“Is this truly Lost-hope?” asked the person who had once been Stephen Black.

“Yes, grandfather.”

“But I do not understand. Lost-hope was a great mansion. This is …” The person who had once been Stephen Black paused. “I do not have a word for what this is.”

“This is a brugh, grandfather! This is the world beneath the hill. Lost-hope is changing! The old King is dead. The new King approaches! And at his approach the world sheds its sorrow. The sins of the old King dissolve like morning mist! The world assumes the character of the new. His virtues fill up the wood and the wold!”

“The new King?” The person who had once been Stephen Black looked down at his own hands. In one was the sceptre and in the other the orb.

The fairy smiled at him, as if wondering why he should be surprized. “The changes you wrought here far surpass any thing you did in England.”

They passed through the opening into a great hall. The new King sat down upon an ancient throne. A crowd of people came and gathered around him. Some faces he knew, others were unfamiliar to him, but he suspected that this was because he had never seen them as they truly were before. For a long time he was silent.

“This house,” he told them at last, “is disordered and dirty. Its inhabitants have idled away their days in pointless pleasures and in celebrations of past cruelties – things that ought not to be remembered, let alone celebrated. I have often observed it and often regretted it. All these faults, I shall in time set right.”¹

The moment the spell took effect a great wind blew through Hurtfew. Doors banged in the Darkness; black curtains billowed out in black rooms; black papers were swept from black tables and made to dance. A bell – taken from the original Abbey long ago and since forgotten – rang frantically in a little turret above the stables.

In the library, visions appeared in mirrors and clock-faces. The wind blew the curtains apart and visions appeared in the windows too. They followed thick and fast upon one another, almost too rapid to comprehend. Mr Norrell saw some that seemed familiar: the shattered branch of holly in his own library at Hanover-square; a raven flying in front of St Paul’s Cathedral so that for a moment it was the living embodiment of the Raven-in-Flight; the great black bed in the inn at Wansford. But others were entirely strange to him: a hawthorn tree; a man crucified upon a thicket; a crude wall of stones in a narrow valley; an unstoppered bottle floating on a wave.

Then all the visions disappeared, except for one. It filled one of the tall library windows, but what it was a vision of, Mr Norrell was at a loss to know. It resembled a large, perfectly round, black stone of almost impossible brilliance and glossiness, set into a thin ring of rough stone and mounted upon what appeared to be a black hillside. Mr Norrell thought of it as a hillside because it bore some resemblance to a moor where the heather is all burnt and charred – except that this hillside was not the black of burnt things, it was the black of wet silk or well-shone leather. Suddenly the stone did something – it moved or spun. The movement was almost too quick to grasp but Mr Norrell was left with the sickening impression that it had blinked.