Stephen was unaccustomed to hard labour and he was soon out of breath and every part of him ached. Fortunately, he had not cut down very far when he struck something much harder than the peat.

“Ah!” cried the gentleman, very well pleased. “That is the moss oak. Excellent! Now, Stephen, cut around it!”

This was easier said than done. Even when Stephen had cut away enough of the peat to expose the moss-oak to the air it was still very difficult to see what was oak and what was peat – both were black, wet and oozing. He dug some more and he began to suspect that, though the gentleman called it a log, this was in fact an entire tree.

“Could you not lift it out by magic, sir?” he asked.

“Oh, no! No, indeed! I shall ask a great deal of this wood and therefore it is incumbent upon us to make its passage from the bog into the wider world as easy as we can! Now, do you take this axe, Stephen, and cut me a piece as tall as my collar-bone. Then with the spit and the tusker we will prise it out!”

It took them three more hours to accomplish the task. Stephen chopped the wood to the size the gentleman had asked for, but the task of manoeuvring it out of the bog was more than one man could manage and the gentleman was obliged to descend into the muddy, stinking hole with him and they strained and pulled and heaved together.

When at last they had finished, Stephen threw himself upon the ground in a condition of the utmost exhaustion, while the gentleman stood, regarding his log with delight.

“Well,” he said, “that was a great deal easier than I had imagined.”

Stephen suddenly found himself once more in the upper room of the Jerusalem Coffee-house. He looked at himself and at the gentleman. Their good clothes were in tatters and they were covered from head to foot with bog-mud.

For the first time he was able to see the log of moss-oak properly. It was as black as sin, extremely fine-grained, and it oozed black water.

“We must dry it out before it will be fit for any thing,” he said.

“Oh, no!” said the gentleman with a brilliant smile. “For my purposes it will do very well as it is!”

43
The curious adventure of Mr Hyde

December 1815

One morning in the first week of December Jeremy knocked upon the door of Strange’s library at Ashfair House and said that Mr Hyde begged the favour of a few minutes’ conversation with him.

Strange was not best pleased to be interrupted. Since he had been in the country he had grown almost as fond of quiet and solitude as Norrell. “Oh, very well!” he muttered.

Delaying only to write another paragraph, look up three or four things in a biography of Valentine Greatrakes, blot his paper, correct some spellings and blot his paper again, he went immediately to the drawing-room.