Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

by Susanna Clarke

  “The work of Antonio Verrio, an Italian gentleman,” said the servant. He pointed to the king upon the left. “That is Edward the Third of Southern England.” He pointed to the king upon the right, “And that is the Magician-King of Northern England, John Uskglass.”

  “Is it though?” said Strange, greatly interested. “I have seen statues of him of course. And engravings in books. But I do not think I ever saw a painting before. And the lady between the two kings, who is she?”

  “That is Mrs Gwynn, one of the mistresses of Charles II. She is meant to represent Britannia.”

  “I see. It is something, I suppose, that he still has a place of honour in the King’s house. But then they put him in Roman dress and make him hold hands with an actress. I wonder what he would say to that?”

  The servant led Strange back through the weapon-lined room to a black door of imposing size overtopped with a great jutting marble pediment.

  “I can take you no further than this, sir. My business ends here and the Dr Willises’ begins. You will find the King behind that door.” He bowed and went back down the stairs.

  Strange knocked on the door. From somewhere inside came the sound of a harpsichord and someone singing.

  The door opened to reveal a tall, broad fellow of thirty or forty. His face was round, white, pockmarked and bedabbled with sweat like a Cheshire cheese. All in all he bore a striking resemblance to the man in the moon who is reputed to be made of cheese. He had shaved himself with no very high degree of skill and here and there on his white face two or three coarse black hairs appeared – rather as if a family of flies had drowned in the milk before the cheese was made and their legs were poking out of it. His coat was of rough brown drugget and his shirt and neckcloth were of the coarsest linen. None of his clothes were particularly clean.

  “Yes?” he said, keeping his hand upon the door as if he intended to shut it again at the least provocation. He had very little of the character of a palace servant and a great deal of the character of a madhouse attendant, which was what he was.

  Strange raised his eyebrow at this rude behaviour. He gave his name rather coldly and said he had come to see the King.

  The man sighed. “Well, sir, I cannot deny that we were expecting you. But, you see, you cannot come in. Dr John and Dr Robert …” (These were the names of the two Willis brothers) “… are not here. We have been expecting them every minute for the past hour and a half. We do not understand where they can have got to.”

  “That is most unfortunate,” said Strange. “But it is none of my concern. I have no desire to see the gentlemen you mention. My business is with the King. I have a letter signed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York granting me permission to visit His Majesty today.” Strange waved the letter in the man’s face.

  “But you must wait, sir, until Dr John and Dr Robert come. They will not allow any one to interfere with their system of managing the King. Silence and seclusion are what suits the King best. Conversation is the very worst thing for him. You can scarcely imagine, sir, what terrible harm you might do to the King merely by speaking to him. Say you were to mention that it is raining. I dare say you would consider that the most innocent remark in the world. But it might set the King a-thinking, you see, and in his madness his mind runs on from one thing to another, enraging him to a most dangerous degree. He might think of times in the past when it rained and his servants brought him news of battles that were lost, and daughters that were dead, and sons that had disgraced him. Why! It might be enough to kill the King outright! Do you want to kill the King, sir?”

  “No,” said Strange.

  “Well, then,” said the man coaxingly, “do you not see, sir, that it would be far better to wait for Dr John and Dr Robert?”

  “Thank you, but I think I will take my chances. Conduct me to the King if you please.”

  “Dr John and Dr Robert will be very angry,” warned the man.

  “I do not care if they are,” replied Strange coolly.

  The man looked entirely astonished at this.

  “Now,” said Strange, with a most determined look and another flourish of his letter, “will you let me see the King or will you defy the authority of two Archbishops? That is a very grave matter, punishable by … well, I do not exactly know what, but something rather severe, I should imagine.”

  The man sighed. He called to another man (as rough and dirty as himself) and told him to go immediately to the houses of Dr John and Dr Robert to fetch them. Then with great reluctance he stood aside for Strange to enter.

  The proportions of the room were lofty. The walls were panelled in oak and there was a great deal of fine carving. More royal and symbolic personages lounged about upon clouds on the ceiling. But it was a dreary place. There was no covering upon the floor and it was very cold. A chair and a battered-looking harpsichord were the only furniture. An old man was seated at the harpsichord with his back to them. He was dressed in a dressing-gown of ancient purple brocade. There was a crumpled nightcap of scarlet velvet on his head and dirty broken slippers on his feet. He was playing with great vigour and singing loudly in German. When he heard the sound of approaching footsteps he stopped.

  “Who’s there?” he demanded. “Who is it?”

  “The magician, Your Majesty,” said the madhouse attendant.

  The old man seemed to consider this a moment and then he said in a loud voice, “It is a profession to which I have a particular dislike!” He struck the keys of his harpsichord again and resumed his loud singing.

  This was rather a discouraging beginning. The madhouse attendant gave an impertinent snigger and walked off, leaving Strange and the King alone. Strange took a few paces further into the room and placed himself where he might observe the King’s face.

  It was a face in which all the misery of madness was compounded by the misery of blindness. The eyes had irises of clouded blue and whites as discoloured as rotten milk. Long locks of whitish hair streaked with grey hung down on either side of cheeks patched with broken veins. As the King sang, spittle flew from his slack red lips. His beard was almost as long and white as his hair. He was nothing at all like the pictures Strange had seen of him, for they had been made when he was in his right mind. With his long hair, long beard and long, purple robe, what he chiefly resembled was someone very tragic and ancient out of Shakespeare – or, rather, two very tragic and ancient persons out of Shakespeare. In his madness and his blindness he was Lear and Gloucester combined.

  Strange had been cautioned by the Royal Dukes that it was contrary to Court etiquette to speak to the King unless the King addressed him first. However there seemed little hope of this since the King disliked magicians so much. So when the King ceased his playing and singing again, he said, “I am Your Majesty’s humble servant, Jonathan Strange of Ashfair in Shropshire. I was Magician-in-Ordinary to the Army during the late war in Spain where, I am happy to say, I was able to do Your Majesty some service. It is the hope of Your Majesty’s sons and daughters that my magic might afford Your Majesty some relief from your illness.”

  “Tell the magician I do not see him!” said the King airily.

  Strange did not trouble to make any reply to this nonsensical remark. Of course the King could not see him, the King was blind.

  “But I see his companion very well!” continued His Majesty in an approving tone. He turned his head as though to gaze at a point two or three feet to the left of Strange. “With such silver hair as he has got, I think I ought to be able to see him! He looks a very wild fellow.”

  So convincing was this speech that Strange actually turned to look. Of course there was no one.

  In the past few days he had searched Norrell’s books for something pertinent to the King’s condition. There were remarkably few spells for curing madness. Indeed he had found only one, and even then he was not sure that was what it was meant for. It was a prescription in Ormskirk’s Revelations of Thirty-Six Other Worlds. Ormskirk said that it would dispel illusions a
nd correct wrong ideas. Strange took out the book and read through the spell again. It was a peculiarly obscure piece of magic, consisting only of the following words:

  Place the moon at his eyes and her whiteness shall devour the false sights the deceiver has placed there.

  Place a swarm of bees at his ears. Bees love truth and will destroy the deceiver’s lies.

  Place salt in his mouth lest the deceiver attempt to delight him with the taste of honey or disgust him with the taste of ashes.

  Nail his hand with an iron nail so that he shall not raise it to do the deceiver’s bidding.

  Place his heart in a secret place so that all his desires shall be his own and the deceiver shall find no hold there.

  Memorandum. The colour red may be found beneficial.

  However, as Strange read it through, he was forced to admit that he had not the least idea what it meant.2 How was the magician supposed to fetch the moon to the afflicted person? And if the second part were correct, then the Dukes would have done better to employ a beekeeper instead of a magician. Nor could Strange believe that their Royal Highnesses would be best pleased if he began piercing the King’s hands with iron nails. The note about the colour red was odd too. He thought he remembered hearing or reading something about red but he could not at present recall what it was.

  The King, meanwhile, had fallen into conversation with the imaginary silver-haired person. “I beg your pardon for mistaking you for a common person,” he said. “You may be a king just as you say, but I merely take the liberty of observing that I have never heard of any of your kingdoms. Where is Lost-hope? Where are the Blue Castles? Where is the City of Iron Angels? I, on the other hand, am King of Great Britain, a place everyone knows and which is clearly marked on all the maps!” His Majesty paused, presumably to attend to the silver-haired person’s reply for he suddenly cried out, “Oh, do not be angry! Pray, do not be angry! You are a king and I am a king! We shall all be kings together! And there is really no need for either of us to be angry! I shall play and sing for you!” He drew a flute from the pocket of his dressing-gown and began to play a melancholy air.

  As an experiment Strange reached forward and plucked off His Majesty’s scarlet nightcap. He watched closely to see if the King grew any more mad without it, but after several minutes of observation he was forced to admit that he could see no difference. He put the nightcap back on.

  For the next hour and a half he tried all the magic he could think of. He cast spells of remembering, spells of finding, spells of awakening, spells to concentrate the mind, spells to dispel nightmares and evil thoughts, spells to find patterns in chaos, spells to find a path when one was lost, spells of demystification, spells of discernment, spells to increase intelligence, spells to cure sickness and spells to repair a limb that is shattered. Some of the spells were long and complicated. Some were a single word. Some had to be said out loud. Some had only to be thought. Some had no words at all but consisted of a single gesture. Some were spells that Strange and Norrell had employed in some form or other every day for the last five years. Some had probably not been used for centuries. Some used a mirror; two used a tiny bead of blood from the magician’s finger; and one used a candle and a piece of ribbon. But they all had this in common: they had no effect upon the King whatsoever.

  At the end of this time: “Oh, I give up!” thought Strange.

  His Majesty, who had been happily unconscious of the magic directed at him, was chatting confidentially to the person with the silver hair that only he could see. “Have you been sent here for ever or can you go away again? Oh, do not stay to be caught! This is a bad place for kings! They put us in strait waistcoats! The last time I was permitted to go out of these rooms was on a Monday in 1811. They tell me that was three years ago, but they lie! By my calculation, it will be two hundred and forty-six years on Saturday fortnight!”

  “Poor, unhappy gentleman!” thought Strange. “Shut away in this cold, melancholy place without friends or amusements! Small wonder time passes so slowly for him. Small wonder he is mad!”

  Out loud he said, “I shall be very happy to take you outside, Your Majesty, if you wish it.”

  The King paused in his chatter and turned his head slightly. “Who said that?” he demanded.

  “I did, Your Majesty. Jonathan Strange, the magician.” Strange made the King a respectful bow, before recollecting that His Majesty could not see it.

  “Great Britain! My dear Kingdom!” cried the King. “How I should love to see her again – especially now that it is summertime. The trees and meadows are all decked in their brightest finery and the air is sweet as cherry-tart!”

  Strange glanced out of the window at the white, icy mist and the skeletal winter trees. “Quite so. And I would account it a great honour if Your Majesty would accompany me outside.”

  The King seemed to consider this proposal. He took off one of his slippers and attempted to balance it upon his head. When this did not work, he put the slipper back on, took a tassel that hung from the end of his dressing-gown cord and sucked upon it thoughtfully. “But how do I know that you are not a wicked demon come to tempt me?” he asked at last in a tone of the most complete reasonableness.

  Strange was somewhat lost for an answer to this question. While he was considering what to say, the King continued, “Of course if you are a wicked demon, then you should know that I am Eternal and cannot die. If I discover that you are my Enemy, I shall stamp my foot and send you straight back to Hell!”

  “Really? Your Majesty must teach me the trick of that. I should like to know something so useful. But permit me to observe that, with such powerful magic at your command, Your Majesty has nothing to fear from accompanying me outside. We should leave as quickly and discreetly as we can. The Willises are sure to be here soon. Your Majesty must be very quiet!”

  The King said nothing, but he tapped his nose and looked very sly.

  Strange’s next task was to discover a way out without alerting the madhouse attendants. The King was no help at all in this regard. When asked where the various doors led to, he gave it as his opinion that one door led to America, another to Everlasting Perdition and a third might possibly be the way to next Friday. So Strange picked one – the one the King thought led to America – and quickly escorted His Majesty through several rooms. All had painted ceilings in which English monarchs were depicted as dashing about the sky in fiery chariots, vanquishing persons who symbolized Envy, Sin and Sedition, and establishing Temples of Virtue, Palaces of Eternal Justice and other useful institutions of that sort. But though the ceilings were full of the most intense activity, the rooms beneath them were forlorn, threadbare and full of dust and spiders. The furniture was all covered up with sheets so that it appeared as if these chairs and tables must have died some time ago and these were their gravestones.

  They came to a sort of back-staircase. The King, who had taken Strange’s warning to be quiet very much to heart, insisted upon tip-toeing down the stairs in the highly exaggerated manner of a small child. This took some time.

  “Well, Your Majesty,” said Strange, cheerfully, when at last they reached the bottom, “I think we managed that rather well. I do not hear any sounds of pursuit. The Duke of Wellington would be glad to employ either of us as Intelligence Officers. I do not believe that Captain Somers-Cocks or Colquhoun Grant himself could have crossed enemy territory with more …”

  He was interrupted by the King playing a very loud, very triumphant blare upon his flute.

  “D—!” said Strange and listened for sounds of the madhouse attendants coming or, worse still, the Willises.

  But nothing happened. Somewhere close at hand there was an odd, irregular thumping and clattering, accompanied by screams and wailing – rather as if someone were being beaten by a whole cupboardful of brooms at once. Apart from that, all was quiet.

  A door opened on to a broad stone terrace. From here the land descended steeply and at the foot of the slope lay a Park. On the right
a long, double line of winter trees could be just seen.

  Arm in arm the King and Strange walked along the terrace to the corner of the Castle. Here Strange found a path leading down the slope and into the Park. They descended this path and had not walked far into the Park when they came upon an ornamental pool, bounded by a low stone rim.3 At its centre stood a little stone pavilion decorated with carved creatures. Some resembled dogs – except that their bodies were long and low like lizards and each had a row of spines along its back. Others were meant to represent curved stone dolphins which had somehow contrived to fasten themselves to the walls. On the roof half a dozen classical ladies and gentlemen were sitting in classical attitudes, holding vases. It had clearly been the architect’s intention that fountains of water should gush out of the mouths of all these strange animals and out of the vases on the roof and tumble decoratively into the pool, but just now all was frozen and silent.

  Strange was about to make some remark on the melancholy sight which this frozen pool presented, when he heard several shouts. He looked back and saw that a group of people was descending the slope of the Castle very rapidly. As they drew nearer he saw that they were four in number: two gentlemen he had never seen before and the two madhouse attendants – the one with the face like a Cheshire cheese and the one who had been sent to fetch the Willises. They all looked angry.

  The gentlemen hurried up, frowning in an important, offended sort of manner. They shewed every symptom of having dressed in a great hurry. One was attempting to fasten the buttons of his coat, but without much success. As soon as he did up the buttons, they flew open again. He was about Mr Norrell’s age and wore an old-fashioned wig (rather like Mr Norrell’s) which from time to time made a little jump and spun round on his head. But he differed from Mr Norrell in that he was rather tall, rather handsome and had an imposing, decisive manner. The other gentleman (who was several years younger) was plagued by his boots, which seemed to have developed opinions of their own. While he was struggling to walk forwards, they were attempting to carry him off in an entirely different direction. Strange could only suppose that his earlier magic had been rather more successful than he had expected and had made the clothes themselves difficult to manage.