Mr Norrell looked at each gentleman in turn. “Yes,” he said in a frightened voice.

Lord Liverpool gave him a long, hard look. Then he said, “The matter shall not rest here, Mr Norrell. But whether it is Strange or not, one thing is clear. Great Britain already has a mad King; a mad magician would be the outside of enough. You have repeatedly asked for commissions; well, here is one. Prevent your pupil from returning to England!”

“But …” began Mr Norrell. Then he caught sight of Lascelles’s warning glance and fell silent.

Mr Norrell and Lascelles returned to Hanover-square. Mr Norrell went immediately to the library. Childermass was working at the table as before.

“Quick!” cried Mr Norrell, “I need a spell which no longer works!”

Childermass shrugged. “There are thousands. Chauntlucet;⁴ Daedalus’s Rose;⁵ the Unrobed Ladies;⁶ Stokesey’s Vitrification⁷ …”

“Stokesey’s Vitrification! Yes! I have a description of that!”

Mr Norrell rushed to a shelf and pulled out a book. He searched for a page, found it and looked hurriedly around the room. On a table near the fireside stood a vase of mistletoe, ivy, red-berried holly and some sprays of a winter-flowering shrub. He fixed his eye upon the vase and began to mutter to himself.

All the shadows in the room did something odd, something not easy to describe or explain. It was as if they all turned and faced another way. Even when they were motionless again Childermass and Lascelles would have been hard pressed to say whether they were the same as they had been or not.

Something fell out of the vase and shattered upon the table with a tinkling sound.

Lascelles went over to the table and examined it. One of the branches of holly had been turned into glass. The glass branch had been too heavy for the vase and so it had toppled out; two or three unbroken holly leaves lay on the table.

“That spell has not worked for almost four hundred years,” said Mr Norrell. “Watershippe specifically mentions it in A Faire Wood Withering as one of the spells which worked in his youth and was entirely ineffective by the time he was twenty!”

“Your superior skill …” began Lascelles.

“My superior skill has nothing to do with it!” snapped Mr Norrell. “I cannot do magic that is not there. Magic is returning to England. Strange has found a way to bring it back.”

“Then I was right, was I not?” said Lascelles. “And our first task is to prevent him returning to England. Succeed in that and Lord Liverpool will forgive a great many other things.”

Mr Norrell thought for a moment. “I can prevent him arriving by sea,” he said.

“Excellent!” said Lascelles. Then something in the way Mr Norrell had phrased this last statement gave him pause. “Well, he is scarcely likely to come any other way. He cannot fly!” He gave a light laugh at the idea. Then another thought struck him. “Can he?”