‘Mister? Can I do that with the rat?’
The man coughed and spat a thick bolus into the grass at his feet. The wooden struts came down and the canvas with its daubed stars and moons and strange symbols was strapped into a package ready to be hoisted on the traveller’s back.
‘Only if you learn the craft, boy.’
‘How? How can I learn?’
‘Ah, that’d be difficult enough. I’d say you’d have to find a ’prentice master in the magic trade.’
The man was ready to leave and Devil looked past him down the lane that led southwards to London. The path through a hollow way beneath oak trees and out across the fields had never seemed so enticing.
He begged, ‘Take me with you. If you teach me how to do those things like you did I’ll carry your bag for you, mister.’
The man didn’t even smile. Devil was surprised that his offer wasn’t instantly taken up. He thought he would make a fine apprentice.
‘You stay here with your ma and pa. You don’t want to be getting yourself a life like mine.’
With that he picked up the last of his belongings and trudged away. Devil stood and watched until the man turned the corner. His body twitched with longing to follow. For weeks afterwards he daydreamed about magic and regretted his failure of courage when the moment of opportunity had presented itself.
Devil’s father was the village schoolmaster, a man who had just enough education to be aware of how much he did not know. Mr Crumhall’s only child had been intended for the Church, but Hector was barely eight years old before it became clear that he was an unsuitable candidate for the cloth. He stole apples, raided the dairy, bullied children who were bigger than himself, and to his father’s constant disapproval only paid attention to what interested him. He was a slow pupil even in the undistinguished setting of the village school. After the travelling performer’s visit, what did interest him was the craft and performance of magic. He pestered his father for information. One of the mysteries that intrigued him was the difference between magic and conjuring.
‘Why are there two names?’
‘Conjuring is tricks. Packs of cards, vanishing handkerchiefs, deceptions of the eye for fools with money to throw away on tawdry entertainments.’
‘What is magic, then?’
He wanted his father to acknowledge the transport of wonder, and to give him permission to immerse himself in it.
‘There is no such thing as magic, Hector. There is only truth, and God shows us the way of that.’ Mr Crumhall was a quietly devout man.
‘What is alchemy?’
His mother glanced up from her darning and frowned at him, and his father became impatient. ‘Only charlatans ever believed in such a thing. There is no process that can turn base metal into gold, or make any such transformation, and all the business of mumbo jumbo associated with it is nothing more than the devil’s work.’
The child thought he had never heard anything so fascinating, and that the devil’s work sounded a good deal more interesting than anything he was required to do, in the schoolroom or out of it.
‘Why?’
‘Creation is the Lord’s, Hector.’
Hector continued to talk about magic, and its lowly cousin conjuring (as he thought of it) so incessantly that Mrs Hargreaves of Park House, for whom Mrs Crumhall did some sewing, presented him with a book from her late husband’s library. It was small, with worn red covers and endpapers printed with signs and symbols that thrillingly reminded him of the traveller’s booth. The title was The Secrets of Conjuring Revealed, by Professor Weissman. Hector raced up to his bedroom with this treasure and began to read.
At first he was disappointed. The print was tiny, there were far too many long words like instantaneous combustion and proscenium, and whilst there were a few intriguing engravings of disembodied heads floating in mid-air, quite a lot of the illustrations were tedious geometrical diagrams showing dotted lines diverging from a sketched representation of a human eye. He persevered, painstakingly consulting the dictionary on his father’s bookshelf, only to be further disappointed because most of the secrets that the Professor revealed employed special apparatus – hollow coins, wires as fine as human hair, or something called an electro-magnet. There was one effect, however, that only called for a handkerchief, a piece of string and a coat sleeve, all of which items happened to be available. While his mother’s back was turned he took a needle and a piece of thread from her workbox and stitched the end of the string to the centre of the handkerchief. This in itself was difficult enough, resulting in a blood-blotched cotton square and a frayed piece of string.
Next he memorised the sequence of movements described in the book and began to practise bending and straightening his arms and making a sharp clap of the hands. There was a framed looking glass on his mother’s washstand, and he stood in front of this for hours.
Then at last, for an audience consisting of Jasper Button, Jasper’s two sickly sisters and poor Gabe who didn’t understand much, he performed for the first time the Handkerchief which Vanishes in the Hand.
Gabe’s jaw fell open in astonishment when the handkerchief disappeared, and he shouted out in his clogged voice. ‘Gone! Gone!’
The Button girls’ shrivelled faces shone with unaccustomed pleasure and even Jasper was deeply impressed.
‘How did you do that?’
‘By magic,’ Devil said. He had never experienced such power, or so much pleasure in exercising it. And his appetite grew. He studied whatever books he could lay his hands on and practised harder. Every penny that came his way he spent on apparatus.
A bad day came when Devil turned fourteen. His mother had died the year before, from one of her fits of breathlessness in which her face turned grey and then dark blue as she struggled for air. The schoolhouse was cold and comfortless without a woman in it and his father grew silent and morose and even more exasperated by his son’s behaviour.
‘Why can’t you follow Jasper’s example?’ he would demand.
Devil shrugged, trying to pretend he didn’t care that he wasn’t clever in the way his father would have liked him to be.
Jasper was Mr Crumhall’s favourite pupil by far. He had been a ready learner for as long as he was able to come to school, and he knew how to apply himself. He was working for a saddler now but he was also developing into a promising artist. There was never any money for any of the Button children because their mother and father needed to drink more than they were able to earn and pay for, but Mrs Hargreaves and the rector’s wife and a few others helped the boy out with paper and pencils. There was even talk of him attending a school of art.
‘I am not him, I am me,’ Devil replied.
‘More’s the pity,’ Mr Crumhall snapped.
Fury curled up in Devil like a flame licking the corner of a document. He leapt up and kicked his chair aside so it crashed on the flagged floor.
‘I’ll show you. I’ll be a great man.’
‘Greatness
