Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (100 page)

3
Most of us are naturally inclined to struggle against the restrictions our friends and family impose upon us, but if we are so unfortunate as to lose a loved one, what a difference then! Then the restriction becomes a sacred trust.

4
Even John Uskglass who had three kingdoms to rule over and all of English magic to direct was not entirely free from this tendency to go on long mysterious journeys. In 1241 he left his house in Newcastle in some mysterious fashion known only to magicians. He told a servant that he would be found asleep upon a bench in front of the fire in one day’s time.

The following day the servant and members of the King’s household looked for the King upon the bench in front of the fire, but he was not there. They looked for him every morning and every evening but he did not appear.

William, Earl of Lanchester, governed in his stead and many decisions were postponed “until the King shall return”. But as time went on many people were inclined to doubt that this would ever happen. Then, a year and a day after his departure, the King was discovered, sleeping on the bench before the fire.

He did not seem aware that any thing untoward had happened and he told no one where he had been. No one dared ask him if he had always intended to be away so long or if something terrible had happened. William of Lanchester summoned the servant and asked him to repeat yet again the exact words that the King had said. Could it be that he had actually said he would be away for a year and a day?

Perhaps said the man. The King was generally quietly spoken. It was quite possible that he had not heard correctly.

Chapter 50: The History and Practice of English Magic

1
This was not in the least true. It had been the Duke of Wellington’s bitterest complaint during the Peninsular War that the Government interfered constantly.

2
Lord Byron left England in April 1816 in the face of mounting debts, accusations of cruelty to his wife and rumours that he had seduced his sister.

3
Despite the seeming lack of sympathy between the two men, something about Strange must have impressed Byron. His next poem,
Manfred
, begun in September or October of the same year, was about a magician. Certainly Manfred does not greatly resemble Jonathan Strange (or at least not the respectable Strange whom Byron so disliked). He much more resembles Byron with his self-obsession, his self-loathing, his lofty disdain for his fellow men, his hints of impossible tragedies and his mysterious longings. Nevertheless Manfred is a magician who passes his time in summoning up spirits of the air, earth, water and fire to talk to him. It was as if Byron, having met a magician who disappointed him, created one more to his liking.

4
Walter De Chepe was an early thirteenth-century London magician. His procedure, Prophylaxis, protects a person, city or object from magic spells. Supposedly it closely follows a piece of fairy magic. It is reputed to be very strong. Indeed the only problem with this spell is its remarkable efficacy. Sometimes objects become impervious to human or fairy agency of any sort whether magical or not. Thus if Strange’s students had succeeded in casting the spell over one of Strange’s books, it is quite possible that no one would have been able to pick up the book or turn its pages.

In 1280 the citizens of Bristol ordered the town’s magicians to cast de Chepe’s Prophylaxis over the whole town to protect it from the magic spells of its enemies. Unfortunately so successful was the magic that everyone in the town, all the animals and all the ships in the harbour became living statues. No one could move; water stopped flowing within the boundaries; even the flames in the hearth were frozen. Bristol remained like this for a whole month until John Uskglass came from his house in Newcastle to put matters right.

5
The letter contained two implications which were considered particularly offensive: first, that the purchasers were not clever enough to understand Strange’s book; and second, that they did not possess the moral judgement to decide for themselves if the magic Strange was describing was good or wicked.

The Norrellites had fully expected that the destruction of Strange’s book would be controversial and they were prepared to receive a great deal of criticism, however the harm done to their own cause by the letter was entirely unintentional. Mr Norrell had been supposed to shew the letter to Mr Lascelles before it was sent out. If Lascelles had seen it, then the language and expressions would have undergone considerable modification and presumably have been less offensive to the recipients.

Unfortunately, there was a misunderstanding. Mr Norrell asked Childermass if Lascelles had made his amendments. Childermass thought they were speaking of an article for
The Friends of English Magic
and said that he had. And so the letter went out uncorrected. Lascelles was furious and accused Childermass of having purposely encouraged Mr Norrell to damage his own cause. Childermass vehemently denied doing any such thing.

From this time on relations between Lascelles and Childermass (never good) worsened rapidly and soon Lascelles was hinting to Mr Norrell that Childermass had Strangite sympathies and was secretly working to betray his master.

6
“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.” St Matthew, 7,16.

7
“… I cannot tell you any thing of Piacenza,” Strange wrote to Henry Woodhope, “as I did not stay long enough to see it. I arrived in the evening. After dinner I thought I would walk about for a half hour, but on entering the main piazza, I was immediately struck by a tall urn standing upon a pedestal with its long, black shadow trailing upon the stones. Two or three strands of ivy or some other creeping plant emerged from the neck of the urn but they were quite dead. I cannot say why, but this seemed to me so deeply melancholy that I could not bear it. It was like an allegory of loss, death and misery. I returned to the inn, went immediately to bed and in the morning left for Turin.”

Chapter 51: A family by the name of Greysteel

1
The Tree of Learning
by Gregory Absalom (1507—99)

2
A famous café on the San Marco Piazza.

3
Aunt Greysteel is probably speaking of the Derwent. Long ago, when John Uskglass was still a captive child in Faerie, a king in Faerie foretold that if he came to adulthood, then all the old fairy kingdoms would fall. The king sent his servants into England to bring back an iron knife to kill him. The knife was forged by a blacksmith on the banks of the Derwent and the waters of the Derwent were used to cool the hot metal. However, the attempt to kill John Uskglass failed and the king and his clan were destroyed by the boy-magician. When John Uskglass entered England and established his kingdom, his fairy-followers went in search of the blacksmith. They killed him and his family, destroyed his house and laid magic spells upon the Derwent to punish it for its part in making the wicked knife.

4
The views Strange is expressing at this point are wildly optimistic and romantic. English magical literature is full of examples of fairies whose powers were weak or who were stupid or ignorant.

5
Jacques Belasis was reputed to have created an excellent spell for summoning fairy-spirits. Unfortunately the only copy of Belasis’s masterpiece,
The Instructions
, was at the library at Hurtfew and Strange had never seen it. All he knew of it were vague descriptions in later histories and so it must be assumed that Strange was re-creating this magic and had only the flimsiest notion of what he was aiming at.

By contrast, the spell commonly attributed to the Master of Doncaster is very well known and appears in a number of widely available works. The identity of the Master of Doncaster is not known. His existence is deduced from a handful of references in
Argentine
histories to thirteenth-century magicians acquiring spells and magic “from Doncaster”. Moreover, it is far from clear that all the magic attributed to the Master of Doncaster is the work of one man. This has led magio-historians to postulate a second magician, even more shadowy than the first, the Pseudo-Master of Doncaster. If, as has been convincingly argued, the Master of Doncaster was really John Uskglass, then it is logical to assume that the spell of summoning was created by the Pseudo-Master. It seems highly unlikely that John Uskglass would have had any need of a spell to summon fairies. His court was, after all, full of them.

Chapter 52: The old lady of Cannaregio

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Signor Tosetti later confessed to the Greysteels that he believed he knew who the old lady of Cannaregio was. He had heard her story often as he went about the city, but until he had seen her with his own eyes he had dismissed it as a mere fable, a tale to frighten the young and foolish.

It seems her father had been a Jew, and her mother was descended from half the races of Europe. As a child she had learnt several languages and spoke them all perfectly. There was nothing she could not make herself mistress of if she chose. She learnt for the pleasure of it. At sixteen she spoke — not only French, Italian and German — which are part of any lady’s commonplace accomplishments — but all the languages of the civilized (and uncivilized) world. She spoke the language of the Scottish Highlands (which is like singing). She spoke Basque, which is a language which rarely makes any impression upon the brains of any other race, so that a man may hear it as often and as long as he likes, but never afterwards be able to recall a single syllable of it. She even learnt the language of a strange country which, Signor Tosetti had been told, some people believed still existed, although no one in the world could say where it was. (The name of this country was Wales.)

She travelled through the world and appeared before kings and queens; archdukes and archduchesses; princes and bishops; Grafs and Grafins, and to each and every one of these important people she spoke in the language he or she had learnt as a child and every one of them proclaimed her a wonder.

And at last she came to Venice.

But this lady had never learnt to moderate her behaviour in any thing. Her appetite for learning was matched by her appetite in other things and she had married a man who was the same. This lady and her husband came at Carnevale and never went away again. All their wealth they gambled away in the
Ridottos
. All their health they lost in other pleasures. And one morning, when all of Venice’s canals were silver and rose-coloured with the dawn, the husband lay down upon the wet stones of the Fondamenta dei Mori and died and there was nothing anyone could do to save him. And the wife would perhaps have done as well to do the same — for she had no money and nowhere to go. But the Jews remembered that she had some claim to their charity, being in a manner of speaking a Jewess herself (though she had never before acknowledged it) or perhaps they felt for her as a suffering creature (for the Jews have endured much in Venice). However it was, they gave her shelter in the Ghetto. There are different stories of what happened next, but what they all agree upon is that she lived among the Jews, but she was not one of them. She lived quite alone and whether the fault was hers or whether the fault was theirs I do not know. And a great deal of time went by and she did not speak to a living soul and a great wind of madness howled through her and overturned all her languages. And she forgot Italian, forgot English, forgot Latin, forgot Basque, forgot Welsh, forgot every thing in the world except Cat — and that, it is said, she spoke marvellously well.

Chapter 54: A little box, the colour of heartache

1
Col Tom Blue was of course the most famous servant of Ralph Stokesey; Master Witcherley assisted Martin Pale.

2
This lady was the most beautiful and tempestuous of Napoleon Buonaparte’s sisters, much given to taking lovers and posing, unclothed, for statues of herself.

3
Agrace is the name sometimes given to John Uskglass’s third Kingdom. This Kingdom was thought to lie on the far side of Hell.

4
Brugh
, the ancient
Sidhe
word for the homes of the fairies, is usually translated as castle or mansion, but in fact means the interior of a barrow or hollow hill.

5
Stokesey summoned Col Tom Blue to his house in Exeter. When the fairy refused for the third time to serve him, Stokesey made himself invisible and followed Col Tom Blue out of the town. Col Tom Blue walked along a fairy road and soon arrived in a place that was not England. There was a low brown hill by a pool of still water. In answer to Col Tom Blue’s command a door opened in the hillside and he went inside. Stokesey went after him.

In the centre of the hill Stokesey found an enchanted hall where everyone was dancing. He waited until one of the dancers came close. Then he rolled a magic apple towards her and she picked it up. Naturally it was the best and most beautiful apple in all the worlds that ever were. As soon as the fairy woman had eaten it, she desired nothing so much as another one just the same. She looked around, but saw no one. “Who sent me that apple?” she asked. “The East Wind,” whispered Stokesey. On the next night Stokesey again followed Col Tom Blue inside the hill. He watched the dancers and again he rolled an apple towards the woman. When she asked who had sent it to her, he replied that it was the East Wind. On the third night he kept the apple in his hand. The fairy woman left the other dancers and looked round. “East Wind! East Wind!” she whispered. “Where is my apple?” “Tell me where Col Tom Blue sleeps,” whispered Stokesey, “and I will give you the apple.”So she told him: deep in the ground, on the northernmost edge of the
brugh
.

On the following nights Stokesey impersonated the West Wind, the North Wind and the South Wind and he used his apples to persuade other inhabitants of the mound to give him information about Col Tom Blue. From a shepherd he learnt what animals guarded Col Tom Blue while he slept — a wild she-pig and an even wilder he-goat. From Col Tom Blue’s nurse he learnt what Col Tom Blue held in his hand while he slept — a very particular and important pebble. And from a kitchen-boy he learnt what three words Col Tom Blue said every morning upon waking.