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"I cannot say I think much of your conduct."
Across an ancient table marked with a labyrinth of vine leaves, two people faced each other in anger.
The woman's lips were pulled into a thin line, her chin raised due to both high breeding and high dudgeon. In contrast, the man opposite her wore a small smile and leaned back in his chair with an air of insolence. The only sign the woman's words had hit home was the glitter in his dark eyes.
Off by the sideboard, Arabella Strange set out three cups and poured tea. Handling delicate cups, she judged, would distract them all until tempers settled. Lady Pole had a particular affection for good English tea, and for all that he postured, Mr Childermass was a civilised man.
Civilised enough, at least, to acknowledge his tea with a nod for her before he resumed the argument. "I'd reached the limit of what I could learn from the servants. I couldn't get upstairs without declaring my real name, and even then the schoolgirls were as like as faint as to talk to me."
Lady Pole raised her cup to her lips, which forced her to unclench them.
"Wouldn't it be safer to stay near the house?" Arabella took advantage of the pause. "We were surprised to see you return so early and alone."
"Mr Childermass is a magician," Lady Pole said. "Magicians do not care much for the safety of others, as a rule."
The man's lips curled in the smile he often wore when one of them afforded him the honorific. Openly practicing magic, it turned out, was a profession that sometimes seemed too respectable for him.
Arabella cleared her throat before another uncomfortable silence could stretch. "I would expect a mentor to oversee his pupil's actions."
"My pupil," he said, "can be trusted to choose reason, do the job and get home without holding on to my coat-sleeve."
The fire was flickering merrily in the fireplace, but its reflection in one of the full-length mirrors on the other side of the room, a rare modern addition they had made to Maria Absalom's house, grew a little darker. Arabella set her cup down.
"And if Mr Lorrit should return?" Lady Pole challenged. "He's proven himself unable to choose reason."
The insolent smile almost revealed teeth. "Mr Lorrit has had an encounter. I doubt he'll get home within three days, and he will find his curse-bowl quite useless on his return."
"That still leaves the matter of the road home. Quite what you were thinking, if you were-"
The movement of air stilled both of them. The gust was cold as the surface of the mirror faded into mist. Arabella finished pouring the fourth cup of tea and lifted it just as Flora Greysteel stepped down onto the floor, clutching a bundle of papers that had to be Mr Lorrit's compacts and curses.
"Thank you," Flora said warmly. "Are they-?"
Arabella opened her palm. "They would consider the evening ill-spent without it."
"I don't know what you mean," Lady Pole said, rising to embrace Flora. "I was only telling Mr Childermass that the King's Roads were far too dangerous for a traveller alone."
"Not with the beacon," Flora said cheerfully. "I just followed the stars Mr Childermass left for me. I used Chester's spell of ending to extinguish them behind me."
Lady Pole nodded grudgingly at the man at the table, then swept Flora out of the room to supervise the safe storage of her prize. Mr Segundus would return from his sojourn at the Honeyfoots in the morning and take the curses apart. Until then, the magic of Starecross Hall would prove strong enough as usual.
Arabella settled back at the table to finish her tea. "I expect the beacons weren't worth mentioning?"
"Miss Greysteel didn't need them," Mr Childermass said. "She knows her craft, and she has the will to fight if need be."
"And Lady Pole trusts both of you. She simply worries. About Flora most of all. The rest of us have suffered combat with magic and fairies, but while Flora has shown great loyalty and determination, she is young."
He didn't smile, but his expression was warmer than most of his smiles. "All three ladies of Starecross Hall would be counted young women."
"We are something akin to sisters here," Arabella admitted. "Sometimes it seems so in truth, in this place of the Raven King's. Lady Pole is the eldest by temper and responsibility if not by age. I'm the middle child, and Flora our so very talented and bright youngest sibling. With Mr Segundus as our absent-minded but dear cousin, which I suppose would make Mr Honeyfoot an uncle."
"And suffering the company of a servant inherited from your husband?"
Arabella laughed. "Would you settle for elder half-brother from our father's wild youth?"
She could see his shock in his stillness, but he played along. "Who would our father be, then, to leave children of all stations?"
"And set them as guardians of English magic against fools and wickedness, don't forget. Didn't he always leave competent people in charge?"
"Until the end," he said quietly.
"I don't think he'll make that mistake again."
The sound of Lady Pole's footsteps preceded her. Three years after the end of her imprisonment she still avoided all shoes that reminded her of dancing.
"I've had a letter from Stephen," she announced. "An old man from Leicester tried to summon the seneschal of Hope Regained twice already, offering several of his grandchildren in the bargain. Stephen will be obliged if we can persuade him not to try again."
"Stephen Black," Mr Childermass said, "could settle his own affairs once in a while."
"We'll find use for a favour from a fairy king," Lady Pole said. "Did I interrupt? Please forgive me."
"We were only talking about family," Arabella said. "The clan of Starecross Hall, if you will. The heirs of the Raven King."
"I suppose so." Smiling, Lady Pole looked her true age. "Though I wish so many of us were not magicians."
Mr Childermass snorted. "So says the only person in England to have a compact with a fairy."
Lady Pole turned on him with a murderous light in her grey eyes.
Arabella rose to make more tea.
**
After the fall of Lost Hope (though he did not know that to be the case for some months), John Segundus converted Starecross Hall back to his first vision of a school for magicians. John Childermass found it a convenient place to stay as he deciphers the King's Book, and he turned out to have a liking for eviscerating the clumsy efforts of gentleman and gentlewoman beginning magicians. Arabella Strange brought a shipment of her husband's papers for John Segundus, and her companion Flora Greysteel joined the pupils, proving herself to be the most talented of the lot.
Then Lady Pole arrived in the dead of night. In her hand was a parchment from Faerie, a plea for help from the king of Hope Regained. She had need of the Book, and of someone brave enough to enter Hell.
England's magic needs guardians. What it gets is the Clan of Starecross Hall.
*
Emma Pole has spent several years campaigning for regulation of magic, producing a large volume of letters and newspaper articles that denounced the dangers and tragic consequences of spells and fairy intervention. For all that relations between husband and wife remained stilted, Sir Walter Pole supported his wife's campaign in public and it was he who told her that the one person still in England in possession of knowledge about magical law enforcement was John Childermass. The latter was by the end of 1817 acknowledged as the most powerful and learned magician in England. At first he either refused to answer her letters or never received them during his travels. Several difficulties he encountered in 1818, however, convinced him that a resurrection of the Cinque Dragownes would be a useful endeavour. It is thought that a letter from Arabella Strange served as introduction for the unlikely duo to the Duke of Wellington, who was just starting to leverage his war-won popularity into a political career. The magical court was formally resurrected on the spring equinox of 1819, and though Childermass refused to sit in it himself, he recommended four men and one respectable widow as judges. Opposition to this last appointment in the Commons was curiously weak, the honourable members uneasily looking up to the gallery where Lady Pole sat in immobile silence. It was agreed that her ordeal had made her ladyship both more beautiful and strangely disconcerting.
By then, Emma Pole was already in contact with Hope Regained, though none but her and Stephen Black knew of it. Stephen approached her in England to apologise, only to learn that from her perspective his treatment of the Gentleman with the Thistle-Down Hair had been all that was needed to satisfy her. Free at last to discuss their shared ordeal, they fell to talking regularly, and Stephen's rebuilding of Hope Regained mirrored Lady Pole's efforts to construct boundaries for English magic.
By 1820, Emma Pole is past thirty, but her aspect seems ageless. When she does not pay attention, moonlight shines in her hair and leaves twist and writhe under her hands. She does not hold truck with spells and books of magic, but when she wants something she asks for it directly. She usually receives it.
Her husband is very much in love with her. He is very bad at expressing it. When he visits Starecross Hall, he exchanges more words with Arabella Strange than with his own wife.
*
Arabella Strange is at peace. Her husband is in her thoughts, and sometimes she looks for him in the patterns of the rain, but she does not let him own all of her thoughts. His papers pile up on her desk, but they are interspersed with books that have nothing to do with magic at all.
These books, she uses for teaching the magicians.
Starecross Hall is the first formal institution for magical education in England. It is subject to some discussion that it is also of the Strangeite school, which eschews Norrellite focus on books of magic and exploits of magicians to the exclusion of all else. Starecross apprentices learn many other things besides: how to read the sky and the earth, how to look inside and outside, how to part the rain. They also learn a variety of mundane subjects from history to engineering. And they learn deportment from Arabella Strange. She aims to teach them the grace to talk with people from all walks of life. A magician should be at home talking to a sailor and a beggar and a king, because all of those can be magicians as well.
Outside of lessons, she is the one the apprentices approach with problems of emotional or personal nature. There are no houses and housemasters in Starecross Hall, since the pupils are all over sixteen years of age and many are older, but they are also younger than her middle thirties. She is the elder sister or young aunt they consult when a mature opinion is needed.
She brews a lot of tea in her parlour, and she has taken to researching recipes as a pastime. John Childermass prefers the spicy ginger biscuits, while John Segundus is fond of Linzer cakes. Flora Greysteel can always be found near if there are florentines. Lady Pole's favourite are silvery concoctions of sugar and spiderweb.
*
The fact John Childermass is the most experienced and educated magician in England at the moment is mostly a hindrance to him. Not so much his actual knowledge as the fact others know of it. People keep approaching him to deal with matters and help those in need and help... England in general. It seems he left Norrell's service only to enter Britannia's.
Left to himself, he would spend more time deciphering the King's Letters. After the first year, he's getting the skill of it, but the language is mutable and highly contextual. And it changes: whenever he decodes a coherent fragment, he can be sure Vinculus will wake up with different adornments the next time he gets drunk.
If he ever sees the Raven King again, he's likely to sock the man in the chin. He must be spending too much time with Lady Pole.
*
On balance, Flora Greysteel enjoys the rumours that surround her sojourn in Italy and acquaintance with Jonathan Strange. There are no secrets between her and Arabella that could cause confusion, and the advantage is in discouraging the more pompous of the young men who would court her. She does not worry about encouragement for the less savoury would-be suitors either. She has learned a lot over the past three years.
She's always had a gift for managing difficult people, and in Starecross Hall she gets to stretch it to the limit. Her studies advance through practical lessons, so usually when Mr Childermass leads one of the excursions outside, she follows the apprentices at a distance. She knows how to speak to the rain now, something their most advanced class is only starting with. She learned the hard way.
*
Henry Woodhope, Arabella's brother, comes to visit once. He hopes to persuade her to run his household. The ladies are gracious to him and Childermass makes sure Vinculus is occupied elsewhere with a bottle of wine. Still, the unwise argument about the legitimacy of the Raven King's rule and the sight of Lady Pole coaxing a wall to pull out its stones to make her a stairway are enough to make it Henry's only visit to Starecross Hall.
*
The roof above the boys' dormitories is leaking. The walls tremble in the tell-tale signs of magic being done. Somewhere, someone calls out the names of English rivers. And in his office, John Segundus is surprised to realise he is happy.
His calendar for the day is covered with scribbles. He has four sets of parents to talk to, a consultation with Mr Honeyfoot about a possible extension to the stables, two petitions that Lady Pole wants him to sign, thirty boys and eight girls to teach, an outraged tutor to soothe, and a half-finished device that should allow Flora Greysteel to melt into the stones of the Shadow House.
He cannot wait to start.
*
On a winter night in 1819, Emma Pole dreams of black hair and black feathers. She wakes up with a short, blackened blade in her hand.
The next time Childermass tries to avoid her by walking into shadow, she slices the darkness apart.
The knife is the price for ten years of her life.