“How long is a life?” he asked.

The gentleman with the thistle-down hair spread his hands in a gesture of the utmost candour. “How long would you like?”

Mr Norrell considered. “Let us suppose she had lived until she was ninety-four. Ninety-four would have been a good age. She is nineteen now. That would be another seventy-five years. If you were to bestow upon her another seventy-five years, then I see no reason why you should not have half of it.”

“Seventy-five years then,” agreed the gentleman with the thistle-down hair, “exactly half of which belongs to me.”

Mr Norrell regarded him nervously. “Is there any thing more we must do?” he asked. “Shall we sign something?”

“No, but I should take something of the lady’s to signify my claim upon her.”

“Take one of these rings,” suggested Mr Norrell, “or this necklace about her neck. I am sure I can explain away a missing ring or necklace.”

“No,” said the gentleman with the thistle-down hair. “It ought to be something … Ah! I know!”

Drawlight and Lascelles were seated in the drawing-room where Mr Norrell and Sir Walter Pole had first met. It was a gloomy enough spot. The fire burnt low in the grate and the candles were almost out. The curtains were undrawn and no one had put up the shutters. The rattle of the rain upon the windows was very melancholy.

“It is certainly a night for raising the dead,” remarked Mr Lascelles. “Rain and trees lash the window-panes and the wind moans in the chimney – all the appropriate stage effects, in fact. I am frequently struck with the play-writing fit and I do not know that tonight’s proceedings might not inspire me to try again – a tragi-comedy, telling of an impoverished minister’s desperate attempts to gain money by any means, beginning with a mercenary marriage and ending with sorcery. I should think it might be received very well. I believe I shall call it, ’Tis Pity She’s a Corpse.”

Lascelles paused for Drawlight to laugh at this witticism, but Drawlight had been put out of humour by the magician’s refusal to allow him to stay and witness the magic, and all he said was: “Where do you suppose they have all gone?”

“I do not know.”

“Well, considering all that you and I have done for them, I think we have deserved better than this! It is scarcely half an hour since they were so full of their gratitude to us. To have forgotten us so soon is very bad! And we have not been offered so much as a bit of cake since we arrived. I dare say it is rather too late for dinner – though I for one am famished to death!” He was silent a moment. “The fire is going out too,” he remarked.

“Then put some more coals on,” suggested Lascelles.

“What! And make myself all dirty?”

One by one all the candles went out and the light from the fire grew less and less until the Venetian paintings upon the walls became nothing but great squares of deepest black hung upon walls of a black that was slightly less profound. For a long time they sat in silence.