Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

by Susanna Clarke

  Another man dreamt that, as he was walking through a little wood, he met his dead mother. She told him that she had just looked down a rabbit hole and seen Napoleon Buonaparte, the King of England, the Pope and the Czar of Russia at the bottom. The man went down the rabbit hole to see, but when he arrived at the bottom he discovered that Napoleon Buonaparte, the King of England, the Pope and the Czar of Russia were in fact all the same person, a huge blubbering great man as big as a church with rusty iron teeth and burning cartwheels for eyes. “Ha!” sneered this ogre. “You did not think we were really different people, did you?” And it reached into a bubbling cauldron that stood nearby and pulled out the dreamer’s little son and ate him. In short the Neapolitans’ dreams, though interesting, were not very illuminating.

  Next morning at about ten o’clock Lord Wellington was sitting at a makeshift desk in the chancel of the ruined church. He looked up and saw Strange entering the church. “Well?” he asked.

  Strange sighed and said, “Where is Sergeant Nash? I need him to bring out the dead bodies. With your permission, my lord, I will try some magic that I heard of once.”3

  News quickly got about Headquarters that the magician was going to do something to the dead Neapolitans. Flores de Avila was a tiny place, scarcely more than a hundred dwellings. The previous evening had proved very dull for an army of young men who had just won a great victory and who felt inclined to celebrate and it was considered highly probable that Strange’s magic would prove the best entertainment of the day. A small crowd of officers and men soon gathered to see it.

  The church had a stone terrace which overlooked a narrow valley and a prospect of pale, towering mountains. Vineyards and olive groves clothed the slopes. Sergeant Nash and his men fetched the seventeen corpses from the bell tower and propped them up in a sitting position against a low wall that marked the edge of the terrace.

  Strange walked along, looking at each in turn. “I thought I told you,” he said to Sergeant Nash, “that I particularly did not want any one interfering with the corpses.”

  Sergeant Nash looked indignant. “I am sure, sir,” he said, “that none of our lads has touched them. But my lord,” he said, appealing to Lord Wellington, “there was scarcely a corpse on the battlefield that those Spanish irregulars had not done something to …” He expatiated on the various national failings of the Spanish and concluded that if a man so much as went to sleep where the Spanish could find him he would be sorry for it when he woke up.

  Lord Wellington waved impatiently at the man to make him be quiet. “I do not see that they are very much mutilated,” he said to Strange. “Does it matter if they are?”

  Strange muttered blackly that he supposed it did not except that he had to look at them.

  Indeed, most of the wounds that the Neapolitans bore appeared to have been the ones that killed them, but all of them had been stripped naked and several had had their fingers cut off – the better to remove their rings. One had been a handsome young man, but his beauty was very much marred now that someone had plucked out his teeth (to make false teeth) and cut off most of his black hair (to make wigs).

  Strange told a man to fetch a sharp knife and a clean bandage. When the knife was brought he took off his coat and rolled up the sleeve of his shirt. Then he began muttering to himself in Latin. He next made a long, deep cut in his arm, and when he had got a good strong spurt of blood, he let it splash over the heads of the corpses, taking care to anoint the eyes, tongue and nostrils of each. After a moment the first corpse roused itself. There was a horrible rasping sound as its dried-out lungs filled with air and its limbs shook in a way that was very dreadful to behold. Then one by one the corpses revived and began to speak in a guttural language which contained a much higher proportion of screams than any language known to the onlookers.

  Even Wellington looked a little pale. Only Strange continued apparently without emotion.

  “Dear God!” cried Fitzroy Somerset, “What language is that?”

  “I believe it is one of the dialects of Hell,” said Strange.

  “Is it indeed?” said Somerset. “Well, that is remarkable.”

  “They have learnt it very quickly,” said Lord Wellington, “They have only been dead three days.” He approved of people doing things promptly and in a businesslike fashion. “But do you speak this language?” he asked Strange.

  “No, my lord.”

  “Then how are we to talk to them?”

  For answer Strange grasped the head of the first corpse, pulled open its jabbering jaws and spat inside its mouth. Instantly it began to speak in its native, earthly language – a thick Neapolitan dialect of Italian, which to most people was quite as impenetrable and almost as horrible as the language it had been speaking before. It had the advantage, however, of being perfectly comprehensible to Captain Whyte.

  With Captain Whyte’s help Major Grant and Colonel De Lancey interrogated the dead Neapolitans and were highly pleased by the answers they returned. Being dead, the Neapolitans were infinitely more anxious to please their questioners than any living informer could have been. It seemed that shortly before their deaths at the battle of Salamanca, these wretches had each received a secret message from their countrymen hidden in the woods, informing them of the capture of the cannon and telling them to make their way to a village a few leagues north of the city of Salamanca, from where they would easily be able to find the wood by following secret signs chalked on trees and boulders.

  Major Grant took a small detachment of cavalry and within a few days he returned with both guns and deserters. Wellington was delighted.

  Unfortunately, Strange was entirely unable to discover the spell for sending the dead Neapolitans back to their bitter sleep.4 He made several attempts, but these had very little effect except that once he made all seventeen corpses suddenly shoot up until they were twenty feet tall and strangely transparent, like huge water-colour paintings of themselves done on thin muslin banners. When Strange had returned them to their normal size, the problem of what should be done with them remained.

  At first they were placed with the other French prisoners. But the other prisoners protested loudly about being confined with such shambling, shuffling horrors. (“And really,” observed Lord Wellington as he eyed the corpses with distaste, “one cannot blame them.”)

  So when the prisoners were sent back to England the dead Neapolitans remained with the Army. All that summer they travelled in a bullock cart and on Lord Wellington’s orders they were shackled. The shackles were intended to restrict their movements and keep them in one place, but the dead Neapolitans were not afraid of pain – indeed they did not seem to feel it – so it was very little trouble to them to extricate themselves from their shackles, sometimes leaving pieces of themselves behind. As soon as they were free they would go in search of Strange and begin pleading with him in the most pitiful manner imaginable to restore them to the fullness of life. They had seen Hell and were not anxious to return there.

  In Madrid the Spanish artist, Francisco Goya, made a sketch in red chalk of Jonathan Strange surrounded by the dead Neapolitans. In the picture Strange is seated on the ground. His gaze is cast down and his arms hang limp at his sides and his whole attitude speaks of helplessness and despair. The Neapolitans crowd around him; some are regarding him hungrily; others have expressions of supplication on their faces; one is putting out a tentative finger to stroke the back of his hair. It is, needless to say, quite different from any other portrait of Strange.

  On the 25th of August Lord Wellington gave an order for the dead Neapolitans to be destroyed.5

  Strange was in some anxiety lest Mr Norrell get to hear of the magic he had done at the ruined church at Flores de Avila. He made no mention of it in his own letters and he begged Lord Wellington to leave it out of his Dispatches.

  “Oh, very well!” said his lordship. Lord Wellington was not in any case particularly fond of writing about magic. He disliked having to deal with any thing he did not u
nderstand extremely well. “But it will do very little good,” he pointed out. “Every man that has written a letter home in the last five days will have given his friends a very full account of it.”

  “I know,” said Strange, uncomfortably, “but the men always exaggerate what I do and perhaps by the time people in England have made allowances for the usual embellishments it will not appear so very remarkable. They will merely imagine that I healed some Neapolitans that were wounded or something of that sort.”

  The raising of the seventeen dead Neapolitans was a good example of the sort of problem faced by Strange in the latter half of the war. Like the Ministers before him, Lord Wellington was becoming more accustomed to using magic to achieve his ends and he demanded increasingly elaborate spells from his magician. However, unlike the Ministers, Wellington had very little time or inclination for listening to long explanations of why a thing was not possible. After all, he regularly demanded the impossible of his engineers, his generals and his officers and he saw no reason to make an exception of his magician. “Find another way!” was all he would say, as Strange tried to explain that such-and-such a piece of magic had not been attempted since 1302 – or that the spell had been lost – or that it had never existed in the first place. As in the early days of his magicianship, before he had met Norrell, Strange was obliged to invent most of the magic he did, working from general principles and half-remembered stories from old books.

  In the early summer of 1813 Strange again performed a sort of magic the like of which had not been done since the days of the Raven King: he moved a river. It happened like this. The war that summer was going well and everything Lord Wellington did was crowned with success. However it so happened that one particular morning in June the French found themselves in a more advantageous position than had been the case for some time. His lordship and the other generals immediately gathered together to discuss what could be done to correct this highly undesirable situation. Strange was summoned to join them in Lord Wellington’s tent. He found them gathered round a table upon which was spread a large map.

  His lordship was in really excellent spirits that summer and he greeted Strange almost affectionately. “Ah, Merlin! There you are! Here is our problem! We are on this side of the river and the French are on the other side, and it would suit me much better if the positions were reversed.”

  One of the generals began to explain that if they marched the Army west here, and then built a bridge across the river here, and then engaged the French here …

  “It will take too long!” declared Lord Wellington. “Far too long! Merlin, could not you arrange for the Army to grow wings and fly over the French? Could you do that, do you think?” His lordship was perhaps half-joking, but only half. “It is only a matter of supplying each man with a little pair of wings. Take Captain Macpherson for example,” he said, eyeing an enormous Scotsman. “I have a great fancy to see Macpherson sprout wings and flutter about.”

  Strange regarded Captain Macpherson thoughtfully. “No,” he said at last, “but I would be grateful, my lord, if you would permit me to borrow him – and the map – for an hour or two.”

  Strange and Captain Macpherson peered at the map for some time, and then Strange went back to Lord Wellington and said it would take too long for every man in the army to sprout wings, but it would take no time at all to move the river and would that do? “At the moment,” said Strange, “the river flows south here and then twists northwards here. If upon the other hand it flowed north instead of south and twisted southwards here, then, you see, we would be on the north bank and the French on the south.”

  “Oh!” said his lordship. “Very well.”

  The new position of the river so baffled the French that several French companies, when ordered to march north, went in entirely the wrong direction, so convinced were they that the direction away from the river must be north. These particular companies were never seen again and so it was widely supposed that they had been killed by the Spanish guerrilleros.

  Lord Wellington later remarked cheerfully to General Picton that there was nothing so wearying for troops and horses as constant marching about and that in future he thought it would be better to keep them all standing still, while Mr Strange moved Spain about like a carpet beneath their feet.

  Meanwhile the Spanish Regency Council in Cadiz became rather alarmed at this development and began to wonder whether, when they finally regained their country from the French, they would recognize it. They complained to the Foreign Secretary (which many people thought ungrateful). The Foreign Secretary persuaded Strange to write the Regency Council a letter promising that after the war he would replace the river in its original position and also “… any thing else which Lord Wellington requires to be moved during the prosecution of the war.” Among the many things which Strange moved were: a wood of olive trees and pines in Navarra;6 the city of Pamplona;7 and two churches in the town of St Jean de Luz in France.8

  On the 6th April 1814 the Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte abdicated. It is said that when Lord Wellington was told he performed a little dance. When Strange heard the news he laughed aloud, and then suddenly stopped and murmured, “Dear God! What will they do with us now?” It was presumed at the time that this somewhat enigmatic remark referred to the Army, but afterwards several people wondered if he might perhaps have been talking about himself and the other magician.

  The map of Europe was created anew: Buonaparte’s new kingdoms were dismantled and the old ones put back in their place; some kings were deposed; other were restored to their thrones. The peoples of Europe congratulated themselves on finally vanquishing the Great Interloper. But to the inhabitants of Great Britain it suddenly appeared that the war had had an entirely different purpose: it had made Great Britain the Greatest Nation in the World. In London Mr Norrell had the satisfaction of hearing from everyone that magic – his magic and Mr Strange’s – had been of vital importance in achieving this.

  One evening towards the end of May Arabella returned home from a Victory Dinner at Carlton House. She had heard her husband spoken of in terms of the warmest praise, toasts had been made in his honour and the Prince Regent had said a great many complimentary things to her. Now it was just after midnight and she was sitting in the drawing-room reflecting that all she needed to complete her happiness was her husband home again, when one of the maids burst in and cried out, “Oh, madam! The master is here!”

  Someone came into the room.

  He was a thinner, browner person than she remembered. His hair had more grey in it and there was a whitish scar above his left eyebrow. The scar was not recent, but she had never seen it before. His features were what they had always been, but somehow his air was different. This scarcely seemed to be the person she had been thinking of only a moment ago. But before she could be disappointed, or awkward, or any of the things she had feared she would be when he at last came home, he looked around the room with a quick, half-ironic glance that she knew in an instant. Then he looked at her with the most familiar smile in the world and said, “I’m home.”

  * * *

  The next morning they still had not said a hundredth part of all they had to tell each other.

  “Sit there,” said Strange to Arabella.

  “In this chair?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “So that I may look at you. I have not looked at you for three years and I have long felt the lack of it. I must supply the deficiency.”

  She sat down, but after a moment or two she began to smile. “Jonathan, I cannot keep my countenance if you stare at me like that. At this rate you will have supplied the deficiency in half an hour. I am sorry to disappoint you, but you never did look at me so very often. You always had your nose in some dusty old book.”

  “Untrue. I had entirely forgotten how quarrelsome you are. Hand me that piece of paper. I shall make a note of it.”

  “I shall do no such thing,” said Arabella, laughing.

 
“Do you know what my first thought upon waking this morning was? I thought I ought to get up and shave and breakfast before some other fellow’s servant took all the hot water and all the bread rolls. Then I remembered that all the servants in the house were mine and all the hot water in the house was mine and all the bread rolls were mine too. I do not think I was ever so happy in my life.”

  “Were you never comfortable in Spain?”

  “In a war one is either living like a prince or a vagabond. I have seen Lord Wellington – his Grace, I should say9 – sleeping under a tree with only a rock for a pillow. At other times I have seen thieves and beggars snoring upon feather-beds in palace bed-chambers. War is a very topsy-turvy business.”

  “Well, I hope you will not find it dull in London. The gentleman with the thistle-down hair said that once you had tasted war, you were sure to be bored at home.”

  “Ha! No, indeed! What, with everything clean, and just so? And all one’s books and possessions so close to hand and one’s wife just before one whenever one looks up? What does …? Who did you say it was? The gentleman with what sort of hair?”

  “Thistle-down. I am sure you must know the person I mean. He lives with Sir Walter and Lady Pole. At least, I am not sure he lives there, but I see him whenever I go to the house.”

  Strange frowned. “I do not know him. What is his name?”

  But Arabella did not know. “I have always supposed him to be a relation of Sir Walter or Lady Pole. How queer it is that I never thought to ask him his name. I have had, oh! hours of conversation with him!”

  “Have you indeed? I am not sure that I approve of that. Is he handsome?”

  “Oh, yes! Very! How odd that I do not know his name! He is very entertaining. Quite unlike most people one meets.”