Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (41 page)

"Has he a cat?" suggested Arabella. "He should get a cat."

"Oh, but that is quite impossible! He hates cats even more than mice. He told me that if he is ever so unlucky as to find himself in the same room as a cat, then he is sure to be all over red pimples within an hour."

It was Mr Norrell's sincere wish to educate his pupil thoroughly, but the habits of secrecy and dissimulation which he had cultivated all his life were not easily thrown off. On a day in December, when snow was falling in large, soft flakes from heavy, greenish- grey clouds, the two magicians were seated in Mr Norrell's library. The slow drifting motion of the snow outside the windows, the heat of the fire and the effects of a large glass of sherry-wine which he had been so ill-advised as to accept when Mr Norrell offered it, all combined to make Strange very heavy and sleepy. His head was supported upon his hand and his eyes were almost closing.

Mr Norrell was speaking. "Many magicians," he said, steepling his hands, "have attempted to confine magical powers in some physical object. It is not a difficult operation and the object can be any thing the magician wishes. Trees, jewels, books, bullets, hats have all been employed for this purpose at one time or another." Mr Norrell frowned hard at his fingertips. "By placing some of his power in whatever object he chuses, the magician hopes to make himself secure from those wanings of power, which are the inevitable result of illness and old age. I myself have often been severely tempted to do it; my own skills can be quite overturned by a heavy cold or a bad sore throat. Yet after careful consideration I have concluded that such divisions of power are most ill-advised. Let us examine the case of rings. Rings have long been considered peculiarly suitable for this sort of magic by virtue of their small size. A man may keep a ring continually upon his finger for years, without exciting the smallest comment — which would not be the case if he shewed the same attachment to a book or a pebble — and yet there is scarcely a magician in history who, having once committed some of his skill and power to a magic ring, did not somehow lose that ring and was put to a world of trouble to get it back again. Take for example, the twelfth-century Master of Nottingham, whose daughter mistook his ring of power for a common bauble, put it on her finger, and went to St Matthew's Fair. This negligent young woman . . ."

"What?" cried Strange, suddenly.

"What?" echoed Mr Norrell, startled.

Strange gave the other gentleman a sharp, questioning look. Mr Norrell gazed back at him, a little frightened.

"I beg your pardon, sir," said Strange, "but do I understand you aright? Are we speaking of magical powers that are got by some means into rings, stones, amulets — things of that sort?"

Mr Norrell nodded cautiously.

"But I thought you said," said Strange. "That is," he made some effort to speak more gently, "I
thought
that you told me some weeks ago that magic rings and stones were a fable."

Mr Norrell stared at his pupil in alarm.

"But perhaps I was mistaken?" said Strange.

Mr Norrell said nothing at all.

"I was mistaken," said Strange again. "I beg your pardon, sir, for interrupting you. Pray, continue."

But Mr Norrell, though he appeared greatly relieved that Strange had resolved the matter, was no longer equal to continuing and instead proposed that they have some tea; to which Mr Strange agreed very readily.
⁴

That evening Strange told Arabella all that Mr Norrell had said and all that he, Strange, had said in reply.

"It was the queerest thing in the world! He was so frightened at having been found out, that he could think of nothing to say. It fell to me to think of fresh lies for him to tell me. I was obliged to conspire with him against myself."

"But I do not understand," said Arabella. "Why should he contradict himself in this odd way?"

"Oh! He is determined to keep some things to himself. That much is obvious — and I suppose he cannot always remember what is to be a secret and what is not. You remember that I told you there are gaps among the books in his library? Well, it seems that the very day he accepted me as his pupil, he ordered five shelves to be emptied and the books sent back to Yorkshire, because they were too dangerous for me to read."

"Good Lord! However did you find that out?" asked Arabella, much surprized.

"Drawlight and Lascelles told me. They took great pleasure in it."

"Ill-natured wretches!"

Mr Norrell was most disappointed to learn that Strange's education must be interrupted for a day or two while he and Arabella sought for a house to live in. "It is his wife that is the problem," Mr Norrell explained to Drawlight, with a sigh. "Had he been a single man, I dare say he would not have objected to coming and living here with me."

Drawlight was most alarmed to hear that Mr Norrell had entertained such a notion and, in case it were ever revived, he took the precaution of saying, "Oh, but sir! Think of your work for the Admiralty and the War Office, so important and so confidential! The presence of another person in the house would impede it greatly."

"Oh, but Mr Strange is going help me with that!" said Mr Norrell. "It would be very wrong of me to deprive the country of Mr Strange's talents. Mr Strange and I went down to the Admiralty last Thursday to wait upon Lord Mulgrave. I believe that Lord Mulgrave was none too pleased at first to see that I had brought Mr Strange . . ."

"That is because his lordship is accustomed to your superior magic! I dare say he thinks that a mere
amateur
- however talented - has no business meddling with Admiralty matters."

". . . but when his lordship heard Mr Strange's ideas for defeating the French by magic he turned to me with a great smile upon his face and said, `You and I, Mr Norrell, had grown stale. We wanted new blood to stir us up, did we not?' "

"Lord Mulgrave said
that
? To
you
?" said Drawlight. "That was abominably rude of him. I hope, sir, that you gave him one of your looks!"

"What?" Mr Norrell was engrossed in his own tale and had no attention to spare for whatever Mr Drawlight might be saying. " `Oh!' I said to him - I said, `I am quite of your mind, my lord. But only wait until you have heard the rest of what Mr Strange has to say. You have not heard the half of it!' "

It was not only the Admiralty - the War Office and all the other departments of Government had reason to rejoice at the advent of Jonathan Strange. Suddenly a good many things which had been difficult before were made easy. The King's Ministers had long treasured a plan to send the enemies of Britain bad dreams. The Foreign Secretary had first proposed it in January 1808 and for over a year Mr Norrell had industriously sent the Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte a bad dream each night, as a result of which nothing had happened. Buonaparte's empire had not foundered and Buonaparte himself had ridden into battle as coolly as ever. And so eventually Mr Norrell was instructed to leave off. Privately Sir Walter and Mr Canning thought that the plan had failed because Mr Norrell had no talent for creating horrors. Mr Canning complained that the nightmares Mr Norrell had sent the Emperor (which chiefly concerned a captain of Dragoons hiding in Buonaparte's wardrobe) would scarcely frighten his children's governess let alone the conqueror of half of Europe. For a while he had tried to persuade the other Ministers that they should commission Mr Beckford, Mr Lewis and Mrs Radcliffe to create dreams of vivid horror that Mr Norrell could then pop into Buonaparte's head. But the other Ministers considered that to employ a magician was one thing, novelists were quite another and they would not stoop to it.

With Strange the plan was revived. Strange and Mr Canning suspected that the wicked French Emperor was proof against such insubstantial evils as dreams, and so they decided to begin this time with his ally, Alexander, the Emperor of Russia. They had the advantage of a great many friends at Alexander's court: Russian nobles who had made a great deal of money selling timber to Britain and were anxious to do so again, and a brave and ingenious Scottish lady who was the wife of Alexander's valet.

On learning that Alexander was a curiously impressionable person much given to mystical religion, Strange decided to send him a dream of eerie portents and symbols. For seven nights in succession Alexander dreamt a dream in which he sat down to a comfortable supper with Napoleon Buonaparte at which they were served some excellent venison soup. But no sooner had the Emperor tasted the soup, than he jumped up and cried, "J'ai une faim qui ne saurait se satisfaire de potage."
⁵
whereupon he turned into a she-wolf which ate first Alexander's cat, then his dog, then his horse, then his pretty Turkish mistress. And as the she-wolf set to work to eat up more of Alexander's friends and relations, her womb opened and disgorged the cat, dog, horse, Turkish mistress, friends, relations, etc. again, but in horrible misshapen forms. And as she ate she grew; and when she was as big as the Kremlin, she turned, heavy teats swaying and maw all bloody, intent on devouring all of Moscow.

"There can be nothing dishonourable in sending him a dream which tells him that he is wrong to trust Buonaparte and that Buonaparte will betray him in the end," explained Strange to Arabella. "I might, after all, send him a letter to say as much. He
is
wrong and nothing is more certain than that Buonaparte
will
betray him in the end."

Word soon came from the Scottish lady that the Russian Emperor had been exceedingly troubled by the dreams and that, like King Nebuchadnezzar in the Bible, he had sent for astrologers and soothsayers to interpret it for him - which they very soon did.

Strange then sent more dreams to the Russian Emperor. "And," he told Mr Canning, "I have taken your advice and made them more obscure and difficult of interpretation that the Emperor's sorcerers may have something to do."

The indefatigable Mrs Janet Archibaldovna Barsukova was soon able to convey the satisfying news that Alexander neglected the business of government and war, and sat all day musing upon his dreams and discussing them with astrologers and sorcerers; and that whenever a letter came for him from the Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte he was seen to turn pale and shudder.

1 Naturally, Mr Norrell based his syllabus upon the classifications contained in
De Generibus Artium Magicarum Anglorum
by Francis Sutton-Grove.

2 Richard Chaston (1620-95). Chaston wrote that men and fairies both contain within them a faculty of reason and a faculty of magic. In men reason is strong and magic is weak. With fairies it is the other way round: magic comes very naturally to them, but by human standards they are barely sane.

3
The Blue Book: being an attempt to expose the most prevalent lies and common deceptions practised by English magicians upon the King's subjects and upon each other
, by Valentine Munday, pub. 1698.

4 The story of the Master of Nottingham's daughter (to which Mr Norrell never returned) is worth recounting and so I set it down here.

The fair to which the young woman repaired was held on St Matthew's Feast in Nottingham. She spent a pleasant day, going about among the booths, making purchases of linens, laces and spices. Sometime during the afternoon she happened to turn suddenly to see some Italian tumblers who were behind her and the edge of her cloak flew out and struck a passing goose. This bad-tempered fowl ran at her, flapping its wings and screaming. In her surprize she dropt her father's ring, which fell into the goose's open gullet and the goose, in
its
surprize, swallowed it. But before the Master of Nottingham's daughter could say or do any thing the gooseherd drove the goose on and both disappeared into the crowd.

The goose was bought by a man called John Ford who took it back to his house in the village of Fiskerton and the next day his wife, Margaret Ford, killed the goose, plucked it and drew out its innards. In its stomach she found a heavy silver ring set with a crooked piece of yellow amber. She put it down on a table near three hens' eggs that had been gathered that morning.

Immediately the eggs began to shake and then to crack open and from each egg something marvellous appeared. From the first egg came a stringed instrument like a viol, except that it had little arms and legs, and played sweet music upon itself with a tiny bow. From the next egg emerged a ship of purest ivory with sails of fine white linen and a set of silver oars. And from the last egg hatched a chick with strange red-and-gold plumage. This last was the only wonder to survive beyond the day. After an hour or two the viol cracked like an eggshell and fell into pieces and by sunset the ivory ship had set sail and rowed away through the air; but the bird grew up and later started a fire which destroyed most of Grantham. During the conflagration it was observed bathing itself in the flames. From this circumstance it was presumed to be a phoenix.

When Margaret Ford realized that a magic ring had somehow fallen into her possession, she was determined to do magic with it. Unfortunately she was a thoroughly malicious woman, who tyrannized over her gentle husband, and spent long hours pondering how to revenge herself upon her enemies. John Ford held the manor of Fiskerton, and in the months that followed he was loaded with lands and riches by greater lords who feared his wife's wicked magic.

Word of the wonders performed by Margaret Ford soon reached Notting-ham, where the Master of Nottingham lay in bed waiting to die. So much of his power had gone into the ring that the loss of it had made him first melancholy, then despairing and finally sick. When news of his ring finally came he was too ill to do any thing about it.

His daughter, on the other hand, was thoroughly sorry for bringing this misfortune on her family and thought it her duty to try and get the ring back; so without telling any one what she intended she set off along the riverbank to the village of Fiskerton.