Gormenghast

'Several important things, Doctor Prune,' she said. 'I want to ask you about them... if I may.'

Prunesquallor looked up sharply. This was a new Fuchsia. Her tone had been perfectly level. Perfectly adult.

'Of course you may, Fuchsia. What are they?'

'The first thing is, what happened to my father, Dr Prune?'

The Doctor leaned back in his chair, as she stared at him he put his hand to his forehead.

'Fuchsia,' he said. 'Whatever you ask I will try to answer. I won't evade your questions. And you must believe me. What happened to your father, I do not know. I only know that he was very ill - and you remember that as well as I do - just as you remember his disappearance. If anyone alive knows what happened to him, I do not know who that man might be unless it is either Flay, or Swelter who also disappeared at the same time.'

'Mr Flay is alive, Dr Prune.'

'No!' said the Doctor. 'Why do you say that?'

'Titus has seen him, Doctor. More than once.'

'Titus!'

'Yes, Doctor, in the woods. But it's a secret. You won't...'

'Is he well? Is he able to keep well? What did Titus say about him?'

'He lives in a cave and hunts for his food. He asked after me. He is very loyal.'

'Poor old Flay!' said the Doctor. 'Poor old faithful Flay. But you mustn't see him, Fuchsia. It would do nothing but harm. I cannot have you getting into trouble.'

'But my father,' cried Fuchsia. 'You said he might know about my father! He may be alive, Dr Prune. He may be alive!'

'No. No. I don't believe he is,' said the Doctor. 'I don't believe so, Fuchsia.'

'But Doctor. Doctor! I must see Flay. He loved me. I want to take him something.'

'No Fuchsia. You mustn't go. Perhaps you will see him again - but you will become distressed - more distressed than you are now, if you start escaping from the castle. And Titus also. This is all very wrong. He is not old enough to be so wild and secret. God bless me - what else does he say?'

'This is all in secret, Doctor.'

'Yes - yes, Fuchsia. Of course it is.'

'He has seen something.'

'Seen something? What sort of thing?'

'A flying thing.'

The Doctor froze into a carving of ice.

'A flying thing,' repeated Fuchsia. 'I don't know what he means.' She leaned back in her chair and clasped her hands. 'Before Nannie Slagg died,' she said - her voice falling to a whisper - 'she talked to me. It was only a few days before she died - and she didn't seem as nervy as usual, because she talked like she used to talk when she wasn't worried. She told me about when Titus was born, and when Keda came to nurse him, which I remember myself, and how when Keda went away again to the Outer Dwellings, one of the Carvers made love to her and she had a baby and how the baby wasn't really like other babies, because of Keda not being married, I mean, but different apart from that, and how there were various rumours about it. The Outer Dwellers wouldn't have it, she said, because it wasn't legitimate, and when Keda killed herself the baby was brought up differently as though it was her fault, and when she was a child she lived in a way that made them all hate her and never talked to the other children, but frightened them sometimes and ran across the roofs and down the mud chimneys and began to spend all her time in the woods. And how the mud Dwellers hated her and were frightened of her because she was so rapid and kept disappearing and bared her teeth. And Nannie Slagg told me that she left them altogether and they didn't know where she had gone for a long time, only sometimes they heard her laughing at them at night, and they called her the "Thing", and Nannie Slagg told me all this and said she is still alive and how she is Titus' foster sister and when Titus told her of the flying thing in the air I wondered, Dr Prune, whether...'

Fuchsia lifted her eyes and found that the Doctor had risen from his chair and was staring through the window into the darkness where a shooting star was trailing down the sky.

'If Titus knew I had told you,' she said in a loud voice, rising to her feet. 'I would never, be forgiven. But I am frightened for him. I don't want anything to happen to him. He is always staring at nothing and doesn't hear half I say. And I love him, Dr Prune. That's what I wanted to tell you.'

'Fuchsia,' said the Doctor. 'It's very late. I will think about all you have told me. A little at a time, you know. If you tell me everything at once I'll lose my place, won't I? But a little at a time. I know there are other things you want to tell me, about this and that and very important things too - but you must wait a day or two and I will try and help you. Don't be frightened. I will do all I can. What with Flay and Titus and the "Thing" I must do some thinking, so run along to bed and come and see me very soon again. Why bless my wits if it isn't hours after your bedtime. Away with you!'

'Good night Doctor.'

'Good night my dear child.'

THIRTY

A few days later when Steerpike saw Fuchsia emerge from a door in the west wing and make her way across the stubble of what had once been a great lawn, he eased himself out of the shadows of an arch where he had been lurking for over an hour, and taking a roundabout route began to run with his body half doubled, towards the object of Fuchsia's evening journey.

Across his back, as he ran, was slung a wreath of roses from Pentecost's flower garden. Arriving, unseen, at the servants' burial ground a minute or two before Fuchsia, he had time to strike an attitude of grief as he knelt on one knee, his right hand still on the wreath which he was placing on the little weedy grave.

So Fuchsia came upon him.

'What are 'you' doing here?' Her voice was hardly audible. ''You' never loved her.'

Fuchsia turned her eyes to the great wreath of red and yellow roses and then at the few wild flowers which were clasped in her hand.

Steerpike rose to his feet and bowed. The evening was green about them.

'I did not know her as you did, your ladyship,' he said. 'But it struck me as so mean a grave for an old lady to be buried in. I was able to get these roses... and... well...' (his simulation of embarrassment was exact).

'But 'your' wildflowers!' he said, removing the wreath from the head of the little mound and placing it at the dusty foot - 'they are the ones that will please her spirit most - wherever she is.'

'I don't know anything about that,' said Fuchsia. She turned from him and flung her flowers away. 'It's all nonsense anyway.' She turned again and faced him. 'But 'you',' she blurted. 'I didn't think you were sentimental.'

Steerpike had never expected this. He had imagined that she would feel she had found an ally in the graveyard. But a new idea presented itself. Perhaps he had found an ally in 'her'. How far was her phrase 'it's all nonsense anyway' indicative of her nature?

'I have my moods,' he said and with a single action plucked the great wreath of roses from the foot of the grave and hurled it from him. For a moment the rich roses glowed as they careered through the dark green evening to disappear in the darkness of the surrounding mounds.

For a moment she stood motionless, the blood drained from her face, and then she sprang at the young man and buried the nails of her hands in his high cheekbones.

He made no move. Dropping her arms and backing away from him with slow, exhausted steps, she saw him standing perfectly quietly, his face absolutely white save the bright blood on his cheeks that were red like a clown's.

Her heart beat as she saw him. Behind him the green porous evening was hung like a setting for his thin body, his whiteness, and the hectic wounds on his cheeks.

For a moment she forgot her sudden, inconsistent hatred of his act; forgot his high shoulders; forgot her station as a daughter of the Line - forgot everything and saw only a human whom she had hurt, and a tide of remorse filled her, and half blind with confusion she stumbled towards him her arms outstretched. Quick as an adder he was in her arms - but even at that moment they fell, tripping each other up on the rough ground - fell, their arms about one another. Steerpike could feel her heart pounding against his ribs, her cheek against his mouth but he made no movement with his lips. His mind was racing ahead. For a few moments they lay. He waited for her limbs and body to relax, but she was taut as a bowstring in his arms. Not a move did he make, nor she, until lifting her head from his she saw, not the blood on his cheeks but the dark red colour of his eyes, the high bulge of his shining forehead. It was unreal. It was a dream. There was a kind of horrible novelty about it. Her gush of tenderness had ended, and there she was in the arms of the high-shouldered man. She turned her head again and realized with a start of horror that they were using for their pillow the narrow grassy grave-mound of her old nurse.

'Oh horrible!' she screamed. 'Horrible! horrible!' and forcing him aside as she scrambled to her feet she bounded like a wild thing into the darkness.

THIRTY-ONE

Sitting at her bedroom window, Irma Prunesquallor awaited the daybreak as though a clandestine meeting of the most hushed and secret kind had been agreed upon between herself and the first morning ray. And suddenly it came - the dawn - a flush of swallow light above a rim of masonry. The day had arrived. The day of the Party, or of what she now called her Soirée.

In spite of her brother's advice, she had passed a very poor night, her speculative excitement breaking through her sleep over and over again. At last she had lit the long green candles on the table by her bed, and frowning at each in turn had begun to polish yet again the ten long and perfect finger nails, her mouth pursed, her muscles tensed. Then she had slipped on her dressing gown and drawing a chair to the window had waited for the sunrise.

Below her window the quadrangle, as yet untouched by the pale light in the east, was spread like a lake of black water. There was no sound, no movement anywhere. Irma sat motionless, bolt upright, her hands clasped in her lap. Her eyes were fixed upon the sunrise. The candle flames in the room behind her stood balanced upon their wicks like yellow leaves upon tiny black stalks. Not a tremor disturbed their perfect lines - and then, suddenly a cock crew - a barbarous, an imperious sound; primal and unashamed it split the darkness, lifting Irma to her feet as it were on the updraught of its clarion. Her pulses raced. She sprang for the bathroom and within a few moments the hissing, steaming water had filled the bath and Irma, standing in an attitude of excruciating coyness was tossing handfuls of emerald and lilac crystals into the sumptuous depths.

Alfred Prunesquallor, his head thrown back across his pillow, was only half asleep. His brows were drawn together and a strange frown gave to his face an unexpected quality. Had any of his acquaintances seen him lying there they would have wondered whether, after all, they had the slightest inkling as to his real nature. Was this the gay, irrepressible and facetious physician?

He had passed a restless and unhappy night. Confused dreams had kept him turning on his bed, dreams that from time to time gathered themselves into vivid images of terrible clarity.

Struggling for breath and strength, he beat his way through the black moat-water to a drowning Fuchsia no bigger than a child's doll. But every time he reached her and stretched out his hand she sank beneath the surface, and there in her place were floating bottles half filled with coloured poison. And then he would see her again, calling for help, tiny, dark desperate, and he would flounder after her, his heart hammering and he would waken.

At various moments through the night he could see Steerpike running through the air, his body bent forward, his feet a few inches above the ground but never touching it. And keeping pace with him and immediately below him as though it were his shadow a swarm of rats with their fangs bared ran in a compact body like one thing, veering as he veered, pausing as he paused, most horrible and intent, filling the landscape of his midnight brain.

He saw the Countess on a great iron tray far out at sea. The moon shone down like a blue lamp, as she fished, with Flay as her frozen rod, attenuate and stiff beyond belief. Between the teeth of the petrified mouth he held a strand of the Countess's dark red hair which shone like a thread of fire in the blue light.

Effortlessly she held him aloft, her big hand gripping him about both ankles.

His clothes were tight about him and he appeared mummified, the thin rigid length of him reaching up stiffly into the stars. With hideous regularity she would pluck at the line and swing aboard another and yet another of her white and sea-drowned cats, and place it tenderly upon the mounting heap of whiteness on the tray.

And then he saw Bellgrove galloping like a horse on all fours with Titus on his back. Through the ravine of terrible darkness and up the slopes of pine-covered mountains he galloped, his white mane blowing out behind his head while Titus, plucking arrow after arrow from an unfailing quiver, let fly at everything in view until, the image dwindling in the Doctor's brain, he lost them in the dire shade of the night.

And the dead, he saw, Mrs Slagg clutching at her heart as she pattered along a tight rope, and the tears that coursed down her cheeks and fell to the earth far below, sounded like gunshots as they struck the ground.

And Swelter, for an instant, filled the darkness, so that even in his sleep, the Doctor retched to see so vile a volume forcing its boneless way, inch by inch, through a keyhole.

And Sepulchrave and Sourdust danced together upon a bed. leaping and turning in the air, their hands joined, and over their heads were great crude paper masks, so that over Sourdust's wizened shoulders the flapping face of a painted kitten put out its tongue at the cardboard sunflower through the great black centre of which the eyes of the seventy-sixth earl of Gormenghast glittered like broken glass.

Picture after moving picture all night long until, as dawn approached, the doctor fell into a dreamless though shallow sleep through which he could hear the dreamland crowing of a cock and the water roaring into Irma's bath.

THIRTY-TWO

In a score of schoolrooms all through the day innumerable urchins wondered what it was that made their masters even less interested than usual in their existence. Familiar as they were with being neglected over long periods and with the disinterest that descends on those who juggle through long decades with sow's ears, yet there was something very different about the kind of listlessness that made itself so evident at every master's desk.

Not a clock in all the various classrooms but had been stared at at least sixty times an hour: not by the bewildered boys, but by their masters.

The secret had been well kept. Not a child knew of the evening party, and when eventually, with the lessons over for the day, the professors arrived back at their private quadrangle, there was a certain smug and furtive air about the way they moved.

There was no particular reason why the invitation to the Prunesquallors should have been kept secret, but a tacit understanding between the masters had been rigidly honoured. There was a sense, perhaps, unformulated for the most part, in their minds, that there was something rather ridiculous about their having 'all' been invited. A sense that the whole thing was somewhat over-simplified. A trifle un-selective. They saw nothing absurd in themselves, individually, and why should they? But a few of them, Perch-Prism in particular, could not visualize his colleagues en masse, himself among them, waiting their entrance at the Prunesquallors' door, without a shudder. There is something about a swarm that is damaging to the pride of its individual members.

As was their habit, they leaned this evening over the balustrade of the verandah that surrounded the Masters' Quadrangle. Below them, the small far-away figure of the quadman was sweeping the ground from end to end, leaving behind him the thin strokes of his broom in the fine dust.

They were all there, the evening light upon them; all except Bellgrove, who, leaning back in the headmaster's chair in his room above the distant classrooms was cogitating the extraordinary suggestions which had been made to him during the day. These suggestions, which had been put forward by Perch-Prism, Opus Fluke, Shred, Swivell and other members, were to the effect that they, for one reason or another and on one occasion or another had heard from friends of friends or had half-heard through hollow panels, or in the darkness below stairs, at such times when Irma was talking to herself aloud (a habit which they assured Bellgrove she had no power to master) that she (Irma) had got the very devil of a passion for him, their reverend headmaster - and that although it was not their affair, they felt he would not be offended to be faced with the reality of the situation - for what could be more obvious than that the party was merely a way for Irma to be near him? It was obvious, was it not, that she could never ask him alone. It would be too blatant, too indelicate, but there it was... there it was. They had frowned at him in sympathy and left.

Now Bellgrove was well used to having his leg pulled. He had had it pulled for as long as he had possessed one. He was thus, for all this weakness and vagueness, no simpleton when it came to banter and the kindred arts. He had listened to all they had said, and now as he sat alone he pondered the whole question for the twentieth time. And his conclusions and speculations came forth from him, heavily like this.

1 The whole thing was poppycock.

2 The purpose of the fabrication was no more than that he should provide, unknowingly, an added zest to the party. These wags on his staff looked forward no doubt to seeing him in constant flight with Irma on his tail.

3 As he had not questioned the story, they could pave no idea that he had seen through it.

4 So far, very excellent.

5 How were the tables to be turned...?

6 What was wrong with Irma Prunesquallor anyway?

A fine, upright woman with a long sharp nose. But what about it? Noses had to be some shape or other. It had character. It wasn't negative. Nor was she. She had no bosom to speak of: that was true enough. But he was rather too old for bosoms anyway. And there was nothing to touch the cool of white pillows in summertime - ('Bless my soul,' he said aloud, 'what am I thinking?')...

As headmaster he was far more alone than he had ever been before. Bad mixer as he was he preferred to be 'out of it' in a crowd than out of it altogether.

He disliked the sense of isolation, when his staff departed every evening. He had pictured himself as a thwarted hermit - one who could find tranquillity, alone with a profound volume on his knee, and a room -about him spare, ascetic, the hard chair, the empty grate. But this was not so. He loathed it and bared his teeth at the mean furniture and the dirty muddle of his belongings. This was no way for a headmaster's study to be! He thought of cushions and bedroom slippers. He thought of socks of long ago with heels to their name. He even thought of flowers in a vase.

Then he thought of Irma again. Yes, there was no denying it, a fine young woman. Well set up. Vivacious. Rather silly, perhaps, but an old man couldn't expect all the qualities.

He rose to his feet and plodding to a mirror wiped the dust from its face with his elbow. Then he peered at himself. A slow childish smile spread over his features as though he were pleased with what he saw. Then with his head on one side, he bared his teeth, and frowned for they were terrible. 'I must keep my mouth shut more than I usually do,' he mused, and he began to practise talking with closed lips but could not make out what he was saying. The novelty of the whole situation and the fantastic project that was now consuming him set his old heart beating as he grasped for the first time its tremendous significance. Not less than the personal triumph with which it would fill him, and the innumerable practical advantages that would surely result from such a union, was the delight he was prematurely tasting of hoisting the staff with its own petard. He began to see himself sailing past the miserable bachelors, Irma on his arm, an unquestioned patriarch, a symbol of success and married stability with something of the gay dog about him too - of the light beneath the bushel, the dark horse, the man with an ace up his sleeve. So they thought that they could fool him. That Irma was infatuated with him. He began to laugh in a sick and exaggerated way, but stopped suddenly 'Could' she be? No. They had made the whole thing up. But could she be, all the same? Coincidentally, as it were. No! no! No! Impossible. Why should she be? 'God bless me!' he muttered 'I must be going mad!'

But the adventure was there. His secret plan was there. It was up to him. A sensation that he imagined was one of youth flooded him. He began to hop laboriously up and down on the floor as though over an invisible skipping rope. He made a jump for the table as though to land on the top, but failed to reach the necessary height, bruised his old leg below the knee.

'Bloody hell!' he muttered and sat down heavily in his chair again.

THIRTY-THREE

As the Professors were changing into their evening gowns, stabbing at startled hanks of hair with broken combs, maligning one another, finding in one another's rooms long lost towels, studs and even major garments that had disappeared in mysterious ways - while this was happening to the accompaniment of much swearing and muttering; and while the coarse jests rumbled along the verandah, and Flannelcat, half sick with excitement, was sitting on the floor of his room with his head between his knees as the heavy hand of Opus Fluke reached hairily through his doorway to steal a towel from a rack - while this and a hundred things were going on around the Masters' Quadrangle, Irma was perambulating the long white room which had been re-opened for the occasion.

It had once been the original salon; a room which the Prunesquallors had never used, being too vast for their requirements. It had been locked up for years, but now, after many days of cleaning and repainting, dusting and polishing, it shone with a terrible newness. A group of skilled men had been kept busy, under Irma's watchful eye. She had a delicate taste, had Irma. She could not bear vulgar colours, or coarse furniture. What she lacked was the power to combine and make a harmony out of the various parts that, though exquisite in themselves, bore no relationship either in style, period, grain, colour or fabric to one another.

Each thing was seen on its own. The walls had to be a most tender shade of washed out coral. And the carpet had to be the kind of green that is almost grey, the flowers were arranged bowl by bowl, vase by vase, and though each was lovely in itself, there was no general beauty in the room.

Unknown to her the 'bittiness' that resulted gave to the salon a certain informality far from her intentions. This was to prove a lubricating thing, for the professors might well have been frozen into a herd of lock-jawed spectres had Irma made of the place the realm of chill perfection that was at the back of her mind. Peering at everything in turn she moved about this long room like something that had spent all its life in planning to counteract the sharpness of its nose, with such a flaunting splendour of silk and jewellery, powder and scent, as set the teeth on edge like coloured icing.

About three quarters of the way along the southern wall of the salon a very fine double window opened upon a walled-in garden where rockeries, crazy pavement, sun-dials, a small fountain (now playing after a two-day struggle with a gardener) trellis work, arbours, statuettes and a fish pond made of the place something so terrifying to the sensitive eye of the Doctor, that he never crossed the garden with his eyes open. Much practice had given him confidence and he could move across it blindly at high speed. It was Irma's territory; a place of ferns and mosses and little flowers that opened at odd hours during the night. Little miniature grottoes had been made for them to twinkle in.

Only at the far end of the garden was there any sense of nature, and even there it was made manifest by no more than a dozen fine trees whose limbs had grown in roughly the direction they had found most natural. But the grass about their stems was closely mown, and under their boughs a rustic chair or two was artlessly positioned.

On this particular evening there was a hunter's moon. No wonder. Irma had seen to it.

When she reached the french windows she was delighted with the scene before her, the goblin-garden, silver and mysterious, the moonbeams glimmering on the fountain, the sun-dial, the trellis work and the moon itself reflected in the fish pond. It was all a bit blurred to her, and that was a pity, but she could not have it both ways. Either she was to wear her dark glasses and look less attractive, or she must put up with finding everything about her out of focus. It didn't matter much how out of focus a garden by moonlight was - in fact in the adding of this supercharge of mystery it became a kind of emotional haze, which was something which Irma, as a spinster, could never have enough of - but how would it be when she had to disengage one professor from another? Would she be able to appreciate the subtlety of their advances, if they made any; those little twitches and twists of the lips, those narrowings and rollings of the eye, those wrinklings of the speculative temple, that shrugging of an eye-brow at play? Would all this be lost to her?

When she had told her brother of her intention to dispense with her glasses, he had advised her, in that case, to leave them off an hour before the guests were due. And he had been right. She was quite sure he had been. For the pain in her forehead had gone and she was moving faster on her swathed legs than she had dared to do at first. But it was all a little confusing, and though her heart beat at the sight of her moon-blur of a garden, yet she clenched her hands at the same time in a gay little temper that she should have been born with bad eyes.

She rang a bell. A head appeared at the door.

'Is that Mollocks?'

'Yes, Madam.'

'Have you got your soft shoe on?'

'Yes, Madam.'

'You may enter.'

Mollocks entered.

'Cast your eye around, Mollocks - I said cast your eye around. No, no! Get the feather duster. No, no. Wait a minute - I said wait a minute.' (Mollocks had made no move.) 'I will ring.' (She rang.) Another head appeared. 'Is that Canvas?'

'Yes, Madam, it is Canvas.'

'Yes Madam is quite enough, Canvas. Quite enough. Your exact name is not so enormously important. Is it? Is it? To the larder with you and fetch a feather brush for Mollocks. A way with you. Where are you, Mollocks?'

'Beside you, Madam.'

'Ah yes. Ah yes. Have you shaved?'

'Definitely, Madam.'

'Quite so. Mollocks. It must be my eyes. You look so dark across the face. Now you are to leave no stone unturned - not one - do you understand me? Move from place to place all over this room, backwards and forwards restlessly do you understand me, with Canvas at your side - 'searching' for those specks of dust that have escaped me - did you say you had your soft shoes on?'

'Yes, Madam.'

'Good. Very good. Is that Canvas who has just come in? Is it? Good. Very good. He is to travel with you. Four eyes are better than two. But you can use the brush - whoever finds the specks. I don't want anything spoilt or knocked over and Canvas can be very clumsy, can't you, Canvas?'

The old man Canvas who had been sent running about the house since dawn, and who did not feel that as an old retainer he was being appreciated, said that he 'didn't know about that'. It was his only line of defence, a repetitive, stubborn attitude beyond which one could not go.

'Oh yes you are,' repeated Irma. ''Quite' clumsy. Run along now. You are 'slow', Canvas, 'slow'.'

Again the old man said he 'didn't know about that' and having said so, turned in a puny fury of temper from his mistress and tripping over his own feet as he turned, grabbed at a small table. A tall alabaster vase swayed on its narrow base like a pendulum while Mollocks and Canvas watched it, their mouths open, their limbs paralysed.

But Irma had surged away from them and was practising a certain slow and languid mode of progress which she felt might be effective. Up and down a little strip of the soft grey carpet she swayed, stopping every now and again to raise a limp hand before her, presumably to be touched by the lips of one or other of the professors.

Her head would be tilted away at these moments of formal intimacy, and there was only a segment of her sidelong glance as it grazed her cheekbones, to reward the imaginary gallant as he mouthed her knuckles.

Knowing Irma's vision to be faulty and that they could not be seen, with the length of the salon between them, Canvas and Mollocks watched her from under their gathered brows, marking time, like soldiers the while, to simulate the sounds of activity.

They had not long, however, in which to watch their mistress for the door opened and the doctor came in. He was in full evening dress and looked more elegant than ever. Across his immaculate breast was the pick of the few decorations with which Gormenghast had honoured him. The crimson Order of the Vanquished Plague, and the Thirty-fifth Order of the Floating Rib lay side by side upon his narrow, snow-white shirt, and were suspended from wide ribbons. In his buttonhole was an orchid.

'O Alfred,' cried Irma. 'How do I seem to you? How do I seem to you?'

The Doctor glanced over his shoulder and motioned the retainers out of the room with a flick of his hand.

He had hidden himself away all afternoon and sleeping dreamlessly had to a great extent recovered from the nightmares he had suffered. As he stood before his sister he appeared as fresh as a daisy, if less pastoral.

'Now I tell you 'what',' he cried, moving round her, his head cocked on one side, 'I tell you 'what', Irma. You've made something out of yourself, and if it ain't a work of art, it's as near as makes no matter. By all that emanates, you've brought it off. Great grief! I hardly know you. Turn round, my dear, on one heel! La! La! 'Significant' form, that's what she is! And to think the same blood batters in our veins! It's quite embarrassing.'

'What do you mean, Alfred? I thought you were praising me.' (There was a catch in her voice.)

'And so I was, and so I was! - but tell me sister, what is it, apart from your luminous, un-sheltered eyes - and your general dalliance - what is it that's altered you - that has, as it were... aha... aha... H'm... I've got it - O dear me... quite so, by all that's pneumatic, how silly of me - you've got a bosom, my love, or haven't you?'

'Alfred! It is not for you to prove.'

'God forbid, my love.'

'But if you 'must' know...'

'No, no, Irma, no no! I am content to leave everything to your judgement.'

'So you won't listen to me...' (Irma was almost in tears).

'O but I will. Tell me all.'

'Alfred dear - you liked the look of me. You 'said' you did.'

'And I still do. Enormously. It was only that, well, I've known you a long time and...'

'I'm 'told',' said Irma, breaking in breathlessly, 'that busts are... well...'

'... that busts are what you make them?' queried her brother standing on his toes.

'Exactly! Exactly!' his sister shouted. 'And I've 'made' one, Alfred, and it gives me pride of bearing. It's a hot water bottle, Alfred; an expensive one.'

There was a long and deathly silence. When at last Prunesquallor had reassembled the fragments of his shattered poise he opened his eyes.

'When do you expect them, my love?'

'You know as well as I do. At nine o'clock, Alfred. Shall we call in the Chef.'

'What for?'

'For final instructions, of course.'

'What again?'

'One can't be too final, dear.'

'Irma,' said the Doctor, 'perhaps you have stumbled on a truth of the first water. And talking of water - is the fountain playing?'

'Darling!' said Irma, fingering her brother's arm. 'It's playing its heart out,' and she gave him a pinch.

The doctor felt the blushes spreading all over his body, in little rushes like red Indians leaping from ambush, to ambush, now here, now there.

'And 'now', Alfred, since it's nearly nine o'clock, I am going to give you a surprise. You haven't seen 'anything' yet. This sumptuous dress. Those jewels at my ears, these flashing stones about my white throat -' (her brother winced) '... and the fancy knot-work of my silvery coiff - all this is but a setting, Alfred, a mere setting. Can you bear to wait, Alfred, or shall I tell you? Or still more better - O yes! Yes, still more better, dear, I'll show you NOW-'

And away she went. The Doctor had no idea she could travel so fast. A swish of 'nightmare blue' and she was gone, leaving behind her the faint smell of almond icing.

'I wonder if I'm getting old?' thought the doctor, and he put his hand to his forehead and shut his eyes. When he opened them she was there again - but O creeping hell! what had she done.

What faced him was not merely the fantastically upholstered and bedizened image of his sister to whose temperament and posturing he had long been immune, but something else, which turned her from a vain, nervous, frustrated, outlandish, excitable and prickly spinster which was bearable enough, into an 'exhibit.' The crude inner workings of her mind were thrust nakedly before him by reason of the long flower-trimmed veil that she now wore over her face. Only her eyes were to be seen, above the thick black netting, very weak, and rather small. She turned them to left and right to show her brother the principle of the thing. Her nose was hidden, and in itself that was excellent, but in no way could it offset the blatancy, the terrible soul-revealing blatancy of the underlying idea.

For the second time that evening Prunesquallor blushed. He had never seen anything so openly, ridiculously, predatory in his life. Heaven knew she would say the wrong thing at the wrong time, but above all she must not be allowed to expose her intention in that palpable way.

But what he said was 'Aha! H'm. What a flair you have. Irma! What a consummate flair. Who else would have thought of it?'

'O Alfred, I knew you'd love it...' she swivelled her eyes again, but her attempt at roguery was heart-breaking.

'Now what 'is' it I keep thinking of as I stand and admire you,' her brother trilled, tapping his forehead with his finger - 'tut... tut... tut, what 'is' it... something I read in one of your journals, I do believe - ah yes, I've almost got it - there... it's slipped away again... how irritating... wait.. wait... here it comes like a fish to the bait of my poor old memory... ah, I almost had it I've 'got' it, O yes indeed... but, oh dear me, No... that wouldn't do at all I mustn't tell you 'that'...'

'What 'is' it, Alfred?... what are you frowning about? How irritating you are just when you were studying me - I said how irritating you are.'

'You would be most unhappy if I told you, my dear. It affects you deeply.'

'Affects me! How do you mean?'

'It was the merest snippet, Irma, which I happened to read. What has reminded me of it is that it was all about veils and the modem woman. Now I, as a man, have always responded to the mysterious and provocative wherever it may be found. And if these qualities are evoked by anything on earth they are evoked by a woman's veil. But O dear me, do you know what this creature in the Women's column wrote?'

'What did she write?' said Irma.

'She wrote that "although there may be those who will continue to wear their veils, just as there are those who still crawl through the jungle on all fours because no one has ever told them that it is the custom these days to walk upright, yet she (the writer) would know full well in what grade of society to place any woman who was continuing to wear a veil, after the twenty-second of the month. After all," the writer continued, "some things are 'done' and some things are not done, and as far as the sartorial aristocracy was concerned, veils might as well never have been invented"'

'But what nonsense it all is,' cried the Doctor. 'As though women are so weak that they have to follow one another so closely as all that.' And he gave a high-pitched laugh as though to imply that a mere male could see through all that kind of nonsense.

'Did you say the twenty-second of this month?' said Irma, after a few moments of thick silence.

'That is so,' said her brother.

'And today is the...'

'The thirtieth,' said her brother - 'but surely, surely, you wouldn't...'

'Alfred,' said Irma. 'Be quiet, please. There are some things which you do not understand and one of them is a woman's mind.' With a deft movement of her hand she freed her face of the veil and there was her nose again as sharp as ever.

'Now I wonder if you'd do something for me, dear.'

'What is it, Irma, my love?'

'I wondered if you'd do something for me, dear?'

'What is it, Irma, my love?'

'I wondered if you'd take - O no, I'll have to do it myself - and you might be shocked - but perhaps if you would shut your eyes, Alfred, I could...'

'What in the name of darkness are you driving at?'

'I wondered, dear, at first, whether you would take my bust to the bedroom and fill it with hot water. It has got very cold, Alfred, and I don't want to catch a chill - or perhaps if you'd rather not do that for me, you could bring the kettle downstairs to my little writing room and I'll do it myself - will you, dear will you?'

'Irma,' said her brother. 'I will not do it for you. I have done and will continue to do a lot of things for you, pleasant and unpleasant, but I will not start running around, looking for water bottles to fill for my sister's bosom. I will not even bring down the kettle for you. Have you no kind of modesty, my love? I know you are very excited, and really don't know what you are doing or saying, but I must have it quite clear from the start that as far as your rubber bust is concerned, I am unable to help you. If you catch a chill, then I will dose you - but until then, I would be grateful if you would leave the subject alone. But enough of that! Enough of that! The magic hour approaches. Come, come! my tiger lily!'

'Sometimes I despise you, Alfred,' said Irma. 'Who would have thought that 'you' were such a prude.'

'Ah no! my dear, you're far too hard on me. Have mercy. Do you think it is easy to bear your scorn when you are looking so radiant?'

'Am I. Alfred! O, am I? Am I?'

THIRTY-FOUR

It had been arranged that the staff should gather in the quadrangle outside the Doctor's house at a few minutes past nine and wait for Bellgrove, who, as headmaster, had ignored the suggestion that he should be first on the spot and wait for them. Perch-Prism's argument that it was a good deal more ludicrous for a horde of men to hang about as though they were hatching some kind of conspiracy than it would be for Bellgrove, even though he was headmaster, cut no ice with the old lion.

Bellgrove, in his present mood, was peculiarly dogged. He had glowered over his shoulder at them as though he were at bay. 'Never let it be said in future years...' he had ended, 'that a headmaster of Gormenghast had once to wait the pleasure of his staff's arrival - by night, in the South Quadrangle. Never let it be said that so responsible an office had sunk into such disrespect.'

And so it was that a few minutes after nine a great blot formed in the darkness of the quadrangle as though a section of the dusk had coagulated. Bellgrove, who had been hiding behind a pillar of the cloisters, had decided to keep his staff waiting for at least five minutes. But he was unable to contain his impatience. Not three minutes had passed since their arrival before his excitement propelled him forwards into the open gloom. When he was half way across the quadrangle, and could hear the muttering of their voices, quite plainly, the moon slid out from behind a cloud. In the cold light that now laid bare the rendezvous, the red gowns of the professors burned darkly, the colour of wine. Not so Bellgrove's. 'His' ceremonial gown was of the finest white silk, embroidered across the back with a large 'G'. It was a magnificent, voluminous affair, this gown, but the effect was a little startling by moonlight, and more than one of the waiting professors gave a start to see what appeared to be a ghost bearing down upon them.

The Professors had forgotten the ceremonial robe of leadership. Deadyawn had never worn it. For the smaller-minded of the staff there was something irritating about this sartorial discrepancy of their gowns which gave the old man so unique an advantage, both decoratively and socially. They had all been secretly rather pleased to have the opportunity of wearing their red robes in public, although the public consisted solely of the Doctor and his sister (for they didn't count each other) - and now, Bellgrove, of all people, Bellgrove, their decrepit head had stolen with a single peal. as it were, the wealth of their red thunder.

He could feel their discontent, short-lived though it was, and the effect of this recognition was to excite him still further. He tossed his white mane of hair in the moonlight and gathered his arctic gown about him in a great sculptural swathe.

'Gentlemen,' he said. 'Silence if you please. I thank you.'

He dropped his head so that with his face in deep shadow he could relax his features in a smile of delight at finding himself obeyed. When he raised his face it was as solemn and as noble as before.

'Are all who are here gathered present?'

'What the hell does that mean?' said a coarse voice, out of the red gloom of the gowns, and immediately on top of Mulefire's voice, the staccato of Cutflower's laughter broke out in little clanks of sound - 'Oh La! la! la! if that isn't ripeness, la! "Are all who are here gathered present?" La!... What a tease the old man is, lord help my lungs!'

'Quite so! Quite so!' broke out a crisper voice. 'What he was trying to ask, presumably' (it was Shrivell speaking) 'was whether everyone here was really here, or whether it was only those who thought themselves here when they weren't really here at all who were here? You see it's quite simple, really, once you have mastered the syntax.'

Somewhere close behind the headmaster there was a sense of strangled body-laughter, a horrible inaudible affair and then the sound of a deep bucketful of breath being drawn out of a well - and then Opus Fluke's mid-stomach voice. 'poor old Bellgrove,' it said. 'Poor old bloody Bellgrove!' and then the rumbling again, and a chorus of dark and stupid laughter.

Bellgrove was in no mood for this. His old face was flushed and his legs trembled. Fluke's voice had sounded very close. Just behind his left shoulder. Bellgrove took a step to the rear and then turning suddenly with a whirl of his white gown he swung his long arm and at once he was startled at what he at first imagined was a complete triumph. His gnarled old fist had struck a human jaw. A quick, wild, and bitter sense of mastery possessed him and the intoxicating notion that he had been under-rating himself for seventy odd years and that all unwittingly he had discovered in himself the 'man of action'. But his exhilaration was short lived for the figure who lay moaning at his feet was not Opus Fluke at all, but the weedy and dyspeptic Flannelcat, the only member of his staff who held him in any kind of respect.

But Bellgrove's prompt action had a sobering effect.

'Flannelcat!' he said. 'Let that be a warning to them. Get up, my man. You have done nobly. Nobly.' At that moment something whisked through the air and struck an obscure member of the staff on the wrist. At his cry, for he was in real pain, Flannelcat was at once forgotten. A small round stone was found at the feet of the obscure member, and every head was turned at once to the dusky quadrangle, but nothing could be seen.

High up on a northern wall, where the windows appeared no larger than keyholes, Steerpike, sitting with his legs dangling over one of the window-sills, raised his eyebrows at the sound of the cry so far below him, and piously closing his eyes he kissed his catapult.

'Whatever the hell that was, or wherever it came from, it does at least remind us that we are late, my friend,' said Shrivell.

'True enough,' muttered Shred, who almost always trod heavily on the tail of his friend's remarks. 'True enough.'

'Bellgrove,' said Perch-Prism, 'wake your ideas up, old friend, and lead the way in. I see that every light is blazing in the homestead of the Prunes. Lord, what a lot we are!' he moved his small pig-like eyes across the faces of his colleagues - 'what a hideous lot we are - but there it is - there it is.'

'You're not much of a silk-purse yourself,' said a voice.

'In we go, la! In we go!' cried Cutflower. 'Terribly gay now! 'Terribly gay'! We must 'all' be terribly gay!'

Perch-Prism slid up under Bellgrove's shoulder. 'My old friend,' he said. 'You haven't forgotten what I said about Irma, have you? It may be difficult for you. I have even more recent information. She's dead nuts on you, old man. Dead nuts. Watch your steps, chief. Watch 'em carefully.'

'I - will- watch - my - steps, Perch-Prism, have no fear,' said Bellgrove with a leer that his colleagues could in no way interpret.

Spiregrain, Throd and Splint stood hand in hand. Their spiritual master was dead. They were enormously glad of it. They winked at each other and dug one another in the ribs and then joined hands again in the darkness.

A mass movement towards the gate of the Prunesquallors began. Within this gate there was nothing that could be called a front garden, merely an area of dark red gravel which had been raked by the gardener. The parallel lines formed by his rake were quite visible in the moonlight. He might have saved himself the trouble for within a few moments the neat striated effect was a thing of the past. Not a square red inch escaped the shuffling and stamping of the Professors' feet. Hundreds of footprints of all shapes and sizes, crossing and recrossing, toes and heels superimposed with such freaks of placing that it seemed as though among the professors there were some who boasted feet as long as an arm, and others who must have found it difficult to balance upon shoes that a monkey might have found too tight.

After the bottleneck of the garden gate had been negotiated and the wine-red horde, with Bellgrove at its van, like an oriflamme, were before the front door, the headmaster turned with his hand hovering at the height of the bell pull, and raising his lion-like head, was about to remind his staff that as the guests of Irma Prunesquallor he hoped to find in their deportment and general behaviour that sense of decorum which he had so far had no reason to suppose they possessed or could even simulate, when a butler, dressed up like a Christmas cracker, flung the front door open with a flourish which was obviously the result of many years' experience. The speed of the door as it swung on its hinges was extraordinary, but what was just as dramatic was the silence - a silence so complete that Bellgrove, with his head turned towards his staff and his hand still groping in the air for the bell-pull, could not grasp the reason for the peculiar behaviour of his colleagues. When a man is about to make a speech, however modest, he is glad to have the attention of his audience. To see on every face that stared in his direction an expression of intense interest, but an interest that obviously had nothing to do with him, was more than disturbing. What had happened to them? Why were all those eyes so out of focus - or if they were 'in' focus why, should they skim his own as though there were something absorbing about the woodwork of the high green door behind him? And why was Throd standing on tiptoe in order to look 'through' him?

Bellgrove was about to turn - not because he thought there could be anything to see but because he was experiencing that sensation that causes men to turn their heads on deserted roads in order to make sure they are alone. But before he could turn of his own free will he received two sharp yet deferential knuckle-taps on his left shoulder-blade - and leaping about as though at the touch of a ghost he found himself face to face with the tall Christmas-cracker of a butler.

'You will pardon me, sir, for making free with my knuckle, I am sure, sir,' said the glittering figure in the hall. 'But you are impatiently awaited, sir, and no wonder if I may say so,'

'If you 'insist',' said Bellgrove. 'So be it.'

His remark meant nothing at all but it was the only thing he could think of to say.

'And now, sir,' continued the butler, lifting his voice into a higher register which gave quite a new expression to his face - 'if you will be so gracious as to follow me, I will lead the way to madam.'

He moved to one side and cried out into the darkness.

'Forward, gentlemen! if you please,' and turning smartly on his heel he began to lead Bellgrove through the hall and down a number of short passageways until a wider space, at the foot of a flight of stairs, brought him and his followers to a halt.

'I have no doubt, sir,' the butler said, inclining himself reverentially as he spoke - and to Bellgrove's way of thinking the man was speaking overmuch 'I have no doubt, sir, that you are familiar with the customary procedure.'

'Of course, my man. Of course,' said Bellgrove. 'What is it?'

'O sir!' said the butler. 'You are very humorous,' and he began to titter - an unpleasant sound to come from the top of a cracker.

'There are many "procedures", my man. Which one were you referring to?'

'To the one, sir, that pertains to the order in which the guests are announced - by name, of course, as they file through the doorway of the salon. It is all very cut and dried, sir.'

'What 'is' the order, my dear fellow, if it is not the order of seniority?'

'And so it is, sir, in all respects, save that it is customary for the headmaster, which would be you, sir, to bring up the rear.'

'The rear?'

'Quite so sir. As a kind of shepherd, I suppose sir, driving his flock before him, as it were.'

There was a short silence during which Bellgrove began to realize that to be the last to present himself to his hostess, he would be the first to hold any kind of conversation with her.

'Very well,' he said. 'The tradition must, of course, remain inviolate.

Ridiculous as it seems in the face of it, I shall, as you put it, bring up the rear. Meanwhile, it is getting late. There is no time to sort out the staff into age-groups, and so on. None of them are chickens. Come along now, gentlemen, come along; and if you will be so kind as to stop combing your hair before the door is opened, Cutflower. I would, as one who is responsible for his staff, be grateful. Thank you.'

Just then, the door which faced the staircase opened and a long rectangle of gold light fell across a section of the embattled masters. Their gowns flamed. Their faces shone like spectres. Turning almost simultaneously after a few minutes of dazzling blankness they shuffled into the surrounding shadow. Around the corner of the open door through which the light was pouring a large face peered out at them.

'Name?' it whispered thickly. An arm crept around the door and drew the nearest figure forwards and into the light by a fistful of wine-red linen. 'Name?' it whispered again.

'The name is Cutflower, 'la'! 'hissed the gentleman, 'but take your great joint of clod's fist off me, you stupid bastard.' Cutflower, whose gusts of temper were rare and short-lived, was really angry at being pulled forward by his gown and in having it clenched so clumsily into a web of creases. 'Let go! he repeated hotly. 'By hell, I'll have you whipped, la!'

The crude footman bent down and brought his lip to Cutflower's ear. 'I... will... kill... you... ' he whispered, but in such an abstracted way as to give Cutflower quite a turn. It was as though the fellow was passing on a scrap of inside information - casually (like a spy) but in confidence. Before Cutflower had recovered he found himself pushed forward, and he was suddenly alone in the long room. Alone, except for a line of servants along the right-hand wall, and away ahead of him, his host and hostess, very still, very upright in the glow of many candles.

Had Bellgrove worked out beforehand the order in which to have his staff announced, it is unlikely that he would have hit upon so happy an idea as that of choosing Cutflower from his pack, and leading off, as it were, with a card so lacking in the solid virtues.

But 'chance' had seen to it that of all the gowns it was Cutflower's that should have been within range of the groping hand. And Cutflower, the volatile and fatuous Cutflower, as he stepped lightly like a wagtail across the grey-green roods of carpet was, in spite of the shocking start he had been given, injecting the air, the cold expectant air, with something no other member of the staff possessed in the same way - a warmth or a gaiety of a kind, but not a human gaiety; rather, it was glass-like; a sparkling, twinkling quality.

It was as though Cutflower was so glad to be alive that he had never lived.

Every moment was vivid, a coloured thing, a trill or a crackle of words in the air. Who could imagine, while Cutflower was around, that there were such vulgar monsters as death, birth, love, art and pain around the corner? It was too embarrassing to contemplate. If Cutflower knew of them he kept it secret. Over their gaping and sepulchral deeps he skimmed now here, now there, in his private canoe, changing his course with a flick of his paddle when death's black whale, or the red squid of passion, lifted for a moment its body from the brine.

He was not more than a third of the way to his hosts, and the echo of the stentorian voice, which had flung his name across the room, was hardly dead, and yet (with his wagtail walk, his spruceness, his perky ductile features so ready to be amused and so ready to amuse as long as no one took life seriously) he had already broken the ice for the Prunesquallors. There was a certain charm in his fatuity, his perkiness. His toecaps shone like mirrors. His feet came down tap-tap-tap-tap in a way all their own.

The Professors craning their necks as they watched his progress breathed more freely. They knew now that they could never accomplish that long carpet-journey with anything like Cutflower's air, but he reminded them at every footstep, every inclination of the head, that the whole point of life was to be happy.

And O, the charm of it! The artless charm of it! When Cutflower, with but a few feet to go, broke into a little dancing run, and putting forward both his hands cupped them over the limp white fingers which Irma had extended.

'O, la! La!' he had cried, his voice running all the way back down the salon. 'This 'is', my dear Miss Prunesquallor, this positively 'is'...' and turning to the Doctor, 'Isn't it?' he added as he clasped the outstretched hand, squaring his shoulders and shaking his head happily as he did so.

'Well, I hope it will 'become' so, my friend,' cried Prunesquallor. 'How good to see you! And bye the bye, Cutflower, you give me heart you do... by all that re-vivifies I thank you from its bottom. Don't disappear now, for the whole evening, will you?'

Irma leaned across her brother and drew her lips apart in a dead, wide and calculated smile.

It was meant to express many things, and among them the sense of how unconditionally she associated herself with her brother's sentiment. It also tried to imply that for all her qualities as a 'femme fatale', she was little more than a wide-eyed girl at heart and terribly vulnerable. But it was early in the evening and she knew she must make many mistakes before her smiles came out right.

Cutflower, whose eyes were still on the doctor, was fortunate enough to be unaware of Irma's blandishment. He was about to say something, when the loud and common voice from the other end of the room brayed forth, 'Professor Mulefire', and Cutflower turned his head gaily from his hosts and shielded his eyes in imitation of a look-out man scanning some distant horizon. With a quick, delighted smile and a twirl of his dapper body, he was away to the side tables, where with his elbows raised very high, he worked his ten fingers together into a knot, as he passed his eye along the wines and delicacies. Self-absorbed, he rocked to and fro on the sides of his shoes.

How different was Mulefire with his long clumsy irritable strides! And indeed how disparate were all who followed one another that evening with only the colour of their gowns in common.

Flannelcat, like a lost soul for whom the journey was a mile at least; the heavy, sloppy, untidy Fluke, who looked as though, for all his strength and for all the forward thrust of his loaf-like jaw, he might at any moment fold up at the knees and go to sleep on the carpet. Perch-Prism, horribly alert, his porcine features shining white in the glow of the candles, his button-black eyes darting to and fro as he moved crisply with short aggressive steps.

With this shape and that shape, with this walk and that walk, they emerged from the hall to the tocsin-bray of their names, until Bellgrove found himself alone in the semi-darkness.

As one after another of the professional guests had made their carpet-journey towards her, Irma had had a world of time in which to ruminate on the vulnerability of each to the charm she would so soon be unleashing. Some, of course, were quite impossible - but even as she dismissed them she began to brood with favour upon such phrases as 'rough diamond', 'heart of gold', 'still waters'....

While the sides of the room filled with those who had presented themselves and their conversation became louder and louder as their numbers increased, Inna, standing rigid by her brother, speculating upon the pros and cons of those she had received, was wakened out of a more than usually sanguine speculation by her brothers voice.

'And how is Irma, that sister of mine, that sweet throb? Is she cooing? Is she weary of the flesh - or isn't she? Great spearheads, Irma! How determined, how martial you look! Relax a little, melt within yourself. Think of milk and honey. Think of jellyfish.'

'Be quiet,' she hissed out of the corner of a smile she was concocting, a smile more ambitious than she had so far dared to invent. Every muscle in her face was pulling its weight. Not all of them knew in which direction to pull, but their common enthusiasm was formidable. It was as though all her previous contortions were mere rehearsals. Something in white was approaching.

The 'something in white' was moving slowly but with more purpose than for over forty years. While he had waited, sitting quietly by himself on the lowest step of the Prunesquallors' staircase, Bellgrove had repeated to himself, his lips moving to the slow rhythm of his thoughts, those conclusions he had come to.

He had decided, intellectually, that Inna Prunesquallor, dwarfed by lack of outlet for her feminine instincts, could find fruition in a life devoted to his comforts. That not only he, but she, in years to come would bless the day when he, Bellgrove, was man enough, was sapient enough, to lift her from stagnation and set her marching through matrimony towards that equipoise of spirit that only wives can know. There were a hundred rational reasons why she should leap at the chance in spite of his advanced years. But what weight had all these arguments for a fine and haughty lady, sensitive as a blood horse and gowned like a queen, if at the same time there was no love? And Bellgrove remembered as he had crossed the quadrangle an hour ago how it was this point that irked him. But now, it was not the rightness of his reasoning that set his old knees trembling, it was something more. For, from a wise and practical project the whole conception had been shifted into another light. His ideas had suddenly been overlaid with stars. What was precise was now enormous, unsubstant, diaphanous, for he had seen her. And tonight it was not merely the Doctor's sister that awaited him, but a daughter of Eve, a living focus, a cosmos, a pulse of the great abstraction, Woman. Was her name Irma? Her name was Irma. But what was the name Irma but four absurd little letters in a certain order? To hell with symbols, cried Bellgrove to himself. She is there, by God, from head to foot and matchless!

It was true that he had only seen her from a distance and it is possible that the distance lent an enchantment self-engendered. No doubt, his sight was not as sharp as it used to be - and the fact that he could not remember having seen any other woman for many years gave Irma a flying start.

But he had obtained a general picture, as he peered through a narrow chasm of light that shone between Throd's and Spiregrain's bodies.

And he had seen how proudly she held herself. Stiff as a soldier, and yet how feminine! That is what he would like to have about him in the evening. A stately type. He could imagine her, sitting bolt upright, at his side, her face twitching a little from gentle breeding, her snow-white hands darning away at his socks while he pondered on this and that, turning his eyes from time to time to see whether it was really true, that she was really there, his wife, his wife, on the chocolate-coloured couch.

And then suddenly he had found himself alone. The big face was peering for him from the door. 'Name?' it whispered hoarsely, for its voice was almost gone.

'I'm the headmaster, you idiot,' barked Bellgrove. He was in no mood for fools. Something was in his blood. Whether it was love or not he must find out soon. There was an impatient streak in him - and this was no moment in which to suffer the man gladly.

The creature with the big face, seeing that Bellgrove was the last to be announced, took a deep breath and to get rid of his pent-up irritability (for he was an hour late for his appointment with a blacksmith's wife) gathered all the forces of his throat together and yelled - but his voice collapsed after the first syllable and only Bellgrove heard the guttering sound that was intended for 'master'.

But there was something rather fine, rather impressive in the abbreviation. Something less formal, it is true, but more penetrating in the first simple syllable.

'The Head -!'

The short hammer blow of the monosyllable reverberated along the room like a challenge.

It struck like a drumstick on the membranes of Irma's ear and Bellgrove, peering forward as he took his first paces into the room, had the impression of his hostess rearing herself up on her hips, tossing her head before it froze into a motionless carving.

His heart, that was already beating wildly, had leapt at the sight. Her attention was riveted upon him. Of that there was no doubt. Not only her attention, but the attention of all those present. He became aware of a lethal hush. Soft as the carpet was, his feet could be heard as they lowered themselves one after another into the grey-green of the pile.

For a moment, as he moved with that fantastic solemnity which the urchins of Gormenghast were so fond of mimicking, he gave his eyes the run of his staff. There they stood, three deep, a solid wine-red phalanx that completely obscured the side-tables. Yes, he could see Perch-Prism, his eyebrows raised, and Opus Fluke with his horse's mouth half open in a grin so inane that for a moment it was difficult for Bellgrove to regain that composure necessary to the advancement of his immediate interests. So they were waiting to see in what way he would try to evade the 'predatory' Irma, were they? So they expected him to back away from her immediately after he had received his formal reception, did they? So they looked for an evening of hide and seek between their hostess and their headmaster, the low curs! By the light of a militant heaven, he would show the dogs! He would show them. And, by the powers, he would surprise them too.

By now he was about half way along the carpet, already trodden into a recognizable highway, the pile of the carpet throwing out a greener sheen than elsewhere, the pile pressed forward by a hundred feet.

Irma, her eyes weak with peering, could just see him. As he approached and the blurred edges of his swan white gown, and the contours of his leonine head, grew sharper, she marvelled at his god-like quality. She had received so many half-men that she had tired, not of numbers, but of waiting for the kind of male she could reverence. There had been the perky ones, and the stolid ones and the sharp ones and the blunt ones - all males she supposed, but although she had a few of them at the back of her mind for further consideration, yet she had been sadly disappointed. There had been that irritating bachelor quality about them, a kind of dead self-sufficiency, a terrible thing in a man, who is, as every woman knows, a mere tag-end of a thing before the distaff side has stitched him together.

But here was something different. Something old it is true, but something noble. She manoeuvred with her mouth. It had had a good deal of practice by this time and the smile she prepared for Bellgrove reflected to a great extent what she had in mind for it. Above all, it was winsome, devastatingly winsome. For a pretty face to be winsome is normal enough and very winsome it can be, but it is a tepid thing, a negative thing compared with the winsomeness to which Irma could subject her features. With her it was as startling as any foreground symbol set against an incongruous background. Irma's weak and eager eyes, Irma's pinnacle of a nose, Irma's length of powdered face; these were the incongruous background on which the smile deployed its artful self. She played with it for a moment or two, as an angler with a fish, and then she let it set like concrete.

Her body had simultaneously rhythmed itself into a stance both statuesque and snake-like, her thorax, amplified with its hot-water bottle bosom, positioned in air so far to the left of her pelvis as to have no visible means of support. Her snow-white hands were clasped at her throat where her jewellery sparkled.

Bellgrove was almost upon her. 'This,' he said to himself, breathing deeply, 'is one of those moments in a man's life when valour is tested.'

The years ahead hung on his every move. His staff had shaken hands with her as though a woman was merely another kind of man. Fools! The seeds of Eve were in this radiant creature. The lullabyes of half a million years throbbed in her throat. Had they no sense of wonder, no reverence, no pride? He, an old man (but a not unhandsome one), would show the dogs the way of it - and there she was, before him, the maddeningly feminine bouquet of her pineapple perfume swimming about his head. He inhaled. He trembled, and then, lion-like, he tossed his venerable mane from his eyes, and raising his shoulders as he took her hand in his, he bowed his head above their milky limpness and planted in the damp of her palms, the first two kisses he had given for over fifty years.

To say that the frozen silence contracted itself into a yet higher globe of ice were to under-rate the exquisite tension and to shroud it in words. The atmosphere had become a physical sensation. As when, before a masterpiece, the acid throat contracts, and words are millstones, so when the supernaturally outlandish happens and a masterpiece is launched through the medium of human gesture, then all human volition is withered at the source and the heart of action stops beating.

Such a moment was this. Irma, a stalagmite of crimson stone, knew, for all the riot of her veins that a page had turned over. At chapter forty? O no! At chapter one, for she had never lived before save in a pulseless preface.

How long did they remain thus? How many times had the earth moved round the sun? How many times had the great blue whales of the northern waters risen to spurt their fountains at the sky? How many reed-bucks had fallen to the claws of how many leopards, while that sublime unit of two-figure statuary remained motionless? It is fruitless to ask. The clocks of the world stood still or should have done.

But at last the arctic stillness broke. A professor at the side tables gave forth a sharp scream, whether of laughter or nerves was never established.

The Doctor glanced across at the wine red gowns, his eyebrows raised, his teeth glinting. There were a few beads of moisture on his forehead. He was going through a lot.

Irma had not consciously heard the sharp cry of laughter nor knew what had broken her from a trance, but she found herself inclining her head graciously above the white locks of the headmaster's reverential poll.

This was 'it'. Something within her was laughing wildly, like cowbells.

It was a pity that the headmaster could not appreciate the amplitude of her graciousness as she hung above him – but, there it was - she couldn't have it both ways - but wait - what was this?

O sweetest mercy! And the wild thorn-throbs of it! What was he doing, the great, gentle, august, brilliant lion? He was raising his eyes to hers with his lips still pressed against her fingers. It was as though he had divined her most secret thoughts.

She lowered her lids and found that his dead-pebble eyes were upon hers.

With their gaze directed upwards and through the white tangle of the eyebrows they appeared to be caged.

She knew the moment to be enormous - enormous in its implications - in its future - but she knew also as a woman that she must draw her hand away. As the first suspicion of a movement crept through her flaccid fingers, Bellgrove lifted his head, withdrew his big hands from hers and at that moment Irma's bosom began to slip. In the complex arrangement of strings, safety pins and tape which held the hot water bottle in place. Time had found a weakness.

But Irma, tingling with excitement, was in so elevated a frame of body and mind that, beyond her capacity as it were, her brain was planning for her in advance, those things she should do, and say, in or out of any emergency. And this was one of those moments when the cells of Irma's brain marched in solid ranks to her rescue.

Her bosom was slipping. She clasped her hands together at her throat so that her forearms might keep the hot water bottle in place, and then with every eye upon her she lifted her head high and began to pace towards the doorway at the far end of the salon. She had not even glanced at her brother, but with a quite overweening confidence had started away, the folds of her evening gown trailing behind her.

The bottle had become horribly cold across her chest. But she revelled in its cruel temperature. Why should she care about such little things? Something on an altogether vaster scale was bearing her on its flood.

The barb had struck. She was naked. She was proud. Had love's arrow not been metaphorical she would have held it high in the air for all to see. And all this she was making plain, by the very movement of her pacing body, and by the volcanic blush which had turned her marmoreal head into something that might have been found among the blood-red ruins of some remote civilization.

Her jewellery took on another tint. Her blush burned through it.

But her expression bore no relation to the blush. It was strangely articulate, and thus, frighteningly simple.

There was no need for words. Her face was saying, 'I am in his power; he has awakened me; I, a mere woman, have been blasted into sentience. Whatever the future holds it will not be through me that love goes hungry. I am aware; not only that history is being made, but of my duty, even at this pinnacled moment, and so, I am leaving the room, to re-adjust myself - to compose myself, and to bring back into the salon the kind of woman that the headmaster may admire - no quivering lovestruck damsel, but a dame in all the high sensuousness of her sex, a dame. composed and glorious!'

Irma, directly she had reached the door and had swept out into the hall, flew, a silken spinster, up the flight of stairs to her room. Slamming the door behind her she gave vent to the primeval jungle in her veins and screamed like a macaw, and then, prancing forward towards the bed, tripped over a small embroidered foot-stool and fell spreadeagled across the carpet.

What did it matter? What did anything ridiculous or shaming matter so long as 'he' was not there to see it?

THIRTY - FIVE

There are times when the emotions are so clamorous and the rational working of the mind so perfunctory that there is no telling where the actual leaves off and the images of fantasy begin.

Irma, in her room, could picture Bellgrove at her side as though he were there, but she could also see clean through him, so that his body was pranked with the pattern of the wallpaper beyond. She could see a great host of professors, thousands of them, and all the size of hatpins. They stood upon her bed, a massed and solemn congregation and bowed to her; but she also saw that her pillow-slip needed changing. She looked out of the window, her eyes wide and un-focused. The moonlight lay in a haze upon the high foliage of an elm, and the elm became Mr Bellgrove again with his distinguished and lordly mane. She saw a figure, no doubt some figment, as it slid over the wall of her grotto'd garden and ran like a shadow to beneath the window of the dispensary. Far away at the back of her mind, there was something that said 'you have seen that movement before; crouching, rapid movement' - yet she had, in her transport, no clue as to what was real and what was fantasy.

And so, when she saw a figure steal across the garden below her she had no conception that it was a real, breathing creature, far less that it was Steerpike. The young man who had forced open the window in the room below that in which Irma was standing moonstruck, had, by the light of a candle, wasted no time in finding the drug for which he was looking. The bottles on the packed shelves shone blue and crimson and deadly green as the small flame moved. Within a few moments he had decanted a few thimblefuls of a sluggish liquid into the flask he carried, and returned the doctor's bottle to the shelf. He corked his own container and within a moment was half-way out of the window.

Above the walls of the garden the upper massives of Gormenghast castle shone in the baleful moonlight. As he paused for a moment before dropping from the window-sill to the ground, he shuddered. The night was warm and there was no cause to shudder save that a twinge of joy, of dark joy can shake the body, when a man is alone, under the moon, on a secret mission, with hunger in his heart and ice in his brain.

THIRTY-SIX

When Irma returned to her guests she paused before she opened the doors of the salon, for a loud and confused noise came from within. It was of a kind that she had never heard before, so happy it was, so multitudinous, so abandoned - the sound of voices at play. She had, of course, in her small way, at gatherings, heard, from time to time, the play of many voices. But what she was hearing now was 'not' the play of voices; it was voices at play; and as such it was novel and peculiar to her ears, in the way that shadow at play (as against the play of shadows) would have been to her eyes. She had, on rare occasions, enjoyed the play of her brother's brain - but in her salon there was something very different going on and from the few remarks that she could distinguish through the panels of the door it was obvious that here there was no play of language, no play of thought, but language playing on its own; enfranchised notions playing by themselves, the truants of the brain.

Gathering the long wreaths of her gown about her she crouched for a moment with her eyes to the keyhole but could see no more than the smoky midnight of the gowns.

What had happened, she wondered, while she had been upstairs? When she had left, in the motionless silence, like a queen, the room had throbbed with her single personality, the silence, the flattering and significant silence, had been her setting, as the great sky is the setting for the white flight of a gull. But now, the stretched drum-skin of the atmosphere had split - and the professors, exultant that this was so, had, each in his own way, erected within himself the romantic image of what he fondly imagined himself to be. For the long lost glories, that never in fact existed save in the wishfulness of their brains, were being remembered with a reality as vivid, if not more so, as truth itself. False memories flowered within them. The days of brilliance when their lances shone, when they leapt into the gold saddle quick as thought and galloped through the white rays of the dawn; when they ran like stags, swam like fish and, laughing like thunder, woke the swaddled towers. Ah Lord, the callow days; the cocky days, the days of sinew and the madcap evenings - the darkness at their elbows, co-conspirator, muffling their firetipped follies.

That but few of the Professors had ever tasted the heady mead of youth in no way dulled the contours of their self-portraits which they were now painting of themselves. And it had all happened so rapidly, this resurgence; this hark-back. It was as though some bell had been struck, some mountain-bell to which their guts responded. They had for so long a time made their evening way to their sacred, musty, airless quadrangle, that to be, for a whole evening in a new atmosphere was like sunrise. True, there was only Irma on the female side, but she was a symbol of all femininity, she was Eve, she was Medusa, she was terrible and she was peerless; she was hideous and she was the lily of the prairies; she was that alien thing from another world - that thing called woman.

Directly she had left the room a thousand imaginary memories had beset them of women they had never known. Their tongues loosened, and their limbs also, and the Doctor found there was no need to launch the evening. For the Dame was alight and the professorial torpor had been burned away, and they were back, all at once in a time when they were brilliant, omniscient and devastating and as dazzlingly attractive as the Devil himself.

With their brains illumined by these spurious and flattering images, the swarming gownsmen trod on air, and bridled up their hot and monstrous heads, flashed their teeth, or if toothless, grinned darkly, their mouths slung across their faces like hammocks.

As Irma turned the handle, taking a deep breath which all but destroyed her bust, she straightened herself and stood for a moment motionless, yet vibrant. As she opened the door and the gay thunder of their voices doubled its volume - she raise an eyebrow. Why, she wondered, should such potent happiness coincide with her absence? It was almost as though she had been forgotten, or worse, that her departure from the room had been welcomed.

She opened the door a little wider and peered around the corner, but in doing so her powdered head created all unknowingly so graphic a representation of something detached that a professor who happened to be staring in the direction of the door, let fall his lower jaw with a clank, and dropped the plate of delicacies to his feet.

'Ah no, no!' he whispered, the colours draining from his face... 'not now, dire Death, not 'now'... I am not ready... I...'

'Ready for what, sweet trout,' said a voice beside him. 'By hell, these peacock-hearts are excellent. A little pepper, please!'

Irma entered. The man who had dropped his jaw swallowed hard and a sick grin appeared on his face. He had cheated death.

As Irma took her first few paces into the room her fear that the gracious authority of her presence had been undermined during tier short absence was dispelled, for a score of professors, ceasing their chatter, and whipping their mortar-boards from their heads, cupped them over their hearts.

Swaying slightly as she proceeded towards the centre of the room, she, in her turn, bowed with a superb and icy grandeur now to left, now to right, as the dark festooning draperies of the professorial jungle opened, at her every step, its musty avenues.

Veering to east and west in gradual curves like a ship that has no precise idea as to which port it is making for, she found all about her, wherever she was, a hush, most gratifying. But the avenues closed behind her, and the conversation was resumed with an enthusiasm.

And then, all of a sudden, there was Bellgrove, not a dozen feet away. A long glass of wine was in his hand. He was in profile; and what a profile - she hissed excitedly! 'That's what it is – grandeur.' And it was then, at her third convulsive stride in the headmaster's direction that something happened which was not only embarrassing but heart-rending in its simplicity, for a hoarse cry, out-topping the general cacophony, silenced the room and brought Irma to a standstill.

It was not the kind of cry that one expects to hear at a party. It had passion in it - and urgency. The very tone and timbre was a smack in the face of propriety, and broke on the instant all those unwritten laws of social behaviour that are the result - the fine flower - of centuries.

As every head was turned in the direction of the sound a movement became apparent in the same quarter where, from a group of professors, something appeared to be making its way towards its rigid hostess. Its face was flushed and its gestures were so convulsive that it was not easy to realize that it was Professor Throd.

On sighting Irma, he had deserted his companions Splint and Spiregrain, and on obtaining a better view of his hostess had suffered a sensation that was in every way too violent, too fundamental, too electric for his small brain and body. A million volts ran through him, a million volts of stark infatuation.

He had seen no woman for thirty-seven years. He gulped her through his eyes as at some green oasis the thirst-tormented nomad gulps the wellhead. Unable to remember any female face, he took Irma's strange proportions and the cast of her features to be characteristic of femininity. And so, his conscious mind blotted out by the intensity of his reaction, he committed the unforgivable crime. He made his feelings public. He lost control. The blood rushed to his head; he cried out hoarsely, and then, little knowing what he was doing, he stumbled forwards, elbowing his colleagues from his path, and fell upon his knees before the lady, and finally, as though in a paroxysm, he collapsed upon his face, his arms and legs spread-eagled like a starfish.

The temperature of the room dropped to zero, and then, as suddenly it rose to an equatorial and burning heat. Five long seconds went by. It would not have been strange in that intense temperature to have found a python hanging from the ceiling - nor, when the icy spell returned again, at the lapse of the third second, to find the carpet white with arctic foxes.

Would no one make a move to crack the glass; the great transparent sheet that spread unbroken from corner to corner of the long room?

And then a stride took place, a stride that brought Bellgrove's gaunt body to within four feet of Irma. With his next step he had halved the distances between himself and her - and then, all at once, he was above her and had found himself gazing down into eyes that pleaded. It was as though he had been injected with lion's blood. Power rushed into him as though from a tap.

'Most dear Madam,' he said. 'Have no fear, I pray you. That one of my staff should be lying below you is shameful, yes, shameful, madam, but lo! is it not a symbol of what we all feel? What shame there is lies in his weakness, madam, not in his passion. Some, dear lady, would have his name expunged from all registers - but no. But no. For he has 'warmth', madam; warmth above all! In this case it has led to something distasteful, dammit' (he relapsed into his common tongue) 'and so, dear hostess, allow me, as headmaster, to have him removed from your presence. Yet forgive him, I implore you, for he recognized quality when he saw it, and his only sin is that in recognizing it too violently he had not the strength to hold his passion captive.'

Bellgrove paused and wiped his forearm across his wet forehead and tossed back his white mane. He had spoken with his eyes shut. A sense of dreamlike strength had filled him. He knew in the self-imposed darkness that Irma's eyes were upon him; he could feel the intensity of her close presence. He could hear the feet of his staff, as his words continued, shuffling away in tactful pairs, and he could even hear himself talking as though the voice was another's.

What a deep and resonant organ the man has, he thought to himself, pretending for the moment that it was not his own voice he was hearing, for there was something humble in his nature which, every once in a while, found outlet.

But such thoughts were no more than momentary. What was paramount in him was the realization that here he was again, within a few inches of the lady whom he now intended to pursue with all the cunning of old age and all the steeple-swarming, torrent-leaping, barn-storming impetus of recaptured youth.

'By the Lord!' he cried, voicelessly, and to himself yet very loud it sounded, in his own brains - 'by the Lord, if I don't show 'em how it's done! Two arms, two legs, two eyes, one mouth, ears, trunk and buttocks, belly and skeleton, lungs, tripes and backbone, feet and hands, brains, eyes and testicles. I've got 'em all- so help me, rightside up.'

His eyes had remained closed, but now he lifted the heavy lids and, peering between his pale eyelashes, he found in the eyes of his hostess so hot and wet a succubus of love as threatened to undermine her marble temple and send its structure toppling.

He glanced about him. His staff, tactful to the point of tactlessness, were gathered in groups and were talking together like those gentlemen of the stage who, in an effort to appear normal, yet with nothing to say, repeat in simulated languor or animation - 'one... two... three... four' and so on. But in the case of the professors they mouthed their fatuities with all the overemphasis of un-rehearsal. In a far corner of the room a scrum of gownsmen were becoming restive.

'Talk about a wax giraffe, Cor slice me edgeways!' muttered Mulefire between his teeth.

'Certainly not, you hulk of flesh unhallowed,' said Perch-Prism. 'I'm ashamed of you!'

'And so indeed, la! Am I a beetroot? What it is, la, to have known better days and better ways, Heaven shrive me - Am I a beetroot?' It was the gay Cutflower talking, but there was something ruffled about his tone.

'As Theoreticus says in his diatribe against the use of the vernacular,' whispered Flannelcat, who had waited for a long while for the moment when by coincidence he would both have the courage to say something and have something to say.

'Well, what did the old bleeder say?' said Opus Fluke.

But no one was interested and Flannelcat knew that his opportunity was gone, for several voices broke in and cut across his nervous reply.

'Tell me, Cutflower, is the Head still staring at her and why can't you pass the wine, by the day of which we're made, it's given me the thirst of cactusland,' said Perch-Prism, his flat nose turned to the ceiling. 'But for my breeding I'd turn round and see for myself.'

'Not a twitch,' said Cutflower. 'Statues, la! Most uncanny.'

'Once upon a time,' broke in the mournful voice of Flannelcat, 'I used to collect butterflies. It was long ago - in a swallow country full of dry river-beds. Well, one damp afternoon when...'

'Another time, Flannelcat,' said Cutflower. 'You may sit down.'

Flannelcat, saddened, moved away from the group in search of a chair. Meanwhile Bellgrove had been savouring love's rare aperitif, the ageless language of the eyes.

Pulling himself together with the air of one who is master of every situation, he swept his gown across one shoulder as though it were a toga and stepping back, surveyed the spread-eagled figure at their feet.

In stepping back, however, he had all but trodden upon Doctor Prunesquallor's feet and would have done so but for the agile side-step of his host.

The Doctor had been out of the room for a few minutes and had only just been told of the immobile figure on the floor. He was about to have examined the body when Bellgrove had taken his backward step, and now he was delayed still further by the sound of Bellgrove's voice.

'My dearest lady,' said the old lion-headed man, who had begun to repeat himself, 'warmth is everything. Yet no... not everything... but a good deal. That you should be caused embarrassment by one of my staff, shall I say one of my colleagues, yea, for so he is, shall always be to me like coals of fire. And why? Because, dearest lady, it was for me to have groomed him, to have schooled him in the niceties or more simply, dammit, to have left him behind. And that is what I must do now. I must have him removed,' and he lifted his voice.

'Gentlemen,' he cried. 'I shall be glad if two of you would remove your colleague and return with him to his quarters. Perhaps Professors... Flannelcat...'

'But no! but no! I will not have it!'

It was Irma's voice. She took a step forward and brought her hands up to her long chin where she interlocked her fingers.

'Mr Headmaster,' she whispered, 'I have heard what you have had to say.

And it was splendid. I said splendid. When you spoke of "warmth", I understood. I, a mere woman, I said a 'mere' woman.' She glared about her, darkly, nervously, as though she had gone too far.

'But when, Mr Headmaster, I found you were, in spite of your belief, determined to have this gentleman removed' (she glanced down at the spread-eagled figure at her feet) 'then I knew it was for me, as your hostess, to ask you, as my guest, to think again. I would not have it said, sir, that one of your staff was shamed in my salon - that he was taken away. Let him be put in a chair in a dim corner. Let him be given wine and pasties, whatever he chooses, and when he is well enough, let him join his friends. He has honoured me, I say he has honoured me...'

It was then that she saw her brother. In a moment she was at his side. 'O Alfred, I am right, aren't I? Warmth is everything, isn't it?'

Prunesquallor gazed at his sister's twitching face. It was naked with anxiety, naked with excitement and also, to make her expression almost too subtle for credulity, it was naked with the lucence of love's dawn. Pray God it is not a false one, thought Prunesquallor. It would kill her. For a moment, the conception of how much simpler life would be 'without' her, flashed through his mind, but he pushed the ugly notion away and rising on his toes he clasped his hands so firmly behind his back that his narrow and immaculate chest came forward like a pigeon's.

'Whether warmth is everything or not, my very dear sister, it is nevertheless a comforting and a cosy thing to have about - although mark you, it can be very stuffy, by all that's oxidized, so it can, but Irma, my sweet one -let that be as it may - for as a physician it has struck me that it is about time that something were done for the warrior at your feet; we must see to him, mustn't we, we must see to him, eh, Mr Bellgrove? By all that's sacred to my weird profession, we most certainly must...'

'But he's not to leave the room, Alfred - he's not to leave the room. He's our 'guest', Alfred, remember that.'

Bellgrove broke in before the Doctor could reply.

'You have humbled me, lady,' he said simply, and bowed his lion's head.

'And you,' whispered Irma, a deep blush raddling her neck, 'have elevated me.'

'No, madam... ah no!' muttered Bellgrove. 'You are over-kind' and then, taking a plunge, 'who can hope to elevate a heart, madam, a heart that is already dancing in the milky way?'

'Why 'milky'?' said Irma, who, with no desire to drop the level of conversation, had a habit of breaking out with forthright queries. However engulfed she might be in the major mysteries, yet her brain, detached as it were from the business of the soul, took little flights on its own, like a gnat, asked little questions, played little tricks, only to be jerked back into place and subdued for a while as the voices of her deeper self took over.

Luckily for Bellgrove there was no need for him to reply, for the Doctor had signalled a couple of gownsmen over and the seemingly prostrate suppliant was lifted from the carpet, and carried, like a wooden effigy, to a candle-lit corner, where a comfortable chair with plump green cushions stood ready.

'Seat him in the chair, gentlemen, if you will be so good, and I will have a look at him.'

The two gownsmen lowered the rigid body. It lay straight as a board, supported by no more than its head on the chair-back, and its heels on the ground. Between these extremities were thrust the plump green cushions so that they might, as it were, prop the plank - to take the little man's weight, but no weight descended and the cushions remained as plump as ever.

There was something frightful about it all and this frightfulness was in no way, mitigated by the radiant smile that was frozen on the face.

With a magnificent gesture, the Doctor stripped himself of his beautiful velvet jacket and flung it away as though he had no further use for it.

Then he began to roll up his silk sleeves like a conjurer.

Irma and Bellgrove were close behind him. By this time the reservoirs of tact on which the professors had been drawing were wellnigh dry and a horde stood watching in absolute silence.

The Doctor was fully conscious of this, but by not so much as a flicker did he reveal his awareness, let alone his delight in being watched.

The incident had changed the whole mood of the party. The hilarity and sense of freedom that had been so spontaneous had received an all but mortal blow. For some while, although certain jests were made, and glasses were filled and emptied, there was a darkness on the spirit of the room, and the jests were forced and the wine was swallowed mechanically.

But now that the first red blush of communal shame had died out of the staff; now that the embarrassment was merely cerebral and now that there was something to absorb them (for there was no resisting such an occasion as was now presented by Prunesquallor as he stood upright in his silken shirt sleeves, as slender as a stork, his skin as pink as a girl's, his glasses gleaming in the light of the candles) - now that there was all this, their equipoise began to return and with it a sense of hope; hope that the evening had not been ruined, that it held in store, once the Doctor had dealt with their seemingly paralysed colleague, a modicum at least of that rare abandon which had begun to set their tongues on fire, and their blood a-jigging - for it was once in a score of years, they told themselves that they could break the endless rhythm of Gormenghast, the rhythm that steered their feet each evening westward westward to their quadrangle.

They were absolutely silent as they watched the Doctor's every movement.

Prunesquallor spoke. It seemed that he was talking to himself, although his voice, in reaching those gownsmen who were at the rear of the audience, was certainly a little louder than one would have thought necessary. He took a pace forwards and at the same time raised his hands before him to the height of his shoulders where he worked his fingers to and fro in the air with the speed of a professional pianist.

Then he brought his hands together and began to draw them to and fro one across the other, palm to palm. His eyes were closed.

'Rarer than Bluggs Disease,' he mused, 'or the spiral spine! No doubt of it... by all that's convulsive... no doubt of it at all. There was a case, quite fascinating - now where was it and when was it very similar - a man if I remember rightly had seen a ghost... yes, yes and the shock had all but finished him...'

Irma shifted her feet...

'Now 'shock' is the operative word,' went on the Doctor rocking himself gently on his heels, his eyes still closed - 'and shock must be answered with shock. But how, and where... how and where... Let me see... let me see...'

Irma could wait no longer. 'Alfred,' she cried, ''do' something! Do something!' The Doctor did not seem to hear her, so deep was he in his reverie.

'Now, perhaps, if one knew the nature of the shock, its scale, the area of the brain that received it - the 'kind' of unpleasantness...'

'Unpleasantness!' came Irma's voice again. 'Unpleasantness! How dare you, Alfred! You 'know' that it was I who turned his head, poor creature, that it was for me he fell headlong, for me that he is rigid and dreadful.'

'Aha!' cried the Doctor. It was obvious he had not heard a word that his sister had said. 'Aha!' If he had appeared animated and vital before, he was trebly so now. His every gesture was as rapid and fluid as mercury. He took a prancing step towards his patient.

'By all that's pragmatical, it's this or nothing,' He slid his hand into one of his waistcoat pockets and withdrew a small silver hammer. This he swivelled between his thumb and index finger for a few moments, his eyebrows raised.

In the meanwhile Bellgrove had begun to grow impatient. The situation had taken a queer turn. It was not in circumstances like these that he had hoped to present himself to Irma nor was this the kind of atmosphere in which his tenderness could flourish. For one thing he was no longer the centre of attraction. His immediate desire was to be alone with her. The very words 'alone with her' made him blush. His hair shone more whitely than ever against his dark red brow. He glanced at her and immediately knew what to do. It was crystal clear that she was uncomfortable. The figure on the chair was not a pleasant sight for anyone, let alone a lady of distinction, a lady of delicate tastes.

He tossed the shaggy splendour of his mane. 'Madam,' he said. 'This is no place for you.' He drew himself up to his full height, forcing back his shoulders and drawing his long chin into his throat. 'No place at all, madam,' and then apprehensive that Irma might interpret him wrongly and find in his remark some slight upon her party, he shot a glance at her through his eyelashes. But she had found nothing amiss. On the contrary, there was gratitude in her small weak eyes; gratitude in the gleaming incline of her bosom, and in the nervous clasping of her hands.

She no longer heard her brother's voice. She no longer felt the presence of the robed males. Someone had been thoughtful. Someone had realized that she was a woman, and that it was not proper for her to stand with the rest as though there was no difference between herself and her guests. And this someone, this noble and solicitous being was no other than the headmaster- O how splendid it was that there should still be a 'gentleman' on the face of the earth: youth had fled from him, ah yes, but not romance.

'Mr Headmaster,' she said, pursing her lips and lifting her eyes to his craggy face with an archness hardly credible, 'it is for you to say. It is for me to hearken. Speak on, I am listening... I said, I am listening.'

Bellgrove turned his head away from her. The wide, weak smile that had spread itself across his face was not the kind of thing that he would wish Irma to see. A year or so ago, he had once, with no warning, caught sight of himself in a mirror when a smile (an antecedent of the uncontrollable expression that was even now undermining the spurious grandeur of his face) had shocked him. It was to his credit that he had recognized the danger of allowing such a thing to become public - for he was, not without cause, proud of his features. And so he turned his face away. How could he help giving vent to some kind of demonstration of his feelings. For at Irma's words 'It is for you to say' the wide rich panorama of married life suddenly appeared before him, stretched out, it seemed, to the horizon with its vistas of pale gold, its gentle meads. He saw himself as an immemorial oak, its branches spreading godlike, with Irma, a sapling poplar, whose leaves like heart-throbs twinkled in his shade. He saw himself as the proud eagle, landing with a sigh of his wings upon a solitary crag. He saw Irma, waiting for him in the nest, but curiously enough, she was sitting there in a nightdress. And then, suddenly, he saw himself as a very old man, with a toothache, and his memory caught sight of an ancient face in the mirrors of a thousand shaving-rooms.

He crushed this most unwelcome glimpse beneath the heel of his immediate sensations.

He turned back to Irma.

'I offer you my arm, dear madam - such as it is.'

'I will accompany you, Mr Headmaster.'

Irma lowered her little eyelids and then flicked a sideways glance at Mr Bellgrove, who having crooked out his elbow somewhat extravagantly· paused a moment before dropping it with a sense of defeat that was quite intoxicating.

'By hell!' he murmured passionately to himself - 'I am not so old that I miss the subtleties.'

'Forgive my precipitation, dear madam,' he said, bowing his head. 'But perhaps... perhaps you understand...'

Clasping her hands together at her bosom Irma turned from the throng, and swaying strangely, began to pace into the empty regions of the room. The carpet lit by a hundred candles had lost something of its glow. It was even brighter but it was not so warm, for the chilly rays of the moon were now streaming through the open windows.

Bellgrove glanced about him as he turned to follow her. No one appeared to be interested in their departure. Every eye was fixed upon the Doctor. For a moment, Bellgrove felt disappointed that he could not stay, for there was drama in the air. The Doctor was evidently making an exhaustive overhaul of the stiffened figure whose clothes were being removed, one by one; no easy work; for the joints were quite inflexible. Mollock and Canvas, the Prunesquallors' servants, had, however, a pair of scissors each and, when necessary, were, under the Doctor's supervision, using them to free the patient.

The Doctor still had the little silver hammer in one hand. With the other he was running his pianist-fingers over the rigid gentleman as though he were a keyboard - his eyebrows raised, his head cocked on one side like a tuner.

Bellgrove could see at a glance that in following Irma he was about to miss the climax of a considerable drama, but turning on his heel, and seeing her again he knew that a drama even more considerable was his for the making.

With his beautiful white gown rippling behind him, he strode in her wake, and on the eleventh stride he came within the orbit of her perfume.

Without pausing in the swaying movement of her gait she turned her head on its swan-white neck. Her emerald ear-ring flashed with light. Her long, sharp nose, immaculately powdered would have put most suitors off, but to Bellgrove it had the proportions of a beak on the proud head of a bird, exquisitely dangerous and sharp. Something to admire rather than love. It was almost a weapon, but a weapon which he felt confident would never be used against him. However that might be, it was hers - and in that simple fact lay its justification.

As they approached the bay window that was open to the night, Bellgrove inclined his head to her.

'This,' he said, 'is our first walk together.'

She stopped as they reached the open window. What he had said had obviously touched her.

'Mr Bellgrove,' she whispered, 'you mustn't say things like that. We hardly know one another.'

'Quite so, dear lady, quite so,' said Bellgrove. He took out a large greyish handkerchief and blew his nose. This is going to be a long business, he thought - unless he were to take some kind of a short cut - some secret path through love's enchanted glades.

Before them, shining balefully in the moonlight lay the walled-in garden.

The upper foliage of the trees shone as white as foam. The underside was black as well-water. The whole garden was a lithograph of richest blacks and staring whites. The fishpool with its surrounding carvings appeared to blaze with a kind of lunar vulgarity. A fountain shot its white jets at the night. Under the livid pergolas, under the stone arches, under the garden tubs, under the great rockery, under the fruit trees, under each moon-white thing the shadows lay as black sea-drenched seals. There were no greys at all. There was no transition. It was a picture, terrifyingly simple.

They stared at it together.

'You said just now, Miss Prunesquallor, that we hardly knew each other. And how true this is - when we measure our mutual recognition by the hands of the clock. But 'can' we, madam, can we measure our knowledge thus? Is there not something in both of us which contradicts so mean a measure? Or am I flattering myself? Am I laying myself open to your scorn? Am I baring my heart too soon?'

'Your 'heart', sir?'

'My heart.'

Irma struggled with herself.

'What were you saying about it, Mr Headmaster?'

Bellgrove could not quite remember, so he joined his big hands together at the height of the organ in question, and waited a moment or two for inspiration. He seemed to have proceeded rather faster than he had meant and then it struck him that his silence, rather than weakening his position, was enhancing it. It seemed to give an added profundity to the proceedings and to himself. He would keep her waiting. O the magic of it! The power of it! He could feel his throat contracting as though he were biting into a lemon.

This time as he angled his arm he knew she would take it. She did. Her fingers on his forearm set his old heart pounding and then, without a word they stepped forward together into the moonlit garden.

It was not easy, for Bellgrove to know in which direction to escort his hostess. Little did he know that it was he who was being steered. And this was natural, for Irma knew every inch of the hideous place.

For some while they stood by the fishpond in which the reflection of the moon shone with a fatuous vacancy. They stared at it. Then they looked up at the original. It was no more interesting than its watery ghost, but they both knew that to ignore the moon on such an evening would be an insensitive, almost a brutish thing to do.

That Irma knew of an arbour in the garden was not her fault. And it was not her fault that Bellgrove knew it not. Yet she blushed inwardly, as casually turning to left and right at the corners of paths, or under flower-loaded trellises, she guided the headmaster circuitously yet firmly in its direction.

Bellgrove, who had in his mind's eye just such a place as he was now unwittingly approaching, had felt it better that they should perambulate together in silence, so that when he had a chance to sit and rest his feet, his deep voice, when he brought it forth again from the depths of his chest, should have its full value.

On rounding a great moon-capped lilac bush and coming suddenly upon the arbour, Irma started, and drew back. Bellgrove came to a halt beside her. Finding her face was turned away from him, he gazed absently at the hard boulder-like bun of iron-grey hair which, with not a hair out of place, shone in the moonlight. It was nothing, however, for a man to dwell upon, and turning from her to the arbour which had caused her trepidation, he straightened himself, and turning his right foot out at a rather more aggressive angle, he struck an attitude, which he knew nothing about, for it was the unconscious equivalent of what was going on in his mind.

He saw himself as the type of man who would never take advantage of a defenceless woman, greathearted, and understanding. Someone a damsel might trust in a lonely wood. But he also saw himself as a buck. His youth had been so long ago that he could remember nothing of it but he presumed, erroneously, that he had tasted the purple fruit, had broken hearts and hymens, had tossed flowers to ladies on balconies, had drunk champagne out of their shoes and generally been irresistible.

He allowed her fingers to fall from his arm. It was at moments like this that he must give her a sense of freedom only to draw her further into the rich purdah of his benevolence.

He held the tabs of his white gown near the shoulders.

'Can you not smell the lilac, madam,' he said - 'the moonlit lilac?'

Irma turned.

'I must be honest with you, mustn't I, Mr Bellgrove?' she said. 'If I said I could smell it, when I couldn't. I would be false to you, and false to myself. Let us not start 'that' way. No, Mr Bellgrove, I cannot smell it. I have a bit of a cold.'

Bellgrove had the sense of having to start life all over again.

'You women are delicate creatures,' he said after a long pause. 'You must take care of yourselves.'

'Why are you talking in the plural, Mr Bellgrove?'

'My dear madam,' he replied slowly, and then, after a pause, 'my... dear... madam,' he said again. As he heard his voice repeat the three words for the second time, it struck him that to leave them as they were - inconsequent, rudderless, without preface or parenthesis, was by far the best thing he could do. He lapsed into silence and the silence was thrilling - the silence which to break with an answer to her question would be to make a commonplace out of what was magic.

He would not answer her. He would play with her with his venerable brain. She must realize from the first that she could not always expect replies to her questions - that his thoughts might be elsewhere, in regions where it would be impossible for her to follow him - or that her questions were (for all his love for her and her for him) not worth answering.

The night poured in upon them from every side - a million million cubic miles of it. O, the glory of standing with one's love, naked, as it were, on a spinning marble, while the spheres ran flaming through the universe!

Involuntarily they moved together into the arbour and sat down on a bench which they found in the darkness. This darkness was intensely rich and velvety. It was as though they were in a cavern, save that the depths were dramatized by a number of small and brilliant pools of moonlight. Pranked for the most part to the rear of the arbour these livid pools were at first a little disturbing, for portions of themselves were lit up with blatant emphasis. This arbitrary illumination had to be accepted, however, for Bellgrove, raising his eyes to where the vents in the roof let through the moonlight, could think of no way by which he could seal them.

From Irma's point of view the dappled condition of the cavernous arbour was both calming and irritating at the same time.

Calming, in that to enter a cave of clotted midnight, with not so much as a flicker of light to gauge her distance from her partner would have been terrifying even with her knowledge of, and confidence in, so reliable and courteous a gentleman as her escort. This dappled arbour was not so fell a place. The pranked lights, more livid, it is true, than gay, removed, nevertheless, that sense of terror only known to fugitives or those benighted in a shire of ghouls.

Strong as was her feeling of gratification that the dark was broken, yet a sense of irritation as strong as her relief fought in her flat bosom for sovereignty. This irritation, hardly understandable to anyone who has neither Irma's figure, nor a vivid picture of the arbour in mind, was caused by the maddening way in which the lozenges of radiance fell upon her body.

She had taken out a small mirror in the darkness, more from nervousness than anything else and in holding it up, saw nothing in the dark air before her but a long sharp segment of light. The mirror itself was quite invisible, as was the hand and arm that held it, but the detached and luminous reflection of her nose hovered before her in the darkness. At first she did not know what it was. She moved her head a little and saw in front of her one of her small weak eyes glittering like quicksilver, a startling thing to observe under any conditions, but infinitely more so when the organ is one's own.

The rest of her was indistinguishable midnight save for a pair of large and spectral feet. She shuffled them, but this blotch of moonlight was the largest in the arbour and to evade it involved a muscular strain quite insufferable.

Bellgrove's entire head was luminous. He was, more than ever before, a major prophet. His white hair positively blossomed.

Irma, knowing that this wonderful and searching light which was transfiguring the head was something that must not be missed - something in fact that she should pore upon - made a great effort to forget herself as a true lover should - but something in her rebelled against so exclusive a concentration upon her admirer, for she knew that it was 'she' who should be stared at; she who should be poured upon.

Had she spent the best part of a day in titivating herself in order that she might sit plunged in darkness, with nothing but her feet and her nose revealed?

It was insufferable. The visual relationship was wrong; quite, quite wrong.

Bellgrove had suffered a shock when for a moment he had seen ahead of him, in quick succession, a moonlit nose and then a moonlit eye. They were obviously Irma's. There was no other nose in all Gormenghast so knifelike - and no eye so weak and worried - except its colleague. To have seen these features ahead of him when the lady to whom they belonged sat shrouded yet most palpable upon his right hand, unnerved the old man, and it was some while after he had caught sight of the mirror glinting on its return to Irma's reticule that he realized what had happened.

The darkness was as deep and black as water.

'Mr Bellgrove,' said Irma, 'can you hear me, Mr Bellgrove?'

'Perfectly, my dear lady. Your voice is high and clear.'

'I would have you sit upon my right, Mr Headmaster - I would have you exchange places with me.'

'Whatever you would have I am here to have it given,' said Bellgrove. For a moment he winced as the grammatical chaos of his reply wounded what was left of the scholar in him.

'Shall we rise together, Mr Headmaster?'

'Dear lady', he replied, 'let that be so.'

'I can hardly see you, Mr Headmaster.'

'Nevertheless, dear lady, I am at your side. Would my arm assist you at our interchange? It is an arm that, in earlier days...'

'I am quite able to get to my own feet. Mr Bellgrove - 'quite' able, thank you.'

Bellgrove rose, but in rising his gown was caught in some rustic contortion of the garden seat, and he found himself squatting in mid-air. 'Hell!' he muttered savagely, and jerking at his gown, tore it badly. A nasty whiff of temper ran through him. His face felt hot and prickly.

'What did you say?' said Irma. 'I said, what did you say?'

For a moment Bellgrove, in the confusion of his irritation, had unknowingly projected himself back into the Masters' Common room, or into a classroom, or into the life he had led for scores of years...

His old lips curled back from his neglected teeth. 'Silence!' he said. 'Am your headmaster for nothing!'

Directly he had spoken, and had taken in what he had said, his neck and forehead burned.

Irma, transfixed with excitement, could make no move. Had Bellgrove possessed any kind of telepathic instinct he must have known that he had beside him a fruit which, at a touch, might have fallen into his hands, so ripe it was. He had no knowledge of this, but luckily for him, his embarrassment precluded any power on his part to utter a word. And the silence was on his side.

It was Irma who was the first to speak.

'You have mastered me,' she said. Her words, simple and sincere, were more proud than humble. They were proud with surrender.

Bellgrove's brain was not quick - but it was by no means moribund. His mood was now trembling at the opposite pole of his temperament.

This by no means helped to clarify his brain. But he sensed the need for extreme caution. He sensed that his position though delicate was lofty. To find that his act of rudeness in demanding silence from his hostess had raised him rather than lowered him in her eyes, appealed to something in him quite shameless - a kind of glee. Yet this glee, though shameless, was yet innocent. It was the glee of the child who had not been found out.

They were both standing. This time he did not offer Irma his arm. He groped in the darkness and found hers. He found it at the elbow. Elbows are not romantic, but Bellgrove's hand shook as he held the joint, and the joint shook in his grasp. For a moment they stood together. Her pineapple perfume was thick and powerful.

'Be seated,' he said. He spoke a little louder than before. He spoke as one in authority. He had no need to 'look' stem, magnetic or masculine. The blessed darkness precluded any exertion in that direction. He made faces in the safety of the night. Putting out his tongue; blowing out his cheeks - there was so much glee in him.

He took a deep breath. It steadied him. 'Are you seated, Miss Prunesquallor?'

'O yes... O yes indeed,' came the answering whisper.

'In comfort, madam?'

'In comfort, Mr Headmaster, and in peace.'

'Peace, my dear lady? What kind of peace?'

'The peace, Mr Headmaster, of one who has no fear. Of one who has faith in the strong am of her loved one. The peace of heart and mind and spirit that belong to those who have found what it is to offer themselves without reserve to something august and tender.'

There was a break in Irma's voice, and then as though to prove what she had said, she cried out into the night, 'Tender! that's what I said. Tender and Unattached!'

Bellgrove shifted himself; they were all but touching.

'Tell me, my dearest lady, is it of me that you speak. If it is not, then humble me - be merciless and break an old man's heart with one small syllable. If you say "no" then, without a word I will leave you and this pregnant arbour, walk out into the night, walk out of your life, and may be, who knows, out of mine also...'

Whether or not he was gulling himself it is certain that he was living the very essence of his words. Perhaps the very use of words themselves was as much a stimulus as Irma's presence and his own designs; but that is not to say that the total effect was not sincere. He was infatuated with all that pertained to love. He trod breast-deep through banks of thorn-crazed roses. He breathed the odours of a magic isle. His brain swam on a sea of spices. But he had his own thought too.

'It was of you I spoke,' said Irma. 'You, Mr Bellgrove. Do not touch me. Do not tempt me. Do nothing to me. Just be there beside me. I would not have us desecrate this moment.'

'By no means. By no means.' Bellgrove's voice was deep and subterranean.

He heard it with pleasure. But he was sensitive enough to know that for all its sepulchral beauty, the phrase he had just used was pathetically inept - and so he added, 'By no means whatsoever...' as though he were beginning a sentence.

'By no means whatsoever, ah, definitely not, for who can tell, when, unawares, love's dagger...' but he stopped. He was getting nowhere. He must start again.

He must say things that would drive his former remarks out of her mind. He must sweep her along.

'Dear one,' he said, plunging into the rank and feverish margin of love's forest. ''Dear' one!'

'Mr Bellgrove - O, Mr Bellgrove,' came the hardly audible reply.

'It is the headmaster of Gormenghast, your suitor, who is speaking to you, my dear. It is a man, mature and tender - yet a disciplinarian, feared by the wicked, who is sitting beside you in the darkness. I would have you concentrate upon this. When I say to you that I shall call you Irma, I am not asking for permission from my love-light - I am telling her what I shall do.'

'Say it, my male!' cried Irma, forgetting herself. Her strident voice, quite out of key with the secret and muted atmosphere of an arbour'd wooing, splintered the darkness.

Bellgrove shuddered. Her voice had been a shock to him. At a more appropriate moment he would teach her not to do things of that kind.

As he settled again against the rustic back of the seat he found that their shoulders were touching.

'I will say it. Indeed I will say it, my dear. Not as a crude statement with no beginning or ending. Not as a mere reiteration of the most lovely, the most provocative name in Gormenghast, but threaded into my sentences, an integral part of our conversation, Irma, for see, already it has left my tongue.'

'I have no power, Mr Bellgrove, to remove my shoulder from yours.'

'And I have no inclination, my dove.' He lifted his big hand and tapped her on the shoulder she had referred to.

They had been so long in darkness that he had forgotten that she was in evening dress. In touching her naked shoulder he received a sensation that set his heart careering. For a moment he was deeply afraid. What was this creature at his side? and he cried out to some unknown God for delivery from the Unknown, the Serpentine, from all that was shameless, from flesh and the devil.

The tremendous gulf between the sexes yawned - and an abyss, terrifying and thrilling, sheer and black as the arbour in which they sat; a darkness wide, dangerous, imponderable and littered with the wrecks of broken bridges.

But his hand stayed where it was. The muscle of her shoulder was tense as a bowstring, but the skin was like satin. And then his terror fled. Something masterful and even dashing began to possess him.

'Irma,' he whispered huskily. 'Is 'this' a desecration. Are we blotting the whitest of all love's copybooks? It is for you to say. For myself I am walking among rainbows - for myself I...' But he had to stop speaking for he wished, more than anything else to lie on his back and to kick his old legs about and to crow like a barn-cook. As he could not do this he had no option but to put his tongue out in the darkness, to squint with his eyes, to make extravagant grimaces of every kind. Excruciating shivers swarmed his spine.

And Irma could not reply. She was weeping with joy. Her only answer was to place her hand upon the headmaster's. They drew together - involuntarily. For a while there was that kind of silence all lovers know. The silence that it is sin to break until of its own volition, the moment comes, and the arms relax and the cramped limbs can stretch themselves again, and it is no longer an insensitive thing to inquire what the time might be or to speak of other matters that have no place in Paradise.

At last Irma broke the hush.

'How happy I am,' she said very quietly. 'How very happy, Mister Bellgrove.'

'Ah my dear... ah,' said the Headmaster very slowly, very soothingly 'that is as it should be... that is as it should be.'

'My wildest, my very 'wildest' dreams have become real, have become something I can touch' (she pressed his hand). 'My little fancies, my little visions - they are no longer so, dear master, they are substance, they are you... they are You.'

Bellgrove was not sure that he liked being one of Irma's 'little fancies, little visions' but his sense of the inappropriate was swamped in his excitement.

'Irma!' He drew her to him. There was less 'give' in her body than in a cakestand. But he could hear her quick excited breathing.

'You are not the only one whose dreams have become a reality, my dear. We are holding one another's dreams in our very arms.'

'Do you mean it, Mr Bellgrove?'

'Surely, ah, surely,' he said.

Dark as it was Irma could picture him at her side, could see him in detail. She had an excellent memory. She was enjoying what she saw. Her mind's eye had suddenly become a most powerful organ. It was, in point of fact, stronger, clearer and healthier than those real eyes of hers which gave her so much trouble.

And so, as she spoke to him she had no sense of communing with an invisible presence. The darkness was forgotten.

'Mr Bellgrove?'

'My dear lady?'

'Somehow, I knew...'

'So did I... so did I.'

'It is more than I dare dwell upon - this strange and beautiful fact - that words can be so unnecessary - that when I start a sentence, there is no 'need' to finish it - and all this, so very suddenly. I said, so 'very' suddenly.'

'What would be sudden to the young is leisurely for us. What would be foolhardy in them is child's-play itself, for you, my dear, and for me. We are mature, my dear. We are ripe. The golden glaze, that patina of time, these are upon us. Hence we are sure and have no callow qualms. Let us admit the length of our teeth, lady. Time, it is true, had flattened our feet, ah yes, but with what purpose? To steady us, to give us balance, to take us safely along the mountain tracks. God bless me... ah. God bless me. Do you think that I could have wooed and won you as a youth? Not in a hundred years! And why... ah... and why? Inexperience. That is the answer. But now, in half an hour or less, I have stormed you; stormed you. But am I breathless? No. I have brought my guns to bear upon you, and yet my dear, have scores of roundshot left... ah yes, yes, Irma my ripe one... and you can see it all?... you can see it all?... dammit, we have equipoise and that is what it is.'

Irma's mental sight was frighteningly clear. His voice had sharpened the edges of his image.

'But I'm not very old, Mr Bellgrove, am I,' said Irma, after a pause. To be sure she felt as young as a fledgeling.

'What is age? What is time!' said Bellgrove - and then answering himself in a darker voice. 'They're 'hell'!' he said. 'I hate 'em.'

'No, no. I won't have it,' said Irma. 'I won't, Mr Bellgrove. Age and time are what you make them. Let us not speak of them again.'

Bellgrove sat forward on his old buttocks. 'Lady!' he said suddenly, 'I have thought of something that I think you will agree is more than comic.'

'Have you, Mr Bellgrove?'

'Pertaining to what you said about Age and Time. Are you listening, my dear?'

'Yes, Mr Bellgrove... eagerly... eagerly!'

'What I think would be rather droll would be to say, in a gathering, when the moment became opportune - perhaps during some conversation about clocks - one could work round to it - to say, quite airily... "Time is what you make it."'

He turned his head to her in the darkness. He waited.

There was no response from Irma. She was thinking feverishly. She began to panic. Her face was prickling with anxiety. She could make no sound. Then she had an idea. She pressed herself against him a little more closely.

'How delicious!' she said at last, but her voice was very strained.

The silence that followed was no more than a few seconds, but to Irma it was as long as that ghastly hush that awaits all sinners when, at the judgement seat, they wait the Verdict. Her body trembled, for there was so much at stake. Had she said something so stupid, that no headmaster, worthy of his office, could ever consider accepting her? Had she unwittingly lifted some hatchway of her brain and revealed to this brilliant man how cold, black, humourless and sterile was the region that lay within?

No. Ah no! For his voice, rolling from the gloom, had, if possible, even more tenderness in it than she would have dared to hope for in a man.

'You are cold, my love. You are chilly. The night is not for delicate skins. By hell, it isn't. And I? And what of me? Your suitor? Is he cold also, my dear? Your old gallant? He is. He is indeed. And what is more he is becoming sick of darkness. Darkness that shrouds. That clogs the living lineaments of beauty. That swathes you, Irma. By hell it's maddening and pointless stuff...'

Bellgrove began to rise... 'it's damnable, I tell you, my own, this arbour's damnable.'

He felt the pressure of fingers on his forearm.

'Ah no... no I will not have you swear. I will not have strong language in our arbour our sacred arbour.'

For a moment Bellgrove was tempted to play the gay dog. His moods flitted across the basic excitement of the wooing. It was so delicious to be chided by a woman. He wondered whether to shock her - to shock her out of the surplus of his love, would be worth the candle. To taste again the sweetness of being reprimanded, the never-before-experienced gushes of sham remorse - would this be worth the lowering of his moral status. No! He would stick to his pinnacle.

'This arbour,' he said, 'is forever ours. It is the darkness it holds captive; this pitchy stuff that hides your face from me - it is this darkness that I called damnable - and damnable it is. It is your face, Irma, your proud face that I am thirsting for. Can you not understand? By the great moonlight! my love; by the tremendous moonlight! Is it not natural that a man should wish to brood upon his darling's brow?'

The word 'darling' affected Irma as might a bullet wound. She clasped her hands at her breast and pressing them inwards the tepid water in her false bosom gurgled in the darkness.

For a moment Bellgrove, thinking she was laughing at what he had said, stiffened at her side. But the terrible blush of humiliation that was about to climb his neck was quenched by Irma's voice. The gurgle must have been a sign of love, of some strange and aqueous love that was beyond his sounding, for 'O master,' she said, 'take me to where the moon can show you me.'

'Show-you-me?' for a short while Bellgrove was quite unable to decipher what sounded to him like a foreign language. But he did not stand still, as lesser men would have done while pondering, but answering the first part of her command he escorted her from the arbour. Instantaneously, they were floodlit - and at the same instant Irma's syntax clarified in the headmaster's mind.

They moved together, like spectres, like mobile carvings casting their long inky shadows across the little paths, down the slopes of rockeries, up the sides of trellises.

At last they stopped for a little while where a stone cherub squatted upon the rim of a granite bird-bath. To their left they could see the lighted windows of the long reception room. But they could not see that in the midst of a rapt audience the Doctor was raising his silver hammer as though to put all to the test. They could not know that by a supernatural effort of the will, and the martialling of all his deductive faculties, and the freeing of an irrational flair, the Doctor had come to the kind of decision more usually associated with composers than with scientists - and was now on the brink of success or failure.

The 'body' had, to aid the physician in his exhaustive search for the cause of the paralysis, been stripped of all clothing save the mortar-board.

What happened next was something which, however much the stories varied afterwards - for it seemed that every professor present was able to note some minor detail hidden from the rest - was yet consistent in the main. The speed at which it happened was phenomenal. and it must be assumed that the microscopic elaborations of the incident which were to be the main subject of conversation for so long a while afterwards, were no more or less than inventions which were supposed to redound to the advantage of the teller, in some way or other - possibly through the reflected glory which they all felt at having been there at all. However this may be, what was agreed upon by all was that the Doctor, his shirt sleeves rolled well back, rose suddenly on his toes, and lifting his silver hammer into the air, where it flashed with candle-light, let it fall, as it were with a kind of controlled, yet effortless downstroke, upon the nether regions of the spinal column. As the hammer struck, the Doctor leapt back and stood with his arms spread out to his sides, his fingers rigid as he saw before him the instantaneous convulsion of the patient. This gentleman writhing like an expiring eel leapt suddenly high into the air, and on landing upon his feet, was seen to streak across the room and out of the bay windows and over the moonlit lawn at a speed that challenged the credulity of all witnesses.

And those who, standing grouped about the Doctor, had seen the transformation and the remarkable athleticism that followed so swiftly upon it, were not the only ones to be startled by the spectacle.

In the garden, among the livid blotches and the cold wells of shadow a voice was saying...

'It is not meet, Irma my dearest, that on this night, this first night, we should tire our hearts... no, no, it is not meet, sweet bride.'

''Bride'?' cried Irma, flashing her teeth and tossing her head. 'O Master, not yet... surely!'

Bellgrove frowned like God considering the state of the world on the Third Day. A knowing smile played across his old mouth but it appeared to have lost its way among the winkles.

'Quite so, my delicious helm. Once more you keep me on my course, and for that I revere you, Irma... not 'bride', it is true, but...'

The old man had jerked like a recoiling firearm, and Irma with him, for she was in his gown-swathed arms. Turning her startled eyes from his she followed his gaze and on the instant clung to him in a desperate embrace, for all at once they saw before them, naked in the dazzling rays of the moon, a flying figure which for, all the shortness of the legs, was covering the ground with the speed of a hare. The tassel of the inky mortarboard, sole claim to decency, streamed away behind like a donkey's tail.

No sooner had Irma and the headmaster caught sight of the apparition, than it had reached the high orchard wall of the garden. How it ever climbed the wall was never discovered. It simply went up it, its shadow swarming alongside, and the last that was ever seen of Mr Throd, the one time member of Mr Bellgrove's staff, was a lunar flash of buttocks where the high wall propped the sky.

THIRTY-SEVEN

There were at least three hours to be burned. It was unusual for Steerpike to have to think in such terms. There was always something afoot. There were always, in the wide and sinister pattern of his scheduled future, those irregular pieces to find and to fit into the great jig-saw puzzle of his predatory life, and of Gormenghast, on whose body he fed.

But on this particular day, when the clocks had all struck two, and the steel of his swordstick which he had been sharpening was as keen as a razor and as pointed as a needle, he wrinkled his high shining forehead as he returned the blade to the stick. At the end of the three hours that lay before him he had something very important to do.

It would be very simple and it would be absorbing, but it would be very important also; so important that for the first time in his life he was at a loss for a few moments as to how to fill in the hours that remained before the business that lay ahead, for he knew that he could not concentrate upon anything very serious. While he pondered, he moved to the window of his room and looked out across the vistas of roofs and broken towers.

It was a breathless day, a frail mist tempering the warmth. The few flags that could be seen above various turrets hung limply from their mastheads.

This prospect never failed to please the pale young man. His eye ran over it with shrewdity.

Then he turned from the scene, for he had had an idea. Pouncing upon the Floor, his arms outstretched, he stood upside-down upon the palms of his hands and began to perambulate the room, one eyebrow raised. His idea was to pay a quick call upon the Twins. He had not visited them for some while. Away across the roofscape he had seen the outskirts of that deserted tract, in one of whose forgotten corridors an archway led to a grey world of empty rooms, in one of which their ladyships Cora and Clarice sat immured. Their presence and the presence of their few belongings seemed to have no effect upon the sense of emptiness. Rather, their presence seemed to reinforce the vacancy of their solitude.

It would take him the best part of an hour's sharp walking to reach that forgotten region, but he was in a restless mood, and the idea appealed to him. Flexing his elbows - for he was still moving about the room on his hands - he pressed, of a sudden, away from the floor and, like an acrobat, was all at once on his feet again.

Within a few moments he was on his way, his room carefully locked behind him. He walked rapidly, his shoulders drawn up and forward a little in that characteristic way that gave to his every movement a quality both purposeful and devilish.

The short cuts he took through the labyrinthian network of the castle led him into strange quarters. There were times when walls would tower above him, sheer and windowless. At other times, naked acres, paved in brick or stone would spread themselves out, wastelands vast and dusty where weeds of all kinds forced their way from between the interstices of the paving stones.

As he moved rapidly from domain to domain, from a world of sunless alleys to the panoramic ruins where the rats held undisputed tenure - from the ruins to that peculiar district where the passageways were all but blocked with undergrowth and the carved façades were cold with sea-green ivy - he exulted. He exulted in it all. In the fact that it was only he who had the initiative to explore these wildernesses. He exulted in his restlessness, in his intelligence, in his passion to hold within his own hands the reins, despotic or otherwise, of supreme authority.

Far above him and to the east the sunlight burned upon a long oval window of blue glass. It blazed like lazuli - like a gem hung aloft against the grey walls. Without changing the speed of his walk he drew from his pocket a small smooth beautifully made catapult, into the pouch of which he fitted a bullet, and then, as though with a single action the elastic was stretched and released and Steerpike returned his catapult to his pocket.

He kept walking, but as he walked his face was turned up to those high grey walls where the blue window blazed.

He saw the small gap in the glass and the momentary impression of a blue powder falling before he heard the distant sound, as of a far gunshot.

A head had appeared at the gap in that splintered window away in the high east.

It was very pale. The body beneath it was swathed in sacking. On the shoulder sat perched a blood red parrot - but Steerpike knew nothing of this and was entering another district and was for a long while in the shadows, moving beneath a continuous roofscape of lichened slates.

When at last he approached the archway which led to the Twins' quarters, he paused and gazed back along the grey perspectives. The air was chill and unhealthy; a smell of rotten wood, of dank masonry filled his lungs. He moved in a climate as of decay - of a decay rank with its own evil authority, a richer, more inexorable quality than freshness; it smothered and drained all vibrancy, all hope.

Where another would have shuddered, the young man merely ran his tongue across his lips. 'This is a 'place',' he said to himself. 'Without any doubt, this is 'somewhere'.'

But the hands of the clock kept moving and he had little time for speculation, and so he turned his back on the cold perspectives where the long walls bulged and sagged, where plaster hung and sweated with cold and inanimate fevers, with sicknesses of umber, and illnesses of olive.

When he reached the door behind which the Twins were incarcerated he took a bunch of keys from his pocket and selecting one, which he had cut himself, he turned the lock.

The door opened to his pressure with a stiff and grating sound.

Stiff as were the hinges, it had not taken Steerpike more than a second to throw it wide open. Had he been forced to fight against the swollen wood for an entrance, to struggle with the lock, or to put his shoulder to the damp panelling - or even had his rapid entrance been heralded by the sound of his footsteps, then the spectacle that awaited him, for all its strangeness, would not have had that uncanny and dreamlike horror that now lay hold of him.

He had made no sound. He had given no warning of his visit - but there before him stood the Twins, hand in hand, their faces white as lard. They were positioned immediately before the door; at which they must have been staring. They were like figures of wax, or alabaster or like motionless animals, upright upon their quarters, their gaze fixed, it would seem, upon the face of their master, their mouths half open as though awaiting some tit-bit - some familiar signal.

No expression at all came into their eyes, nor would there have been room for any, for they were separately filled, each one of them, with a foreign body, for in each of the four glazed pupils the image of the young man was exquisitely reflected. Let those who have tried to pass love letters through the eyes of needles or to have written poems on the heads of pins take heart. Crude and heavy handed as they found themselves, yet they will never appreciate the extent of their clumsiness for they will never know how Steerpike's head and shoulders leaned forward through circles the size of beads, whose very equidistance from one another (the Twins were cheek to cheek) was as though to prove by ghastly repetition the nightmare of it all. Minute and exquisite in the microcosm of the pupils, these four worlds, identical and terrible, gleamed between the lids. It would seem they had been painted - these images of Steerpike - with a single hair or with the proboscis of a bee - for the very whites of his eyes were crystalline. And when Steerpike at the door drew back his head - drew it back on a sudden impulse, then the four heads, no bigger than seeds, were drawn back at that same instant, and the eight eyes narrowed as they stared back from the four microscopic mirrors - stared back at their origin, the youth, mountain high in the doorway, the youth on whom their quick and pulseless lives depended - the youth with his eyes narrowed, and whose least movement was theirs.

That the eyes of the Twins should be ignorant of that they reflected was natural enough but it was not natural that in carrying the image of Steerpike to their identical brains, there should be, by not so much as the merest shade, a due to the excitement in their breasts. For it seemed that they felt nothing, that they saw nothing, that they were dead, and stood upon their feet by some miracle.

Steerpike knew at once that yet another chapter was over in his relationship with Cora and Clarice. They had become day in his hands, but they were day no more, unless there is in day not only something imponderable but something sinister also. Not only this, but something adamantine. From now on he knew that they were no longer ductile - they had changed into another medium - a sister medium - but a harsher one - they were stone.

All this could be seen at a glance. But now, suddenly, there was something which escaped his vigilance. It was this. His reflections were no longer in their eyes. Their ladyships had unwittingly expelled him. Something else had taken place - and as he was unaware that he had ever been reflected so he was equally unaware that he was no longer so - and that in the lenses of their eyes he had exchanged places with the head of an axe.

But what Steerpike 'could' see was that they were no longer staring at him - that their gaze was fixed upon something above his head. They had not tilted their heads back although it would have been the normal thing to do for whatever they were looking at was all but out of their line of vision. Their upturned eyes shone white. Save for this movement of their eyeballs they had not so much as stirred.

Fighting down his fear that were he to move his eyes from them, even for a second, he would fall in a peculiar way into some trap, he swung himself about and in a moment had seen a great axe dangling a dozen feet above him, and the complex network of cords and strings which, like a spider's web in the darkness of the upper air, held in position the cold and grizzly weight of the steel head.

With a backward leap the young man was through the doorway. Without a pause he slammed the door and before he had turned the key in the lock he had heard the thud as the head of the axe buried itself in that part of the floor where he had been standing.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Steerpike's return to the castle's heart was rapid and purposeful. A pale sun like a ball of pollen was hung aloft an empty and faded sky, and as he sped below it his shadow sped with him, rippling over the cobbles of great squares, or cruising alongside, upright, where at his elbow the lit and attenuate walls threw back the pallid light. For all that within its boundaries, this shadow held nothing but the uniform blankness of its tone, yet it seemed every whit as predatory and meaningful as the body that cast it - the body, that with so many aids to expressiveness within the moving outline, from the pallor of the young man and the dark red colour of his eyes, to the indefinable expressions of lip and eye, was drawing nearer at every step to a tryst of his own making.

The sun was blocked away. For a few minutes the shadow disappeared like the evil dream of some sleeper who on waking finds the substance of his nightmare standing beside his bed - for 'Steerpike' was there, turning the corners, threading the mazes, gliding down slopes of stone or flights of rotten wood. And yet it was strange that with all the vibrancy that lay packed within the margins of his frame, yet his shadow when it reappeared reaffirmed its self-sufficiency and richness as a scabbard for malignity. Why should this be - why with certain slender proportions and certain tricks of movement should a sense of darkness be evoked? Shadows more terrible and grotesque than Steerpike's gave no such feeling. They moved across their walls bloated or spidery with a comparative innocence. It was as though a shadow had a heart - a heart where blood was drawn from the margins of a world of less substance than air. A world of darkness whose very existence depended upon its enemy, the light.

And there it was; there it slid, this particular shadow - from wall to wall, from floor to floor, the shoulders a little high, but not unduly, the head cocked, not to one or other side, but forward. In an open space it paled as it moved over dried earth, for the sun weakened - and then it fainted away altogether as the fringe of a cloud half the size of the sky moved over the sun.

Almost at once the rain began to fall, and the air yet further darkened. Nor was this darkening enough, for beneath the expanse of the cloud that moved inexorably to the north, dragging behind it miles and miles of what looked like filthy linen, beneath 'this' expanse, yet another, of similar hugeness, but swifter, began to overtake it from beneath, and when this lower continent of cloud began to pass over that part of the sky where the sun had lately been shining, then something very strange made itself felt at once.

A darkness almost unprecedented had closed down over Gormenghast. Steerpike glancing left and right could see the lights begin to burn in scores of windows. It was too dark to see what was happening above, but judging from a still deepening of the pall, yet further clouds, thick and rain-charged, must have slid across the sky to form the lowest of three viewless and enormous layers.

By now the rain was loud on the roofs, was flooding along the gutterings, gurgling in crannies and brimming the thousand irregular cavities that the centuries had formed among the crumbling stones. The advance of these weltering clouds had been so rapid that Steerpike had not entirely escaped the downpour, but it was not for more than a few moments that the rain beat on his head and shoulders, for, running through the unnatural darkness to the nearest of the lighted windows, he found himself in a part of the castle that he remembered. From here he could make the rest of the journey under cover.

The premature darkness was peculiarly oppressive. As Steerpike made his way through the lighted corridors he noticed how at the main windows there were groups gathered, and how the faces that peered out into the false night wore expressions of perplexity and apprehension. It was a freak of nature, and no more, that the world had been swathed away from the westering sun as though with bandages, layer upon layer, until the air was stifled. Yet it seemed as though the sense of oppression which the darkness had ushered in had more than a material explanation.

As though to fight back against the circumscribing darkness the hierophants had lighted every available lantern, burner, candle and lamp, and had even improvised an extraordinary variety of reflectors, of tin and glass, and even trays of gold and plates of burnished copper. Long before any message could have been couriered across the body of Gormenghast, there was not a limb, not a digit that had not responded to the universal sense of suffocation, not the merest finger joint of stone that had not set itself alight.

Countless candles dribbled with hot wax, and their flames, like little flags, fluttered in the uncharted currents of air. Thousands of lamps, naked, or shuttered behind coloured glass, burned with their glows of purple, amber, grass-green, blue, blood red and even grey. The walls of Gormenghast were like the walls of paradise or the walls of an inferno. The colours were devilish or angelical according to the colour of the mind that watched them. They swam, those walls, with the hues of hell, with the tints of Zion. The breasts of the plumaged seraphim; the scales of Satan.

And Steerpike, moving rapidly through these varying flushes, could hear the loudening of the rain. He had come to something very like an isthmus - a corridor with circular windows on either side that gave upon the outer darkness. This arcade, or cover-way - this isthmus that joined together one great mass of sprawling masonry to another, was illumined along its considerable length at three more or less regular intervals by firstly a great age-green oil lamp with an enormous wick as wide as a sheep's tongue. The glass globe that fitted over it was appallingly ugly; a fluted thing, a piece missing from its lower lip. But its colour was something apart - or rather the colour of the glass when lit from behind, as it now was. To say it was indigo gives no idea of its depth and richness, nor of the underwater or cavernous glow that filled that part of the arcade with its aura.

In their different ways the other two lamps, with their globe of sullen crimson and iceberg green, made within the orbits of their influence, arenas no less theatrical. The glazed and circular windows, dark as jet, were yet not featureless. Across the blind blackness of those flanking eyes the strands of rain which appeared not to move but to be stretched across the inky portholes like harp strings - these strands, these strings of water burned blue, beyond the glass, burned crimson, burned green, for the lamplight stained them. And in the stain was something serpentine - something poisonous, exotic, feverish and merciless; the colours were the colours of the sea-snake, and beyond the windows on either hand, was the long-drawn hiss of the reptilian rain.

And while Steerpike sped along this covered-way, the shadow that he cast changed colour. Sometimes it was before him as though eager to arrive at some rendezvous before the body of its caster; and sometimes it followed him, sliding at his heels, dogging him, changing its dark colour as it flowed.

With the isthmus behind him, and a continent of stone once more about him, a continent into whose fastnesses he moved the deeper with every step and with every breath he took, Steerpike banished from his mind every thought of the Twins and of their behaviour. His mind had been largely taken up with conjecture as to the cause of their insurrection, and with tentative plans for their disposal.

But there were matters more pressing and one matter in particular. With enviable ease he emptied his mind of their ladyships and filled it with Barquentine.

His shadow moved upon his right hand. It was climbing a staircase. It crossed a landing. It descended three steps. It followed for a short while at its maker's heels and then overtook him. It was at his elbow when it suddenly deepened its tone and grew up the side of the wall until the shadow-head twelve feet above the ground, pursued its lofty way, the profile undulating from time to time, when it was forced to float across the murky webs that choked the junction of wall and ceiling.

And then the giant shade began to shrivel, and as it descended it moved a little forward of its caster, until finally it was a thick and stunted thing - a malformation, intangible, terrible, that led the way towards those rooms where its immediate journey could, for a little while, be ended.

THIRTY-NINE

Barquentine in his room sat with his withered leg drawn up to his chin. His hair, dirty as a fly-blown web, hung about his face, dry and lifeless. His skin, equally filthy, with its silted fissures, its cheese-like cracks and discolorations, was dry also - an arid terrain, dead it seemed, and waterless as the moon, and yet, at its centre those malignant lakes, his vile and brimming eyes.

Outside the broken window at the far end of the room lay stretched the stagnant waters of die moat.

He had been sitting there, his only leg drawn up to his face, his crutch leaning against the back of his chair, his hands clasped about his knee, a hank of his beard between his teeth - he had been sitting there, for over an hour. On the table before him at least a dozen books lay spread; books of ritual and precedence, books of cross-reference, ciphers and secret papers. But his eyes were not on them. No less ruthless for being out of focus and gleaming wetly in their dry sockets, they could not see that a shadow had entered the room - that intangible as air, yet graphic to a degree, it had reared itself against high tiers of books - books of all shapes and in every stage of dilapidation, that glimmered in the bad light save where this shadow lay athwart them, black as a shade from hell.

And while he sat there, what was he thinking of, this wrinkled and filthy dwarf?

He was thinking of how a change had come over the workings of Gormenghast - over the workings of its heart and the temper of its brain. Something so subtle that he could in no way fix upon it. Something that was not to be located in the normal way of his thinking yet something which, nevertheless, was filling his nostrils with its odour. He knew it to be evil, and what was evil in the eyes of Barquentine was anything that smelt of insurrection, anything that challenged, or worked to undo the ancient procedures.

Gormenghast was not what it was. He knew it. There was devilry somewhere among these cold stones. And yet he could not put his finger upon the spot. He could not say what it was that was now so different. It was not that he was an old man. He was not sentimental about the days of his youth. They had been dark and loveless. But he had no pity for himself. He had only this blind, passionate and cruel love for the dead letter of the castle's law. He loved it with a love as hot as his hate. For the members of the Groan line itself he had less regard than for the meanest and drearest of the rituals that it was their destiny to perform. Only in so far as they were symbols did he bow his ragged head. He had no love for Titus - only for his significance as the last of the links in the great chain. There was something about the way the boy moved... a restlessness, an independence, that galled him. It was almost as though this heir to a world of towers had learned of other climes, of warm, clandestine lands, and that the febrile and erratic movements of the child's limbs were the reflection of what lived and throve in his imagination. It was as though his brain, in regions remote and seductive, was sending its unsettling messages to the small bones, to the tissues of the boy, so that there was, in his movements, something remote and ominous.

But Barquentine, knowing that the seventy-seventh earl had never moved as far as a day's journey from his birthplace, spat, as it were, these reflections from his puzzled brain. And yet the taste lingered. The taste of something acid; something rebellious. The young earl was too much himself. It was as though the child imagined he had a life of his own apart from the life of Gormenghast.

And he was not the only one. There was this Steerpike youth. A quick, useful disciple no doubt, but a danger, for that very reason. What was to be done about him? He had learned too much. He had opened books that were not for him to open and found his way about too rapidly. There was something about him that set him apart from the life of the place - something subtly foreign - something ulterior.

Barquentine shifted his body on the chair, growling with irritation both at the twinge which the altering of his position gave to his withered leg, and at the frustration of being unable to do more than gnaw at the fringe of his suspicions. He longed, as master of the Groan law, to take action, to stamp out, if necessary, a score of malcontents, but there was nothing clear - no tangible target - nothing definable upon which he could direct his fire. He only knew that were he to discover that Steerpike had in the smallest degree abused the grudging trust he had placed in him, then, bringing all his authority to bear, he would have the pallid snipe from the Tower of Flints - he would strike with the merciless venom of the fanatic for whom the world holds no gradations - only the blind extremes of black and white. To sin was to sin against Gormenghast. Evil and doubt were one. To doubt the sacred stones was to profane the godhead. And there was this evil somewhere - close but invisible. His sense caught a whiff of it - but as soon as he turned his brain as it were over the shoulder of his mind - it was gone - and there was nothing palpable - nothing but the hierophants - moving here and there, upon this business or that, and seemingly absorbed.

Was there no way for him either to snare this wandering evil and turn its face to the light or to quell his suspicions? For they were harmful, keeping him awake through the long night hours, nagging at him, as though the castle's illness were his own.

'By the blood of hell,' he whispered, and his whisper was like grit - 'I will search it out, though it hide like a bat in the vaults or a rat in the southern lofts.'

He scratched himself disgustingly, rumps and crutch, and again he shifted himself on the high chair.

It was then that the shadow that lay across the bookshelves moved a little.

The shoulders appeared to rise as the whole silhouette shifted itself further from the door and the impalpable body of the thing rippled across a hundred leather spines.

Barquentine's eyes took focus for a moment or two as they strayed over the documents on the table before him, and, unsolicited at the moment, the recollection of having once been married returned to him. What had happened to his wife he could not remember. He assumed that she had died.

He had no recollection of her face, but could remember - and perhaps it was the sight of the papers before him that had brought back the unwelcome memory - how, as she wept, she would, hardly knowing that she was doing so, make paper boats, which, wet with her tears and grimed from her cracked hands, she sailed across the harbour of her lap or left stranded about the floor or on the rope matting of her bed, in throngs like fallen leaves, wet, grimed and delicate, in scattered squadrons, a navy of grief and madness.

And then, with a start he remembered that she had borne him a son. Or was it she? It was over forty years since he had spoken to his child. He would be hard to find; but found he must be. All he remembered was that a birthmark took up most of the face and that the eyes were crossed.

With his mind cast back to earlier days, a number of pictures floated hesitantly before his eyes, and in all of them he saw himself as someone with his head perpetually raised - as someone on a level with men's knees - as a target for jibes and scorn. He could see in the mind's eye the growth of hatred; he could feel again his crutch being kicked from beneath him, and of the urchins hooting in his wake, 'Rotten leg! rotten spine!'

'Ya! Ya! Barquentine!'

All that was over. He was feared now. Feared and hated.

With his back to the door and to the bookshelves he could not see that the shadow had moved again. He lifted his head and spat.

Picking up a piece of paper he began to make a boat but he did not know what he was doing.

'It has gone on long enough,' he said to himself, - 'too long, by the blood of hags. He must go. He is finished. Dead. Over. Done with. I must be alone, or the cock of the great Ape, I'll jeopardize the Inner Secrets. He'll have the keys off me with his bloody efficiency.'

And while he muttered in his own throat the shadow of the youth of whom he was speaking slid inexorably over the spines, and came to a stop a dozen feet from Barquentine, but the body of Steerpike was at the same moment immediately behind the cripple's chair.

It had not been easy for the young man to decide in what way he would kill his master. He had many means at his disposal. His nocturnal visits to the Doctor's dispensary had furnished him with a sinister array of poisons. His swordstick was almost too obviously efficacious. His catapult was no toy, but something lethal as a gun and silent as a sword. He knew of ways to break the neck with the edge of the palm, and he knew how to send a pen knife through the air with extraordinary precision. He had not, for nothing, spent an allotted number of minutes every morning and for several years in throwing his knife at the dummy in his bedroom.

But he was not interested merely in dispatching the old man.

He had to kill him in some way which left no trace: to dispose of the body and at the same time to mix pleasure and business in such a compound that neither was the weaker for the union. He had old Scores to payoff. He had been spat upon and reviled by the withered cripple. To merely stop his life in the quickest way would be an empty climax - something to be ashamed of.

But what really happened and how Barquentine really died in Steerpike's presence bore no relation to the plan which the young man had made.

For, as he stood immediately behind his victim's chair the old man leaned forward across his books and papers and pulled towards himself a rusty, three-armed candlestick, and after a great deal of scrabbling about among his rags, eventually set a light to the wicks. This had the double effect of sending Steerpike's shadow sidling across the book-filled wall and sucking the strength out of it.

From where Steerpike stood he could see over Barquentine's shoulder the honey-coloured flames of the three candles. They were the shapes of bamboo leaves, attenuate and slender and they trembled against the darkness. Barquentine himself was silhouetted against the glow of the candlelight, and suddenly, as his body shifted, and Steerpike obtained an even clearer view of the candleflame an idea occurred to the young man which made all his carefully prepared plans for the death and disposal of the ancient's body appear amateurish: amateurish through lack of that deceptive simplicity which is the hallmark of all great art; amateurish, for all their ingenuity, and for the very reason of it.

But here - here before him, ready made was a candlestick with three gold flames that licked at the sullen air. And, here within his reach was the old man he wished to kill, but not too quickly; an old man whose rags and skin and beard were as dry and inflammable as the most exacting of fire-raisers could wish. What would be easier than for a man as ancient as Barquentine to lean forward accidentally at his work and for his beard to catch light from the candles? What would be more diverting than to watch the irritable and filthy tyrant caught among flames, his rags blazing, his skin smoking, his beard leaping like a crimson fish. It would only remain, at a later date, for Steerpike to discover the charred corpse and arouse the castle.

The young man glanced about him. The door through which he had entered the room was closed. It was an hour when there was small chance of their being disturbed. The silence in the room was only intensified by the thin grating of Barquentine's breathing.

No sooner had Steerpike realized the advantages of setting fire to the ragged silhouette which squatted like a black gnome immediately before him, than he drew the blade from his swordstick and raised it so that the steel point hovered within an inch of Barquentine's neck, and immediately below his left ear.

Now that Steerpike was so close upon the heels of the gross and bloody deed, a kind of cold and poisonous rage filled him. Perhaps the dry root of some long deadened conscience stirred for a moment in his breast. Perhaps, for that sharp second, he remembered in spite of himself that to kill a man involved a sense of guilt: and perhaps it was because of the momentary distraction of purpose that hatred swept his face, as though a frozen sea were whipped of a sudden into a living riot of tameless water. But the waves subsided as quickly as they had risen. Once again his face was white with a deadly equipoise. The point of his blade had trembled beneath the age-bitten ear. But now it was motionless.

It was then that there was a knock at the door. The old head twisted to the sound, but away from the blade so that Steerpike and his weapon were still invisible.

'To black hell with you whoever you are! I will see no son of a bitch today!'

'Very well, sir,' said a door-blocked voice, and then the faint sound of footsteps could be heard, and then silence again.

Barquentine turned his head back, and then scratched himself across the belly.

'Saucy bullprong,' he muttered aloud. 'I'll have his face off him. I'll have his white face off! I'll have the shine off it! By the gall of the great mule he's over-shiny. "Very well, sir" he says, does he? What's 'well' about it? What's well about it? The upstart piss-worm!'

Again Barquentine began to scratch, loins, buttocks, belly and ribs.

'O sucking fire!' he cried, 'it gripes my heart! No earl but a brat. The Countess, cat-mad. And for me, no tyro but this upstart of a Steerpike bastard.'

The young man, his swordstick beautifully poised, its cold tip sharp as a needle, pursed his thin lips and clicked his tongue. This time Barquentine turned his head over his left shoulder so that he received half an inch of steel beneath his ear. His body stiffened horribly while his throat swelled into the semblance of a scream, but no scream came. When Steerpike withdrew the blade, and while a trickle of dark blood made its way over the wrinkled terrain of his turtle-neck, the whole frame became all of a sudden convulsively active, each part of him seeming to contort itself without relation to what was happening to the rest of the body. It was a miracle that he remained balanced on the high chair. But these convulsions suddenly ended and Steerpike, standing back with his chin cupped in his hands, was chilled, in spite of the half-smile on his face, by the direst expression of mortal hatred that had ever turned an old man's face into a nest of snakes. The eyes grew, of a sudden, congested, their vile waters taking on, it seemed, the flush of a dangerous sunrise. The mouth and the lines about it appeared to seethe. The dirty brow and neck were wet with venom.

But there was a brain behind it all. A brain which, while Steerpike stood by and smiled, was in spite of the young man's initial advantage, a step ahead of the youth. For the one thing without which he would indeed have been helpless was still in his power to capture. Steerpike had made a mistake at the outset. And he was taken completely by surprise when Barquentine, thrusting himself off the high chair, fell to the floor in a heap. The old man landed upon the object which was his only hope. It had fallen to the ground when he had stiffened at the sword-prick - and now in a flash he had grasped his crutch, prised himself upright, and hopped to the rear of his chair through the bars of which he directed his red gaze upon the face of his armed and agile enemy.

But the spirit in the old tyrant was something so intense that Steerpike in spite of his two legs, his youth and his weapons was taken aback by the realization that so much passion could be housed in so dry and stunted a thing. He was also taken aback at having been outwitted. It was true that even now the duel was ludicrously one-sided - an ancient cripple with a crutch - an athlete with a sword - but nevertheless, had his first action been to remove the crutch he would now have the old man in as helpless a position as a tortoise upon its back.

For a few moments they faced one another, Barquentine expressing everything in his face, Steerpike nothing. Then the young man began to walk slowly backwards to the door, his eyes all the while on his quarry. He was taking no chances. Barquentine had shown how quick he could be.

When he reached the door he opened it and took a rapid glance along the attenuate corridor. It was enough to show him that there was no one in the neighbourhood. He closed the door behind him and then began to advance towards the chair through the bars of which the dwarf was peering.

As Steerpike advanced with his slender steel in his hand, his eyes were upon his prey but his thoughts were centred upon the candlestick.

His foe could have no idea of how he was within reach of what would burn him up. The three little flames trembled above the melting wax. He had brought them to life, those three dead lumps of tallow. And they were to turn upon him. But not yet.

Steerpike continued his lethal advance. What was there that the cripple could do? For the moment he was partially shielded by the back of the chair. And then, in a voice strangely at variance with the demoniac aspect of his face, for it was as cold as ice, he uttered the one word 'Traitor.'

It was not merely his life he was fighting for. That single word, freezing the air, had revealed what Steerpike had forgotten: that in his adversary he was pitting himself against Gormenghast. Before him he had a living pulse of the immemorial castle.

But what of all this? It merely meant that Steerpike must be careful. That he must keep his distance until the moment in which to make his attack. He continued to advance and then, when another step would have taken him within range of Barquentine's crutch, he side-stepped to the right and speeding to the far end of the table, placed his rapier before him across the littered books and taking his knife from his pocket opened it with a single action and then, as Barquentine turned about in his tracks in order to face his assailant, he sent the sharp thing whipping through the candlelight. As Steerpike had intended it pinned the old man's right hand to the shaft of his crutch. In the moment of Barquentine's surprise and pain, Steerpike leapt on the table and sprang along it. Immediately below him the dwarf plucked at the knife in his blind fury. As he did so, Steerpike, all in a breath, had snatched up the candlestick, and lunging forward, swept the tiny flame across the upturned face. In a moment, the lifeless beard had shone out in sizzling fire and it was but a moment before the rotten rags about the shoulders of the old man were ablaze also.

But again, and this time while in the throes of mortal agony, Barquentine's brain had risen instantaneously to the call which was made upon it. He had no moment to lose. The knife was still in his hand though the crutch had fallen away - but all that was forgotten, as with a superhuman effort, one-legged though he was, he flexed his knee and in a spring caught hold of some portion of Steerpike's clothing. No sooner had he made his first grip, than, with his arms straining themselves to breaking point, and his old heart pounding, he made good his purchase and began to swarm the youth like an ape on fire. By now he had a grip of Steerpike's waist and the flames were beginning to catch the clothing of his young enemy. The searing pain across his face and chest but made him cling the tighter. That he must die, he knew. But the traitor must die with him, and in his agony there was something of joy; joy in the 'rightness' of his revenge.

At the same time, Steerpike was fighting to free himself, clawing at the burning leech, striking upwards with his knees, his face transparent with a deadly mixture of rage, astonishment and desperation.

His clothes, less inflammable than Barquentine's threadbare sacking, were nevertheless alight by now, and across his cheek and throat a flame had scorched his skin to crimson. But the more he struggled to wrench himself away the fiercer seemed the arms that gripped his waist.

Had anyone opened the door they would have seen, at that moment, a young man luminous against the darkness, his feet striking and trampling among the sacred books that littered the table, the body writhing and straining as though demented and they would have seen that his vibrating hands were locked upon the turtle throat of a dwarf on fire: and they would have seen the paroxysm that toppled the combatants off the table's edge so that they fell in a smoking heap to the floor.

Even now in his pain and danger there was room in him for the bitter shame of his failure. Steerpike the arch contriver, the cold and perfect organizer, had bungled the affair. He had been out-generalled by a verminous septuagenarian. But his shame took the form of desperate anger. It whipped him to a feverpitch.

In a kind of spasm, quite diabolical in the access of its ferocity and purpose, he struggled to his knees, and then with a jerk, to his feet. He had let go the throat and he stood swaying a moment, his hands free at his sides, and the pain of his bums so intense that, although he did not know it, he was moaning like something lost. It had nothing to do with his merciless nature, this moaning. It was something quite physical. It was his body crying. His brain knew nothing about it.

The Master of Ritual clung, like a vampire, at his breast. The old arms were clasped about him. Mixed with the pain in the agonized face, there was an unholy glee. He was burning the traitor with his own flame. He was burning an unbeliever.

But the unbeliever was, for all the fiery hugging of his master, by no means ready for sacrifice however right or deserving his death might be. He had paused only to regain strength. He had dropped his arms only through an abnormal degree of control. He knew that he could not free himself from the clutch of the fanatic. And so for a moment he stood there, upright, his coat half burned away, his head thrust back to keep as great a distance as he could between his face and the flames that rose from the blackening creature that clung like a growth. To be able to stand for a moment under so horrific a duress - to be able to stand, to take a deep breath, and to relax the muscles of his arms demanded an almost inhuman control of the will and the passions.

The circumstances having gone so far beyond his control there was no longer any question of choice. It was no longer a case of killing Barquentine. It was a case of saving himself. His plans had gone so wildly astray that there was no recovery. He was ablaze.

There was only one thing he could do. Saddled as he was, his limbs were disencumbered. He knew that he had only a few moments in which to act. His head swam and a darkness filled him, but he began to run, his burned hands spread out like starfish at his sides, to run in a dizzy curve of weakness to the far end of the room - to where the night was a square of darkness. For a moment they were there, against the starless sky, lit like demons with their own conflagration, and then, suddenly they were gone. Steerpike had hurdled the window-sill and had fallen with his virulent burden into the black waters of the moat below. There were no stars but the moon like a nail-paring floated unsubstantially in the low north. It cast no light upon the earth.

Deep in the horrible waters of the moat the protagonists, their consciousness having left them, still moved together as one thing like some foul subaqueous beast of allegory. Above them the surface water through which they had fallen was sizzling and steam drifted up invisible through the darkness.

When after what he could only recall as his death, Steerpike, his head having at last risen above the surface, found that he was not alone but that something clung to him below the water, he vomited and of a sudden, howled. But the nightmare continued and there was no answer to his howl. He did not waken. And then the excruciating pains of his burns racked him, and he knew it was no dream.

And then he realized what he must do. He must keep that charred and hairless head which kept bobbing against his breast, he must keep it below the water. But it was not easy for him to fasten upon the wrinkled throat. The mud had been churned up about them, and the burden he carried was, like his own hands, coated with slime. The vile arms clung about him with the tenacity of tentacles. That he did not sink like a stone was a wonder; perhaps it was the thickness of the water, or the violent stamping of his feet in the stagnant depth which helped him to keep afloat for long enough.

But gradually, inexorably, he fought the old head backwards, his fierce hands clenched on the gullet strings - he fought it downwards, down into the black water, while bubbles rose and the thick and slapping sound of the agitated water filled up the hollow, of the listening night.

There was no knowing how long the old man's face remained under water before Steerpike could feel any loosening of the grip at his waist. To the murderer the act of death was endless. But by degrees the lungs had filled with water and the heart had ceased to beat, and the Hereditary Keeper of the Groan lore and Master of Ritual had slid away into the muddy depths of the ancient moat.

The moon was higher in the sky, was surrounded by a sprinkling of stars. It could not be said that they gave light to the walls and towers that flanked the moat, but a kind of dusk was inlaid upon the inky darkness, a dusk in the shape of walls and towers.

Exhausted and in terrible pain, Steerpike had yet to swim on through the scum and duckweed - to swim on until the slimy walls of the moat gave way on the northern side to a muddy bank. It seemed that the walls on his either side were endless. The foul water got into his throat. The vile weeds clung to his face. It was difficult to see more than a few yards ahead; but all at once he realized that the wall upon his right had given way to a steep and muddy bank.

The water had drawn away what clothes the fire had left. He was naked, covered with burns, half drowned, his body shaking with an icy cold, his brow burning with a feverish heat.

Crawling up the bank, not knowing what he was doing, save that he must find some place of neither fire nor water, he came at last to a patch of level mud where a few rank ferns and mudplants flourished, and there, as though (now that his affairs were concluded) he could afford to faint, he collapsed into darkness.

And there he lay motionless, very small and naked on the mud, like something lifeless that had been discarded, or like a fish thrown up by the sea over whose minute and stranded body the great cliffs tower, for the walls of Gormenghast rose high above the moat, soaring like cliffs themselves into the upper darkness.

FORTY

While the dust that lay upon the gaunt back of the castle became warm in the sun, and the birds grew drowsy in the shadows of the towers, and while there was little to hear but the droning of the bees as they hovered over the wastes of ivy - at the same time, in the green hush of noon, the spirit of Gormenghast forest held its breath like a diver. There was no sound. Hour followed hour and all things were asleep or in a state of trance. The trunks of the great oaks were blotched with honey-coloured shadows and the prodigious boughs were stretched like the arms of bygone kings and appeared to be heavy with the weight of their gold bangles, the bracelets of the sun. There seemed to be no end to the gold afternoon and then something fell from a high branch, and the faint swish of the leaves through which it passed awoke the region. The stillness had been for the moment punctured, but the wound healed over almost at once.

What was it that had fallen through the silence? Even the tree-cat would have hesitated to drop so far through the green gloom. But it was no cat, but something human that stood dappled with leaf-shaped shadows, a child, with its thick hair hacked off close to its head and the face freckled like a bird's egg. The body, slender, indeed thin, appeared, when the child began to move, to be without weight.

The features of her face were quite nondescript - in fact, empty. It was as though she wore a kind of mask, neither pleasant nor unpleasant - something that hid rather than revealed her mind. And yet, at the same time, although by feature there was nothing to remember, nothing distinctive, yet the whole head was so set upon the neck, the neck so perfectly adjusted upon the slender shoulders, and the movements of those three so expressive in their relationship that it seemed that there was not only nothing lacking, but that for the face to have had a life of its own would have ruined the detached and unearthly quality she possessed.

She stood there for a moment, entirely alone in the dreaming oakwoods and began, with strangely rapid movements of her fingers, to pluck the feathers from a missel-thrush which, during her long fall through the foliage, she had snatched from its branch and throttled in her small fierce hand.

FORTY-ONE

Surrounding the outer walls of Gormenghast castle the mud city of the Outer Dwellers lay sprawled in the sun, its thousands of hovels hummocking the earth like molehills. These Dwellers, or Bright Carvers as they were sometimes called, had rituals of their own as sacrosanct as those of the castle itself.

Bitter with poverty and prone to those diseases that thrive on squalor, they were yet a proud though bigoted people. Proud of their traditions, of their power of carving - proud of their very misery, it seemed. For one of their number to have left them and to have become wealthy and famous would have been to them a cause for shame and humiliation. But such a possibility was unthinkable. In their obscurity, their anonymity lay their pride. All else was something lower - saving only the family of the Groans to whom they owed allegiance and under whose patronage they were allowed their hold upon the Outer Walls. When the great sacks of crusts were lowered by ropes from the summit of those Walls, over a thousand at a time making their simultaneous descents, they were received (this time-honoured gesture on the part of the castle) with a kind of derision. It was they, the Bright Carvers, who were honouring the castle; it was they who condescended to unhook the ropes every morning of the year, so that the empty sacks might be hoisted up again. And with every mouthful of these dry crusts (which with the jarl-root of the neighbouring forest composed the beginning and end of their diet) they knew themselves to be conferring an honour upon the castle bakeries.

It was perhaps the pride of the subjugated - a compensatory thing - but it was very real to them. Nor was it built on nothing, for in their carvings alone they showed a genius for colour and for ornament that had no kind of counterpart in the life of the Castle.

Taciturn and bitter as they were in their ancient antipathies yet their hottest enmity was directed, not against any that lived within the outer walls, but against those of their own kind who in any way made light of their own customs. At the heart of their ragged and unconventional life there was an orthodoxy as hard as iron. Their conventions were ice-bound. To move among them for a day without forewarning of their innumerable conventions would be to invite disaster. Side by side with an outrageous lack of the normal physical decencies was an ingrained prudery, vicious and unswervingly cruel.

For a child to be illegitimate was for that child to be loathed, as though it were a diseased thing. Not only this. A bastard babe was feared. There was a strong belief that in some way a love-child was evil. The mother would invariably be ostracized but it was only the babe who was to be feared - it was, in fact, a witch in embryo.

But it was never killed. For to kill, it would be only to kill the body. Its ghost would haunt the killer.

In a lane of flies that wound beneath a curve of the Outer Walls, the dusk began to settle down like pollen. It thickened by degrees until the lane and the irregular roofs of reeds and mud were drowned in it.

Along the wall of the lane or alleyway a line of beggars squatted. It seemed that they were growing out of the dust they sat in. It covered their ankles and their haunches. It was like a dead, grey sea. It was as though the tide were in - a tide of soft dust. It was voluptuously fine and feathery.

And in this common dove-coloured dust, they sat, their backs to the clay walls of a sun-warmed hovel. They had these luxuries, the soft dust and the warm fly-filled air.

As they sat there silently, while the night descended, their eyes were fixed upon those few figures on the other side of the alley, who, their carving over for the day, were gathering up their chisels, rasps and mallets and returning with them to their various huts.

Until a year ago there had been no need for the Bright Carvers to return their sculpture to the safety of their homes. It had remained all night in the open. It was never touched. No, not the meanest vandal of them all would dare to touch or move by an inch the work of another.

But now there was a difference. The carvings were no longer safe. Something horrible had happened. And so the beggars by the wall continued to stare as the removal of the wood sculpture proceeded. It had been going on now for twelve months, evening after evening, but they were not yet used to it. They could not grasp it. All their lives they had known the moonlight on the deserted lanes, and, flanking these lanes the wooden carvings like sentinels at every door. But now, after dark, the heart had gone out of the streets - a vibrancy, a beauty had departed from the alleys.

And so they still watched, at dusk, with a kind of hapless wonder, the younger men as they struggled to return the often massive and weighty horses with their manes like clusters of frozen sea foam - or the dappled gods of Gormenghast forest with their heads so strangely tilted. They watched all this and knew that a blight had come upon the one activity for which the Dwellers lived.

They said nothing, these beggars, but as they sat in the soft dust, there was, at back of each one's mind, the image of a child. Of an illegitimate child, a pariah, a thing of not yet twelve years old, but a raven, a snake, witch, all the same, a menace to them all and to their carvings.

It had happened first about a year ago, that first midnight attack, secret, silent and of a maliciousness quite terrible.

A great piece of sculpture had been found at dawn, its face in the dust, its body scarred with long jagged knife wounds, and a number of small carvings had been stolen. Since that first evil and silent assault a score of works had been defaced and a hundred carvings stolen, carvings no bigger than a hand, but of a rare craftsmanship, rhythm and colour. There was no doubt as to who it was. It was the Thing. Shunned as a bastard ever since the day of her mother's suicide, this child had been a thorn in the flesh of the Dwellers. Running wild, like an animal, and as untameable; a thief as though by nature, she was, even before she ran away, a legend, a thing of evil.

She was always alone. It seemed unthinkable that she could be companioned. There was no soft spot in her self-sufficiency. She stole for her food, moving shadowlike in the night, her face utterly expressionless, her limbs as light and rapid as a switch of hazel. Or she would disappear completely for months on end, but then, suddenly return and darting from roof to roof, blister the evening air with sharp cries of derision.

The dwellers cursed the day when the Thing was born; the Thing that could not speak but could run, it was rumoured, up the stem of a branchless tree; could float for a score of yards at a time on the wings of a high wind.

They cursed the mother that bore her - Keda, the dark girl, who had been summoned to the castle and who had fed the infant Titus from her breast. They cursed the mother, they cursed the child - but they were afraid - afraid of the super-natural and were oppressed with a sense of awe - that the tameless Thing should be the foster sister of the Earl, Lord Groan of Gormenghast, Titus the Seventy-seventh.

FORTY-TWO

When Steerpike had come out of his faint and when his consciousness of the horrors through which he had passed returned to him, as they did in a flash of pain, for he was raw with the searings of the fire, he got to his feet like a cripple and staggered through the night until he came at last to the Doctor's doorway. There, after beating at the door with his feverish forehead, for his hands were scalded, he fainted again where he stood and knew no more until three days later when he found himself staring at the ceiling of a small room with green walls.

For a long while he could recall nothing, but bit by bit the fragments of that violent evening pieced themselves together until he had the whole picture.

He turned his head with difficulty and saw that the door was to his left. To his right was a fireplace, and ahead of him and near the ceiling was a fair sized window over which the blinds were partially drawn. By the dusky look in the sky he guessed it to be either dawn or evening. Part of a tower could be seen through the gap of the curtains, but he could not recognize it. He had no idea in what part of the castle he was lying.

He dropped his eyes and noticed that he was bandaged from head to foot, and as though he needed this reminder, the pain of his burns became more acute. He shut his eyes and tried to breathe evenly.