The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

She had heard the cats crying to her from the lawn sixty feet below her room as she lay in bed those three mornings after little Titus had been delivered, and lying there hugely in her candlelit room she had yearned to be with them, and beads of sweat had stood out upon her skin as in her agony she hankered for strength.

Had not her birds been with her, the frustration of her spirit must surely have done her more than the physical harm of getting up. The constantly changing population of her feathered children were the solace of those few days that seemed to her like months.

The white rook was the most constant in his re-appearances at the ivy-choked window, although up to the moment of her confinement he had been the most fickle of visitors.

In her deep voice she would hold converse with him for an hour at a time, referring to him as ‘Master Chalk’ or her ‘wicked one’. All her companions came. Sometimes the room was alive with song. Sometimes, feeling the need to exercise their pinions in the sky, a crowd of them would follow one another through the window of ivy, around which in the shadowy air as they waited their turn to scramble through, a dozen birds at a time would hover, fall and rise, rattling their many-coloured wings.

Thus it might be that from time to time she would be almost deserted. On one occasion only a stonechat and a bedraggled owl were with her.

Now she was strong enough to walk and watch them circling in the sky or to sit in her arbour at the end of the long lawn, and with the sunlight smouldering in the dark red hair and lying wanly over the area of her face and neck, watch the multiform and snow-white convolutions of her malkins.

Mrs Slagg had found herself becoming more and more dependent upon Keda’s help. She did not like to admit this to herself. There was something so still about Keda which she could not understand. Every now and again she made an effort to impress the girl with an authority which she did not possess, keeping on the alert to try and find some fault in her. This was so obvious and pathetic that it did not annoy the girl from the Mud Dwellings. She knew that an hour or so afterwards when Mrs Slagg felt that her position was once again established, the old nurse would run up to her, nearly in tears for some petty reason or other and bury her shaking head in Keda’s side.

Fond as Keda had become of Titus whom she had suckled and cared for tenderly, she had begun to realize that she must return to the Mud Dwellings. She had left them suddenly as a being who, feeling that Providence has called him, leaves the old life suddenly for the new. But now she realized that she had made a mistake and knew that she would be false to remain any longer in the castle than was necessary for the child. Not so much a mistake as a crime against her conscience, for it was with a very real reason that she had accompanied Mrs Slagg at such short notice.

Day after day from the window in the small room she had been given next to Mrs Slagg’s she gazed to where the high surrounding wall of the castle grounds hid from her sight the Dwellings that she had known since her infancy, and where during the last year her passions had been so cruelly stirred.

Her baby, whom she had buried so recently, had been the son of an old carver of matchless reputation among the Dwellers. The marriage had been forced upon her by the iron laws. Those sculptors who were unanimously classed as pre-eminent were, after the fiftieth year, allowed to choose a bride from among the damsels, and against their choice no shadow of objection could be raised. This immemorial custom had left Keda no option but to become the wife of this man, who, though a sour and uncouth old creature, burned with a vitality that defied his years.

From the morning until the light failed him he would be with his carvings. He would peer at it from all angles, or crouch grotesquely at some distance, his eyes narrowed in the sunlight. Then, stealing up upon it, it would seem that he was preparing to strike like a beast attacking its paralysed quarry; but on reaching the wooden form he would run his great hand over the surfaces as a lover will fondle the breasts of his mistress.

Within three months from the time when he and Keda had performed the marriage ceremony, standing alone upon the marriage hill, to the south of the Twisted Woods, while an ancient voice called to them through the half-lit distances, their hands joined, her feet upon his – within the three months that followed he had died. Suddenly letting the chisel and the hammer fall to the ground, his hands had clutched at his heart, his lips had drawn themselves away from his teeth, and he had crumpled up, his energy passing out of him and leaving only the old dry sack of his body. Keda was alone. She had not loved him but had admired him and the passion that consumed him as an artist. Once more she was free save that, on the day that he died, she felt within her the movement of another life than her own and now, nearly a year later, her first born was lying near the father, lifeless, in the dry earth.

The dreadful and premature age that descended so suddenly upon the faces of the Dwellers had not yet completely fallen over her features. It was as though it was so close upon her that the beauty of her face cried out against it, defying it, as a stag at bay turns upon the hounds with a pride of stance and a shaking of antlers.

A hectic beauty came upon the maidens of the Mud buildings a month or so before the ravages to which they were predestined attacked them. From infancy until this tragic interim of beauty their loveliness was of a strange innocence, a crystal like tranquillity that held no prescience of the future. When in this clearness the dark seeds began to root and smoke was mixed with the flame, then, as with Keda now, a thorny splendour struck outward from their features.

One warm afternoon, sitting in Mrs Slagg’s room with Titus at her breast, she turned to the old nurse and said quietly: ‘At the end of the month I shall return to my home. Titus is strong and well and he will be able to do without me.’

Nannie, whose head had been nodding a little, for she was always either dropping off for a nap or waking up from one, opened her eyes when Keda’s words had soaked into her brain. Then she sat up very suddenly and in a frightened voice called out: ‘No! no! you mustn’t go. You mustn’t! You mustn’t! Oh, Keda, you know how old I am.’ And she ran across the room to hold Keda’s arm. Then for the sake of her dignity: ‘I’ve told you not to call him Titus,’ she cried in a rush. ‘“Lord Titus” or “his Lordship,” is what you should say.’ And then, as though with relief, she fell back upon her trouble. ‘Oh, you can’t go! you can’t go!’

‘I must go,’ said Keda. ‘There are reasons why I must go.’

‘Why? why? why?’ Nannie cried out through the tears that were beginning to run jerkily down her foolish wrinkled face. ‘Why must you go?’ Then she stamped a tiny slippered foot that made very little noise. ‘You must answer me! You must! Why are you going away from me?’ Then, clenching her hands – ‘I’ll tell the Countess,’ she said, ‘I’ll tell her.’

Keda took no notice at all, but lifted Titus from one shoulder to another where his crying ceased.

‘He will be safe in your care,’ said Keda. ‘You must find another helper when he grows older for he will be too much for you.’

‘But they won’t be like you,’ shrilled Nannie Slagg, as though she were abusing Keda for her suitability. ‘They won’t be like you. They’ll bully me. Some of them bully old women when they are like me. Oh, my weak heart! my poor weak heart! what can I do?’

‘Come,’ said Keda. ‘It is not as difficult as that.’

‘It is. It is!’ cried Mrs Slagg, renewing her authority. ‘It’s worse than that, much worse. Everyone deserts me, because I’m old.’

‘You must find someone you can trust. I will try and help you,’ said Keda.

‘Will you? will you?’ cried Nannie, bringing her fingers up to her mouth and staring at Keda through the red rims of her eyelids. ‘Oh, will you? They make me do everything. Fuchsia’s mother leaves everything to me. She has hardly seen his little Lordship, has she? Has she?’

‘No,’ said Keda. ‘Not once. But he is happy.’

She lifted the infant away from her and laid him between the blankets in his cot, where after a spell of whimpering he sucked contentedly at his fist.

Nannie Slagg suddenly gripped Keda’s arm again. ‘You haven’t told me why; you haven’t told me why,’ she said. ‘I want to know why you’re going away from me. You never tell me anything. Never, I suppose I’m not worth telling. I suppose you think I don’t matter. Why don’t you tell me things? Oh, my poor heart, I suppose I’m too old to be told anything.’

‘I will tell you why I have to go,’ said Keda. ‘Sit down and listen.’ Nannie sat upon a low chair and clasped her wrinkled hands together. ‘Tell me everything,’ she said.

Why Keda broke the long silence that was so much a part of her nature she could not afterwards imagine, feeling only that in talking to one who would hardly understand her she was virtually talking to herself. There had come to her a sense of relief in unburdening her heart.

Keda sat upon Mrs Slagg’s bed near the wall. She sat very upright and her hands lay in her lap. For a moment or two she gazed out of the window at a cloud that had meandered lazily into view. Then she turned to the old woman.

‘When I returned with you on that first evening,’ said Keda quietly, ‘I was troubled. I was troubled and I am still unhappy because of love, I feared my future; and my past was sorrow, and in my present you had need of me and I had need of refuge, so I came.’ She paused.

‘Two men from our Mud Dwellings loved me. They loved me too much and too violently.’ Her eyes returned to Nannie Slagg, but they hardly saw her, nor noticed that her withered lips were pursed and her head tilted like a sparrow’s. She continued quietly.

‘My husband had died. He was a Bright Carver, and died struggling. I would sit down in the long shadows by our dwelling and watch a dryad’s head from day to day finding its hidden outline. To me it seemed he carved the child of leaves. He would not rest, but fight; and stare – and stare. Always he would stare, cutting the wood away to give his dryad breath. One evening when I felt my unborn moving within me my husband’s heart stopped beating and his weapons fell. I ran to him and knelt beside his body. His chisel lay in the dust. Above us his unfinished dryad gazed over the Twisted Woods, an acorn between its teeth.

‘They buried him, my rough husband, in the long sandy valley, the valley of graves where we are always buried. The two dark men who loved and love me carried his body for me and they lowered it into the sandy hollow that they had scooped. A hundred men were there and a hundred women; for he had been the rarest of the carvers. The sand was heaped upon him and there was only another dusty mound among the mounds of the Valley and all was very silent. They held me in their eyes while he was buried – the two who love me. And I could not think of him whom we were mourning. I could not think of death. Only of life. I could not think of stillness, only of movement. I could not understand the burying, nor that life could cease to be. It was all a dream. I was alive, alive, and two men watched me standing. They stood beyond the grave, on the other side. I saw only their shadows for I dared not lift up my eyes to show my gladness. But I knew that they were watching me and I knew that I was young. They were strong men, their faces still unbroken by the cruel bane we suffer. They were strong and young. While yet my husband lived I had not seen them. Though one brought white flowers from the Twisted Woods and one a dim stone from the Gormen Mountain, yet I saw nothing of them, for I knew temptation.

‘That was long ago. All is changed. My baby has been buried and my lovers are filled with hatred for one another. When you came for me I was in torment. From day to day their jealousy had grown until, to save the shedding of blood, I came to the castle. Oh, long ago with you, that dreadful night.’

She stopped and moved a lock of hair back from her forehead. She did not look at Mrs Slagg, who blinked her eyes as Keda paused and nodded her head wisely.

‘Where are they now? How many, many times have I dreamed of them! How many, many times have I, into my pillow, cried: “Rantel!” whom I first saw gathering the Root, his coarse hair in his eyes … cried “Braigon!” who stood brooding in the grove. Yet not with all of me am I in love. Too much of my own quietness is with me. I am not drowned with them in Love’s unkindness. I am unable to do aught but watch them, and fear them and the hunger in their eyes. The rapture that possessed me by the grave has passed. I am tired now, with a love I do not quite possess. Tired with the hatreds I have woken. Tired that I am the cause and have no power. My beauty will soon leave me, soon, soon, and peace will come. But ah! too soon.’

Keda raised her hand and wiped away the slow tears from her cheeks. ‘I must have love,’ she whispered.

Startled at her own outburst she stood up beside the bed rigidly. Then her eyes turned to the nurse. Keda had been so much alone in her reverie that it seemed natural to her to find that the old woman was asleep. She moved to the window. The afternoon light lay over the towers. In the straggling ivy beneath her a bird rustled. From far below a voice cried faintly to some unseen figure and stillness settled again. She breathed deeply, and leaned forward into the light. Her hands grasped the frame of the window on her either side and her eyes from wandering across the towers were drawn inexorably to that high encircling wall that hid from her the houses of her people, her childhood, and the substance of her passion.

FLAY BRINGS A MESSAGE

Autumn returned to Gormenghast like a dark spirit re-entering its stronghold. Its breath could be felt in forgotten corridors – Gormenghast had itself become autumn. Even the denizens of this fastness were its shadows.

The crumbling castle, looming among the mists, exhaled the season, and every cold stone breathed it out. The tortured trees by the dark lake burned and dripped, and their leaves snatched by the wind were whirled in wild circles through the towers. The clouds mouldered as they lay coiled, or shifted themselves uneasily upon the stone skyfield, sending up wreaths that drifted through the turrets and swarmed up the hidden walls.

From high in the Tower of Flints the owls inviolate in their stone galleries cried inhumanly, or falling into the windy darkness set sail on muffled courses for their hunting grounds. Fuchsia was less and less to be found in the castle. As, with every day that passed, the weather became increasingly menacing, so she seemed to protract the long walks that had now become her chief pleasure. She had captured anew the excitement that had once filled her when with Mrs Slagg, several years before, she had insisted on dragging her nurse on circuitous marches which had seemed to the old lady both hazardous and unnecessary. But Fuchsia neither needed nor wanted a companion now.

Revisiting those wilder parts of the environs that she had almost forgotten, she experienced both exaltation and loneliness. This mixture of the sweet and bitter became necessary to her, as her attic had been necessary. She watched with frowning eyes the colour changing on the trees and loaded her pockets with long golden leaves and fire-coloured ferns and, indeed, with every kind of object which she found among the wood and rocky places. Her room became filled with stones of curious shapes that had appealed to her, fungi resembling hands or plates; queer-shaped flints and contorted branches; and Mrs Slagg, knowing it would be fruitless to reproach her, gazed each evening, with her fingers clutching her lower lip, at Fuchsia emptying her pockets of fresh treasures and at the ever-growing hoard that had begun to make the room a tortuous place to move about in.

Among Fuchsia’s hieroglyphics on the wall great leaves had begun to take residence, pinned or pasted between her drawings, and areas of the floor were piled with trophies.

‘Haven’t you got enough, dear?’ said Nannie, as Fuchsia entered late one evening and deposited a moss-covered boulder on her bed. Tiny fronds of fern emerged here and there from the moss, and white flowers the size of gnats.

Fuchsia had not heard Nannie’s question, so the little old creature advanced to the side of the bed.

‘You’ve got enough now, haven’t you, my caution? Oh, yes, yes, I think so. Quite enough for your room now, dear. How dirty you are, my … Oh, my poor heart, how unappetising you are.’

Fuchsia tossed back her dripping hair from her eyes and neck, so that it hung in a heavy clump like black seaweed over the collar of her cape. Then after undoing a button at her throat with a desperate struggle, and letting the corded velvet fall to her feet, she pushed it under her bed with her foot. Then she seemed to see Mrs Slagg for the first time. Bending forward she kissed her savagely on the forehead and the rain dripped from her on to the nurse’s clothes.

‘Oh, you dirty thoughtless thing! you naughty nuisance. Oh, my poor heart, how could you?’ said Mrs Slagg, suddenly losing her temper and stamping her foot. ‘All over my black satin, you dirty thing. You nasty wet thing. Oh, my poor dress! Why can’t you stay in when the weather is muddy and blowy? You always were unkind to me! Always, always.’

‘That’s not true,’ said Fuchsia, clenching her hands. The poor old nurse began to cry.

‘Well, is it, is it?’ said Fuchsia.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know at all,’ said Nannie. ‘Everyone’s unkind to me; how should I know?’

‘Then I’m going away’, said Fuchsia.

Nannie gulped and jerked her head up. ‘Going away?’ she cried in a querulous voice. ‘No, no! you mustn’t go away.’ And then with an inquisitive look struggling with the fear in her eyes, ‘Where to?’ she said. ‘Where could you go to, dear?’

‘I’d go far away from here – to another kind of land’, said Fuchsia, ‘where people who didn’t know that I was the Lady Fuchsia would be surprised when I told them that I was; and they would treat me better and be more polite and do some homage sometimes. But I wouldn’t stop bringing home my leaves and shining pebbles and fungi from the woods, whatever they thought’.

‘You’d go away from me?’ said Nannie in such a melancholy voice that Fuchsia held her in her strong arms.

‘Don’t cry,’ she said. ‘It isn’t any good.’

Nannie turned her eyes up again and this time they were filled with the love she felt for her ‘child’. But even in the weakness of her compassion she felt that she should preserve her station and repeated: ‘Must you go into the dirty water, my own one, and tear your clothes just like you’ve always done, caution dear? Aren’t you big enough to go out only on nice days?’

‘I like the autumn weather,’ said Fuchsia very slowly. ‘So that’s why I go out to look at it.’

‘Can’t you see it from out of your window, precious?’ said Mrs Slagg. ‘Then you would keep warm at the same time, though what there is to stare at I don’t know; but there, I’m only a silly old thing.’

‘I know what I want to do, so don’t you think about it any more’, said Fuchsia. ‘I’m finding things out.’

‘You’re a wilful thing,’ said Mrs Slagg a little peevishly, ‘but I know much more than you think about all sorts of things. I do; yes, I do; but I’ll get you your tea at once. And you can have it by the fire, and I will bring the little boy in because he ought to be awake by now. Oh dear! there is so much to do. Oh, my weak heart, I wonder how long I will last.’

Her eyes, following Fuchsia’s, turned to the boulder around which a wet mark was spreading on the patchwork quilt.

‘You’re the dirtiest terror in the world,’ she said. ‘What’s that stone for? What is it for, dear? What’s the use of it? You never listen. Never. Nor grow any older like I told you to. There’s no one to help me now. Keda’s gone, and I do everything.’ Mrs Slagg wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘Change your wet clothes or I won’t bring you anything and your dirty wet shoes at once!’ … Mrs Slagg fumbled at the door handle, opened the door and shuffled away down the corridor, one hand clasped at her chest.

Fuchsia removed her shoes without untying the laces by treading on the heels and working her feet loose. Mrs Slagg had made up a glowing fire and Fuchsia, pulling off her dress, rubbed her wet hair with it. Then, wrapping a warm blanket about her, she fell back into a low armchair that had been drawn up to the fire and, sinking into its familiar softness, gazed absently at the leaping flames with half-closed eyes.

When Mrs Slagg returned with a tray of tea and toasted scones, currant bread, butter and eggs and a jar of honey, she found Fuchsia asleep.

Placing the tray on the hearth she tip-toed to the door and disappeared, to return within the minute with Titus in her arms. He was dressed in a white garment which accentuated what warmth of colour there was in his face. At birth he had been practically bald, but now, though it was only two months later, he was blessed with a mop of hair as dark as his sister’s.

Mrs Slagg sat down with Titus in a chair opposite Fuchsia and peered weakly at the girl, wondering whether to wake her at once or whether to let her finish her sleep and then to make another pot of tea. ‘But the scones will be cold, too’, she said to herself. ‘Oh, how tiresome she is.’ But her problem was solved by a loud single knuckle-rap at the door, which caused her to start violently and clutch Titus to her shoulder, and Fuchsia to wake from her doze.

‘Who is it?’ cried Mrs Slagg. ‘Who is it?’

‘Flay,’ said the voice of Lord Sepulchrave’s servant. The door opened a few inches and a bony face looked in from near the top of the door.

‘Well?’ said Nannie, jerking her head about. ‘Well? Well? What is it?’

Fuchsia turned her head and her eyes moved up the fissure between the door and the wall until they came at last to settle on the cadaverous features.

‘Why don’t you come inside?’ she said.

‘No invitation,’ said Flay flatly. He came forward, his knees cracking at each step. His eyes shifted from Fuchsia to Mrs Slagg and from Mrs Slagg to Titus, and then to the loaded tea-tray by the fire, on which they lingered before they returned to Fuchsia wrapped in her blanket. When he saw she was still looking at him his right hand raised itself like a bunch of blunt talons and began to scratch at a prominent lump of bone at the back of his head.

‘Message from his Lordship, my Lady,’ he said; and then his eyes returned to the tea-tray.

‘Does he want me?’ said Fuchsia.

‘Lord Titus,’ said Flay, his eyes retaining upon their lenses the pot of tea, toasted scones, currant bread, butter, eggs and a jar of honey.

‘He wants little Titus, did you say?’ cried Mrs Slagg, trying to make her feet reach the ground.

Flay gave a mechanical nod. ‘Got to meet me, quadrangle-arch, half-past eight,’ added Flay, wiping his hands on his clothes.

‘He wants my little Lordship, whispered the old nurse to Fuchsia, who although her first antipathy to her brother had worn off had not acquired the same excited devotion which Nannie lavished upon the infant. ‘He wants my little wonder.’

‘Why not?’ said Flay and then relapsed into his habitual silence after adding: ‘Nine o’clock – library.’

‘Oh, my poor heart, he ought to be in bed by then,’ gulped the nurse; and clutched Titus even closer to her.

Fuchsia had been looking at the tea-tray as well.

‘Flay,’ she said, ‘do you want to eat anything?’

By way of reply the spidery servant made his way at once across the room to a chair which he had kept in the corner of his eye, and returned with it to seat himself between the two. Then he took out a tarnished watch, scowled at it as though it were his mortal enemy, and returned it to a secret recess among his greasy black clothes.

Nannie edged herself out of the chair and found a cushion for Titus to lie on in front of the fire, and then began to pour out the tea. Another cup was found for Flay, and then for a long while the three of them sat silently munching or sipping, and reaching down to the floor for whatever they needed but making no effort to look after each other. The firelight danced in the room, and the warmth was welcome, for outside or in the corridors the wet earthy draughts of the season struck to the marrow.

Flay took out his watch again and, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, arose to his feet. As he did so, he upset a plate at the side of his chair and it fell and broke on the floor. At the sound he started and clutched the back of the chair and his hand shook. Titus screwed his face up at the noise as though about to cry, but changed his mind.

Fuchsia was surprised at so obvious a sign of agitation in Flay whom she had known since her childhood and on whom she had never before noticed any sign of nerves.

‘Why are you shaking?’ she said. ‘You never used to shake.’

Flay pulled himself together and then sat down suddenly again, and turned his expressionless face to Fuchsia. ‘It’s the night,’ he said tonelessly. ‘No sleep, Lady Fuchsia.’ And he gave a ghastly mirthless laugh like something rusty being scraped by a knife.

Suddenly he had regained his feet again and was standing by the door. He opened it very gradually and peered through the aperture before he began to disappear inch by inch, and the door clicked finally upon him.

‘Nine o’clock,’ said Nannie tremulously. ‘What does your father want with my little Lordship at nine o’clock? Oh, my poor heart, what does he want him for?’

But Fuchsia, tired out from her long day among the dripping woods was once more fast asleep, the red firelight flickering to and fro across her lolling head.

THE LIBRARY

The library of Gormenghast was situated in the castle’s Eastern wing which protruded like a narrow peninsula for a distance out of all proportion to the grey hinterland of buildings from which it grew. It was from about midway along this attenuated East wing that the Tower of Flints arose in scarred and lofty sovereignty over all the towers of Gormenghast.

At one time this Tower had formed the termination of the Eastern wing, but succeeding generations had added to it. On its further side the additions had begun a tradition and had created the precedent for Experiment, for many an ancestor of Lord Groan had given way to an architectural whim and made an incongruous addition. Some of these additions had not even continued the Easterly direction in which the original wing had started, for at several points the buildings veered off into curves or shot out at right angles before returning to continue the main trend of stone.

Most of these buildings had about them the rough-hewn and oppressive weight of masonry that characterized the main volume of Gormenghast, although they varied considerably in every other way, one having at its summit an enormous stone carving of a lion’s head, which held between its jaws the limp corpse of a man on whose body was chiselled the words: ‘He was an enemy of Groan’; alongside this structure was a rectangular area of some length entirely filled with pillars set so closely together that it was difficult for a man to squeeze between them. Over them, at the height of about forty feet, was a perfectly flat roof of stone slabs blanketed with ivy. This structure could never have served any practical purpose, the closely packed forest of pillars with which it was entirely filled being of service only as an excellent place in which to enjoy a fantastic game of hide-and-seek.

There were many examples of an eccentric notion translated into architecture in the spine of buildings that spread eastwards over the undulating ground between the heavy walls of conifer, but for the most part they were built for some especial purpose, as a pavilion for entertainments, or as an observatory, or a museum. Some in the form of halls with galleries round three sides had been intended for concerts or dancing. One had obviously been an aviary, for though derelict, the branches that had long ago been fastened across the high central hall of the building were still hanging by rusty chains, and about the floor were strewn the broken remains of drinking cups for the birds; wire netting, red with rust, straggled across the floor among rank weeds that had taken root.

Except for the library, the Eastern wing, from the Tower of Flints onwards, was now but a procession of forgotten and desolate relics, an Ichabod of masonry that filed silently along an avenue of dreary pine whose needles hid the sky.

The library stood between a building with a grey dome and one with a façade that had once been plastered. Most of the plaster had fallen away, but scraps had remained scattered over the surface, sticking to the stones. Patches of faded colour showed that a fresco had once covered the entire face of the building. Neither doors nor windows broke the stone surface. On one of the larger pieces of plaster that had braved a hundred storms and still clung to the stone, it was possible to make out the lower part of a face, but nothing else was recognizable among the fragments.

The library, though a lower building than these two to which it was joined at either end, was of a far greater length than either. The track that ran alongside the Eastern wing, now in the forest and now within a few feet of the kaleidoscopic walls shadowed by the branches of the evergreens, ended as it curved suddenly inwards towards the carved door. Here it ceased among the nettles at the top of the three deep steps that led down to the less imposing of the two entrances to the library, but the one through which Lord Sepulchrave always entered his realm. It was not possible for him to visit his library as often as he wished, for the calls made upon him by the endless ceremonials which were his exacting duty to perform robbed him for many hours each day of his only pleasure – books.

Despite his duties, it was Lord Sepulchrave’s habit to resort each evening, however late the hour, to his retreat and to remain there until the small hours of the following day.

The evening on which he sent Flay to have Titus brought to him found Lord Sepulchrave free at seven in the evening, and sitting in the corner of his library, sunk in a deep reverie.

The room was lit by a chandelier whose light, unable to reach the extremities of the room lit only the spines of those volumes on the central shelves of the long walls. A stone gallery ran round the library at about fifteen feet above the floor, and the books that lined the walls of the main hall fifteen feet below were continued upon the high shelves of the gallery.

In the middle of the room, immediately under the light, stood a long table. It was carved from a single piece of the blackest marble, which reflected upon its surface three of the rarest volumes in his Lordship’s collection.

Upon his knees, drawn up together, was balanced a book of his grandfather’s essays, but it had remained unopened. His arms lay limply at his side, and his head rested against the velvet of the chair back. He was dressed in the grey habit which it was his custom to wear in the library. From full sleeves his sensitive hands emerged with the shadowy transparency of alabaster. For an hour he had remained thus; the deepest melancholy manifested itself in every line of his body.

The library appeared to spread outwards from him as from a core. His dejection infected the air about him and diffused its illness upon every side. All things in the long room absorbed his melancholia. The shadowing galleries brooded with slow anguish; the books receding into the deep corners, tier upon tier, seemed each a separate tragic note in a monumental fugue of volumes.

It was only on those occasions now, when the ritual of Gormenghast dictated, that he saw the Countess. They had never found in each other’s company a sympathy of mind or body, and their marriage, necessary as it was from the lineal standpoint, had never been happy. In spite of his intellect, which he knew to be far and away above hers, he felt and was suspicious of the heavy, forceful vitality of his wife, not so much a physical vitality as a blind passion for aspects of life in which he could find no cause for interest. Their love had been passionless, and save for the knowledge that a male heir to the house of Groan was imperative, they would have gladly forgone their embarrassing yet fertile union. During her pregnancy he had only seen her at long intervals. No doubt the unsatisfactory marriage had added to his native depression, but compared with the dull forest of his inherent melancholy it was but a tree from a foreign region that had been transplanted and absorbed.

It was never this estrangement that grieved him, nor anything tangible but a constant and indigenous sorrow.

Of companions with whom he could talk upon the level of his own thought there were few, and of these only one gave him any satisfaction, the Poet. On occasion he would visit that long, wedge-headed man and find in the abstract language with which they communicated their dizzy stratas of conjecture a temporary stir of interest. But in the Poet there was an element of the idealist, a certain enthusiasm which was a source of irritation to Lord Sepulchrave, so that they met only at long intervals.

The many duties, which to another might have become irksome and appeared fatuous, were to his Lordship a relief and a relative escape from himself. He knew that he was past all hope a victim of chronic melancholia, and were he to have had each day to himself he would have had to resort constantly to those drugs that even now were undermining his constitution.

This evening, as he sat silently in the velvet-backed chair, his mind had turned to many subjects like a black craft, that though it steers through many waters has always beneath it a deathly image reflected among the waves. Philosophers and the poetry of Death – the meaning of the stars and the nature of these dreams that haunted him when in those chloral hours before the dawn the laudanum built for him within his skull a tallow coloured world of ghastly beauty.

He had brooded long and was about to take a candle that stood ready on a table at his elbow and search for a book more in keeping with his mood than were the essays on his knee, when he felt the presence of another thought that had been tempering his former cogitations, but which now stood boldly in his mind. It had begun to make itself felt as something that clouded and disturbed the clarity of his reflections when he had pondered on the purpose and significance of tradition and ancestry, and now with the thought detached from its erudite encumbrances he watched it advance across his brain and appear naked, as when he had first seen his son, Titus.

His depression did not lift; it only moved a little to one side. He rose to his feet and, moving without a sound, replaced the book in a shelf of essays. He returned as silently to the table.

‘Where are you?’ he said.

Flay appeared at once from the darkness of one of the corners.

‘What hour is it?’

Flay brought out his heavy watch. ‘Eight, your Lordship.’

Lord Sepulchrave, with his head hanging forward on his breast, walked up and down the length of the library for a few minutes. Flay watched him as he moved, until his master stopped opposite his servant.

‘I wish to have my son brought to me by his nurse. I shall expect them at nine. You will conduct them through the woods. You may go.’

Flay turned and, accompanied by the reports of his knee-joints, disappeared into the shadows of the room. Pulling back the curtain from before the door at the far end, he unlatched the heavy oak and climbed the three steps into the night. Above him the great branches of the pines rubbed against one another and grated in his ears. The sky was overcast and had he not made this same journey through the darkness a thousand times he must surely have lost himself in the night. To his right he could sense the spine of the Western Wing although he could not see it. He walked on and in his mind he said: ‘Why now? Had the summer to see his son in. Thought he’d forgotten him. Should have seen the child long ago. What’s the game? Heir to Gormenghast to come through woods on cold night. Wrong. Dangerous. Catch a cold. But Lordship knows. He knows, I am only his servant. First servant. No one else that. Chose me; ME, Flay, because he trusts me. Well may he trust me. Ha, ha, ha! And why? they wonder. Ha ha! Silent as a corpse. That’s why.’

As he neared the Tower of Flints the trees thinned and a few stars appeared in the blackness above him. By the time the body of the castle was reached only half the sky was hidden by the night clouds and he could make out vague shapes in the darkness. Suddenly he stopped, his heart attacking his ribs, and drew up his shoulders to his ears; but a moment later he realized that the vague obese patch of blackness a few feet from him was a shrub of clipped box and not that figure of evil who now obsessed him.

He straddled onwards, and came at last to an entrance beneath the sweep of an archway. Why he did not enter it at once and climb the stairs to find Nannie Slagg he did not know. That he could see through the archway and across the darkness of the servants’ quadrangle a dim light in a high window of one of the kitchen buildings was in itself nothing unusual. There was generally a light showing somewhere in the kitchen quarters although most of the staff would have resorted to their underground dormitories by that time of night. An apprentice given some fatigue duty to perform after his normal hours might be scrubbing a floor, or an especial dish for the morrow might necessitate a few cooks working late into the evening.

Tonight, however, a dull greenish light from a small window held his eye, and before he realized that he was even intrigued, he found that his feet had forestalled his brain and were carrying him across the quadrangle.

On his way across he stopped twice to tell himself that it was a pointless excursion and that he was in any case feeling extremely cold; but he went on nevertheless with an illogical and inquisitive itch overriding his better judgement.

He could not tell which room it was that gave forth this square, greenish, glow. There was something unhealthy about its colour. No one was about in the quadrangle; there were no other footsteps but his own. The window was too high for even him to peer into, although he could easily reach it with his hands. Once again he said to himself: ‘What are you doing? Wasting your time. Told by Lordship to fetch Nannie Slagg and child. Why are you here? What are you doing?’

But again his thin body had anticipated him and he had begun to roll away an empty cask from against the cloister walls.

In the darkness it was no easy matter to steer the barrel and to keep it balanced upon the tilted rim as he rolled it towards the square of light; but he managed with very little sound to bring it eventually immediately under the window.

He straightened his back and turned his face up to the light that escaped like a kind of gas and hovered about the window in the haze of the autumn night.

He had lifted his right foot onto the barrel, but realized that to raise himself into the centre of the window would cause his face to catch the light from the room. Why, he did not know, but the curiosity which he had felt beneath the low arch was now so intense, that after lowering his foot and pulling the barrel to the right of the small window, he scrambled upon it with a haste that startled him. His arms were outstretched on either side along the viewless walls and his fingers, spread out like the ribs of a bone fan, began to sweat as he moved his head gradually to the left. He could already see through the glass (in spite of a sweep of old cobwebs, like a fly-filled hammock) the smooth stone walls of the room beneath him; but he had still to move his head further into the light in order to obtain a clear view of the floor of the room.

The light that seeped in a dull haze through the window dragged out as from a black canvas the main bone formation of Mr Flay’s head, leaving the eye sockets, the hair, an area beneath the nose and lower lip, and everything that lay beneath the chin, as part of the night itself. It was a mask that hung in the darkness.

Mr Flay moved it upwards inch by inch until he saw what he had by some prophetic qualm known all along that it was his destiny to see. In the room below him the air was filled with an intensification of that ghastly green which he had noticed from across the quadrangle. The lamp that hung from the centre of the room by a chain was enclosed in a bowl of lime-green glass. The ghoulish light which it spewed forth gave to every object in the room a theatrical significance.

But Flay had no eyes for the few scattered objects in the nightmare below him, but only for an enormous and sinister presence, the sight of which had caused him to sicken and sway upon the cask and to remove his head from the window while he cooled his brow on the cold stones of the wall.

IN A LIME-GREEN LIGHT

Even in his nausea he could not help wondering what it was that Abiatha Swelter was doing. He raised his head from the wall and brought it by degrees to its former position.

This time Flay was surprised to find that the room appeared empty, but, with a start at its dreadful nearness, he found that the chef was sitting on a bench against the wall and immediately below him. It was not easy to see him clearly through the filth and cobwebs of the window, but the great pasty dome of his head surrounded by the lamp-tinted whiteness of his swollen clothes, seemed, when Flay located them, almost at arm’s length. This proximity injected into Mr Flay’s bones a sensation of exquisite horror. He stood fascinated at the pulpy baldness of the chef’s cranium and as he stared a portion of its pale plush contracted in a spasm, dislodging an October fly. Nothing else moved. Mr Flay’s eyes shifted for a moment and he saw a grindstone against the wall opposite. Beside it was a wooden stool. To his right, he saw two boxes placed about four feet apart. On either side of these wooden boxes two chalk lines ran roughly parallel to each other, and passed laterally along the room below Mr Flay. Nearing the left hand wall of the room they turned to the right, keeping the same space between them, but in their new direction they could not proceed for more than a few feet before being obstructed by the wall. At this point something had been written between them in chalk, and an arrow pointed toward the wall. The writing was hard to read, but after a moment Flay deciphered it as: ‘To the Ninth stairs.’ This reading of the chalk came as a shock to Mr Flay, if only for the reason that the Ninth stairs were those by which Lord Sepulchrave’s bedroom was reached from the floor below. His eyes returned swiftly to the rough globe of a head beneath him, but there was still no movement except perhaps the slight vibration of the chef’s breathing.

Flay turned his eyes again to the right where the two boxes were standing, and he now realized that they represented either a door or an entrance of some sort from which led this chalked passageway before it turned to the right in the direction of the Ninth stairs. But it was upon a long sack which had at first failed to attract his attention that he now focused his eyes. It lay as though curled up immediately between and a little in advance of the two boxes. As he scrutinized it, something terrified him, something nameless, and which he had not yet had time to comprehend, but something from which he recoiled.

A movement below him plucked his eyes from the sack and a huge shape arose. It moved across the room, the whiteness of the enveloping clothes tinctured by the lime-green lamp above. It sat beside the grindstone. It held in its hand what seemed, in proportion to its bulk, a small weapon, but which was in reality a two-handed cleaver.

Swelter’s feet began to move the treadles of the grindstone, and it began to spin in its circles. He spat upon it rapidly three or four times in succession, and with a quick movement slid the already razor-keen edge of the cleaver across the whirr of the stone. Doubling himself over the grindstone he peered at the shivering edge of the blade, and every now and then lifted it to his ear as though to listen for a thin and singing note to take flight from the unspeakable sharpness of the steel.

Then again he bent to his task and continued whetting the blade for several minutes before listening once more to the invisible edge. Flay began to lose contact with the reality of what he saw and his brain to drift into a dream, when he found that the chef was drawing himself upwards and travelling to that part of the wall where the chalk lines ended and where the arrow pointed to the Ninth staircase. Then he removed his shoes, and lifted his face for the first time so that Mr Flay could see the expression that seeped from it. His eyes were metallic and murderous, but the mouth hung open in a wide, fatuous smile.

Then followed what appeared to Flay an extraordinary dance, a grotesque ritual of the legs, and it was some time before he realized, as the cook advanced by slow, elaborate steps between the chalk lines, that he was practising tip-toeing with absolute silence. ‘What’s he practising that for?’ thought Flay, watching the intense and painful concentration with which Swelter moved forward step by step, the cleaver shining in his right hand. Flay glanced again at the chalk arrow. ‘He’s come from the ninth staircase: he’s turned left down the worn passage. There’s no rooms right or left in the worn passage. I ought to know. He’s approaching the Room.’ In the darkness Flay turned as white as death.

The two boxes could represent only one thing – the door-posts of Lord Sepulchrave’s bedroom. And the sack …

He watched the chef approach the symbol of himself asleep outside his master’s room, curled up as he always was. By now the tardiness of the approach was unendingly slow. The feet in their thick soles would descend an inch at a time, and as they touched the ground the figure cocked his head of lard upon one side and his eyes rolled upwards as he listened for his own footfall. When within three feet of the sack the chef raised the cleaver in both hands and with his legs wide apart to give him a broader area of balance, edged his feet forward, one after the other, in little, noiseless shiftings. He had now judged the distance between himself and the sleeping emblem of his hate. Flay shut his eyes as he saw the cleaver rise in the air above the cumulous shoulder and the steel flared in the green light.

When he opened his eyes again, Abiatha Swelter was no longer by the sack, which appeared to be exactly as he had last seen it. He was at the chalk arrow again and was creeping forward as before. The horror that had filled Flay was aggravated by a question that had entered his mind. How did Swelter know that he slept with his chin at his knees? How did Swelter know his head always pointed to the east? Had he been observed during his sleeping hours? Flay pressed his face to the window for the last time. The dreadful repetition of the same murderous tip-toeing journey towards the sack, struck such a blow at the very centre of his nervous control that his knees gave way and he sank to his haunches on the barrel and wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. Suddenly his only thought was of escape – of escape from a region of the castle that could house such a friend; to escape from that window of green light; and, scrambling from the cask, he stumbled into the mist-filled darkness and, never turning his head again to the scene of horror, made tracks for the archway from whence he had deviated so portentously from his course.

Once within the building he made directly for the main stairs and with gigantic paces climbed like a mantis to the floor in which Nannie Slagg’s room was situated. It was some time before he came to her door, for the west wing in which she lived was on the opposite side of the building and necessitated a détour through many halls and corridors.

She was not in her room, and so he went at once to Lady Fuchsia’s, where, as he had surmised, he found her sitting by the fire with little of the deference which he felt she should display in front of his Lordship’s daughter.

It was when he had knocked at the door of the room with the knuckly single rap, that he had wakened Fuchsia from her sleep and startled the old nurse. Before he had knocked on the panels he had stood several minutes recovering his composure as best he could. In his mind emerged the picture of himself striking Swelter across the face with the chain, long ago as it seemed to him now in the Cool room. For a moment he started sweating again and he wiped his hands down his sides before he entered. His throat felt very dry, and even before noticing Lady Fuchsia and the nurse he had seen the tray. That was what he wanted. Something to drink.

He left the room with a steadier step and, saying that he would await Mrs Slagg and Titus under the archway and escort her to the library, he left them.

REINTRODUCING THE TWINS

At the same moment that Flay was leaving Fuchsia’s bedroom, Steerpike was pushing back his chair from the supper table at the Prunesquallors’, where he had enjoyed, along with the Doctor and his sister Irma, a very tender chicken, a salad and a flask of red wine; and now, the black coffee awaiting them on a little table by the fire, they were preparing to take up warmer and more permanent stations. Steerpike was the first to rise and he sidled around the table in time to remove the chair from behind Miss Prunesquallor and to assist her to her feet. She was perfectly able to take care of herself, in fact she had been doing it for years, but she leaned on his arm as she slowly assumed the vertical.

She was swathed to her ankles in maroon-coloured lace. That her gowns should cling to her as though they were an extra layer of skin was to her a salient point, in spite of the fact that of all people it was for her to hide those angular outcrops of bone with which Nature had endowed her and which in the case of the majority of women are modified by a considerate layer of fat.

Her hair was drawn back from her brow with an even finer regard for symmetry than on the night when Steerpike had first seen her, and the knot of grey twine which formed a culmination as hard as a boulder, a long way down the back of her neck, had not a single hair out of place.

The Doctor had himself noticed that she was spending more and more time upon her toilette, although it had at all times proved one of her most absorbing occupations; a paradox to the Doctor’s mind which delighted him, for his sister was, even in his fraternal eyes, cruelly laden with the family features. As she approached her chair to the left of the fire, Steerpike removed his hand from her elbow, and, shifting back the Doctor’s chair with his foot while Prunesquallor was drawing the blinds, pulled forward the sofa into a more favourable position in front of the fire.

‘They don’t meet – I said “They don’t meet”,’ said Irma Prunesquallor, pouring out the coffee.

How she could see anything at all, let alone whether they met or not, through her dark glasses was a mystery.

Dr Prunesquallor, already on his way back to his chair, on the padded arms of which his coffee was balancing, stopped and folded his hands at his chin.

‘To what are you alluding, my dear? Are you speaking of a brace of spirits? ha ha ha! – twin souls searching for consummation, each in the other? Ha ha! ha ha ha! Or are you making reference to matters more terrestrial? Enlighten me, my love.’

‘Nonsense,’ said his sister. ‘Look at the curtains, I said: “Look at the curtains”.’

Dr Prunesquallor swung about.

‘To me,’ he said, ‘they look exactly like curtains. In fact, they are curtains. Both of them. A curtain on the left, my love, and a curtain on the right. Ha ha! I’m absolutely certain they are!’

Irma, hoping that Steerpike was looking at her, laid down her coffee-cup.

‘What happens in the middle, I said; what happens right down the middle?’ Her pointed nose warmed, for she sensed victory.

‘There is a great yearning one for the other. A fissure of impalpable night divides them, Irma, my dear sister, there is a lacuna.’

‘Then kill it,’ said Irma, and sank back into her chair. She glanced at Steerpike, but he had apparently taken no notice of the conversation and she was disappointed. He was leaning back into one corner of the couch, his legs crossed, his hands curled around the coffee-cup as though to feel its warmth, and his eyes were peering into the fire. He was evidently far away.

When the Doctor had joined the curtains together with great deliberation and stood back to assure himself that the Night was satisfactorily excluded from the room, he seated himself, but no sooner had he done so than there was a jangling at the door-bell which continued until the cook had scraped the pastry from his hands, removed his apron and made his way to the front door.

Two female voices were speaking at the same time.

‘Only for a moment, only for a moment,’ they said. ‘Just passing – On our way home – Only for a moment – Tell him we won’t stay – No, of course not; we won’t stay. Of course not. Oh no – Yes, yes. Just a twinkling – only a twinkling.’

But for the fact that it would have been impossible for one voice to wedge so many words into so short a space of time and to speak so many of them simultaneously, it would have been difficult to believe that it was not the voice of a single individual, so continuous and uniform appeared the flat colour of the sound.

Prunesquallor cast up his hands to the ceiling and behind the convex lenses of his spectacles his eyes revolved in their orbits.

The voices that Steerpike now heard in the passage were unfamiliar to his quick ear. Since he had been with the Prunesquallors he had taken advantage of all his spare time and had, he thought, run to earth all the main figures of Gormenghast. There were few secrets hidden from him, for he had that scavenger like faculty of acquiring unashamedly and from an infinite variety of sources, snatches of knowledge which he kept neatly at the back of his brain and used to his own advantage as opportunity offered.

When the twins, Cora and Clarice, entered the room together, he wondered whether the red wine had gone to his head. He had neither seen them before nor anything like them. They were dressed in their inevitable purple.

Dr Prunesquallor bowed elegantly. ‘Your Ladyships,’ he said, ‘we are more than honoured. We are really very much more than honoured, ha ha ha!’ He whinnied his appreciation. ‘Come right along, my dear ladies, come right the way in, Irma, my dear, we have been doubly lucky in our privileges. Why “doubly” you say to yourself, why “doubly”? Because, O sister, they have both come, ha ha ha! Very much so, very much so.’

Prunesquallor, who knew from experience that only a fraction of what anyone said ever entered the brains of the twins, permitted himself a good deal of latitude in his conversation, mixing with a certain sycophancy remarks for his own amusement which could never have been made to persons more astute than the twins.

Irma had come forward, her iliac crest reflecting a streak of light.

‘Very charmed, your Ladyships; I said “very, very charmed”.’

She attempted to curtsey, but her dress was too tight.

‘You know my sister, of course, of course, of course. Will you have coffee? Of course you will, and a little wine? Naturally – or what would you prefer?’

But both the Doctor and his sister found that the Ladies Cora and Clarice had not been paying the slightest attention but had been staring at Steerpike more in the manner of a wall staring at a man than a man staring at a wall.

Steerpike in a well-cut uniform of black cloth, advanced to the sisters and bowed. ‘Your Ladyships,’ he said, ‘I am delighted to have the honour of being beneath the same roof. It is an intimacy that I shall never forget.’ And then, as though he were ending a letter – ‘I am your very humble servant,’ he added.

Clarice turned herself to Cora, but kept her eyes on Steerpike.

‘He says he’s glad he’s under the same roof as us,’ she said.

‘Under the same roof,’ echoed Cora. ‘He’s very glad of it.’

‘Why?’ said Clarice emptily. ‘What difference does it make about the roof?’

‘It couldn’t make any difference whatever the roof’s like,’ said her sister.

‘I like roofs,’ said Clarice; ‘they are something I like more than most things because they are on top of the houses they cover, and Cora and I like being over the tops of things because we love power, and that’s why we are both fond of roofs.’

‘That’s why,’ Cora continued. ‘That’s the reason. Anything that’s on top of something else is what we like, unless it is someone we don’t like who’s on top of something we are pleased with like ourselves. We’re not allowed to be on top, except that our own room is high, oh, so high up in the castle wall, with our Tree – our own Tree that grows from the wall, that is so much more important than anything Gertrude has.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Clarice; ‘she hasn’t anything as important as that. But she steals our birds.’

She turned her expressionless eyes to Cora, who met them as though she were her sister’s reflection. It may be that between them they recognized shades of expression in each other’s faces, but it is certain that no one else, however keen his eyesight, could have detected the slightest change in the muscles that presumably governed the lack of expressions of their faces. Evidently this reference to stolen birds was the reason why they came nearer to each other so that their shoulders touched. It was obvious that their sorrow was conjoined.

Dr Prunesquallor had, during all this, been trying to shepherd them into the chairs by the fire, but to no avail. They had no thought for others when their minds were occupied. The room, the persons around them ceased to exist. They had only enough room for one thought at a time.

But now that there was a sudden lull the Doctor, reinforced this time by Irma, managed to shift the twins by means of a mixture of deference and force and to get them established by the fire. Steerpike, who had vanished from the room, now returned with another pot of coffee and two more cups. It was this sort of thing that pleased Irma, and she tilted her head on its neck and turned up the corners of her mouth into something approaching the coy.

But when the coffee was passed to the twins they did not want it. One, taking her cue from the other, decided that she, or the other one, or possibly both, or neither, did not want it.

Would they have anything to drink? Cognac, sherry, brandy, a liqueur, cherry wine …?

They shook their heads profoundly.

‘We only came for a moment,’ said Cora.

‘Because we were passing,’ said Clarice. ‘That’s the only reason.’

But although they refused on those grounds to indulge in a drink of any sort, yet they gave no indication of being in a hurry to go, nor had they for a long time anything to say, but were quite content to sit and stare at Steerpike.

But after a long interval, halfway through which the Doctor and his sister had given up all attempts to make conversation, Cora turned her face to Steerpike.

‘Boy,’ she said, ‘what are you here for?’

‘Yes,’ echoed Clarice, ‘that’s what we want to know.’

‘I want,’ said Steerpike, choosing his words, ‘only your gracious patronage, your Ladyships. Only your favour.’

The twins turned their faces towards each other and then at the same moment they returned them to Steerpike.

‘Say that again,’ said Cora.

‘All of it,’ said Clarice.

‘Only your gracious patronage, your Ladyships. Only your favour. That is what I want.’

‘Well, we’ll give it you,’ said Clarice. But for the first time the sisters were at variance for a moment.

‘Not yet,’ said Cora. ‘It’s too soon for that.’

‘Much too soon,’ agreed Clarice. ‘It’s not time yet to give him any favour at all. What’s his name?’

This was addressed to Steerpike.

‘His name is Steerpike,’ was the youth’s reply.

Clarice leaned forward in her chair and whispered to Cora across the hearthrug: ‘His name is Steerpike.’

‘Why not?’ said her sister flatly. ‘It will do.’

Steerpike was, of course, alive with ideas and projects. These two half-witted women were a gift. That they should be the sisters of Lord Sepulchrave was of tremendous strategic value. They would prove an advance on the Prunesquallors, if not intellectually at any rate socially, and that at the moment was what mattered. And in any case, the lower the mentality of his employers the more scope for his own projects.

That one of them had said his name ‘Steerpike’ would ‘do’ had interested him. Did it imply that they wished to see more of him? That would simplify matters considerably.

His old trick of shameless flattery seemed to him the best line to take at this critical stage. Later on, he would see. But it was another remark that had appealed to his opportunist sense even more keenly, and that was the reference to Lady Groan.

These ridiculous twins had apparently a grievance, and the object of it was the Countess. This when examined further might lead in many directions. Steerpike was beginning to enjoy himself in his own dry, bloodless way.

Suddenly as in a flash he remembered two tiny figures the size of halma players, dressed in the same crude purple. Directly he had seen them enter the room an echo was awakened somewhere in his subconscious, and although he had put it aside as irrelevant to the present requirements, it now came back with redoubled force and he recalled where he had seen the two minute replicas of the twins.

He had seen them across a great space of air and across a distance of towers and high walls. He had seen them upon the lateral trunk of a dead tree in the summer, a tree that grew out at right angles from a high and windowless wall.

Now he realized why they had said ‘Our Tree that grows from the wall that is so much more important than anything Gertrude has.’ But then Clarice had added: ‘But she steals our birds.’ What did that imply? He had, of course, often watched the Countess from points of vantage with her birds or her white cats. That was something he must investigate further. Nothing must be let fall from his mind unless it were first turned to and fro and proved to be useless.

Steerpike bent forward, the tips of his fingers together. ‘Your Ladyships,’ he said, ‘are you enamoured of the feathered tribe? – Their beaks, their feathers, and the way they fly?’

‘What?’ said Cora.

‘Are you in love with birds, your Ladyships?’ repeated Steerpike, more simply.

‘What?’ said Clarice.

Steerpike hugged himself inside. If they could be as stupid as this, he could surely do anything he liked with them.

‘Birds,’ he said more loudly; ‘do you like them?’

‘What birds?’ said Cora. ‘What do you want to know for?’

‘We weren’t talking about birds,’ said Clarice unexpectedly.

‘We hate them.’

‘They’re such silly things,’ Cora ended.

‘Silly and stupid; we hate them,’ said Clarice.

‘Avis, avis, you are undone, undone!’ came Prunesquallor’s voice. ‘Your day is over. Oh, ye hordes of heaven! the treetops shall be emptied of their chorus and only clouds ride over the blue heaven.’

Prunesquallor leaned forward and tapped Irma on the knee.

‘Pretty pleasing,’ he said, and showed her all his brilliant teeth together. ‘What did you think, my riotous one?’

‘Nonsense!’ said Irma, who was sitting on the couch with Steerpike. Feeling that as the hostess she had so far this evening had very little opportunity of exhibiting what she, and she alone felt was her outstanding talent in that direction, she bent her dark glasses upon Cora and then upon Clarice and tried to speak to both of them at once.

‘Birds,’ she said, with something arch in her voice and manner, ‘birds depend – don’t you think, my dear Ladyships – I said birds depend a lot upon their eggs. Do you not agree with me? I said do you not agree with me?’

‘We’re going now,’ said Cora, getting up.

‘Yes, we’ve been here too long. Much too long. We’ve got a lot of sewing to do. We sew beautifully, both of us.’

‘I am sure you do,’ said Steerpike. ‘May I have the privilege of appreciating your craft at some future date when it is convenient for you?’

‘We do embroidery as well,’ said Cora, who had risen and had approached Steerpike.

Clarice came up to her sister’s side and they both looked at him. ‘We do a lot of needlework, but nobody sees it. Nobody is interested in us, you see. We only have two servants. We used –’

‘That’s all,’ said Cora. ‘We used to have hundreds when we were younger. Our father gave us hundreds of servants, We were of great – of great –’

‘Consequence,’ volunteered her sister. ‘Yes, that’s exactly what it was that we were. Sepulchrave was always so dreamy and miserable, but he did play with us sometimes; so we did what we liked. But now he doesn’t ever want to see us.’

‘He thinks he’s so wise,’ said Cora.

‘But he’s no cleverer than we are.’

‘He’s not as clever,’ said Clarice.

‘Nor is Gertrude,’ they said almost at the same moment.

‘She stole your birds, didn’t she?’ said Steerpike, winking at Prunesquallor.

‘How did you know?’ they said, advancing on him a step further.

‘Everyone knows, your Ladyships. Everyone in the castle knows,’ replied Steerpike, winking this time at Irma.

The twins held hands at once and drew close together. What Steerpike had said had sunk in and was making a serious impression on them. They had thought it was only a private grievance, that Gertrude had lured away their birds from the Room of Roots which they had taken so long preparing. But everyone knew! Everyone knew!

They turned to leave the room, and the Doctor opened his eyes, for he had almost fallen asleep with one elbow on the central table and his hand propping his head. He arose to his feet but could do nothing more elegant than to crook a finger, for he was too tired. His sister stood beside him creaking a little, and it was Steerpike who opened the door for them and offered to accompany them to their room. As they passed through the hall he removed his cape from a hook. Flinging it over his shoulders with a flourish he buttoned it at the neck. The cloak accentuated the highness of his shoulders, and as he drew its folds about him, the spareness of his body.

The aunts seemed to accept the fact that he was leaving the house with them, although they had not replied when he had asked their permission to escort them to their rooms.

With an extraordinary gallantry he shepherded them across the quadrangle.

‘Everybody knows, you said.’ Cora’s voice was so empty of feeling and yet so plaintive that it must have awakened a sympathetic response in anyone with a more kindly heart than Steerpike’s.

‘That’s what you said,’ repeated Clarice.

‘But what can we do? We can’t do anything to show what we could do if only we had the power we haven’t got,’ said Clarice lucidly. ‘We used to have hundreds of servants.’

‘You shall have them back,’ said Steerpike. ‘You shall have them all back. New ones. Better ones. Obedient ones. I shall arrange it. They shall work for you, through me. Your floor of the castle shall be alive again. You shall be supreme. Give me the administration to handle, your Ladyships, and I will have them dancing to your tune – whatever it is – they’ll dance to it.’

‘But what about Gertrude?’

‘Yes, what about Gertrude,’ came their flat voices.

‘Leave everything to me, I will secure your rights for you. You are Lady Cora and Lady Clarice, Lady Clarice and Lady Cora. You must not forget that. No one must be allowed to forget it.’

‘Yes, that’s what must happen,’ said Cora.

‘Everyone must think of who we are,’ said Clarice.

‘And never stop thinking about it,’ said Cora.

‘Or we will use our power,’ said Clarice.

‘Meanwhile, I will take you to your rooms, dear ladies. You must trust me. You must not tell anyone what we’ve said. Do you both understand?’

‘And we’ll get our birds back from Gertrude.’

Steerpike took them by the elbows as they climbed the stairs.

‘Lady Cora,’ he said, ‘you must try to concentrate on what I am saying to you. If you pay attention to me I will restore you to your places of eminence in Gormenghast from which Lady Gertrude has dethroned you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes.’

The voices showed no animation, but Steerpike realized that only by what they said, not by how they said it, could he judge whether their brains reacted to his probing.

He also knew when to stop. In the fine art of deceit and personal advancement as in any other calling this is the hallmark of the master. He knew that when he reached their door he would itch to get inside and to see what sort of appointments they had and what on earth they meant by their Room of Roots. But he also knew to a nicety the time to slacken rein. Such creatures as the aunts for all their slowness of intellect had within them the Groan blood which might at any moment, were a false step to be made, flare up and undo a month of strategy. So Steerpike left them at the door of their apartments and bowed almost to the ground. Then as he retired along the oak passage, and was turning a corner to the left he glanced back at the door where he had left the twins. They were still looking after him, as motionless as a pair of waxen images.

He would not visit them tomorrow, for it would do them good to spend a day of apprehension and of silly discussion between themselves. In the evening they would begin to get nervous and need consoling, but he would not knock at the door until the following morning. Meanwhile he would pick up as much information as he could about them and their tendencies.

Instead of crossing over to the Doctor’s house when he had reached the quadrangle he decided he would take a stroll across the lawns and perhaps around by the terraces to the moat, for the sky had emptied itself of cloud and was glittering fiercely with a hundred thousand stars.

‘THE FIR-CONES’

The wind had dropped, but the air was bitterly cold and Steerpike was glad of his cape. He had turned the collar up and it stood stiffly above the level of his ears. He seemed to be bound for somewhere in particular, and was not simply out for a nocturnal stroll. That peculiar half-walking, half-running gait was always with him. It appeared that he was eternally upon some secret mission, as indeed from his own viewpoint he generally was.

He passed into deep shadows beneath the arch, and then as though he were a portion of that inky darkness that had awakened and disengaged itself from the main body, he reappeared beyond the archway in the half light.

For a long time he kept close to the castle walls, moving eastwards continually. His first project of making a détour by way of the lawns and the terraces where the Countess walked before breakfast had been put aside, for now that he had started walking he felt an enjoyment in moving alone, absolutely alone, under the starlight. The Prunesquallors would not wait up for him. He had his own key to the front door and, as on previous nights, after late wanderings he would pour himself out a nightcap and perhaps enjoy some of the Doctor’s tobacco in his little stubby pipe before he retired.

Or he might, as he had so often done before during the night, resort to the dispensary and amuse himself by compounding potions with lethal possibilities. It was always to the shelf of poisons that he turned at once when he entered and to the dangerous powders.

He had filled four small glass tubes with the most virulent of these concoctions, and had removed them to his own room. He had soon absorbed all that the Doctor, whose knowledge was considerable, had divulged on the subject. Under his initial guidance he had, from poisonous weeds found in the vicinity, distilled a number of original and death-dealing pastes. To the Doctor these experiments were academically amusing.

Or on retiring to the Prunesquallors he might take down one of the Doctor’s many books and read, for these days a passion to accumulate knowledge of any and every kind consumed him; but only as a means to an end. He must know all things, for only so might he have, when situations arose in the future, a full pack of cards to play from. He imagined to himself occasions when the conversation of one from whom he foresaw advancement might turn to astronomy, metaphysics, history, chemistry, or literature, and he realized that to be able to drop into the argument a lucid and exact thought, an opinion based on what might appear to be a life-time study, would instantaneously gain more for him than an hour of beating about the bush and waiting until the conversation turned upon what lay within his scope of experience.

He foresaw himself in control of men. He had, along with his faculty for making swift and bold decisions, an unending patience. As he read in the evenings after the Doctor and Irma had retired for the night, he would polish the long, narrow steel of the swordstick blade which he had glimpsed and which he had, a week later, retrieved from the pile of ancient weapons in the chill hall. When he had first drawn it from the pile it had been badly tarnished, but with the skilful industry and patience with which he applied himself to whatever he undertook, it had now become a slim length of white steel. He had after an hour’s hunting found the hollow stick which was screwed into the innocent-looking hilt by a single turn of the wrist.

Whether on his return he would apply himself to the steel of his swordstick, and to the book on heraldry which he had nearly completed, or whether in the dispensary he would grind in the mortar, with the red oil, that feathery green powder with which he was experimenting, or whether he would be too tired to do anything but empty a glass of cognac and climb the stairs to his bedroom, he did not know, nor, for that matter, was he looking so short a way ahead. He was turning over in his mind as he walked briskly onwards not only every remark which he could remember the twins having let fall during the evening, but the trend of the questions which he proposed to put to them on the evening of the day after tomorrow.

With his mind working like an efficient machine, he thought out probable moves and parries, although he knew that in any dealings with the aunts the illogical condition of their brains made any surmise or scheming on his part extraordinarily difficult. He was working with a low-grade material, but one which contained an element which natures more elevated lack – the incalculable.

By now he had reached the most eastern corner of the central body of the castle. Away to his left he could distinguish the high walls of the west wing as they emerged from the ivy-blackened, sunset-facing precipice of masonry that shut off the northern halls of Gormenghast from the evening’s light. The Tower of Flints could only be recognized as a narrow section of the sky the shape of a long black ruler standing upon its end, the sky about it was crowded with the stars.

It occurred to him as he saw the Tower that he had never investigated the buildings which were, he had heard, continued on its further side. It was too late now for such an expedition and he was thinking of making a wide circle on the withered lawns which made good walking at this corner of the castle, when he saw a dim light approaching him. Glancing about, he saw within a few yards the black shapes of stunted bushes. Behind one of these he squatted and watched the light, which he recognized now as a lantern, coming nearer and nearer. It seemed that the figure would pass within a few feet of him, and peering over his shoulder to see in what direction the lantern was moving, he realized that he was immediately between the light and the Tower of Flints. What on earth could anyone want at the Tower of Flints on a cold night? Steerpike was intrigued. He dragged his cape well over himself so that only his eyes were exposed to the night air. Then, remaining as still as a crouching cat, he listened to the feet approaching.

As yet the body of whoever it was that carried the lantern had not detached itself from the darkness, but Steerpike, listening intently, heard now not only the long footsteps but the regular sound of a dry stick being broken. ‘Flay’, said Steerpike to himself. But what was that other noise? Between the regular sounds of the paces and the click of the knee joints a third, a quicker, less positive sound, came to his ears.

Almost at the same moment as he recognized it to be the pattering of tiny feet, he saw, emerging from the night, the unmistakable silhouettes of Flay and Mrs Slagg.

Soon the crunching of Flay’s footsteps appeared to be almost on top of him, and Steerpike, motionless as the shrub he crouched beneath, saw the straggling height of Lord Sepulchrave’s servant hastily pass above him, and as he did so a cry broke out. A tremor ran down Steerpike’s spine, for if there was anything that worried him it was the supernatural. The cry, it seemed, was that of some bird, perhaps of a seagull, but was so close as to disprove that explanation. There were no birds about that night nor, indeed, were they ever to be heard at that hour, and it was with some relief that he heard Nannie Slagg whisper nervously in the darkness:

‘There, there, my only … It won’t be long, my little Lordship dear … it won’t be long now. Oh, my poor heart! why must it be at night?’ She seemed to raise her head from the little burden she carried and to gaze up at the lofty figure who strode mechanically beside her; but there was no answer.

‘Things become interesting,’ said Steerpike to himself. ‘Lordships, Flays and Slaggs, all heading for the Tower of Flints.’

When they were almost swallowed into the darkness, Steerpike rose to his feet and flexed his cape-shrouded legs to get the stiffness from them, and then, keeping the sound of Mr Flay’s knees safely within earshot, he followed them silently.

Poor Mrs Slagg was utterly exhausted by the time they arrived at the library, for she had consistently refused to allow Flay to carry Titus, for he had, much against his better judgement, offered to do so when he saw how she was continually stumbling over the irregularities of the ground, and when, among the conifers how she caught her feet in the pine roots and ground creepers.

The cold air had thoroughly wakened Titus, and although he did not cry it was obvious that he was disconcerted by this unusual adventure in the dark. When Flay knocked at the door and they entered the library, he began to whimper and struggle in the nurse’s arms.

Flay retired to the darkness of his corner, where there was presumably some chair for him to sit on. All he said was: ‘I’ve brought them, Lordship.’ He usually left out the ‘your’ as being unnecessary for him as Lord Sepulchrave’s primary attendant.

‘So I see,’ said the Earl of Groan, advancing down the room, ‘I have disturbed you, nurse, have I not? It is cold outside. I have just been out to get these for him.’

He led Nannie to the far side of the table. On the carpet in the lamplight lay scattered a score of fir cones, each one with its wooden petals undercut with the cast shadow of the petal above it.

Mrs Slagg turned her tired face to Lord Sepulchrave. For once she said the right thing. ‘Are they for his little Lordship, sir?’ she queried. ‘Oh, he will love them, won’t you, my only?’

‘Put him among them. I want to talk to you,’ said the Earl. ‘Sit down.’

Mrs Slagg looked around for a chair and seeing none turned her eyes pathetically towards his Lordship, who was now pointing at the floor in a tired way. Titus, whom she had placed amongst the cones, was alternately turning them over in his fingers and sucking them.

‘It’s all right, I’ve washed them in rainwater,’ said Lord Groan. ‘Sit on the floor, nurse, sit on the floor.’ Without waiting, he himself sat upon the edge of the table, his feet crossed before him, his hands upon the marble surface at his side.

‘Firstly,’ he said, ‘I have had you come this way to tell you that I have decided upon a family gathering here in a week’s time. I want you to inform those concerned. They will be surprised. That does not matter. They will come. You will tell the Countess. You will tell Fuchsia. You will also inform their Ladyships Cora and Clarice.’

Steerpike, who had opened the door inch by inch, had crept up a stairway he had found immediately to his left. He had shut the door quietly behind him and tip-toed up to a stone gallery which ran around the building. Conveniently for him it was in the darkest shadow, and as he leaned against the bookshelves which lined the walls and watched the proceedings below, he rubbed the palms of his hands together silently.

He wondered where Flay had got to, for as far as he could see there was no other way out save by the main doorway, which was barred and bolted. It seemed to him that he must, like himself, be standing or sitting quietly in the shadows, and not knowing in what part of the building that might be, he kept absolute silence.

‘At eight o’clock in the evening, I shall be awaiting him and them, for you must tell them I have in my mind a breakfast that shall be in honour of my son.’

As he said these words, in his rich, melancholy voice, poor Mrs Slagg, unable to bear the insufferable depression of his spirit, began to clutch her wrinkled hands together. Even Titus seemed to sense the sadness which flowed through the slow, precise words of his father. He forgot the fir cones and began to cry.

‘You will bring my son Titus in his christening robes and will have with you the crown of the direct heir to Gormenghast. Without Titus the castle would have no future when I am gone. As his nurse, I must ask you to remember to instil into his veins, from the very first, a love for his birthplace and his heritage, and a respect for all of the written and unwritten laws of the place of his fathers.

‘I will speak to them, much against my own peace of spirit: I will speak to them of this and of much more that is in my mind. At the Breakfast, of which the details will be discussed on this same evening of next week, he shall be honoured and toasted. It shall be held in the Refectory.’

‘But he is only two months old, the little thing,’ broke in Nannie in a tear-choked voice.

There is no time to lose, nevertheless,’ answered the Earl. ‘And now, my poor old woman, why are you crying so bitterly? It is autumn. The leaves are falling from the trees like burning tears – the wind howls. Why must you mimic them?’

Her old eyes gazed at him and were filmed. Her mouth quivered. ‘I am so tired, sir,’ she said.

‘Then lie down, good woman, lie down,’ said Lord Sepulchrave. ‘It has been a long walk for you. Lie down.’

Mrs Slagg found no comfort in lying upon her back on the huge library floor with the Earl of Groan talking to her from above in phrases that meant nothing to her.

She gathered Titus to her side and stared at the ceiling, her tears running into her dry mouth. Titus was very cold and had begun to shiver.

‘Now, let me see my son,’ said his Lordship slowly. ‘My son Titus. Is it true that he is ugly?’

Nannie scrambled to her feet and lifted Titus in her arms.

‘He is not ugly, your Lordship,’ she said, her voice quavering. ‘My little one is lovely.’

‘Let me see him. Hold him up, nurse; hold him up to the light. Ah! that is better. He has improved,’ said Lord Sepulchrave. ‘How old is he?’

‘Nearly three months,’ said Nannie Slagg. ‘Oh, my weak heart! he is nearly three months old.’

‘Well, well, good woman, that is all. I have talked too much tonight. That is all that I wanted – to see my son, and to tell you to inform the Family of my desire to have them here at eight o’clock today week. The Prunesquallors had better come as well. I will inform Sourdust myself. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Nannie, already making for the door. ‘I will tell them, sir. Oh, my poor heart, how tired I am!’

‘Flay!’ said Lord Sepulchrave, ‘take the nurse back to her room. You need not return tonight. I shall have left in four hours’ time. Have my room prepared and the lanthorn on my bedside table. You may go.’

Flay, who had emerged into the lamplight, nodded his head, relit the wick of the lamp, and then followed Nannie Slagg out of the door and up the steps to the starlight. This time he took no heed of her expostulations, but taking Titus from her, placed him carefully into one of his capacious jacket pockets, and then, lifting the tiny struggling woman in his arms, marched solemnly through the woods to the castle.

Steerpike followed, deep in thought, and did not even trouble to keep them in sight.

Lord Sepulchrave, lighting a candle, climbed the staircase by the door and, moving along the wooden balcony, came at last to a shelf of dusty volumes. He blew the grey pollen from the vellum spine of one which he tilted forward from the rest with his index finger and then, turning over a page or two, near the beginning, made his way around the balcony again and down the stairs.

When he had reached his seat he leaned back and his head fell forward on his chest. The book was still in his hand. His sorrowful eyes wandered about the room from under the proud bone of his brow, until they fell at last upon the scattered fir cones.

A sudden uncontrollable gust of anger seized him. He had been childish in gathering them. Titus had not in any case derived any amusement from them.

It is strange that even in men of much learning and wisdom there can be an element of the infantile. It may be that it was not the cones themselves that angered him, but that they acted in some way as a reminder of his failures. He flung the book from him, and then immediately retrieved it, smoothing its sides with his shaking hands. He was too proud and too melancholy to unbend and be the father of the boy in anything but fact; he would not cease to isolate himself. He had done more than he expected himself to do. At the breakfast which he had envisaged he would toast the heir to Gormenghast. He would drink to the Future, to Titus, his only son. That was all.

He sat back again in the chair, but he could not read.

KEDA AND RANTEL

When Keda came back to her people the cacti were dripping with the rain. The wind was westerly, and above the blurred outline of the Twisted Woods the sky was choked with crumpled rags. Keda stood for a moment and watched the dark rulers of the rain slanting steadily from the ragged edge of the clouds to the ragged edge of the woods. Behind the opaque formations the sun was hidden as it sank, so that but little light was reflected from the empty sky above her.

This was the darkness she knew of. She breathed it in. It was the late autumn darkness of her memories. There was here no taint of those shadows which had oppressed her spirit within the walls of Gormenghast. Here, once again an Outer dweller, she stretched her arms above her head in her liberation.

‘I am free,’ she said. ‘I am home again.’ But directly she had said these words she knew that it was not so. She was home, yes, among the dwellings where she was born. Here beside her, like an ancient friend, stood the gaunt cactus, but of the friends of her childhood who were left? Who was there to whom she could go? She did not ask for someone in whom she could confide. She only wished that she might go unhesitatingly to one who would ask no questions, and to whom she need not speak.

Who was there? And against this question arose the answer which she feared: There were the two men.

Suddenly the fear that had swept her died and her heart leapt with inexplicable joy and as the clouds above her in the sky had rolled away from their zenith, those that had choked her heart broke apart and left her with an earthless elation and a courage that she could not understand. She walked on in the gathering dusk and, passing by the empty tables and benches that shone unnaturally in the darkness with the film of the rain still upon them, she came at last to the periphery of the mud dwellings.

It seemed at first as though the narrow lanes were deserted. The mud dwellings, rising usually to a height of about eight feet, faced each other across dark lanes like gullies, and all but met overhead. At this hour in the lanes it would have been pitch dark if it had not been for the dwellers’ custom of hanging lamps above the doors of all their houses, and lighting them at sunset.

Keda had turned several corners before she came upon the first sign of life. A dwarf dog, of that ubiquitous breed that was so often to be seen slinking along the mud lanes, ran past Keda on little mangy legs, hugging the wall as he ran. She smiled a little. Since childhood she had been taught to despise these scavenging and stunted curs, but as she watched it slink past her she did not despise it, but in the sudden gladness that had filled her heart she knew of it only as a part of her own being, her all-embracing love and harmony. The dog-urchin had stopped a few yards after passing her and was sitting up on its mangy haunches and scratching with one of its hind legs at an itch beneath its ear. Keda felt her heart was breaking with a love so universal that it drew into its fiery atmosphere all things because they were; the evil, the good, the rich, the poor, the ugly, the beautiful, and the scratching of this little yellowish hound.

She knew these lanes so well that the darkness did not hinder her progress. The desertion of the mud lanes was, she knew, natural to that hour of evening when the majority of the dwellers would be huddled over their root fires. It was for this reason that she had left the castle so late on her homeward journey. There was a custom among the dwellers that when passing each other at night they should move their heads into the light of the nearest door lamp and then, as soon as they had observed one another, continue upon their journeys. There was no need for them to show any expression; the chances were that the mutual recognition of friends would be infrequent. The rivalry between the families and the various schools of carving was relentless and bitter, and it would often happen that enemies would find each other’s features in this way within a few feet of their own, lit by these hanging lamps; but this custom was rigorously observed – to stare for a moment and pass on.

It had been Keda’s hope that she would be able to reach her house, the house which was hers through the death of her old husband, without having to move into the lamplight and be recognized by a passing Dweller, but now she did not mind. It seemed to her that the beauty that filled her was keener than the edge of a sword and as sure a protection against calumny and gossip, the jealousies and underground hatreds which she had once feared.

What was it that had come over her? she wondered. A recklessness alien to the whole quietness of her nature startled but fascinated her. This, the very moment which she had anticipated would fill her with anxiety – when the problems, to escape which she had taken refuge in the castle, would lower themselves over her like an impenetrable fog and frighten her – was now an evening of leaves and flame, a night of ripples.

She walked on. From behind the rough wooden doors of many of the dwellings she could hear the heavy voices of those within. She now came to the long lane that led directly up to the sheer outer wall of Gormenghast. This lane was a little broader than most, being about nine feet wide and broadening at times to almost twelve. It was the highway of the Dwellers, and the daily rendezvous for groups of the Bright Carvers. Old women and men would sit at the doors, or hobble on their errands, and the children play in the dust in the shifting shadow of the great Wall that edged by degrees along the street until by evening it had swallowed the long highway and the lamps were lit. Upon the flat roof of many of the dwellings a carving would be placed, and on evenings of sunset the easterly line of those wooden forms would smoulder and burn and the westerly line against the light in the sky would stand in jet-black silhouette, showing the sweeping outlines and the harsh angles which the Dwellers delighted in contrasting.

These carvings were now lost in the upper darkness above the door lamps, and Keda, remembering them as she walked, peered in vain for a glimpse of them against the sky.

Her home did not lie in this highway but at the corner of a little mud square where only the most venerable and revered of the Bright Carvers were permitted to settle. In the centre of this square stood the pride of the mud dwellers – a carving, some fourteen feet high, which had been hewn several hundred years before. It was the only one of that carver’s works which the dwellers possessed although several pieces from his hand were within the castle walls, in the Hall of the Bright Carvings. There were diverse opinions as to who he may have been, but that he was the finest of all the carvers was never disputed. This work, which was repainted each year in its original colours, was of a horse and rider. Hugely stylized and very simple, the bulk of rhythmic wood dominated the dark square. The horse was of the purest grey and its neck was flung backwards in a converse arch so that its head faced the sky, and the coils of its white mane were gathered like frozen foam about the nape of its strained neck and over the knees of the rider, who sat draped in a black cape. On this cape were painted dark crimson stars. He was very upright, but his arms and hands, in contrast to the vitality of the grey and muscular neck of the horse, hung limply at his sides. His head was very sharply cut with the chisel and was as white as the mane, only the lips and the hair relieving the deathlike mask, the former a pale coral and the latter a dark chestnut brown. Rebellious children were sometimes brought by their mothers to see this sinister figure and were threatened with his disfavour should they continue in their wrong-doing. This carving had a terror for them, but to their parents it was a work of extraordinary vitality and beauty of form, and with a richness of mysterious mood the power of which in a work was one of their criteria of excellence.

This carving had come into Keda’s mind as she approached that turning from the highway which led to the mud square, when she heard the sound of feet behind her. Ahead, the road lay silent, the door lamps lighting faintly small areas of the earth below them, but giving no intimation of any passing figure. Away to the left, beyond the mud square, the sudden barking of a dog sounded in her ears, and she became conscious of her own footsteps as she listened to those that were overtaking her.

She was within a few yards of one of the door lamps and knowing that were she to pass it before the approaching figure had done so, then both she and the unknown man would have to walk together in the darkness until the next lamp was reached, when the ritual of scanning each other’s features would be observed, Keda slackened her pace, so that the observance might be more rapidly disposed of and the follower, whoever he was, might proceed on his way.

She stopped as she came to the light, nor in doing so and waiting was there anything unusual, for such was the not infrequent habit of those who were nearing the lamps and was, in fact, considered an act of politeness. She moved through the glow of the lamp so that on turning about the rays would illumine her face, and the approaching figure would then both see her and be seen the more easily.

In passing under the lamp the light wavered on her dark brown hair lighting its highest strands almost to the colour of barley, and her body, though full and rounded, was upright and lithe, and this evening, under the impact of her new emotion had in it a buoyancy, an excitement, that through the eyes attacked the one who followed.

The evening was electric and unreal, and yet perhaps, thought Keda, this is reality and my past life has been a meaningless dream. She knew that the footsteps in the darkness which were now only a few yards away were a part of an evening she would not forget and which she seemed to have enacted long ago, or had foreseen. She knew that when the footsteps ceased and she turned to face the one who followed she would find that he was Rantel, the more fiery, the more awkward of the two who loved her.

She turned and he was standing there.

For a long time they stood. About them the impenetrable blackness of the night shut them in as though they were in a confined space, like a hall, with the lamp overhead.

She smiled, her mature, compassionate lips hardly parting. Her eyes moved over his face – over the dark mop of his hair, his powerful jutting brow, and the shadows of his eyes that stared as though fixed in their sockets, at her own. She saw his high cheekbones and the sides of his face that tapered to his chin. His mouth was drawn finely and his shoulders were powerful. Her breast rose and fell, and she was both weak and strong. She could feel the blood flowing within her and she felt that she must die or break forth into leaves and flowers. It was not passion that she felt: not the passion of the body, though that was there, but rather an exultation, a reaching for life, for the whole of the life of which she was capable, and in that life which she but dimly divined was centred love, the love for a man. She was not in love with Rantel: she was in love with what he meant to her as someone she could love.

He moved forward in the light so that his face was darkened to her and only the top of his ruffled hair shone like wire.

‘Keda,’ he whispered.

She took his hand. ‘I have come back.’

He felt her nearness; he held her shoulders in his hands.

‘You have come back,’ he said as though repeating a lesson. ‘Ah, Keda – is this you? You went away. Every night I have watched for you.’ His hands shook on her shoulders. ‘You went away,’ he said.

‘You have followed me?’ said Keda. ‘Why did you not speak to me by the rocks?’

‘I wanted to,’ he said, ‘but I could not.’

‘Oh, why not?’

‘We will move from the lamp and then I will tell you,’ he said at last. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Where? To where should I go but to where I lived – to my house?’

They walked slowly. ‘I will tell you,’ he said suddenly. ‘I followed you to know where you would go. When I knew it was not to Braigon I overtook you.’

‘To Braigon?’ she said. ‘Oh Rantel, you are still as unhappy.’

‘I cannot alter, Keda; I cannot change.’

They had reached the square.

‘We have come here for nothing,’ said Rantel, coming to a halt in the darkness. ‘For nothing, do you hear me, Keda? I must tell you now. Oh, it is bitterness to tell you.’

Nothing that he might say could stop a voice within her that kept crying: ‘I am with you, Keda! I am life! I am life! Oh, Keda, Keda, I am with you!’ But her voice asked him as though something separate from her real self were speaking:

‘Why have we come for nothing?’

‘I followed you and then I let you continue here with me, but your house, Keda, where your husband carved, has been taken from you. You can do nothing. When you left us the Ancients met, the Old Carvers, and they have given your house to one who is of their company, for they say that now that your husband is dead you are not worthy to live in the Square of the Black Rider.’

‘And my husband’s carvings,’ said Keda, ‘what has become of them?’

While she waited for him to answer she heard his breathing quicken and could dimly see him dragging his forearm over his brow.

‘I will tell you,’ he said. ‘O fire! why was I so slow – so slow! While I was watching for you, watching from the rocks, as I have done every night since you left, Braigon broke into your house and found the Ancients dividing up your own carvings among themselves. “She will not come back,” they said of you. “She is worthless. The carvings will be left untended”, they said, “and the grain-worm will attack them.” But Braigon drew his knife and sent them into a room below the stairs and made twelve journeys and carried the carvings to his own house, where he has hidden them, he says, until you come.

‘Keda, Keda, what can I do for you? Oh Keda, what can I do?’

‘Hold me close to you,’ she said. ‘Where is that music?’

In the silence they could hear the voice of an instrument.

‘Keda …’

His arms were about her body and his face was deep in her hair.

She could hear the beating of his heart, for her head was lying close to him. The music had suddenly ended and silence, as unbroken as the darkness about them, returned.

Rantel spoke at last. ‘I will not live until I take you, Keda. Then I will live, I am a Sculptor. I will create a glory out of wood, I will hack for you a symbol of my love. It will curve in flight. It will leap. It shall be of crimson and have hands as tender as flowers and feet that merge into the roughness of earth, for it shall be its body that leaps. And it shall have eyes that see all things and be violet like the edge of the spring lightning, and upon the breast I shall carve your name – Keda, Keda, Keda – three times, for I am ill with love.’

She put up her hand and her cool fingers felt the bones of his brow and his high cheekbones, and came to his mouth where they touched his lips.

After a little while Rantel said softly: ‘You have been crying?’

‘With joy,’ she said.

‘Keda …’

‘Yes …’

‘Can you bear cruel news?’

‘Nothing can pain me any more,’ said Keda. ‘I am no longer the one you knew. I am alive.’

‘The law that forced you in your marriage, Keda, may bind you again. There is another. I have been told he has been waiting for you, Keda, waiting for you to return. But I could slay him, Keda, if you wish.’ His body toughened in her arms and his voice grew harsher. ‘Shall I slay him?’

‘You shall not speak of death,’ said Keda. ‘He shall not have me. Take me with you to your house.’ Keda heard her own voice sounding like that of another woman, it was so different and clear. ‘Take me with you – he will not take me after we have loved. They have my house, where else should I sleep tonight but with you? For I am happy for the first time. All things are clear to me. The right and the wrong, the true and the untrue. I have lost my fear. Are you afraid?’

‘I am not afraid!’ cried Rantel into the darkness, ‘if we love one another.’

‘I love all, all,’ said Keda. ‘Let us not talk.’

Dazed, he took her with him away from the square, and threading their way through the less frequented lanes found themselves at last at the door of a dwelling at the base of the castle wall.

The room they entered was cold, but within a minute Rantel had sent the light from an open fire on the earth dancing across the walls. On the mud floor was the usual grass matting common to all the dwellings.

‘Our youth will pass from us soon,’ said Keda. ‘But we are young this moment and tonight we are together. The bane of our people will fall on us, next year or the year after, but now – NOW, Rantel; it is NOW that fills us. How quickly you have made the fire! Oh, Rantel, how beautifully you have made it! Hold me again.’

As he held her there was a tapping at the window; they did not move, but only listened as it increased until the coarse slab of glass sunk in the mud walls vibrated with an incessant drumming. The increasing volume of the sudden rain was joined by the first howls of a young wind.

The hours moved on. On the low wooden boards, Rantel and Keda lay in the warmth of the fire, defenceless before each other’s love.

When Keda wakened she lay for some while motionless. Rantel’s arm was flung over her body and his hand was at her breast like a child’s. Lifting his arm she moved slowly from him, lowered his hand again softly to the floor. Then she rose and walked to the door. And as she took the first steps, there flashed through her the joyous realization that the mood of invulnerability before the world was still with her. She unlatched the door and flung it open. She had known that the outer wall of Gormenghast would face her as she did so. Its rough base within a stone’s throw would rise like a sheer cliff. And there it was, but there was more. Ever since she could remember anything the face of the outer wall had been like the symbol of endlessness, of changelessness, of power, of austerity and of protection. She had known it in so many moods. Baked to dusty whiteness, and alive with basking lizards, she could remember how it flaked in the sun. She had seen it flowering with the tiny pink and blue creeper flowers that spread like fields of coloured smoke in April across acres of its temperate surface. She had seen its every protruding ledge of stone, its every jutting irregularity furred with frost, or hanging with icicles. She had seen the snow sitting plumply on those juttings, so that in the darkness when the wall had vanished into the night these patches of snow had seemed to her like huge stars suspended.

And now this sunlit morning of late autumn gave to it a mood which she responded to. But as she watched its sunny surface sparkling after a night of heavy rain, she saw at the same moment a man sitting at its base, his shadow on the wall behind him. He was whittling at a branch in his hand. But although it was Braigon who sat there and who lifted his eyes as she opened the door, she did not cry in alarm or feel afraid or ashamed, but only looked at him quietly, happily, and saw him as a figure beneath a sparkling wall, a man whittling at a branch; someone she had longed to see again.

He did not get to his feet, so she walked over to him and sat down at his side.

His head was massive and his body also; squarely built, he gave the impression of compact energy and strength. His hair covered his head closely with tangled curls.

‘How long have you been here, Braigon, sitting in the sun carving?’

‘Not long.’

‘Why did you come?’

‘To see you.’

‘How did you know that I had come back?’

‘Because I could carve no more.’

‘You stopped carving?’ said Keda.

‘I could not see what I was doing. I could only see your face where my carving had been.’

Keda gave vent to a sigh of such tremulous depth that she clasped her hands at her breast with the pain that it engendered.

‘And so you came here?’

‘I did not come at once. I knew that Rantel would find you as you left the gate in the Outer Wall, for he hides each night among the rocks waiting for you. I knew that he would be with you. But this morning I came here to ask him where he had found you a dwelling for the night, and where you were, for I knew your house had been taken from you by the law of the Mud Square. But when I arrived here an hour ago I saw the ghost of your face on the door, and you were happy; so I waited here. You are happy, Keda?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘You were afraid in the castle to come back; but now you are here you are not afraid. I can see what it is,’ he said. ‘You have found that you are in love. Do you love him?’

‘I do not know. I do not understand. I am walking on air, Braigon. I cannot tell whether I love him or no, or whether it is the world I love so much and the air and the rain last night, and the passions that opened like flowers from their tight buds. Oh, Braigon, I do not know. If I love Rantel, then I love you also. As I watch you now, your hand at your forehead and your lips moving such a little, it is you I love. I love the way you have not wept with anger and torn yourself to shreds to find me here. The way you have sat here all by yourself, oh Braigon, whittling a branch, and waiting, unafraid and understanding everything, I do not know how, for I have not told you of what has transformed me, suddenly?’

She leaned back against the wall and the morning sun lay whitely upon her face. ‘Have I changed so much?’ she said.

‘You have broken free,’ he said.

‘Braigon,’ she cried, ‘it is you – it is you whom I love.’ And she clenched her hands together. ‘I am in pain because of you and him, but my pain makes me happy. I must tell you the truth, Braigon. I am in love with all things – pain and all things, because I can now watch them from above, for something has happened and I am clear – clear. But I love you, Braigon, more than all things. It is you I love.’

He turned the branch over in his hand as though he had not heard, and then he turned to her.

His heavy head had been reclining upon the wall and now he turned it slightly towards her, his eyes half closed.

‘Keda,’ he said, ‘I will meet you tonight. The grass hollow where the Twisted Woods descend. Do you remember?’

‘I will meet you there,’ she said. While she spoke the air became shrill between their heads and the steel point of a long knife struck the stones between them and snapped with the impact.

Rantel stood before them, he was shaking.

‘I have another knife,’ he said in a whisper which they could only just hear. ‘It is a little longer. It will be sharper by this evening when I meet you at the hollow. There is a full moon tonight. Keda! Oh Keda! Have you forgotten?’

Braigon got to his feet. He had moved only to place himself before Keda’s body. She had closed her eyes and she was quite expressionless.

‘I cannot help it,’ she said, ‘I cannot help it I am happy.’

Braigon stood immediately before his rival. He spoke over his shoulder, but kept his eyes on his enemy.

‘He is right,’ he said. ‘I shall meet him at sunset. One of us will come back to you.’

Then Keda raised her hands to her head. ‘No, no, no, no!’ she cried. But she knew that it must be so, and became calm, leaning back against the wall, her head bowed and the locks of her hair falling over her face.

The two men left her, for they knew that they could never be with her that unhappy day. They must prepare their weapons. Rantel re-entered his hut and a few moments later returned with a cape drawn about him. He approached Keda.

‘I do not understand your love,’ he said.

She looked up and saw his head upright upon his neck. His hair was like a bush of blackness.

She did not answer. She only saw his strength and his high cheekbones and fiery eyes. She only saw his youth.

‘I am the cause,’ she said. ‘It is I who should die. And I will die,’ she said quickly. ‘Before very long – but now, now what is it? I cannot enter into fear or hate, or even agony and death. Forgive me, forgive me.’

She turned and held his hand with the dagger in it.

‘I do not know. I do not understand,’ she said, ‘I do not think that we have any power.’

She released his hand and he moved away along the base of the high wall until it curved to the right and she lost him.

Braigon was already gone. Her eyes clouded.

‘Keda,’ she said to herself, ‘Keda, this is tragedy.’ But as her words hung emptily in the morning air, she clenched her hands for she could feel no anguish and the bright bird that had filled her breast was still singing … was still singing.

THE ROOM OF ROOTS

‘That’s quite enough for today,’ said Lady Cora, laying down her embroidery on a table beside her chair.

‘But you’ve only sewn three stitches, Cora,’ said Lady Clarice, drawing out a thread to arm’s length.

Cora turned her eyes suspiciously. ‘You have been watching me,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you?’

‘It wasn’t private,’ replied her sister. ‘Sewing isn’t private.’ She tossed her head.

Cora was not convinced and sat rubbing her knees together, sullenly.

‘And now I’ve finished as well,’ said Clarice, breaking the silence. ‘Half a petal, and quite enough, too, for a day like this. Is it tea time?’

‘Why do you always want to know the time?’ said Cora, “Is it breakfast time, Cora?” … “Is it dinner time, Cora?” … “Is it tea time, Cora?” – on and on and on. You know that it doesn’t make any difference what the time is.’

‘It does if you’re hungry,’ said Clarice.

‘No, it doesn’t. Nothing matters very much; even if you’re hungry.’

‘Yes, it does,’ her sister contested, ‘I know it does.’

‘Clarice Groan,’ said Cora sternly, rising from her chair, ‘you know too much.’

Clarice did not answer, but bit her thin, loose lower lip.

‘We usually go on much longer with our sewing, don’t we, Cora?’ she said at last. ‘We sometimes go on for hours and hours, and we nearly always talk a lot, but we haven’t today, have we, Cora?’

‘No,’ said Cora.

‘Why haven’t we?’

‘I don’t know. Because we haven’t needed to, I suppose, you silly thing.’

Clarice got up from her chair and smoothed her purple satin, and then looked archly at her sister. ‘I know why we haven’t been talking,’ she said.

‘Oh no, you don’t.’

‘Yes, I do,’ said Clarice. ‘I know.’

Cora sniffed, and after walking to a long mirror in the wall with a swishing of her skirts, she readjusted a pin in her hair. When she felt she had been silent long enough:

‘Oh no, you don’t,’ she said, and peered at her sister in the mirror over the reflection of her own shoulder. Had she not had forty-nine years in which to get accustomed to the phenomenon she must surely have been frightened to behold in the glass, next to her own face, another, smaller, it is true, for her sister was some distance behind her, but of such startling similarity.

She saw her sister’s mouth opening in the mirror.

‘I do,’ came the voice from behind her, ‘because I know what you’ve been thinking. It’s easy.’

‘You think you do,’ said Cora, ‘but I know you don’t, because I know exactly what you’ve been thinking all day that I’ve been thinking and that’s why.’

The logic of this answer made no lasting impression upon Clarice, for although it silenced her for a moment she continued: ‘Shall I tell you what you’ve been brooding on?’ she asked.

‘You can if you like, I suppose. I don’t mind. What, then? I might as well incline my ear. Go on.’

‘I don’t know that I want to now,’ said Clarice. ‘I think I’ll keep it to myself, although it’s obvious.’ Clarice gave great emphasis to this word ‘obvious’. ‘Isn’t it tea time yet? Shall I ring the bell, Cora? What a pity it’s too windy for the tree.’

‘You were thinking of that Steerpike boy,’ said Cora, who had sidled up to her sister and was staring at her from very close quarters. She felt she had rather turned the tables on poor Clarice by her sudden renewal of the subject.

‘So were you,’ said Clarice. ‘I knew that long ago. Didn’t you?’

‘Yes, I did,’ said Cora. ‘Very long ago. Now we both know.’

A freshly burning fire flung their shadows disrespectfully to and fro across the ceiling and over the walls where samples of their embroidery were hung. The room was a fair size, some thirty feet by twenty. Opposite the entrance from the corridor was a small door. This gave upon the Room of Roots, in the shape of a half circle. On either side of this smaller opening were two large windows with diamond panes of thick glass, and on the two end walls of the room, in one of which was the small fireplace, were narrow doorways, one leading to the kitchen and the rooms of the two servants, and the other to the dining-room and the dark yellow bedroom of the twins.

‘He said he would exalt us,’ said Clarice. ‘You heard him, didn’t you?’

‘I’m not deaf,’ said Cora.

‘He said we weren’t being honoured enough and we must remember who we are. We’re Lady Clarice and Cora Groan; that’s who we are.’

‘Cora and Clarice’, her sister corrected her, ‘of Gormenghast.’

‘But no one is awed when they see us. He said he’d make them be.’

‘Make them be what, dear?’ Cora had begun to unbend now that she found their thoughts had been identical.

‘Make them be awed,’ said Clarice. ‘That’s what they ought to be. Oughtn’t they, Cora?’

‘Yes; but they won’t do it,’

‘No. That’s what it is,’ said Clarice, ‘although I tried this morning.’

‘What, dear?’ said Cora.

‘I tried this morning, though,’ repeated Clarice.

‘Tried what?’ asked Cora in a rather patronizing voice.

‘You know when I said “I’ll go for a saunter”?’

‘Yes.’ Cora sat down and produced a minute but heavily scented handkerchief from her flat bosom. ‘What about it?’

‘I didn’t go to the bathroom at all.’ Clarice sat down suddenly and stiffly, ‘I took some ink instead – black ink.’

‘What for?’

‘I won’t tell you yet, for the time isn’t ripe,’ said Clarice importantly; and her nostrils quivered like a mustang’s. ‘I took the black ink, and I poured it into a jug. There was lots of it. Then I said to myself, what you tell me such a lot, and what I tell you as well, which is that Gertrude is no better than us – in fact, she’s not as good because she hasn’t got a speck of Groan blood in her veins like we have, but only the common sort that’s no use. So I took the ink and I knew what I would do. I didn’t tell you because you might have told me not to, and I don’t know why I’m telling you now because you may think I was wrong to do it; but it’s all over now so it doesn’t matter what you think, dear, does it?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ said Cora rather peevishly.

‘Well, I knew that Gertrude had to be in the Central Hall to receive the seven most hideous beggars of the Outer Dwellings and pour a lot of oil on them at nine o’clock, so I went through the door of the Central Hall at nine o’clock with my jug full of ink, and I walked up to her at nine o’clock, but it was not what I wanted because she had a black dress on.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Cora.

‘Well, I was going to pour the ink all over her dress.’

‘That would be good, very good,’ said Cora. ‘Did you?’

‘Yes,’ said Clarice, ‘but it didn’t show because her dress was black, and she didn’t see me pouring it, anyway, because she was talking to a starling.’

‘One of our birds,’ said Cora.

‘Yes,’ said Clarice. ‘One of the stolen birds. But the others saw me. They had their mouths open. They saw my decision. But Gertrude didn’t, so my decision was no use. I hadn’t anything else to do and I felt frightened, so I ran all the way back; and now I think I’ll wash out the jug.’

She got up to put her idea into operation when there was a discreet tapping at their door. Visitors were very few and far between and they were too excited for a moment to say ‘Come in.’

Cora was the first to open her mouth and her blank voice was raised more loudly than she had intended:

‘Come in.’

Clarice was at her side. Their shoulders touched. Their heads were thrust forward as though they were peering out of a window.

The door opened and Steerpike entered, an elegant stick with a shiny metal handle under his arm. Now that he had renovated and polished the pilfered swordstick to his satisfaction, he carried it about with him wherever he went. He was dressed in his habitual black and had acquired a gold chain which he wore about his neck. His meagre quota of sandy-coloured hair was darkened with grease, and had been brushed down over his pale forehead in a wide curve.

When he had closed the door behind him he tucked his stick smartly under his arm and bowed.

‘Your Ladyships,’ he said, ‘my unwarranted intrusion upon your privacy, with but the summary knock at the panels of your door as my mediator, must be considered the acme of impertinence were it not that I come upon a serious errand.’

‘Who’s died?’ said Cora.

‘Is it Gertrude?’ echoed Clarice.

‘No one has died,’ said Steerpike, approaching them. ‘I will tell you the facts in a few minutes; but first, my dear Ladyships, I would be most honoured if I were permitted to appreciate your embroideries. Will you allow me to see them?’ He looked at them both in turn inquiringly.

‘He said something about them before; at the Prunesquallors’ it was,’ whispered Clarice to her sister. ‘He said he wanted to see them before. Our embroideries.’

Clarice had a firm belief that as long as she whispered, no matter how loudly, no one would hear a word of what she said, except her sister.

‘I heard him,’ said her sister. ‘I’m not blind, am I?’

‘Which do you want to see first?’ said Clarice. ‘Our needlework or the Room of Roots or the Tree?’

‘If I am not mistaken’, said Steerpike by way of an answer, ‘the creations of your needle are upon the walls around us, and having seen them, as it were, in a flash, I have no choice but to say that I would first of all prefer to examine them more closely, and then if I may, I would be delighted to visit your Room of Roots.’

‘“Creations of our needle”, he said,’ whispered Clarice in her loud, flat manner that filled the room.

‘Naturally,’ said her sister, and shrugged her shoulders again, and turning her face to Steerpike gave to the right-hand corner of her inexpressive mouth a slight twitch upwards, which although it was as mirthless as the curve between the lips of a dead haddock, was taken by Steerpike to imply that she and he were above making such obvious comments.

‘Before I begin,’ said Steerpike, placing his innocent-looking swordstick on a table, ‘may I inquire out of my innocence why you ladies were put to the inconvenience of bidding me to enter your room? Surely your footman has forgotten himself. Why was he not at the door to inquire who wished to see you and to give you particulars before you allowed yourselves to be invaded? Forgive my curiosity, my dear Ladyships, but where was your footman? Would you wish me to speak to him?’

The sisters stared at each other and then at the youth. At last Clarice said:

‘We haven’t got a footman.’

Steerpike, who had turned away for this very purpose, wheeled about, and then took a step backwards as though struck.

‘No footman!’ he said, and directed his gaze at Cora.

She shook her head. ‘Only an old lady who smells,’ she said. ‘No footman at all.’

Steerpike walked to the table and, leaning his hands upon it, gazed into space.

‘Their Ladyships Cora and Clarice Groan of Gormenghast have no footman – have no one save an old lady who smells. Where are their servants? Where are their retinues, their swarms of attendants?’ And then in a voice little above a whisper: ‘This must be seen to. This must end.’ With a clicking of his tongue he straightened his back. ‘And now’, he continued in a livelier voice, ‘the needlework is waiting.’

What Steerpike had said, as they toured the walls, began to re-fertilize those seeds of revolt which he had sown at the Prunesquallors’. He watched them out of the corner of his eyes as he flattered their handiwork, and he could see that although it was a great pleasure for them to show their craft, yet their minds were continually returning to the question he had raised. ‘We do it all with our left hands, don’t we, Cora?’ Clarice said, as she pointed to an ugly green-and-red rabbit of intricate needlework.

‘Yes,’ said Cora, ‘it takes a long time because it’s all done like that – with our left hands. Our right arms are starved, you know,’ she said, turning to Steerpike. ‘They’re quite, quite starved.’

‘Indeed, your Ladyship,’ said Steerpike. ‘How is that?’

‘Not only our left arms,’ Clarice broke in, ‘but all down our left-hand sides and our right-hand legs, too. That’s why they’re rather stiff. It was the epileptic fits which we had. That’s what did it and that’s what makes our needlework all the more clever.’

‘And beautiful,’ said Cora.

‘I cannot but agree,’ said Steerpike.

‘But nobody sees them,’ said Clarice. ‘We are left alone. Nobody wants our advice on anything. Gertrude doesn’t take any notice of us, nor does Sepulchrave. You know what we ought to have, don’t you, Cora?’

‘Yes,’ said her sister, ‘I know.’

‘What, then?’ said Clarice. ‘Tell me. Tell me.’

‘Power,’ said Cora.

‘That’s right. Power. That’s the very thing we want.’ Clarice turned her eyes to Steerpike. Then she smoothed the shiny purple of her dress.

‘I rather liked them,’ she said.

Steerpike, wondering where on earth her thoughts had taken her, tilted his head on one side as though reflecting upon the truth in her remark, when Cora’s voice (like the body of a plaice translated into sound) asked:

‘You rather liked what?’

‘My convulsions,’ said Clarice earnestly. ‘When my left arm became starved for the first time. You remember, Cora, don’t you? When we had our first fits? I rather liked them.’

Cora rustled up to her and raised a forefinger in front of her sister’s face. ‘Clarice Groan,’ she said, ‘we finished talking about that long ago. We’re talking about Power now. Why can’t you follow what we’re talking about? You are always losing your place. I’ve noticed that.’

‘What about the Room of Roots?’ asked Steerpike with affected gaiety. ‘Why is it called the Room of Roots? I am most intrigued.’

‘Don’t you know?’ came their voices.

‘He doesn’t know,’ said Clarice. ‘You see how we’ve been forgotten. He didn’t know about our Room of Roots.’

Steerpike was not kept long in ignorance. He followed the two purple ninepins through the door, and after passing down a short passage, Cora opened a massive door at the far end whose hinges could have done with a gill of oil apiece, and followed by her sister entered the Room of Roots. Steerpike in his turn stepped over the threshold and his curiosity was more than assuaged.

If the name of the room was unusual there was no doubt about its being apt. It was certainly a room of roots. Not of a few simple, separate formations, but of a thousand branching, writhing, coiling, intertwining, diverging, converging, interlacing limbs whose origin even Steerpike’s quick eyes were unable for some time to discover.

He found eventually that the thickening stems converged at a tall, narrow aperture on the far side of the room, through the upper half of which the sky was pouring a grey, amorphous light. It seemed at first as though it would be impossible to stir at all in this convoluting meshwork, but Steerpike was amazed to see that the twins were moving about freely in the labyrinth. Years of experience had taught them the possible approaches to the window. They had already reached it and were looking out into the evening. Steerpike made an attempt at following them, but was soon inextricably lost in the writhing maze. Wherever he turned he was faced with a network of weird arms that rose and fell, dipped and clawed, motionless yet alive with serpentine rhythms.

Yet the roots were dead. Once the room must have been filled with earth, but now, suspended for the most part in the higher reaches of the chamber, the thread-like extremities clawed impotently in the air. Nor was it enough that Steerpike should find a room so incongruously monopolized, but that every one of these twisting terminals should be hand-painted was even more astonishing. The various main limbs and their wooden tributaries, even down to the minutest rivulet of root, were painted in their own especial colours, so that it appeared as though seven coloured boles had forced their leafless branches through the window, yellow, red and green, violet and pale blue, coral pink and orange. The concentration of effort needed for the execution of this work must have been considerable, let alone the almost superhuman difficulties and vexations that must have resulted from the efforts to establish, among the labyrinthic entanglements of the finer roots, which tendril belonged to which branch, which branch to which limb, and which limb to which trunk, for only after discovering its source could its correct colour be applied.

The idea had been that the birds on entering should choose those roots whose colours most nearly approximated to their own plumage, or if they had preferred it to nest among roots whose hue was complementary to their own.

The work had taken the sisters well over three years, and yet when all had been completed the project for which all this work had been designed had proved to be empty, the Room of Roots a failure, their hopes frozen. From this mortification the twins had never fully recovered. It is true that the room, as a room, gave them pleasure, but that the birds never approached it, let alone settled and nested there, was a festering sore at the back of what minds they had.

Against this nagging disappointment was the positive pride which they felt in having a room of roots at all. And not only the Roots but logically enough the Tree whose branches had once drawn sustenance into its highest twigs, and, long ago, burst forth each April with its emerald jets. It was this Tree that was their chief source of satisfaction, giving them some sense of that distinction which they were now denied.

They turned their eyes from its branches and looked around for Steerpike. He was still not unravelled. ‘Can you assist me, my dear Ladyships?’ he called, peering through a skein of purple fibres.

‘Why don’t you come to this window?’ said Clarice.

‘He can’t find the way,’ said Cora.

‘Can’t he? I don’t see why not,’ said Clarice.

‘Because he can’t,’ said Cora. ‘Go and show him,’

‘All right. But he must be very stupid,’ said Clarice, walking through the dense walls of roots which seemed to open up before her and close again behind her back. When she reached Steerpike, she walked past him and it was only by practically treading on her heels that he was able to thread his way towards the window. At the window there was a little more space, for the seven stems which wedged their way through its lower half protruded some four feet into the room before beginning to divide and subdivide. Alongside the window there were steps that led up to a small platform which rested on the thick horizontal stems.

‘Look outside,’ said Cora directly Steerpike arrived, ‘and you’ll see It.’

Steerpike climbed the few steps and saw the main trunk of the tree floating out horizontally into space and then running up to a great height, and as he saw it he recognized it as the tree he had studied from the roof tops, half a mile away near the stone sky-field.

He saw how, what had then seemed a perilous balancing act on the part of the distant figures, was in reality a safe enough exercise, for the bole was conveniently flat on its upper surface. When it reached that point where it began to ascend and branch out, the wooden highway spread into an area that could easily have accommodated ten or twelve people standing in a close group.

‘Definitely a tree,’ he said. ‘I am all in favour of it. Has it been dead as long as you can remember it?’

‘Of course,’ said Clarice.

‘We’re not as old as that,’ said Cora, and as this was the first joke she had made for over a year, she tried to smile, but her facial muscles had become, through long neglect, unusable.

‘Not so old as what?’ said Clarice.

‘You don’t understand,’ said Cora. ‘You are much slower than I am. I’ve noticed that.’

‘INKLINGS OF GLORY’

‘I want some tea,’ said Clarice; and leading the way she performed the miraculous journey through the room once more, Steerpike at her heels like a shadow and Cora taking an alternative path.

Once more in the comparatively sane living room where the tapers had been lit by the old woman, they sat before the fire and Steerpike asked if he might smoke. Cora and Clarice after glancing at each other nodded slowly, and Steerpike filled his pipe and lit it with a small red coal.

Clarice had pulled at a bell-rope that hung by the wall, and now as they sat in a semi-circle about the blaze, Steerpike in the centre chair, a door opened to their right and an old dark-skinned lady, with very short legs and bushy eyebrows, entered the room.

‘Tea, I suppose,’ she said in a subterranean voice that seemed to have worked its way up from somewhere in the room beneath them. She then caught sight of Steerpike and wiped her unpleasant nose with the back of her hand before retiring and closing the door behind her like an explosion. The embroideries flapped outwards in the draught this occasioned, and sank again limply against the walls.

‘This is too much,’ said Steerpike. ‘How can you bear it?’

‘Bear what?’ said Clarice.

‘Do you mean, your Ladyships, that you have become used to being treated in this offhand and insolent manner? Do you not mind whether your natural and hereditary dignities are flouted and abused – when an old commoner slams the doors upon you and speaks to you as though you were on her own degraded level? How can the Groan blood that courses so proudly and in such an undiluted stream, through your veins, remain so quiet? Why in its purple wrath is it not boiling at this moment?’ He paused a moment and leant further forward.

‘Your birds have been stolen by Gertrude, the wife of your brother. Your labour of love among the roots, which but for that woman would now be bearing fruit, is a fiasco. Even your Tree is forgotten. I had not heard of it. Why had I not heard of it? Because you and all you possess have been put aside, forgotten, neglected. There are few enough of your noble and ancient family in Gormenghast to carry on the immemorial rites, and yet you two who could uphold them more scrupulously than any, are slighted at every turn.’

The twins were staring at him very hard. As he paused they turned their eyes to one another. His words, though sometimes a little too swift for them, communicated nevertheless their subversive gist. Here, from the mouth of a stranger, their old sores and grievances were being aired and formulated.

The old lady with the short legs returned with a tray which she set before them with a minimum of deference. Then inelegantly waddling away, she turned at the door and stared again at their visitor, wiping, as before, the back of her large hand across her nose.

When she had finally disappeared, Steerpike leaned forward and, turning to Cora and Clarice in turn, and fixing them with close and concentrated eyes, he said:

‘Do you believe in honour? Your Ladyships, answer me, do you believe in honour?’

They nodded mechanically.

‘Do you believe that injustice should dominate the castle?’

They shook their heads.

‘Do you believe it should go unchecked – that it should flourish without just retribution?’

Clarice, who had rather lost track of the last question waited until she saw Cora shaking her head before she followed suit.

‘In other words,’ said Steerpike, ‘you think that something must be done. Something to crush this tyranny.’

They nodded their heads again, and Clarice could not help feeling a little satisfied that she had so far made no mistake with her shakes and nods.

‘Have you any ideas?’ said Steerpike. ‘Have you any plans to suggest?’

They shook their heads at once.

‘In that case,’ said Steerpike, stretching his legs out before him and crossing his ankles, ‘may I make a suggestion, your Ladyships?’

Again, most flatteringly, he faced each one in turn to obtain her consent. One after the other they nodded heavily, sitting bolt upright in their chairs.

Meanwhile, the tea and the scones were getting cold, but they had all three forgotten them.

Steerpike got up and stood with his back to the fire so that he might observe them both at the same time.

‘Your gracious Ladyships,’ he began, ‘I have received information which is of the highest moment. It is information which hinges upon the unsavoury topic with which we have been forced to deal. I beg your undivided concentration; but I will first of all ask you a question: who has the undisputed control over Gormenghast? Who is it who, having this authority, makes no use of it but allows the great traditions of the castle to drift, forgetting that even his own sisters are of his blood and lineage and are entitled to homage and – shall I say it? – yes, to adulation, too? Who is that man?’

‘Gertrude,’ they replied.

‘Come, come,’ said Steerpike, raising his eyebrows, ‘who is it who forgets even his own sisters? Who is it, your Ladyships?’

‘Sepulchrave,’ said Cora.

‘Sepulchrave,’ echoed Clarice.

They had become agitated and excited by now although they did not show it, and had lost control over what little circumspection they had ever possessed. Every word that Steerpike uttered they swallowed whole.

‘Lord Sepulchrave,’ said Steerpike. After a pause, he continued. ‘If it were not that you were his sisters, and of the Family, how could I dare to speak in this way of the Lord of Gormenghast? But it is my duty to be honest. Lady Gertrude has slighted you, but who could make amends? Who has the final power but your brother? In my efforts to re-establish you, and to make this South Wing once again alive with your servants, it must be remembered that it is your selfish brother who must be reckoned with.’

‘He is selfish, you know,’ said Clarice.

‘Of course he is,’ said Cora. ‘Thoroughly selfish. What shall we do? Tell us! Tell us!’

‘In all battles, whether of wits or of war,’ said Steerpike, ‘the first thing to do is to take the initiative and to strike hard.’

‘Yes,’ said Cora, who had reached the edge of the chair and was stroking her smooth heliotrope knees in quick, continual movements which Clarice emulated.

‘One must choose where to strike,’ said Steerpike, ‘and it is obvious that to strike at the most vulnerable nerve centre of the opponent is the shrewdest preliminary measure. But there must be no half-heartedness. It is all or nothing.’

‘All or nothing,’ echoed Clarice.

‘And now you must tell me, dear ladies, what is your brother’s main interest?’

They went on smoothing their knees.

‘Is it not literature?’ said Steerpike. ‘Is he not a great lover of books?’

They nodded.

‘He’s very clever,’ said Cora.

‘But he reads it all in books,’ said Clarice.

‘Exactly.’ Steerpike followed quickly upon this. ‘Then if he lost his books, he would be all but defeated. If the centre of his life were destroyed he would be but a shell. As I see it, your Ladyships, it is at his library that our first thrust must be directed. You must have your rights,’ he added hotly. ‘It is only fair that you should have your rights.’ He took a dramatic step towards the Lady Cora Groan; he raised his voice: ‘My Lady Cora Groan, do you not agree?’

Cora, who had been sitting on the extreme edge of her chair in her excitement, now rose and nodded her head so violently as to throw her hair into confusion.

Clarice, on being asked, followed her sister’s example, and Steerpike relit his pipe from the fire and leaned against the mantelpiece for a few moments, sending out wreaths of smoke from between his thin lips.

‘You have helped me a great deal, your Ladyships,’ he said at last, drawing at his stubby pipe and watching a smoke-ring float to the ceiling. ‘You are prepared, I am sure, for the sake of your own honour, to assist me further in my struggle for your deliverance.’ He understood from the movements of their perched bodies that they agreed that this was so.

‘The question that arises in that case’, said Steerpike, ‘is how are we to dispose of your brother’s books and thereby bring home to him his responsibilities? What do you feel is the obvious method of destroying a library full of books? Have you been to his library lately, your Ladyships?’

They shook their heads.

‘How would you proceed, Lady Cora? What method would you use to destroy a hundred thousand books?’

Steerpike removed his pipe from his lips and gazed intently at her.

‘I’d burn them,’ said Cora,

This was exactly what Steerpike had wanted her to say; but he shook his head. ‘That would be difficult. What could we burn it with?’

‘With fire,’ said Clarice.

‘But how would we start the fire, Lady Clarice?’ said Steerpike pretending to look perplexed.

‘Straw,’ said Cora.

‘That is a possibility,’ said Steerpike, stroking his chin. ‘I wonder if your idea would work swiftly enough. Do you think it would?’

‘Yes, yes!’ said Clarice. ‘Straw is lovely to burn.’

‘But would it catch the books’, persisted Steerpike, ‘all on its own? There would have to be a great deal of it. Would it be quick enough?’

‘What’s the hurry?’ said Cora.

‘It must be done swiftly,’ said Steerpike, ‘otherwise the flames might be put out by busybodies.’

‘I love fires,’ said Clarice.

‘But we oughtn’t to burn down Sepulchrave’s library, ought we?’

Steerpike had expected, sooner or later, that one of them would feel conscience-stricken and he had retained his trump card.

‘Lady Cora,’ he said, ‘sometimes one has to do things which are unpalatable. When great issues are involved one can’t toy with the situation in silk gloves. No. We are making history and we must be stalwart. Do you recall how when I first came in I told you that I had received information? You do? Well, I will now divulge what has come to my ears. Keep calm and steady; remember who you are. I shall look after your interests, have no fear, but at this moment sit down, will you, and attend?

‘You tell me you have been treated badly for this and for that, but only listen now to the latest scandal that is being repeated below stairs. “They aren’t being asked,” everyone is saying, “They haven’t been asked.”’

‘Asked what?’ said Clarice.

‘Or where?’ said Cora.

‘To the Great Gathering which your brother is calling. At this Great Gathering the details for a party for the New Heir to Gormenghast, your nephew Titus, will be discussed. Everyone of importance is going. Even the Prunesquallors are going. It is the first time for many years that your brother has become so worldly as to call the members of his family together. He has, it is said, many things which he wishes to talk of in connexion with Titus, and in my opinion this Great Gathering in a week’s time will be of prime importance. No one knows exactly what Lord Sepulchrave has in mind, but the general idea is that preparations must be begun even now for a party on his son’s first Birthday.

‘Whether you will even be invited to that Party I would not like to say, but judging from the remarks I have heard about how you two have been thrust aside and forgotten like old shoes, I should say it was very unlikely.

‘You see,’ said Steerpike, ‘I have not been idle, I have been listening and taking stock of the situation, and one day my labours will prove themselves to have been justified – when I see you, my dear Ladyships, sitting at either end of a table of distinguished guests, and when I hear the glasses clinking and the rounds of applause that greet your every remark I shall congratulate myself that I had long ago enough imagination and ruthless realism to proceed with the dangerous work of raising you to the level to which you belong.

‘Why should you not have been invited to the party? Why? Why? Who are you to be spurned thus and derided by the lowest menials in Swelter’s kitchen?’

Steerpike paused and saw that his words had produced a great effect. Clarice had gone over to Cora’s chair where now they both sat bolt upright and very close together.

‘When you suggested so perspicaciously just now that the solution to this insufferable state of affairs lay in the destruction of your brother’s cumbersome library, I felt that you were right and that only through a brave action of that kind might you be able to lift up your heads once more and feel the slur removed from your escutcheon. That idea of yours spelt genius. I appeal to your Ladyships to do what you feel to be consistent with your honour and your pride. You are not old, your Ladyships, oh no, you are not old. But are you young? I should like to feel that what years you have left will be filled with glamorous days and romantic nights. Shall it be so? Shall we take the step towards justice? Yes or no, my dear ladies, yes or no.’

They got up together. ‘Yes,’ they said, ‘we want Power back.’

‘We want our servants back and justice back and everything back,’ Cora said slowly, a counterpoint of intense excitement weaving through the flat foreground of her voice.

‘And romantic nights,’ said Clarice. ‘I’d like that. Yes, yes. Burn! Burn,’ she continued loudly, her flat bosom beginning to heave up and down like a machine. ‘Burn! burn! burn!’

‘When?’ said Cora. ‘When can we burn it up?’

Steerpike held up his hand to quieten them. But they took no notice, only leaning forward, holding each other’s hands and crying in their dreadful emotionless voices:

‘Burn! Burn! Burn! Burn! Burn!’ until they had exhausted themselves.

Steerpike had not flinched under this ordeal. He now realized more completely than before why they were ostracized from the normal activities of the castle. He had known they were slow, but he had not known that they could behave like this.

He changed his tone.

‘Sit down!’ he rapped out. ‘Both of you. Sit down!’

They complied at once, and although they were taken aback at the peremptory nature of his order, he could see that he now had complete control over them, and though his inclination was to show his authority and to taste for the first time the sinister delights of his power, yet he spoke to them gently – for, first of all, the library must be burned for a reason of his own. After that, with such a dreadful hold over them, he could relax for a time and enjoy a delicious dictatorship in the South Wing.

‘In six days’ time, your Ladyships,’ he said, fingering his gold chain – ‘on the evening before the Great Gathering to which you have not been invited – the library will be empty and you may burn it to the ground. I shall prepare the incendiaries and will school you in all the details later; but on the great night itself when you see me give the signal you will set fire at once to the fuel and will make your way immediately to this room.’

‘Can’t we watch it burn?’ said Cora.

‘Yes,’ said Clarice, ‘can’t we?’

‘From your Tree,’ said Steerpike. ‘Do you want to be found out?’

‘No!’ they said. ‘No! No!’

‘Then you can watch it from your Tree and be quite safe. I will remain in the wood so that I can see that nothing goes wrong. Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ they said. ‘Then we’ll have Power, won’t we?’

The unconscious irony of this caused Steerpike’s lip to lift, but he said:

‘Your Ladyships will then have Power.’ And approaching them in turn he kissed the tips of their fingers. Picking up his swordstick from the table he walked swiftly to the door, where he bowed.

Before he opened it he said: ‘We are the only ones who know. The only ones who will ever know, aren’t we?’

‘Yes,’ they said. ‘Only us.’

‘I will return within a day or two,’ said Steerpike, ‘and give you the details. Your honour must be saved.’

He did not say good night, but opened the door and disappeared into the darkness.

‘PREPARATIONS FOR ARSON’

On one excuse or another Steerpike absented himself from the Prunesquallors’ during the major part of the next two days. Although he accomplished many things during this short period, the three stealthy expeditions which he made to the library were the core of his activities. The difficulty lay in crossing, unobserved, the open ground to the conifer wood. Once in the wood and among the pines there was less danger. He realized how fatal it might prove to be seen in the neighbourhood of the library, so shortly before the burning. On the first of the reconnaissances, after waiting in the shadows of the Southern wing before scudding across the overgrown gardens to the fields that bordered the conifers, he gathered the information which he needed. He had managed after an hour’s patient concentration to work the lock of the library door with a piece of wire, and then he had entered the silent room, to investigate the structure of the building. There was a remoteness about the deserted room. Shadowy and sinister though it was by night, it was free of the vacancy which haunted its daylight hours. Steerpike felt the insistent silence of the place as he moved to and fro, glancing over his high shoulder more than once as he took note of the possibilities for conflagration.

His survey was exhaustive, and when he finally left the building he appreciated to a nicety the nature of the problem. Lengths of oil-soaked material would have to be procured and laid behind the books where they could stretch unobserved from one end of the room to the other. After leading around the library they could be taken up the stairs and along the balcony. To lay these twisted lengths (no easy matter to procure without awakening speculation) was patently a job for those hours of the early morning, after Lord Sepulchrave had left for the castle. He had staggered, on his second visit, under an enormous bundle of rags and a tin of oil to the pine wood at midnight, and had occupied himself during the hours while he waited for Lord Sepulchrave to leave the building in knotting together the odd assortment of pilfered cloth into lengths of not less than forty feet.

When at last he saw his Lordship leave the side door and heard his slow, melancholy footsteps die away on the pathway leading to the Tower of Flints, he rose and stretched himself.

Much to his annoyance the probing of the lock occupied even more time than on the last occasion, and it was four o’clock in the morning before he pushed the door open before him.

Luckily, the dark autumn mornings were on his side, and he had a clear three hours. He had noticed that from without no light could be observed and he lit the lamp in the centre of the room.

Steerpike was nothing if not systematic, and two hours later, taking a tour of the library, he was well satisfied. Not a trace of his handiwork could be seen save only where four extremities of the cloth hung limply beside the main, unused, door of the building. These strips were the terminals of the four lengths that circumscribed the library and balcony and would be dealt with.

The only thing that caused him a moment’s reflection was the faint smell of the oil in which he had soaked the tightly twisted cloth.

He now concentrated his attention upon the four strips and twining them together into a single cord, he knotted it at its end. Somehow or other this cord must find its way through the door to the outside world. He had on his last visit eventually arrived at the only solution apart from that of chiselling away through the solid wall and the oak that formed the backs of the bookshelves. This was obviously too laborious. The alternative, which he had decided on, was to bore a neat hole through the door immediately under the large handle in the shadow of which it would be invisible save to scrutiny. Luckily for him there was a reading stand in the form of a carven upright with three short, bulbous legs. This upright supported a tilted surface the size of a very small table. This piece stood unused in front of the main door. By moving it a fraction to the right, the twisted cord of cloth was lost in darkness and although its discovery was not impossible, both this risk and that of the faint aroma of oil being noticed, were justifiable.

He had brought the necessary tools with him and although the oak was tough had bored his way through it within half an hour. He wriggled the cord through the hole and swept up the sawdust that had gathered on the floor.

By this time he was really tired, but he took another walk about the library before turning down the lamp and leaving by the side door. Once in the open he bore to his right, and skirting the adjacent wall, arrived at the main door of the building. As this entrance had not been used for many years, the steps that led to it were invisible beneath a cold sea of nettles and giant weeds. He waded his way through them and saw the loose end of the cord hanging through the raw hole he had chiselled. It glimmered whitely and was hooked like a dead finger. Opening the blade of a small sharp knife he cut through the twisted cloth so that only about two inches protruded, and to prevent this stub end slipping back through the hole, drove a small nail through the cloth with the butt of his knife.

His work for the night now seemed to be complete and, only stopping to hide the can of oil in the wood, he retraced his steps to the Prunesquallors’, where climbing at once to his room he curled up in bed, dressed as he was, and incontinently fell asleep.

The third of his expeditions to the library, the second during the daylight, was on other business. As might be supposed, the childishness of burning down Lord Sepulchrave’s sanctum did not appeal to him. In a way it appalled him. Not through any prickings of conscience but because destruction in any form annoyed him. That is, the destruction of anything inanimate that was well constructed. For living creature he had not this same concern, but in a well-made object, whatever its nature, a sword or a watch or a book, he felt an excited interest. He enjoyed a thing that was cleverly conceived and skilfully wrought, and this notion, of destroying so many beautifully bound and printed volumes, had angered him against himself, and it was only when his plot had so ripened that he could neither retract nor resist it, that he went forward with a single mind. That it should be the Twins who would actually set light to the building with their own hands was, of course, the lynch-pin of the manoeuvre. The advantages to himself which would accrue from being the only witness to the act were too absorbing for him to ponder at this juncture.

The aunts would, of course, not realize that they were setting fire to a library filled with people: nor that it would be the night of the Great Gathering to which, as Steerpike had told them, they were not to be invited. The youth had waylaid Nannie Slagg on her way to the aunts and had inquired whether he could save her feet by delivering her message to them. At first she had been disinclined to divulge the nature of her mission, but when she at last furbished him with what he had already suspected, he promised he would inform them at once of the Gathering, and, after a pretence of going in their direction, he had returned to the Prunesquallors’ in time for his midday meal. It was on the following morning that he told the Twins that they had not been invited.

Once Cora and Clarice had ignited the cord at the main door of the library and the fire was beginning to blossom, it would be up to him to be as active as an eel on a line.

It seemed to Steerpike that to save two generations of the House of Groan from death by fire should stand him in very good stead, and moreover, his headquarters would be well established in the South Wing with their Ladyships Cora and Clarice who after such an episode would, if only through fear of their guilt being uncovered, eat out of his hand.

The question of how the fire started would follow close upon the rescue. On this he would have as little knowledge as anyone, only having seen the glow in the sky as he was walking along the South Wing for exercise. The Prunesquallors would bear out that it was his habit to take a stroll at sundown. The twins would be back in their room before news of the burning could ever reach the castle.

Steerpike’s third visit to the library was to plan how the rescues were to be effected. One of the first things was, of course, to turn and remove the key from the door when the party had entered the building, and as Lord Sepulchrave had the convenient habit of leaving it in the lock until he removed it on retiring in the small hours, there should be no difficulty about this. That such questions as ‘Who turned the key?’ and ‘how did it disappear?’ would be asked at a later date was inevitable, but with a well-rehearsed alibi for himself and the twins, and with the Prunesquallors’ cognizance of his having gone out for a stroll on that particular evening, he felt sure the suspicion would no more centre upon himself than on anyone else. Such minor problems as might arise in the future could be dealt with in the future.

This was of more immediate consequence: How was he to rescue the family of Groan in a manner reasonably free of danger to himself and yet sufficiently dramatic to cause the maximum admiration and indebtedness?

His survey of the building had shown him that he had no wide range of choice – in fact, that apart from forcing one of the doors open by some apparently superhuman effort at the last moment, or by smashing an opening in the large skylight in the roof through which it would be both too difficult and dangerous to rescue the prisoners, the remaining possibility lay in the only window, fifteen feet from the ground.

Once he had decided on this window as his focus he turned over in his mind alternative methods of rescue. It must appear, above all else, that the deliverance was the result of a spontaneous decision, translated at once into action. It did not matter so much if he were suspected, although he did not imagine that he would be; what mattered was that nothing could later be proved as prearranged.

The window, about four feet square, was above the main door and was heavily glazed. The difficulty naturally centred on how the prisoners were to reach the window from the inside, and how Steerpike was to scale the outer wall in order to smash the pane and show himself.

Obviously he must not be armed with anything which he would not normally be carrying. Whatever he used to force an entrance must be something he had picked up on the spur of the moment outside the library or among the pines. A ladder, for instance, would at once arouse suspicions, and yet something of that nature was needed. It occurred to him that a small tree was the obvious solution, and he began to search for one of the approximate length, already felled, for many of the pines which were cleared for the erection of the library and adjacent buildings were still to be seen lying half buried in the thick needle-covered ground. It did not take him long to come upon an almost perfect specimen of what he wanted. It was about twelve to fifteen feet long, and most of its lateral branches were broken off close to the bole, leaving stumps varying from three inches to a foot in length. ‘Here’, said Steerpike to himself, ‘is the thing.’

It was less easy for him to find another, but eventually he discovered some distance from the library what he was searching for. It lay in a dank hollow of ferns. Dragging it to the library wall, he propped both the pines upright against the main door and under the only window. Wiping the sweat from his bulging forehead he began to climb them, stamping off those branches that would be too weak to support Lady Groan, who would be the heaviest of the prisoners. Dragging them away from the wall, when he had completed these minor adjustments, and feeling satisfied that his ‘ladders’ were now both serviceable yet natural, he left them at the edge of the trees where a number of felled pines were littered, and next cast about for something with which he could smash the window. At the base of the adjacent building, a number of moss-covered lumps of masonry had fallen away from the walls. He carried several of these to within a few yards of the ‘ladders.’ Were there any question of his being suspected later, and if questions were raised as to how he came across the ladders and the piece of masonry so conveniently, he could point to the heap of half hidden stones and the litter of trees. Steerpike closed his eyes and attempted to visualize the scene. He could see himself making frantic efforts to open the doors, rattling the handles and banging the panels. He could hear himself shouting ‘Is there anybody in there?’ and the muffled cries from within. Perhaps he would yell: ‘Where’s the key? Where’s the key?’ or a few gallant encouragements, such as ‘I’ll get you out somehow.’ Then he would leap to the main door and beating on it a few times, deliver a few more yells before dragging up the ‘ladders’, for the fire by that time should be going very well. Or perhaps he would do none of these things, simply appearing to them like the answer to a prayer, in the nick of time. He grinned.

The only reason why he could not spare himself both time and energy by propping the ‘ladders’ against the wall after the last guest had entered the library was that the Twins would see them as they performed their task. It was imperative that they should not suspect the library to be inhabited, let alone gain an inkling of Steerpike’s preparations.

On this, the last occasion of his three visits to the library, he once again worked the lock of the side door and overhauled his handiwork. Lord Sepulchrave had been there on the previous night as usual, but apparently had suspected nothing. The tall book stand was as he had left it, obstructing a view of and throwing a deep shadow over the handle of the main door from beneath which the twisted cloth stretched like a tight rope across the two foot span to the end of the long book shelves. He could now detect no smell of oil, and although that meant that it was evaporating, he knew that it would still be more inflammable than the dry cloth.

Before he left he selected half a dozen volumes from the less conspicuous shelves, which he hid in the pine wood on his return journey, and which he collected on the following night from their rainproof nest of needles in the decayed bole of a dead larch. Three of the volumes had vellum bindings and were exquisitely chased with gold, and the others were of equally rare craftsmanship, and it was with annoyance, on returning to the Prunesquallors’ that night that he found it necessary to fashion for them their neat jackets of brown paper and to obliterate the Groan crest on the fly-leaves.

It was only when these nefarious doings were satisfactorily completed that Steerpike visited the aunts for the second time and re-primed them in their very simple rôles as arsonists. He had decided that rather than tell the Prunesquallors that he was going out for a stroll he would say instead that he was paying a visit to the aunts, and then with them to prove his alibi (for somehow or other they must be got to and from the library without the knowledge of their short-legged servant), their story and that of the Doctor’s would coincide.

He had made them repeat a dozen or so times: ‘We’ve been indoors all the time. We’ve been indoors all the time,’ until they were themselves as convinced of it as though they were reliving the Future!

THE GROTTO

It happened on the day of Steerpike’s second daylight visit to the Library. He was on his return journey and had reached the edge of the pine woods and was awaiting an opportunity to run unobserved across the open ground, when, away to his left, he saw a figure moving in the direction of Gormenghast Mountain.

The invigorating air, coupled with his recognition of the distant figure, prompted him to change his course, and with quick, birdlike steps he moved rapidly along the edge of the wood. In the rough landscape away to his left, the tiny figure in its crimson dress sang out against the sombre background like a ruby on a slate. The midsummer sun, and how much less this autumn light, had no power to mitigate the dreary character of the region that surrounded Gormenghast. It was like a continuation of the castle, rough and shadowy, and though vast and often windswept, oppressive too, with a kind of raw weight.

Ahead lay Gormenghast Mountain in all its permanence, a sinister thing as though drawn out of the earth by sorcery as a curse on all who viewed it. Although its base appeared to struggle from a blanket of trees within a few miles of the castle, it was in reality a day’s journey on horseback. Clouds were generally to be seen clustering about its summit even on the finest days when the sky was elsewhere empty, and it was common to see the storms raging across its heights and the sheets of dark rain slanting mistily over the blurred crown and obscuring half the mountain’s hideous body, while, at the same time, sunlight was playing across the landscape all about it and even on its own lower slopes. Today, however, not even a single cloud hung above the peak, and when Fuchsia had looked out of her bedroom window after her midday meal she had stared at the Mountain and said: ‘Where are the clouds?’

‘What clouds?’ said the old nurse, who was standing behind her, rocking Titus in her arms. ‘What is it, my caution?’

‘There’s nearly always clouds on top of the Mountain,’ said Fuchsia.

‘Aren’t there any, dear?’

‘No,’ said Fuchsia. ‘Why aren’t there?’

Fuchsia realized that Mrs Slagg knew virtually nothing, but the long custom of asking her questions was a hard one to break down. This realization that grown-ups did not necessarily know any more than children was something against which she had fought. She wanted Mrs Slagg to remain the wise recipient of all her troubles and the comforter that she had always seemed, but Fuchsia was growing up and she was now realizing how weak and ineffectual was her old guardian. Not that she was losing her loyalty or affection. She would have defended the wrinkled midget to her last breath if necessary; but she was isolated within herself with no one to whom she could run with that unquestioning confidence – that outpouring of her newest enthusiasms – her sudden terrors – her projects – her stories.

‘I think I’ll go out,’ she said, ‘for a walk.’

‘Again?’ said Mrs Slagg, stopping for a moment the rocking of her arms. ‘You go out such a lot now, don’t you? Why are you always going away from me?’

‘It’s not from you,’ said Fuchsia; ‘it’s because I want to walk and think. It isn’t going away from you. You know it isn’t.’

‘I don’t know anything,’ said Nannie Slagg, her face puckered up. ‘But I know you never went out all the summer, did you dear? And now that it is so temper-some and cold you are always going out into the nastiness and getting wet or frozen every day. Oh, my poor heart. Why? Why every day?’

Fuchsia pushed her hands into the depths of the big pockets of her red dress.

It was true she had deserted her attic for the dreary moors and the rocky tracts of country about Gormenghast. Why was this? Had she suddenly outgrown her attic that had once been all in all to her? Oh no; she had not outgrown it, but something had changed ever since that dreadful night when she saw Steerpike lying by the window in the darkness. It was no longer inviolate – secret – mysterious. It was no longer another world, but a part of the castle. Its magnetism had weakened – its silent, shadowy drama had died and she could no longer bear to revisit it. When last she had ventured up the spiral stairs and entered the musty and familiar atmosphere, Fuchsia had experienced a pang of such sharp nostalgia for what it had once been to her that she had turned from the swaying motes that filled the air and the shadowy shapes of all that she had known as her friends; the cobwebbed organ, the crazy avenue of a hundred loves – turned away, and stumbled down the dark staircase with a sense of such desolation as seemed would never lift. Her eyes grew dim as she remembered these things; her hands clenched in her deep pockets.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I have been out a lot. Do you get lonely? If you do, you needn’t, because you know I love you, don’t you? You know that, don’t you?

She thrust her lower lip forward and frowned at Mrs Slagg, but this was only to keep her tears back, for nowadays Fuchsia had so lonely a feeling that tears were never far distant. Never having had either positive cruelty or kindness shown to her by her parents, but only an indifference, she was not conscious of what it was that she missed – affection.

It had always been so and she had compensated herself by weaving stories of her own Future, or by lavishing her own love upon such things as the objects in her attics, or more recently upon what she found or saw among the woods and waste lands.

‘You know that, don’t you?’ Fuchsia repeated.

Nannie rocked Titus more vigorously than was necessary and by the pursing of her lips indicated that his Lordship was asleep and that she was speaking too loudly.

Then Fuchsia came up to her old nurse and stared at her brother. The feeling of aversion for him had disappeared, and though as yet the lilac-eyed creature had not affected her with any sensation of sisterly love, nevertheless she had got used to his presence in the Castle and would sometimes play with him solemnly for half an hour or so at a time.

Nannie’s eyes followed Fuchsia’s.

‘His little Lordship,’ she said, wagging her head, ‘it’s his little Lordship.’

‘Why do you love him?’

‘Why do I love him! oh, my poor, weak heart! Why do I love him, stupid? How could you say such a thing?’ cried Nannie Slagg. ‘Oh my little Lordship thing. How could I help it – the innocent notion that he is! The very next of Gormenghast, aren’t you, my only? The very next of all. What did your cruel sister say, then, what did she say?

‘He must go to his cot now, for his sleep, he must, and to dream his golden dreams.’

‘Did you talk to me like that when I was a baby,’ asked Fuchsia.

‘Of course I did,’ said Mrs Slagg. ‘Don’t be silly. Oh, the ignorance of you! Are you going to tidy your room for me now?’

She hobbled to the door with her precious bundle. Every day she asked this same question, but never waited for an answer, knowing that whatever it was, it was she who would have to make some sort of order out of the chaos.

Fuchsia again turned to the window and stared at the Mountain whose shape down to the least outcrop had long since scored its outline in her mind.

Between the castle and Gormenghast Mountain the land was desolate, for the main part empty wasteland, with large areas of swamp where undisturbed among the reedy tracts the waders moved. Curlews and peewits sent their thin cries along the wind. Moorhens reared their young and paddled blackly in and out of the rushes. To the east of Gormenghast Mountain, but detached from the trees at its base, spread the undulating darkness of the Twisted Woods. To the west the unkempt acres, broken here and there with low stunted trees bent by the winds into the shape of hunchbacks.

Between this dreary province and the pine wood that surrounded the West Wing of the castle, a dark, shelving plateau rose to a height of about a hundred to two hundred feet – an irregular tableland of greeny-black rock, broken and scarred and empty. It was beyond these cold escarpments that the river wound its way about the base of the Mountain and fed the swamps where the wild fowl lived.

Fuchsia could see three short stretches of the river from her window. This afternoon the central portion and that to its right were black with the reflection of the Mountain, and the third, away to the west beyond the rocky plateau, was a shadowy white strip that neither glanced nor sparkled, but, mirroring the opaque sky, lay lifeless and inert, like a dead arm.

Fuchsia left the window abruptly and closing the door after her with a crash, ran all the way down the stairs, almost falling as she slipped clumsily on the last flight, before threading a maze of corridors to emerge panting in the chilly sunlight.

Breathing in the sharp air she gulped and clenched her hands together until her nails bit at her palms. Then she began to walk. She had been walking for over an hour when she heard footsteps behind her and, turning, saw Steerpike. She had not seen him since the night at the Prunesquallors’ and never as clearly as now, as he approached her through the naked autumn. He stopped when he noticed that he was observed and called.

‘Lady Fuchsia! May I join you?’

Behind him she saw something which by contrast with the alien, incalculable figure before her, was close and real. It was something which she understood, something which she could never do without, or be without, for it seemed as though it were her own self, her own body, at which she gazed and which lay so intimately upon the skyline. Gormenghast. The long, notched outline of her home. It was now his background. It was a screen of walls and towers pocked with windows. He stood against it, an intruder, imposing himself so vividly, so solidly, against her world, his head overtopping the loftiest of its towers.

‘What do you want?’ she said.

A breeze had lifted from beyond the Twisted Woods and her dress was blown across her so that down her right side it clung to her showing the strength of her young body and thighs.

‘Lady Fuchsia!’ shouted Steerpike across the strengthening wind. ‘I’ll tell you.’ He took a few quick paces towards her and reached the sloping rock on which she stood. ‘I want you to explain this region to me – the marshes and Gormenghast Mountain. Nobody has ever told me about it. You know the country – you understand it,’ (he filled his lungs again) ‘and though I love the district I’m very ignorant.’ He had almost reached her. ‘Can I share your walks, occasionally? Would you consider the idea? Are you returning?’ Fuchsia had moved away. ‘If so, may I accompany you back?’

‘That’s not what you’ve come to ask me,’ said Fuchsia slowly. She was beginning to shake in the cold wind.

‘Yes, it is,’ said Steerpike, ‘it is just what I’ve come to ask you. And whether you will tell me about Nature.’

‘I don’t know anything about Nature,’ said Fuchsia, beginning to walk down the sloping rock. ‘I don’t understand it. I only look at it. Who told you I knew about it? Who makes up these things?’

‘No one,’ said Steerpike. ‘I thought you must know and understand what you love so much. I’ve seen you very often returning to the castle laden with the things you have discovered. And also, you look as though you understand.’

‘I do?’ said Fuchsia, surprised. ‘No, I can’t do. I don’t understand wise things at all.’

‘Your knowledge is intuitive,’ said the youth. ‘You have no need of book learning and such like. You only have to gaze at a thing to know it. The wind is getting stronger, your Ladyship, and colder. We had better return.’

Steerpike turned up his high collar, and gaining her permission to accompany her back to the castle, he began with her the descent of the grey rocks. Before they were halfway down, the rain was falling and the autumn sunlight had given way to a fast, tattered sky.

‘Tread carefully, Lady Fuchsia,’ said Steerpike suddenly; and Fuchsia stopped and stared quickly over her shoulder at him as though she had forgotten he was there. She opened her mouth as though to speak when a far rattle of thunder reverberated among the rocks and she turned her head to the sky. A black cloud was approaching and from its pendulous body the rain fell in a mass of darkness.

Soon it would be above them and Fuchsia’s thoughts leapt backward through the years to a certain afternoon when, as today, she had been caught in a sudden rain storm. She had been with her mother on one of those rare occasions, still rarer now, when the Countess for some reason or other decided to take her daughter for a walk. Those occasional outings had been silent affairs, and Fuchsia could remember how she had longed to be free of the presence that moved at her side and above her, and yet she recalled how she had envied her huge mother when the wild birds came to her at her long, shrill, sweet whistle and settled upon her head and arms and shoulders. But what she chiefly remembered was how, on that day, when the storm broke above them, her mother instead of turning back to the castle, continued onward towards these same layers of dark rock which she and Steerpike were now descending. Her mother had turned down a rough, narrow gully and had disappeared behind a high slab of dislodged stone that was leaning against a face of rock. Fuchsia had followed. But instead of finding her mother sheltering from the downpour against the cliff and behind the slab, to her surprise she found herself confronted with the entrance to a grotto. She had peered inside, and there, deep in its chilly throat, was her mother sitting upon the ground and leaning against the sloping wall, very still and silent and enormous.

They had waited there until the storm had tired of its own anger and a slow rain descended like remorse from the sky. No word had passed between them, and Fuchsia, as she remembered the grotto, felt a shiver run through her body. But she turned to Steerpike. ‘Follow me, if you want to,’ she said. ‘I know a cave.’

The rain was by now thronging across the escarpment, and she began to run over the slippery grey rock surfaces with Steerpike at her heels.

As she began the short, steep descent she turned for an instant to see whether Steerpike had kept pace with her, and as she turned, her feet slipped away from under her on the slithery surface of an oblique slab, and she came crashing to the ground, striking the side of her face, her shoulders and shin with a force that for the moment stunned her. But only for a moment. As she made an effort to rise and felt the pain growing at her cheekbone, Steerpike was beside her. He had been some twelve yards away as she fell, but he slithered like a snake among the rocks and was kneeling beside her almost immediately. He saw at once that the wound upon her face was superficial. He felt her shoulder and shinbone with his thin fingers and found them sound. He removed his cape, covered her and glanced down the gully. The rain swam over his face and thrashed on the rocks. At the base of the steep decline he could see, looming vaguely through the downpour, a huge propped rock, and he guessed that it was towards this that Fuchsia had been running, for the gully ended within forty feet in a high, unscalable wall of granite.

Fuchsia was trying to sit up, but the pain in her shoulder had drained her of strength.

‘Lie still!’ shouted Steerpike through the screen of rain that divided them. Then he pointed to the propped rock.

‘Is that where we were going?’ he asked.

‘There’s a cave behind it,’ she whispered. ‘Help me up I can get there all right.’

‘Oh no,’ said Steerpike. He knelt down beside her, and then with great care he lifted her inch by inch from the rocks. His wiry muscles toughened in his slim arms, and along his spine, as by degrees he raised her to the level of his chest, getting to his feet as he did so. Then, step by tentative step over the splashing boulders he approached the cave. A hundred rain thrashed pools had collected among the rocks.

Fuchsia had made no remonstrance, knowing that she could never have made this difficult descent; but as she felt his arms around her and the proximity of his body, something deep within her tried to hide itself. Through the thick, tousled strands of her drenched hair she could see his sharp, pale, crafty face, his powerful dark-red eyes focused upon the rocks below them, his high protruding forehead, his cheekbones glistening, his mouth an emotionless line.

This was Steerpike. He was holding her; she was in his arms; in his power. His hard arms and fingers were taking the weight at her thighs and shoulders. She could feel his muscles like bars of metal. This was the figure whom she had found in her attic, and who had climbed up the sheer and enormous wall. He had said that he had found a stone sky-field. He had said that she understood Nature. He wanted to learn from her. How could he with his wonderful long sentences learn anything from her? She must be careful. He was clever. But there was nothing wrong in being clever. Dr Prune was clever and she liked him. She wished she was clever herself.

He was edging between the wall of rock and the slanting slab, and suddenly they were in the dim light of the grotto. The floor was dry and the thunder of the rain beyond the entrance seemed to come from another world.

Steerpike lowered her carefully to the ground and propped her against a flat, slanting portion of the wall. Then he pulled off his shirt and began, after wringing as much moisture from it as he could, to tear it into long narrow pieces. She watched him, fascinated in spite of the pain she was suffering. It was like watching someone from another world who was worked by another kind of machinery, by something smoother, colder, harder, swifter. Her heart rebelled against the bloodlessness of his precision, but she had begun to watch him with a grudging admiration for a quality so alien to her own temperament.

The grotto was about fifteen feet in depth, the root dipping to the earth, so that in only the first nine feet from the entrance was it possible to stand upright. Close to the arching roof, areas of the rock face were broken and fretted into dim convolutions of stone, and a fanciful eye could with a little difficulty beguile any length of time by finding among the inter-woven patterns an inexhaustible army of ghoulish or seraphic heads according to the temper of the moment.

The recesses of the grotto were in deep darkness, but it was easy enough for Fuchsia and Steerpike to see each other in the dull light near the shielded entrance.

Steerpike had torn his shirt into neat strips and had knelt down beside Fuchsia and bandaged her head and staunched the bleeding which, especially from her leg, where the injury was not so deep, was difficult to check. Her upper arm was less easy, and it was necessary for her to allow Steerpike to bare her shoulder before he could wash it clean.

She watched him as he carefully dabbed the wound. The sudden pain and shock had changed to a raw aching and she bit her lip to stop her tears. In the half light she saw his eyes smouldering in the shadowy whiteness of his face. Above the waist he was naked. What was it that made his shoulders look deformed? They were high, but were sound, though like the rest of his body, strangely taut and contracted. His chest was narrow and firm.

He removed a swab of cloth from her shoulder slowly and peered to see whether the blood would continue to flow.

‘Keep still,’ he said. ‘Keep your arm as still as you can. How’s the pain?’

‘I’m all right,’ said Fuchsia.

‘Don’t be heroic,’ he said, sitting back on his heels, ‘We’re not playing a game. I want to know exactly how much you’re in pain – not whether you are brave or not. I know that already. Which hurts you most?’

‘My leg,’ said Fuchsia. ‘It makes me want to be ill. And I’m cold. Now you know.’

Their eyes met in the half light.

Steerpike straightened himself, ‘I’m going to leave you,’ he said. ‘Otherwise the cold will gnaw you to bits, I can’t get you back to the castle alone. I’ll fetch the Prune and a stretcher. You’ll be all right here. I’ll go now, at once. We’ll be back within half an hour. I can move when I want to.’

‘Steerpike,’ said Fuchsia.

He knelt down at once. ‘What is it?’ he said, speaking very softly.

‘You’ve done quite a lot to help,’ she said.

‘Nothing much,’ he replied. His hand was close to hers.

The silence which followed became ludicrous and he got to his feet.

‘Mustn’t stay.’ He had sensed the beginning of something less frigid. He would leave things as they were. ‘You’ll be shaking like a leaf if I don’t hurry. Keep absolutely still.’

He laid his coat over her and then walked the few paces to the opening.

Fuchsia watched his hunched yet slender outline as he stood for a moment before plunging into the rain-swept gully. Then he had gone, and she remained quite still, as he had told her, and listened to the pounding of the rain.

Steerpike’s boast as to his fleetness was not an idle one. With incredible agility he leapt from boulder to boulder until he had reached the head of the gully and from there, down the long slopes of the escarpment, he sped like a Dervish. But he was not reckless. Every one of his steps was a calculated result of a decision taken at a swifter speed than his feet could travel.

At length the rocks were left behind and the castle emerged through a dull blanket.

His entrance into the Prunesquallors’ was dramatic. Irma, who had never before seen any male skin other than that which protrudes beyond the collar and the cuffs, gave a piercing cry and fell into her brother’s arms only to recover at once and to dash from the room in a typhoon of black silk. Prunesquallor and Steerpike could hear the stair rods rattling as she whirled her way up the staircase and the crashing of her bedroom door set the pictures swaying on the walls of all the downstairs rooms.

Dr Prunesquallor had circled around Steerpike with his head drawn back so that his cervical vertebrae rested against the rear wall of his high collar, and a plumbless abysm yawned between his Adam’s apple and his pearl stud. With his head bridled backwards thus, somewhat in the position of a cobra about to strike, and with his eyebrows raised quizzically, he was yet able at the same time to flash both tiers of his startling teeth which caught and reflected the lamplight with an unnatural brilliancy.

He was in an ecstasy of astonishment. The spectacle of a half-nude, dripping Steerpike both repelled and delighted him. Every now and again Steerpike and the Doctor could hear an extraordinary moaning from the floor above.

When, however, the Doctor heard the cause of the boy’s appearance, he was at once on the move. It had not taken Steerpike long to explain what had happened. Within a few moments the Doctor had packed up a small bag and rung for the cook to fetch both a stretcher and a couple of young men as bearers.

Meanwhile, Steerpike had dived into another suit and run across to Mrs Slagg in the castle, whom he instructed to replenish the fire and to have Fuchsia’s bed ready and some hot drink brewing, leaving her in a state of querulous collapse, which was not remedied by his tickling her rudely in the ribs as he skipped past her to the door.

Coming into the quadrangle he caught sight of the Doctor as he was emerging from his garden gate with the two men and the stretcher. Prunesquallor was holding his umbrella over a bundle of rugs under which he had placed his medical bag.

When he had caught them up, he gave them their directions saying that he would run on ahead, but would reappear on the escarpment to direct them in the final stage of their journey. Tucking one of the blankets under his cape he disappeared into the thinning rain. As he ran on alone, he made jumps into the air. Life was amusing. So amusing. Even the rain had played into his hand and made the rock slippery. Everything, he thought to himself, can be of use. Everything. And he clicked his fingers as he ran grinning through the rain.

When Fuchsia awoke in her bed and saw the firelight flickering on the ceiling and Nannie Slagg sitting beside her, she said:

‘Where is Steerpike?’

‘Who, my precious? Oh, my poor pretty one!’ And Mrs Slagg fidgeted with Fuchsia’s hand which she had been holding for over an hour. ‘What is it you need, my only? What is it, my caution dear? Oh, my poor heart, you’ve nearly killed me, dear. Very nearly. Yes, very nearly, then. There, there. Stay still, and the Doctor will be here again soon. Oh, my poor, weak heart!’ The tears were streaming down her little, old terrified face.

‘Nannie,’ said Fuchsia, ‘where’s Steerpike?’

‘That horrid boy?’ asked Nannie. ‘What about him, precious? You don’t want to see him, do you? Oh no, you couldn’t want that boy. What is it, my only? Do you want to see him?’

‘Oh, no! no!’ said Fuchsia. ‘I don’t want to. I feel so tired. Are you there?’

‘What is it, my only?’

‘Nothing; nothing. I wonder where he is.’

KNIVES IN THE MOON

The moon slid inexorably into its zenith, the shadows shrivelling to the feet of all that cast them, and as Rantel approached the hollow at the hem of the Twisted Woods he was treading in a pool of his own midnight.

The roof of the Twisted Woods reflected the staring circle in a phosphorescent network of branches that undulated to the lower slopes of Gormenghast Mountain. Rising from the ground and circumscribing this baleful canopy the wood was walled with impenetrable shadow. Nothing of what supported the chilly haze of the topmost branches was discernible – only a winding façade of blackness.

The crags of the mountain were ruthless in the moon; cold, deadly, and shining. Distance had no meaning. The tangled glittering of the forest roof rolled away, but its furthermost reaches were brought suddenly nearer in a bound by the terrifying effect of proximity in the mountain that they swarmed. The mountain was neither far away nor was it close at hand. It arose starkly, enormously, across the lens of the eye. The hollow itself was a cup of light. Every blade of the grass was of consequence, and the few scattered stones held an authority that made their solid, separate marks upon the brain – each one with its own un duplicated shape: each rising brightly from the ink of its own spilling.

When Rantel had come to the verge of the chosen hollow he stood still. His head and body were a mosaic of black and ghastly silver as he gazed into the basin of grass below him. His cloak was drawn tightly about his spare body and the rhythmic folds of the drapery held the moonlight along their upper ridges. He was sculpted, but his head moved suddenly at a sound, and lifting his eyes he saw Braigon arise from beyond the rim across the hollow.