Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

by Susanna Clarke

  “Then, you know, we could put ‘Supplier of Buttons to his Grace the Duke of Wellington’ in all our advertisements.” Mr Pink beamed happily. “Off I go then!”

  “Yes, yes. Off you go.” Strange created the road for the Prussians, but in later times he was always inclined to suppose he must have dreamt Mr Pink of Welbeck’s Superior Buttons.6

  Events seemed to repeat themselves. Again and again the French cavalry charged and Strange took refuge within the infantry square. Again the deadly horsemen swirled against the sides of the square like waves. Again Strange drew monstrous hands from the earth to pull them down. Whenever the cavalry withdrew the cannonade began again; he returned to his silver dish and made men out of water to put out the flames and succour the dying in ruined, desperate Hougoumont. Everything happened over and over, again and again; it was inconceivable that the fighting would ever end. He began to think it had always been like this.

  “There must come a time when the musket-balls and cannon-shot run out,” he thought. “And what will we do then? Hack at each other with sabres and bayonets? And if we all die, every one of us, who will they say has won?”

  The smoke rolled back revealing frozen moments like tableaux in a ghostly theatre: at the farmhouse called La Haye Sainte the French were climbing a mountain of their own dead to get over the wall and kill the German defenders.

  Once Strange was caught outside the square when the French arrived. Suddenly, directly in front of him, was an enormous French cuirassier upon an equally enormous horse. His first thought was to wonder if the fellow knew who he was. (He had been told the entire French Army hated the English magician with a vivid, Latin passion.) His second thought was that he had left his pistols inside the infantry square.

  The cuirassier raised his sabre. Without thinking, Strange muttered Stokesey’s Animam Evocare. Something like a bee flew out of the breast of the cuirassier and settled in the palm of Strange’s hand. But it was not a bee; it was a bead of pearly blue light. A second light flew out of the cuirassier’s horse. The horse screamed and reared up. The cuirassier stared, puzzled.

  Strange raised his other hand to smash horse and horseman out of existence. Then he froze.

  “And can a magician kill a man by magic?” the Duke had asked.

  And he had answered, “A magician might, but a gentleman never could.”

  While he was hesitating a British cavalry officer – a Scots Grey – swung round out of nowhere. He slashed the cuirassier’s head open, from his chin, upwards through his teeth. The man toppled like a tree. The Scots Grey rode on.

  Strange could never quite remember what happened after this. He believed that he wandered about in a dazed condition. He did not know for how long.

  The sound of cheering brought him to himself. He looked up and saw Wellington upon Copenhagen. He was waving his hat – the signal that the Allies were to advance upon the French. But the smoke wreathed itself so thickly about the Duke that only the soldiers nearest to him could share in this moment of victory.

  So Strange whispered a word and a little gap appeared in the billows. A single ray of evening sunlight shone down upon Wellington. All along the ridge the faces of the soldiers turned towards him. The cheering grew louder.

  “There,” thought Strange, “that is the proper use of English magic.”

  He followed the soldiers and the retreating French down through the battlefield. Scattered about among the dead and the dying were the great earthen hands he had created. They seemed frozen in gestures of outrage and horror as if the land itself despaired. When he came level with the French guns that had done the Allied soldiers such profound injury, he did one last act of magic. He drew more hands out of the earth. The hands grasped the cannons and pulled them under.

  At the Inn of Belle Alliance on the far side of the battlefield, he found the Duke with the Prussian General, Prince Blücher. The Duke nodded to him and said, “Come to dinner with me.”

  Prince Blücher shook his hand warmly and said a great many things in German (none of which Strange understood). Then the old gentleman pointed to his stomach wherein lay the illusory elephant and made a wry face as if to say, “What can one do?”

  Strange stepped outside and immediately he almost walked into Captain Hadley-Bright. “I was told you were dead!” he cried.

  “I was sure you would be,” replied Hadley-Bright.

  There was a pause. Both men felt faintly embarrassed. The ranks of dead and wounded stretched away upon all sides as far as the eye could see. Simply being alive at that moment seemed, in some indefinable way, ungentlemanly.

  “Who else survived? Do you know?” asked Hadley-Bright.

  Strange shook his head. “No.”

  They parted.

  At Wellington’s Headquarters in Waterloo that night the table was laid for forty or fifty people. But when the dinner-hour came, only three men were there: the Duke, General Alava (his Spanish attaché) and Strange. Whenever the door opened the Duke turned his head to see if it was one of his friends, alive and well; but no one came.

  Many places at that table had been laid for gentlemen who were either dead or dying: Colonel Canning, Lieutenant-Colonel Gordon, Major-General Picton, Colonel De Lancey. The list would grow longer as the night progressed.

  The Duke, General Alava and Mr Strange sat down in silence.

  41

  Starecross

  Late September–December 1815

  Fortune, it seemed, could not be persuaded to smile upon Mr Segundus. He had come to live in York with the aim of enjoying the society and conversation of the city’s many magicians. But no sooner had he got there than all the other magicians were deprived of their profession by Mr Norrell, and he was left alone. His little stock of money had dwindled considerably and in the autumn of 1815 he was forced to seek employment.

  “And it is not to be supposed,” he remarked to Mr Honeyfoot with a sigh, “that I shall be able to earn very much. What am I qualified to do?”

  Mr Honeyfoot could not allow this. “Write to Mr Strange!” he advised. “He may be in need of a secretary.”

  Nothing would have pleased Mr Segundus better than to work for Jonathan Strange, but his natural modesty would not allow him to propose it. It would be a shocking thing to put himself forward in such a way. Mr Strange might be embarrassed to know how to answer him. It might even look as if he, John Segundus, considered himself Mr Strange’s equal!

  Mr and Mrs Honeyfoot assured him that if Mr Strange did not like the idea he would very soon say so – and so there could be no possible harm in asking him. But upon this point Mr Segundus proved unpersuadable.

  Their next proposal, however, pleased him better. “Why not see if there are any little boys in the town who wish to learn magic?” asked Mrs Honeyfoot. Her grandsons – stout little fellows of five and seven – were just now of an age to begin their education and so the subject rather occupied her mind.

  So Mr Segundus became a tutor in magic. As well as little boys, he also discovered some young ladies whose studies would have more usually been confined to French, German and music, but who were now anxious to be instructed in theoretical magic. Soon he was asked to give lessons to the young ladies’ older brothers, many of whom began to picture themselves as magicians. To young men of a studious turn of mind, who did not desire to go into the Church or the Law, magic was very appealing, particularly since Strange had triumphed on the battlefields of Europe. It is, after all, many centuries since clergymen distinguished themselves on the field of war, and lawyers never have.

  In the early autumn of 1815 Mr Segundus was engaged by the father of one of his pupils upon an errand. This gentleman, whose name was Palmer, had heard of a house in the north of the county that was being sold. Mr Palmer did not wish to buy the house, but a friend had told him that there was a library there worth examining. Mr Palmer was not at leisure just then to go and see for himself. Though he trusted his servants in many other matters, their talents did not quite run to
scholarship, so he asked Mr Segundus to go in his place, to find out how many books there were and what their condition might be and whether they were worth purchasing.

  Starecross Hall was the principal building in a village which otherwise comprised a handful of stone cottages and farmhouses. Starecross itself stood in a most isolated spot, surrounded on all sides by brown, empty moors. Tall trees sheltered it from storms and winds – yet at the same time they made it dark and solemn. The village was amply provided with tumbledown stone walls and tumbledown stone barns. It was very quiet; it felt like the end of the world.

  There was a very ancient and worn-looking packhorse bridge that crossed a deep beck of fast-running water. Bright yellow leaves flowed swiftly upon the dark, almost-black water, making patterns as they went. To Mr Segundus the patterns looked a little like magical writing. “But then,” he thought, “so many things do.”

  The house itself was a long, low, rambling building, constructed of the same dark stone as the rest of the village. Its neglected gardens, garths and courts were filled with deep drifts of autumn leaves. It was hard to know who would wish to buy such a house. It was much too large for a farmhouse, yet altogether too gloomy and remote for a gentleman’s residence. It might have done for a parsonage except that there was no church. It might have done for an inn, except that the old pack-road that had once passed through the village had fallen into disuse and the bridge was all that remained of it.

  No one came in answer to Mr Segundus’s knock. He observed that the front door was ajar. It seemed rather impertinent simply to go inside, but after four or five minutes of fruitless knocking he did so.

  Houses, like people, are apt to become rather eccentric if left too much on their own; this house was the architectural equivalent of an old gentleman in a worn dressing-gown and torn slippers, who got up and went to bed at odd times of day, and who kept up a continual conversation with friends no one else could see. As Mr Segundus wandered about in search of whoever was in charge, he found a room which contained nothing but china cheese-moulds, all stacked one upon another. Another room had heaps of queer red clothes, the like of which he had never seen before – something between labourers’ smocks and clergymen’s robes. The kitchen had very few of those articles that usually belong to kitchens, but it did have the skull of an alligator in a glass case; the skull had a great grin and seemed very pleased with itself, though Mr Segundus did not know why it should be. There was one room that could only be reached by a queer arrangement of steps and staircases, where the pictures all seemed to have been chosen by someone with an inordinate love of fighting; there were pictures of men fighting, boys fighting, cocks fighting, bulls fighting, dogs fighting, centaurs fighting and even a startling depiction of two beetles locked in combat. Another room was almost empty except for a doll’s house standing on a table in the middle of the floor; the doll’s house was an exact copy of the real house – except that inside the doll’s house a number of smartly dressed dolls were enjoying a peaceful and rational existence together: making doll-sized cakes and loaves of bread, entertaining their friends with a diminutive harpsichord, playing casino with tiny cards, educating miniature children, and dining upon roast turkeys the size of Mr Segundus’s thumbnail. It formed a strange contrast with the bleak, echoing reality.

  He seemed to have looked in every room, but he still had not found the library and he still had not found any people. He came to a small door half-hidden by a staircase. Behind it was a tiny room – scarcely more than a closet. A man in a dirty white coat with his boots propped up on the table was drinking brandy and staring at the ceiling. After a little persuasion this person agreed to shew him where the library was.

  The first ten books Mr Segundus looked at were worthless – books of sermons and moralizing from the last century, or descriptions of persons whom no one living cared about. The next fifty were very much the same. He began to think his task would soon be done. But then he stumbled upon some very interesting and unusual works of geology, philosophy and medicine. He began to feel more sanguine.

  He worked steadily for two or three hours. Once he thought he heard a carriage arrive at the house, but he paid it no attention. At the end of that time he was suddenly aware that he was extremely hungry. He had no idea whether any arrangements had been made for his dinner or not, and the house was a long way from the nearest inn. He went off in search of the negligent man in the tiny room to ask him what could be done. In the labyrinth of rooms and corridors he was lost immediately. He wandered about opening every door, feeling more and more hungry, and more and more out of temper with the negligent man.

  He found himself in an old-fashioned parlour with dark oak panelling and a mantelpiece the size of a young triumphal arch. Directly before him a lovely young woman was sitting in a deep window-seat, gazing out at the trees and the high, bare hills beyond. He had just time enough to notice that her left hand lacked a little finger, when suddenly she was not there at all – or perhaps it was more accurate to say she changed. In her place was a much older, stouter woman, a woman about Mr Segundus’s own age, dressed in a violet silk gown, with an Indian shawl about her shoulders and a little dog in her lap. This lady sat in exactly the same attitude as the other, gazing out of the window with the same wistful expression.

  All these details took but a moment to apprehend, yet the impression made upon Mr Segundus by the two ladies was unusually vivid – almost supernaturally so – like images in a delirium. A queer shock thrilled through his whole being, his senses were overwhelmed and he fainted away.

  When he came to himself he was lying on the floor and two ladies were leaning over him, with exclamations of dismay and concern. Despite his confusion he quickly comprehended that neither lady was the beautiful young woman with the missing finger whom he had seen first. One was the lady with the little dog whom he had seen second, and the other was a thin, fair-haired, equally mature lady of unremarkable face and figure. It appeared that she had been in the room all along, but she had been seated behind the door and so he had not observed her.

  The two ladies would not permit him to stand up or attempt any movement of his limbs. They would scarcely allow him to speak; they warned him sternly it would bring on another fainting fit. They fetched cushions for his head, and blankets to keep him warm (he protested he was perfectly warm to begin with, but they would not listen to him). They dispensed lavender water and sal volatile. They stopt a draught they thought might be coming from under one of the doors. Mr Segundus began to suspect that they had had an uneventful morning, and that when a strange gentleman had walked into the room and dropt down in a swoon, they were rather pleased than otherwise.

  After quarter of an hour of this treatment he was permitted to sit in a chair and sip weak tea unaided.

  “The fault is entirely mine,” said the lady with the little dog. “Fellowes told me that the gentleman had come from York to see the books. I ought to have made myself known to you before. It was too great a shock coming upon us like that!”

  The name of this lady was Mrs Lennox. The other was Mrs Blake, her companion. They generally resided in Bath and they had come to Starecross so that Mrs Lennox might see the house one more time before it was sold.

  “Foolish, is it not?” said Mrs Lennox to Mr Segundus. “The house has stood vacant for years and years. I ought to have sold it long ago, but when I was a child I spent several summers here which were particularly happy.”

  “You are still very pale, sir,” offered Mrs Blake. “Have you eaten any thing today?”

  Mr Segundus confessed that he was very hungry.

  “Did not Fellowes offer to fetch your dinner?” asked Mrs Lennox in surprize.

  Fellowes was presumably the negligent servant in the tiny room. Mr Segundus did not like to say that he had barely been able to rouse Fellowes to speak to him.

  Fortunately, Mrs Lennox and Mrs Blake had brought an ample dinner with them and Fellowes was, at that moment, preparing it. Half an hour later
the two ladies and Mr Segundus sat down to dine in an oak-panelled room with a melancholy view of autumn trees. The only slight inconvenience was that the two ladies wished Mr Segundus, in his invalid character, to eat light, easily digestible foods, whereas in truth he was very hungry and wanted fried beefsteaks and hot pudding.

  The two ladies were glad of a companion and asked him a great many questions about himself. They were most interested to learn that he was a magician; they had never met one before.

  “And have you found any magical texts in my library?” asked Mrs Lennox.

  “None, madam,” said Mr Segundus. “But magical books, valuable ones, are very rare indeed. I would have been most surprized to find any.”

  “Now that I think of it,” mused Mrs Lennox, “I believe there were a few. But I sold them all years ago to a gentleman who lived near York. Just between ourselves I thought him a little foolish to pay me such a great sum for books no one wanted. But perhaps he was wise after all.”

  Mr Segundus knew that “the gentleman who lived near York” had probably not paid Mrs Lennox one quarter the proper value of the books, but it does no good to say such things out loud and so he smiled politely, and kept his reflections to himself.

  He told them about his pupils, both male and female, and how clever they were and how eager to learn.

  “And since you encourage them with such praise,” said Mrs Blake, kindly, “they are sure to fare better under your tutelage than they would with any other master.”

  “Oh! I do not know about that,” said Mr Segundus.

  “I had not quite understood before,” said Mrs Lennox, with a thoughtful air, “how universally popular the study of magic has become. I had thought that it was confined to those two men in London. What are their names? Presumably, Mr Segundus, the next step is a school for magicians? Doubtless that is where you will direct your energies?”

  “A school!” said Mr Segundus. “Oh! But that would require – well, I do not know what exactly – but a great deal of money and a house.”