The Illusionists

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.

The evening after that he was in the heart of London. Grand carriages and hansom cabs and handcarts crowded the streets as money and filth fought for supremacy. Exhausted, he sank down at a street corner and looked up to the gable end of a building across the way. It was painted with elaborate curling letters that read:

In his weary, famished state the word trick took on great significance. This was a message aimed at him. He was going to be a magician, the best on the London stage. He needed a new name, because Hector Crumhall had killed a boy.

Devil Wix.

The black shape outlined in flame ran at him out of dark places. Even when he was wide awake it came at him. The screams still sounded in his ears, louder even than the din of the city. If he was no longer Hector Crumhall, perhaps he could escape the apparition?

Devil Wix.

‘You’re going to drop my china cup.’ Jasper took it from his hand. Devil woke with a shudder. He rubbed his face and looked at the kettle on the hob, and at the bag beside him that contained Carlo’s decapitated head.

‘I’ll be on my way. You’ll come to see the show, Jas, won’t you?’

‘If you give me a ticket.’

‘It’ll be worth a tanner or two of anyone’s money.’

‘Not mine,’ Jasper sniffed.

The two of them briefly embraced, like the old friends they were. Neither of them had spoken of Stanmore for years. Mr Crumhall had followed his wife to the churchyard, the Buttons had drunk themselves to death, and Jasper’s two sisters were gone into service. In their different ways the two boys were doing their best to better themselves.

THREE

As Jacko Grady had said it would be, the Palmyra was partly restored. The charred ruins of stage and seating were carted away, the worst of the soot was rinsed from the walls and the pillars. The box fronts were crudely repainted, obliterating the ruined gilding, and carpenters sawed and hammered to create a new stage. Grady obtained a set of curtains, well used on some other stage. The cloth was faded and the folds exuded plumes of acrid dust. The owner was out to make some quick money and he invested as little as possible in his restoration. The theatre was still a shabby place, with none of the colour and opulence its structure called for.

The trapdoors Devil and Carlo required were cut and hinged and tested with care. Backstage on Jacko Grady’s grand opening night, Devil sat on an upturned bucket listening and waiting.

He was obliged to acknowledge disappointment. That it was a poor audience came as no great surprise, although he had hoped for better. It was true that the gallery was filled almost to capacity, but the crowd in these cheapest seats was composed mostly of rowdy young men. They came in search of novelty, spectacle and vulgar comedy, and they were ready to express their dissatisfaction when these were not immediately forthcoming. The act now on stage, only the second on the bill, was a comic vocalist and before this performer could finish his smirking delivery of ‘Kitty and the Old Corner Cupboard’ they were drowning him out by bellowing coarser versions of the chorus. As he struggled to lift his voice over the uproar of singing and guffawing the musicians played louder and faster to help him along. An object flew through the air and landed on the boards close to his feet. It was a ripe peach. The pulp sprayed over the cracked toecaps of his patent leather shoes.

In the better seats were pairs and trios of young gentlemen, sitting with arms akimbo and legs outstretched. At the supper clubs, during the acts which did not appeal to them, they could be diverted by chops and potatoes and by the young women who served them, or else resort to their own talk and cigars, but here they found themselves captive as if they had bought tickets for the opera.

Interspersed with these gentlemen and in one or two of the boxes sat a few families and some young fellows who had brought their wives or sweethearts. Two or three of these had already stood up and escorted their womenfolk to the curtained exit.

Devil dropped his head into his hands. Grady had sent out printed playbills, and he had done that well enough. For their act, all that was promised was:

Devil approved. Keep them guessing, that was the idea. But Grady had ordered the distribution of his bills in the taverns and markets and such places, and this had brought in the gallery crowd. All this was quite wrong, in Devil’s opinion. The desirable audience was composed of the very people who were now leaving. The Palmyra was an elegant theatre and the show should be an elegant affair, to which a gentleman could bring his wife and daughters, his mother or his sisters.

Devil had tried to point this out to Grady but the fat man had rudely dismissed him.

‘It would be of benefit to us all if your act proves to be as big as your mouth, Wix. Anyways, I thought it was supposed to be the Sphinx. What is this monstrous thing? It looks like a damned duke’s tomb.’

In constructing their magic cabinet Carlo and Devil had encouraged each other to pile decoration upon decoration, and the piece was ornamented with golden pinnacles and carved finials, paste jewels and panels painted with stars and suns.

‘This will be better than anything else you’ve got,’ Devil answered.

The vocalist came offstage, mopping his face with a handkerchief. Despairingly he hurried away to the dressing rooms. The next act was ready to go on. It was a pair of acrobats, one of them a supple young woman. The lower half of her face was covered by a spangled scarf and as she edged past Devil their eyes briefly met. There were tiny bells stitched to her clothing and these jingled a mocking accompaniment as her brother grasped her hand and they somersaulted out into the lights.

Devil resumed the contemplation of his own feet. It was warm in the wings and the close air was heavy with sweat and greasepaint. He needed this interval to concentrate and collect his wits. Beside him stood the cabinet and the mirrors, ready to be placed in position when the curtain fell. It was unusual for Devil to feel nervous, whatever lay in store, but there was no other way to explain the damp palms of his hands and the small impediment in his chest that seemed to catch his breathing.