Back at home.

At the end of the eighteenth century, following Cook’s voyages to Australia, a magician called Mr. Pembroke tried to finance his own expedition to the Southern Hemisphere. The potions and spells of Europe were all designed around the manipulations made possible by European species of flora and fauna. New magics had already become possible with the discovery of the Americas, and now there was a land mass full of animals unlike anything else on Earth.

I asked Samuel if that meant magic was locked into living things, like codes. He explained that the source of magic is the Universe itself, and the ability to corrupt the universe lies within man’s imagination. So what is possible is only limited by what can be dreamt of, but the spells, objects, and ingredients allow that dream to be realised – they give it form. He liked my code analogy though – said it needed further thought.

It was Pembroke’s proposal that a zoological expedition bring back small samples of everything the new continent had to offer. He failed though, to make this appear in any way profitable to investors. Mr. Pembroke had never been one for selling his arts – he was not one of those wizards for hire, swapping cures for silver or curses for gold. His unremitting interest was in the possibilities of magic, and he could not conceive of a compromise to his scheme.

He found a landowner, in Lancashire, who had a surplus of money and an unattractive daughter. Not that she was ugly. History does not record exactly the details of her face or physique, because it was her temper that men found so repugnant. The only men who could bear the constant onslaught of her scorn were turned out of the house by her father as scoundrels. If Mr. Pembroke could arrange for a suitable suitor, the he could have the funds for his expedition the day after the wedding. He met the girl in question, sized her up, and buckled her knees with a wink of his eye. He had sat in her presence for an hour, suffering sarcasm, put downs, insults, abuses and slander – after which he happily made her fall face first into a table, and pocketed the tooth that was knocked loose.

It occurred to me that the girl in question was possibly a bit tapped in the head, but at the time she was just dismissed as being wilful and headstrong. The marriage itself was needed to make life sweeter for her brother, but she herself was disinclined towards men. That’s disinclined towards men. The subtext of which was lost on Samuel, who sometimes talks like he’s been asleep for the last twenty years. I think I know more about the Seventies than he does.

With the tooth, Mr. Pembroke made a love potion, and all who took the merest drop fell in love with the girl at that instant. However, since all the gentlemen in the area kept three streets distance, it became necessary to dose a number of young men in the hopes they might coincidently meet her. This had the effect of creating a social circle of dreamy eyed men who spurned all other advances, but had no idea who it was they suddenly wanted to recite poetry at. Meanwhile, the father of the bride-to-be went on his annual round of bribes and political manoeuvres to reintroduce his daughter to society, whereupon the poor girl was smothered by an avalanche of soft words and simpers. The suitors, finding themselves enrivalled, worked on making themselves seem magnificent, while the object of their devotions shot them down with harsh words, home truths and outright offensive language. Mr. Pembroke stepped in again, with another charm for the young men whose ardour had not been dissolved, so that they became oblivious to her temper. This, of course, made her even more furious; and the more her temper grew, the more compliant her suitors became, so that at the peak of her wrath they were left with no will of their own. In the end, despite the infatuation Mr. Pembroke had put them under, they could no longer pursue her, or even leave their homes, for they had become convinced that the world could not abide them.

I imagined Pembroke like an old stage magician, with top hat, cloak and cane, perhaps dashing strikes of moustaches, but Samuel tells me he was inconspicuous, in the bewigged and coloured linen fashions of the day. He was not known to be a magician, just a chancer, trying to mix with the upper classes. Samuel also pointed out that I had my eras wildly wrong.

Before his potential investor lost all patience with him, Mr. Pembroke was forced to find a new suitor who could tolerate the girl’s passions long enough to marry her. He could think of no such man, so he was forced to invent one.

Using a mirror, much like the one in my father’s study, he summoned an old demon by the name of Lockhart, who had a reputation for bloodthirstiness but a soft spot for romance. One doesn’t command a demon of Lockhart’s heritage, but it did accept the challenge: making itself delicately beautiful, cryptic, sensitive, bashful and forlorn, Lockhart finally got the girl.

The marriage lasted five days, which was long enough for Mr. Pembroke to set sail, and then the demon ate her.

Samuel tells me he told me that story for no particular reason.

I’ve spent the last three days on the floor of different friends’ bedrooms. I can’t talk to them about my father in the way I can to you or the houseguests, but that’s a good thing. With them I can pretend he was just my dad - and I don’t have to think about letters which blame him for the destruction of magic, and I don’t have to think about whether that’s bad or not. In my friends’ homes he died of natural causes.

Pele, last night, said that he never really knew his dad either. He just assumed he knew him because he was there, and he told jokes, and he drove him to school. But when he left, Pele found all this stuff in the attic about the army. He didn’t even know his dad was ever in the army, but it made sense. He was the only person in the world who insisted on calling him Peter.