‘It’s Latin for light,’ he said. ‘They don’t teach Latin in secondary moderns any more?’

‘Not at my school they didn’t.’

‘Not to worry,’ said Nightingale. ‘I can tutor you in that as well.’

Lucky me, I thought.

‘Why use Latin?’ I asked. ‘Why not use English, or make up your own words?’

‘Lux, the spell you just did, is what we call a form,’ said Nightingale. ‘Each of the basic forms you learn has a name: Lux, Impello, Scindere – others. Once these become ingrained, you can combine the forms to create complex spells the way you combine words to create a sentence.’

‘Like musical notation?’ I asked.

Nightingale grinned. ‘Exactly like musical notation,’ he said.

‘So why not use musical notation?’

‘Because in the main library there are thousands of books detailing how to do magic, and all of them use the standard Latin forms,’ said Nightingale.

‘Presumably all this was invented by Sir Isaac?’ I asked.

‘The original forms are in the Principia Artes Magicis,’ said Nightingale. ‘There have been changes over the years.’

‘Who made the changes?’

‘People who can’t resist fiddling with things,’ said Nightingale. ‘People like you, Peter.’

So Newton, like all good seventeenth-century intellectuals, wrote in Latin because that was the international language of science, philosophy and, I found out later, upmarket pornography. I wondered if there was a translation.

‘Not of the Artes Magicis,’ said Nightingale.

‘Wouldn’t want the hoi polloi learning magic, would we?’

‘Quite,’ said Nightingale.

‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘In the other books, it’s not just the forms. Everything is written in Latin.’

‘Except for the stuff that’s in Greek and Arabic,’ said Nightingale.

‘How long does it take to learn all the forms?’ I asked.

‘Ten years,’ said Nightingale. ‘If you work at it.’

‘I’d better get on.’

‘Practise for two hours and then stop,’ said Nightingale. ‘Don’t do the spell again until at least six hours have passed.’

‘I’m not tired, you know,’ I said. ‘I can keep this up all day.’

‘If you overdo it there are consequences,’ said Nightingale.

I didn’t like the sound of that at all. ‘What kind of consequences?’

‘Strokes, brain haemorrhages, aneurysms …’

‘How do you know when you’ve overdone it?’

‘When you have a stroke, a brain haemorrhage or an aneurysm,’ said Nightingale.

I remembered Brandon Coopertown’s shrunken cauliflower brain, and Dr Walid saying, This is your brain on magic.

‘Thank you for the safety tip,’ I said.

‘Two hours,’ said Nightingale from the doorway. ‘Then meet in the study for your Latin lesson.’

I waited until he had gone before opening my hand and whispering, ‘Lux!’

This time the globe gave off a soft white light and no more heat than a sunny day.

Fuck me, I thought. I can do magic.

6 The Coach House

The Coach House