Lascelles looked inquiringly at him.

“Easby Abbey was one of the foundations of the Raven King,” explained Mr Norrell.

“As was Hurtfew,” added Childermass.

“Indeed!” said Lascelles in surprize.2 “I confess that after all you have said about him, I am surprized that you live in a house so closely connected to him.”

“You do not understand,” said Mr Norrell, irritably. “We are speaking of Yorkshire, of John Uskglass’s Kingdom of Northern England where he lived and ruled for three hundred years. There is scarcely a village, scarcely a field even, that does not have some close connexion with him.”

Childermass continued. “Findhelm’s family possessed something else that had once belonged to the Abbey – a treasure that had been given into their keeping by the last Abbot and which was handed down from father to son with the land.”

“A book of magic?” asked Norrell, eagerly.

“If what they told me in Yorkshire is true, it was more than a book of magic. It was The Book of Magic. A book written by the Raven King and set down in his own hand.”

There was a silence.

“Is this possible?” Lascelles asked Mr Norrell.

Mr Norrell did not answer. He was sitting deep in thought, wholly taken up with this new, and not altogether pleasant, idea.

At last he spoke, but it was more as if he were speaking his thoughts out loud, rather than answering Lascelles’s question. “A book belonging to Raven King or written by him is one of the great follies of English magic. Several people have imagined that they have found it or that they know where it is hidden. Some of them were clever men who might have written important works of scholarship but instead wasted their lives in pursuit of the King’s book. But that is not to say that such a book might not exist somewhere …”

“And if it did exist,” urged Lascelles, “and if it were found – what then?”

Mr Norrell shook his head and would not reply.

Childermass answered for him. “Then all of English magic would have to be reinterpreted in the light of what was found there.”

Lascelles raised an eyebrow. “Is this true?” he asked.

Mr Norrell hesitated and looked very much as if he would like to say that it was not.

“Do you believe that this was the King’s book?” Lascelles asked Childermass.