Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

by Susanna Clarke

  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.)
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  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.

  12

  The Spirit of English Magic urges Mr Norrell to the Aid of Britannia

  December 1807

  On a day in December two great draycarts happened to collide in Cheapside. One, which was loaded with barrels of sherry-wine, overturned. While the draymen argued about which of them was to blame, some passers-by observed that sherry-wine was leaking from one of the barrels. Soon a crowd of drinkers gathered with glasses and pint-pots to catch the sherry, and hooks and bars to make holes in those casks which were still undamaged. The draycarts and crowd had soon so effectively stopt up Cheapside that queues of carriages formed in all the neighbouring streets, Poultry, Threadneedle-street, Bartholomew-lane and, in the other direction, Aldersgate, Newgate and Paternoster-row. It became impossible to imagine how the knot of carriages, horses and people would ever get undone again.

  Of the two draymen one was handsome and the other was fat and, having made up their quarrel, they became a sort of Bacchus and Silenus to the revel. They decided to entertain both themselves and their followers by opening all the carriage-doors to see what the rich people were doing inside. Coachmen and footmen tried to prevent this impertinence but the crowd were too many to be held off and too drunk to mind the blows of the whip which the crosser sort of coachmen gave them. In one of these carriages the fat drayman discovered Mr Norrell and cried, “What! Old Norrell!” The draymen both climbed into the carriage to shake Mr Norrell’s hand and breathe sherry fumes all over him and assure him that they would lose no time in moving everything out of the way so that he – the hero of the French Blockade – might pass. Which promise they kept and respectable people found their horses unhitched and their carriages pushed and shoved into tanners’ yards and other nasty places, or backed into dirty brick-lanes where they got stuck fast and all the varnish was scraped off; and when the draymen and their friends had made this triumphal path for Mr Norrell they escorted him and his carriage along it, as far as Hanover-square, cheering all the way, flinging their hats in the air and making up songs about him.

  Everyone, it seemed, was delighted with what Mr Norrell had done. A large part of the French Navy had been tricked into remaining in its ports for eleven days and during that time the British had been at liberty to sail about the Bay of Biscay, the English Channel and the German Sea, just as it pleased and a great many things had been accomplished. Spies had been deposited in various parts of the French Empire and other spies brought back to England with news about what Buonaparte was doing. British merchant ships had unloaded their cargoes of coffee and cotton and spices in Dutch and Baltic ports without any interference.

  Napoleon Buonaparte, it was said, was scouring France to find a magician of his own – but with no success. In London the Ministers were quite astonished to find that, for once, they had done something the Nation approved.

  Mr Norrell was invited to the Admiralty, where he drank madeira-wine in the Board Room. He sat in a chair close to the fire and had a long comfortable chat with the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Mulgrave, and the First Secretary to the Admiralty, Mr Horrocks. Above the fireplace there were carvings of nautical instruments and garlands of flowers which Mr Norrell greatly admired. He described the beautiful carvings in the library at Hurtfew Abbey; “And yet,” said Mr Norrell, “I envy you, my lord. Indeed I do. Such a fine representation of the instruments of your profession! I wish that I might have done the same. Nothing looks so striking. Nothing, I believe, inspires a man with such eagerness to begin his day’s work as the sight of his instruments neatly laid out – or their images in good English oak as we have here. But really a magician has need of so few tools. I will tell you a little trick, my lord, the more apparatus a magician carries about with him – coloured powders, stuffed cats, magical hats and so forth – the greater the fraud you will eventually discover him to be!”

  And what, inquired Mr Horrocks politely, were the few tools that a magician did require?

  “Why! Nothing really,” said Mr Norrell. “Nothing but a silver basin for seeing visions in.”

  “Oh!” cried Mr Horrocks. “I believe I would give almost any thing to see that magic done – would not you, my lord? Oh, Mr Norrell, might we prevail upon you to shew us a vision in a silver basin?”

  Usually Mr Norrell was the last man in the world to satisfy such idle curiosity, but he had been so pleased with his reception at the Admiralty (for the two gentlemen paid him a world of compliments) that he agreed almost immediately and a servant was dispatched to find a silver basin; “A silver basin about a foot in diameter,” said Mr Norrell, “which you must fill with clean water.”

  The Admiralty had lately sent out orders for three ships to rendezvous south of Gibraltar and Lord Mulgrave had a great curiosity to know whether or not this had occurred; would Mr Norrell be able to find it out? Mr Norrell did not k
now, but promised to try. When the basin was brought and Mr Norrell bent over it, Lord Mulgrave and Mr Horrocks felt as if nothing else could have so conjured up the ancient glories of English magic; they felt as if they were living in the Age of Stokesey, Godbless and the Raven King.

  A picture appeared upon the surface of the water in the silver basin, a picture of three ships riding the waves of a blue sea. The strong, clear light of the Mediterranean shone out into the gloomy December room and lit up the faces of the three gentlemen who peered into the bowl.

  “It moves!” cried Lord Mulgrave in astonishment.

  It did indeed. The sweetest white clouds imaginable were gliding across the blue sky, the ships rode the waves and tiny people could be seen moving about them. Lord Mulgrave and Mr Horrocks had no difficulty in recognizing HMS Catherine of Winchester, HMS Laurel and HMS Centaur.

  “Oh, Mr Norrell!” cried Mr Horrocks. “The Centaur is my cousin’s ship. Can you shew me Captain Barry?”

  Mr Norrell fidgeted about and drew in his breath with a sharp hiss and stared fiercely at the silver basin, and by and by appeared a vision of a pink-faced, gold-haired, overgrown cherub of a man walking about a quarterdeck. This, Mr Horrocks assured them, was his cousin, Captain Barry.

  “He looks very well, does he not?” cried Mr Horrocks. “I am glad to know he is in such good health.”

  “Where are they? Can you tell?” Lord Mulgrave asked Mr Norrell.

  “Alas,” said Mr Norrell, “this art of making pictures is the most imprecise in the world.1 I am delighted to have had the honour of shewing your lordship some of His Majesty’s ships. I am yet more pleased that they are the ones you want – which is frankly more than I expected – but I fear I can tell you nothing further.”