“Oh! certainly!” said Childermass. “But I am very much afraid, sir, that you must give up some of your habits of privacy. Retirement and seclusion are all very well in Yorkshire, but we are not in Yorkshire any more.”

“Yes, yes!” said Mr Norrell irritably. “I know that we are not. But that is not the question. The question is: what does this Drawlight want?”

“To have the distinction of being the first gentleman in London to make the acquaintance of a magician. That is all.”

But Mr Norrell was not to be reasoned out of his fears. He rubbed his yellow-white hands nervously together, and directed fearful glances into the shadowy corners of the room as though suspecting them of harbouring other Drawlights, all spying upon him. “He did not look like a scholar in those clothes,” he said, “but that is no guarantee of any thing. He wore no rings of power or allegiance but still …”

“I do not well understand you,” said Childermass. “Speak plainly.”

“Might he not have some skill of his own, do you suppose?” said Mr Norrell. “Or perhaps he has friends who are jealous of my success! Who are his associates? What is his education?”

Childermass smiled a long smile that went all up one side of his face. “Oh! You have talked yourself into a belief that he is the agent of some other magician. Well, sir, he is not. You may depend upon me for that. Far from neglecting your interests, after we received Mrs Godesdone’s letter I made some inquiries about the gentleman – as many, I dare say, as he has made about you. It would be an odd sort of magician, I think, that employed such a creature as he is. Besides, if such a magician had existed you would have long since found him out, would not you? – and discovered the means to part him from his books and put an end to his scholarship? You have done it before, you know.”

“You know no harm of this Drawlight then?”

Childermass raised an eyebrow and smiled his sideways smile. “Upon the contrary,” he said.

“Ah!” cried Mr Norrell, “I knew it! Well then, I shall certainly make a point of avoiding his society.”

“Why?” asked Childermass. “I did not say so. Have I not just told you that he is no threat to you? What is it to you that he is a bad man? Take my advice, sir, make use of the tool which is to hand.”

Then Childermass related to Mr Norrell what he had discovered about Drawlight: how he belonged to a certain breed of gentlemen, only to be met with in London, whose main occupation is the wearing of expensive and fashionable clothes; how they pass their lives in ostentatious idleness, gambling and drinking to excess and spending months at a time in Brighton and other fashionable watering places; how in recent years this breed seemed to have reached a sort of perfection in Christopher Drawlight. Even his dearest friends would have admitted that he possessed not a single good quality.¹