“This is the person you wish me to see?” said a woman’s voice. There was something odd about it, as if it were coming from two places at once, as if there were an echo. “But I know this person! He is the magician’s servant! He is …”

“I am the person your ladyship shot,” said Childermass and he opened his eyes.

He saw not one woman, but two – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he saw the same woman doubled. Both sat in the same posture, looking up at him. They occupied the same space, so that he had the same giddy feeling in looking at her as he had had walking through the corridors.

One version of Lady Pole sat in the house in Yorkshire; she wore an ivory-coloured morning dress and regarded him with calm indifference. The other version was fainter – more ghostly. She sat in the gloomy, labyrinthine house, dressed in a blood-red evening gown. There were jewels or stars in her dark hair and she regarded him with fury and hatred.

Mr Segundus pulled Childermass to the right. “Stand just here!” he said, excitedly. “Now close one eye! Can you see it? Observe! A red-and-white rose where her mouth ought to be.”

“The magic affects us differently,” said Childermass. “I see something very strange, but I do not see that.”

“You are very bold to come here,” said both versions of Lady Pole, addressing Childermass, “considering who you are and whom you represent.”

“I am not here on Mr Norrell’s business. To own the truth I am not entirely sure who it is I represent. I think it is Jonathan Strange. It is my belief that he sent me a message – and I think it was about your ladyship. But the messenger was prevented from reaching me and the message was lost. Do you know, your ladyship, what Mr Strange might have wished to tell me about you?”

“Yes,” said both versions of Lady Pole.

“Will you tell me what it is?”

“If I speak,” they said, “I shall speak nothing but madness.”

Childermass shrugged his shoulders. “I have passed twenty years in the society of magicians. I am accustomed to it. Speak.”

So she (or they) began. Immediately Mr Segundus took a memorandum book out of a pocket of his night-gown and began to scribble notes. But, in Childermass’s eyes, the two versions of Lady Pole were no longer speaking as one. The Lady Pole who sat in Starecross Hall told a tale about a child who lived near Carlisle,2 but the woman in the blood-red gown seemed to be telling quite a different story. She wore a fierce expression and emphasized her words with passionate gestures – but what she said Childermass could not tell; the whimsical tale of the Cumbrian child drowned it out.