Sorcerer to the Crown Read online

  In consequence the dining rooms of the Theurgist’s were swelled with gentlemen who cared more for whist than wizardry. Serious-minded unnatural philosophers fled for the refuge of the Society’s august halls and hushed libraries.

  It might have been expected that Zacharias would join them, but in fact he found the Theurgist’s young bucks and dandies more congenial company. He had not been admitted as a Fellow of the Society, despite fulfilling all the requirements of learning and ability, until he had taken up his staff, and even then the Society’s acceptance of its new Sorcerer Royal had been grudging at best.

  Boisterous as the Theurgist’s dining rooms were, within them, at least, Zacharias could trust that his colour was no bar. There he was merely Zacharias Wythe: “Gentlemanly fellow, Wythe, even if he does talk like a book.” Zacharias always experienced a sense of relief upon stepping over its threshold, a relaxation of his guard he could enjoy nowhere else in public.

  A group of thaumaturges was busy spell-making in the grand front sitting room of the club as Zacharias passed through. They were reflected in tall looking glasses, so that it seemed as though the room were full of dozens of lounging magicians.

  Josiah Cullip stood among them, wobbling on his feet, and declaring, in the deliberate, portentuous manner of the foxed:

  “All this talk of Puffett’s impenetrability is humbug! Any middling thaumaturge could cast it. All that is needed is a modicum of ability—and a candle, of course.”

  “Well, we have an abundance of candles here,” said an associate. “Perhaps you would condescend to demonstrate Puffett’s for us, since it is so straightforward.”

  The exchange was nothing remarkable. The execution of trifling illusions and glamours was the accustomed dinner entertainment at the Theurgist’s, so commonplace that Zacharias would be deemed very eccentric for raising any objection to it. He might nonetheless have remonstrated with his colleagues for their extravagance—Puffett’s fireworks in miniature was in fact rather a ticklish spell, requiring a significant expenditure of magical resource—but that speaking would entail reproving Cullip. In the common way of men, Cullip’s guilt led him to resent Zacharias for having been kinder to him than he deserved, and Zacharias had no wish to increase the ill feeling between them.

  The footman who greeted Zacharias knew whom he was there to see:

  “Mr. Damerell asked to be put in the Blue Room, sir, being quieter than the main hall. Will you be having the lobster as well?”

  “A boiled fowl will suffice for me, thank you, Tom,” Zacharias was saying, when there was the most extraordinary noise behind him. It sounded like nothing so much as a thousand deep resonant voices saying at once, “Blurp.”

  Zacharias turned to see Cullip brandishing a silver candlestick above his head, like a sword. It held no candles, but Cullip now wore a top hat, made not of beaver or silk plush, but of pure white wax. Small orange flames blazed on wicks sprouting from his ears, illumining his baffled countenance.

  Tom tutted. “I knew he would come a cropper! I never saw a man that could carry off Puffett’s when he was in his cups. I doubt whether even Sir Stephen could have done it!”

  The thaumaturge who had egged Cullip on said drily:

  “I doubt that is quite what Puffett intended! But I am sure you are right, Cullip, and I vastly overrated the difficulty of the spell. I should think it is a problem with the candles.” Noticing Zacharias, he cried:

  “Why, we have the Sorcerer Royal among us! He will shed some light on this. Do not you think, sir, that it is a false economy to have candles that will not permit of Puffett’s success? For the skill of the magician cannot be doubted.”

  Cullip went crimson, snatching off his wax top hat and hurling it to the ground. He exclaimed:

  “Are we to defer to the Sorcerer Royal’s judgment? If the office were held by one deserving the title, English thaumaturges might not be reduced to scrabbling for magic for every inconsequential spell!”

  Zacharias stiffened, but he had received snubs worse than this before, and swallowed his resentment.

  “There is only so much even my wealth and influence can do to counteract the prejudice against you,” Sir Stephen had told him once, long ago. “In time you will prove yourself, Zacharias, and your accomplishments will leave no one in any doubt of your worth. Till then your only defence against impertinence must be patience and courtesy. By such means you may win your enemies over—but it is certain you cannot afford the alternative.”

  The nearest Zacharias could approach the requisite patience and courtesy now was to ignore Cullip. He said to Tom:

  “In the Blue Room, did you say?”

  But Cullip was too angry and incautious to let the matter lie.

  “At least he knows his place well enough not to seek to defend himself,” he said to his acquaintance. “It is only a pity he has not the wisdom to surrender his office to a true English thaumaturge!”

  Zacharias was no paragon, despite his long training in enduring insults. The sneering tone of Cullip’s voice could not be borne. He turned and snapped:

  “You need only one candle for Puffett’s—tallow, not wax—and if you had recited the correct formula, you might have carried it off. As for the rest, sir, I shall not dignify it with an answer—save that if English thaumaturges spent less of their magic in foolish diversions, perhaps they might have more to serve their country with!”

  Cullip was already so purple from claret and temper that he could not turn redder, but he flung down the candlestick and drew himself up, swelling like a bantam.

  “Well, sir, I believe you know where I am to be found—” he began, but he was interrupted.

  “You are shockingly late, Zacharias. What can you be about?”

  No one could recall ever having seen Paget Damerell perform an enchantment, though he had somehow contrived to attain the much-coveted status of sorcerer. He pursued a life of the completest inutility, flirting with interesting women, eating handsome meals, paying scrupulous attention to his clothes and making it the sole business of his life to know every scrap of news floating about the thaumaturgical world. For this, as much as the silver sorcerer’s star pinned to his coat, he was respected and even feared at the Theurgist’s, and his appearance threw Cullip off his stride.

  As he hesitated, Damerell lifted a quizzing-glass to his eye, saying in a tone of mild surprise:

  “Those flames in your ears are a clever trick, Cullip, but dangerous, do not you think? I daresay I am an old fogey, and flaming ears are all the rage. I do not like to take Mr. Wythe from such delightful society, but there is the matter of my lobster, you know.” Damerell’s manner was apologetic, but that of a man who is serene in his conviction of doing what is right. “A gentleman cannot keep a lobster waiting. You will understand, I am sure.”

  By the time Cullip had formulated a response to his own satisfaction, Damerell had hustled Zacharias to the refuge of one of the small private dining rooms.

  “I am loath to discourage you from calling out Cullip, for if any man deserved a drubbing it is he,” said Damerell. “But a Sorcerer Royal cannot duel his brother-thaumaturges. It is not at all the thing.”

  His ears burning, Zacharias said:

  “I had no intention of calling him out, and must thank you for interrupting us before he could commit us. I ought not to have addressed him in such intemperate terms. Cullip’s thaumaturgy was always better than his judgment, but I have not that excuse.”

  “Your estimation of his parts is kinder than he merits, if that is his notion of Puffett’s,” Damerell observed. “At any other time I should congratulate you on your intemperance—I would call it candour. But this is not the time for it, Zacharias. Do not you know what they are saying of you?”

  “That I am a murderer?” said Zacharias, after a moment. No other man would have ventured to speak so openly of the dark rumours that ci
rcled Zacharias, but Damerell’s was a nature that thrived on picking up rocks and making amusing comments on the manners of the creatures scurrying underneath.

  Damerell shook his head. “Not only that.”

  He slid a pamphlet across the table. Upon the frontispiece was a caricature of a leering old man in thaumaturgical blue, making his leg to a dark-skinned gentleman with a leopard skin slung over his shoulders and bones entwined in his hair. Emblazoned above the curious pair was the title: ENGLISH MAGIC UNDER SIEGE.

  “This was on the floor of my entrance hall this morning,” said Damerell. “You have not seen it?”

  Zacharias had not, though he had seen many depictions like it. Unkind portraits of him had begun appearing in the press since Sir Stephen had announced his adoption. These had fallen off as the Society grew accustomed to his existence, but his appointment as Sorcerer Royal had lent fresh inspiration to the pens of the caricaturists.

  The tension in Damerell’s manner suggested that this was no ordinary joke, however, and Zacharias bent his head to examine it with a sense of dread. The pamphlet proclaimed:

  Its most faithful supporters cannot deny that English magic is now at its lowest ebb. We count fewer sorcerers among us than ever before, and in the past twenty years only a single magician has dared venture into Fairyland, where before there was a continual traffic across the border. As for familiars, those most valuable vessels of magic, England has received not a one since the ascension of our King.

  Is it any surprise, however, that English thaumaturgy should find itself in such a state of degradation, when it willingly bends its knee to a woolly Afric? One who, so far from overcoming his native savagery, has repaid his benefactor in the coin of villainy, and been rewarded with the staff of the Sorcerer Royal?

  England’s magicians, throw off your shackles and wrest the ancient staff that is your birthright from the hand of the interloper! Were we to cease this foolish forbearance and exact justice, Zacharias Wythe could not withstand us—and we would do our nation a service that would not soon be forgotten.

  Zacharias dropped the pamphlet as if it burnt his fingers.

  “This is a call to action, Zacharias,” said Damerell. “It would be unwise to ignore it.”

  “Do you have any notion who the author is?” said Zacharias, striving to keep his voice even.

  “You rejoice in such a number of enemies it would be difficult to trace this delightful confection to any one of them,” said Damerell. “That it refers to Geoffrey Midsomer suggests he might have something to do with it, perhaps.”

  Geoffrey Midsomer had recently returned from a year’s sojourn at the Fairy Court, against all expectations, for visits by seemly young gentlemen to the Fairy Queen were rarely curtailed by anything short of their demise.

  “But I should be surprised,” Damerell continued. “Vaulting ambition he always had, in common with all that family, but Geoffrey never struck me as possessing sufficient enterprise to o’erleap himself. But it is clear there is a general feeling against you, Zacharias. It is not promising that Cullip was so ready to snub you, and this”—he shook the pamphlet—“worries me more than his incivility—there is an ugly tone in it I have not seen before. It would be just as well if you were to make yourself scarce for a time. I wish you would leave London.”

  “Leave London?” exclaimed Zacharias. “At such a time as this?”

  Damerell was prepared for Zacharias’s obstinacy. He lowered his chin, and said:

  “I should be worried for your safety if you stayed. I know you do not like to abandon your duties, but you are to consider, Zacharias, that it will not do one jot of good how many meetings you attend, or what scores of letters you write, so long as we want for magic. Did not you design spells to increase the influx of magic from the Fairy border? I cannot think of a better time to make a trial of them. Why do not you go to Fobdown Purlieu?”

  Zacharias shook his head. “Any attempt to extract magic from Fairy must be a delicate operation, and I should wish to perfect those spells before I ventured to cast them so near Fairyland. I need not tell you what perils attend any instability at that border.”

  “Well then,” said Damerell, without much hope, “perhaps a holiday . . .”

  But then a voice rang across the room, full of joyful relief:

  “Why, there you are, Poggs! I had begun to despair of finding you.”

  • • •

  AS he bounded into the room, Rollo (christened Robert Henry Algernon) brought irresistibly to mind a golden-haired cocker spaniel. He was a typical specimen of the younger son in avid pursuit of mediocrity with which the Theurgist’s teemed: the cut of his coat was faultless and his neckcloths were fearful in their construction, but he had never managed to inspire in anyone a serious suspicion that he was capable of magic. He seemed to have been admitted to the Theurgist’s largely on the ground that he was a particular friend of Damerell’s.

  “What fellows you are to be dining in this poky room, when you could be in the main hall watching the fun,” he said. “You would enjoy it, Zacharias. They are making their reflections recite poetry. It is vastly philosophical.”

  “We wished for peace,” said Damerell lugubriously, whisking the pamphlet out of sight. No one could doubt Rollo’s good will, but his discretion was less to be relied upon. “It was a foolish fancy—but how pretty, while it survived! Did not you promise me that you were dining with your aunt?”

  “Didn’t I dine with my aunt!” said Rollo, with feeling. “Would you believe Aunt Georgiana has a friend that runs a school for young ladies?”

  “I cannot say that intelligence provokes either surprise or interest,” said Damerell. “Rollo’s aunt Georgiana,” he added as an aside to Zacharias, “is one of those eccentric relations that goes travelling about by themselves, and picks up all manner of unsuitable acquaintance in out of the way places—silk weavers at Macclesfield, and baronetesses at Tunbridge Wells. What does it signify if she has a friend with a school for young ladies?”

  “It signifies when my aunt has a mind to offer me up as a sacrifice to the wretched creature,” said Rollo. “It seems it is a school for gentlewitches, of all things, and nothing would do the friend but that I should come and give a speech to her girls on ‘Magic, the Purposes and Dangers Thereof.’ Can you conceive of my giving a speech to a gaggle of gentlewitches? What do I know of the Purposes and Dangers of Magic?”

  “Why, very little, to be sure,” said Damerell. “You might have to read a book about it if you are to give this speech. Have you any books? Zacharias might let you borrow one, if you do not.”

  “But I can’t give any blasted speech,” said Rollo. “It is positively against nature that I talk as much as I do. My pater never opened his mouth without there was dinner waiting at the other end.”

  “Then you must tell your aunt you will not do it.”

  “One might have thought you had never met my aunt Georgiana,” said Rollo, with the steeliness of despair. “She is the one with the false curls and glowing eyes and smoke rising from her jaws. Do not you recollect her?”

  “She did strike me as possessing unusual force of character,” admitted Damerell.

  “Whereas I haven’t any character to speak of,” said Rollo. “If I were to say anything to Aunt Georgiana that she did not like, she would devour me in two bites. I doubt she would even wait to reach for the fish knife.”

  “Well then, Rollo,” said Damerell, “it seems you are in for it.”

  “I should have thought two intellectual fellows like you would be able to think of some means of rescuing a friend in a pickle,” said Rollo bitterly. “Here’s me, who can’t tell one end of a word from t’other, being made to give a speech, when one of you is the Sorcerer Royal, and the other is always wittering on so a fellow hardly knows where he’s at . . . !”

  He broke off. Light dawned upon his face. “Here,
Poggs, why do not you go and—”

  “I have it!” said Damerell quickly. “Zacharias will give the speech in your stead.”

  Zacharias had been making swift progress on his boiled fowl as his friends argued. At this he sat bolt upright. “Hold up!”

  “I was about to suggest that you might do it, but that is an even better notion,” said Rollo to Damerell. “Landing the Sorcerer Royal would be a coup for that headmistress. Aunt Georgiana could have no reason to object.”

  He looked relieved. Damerell could be a froward customer when he chose, but you could rely upon Zacharias. Sort of fellow who would lend you a guinea and never ask to see it again. He would certainly help a friend in need.

  But Zacharias had no compunction in disenchanting Rollo.

  “It is out of the question,” he said. “There is this business of the Committee of Thaumaturgical Standards to settle, and I have a meeting with John Edgeworth tomorrow.”

  “I am not meant to go down for a fortnight yet,” said Rollo hopefully.

  “No one could reproach you for your absence from London, with such excellent reason to be gone,” added Damerell. “Your visit would be as good as a tonic for the young ladies’ constitutions. The inmates of every good girls’ school are perpetually on the brink of expiring from boredom, and you would stir them up nicely. Women find you so frightening, and so romantic.”

  “Indeed, Zacharias, I have no notion what I will do if you do not help me,” pleaded Rollo. “A speech is nothing to a fellow like you, but imagine me standing up before a pack of ravening schoolgirls! I expect I shall go into a decline before I ever reach the school.”