Captain and Perroquet felt themselves to be perfectly safe, for, as Perroquet remarked, “Even if the rain-sailors wish to fire upon us, they only have rain-cannonballs to do it with and we will only get wet.”

Perroquet and the Admiral and Captain Jumeau were lost in admiration. They forgot that they had been tricked, forgot that they had wasted a week and that for a week the British had been slipping into ports on the Baltic coast and ports on the Portuguese coast and all sorts of other ports where the Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte did not want them to go. But the spell which held the ships in place appeared to be weakening (which presumably explained the melting ship at the northernmost point of the fleet). After two hours it stopped raining and in the same moment the spell broke, which Perroquet and the Admiral and Captain Jumeau knew by a curious twist of their senses, as if they had tasted a string quartet, or been, for a moment, deafened by the sight of the colour blue. For the merest instant the rain-ships became mist-ships and then the breeze gently blew them apart.

The Frenchmen were alone upon the empty Atlantic.