Rosie Thomas - The Illusionists

‘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.