Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (79 page)

There was something ahead of them. At first it looked like a black line that cut the sky in half. But as they drew nearer, it became a Black Pillar that reached up from the earth and had no end.

Stephen and the gentleman came to rest high above Venice (as to what they might be resting
upon
, Stephen was determined not to consider). The sun was setting and the streets and buildings beneath them were dark, but the sea and sky were full of light in which shades of rose, milky-blue, topaz and pearl were all blended harmoniously together. The city seemed to float in a radiant void.

For the most part the Black Pillar was as smooth as obsidian, but, just above the level of the house-roofs, twists and spirals of darkness were billowing out from it and drifting away through the air. What they could be, Stephen could not imagine.

“Is it smoke, sir? Is the tower on fire?” asked Stephen.

The gentleman did not reply, but as they drew closer Stephen saw that it was not smoke. A dark multitude was flying out of the Tower. They were ravens. Thousands upon thousands of ravens. They were leaving Venice and flying back in the direction Stephen and the gentleman had come.

One flock wheeled towards them. The air was suddenly tumultuous with the beating of a thousand wings, and loud with a thrumming, drumming noise. Clouds of dust and grit flew into Stephen’s eyes, nose and throat. He bent low and cupped his hand over his nose to shut out the stench.

When they were gone, he asked in amazement, “What are they, sir?”

“Creatures the magician has made,” said the gentleman. “He is sending them back to England with instructions for the Sky and the Earth and the Rivers and the Hills. He is calling up all the King’s old allies. Soon they will attend to English magicians, rather than to me!” He gave a great howl of mingled anger and despair. “I have punished him in ways that I never punished my enemies before! Yet still he works against me! Why does he not resign himself to his fate? Why does he not despair?”

“I never heard that he lacked courage, sir,” said Stephen. “By all accounts he did many brave things in the Peninsula.”

“Courage? What are you talking about? This is not courage! This is malice, pure and simple! We have been negligent, Stephen! We have let the English magicians get the advantage of us. We must find a way to defeat them! We must redouble our efforts to make you King!”

60
Tempest and lies

February 1817

Aunt greysteel had rented a house in Padua within sight of the fruit market. It was very convenient for everywhere and only eighty sechinis a quarter (which comes to about 38 guineas). Aunt Greysteel was very well pleased with her bargain. But it sometimes happens that when one acts quickly and with great resolve, all the indecisiveness and doubt comes afterwards, when it is too late. So it was in this case: Aunt Greysteel and Flora had not been living in the house a week, when Aunt Greysteel began to find fault with it and began to wonder if, in fact, she ought to have taken it at all. Although ancient and pretty, its gothic windows were rather small and several of them were fenced about with stone balconies; in other words it was inclined to be dark. This would never have been a problem before, but just at present Flora’s spirits required support, and (thought Aunt Greysteel) gloom and shadows — be they ever so picturesque — might not in fact be the best thing for her. There were moreover some stone ladies who stood about the courtyard and who had, in the course of the years, acquired veils and cloaks of ivy. It was no exaggeration to say that these ladies were in imminent danger of disappearing altogether and every time Aunt Greysteel’s eye fell upon them, she was put in mind of Jonathan Strange’s poor wife, who had died so young and so mysteriously, and whose unhappy fate seemed to have driven her husband mad. Aunt Greysteel hoped that no such melancholy notions occurred to Flora.

But the bargain had been made and the house had been taken, so Aunt Greysteel set about making it as cheerful and bright as she could. She had never squandered candles or lamp oil in her life, but in her endeavour to raise Flora’s spirits she put all questions of expence aside. There was a particularly gloomy spot on the stairs, where a step turned in an odd way that no one could possibly have predicted, and lest any one should tumble down and break their neck, Aunt Greysteel insisted upon a lamp being placed upon a shelf just above the step. The lamp burnt day and night and was a continual affront to Bonifazia, the elderly Italian maid who came with the house and who was an even more economical person than Aunt Greysteel herself.

Bonifazia was an excellent servant, but much inclined to criticism and long explanations of why the instructions she had just been given were wrong or impossible to carry out. She was aided in her work by a slow, put-upon sort of young man called Minichello, who greeted any order with a low, grumbling murmur of dialect words, quite impossible to comprehend. Bonifazia treated Minichello with such familiar contempt that Aunt Greysteel supposed they must be related, though she had yet to obtain any precise information upon this point.

So what with the arrangements for the house, the daily battles with Bonifazia and all the discoveries, pleasant or otherwise, attendant upon a sojourn in a new town, Aunt Greysteel’s days were full of interesting occupation; but her chief and most sacred duty at this time was to try and find amusement for Flora. Flora had fallen into habits of quiet and solitude. If her aunt spoke to her she answered cheerfully enough, but few indeed were the conversations that she began. In Venice Flora had been the chief instigator of all their pleasures; now she simply fell in with whatever projects of exploration Aunt Greysteel proposed. She preferred those occupations that require no companion. She walked alone, read alone, sat alone in the sitting-room or in the ray of faint sunshine which sometimes penetrated the little courtyard at about one o’clock. She was less open-hearted and confiding than before; it was as if someone — not necessarily Jonathan Strange — had disappointed her and she was determined to be more independent in future.

In the first week in February there was a great storm in Padua. It happened at about the middle of the day. The storm came very suddenly out of the east (from the direction of Venice and the sea). The old men who frequented the town’s coffee-houses said that there had been no sign of it moments before. But other people were not much inclined to take any notice of this; after all it was winter and storms must be expected.

First a great wind blew through the town. It was no respecter of doors or windows, this wind. It seemed to find out chinks that no one knew existed and it blew almost as fiercely within the houses as without. Aunt Greysteel and Flora were together in a little sitting-room on the first floor. The window-panes began to rattle and some crystals that hung from a chandelier began to jingle. Then the pages of a letter that Aunt Greysteel was writing escaped from beneath her hand and went flying about the room. Outside the window, the skies darkened and it became as black as night; sheets of blinding rain began to descend.

Bonifazia and Minichello entered the sitting-room. They came under the pretext of finding out Aunt Greysteel’s wishes concerning the storm, but in truth Bonifazia wanted to join with Aunt Greysteel in exclamations of astonishment at the violence of the wind and rain (and a fine duet they made of it too, albeit in different languages). Minichello came presumably because Bonifazia did; he regarded the storm gloomily, as if he suspected it of having been arranged on purpose to make work for him.

Aunt Greysteel, Bonifazia and Minichello were all at the window and saw how the first stroke of lightning turned the whole familiar scene into something quite Gothic and disturbing, full of pallid, unearthly glare and unexpected shadows. This was followed by a crack of thunder that shook the whole room. Bonifazia murmured appeals to the Virgin and several saints. Aunt Greysteel, who was equally alarmed, might well have been glad of the same refuge, but as a member of the communion of the Church of England, she could only exclaim, “Dear me!” and, “Upon my word!” and “Lord bless me!” — none of which gave her much comfort.

“Flora, my love,” she called out in a voice that quavered slightly, “I hope you are not frightened. It is a very horrid storm.”

Flora came to the window and took her aunt’s hand and told her that it was sure to be over very soon. Another stroke of lightning illuminated the town. Flora dropped her aunt’s hand, undid the window-fastening and stepped eagerly out on to the balcony.

“Flora!” exclaimed Aunt Greysteel.

She was leaning into the howling darkness with both hands upon the balustrade, quite oblivious of the rain that soaked her gown or of the wind that pulled at her hair.

“My love! Flora! Flora! Come out of the rain!”

Flora turned and said something to her aunt, but what it was they could not hear.

Minichello followed her on to the balcony and, with a surprizing delicacy (though without relinquishing for a moment his native gloominess), he managed to herd her inside again, using his large, flat hands to guide her, in the same way shepherds use hurdles to direct sheep.

“Can you not see?” exclaimed Flora. “There is someone there! There, at the corner! Can you tell who it is? I thought …” She fell silent abruptly and whatever it was that she thought, she did not say.

“Well, my love, I hope you are mistaken. I pity any one who is in the street at this moment. I hope they will find some shelter as soon as they can. Oh, Flora! How wet you are!”

Bonifazia fetched towels and then she and Aunt Greysteel immediately set about drying Flora’s gown, turning her round and round between them, and sometimes trying to give her a turn in contrary directions. At the same time both were giving Minichello urgent instructions, Aunt Greysteel in stumbling, yet insistent Italian, and Bonifazia in rapid Veneto dialect. The instructions, like the turns, may well have been at odds with each other, because Minichello did nothing, except regard them with a baleful expression.

Flora gazed over the bowed heads of the two women into the street. Another stroke of lightning. She stiffened, as if she had been electrified, and the next moment she wriggled out of the clutches of aunt and maid, and ran out of the room.

They had no time to wonder where she was going. The next half hour was one of titanic domestic struggle: of Minichello trying to close shutters in the teeth of the storm; of Bonifazia stumbling about in the dark, looking for candles; of Aunt Greysteel discovering that the Italian word she had been using to mean “shutter" actually meant “parchment”. Each of them in turn lost his or her temper. Nor did Aunt Greysteel feel that the situation was much improved when all the bells in the town began to ring at once, in accordance with the belief that bells (being blessed objects) can dispel storms and thunder (which are clearly works of the Devil).

At last the house was secured — or very nearly. Aunt Greysteel left Bonifazia and Minichello to complete the work and, forgetting that she had seen Flora leave the sitting-room, she returned thither with a candle for her niece. Flora was not there, but Aunt Greysteel observed that Minichello still had not closed the shutters in that room.

She mounted the stairs to Flora’s bed-chamber: Flora was not there either. Nor was she in the little dining-parlour, nor in Aunt Greysteel’s own bed-chamber, nor in the other, smaller sitting-room which they sometimes used after dinner. The kitchen, the vestibule and the gardener’s room were tried next; she was not in any of those places.

Aunt Greysteel began to be seriously frightened. A cruel little voice whispered in her ear that whatever mysterious fate had befallen Jonathan Strange’s wife, it had begun when she had disappeared very unexpectedly in bad weather.

“But that was snow, not rain,” she told herself. As she went about the house, looking for Flora, she kept repeating to herself, “Snow, not rain. Snow, not rain.” Then she thought, “Perhaps she was in the sitting-room all along. It was so dark and she is so quiet, I may well not have perceived her.”

She returned to the room. Another stroke of lightning gave it an unnatural aspect. The walls became white and ghastly; the furniture and other objects became grey, as if they had all been turned to stone. With a horrible jolt, Aunt Greysteel realized that there was indeed a second person in the room — a woman,
but not Flora
— a woman in a dark, old-fashioned gown, standing with a candle in a candlestick, looking at her — a woman whose face was entirely in shadow, whose features could not be seen.

Aunt Greysteel grew cold all over.

There was a crack of thunder: then pitch-black darkness, except for the two candle flames. But somehow the unknown woman’s candle seemed to illuminate nothing at all. Queerer still the room seemed to have grown larger in some mysterious way; the woman and her candle were strangely distant from Aunt Greysteel.

Aunt Greysteel cried out, “Who is there?”

No one answered.

“Of course,” she thought, “she is Italian. I must ask her again in Italian. Perhaps she has wandered into the wrong house in the confusion of the storm.” But try as she might, she could not at that moment think of a single Italian word.

Another flash of lightning. There was the woman, standing just as she had been before, facing Aunt Greysteel. “It is the ghost of Jonathan Strange’s wife!” she thought. She took a step forward, and so did the unknown woman. Suddenly realization and relief came upon her in equal measures; “It is a mirror! Oh! How foolish! How foolish! To be afraid of my own reflection!” She was so relieved she almost laughed out loud, but then she paused; it had not been foolish to be frightened, not foolish at all;
there had been no mirror in that corner until now
.

The next flash of lightning shewed the mirror to her. It was ugly and much too large for the room; she knew she had never seen it before in her life.

She hurried out of the room. She felt she would be able to think more clearly away from the sight of the baleful mirror. She was halfway up the stairs when some sounds that seemed to originate in Flora’s bed-chamber made her open the door and look inside.

There was Flora. She had lit the candles they had placed for her and was in the middle of pulling her gown over her head. The gown was sopping wet. Her petticoat and stockings were no better. Her shoes were tumbled on the floor at the side of the bed; they were quite soaked and spoilt with rain.

Flora looked at her aunt with an expression in which guilt, embarrassment, defiance and several other things more difficult of interpretation were mixed together. “Nothing! Nothing!” she cried.

This, presumably, was the answer to some question she expected her aunt to put to her, but all that Aunt Greysteel said was: “Oh, my dear! Where have you been? Whatever made you go out in such weather?”

“I … I went out to buy some embroidery silk.”

Aunt Greysteel must have looked a good deal astonished at this, because Flora added doubtfully, “I did not think the rain would last so long.”

“Well, my love, I must say I think you acted rather foolishly, but you must have been a good deal frightened! Was it that that made you cry?”

“Cry! No, no! You are mistaken, aunt. I have not been crying. It is rain, that is all.”

“But you are …” Aunt Greysteel stopped. She had been going to say,
you are crying now
, but Flora shook her head and turned away. For some reason she had wrapped her shawl into a bundle and Aunt Greysteel could not help thinking that if she had not done that the shawl would have given her some protection from the rain and she would not now be so wet. From out of the bundle she took a little bottle half full of an amber-coloured liquid. She opened a drawer, and put it inside.

“Flora! Something very peculiar has happened. I do not know quite how to tell you, but there is a mirror …”

“Yes, I know,” said Flora, quickly. “It belongs to me.”

“Belongs to you!” Aunt Greysteel was more perplexed than ever. A pause of some moments’ duration. “Where did you buy it?” she asked. It was all she could think of to say.

“I do not remember exactly. It must have been delivered just now.”

“But surely no one would deliver any thing in the middle of a storm! And even if any body had been so foolish as to do such a thing, they would have knocked upon the door — and not done it in this strange, secret way.”

To these very reasonable arguments Flora made no reply.

Aunt Greysteel was not sorry to let the subject drop. She was quite sick of storms and frights and unexpected mirrors. The question of
why
the mirror had appeared was now resolved and so, for the present, she put aside the question of
how
it had appeared. She was glad to fall back upon the more soothing subjects of Flora’s gown and Flora’s shoes and the likelihood of Flora’s catching cold and the necessity for Flora drying herself immediately and putting on her dressing-gown and coming and sitting by the fire in the sitting-room and eating something hot.