“Yes, yes! Very well! But your companion saw the fairy. Why?”

“Oh, I know why. There was something very particular about him which enabled him to see fairies.”

“Well, can you not use that somehow?”

Strange considered this. “I do not see how. It is a mere chance like one man having blue eyes and another brown.” He was silent a moment, musing. “But then again perhaps not. Perhaps you are right. It is not such a very outlandish notion when you come to consider it. Think of the Aureates! Some of them were the fairies’ near-neighbours in wildness and madness! Think of Ralph Stokesey and his fairy-servant, Col Tom Blue! When Stokesey was a young man there was scarcely any thing to chuse between them. Perhaps I am too tame, too domestic a magician. But how does one work up a little madness? I meet with mad people every day in the street, but I never thought before to wonder how they got mad. Perhaps I should go wandering on lonely moors and barren shores. That is always a popular place for lunatics – in novels and plays at any rate. Perhaps wild England will make me mad.”

Strange got up and went to the drawing-room window, as if he expected to be able to survey wild England from there – although all it shewed was the very ordinary sight of Soho-square in a thick and mizzling rain. “I think you may have hit upon something, Pole.”

“I?” cried Sir Walter, somewhat alarmed at where his remarks appeared to be leading, “I meant to suggest no such thing!”

“But, Mr Strange,” reasoned the gentle Lord Portishead, “you cannot possibly mean this. For a man of such erudition as you possess to propose that he become a … a vagabond. Well, sir, it is a very shocking thought.”

Strange crossed his arms and took another look at Soho-square and said, “Well, I shall not go today.” And then he smiled his self-mocking smile and looked almost like his old self. “I shall wait,” he said, “until it stops raining.”⁴

50
The History and Practice of English Magic

April to late September 1816

Strange’s friends were glad to be assured that he did not intend to give up his comfortable houses, his good income and his servants to go and be a gypsy in the wind and the rain, but still very few of them were entirely comfortable with his new practices. They had good reason to fear that he had lost all restraint and was prepared to indulge in any and all kinds of magic. His promise to Arabella kept him from the King’s Roads for the present, but all Sir Walter’s warnings could not prevent him from continually talking and wondering about John Uskglass and his fairy subjects.

By the end of April, Strange’s three new pupils, the Honourable Henry Purfois, William Hadley-Bright and Tom Levy, the dancing-master, had all taken lodgings near Soho-square. Every day they attended Strange’s house to study magic. In the intervals between directing their magical education Strange worked at his book and performed magic on behalf of the Army and the East India Company. He had also received applications for assistance from the Corporation of Liverpool and the Society of Merchant Venturers in Bristol.