Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

by Susanna Clarke

That night the French Army fled through the woods that lay to the south of Salamanca. As they ran, the soldiers looked up and were amazed to see flights of angels descending through the dark trees. The angels shone with a blinding light. Their wings were as white as swans’ wings and their robes were the shifting colours of mother-of-pearl, fish scales or skies before thunder. In their hands they held flaming lances and their eyes blazed with a divine fury. They flew through the trees with astonishing rapidity and brandished their lances in the faces of the French.

  Many of the soldiers were stricken with such terror that they turned and ran back towards the city – towards the pursuing British Army. Most were too amazed to do any thing but stand and stare. One man, braver and more resolute than the rest, tried to understand what was happening. It seemed to him highly unlikely that Heaven should suddenly have allied itself with France’s enemies; after all such a thing had not been heard of since Old Testament times. He noticed that though the angels threatened the soldiers with their lances, they did not attack them. He waited until one of the angels swooped down towards him and then he plunged his sabre into it. The sabre encountered no resistance – nothing but empty air. Nor did the angel exhibit any signs of hurt or shock. Immediately the Frenchman called out to his compatriots that there was no reason to be afraid; these were nothing but illusions produced by Wellington’s magician; they could not harm them.

  The French soldiers continued along the road, pursued by the phantom angels. As they came out of the trees they found themselves on the bank of the River Tormes. An ancient bridge crossed the river, leading into the town of Alba de Tormes. By an error on the part of one of Lord Wellington’s allies this bridge had been left entirely unguarded. The French crossed over and escaped through the town.

  Some hours later, shortly after dawn, Lord Wellington rode wearily across the bridge at Alba de Tormes. With him were three other gentlemen: Lieutenant-Colonel De Lancey who was the Army’s Deputy Quartermaster; a handsome young man called Fitzroy Somerset who was Lord Wellington’s Military Secretary; and Jonathan Strange. All of them were dusty and battle-stained and none of them had been to bed for some days. Nor was there much likelihood of their doing so soon since Wellington was determined to continue his pursuit of the fleeing French.

  The town with its churches, convents and mediaeval buildings stood out with perfect clarity against an opalescent sky. Despite the hour (it was not much after half past five) the town was already up. Bells were already being rung to celebrate the defeat of the French. Regiments of weary British and Portuguese soldiers were filing through the streets and the townspeople were coming out of their houses to press gifts of bread, fruit and flowers on them. Carts bearing wounded men were lined up against a wall while the officer in charge sent men to seek out the hospital and other places to receive them. Meanwhile five or six plain-faced, capable-looking nuns had arrived from one of the convents and were going about among the wounded men giving them draughts of fresh milk from a tin cup. Small boys whom nobody could persuade to stay in bed were excitedly cheering every soldier they saw and forming impromptu victory parades behind any that did not seem to mind it.

  Lord Wellington looked about him. “Watkins!” he cried, hailing a soldier in an artillery uniform.

  “Yes, my lord?” said the man.

  “I am in search of my breakfast, Watkins. I don’t suppose you have seen my cook?”

  “Sergeant Jefford said he saw your people going up to the castle, my lord.”

  “Thank you, Watkins,” said his lordship and rode on with his party.

  The Castle of Alba de Tormes was not much of a castle. Many years ago at the start of the war the French had laid siege to it and with the exception of one tower it was all in ruins. Birds and wild creatures now made nests and holes where once the Dukes of Alba had lived in unimaginable luxury. The fine Italian murals for which the castle had once been famous were a great deal less impressive now that the ceilings were all gone and they had been subjected to the rough caresses of rain, hail, sleet and snow. The dining-parlour lacked some of the convenience that other dining-parlours have; it was open to the sky and there was a young birch tree growing in the middle of it. But this troubled Lord Wellington’s servants not one whit; they were accustomed to serve his lordship his meals in far stranger places. They had set a table beneath the birch tree and spread it with a white cloth. As Wellington and his companions rode up to the castle they had just begun to lay it with plates of bread rolls, slices of Spanish ham, bowls of apricots and dishes of fresh butter. Wellington’s cook went off to fry fish, devil kidneys and make coffee.

  The four gentlemen sat down. Colonel De Lancey remarked that he did not believe he could remember when his last meal had been. Somebody else agreed and then they all silently applied themselves to the serious business of eating and drinking.

  They were just beginning to feel a little more like their usual selves and grow a little more conversational when Major Grant arrived.

  “Ah! Grant,” said Lord Wellington. “Good Morning. Sit down. Have some breakfast.”

  “I will in a moment, my lord. But first I have some news for you. Of rather a surprizing sort. It seems the French have lost six cannon.”

  “Cannon?” said his lordship, not much interested. He helped himself to a bread roll and some devilled kidneys. “Of course they have lost cannon. Somerset!” he said, addressing his Military Secretary. “How many pieces of French cannon did I capture yesterday?”

  “Eleven, my lord.”

  “No, no, my lord,” said Major Grant. “I beg your pardon, but you misunderstand. I am not speaking of the cannon that were captured during the battle. These cannon were never in the battle. They were on their way from General Caffarelli in the north to the French Army. But they did not arrive in time for the battle. In fact they never arrived at all. Knowing that you were in the vicinity, my lord, and pressing the French hard, General Caffarelli was anxious to deliver them with all dispatch. He made up his escort out of the first thirty soldiers that came to hand. Well, my lord, he acted in haste and has repented at leisure for it seems that ten out of thirty were Neapolitan.”

  “Neapolitan! Were they indeed?” said his lordship.

  De Lancey and Somerset exchanged pleased looks with one another and even Jonathan Strange smiled.

  The truth was that, although Naples was part of the French Empire, the Neapolitans hated the French. The young men of Naples were forced to fight in the French Army but they took every opportunity they could to desert, often running away to the enemy.

  “But what of the other soldiers?” asked Somerset. “Surely we must assume that they will prevent the Neapolitans doing much mischief?”

  “It is too late for the other soldiers to do any thing,” said Major Grant. “They are all dead. Twenty pairs of French boots and twenty French uniforms are, at this very moment, hanging in the shop of an old clothes dealer in Salamanca. The coats all have long slits in the back, such as might be made by an Italian stiletto, and they are all over blood stains.”

  “So, the cannon are in the hands of a pack of Italian deserters, are they?” said Strange. “What will they do? Start a war of their own?”

  “No, no!” said Grant. “They will sell them to the highest bidder. Either to you, my lord or to General Castanos.” (This was the name of the General in charge of the Spanish Army.)

  “Somerset!” said his lordship. “What ought I to give for six French cannon? Four hundred dollars?”

  “Oh! It is certainly worth four hundred dollars to make the French feel the consequences of their foolishness, my lord. But what I do not understand is why we have not heard something from the Neapolitans already. What can they be waiting for?”

  “I believe I know the answer to that,” said Major Grant. “Four nights ago two men met secretly in a little graveyard upon a hillside not far from Castrejon. They wore ragged French uniforms and spoke a sort of Italian. They conferred a while and when they parted one went south towa
rds the French Army at Cantalapiedra, the other went north towards the Duero. My lord, it is my belief that the Neapolitan deserters are sending messages to their countrymen to come and join them. I dare say they believe that with the money that you or General Castanos will give them for the guns, they will all be able to sail back to Naples in a golden ship. There is probably not a man among them who does not have a brother or cousin in some other French regiment. They do not wish to return home and face their mothers and grandmothers without bringing their relations with them.”

  “I have always heard that Italian women are rather fierce,” agreed Colonel De Lancey.

  “All we need to do, my lord,” continued Major Grant, “is find some Neapolitans and question them. I am certain we will find that they know where the thieves are and where the guns are.”

  “Are there any Neapolitans among yesterday’s prisoners?” asked Wellington.

  Colonel De Lancey sent a man to find out.

  “Of course,” continued Wellington, thoughtfully, “it would suit me much better to pay nothing at all. Merlin!” (This was his name for Jonathan Strange.) “If you will be so good as to conjure up a vision of the Neapolitans, perhaps we will gain some clue as to where they and the guns are to be found and then we can simply go and get them!”

  “Perhaps,” said Strange.

  “I dare say there will be an oddly shaped mountain in the background,” said his lordship cheerfully, “or a village with a distinctive church tower. One of the Spanish guides will soon recognize the place.”

  “I dare say,” said Strange.

  “You do not seem very sure of it.”

  “Forgive me, my lord, but – as I think I have said before – visions are precisely the wrong sort of magic for this sort of thing.”2

  “Well, have you any thing better to suggest?” asked his lordship.

  “No, my lord. Not at present.”

  “Then it is decided!” said Lord Wellington. “Mr Strange, Colonel De Lancey and Major Grant can turn their attention to the discovery of these guns. Somerset and I will go and annoy the French.” The brisk manner in which his lordship spoke suggested that he expected all of these things to start happening very soon. Strange and the gentlemen of the Staff swallowed the rest of their breakfast and went to their various tasks.

  At about midday Lord Wellington and Fitzroy Somerset were seated upon their horses on a slight ridge near the village of Garcia Hernandez. On the stony plain below several brigades of British Dragoons were preparing to charge some squadrons of cavalry which formed the rearguard of the French Army.

  Just then Colonel De Lancey rode up.

  “Ah, Colonel!” said Lord Wellington. “Have you found me any Neapolitans?”

  “There are no Neapolitans among the prisoners, my lord,” said De Lancey. “But Mr Strange suggested we look among the dead upon yesterday’s battlefield. By magical means he has identified seventeen corpses as Neapolitan.”

  “Corpses!” said Lord Wellington, putting down his telescope in surprize. “What in the world does he want corpses for?”

  “We asked him that, my lord, but he grew evasive and would not answer. However he has asked that the dead men be put somewhere safe where they will be neither lost nor molested.”

  “Well, I suppose one ought not to employ a magician and then complain that he does not behave like other people,” said Wellington.

  At that moment an officer standing close by cried out that the Dragoons had increased their pace to a gallop and would soon be upon the French. Instantly the eccentricities of the magician were forgotten; Lord Wellington put his telescope to his eye and every man present turned his attention to the battle.

  Strange meanwhile had returned from the battlefield to the castle at Alba de Tormes. In the Armoury Tower (the only part of the castle still standing) he had found a room that no one was using and had appropriated it. Scattered about the room were Norrell’s forty books. They were all still more or less in one piece, though some were decidedly battered-looking. The floor was covered with Strange’s notebooks and pieces of paper with scraps of spells and magical calculations scribbled on them. On a table in the centre of the room stood a wide and shallow silver bowl, filled with water. The shutters had been pulled tight and the only light in the room came from the silver bowl. All in all it was a veritable magician’s cave and the pretty Spanish maid who brought coffee and almond biscuits at regular intervals was quite terrified and ran out again as soon as she had put down her trays.

  An officer of the 18th Hussars called Whyte had arrived to assist Strange. Captain Whyte had lived for a time at the house of the British Envoy in Naples. He was adept at languages and understood the Neapolitan dialect perfectly.

  Strange had no difficulty in conjuring up the visions but, just as he had predicted, the visions gave very little clue as to where the men were. The guns, he discovered, were half hidden behind some pale yellow rocks – the sort of rocks which were scattered liberally throughout the Peninsula – and the men were camped in a sparse woodland of olive and pine trees – the sort of woodland in fact that one might discover by casting one’s glance in any direction.

  Captain Whyte stood at Strange’s side and translated everything the Neapolitans said into clear, concise English. But, though they stared into the silver bowl all day they learnt very little. When a man has been hungry for eighteen months, when he has not seen his wife or sweetheart for two years, when he has spent the last four months sleeping upon mud and stones his powers of conversation tend to be somewhat dulled. The Neapolitans had very little to say to each other and what they did say chiefly concerned the food they wished they were eating, the charms of the absent wives and sweethearts they wished they were enjoying, and the soft feather mattresses they wished they were sleeping upon.

  For half the night and most of the following day Strange and Captain Whyte remained in the Armoury Tower, engaged in the dull work of watching the Neapolitans. Towards the evening of the second day an aide-de-camp brought a message from Wellington. His lordship had set up his Headquarters at a place called Flores de Avila and Strange and Captain Whyte were summoned to attend him there. So they packed up Strange’s books and the silver bowl and gathered their other possessions and set off along the hot, dusty roads.

  Flores de Avila proved to be rather an obscure place; none of the Spanish men and women whom Captain Whyte accosted had heard of it. But when two of Europe’s greatest armies have recently travelled along a road, they cannot help but leave some signs of their passing; Strange and Captain Whyte found that their best plan was to follow the trail of discarded baggage, broken carts, corpses and feasting black birds. Against a background of empty, stone-strewn plains these sights resembled nothing so much as images from a mediaeval painting of Hell and they provoked Strange to make a great many gloomy remarks upon the Horror and Futility of War. Ordinarily Captain Whyte, a professional soldier, would have felt inclined to argue, but he too was affected by the sombre character of their surroundings and only answered, “Very true, sir. Very true.”

  But a soldier ought not to dwell too long on such matters. His life is full of hardship and he must take his pleasure where he can. Though he may take time to reflect upon the cruelties that he sees, place him among his comrades and it is almost impossible for his spirits not to rise. Strange and Captain Whyte reached Flores de Avila at about nine o’clock and within five minutes they were greeting their friends cheerfully, listening to the latest gossip about Lord Wellington and making a great many inquiries about the previous day’s battle – another defeat for the French. One would scarcely suppose they had seen any thing to distress them within the last twelvemonth.

  The Headquarters had been set up in a ruined church on a hillside above the village and there Lord Wellington, Fitzroy Somerset, Colonel De Lancey and Major Grant were waiting to meet them.

  For all that he had won two battles in as many days Lord Wellington was not in the best of tempers. The French Army, famed throughou
t Europe for the rapidity of its marches, had got away from him and was now well on the way to Valladolid and safety. “It is a perfect mystery to me how they get on so fast,” he complained, “and I would give a great deal to catch up with them and destroy them. But this is the only army I have and if I wear it out I cannot get another.”

  “We have heard from the Neapolitans with the guns,” Major Grant informed Strange and Captain Whyte. “They are asking a hundred dollars a piece for them. Six hundred dollars in all.”

  “Which is too much,” said his lordship briefly. “Mr Strange, Captain Whyte, I hope you have good news for me?”

  “Hardly, my lord,” said Strange. “The Neapolitans are in a wood. But as to where that wood might be I have not the least idea. I am not sure how to progress. I have exhausted everything I know.”

  “Then you must quickly learn something else!”

  For a moment Strange looked as if he was going to return his lordship an angry reply, but thinking better of it he sighed and inquired whether the seventeen dead Neapolitans were being kept safe.

  “They have been put in the bell tower,” said Colonel De Lancey. “Sergeant Nash has charge of them. Whatever you want them for, I advise you to use them soon. I doubt they will last much longer in this heat.”

  “They will last another night,” said Strange. “The nights are cold.” Then he turned and went out of the church.

  Wellington’s Staff watched him go with some curiosity. “You know,” said Fitzroy Somerset, “I really cannot help wondering what he is going to do with seventeen corpses.”

  “Whatever it is,” said Wellington, dipping his quill in the ink and beginning a letter to the Ministers in London, “he does not relish the thought of it. He is doing everything he can to avoid it.”

  That night Strange did a sort of magic he had never done before. He attempted to penetrate the dreams of the Neapolitan company. In this he was perfectly successful.

  One man dreamt that he was chased up a tree by a vicious Roast Leg of Lamb. He sat in the tree weeping with hunger while the Leg of Lamb ran round and round and thrust its knob of bone at him in a menacing way. Shortly afterwards the Leg of Lamb was joined by five or six spiteful Boiled Eggs who whispered the most dreadful lies about him.