Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

by Susanna Clarke

  The searchers returned to Strange’s house, where Captain Ayrton intended to review what had been done so far and hoped to determine what ought to be done next. Several of the ladies of the neighbourhood were also present. They had tried waiting in their own houses for news of Mrs Strange’s fate and found it a lonely, anxious business. They had come to Ashfair partly in case they were needed, but chiefly so that they might take comfort in each other’s society.

  The last to arrive were Strange and Jeremy Johns. They came, booted and muddy, direct from the stables. Strange was ashen-faced and hollow-eyed. He looked and moved like a man in dream. He would probably not even have sat down, had Jeremy Johns not pushed him into a chair.

  Captain Ayrton laid out his maps upon the table and began to question each of the search parties about where they had been and what they had found – which was nothing at all.

  Every man and woman present thought how the neatly drawn lines and words upon the maps were in truth ice-covered pools and rivers, silent woods, frozen ditches and high, bare hills and every one of them thought how many sheep and cattle and wild creatures died in this season.

  “I think I woke last night …” said a hoarse voice, suddenly. They looked round.

  Strange was still seated in the chair where Jeremy had placed him. His arms hung at his sides and he was staring at the floor. “I think I woke last night. I do not know when exactly. Arabella was sitting at the foot of the bed. She was dressed.”

  “You did not say this before,” said Mr Hyde.

  “I did not remember before. I thought I had dreamt it.”

  “I do not understand,” said Captain Ayrton. “Do you mean to say that Mrs Strange may have left your house during the night?”

  Strange seemed to cast about for an answer to this highly reasonable question, but without success.

  “But surely,” said Mr Hyde, “you must know if she was there or not in the morning?”

  “She was there. Of course she was there. It is ridiculous to suggest … At least …” Strange paused. “That is to say I was thinking about my book when I rose and the room was dark.”

  Several people present began to think that as a husband Jonathan Strange, if not absolutely neglectful, was at least curiously unobservant of his wife, and some of them were led to eye him doubtingly and run through in their minds the many reasons why an apparently devoted wife might suddenly run away into the snow. Cruel words? A violent temper? The dreadful sights attendant on a magician’s work – ghosts, demons, horrors? The sudden discovery that he had a mistress somewhere and half a dozen natural children?

  Suddenly there was a shout from outside in the hall. Afterwards no one could say whose voice it had been. Several of Strange’s neighbours who were standing nearest the door went to see what the matter was. Then the exclamations of those people drew out the rest.

  The hall was dark at first, but in a moment candles were brought and they could see that someone was standing at the foot of the stairs.

  It was Arabella.

  Henry rushed forward and embraced her; Mr Hyde and Mrs Ayrton told her how glad they were to see her safe and sound; other people began to express their amazement and to inform any one who would listen that they had not had the least idea of her being there. Several of the ladies and maids gathered around her, asking her questions. Was she hurt? Where had she been? Had she got lost? Had something happened to distress her?

  Then, as sometimes will happen, several people became aware at the same time of something rather odd: Strange had said nothing, made no movement towards her – nor, for that matter, had she spoken to him or made any movement towards him.

  The magician stood, staring silently at his wife. Suddenly he exclaimed, “Good God, Arabella! What have you got on?”

  Even by the candles’ uncertain, flickering light it was quite plain that she was wearing a black gown.

  44

  Arabella

  December 1815

  “You must be chilled to the bone!” declared Mrs Ayrton, taking one of Arabella’s hands. “Oh, my dear! You are as cold as the grave!”

  Another lady ran and fetched one of Arabella’s shawls from the drawing-room. She returned carrying a blue Indian cashmere with a delicate border of gold and pink threads, but when Mrs Ayrton wrapped it around her, the black gown seemed to extinguish all its prettiness.

  Arabella, with her hands folded in front of her, looked at them all with a calm, indifferent expression upon her face. She did not trouble to answer any of their kind inquiries. She seemed neither surprized nor embarrassed to find them there.

  “Where in the world have you been?” demanded Strange.

  “Walking,” she said. Her voice was just as it had always been.

  “Walking! Arabella, are you quite mad? In three feet of snow? Where?”

  “In the dark woods,” she said, “among my soft-sleeping brothers and sisters. Across the high moors among the sweet-scented ghosts of my brothers and sisters long dead. Under the grey sky through the dreams and murmurs of my brothers and sisters yet to come.”

  Strange stared at her. “What?”

  With such gentle questioning as this to encourage her, it surprized no one that she said no more and at least one of the ladies began to think that it was her husband’s harshness that made her so quiet and made her answer in such odd strain.

  Mrs Ayrton put her arm around Arabella and gently turned her towards the stairs. “Mrs Strange is tired,” she said firmly. “Come, my dear, let you and I go up to …”

  “Oh, no!” declared Strange. “Not yet! I wish to know where that gown came from. I beg your pardon, Mrs Ayrton, but I am quite determined to …”

  He advanced towards them, but then stopt suddenly and stared down at the floor in puzzlement. Then he carefully stepped out of the way of something. “Jeremy! Where did this water come from? Just where Mrs Strange was standing.”

  Jeremy Johns brought a candelabra to the foot of the stairs. There was a large pool. Then he and Strange peered at the ceiling and the walls. The other manservants became interested in the problem and so did the gentlemen.

  While the men were thus distracted, Mrs Ayrton and the ladies led Arabella quietly away.

  The hall at Ashfair was as old-fashioned as the rest of the house. It was panelled in cream-painted elmwood. The floor was well-swept stone flags. One of the manservants thought that the water must have seeped up from under the stones and so he went and fetched an iron rod to poke about at them to prove that one of them was loose. But he could not make them move. Nowhere was there any sign of where the water could have crept in. Someone else thought that perhaps Captain Ayrton’s two dogs might have shed the water. The dogs were carefully examined. They were not in the least wet.

  Finally they examined the water itself.

  “It is black and there are tiny scraps of something in it,” pointed out Strange.

  “It looks like moss,” said Jeremy Johns.

  They continued to wonder and exclaim for some time until a complete lack of any success obliged them to abandon the matter. Shortly afterwards the gentlemen left, taking their wives with them.

  At five o’clock Janet Hughes went up to her mistress’s bedchamber and found her lying upon the bed. She had not even troubled to take off the black dress. When Janet asked her if she felt unwell, Arabella replied that she had a pain in her hands. So Janet helped her mistress undress and then went and told Strange.

  On the second day Arabella complained of a pain which went from the top of her head all down her right side to her feet (or at least that was what they supposed she meant when she said, “from my crown to the tips of my roots”). This was sufficiently alarming for Strange to send for Mr Newton, the physician at Church Stretton. Mr Newton rode over to Clun in the afternoon, but apart from the pain he could find nothing wrong and he went away cheerfully, telling Strange that he would return in a day or two.

  On the third day she died.

  Volume III

&
nbsp; John Uskglass

  It is the contention of Mr Norrell of Hanover-square

  that everything belonging to John

  Uskglass must be shaken out of modern magic,

  as one would shake moths and dust out of an

  old coat. What does he imagine he will have

  left? If you get rid of John Uskglass you will

  be left holding the empty air.

  Jonathan Strange, Prologue to The History and

  Practice of English Magic, pub. John Murray,

  London, 1816

  45

  Prologue to The History and Practice of English Magic

  by Jonathan Strange

  In the last months of 1110 a strange army appeared in Northern England. It was first heard of near a place called Penlaw some twenty or thirty miles north-west of Newcastle. No one could say where it had come from – it was generally supposed to be an invasion of Scots or Danes or perhaps even of French.

  By early December the army had taken Newcastle and Durham and was riding west. It came to Allendale, a small stone settlement that stands high among the hills of Northumbria, and camped one night on the edge of a moor outside the town. The people of Allendale were sheep-farmers, not soldiers. The town had no walls to protect it and the nearest soldiers were thirty-five miles away, preparing to defend the castle of Carlisle. Consequently, the townspeople thought it best to lose no time in making friends with the strange army. With this aim in mind several pretty young women set off, a company of brave Judiths determined to save themselves and their neighbours if they could. But when they arrived at the place where the army had their camp the women became fearful and hung back.

  The camp was a dreary, silent place. A thick snow was falling and the strange soldiers lay, wrapped in their black cloaks, upon the snowy ground. At first the young women thought the soldiers must be dead – an impression which was strengthened by the great multitude of ravens and other black birds which had settled over the camp, and indeed upon the prostrate forms of the soldiers themselves – yet the soldiers were not dead; from time to time one would stir himself and go attend to his horse, or brush a bird away if it tried to peck at his face.

  At the approach of the young women a soldier got to his feet. One of the women shook off her fears and went up to him and kissed him on the mouth.

  His skin was very pale (it shone like moonlight) and entirely without blemish. His hair was long and straight like a fall of dark brown water. The bones of his face were unnaturally fine and strong. The expression of the face was solemn. His blue eyes were long and slanting and his brows were as fine and dark as pen-strokes with a curious flourish at the end. None of this worried the girl in the least. For all she knew every Dane, Scot and Frenchman ever born is eerily beautiful.

  He took well enough to the kiss and allowed her to kiss him again. Then he paid her back in kind. Another soldier rose from the ground and opened his mouth. Out of it came a sad, wailing sort of music. The first soldier – the one the girl had kissed – began to coax her to dance with him, pushing her this way and that with his long white fingers until she was dancing in a fashion to suit him.

  This went on for some time until she became heated with the dance and paused for a moment to take off her cloak. Then her companions saw that drops of blood, like beads of sweat, were forming on her arms, face and legs, and falling on to the snow. This sight terrified them and so they ran away.

  The strange army never entered Allendale. It rode on in the night towards Carlisle. The next day the townspeople went cautiously up to the fields where the army had camped. There they found the girl, her body entirely white and drained of blood while the snow around her was stained bright red.

  By these signs they recognized the Daoine Sidhe – the Fairy Host.

  Battles were fought and the English lost every one. By Christmas the Fairy Host was at York. They held Newcastle, Durham, Carlisle and Lancaster. Aside from the exsanguination of the maid of Allendale the fairies displayed very little of the cruelty for which their race is famed. Of all the towns and fortifications which they took, only Lancaster was burnt to the ground. At Thirsk, north of York, a pig offended a member of the Host by running out under the feet of his horse and causing it to rear up and fall and break its back. The fairy and his companions hunted the pig and when they had caught it they put its eyes out. Generally, however, the arrival of the Host at any new place was a cause of great rejoicing among animals both wild and domesticated as if they recognized in the fairies an ally against their common foe, Man.

  At Christmas, King Henry summoned his earls, bishops, abbots and the great men of his realm to his house in Westminster to discuss the matter. Fairies were not unknown in England in those days. There were long-established fairy settlements in many places, some hidden by magic, some merely avoided by their Christian neighbours. King Henry’s counsellors agreed that fairies were naturally wicked. They were lascivious, mendacious and thieving; they seduced young men and women, confused travellers, and stole children, cattle and corn. They were astonishingly indolent: they had mastered the arts of masonry, carpentry and carving thousands of years ago but, rather than take the trouble to build themselves houses, most still preferred to live in places which they were pleased to call castles but which were in fact brugh – earth barrows of great antiquity. They spent their days drinking and dancing while their barley and beans rotted in the fields, and their beasts shivered and died on the cold hillside. Indeed, all King Henry’s advisers agreed that, had it not been for their extraordinary magic and near immortality, the entire fairy race would have long since perished from hunger and thirst. Yet this feckless, improvident people had invaded a well-defended Christian kingdom, won every battle they had fought and had ridden from place to place securing each stronghold as they came to it. All this spoke of a measure of purposefulness which no fairy had ever been known to possess.

  No one knew what to make of it.

  In January the Fairy Host left York and rode south. At the Trent they halted. So it was at Newark on the banks of the Trent that King Henry and his army met the Daoine Sidhe in battle.

  Before the battle a magic wind blew through the ranks of King Henry’s army and a sweet sound of pipe music was heard, which caused a great number of the horses to break free and flee to the fairy side, many taking their unlucky riders with them. Next, every man heard the voices of his loved ones – mothers, fathers, children, lovers – call out to him to come home. A host of ravens descended from the sky, pecking at the faces of the English and blinding them with a chaos of black wings. The English soldiers not only had the skill and ferocity of the Sidhe to contend with, but also their own fear in the face of such eerie magic. It is scarcely to be wondered at that the battle was short and that King Henry lost. At the moment when all fell silent and it became clear beyond any doubt that King Henry had been defeated the birds for miles around began singing as if for joy.

  The King and his counsellors waited for some chieftain or king to step forward. The ranks of the Daoine Sidhe parted and someone appeared.

  He was rather less than fifteen years old. Like the Daoine Sidhe he was dressed in ragged clothes of coarse black wool. Like them his dark hair was long and straight. Like them, he spoke neither English nor French – the two languages current in England at that time – but only a dialect of Faerie.1 He was pale and handsome and solemn-faced, yet it was clear to everyone present that he was human, not fairy.

  By the standards of the Norman and English earls and knights, who saw him that day for the first time, he was scarcely civilized. He had never seen a spoon before, nor a chair, nor an iron kettle, nor a silver penny, nor a wax candle. No fairy clan or kingdom of the period possessed any such fine things. When King Henry and the boy met to divide England between them, Henry sat upon a wooden bench and drank wine from a silver goblet, the boy sat upon the floor and drank ewe’s milk from a stone cup. The chronicler, Orderic Vitalis, writing some thirty years later, describes the shock felt b
y King Henry’s court when they saw, in the midst of all these important proceedings, a Daoine Sidhe warrior lean across and begin solicitously plucking lice out of the boy’s filthy hair.

  There was among the Fairy Host a young Norman knight called Thomas of Dundale.2 Though he had been a captive in Faerie for many years he remembered enough of his own language (French) to make the boy and King Henry understand each other.

  King Henry asked the boy his name.

  The boy replied that he had none.3

  King Henry asked him why he made war on England.

  The boy said that he was the only surviving member of an aristocratic Norman family who had been granted lands in the north of England by King Henry’s father, William the Conqueror. The men of the family had been deprived of their lands and their lives by a wicked enemy named Hubert de Cotentin. The boy said that some years before his father had appealed to William II (King Henry’s brother and predecessor) for justice, but had received none. Shortly afterwards his father had been murdered. The boy said that he himself had been taken by Hubert’s men while still a baby and abandoned in the forest. But the Daoine Sidhe had found him and taken him to live with them in Faerie. Now he had returned.

  He had a very young man’s belief in the absolute rightness of his own cause and the absolute wrongness of everyone else’s. He had settled it in his own mind that the stretch of England which lay between the Tweed and the Trent was a just recompense for the failure of the Norman kings to avenge the murders of his family. For this reason and no other King Henry was suffered to retain the southern half of his kingdom.