The Consolations of Arabella Strange

Dear Jonathan,

The Strangeites have tracked me down. The tiresome thing about magicians, apart from their tendency to vanish into a pillar of night, is the difficulty of hiding from them. I thought being out of England would offer me some cover, but someone was far-seeing enough to find this pensione in Genoa and make themselves appear in the Greysteels’ sitting room mirror.

The gentleman in question endeavoured to introduce himself, but I am afraid his name was lost beneath the entire family’s loud protests at the intrusion. He started to entreat my endorsement of some scheme or organisation or political campaign, and at all events my immediate return to England; but this speech, which had evidently been practised, was cut short when Dr Greysteel bid him a forceful adieu and turned the mirror to face the wall. The other looking glasses in the house have been given the same treatment. We are fortunate that he did not actually go on the King’s Roads and tumble into our sitting room in person.

They don’t like me, Jonathan. Your disciples wish you had taken a more public sort of a wife. They think that since I am here and you are not, I ought to be the guardian of your flame. There is no part of this plan that appeals to me. I don’t want a court, a prince, or intrigues; I’ve had many lifetimes’ worth of those. I should prefer some privacy, and an endeavour I can pursue for its own sake, and mine, and that of my friends. What endeavour? I wish I knew, but I am still learning to walk on solid ground.

This encounter is part of the reason, though not the whole reason, that we are leaving Italy. The house is in a flurry; the Italian staff are packing up the family’s belongings in the way that seems suitable to them, and Aunt Greysteel is following them from room to room re-packing everything after her own system. Dr Greysteel objects that they might as well dismiss the servants, but Aunt waves him away. She seems to consider herself to be helping, rather than simply doing all the work herself over again. I suppose she would rather look at a box and re-pack it than look at a room and decide how to put it in boxes in the first place.

Packing has lent a purpose to the house. Flora seems concerned that I not exert myself in trying to help, but I would rather be active than not, and some exercise during the day makes it easier to sleep at night. And there is something very engaging in working this way with things that are not my own. I have the clothes I arrived in, and my own handkerchief and shoes, but everything else there is to my name is back in England and I am living in borrowed clothes. Having nothing of my own to pack I am helping Flora, who brought many things with her and has purchased more since being in Italy. She has good taste. There are plenty of shops in Italy willing to sell cheap trinkets to visitors passing through, but she has selected a small number of mementoes that demonstrate she has a good eye for the well-crafted, and for the unusual. She has a mask from Venice, a hand-made leather mask and not a plaster one made from a mould. It is green and brown and fanciful, a mask for Carnival. I asked her to put it on so I could see it properly. She demurred; it was only a show piece, she said, nothing she intended ever to wear. I started to press my case, but it made me feel suddenly rather old—matronly, even—to be telling a younger woman what to do, and I desisted. I did tell her how much I liked the mask, and how it reminded me of a tree I was acquainted with at Lost-hope.

The real reason I treasure Flora is how calmly she accepts such things. She thanked me as if I had delivered an ordinary compliment, and then she asked for help finding a way to wrap the mask and pack it.

We are leaving Italy, as I said, but we are not going to England just yet. First we are bound for France. Flora’s mother, the doctor’s late wife, was French, as I think you know, and we are going to visit her relations in Gascony.

Sending this by linden tree again. Either the last time it worked, or someone saw the letter there and stole it. I find myself surprizingly sanguine on the question of which it was.

All my love,

Arabella

Dear Jonathan,

It’s the middle of the night, and the night has been bad. Lost-hope dogs me; old ghosts dog me. I wonder what became of Stephen. I miss Lady Pole and yet I don’t know if I could bear to see her again. I have written to her, but the Greysteels and I are so uncertain of our itinerary at present that I advised her not to respond just yet, as I could not provide a reliable direction. She might yet do it, but so far I have not heard from her.

These nights are long, and so timeless that I fear time has stopped. Then I think that perhaps time has stopped because you are near. Then I berate myself for childish wishful thinking, and look out the window for familiar stars, and force myself to admit you are very far away. In this way I torment myself until the sun finally rises, at just the time it should but always later than I wish.

Today was sunny, sociable, human. Tonight nothing is right or ever can be, and all the day’s happiness is undone.

I don’t want to work a spell to send this letter. I’m kissing it and putting it to my candle, to set it to burn on the fireplace grate. Either this will have some magical effect or it won’t, but I don’t wish to carry this letter around looking for a fortunate-seeming tree.

If it does reach you, if you can, I don’t ask for a reply—only some better dreams.

Arabella

Dear Jonathan,

We have arrived in France and settled in at the home of a cousin. Antoinette Greysteel seems to have been a rather complicated person. We pay our visits all piecemeal; her sister mustn’t know that we have been to see her brother, and her brother is happy to converse about everyone but refuses to see their uncle, who it seems is a priest and made a terrible row about Antoinette’s marrying an Englishman and a Protestant. That isn’t the only point of contention, but I can’t be sure of the others because my French is not always up to comprehending the conversation. Flora is very apologetic about bringing me along on visits where they all speak French and I can’t keep up, but it is not such a trial; I sit and think about the decor of the room and the temperature of the air and the sound of the fire if there is one, and then I think for a while about what we have eaten or are likely to eat, and when I last ate it if I ever did—the food here is largely quite good although something is always a little unfamiliar about it—and by the time I start wondering about absent friends, usually someone tries speaking English to me again, or it is time to drink coffee, or someone’s child appears to be shown off. They speak of me sometimes, I can tell. It is always easy to tell. Each new relative asks me whether I speak French, and I say not very much, and then they direct the rest of their questions to Flora, while stealing glances in my direction. The whole family shares the trait of wanting to appear to know things already, of refusing to be taken by surprize, and so when they hear my name it is impossible to tell if they know who I am—by which I suppose I mean, if they know who you are—and I don’t know how they feel about the connection if they are aware of it. I really have no idea what the French think of the English nowadays. In fact I have less of an idea after sitting in conversation with a number of French men and women than I had before. Political feeling seems to be quite muddled here; there is of course a king on the French throne again, and it is not at all clear to me whether the families I’ve met are relieved, grieved, or entirely indifferent about the state of their country’s government. I can attest at least that no one has called me a roast beef. Maybe they only give that name to soldiers in red coats.

I tap my feet often, involuntarily, and I hum the counterpoint to songs that no one else can hear, and as I said I prefer not to be alone; but for all that, I am feeling steadier these days, less at risk of floating away, if still more idle than I would like to be.

I have asked Flora for help improving my French. She has made me a present of a fine recent edition of the essays of Montaigne. They can be had in English, she says, but mostly in expurgated form, edited by some lady concerned for the sensibilities of others of her sex. I wondered at first if I were being given something scandalous, but the table of contents seems to indicate that it is simply a collection of thoughts about speaking in public, and mourning, and taxes, and many abstract subjects that do not seem particularly shocking—certainly not for a married woman, and one who has travelled already between worlds. I shall let you know if these turn out to be lurid or controversial, and your wife finds herself morally outraged by these musings from the Renaissance.

In any case I remain your faithful Arabella.

Jonathan,

I was reading the other day and became so confused about what I was trying to read, what some antique French word was meant to convey, that I quite forgot to continue. I wavered between book and dictionary until I reached an odd equipoise between them and stayed there, thinking of nothing at all. It was the most peace I have known since returning to this world and I wish I knew how to do it on purpose.

Aunt Greysteel’s moods have been worse lately, for reasons I cannot guess, and in consequence she has been spending longer hours by my side—apparently to avoid her family—but talking to me less. This is largely acceptable to me, because I am spending a great deal of time sniffing the air and trying to remember of what it reminds me, and it is difficult under those circumstances to carry on a conversation. She sits and sews and feels whatever it is she is feeling, and I sit and refrain from muttering and narrow my eyes at the fall of the light on the rug and can never quite remember what I meant to do with my day.

The mirrors are not turned to face the walls here, and every time I look at one I can half-way believe you are on the other side. I don’t expect you, and I don’t have much faith that I could sense your presence in fact if you were there—but by the same token you might actually be there and I wouldn’t know, so you see there is always a possibility.

There is always a possibility of something.

And in any case if you’re not there on the other side of the mirror, the mirror is still there; this seems significant although it is hard to explain. The enormous tree by the Greysteels’ cousin’s house looks rather like it has magical qualities; in fact I was a little afraid of it the first time I saw it; but whether or not it is magical, it verifiably exists. This seems worthy of note, although every time I try to express the thought in words it vanishes, and all that remains are these absurdly simple statements of fact. Things that exist, exist: how wise I am to understand this, after all I have seen!

I shall try again next time I write.

Arabella

Dear,

I’ve started to read Montaigne, as Flora suggested. A curious writer; one minute he is talking about the virtues of speaking extemporaneously, the next about what his neighbours think of him, and then he quotes something in Latin and continues his sentence without, as it were, pausing for breath. I am reading slowly and looking for help every sentence; Montaigne proceeds leisurely on with his book friends, and I with my dictionary, keeping up as best I can!

Reading has made it possible for me to beg off some family visits and still have something to do. Before now, if I would decline to go along to one of those long afternoons of family talk in Gascon French, I felt obliged to feign a headache so I could be alone in my room, where I stitched a little and looked out the window a great deal and did my best to keep myself calm. Now I can sit in the study with Montaigne and a Dictionaire critique de la langue française, which helps me with the too many words I don’t know, and I work away at my reading, surrounded by books, just as Montaigne worked away at writing in his own library.

I feel a little bit like you, my ink-stained love. But every day this reading seems less as if I’m doing something you would, and a little more like a natural habit of my own.

This is beautiful country, and a beautiful time of year. The land is rich and fruiting and the grocers’ shops are abundant every morning, as are the bakeries. I am out quite early most mornings. I sleep better than I used to but not as well as in my old life, and when the sun comes up, so do I. Fortunately, Aunt Greysteel is a light sleeper as well, and so the two of us often walk out in the morning and buy some bread, on the pretext of being useful to the household. I think it is useful in truth—the cousin our host has only one servant, a man well into middle age who is often busy out of doors—and I am glad there is a real errand for us to do, but both of us are escaping our own private sorrows. Aunt’s are private even from me; she has a very brave face but has admitted, in vague terms, that she takes mornings hard, for reasons that she identified to me as “regrets” with a wave of her hand. I don’t like to ask her what it is she regrets. I accept her companionship and we break bread together, stealing the top off the long fresh French loaves before we get them home, running a hand over a promising melon for sale, greeting the shopkeepers with a “Bonjour” that I’m sure is very poorly accented indeed. We must be so obviously British that we may as well wave flags and cheer for Nelson as we walk; but if anyone minds, they don’t say so. By now most of the town knows, if not who we are, then at least that we are somehow connected to a local family, and so no one mistakes us for les touristes. All these things—the bread, the melon, my own English voice in my ears, the morning light and the rocky earth and the routine of it all—form a kind of hammock, or perhaps a warm sea. I am learning to sway, to float, to keep my sails in good trim, and to catch the favourable wind when it rises. One of these days I will learn to skip before the breeze.

I am sure that this is very bad sailing terminology indeed, but it suits me, novice that I am.

Fittingly, perhaps, I am letting this letter itself set off on the wind. All at once I thought of how I could fold the paper, how I could release it from my window to make a little balloon of it, which might fly a little way until the wind fails and it comes to earth, perhaps to you. I don’t know whether I believe that you have been receiving my letters—I really cannot tell whether I believe that or not—but in any case it is better, I do believe, to write them and release them than not. And so I do.

Love to you,

Arabella

Voire - even (distinct from voir, to see)

Iniquement - unjustly

Meschancetez - wickedness

Remue - moves?

Bisayeul - great-grandfather

À ce qu’on dit - so they say

Monsieur Montaigne has a great deal to say about the classical world. I feel poorly educated the instant I begin one of his essays; he refers to historical personages as if they were old friends, and I never know what he is talking about. I do my best to follow along, and he does usually tell enough of a story that the references make sense.

“Nous ne sommes jamais chez nous, nous sommes toujours au delà,” he says, which I think means “we are never at home, we are always away,” or “we are always over there,” or something close to that. This is in a paragraph about how people think too much about the future and the past, and human nature seldom lets us appreciate what we presently have. I thought I understood this, but then he changed the subject—subtly, but decidedly—to talk about death instead, and I discovered that I was not prepared for that. “Call no man happy until he is dead” felt uncomfortably close to home, and I worked through the rest a little uneasily, forgetting to mark the meanings of words I had looked up and subsequently needing to look them up again, until I reached the end of that essay and discovered the point, something to do with the lasting influence, and lasting mutability, of the dead; “le vin s’altère aux caves, selon aucunes mutations des saisons de sa vigne”—which I think means that wine changes in the caves, and something about the seasons of its vine, although I’m not clear what relationship he is trying to assert between the two.

In any case I read that, and took notes which I have largely transcribed here in neater form, and I have spent the rest of the day uncomfortably aware of the fact that in the eyes of almost everyone I had ever met, I died and was buried, and everyone went about drawing conclusions about my life as a thing concluded, and then I resumed it. This was never meant to happen. I have felt for some time now a persistent internal gladness at having come back to the world, at having escaped; but today it felt truly as if I were returned to life, and while this sounds like a happier sensation I found it a more complicated and melancholy one. I arrived at this place only by means of significant loss—truly, the loss of my whole life; and I have now regained only some pieces of it. I wonder if, having died once, I could pass judgment on everything before my death and adjudicate whether that life was a happy one. I am in a very unusual position, to be able to do this in the first person! And I think it was a happy life, even an absurdly blessed one; but it does seem conclusively over when I reflect on my childhood, my youth, my life with you; and that makes me feel rather serious.

—I reached this point in my meditations before remembering poor Emma, and now I am embarrassed. Could I ever have this conversation with her? I have avoided, studiously and consistently, ever asking her about her very literal death and resurrection, and I do not know why. At first I thought she was mad; then we were both in another world; but we had time enough together, at Lost-hope, to talk about anything we could have wished, and I was never brave enough to try it. I suppose I felt that asking her about her death would have felt like asking about a wound or disfigurement—rude, unfriendly—but it cannot have been very comforting to her to have one friend who might have spoken honestly with her about her experiences, but neglected to do so out of a strange fear of rudeness. This, in a house where all social laws were openly flouted every night!

How bookish and how inattentive I am, after all! You have been a bad influence.

Nevertheless I remain,

Your Arabella.

Jonathan,

I was thinking today about your death. I suppose that sounds maudlin, but I was trying to understand something. When I was at Lost-hope, you see, when I was there with Lady Pole and all the customary guests of that house, near the end of a time that I thought would have no end, I saw you once. And I was certain you were not real. There was a brief catch of hope in some recess of my mind that I saw what you were really doing at that moment, or that I was having a premonition of you coming to that place in search of me. But it seemed absolutely impossible that you were truly there in front of me. It was not until later, when I learned a little of what you had been doing, that I thought how likely it was that you were standing before me and I failed to realise it. There we were, face to face, and I looked as if through heavy glass and did not understand.

Later, the lord of that hall was destroyed, and I knew this instantaneously and truly. Everyone did. It was as obvious as a bolt of lightning or, perhaps more appropriately, the end of a storm. I felt the change as a personal one, a loosening of shackles, a sensation of total personal liberty succeeded by one of fierce and unfamiliar wilfulness. I found a direction to run and I ran, as determined as if I were carrying the news to Athens from Marathon. I ran straight into Flora’s arms.

When I was younger and used to read novels, I imagined love as a tangible quality, a property of the body as well as the soul, which would alert me if my true love were to come to harm. I did not properly know that I had held such a belief until you went to war and I was forced to realise that I never knew whether you were safe. At any moment on any day you could be injured, dying, or dead, and it could be too soon for me to have found out. My heart did not inform me you were well; it only racked me daily with fear, every day and at night; I forgot it only when someone made me laugh, and then for a moment at best. Or sometimes I had happy dreams. I believed you were coming back, but I knew I could be wrong.

I could feel the gentleman’s death, but I fear I could not, will not, know of yours, my love, out there in a world with no one to convey me the news.

What should I make, then, of my habitual feeling of having your company? The sense that you might be behind any mirror, the conviction that I know how to convey these letters? Am I entertaining delusions, writing documents to burn up and blow away in the wind, or am I prescient and are you speaking to me somehow?

—And then, sometimes that conviction departs from me and I can only miss you, entirely, obnoxiously, whole-heartedly. On some days—yesterday was one—I feel as if things have worked out in the best way they could, that you are where fate has put you and I am safely back under the sun, and this is good. This morning I woke up realising that yesterday’s certainty was little more than an attempt at courage. Today I would run to you in a moment if I had any idea how to do it. I would—well, I was about to say I would give up everything I have to bring you back, but what a vain offer! For I have nothing at all. I gave it all to you, did I not? My love, my time, my person: I vowed these to you until death, I said. Obey, I said; honour and love, you said; one person, said the Church and the Crown. English magic said nothing on the subject, and then it proceeded to define the whole course of our marriage.

I know this feeling of loss which has so over-powered me today will pass. I know it because I am not a person who experiences such strong feelings for years on end, and because I have missed you before. But this is very cold comfort, to know that I shall feel it less, rather than having occasion to feel its opposite more. If all improvement came as a lessening of feeling then we should all come to an entirely numb end.

Do you remember, just after we were married, how proud you were of having a profession, how often you identified yourself as a magician in conversations that did not require that information? How you showed off to me, when Norrell would not allow you to exhibit your progress to anyone else? You were most anxious to prove to me that you were working very hard and knew what you were about. I knew you remembered my questions, before our marriage, about how you would occupy yourself. But I was never only concerned about you. I was thinking of myself. Wifehood as a vocation is a frighteningly empty prospect if one intends merely to keep a home for a man to sit in; it becomes—or so it seemed to me at the time—more worth the while if it is in aid of someone with work to do, with a purpose to fulfil. If you had none we would have become two very small people in the world, two rich-enough bores who would not be missed if their house did disappear from the landscape one day.

I must chart a course of my own, but it is difficult to do so in this state.

I remain,

Your Arabella

Jonathan,

I had a letter today from Lady Pole. A long letter, though she claims to have written it in less than an hour. The life that had been draining away from her for so many years seems to have leapt back in double speed. She is making plans, demanding meetings with Sir Walter’s friends and associates, and apparently corresponding with William Wilberforce about the total abolition of slavery in all of Britain’s possessions. Magic is already afoot in England to a greater extent than I had appreciated, and she is determined to see it governed. I could wish her more cautious—she has had so little intercourse with society, and I am sure she will be hurt to discover the callousness of politicians and the world’s reluctance to change. But such passion for action may perhaps be a sort of calling, and she has sat so long in empty rooms, been made to dance so many dances, that I cannot wish her still and quiet again. When I reached the end of the letter I realised I was hoping to learn that she missed me; but she did not spare any time or space for such personal sentiments.

She also tells me that the house is gone, as no one had yet troubled themselves to inform me. The London house, and Norrell’s, and Ashfair gone too. Jonathan, what did you do? What on earth am I going to do now, and where am I to go home to? This is really a spell too far, and I consider it greedy of you two to take both your houses along into the darkness. I suppose you will say it was not your doing—perhaps not; but I am still, for the moment, angry, and feeling rather cruelly cut adrift.

Yours, I suppose,

Arabella

Dear Jonathan,

Our time in France is coming to an end. Tomorrow we leave for Calais, from Calais to Dover, and at Dover we part ways.

I am reluctant to say good-bye to the Greysteels. All three of them have at various times made comments that seemed intended to convey that I would be welcome to stay with them when they return to their home in Wiltshire. However this has been stated so vaguely that I do not think they really want to invite me; they only feel worried about letting me go. I have reassured them that I have other friends waiting for me, as Lady Pole is expecting me at their house in London. Doctor Greysteel said he had heard worrying things about that house and I said, without meaning to, that I had heard worrying things about myself, so if gossip is to be trusted I am safe nowhere; but that the Poles are old friends. That felt a little like a lie—“old friend” still feels like it ought to mean only people from Shropshire, people I have known since childhood, and I could feel my sense of time go a little side-ways as I said it and forgot for a moment how old I was. How long did I live in London—two weeks? Ten years?

I am becoming adept at masking these distracted moments. I don’t think my technique is perfect, and Doctor Greysteel is always ready to scrutinise one’s face for evidence that one is unwell, but while worrying back over the years in London (I believe there were five?) I kept my gaze fixed on his face as if I were waiting for his response, which he relented and gave. I think he said something complimentary about Sir Walter’s service in Parliament. I said that he had always been a valuable ally to Mr Strange and myself, leaving out any mention of my friendship with Lady Pole, which I do not think I rightly know how to discuss.

Parting from Flora and her aunt will be harder, even as I feel I have imposed myself upon them for too long. My feelings of groundlessness are not improved by my lack of a permanent address. You cannot have taken the houses away on purpose—can you? Surely you wouldn’t have set me in this predicament only for the sake of taking your library with you, or allowed Norrell to do the same—certainly he would not so intentionally rob me, would he, after we were always on cordial terms—or if my cordiality were worth so little, could he not have taken the books and left the house? If not the house, my personal possessions? Or did you burn those up or give them away when I was supposed to have died?

It is futile to barrage you with these questions, which you so clearly will not answer, but I had not anticipated becoming so helpless, or such a burden on my friends. Even going to Henry in Shropshire, which I suppose would be the obvious course of action, feels too large an imposition. (At any rate he has not written to me, and I am not eager to face his reaction to my story.)

I think I had hoped that I would be better recovered by the time the Greysteels and I left one another; I had hoped to become a better friend to both of them, and less of a fading quiet presence in the room. But our habits of being around one another have formed into the shape of my oddity, so perhaps it is better for us to spend some time apart and meet again later when I have a better-formed notion of how to be a friend, and less of a burden.

I fear I shall have less of a notion what to do with these letters when I return to England, but I am not prepared to stop writing them. This one goes into the middle of a rose bush, along with a drawing I made of one of the roses. Drawing a perfect rose is almost simple, but none of them are perfect. I spent some time on this one, with its outer petals somewhat shredded by insects or wind.

Yours,

Arabella

Jonathan,

I’ve come home.

That is to say, I have come back to England, where nothing is as I left it. There is magic everywhere, written on the sky and threaded between the bricks of what were once ordinary houses. I do not know how to explain this, but I imagine you know what I mean. It is like Lost-hope, but not truly like Lost-hope at all. The earth is solid, after all, and the people wear clothes made of cotton and linen and wool, not cat’s whiskers and despair. In these respects it is still like England.

I am staying at the Poles’ home near Regent’s Park. It was a peculiar thing to see my friend Lady Pole again, to stand face to face in an ordinary way, both of us alive, sane, disenchanted, and free! We had never met in this way before, and we did not know how to speak to one another at first. Ordinary greetings seemed impossible after everything we have been through, and nothing else came immediately to my tongue, so that I could only hold both her hands and smile. Eventually she grew impatient with this and announced that if I had nothing to talk about, she nevertheless had a great deal to tell me.

The tale that followed was complicated, and perhaps you are acquainted with some of the particulars. In brief, her ladyship had been (when not dancing through the night) cared for by Mr John Segundus of Yorkshire, who has recently remanded her into the custody of her husband. Her ladyship is glad to be freed, but not at all glad to be home. Sir Walter continues solicitous of her comfort, but she is really a little contemptuous of him. He tries to persuade her to take her political projects more slowly; she is not interested in being so persuaded. At any rate she is now well, ambitious, notorious, and she is also a grown woman who has seldom spent an evening in civilised society.

The house itself is in something of a neglected state, owing to the fact that Sir Walter’s butler, Stephen Black, whom I often saw at Lost-hope, has disappeared. Emma says she saw him walk over a hill and away, and when she pursued him he was gone. Everyone blames magic, except for the few who make suggestions about his character that I do not wish to repeat. Some people assume he is dead—perhaps dead in that new, impermanent way that seems to be the fashion among friends of that house. There have been many applicants for the position, but Sir Walter has not brought himself to interview any of them, and in fairness, they are not all serious applications, since the household has acquired such a peculiar reputation that all manner of people come round in plain hopes of having a look at the mistress. In the meanwhile, the servants who remain do their work a little at random. Lady Pole and I had been speaking for half an hour when a footman came in to ask if we wanted a fire laid, which we fortunately did not, and he then spent some time fidgeting with the books on the shelves in an obvious attempt to look busy until Lady Pole sent him out so she could speak freely of her plans. Most people of her class whom I have met would not hesitate to talk in front of a servant; but she has had frequent occasion for mistrust.

Her industry is admirable. Emma has seldom known a healthy, unensorcelled, waking moment in this life, but now that she has her days to use as she will, she seizes upon every one and puts it to use. She is full of plans. She wants to regulate magic; she wants Mr Segundus to consult with her about the book he may write (and, I think, she wants the right to reject anything in it with which she does not agree); she wants to be heard; she wants revenge. I think it is a daily source of frustration that there is no obvious object for her to revenge herself upon. She fills the house with energy.

I am seeking some legal counsel, as it is not clear how I am to live. Even if you had left Ashfair where it was, I should now occupy an uncertain status: a little like a military wife but with none of the usual supports. Lady Pole thinks that the government should establish a special pension for me, which seems a great deal to ask; but they did create a position for you, and Emma thinks she could argue the case that I am in a similar position to an officer’s widow. Coming from anyone else, I should consider this to be braggadocio; coming from Emma it sounds like a serious suggestion. Perhaps she will pull it off.

In hope,

Arabella

Jonathan,

I am still staying with Sir Walter and Lady Pole. I feel I am trespassing on their hospitality, but Lady Pole would be sorry to see me go, and Sir Walter usually does not seem to notice I am here, so I will likely stay for some time yet. I feel, as of yet, reluctant to speak to Sir Walter directly about the pension that Emma thinks should be established for me. We have ever been on good terms with one another, but things are not easy between him and his wife.

I have observed since staying here that Sir Walter kisses his wife goodbye every time he leaves the house to go to his office, or to his club, or to a party she is not attending, which is every party that has occurred since I have been here. Wherever she is in the house, he finds her, kisses her forehead, and bids her farewell, with a rather maidenly sense of resignation. Lady Pole always closes her eyes when he does this, and then she opens them and tells him goodbye in a neutral tone. This is as warm as I have seen them be to one another. The rest of the time there is a vast Arctic ocean between them. I don’t know what to think. I don’t suppose they were ever a love-match, but everyone seemed to hold out high hopes for the marriage. People couldn’t stop talking about it, when we first came to London. I always thought he took such good care of her, and he seemed grateful when I would come to visit her. But Emma studiously avoids him. She does not wish for kindness but for liberty, although I think she is still trying to understand how she might have that. In any regard I have ended up on her side of the divide, simply because of circumstance.

I sometimes think that Lady Pole and I do not understand one another very well. She expects me to share her opinions and her enthusiasm, and I am not always sure I do. But I am sufficiently attached to her, now, that by extension I am attached to the way she misunderstands me. I like her notion of Arabella—so virtuous, and so certain!—even if I don’t expect to become it. Does she like my version of her? She keeps me close, but I catch myself sometimes still considering her as an invalid, or indulging her as if this is only a holiday, an interlude of health that will have to end. Is this false friendship? Or are all affections founded on such a basis—part understanding, part invention?

Can you tell me? Please appear in a pillar of flame and answer this question directly; I am getting tired of corresponding with your silence.

A

News for you—

Mr Segundus came to visit today. He is styling himself a Strangeite because he deems it necessary to take sides, although he seemed embarrassed to use the term in front of me. We drank tea together in one of the sitting rooms; Emma sat with us for a little while, but then she remembered something urgent to take care of in another room. If anyone else gave such an excuse I would consider it a poor attempt at a polite fiction. Emma is so busy at every moment that from her I believe it.

Mr Segundus was polite, inquired after my health and that of most acquaintances we have in common, and talked at some length about the weather before seeming to come to a decision and asking me point blank whether I had found myself able to do magic. I told him I had not tried. (I did not tell him, though I am thinking about it now, that I have never in my life simply “found myself able” to do something without any lessons or practice; it seems like a bizarre way to live, and I wonder how you took it with such equanimity.) He told me that many people in England have discovered new abilities in themselves these past few months, and he was curious how I might have been affected, as someone who was at once very close to the source of magic, and out of England when it came back.

I found this an exceedingly difficult question to answer. Of course I have felt different since returning from Lost-hope but even if I could describe the changes, to answer the question honestly I would have to explain other changes I have experienced—growing up, leaving home, coming to London, meeting dukes and generals, learning to act as head of our household while you were gone during the war...none of which is like what I have experienced this year, but I don’t see how to identify the difference. How can I possibly explain this to a gentleman I know only a little, who understands nothing about me?

Mr Segundus seemed, however, keen on finding out an answer, and when I could not tell him one, he proposed to find one experimentally, by conducting a test to see whether—and I do not know if I can repeat his words accurately—I could serve as a conduit for magic. I gave him permission to try it, as I was so perplexed by the question that I could not see my way clear to refusing, and he came to sit next to me, took my hand, and told me to reach out with my other hand and touch the tea-tray while saying a few words.

I said the words I was given. As soon as I spoke them they fled from my mind like water running out of a basin, and my head filled with the most curious sensation, as if I were quite hollow and filling up with air. Or, no, not filling up, not like a balloon—I felt a great wind passing through me, and I was at once rather thrilled by it, and terrified that something vital was about to blow away. I gave a little shout, and Emma came running into the room to see if I was hurt and it was several minutes before anyone noticed the tea-tray, which was floating an inch or two above the table. As soon as Emma saw it she slammed it back down and told Mr Segundus that he was not welcome to harass her friends. He tried to apologise, but I was too distracted to accept, and Emma was disinclined to do so. The household staff never go far away from Lady Pole, so it was not long before a maid came in to see what was amiss, and Emma told her firmly that Mr Segundus was just leaving. He bowed and hurried away and seemed to take the spell with him, pieces trailing invisibly but perceptibly after him as if he had walked through a spider’s web.

Emma was very concerned, but then she is always concerned about me; it is her chief method of deflecting concern away from herself. Once I caught my breath, I found I was mostly annoyed. Certainly there appear to be people who are taking up the practice of magic lately with enthusiasm, even fervour, but to presume that anyone must do so—to suppose that I must do so, without ascertaining whether this is a good idea—seems like a belief arising from a fixation on magic as the only topic worth pursuing. Well, I have tried it. I am a little concerned about the fact that Mr Segundus was so keen on trying the experiment. He seems an honourable man, but still I worry about being grabbed at, traded, negotiated over. I do not relish the idea of my actions (or even the lack thereof) being taken as evidence of some truth about English magic.

This is not the only thing that has happened, but it is hard to keep up. Emma has been very concerned about trying to retrieve Stephen Black from the place where he has gone, but I think she is giving up hope. (Oh dear, I did not mean to suggest the name of that house! Well, she shall not see it.) No one has been any help: not Mr Segundus, nor Mr Childermass (I gather she has been writing to him; he has not been much in London), nor any of the ministers in government.

I visited a book-shop this week and asked if they could acquire for me a copy of the complete Cotton translation of Montaigne. I am not abandoning my reading of the essays in French but am interested to check my understanding against that of a learned translator. The bookseller is investigating the availability of the text. He tried to sell me the ladies’ edition by “Honoria,” but I declined, saying that I needed the full text for a particular project and then, without pausing for interruption, telling him I could be contacted at the house of Sir Walter Pole. This was not an explanation—Sir Walter is not a scholar—but rather an appeal to authority, and I feel a little guilty about it. I shall need to give my conscience a stern lecture about the difference between doing wrong and simply appearing a little odd; it is a waste of energy to feel so guilty about the latter.

A

J,

I went to church this morning, at a little church not far from where our house used to be, and took Emma with me. It was the first time I had been to Sunday services since everything began. I suppose that attending a Roman mass in Italy would have been no more strange than anything else in this past year, but to tell the truth it never occurred to me, and it must not have occurred to the Greysteels either. Is it not remarkable, how we limit the places where we will travel in this world? All those church doors were open to me in every French and Italian city we visited, and yet when devotions were in progress I considered them closed, much like the homes of strangers; and now the opportunity is lost.

There was a lady in Lost-hope, I think—it is hard to describe anything there with certainty, but I seem to remember her—who left a slight shining trail behind her everywhere she went. I always thought of a snail, but the mark she left was more like a silver thread etching itself into the ground. She was not always there, but she must have been a frequent visitor, because once I knew how to recognise them I saw the signs of her coming and going all over the ballroom floor. If I left a line like that it would be a discontinuous line, one that hopped out of this world and back into it, but it would thread rather narrow passage-ways. Everywhere I go I am surrounded by large spaces that other people may enter but I do not: other people’s houses, gentlemen’s clubs, stores selling things I don’t need, coffee-houses where gentlewomen are not expected, and theatres I suppose I could attend but don’t, because there is no one to go with me. Even when I had you around you were never much of one for the theatre, were you? You were the toast of the town and yet we could go weeks only ever spending time at our house, or Norrell’s, or the Poles’, and a small number of stores, marking and remarking the same silver line over the same little plot of space. If you think about it, as I have lately been doing a great deal, there are people very close to me at every moment whom I have never noticed or spoken to, just because they are on the other side of a brick wall, and the space on their side is somehow different from the space on mine. Are bees like this, or ants? I always imagine them living closely, in communication, but perhaps they don’t. Perhaps a bee comes and goes to its own particular cell and knows nothing of its fellows at all. Is this a poor metaphor? I don’t know very much about bees. Lately it feels as if I don’t know very much about anything.

I have wandered from what I was going to tell you about, which was church. I went mostly because it seemed like I ought, having been away for so long. Emma seemed surprized I was going and then asked to accompany me. It felt obscurely impolite to ask why, perhaps because I wouldn’t ask it of most people, so I did not. But then when we went, she didn’t follow along with the order of worship at all, did not stand or kneel or speak the responses or receive the sacrament. After the service was concluded, the woman in the next compartment to ours reached over to take my hand and told me, “Bless you for coming today,” but I couldn’t tell whether this were what she said to everybody, or if she were referring to my having brought an apparent unbeliever, or if she had an idea who I was. (Most people do not, of course, have any notion of who I am, at least not well enough to recognise me by sight; but lately I am never sure.) I felt rather self-conscious on Emma’s behalf, though it seems she never feels so for herself. On the way out we all shook the vicar’s hand, of course, and he tried to engage Emma in a word or two, but she was so thoroughly unresponsive that he did not have much success.

I walked with her back to her house and said, “I hope that you do not regret having come,” and she only said, “No, of course not. You were very good to take me.” It was not until this afternoon that I thought she might have gone only to get away from magic for a little while. I suppose that’s well enough—she is frequently uncomfortable, the poor thing—but it made me a little sad.

My requested edition of Montaigne in English has arrived. It was translated in the seventeenth century, and so the spelling is sometimes archaic. It is a solid enough piece of work, as far as I am able to judge, but I am continually arriving at paragraphs that seem to lack the life of the original. I find myself taking notes in the margins—both margins, the margin of Mr Cotton’s translation and the margin of Montaigne’s original, and sometimes in the dictionary as well, and on free-floating slips of paper which I try to keep together but which find their way into the other parts of the house as if of their own volition. I understand you better than I used to do, my love.

Yours, apparently,

Arabella

Dear Jonathan,

It has been a while since I have written to you. Ordinarily such things do not need remarking upon—you ought to know it already, no?—but I have no certainty about how time is passing for you. It passed by inches and then miles, at Lost-hope.

Lady Pole has been rearranging the house such that she effectively lives and moves and has her being in an entirely separate sphere from her husband. On paper they share a household and a staff, but the servants have been assigned to one party or the other. The downstairs quarters are still shared, and so one can only speculate what they think of the arrangement. In general, the fact that this is an entirely indoor separation has not spared the house from gossip—it seems to be all that anyone wishes to talk to me about, on the occasion I get outside conversation at all. Lady Pole gets the worst of it, because such is the cruelty of the world. It is not that I wish Sir Walter to be punished for not knowing how to save or protect her—I was equally ignorant and, while I do feel culpable, it is the guilt of not having lived up to the demands of a friendship, not the guilt that accompanies a crime. But I do wish there were not such a heavy presumption by the public that any culpability in the matter belongs to her. People accuse her of all sorts of scandals and adulteries. If they could but observe her schedule, they would soon realise she has no time for such things, but you know how a lie travels all about town before the truth has even called for its carriage.

Sir Walter is not, I think, happy about this arrangement. He would like to have a wife, and is not sufficiently rich, popular, or politically established to keep a mistress instead. But he is not willing to tell the lies that would be necessary to provide cause for divorce, and those would be difficult for even so formidable a woman as Emma to weather with any hopes of keeping her political ambition alive. And so here they remain, in a truce of celibacy.

The question of a pension for me is still working its way through the halls of power, and in the meantime Lady Pole has hired me as her companion. This means that I am subject to the same rumours as she, but I am less bothered by this than I used to be. The name of Strange is so abused, adapted, and bruited about nowadays that people have already a confused notion of who and what I am, and it seems to have very little to do with my actual person.

There is no magic in Emma’s household. There is a little in Sir Walter’s. I do not spend time there except on rare occasion; when I do, there are traces of it in the tea, or rising up like threads of steam from the carpet. At least, that is how I perceive it. Emma considers it an infestation, but I don’t mind it. The world is changing, and this seems fascinating.

Emma little needs a chaperon, but I keep her company; we are quite studious, she at her desk writing letters, and I at mine reading French! My notes are become so extensive that I have started to organise them into something that rather resembles a re-translation. I am experimenting with the essay on fairies, which Cotton did translate but which Honoria leaves out. Can I claim to have a new scholarly perspective on the work? Perhaps not—to the extent that I have first-hand experience, it is of things that Montaigne did not know—but Cotton knew, if possible, even less on the subject, and seems to have missed a number of French words that seem to me to refer, transparently, to magical phenomena, and which he translated to refer to mundane irrelevancies.

Whether the world needs this text at all is a fair question, but it is one that seldom troubles me while I am working.

Busily,

Arabella

Dearest,

I saw Flora today. Her family came recently to London, and so she wrote to me, I informed Emma, and Emma extended an invitation to tea—though with, I thought, more of an air of duty than pleasure. I try not to read too much into the manner in which she does things; she lives chiefly at her desk, and so it is no great departure if she does something in a business-like manner. Still, I think she had some expectation, some notion of Flora which she already disliked.

So we three drank tea. Flora asked polite questions and Emma asked pointed ones, but I could not determine the point at which she was driving. Dare we speculate? I am tempted to attribute any coldness to jealousy of some kind; of Flora’s health? her freedom from captors? her possession of a family willing both to care for and to listen to her? Perhaps even her unmarried state? The list runs on, poor thing (“poor thing”—bad habit—Emma hates my pity and she always has). Flora is to have a season; does she look forward to it, Emma inquired; she expects to make the best of it, she returned, with equanimity. Is she aware of the notoriety accrued to anyone who has magic attached to their reputation—oh yes, of course, she replied, but she must show her face in the world again sometime, and preferably soon. I was not entirely certain whether Flora were hoping for a particular response, but I made it nevertheless: that if she needed a chaperon, and if Emma could spare me, I would be happy to serve in such a capacity. Flora looked humorous: “don’t you, Mrs Strange, appreciate the notoriety accrued to anyone who...” —of course I do, and I shan’t look forward to crossing paths with certain people, but I do not actively fear for my safety, nor do I wish to swear off the world. Emma did not seem precisely happy, but neither did she object, and I cannot be responsible for confining myself to spare her concern. Flora delicately left open the possibility of accepting, without settling a date.

With that topic exhausted, we discussed books. Emma reads chiefly history; she sometimes liked poetry, I’m told, in her youth, but she has not favoured it of late. Like me she learned a school-girl’s French. I expect she had more expensive teachers, but she has not had the opportunity to improve her fluency by travel, and so she has not read much in French since leaving the schoolroom. It was not until I was talking with Flora that I realised I had not properly let Emma in on my adventures with Montaigne. —That is, she knew what I had been reading, but my thoughts toward translating or, perhaps more accurately, re-editing some of the essays, I had shared only with you. I explained my ambition, a little haltingly for I had not prepared to speak of it. Flora was delighted, Emma surprized; but once she had understood what I was saying she undertook to involve herself in it. I must have the name of anyone she could deign to introduce me to who was in any way literary; I must have the advice, if I wanted it, of her French tutor from childhood. It is—I broke it to her gently—an essay chiefly about the fairies, that I hope to edit first. But there is nothing of very great weight in it—here Emma was trepidatious—what I meant was, I told her, that it offered a different attitude toward the fairies than anything I had read in English, and I don’t think the English understand that such an attitude could be possible. I think it is worth spending some time with it, at any rate.

Flora waited out these negotiations and then offered, in a more muted voice than usual, to help with the language in any way she could.

It felt remarkably final to speak of this topic with my friends. I had developed the idea so far without knowing whether I truly meant to pursue it or not. And now here I am, funded, encouraged, advised! I could still choose not to do it; but that would be a much more active choice today than it would have been yesterday.

What is a calling, Jonathan? Is it a voice in the heart, or simply a road that one finds one has the capacity to walk?

Yours,

Arabella

Dear Jonathan,

I am thoughtful today. The pension has come through—not as generously as Emma demanded, but more than I deserve. I think she was negotiating in a purposeful manner, anywise, when she named the amount. It is a victory, and a welcome source of freedom, but it comes with a formal acknowledgment of your service that speaks of you entirely in the past tense, and it made me a little sad.

I seldom write to you of the way people talk about you, about myself. I attempt not to care too much about it, but sometimes the subject grieves me. There are some who find me ungrateful: they think you are my Orpheus, and I, more fortunate than Eurydice, have been saved by a husband who never looked back.

But that is just the problem. You did not look back, and neither can I, and both of us are still on our trek upward. I can see no probability of both of us emerging finally, victorious, together—because where would we be then? Neither in John Uskglass’ kingdom nor that of George III. Not Ithaca either: I cannot be Penelope, my dear. I refuse to undo any of my work.

The other day I remembered that moment after our wedding and before we walked in to the wedding-breakfast, how you and I stopped outside before going in, just for a moment alone, and you looked at me with wonder and you called me Mrs Strange. The way I felt then revisits me unbidden at odd moments. It is nothing so complex as magic, but I think it must be as potent as a spell.

And your cold hands, and the quiet shut-in quality of certain late winter mornings at Ashfair, and the feeling I used to have of being sure that I knew where you were, and then turning around to find you were not there at all; all of these things come back to me, pieces of the world bringing them to me. I hear a boot heel click on the pavement and it is like yours. I let my breath out in an exasperated puff and it sounds like yours. In the face of the government’s solemn acknowledgment of something closely resembling your death, I wish to assert that all these things still exist and so do you; but Parliament does not get to have you, or them. I find you strewn about in the world; I have tucked you behind my ear and I carry you there always. Not eerily, like the deathless flowers worn by the ladies of Lost-hope; not sad like a locket, or a silly lock of hair. But privately, lastingly, close to the skin.

I am taking special care with this letter; rather than burning it in the grate I am taking it out into London to entrust to the magic there. I don’t know yet what I shall do with it, but I trust I shall come to understand. I pray that both of us, you and I, come to understand what we must do.

Yours,

Arabella