Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

by Susanna Clarke

and the pleasant female domestic chat, which the gentlemen of the York society affected to despise so much, and which was in truth the sweet and mild refrain in the music of their ordinary lives, was absent.

They must understand that in an old Cathedral town the great old church is not one building among many; it is the building – different from all others in scale, beauty and solemnity. Even in modern times when an old Cathedral town may have provided itself with all the elegant appurtenances of civic buildings, assembly and meeting rooms (and York was well-stocked with these) the Cathedral rises above them – a witness to the devotion of our forefathers. It is as if the town contains within itself something larger than itself.

Such were Mr Segundus’s thoughts as he entered the Close and stood before the great brooding blue shadow of the Cathedral’s west face.

cold. The room changes with the season: he does not. Three tall windows open on a view of English countryside which is tranquil in spring, cheerful in summer, melancholy in autumn and gloomy in winter – just as English landscape should be.

Childermass assured him that the time was propitious and Childermass knew the world. Childermass knew what games the children on street-corners are playing – games that all other grown-ups have long since forgotten. Childermass knew what old people by firesides are thinking of, though no one has asked them in years. Childermass knew what young men hear in the rattling of the drums and the tooting of the pipes that makes them leave their homes and go to be soldiers – and he knew the half-eggcupful of glory and the barrelful of misery that await them. Childermass could look at a smart attorney in the street and tell you what he had in his coat-tail pockets. And all that Childermass knew made him smile; and some of what he knew made him laugh out loud; and none of what he knew wrung from him so much as ha’pennyworth of pity.

And how to describe a London party? Candles in lustres of cut-glass are placed everywhere about the house in dazzling profusion; elegant mirrors triple and quadruple the light until night outshines day; many-coloured hot-house fruits are piled up in stately pyramids upon white-clothed tables; divine creatures, resplendent with jewels, go about the room in pairs, arm in arm, admired by all who see them. Yet the heat is over-powering, the pressure and noise almost as bad; there is nowhere to sit and scarce anywhere to stand. You may see your dearest friend in another part of the room; you may have a world of things to tell him – but how in the world will you ever reach him? If you are fortunate then perhaps you will discover him later in the crush and shake his hand as you are both hurried past each other. Surrounded by cross, hot strangers, your chance of rational conversation is equal to what it would be in an African desert. Your only wish is to preserve your favourite gown from the worst ravages of the crowd. Every body complains of the heat and the suffocation. Every body declares it to be entirely insufferable. But if it is all misery for the guests, then what of the wretchedness of those who have not been invited? Our sufferings are nothing to theirs! And we may tell each other tomorrow that it was a delightful party.

But it was his eyes that were remarkable: large, well-shaped, dark and so very brilliant as to have an almost liquid appearance. They were fringed with the longest, darkest eyelashes. There were many little feminine touches about him that he had contrived for himself, but his eyes and eyelashes were the only ones which nature had given him.

He ordered a good dinner and went and sat down by the fire in a comfortable chair with a newspaper. But he soon discovered that comfort and tranquillity were poor substitutes for Miss Woodhope’s company and so he cancelled the dinner and went immediately to the house of Mr and Mrs Redmond in order to begin being unhappy as soon as possible.

Beyond the gate were a thousand pale pink roses and high, nodding cliffs of sunlit elm and ash and chestnut and the blue, blue sky.

Poor Stephen was assailed by miracles.

“I dare say Africa is a remarkably charming place,” said Mrs Brandy, who seemed determined to punish herself by sending Stephen immediately to Africa. “I have always heard that it is. With oranges and pineapples everywhere one looks, and sugar canes and chocolate trees.” She had laboured fourteen years in the grocery trade and had mapped out her world in its stock. She laughed bitterly. “It seems that I would fare very ill in Africa. What need have people of shops when they have only to stretch out their hand and pluck the fruit of the nearest tree? Oh, yes! I should be ruined in no time in Africa.” She snapped a thread between her teeth. “Not that I should not be glad to go tomorrow,” She poked the thread viciously into the needle’s innocent eye, “if any one were to ask me.”

“Would you go to Africa for my sake?” asked Stephen in surprize. She looked up. “I would go any where for your sake,” she said. “I thought you knew that.” They regarded one another unhappily.

could be disappointed, or awkward, or any of the things she had feared she would be when he at last came home, he looked around the room with a quick, half-ironic glance that she knew in an instant. Then he looked at her with the most familiar smile in the world and said, “I’m home.”

You always had your nose in some dusty old book.”

He touched his master’s arm to rouse him a little and England’s only two magicians took tea together for the last time.

When he awoke it was dawn. Or something like dawn. The light was watery, dim and incomparably sad. Vast, grey, gloomy hills rose up all around them and in between the hills there was a wide expanse of black bog. Stephen had never seen a landscape so calculated to reduce the onlooker to utter despair in an instant. “This is one of your kingdoms, I suppose, sir?” he said. “My kingdoms?” exclaimed the gentleman in surprize. “Oh, no! This is Scotland!”

The pattern of the pools had meaning. The pools had been written on to the fields by the rain. The pools were a magic worked by the rain, just as the tumbling of the black birds against the grey was a spell that the sky was working and the motion of grey-brown grasses was a spell that the wind made. Everything had meaning.

Mr Norrell was at least as susceptible to flattery as most men and he began to think that perhaps he was indeed doing something unusually virtuous. He extended his hand with the intention of patting Childermass’s hand in a friendly and condescending manner. However, upon meeting Childermass’s cold stare, he thought better of it, coughed and left the room.

On either hand empty moors the colour of a bruise stretched up to a dark sky that threatened snow.

It was towards evening and our two gondolas were as black as night and quite as melancholy. Yet the sky was the coldest, palest blue imaginable. There was no wind or hardly any, and the sea was nothing but the sky’s mirror. There were immeasurable spaces of still cold light above us and immeasurable spaces of still cold light beneath. But the city ahead of us received no illumination either from sky or lagoon, and appeared like a vast collection of shadow-towers and shadow-pinnacles, all pierced with tiny lights and set upon the shining water. As we entered Venice the water became crowded with scraps and rubbish – splinters of wood and hay, orange peels and cabbage stalks.

The sunlight was as cold and clear as the note struck by a knife on a fine wine-glass. In such a light the walls of the Church of Santa Maria Formosa were as white as shells or bones – and the shadows on the paving stones were as blue as the sea.

Though all the streets of Venice are melancholy, these streets had a melancholy that was quite distinct – as if Jewish sadness and Gentile sadness were made up according to different recipes.

But Dr Greysteel had come to Italy to see everything he could and saw no reason to make an exception of Hebrew gentlemen in their private apartments.

Every colour in the room had faded, or darkened, or done what it must until it was grey.

There was a silence. Or rather some moments passed filled with nothing but the breathing of fifty cats.

The box was small and oblong and apparently made of silver and porcelain. It was a beautiful shade of blue, but then again not exactly blue, it was more like lilac. But then again, not exactly lilac either, since it had a tinge of grey in it. To be more precise, it was the colour of heartache. But fortunately neither Miss Greysteel nor Aunt Greysteel had ever been much troubled by heartache and so they did not recognize it.

A lovely young Italian girl passed by. Byron tilted his head to a very odd angle, half-closed his eyes and composed his features to suggest that he was about to expire from chronic indigestion. Dr Greysteel could only suppose that he was treating the young woman to the Byronic profile and the Byronic expression.