Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (98 page)

From
Recollections of Sir Thomas Lawrence during an intimacy of nearly thirty years by Miss Croft

2
Francis Pevensey, sixteenth-century magician. Wrote
Eighteen Wonders to be found in the House of Albion
. We know that Pevensey was trained by Martin Pale. The
Eighteen Wonders
has all the characteristics of Pale’s magic, including his fondness for complicated diagrams and intricate magical apparatus. For many years Francis Pevensey occupied a minor but respectable place in English magical history as a follower of Martin Pale and it was a great surprize to everyone when he suddenly became the subject of one of the bitterest controversies in eighteenth-century magical theory.

It began in 1754 with the discovery of a number of letters in the library of a gentleman in Stamford in Lincolnshire. They were all in an antique hand and signed by Martin Pale. The magical scholars of the period were besides themselves with joy.

But upon closer examination the letters proved to be
love letters
with no word of magic in them from beginning to end. They were of the most passionate description imaginable: Pale compared his beloved to a sweet shower of rain falling upon him, to a fire at which he warmed himself, to a torment that he preferred to any comfort. There were various references to milk-white breasts and perfumed legs and long soft, brown hair in which stars became entangled, and other things not at all interesting to the magical scholars who had hoped for magic spells.

Pale was much addicted to writing his beloved’s name — which was Francis — and in one letter he made a sort of punning poem or riddle upon her surname: Pevensey. At first the eighteenth-century magical scholars were inclined to argue that Pale’s mistress must have been the sister or wife of the other Francis Pevensey. In the sixteenth century Francis had been a common name for both men and women. Then Charles Hether-Gray published seven different extracts from the letters which mentioned
Eighteen Wonders in the House of Albion
and shewed plainly that Pale’s mistress and the author of the book were one and the same person.

William Pantler argued that the letters were forgeries. The letters had been found in the library of a Mr Whittlesea. Mr Whittlesea had a wife who had written several plays, two of which had been performed at the Drury Lane Theatre. Clearly, said Pantler, a woman who would stoop to writing plays would stoop to any thing and he suggested that Mrs Whittlesea had forged the letters “… in order to elevate her Sex above the natural place that God had ordained for it …” Mr Whittlesea challenged William Pantler to a duel and Pantler, who was a scholar through and through and knew nothing of weapons, apologized and published a formal retraction of his accusations against Mrs Whittlesea.

Mr Norrell was quite happy to employ Pevensey’s magic, since he had settled it in his own mind long ago that Pevensey was a man. As to the letters — since they contained no word of magic he did not concern himself with them. Jonathan Strange took a different view. According to him only one question needed to be asked and answered in order to settle the matter: would Martin Pale have taught a woman magic? The answer was, again according to Strange, yes. After all Martin Pale claimed to have been taught by a woman — Catherine of Winchester.

3
Thaddeus Hickman (1700—38), author of a life of Martin Pale.

4
The ivy promised to bind England’s enemies Briars and thorns promised to whip them The hawthorn said he would answer any question The birch said he would make doors to other countries The yew brought us weapons The raven punished our enemies The oak watched the distant hills The rain washed away all sorrow This traditional English saying supposedly lists the various contracts which John Uskglass, the Raven King, made on England’s behalf with the forests.

Chapter 37: The Cinque Dragownes

1
Les Cinque Dragownes (The Five Dragons). This court took its name not, as is generally supposed, from the ferocity of its judges, but from a chamber in the house of John Uskglass, the Raven King, in Newcastle where the judgements were originally given. This chamber was said to be twelve-sided and to be decorated by wonderful carvings, some of them the work of men and some of them the work of fairies. The most marvellous of all were the carvings of five dragons.

Crimes tried by the Cinque Dragownes included: “Evil Tendings" — magic with an inherently malevolent purpose; “False Magic" — pretending to do magic or promising to do magic which one either could not or did not intend to do; selling magic rings, hats, shoes, coats, belts, shovels, beans, musical instruments etc., etc. to people who could not be expected to control those powerful articles; pretending to be a magician or pretending to act on behalf of a magician; teaching magic to unsuitable persons, e.g. drunkards, madmen, children, persons of vicious habits and inclinations; and many other magical crimes committed by trained magicians and other Christians. Crimes against the person of John Uskglass were also tried by the Cinque Dragownes. The only category of magical crimes with which the Cinque Dragownes had nothing to do was crimes by fairies. These were dealt with by the separate court of Folflures.

In England in the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a thriving community of magicians and fairies was continually performing magic. Magic is notoriously difficult to regulate and, naturally enough, not all the magic that was done was well intentioned. John Uskglass seems to have devoted a great deal of time and energy to the creation of a body of law to govern magic and magicians. When the practice of magic spread throughout England, the southern English kings were only too grateful to borrow the wisdom of their northern neighbour. It is a peculiarity of that time that though England was divided into two countries with separate judiciary systems, the body of law which governed magic was the same for both. The southern English equivalent of the Cinque Dragownes was called the Petty Dragownes of London and was situated near Blackfriars.

Chapter 39: The two magicians

1
In the late seventeenth century there was a glovemaker in the King’s city of Newcastle who had a daughter — a bold little thing. One day this child, whom everyone supposed to be playing in some corner of her father’s house, was missed. Her mother and father and brothers searched for her. The neighbours searched, but she was nowhere to be found. Then in the late afternoon they looked up and saw her coming down the muddy, cobbled hill. Some of them thought for a moment that they saw someone beside her in the dark winter street, but she came on alone. She was quite unharmed and her story, when they had pieced it together, was this:

She had left her father’s house to go wandering in the city and had quickly come upon a street she had never seen before. This street was wide and well-paved and led her straight up, higher than she had ever been before, to the gate and courtyard of a great stone house. She had gone into the house and looked into many rooms, but all were silent, empty, full of dust and spiders. On one side of the house there was a suite of rooms where the shadows of leaves fell ceaselessly over walls and floor as if there were summer trees outside the windows, but there were no trees (and it was, in any case, winter). One room contained nothing but a high mirror. Room and mirror seemed to have quarrelled at some time for the mirror shewed the room to be filled with birds but the room was empty. Yet the glovemaker’s child could hear birdsong all around her. There was a long dark corridor with a sound of rushing water as if some dark sea or river lay at the end of it. From the windows of some rooms she saw the city of Newcastle, but from others she saw a different city entirely and others shewed only high, wild moors and a cold blue sky.

She saw many staircases winding up inside the house, great staircases at first, which grew rapidly narrower and more twisting as she mounted higher in the house, until at the top they were only such chinks and gaps in the masonry that a child might notice and a child could slip through. The last of these led to a little door of plain wood.

Having no reason to fear she pushed it open but what she found on the other side made her cry out. It seemed to her that a thousand, thousand birds thronged the air, so that there was neither daylight nor darkness but only a great confusion of black wings. A wind seemed to come to her from far away and she had the impression of immense space as if she had climbed up to the sky and found it full of ravens. The glovemaker’s child began to be very much afraid, but then she heard someone say her name. Instantly the birds disappeared and she found herself in a small room with bare stone walls and a bare stone floor. There was no furniture of any kind but, seated upon the floor, was a man who beckoned to her and called her by her name again and told her not to be afraid. He had long, ragged black hair and strange, ragged black clothes. There was nothing about him that suggested a king and the only symbol of his magicianship was the great silver dish of water at his side. The glovemaker’s daughter stayed by the man’s side for some hours until dusk, when he led her down through the house into the city to her home.

2
See Chapter 33, footnote 3.

3
Perhaps the eeriest tale told of John Uskglass’s return was that told by a Basque sailor, a survivor of the Spanish king’s great Armada. After his ship was destroyed by storms on the far northern coasts of England, the sailor and two companions had fled inland. They dared not go near villages, but it was winter and the frost was thick upon the ground; they feared they would die of the cold. As night came on they found an empty stone building on a high hillside of bare frozen earth. It was almost dark inside, but there were openings high in the wall that let in starlight. They lay down upon the earth floor and slept.

The Basque sailor dreamt that there was a king who watched him.

He woke. Above him dim shafts of grey light pierced the winter dark. In the shadows at the farthest end of the building he thought he saw a raised stone dais. As the light grew he saw something upon the dais: a chair or throne. A man sat upon the throne; a pale man with long black hair, wrapped in a black robe. Terrified, the man woke his fellows and shewed them the uncanny sight of the man who sat upon the throne. He seemed to watch them but he never moved, not so much as a finger; yet it did not occur to them to doubt that he was a living man. They stumbled to the door and ran away across the frozen fields.

The Basque sailor soon lost his companions: one man died of cold and heartbreak within the week; the other, determined to try and make his way back to the Bay of Biscay, began to walk south, and what became of him no one knows. But the Basque sailor stayed in Cumbria and was taken in by some farm people. He became a servant at that same farm and married a young girl from a neighbouring farm. All his life he told the story of the stone barn upon the high hills, and he was taught by his new friends and neighbours to believe that the man upon the black throne was the Raven King. The Basque sailor never found the stone barn again, and neither did his friends nor any of his children.

And all his life whenever he went into dark places he said, “I greet thee, Lord, and bid thee welcome to my heart" — in case the pale king with the long black hair should be seated in the darkness waiting for him. Across the expanses of northern England a thousand, thousand darknesses, a thousand, thousand places for the King to be. “I greet thee, Lord, and bid thee welcome to my heart.”

4
A Faire Wood Withering
(1444) by Peter Watershippe. This is a remarkably detailed description by a contemporary magician of how English magic declined after John Uskglass left England. In 1434 (the year of Uskglass’s departure) Watershippe was twenty-five, a young man just beginning to practise magic in Norwich.
A Faire Wood Withering
contains precise accounts of spells which were perfectly practicable as long as Uskglass and his fairy subjects remained in England but which no longer had any effect after their departure. Indeed it is remarkable how much of our knowledge of
Aureate
English magic comes from Watershippe.
A Faire Wood Withering
seems an angry book until one compares it with two of Watershippe’s later books:
A Defence of my Deeds Written while Wrongly Imprisoned by my Enemies in Newark Castle
(1459/60) and
Crimes of the False King
(written 1461?, published 1697, Penzance).

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Lord Liverpool’s London home, a quaint, old, rambling mansion which stood by the Thames.

Chapter 40: “Depend upon it; there is no such place.”

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The citizens of Brussels and the various armies occupying the city were intrigued to learn that they were now situated in a far-away country. Unfortunately they were much occupied in preparing for the coming battle (or in the case of the richer and more frivolous part of the population in preparing for the Duchess of Richmond’s ball that evening) and hardly any one had leisure just then to go and discover what the country was like or who its inhabitants were. Consequently for a long time it was unclear where precisely Strange had put Brussels on that June afternoon.

   In 1830 a trader and trapper named Pearson Denby was travelling through the Plains country. He was approached by a Lakota chief of his acquaintance, Man-afraid-of-the-Water. Man-afraid-of-the-Water asked if Denby could acquire for him some black lightning balls. Man-afraid-of-the-Water explained that he was intending to make war upon his enemies and had urgent need of the balls. He said that at one time he had had about fifty of the balls and he had always used them sparingly, but now they were all gone. Denby did not understand. He asked if Man-afraid-of-the-Water meant ammunition. No, said Man-afraid-of-the-Water. Like ammunition, but much bigger. He took Denby back to his camp and showed him a brass 5½.-inch howitzer made by the Carron Company of Falkirk in Scotland. Denby was astonished and asked how Man-afraid-of-the-Water had acquired the gun in the first place. Man-afraid-of-the-Water explained that in some nearby hills lived a tribe called the Half-Finished People. They had been created very suddenly one summer, but their Creator had only given them one of the skills men need to live: that of fighting. All other skills they lacked; they did not know how to hunt buffalo or antelope, how to tame horses or how to make houses for themselves. They could not even understand each other since their crazy Creator had given them four or five different languages. But they had had this gun, which they had traded to Manafraid-of-the-Water in exchange for food.