“No. Geoffrey said it gave him a cold, disdainful look and passed on.”

“Oh! Your footman was dreaming, Sir Walter. He was certainly dreaming,” said Mr Perceval.

“Or drunk,” offered Mr Canning.

“Yes, that occurred to me too. So naturally I asked Stephen Black,” said Sir Walter, “but Stephen is as foolish as the rest of them. I can scarcely get him to speak to me.”

“Well,” said Mr Canning, “you will not, I think, attempt to deny that there is something here that suggests magic? And is it not Mr Norrell’s business to explain what other people cannot? Send for Mr Norrell, Sir Walter!”

This was so reasonable that Sir Walter began to wonder why he had not thought of it himself. He had the highest opinion of his own abilities and did not think he would generally miss so obvious a connection. The truth was, he realized, that he did not really like magic. He had never liked it – not at the beginning when he had supposed it to be false and not now that it had proved to be real. But he could hardly explain this to the other Ministers – he who had persuaded them to employ a magician for the first time in two hundred years!

At half-past three he returned to Harley-street. It was the eeriest part of a winter day. Twilight was turning all the buildings and people to blurred, black nothingnesses while, above, the sky remained a dizzying silver-blue and was full of cold light. A winter sunset was painting a swathe of rose-colour and blood-colour at the end of all the streets – pleasing to the eyes but somehow chilling to the heart. As Sir Walter gazed from his carriage-window, he thought it fortunate that he was not in any way a fanciful person. Someone else might have been quite unsettled by the combination of the disagreeable task of consulting a magician and this queer, black-and-bloody dissolution of the London streets.

Geoffrey opened the door of no. 9 Harley-street and Sir Walter rapidly mounted the stairs. On the first floor he passed the Venetian drawing-room where her ladyship had been sitting that morning. A sort of presentiment made him look inside. At first it did not seem as though any body could be there. The fire was low in the grate, creating a sort of second twilight within the room. No body had lit a lamp or candle yet. And then he saw her.

She was sitting very upright in a chair by the window. Her back was towards him. Everything about her – chair, posture, even the folds of her gown and shawl – was precisely the same as when he had left her that morning.

The moment he reached his study, he sat down and wrote an urgent message to Mr Norrell.

Mr Norrell did not come immediately. An hour or two passed. At last he arrived with an expression of fixed calm upon his face. Sir Walter met him in the hall and described what had happened. He then proposed that they go upstairs to the Venetian drawing-room.