Childermass did not seem much dismayed by Dr Foxcastle’s opinion of him, indeed he looked rather entertained by it. He said, “It is time, sirs. You should take your stations within the Church. You would be sorry, I am sure, to miss anything when so much hangs upon it.”

It was twenty minutes past the hour and gentlemen of the York society were already filing into the Cathedral by the door in the south transept. Several looked about them before going inside, as if taking a last fond farewell of a world they were not quite sure of seeing again.

3
The stones of York

February 1807

A great old church in the depths of winter is a discouraging place at the best of times; the cold of a hundred winters seems to have been preserved in its stones and to seep out of them. In the cold, dank, twilight interior of the Cathedral the gentlemen of the York society were obliged to stand and wait to be astonished, without any assurance that the surprize when it came would be a pleasant one.

Mr Honeyfoot tried to smile cheerfully at his companions, but for a gentleman so practised in the art of a friendly smile it was a very poor attempt.

Upon the instant bells began to toll. Now these were nothing more than the bells of St Michael-le-Belfrey telling the half hour, but inside the Cathedral they had an odd, far-away sound like the bells of another country. It was not at all a cheerful sound. The gentlemen of the York society knew very well how bells often went with magic and in particular with the magic of those unearthly beings, fairies; they knew how, in the old days, silvery bells would often sound just as some Englishman or Englishwoman of particular virtue or beauty was about to be stolen away by fairies to live in strange, ghostly lands for ever. Even the Raven King – who was not a fairy, but an Englishman – had a somewhat regrettable habit of abducting men and women and taking them to live with him in his castle in the Other Lands.¹ Now, had you and I the power to seize by magic any human being that took our fancy and the power to keep that person by our side through all eternity, and had we all the world to chuse from, then I dare say our choice might fall on someone a little more captivating than a member of the Learned Society of York Magicians, but this comforting thought did not occur to the gentlemen inside York Cathedral and several of them began to wonder how angry Dr Foxcastle’s letter had made Mr Norrell and they began to be seriously frightened.

As the sounds of the bells died away a voice began to speak from somewhere high up in the gloomy shadows above their heads. The magicians strained their ears to hear it. Many of them were now in such a state of highly-strung nervousness that they imagined that instructions were being given to them as in a fairy-tale. They thought that perhaps mysterious prohibitions were being related to them. Such instructions and prohibitions, the magicians knew from the fairy-tales, are usually a little queer, but not very difficult to conform to – or so it seems at first sight. They generally follow the style of: “Do not eat the last candied plum in the blue jar in the corner cupboard,” or “Do not beat your wife with a stick made from wormwood.” And yet, as all fairy-tales relate, circumstances always conspire against the person who receives the instructions and they find themselves in the middle of doing the very thing that was forbidden to them and a horrible fate is thereby brought upon their heads.