Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

by Susanna Clarke

  15

  “How is Lady Pole?”

  January 1808

  “How is lady Pole?”

  In every part of the Town and among all stations and degrees of citizen the question was to be heard. In Covent-garden at break of dawn, costermongers asked flower-girls, “How is Lady Pole?”. In Ackermann’s in the Strand, Mr Ackermann himself inquired of his customers (members of the nobility and persons of distinction) whether they had any news of Lady Pole. In the House of Commons during dull speeches, Members of Parliament whispered the question to their neighbours (each regarding Sir Walter out of the corner of his eye as he did so). In Mayfair dressing-rooms in the early hours of the morning, maids begged their mistresses’ pardons, “… but was Lady Pole at the party tonight? And how is her ladyship?”

  And so the question went round and round; “How is Lady Pole?”

  And, “Oh!” (came back the reply), “her ladyship is very well, exceedingly well.”

  Which demonstrates the sad poverty of the English language, for her ladyship was a great deal more than well. Next to her ladyship every other person in the world looked pale, tired, half-dead. The extraordinary energy she had exhibited the morning after her resurrection had never left her; when she took her walk people stared to see a lady get on so fast. And as for the footman who was meant to attend her, he, poor fellow, was generally many yards in the rear, red-faced and breathless. The Secretary of War, coming out of Drummond’s in Charing Cross one morning, was brought into sudden and unexpected conjunction with her ladyship walking rapidly along the street and was quite overturned. She helped him to his feet, said she hoped she had not hurt him and was gone before he could think of a reply.

  Like every other young lady of nineteen Lady Pole was wild for dancing. She would dance every dance at a ball without ever once losing her breath and was dismayed that everyone went away so soon. “It is ridiculous to call such a half-hearted affair a ball!” she told Sir Walter. “We have had scarcely three hours dancing!” And she marvelled too at the frailty of the other dancers. “Poor things! I pity them.”

  Her health was drunk by the Army, the Navy and the Church. Sir Walter Pole was regularly named as the most fortunate man in the Kingdom and Sir Walter himself was quite of the same opinion. Miss Wintertowne – poor, pale, sick Miss Wintertowne – had excited his compassion, but Lady Pole, in a constant glow of extraordinary good health and happy spirits, was the object of his admiration. When she accidentally knocked the Secretary of War to the ground he thought it the best joke in the world and spoke of it to everyone he met. He privately confided to Lady Winsell, his particular friend, that her ladyship was exactly the wife to suit him – so clever, so lively, so everything he could have wished for. He was particularly struck by her independent opinions.

  “She advised me last week that the Government ought not to send money and troops to the King of Sweden – which is what we have decided – but instead to lend our support to the Governments of Portugal and Spain and make these countries the bases of our operations against Buonaparte. At nineteen, to have thought so deeply upon all manner of things and to have come to so many conclusions about them! At nineteen, to contradict all the Government so boldly! Of course I told her that she ought to be in Parliament!”

  Lady Pole united in one person all the different fascinations of Beauty, Politics, Wealth and Magic. The fashionable world had no doubt but that she was destined to become one of its most brilliant leaders. She had been married almost three months now; it was time to embark upon the course that Destiny and the fashionable world had marked out for her. Cards were sent out for a magnificent dinner-party to be held in the second week of January.

  The first dinner-party of a bride’s career is a momentous occasion, entailing a world of small anxieties. The accomplishments which have won her acclaim in the three years since she left the schoolroom are no longer enough. It is no longer enough to dress exquisitely, to chuse jewels exactly appropriate to the occasion, to converse in French, to play the pianoforte and sing. Now she must turn her attention to French cooking and French wines. Though other people may advise her upon these important matters, her own taste and inclinations must guide her. She is sure to despise her mother’s style of entertaining and wish to do things differently. In London fashionable people dine out four, five times a week. However will a new bride – nineteen years old and scarcely ever in a kitchen before – think of a meal to astonish and delight such jaded palates?

  Then there are the servants. In the new bride’s new house the footmen are all new to their business. If something is needed quickly – candles, a different sort of fork, a heavy cloth in which to carry a hot soup tureen – will they be able to find it? In the case of Lady Pole’s establishment at no. 9 Harley-street the problems were multiplied threefold. Half of the servants were from Northamptonshire – from her ladyship’s estate at Great Hitherden – and half were newly hired in London; and as everybody knows there is a world of difference between country servants and London servants. It is not a matter of duties exactly. Servants must cook and clean and fetch and carry in Northamptonshire just as in London. No, the distinction lies more in the manner in which those duties are carried out. Say a country squire in Northamptonshire visits his neighbour. The visit over, the footman fetches the squire’s greatcoat and helps the squire on with it. While he is doing so it is only natural for the footman to inquire respectfully after the squire’s wife. The squire is not in the least offended and responds with some inquiries of his own. Perhaps the squire has heard that the footman’s grandmother fell over and hurt herself while cutting cabbages in her garden and he wishes to know if she is recovered. The squire and the footman inhabit a very small world and have known each other from childhood. But in London this will never do. A London footman must not address his master’s guests. He must look as if he did not know there were such things as grandmothers and cabbages in the world.

  At no. 9 Harley-street Lady Pole’s country servants were continually ill at ease, afraid of going wrong and never sure of what was right. Even their speech was found fault with and mocked. Their Northamptonshire accent was not always intelligible to the London servants (who, it must be said, made no very great efforts to understand them) and they used words like goosegogs, sparrow-grass, betty-cat and battle-twigs, when they should have said gooseberries, asparagus, she-cat and earwigs.

  The London servants delighted in playing tricks on the country servants. They gave Alfred, a young footman, plates of nasty, dirty water and told him it was French soup and bade him serve it up to the other servants at dinner. Often they gave the country servants messages to pass on to the butcher’s boy, the baker and the lamplighter. The messages were full of London slang and the country servants could make neither head nor tail of them, but to the butcher’s boy, the baker and the lamplighter, who understood them very well, they were both vulgar and insulting. The butcher’s boy punched Alfred in the eye on account of what was said to him, while the London servants hid in the larder, to listen and laugh.

  Naturally, the country servants complained vigorously to Lady Pole (whom they had known all their lives) about the manner in which they were persecuted and Lady Pole was shocked to find that all her old friends were unhappy in their new home. But she was inexperienced and uncertain how to proceed. She did not doubt the truth of what the country servants said for a moment, but she feared making matters worse.

  “What ought I to do, Sir Walter?” she asked.

  “Do?” said Sir Walter in surprize. “Do nothing. Leave it all to Stephen Black. By the time Stephen has finished with them they will all be as meek as lambs and as harmonious as blackbirds.”

  Before his marriage Sir Walter had had only one servant, Stephen Black, and Sir Walter’s confidence in this person knew scarcely any bounds. At no. 9 Harley-street he was called “butler”, but his duties and responsibilities extended far beyond the range of any ordinary butler: he dealt with bankers and lawyers on Sir Walter’s beha
lf; he studied the accounts of Lady Pole’s estates and reported to Sir Walter upon what he found there; he hired servants and workmen without reference to any one else; he directed their work and paid bills and wages.

  Of course in many households there is a servant who by virtue of his exceptional intelligence and abilities is given authority beyond what is customary. But in Stephen’s case it was all the more extraordinary since Stephen was a negro. I say “extraordinary”, for is it not generally the case that a negro servant is the least-regarded person in a household? No matter how hardworking he or she may be? No matter how clever? Yet somehow Stephen Black had found a way to thwart this universal principle. He had, it is true, certain natural advantages: a handsome face and a tall, well-made figure. It certainly did him no harm that his master was a politician who was pleased to advertise his liberal principles to the world by entrusting the management of his house and business to a black servant.

  The other servants were a little surprized to find they were put under a black man – a sort of person that many of them had never even seen before. Some were inclined to be indignant at first and told each other that if he dared to give them an order they would return him a very rude answer. But whatever their intentions, they discovered that when they were actually in Stephen’s presence they did nothing of the sort. His grave looks, air of authority and reasonable instructions made it very natural to do whatever he told them.

  The butcher’s boy, the baker, the lamplighter and other similar new acquaintances of the Harley-street servants shewed great interest in Stephen from the first. They asked the Harley-street servants questions about Stephen’s mode of life. What did he eat and drink? Who were his friends? Where did he like to go whenever he should happen to be at liberty to go anywhere? When the Harley-street servants replied that Stephen had had three boiled eggs for breakfast, the Secretary at War’s Welsh valet was a great friend of his and that he had attended a servants’ ball in Wapping the night before, the butcher’s boy, the baker and the lamplighter were most grateful for the information. The Harley-street servants asked them why they wished to know. The butcher’s boy, the baker and the lamplighter were entirely astonished. Did the Harley-street servants really not know? The Harley-street servants really did not. The butcher’s boy, the baker and the lamplighter explained that a rumour had been circulating London for years to the effect that Stephen Black was not really a butler at all. Secretly he was an African prince, the heir to a vast kingdom, and it was well known that as soon as he grew tired of being a butler he would return there and marry a princess as black as himself.

  After this revelation the Harley-street servants watched Stephen out of the corners of their eyes and agreed among themselves that nothing was more likely. In fact, was not their own obedience to Stephen the best proof of it? For it was hardly likely that such independent, proud-spirited Englishmen and women would have submitted to the authority of a black man, had they not instinctively felt that respect and reverence which a commoner feels for a king!

  Meanwhile Stephen Black knew nothing of these curious speculations. He performed his duties diligently as he had always done. He continued to polish silver, train the footmen in the duties of service à la française, admonish the cooks, order flowers, linen, knives and forks and do all the thousand and one things necessary to prepare house and servants for the important evening of the magnificent dinner-party. When it finally came, everything was as splendid as his ingenuity could make it. Vases of hot-house roses filled the drawing-room and dining-room and lined the staircase. The dining-table was laid with a heavy white damask cloth and shone with all the separate glitters that silver, glass and candlelight can provide. Two great Venetian mirrors hung upon the wall and on Stephen’s instructions these had been made to face each other, so that the reflections doubled and tripled and twice-tripled the silver and the glasses and the candles, and when the guests finally sat down to dinner they appeared to be gently dissolving in a dazzling, golden light like a company of the blessed in glory.

  Chief among the guests was Mr Norrell. What a contrast now with that period when he had first arrived in London! Then he had been disregarded – a Nobody. Now he sat among the highest in the land and was courted by them! The other guests continually directed remarks and questions to him and seemed quite delighted by his short, ungracious replies: “I do not know whom you mean,” or “I have not the pleasure of that gentleman’s acquaintance,” or “I have never been to the place you mention.”

  Some of Mr Norrell’s conversation – the more entertaining part – was supplied by Mr Drawlight and Mr Lascelles. They sat upon either side of him, busily conveying his opinions upon modern magic about the table. Magic was a favourite subject that evening. Finding themselves at one and the same time in the presence of England’s only magician and of the most famous subject of his magic, the guests could neither think nor talk of any thing else. Very soon they fell to discussing the numerous claims of successful spells which had sprung up all over the country following Lady Pole’s resurrection.

  “Every provincial newspaper seems to have two or three reports,” agreed Lord Castlereagh. “In the Bath Chronicle the other day I read about a man called Gibbons in Milsom-street who awoke in the night because he heard thieves breaking into his house. It seems that this man has a large library of magical books. He tried a spell he knew and turned the housebreakers into mice.”

  “Really?” said Mr Canning. “And what happened to the mice?”

  “They all ran away into holes in the wainscotting.”

  “Ha!” said Mr Lascelles. “Believe me, my lord, there was no magic. Gibbons heard a noise, feared a housebreaker, said a spell, opened a door and found – not housebreakers, but mice. The truth is, it was mice all along. All of these stories prove false in the end. There is an unmarried clergyman and his sister in Lincoln called Malpas who have made it their business to look into supposed instances of magical occurrences and they have found no truth in any of them.”

  “They are such admirers of Mr Norrell, this clergyman and his sister!” added Mr Drawlight, enthusiastically. “They are so delighted that such a man has arisen to restore the noble art of English magic! They cannot bear that other people should tell falsehoods and claim to imitate his great deeds! They hate it that other people should make themselves seem important at Mr Norrell’s expense! They feel it as a personal affront! Mr Norrell has been so kind as to supply them with certain infallible means of establishing beyond a doubt the falsity of all such claims and Mr Malpas and Miss Malpas drive about the country in their phaeton confounding these imposters!”

  “I believe you are too generous to Gibbons, Mr Lascelles,” said Mr Norrell in his pedantic fashion. “It is not at all certain that he did not have some malicious purpose in making his false claim. At the very least he lied about his library. I sent Childermass to see it and Childermass says there is not a book earlier than 1760. Worthless! Quite worthless!”

  “Yet we must hope,” said Lady Pole to Mr Norrell, “that the clergyman and his sister will soon uncover a magician of genuine ability – someone to help you, sir.”

  “Oh! But there is no one!” exclaimed Drawlight. “No one at all! You see, in order to accomplish his extraordinary deeds Mr Norrell shut himself away for years and years reading books. Alas, such devotion to the interests of one’s country is very rare! I assure you there is no one else!”

  “But the clergyman and his sister must not give up their search,” urged her ladyship. “I know from my own example how much labour is involved in one solitary act of magic. Think how desirable it would be if Mr Norrell were provided with an assistant.”

  “Desirable yet hardly likely,” said Mr Lascelles. “The Malpases have found nothing to suggest that any such person is in existence.”

  “But by your own account, Mr Lascelles, they have not been looking!” said Lady Pole. “Their object has been to expose false magic, not find new magicians. It would be very easy for them, as they drive
about in their phaeton, to make some inquiries as to who does magic and who has a library. I am certain they will not mind the extra trouble. They will be glad to do what they can to help you, sir.” (This to Mr Norrell.) “And we shall all hope that they soon succeed, because I think you must feel a little lonely.”

  In due course a suitable proportion of the fifty or so dishes was deemed to have been eaten and the footmen took away what was left. The ladies withdrew and the gentlemen were left to their wine. But the gentlemen found they had less pleasure in each other’s society than usual. They had got to the end of all they had to say about magic. They had no relish for gossiping about their acquaintance and even politics seemed a little dull. In short they felt that they should like to have the pleasure of looking at Lady Pole again, and so they told Sir Walter – rather than asked him – that he missed his wife. He replied that he did not. But this was not allowed to be possible; it was well known that newly married gentlemen were never happy apart from their wives; the briefest of absences could depress a new husband’s spirits and interfere with his digestion. Sir Walter’s guests asked each other if they thought he looked bilious and they agreed that he did. He denied it. Ah, he was putting a brave face on it, was he? Very good. But clearly it was a desperate case. They would have mercy on him and go and join the ladies.

  In the corner by the sideboard Stephen Black watched the gentlemen leave. Three footmen – Alfred, Geoffrey and Robert – remained in the room.

  “Are we to go and serve the tea, Mr Black?” inquired Alfred, innocently.

  Stephen Black raised one thin finger as a sign they were to stay where they were and he frowned slightly to shew they were to be silent. He waited until he was sure the gentlemen were out of hearing and then he exclaimed, “What in the world was the matter with everyone tonight? Alfred! I know that you have not often been in such company as we have tonight, but that is no reason to forget all your training! I was astonished at your stupidity!”