2 Jonathan Strange to John Segundus, Madrid, Aug. 20th, 1812.

“Whenever someone or something needs to be found, Lord Wellington is sure to ask me to conjure up a vision. It never works. The Raven King and the other Aureates had a sort of magic for finding things and persons. As I understand it they began with a silver basin of water. They divided the surface of the water into quarters with glittering lines of light. (By the by, John, I really cannot believe that you are having as much difficulty as you say in creating these lines. I cannot describe the magic any more clearly. They are the simplest things in the world!) The quarters represent Heaven, Hell, Earth and Faerie. It seems that you employ a spell of election to establish in which of these realms the person or thing you seek is to be found – but how it goes on from there I have not the least idea, and neither does Norrell. If I only had this magic! Wellington or his staff is forever giving me tasks which I cannot do or which I must leave half-completed because I do not have it. I feel the lack of it almost daily. Yet I have no time for experiment. And so, John, I would be infinitely obliged to you if you could spend a little time attempting this spell and let me know immediately if you have the least success.”

There is nothing in any of John Segundus’s surviving papers to suggest that he had any success in his attempts to retrieve this magic. However in the autumn of 1814 Strange realised that a passage in Paris Ormskirk’s Revelations of Thirty-Six Other Worlds – long thought to be a description of a shepherd’s counting rhyme – was in fact a somewhat garbled version of precisely this spell. By late 1814 both Strange and Mr Norrell were performing this magic with confidence.

3 Strange knew of it as a piece of magic done by the Raven King. Most of the King’s magic was mysterious, beautiful, subtle, and so it comes as some surprize to us to learn that he should have employed any spell so brutal.

In the mid-thirteenth century several of the King’s enemies were attempting to form an alliance against him. Most of its members were known to him: the King of France was one, the King of Scotland another, and there were several disaffected fairies who gave themselves grandiose titles and who may, or may not, have governed the vast territories they claimed. There were also other personages more mysterious, but even greater. The King had for most of his reign been on good terms with most angels and demons, but now it was rumoured that he had quarrelled with two: Zadkiel who governs mercy and Alrinach who governs shipwreck.

The King does not seem to have been greatly worried by the activities of the alliance. But he became more interested when certain magical portents seemed to shew that one of his own noblemen had joined with them and was plotting against him. The man he suspected was Robert Barbatus, Earl of Wharfdale, a man so known for his cunning and manipulative ways that he was nicknamed the Fox. In the King’s eyes there was no greater crime than betrayal.