“The nameless slave! Well, that is me, sir, is it not? And this prophecy seems to tell how I will be a king!”

“Well, of course you are going to be a king! I have said so, and I am never wrong in these matters. But dearly as I love you, Stephen, this prophecy does not refer to you at all. Most of it is about the restoration of English magic, and the part you have just recited is not really a prophecy at all. The King is remembering how he came into his three kingdoms, one in England, one in Faerie, one in Hell. By the nameless slave he means himself. He was the nameless slave in Faerie, the little Christian child hidden in the brugh, brought there by a very wicked fairy who had stolen him away out of England.”

Stephen felt oddly disappointed, though he did not know why he should be. After all he did not wish to be king of anywhere. He was not English; he was not African. He did not belong anywhere. Vinculus’s words had briefly given him the sense of belonging to something, of being part of a pattern and of having a purpose. But it had all been illusory.

48
The Engravings

Late February–March 1816

“You are changed. I am quite shocked to see you.”

“Am I? You surprize me. I am perhaps a little thinner, but I am not aware of any other change.”

“No, it is in your face, your air, your … something.”

Strange smiled. Or rather he twisted something in his face and Sir Walter supposed that he was smiling. Sir Walter could not really recall what his smile had looked like before.

“It is these black clothes,” said Strange. “I am like a leftover piece of the funeral, condemned to walk about the Town, frightening people into thinking of their own mortality.”

They were in the Bedford coffee-house in Covent-garden, chosen by Sir Walter as a place where they had often been very merry in the past and which might therefore do something to cheer Strange’s spirits. But on such an evening as this even the Bedford was somewhat deficient in cheerfulness. Outside, a cold black wind was pulling people this way and that, and driving a thick black rain into their eyes. Inside, rooms full of damp, unhappy gentlemen were producing a kind of gloomy, domesticated fog, which the waiters were attempting to dispel by putting extra shovelsful of coals on the fire and getting extra glassesful of hot spiced wine into the gentlemen.

When Sir Walter had come into the room he had discovered Strange writing furiously in a little book. He nodded towards the book and remarked, “You have not given up magic then?”

Strange laughed.