Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (69 page)

Mrs Delgado made no sign that she had heard any of this. She had turned her attention to the saucer with the dead mouse and her ancient mouth gaped to devour it.

“Really, madam!” cried Strange. “I must insist that you put off your dinner for a moment and attend to what I am saying.” He leant forward and removed the saucer. For the first time Mrs Delgado seemed to know he was there. She made a little mew of displeasure and looked resentfully at him.

“I want you to teach me how to be mad. The idea is so simple, I wonder I did not think of it before.”

Mrs Delgado growled very low.

“Oh! You question the wisdom of my proceedings? You are probably right. To wish madness upon oneself is very rash. My tutor, my wife and my friends would all be angry if they knew any thing of it.” He paused. The sardonic expression disappeared from his face and the light tone disappeared from his voice. “But I have cast off my tutor, my wife is dead and I am separated from my friends by twenty miles of chill water and the best part of a continent. For the first time since I took up this odd profession, I am not obliged to consult any one else. Now, how to begin? You must give me something — something to serve as a symbol and vessel of your madness.” He glanced around the room. “Unfortunately, you do not appear to possess any thing, except your gown …” He looked down at the saucer which he held in his hand. “… and this mouse. I believe I prefer the mouse.”

Strange began to say a spell. There was a burst of silver lights in the room. It was something between white flames and the glittering effect which fireworks produce. For a moment it hung in the air between Mrs Delgado and Strange. Then Strange made a gesture as if he intended to throw it at her; the light flew towards her and, just for a moment, she was bathed in a silver radiance. Suddenly Mrs Delgado was nowhere to be seen and in her place was a solemn, sulky girl in an old-fashioned gown. Then the girl too disappeared to be replaced by a beautiful young woman with a wilful expression. She was followed swiftly by an older woman of imperious bearing but with a glint of impending madness in her eyes. All the women Mrs Delgado had ever been flickered for an instant in the chair. Then all of them disappeared.

On the chair was only a heap of crumpled silk. Out of it stepped a little grey cat. The cat jumped daintily down, sprang up on the windowsill and vanished into the darkness.

“Well, that worked,” said Strange. He picked up the half-rotten dead mouse by its tail. Instantly he became interesting to several of the cats who mewed and purred and rubbed themselves against his legs to attract his attention.

He grimaced. “And what was John Uskglass forced to endure, I wonder, in order to forge English magic?”

He wondered if he would notice any difference. Would he find, after he had done the spell, that he was trying to guess if he were mad now? Would he stand about, trying to think mad thoughts to discover if any of them seemed more natural? He took a last look around at the world, opened his mouth and gingerly lowered the mouse into it …

It was like plunging beneath a waterfall or having two thousand trumpets sound in one’s ear. Everything he thought before, everything he knew, everything he had been was swept away in a great flood of confused emotion and sensation. The world was made again in flame-like colours that were impossible to bear. It was shot through with new fears, new desires, new hatreds. He was surrounded by great presences. Some had wicked mouths full of teeth and huge, burning eyes. There was a thing like a horribly crippled spider that reared up beside him. It was full of malice. He had something in his mouth and the taste of it was unspeakable. Unable to think, unable to know, he found from God-knows-where the presence of mind to spit it out. Someone screamed …

He found that he was lying on his back staring up into a confusion of darkness, roof beams and moonlight. A shadowy face appeared and peered into his own face in an unnerving manner. Its breath was warm, damp and malodorous. He had no recollection of lying down, but then he did not have much recollection of any thing. He wondered vaguely if he were in London or Shropshire. There was the queerest sensation all over his body as if several cats were walking on him at once. After a moment he raised his head and found that this was indeed the case.

He sat up and the cats leapt away. The full moon shone down through a broken window. Then, mounting from recollection to recollection, he began to piece the evening together. He remembered the spell by which he had transformed the old woman, his plan to bring madness upon himself in order to see the fairy. At first it seemed to him so distant that he thought he must be remembering events that had happened, oh!, perhaps a month or so ago. Yet here he was in the room and he found by his pocket-watch that scarcely any time had passed at all.

He managed to rescue the mouse. By luck his arm had fallen upon it and kept it safe from the cats. He tucked it into his pocket and left the room hurriedly. He did not want to remain there a moment longer; the room had been nightmarish to begin with — now it seemed to him a place of untold horror.

He met several people on the stairs, but they took not a scrap of notice of him. He had previously cast a spell over the inhabitants of the house and they were quite convinced that they saw him every day, that he frequented these rooms regularly, and that nothing was more natural than that he should be there. But if any one had asked them who he was, they would have been quite unable to say.

He walked back to his lodgings at Santa Maria Zobenigo. The old woman’s madness still seemed to infect him. People he passed in the street were strangely changed; their expressions seemed ferocious and unintelligible, and even their gait was lumbering and ugly. “Well one thing is clear,” he thought, “the old woman was very mad indeed. I could not possibly summon the fairy in that condition.”

The next day he rose early and immediately after breakfast began the process of reducing the flesh and guts of the mouse to a powder, according to various well-known principles of magic. The bones he preserved intact. Then he turned the powder into a tincture. This had two advantages. First (and by no means least), it was considerably less repulsive to swallow a few drops of tincture than to put a dead mouse in his mouth. Secondly, he believed that in this way he might be able to regulate the degree of madness he imposed upon himself.

By five o’clock he had a darkish brown liquid, which smelt chiefly of the brandy he had used to make the tincture. He decanted it into a bottle. Then he carefully counted fourteen drops into a glass of brandy and drank it.

After a few minutes he looked out of the window and into the Campo Santa Maria Zobenigo. People were walking up and down. The backs of their heads were hollowed out; their faces were nothing but thin masks at the front. Within each hollow a candle was burning. This was so plain to him now, that he wondered he had never noticed it before. He imagined what would happen if he went down into the street and blew some of the candles out. It made him laugh to think of it. He laughed so much that he could no longer stand. His laughter echoed round and round the house. Some small remaining shred of reason warned him that he ought not to let the landlord and his family know what he was doing so he went to bed and muffled the sound of his laughter in the pillows, kicking his legs from time to time with the sheer hilarity of the idea.

Next morning he awoke in bed, fully dressed and with his boots still on. Apart from the dull, greasy feeling that generally results from sleeping in one’s clothes, he believed he was much as usual. He washed, shaved and put on fresh clothes. Then he went out to take something to eat and drink. There was a little coffee-house he liked on the corner of the Calle de la Cortesia and the Campo San Angelo. All seemed well until the waiter approached his table and put the cup of coffee down upon it. Strange looked up and saw a glint in the man’s eye like a tiny candle-flame. He found he could no longer recall whether people had candles in their heads or not. He knew that there was a world of difference between these two notions: one was sane and the other was not, but he could not for the life of him remember which was which.

This was a little unsettling.

“The only problem with the tincture,” he thought, “is that it is really quite difficult to judge when the effects have worn off. I had not thought of that before. I suppose I ought to wait a day or two before trying it again.”

But at midday his impatience got the better of him. He felt better. He was inclining to the view that people did
not
have candles in their heads. “And anyway,” he thought, “it does not much matter which it is. The question has no relevance to my present undertaking.” He put nine drops of the tincture into a glass of Vin Santo and drank it down.

Immediately he became convinced that all the cupboards in the house were full of pineapples. He was certain that there were other pineapples under his bed and under the table. He was so alarmed by this thought that he felt hot and cold all over and was obliged to sit down on the floor. All the houses and
palazzi
in the city were full of pineapples and outside in the streets people were carrying pineapples, hidden under their clothes. He could smell the pineapples everywhere — a smell both sweet and sharp.

Some time later there was a knock at his door. He was surprized to find it was now evening and the room was quite dark. The knock sounded again. The landlord was at the door. The landlord began to talk, but Strange could not understand him. This was because the man had a pineapple in his mouth. How he had managed to cram the whole thing in there, Strange could not imagine. Green, spiky leaves emerged slowly out of his mouth and then were sucked back in again as he spoke. Strange wondered if perhaps he ought to go and fetch a knife or a hook and try and fish the pineapple out, in case the landlord should choke. But at the same time he did not care much about it. “After all,” he thought with some irritation, “it is his own fault. He put it there.”

The next day in the coffee-house on the corner of the Calle de la Cortesia one of the waiters was cutting up a pineapple. Strange, huddled over his coffee, shuddered to see it.

He had discovered that it was easier — far easier than any one could have supposed — to make oneself mad, but like all magic it was full of obstacles and frustrations. Even if he succeeded in summoning the fairy (which did not seem very likely), he would be in no condition to talk to him. Every book he had ever read on the subject urged magicians to be on their guard when dealing with fairies. Just when he needed all his wits, he would have scarcely any wits at all.

“How am I supposed to impress him with the superiority of my magicianship if all I can do is babble about pineapples and candles?” he thought.

He spent the day pacing up and down his room, breaking off every now and then to scribble notes upon bits of paper. When evening came he wrote down a spell for summoning fairies and put it on the table. Then he put four drops of tincture into a glass of water and swallowed it.

This time the tincture affected him quite differently. He was not assailed by any peculiar beliefs or fears. Indeed in many ways he felt better than he had in a long time: cooler, calmer, less troubled. He found that he no longer cared very much about magic. Doors slammed in his mind and he went wandering off into rooms and hallways inside himself that he had not visited in years. For the first ten minutes or so he became the man he had been at twenty or twenty-two; after that he was someone else entirely — someone he had always had the power to be, but for various reasons had never actually become.

His first desire after taking the tincture was to go to a
Ridotto
. It seemed ridiculous that he should have been in Venice since the beginning of October and never visited one. But on examining his pocket-watch he discovered that it was only eight o’clock. “That is much too early,” he remarked to no one in particular. He was feeling talkative and looked round for someone to confide in. For lack of any one better, he settled upon the little wooden figure in the corner. “There will be no one worth seeing for three or four hours yet,” he told it.

To fill the time he thought he might go and find Miss Greysteel. “But I suppose her aunt and father will be there.” He made a small sound of irritation. “Dull! Dull! Dull! Why do pretty women always have such herds of relatives?” He looked at himself in a mirror. “Dear God! This neckcloth looks as if it was tied by a ploughman.”

He spent the next half hour tying and re-tying the neckcloth until he was satisfied with it. Then he discovered that his fingernails were longer than he liked and not particularly clean. He went to look for a pair of scissars to cut them with.

The scissars were on the table. And something else besides. “What have we here?” he asked. “Papers! Papers with magic spells on them!” This struck him as highly amusing. “You know, it is the queerest thing,” he told the little wooden figure, “but I know the fellow who wrote this! His name is Jonathan Strange — and now that I think about it, I think these books belong to him.” He read a little further. “Ha! You will never guess what idiocy he is engaged in now! Casting spells to summon fairies! Ha! Ha! He tells himself he is doing it to get himself a fairy-servant and further the cause of English magic. But really he is only doing it to terrify Gilbert Norrell! He has come hundreds of miles to the most luxurious city in the world and all he cares about is what some old man in London thinks! How ridiculous!”

He put the piece of paper down again in disgust and picked up the scissars. He turned and just avoided striking his head against something. “What in the world … ?” he began.

A black ribbon hung from the ceiling. At the end of it were a few tiny bones, a phial of some dark liquid — blood perhaps — and a piece of paper with writing on it, all tied up together. The length of the ribbon was such that a person moving about the room was almost certain to knock against it sooner or later. Strange shook his head in disbelief at other people’s stupidity. Leaning against the table, he began to cut his nails.