It was a revolutionary thought in this industrial age of logic and reason. It was difficult to maintain belief in what he’d just seen once the evidence had disappeared. It would be much simpler to dismiss the entire event as delusion, but he would not.

I am being tested, he realized. My night of opportunity has arrived, and I must find within myself the mettle to seize my chance.

Garrick’s faith had always been in bone, blood, and butchery—in things he could wrap his fingers around and throttle, substantial things. There was nothing ethereal about them, but this was something different, something extraordinary.

Magic.

Garrick had been fascinated by magic for as long as he could remember. As a boy he had accompanied his father to the Adelphi Theatre in London and watched from his perch in the wings as his old da swept the stage and kow-towed to the talent. Even then, this deference had angered the young Albert Garrick. Who were these people to treat his father with such disdain? Hacks, most of them—hacks, hags, and hams.

Among the ranks of the players there was a hierarchy. The singers were top dogs, then the comics, followed by the chorus pretties, and finally the conjurers and animal acts. Albert watched, fascinated, as the petty dramas played out every night backstage. Divas threw tantrums over dressing-room allocation or the size of opening-night bouquets. The young Garrick saw cheeks slapped, doors slammed, and vases hurled.

One particularly vain tenor, an Italian named Gallo, decided that the magic turn was not affording him due respect, and so he decided to ridicule the man at his birthday celebration in the Coal Hole public house on the Strand. Garrick witnessed the encounter from a stool beside the fireplace, and it made such an impression on the lad that he could recall the incident even now, almost forty years later.

The magician, the Great Lombardi, was built like a jockey, small and wiry, with a head that was too big for his body. He wore a pencil mustache that made him seem a touch austere, and a slick helmet of pomaded hair added to this impression. Lombardi was also Italian, but from the southern region of Puglia, which Gallo, a Roman, considered a land of peasants—an opinion he shared often and loudly. And, as Gallo was the star turn, it was understood that Lombardi would stomach the constant jibes. But Gallo should have known that Italian men are proud, and swallowed insults sit like bile in their stomachs.

On that particular evening, having treated the assembly to a raucous rendition of the “Drinking Song” from La Traviata, Gallo sauntered across the lounge to the magician and draped his meaty arm across the little man’s shoulders.

“Tell us, Lombardi, is it true that the poor of Puglia fight with the pigs for root vegetables?”

The crowd laughed and clinked glasses, encouraging Gallo to further mischief.