The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

Titus was crying. The long day he had spent alone, the lateness of the hour, the excitement, the sense of his essential isolation – all these things had worked together to weaken him. But he nodded. Whether Fuchsia saw his silent answer to her question or not, she made no further remark, but lifting him from the ground, she dried his eyes with the loose sleeve of her dress.

Together they picked their way to the edge of the wood, and there were the bonfires again and the crowds and the lake with the chestnut trees beyond, and there was the platform where he had sat alone, and there was their mother at the long table with her elbows on the moonlit linen, and her chin in her hands, while before her, and seemingly unnoticed, for her gaze was fixed upon the distant hills, the customary banquet lay spread in all its splendour, a rich and crowded masterpiece, the gold plate of the Groans burning with a slow and mellow fire and the crimson goblets smouldering at the moon.

FIFTY-ONE

I

And all the while the progress of the seasons, those great tides, enveloped and stained with their passing colours, chilled or warmed with their varying exhalations, the tracts of Gormenghast. And so, as Fuchsia wanders across her room in search of a lost book, the south spinneys below her window are misty with a green hesitation, and a few days later the sharp green fires have broken out along the iron boughs.

II

Opus Fluke and Flannelcat are leaning over the verandah railing above the Professors’ Quadrangle. The old quadman is sweeping the dust thirty feet below them. It is thick and white with heat, for the spring has long since passed.

‘Hot work for an old fellow!’ shouts Fluke to the old man. The ancient lifts his head and wipes his brow. ‘Ah!’ he calls up in a voice that could not have been used for weeks. ‘Ah, sir, it’s a dry do.’ Fluke retires and in a few minutes has returned with a bottle which he has stolen from Mulefire’s apartment. This he lowers on a length of string to the old man, far below in the dust.

III

In his study, and locked away from the world, Prunesquallor, lying rather than sitting in his elegant arm chair, reads with his crossed feet resting just below the mantelpiece.

The small fire in the grate lights up his keen, absurdly refined, and for all its weirdness of proportion, delicate face. The magnifying lenses of his spectacles, which can give so grotesque an effect to his eyes, gleam in the firelight.

It is no book of medicine that he is so absorbed in. On his knee there is an old exercise book filled with verses. The handwriting is erratic but legible. Sometimes the poems are in a heavy, ponderous and childish hand – sometimes in a quick, excited calligraphy, full of crossings-out and misspellings.

That Fuchsia should have ever asked him to read them was the most thrilling thing that he had ever experienced. He loved the girl as though she were his own daughter. But he had never sought her out. Little by little, as the times went by she had taken him into her confidence.

But as he reads, and while the autumn wind whistles in the branches of the garden trees, his brow contracts and he returns his gaze to the four curious lines which Fuchsia had crossed out with a thick pencil –

How white and scarlet is that face,

Who knows, in some unusual place

The coloured heroes are alight

With faces made of red and white.

IV

It is a cold and dreary winter. Once again Flay, who is now as much at home in the Silent Halls as he had been in the forests, sits at the table in his secret room. His hands are deep in his ragged pockets. Before him is spread a great sail of paper that not only covers the table, but descends in awkward folds and creases to the floor on every side. A portion near its centre is covered with markings, laboriously scripted words, short arrows, dotted lines, and incomprehensible devices. It is a map; a map which Mr Flay has been working upon for over a year. It is a map of the district that surrounds him – the empty world, whose anatomy, little by little, he is piecing together, extending, correcting, classifying. He is, it seems, in a city that has been forsaken and he is making it his own; naming its streets and alleys, its avenues of granite, its winding flights and blackened terraces – exploring ever further its hollow hinterlands, while over all, like a lowering sky, as continuous and as widespread are the endless ceilings and the unbroken roof.

He is no master of graphology. A pen sits awkwardly in his hand. But both while engaged upon his expeditions and when adding with painful slowness to his map, during the long days his life in the pathless woods is standing him in good stead.

With no stars to help him, his sense of orientation has become uncanny.

Tonight he will keep watch upon Steerpike’s door as has become his custom in the small hours, and if the opportunity arises, he will follow him upon whatever business he is bent. Until then he has seven hours in which to push forward with this task of reconnaissance which has now become a passion.

He takes his hands out of his pockets and with a scarred and bony forefinger he traces for himself the path he proposes to follow. It takes a northward course sweeping in a number of arcs before it zig-zags through a veritable cross-hatching of narrow alleys to reappear as a twelve foot corridor with a worn pavement on its either side. This corridor heads undeviatingly to the north and fades out in a series of small, hesitant dots that part of Mr Flay’s paper that has all but overlapped the table. It has reached the margin of his knowledge to the north.

He pulls the chart towards him and the loose paper on the far side of the table slides upwards from the floor, and then, in creeping forwards to beneath his outstretched head, it opens out its wastes of untrodden whiteness with an arctic yawn.

V

And the days move on and the names of the months change and the four seasons bury one another and it is spring again and yet again and the small streams that run over the rough sides of Gormenghast Mountain are big with rain while the days lengthen and summer sprawls across the countryside, sprawls in all the swathes of its green, with its gold and sticky head, with its slumber and the drone of doves and with its butterflies and its lizards and its sunflowers, over and over again, its doves, its butterflies, its lizards, its sunflowers, each one an echo-child while the fruit ripens and the grotesque boles of the ancient apple trees are dappled in the low rays of the sun and the air smells of such rotten sweetness as brings a hunger to the breast, and makes of the heart a sea-bed, and a tear, the fruit of salt and water, ripens, fed by a summer sorrow, ripens and falls … falls gradually along the cheekbones, wanders over the wastelands listlessly, the loveliest emblem of the heart’s condition.

And the days move on and the names of the months change and the four seasons bury one another and the field-mice draw upon their granaries. The air is murky, and the sun is like a raw wound in the grimy flesh of a beggar, and the rags of the clouds are clotted. The sky has been stabbed and has been left to die above the world, filthy, vast and bloody. And then the great winds come and the sky is blown naked, and a wild bird screams across the glittering land. And the Countess stands at the window of her room with the white cats at her feet and stares at the frozen landscape spread below her, and a year later she is standing there again but the cats are abroad in the valleys and a raven sits upon her heavy shoulder.

And every day the myriad happenings. A loosened stone falls from a high tower. A fly drops lifeless from a broken pane. A sparrow twitters in a cave of ivy.

The days wear out the months and the months wear out the years, and a flux of moments, like an unquiet tide, eats at the black coast of futurity.

And Titus Groan is wading through his boyhood.

FIFTY-TWO

A kind of lull had settled upon the castle. It was not that events were lacking but that even those of major importance had about them a sense of unreality. It was as though some strange wheel of destiny had brought to the earth its preordained lacuna.

Bellgrove was now a husband. Irma had not wasted a moment before she began to raise those formidable earthworks that can so isolate the marital unit from the universe.

She always knew what was best for Bellgrove. She always knew what he most needed. She knew how the headmaster of Gormenghast should behave and she knew how his inferiors should behave in his presence. The staff were terrified of her. There was no difference between them and their pupils where Irma was concerned. It was a case of whispering behind the hand; tip-toeing past the door of Bellgrove’s apartment; looking to the condition of their fingernails, and, worst of all, attending their classes at the scheduled time.

She had changed almost out of recognition. Marriage had given her vanity both drive and direction. It had not taken her long to discover the inherent weakness of her husband. She loved him no less for this, but her love became militant. He was her child. Noble, but ah, no longer wise. It was she who was wise and in her loving wisdom it was for her to guide him.

From Bellgrove’s point of view it was a sad story. Having had her in the palm of his hand – it was now a bitter business, this reversal. He had been unable to keep it up. Little by little, his lack of will, his native feebleness became apparent. She had found him, one day, practising a series of noble expressions before the mirror. She saw him shake his beautiful white locks, and she had heard him chiding her for some imaginary misdemeanour. ‘No, Irma,’ he was saying. ‘I will not have it. I would be gratified if you would remember your station,’ and then he had smirked, as though ashamed, and on looking into the mirror again, had seen her standing behind him.

But he knew himself to be her superior. He knew that there was in him a kind of golden fund, a reserve of strength, but at the same time he knew that this strength was of no avail for he had never drawn upon it. He did not know how to. He didn’t even know exactly what kind of strength it was. But it was there, and it was real to him in the way that an ultimate innocence, like a nest egg, awaits its moment in the breasts of sinners.

And yet for all his subjugation it was a relief to be able to be weak again. Gradually he gave himself up to it, bearing in mind, all the time, his own secret superiority – as a man – and as a broken reed. Better, he argued to have been a thing of mystery and music and to have been broken than to have never been a reed, but to have been composed of some prosaic if quite unbreakable material with about as much mystery or music in its bloodstream as there is love in a condor’s eye.

All these thoughts, of course, he kept strictly to himself. To Irma’s mind he was her lord upon a leash. To the staff he was simply on a leash. In his own mind, leash or not, a philosophy was growing. The philosophy of invisible revolution.

He peered at her, not unlovingly, through his white eyelashes. He was glad she was there, mending his ceremonial gown. It was better than being baited by the staff as in the old days. After all, she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. He watched her pointed nose. How had he ever admired it?

But oh the glee of thinking to himself. Of dreaming of impossible escapes, or of reversing the status quo, so that once again she would be in his power, as on that magical evening in the dappled arbour. But then – the strain of it, the strain of it. There was no joy in will-power.

He settled back in his chair and revelled in his weakness, his old mouth twisting a little at one corner, his eyes half-closing as he relaxed the leonine features of his magnificent old head.

The sense of unreality which had spread through the castle like some strange malaise had muffled Bellgrove’s marriage so that although there was no lack of incident, and no question as to its importance, a sharpness, an awareness was missing and nobody really believed in what was happening. It was as though the castle was recovering from an illness, or was about to have one. It was either lost in a blur of unfocused memory or in the unreality of a disquietening premonition. The immediacy of the castle’s life was missing. There were no sharp edges. No crisp sounds. A veil was over all things, a veil that no one could tear away.

How long it lasted was impossible to say, for although there was this general oppression that weighed on every action, all but annihilating its reality of significance, making, for instance, of Bellgrove’s marriage a ceremony of dream, yet the sense of unreality in each individual was different; different in intensity, in quality, and in duration, according to the temperaments of all who were submerged.

There were some who hardly realized that there was a difference. Thick bullet-headed men with mouths like horses, were scarcely aware. They felt that nothing mattered quite as much as it used to do, but that was all.

Others were drowned in it, and walked like ghosts. Their own voices, when they spoke, appeared to be coming to them from far away.

It was the influence of Gormenghast, for what else could it have been? It was as though the labyrinthian place had woken from its sleep of stone and iron and in drawing breath had left a vacuum, and it was in this vacuum that its puppets moved.

And then came a time when, on a late spring evening, the castle exhaled and the distances came forward in a rush, and the far away voices grew sharp and close, and the hands became aware of what they were grasping, and Gormenghast became stone again and returned to its sleep.

But before the weight of emptiness had lifted, a number of things had happened which, although when seen in retrospect appeared vague and shadow, had nevertheless taken place. However nebulous they had appeared at the time their repercussions were concrete enough.

Titus was no longer a child, and the end of his schooldays was in sight. He had, as the years went by become more solitary. To all save Fuchsia, the Doctor, Flay and Bellgrove he presented a sullen front. Beneath this dour and unpleasing armour his passionate longing to be free of his hereditary responsibilities smouldered rebelliously. His hatred, not for Gormenghast, for its very dust was in his bloodstream, and he knew no other place, but for the ill fate that had chosen him to be the one upon whose restless shoulders there would rest, in the future, the heavy onus of an ancient trust.

He hated the lack of choice: the assumption on the part of those around him that there were no two ways of thinking: that his desire for a future of his own making was due to ignorance or to a wilful betrayal of his birthright.

But more than all this he hated the confusion in his own heart. For he was proud. He was irrationally proud. He had lost the unselfconsciousness of childhood where he was a boy among boys; he was now Lord Titus and conscious of the fact. And while he ached for the anonymity of freedom he moved erect with a solitary pride of bearing, sullen and commanding.

And it was this contradiction within himself that was as much as anything else the cause of his blunt and uncompromising manners. With the youths of his own age he had become more and more unpopular, his schoolmates seeing no cause for the violence of his outbursts. He had ripped the lid off his desk for less than nothing. He could be dangerous and as time went on his isolation grew more complete. The boy who had been ready for any act of mischief, for any midnight venture, in the long dormitories, was now another being!

The tangle of his thoughts and emotions – the confused groping for an outlet for his wayward spirit, his callow lust for revolt, left no room in him for those things that would once have quickened his pulse. He had found that to be alone was more intoxicating. He had changed.

And yet, in spite of the long years that had passed since he, Doctor Prunesquallor and Professor Bellgrove had played marbles in the small fort, he was still as able to delight in the most childish of amusements. He would often be found sitting by the moat, and launching by the hour small wooden boats of his own making. But more abstractedly than in the old days, as though for all his apparent concentration, as he carved with his penknife the tapering bows or the blunt stern of some monarch of the waves – his mind was really far away.

Yet he carved away at these small craft and he named them as he launched them upon their perilous missions to the isles of blood and spices. And he would visit the Doctor and watch him making those peculiar drawings which Irma had never cared for, those drawings of small spidery men, a hundred on a page, engaged now in battle, now in conclave, now in scenes of hunting, now in worship before some spidery god. And for the hour he would be very happy. And he would visit Fuchsia and they would talk and talk until their throats were sore … would talk about all there was in Gormenghast for they knew no other place – but neither to his sister nor to Bellgrove who would sometimes, when Irma was engaged elsewhere, shamble down to the moat’s edge to launch a ship or two – neither to him, nor to the Doctor did Titus ever unburden himself of his secret fear, the fear that his life would become no more than a round of preordained ritual. For there was no one, not even Fuchsia who, however much she might sympathize, could help him now. There was no one who would dare to encourage him in his longing to free himself of his yoke to escape and to discover what lay beyond the margins of his realm.

FIFTY-THREE

The unearthly lull that had descended upon Gormenghast had not failed to affect so imaginative and highly strung a nature as Fuchsia’s. Steerpike who, although sensitive to atmosphere in a high degree, was less submerged, and moved as it were with his crafty head protruding above the weird water. He could see Fuchsia, as she walked in a transparent world, far below the surface. Acutely aware of this trance-like omnipresence, Steerpike, following the course of his nature, was at once concerned with how best he could use this drug to further his own ends, and it was not long before he had come to a decision.

He must woo the daughter of the House. He must woo her with all the guile and artistry in his power. He must break down her reserve with an approach both simple and candid, with an assumed gentleness, and a concentration upon those things which he could pretend they had in common: and with a charming yet manly deference to her rank. At the same time he would both give the impression of those fires within him that were undoubtedly there, if for the wrong reason, and by devious means, so engineer their assignations and coincidental meetings that she would often come upon him in hazardous situations, for he knew already how much she admired his bravery.

But at the same time he must keep his face hidden as much as possible. He had no illusions about its power to horrify. That she was impregnated with the heavy yet far away atmosphere of the place, was no reason for him to assume that she was impervious to the fearfulness of his ruined face. They would meet after dark, when with no visual distraction she could gradually realize that only in him could she find that complete companionship, that harmony of mind and spirit – that sense of confidence, of which she had been so starved. But she was starved for more than this. He knew her life had been loveless – and he knew of the warmth and vibrancy of her nature. But he had always waited. And now the time had come.

He laid his plans. He made his first advances in the dusky evenings. As Master of Ceremonies, it was not difficult for him to know what parts of the castle would be clear of possible intruders at varying times of the late evening.

Fuchsia, deeply affected by the unearthly atmosphere that had made of her ancient home a place that she could hardly believe in, was led by subtle degrees, through a period of weeks, to a state of mind where she felt it a natural thing to have her advice solicited, as to this point or that, and for Steerpike to tell her of what had happened to him during the day. His voice was quiet and even. His vocabulary, rich and flexible. She was attracted by his grip upon whatever subject they conversed about – it was so far beyond her own powers. Her admiration for his vitality of mind developed, in its turn, into an excited interest in the whole being, this Steerpike, this nimble, fearless confidant of their nocturnal meetings. He was unlike anyone else. He was wide awake and alive to his fingertips. Her old revulsion at the memory of his burned face and red hands became buried under the ever growing structure of this propinquity.

That she, the daughter of the Line, should see so much of an officer of the castle, for unofficial reasons, was, she knew, a crime against her station. But she had been so long a time alone. To be able to feel that she could interest anyone to the extent of their wanting to see her night after night was something so new to her that it was but a short way to the outskirts of that treacherous land whose paths she would so soon be treading.

But she did not look ahead. Unlike this new companion, this man of the dusk, whose every sentence, every thought, every action was ulterior, she lived in the moment of excitement, savouring the taste of an experience that was enough in itself. She had no instinct of self-preservation. She had no apprehension. For Steerpike had moved towards her with a gradual and circuitous cunning until the evening came when their hands met involuntarily in the darkness, and neither hand was withdrawn, and from that moment, it seemed to Steerpike that his road to power was clear before him.

And for a long time everything continued to develop in the way he had foreseen, the intimacy of their secret meetings leading them ever more deeply into, as Fuchsia thought, each other’s confidence.

But, with the evil knowledge of the power that was now his, Steerpike, indulging himself in the anticipation of final conquest, made no rash attempt to seduce Fuchsia. He knew that with Fuchsia no longer a virgin, he would have her, if for no other reason than that of simple blackmail, in the palm of his hand. But he was not ready yet. There was a lot to be considered.

As for Fuchsia, it was all so new and tremendous to her that her emotions had enough on which to feed. She was happier than she had ever been in her life.

FIFTY-FOUR

The disappearance of the Earl, Sepulchrave, Titus’ father, and of his sisters, the Twins, and of their terrible and secret ends; the death of Sourdust by burning, and of his son Barquentine by fire and water, what of all this mystery and violence in the eyes of the castle? They had spread themselves, these horrors, over a period of twelve or more years, and although the minds, active in their different ways, of the Countess, the Doctor, and Flay, had, from their different angles, made periodic efforts to discover in the tragedies some common ground, yet no proof of foul play had yet been found which could support their suspicions.

Flay alone knew the grizzly truth about the secret death of his master, Lord Sepulchrave, and of his enemy the gross Swelter whom he had killed. This knowledge he had never divulged.

But his own banishment had been the result of Steerpike’s gesture of disloyalty to his mad master, when the skewbald man was a youth of seventeen or eighteen years, and this disloyalty had remained rooted in Flay’s mind. But of the incarceration and death of the Twins he knew nothing, although, witless of its origins and significance, he had heard their terrible laughter as they died in the hollow halls.

He had strained his brain and memory, as had the Doctor and the Countess, to draw some significant conclusion from the common deaths by fire of the father and son – Sourdust and Barquentine – and from the fact that Steerpike had been the hero of both occasions. Try as they would they were unable to rationalize their suspicions.

And yet there were, over the course of the years, small concrete although disconnected reasons for apprehension. As yet they fitted into no pattern, but they were there, and they were not forgotten.

The Doctor had always been anxious to discover Steerpike’s reason for leaving his service and establishing himself as confidant and retainer of the vacant Twins. His was no mind to find pleasure in such surroundings. His only reason must have been for social advancement or for some darker motive. The identical Twins had disappeared. Their note which Steerpike had found on their table had told of their intention to kill themselves. Prunesquallor had got hold of this note and compared its calligraphy with a letter Irma had once received from them. He compared them in mirrors – he devoted an entire evening to their scrutiny. It seemed that they were by the same hand, the formation of letters big and round and uncertain as a child’s.

But the Doctor had known these retarded women for many years and he did not believe, for all the oddness of their thwarted natures, that they would ever take their own lives.

Nor did the Countess believe that they were capable of making an end to themselves. Their puerile ambition and vanity – and their only too obvious longing to assume, one day, the rôles in which they were always seeing themselves, the rôles of ladies, great and splendid, bedecked with jewels, precluded any such idea as suicide. But there was no proof either way.

The Doctor had told the Countess of Steerpike’s delirious cry ‘And the twins will make it five!’ She had stared out of the window of her room.

‘Five what?’ she had said.

‘Exactly,’ said the Doctor. ‘Five what?’

‘Five enigmas,’ she answered heavily, without a change of expression.

‘And what are they, your ladyship? Do you mean five …?’

She interrupted him heavily. ‘The Earl, my husband,’ she said. ‘Vanished. One. His sisters, vanished: two. Swelter, vanished: three. Sourdust and Barquentine, burned: five …’

‘But the deaths of Sourdust and Barquentine were hardly enigmatic …’

‘One wouldn’t be. Two would,’ said the Countess. ‘And the youth at them both.’

‘The youth?’ queried the Doctor.

‘Steerpike,’ said the Countess.

‘Ah,’ said the Doctor, ‘we have the same fears.’

‘We have,’ said the Countess. ‘I am waiting.’

The Doctor thought of Fuchsia’s poem:

How white and scarlet is that face!

Who knows in some unusual place

The coloured heroes are alight

With faces made of red and white.

‘But your ladyship,’ he said – she was still staring through the window. The words “And the Twins will make it five” suggest to me that their ladyships Cora and Clarice would make two of the group he had in his delirious mind. He was making a list of individuals, in his fever, I will stake my brightest penny.’

‘And so …’

‘And so, your ladyship, the deaths and disappearances would be six, not five.’

‘Who knows?’ said the Countess. ‘It is too early. Give him rope. We have no proof. But by the black tap-root of the very castle, if my fear is founded, the towers themselves will sicken at his death: the oldest stones will spew.’

Her heavy face flushed. She lowered her hand into a wide pocket, and drawing forth some grain she extended her arm. A small mottled bird appeared out of nowhere and running along her outstretched arm, perched with its claws about her index finger and with a sideways movement began to peck from her palm.

FIFTY-FIVE

‘But he can’t help giving you your ritual for each day, can he?’ said Fuchsia. ‘And instructing you. It’s not his fault, it’s the law. Father had to do it when he was alive – and his father had to – and they’ve all had to. It isn’t possible for him to do any different. He has to tell you what’s in the books, however trying it is for you.’

‘I hate him,’ said Titus.

‘Why? Why?’ cried Fuchsia. ‘What’s the good of hating him because he’s doing what he has to do? You don’t expect that he can make an exception, do you, after thousands of years? I suppose you’d rather have Barquentine. Can’t you see how bigoted you are? I think he does his work wonderfully.’

‘I hate him!’ said Titus.

‘You’re becoming a bore!’ said Fuchsia, with heat. ‘Can’t you say anything except “I hate him”? What’s wrong with him? Do you hold his appearance against him? Do you? If so, you’re mean and damnable.’

She shook her thick black hair away from her eyes. Her chin trembled.

‘Oh God! God! Do you think I want to quarrel with you, Titus, my darling? You know how I love you. But you’re unfair. Unfair. You know nothing about him.’

‘I hate him,’ said Titus. ‘I hate the cheap and stinking guts of him.’

FIFTY-SIX

As the months passed the tensions increased. Titus and Steerpike were at daggers drawn, although Steerpike, the soul of bland discretion, showed nothing of his feelings, and gave no sign to Titus or the outside world of his loathing of this forward boy – the boy who unconsciously stood between him and the zenith of his ambition.

Titus, who ever since that day when, little more than a child, he had defied Steerpike in the classroom silence, and had fallen fainting from his desk, had held on grimly to the dangerous ascendancy he had gained by that curious and childish victory.

Every day the details of his after-school duties were read out to Titus in the Library, Steerpike flicking through the pages of cross-reference, and explaining the obscurer passages with clarity and precision. Up till now the Master of Ceremonies had kept rigidly to the letter of the Law. But now, in the all but invulnerable position of being the only one who had access to the tomes of reference and procedure, he was making a list of duties which he would insert among the ancient papers. He had been able to unearth some of the original paper, and it was only for him to forge the copper-plate writing, and the archaic spelling and invent a series of duties for Titus which would be both galling and, on occasion, sufficiently hazardous for there to be always the outside chance of the young Earl coming to grief. There were for instance stairways that were no longer safe – there were the rotten beams and crumbling masonry. Beyond this there would always be the possibility of deliberately weakening and undermining certain cat-walks that stretched along the upper walls of the castle, or in some way or another of making sure that in following out the forged procedures, Titus would sooner or later fall accidentally to his death.

And with the death of Titus, and with Fuchsia in his power, the Countess alone would stand between him and a virtual dictatorship.

There would yet be enemies. There would be the Doctor whose intelligence was rather more acute than Steerpike would have wished; and there was the Countess herself, the only character for whom he held a puzzled and grudging respect – not for her intelligence, but for the reason of the very fact that she baffled his analysis. What was she? What was she thinking and by what processes? His mind and hers had no point of contact. In her presence he was doubly careful. They were animals of different species. They watched one another with the mutual suspicion of those who have no common tongue.

As for Fuchsia, it was but a step towards mastery. He had surpassed himself. Her heart was now as tender as his overtures had been, with their delicate gradations, their subtle cadences, their superb restraint.

It was no longer a case of their meeting at dusk, now here, now there, at varying rendezvous. For some while, Steerpike had for his own delectation been furnishing yet another secret room for himself. He now had nine, scattered throughout the castle only one of which, a large bedroom-study, was known to the castle. Of the rest five were in obscure quarters of Gormenghast, and three, though in the most populous areas, were as curiously hidden as a wren’s nest in a bank of grass and weeds. Their doors, abutting on major arteries of the castle, were never seen to open. They were there for all to see but no one saw them.

In one of these rooms which he had but recently appropriated, and which he only visited at night when thick silence lay along the corridor, he had got together a few pictures, some books, a cabinet of shallow drawers in which he kept his collection of stolen jewellery, of old coins, a range of poisons, and various secret papers. A thick crimson carpet covered the floor. The small table and the two chairs were of elegant design and he had skilfully repaired the damage that long years had worked upon them. How different was this interior to the rough stone corridor without, with its stone pillars on either side of every door and the heavily protruding shelf-like slabs of stone above.

It was to this room that Fuchsia made her nocturnal journeys, her heart beating, her pupils dilated in the darkness. And it was here that she was so courteously received. A shaded lamp threw out a soft golden glow. A book or two, carefully chosen, lay casually here and there. It was always irksome for Steerpike to make those last few changes in the disposition of the objects which were calculated to give an air of informality to the room. He detested untidiness as he detested love. But he knew that Fuchsia would be ill at ease with the kind of formal and perfect arrangement that gave him pleasure.

Even so, she seemed strangely incongruous in that tasteful and orderly trap. For Steerpike could not entirely destroy the reflection of his own coldness. She seemed too much alive – alive in so different a sense from the glittering and icy vitality of her companion – too much alive in the way that love like an earthquake or some natural and sinless force, is incompatible with a neat and formal world. However quietly she sat back in her chair, her black hair about her shoulders, she was potentially disruptive.

But she admired what she saw. She admired all that she was not. It was all so different from Gormenghast. When she remembered her old untidy attic and the rooms she now occupied with the floor littered with poems, and the walls with drawings, she supposed that there must be something wrong with her.

When she remembered her mother, she felt, for the first time, embarrassed.

One night when she tapped upon the door with her fingertips there was no reply. She tapped again, glancing apprehensively along the corridor on either side. The silence was absolute. She had never before had to wait for more than the fraction of a second. And then a voice said, ‘Be careful, my lady.’

Fuchsia had started at the sound as at the touch of a red iron. The voice had come from nowhere. There was no sound of a step. In fear and trembling she lit the candle she carried in her hand – a rash and risky thing to do. But there was no one. And then, in the far distance, something began to approach her rapidly. Long before she could see Steerpike she knew it was he. It was but a few moments before his swift, narrow, high-shouldered form was upon her and had snatched the candle from her hand and crushed out the flame. In another moment his key had been turned in the lock and she had been hustled through the door. He locked it from the inside, in the darkness, but he had already whispered fiercely ‘Fool.’ With that word the world turned over. Everything changed.

The delicate balance of their relationship was set in violent agitation – and a dead weight came down over Fuchsia’s heart.

Had the crystalline and dazzling structure which Steerpike had gradually erected, adding ornament to ornament until, balanced before her in all its beauty, it had dazzled the girl – an outward sign of his regard for her – had the exquisite structure been less exquisite, less crystalline, less perfect, then its crash upon the cold stones far beneath would never have been so final. Its substance, brittle as glass, had been scattered in a thousand fragments.

The short, brutal word, and the push which he had given her had turned her on the instant from a dark and eager girl into something more sombre. She was shocked and resentful – but less resentful, for those first moments, than hurt. She had also become, without her knowing it, Lady Fuchsia. Her blood had risen in her – the blood of her Line. She had forgotten it when love was tender, but now in bitterness she was again the daughter of an Earl.

She had known, of course, that to light a candle outside the very door was against all their strictest rules of care and secrecy. But she had been frightened. Maddening as it would have been for their rendezvous to have been discovered, yet there had been no sin in it, save that of her conducting her affairs in secret, and of allowing herself to be the close friend of a commoner.

But his face had been ugly with anger. She had never known that he could so lose that perfect, that chiselled quietness of pose and feature. She had never known that his clear, neat and persuasive voice could have taken on a tone so savage and cruel.

And to have been pushed! To have been thrust forwards in the darkness. His hands, which once, like those of a musician, had been so thrilling in their delicate strength, had been rough as the claws of an animal. As surely as the change of his voice, as surely as the word ‘fool’, this shove in the darkness had woken her to a reality both bitter and galling.

But, as she trembled, there was, mixed with the mortification, the ghostly and exciting memory of that voice out of nowhere. It had evolved out of the darkness and at no more distance from her than a few feet, but there had been no one there. She had no more idea of how it had originated than of the intention or meaning of its warning. She only knew now, that she would not seek assistance from Steerpike; she would not confide her fear of this inexplicable ‘voice’ in someone who had degraded her. All the Lords of Gormenghast were at her shoulder.

She turned on her heel, in the darkened room, and before he had lit the lamp, ‘Let me out of here,’ she said. But almost immediately the familiar room was filled with the gold lamp-light and she saw upon the table, sitting with its face cupped in its wrinkled hands, a monkey. It was dressed in a little costume of red and yellow diamonds. On its head was a small velvet hat, like a pirate’s, with a violet feather curling from the crown.

Steerpike had covered his face with his hands, but he was watching Fuchsia through the slits between his fingers. He had lost command. The sight of a flame, where it had no cause to be, had struck at him like a lash. He had not been burned for nothing and fire was his only fear. Once again he had failed.

But he did not know how seriously. He watched her through his fingers.

She stared at the monkey with an expression quite indefinable. What surprise she felt was not in evidence. The turmoil and the shock of having been so roughly treated was still too strong in her for any other emotion to supplant it, however bizarre the stimulus might be. But when the vivid little animal rose to its feet and took off its hat, and when it replaced it after scratching its head and yawning, then, for an instant, something less sad suffused her face with a fleeting animation.

But it was impossible for her mood to be swung so rapidly from one extreme to another. A part of her mind was fascinated by the oddness of it all, but nothing touched her heart. It was a monkey dressed up and that was all. What would once have inflamed her with excitement, left her now, at this paralysing moment, quite frozen.

Steerpike had gained a moment or two but what could he do with them? She had commanded him to let her go from the room when the monkey had caught her eye.

Once again she turned her gaze to him. Her black eyes appeared quite dead, the lustre drained away. Her lips were tightly closed.

She saw him with his hands across his face. And then she heard his voice.

‘Fuchsia,’ he said. ‘Allow me one moment, only one, in which to tell you of the danger from which we have just escaped. There was no time to be lost and though there could never be any excuse, and although I can never ask for forgiveness, yet you must allow me a short moment in which to explain my violence.

‘Fuchsia! it was for you. My violence was for you. My roughness was the roughness of love. I had no time to do other than to save you. Have you not heard the footsteps? She has just gone by. One moment later and your light would have brought her to this door. And you know the punishment. Of course you do, the punishment, which by ancient law is meted out to those daughters of the Line who consort with the mere outsiders. It is too awful to think about. And that is why our plans have been so secret, our rules so rigorous. And you know this. And you have been meticulous. But tonight you misjudged the time, did you not? You were four minutes early. O that was risky enough. But to add to such a peril the lighting of your candle. And then, as always happens, it was precisely when all this was happening that your mother should follow me.’

‘My mother?’ Fuchsia’s voice was a whisper.

‘Your mother. I had led her away for I knew that she was near. I doubled back. I crossed my tracks. I doubled back again and yet she was there, and moving slowly – I cannot understand it – but I came as I intended to this door with the length of the corridor between us – the length of the corridor and the odd twenty feet that would give me the chance of whipping into our room in time – but no, it wasn’t this that I was going to do. No. For what would have been more likely than for you to have met her – and then …’

Steerpike dropped his hands from his face where they had been all this time. His voice had been running on with a certain charm for he had managed to vary it with a kind of stutter – not so much nervous in effect as eager and candid.

‘But what happened, Fuchsia? Well, you know that as well as I do. I turned the north corner with your mother the length of a corridor behind – and there you were, like a bonfire, the length of the corridor before me. Put yourself in my place. One cannot have all the noble emotions at the same time. One cannot mix up desperation with being a perfect gentleman. At least I can’t. Perhaps I should have been given lessons. All I could do was to save the situation. To hide you. To save you. You were there too early; and Fuchsia, it made me angry. I have never been angry with you before as you know. I could never imagine being angry with you. And perhaps even now, it wasn’t really you I was angry with, but fate, or destiny or whatever it is that might have upset our plans. And it was because our plans have always been so carefully prepared – so that there shall be no risk, and you shall come to no harm – that my rage boiled up. You were no longer Fuchsia to me, at that moment. You were this thing that I was to save. After I had got behind the door, then you would be Fuchsia again. Had I waited for a moment before stifling your light or getting you through the door, then our lives might indeed have been ruined. For I love you, Fuchsia. You are all I ever longed for. Can’t you see that it was because of this that I had no time to be polite? It was a boiling moment. It was a maelstrom. I called you “fool”, yes “fool”, out of my love for you – and then … and then … here in this room again, it all seemed so unbelievable and it does so still, and I am half ashamed of the gift I had brought you and the writing I have done for you – O Fuchsia – I don’t even know if I can show it to you now …’ he turned abruptly with his hand clenched at his forehead, and then as though to say he would not give way to his despair, ‘Come on then, Satan,’ he whispered. ‘Come on, my wicked boy!’ and the monkey leapt on to Steerpike’s shoulder.

‘What writing?’ said Fuchsia.

‘I had written you a poem.’ He spoke very softly, in a way that had often proved successful but he was a step too far in advance of his progress.

‘But perhaps now,’ he said, ‘you will not wait to see it, Fuchsia.’

‘No,’ she said after a pause. ‘Not now.’

Her inflection was so strange that it was impossible to tell whether she meant ‘not now’ in the sense of it being no longer possible for her to do anything so intimate as to read a love poem; or not now, but some other time.

Steerpike could only cry, ‘I understand,’ and placed the monkey on the table where it walked rapidly to and fro, on all four legs, and then leapt onto one of his cabinets.

‘And I will understand, if you have no wish for Satan.’

‘Satan?’ her voice was quite expressionless.

‘Your monkey,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you would rather not be bothered. I thought he would please you. I made his clothes myself.’

‘I don’t know! I don’t know!’ cried Fuchsia suddenly. ‘I don’t know, I tell you, I don’t know!’

‘Shall I take you to your room?’

‘I will go myself.’

‘As you please,’ said Steerpike. ‘But recall what I have said, I implore you. Try and understand; for I love you as the shadows love the castle.’

She turned her eyes to him. For a moment a light came into them, but in the next moment they appeared empty once more; empty and blank.

‘I will never understand,’ she said. ‘It is no good however much you talk. I may have been wrong. I don’t know. At any rate everything is changed. I don’t feel the same any more. I want to go now.’

‘Yes, of course. But will you grant me two small favours?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Fuchsia. ‘What are they? I’m tired.’

‘The first one is to ask you from the bottom of my heart to try to understand the strain which was put upon me, and to ask you whether, even if it is for the last time, you will meet me, as we have done for so long, meet me that we can talk for a little while – not about us, not about our trouble, not about my faults, not about this terrible chasm between us, but about all the happy things. Will you meet me tomorrow night, on those conditions?’

‘I don’t know!’ said Fuchsia. ‘I don’t know! But I suppose so. O God, I suppose so.’

‘Thank you,’ said Steerpike. ‘Thank you, Fuchsia.’

‘And my other request is only this. To know, whether, if you have no use for Satan, you will let me have him back – because he is yours … and …’ Steerpike turned his head from her and moved away a few paces.

‘You would like to know, wouldn’t you, Satan, to whom you belong …’ he cried in a voice that was intended to sound gallant.

Fuchsia turned on him suddenly. It seemed that she had now realized the natural edge of her own intellect. She stared at the skewbald man with the monkey on his shoulder and then her words cut into the pale man like knives. ‘Steerpike,’ she said. ‘I think you’re going soft.’

From that moment Steerpike knew that when she came on the following night he would seduce her. With so dark a secret to keep hidden, the daughter of the Countess would indeed be at his mercy. He had waited long enough. Now, upon the heels of his mistake, was the only time for him to strike. He had felt the first intimation of something slipping away beneath his feet. If guile and coercion failed him, then there could be no two ways about it. This was no time for mercy – and though she proved a tigress he would have her – and blackmail would follow as smoothly as a thundercloud.

FIFTY-SEVEN

I

When Flay heard the door open quietly below him he held his breath. For a few moments no one appeared and then a shape still darker than the darkness stepped out into the corridor and began to walk rapidly away to the south. When he heard the door close again he lowered himself from the great stone shelf that stretched above Steerpike’s doorway and with his long bony arms outstretched to their full extent he dropped the odd few inches to the ground.

His frustration at being unable to gain any clue as to what had been going on inside the room was only equalled by his horror at finding that it was Fuchsia who had been the clandestine visitor.

He had sensed her danger. He knew it in his bones. But he could not have persuaded her, suddenly, in the night, that she was in peril. He could not have told her what kind of peril. He did not know himself. But he had acted on the spur of the moment and in whispering to her out of the darkness he hoped that she might be put upon her guard, if only for reasons of supernatural fear.

He followed Fuchsia only so far as to be sure that she was safely upon her way to her own rooms. It was all he could do not to call after her, or overtake her, for he was deeply perplexed and frightened. His love for her was something quite alone in his sour life. Fond as he was of Titus, it was the memory of Fuchsia, more than of the boy, or of any other living soul, that gave to the flinty darkness of his mind those touches of warmth which, along with his worship of Gormenghast, that abstraction of outspread stone, were seemingly so foreign to his nature.

But he knew that he must not speak to her tonight. The distracted way in which she moved, sometimes running and sometimes walking, gave him sufficient evidence of her fatigue and, he feared, of her misery.

He did not know what Steerpike had done or said but he knew he had hurt her, and if it were not that he felt upon the brink of gaining some kind of damning evidence, then he would have returned to that room from which Fuchsia had emerged, and on the reappearance of Steerpike, at the doorway, he would have plucked the skewbald face, barehanded, from the head.

II

As he returned in the direction of the fateful corridor, a heavy pain lay across his forehead and his thoughts pursued one another in a confusion of anger and speculation. He could not know that with every step he was travelling, not nearer to his room but further from it – further in time, further in space, nor that the night’s adventures far from coming to a close were about to begin in earnest.

By now the night was well advanced. He had returned with a slow and somewhat dragging pace, lingering here and there to lean his head against the cold walls while his headache hammered behind his eyes and across his angular brow. Once he sat down for a hour upon the lowest step of a flight of age-hollowed stairs, his long beard falling upon his knee, and taking the sharp curve of them and falling again in a straggle of string-like hair to within a few inches of the floor.

Fuchsia and Steerpike? What could it mean? The blasphemy of it! The horror of it! He ground his teeth in the darkness.

The castle was as silent as some pole-axed monster. Inert, breathless, spreadeagled. It was a night that seemed to prove by the consolidation of its darkness and its silence the hopelessness of any further dawn. There was no such thing as dawn. It was an invention of the night’s or of the old-wives of the night – a fable, immemorially old – recounted century after century in the eternal darkness; retold and retold to the gnomic children in the tunnels and the caves of Gormenghast – a tale of another world where such things happened, where stones and bricks and ivy stems and iron could be seen as well as touched and smelt, could be lit and coloured, and where at certain times a radiance shone like honey from the east and the blackness was scaled away, and this thing they called dawn arose above the woods as though the fable had materialized, the legend come to life.

It was a night with a bull’s mouth. But the mouth was bound and gagged. It was a night with enormous eyes, but they were hooded.

The only sound that Flay could hear was the tapping of his heart.

III

It was later, and at an indeterminate hour of the same night, or inky morning, that Mr Flay, long after passing the door in the passage, came to an involuntary halt as he was about to cross a small cloistered quadrangle.

There was no reason why he should have been startled by the single band of livid yellow in the sky. He must have known that the dawn could not have been much longer delayed. He was certainly not held by its beauty. He did not think in that way.

In the centre of the quadrangle was a thorn tree, and his eyes turned to the pitchy silhouette of that part of it that cut across the yellow of the sunrise. His familiarity with the shape of the old tree caused him to stare more intently at the rough and branching stem. It seemed thicker than usual. He could only see with any clarity that portion of its bole that crossed the sunrise. It appeared to have changed its outline. It was as though something were leaning against it and adding a little to its bulk. He crouched so that still more of the unfamiliar shape came into view, for the upper part was criss-crossed with branches. As his vision was lowered and he commanded a clearer view beneath the overhanging boughs his muscles became tense for it seemed that against the livid strip of sky – which threw everything else both on the earth and in the air into yet richer blackness – it seemed – that against this livid strip the unfamiliar outline on the left of the stem was narrowing to something the shape of a neck. He got silently to his knee and then, lowering his head and lifting his eyes, he obtained an uninterrupted view of Steerpike’s profile. His body and the back of the head were glued together as though he and the tree had grown up as one thing from the ground.

And that was all there was. The universal darkness above and below. The horizontal stream of saffron yellow and, like a rough black bridge that joined the upper darkness to the lower, the silhouette of the ragged thorn stem, with the profile of a face among the stems.

What was he doing there in the darkness alone and motionless?

Flay raised himself and leaned against the nearest of the cloistered pillars. The cut-out face of his enemy was immediately obscured by branches. But what had caught his eye – the unfamiliar outline of the bole he now recognized as being formed by an angle of the young man’s elbow and the line of his hip and thigh.

Without wasting a moment in trying to rationalize his instinctive belief that some fresh act of evil was afoot, Mr Flay prepared himself for, if necessary, a protracted vigil. There was nothing evil in leaning against a thorn tree as the first light broke in a yellow band – even though the leaning form was Steerpike’s. There was no reason why he should not return at any moment to his room and sleep or indulge in some other equally innocent occupation.

He knew that he was caught up in one of those stretches of time when for anything to happen normally would be abnormal. The dawn was too tense and highly charged for any common happening to survive.

Steerpike, while he leaned there, rigid with the cold and flexible steel of his own conspirings, eyed the yellow light. He now knew that whatever steps were to be taken for his own advancement should be taken now. However much he may have wished to delay his designs there was no gainsaying the sense of urgency – the sense that time was not, for all the logic of his mind, upon his side.

It was true that there was still no evidence of his guilt. But there was something almost as bad. An indescribable sensation that his power was somehow crumbling away; that the earth was slippery beneath his feet; that in spite of his formidable position, there was that in Gormenghast that, with a puff, could blow him into darkness. However much he told himself that he had made no fundamental error – that the few slips he had made had been invariably in minor matters, maddening as they might be, yet this sensation remained. It had come upon him with the shutting of the door – when Fuchsia had left him and he was alone in his room. It was new to him. He had believed in nothing that could not be proven one way or another, in the cells of his agile brain. Apart from the inconvenience that his carelessness would, for a short time, cause him, what else was there for him to rack his brains about in regard to the incident of a few hours earlier? What was there for Fuchsia to hold against him – or even to give as evidence, save that he, the Master of Ceremonies, had been rude to her?

And yet all this was beside the point of his apprehension. If it was Fuchsia’s resentment that had uncovered, witlessly, the dark pit into which he was now staring, what then was this pit, wherefore was its depth, and why its darkness?

It was the first time that he had ever known that sleep, though he craved it, was beyond him. But his habit of making good use of every moment was deeply rooted – and especially when the time at his disposal was that in which the castle lay abed.

And Flay knew this. He knew that it was hardly a part of Steerpike’s nature to lean against a tree for the sake of watching the sun rise. Nor was it characteristic of him to brood. He was no romantic. He lived too much upon the edge of instancy for introspection. No. It was for some other reason that he leaned there, biding his time – for what?

Mister Flay knelt down again and with his chin almost touching the ground and his small eyes swivelled upwards he stared once more at that sharp profile, its edges razor-keen against the yellow band. And then, while on his knees, two things occurred to him almost simultaneously. The first, that it was more than possible that Steerpike was waiting for sufficient light to enable him to make his way to unfamiliar ground. That he wished to go secretly and yet not lose his way, for even now the darkness was intense, the bar of light that lay like a livid ruler across the black east in no way lightening the earth or the sky about it. It kept its brilliance to itself; saffron inlaid on ebony. And this was Flay’s guess: that the silhouette was waiting for the first diffusion of the light – that the line of the elbow and the hip would alter – that a profile would detach itself from a thorn tree and that a figure, lithe as a lynx, would steer into the gloom. But not alone. Flay would be following and it was when Flay, still upon his bony knees, his head near the ground, his beard spread, was turning this over in his mind that the need for some confederate not for reason of companionship or safety, but in order to bear witness, occurred to him. Whatever he was to find, whatever lay ahead, however innocent or however bloody, it would be his word alone against the pale man’s. It would be the word of an exile against that of the Master of Ritual. In being within the precincts of the castle at all, he was committing a grievous sin. He had been banished by the Countess and it would ill become him to point his finger at an officer unless his accusation was doubly backed with proof.

No sooner had this notion occurred to him than he was on his feet. He judged that he had, at the most, another quarter of an hour in which to waken – whom? He had no choice. Titus and Fuchsia alone knew of his return to the castle and that he lived in secret among the Hollow Halls.

It was of course grotesquely out of the question either that Fuchsia should be disturbed or allowed within Steerpike’s range. As for Titus, he was now almost grown to his full height. But he was of an odd highly strung nature – sullen and excitable by turns. Strong as need be for his years, he was more apt to have his energy sapped by the excess of his imagination than of his body. Flay did not understand him, but he trusted him, and he knew of how the boy’s loathing of Steerpike had estranged him from Fuchsia. He had no doubt that Titus would join him, but he doubted for a moment his own courage to do so dangerous a thing as to draw the heir of Gormenghast within the circle of expected danger. Yet he knew that above all else it was his duty to unmask if possible his enemy, for upon so doing hung the safety of the young earl and all he symbolized. And what is more, he swore by the iron of his long muscles, and by the strong teeth in his bony head, that whatever danger might menace his own person, no harm would come to the boy.

And so, without a moment to lose, he turned and re-entered the door in the cloisters and set off upon what in saner moments he would have considered an unthinkable mission. For what could be more iniquitous than to jeopardize the safety of his lordship? But now he saw only that by awakening Titus and launching him at dawn upon so dark a game as that of shadowing a suspect, he was perhaps bringing closer the day when the heart of Gormenghast, purged and loyal, would beat again unthreatened.

With every moment the yellow band in the sky was brightening. He sped with the awkward speed of the predatory spider, his long legs eating up the corridors, four feet at a stride and treading the stairways beneath them as though he were on stilts. But when he came to the dormitory he moved with the circumspection of a thief.

He opened the door by degrees. On his right was the janitor’s cubicle. Directly he heard the sound of sand-paper scraping away behind the woodwork he recognized the breathing of the same old man who had held this watch-dog office from the early days and he knew that he was safe enough from that quarter.

But how to recognize the Earl? He had no light. Apart from the breathing of the janitor the dormitory was in absolute silence. There was no time for anything but to put his first notion into operation. There were two rows of beds that stretched away to the south-west. Why he turned to the right hand wall he did not know, but he did so without hesitation. Feeling for the end-rail of the first bed, he leaned over. ‘Lordship!’ he whispered. ‘Lordship!’ There was no reply. He turned to the second bed and whispered again. He thought he heard a head turn upon a pillow but that was all. He repeated this quick, harsh whisper at the foot of every bed. ‘Lordship … lordship! …’ but nothing happened and the time was slipping by. But at the fourteenth bed he repeated the whisper for a third time, for he could feel rather than hear a restlessness in the darkness below him. ‘Lordship! …’ he whispered again. ‘Lord Titus!’

Something sat up in the darkness and he could hear the catch in a boy’s breathing.

‘Have no fear,’ he whispered fiercely and his hand shook on the bedrail.

‘Have no fear. Are you Titus, the Earl?’

Immediately there was a reply. ‘Mister Flay? What are you doing here?’

‘Have you a coat and stockings?’

‘Yes.’

‘Put them on. Follow me. Explain later, lordship.’

Titus made no reply but slid over the side of his bed and after fumbling for his shoes and garments, clasped them like a bundle in his arms. Together they tip-toed to the dormitory door and, once without, walked rapidly in the darkness, the bearded man with his hand upon the boy’s elbow.

At the head of a staircase Titus got into his clothes, his heart beating loudly. Flay stood beside him and when he was ready they descended the stairs in silence.

As they drew nearer to the quadrangle Flay in short broken phrases was able to give Titus a disjointed idea of why he had been woken and whisked out into the night. Much as Titus sympathized with Flay’s suspicions and with his hatred of Steerpike, he was becoming afraid that Flay himself had gone mad. He could see that it was a very odd thing for Steerpike to spend the night leaning against a thorn tree, but equally there was nothing criminal in it. What, he wondered, in any event, was Flay doing to be there himself? and why should the long ragged creature of the woods be so anxious to have him with him? There was no doubt about the excitement of it all and that to be sought out was deeply flattering, but Titus had but a vague idea as to what Flay meant by needing a witness. A witness to what, and to prove what? Deeply as Titus suspected Steerpike of being intrinsically foul, yet he had never suspected him of actually doing other than his duty in the castle. He had never hated him for any understandable reason. He had simply hated him for being alive at all.

But when they reached the cloisters and when he peered along Flay’s outstretched arm as they lay upon the cold ground, and saw, all at once, after a long and abortive scrutiny of the thorn, the sharp profile, as angular as broken glass save for the doming forehead, then he knew that the gaunt man lying beside him was no more mad than himself, and that for the first time in his life he was tasting upon his tongue the acid of an intoxicating fear, of a fearful elation.

He also knew that to leave Steerpike where he was and to return to bed would be to deliberately turn away from a climate of sharp and dangerous breath.

He put his lips to his companion’s ear.

‘It’s Doctor’s quadrangle,’ he whispered.

Flay made no reply for several moments, for the remark made little sense to him.

‘What of it?’ he replied in an almost inaudible voice.

‘Very close – on our side,’ whispered Titus, ‘just across the quadrangle.’

This time there was a longer silence. Flay could see at once the advantage of yet another witness and also of a double bodyguard for the boy. But what would the Doctor think of his reappearance after all these years? Would he countenance this clandestine return to the castle – even in the knowledge that it was for the castle’s sake? Would he be prepared, in the future, to deny all knowledge of his, Mr Flay’s, return?

Again Titus whispered, ‘He is on our side.’

It seemed to Mr Flay that he was now so deeply involved that to argue each problem as it posed itself, to study each move would get him nowhere. Had he behaved in a rational way he would never have left the woods, and he would not now be lying upon his stomach, staring at a man leaning innocently against a tree. That the figure’s profile against the saffron dawn was sharp and cruel was no proof of anything.

No. It was for him to obey the impulse of the moment and to have the courage to risk the future. This was no time for anything but action.

The dawn, although fiercer in the east, was yet withheld. There was no light in the air – only a strip of intense colour. But at any moment a diffusion of the sunrise would begin and the sun would heave itself above the broken towers.

There was no time to lose. In a matter of minutes the quadrangle might become impossible to cross without attracting Steerpike’s attention, or Steerpike, judging himself to have sufficient light for whatever journey he wished to make, might slip away suddenly into the gloom and be irreparably lost among a thousand ways.

The Doctor’s house was on the far side of the quadrangle. To get there would necessitate a détour around the margin of the quadrangle for the thorn tree was at the centre.

Obeying Flay’s instructions Titus took off his shoes, and, like Flay with his boots, tied the laces together and slung them around his neck. It was Flay’s first idea that they should go together, but they had no sooner taken the first few silent paces than the sudden disappearance of Steerpike reminded Flay that it was only from the particular place where they had been lying that they could keep a check upon his movements. From the Doctor’s side of the quadrangle there would be no way of knowing whether or not he were still beneath the tree.

It was a full minute before Flay knew what he ought to do; and then, it was only because one of his hands, thrust deep into a ragged pocket, came upon a piece of chalk that a solution occurred to him. For a piece of white chalk meant only one thing to him. It meant a trail. But who was to blaze it? There was only one answer, and for two reasons.

In the first place, if one of them were to remain where he was and keep Steerpike under observation, and in the event of Steerpike’s moving away from the thorn tree, of following him and leaving chalk marks upon the ground or upon walls – then it were best for Flay to perform this none too simple function, not only because of his experience of stalking in the woods and of the danger of being discovered, but because secondly, in learning of what was afoot the Doctor would more readily and speedily accompany the young Earl than Mr Flay, the long lost exile, with whom a certain amount of time-wasting explanation would be a preliminary necessity.

And so Flay explained to Titus what he must do. He must waken the Doctor, silently. How this was to be done he did not know. He must leave this to the boy’s ingenuity. He must impress upon the Doctor that there was no time to be lost. It was not the moment in which to warn him that the whole venture was based upon guess-work – that in sober fact there was no cause to rouse the Doctor from his bed. That in the open air, there was not a leaf that was not whispering of treachery, not a stone but muttered its warning, was not the kind of argument to impress anyone wakened of a sudden from their sleep. And yet he must impress the Doctor with a sense of urgency. They must return across the quadrangle to where they were now crouching, for only from this position could they tell whether Steerpike were still beneath the tree, unless, as might have happened, the sun had suddenly risen. Had it not done so, and if Steerpike was still there beneath the thorn, then they would find Mr Flay where Titus had left him; but if Steerpike had gone, then Mr Flay would also have disappeared and it was for them to move swiftly to the thorn tree, and if there were enough light, to follow the chalk trail which Flay would have begun to blaze. If, however, it were still too dark to see the marks, they were to follow them directly there was enough light. It was for them to move sufficiently rapidly to be able to overtake Mr Flay, but absolute silence was the prime essential, for the gap between Flay and Steerpike might, for reasons of darkness, be, of necessity, perilously narrow.

Feeling his way from pillar to pillar, Titus began to make a circuit of the quadrangle. His stocking’d feet made no noise at all. Once a button on the sleeve of his coat clicked against an outcrop of masonry and sounded like the snapping of a twig, so that he stopped dead in his tracks and listened for a moment or two anxiously in the silence, but that was all and a little afterwards he was standing beneath the Doctor’s wall.

Meanwhile Flay lay stretched out beneath the pillar on the far side of the square, his bearded chin propped by his bony hands.

Not for a moment did his eyes wander from the silhouette of the head against the dawn. The yellow band had widened and still further intensified so that it was now not so much a thing that might be painted as a radiance beyond the reach of pigment.

As he watched he saw the first movement. The head raised itself and as the face stared up into the branches the mouth opened in a yawn. It was like the yawning of a lizard; the jaws, sharp, soundless, merciless. It was as though all thought was over, and out of some reptilian existence the yawn grew and opened like a reflex. And it was so, for Steerpike, leaning there, had, instead of pitying himself and brooding upon his mistakes, been tabulating and re-grouping in his scheduled brain every aspect of his position, of his plans, of his relationship not only with Fuchsia but with all with whom he had dealings, and making out of the maze, of these relationships and projects a working pattern – something that was a masterpiece of cold-blooded systemization. But the plan of action, condensed and crystallized though it was, was nevertheless, for all its ingenuity, somehow less microscopically careful in its every particular than usual. He was prepared for the first time to take risks. The time had come for drawing together the hundred and one threads that had for so long been stretched from one end of the castle to another. This would need action. For the moment he could relax. This dawn would be his own. Tonight he must bewilder Fuchsia; dazzle her, awake her; and if all failed, seduce her so that, compromised in the highest degree, he would have her at his mercy. In her present mood she was too dangerous.

But today? He yawned again. His brainwork was done. His plans were complete. And yet there was one loose end. Not in the logic of his brain, but in spite of it – a loose end that he wished to tuck away. What his brain had proved his eyes were witless of. It was his eyes that needed confirmation.

He ran his tongue between his thin, dry lips. Then he turned his face to the east. It shone in the yellow light. It shone like a carbuncle, as, breaking suddenly out of the darkness, the first direct ray of the climbing sun broke upon his bulging brow. His dark red eyes stared back into the heart of the level ray. He cursed the sun and slid out of the beam.

FIFTY-EIGHT

It was lucky for Titus that when the Doctor started from his sleep he immediately recognized the boy’s shape against the windowpane.

Titus had climbed the thick creeper below the Doctor’s window and had with difficulty forced up the lower sash. There had been no other way to enter. To knock or ring would have been to have lost Steerpike.

Dr Prunesquallor reached for the candle by his bed but Titus bent forward in the darkness.

‘No, Dr Prune, don’t light it … it’s Titus … and we want your help … terribly … sorry it’s so early … can you come? … Flay is with me …’

‘Flay?’

‘Yes, he has come from exile – but out of concern for Fuchsia, and me, and the laws … but quickly, Doctor, are you coming? We are trailing Steerpike – he’s just outside.’

In a moment the Doctor was in his elegant dressing gown – had found and put on his spectacles, a pair of socks and his soft slippers.

‘I am flattered,’ he said, in his quick, stilted, yet very pleasant voice. ‘I am more than flattered – lead on, boy, lead on.’

They descended the dark stairs; on reaching the hall the Doctor vanished but reappeared almost at once with two pokers: one long, top-heavy brass affair with a murderous club-end and the other a short heavy iron thing with a perfect grip.

The Doctor hid them behind his back. ‘Which hand?’ he said. Titus chose the left and received the iron. Even with so crude a weapon in his grip the boy’s confidence rose at once. Not that his heart beat any the less rapidly or that he was any the less aware of danger, but the feeling of acute vulnerability had gone.

The Doctor asked no questions. He knew that this strange business would unfold its meaning as the minutes went by. Titus was in no state to give an explanation now. He had begun breathlessly to tell the Doctor of how Flay would leave a trail of chalk, but had ceased, for there was no time to act and to explain together. Before they opened the front door Dr Prunesquallor drew the blind of the hall window. The quadrangle though still extremely dark was no longer a featureless and inky mass. The buildings on the far side loomed, and a blot of ebony blackness that appeared to float in the gun-grey air showed where the thorn tree grew.

Titus was at the Doctor’s side and peered through the pane.

‘Can you see him, Doctor?’

‘Where ought he to be, my boy?’

‘Under the thorn.’

‘Hard to say … hard to say …’

‘Easy to tell from the other side, Doctor. Shall we go round by the cloisters …? If he’s gone there’s no time to lose, is there?’

‘I take it from you that there isn’t, Titus, though what in the name of guilt we are doing only the screech-owl knows. However, away!’

He stood upon his toes in the hall, and lifting his arms, stretched them before him. Between his outstretched fingertips the brass poker was poised as though it were a mace, or some symbolic rod. His dressing gown was corded tightly at his slender waist. His delicate features were set in an extraordinary expression of speculative determination both impressive and bizarre.

He unlatched the door and the two of them set off down the garden path. The Doctor in his slippers, Titus in his socks, with his shoes slung loosely around his neck, they moved rapidly and silently along the skirting cloisters until Titus, gripping the Doctor’s arm, brought his companion to a halt. There was the thorn, an inky etching against the rising sun, but the silhouette of Steerpike was missing. This was no surprise for Flay had also vanished. Without loss of time they sped across the quadrangle, and in the early light were able at once to see the dim sign of a chalk mark on the ground at their feet. Titus went down on his knees to it at once. That it was a rough arrow pointing to the north was apparent enough, but there were some words scrawled below which were not so easy to decipher, but at last Titus was able to disentangle the roughened phrase ‘every twenty paces’.

‘“Every twenty paces” I think it is,’ Titus whispered.

Together they counted their steps as they moved gingerly to the north, the pokers in their hands, their eyes peering into the darkness ahead of them for the first sign of Flay or of danger.

Sure enough, at roughly the twentieth pace another arrow pointed them their way and showed Titus’ interpretation of Flay’s crude lettering to have been correct. They went forward now with more confidence. It seemed certain that they must come first upon Mr Flay, and that so long as they made no sound they could do no harm by moving swiftly from one arrow to another.

There were times when these arrows were of necessity closer together; when the paths divided, or there was any kind of choice of direction. At other times, when, with high flanking walls on either side, or a mile of doorless passageways ahead, and where there was no alternative direction to confuse his followers, Flay had not troubled to make his chalk marks for long stretches. There were times when the length of these stone arteries was such that, all unknowing, the Doctor and Titus had more than once set forth along a fresh corridor before Steerpike, at the other end, had made his exit. Flay alone could hazard the guess that before him and behind him his friends and his enemy were all at once beneath the same long ceiling.

Rapid as Titus had been in calling the Doctor yet there was a great space between them and Mr Flay, for no sooner had Titus left Flay’s side than Steerpike had yawned and sped into the night.

As the light grew it became easier for the Doctor and Titus to accelerate their pace and to see what part of the castle they were moving through. The chalk arrows had become short brusque marks upon the ground. Suddenly, as they turned a corner they came upon the second of the bearded man’s messages. It was scrawled at the foot of some stone stairs. ‘Faster,’ it read. ‘He is in a hurry. Catch me but silence.’

By now the light was strong enough for them both to know that they were lost. Neither of them could recognize the masonry that rose about them, the twisting passageways, the shallow flights of stairs and the long treadless inclines; they were speeding through a new world. A world unfamiliar in its detail – new to them, although unquestionably of the very stuff of their memories and recognizable in this general and almost abstract way. They had never been there before, yet it was not alien – it was all Gormenghast.

But this did not mean it was not dangerous. It was obvious that they were in a deserted province. Early as was the hour yet that was not the reason for the silence. There was an abandoned, empty, voiceless hollow atmosphere that had nothing to do with the dawn or with multitudes abed and asleep.

What beds there were would be broken and empty. What multitudes there were would be the multitudes of the ant and the weevil.

And now began a series of dusky journeys across open squares, with the sky reddening overhead. The Doctor, wildly incongruous in so grim a setting, moved with surprising speed, his brass poker held in both hands at the height of his breast, his head erect, the skirt of his dressing gown flaring behind him.

Titus beside him looked by contrast like a beggar. His socks had worn out, and although they gripped his ankles, the soles had gone, and his feet were cut and bruised. But this he hardly noticed. His hair was across his face. His jacket was bundled over his nightshirt. His trousers were half undone. His shoes jogged at his shoulders.

They had increased their speed, even to the point of running when it seemed safe to do so. But whenever they came to a corner they invariably stopped and peered cautiously about it before proceeding. The chalk marks never failed them, though from the way they had changed from thick white arrows to the merest flick of chalk on stone or boarding it was plain not only that the speed of Flay’s progress had increased but that the stick of chalk itself was wearing out.

There was no longer any difficulty as far as visibility was concerned. They moved in the naked light. It was surely no longer possible for Mr Flay to keep at close range with his quarry. And yet, with all their swiftness they had not yet caught up with him. The Doctor’s brow was glistening with perspiration. Both he and Titus were growing increasingly weary. The unfamiliar buildings came and went. One after another, square after square, hall after hall, corridor after corridor, winding and turning to and fro in a maze of dawn-lit stone.

And then, half in a state of disbelief – as though it were all a dream, the Doctor, mechanically stopping at the corner of a high wall, moved his head so that he could command a view of the next expanse or artery that lay ahead. But instead of rounding the corner, his body recoiled a fraction and his arm moved backwards.

When his hand had found Titus and had gripped his elbow he drew the boy to his side. Together they could see him – the gaunt and bearded figure. He was at the far end of a narrow lane, the floor of which was a foot deep in dust and plaster. He was in an almost identical position to their own for he was also stationed at a corner; around which he was peering, and like themselves he had his eyes fixed upon some object of vivid and immediate interest, for even at so considerable a distance the Doctor could see how tense was his scarecrow body.

Had they been a few moments later they would have missed him for even as they watched he slid around the base of the high, sharp corner and was lost to them. At once, Titus and the Doctor set off in hot pursuit until they came to that angle of stone which Flay had so recently vacated. Cautiously, they moved their heads until once again they were afforded yet another long perspective with its floor crisp and ashen with fallen plaster. And there at the end of the corridor was a replica of the picture they had been witnessing a minute earlier, with Flay at yet another angle of stone. It was as though they were reliving the incident, for, visually, it differed in no particular. But this time they did not wait for Mr Flay to disappear. At a sign from the Doctor they began to run towards him. Evidently Steerpike was still in view for Mr Flay, motionless as a stick-insect, made no move until Titus and the Doctor were within a short way of him. Then suddenly, at the sound of plaster breaking under Titus’ feet, faint though it was, he turned his craggy face over his shoulder and saw them.

He touched his brow with his hand, and darted a questioning glance at the Doctor. Then he put his finger to his lips as he bared his irregular teeth. The Doctor inclined his body, so splendidly sheathed in its dressing gown, in the gaunt man’s direction. Meanwhile Titus crept to the angle of the wall and peering around the corner saw, at a distance of about sixty feet, something which set his heart pounding. It was the Master of Ritual, Steerpike; the man with the red and white face. It was his foe – long since defied in the summer schoolroom – the pale and agile officer of the realm – the one who had spoiled his happiness and weaned his sister from him.

There he sat upon the edge of some kind of low stone basin like a drinking trough that protruded from the wall at the side of the plaster-littered passage. Beyond him there was an arch, hung with torn sacking which obscured whatever lay beyond.

As Titus watched, he saw the sitting figure draw up his knee so that his feet were beneath him on the rim of the trough. His head and shoulders were turned a little away so that it was not easy for Titus to tell what he had taken from his pocket. It seemed that Steerpike’s hands were near his mouth and a little forward of it and then suddenly, as the first thin reedy note of a bamboo pipe shrilled along the resonant corridor, all became plain. For some little while, it was impossible to know how long, the three watchers listened to the solitary figure, to his nimble fingering of the stops, to the shrill and plaintive improvisations. Only the Doctor realized how well he played. Only the Doctor knew how quick and cold it was. How brilliant and empty.

‘Is there nothing he can’t do?’ muttered Prunesquallor to himself. ‘By all that’s versatile, he frightens me.’

The music had come to an end, and Steerpike stretched out his arms and legs and then slipping his recorder into a pocket, stood up. It was then that Titus gasped, and as he did so was plucked back from the corner by the two men behind him. For a few moments they hardly dared to draw breath. But no footsteps approached them from the adjacent corridor. What was it he had seen? Neither the Doctor nor Flay dared question him, but after a little while the latter, squinting round the corner, could see what it was that had startled the boy. He had himself been puzzled by Steerpike’s monkey. For a long while he had been unable to tell what it was that sat hunched upon his quarry’s shoulder, or bounded at his side. At other times it disappeared altogether. It had not added, for instance, to the silhouette beneath the thorn tree, and Flay could only think that it clung closely to his side and was lost for long periods at a time beneath the folds of his cape.

But now it bounded beside him, or stood on two legs, its long thin arms hanging loosely, its wrinkled hands trailing among the scraps of plaster.

And so there was a double need for silence. What Steerpike might miss his monkey might easily hear.

But the discovery of what had startled Titus was of small importance compared with the fact that Flay was only just in time to see the man and his monkey pass through the hangings, and under the arch. A moment later and there would have been no knowing whether he had turned to the left or the right. As it was it was not easy to tell save by the indicative rippling of the ragged hangings.

What lay beyond? There was no reason to suppose that there would be any further repetition of this corner-to-corner trailing. Save for the fatigue of the journey and for their constant grip upon the silence, they had as yet encountered neither problem nor peril. But now, as they stared at the hangings, that were yet moving a little in the still air, they knew that they were entering upon a new phase.

Titus gripped the short iron poker in his hand as though to squeeze the life out of it. The Doctor tossed his head, arched his nostrils, and tip-toed to the very point where Steerpike had disappeared. Flay, who insisted on leading, had already drawn back, by no more than half an inch, a fold of the drapery, and was peering to his left. What he saw brought the blood to his head and his hand trembled violently.

He found himself staring along a short passage to where the slanting section of yet another and broader corridor slanted darkly. This further corridor was faced with cold bricks; its floor also, and that was all, but it brought the sweat suddenly to his brow and to the palms of his hands. Yet why, for he was looking at no more than the sort of things he had seen a score of times already on this same morning? But there was this difference. He had seen those bricks before. He had come upon the outskirts of his own domain. Unwittingly as he had moved through the uncharted hinterlands, he had come upon the outskirts of the Hollow Halls – the world he had made his own. He was no longer lost. Steerpike had led them by a trail of his own to a domain which Mr Flay had thought to be impregnable.

What was he doing here? Here, where Mr Flay had stood, his blood running cold, and had heard the grizzly laughter long ago? Here, where night after night and day after day he had sought the screaming nest to no avail? Here, where ever since those days the silence had come down like a deadweight – so that he had not dared to return, for the stillness had become more terrible than the demoniac laughter.

He alone knew of this. He passed the back of his hand across his eyes.

Without waiting to make so much as a sign to the two behind him he paced out grotesquely, on tip-toe to the juncture and, again to his left he saw the young man. Had Steerpike turned to the right he might well have proceeded towards those districts which Mr Flay knew so well. Turning to the left, however, took him into that labyrinth in which he had so often lost himself in his search for the haunted room.

Mr Flay knew only too well that to keep Steerpike in sight would be no easy task. There was the double difficulty of their following him closely enough to keep him in sight, and yet to remain inaudible and unseen themselves.

Nothing would be more embarrassing than for them to be discovered – for Steerpike was committing no crime in moving rapidly through this deserted place. If there were anything nefarious going on, it was upon their side, in shadowing the Master of Ritual.

But there was no need for Flay to warn the Doctor and the boy that the necessity for absolute silence was even more acute. As they slid along the brickwork corridor they felt a closing in of the world.

And now began the threading of a maze so labyrinthine as to suggest that the builders of these sunless walls had been ordered to construct a maze for no other purpose than to torture the mind and freeze the memory. It was no wonder that Flay had never done more in those past days, than stumble blindly through so tortuous a region. And yet, in spite of the confusion, and the necessity for his concentrating upon keeping Steerpike in view, his instincts were working upon their own and they told him that they were returning by devious and contradictory roads to the proximity of the cold brick corridor from which they had started. Steerpike had slowed his pace. His head hung forward on his chest, not dejectedly but with an air of abstraction. His feet moved even slower, until he was virtually loitering. When he came to flights of shallow stairs he descended with a kind of loose-jointed and collapsing motion of the legs – as though his body had forgotten its own existence. He wandered round corners with a dream-like motion, his body at so strange an angle of relaxation as to be almost dangerous.

When at last he came to a certain door he straightened himself with a jerk – stretched out his fingers and became on the instant all awareness. He made a sound between his teeth and the monkey scrambled from the folds of his cape and sat upon his shoulder, the feather in its hat nodding to and fro. For a moment as the monkey turned his head, and its black eyes peered from that small and wrinkled face, peered back along the way it had come, the Doctor thought he had been seen. But he did not draw back his head or make any movement and the creature with its naked face and its costume of coloured diamonds scratched itself and turned away at last. Only then did the Doctor and his companions withdraw themselves even more deeply into the shadows.

Meanwhile Steerpike sorted out a key from a bunch in his pocket and after pausing a moment or two turned it with difficulty in the lock. But he did not touch the handle of the door. He turned his back upon it and gazed along the way he had come, tapping his teeth with his thumb nail.

It was obvious that for some reason best known to himself he was chary of walking in. The monkey on his shoulder shifted its position and in doing so its long tail tapped lightly across Steerpike’s face. But that was seemingly enough to irritate its master, for the little beast was flung to the floor where it crouched and whimpered.

As Steerpike turned his eyes from his bruised plaything his attention was caught by sprawling heaps of rubbish, stones and broken timbers that lay a little way along the side passage. As he stared at them his anger drained from his face, and his features became set again and the corner of his lips lifted into a dead line.

For a moment or two the three watchers feared that they had lost him for he moved suddenly out of their range of vision. It was fortunate for them that the monkey remained where it was, outside the door where it nursed its bruised forearm. Had they followed Steerpike they would at once have met him face to face, for he returned within a minute with a long broken pole.

And now began an operation that completely baffled the hidden spectators. With extreme care Steerpike turned the handle and released the latch. The door was now free but was not yet opened by so much as a quarter of an inch. He stood back from it, and holding the broken pole like a battering ram, pushed gently at the black wooden panel of the mysterious door. It moved upon its hinges with no great difficulty and Steerpike was able to obtain a view of a section of the room beyond. For a little while he held the pole motionless as he stared along its length and through the narrow opening. It was obvious that what he saw concerned him deeply. He rose upon his toes. He cocked his head to one side. Then he withdrew the pole and laid it on the ground at his feet. It was now, at this same moment, as he took a scarf from his pocket and tied it about his face so that only his eyes were visible, that the Doctor, Flay and Titus became conscious of a sickly and musty odour. But the strange performance that was going on before their eyes, so riveted their attention that at first they hardly noticed it. Again Steerpike raised the pole and pushing at the panels with the utmost caution was able momentarily to see more and more of the room which he was evidently so anxious to inspect. When the door was sufficiently ajar to admit the entry of a man, he paused.

As he did so the monkey, whose feathered hat had fallen in the dust, began to make its inquisitive way to the open door. It was evident that its arm was hurting it. Once or twice, in spite of its eagerness to explore the room beyond the door, it glanced apprehensively over its shoulder at Steerpike, baring its teeth in a nervous grimace. But its resilient nature became dominant and springing off its back legs it clung to the door handle with its nervous little hands. Again Steerpike pressed upon the long pole, this time with more force, and as the door swung ajar the monkey, swinging with it, let go and dropped upon the great mouldering carpet that lay within. But it did not drop alone, for no sooner had its four feet touched the ground than with a sickening thud an axe-head fell from high above the door, severing the long tail of the monkey as it buried its murderous edge in the floor. The shrill and appallingly human scream of the little creature rang through the hollow district, echoing and re-echoing the agony of that moment, while, beside itself with pain, surprise and rage, it tore about the huge room that lay spread before it, leaping from chair to chair, from window-sill to mantelpiece, from cupboard to cupboard, scattering vases, lamps and small objects of all kinds to left and right in its wild circuits.

Into this room, now spattered with the monkey’s blood, Steerpike advanced at once. There was no longer any caution in his bearing. He gave the careering creature not so much as a single glance. Had he done so he might have noticed that on seeing him the monkey halted its flight and was crouched quivering upon the back of a chair. Its eyes were upon him and in them was a moist and lethal hatred, as though all the spleen and gall of the vile tropics was floating there beneath the small grey eyelids. Its pain and its humiliation were laid at the door of the man who had flung it from his shoulder. As it watched its master it bared its teeth and wrung its hands together. The blood dripped freely from the stump of its tail. What had happened to the monkey – what had caused its harrowing outcry was, of course, unknown to Titus, the Doctor and Mr Flay. But the urgency of that human cry lifted them out of their hiding places, and brought them to the door. They saw at once that Steerpike had left this first room and had presumably descended the three or four steps that led to a second apartment. But the monkey caught sight of them at once and ran towards them. When it reached Titus it rose to its back legs and began a series of grimaces, which in any other circumstances would have been amusing enough, but were at that moment almost heartbreaking. But they had no time for it. Too much was at stake. Their nerves were at full stretch. They were all but exhausted and above all they were still in the invidious position of following a man without any warrant or rational excuse. Nevertheless the last half-hour had intensified their suspicions to a high degree. They knew in their hearts that they had been right to follow him. They were now prepared for anything that might unfold.

Their apprehension had grown so dark, their speculation so fantastic that when they crept to the second door and peered into the apartment below, and when they saw in the centre of the great carpet that filled the room the two skeletons lying side by side in their fast decaying dresses of imperial purple, their pulses beat no faster. Their emotions had been over-strained and had gone limp. But their brains raced.

The Doctor, who had been holding his silk handkerchief across his face, had known for some while that there was death in the air. He was also the first to know that they were looking at all that was left of Cora and Clarice Groan. Titus had no idea that he was staring at his aunts. He was simply looking at skeletons. He had never seen skeletons before.

It was a moment or two before Mr Flay remembered the invariable purple of the Twins. That there had been foul play was immediately apparent to them all.

The remoteness of these rooms from the castle; the double-death; the windowless walls; the possession by Steerpike of a key and his familiarity with the corridors of approach – and more than all this, his present behaviour. For as they watched him the young man, never doubting the security of his solitude, began to behave in a way which could only be interpreted by those who watched him as a form of madness, or if not madness, something so eccentric as to tread its arbitrary borderland.

Steerpike was aware, directly he had entered the terrible room, that he was behaving strangely. He could have stopped himself at any moment. But to have stopped himself would have been to have stopped a valve – to have bottled up something which would have clamoured for release. For Steerpike was anything but inhibited. His control that had so seldom broken had never frustrated him. In one way that this new expression had need of an outlet he gave himself up to whatever his blood dictated. He was watching himself, but only so that he should miss nothing. He was the vehicle through which the gods were working. The dim primordial gods of power and blood.

There at his feet were the decomposing relics, the purple of their dresses hanging over the ribs in clotted folds, the skulls protruding horribly, their sockets staring at the ceiling. No less than had been their vanished faces, these skulls were identical save that across a single socket some spider, fastidious in his craftsmanship, had spun a delicate web. At its centre struggled a fly, so that in a way a kind of animation had come to either Cora or to Clarice.

In some kind of way the Doctor, though he could not understand, was able to gain an inkling as to what was happening in Steerpike’s mind, as the skewbald homicide began to strut like a cockerel about the bodies of the women he had imprisoned, humiliated and starved to death. The Doctor could see that Steerpike was by no means mad in any accepted sense for every now and then he would repeat a number of high stepping paces as though to perfect them. It was as though he were identifying himself with some archetypal warrior, or fiend. A fiend, which although it had no sense of humour, had a ghastly gaiety – a kind of lethal lightness that struck at the very heart of the humanities; struck at it, darted at it, played about it jabbing here and there, as though with a blade of speargrass.

When Flay and the Doctor, in their different ways, saw what was happening in the room they were both aware that Titus should not be with them. He was no child, but this was no scene for a boy. But there was nothing they could do. For them to separate would be criminally unwise. He could never in any event have found his way back alone. That as yet there had been no movement on their part to disturb the criminal was fortunate, but this deathly silence, in which the only sound was that of Steerpike’s footsteps, could not last for ever.

The Doctor was appalled, but at the same time, as a man of high intelligence and curiosity he was fascinated by what he saw. Not so Flay. An eccentric himself he despised and abhorred any form of eccentricity in others and what he was now witnessing had the effect of all but blinding him with a kind of bourgeois rage. Only in one thing was he happy – that the upstart had unmasked himself and that from now onwards the battle was joined in earnest.

His small eyes were fixed upon his enemy. His neck was thrust out like a turtle’s. His long beard trembled as it hung forward on his chest. His forest knife shook in his hand.

It was not the only weapon that was shaking. The short heavy poker in Titus’ clenched fist was far from steady. The young earl was quite frankly terrified by what he saw. An area of solid ground had given way beneath his feet and he had fallen into an underworld of which he had had no conception. A place where a man can pace like a cock about the ribs and skulls of his victims. A place where the air was rank with their corruption.

The Doctor was gripping his arm to steady him, and the grip tightened suddenly. Steerpike had stopped for a moment to re-tie his shoelace. When this was completed he rose from his knee and stood on tip-toe where he remained poised, his head thrown back. Then he dropped his heels and flexed his knees and at the same time turning his toes outwards, he raised his arms to his side, and with his elbows bent at right angles, he began to stamp, his fists clenched at the height of his shoulders. The sound of his feet was very loud and close.

He was in the posture of some earthish dancer, but he soon tired of this strange display – this throw-back to some savage rite of the world’s infancy. He had given himself up to it for those few moments, in the way that an artist can be the ignorant agent of something far greater and deeper than his conscious mind could ever understand. But as he strutted, his knees bent, his feet turned outwards, his body and head erect, his elbows crooked, and his hands clenched, he had enjoyed the novelty of what he was doing. He was amused at this peculiar need of his body; that it wished to stamp, to strut, to rear on tip-toes, to sink upon the heels – and all because he was a murderer – all this intrigued him, titillating his brain, so that, now, as he ceased to stamp, and sank into a dusty chair, the muscles of his throat went through the contractions that form laughter – but no sound came.

He shut his eyes, and in the darkness, it seemed to him that he was in peril and he opened them again with a start and sat forward in his chair, glancing about the room. This time as his gaze returned to the skeletons he was revolted. Not with what he had done to bring them to this state – but that they should pollute this room; that they should show him their ugly skulls and hollow bones.

He rose from his chair in anger. But he knew in his heart that he was not angry with them. He was enraged with himself. For what had seemed amusing a few moments ago was now a source, almost of fear to him. In looking back and seeing himself strutting like a cock about their bodies, he realized that he had been close to lunacy. This was the first time that any such thought had entered his head, and to dismiss it he crowed like a cock. He was not afraid of strutting; he had known what he was doing; to prove it he would crow and crow again. Not that he wished to do so, but to prove that he could stop whenever he wanted, and start when he wished to, and be all the while in complete control of himself, for there was no madness in him.

What he did not realize was that the death of Barquentine, and the nightmare of the fire and the vile waters of the moat and the long fever that followed had made a difference to him. Whatever he now believed about himself was based on the assumption that he was the same Steerpike as his former self of a few years earlier. But he was no longer that youth. The fire had burned a part of him away. Something of him was drowned for ever in the waters of the moat. His daring was no longer a thing that fanned itself abroad; it had contracted into a fist of brimstone.

He was meaner, more irritable, more impatient for the ultimate power which could only be his through the elimination of all rivals; and if he had ever had any scruples, any love at all for even a monkey, a book, or a sword-hilt, all this, and even this, had been cauterized and drowned away.

As he had entered this second apartment, he had propped the broken pole against the wall on his left. He now felt himself gravitating towards it. He no longer stamped or strutted. He was himself again, or perhaps he had ceased to be himself. At any rate, the three watchers recognized again that familiar walk, with the shoulders hunched and the cat-like footsteps. When he reached the pole he ran his hand along its side. The scarf was still about his face. His dark red eyes were like small circular pits.

As his hand strayed over the surface of the pole, rather as a pianist will fondle a keyboard, his fingers came across a fissure in the wood, and as they played about it they found how easy it would be to tear from the beam a long and narrow splinter. Abstractedly, hardly knowing that he was doing it, a score of disquieting impressions had taken the place of the surety within him, he prised the splinter away, using, at the last, the whole strength of his arm as it arched, in its tension, from the pole. He did not look at it, and he was about to throw it away, for the tearing of it from the pole had been his only interest, when, his gaze having returned to the skeletons, he wandered towards them, and running the long resilient splinter along their ribs, as a child might run a stick along a railing, he heard the bone-notes of an instrument.

For a few minutes he spent his time in this way, creating by a series of taps and runs, a kind of percussive rhythm in key with his mood.

But he was tiring of the place. He had returned in order to satisfy his eyes that the Twins were truly dead, and he had stayed longer than he had intended. Now he flung the splinter away and, kneeling, unclasped the strings of pearls that hung about the vertebrae. Rising, he dropped them into his pocket and made at once for the three steps that led to the upper room and as he did so Mr Flay stepped out from his hiding place.

The effect upon Steerpike was electric. He bounded backwards, with a leap like the leap of a dancer, his cloak swirling about him and his thin lips parted in a murderous snarl of amazement.

There was no longer any case of symbolism. The strutting and the stamping were nothing to the fierce reality of that leap which sent him, as though from a springboard, backwards through the air.

Quick as a reflex, even at the height of his elevation, he felt for his knife. Before he landed he knew that he was unmasked. That from now onwards, unless he slew the bearded figure, on the instant, he would be on the run. In a flash he saw the life of a fugitive spread out before him.

It was only as he landed that he realized at whom he was looking. He had not seen Flay for many years and had supposed him dead. The beard had altered him. But now he knew him, and this knowledge did nothing to stay his hand. Of all men, Flay would have the least sympathy for a rebel.

He had found his knife, had balanced it upon the palm of his hand and had drawn back his right arm when he saw the Doctor and Titus.

The boy was white. The poker shook in his hand but his teeth were gritted. A terrible sickness had hold of him. He was in a nightmare. The last sixty minutes had added more than an hour to his age.

The Doctor was pale also. His face had lost all trace of its habitual drollery. It was a face cut out of marble, strangely proportioned but refined and determined.

The sight of the three of them, blocking the stairs, halted Steerpike’s arm as he was about to launch the knife.

And then, in a peculiarly quiet voice clear and precise, a voice that told nothing of the hammering heart …

‘You will drop your penknife to the ground. You will come forward with your arms raised. You are under arrest,’ said the Doctor.

But Steerpike hardly heard him. His future was ruptured. His years of self-advancement and intricate planning were as though they had never been. A red cloud filled his head. His body shuddered with a kind of lust. It was the lust for an unbridled evil. It was the glory of knowing himself to be pitted, openly, against the big battalions. Alone, loveless, vital, diabolic – a creature for whom compromise was no longer necessary, and intrigue was a dead letter. If it was no longer possible for him to wear, one day, the legitimate crown of Gormenghast, there was still the dark and terrible domain – the subterranean labyrinth – the lairs and warrens where, monarch of darkness like Satan himself, he could wear undisputed a crown no less imperial. Poised like an acrobat and vividly aware of the slightest move that was made by the three figures before him, the Doctor’s voice for all his sensory acuteness, seemed to come from far away.

‘I give you one last chance,’ said his ex-patron. ‘If you have not dropped your knife within five seconds from now, we will advance upon you!’

But it was not the knife that dropped. It was Flay. The loyal seneschal fell backwards with a grinding cry and was half caught in the arms of Titus and the Doctor, and in that instant, while the blade of Steerpike’s knife still quivered in his heart, and while the four hands of Flay’s friends were engaged with the weight of the long ragged body, the young man, following the path of the flung knife, as though he were tied behind it, sped over their shoulders and was in the upper room before they could recover.

Now, with the fear of retributory death upon him, and the redoubled cunning that comes to the marked man, Steerpike lost not a second in speeding from the room. But he did not pass through the door alone, for as he slammed it and turned the key in the lock he was bitten savagely in the back of the neck. With a scream he swivelled on his feet and clutched at nothing.

A panic possessed him and he ran as he had never run before, turning left and right like a wild creature as he made his way ever deeper into a nether empire.

Outside the door of what had been the Twins’ apartment, the monkey, squatting on a rafter, chattered and wrung its hands.

FIFTY-NINE

A few days after the murder of Mr Flay and the subsequent smashing of the door and escape of the Doctor and Titus from those dread apartments, the relics of the Twins were heaped into a single coffin and were buried, at the orders of the Countess, with all the rites and solemnities that were due to the sisters of an earl.

Mr Flay was buried on the same day in the graveyard of the Elect Retainers, a small space of nettle-covered ground. At evening the long shadow of the Tower of Flints lay across this simple boneyard with its conical heaps of stones to show where not more than a dozen servants of exceptional loyalty lay silently under the tall weeds.

Had Mr Flay been able to foresee his funeral he would have appreciated the honour of joining so small and loyal a company of the dead. And if he had known that the Countess herself, in draperies as black and as intense as the plumage of her own ravens, was to be there at the graveside, then his wounds would indeed have been healed.

The Poet had taken over as Master of Ritual. He had no easy task. Night after night, his long wedge-shaped head was bowed over the manuscripts.

When the Countess had been told by Prunesquallor of the finding of the Twins, the manner of Flay’s death, and of Steerpike’s escape, she had risen from the upright chair in which she had been sitting, and without any change of expression in her big face had lifted the chair from the floor and had methodically broken its curved legs off one by one, and had then, in what seemed to be a state of abstraction, tossed the chair-legs one after another through the glass-panes of the nearest window.

When she had done this she moved to the smashed window and stared through the jagged hole. There was a white mist in the air and the tops of the towers appeared to be floating.

From where the Doctor stood he saw, for the first time, a picture. He was not looking for one. What pictures he had ever painted had been very delicate and charming. But this was quite different. He saw something dynamic, something quite wonderful in the contrast of the sharp and angular edges of the broken glass, and the smooth and doming line of her ladyship’s shoulders that, in the immediate foreground, curved heavily across the jaggedness. And at the same time he saw the deep, copper-beech colour of her hair against the pearl-grey tower-tops that floated in the distance. And the blackness of her dress, and the marble of her neck and the sheen of the glass, and the pollen-like softness of the sky and towers so jaggedly circumscribed. She was a monument against a broken window and beyond the broken window her realm, tremulous and impalpable in the white mist.

But Dr Prunesquallor had only a few moments in which to regret that he had not learned to paint, for the monument turned about.

‘Sit down,’ she said.

Prunesquallor looked about him. The confusion in the room made it difficult for him to see anything that could possibly be sat on, but he found himself a perch at last in the corner of a window-sill that was scattered with bird seed.

She approached and stood above him. She did not look down, but gazed through a small casement above his head while she spoke. Finding that she never turned her eyes to him and that for him to look up when listening or speaking was neither noticed nor necessary, and what is more that it gave him a pain at the back of his neck, the doctor gazed at the scallops of sartorial immediately ahead of him and within a few inches of his nose, or simply shut his eyes as they conversed.

It was soon obvious to the Doctor that he was in conversation with someone whose thoughts were concentrated upon the capture of Steerpike not only to the exclusion of everything else but with a menacing power and a ruthless simplicity.

Her heavy voice was slower than ever.

‘All normal work shall be suspended. Man, woman and child shall be given their orders-of-search. Every known spring and well-head, every cistern, tank and catchment shall have its sentry. No doubt the beast must drink.’

The Doctor suggested a meeting of officers, the drawing up of a plan of campaign, the working out of a time table or rota of sentries and search parties, and the formation of redoubtable bands drawn from the young blood of the castle’s lower life where there was no lack of spleen, and where the price which was to be set upon Steerpike’s head would encourage their intrepidity.

They agreed that there was no time to waste for with every hour that passed the fugitive would be withdrawing ever more deeply into some forgotten quarter, or constructing some ambuscade or hiding place, even at the heart of the castle’s activities. There was no place on earth so terrible and so suited to a game of hide and seek as this gaunt warren.

Leaders were to be chosen. Weapons were to be served out. The castle was to be placed upon a war footing. A curfew was to be imposed, and wherever he might be lurking, from vault to eyrie, the murderer was to have no respite from the sound of feet and the light of torches. Sooner or later he would make his first mistake. Sooner or later, in the corner of some eye, the tail of his shadow would be seen. Sooner or later if there was no relaxation in the search, he would be found at some well-head, drinking like an animal, or flying from some storehouse with his plunder.

The Countess was using her powerful brain as though for the first time. The Doctor had never known her like this. Had her cats entered the room or a bird descended flapping to her shoulder it is doubtful whether, at this moment, she would have noticed them. Her thoughts were so concentrated upon the seizure of Steerpike that she had not moved a muscle since she and the Doctor had started talking. Only her lips had moved. She had talked very slowly and quietly but there was a thickness in her voice.

‘I shall outwit him,’ she said. ‘The ceremonies shall continue.’

‘The Day of the Bright Carvings?’ queried the Doctor. ‘Shall it proceed as usual?’

‘As usual.’

‘And the Outer-dwellers be allowed within the gates?’

‘Naturally,’ she said. ‘What could stop them?’

What could stop them? It was Gormenghast that spoke. A fiend might be wandering the castle with dripping hands, but the traditional ceremonies were at the back of it all, enormous, immemorial, sacrosanct. In a fortnight’s time it was their day, the day of the Mud Dwellers, when all along the white stone shelf at the foot of the long courtyard wall the coloured carvings would be displayed; and at night, when the bonfires roared and all but the three chosen statues were turned to ash in their flames, Titus standing on the balcony with the Outer Dwellers below him in the fire-lit darkness, would hold aloft in turn, each masterpiece. And as each was raised above his head, a gong would clash. And after the echoes of the third reverberation had died away he would order them to be taken to the Hall of Bright Carvings where Rottcodd slept and the dust collected and the flies crawled over the tall slatted blinds.

Prunesquallor rose to his feet. ‘You are right,’ he said. ‘There must be no difference, your ladyship, save for an eternal vigilance, and unflagging pursuit.’

‘There is never any difference,’ she replied. ‘There is never any difference.’ Then she turned her head for the first time and looked at the Doctor. ‘We will have him,’ she said. Her voice, as soft and heavy and thick as velvet, was in so grim and incongruous a contrast to the merciless pin-head of light that glittered in her narrowed eyes that the doctor made for the door. He was in need of an atmosphere less charged. As he turned the door handle he caught sight of the smashed window, and saw through the jagged star-shaped opening the towers floating. The white mist seemed lovelier than ever, and the towers more fairy-like.

SIXTY

Bellgrove and his wife sat opposite one another in their living room, Irma, very upright, as was her habit, her back as straight as a yard of pump-water. There was something irritating in this unnecessary rigidity. It was, perhaps, ladylike, but it was certainly not feminine. It annoyed Bellgrove for it made him feel that there was something wrong in the way that he had always used a chair. To his mind an armchair was something to curl up in, or to drape oneself across. It was a thing for human delectation. It was not built to be perched on.

And so he curled his old spine and draped his old legs and lolled his old head, while his wife sat silently and stared at him.

‘… And why on earth should you think that he would dream of risking his life in order to attack you?’ the old man was saying. ‘You deceive yourself, Irma. Peculiar as he is, there is no reason why he should flatter you to the extent of killing you. To climb in at your bedroom window would be highly hazardous. The entire castle is on the watch for him. Do you really imagine that it matters to him whether you are alive or dead, any more than whether I am alive or dead, or that fly up there on the ceiling is alive or dead? Good grief, Irma, be reasonable if you can, if only for the sake of the love that once I bore you.’

‘There is no need for you to speak like that,’ Irma replied, in a voice as clipped as the sound of castanets. ‘Our love has nothing to do with what we are talking about. Nor is it anything to mock at. It has changed, that is all. It is no longer green.’

‘And nor am I,’ murmured Bellgrove.

‘What an obvious thing to say!’ said Irma, with forced brightness. ‘And how very trite – I said how very trite!’

‘I heard you, my dear.’

‘And this is no time for shallow talk. I have come to you as a wife should come to her husband. For guidance. Yes, for guidance. You are old, I know, but …’

‘What the hell has my age got to do with it?’ snarled Bellgrove, lifting his magnificent head from a cushion. The milk-white locks were clustered on his shoulders. ‘You were never one to ask for advice. You mean you’re terrified.’

‘That is so,’ said Irma. She said it so simply and so quietly that she did not recognize her own voice. She had spoken involuntarily. Bellgrove turned his head sharply in her direction. He could hardly believe that it was she who had spoken. He rose from his chair and crossed the ugly carpet to where she sat bolt upright. He squatted on his heels before her. A sense of pity stirred in him. He took her long hands in his.

At first she tried to withdraw them but he held them tightly. She had tried to say ‘don’t be ridiculous’ but no words came.

‘Irma,’ he said at last. ‘Let us try again. We have both changed – but that is perhaps as it should be. You have shown me sides of your nature which I never knew existed. Never. How could I ever have guessed, my dear, that you should for instance have thought that half my staff were in love with you – or that you could become so irritated with my innocent habit of falling asleep? We have our different spirits, our different needs, our different lives. We are fused, Irma, it is true; we are integrated – but not all that much. Relax your back, my dear. Relax your backbone. It makes it easier for me to talk. I’ve asked you so often – and in all humility – knowing as I do that your spine is your own.’

‘My dearest husband,’ said Irma. ‘You are talking overmuch. If you could leave a sentence alone, it would be so much stronger.’ She bowed her head to him. ‘But I will tell you something,’ she continued, ‘it makes me happy to see you there, crouched at my feet. It makes me feel young again – or it would do, it would do, if they could only lay their hands on him and end the suspense. It is too much – too much … night after night … night after night … Oh can’t you see how it racks a woman? Can’t you? Can’t you?’

‘My brave one,’ said Bellgrove. ‘My lady love; pull yourself together. Sinister as the business is, there is no need for you to take the whole thing personally. You are nothing to him, Irma, as I have said before. You are not his foe, my dear, are you? Nor yet his accomplice? Or are you?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Quite so. I am being ridiculous. Your husband, the headmaster of Gormenghast, is being ridiculous. And why? Because I have caught the germ. I have caught it from my wife.’

‘But in the darkness … in the darkness … I seem to see him.’

‘Quite so,’ said Bellgrove. ‘But if you did see him you would feel worse still. Except of course that we could claim a reward, you know!’

Bellgrove found that his legs were aching so he rose to his feet.

‘My advice, Irma, is to put a little more trust in your husband. He may not be perfect. There may be husbands with finer qualities. With nobler profiles for instance, eh? Or with hair like almond blossom. It is not for me to say. And of course there may be husbands who have even become headmasters, or whose intellect is wider, or whose youth was more dazzling in its gallantry. It is not for me to say. But such as I am I have become yours. And such as you are you have become mine. And such as we both are we have become one another’s. And what does this lead to? It leads to this. That if all this is so, and yet you quake at every sound of the night, then I take it that your trust in me has waned since those early days when I had you at my feet. O you have schemed … schemed …!’

‘How dare you!’ cried Irma. ‘How dare you!’

Bellgrove had forgotten himself. He had forgotten what his argument was intended to prove. A little whiff of temper springing from some unformulated thought had caught him unaware. He tried to recover.

‘Schemed,’ he continued, ‘for my happiness. And you have very largely succeeded. I like you sitting there, if you weren’t so upright. Can’t you melt, my dear one … just a little. One grows so very tired of straight lines. As for Steerpike, take my advice; make use of me when you are frightened. Run to me. Fly to me. Press yourself against my chest; run your fingers through my locks. Be comforted. If he ever did appear before me, you know very well how I would deal with him.’

Irma looked at her venerable husband. ‘I certainly do not,’ she said. ‘How would you?’

Bellgrove, who had even less idea than Irma, stroked his long chin, and then a sickly smile appeared on his lips.

‘What I would do,’ he said, ‘is something that no gentleman could possibly divulge. Faith: that is what you need. Faith in me, my dear.’

‘There would be nothing you could do,’ said Irma, ignoring her husband’s suggestion that she should have faith in him. ‘Nothing at all. You are too old.’

Bellgrove, who had been about to resume his seat, remained standing. His back was to his wife. A dull pain began to grow beneath his ribs. A sense of the black injustice of bodily decay came over him, but a rebellious voice crying in his heart ‘I am young, I am young,’ while the carnal witness of his three score years and ten sank suddenly at the knees.

In a moment Irma was at his side. ‘Oh my dear one! What is it? What is it?’

She lifted his head and put a cushion beneath it. Bellgrove was fully conscious. The shock of finding himself suddenly on the floor had upset him for a moment or two and had taken his breath away, but that was all.

‘My legs went,’ he said, looking up at the earnest face above him with its wonderfully sharp nose. ‘But I am all right again.’

Directly he had made this remark he was sorry for it, for he could have done with an hour of nursing.

‘Perhaps you had better get up in that case, my dear,’ said Irma. ‘The floor is no place for a headmaster.’

‘Ah, but I feel very …’

‘Now, now!’ interrupted Irma. ‘Let me have no nonsense. I shall go and see whether the doors have been locked. When I return I expect to find you in your chair again.’ She left the room.

After kicking his heels irritably on the carpet, the headmaster struggled to his feet, and when he was in his chair again he put out his tongue at the door through which Irma had passed, but immediately he had done so he blushed for shame and blew a kiss in the same direction from the wasted palm of his hand.

SIXTY-ONE

There was a part of the outer wall which was so deeply hidden with canopies of creeper that for over a hundred years no eyes had seen the stones of the wall itself but the eyes of insects, mice and birds. These undulating acres of hanging foliage overlooked a certain lane which lay so close to the outer wall of Gormenghast that had the mice or the hidden birds been capable of tossing a twig out of the leafy darkness it would have fallen into this lane that lay below.

It was a narrow way, in deep shadow for most of the day. Only in the late evening, as the sun sank over Gormenghast forest, a quiverful of honey-coloured beams would slant along the alley and there would be pools of amber where all day long the chill, inhospitable shadows had brooded.

And when these amber pools appeared the curs of the district would congregate out of nowhere and would squat in the golden beams and lick their sores.

But it was not in order to watch those half-wild dogs or to marvel at the sunbeams that the Thing had taken to working her way through the dense growth of the wall-draped creepers, threading the vertical foliage with the noiseless ease of a snake until twenty feet above the ground she moved outward from the wall to such a position that she could look down upon certain sections of the lane. It was for a reason more covetous. It was because the solitary carver who shared this evening hour with the dogs and the sunbeams never failed to be at his accustomed place at sundown. It was then that he worked upon the block of jarl-wood. It was then that the image grew under his chisel. It was then that the Thing watched, with her eyes wide as a child’s, the evolution of the wooden raven. And it was for this carving that she pined angrily, impatiently. It was so that she might snatch it from its maker, and then away, in a breath, to the hills, that she crouched there evening after evening, watching greedily from the loose ivy, for the completion of so pretty a toy.

SIXTY-TWO

When Fuchsia heard the news of Steerpike’s treachery and when she realized how her first and only affair of the heart had been with a murderer, an expression of such sickness and horror darkened her face that her aspect was, from that moment, never wholly free of that corosive stain.

For a long while she spoke to no one, keeping herself to her room, where, unable to cry, she became exhausted with the emotions that fought in her to find some natural outlet. At first there was only the sense of having been physically struck, and the pain of the wound. Her arms gave little jerks and tingled. A depression of utter blackness drowned her. She had no wish to live at all. Her breast pained her. It was as though a great fear filled the cage of her ribs, a globe of pain that grew and grew. For the first week after the crushing news she could not sleep. And then a kind of hardness entered her. Something she had never housed before. It came as a protection. She needed it. It helped her to grow bitter. She began to kill at birth all thoughts of love that were natural to her. She changed and she aged as she wandered to and fro across her solitary room. She began to see no reason why others, as well as Steerpike, should not be double-faced and merciless. She hated the world.

When Titus called to see her he was amazed at the change in her voice, and the sunken look of her eyes. He saw for the first time that she was a woman as well as being his sister.

On her side, she saw a change in him. His restlessness was as real as her disillusion. His longing for freedom as pressing as her longing for love.

But what could he do, and what could she do? The castle was round and about them, widespread and as unchartable as a dark day.

‘Thank you for coming,’ she said, ‘but there’s nothing we can talk about!’

Titus said nothing but leaned against a wall. She looked so much older. His heel began to work away at a piece of loose plaster above the skirting board until it came away.

‘I can’t believe he’s dead,’ said the boy at last.

‘Who?’

‘Flay, of course. And all the things he did. What about his cave? Empty for ever I suppose. Would you like to …’

‘No,’ said Fuchsia, anticipating his question. ‘Not now. Not any more. I don’t want to go anywhere, really. Have you seen Dr Prune?’

‘Once or twice. He asked me to tell you that he’d like to see you, whenever you want. He’s not very well.’

‘None of us are,’ said Fuchsia. ‘What are you going to do? You look quite different. Was it awful, seeing what happened? But don’t tell me. I don’t want to dwell on it!’

‘There are sentries everywhere,’ said Titus.

‘I know.’

‘And a curfew. I have to be in my room by eight o’clock. Who’s the man outside the door here?’

‘I don’t know his name. He’s there most of the day and all night. A man in the courtyard too, under the window.’

Titus wandered to the window and looked down. ‘What good is he doing there?’ And then, turning about. ‘They’ll never catch him,’ he said. ‘He’s too cunning, the bloody beast. Why can’t they burn the whole place down, and him with it, and us with it, and the world with it, and finish the whole dirty business, and the rotten ritual and everything and give the green grass a chance?’

‘Titus,’ she said. ‘Come here.’ He approached her, his hands shaking.

‘I love you, Titus, but I can’t feel anything. I’ve gone dead. Even you are dead in me. I know I love you. You’re the only one I love, but I can’t feel anything and I don’t want to. I’ve felt too much, I’m sick of feelings … I’m frightened of them.’

Titus took another step towards her. She gazed at him. A year ago they would have kissed. They had needed each other’s love. Now, they needed it even more but something had gone wrong. A space had formed between them, and they had no bridge.

But he gripped her arm for a moment before walking quickly to the door and disappearing from her sight.

SIXTY-THREE

The Day of the Bright Carvings was at hand. The Carvers had put the final touches to their creations. The expectancy in the castle was as acute as it was possible for it to be, when at the same time the larger and more horrible awareness that Steerpike might at any moment strike again, took up the larger part of their minds. For the skewbald man had struck four times within the last eight days with accuracy, a small pebble being found, in every case, near the fractured heads of the newly-slain, or lodged in the bone above the eyes. These killings, so wicked in their want of purpose, took place in such widely separated districts as to give no clue as to where the haunt of the homicide might be. His deadly catapult had spread a clammy terror through Gormenghast.

But in spite of this preponderant fear, the imminence of the traditional day of carvings had brought a certain excitement of a less terrible kind to the hearts of the denizens. They turned with relief to this age-old ceremony as though to something on which they could rely – something that had happened every year since they could remember anything at all. They turned to tradition as a child turns to its mother.

The long courtyard where the ceremony was to be held had been scrubbed and double scrubbed. The clanking of buckets, the swilling and hissing of water, the sound of scouring had echoed along the attenuate yard, sunrise after sunrise, for a week past. The high southern wall in particular was immaculate. The scaffolding to which the scrubbers had clung like monkeys while they ferreted among the rough stones, scraping at the interstices and sluicing every vestige of accumulated dust from niche and crack, had been removed. It sailed away, this wall, in a dwindling perspective of gleaming stone – and five feet from the ground along its entire length the Carvers’ shelf protruded. The solid shelf or buttress was of so handsome a breadth that even the largest of the coloured carvings stood comfortably upon it. It had already been whitewashed in preparation for the great day, as had also the wall above it, to the height of a dozen feet. What plants and creepers had forced their way through the stones during the past year, were cut down, as usual, flush with the stones.

It was into this courtyard so unnaturally lustrated that the Carvers from the Outer Dwellings were to pour like a dark and ragged tide, bearing their heavy wooden carvings in their arms or upon their shoulders, or when the works were too weighty for a man to sustain he would be aided by his family – the children running alongside, barefooted, their black hair in their eyes their shrill excited voices jabbing the heavy air as though with stilettos.

For the air was full of an oppressive weight. What breath there was moved hotly on its way as though it were fanned by the mouldering wings of huge and sickly birds.

The Steerpike terror had been still further intensified by these stifling conditions, and the ceremony of the Bright Carvings was for this reason all the more eagerly anticipated, for it was a relief for the mind and spirit to be able to turn to something the only purpose of which was beauty.

But, for all the consummate craft and rhythmic loveliness of the carvings there was no love lost between their jealous authors. The inter-family rivalries, the ancient wrongs, a hundred bitter quarrels, were all remembered at this annual ceremony. Old wounds were reopened or kept green. Beauty and bitterness existed side by side. Old claw-like hands, cracked with long years of thankless toil, would hold aloft a delicate bird of wood, its wings, as thin as paper, spread for flight, its breast afire with a crimson stain.

On the penultimate evening all was ready. The Poet, now fully established as Master of Ritual, had made his final tour of inspection with the Countess. On the following morning the gates in the Outer Wall were opened and the Bright Carvers began the three miles trail to the Carver’s Courtyard.

From then onwards the day blossomed like a rose, with its hundred blooms and its thousand thorns. Grey Gormenghast became blood-shot, became glutted with gold, became chill with blues as various as the blue of the flowers, and the waters became stained with evergreen from the softest olive to veridian, became rich with all the ochres; flamed and smouldered, shuddered with the hues of earth and air.

And holding these solid figures in their arms were the dark and irritable mendicants. By afternoon the long stone shelf had been loaded with its coloured forms, its birds, its beasts, its fantasies, its giant grasshoppers, its reptiles and its rhythms of leaf and flower; its hundred heads that turned upon their necks, that dropped or were raised more proudly from the shoulders than any living head of flesh and blood.

There they stood in a long burning line with their shadows behind them on the southern wall. From all these carvings three were to be chosen as the most original and perfect and these three would be added to those that were displayed in the unfrequented Hall of the Bright Carvings. The rest were to be burned that same evening.

The judging was a long and scrupulous affair. The carvers would eye the judges from a distance as they squatted about the courtyard in families, or leaned against the opposite wall. Hour after hour the fateful business proceeded – the only sound being the shouting and crying of the scores of urchins. At about six o’clock the long tables were carried out by the castle servants and placed end to end in three long lines. These tables were then loaded with loaves, and bowls of thick soup.

When dusk began to fall the judging was all but completed. The sky had become overcast and an unusual darkness brooded over the scene. The air had become intolerably close. The children had ceased to run about, although in other years they had sported tirelessly until midnight. But now they sat near their mothers in a formidable silence. To lift an arm was to become tired and to sweat profusely. Many faces were turned to the sky where a world of cloud was gathering together its gloomy continents, tier behind tier like the foliage of some fabulous cedar.

As a minor Titus was not directly involved in the actual choice of the ‘Three’, but his technical approval had to be obtained when the decisions were finally made. He had wandered restlessly up and down the line of the exhibits, threading his way through the crowds, which parted deferentially at his approach. The weight of the iron chain about his neck and the stone that was strapped to his forehead became almost too much to bear. He had seen Fuchsia but had lost her again in the crowds.

‘There’s going to be an almighty storm, my boy,’ said a voice at his shoulder. ‘By all that’s torrential, there most certainly is!’

It was Prunesquallor.

‘Feels like it, Doctor Prune,’ said Titus.

‘And looks like it, my young stalker of felons!’

Titus turned his gaze to the sky. It seemed to have gone mad. It bulged and shifted itself as though it were not moved by any breeze or current of the air, but only through its own foul impulses.

It was a foul sky, and it was growing. It was accumulating filth from the hot slums of hell. Titus turned his eyes from its indescribable menace and faced the doctor again. His face was gleaming with sweat. ‘Have you seen Fuchsia?’ he said.

‘I saw her,’ answered Titus. ‘But I lost her again. She is somewhere here.’ The Doctor lifted his head high and stared about him, his Adam’s apple very angular, his teeth flashing, but in a smile that Titus could see was empty.

‘I wish you would see her, Doctor Prune … she looks awful, suddenly.’

‘I will certainly see her, Titus, and as soon as I can.’

At that moment a messenger approached. Titus was wanted by the judges.

‘Away with you,’ cried the doctor in this new voice that had lost its ring. ‘Away with you, young fellow!’

‘Good-bye, doctor.’

SIXTY-FOUR

That night, upon the balcony, his mother sat upon his right hand like an enormous stranger, and the Poet upon his left, an alien figure. Below him was a vast field of upturned faces. Away ahead of him and far beyond the reach of the great bonfire’s radiance the Mountain was just visible against the dark sky.

The moment was approaching when he must call for the three successful carvers to come forward and for him to draw up the carvings from below with a cord and to place them in full sight of the crowd.

The flames of the bonfire around which the multitude was congregated streamed up into the sky. Its insatiable heat had already reduced a hundred dreams to ashes.

As he watched, a glorious tiger, its snarling head bent back along its spine, and its four feet close together beneath its belly, was flung through the air, by one of the twelve hereditary ‘vandals’. The flames appeared to flick out their arms to receive it, and then they curled about it and began to eat.

His longing to escape came upon him with a sudden and elemental force. He hated this gross wastage that was going on below him. The heat of the evening made him sick. The nearness of his mother and of the abstracted Poet disquieted him. His eyes moved to Gormenghast Mountain. What lay beyond? Was there another land …? Another world? Another kind of life?

If he should leave the castle! The very notion of it made him shake with a mixture of fear and excitement. His thought was so revolutionary that he glanced at his mother’s back to see whether she had heard his mind at work.

If he should leave Gormenghast? He was unable to hazard a guess as to what such a thought implied. He knew of no other place. He had thought before, of Escape. Escape as an abstract idea. But he had never thought seriously of where he would escape to, or of how he would live in some place where he would be unknown.

And a seditious fear that he was in reality of no consequence came over him. That Gormenghast was of no consequence and that to be an earl and the son of Sepulchrave, a direct descendant of the blood line – was something of only local interest. The idea was appalling.

He raised his head and gazed across the thousands of faces below him. He nodded his head in a kind of pompous approval as yet another carving was tossed into the great bonfire. He counted a score of towers to his left. ‘All mine …’ he said, but the words sounded emptily in his head when suddenly something happened which blew his terror and his hope sky-high, which filled him with a joy too huge for him to contain, which took him and shook him out of his indecisions, and swept him into a land of hectic and cruel brilliance, of black glades, and of a magic insupportable.

For, as he was watching, something happened with great rapidity. A coal black raven, its head cocked, its every feather exquisitely chiselled, its claws gripping a wrinkled branch was about to be thrown into the flames when, as Titus watched, in a half-dream, a ripple in the silent, heat-heavy crowd, showed where a single figure was threading its way with an unusual speed. The hereditary ‘vandal’ had hold of the wooden raven by its head and swung back his hand. The bonfire leapt and crackled and lit his face. The arm came forward; the fingers loosed their grip; that raven sailed up in the air, turning over and over and began to fall towards the fire when, as unforeseen and rapid as the course of a dream, there leapt from the body of the fire-lit crowds something that, with a mixture of grace and savagery quite indescribable, snatched at the height of its leap the raven from the air, and holding it above its head continued without a pause or break in the superb rhythm of its flight, and apparently floating over an ivy-covered wall disappeared into the night. For more than a minute there was no movement at all. A dreadful embarrassment held the witnesses immobile as though with a vice. The individual shock that each sustained was heightened by the stunned condition of the mass. Something unthinkable had been done, something so flagrant that the anger that was so soon to show itself was for the moment held back as though by a wall of embarrassment.

Such violation of a hallowed ceremony was unprecedented.

The Countess was one of the first to stir. For the first time since Steerpike’s escape she was moved by a tremendous anger that had no connexion with the skewbald rebel. She rose to her feet and with her big hands gripping the balustrade stared into the night. The congested clouds hung with a terrible nearness and an increasing weight. The air sweated. The crowds began to mutter and to move like bees in a hive. Isolated cries of rage from below the balcony sounded close, raw and horrible.

What was the death of a few hierophants at Steerpike’s hand compared with the stabbing of the castle’s very heart. The heart of Gormenghast was not its garrison – its transient denizens, but that invisible thing that had been wounded in their sight. As the cries rose and the swollen clouds pressed down, Titus, the last to move, turned his eyes to his mother’s with a sidelong sweep. Sick with excitement he rose gradually to his feet.

He alone, of all who had been so fundamentally affected by the profane insult to tradition, was affected for a reason of his own. The shock he had suffered was unique. He had not been drawn into the maelstrom of the general shock. He was alone in his unique excitement. At the first sight of that mercurial creature he was transported in a flash to an earlier day, a day which he had no longer believed in, and had relegated to the world of dreams: to a day when among the spectral oakwoods he had seen, or had thought he had seen, an air-borne figure with its small head turned away. It was so long ago. It had become no more than a fume of his mind – a vapour.

But it was she. There was no doubting that it had all been true. He had seen her before, when lost among the oakwood she had floated past like a leaf. And now again! Taller, of course, as he was taller. But no less fleet, no less uncanny.

He remembered how the momentary sight of her had awakened in him an awareness of liberty. But now! How much more so! The heat was terrible in the air, but his spine was icy with excitement.

He looked about him again, with an air of cunning quite out of character. Everything was as it was. His mother was still beside him, her big hands on the balustrade. The bonfire roared and spat red embers into the dark and stifling air. Someone in the crowd was shouting, ‘The Thing! The Thing!’ and another voice with dreadful regularity cried ‘Stone her! stone her!’ But Titus heard nothing of this. Moving gradually backwards step by step, he turned at last and in a few quick paces was in the room behind the balcony.

Then he began to run, his every step a crime. Through midnight corridors in any one of which the skewbald Steerpike might well have been lurking, he sped. His jaw ached with fear and excitement. His clothes stuck to his back and thighs. Turning and turning, sometimes losing himself, and sometimes colliding with the rough walls, he came at last to a flight of broad shallow steps that ran out into the open. A mile away to his right the light of the bonfire was reflected on the bulging clouds that hung above it like the ghostly bolsters of some beldam’s bed.

Ahead of him, Gormenghast Mountain and the widespread slopes of Gormenghast forest were hidden from his vision in the night, but he ran to them as a migratory bird flies blindly through the darkness to the country that it needs.

SIXTY-FIVE

His sense of supreme disobedience, rather than retarding his progress through the night, gave it impetus. He could feel the angry breath of retribution on the nape of his neck as he stumbled on. There was yet time for him to return but in spite of his hammering heart it never occurred to him to do so. He was propelled forward by his imagination having been stirred to its depths by the sight of her. He had not seen her face. He had not heard her speak. But that which over the years had become a fantasy, a fantasy of dreaming trees and moss, of golden acorns and a sprig in flight, was fantasy no longer. It was here. It was now. He was running through heat and darkness towards it; to the verity of it all.

But his body was profoundly tired. The sickening heat was something to be fought against and at last when within a mile of the foothills he fell to his knees and then onto his side, where he lay soaked in perspiration, his flushed face in his arms.

But his mind did not rest. His mind was still running and stumbling along. A thousand times as he lay with his eyes closed, he saw her take the ivy-covered wall with that maddening beauty of flight; effortless, and overweeningly arrogant, her small bragging head, turned away from him, and perched so exquisitely upon the neck – the whole thing floating in his mind with a kind of aerial ease.

A hundred times he saw her as he lay and a hundred times he turned restlessly from side to side, while the sprite flew on and on and its legs like water-reeds appeared to trail in the body’s wake rather than cause the earthless speed of it.

And then he heard the hoarse voice of a cannon and before the heavy, tumbling echoes that followed it had ended he was on his feet again and running dangerously through the darkness, to where the high masses of Gormenghast Mountain arose in the sightless night. It was the single explosion that was the traditional warning of danger. He knew it meant that his disappearance had not only been discovered, but that his defiance of Gormenghast had been suspected by his mother.

When the time came for the three chosen carvings to be drawn up to the balcony and to be flourished before the crowd, he was no longer there. On top of the sickening heat and the terror of the swollen sky; on top of the fear of the beast of Gormenghast and of his roving catapult – on top of the unprecedented snatching of a carving from the flames, and the sight of the ‘Thing’ in their midst, there was now this unimaginable offence to the castle’s honour, to gall not only the hierophants but the carvers.

At first they had imagined that the young earl had fainted in the heat. This had occurred to the Poet, who with the permission of the Countess disappeared into the room at the rear of the balcony. But he found no sign of the boy. As the minutes passed the anger grew, and only the heaviness of the stifling night and the resulting weariness of the crowds prevented the indiscriminate violence that might easily have developed.

The acid of this dreadful night bit deep. Something fundamental to the life of Gormenghast had been affected and weakened.

At a time when a devil was loose and the whole energy of the place was concentrated upon his capture it was stupefying to find that the castle had been stabbed to the heart by the perfidy of its brightest symbol, the heir himself to the sacred masonry, the seventy-seventh earl.

This child of fate was climbing through the gloom; stumbling among the roots of trees, forcing his way through undergrowth, pressing fanatically onwards.

How he would find her when the sun rose over the mazes of the forest and played across the trackless expanses of Gormenghast Mountain, he had no idea. He simply believed that the power that drew him could not fail to show itself.

But a time came when he was so benighted that further progress was impossible. He was sufficiently far from the castle, sufficiently lost, to evade immediate capture. He knew that search parties were even now being organized and that the vanguard of those levies was probably already on its way. He knew also that the sending forth of a single searcher redounded in Steerpike’s favour. This would not be forgiven him.

Whether his absence would be associated with the sudden appearance of the ‘Thing’ he could not tell. Perhaps the coincidence was all too apparent. What he did know was that the sin to cap all sins would be for any member of the castle, let alone its rightful sovereign, to have the remotest association with an Outer Dweller – for the earl of Gormenghast to go in search of a daughter of that squalid cantonment and a bastard child at that. He knew from his mother downwards to the most obscure of her menials the conception of any such happening would be equally revolting. It would be worse than shameless treachery. It would be at the same time a defilement of the blood line.

He knew all this. But he could do nothing. He could only pretend, if ever he were caught, that the impending storm had affected his brain. But he could not alter anything. Something more fundamental than tradition had him in its grip. If he was caught he was caught. If they imprisoned him, or held him up for public contumely then that was what he deserved. If he was disinherited he had only himself to blame. He had slapped a god across its age-old face. It was so … it was so … but as the night-heat swaddled him in a near-sleep his thoughts were not of his mother’s mortification, of the castle’s peril, of his treachery or of his sister’s anxiety, but of a thing of fierce and shameless insolence – of a rebel like himself who gloried in it: of a rebel like a lyric in green flight.

SIXTY-SIX

He awoke to the first crash of thunder. There was a shadowy light in the dark air that could only have come from some remote and cloud-choked sunrise. And as the thunder spoke the first of the great rain came.

The danger of it was at once apparent. This was no ordinary downpour. Even the first streaks from the sky were things that lashed and kicked the dust out of the ground with a vicious deliberation.

The air was like the air in an oven. Titus had leapt to his feet as though he had been prodded with a stick. The sky seethed and rumbled. The clouds yawned like hippopotami; deep holes or funnels, opening and closing, mouthlike, now here, now there.

He began to run again, climbing all the while through a kind of half-light. The forms of trees and rocks suddenly looming over him, forced him to turn to left and right in a sudden and jerky way, for it was not until he was upon them that they made themselves known.

His immediate object was to strike the fringe of the close-set trees of Gormenghast forest, for only beneath their boughs could he hope to shield himself from the rain. It hissed in the loose foliage about him which was no kind of shelter, even for this first flurry of the storm.

For all its initial violence there was yet no sense of hurry about the rain. It gave the impression of an endless reserve of sky-wide energy.

And as he stumbled on through the rain that spilled itself from the canopies of leaf above, a streak of lightning, like an outrider, lit up the terrain so that for a moment the world was made of nothing but wet steel.

And in that moment his eyes fled over the glittering landscape, and before the enormous gloom had settled again he had seen a pair of solitary pines on a hill of boulders, and he at once recognized the place, for one of the pines had been broken by the wind and was caught in the upper arms of its brother.

He had never climbed these pines nor stood in their shade nor heard the rustle of their needles; but they were more than familiar to him, for years ago he had stared at them every time he had emerged from the long tunnel – the tunnel that led from the Hollow Halls to within a mile of Mr Flay’s cave.

When he saw the pines in the lightning-flash his heart leapt. But the darkness came down again and it was at once apparent how difficult it would be not only to arrive at the pines but to strike off from them, with confidence, towards the tunnel mouth. To arrive at the pines would yet not be to come to any place where he had stood before. In the moment that he had recognized those trees he had also realized that the rest of the dazzling panorama was unknown to him. He had taken some strange path in the darkness.

But though it might well be difficult, even with the increasing light, to know exactly in which direction to move, when at last he should come to the pines (for it would of course be impossible to see the caveward mouth of the tunnel) yet it was useless to dwell upon the difficulties, and Titus, altering his direction, struck out across the wilderness of coarse grasses that were already under water. The churned ‘lake’ reached upwards to his ankles. It spouted all about him. What had been fierce streaks of rain were now no longer streaks. Nor even ropes. Each one was like pump-water or a tap turned to its full. And yet there was still the dreadful closeness in the air; although the tepid water, hammering him and streaming over his body mitigated the heat.

Beyond the soaking grasslands, and the alder copses, beyond the stony and grassless foothills where the big ponds were forming; beyond the old silver-mines and the gravel quarries; beyond all these in a district of harsher country than he had so far encountered, he came at last to a group of giant rocks.

By now the light had to some extent percolated through the clouds of black water and when he climbed upon the back of the largest of the rocks he was able to see the two pines, not away to his right, as he suspected they would be, but immediately ahead of him.

But there was no need for him to approach them further. He could not have found a better look-out station than the rock on which he stood. Nor was there any need for him to strain his eyes to find features in the landscape by which he could determine the position of the tunnel’s mouth. For there to the east, not a mile away, was that high line of trees that overhung the shelving masses of green-gravel, which, overgrown with every kind of vegetable life, descended step-like, to where among the valley rocks the small stream chattered, the stream which Flay had dammed, and which ran within a stone’s throw of what had been the exile’s cave.

With the dusky light of morning strengthening, the rain, through which it had been difficult to recognize any object, so solidly had it descended, began to lessen. There was no question of the rain wishing to rest itself; far less that the sky were running out of water. No, it was only that the clouds withdrew their claws into the black pads of the storm as a wild beast might draw in its talons for no other reason than to savour the contraction.

But still the rain came down. A body of water had been held in check, but there was no stopping the overflow. Titus no longer felt the rain. It was as though he had always lived in water.

He sat down on the rock, and like a fly in amber, was a prisoner of the morning. All about him on the flat head of the rock the rebounding rain threw up its short fierce fountains, and the hard slopes seethed with it. What was he doing here, soaked to the skin, far from his home? Why was he not frightened? Why was he not repentant and ashamed?

He sat there alone, his knees drawn up to his chin, his arms clasping his legs, how small a thing beneath those continents of gushing cloud.

He knew that it was no dream, but he had no power to override the dreamlike nature of it all. The reality was in himself – in his longing to experience the terror of what he already thought of as love.

He had heard of love: he had guessed at love: he had no knowledge of love but he knew all about it. What, if not love, was the cause of all this?

The head had been turned away. The limbs had floated. But it was not the beauty. It was the sin against the world of his fathers. It was the arrogance! It was the wicked swagger of it all! It was the effrontery! It was that Gormenghast meant nothing to this elastic switch of a girl!

But it was not only that she was so much the outward expression of all he meant by the word ‘Freedom’, or that the physical she and what she symbolized had become fused into one thing – it was not only this that intoxicated Titus – it was more than an abstract excitement that set his limbs trembling when he thought of her. He lusted to touch those floating limbs. She was romance to him. She was freedom. But she was more than these. She was a thing that breathed the same air and trod the same ground, though she might have been a faun or a tigress or a moth or a fish or a hawk or a martin. Had she been any of these she would have been no more dissimilar from him than she was now. He trembled at the thought of this disparity. It was not closeness or a sameness, or any affinity or hope of it, that thrilled him. It was the difference, the difference that mattered; the difference that cried aloud.

And still the rain came down, rapid and warm from the hot air it passed through. Titus’ eyes were on those trees that crowned the long hill in whose shadow was the cave. A few miles to the west, a huge blur showed where Gormenghast Mountain brooded. It was streaked with the vertical bars of the rain as though it were a beast in prison.

Titus got to his feet and made his way down the rock and all at once he felt frightened. Too much had happened to him in too short a time. It was the thought of the cave, and thence the thought of Flay and from the thought of Flay as he had first seen him in his cave then sprang the image of that faithful servant with a knife in his heart and the vile room where his Aunts lay side by side. And so the face of Steerpike swam across the lines of the rain, the terrible pattern of red and white, like the mask of some horror-dance, expanding and contracting, the shoulders very spare, very high, and for a hundred paces Titus was all but sick as he ran, and more than once he turned his head over his shoulder, and peered into the rain on either hand.

It was a long journey to the cave. Even had there been no deluge he would have made for it. He thought of it as a centre from which he could move in the wilderness and to which he could return.

But when he reached it he was hesitant to enter. The old stone mouth gaped emptily. It was no longer as he remembered it. It was a deserted place.

Above the cave the hill arose tier upon streaming tier of shelving rock, the broken ledges thick with ferns and shrubs, and even trees that leaned out fantastically into space.

Titus stared up to where the upper heights were lost in the clouds but his eyes were almost at once drawn back to the cave mouth.

His head was a little lowered and thrust forward from his shoulders in a characteristic position that suggested that he was ready to butt whatever enemy might appear. His nondescript hair was black with the rain and clung across his face in streaks and rats’-tails.

The melancholy look of the entrance had for a moment dulled his excitement at seeing the place again. He stood about a dozen feet away from the mouth, and could see through the streaks of the rain the dark, dry tunnel that led to the spacious interior.

As he stood there, hesitant, his head forwards, his rain-heavy clothes clinging to his body like seaweed, it could be seen how much the last few months had changed him. His eyes were still as clear as spring water, with that glitter of wilfulness, but a frown had made a permanent groove above them. A nest of faint and shallow lines had formed between his eyes. The boyish proportions of his face were clear evidence that he was no more than his seventeen years, but the sombre expression which had become ever more typical of him was more to be expected in a person twice his age.

This darkness in his face was by no means the outcome of sad or tragic experience. He had had his times of loneliness, of fear, of frustration, and of late, of horror, but equally like any other child, he had had his carefree golden days, his laughter and his excitements. He was no cowed and mournful child of misfortune. He was, if anything, too much alive. Too much aware. It was that that had forced him, in the end, to wear a mask. To scowl at his school-friends, while at the same moment his heart would be beating wildly, and his imagination racing. To scowl because, by scowling he was left alone. And when he was alone he was able to brood by the hour upon his lot, to whip himself into unhealthy and self-indulgent fits of rebellion against his heritage and against the ritual that so hampered him, and conversely he was able to sit undisturbed at his desk while his thoughts flickered to and fro across the realm of Gormenghast, marvelling, as he did so, at all that it was, and how it was his mammoth legacy.

His physical vitality had begun to find its outlet through solitary exploration of the castle and the surrounding country but it was the expeditions of his imagination, of his day dreams, that drew him further and further away from companionship.

He had been, virtually, an orphan. That his mother, deep in her heart, too deep for her own recognition, had a strange need for him, as a son of the Line, was of no value to him, for he knew nothing of it.

To be alone was nothing new to him. But to have defied his mother and his subjects as he had done this day was new, and this knowledge of his treachery made him feel, for the first time since he had escaped from the carver’s balcony, lonely in the extreme. Lonely, not for his home, but lonely in the knowledge of his inward isolation.

He took a step nearer the cave. The rain, surging over his head, had so glued-down his hair that his skull showed its shape like a boulder. His slightly heavy cheekbones, his blunt nose, his wide mouth were by no means handsome in themselves, but, held in by the oval outline of the face, they formed a kind of simple harmony that was original and pleasant to the eye.

But his habit of drawing down his eyebrows and scowling to hide his feelings was making him look more than his seventeen years, and it appeared that a young man rather than a boy was approaching the cave. Directly he had decided to wait no longer, and had passed under the rough natural archway he was startled at the freedom of his head and body from the battering of the rain. He had become so used to it that standing there in the dry dust beneath the vaulting roof of the tunnel, he felt a sudden buoyancy as though a burden had been lifted.

And now another wave of fatigue heaved up in him, and he longed for nothing so much as sleep in a dry place. The air was warm in the cave, for the rain, heavy as it was, had done nothing to relieve the heat. He longed to lie down, in his newfound lightness of body, and with nothing pouring down upon him from above, to sleep for ever.

Now that he was inside the cave, the melancholy atmosphere of desertion had lost its potency. Perhaps he was too tired and his emotions too blunted to be conscious any more of such subtleties.

When he came to the main, inner chamber with its ample space, its natural shelves, its luxuriating ferns he could hardly keep his eyes open. He hardly noticed that a number of small woodland animals had taken shelter and were lying upon the stone shelves, or squatting on the ferny floor, watching him with bright eyes.

Automatically he tore off his clinging clothes and stumbling to a dark corner of a cave lay down beneath the arched arms of a great fern and fell, incontinently, fast asleep.

SIXTY-SEVEN

As Titus slept the small animals were joined by a drenched fox and a few birds which perched on outcrops of rock near the doming roof. The boy was all but invisible where he lay beneath the overhang of the ferns. So deep was his sleep that the lightning that had begun to play across the sky and illumine the mouth of the cave had no effect upon him. The thunder, when it came, for all that it was louder than before was equally powerless to wake him. But it was drawing closer all the while, and the last of the bull-throated peals caused him to turn over in his sleep. By now it was afternoon but the air had darkened so that there was now less light than there was when Titus sat upon the ‘look-out’ rock.

The roaring and hissing of the rain was mounting steadily in volume and the noise of it upon the stones and the earth outside the mouth of the cave made all but the most violent of the thunder-peals inaudible. A hare with its ears laid along its back sat motionless with its eyes fixed upon the fox. The cave was filled with the noise of the elements, and yet there was a kind of silence there, a silence within the noise; the silence of stillness, for nothing moved.

When the next flash of lightning skinned the landscape, ripping its black hide off it so that there was no part of its anatomy that was not exposed to the floodlight, the reflections of that blinding illumination were fanned to and fro across the cavern walls so that the birds and beasts shone out like radiant carvings among the radiant ferns, and their shadows flew away across the walls and contracted again as though they were made of elastic: and Titus stirred beneath the archery of the giant hearts-tongue which shielded him from the momentary glare, so that he did not waken, and he could not see that at the mouth of the cave stood the ‘Thing’.

SIXTY-EIGHT

I

It was hunger that finally woke him. For a while as he lay with his eyes still closed he imagined himself to be in his room at the castle. Even when he opened his eyes and found on his right-hand side the rough wall of a rock and on his left a curtain of thick ferns he could not remember where he was. And then he became aware of a roaring sound and all at once he remembered how he had escaped from the castle and had made his way through an eternity of rain until he had come to a cave … to Flay’s cave … to this cave in which he was now lying.

It was then that he heard something move. It was not a loud sound and it was only audible above the thrumming of the storm because of its nearness.

His first thought was that it was one of the animals, perhaps a hare, and his hunger made him cautious as he rose upon his elbow and parted the long tongue of the ferns.

But what he saw was something that made him forget his hunger as though it had never been: that made him start backwards against the rock and sent the blood rushing to his head. For it was she! But not as he remembered her. It was she! But how different!

What had his memory done to her that he should now be seeing a creature so radically at variance with the image that had filled his mind?

There she sat, the Thing, balanced upon her heels, unbelievably small, the light of a fresh fire flickering over her as she swivelled a plucked bird on a spit above the flames. All about her were scattered the feathers of a magpie. Was this the lyric swallow? The fleet limbed hurdler?

Was this small creature who was now squatting there like a frog in the dust, and scratching her thigh with a dirty hand the size of a beech leaf, was this what had floated through his imagination in arrogant rhythms that spanned the universe?

Yes, it was she. The vision had contracted to the small and tangible proportions of the uncompromising urchin – the rarefaction had become clay.

And then she turned her head and Titus saw a face that shocked and thrilled him. All that was Gormenghast within him shuddered: shuddered and bridled up in a kind of anger. All that was rebellious in him cried with joy: with the joy of witnessing the heart of defiance. The confusion in his breast was absolute. His memory of her, of a proud and gracile creature, was now destroyed. It was no longer true. It had become trite, shallow and saccharine. Proud, she was and vibrant in all conscience. And graceful, perhaps in flight – but not now. There was nothing graceful in the way her body, uninhibited as an animal’s, crouched over the flames. This was something new and earthy.

Titus who had been in love with an arrogance and a swallow-like beauty of limb, so that he longed savagely and fearfully to clasp it was now aware of how there were these new dimensions, this dark reality of slaughtered birds, of scattered feathers, of an animal’s posture and above all of an ignorant originality that was redolent in her every gesture.

Her head had turned. He had seen her face. He was staring at an original. It was not that the face had any unique peculiarity of proportion or feature but that it was so blatant an index of all she was.

And yet it was not through any particular mobility of the features that it conveyed the independence of her life. The line of the mouth seldom altered, save when, in devouring the roasted bird, she bit with an undue ferocity. No: the face was more mask-like than expressive. It symbolized her way of life, not her immediate thoughts. It was the colour of a robin’s egg, and as closely freckled. Her hair was black and thick but she had hacked it away, a little above her shoulders. Her rounded neck was set upright upon her shoulders, and was so flexible that the liquid ease with which she turned it was reminiscent of a serpent.

It was through such motions as this, and the movements of her small shoulders and in the quickness of her fingers that she conveyed to Titus, more vividly than any expression of the features could ever do, the quality of her fanatical independence.

As he watched she tossed the bones of the magpie over her shoulder, and dipping her hand into the shadows at her side drew up, out of the darkness that she cast, the little carving of the raven. Turning it round and round in her hand she stared at it intently, but no vestige of an expression crossed her face. She placed it on the ground at her side, but the earth was uneven and it fell forwards upon its face. Without a moment’s hesitation she struck it with her clenched fist as a child might strike a toy in anger, and then, rising in a smooth and single action to her feet, she flicked it out of her way with her foot so that it lay upon its side against the wall.

Upon her feet she had become another thing. It was difficult to reconcile her with the creature who had squatted by the fire. She had become a sapling. Her face was turned to where the water streamed across the cave-mouth. For a few moments she stared expressionlessly at the rain-filled opening and then she moved towards it, but at her third step she stopped and as her body tautened her head gyrated on her neck. Her shoulders had not moved, but as her head swivelled, her eyes sped around the walls of the cave. Something had disturbed her.

Her slender body was poised for instantaneous action. Again her eyes flew across the walls piercing every shadow, and then for a moment they stayed their flight and Titus could see from his dark recess that she had seen his shirt where it lay, torn and sodden, on the floor of the cave.

She turned and with a tread both light and apprehensive approached the garment that lay in a pool of its own making. She sat down on her heels at its side, and again she was a frog, an almost repellent thing. Her eyes still moved about the cave, suspiciously. For a little while they lingered upon the giant ferns that, arching over Titus, hid him in their shadows.

Swivelling her head she stared backwards to the mouth of the cave, but only for a second; for the next moment she had taken the shirt, and held it up before her. A stream of rain water slid from its folds to the floor; she crushed the cloth together and then began to wring it out with a surprising strength and then spreading it out upon the ground she gazed at it, her expressionless head upon one side like a bird’s.

Titus, half numbed by his cramped position, was forced to lie back and rest his arms and straighten his leg. When he rose again upon his elbow she was no longer by the shirt but was standing at the cave-mouth. He knew that he could not stay where he was for ever. Sooner or later he must make his presence known – and he was about to get to his feet whatever the consequences when a glare of lightning showed him the Thing silhouetted against the brilliance, her backbone arched a little, her head thrown back to catch the stream of translucent rain that golden as the lightning itself was falling directly into her upturned mouth. For that split second of time she was something cut out of black paper, her head meticulous in its contour, the mouth wide open as though to drink the sky.

And then the dark came down, and he saw her appear out of the gloom and grow more visible as she approached the embers of the fire. It was evident that the shirt fascinated her, for she paused when she reached it, and stared at it now from one angle, now from another. Finally she took it up and pulling it over her head and thrusting her arms through the sleeves she stood, as though in a nightgown.

Titus, whose conception of the Thing had been flung from one side of his mind to the other, so that he hardly knew whether she was a frog, a snake, or a gazelle, was now powerless to assimilate the bizarre transfiguration that now stood within a few feet of him.

All he knew was that what he had so avidly sought was with him in the cave, had sheltered, like himself, from the storm and was now standing like a child, staring down at his shirt that fell in wet folds almost to the ankles.

And he forgot the wilderness within her. He forgot her ignorance. He forgot the raw blood and the speed. He only saw the stillness. He only saw the deceptive grace of her head as it hung forward. And seeing only this he pushed aside the ferns and rose to his feet.

II

The effect of his sudden appearance upon the Thing was so violent that Titus took a step backwards. Encumbered as she was with her new garment she leapt to the side of the cave where the floor was littered with loose stones, and all in a breath she had snatched at one and flung it with a vicious speed at Titus. He jerked his head to one side but the rough stone scraped his cheekbone and stung him badly, the blood running down his neck.

The pain and surprise which lit his face were in contrast to her inscrutable features. But it was his body that was still, and hers that moved.

She had swarmed up the rock face on her side of the cave and was leaping from ledge to ledge in an attempt to circumscribe the rough circle of wall beneath the dome. Titus had been between her and the entrance tunnel, and she was even now springing to a position from which she could swing herself over his head and drop on the stormward side – and so away.

But Titus, just in time to realize what she was doing, retreated further down the tunnel, so that he blocked the way for her escape. But he was still in a position to observe her. Thwarted in her plan, she sprang backwards to one of the higher ledges that she had already used, and there, twelve feet above him, her head among the ferns that hung downwards from the roof, she directed her gaze upon him, her freckled face expressionless, but her head moving continuously from side to side like an adder’s.

The effect of the blow on his cheek was to waken Titus out of his adulation. His temper flared out, and his fear of her lessened, not because she was not dangerous, but because she had resorted to so ordinary a means of warfare as the flinging of a stone. That was something he could understand.

Had she been able to pluck out rocks from the fern-cloaked roof she would even now be doing so, and hurling them down upon him. But even as he stared up at her with angry amazement, he felt an irrational longing for her, for what was she doing but defying, through him, the very core of Gormenghast? And it was this solitary insurrection that had first affected him with wonder and excitement. And while the stinging of his cheekbone angered him so that he wished to shake her, strike her and subdue her, at the same time the ease with which she had flitted from ledge to perilous ledge, the long wet garment slapping on the rocks as she sped, had made him lust for her small breasts and her slender limbs. He yearned to crush and master them. And yet he was angry.

How it was that she had been able to move at all across the rock face with his shirt impeding the freedom of her legs, let alone travel so speedily, he could not tell. The long sleeves flapped about her hands, but somehow or other she had been able to flick out her fingers from the folds, time after time, to grasp the cavern outcrops.

Now, as she crouched in the upper shadows, the damp cloth clinging to her and taking the form of her narrow limbs as though it had been sculptured, Titus, watching from below, cried out suddenly in a voice that seemed not his own.

‘I am your friend! Your friend! Can’t you understand? I am Lord Titus! Can’t you hear me?’

The face like a robin’s egg stared down at him from among the ferns, but there was no reply, save what sounded like a distant hissing.

‘Listen to me,’ he shouted again, more loudly than before, although his heart beat wildly and the words were difficult to form.

‘I have followed you. Don’t you see? … followed you … O, can’t you understand! I’ve run away …’ He took a step nearer the wall so that she was almost directly overhead …

‘And I’ve found you! So speak to me, for God’s sake, can’t you? Can’t you?’

He saw her mouth open above him, and at that moment she might have been a giant phantom, something too earthless to be held in by the worldly dimensions of this cave, something beyond measurement. And her open mouth gave him the answer to his question.

‘So speak,’ he shouted, ‘can’t you?’ And this is what she could not do, for the first sound which Titus heard her utter bore no relation to human speech. Nor did the tone of it convey that he was being answered even in a language of her own. It was a sound, quite solitary and detached. It had no concern with communication. It was inward and curiously pitched.

So divorced was it, this nameless utterance from the recognized sounds of the human throat, that it left Titus in no doubt that she was incapable of civilized speech and not only this but that she had not understood a word he had said.

What could he do to show her he was not her enemy, that he had no wish to avenge himself for the blood on his cheek? The thought of his wound gave him an idea, and he immediately lowered himself to his knees, never taking his eyes off her, and felt about him for a stone, her eyes following his every movement with the concentration of a cat. He could see the tenseness of her body vibrating through the shirt. When his fingers closed upon a stone he rose to his feet, stretched out his hand with the missile displayed upon his open palm. Surely she must realize that it was now in his power to fling the thing at her. For a moment or two he showed her the stone, and then tossed it backwards over his shoulder where it clanged on the solid rock of the wall behind him.

But no expression crossed the freckled face. She had seen everything but as far as Titus could tell it had meant nothing to her. But as he stared up he became conscious that she was preparing to change her position, or to make some kind of attempt at escape. For the hundredth part of a second her eyes had flicked away as though to remind herself of the surrounding footholds and the dangerous ledges, and then again her eyes switched from his face, but this time it was to something that lay behind Titus on the other side of the cave. Quick as thought he turned his head and saw what he had forgotten all about, the two wide natural chimneys through the rock, that, twelve feet above the entrance of the cave, led to the outer air.

So that was what she would try and do. He knew that she could not reach these rounded vents from where she was, but that if she could circle the cave, she might spring from the opposite side into the upper chimney, and so, out into the open, where, no doubt, she would be able to swarm across the moss-grey walls of streaming rain.

For the rain was still pounding. It was an inevitable background to all they did. They were no longer conscious of the steady roaring, of the shouts of the thunder or of the intermittent lightning. It had become normality.

And then, from where she crouched, the Thing rose in the air, and was all at once upon a broader ledge six feet to her right. There seemed to have been no muscular effort. It was flight. But once there, she tore at Titus’ shirt, hauling it over her head as though she were freeing herself of a sail, but somehow it had become entangled about her, during her leap, and, blinded for a moment by its folds across her face, she had, in a momentary panic, shifted her foothold and, misjudging the area of the ledge, she had overbalanced in the darkness and, with a muffled cry, had toppled from the height.

Involuntarily, as she had leapt to the broader shelf of rock, Titus had moved after her, as though drawn by the magic of her mobility, so that as she overbalanced he was within a few feet of where she would have struck the floor. But before she had fallen more than her own length he was stationed beneath her, his knees flexed, his hands raised, his fingers spread, his head thrown back.

But what he caught was so unsubstantial that he fell with it to the floor from the very shock of its lightness. His legs weakened beneath him with surprise, as though they had been cheated of the weight, however slight, that they were prepared to sustain. He had caught at a feather and it had struck him down. But his arms closed about the sprite that struggled in the cold wet linen, and Titus gripped her with an angry strength, the full weight of his body lying across hers, for they had rolled over one another and he had forced her under.

He could not see her face; it was closely shrouded in the wet linen, but the shape of it was there as her head tossed to and fro; it was like the head of sea-blurred marble long drowned beneath innumerable tides, save where a ridge of cloth was stretched across the forehead and took the shape of the temples. Titus, his body and his imagination fused in a throbbing lust, gripping her even more savagely than before with his right arm, tore at the shirt with his left until her face was free.

And it was so small that he began to cry. It was a robin’s egg, and his whole body weakened as the first wild virgin kiss that trembled on his lips for release died out. He laid his cheek along hers. She had ceased to move. His tears ran. He could feel her cheek grow wet with them. He raised his head. He had become far away and he knew that there would be no climax. He was sick with a kind of glory.

Her head was turned to one side upon the ground and her eyes were fixed upon something. Her body had become rigid. For a moment it had melted and was like a stream in his arms, but now it was frozen once more, like ice.

Slowly he turned his head, and there was Fuchsia, the rain water streaming from her to the ground, her drenched hair hanging snake-like over her face, and her face in her hand.

III

All of a sudden Titus knew that he was lying alone. The sleeve of the shirt was clenched in his hands but the Thing had gone.

He had forgotten there was any other world. A world in which he had a sister and a mother, in which he was an earl. He had forgotten Gormenghast.

And then he heard the shrill scream of derision which he was never to forget. He leapt to his feet and ran dizzily to the door of the cave. There he saw her standing in the downpour, knee deep in water, naked as the rain itself. The lightning was playing continuously now, lighting her as though she were a thing of fire herself, now flickering across her in a yellow half light.

As he stared a kind of ecstasy filled him. He had no sense of losing her – but only the blind and vaunting pride that he had held her in his arms; that naked creature that was now crying again, derisively in a language of her own.

It was finality. Titus knew in his bones that he could expect no more than this. His teeth had met in the dark core of life. He watched her almost with indifference – for it was all in the past – and even the present was nothing to the pride of his memory.

But when, out of the heart of the storm that searing flash of flame broke loose, and ripping a path across the dazzled floods, burned up the ‘Thing’ as though she had been a dry leaf in its path, and when Titus knew that the world was without her for ever, then something fled in him – something fled away – or was burned away even as she had been burned away. Something had died as though it had never been.

At seventeen he stepped into another country. It was his youth that had died away. His boyhood was something for remembrance only. He had become a man.

He turned and retraced his steps to where Fuchsia leaned against the wall. They could not speak.

How pitifully human she was. When he parted the long locks that straggled over her face and saw how defenceless she was, and when she pushed his hand away with the tired disillusion of a woman twice her age, then he realized his own strength.

At a time when he should have been broken by the scene he had just witnessed – by the death of his imagination – he found himself to be emptied of distress. He was himself. He was free for the first time. He had learned that there were other ways of life from the ways of his great home. He had completed an experience. He had emptied the bright goblet of romance; at a single gulp he had emptied it. The glass of it lay scattered on the floor. But with the beauty and the ugliness, the ice and the fire of it on his tongue and in his blood he could begin again.

The Thing was dead … dead … lightning had killed her, but had Fuchsia not been there he would have shouted with happiness for he had grown up.

IV

It was a long time before a word was exchanged. They sat exhausted side by side. Fuchsia had been persuaded to take off her long red dress, and Titus had wrung it out and it was now spread before the fire he had re-kindled. He longed to leave the cave. It was now so much dead rock. It was over and done with. But Fuchsia, sick with exhaustion, was in no state to start the return journey for an hour or more.

While he moved about the cave, Titus caught sight of some dead birds on a ledge of rock but his hunger had never returned.

Then he heard Fuchsia’s voice, very low and heavy.

‘I thought perhaps you’d be here. I am better now. We must go back. The flood is rising.’

Titus walked quickly to the door of the cave. It was true. They were in danger. Far from lessening the rain was heavier than ever with formidable massings of cloud.

He returned quickly to her side.

‘I told them you had lost your memory,’ she said. ‘I told them you had been like this before. You must say the same. We’ll part near the Castle. Come on.’

She got to her feet and pulled her damp red dress over her head. Her heart was raw with disappointment. Her fear had been for Titus’ safety and she had risked her neck for him, but her hopes had been that he would be proud of her. To struggle all that way, and to find him with … the ‘Thing’!