“Mrs Redmond! Henry!” cried Arabella. “Come quickly! See what Mr Strange has done!”

“But who in the world is he?” asked Strange, mystified. He lifted the mirror and looked under it, apparently with the idea that he might discover there a tiny gentleman in a grey coat, ready to be questioned. When the mirror was replaced upon the table the vision of the other room and the other man was still there. They could hear no sounds from the other room but the flames of the fire danced in the grate and the man, with his glinting spectacles on his nose, turned his head from one book to another.

“Why is he your enemy?” asked Arabella.

“I have not the least idea.”

“Do you owe him money, perhaps?” asked Mr Redmond.

“I do not think so.”

“He could be a banker. It looks a little like a counting house,” suggested Arabella.

Strange began to laugh. “Well, Henry, you can cease frowning at me. If I am a magician, I am a very indifferent one. Other adepts summon up fairy-spirits and long-dead kings. I appear to have conjured the spirit of a banker.”

Volume II
Jonathan Strange

“Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord
Wellington asked Strange. Strange frowned.
He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose
a magician might,” he admitted, “but a
gentleman never could.”

23
The Shadow House

July 1809

On a summer’s day in 1809 two riders were travelling along a dusty country lane in Wiltshire. The sky was of a deep, brilliant blue, and beneath it England lay sketched in deep shadows and in hazy reflections of the sky’s fierce light. A great horse-chestnut leant over the road and made a pool of black shadow, and when the two riders reached the shadow it swallowed them up so that nothing remained of them except their voices.

“… and how long will it be before you consider publication?” said one. “For you must, you know. I have been considering the matter and I believe it is the first duty of every modern magician to publish. I am surprized Norrell does not publish.”

“I dare say he will in time,” said the other. “As to my publishing, who would wish to read what I have written? These days, when Norrell performs a new miracle every week, I cannot suppose that the work of a purely theoretical magician would be of much interest to any body.”

“Oh! You are too modest,” said the first voice. “You must not leave every thing to Norrell. Norrell cannot do every thing.”

“But he can. He does,” sighed the second voice.

How pleasant to meet old friends! For it is Mr Honeyfoot and Mr Segundus. Yet why do we find them on horseback? – a kind of exercise which agrees with neither of them and which neither takes regularly, Mr Honeyfoot being too old and Mr Segundus too poor. And on such a day as this! So hot that it will make Mr Honeyfoot first sweat, and then itch, and then break out in red pimples; a day of such dazzling brightness that it is certain to bring on one of Mr Segundus’s headachs. And what are they doing in Wiltshire?