The Illusionists

‘See you later.’ He smiled almost tenderly.

He had it in his mind to pay a visit to the wax modeller, who happened to be one of the very few of his acquaintances with any knowledge of the days before Devil Wix, when he had been Hector Crumhall. But this craftsman’s place of work was in Camden Town, a long way north of the Strand. Devil thought he would go home to his lodging first and snatch an hour’s sleep, if that were to prove possible against the racket of Carlo’s snoring.

The series of alleys, growing ever narrower, twistier and more foetid as they led towards the rookery, obliterated all Devil’s benign thoughts regarding the city’s early-morning loveliness. He passed Annie Fowler, already seated in her doorway with a cup of gin, but he ignored her. The low door of the house where he lodged creaked open and Devil stepped inside. A heavy figure immediately placed itself in front of him.

‘Good morning, Mrs Hayes,’ Devil greeted his landlady. ‘It’s a fine day.’

Mrs Hayes folded her arms. ‘It may well be. For those who don’t have to see a blasted midget creeping up and down their stairs, in and out at all hours. What’s that creature doing in my house?’

‘He is my associate, Carlo Boldoni the famous theatre performer, until recently a member of Morris’s Amazing Performing Midgets, no less, and fresh from performing before the crowned heads of Europe …’

She came one step closer to him. ‘Do I care who he is? I can tell you straight off, I do not. He is a dwarf and I find he’s sleeping under my roof without so much as a handshake. I don’t care for him. This is a respectable house.’

‘It is a temporary arrangement, Mrs Hayes. You see, he doesn’t have anywhere else to go at present and I am a kind-hearted fellow. I suffer for my kindness, but I hope you will understand.’ Devil’s voice grew softer. ‘I believe you will, Maria, of all women. You have shown such particular kindness to me.’

Maria Hayes hesitated. She was a large woman in her forties with some of the prettiness of her youth still in her face, her black hair unpinned, and the white folds of her body unconfined by stays. Devil might have assumed she had only just stepped out of her bed, had he not known that she could be encountered in a similar state of undress at any hour of the day. She raised a hand and brushed a stray coil of hair from her flushed cheek.

‘I have, Mr Wix. I have been as kind as I could be.’

Devil lifted a matching coil of hair from the opposite cheek. They were already standing close together and the confined space of the vestibule offered no latitude. Devil used his elbow to nudge open the door of the landlady’s room. It was not a very much more spacious resort. One glance was enough to reveal that Mr Hayes was absent, as usual, nor was there any sign of the slow-witted son of the house.

Maria’s mouth was only six inches from his. He leaned down to close the distance. Her lips obligingly parted.

After the kiss Devil ran his hands over her breasts. He put his mouth to her ear.

‘Tell me, is My Lady Laycock at home today?’

Maria smirked. ‘I’ll have to see if Her Ladyship is receiving visitors this morning.’

‘Won’t you tell her Mr Devil Wix is calling?’

Maria grasped his wrist and yanked him over the threshold. Devil kicked the door shut and she slid the bolt behind them. He put his arms round her and they half waltzed to the stuffy alcove with the bed concealed behind a curtain. The sheets were far from clean and the bolster leaked feathers from its case of greasy ticking. Devil untied the strings of Maria’s chemise and the thought of the golden ribbon came happily into his mind again. His landlady pressed herself against him and her tongue sought his.

‘I find she is at home, and waiting for you,’ she murmured. Her fingers were tugging at his shirt buttons, then her hand moved downwards. ‘It’s a good name for you, wherever you got it. Devil by nature as well, aren’t you?’

Cheerfully Devil tipped her backwards on to the bed and pulled up her grubby petticoat. He got busy, at the same time tasting the sweat of her neck and the rankness of her black hair.

Afterwards they lay on the mattress with a coil of bedding twisted round them. Maria was an energetic performer and Devil hadn’t slept for twenty-four hours. His eyelids were so heavy that he was wondering how he was going to get up the stairs to his own bed. A sudden thumping on the door jolted him upright quickly enough, however. Groaning at the thought of Mr Hayes on the threshold he pulled his clothing together. Maria went undressed to the tiny window and stuck her head out.

‘Stop that racket. Get down to Ransome’s and bring me back a jug of porter,’ she yelled. From this exchange Devil understood that it was her son at the door, not the husband. When she pulled herself back into the room they grinned at each other.

‘You’ll wet your whistle?’ Maria asked.

Devil took her reddened hands and kissed the knuckles of each.

‘I have to go to work, my lovely girl.’

The delighted smile she gave him was almost shy, and her blush did make her look girlish. Devil slid out of the room and softly closed the door before she could mention the dwarf again. Aching for rest he climbed the bare flights of stairs, past doorways to rooms hardly larger than cupboards, which nevertheless housed families of lodgers, until he reached the attic. As he had expected he found Carlo lying on his makeshift bed, fast asleep and snoring like an engine. Devil kicked him as he stepped past, but this had no effect at all. Ten minutes later, his own snores provided a counterpoint.

In the two weeks that followed Devil worked harder than he had ever done, and he had laboured for long, bitter hours on plenty of occasions before this. Nights with Carlo at the coffin maker’s followed on from late evenings of performing his own act at whichever of the taphouses or small halls would offer him a booking. He took the money wherever he could get it. One evening he arrived at the workshop still in his stage costume, such was his eagerness to resume work on the cabinet trick. Carlo eyed him as he discarded his greatcoat.

‘What’s this?’ the dwarf sniggered.

Devil preened. He wore a suit of red cloth, cut to fit so snugly that it might have been a second skin.

‘Ah, my performance costume? It is for a trick called the Infernal Flames. Tonight at Prewett’s they were begging for more.’ This was not strictly true, but Devil was always good at reinterpreting reality in his own favour. ‘But for our grand opening at the Palmyra we will do far better than Jacko Grady has bargained for.’

They turned to their work. The cabinet interior was empty except for a double shelf. Tonight’s work was to line all the inside surfaces with a seamless layer of jet-black velvet. Devil undid a draper’s brown-paper package and smoothed a bolt of fabric on a swept circle of floor. He took a tailor’s tape and called out the measurements in feet and inches and Carlo pencilled them on a sheet of paper. Each measurement was taken twice, to ensure accuracy. The velvet had been expensive to buy and none of Devil’s techniques of persuasion had achieved even a pennyworth of discount. Carlo set to with a pair of shears. He was a dextrous worker and the first neat rectangle was soon cut to the precise size. Devil had applied brush and glue to the cabinet wall and with some cursing and arguing they succeeded in sticking the light-absorbing material in place.

Halfway through the task they stood back to gauge the effect. The finished walls of the box seemed to melt into black space. Even Carlo the perfectionist was pleased.

‘I have some more good news,’ Devil announced. ‘Tomorrow your head will be ready. I am to collect it after we leave here.’

‘At last. So we must begin to work up the beheading. I’ll be needing a suit of tall clothing.’

Devil sighed. There was a deal of investing to be done before any return could be hoped for, but still his confidence held.

Devil and Carlo together had visited the wax-modelling studio of Mr Jasper Button in Camden Town, and Carlo had made his way there alone on three subsequent occasions. He had sat patient and motionless on a stool, with the smells of warm wax and linseed oil and turpentine all round him, while the modeller built up sub-layers and then sculpted pellets of wax over a wire frame. On the last visit the modeller had sorted through a basket filled with plaited hanks of cut human hair, holding up one specimen after another next to Carlo’s head and muttering to himself as he searched for the best match. He ran his fingers through the dwarf’s abundant locks and pulled at the sprouting tufts of his eyebrows.

‘Where does it all come from?’ Carlo had asked.

‘Plenty of people hereabouts are glad to sell the hair off their heads for a shilling or two.’ Jasper held up a long plait of rich copper-gold. ‘This one belonged to a woman who knew that all her youth and loveliness shone out of it, but the day came when she had nothing else to sell. Her hair was just the start of it.’ He dropped the plait into the basket again.

‘If this was quality work, I’d be using human hair on you. See? This is the closest for colour and texture.’ He brandished a salt-and-pepper bunch next to the dwarf’s face and Carlo twisted away from it in disgust. ‘Devil Wix won’t pay for that, of course. You and your model will be making do with an identical pair of horsehair wigs. What are you supposed to be? The good philosopher, isn’t it? Maybe I’ll be generous to you both and give you your eyebrows in real hair.’

Carlo stared at the egg-bald wax head on its stand. The coffin maker’s was creepy enough, but this shadowy place deep in the wrecked streets surrounding the railway yards more than matched it. There was a box containing dozens of glass eyes on the floor at his feet, all unwinking and all fixed on him.

‘You and Wix know each other from back when?’

The other held up a loop of wire, measuring by eye the breadth of skin between Carlo’s brows.

‘A long time.’

No more was forthcoming.

Without meeting the gaze of the glass eyes Carlo tried another topic on the modeller. ‘Odd sort of a job you do, wouldn’t you say?’

Jasper gave him a contemptuous glance. ‘My waxwork of Miss Nellie Bromley in Trial by Jury is the favourite figure in the Baker Street exhibition. I’d not call my artistic work odd. Not by comparison with your own, for example.’

Carlo scowled but said nothing. After that they had posed and modelled in silence.

After a long night at the coffin maker’s Devil walked up from Holborn to Euston and thence along the sooty roads that led to Camden Town. All along the way rough tent encampments lay beside the railway lines and under the arches and bridges. The men, women and children who existed here were black-faced and their ragged clothes were black, as were the heaps of brick rubble and even the dead leaves hanging on the few weak trees. Black smoke billowed from cooking fires and smouldering brick kilns, and the occasional threatening figure lurched out of this murk and mumbled at him. By shrinking inwardly Devil made himself seem smaller and darker too, and he passed through these places without difficulty.

By the time he rattled the latch of the studio door Jasper Button was already at work.

‘Jas? You there?’

‘Where else would I be?’

‘I’d say anywhere you could be, if only you had the choice.’

Jasper ignored him. The streets outside might be warrens of decrepit houses and belching chimneys and gaunt sheds but his studio was snug enough. A blanket hung over the doorway to keep in the warmth, there was a coal fire in a narrow little grate and a black kettle on the hob.

‘You want some tea?’

‘You don’t have anything stronger?’

It was a question that didn’t expect an answer. Jasper Button never touched a drop, and given what had happened to his mother and father Devil understood why not. The modeller warmed an earthenware teapot and lifted the kettle using a knitted potholder.

Devil was stalking the bald wax head, examining it from every angle.

‘What do you think?’ Jasper was eager for Devil’s approval. More than a decade ago, the two of them had played together up in the green fields and lanes surrounding the village of Stanmore. Devil had been the ringleader in those days, the admired and feared chief of a band of boys who had in common their rebelliousness and their longing for first-hand experience of the world they could see from the top of Stanmore Hill.

Devil pretended to consider. ‘I think you have achieved a reasonable likeness.’

‘Go to hell. The head’s not for sale, then.’

‘Poor Jas. What will you do with it, in that case?’

‘I’ll exhibit it. There’s always an audience in the Chamber of Horrors.’

‘True enough. Let’s have a look.’

Jasper lifted the head off the stand and turned it upside down to reveal a meticulously gory cross-section of severed bone, muscle and artery. Devil whistled.

‘I say. That’s very pretty. Is that what it really looks like?’

‘Like enough,’ Jasper said brusquely. ‘Enough to satisfy your tavern audiences, at any rate. If I decide to let you have it, that is. I rather liked your midget friend, so I might just keep his likeness beside me for sentimental reasons.’

‘I expect you will feel even more sentimental about two sovereigns, won’t you?’ He put two fingers into the pocket of his waistcoat where the naked end of his watch chain rested.

‘Let’s see the colour of them,’ Jasper insisted, knowing his friend too well.

The money and the model were exchanged and Devil stowed the waxen version of Carlo in a bag with his scarlet stage costume. Once the transaction was complete he was able to give due praise.

‘You’re a magician, Jas, you know, in your own way. Not in my league of course, but it’s a decent skill. Are you going to pour that tea or leave it to stew?’

Jasper passed him a cup and they settled beside the fire.

Once, long ago, the two of them had been amongst a crowd of gaping children who had watched the performance of a few magic tricks in a painted canvas booth set up by a travelling conjuror on the village square. The man had been more of a tramp than a real performer, and the sleights as Devil now recalled them had been shabby and fumbling. But still, here was a man who could make a white rat appear from a folded pocket handkerchief and who could grasp a shilling out of blue air. They hadn’t been there an instant before, but the rat and the shilling were definitely real. He could still remember how the sleek warmth of the animal had filled his hands when the conjuror asked him to mind it for him, and he could taste the coin’s metal between his teeth when he had tested it with a bite. How had such solid things appeared from nowhere? What strange dimensions existed beyond the range of his limited understanding?

Everything he had known up to that point had been narrow, painful, humdrum, and devoid of mystery. There was his own confined world and then there was beyond, somewhere out of reach, where great events took place. Yet here he was in the centre of the ordinary with the extraordinary somehow taking place right in front of him. To witness the magic had been his first experience of wonder, and it had filled his childish heart with yearning.

All around him his friends and their brothers and sisters were shouting and jeering and trying to grab the rat or the shilling but Devil was silent. All he wanted was to see more magic, to be further amazed and transported, and at the same time he was envious. Why was it not given to him to create wonder in the same way? What a gift that must be, he thought, as he gazed at the grog-faced man in the canvas booth with his tattered string of silks and his hands that shook so much he dropped his shilling, to the great amusement of the crowd.

Ten-year-old Hector Crumhall hardly knew how, but he understood that the bestowal of wonder was the ticket that was going to carry him out of Stanmore.

At the end of the scrappy show a few halfpennies and pennies landed in the man’s hat. He gathered them up and peered at the skinny black-haired boy waiting at the edge of the booth.

‘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 doesn’t arrive by magic, Hector. You won’t do it by shuffling playing cards and waiting to be fed.’

Anger was always Devil’s stalker.

It burst out of him now in a great wave and the force of it swept him across the room to where his father was seated. His hands closed around his father’s throat and he squeezed.

He didn’t keep up the pressure for more than two or three seconds before the appalled recognition of what he was doing came over him. He realised that he was shouting, ugly words that were choked with the piled-up frustration of his village days and unvoiced grief for his mother. His hands dropped to his sides and he sprang backwards, shaking from head to foot as if he had a fever. Mr Crumhall had a temper that matched his son’s. He leapt up and hit the boy across the face, a blow that sent Devil flying backwards against the kitchen dresser and knocked three plates to the floor where they smashed into flowered shards.

Father and son faced each other, panting and appalled.

‘Get out of my house.’

‘I wouldn’t stay here to save my life.’

Taking nothing but his tiny library of magic books Devil left the schoolhouse. That night he spent shivering and trying to sleep on the hay stacked in a barn. The next day Jasper and one of his sisters slipped in to find him, bringing some bread and apples which Devil crammed into his mouth like a starving man. Jasper advised him to go home and tell his father that he was sorry but he refused even to consider the possibility.

‘I don’t care,’ he insisted to the others. ‘I’m going to London. I’ll be rich, I’m telling you. I’ll have – I’ll live in a house bigger than Park House. With a butler and maidservants, and lamps to light all the rooms like a palace.’

Sophy Button sneezed and wiped her nose on her sleeve.

Devil summoned up his determination. He could feel his power leaking out of him and its loss was intolerable, so he pinned a smile across his face.

‘Tell everyone to come. Before I go I’ll show them a spectacle to remember me by.’

After the Buttons had left Devil sat down to wait. There was silence except for the rustling of rats under the hay.

The news spread quickly enough. As twilight came a little file of contemporaries and smaller children flitted and crept towards the barn.

One of the books in his possession described a trick called the Inferno. Devil loved playing with fire and he had read through the description often enough, although he had never actually tried it out. But now he was ready to do every last thing he could to impress this small world before exchanging it for the bigger one. He had to save his own face by leaving Stanmore on a drum roll and a crash of cymbals.

There were twenty spectators gathered in the darkened barn. Only one of them had thought to bring a lantern, and there was no other light except for the box of lucifers that Jasper had been instructed to provide. Devil’s arms ached and his fingers were as stiff as wooden clothes pins. He fumbled with a lit taper, holding the wavering flame poised above a little figure he had made out of plaited straw. It was supposed to be a bowl of golden fish, but desperate times called for extreme improvisation. It was satisfying to think how demonic he would be looking with the taper’s light licking his face and deepening the shadows in his eye sockets.

Sophy Button sneezed again and Devil jumped. At the same time a gust of wind caught the barn door and slammed it shut. With the jitters in his blood Devil swung round to see who was coming. The taper spat a stream of sparks into the dusty air and the hay caught fire in a dozen different places.

The audience sat gaping, imagining this was the very spectacle they had been invited to see. Devil threw himself at the spurts of fire but as soon as he had stamped out one another flickered to life with a whisper like an evil rumour spreading. In a matter of seconds a wall of flames roared up to the barn roof. Poor Gabe was laughing, haw-haw-haw, and thudding his hands together in raucous applause.

‘Good un!’ he yelled.

‘Get outside!’ Devil bawled.

Most of the spectators were on their feet now, staring uncertainly from the fire to the barn door and back to Devil again, expecting him to work some magic that would restore the hay to its original state. Devil ran to the door and threw it open and a great gust of air was sucked in, fanning the blaze and sending a pall of smoke to stifle and blind them all.

‘Get out of here.’ This was Jasper, who was dragging one of his sisters by the arm. Children coughed and choked as they stumbled over each other. One by one they spilled out into the sweet darkness. Devil ran dementedly through the smoke, thinking of his precious books being consumed by the fire. He knew that there was no hope of beating out these flames, and that his childhood was burning up along with the hay. He was taken by the elemental urge to run, to hide, to escape the inescapable. He found his way out into the cold air and gathered himself for flight.

Then he heard Jasper yelling for Gabe. Staring out of the darkness they could all see that vast black clouds were rolling out of the barn and that the interior was an inferno, no trickery.

Wired with terror Devil ran back towards the blaze, sensing rather than seeing Jasper racing alongside him. They both stopped as a black silhouette appeared against the roaring barn, its margins fretted by flame. Gabe staggered towards them, arms outstretched. The sleeves of his old coat, his breeches, even his hair was on fire. The boy was screaming. He dropped to his knees and then fell prone as the others swarmed about him to try to beat out the flames.

Jasper pulled Devil’s collar.

‘Run,’ he said. ‘Run before the bobby gets here.’

Sophy Button howled like an animal.

‘My ma said you were the devil’s spawn, Hector Crumhall. She did.’

As he ran down the hollow way and across the fields, his feet pounding over the familiar ground, Devil was thinking that he had killed a halfwit boy. The other thought was that Jasper’s poor drunken mother, a sodden bag of bones and wet gums and muttered curses, considered that he was a devil.

The next night he slept in another barn. The nightmares of fire and Gabe’s screaming were terrible, and when he was awake and walking he was so sure the spectre of the burning boy was following him that he had to keep turning and looking over his shoulder.