legerdemain
Sleight of hand; "magic" trickery.
uncountable
For he in slights and jugling feates did flow, / And of legierdemayne the mysteries did know.
A show of skill or deceitful ability.
uncountable
Certainly, that they are to this day so rife in Italy and Spain, and so scant in Britain, is a shrewd ground to apprehend Legerdemain, and forgery, in the accounts we get of their later Saints.
Where it comes from
From Middle English legerdemeyn, lechardemane, from Old French léger de main (literally “light of hand”), a phrase that meant “dexterous, skillful at fooling others (especially through sleights of hand)”, which was however treated as a noun when it was borrowed by late Middle English. The Modern French descendant léger de main of the Old French phrase is archaic but still sometimes found in older literature and simply means “skillful” without any connotation of sleight of hand.
Adapted from the Wiktionary entry legerdemain (CC BY-SA 4.0).