The man said nothing. He regarded Childermass a moment longer and then, as if he had become bored with him, turned back to his examination of the body.

Childermass looked round for a horse or a carriage – some indication of how the man had got here. There was nothing. In all the wide moor there were only the two men, the horse, the corpse and the hawthorn tree.

“Yet there must be a carriage somewhere,” he thought. “There is not so much as a spot of mud on his coat and none on his boots. He looks as if he has just come fresh from his valet. Where are his servants?”

This was a discomfiting thought. Childermass doubted he would have much difficulty in overpowering this pale, thin, poetical-looking person, but a coachman and two or three stout footmen would be another matter entirely.

“Does the land hereabouts belong to you, sir?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“And where is your horse? Where is your carriage? Where are your servants?”

“I have no horse, John Childermass. I have no carriage. And only one of my servants is here.”

“Where?”

Without troubling to look up, the man raised his arm and pointed a thin, pale finger.

Childermass looked behind him in confusion. There was no one there. Just the wind blowing across the snowy tussocks. What did he mean? Was it the wind or the snow? He had heard of mediaeval magicians who claimed these and other natural forces as servants. Then comprehension dawned on him. “What? No, sir, you are mistaken! I am not your servant!”

“You boasted of it, not three days ago,” said the man.

There was only one person who had any claim to be Childermass’s master. Was this, in some mysterious fashion, Norrell? An aspect of Norrell? In the past, magicians had sometimes appeared in different forms according to the qualities which made up their character. Childermass tried to think what part of Gilbert Norrell’s character might suddenly manifest as a pale, handsome man with a peculiar accent and an air of great authority. He reflected that strange things had happened recently, but nothing as queer as that. “Sir!” he cried. “I have warned you! Let the body be!”

The man bent closer to Vinculus’s corpse. He plucked something out of his own mouth – a tiny pearl of light faintly tinged with rose and silver. He placed it in Vinculus’s mouth. The corpse shivered. It was not like the shudder of a sick man, nor yet like the shiver of a healthy one; it was like the shiver of a bare birch wood as spring breathes upon it.

“Move away from the body, sir!” cried Childermass. “I will not ask you again!”

The man did not even trouble to look up. He passed the tip of his finger over the body as if he were writing upon it.