The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

Steerpike holds the dark figure down with one hand, for there is no attempt to escape, and the Doctor flicks a slim needle into his Lordship’s wrist and injects a drug of such weird potency that when they turn the patient over Steerpike is startled to see that the face has changed to a kind of chalky green. But the eyes have altered also and are once more the sober, thoughtful, human eyes which the Castle knew so well. His fingers have uncurled; the claws are gone.

‘Be so good as to draw the blind,’ says the Doctor, raising himself to his full height beside the bed, and returning his needle to its little silver case. This done, he taps the points of his long white fingers together thoughtfully. With the blinds drawn across the sunrise the colour of his lordship’s face is mercifully modified.

‘That was quick work, Doctor.’

Steerpike is balancing upon his heels. ‘What happens next?’ He clicks his tongue ruminatively as he waits for Prunesquallor’s answer. ‘What was the drug you used, Doctor?’

‘I am not in the mood to answer questions, dear boy,’ replies Prunesquallor, showing Steerpike the whole range of his teeth, but in a mirthless way. ‘Not at all in the mood.’

‘What about the Breakfast?’ says Steerpike, unabashed.

‘His Lordship will be at the Breakfast.’

‘Will he, though?’ says the youth, peering at the face. ‘What about his colour?’

‘In half an hour his skin will have returned to normal. He will be there … Now, fetch me Flay and some boiling water, a towel. He must be washed and dressed. Quickly now.’

Before Steerpike leaves the room he bends over Lord Sepulchrave, whistling tunelessly between his teeth. The Earl’s eyes are closed and there is a tranquillity about his face which has been absent for many years.

A BLOODY CHEEKBONE

Steerpike has some difficulty in finding Flay, but he comes across him at last in the blue-carpeted Room of Cats, whose sunlit pile they had trodden together under very different circumstances a year ago. Flay has just reappeared from the Stone Lanes and looks very bedraggled, a long dirty hank of cobweb hanging over his shoulder. When he sees Steerpike his lips curl back like a wolf’s.

‘What you want?’ he says.

‘How’s Flay?’ says Steerpike.

The cats are crowded upon one enormous ottoman with its carven head and foot piece rising into the air in a tangle of gilded tracery as though two toppling waves at sunset were suspended in mid-air, the hollow between them filled with foam. There is no sound from them and they do not move.

‘The Earl wants you,’ continues Steerpike, enjoying Flay’s discomfort. He does not know whether Flay has any knowledge of what is happening to his master.

Flay involuntarily propels his gawky body forwards as he hears that his Lordship wants him, but he pulls himself up at the end of his first long step towards the door, and peers even more suspiciously and acidly at the youth in his immaculate black cloth.

Steerpike on a sudden, without considering the consequences of his action with the same thoroughness that is typical of him, forces his eyes open with the forefinger and thumb of either hand. He wishes to see whether the thin creature before him has seen the Earl during his madness. He is really banking on the assumption that Flay will not have done so, in which case the forcing of his eyes into owlish circles will have no meaning. But he has made this early morning one of his rare mistakes.

With a hoarse, broken cry, Flay, his head reddening with wrath at this insult to his master, staggers to the divan and, shooting out a gaunt hand, plucks a cat by its head from the snowy hill and hurls it at his tormentor. As this happens a cloaked and heavy woman enters the room. The living missile, hurtling at Steerpike’s face, reaches out one of its white legs and as the youth jerks his head to one side, five claws rip out a crimson wedge from his cheek immediately below the right eye.

The air is filled at once with the screaming of a hundred cats which, swarming the walls and furniture, leaping and circling the blue carpet with the speed of light, give the room the appearance of a white maelstrom. The blood, streaming down Steerpike’s neck, feels as warm as tea as it slides to his belly. His hand, which he has raised automatically to his face in a vain attempt to ward off the blow, moves to his cheek as he drops back a pace, and the tips of his fingers become wet. The cat itself has ended its flight against the wall, near the door through which the third figure has just entered. As it falls in a huddle to the floor, half stunned, and with the wedge of Steerpike’s sallow skin between the claws of its left forefoot, it sees the figure above it; it crawls with a moan to within a pace of the visitor, and then, with a superfeline effort, springs to the height of her great breasts where it lies coiled with its eyes like yellow moons appearing above the whiteness of its haunches.

Flay turns his eyes from Steerpike. It has done him good to watch the red blood bubbling from the upstart’s cheek, but now his satisfaction is at an end, for he is gazing stupefied into the hard eyes of the Countess of Groan.

Her big head has coloured to a dim and dreadful madder. Her eyes are completely remorseless. She has no interest in the cause of the quarrel between Flay and the Steerpike youth. All she knows is that one of her white cats had been dashed against the wall and has suffered pain.

Flay waits as she approaches. His bony head is quite still. His loose hands hang gawkily at his sides. He realizes the crime he has committed, and as he waits his world of Gormenghast – his security, his love, his faith in the House, his devotion – is all crumbling into fragments.

She is standing within a foot of him. The air is heavy with her presence.

Her voice is very husky when she speaks. ‘I was going to strike him down,’ she says heavily. ‘That is what I intended to do with him. To break him.’

He lifts his eyes. The white cat is within a few inches of him. He watches the hairs of its back; each one has become a bristle and the back is a hummock of sharp white grass.

The Countess begins to talk again in a louder voice, but it has become so choked that Flay cannot understand what she is saying. At last he can make out the words: ‘You are no more, no more at all. You are ended.’

Her hand, as it moves gently over the body of the white cat, is trembling uncontrollably. ‘I have finished with you,’ she says. ‘Gormenghast has finished with you.’ It is hard for her to draw the words from her great throat. ‘You are over … over.’ Suddenly she raises her voice. ‘Crude fool!’ she cries. ‘Crude, broken fool and brute! Out! Out! The Castle throws you. Go!’ she roars, her hands upon the cat’s breast. ‘Your long bones sicken me.’

Flay lifts his small bony head higher into the air. He cannot comprehend what has happened. All he knows is that it is more dreadful than he can feel, for a kind of numbness is closing in on his horror like a padding. There is a greenish sheen across the shoulders of his greasy black suit, for the morning light has of a sudden begun to dance through the bay window. Steerpike, with a blood-drenched handkerchief wound about his face, is staring at him and rapping the top of a table with his nails. He cannot help but feel that there is something very fine about the old creature’s head. And he had been very quick. Very quick indeed. Something to remember, that: cats for missiles.

Flay moved his little eyes around the room. The floor is alive and white behind the Countess, around whose feet lies the stilled froth of a tropic tide, the azure carpet showing now here and now there. He feels he is looking at it for the last time and turns to go, but as he turns he thinks of the Breakfast. He is surprised to hear his own mirthless voice saying: ‘Breakfast.’

The Countess knows that her husband’s first servant must be at the Breakfast. Had he killed every white cat in the world he must still be at the Breakfast in honour of Titus, the 77th Earl of Gormenghast, to be. Such things are cardinal.

The Countess turns herself about and moves to the bay window after making a slow detour of the room and picking up from a rack near the fireplace a heavy iron poker. As she reaches the window her right arm swings slowly back and forward with the deliberation of a shire-mare’s bearded hoof as it falls into a rain pool. There is a startling split and crash, a loud cascading of glass upon the flag-stones outside the window, and then silence.

With her back to the room she stares through the star-shaped gap in the glass. Before her spreads the green lawn. She is watching the sun breaking through the distant cedars. It is the day of her son’s Breakfast. She turns her head. ‘You have a week,’ she says, ‘and then you leave these walls. A servant shall be found for the Earl.’

Steerpike lifts his head, and for a moment he ceases to drum on the woodwork with his fingernails. As he starts tapping again, a kestrel, sweeping through the star of the shattered pane, alights on the shoulder of the Countess. She winces as its talons for a moment close, but her eyes soften.

Flay approaches a door in three slow, spidery slides. It is the door that opens into the Stone Lanes. He fumbles for his key, and turns it in the lock. He must rest in his own region before he returns to the Earl, and he lets himself into the long darkness.

The Countess, for the first time, remembers Steerpike. She moves her eyes slowly in the direction where she had last seen him, but he is no longer there nor in any part of the room.

A bell chimes from the corridor beyond the Room of Cats and she knows that there is but a short while before the Breakfast.

She feels a splash of water on her hand, and, turning, sees that the sky has become overcast with a blanket of ominous dark rose-coloured cloud, and of a sudden the light fades from the lawn and the cedars.

Steerpike, who is on his way back to the Earl’s bedroom, stops a moment at a staircase window to see the first descent of the rain. It is falling from the sky in long, upright and seemingly motionless lines of rosy silver that stand rigidly upon the ground as though there were a million harp strings strung vertically between the solids of earth and sky. As he leaves the window he hears the first roar of the summer thunder.

The Countess hears it as she stares through the jagged star in the bay window. Prunesquallor hears it as he balances the Earl upon his feet at the side of the bed. The Earl must have heard it, too, for he takes a step of his own volition towards the centre of the room. His own face has returned.

‘Was that thunder, Doctor?’ he says.

The Doctor watches him very carefully, watches his every movement, though few would have guessed how intently he was studying his patient had they seen his long ingenious mouth open with customary gaiety.

‘Thunder it was, your Lordship. A most prodigious peal. I am waiting for the martial chords which must surely follow such an opening, what? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!’

‘What has brought you to my bedroom, Doctor? I do not remember sending for you.’

‘That is not unnatural, your Lordship. You did not send for me. I was summoned a few minutes ago, to find that you had fainted, an unfortunate, but by no means rare thing to happen to anyone. Now, I wonder why you should have fainted?’ The Doctor stroked his chin. ‘Why? Was the room very hot?’

The Earl comes across to the Doctor. ‘Prunesquallor,’ he says, ‘I don’t faint.’

‘Your Lordship,’ says the Doctor, ‘when I arrived in this bedroom you were in a faint.’

‘Why should I have fainted? I do not faint, Prunesquallor.’

‘Can you remember what you were doing before you lost consciousness?’

The Earl moves his eyes from the Doctor. All at once he feels very tired and sits down on the edge of the bed.

‘I can remember nothing, Prunesquallor. Absolutely nothing. I can only recall that I was hankering for something, but for what I do not know. It seems a month ago.’

‘I can tell you,’ says Prunesquallor. ‘You are making ready to go to your son’s Breakfast Gathering. You were pressed for time and were anxious not to be late. You are, in any event, over-strained, and in your anticipation of the occasion you became overwrought. Your “hankering” was to be with your one-year-old son. That is what you vaguely remember.’

‘When is my son’s Breakfast?’

‘It is in half an hour’s time, or to be precise, it is in twenty-eight minutes’ time.’

‘Do you mean this morning?’ A look of alarm has appeared on Lord Sepulchrave’s face.

‘This morning as ever was, as ever is, and as ever will or won’t be, bless its thunderous heart. No, no, my lord, do not get up yet.’ (Lord Sepulchrave has made an attempt to stand.) ‘In a moment or two and you will be as fit as the most expensive of fiddles. The Breakfast will not be delayed. No, no, not at all – You have twenty-seven long, sixty-second-apiece minutes, and Flay should be on his way to get your garments laid out for you – yes, indeed.’

Flay is not only on his way, but he is at the door, having been unable to remain in the Stone Lanes any longer than it took him to tear his way through them and up to his master’s room by an obscure passage which he alone knew. Even so he is only a moment or two in advance of Steerpike, who slides under Flay’s arm and through the bedroom door as Flay opens it.

Steerpike and the servant are amazed to find that Lord Sepulchrave is seemingly his own melancholy self again, and Flay shambles toward his master and drops upon his knees before him with a sudden, uncontrollable, clumsy movement, his knees striking the floor with a crash. The Earl’s sensitive pale hand rests for a moment on the shoulders of the scarecrow, but all he says is: ‘My ceremonial velvet, Flay. Be as quick as you can. My velvet and the bird-brooch of opal.’

Flay scrambles to his feet. He is his master’s first servant. He is to lay out his master’s clothes and to prepare him for the Great Breakfast in honour of his only son. This is no time or place for the wretched youth to be in his Lordship’s bedroom. Nor for that matter need the Doctor stay.

With his hand on the wardrobe door he turns his head creakily. ‘I manage, Doctor,’ he says. His eyes move from Prunesquallor to Steerpike, and he draws back his lips in an expression of contempt and disgust.

The Doctor notices this expression, ‘Quite right. Quite, quite right! His Lordship will improve with every minute that passes, and there is no need for us any longer, most assuredly not, by all that’s tactful I should definitely think not, ha, ha, ha! Oh, dear me, no. Come along, Steerpike. Come along. And, by the way, what’s all that blood on your face? Are you playing at being a pirate or have you had a tiger in bed with you? Ha, ha, ha! But tell me afterwards, dear boy, tell me afterwards.’ And the Doctor proceeds to shepherd Steerpike out of the room.

But Steerpike dislikes being shepherded and ‘After you, Doctor,’ he says, and insists on Prunesquallor’s preceding him through the door. Before he closes it he turns and, speaking to the Earl in a confidential tone: ‘I will see that everything is in readiness,’ he says. ‘Leave it to me, your Lordship. I will see you later, Flay. Now then, Doctor, let us be on our way.’

The door closes.

THE TWINS AGAIN

The Aunts have been sitting opposite one another for well over an hour with hardly a movement. Surely only vanity could account for so long a scrutiny of a human face, and as it so happens it is Vanity and nothing but Vanity, for knowing that their features are identical and that they have administered the identical amount of powder and have spent the identical length of time in brushing their hair, they have no doubt at all that in scrutinizing one another they are virtually gazing at themselves. They are garbed in their best purple, a hue so violent as to give physical discomfort to any normally sensitive eye.

‘Now, Clarice,’ says Cora at last, ‘you turn your lovely head to the right, so that I can see what I look like from the side.’

‘Why?’ says Clarice. ‘Why should I?’

‘Why shouldn’t you? I’ve got a right to know.’

‘So have I, if it comes to that.’

‘Well, it will come to that, won’t it? Stupid!’

‘Yes, but …’

‘You do what I say and then I’ll do it for you.’

‘Then I’ll see what my profile’s like, won’t I?’

‘We both will, not just you.’

‘I said we both will.’

‘Well? What’s the matter, then?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Well?’

‘Well, what?’

‘Well, go on, then – turn your lovely head.’

‘Shall I do it now?’

‘Yes. There’s nothing to wait for, is there?’

‘Only the Breakfast. It won’t be just yet.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I heard the bell go in the corridor.’

‘So did I. That means there’s a lot of time.’

‘I want to look at my profile, Cora. Turn it now.’

‘All right. How long shall I be, Clarice?’

‘Be a long time.’

‘Only if I have a long time, too.’

‘We can’t both have a long time, silly.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because there isn’t one.’

‘Isn’t one what, dear?’

‘Isn’t one long time, is there?’

‘No, there’s lots of them.’

‘Yes, lots and lots of beautiful long times.’

‘Ahead of us, you mean, Clarice?’

‘Yes, ahead of us.’

‘After we’re on our thrones, isn’t it?’

‘How do you know?’

‘Well, that’s what you were thinking. Why do you try to deceive me?’

‘I wasn’t. I only wanted to know.’

‘Well, now you do know.’

‘Do know what?’

‘You do know, that’s all. I’m not going any deeper for you.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you can’t go as deep as I can. You never could.’

‘I’ve never tried, I don’t suppose. It’s not worth it, I shouldn’t think. I know when things are worth it.’

‘Well, when are they, then?’

‘When are they what?’

‘When are they worth something?’

‘When you’ve bought something wonderful with your wealth, then it’s always worth it.’

‘Unless you don’t want it, Clarice, you always forget that. Why can’t you be less forgetful?’

There is a long silence while they study each other’s faces.

‘They’ll look at us, you know,’ says Cora flatly. ‘We’re going to be looked at at the Breakfast.’

‘Because we’re of the original blood,’ says Clarice. ‘That’s why.’

‘And that’s why we’re important, too.’

‘Two what?’

‘To everyone, of course.’

‘Well, we’re not yet, not to everyone.’

‘But we will be soon.’

‘When the clever boy makes us. He can do anything.’

‘Anything. Anything at all. He told me so.’

‘Me, too. Don’t think he only tells you, because he doesn’t.’

‘I didn’t say he did, did I?’

‘You were going to.’

‘Two what?’

‘To exalt yourself.’

‘Oh, yes, yes. We will be exalted when the time is ripe.’

‘Ripe and rich.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Of course.’

There is another silence. Their voices have been so flat and expressionless that when they cease talking the silence seems no new thing in the room, but rather a continuation of flatness in another colour.

‘Turn your head now, Cora. When I’m looked at at the Breakfast I want to know how they see me from the side and what exactly they are looking at; so turn your head for me and I will for you afterwards.’

Cora twists her white neck to the left.

‘More,’ says Clarice.

‘More what?’

‘I can still see your other eye.’

Cora twists her head a fraction more, dislodging some of the powder from her neck.

‘That’s right, Cora. Stay like that. Just like that. Oh, Cora!’ (the voice is still as flat), ‘I am perfect.’

She claps her hands mirthlessly, and even her palms meet with a dead sound.

Almost as though this noise were a summons the door opens and Steerpike moves rapidly across the room. There is a fresh piece of plaster across his cheek. The twins rise and edge towards him, their shoulders touching as they advance.

He runs his eyes over them, takes his pipe out of his pocket and strikes a light. For a moment he holds the flame in his hand, but only for a moment, for Cora has raised her arm with the slow gesture of a somnabulist and has let it fall upon the flame, extinguishing it.

‘What in plague’s name are you up to?’ shouts Steerpike, for once losing his control. Seeing an Earl as an owl on a mantelpiece, and having part of one’s face removed by a cat, both on the same morning, can temporarily undermine the self-control of any man.

‘No fire,’ says Cora. ‘We don’t have fires any more.’

‘We don’t like them any more. No. Not any more.’

‘Not after we –’

Steerpike breaks in, for he knows how their minds have turned, and this is no moment just before the Breakfast for them to start reminiscing. ‘You are awaited! Breakfast table is agog for you. They all want to know where you are. Come along, my lovely brace of ladies. Let me escort you some of the way, at least. You are looking most alluring – but what can have been keeping you? Are you ready?’

The twins nod their heads.

‘May I be so honoured as to give you my right arm, Lady Cora? And, Lady Clarice, my dear, if you will take my left …?’

Steerpike, bending his elbows, waits for the Aunts to split apart to take his either arm.

‘The right’s more important than the left,’ says Clarice. ‘Why should you have it?’

‘Why shouldn’t I?’

‘Because I’m as good as you.’

‘But not as clever, are you, dear?’

‘Yes, I am, only you’re favoured.’

‘That’s because I’m alluring, like he says I am.’

‘He said we both were.’

‘That was just to please you. Didn’t you know?’

‘Dear ladies,’ says Steerpike, breaking in, ‘will you please be quiet! Who is in control of your destinies? Who is it you promised you would trust and obey?’

‘You.’ They speak together.

‘I think of you as co-equals, and I want you to think of yourselves as of similar status, for when your thrones arrive they will be of equal glory. Now, will you take my arms, if you please?’

Cora and Clarice take an arm each. The door of their room had been left open and the three of them make their exit, the youth’s thin black figure walking between the stiff purple bodies of the Aunts, who are gazing over his head at each other, so that as they recede down the half-lit corridor and diminish in size as they move into the long perspective, the last that can be seen, long after Steerpike in his black and the purple of the twins has become swallowed in the depths, are the tiny, pallid pattern of the two identical profiles facing one another and floating, as it were, in the mid-air shadows, diminishing and diminishing as they drift away, until the last mote of light has crumbled from them.

THE DARK BREAKFAST

Barquentine is unaware that there have been grave and sinister happenings in the Castle on this historic morning. He knows, of course, that the Earl has, since the burning of the library, been in a critical state of health, but of his dreadful transformation upon the mantelpiece he is ignorant. Since the early hours he has been studying the finer points of ritual to be observed at the Breakfast. Now, as he stumps his way to the dining-hall, his crutch clanking ominously on the flagstones, he sucks at a hank of his beard, which curls up and into his mouth through long training, and mutters irritably.

He still lives in the dusty, low-ceilinged room which he has had for over sixty years. With his new responsibilities bringing with them the necessity for interviewing numerous servants and officials has come no desire to establish himself in any of the numerous suites of rooms which are his to occupy if he so desires. The fact that those who are obliged to come either to consult him or for orders are forced to contort themselves painfully in order to negotiate a passage through his rabbit hutch doorway, and when inside to move about in a doubled-up condition, has no effect on him at all. Banquentine is not interested in the comfort of others.

Fuchsia, approaching the dining-hall in company with Mrs Slagg who is carrying Titus, hears the rattle of Barquentine’s crutch following them down the corridor. At a normal time she would have shuddered at the sound, but the horrifying and tragic minutes which she had spent with her father have filled her with so violent an alarm and so nameless a foreboding as to expel all other fears. She has on the immemorial crimson which is worn by the first daughter of the House of Groan at the christening of a brother, and around her neck are the so called Daughter’s Doves, a necklace of white sandstone doves carved by the 17th Earl of Gormenghast, strung together on a cord of plaited grass.

There is no sound from the infant, who is encased in the lilac roll. Fuchsia carries the black sword at one side, although the golden chain is still attached to Titus. Nannie Slagg beside herself with trepidation and excitement, peers now at her bundle and now at Fuchsia, sucking at her wrinkled lips as her little feet shuffle along below her best sepia-coloured skirt.

‘We won’t be late, my caution, will we? Oh no, because we mustn’t, must we?’ She peers into one end of the lilac roll. ‘Bless him that he’s so good, with all this horrible thunder; yis, he’s been as good as gold.’

Fuchsia does not hear; she is moving in a nightmare world of her own. Who can she turn to? Who can she ask? ‘Doctor Prune, Doctor Prune,’ she says to herself, ‘… he will tell me; he will know that I can make him well again. Only I can make him well again.’

Before them, as they turn a corner, the door of the Dining-hall looms up and, obliterating most of it, with his hand on the brass handle, is Swelter. He swings open the door for them and they enter the Dining-Hall. They are the last to arrive, and more through coincidence than design this is as it should be – Titus being the guest of honour, or perhaps the host of honour, for it is today that, as the Heir of Gormenghast, he Enters upon the Realms, having braved the cycle of four seasons.

Fuchsia climbs the seven wooden steps which lead up to the rostrum and the long table. Away to her right spreads the cold, echoing hall, with the pool of rain-drips spreading on the stone floor. The drumming of the thick vertical rain on the roof is a background to everything that happens. Reaching down with her right hand Fuchsia helps Mrs Slagg up the last two steps. The assemblage, perfectly silent at the long table, have turned their heads towards Nannie with her momentous bundle, and when both her feet are well established upon the level of the rostrum the company rise and there is a scraping of chair-legs on the board. It seems to Fuchsia that high, impenetrable forests have risen before her, great half-lit forms of a nature foreign to her own – belonging to some other kingdom. But though for a moment she thinks of this, she is not feeling it, for she is subjugated beneath the weight of her fear for her father.

It is with a shock of indefinable emotion that she sees him as she lifts her head. She had never for a moment contemplated his being able to attend the Breakfast, imagining that the Doctor would be with him in his bedroom. So vivid in her mind is the picture of her father in his room as she had last seen him, that to find him in this so different atmosphere gives her for a moment a gush of hope – hope that she had been dreaming – that she had not been to his room – that he had not been upon the mantelpiece with his round, loveless eyes; for now as she stares at him he is so gentle and sad and thin and she can see that there is a weak smile of welcome upon his lips.

Swelter, who has followed them in, is now ushering Mrs Slagg into a chair on whose back-rest is painted the words: ‘FOR A SERVANT’. There is a space cleared before her on the table in the shape of a half-circle, in which has been laid a long cushion. When Mrs Slagg sits down she finds that her chin is on a level with the table-edge, and it is with difficulty that she lifts the lilac bundle high enough to place it on the cushion. On her left is Gertrude Groan. Mrs Slagg glances at her apprehensively. She is gazing at an expanse of darkness, for the black clothes of the Countess seem to have no ending. She lifts her eyes a little and there is still darkness. She lifts them more, and still the darkness climbs. Raising her whole head and staring almost vertically above her she imagines that, near the zenith of her vision, she can descry a warmth of colour in the night. To think that an hour earlier she had been helping to plait those locks that now appear to be brushing the flaking cherubs of the ceiling.

On her right is the Earl. He leans back in his chair, very listless and weak, but he still smiles wanly at his daughter, who is on the opposite side of the table and facing her mother. On Fuchsia’s right and left sit Irma Prunesquallor and her brother respectively, The Doctor and Fuchsia have their little fingers interlocked under the table. Cora is sitting opposite to the Earl her brother, and on the left of the Countess, and facing Irma, is Clarice. A fine, succulent ham, lit by a candle, takes up most of the space at the Earl’s and Cora’s end of the table, where Swelter presides and has now taken up his official duties armed with carving-knife and steel. At the other end of the table Barquentine smoulders on a high chair.

The eating is done spasmodically whenever a gap of time appears between the endless formalities and ornate procedures which Barquentine sets in motion at the correct time-honoured moments. Tiresome in the extreme for all those present, it would be hardly less tedious for the reader to be obliged to suffer the long catalogue of Breakfast ritual, starting with the smashing of the central Vase, whose shattered fragments are gathered together in two heaps, one at the head and the other at the feet of Titus, and ending with the extraordinary spectacle of Barquentine trampling (apparently as a symbol of the power invested in his hands as warder of the unbroken laws of Gormenghast), up and down the length of the Breakfast table seven times amidst the débris of the meal, his wooden leg striking at the dark oak.

Unknown to any who sit there at the long table there are not nine of them upon the daïs – but ten. All through the meal there have been ten.

The tenth is Steerpike. In the late afternoon of the previous day, when the dining-hall had swum in a warm haze of motes and every movement had bred its hollow echo through the silence, he had moved swiftly up to the platform from the doorway with a black, stumpy roll of cloth and what appeared to be a bundle of netting under his arm. After satisfying himself that he was quite alone, he half unrolled the cloth, slipped up the wooden steps of the daïs, and in a flash has slithered under the table.

For a few moments there were only some scrabbling sounds and the occasional clinking of metal, but the noise mounted, and for two minutes there was intense activity. Steerpike believed in working fast, especially in nefarious matter. When at last he emerged he dusted himself carefully and it might have been noticed, had there been anyone there to notice it, that although he still carried the lumpy roll of cloth, the netting was no longer with him. Had this same hypothetical watcher glanced under the table from any part of the room he would have noticed nothing extraordinary, for there would have been nothing to see; but had he taken the trouble to have crawled between the table legs and then gazed upwards, he would have noticed that, stretching down the centre of the low ‘roof’ was a very comfortable hammock.

And it is in this hammock that Steerpike is now reclining at full length, in semi-darkness, hedged in with a close up panorama of seventeen legs and one wooden stump, or to be exact with sixteen, for Fuchsia is sitting with one of hers curled up under her. He had left the Twins hurriedly on his way down with them and had managed to be the first to slip into the hall. The oak of the table is within a few inches of his face. He has had very little satisfaction, so much of the time having been spent above him in fantastic dumb shows invisible to him. There is, in fact, no conversation and all he has heard during the seemingly interminable meal is the loveless, didactic voice of Barquentine, reeling out the time-worn, legendary phrases; the irritating, and apologetic coughing of Irma, and the slight creaking of Fuchsia’s chair every time she moves. Occasionally the Countess mutters something which no one can hear, which is invariably followed by Nannie rubbing her ankles nervously together. Her feet are at least twenty inches from the floor and it is a great temptation to Steerpike to give them a twitch.

Finding he is going to gain no advantage at all by having secreted himself so cunningly, and yet seeing also that it is impossible to get away, he begins to think like a machine, over-hauling in his mind his position in the Castle.

Saving Sepulchrave and Titus, whose cardinal interests are still limited to the worlds of whiteness and blackness – of milk and sleep – there is very little for the remainder of the company to do other than to brood, for there is no conversation, and there is very little chance of eating the breakfast so lavishly spread before them, for no one passes anything along the table. And so the company brood through the wasted meal. The dry, ancient voice at the end of the table has had an almost hypnotic effect, even at this early hour, and as their minds move to and fro and in and out the rain continues to beat upon the high roof overhead, and to drip, drip, drip, into the pool in the far centre of the long dining-hall.

No one is listening to Barquentine. The rain has drummed for ever. His voice is in the darkness – and the darkness in his voice, and there is no end at all.

THE REVERIES

THE REVERIE OF CORA

… and it’s so cold, hands and cold feet but nice ones mine are nicer than Clarice’s which she pricks with her embroidery clumsy thing but hers are also cold I hope but I want Gertrude’s to be colder than the ice in dreadful places she’s so fat and proud and far too big and I desire her frozen with her stupid bosom and when we’re stronger in power we will tell her so Clarice and I when he lets us with his cleverness which is more clever than all the Castle and our thrones will make us regal but I’m the one to sit highest and I wonder where he is and stupid Gertrude thinks I’m frightened and I am but she doesn’t know and I wish she would die and I’d see her big ugly body in a coffin because I’m of the blood and poor Sepulchrave looks different which she’s done to him ugly woman with fat bosom and carrots hair the vegetable thing so cold here cold and my hands and feet which is what Clarice is feeling like I suppose she’s so slow compared with me she looks so silly with her mouth open not like me my mouth isn’t open yes it is I’ve left it open but now I’ve shut it and it’s closed up and my face must be perfect like I’ll be when I get my power and the West Wing is raging with glory why was the fire so big when I don’t understand and we are made to be in darkness and one day perhaps I will banish Steerpike when he’s done everything for us and perhaps I won’t for it’s not time to know yet and I’ll wait and see because he isn’t really of good stock like us and ought to be a servant but he’s so clever and sometimes treats me with reverence which is due to me of course for I’m Lady Cora of Gormenghast I am and there’s only me and my sister who are like that and she’s not got the character I have and must take advice from me it is so cold and Barquentine is so long and he is so nasty but I will bow a little to him not too much but about an inch to show that he’s done his work adequately not well but adequately with his voice and his wooden crutch which is so unnecessarily stupid to have instead of a leg and perhaps I’ll look at it so that he sees me while I look just for a little moment to show him I am me and he mustn’t forget my blood and what is poor Sepulchrave looking like that for with his mouth slipping down on one side and upon the other while he looks at her and she looks so frightened poor stupid Fuchsia who is still too young to understand anything yet she never comes to visit us when she could be taught but her cruel mother has turned her against us with her evil I feel hungry but nobody will pass me anything for the narrow squeaky. Doctor is asleep or very nearly and Swelter never notices nor does anyone except the clever boy.

There is a thud on the table beyond the Doctor, to her right.

REVERIE OF ALFRED PRUNESQUALLOR

… and although it is patent that he hasn’t very long I can’t keep pumping hydrophondoramischromatica of ash into him every five hours or so and he’ll need it even more frequently than that his mouth is slipping already devil take it which is too near the mark by all that’s gruesome it is but the stuff will wipe him out unless I go easy and what will happen god knows if the owl crops up again but we or rather I must be prepared for anything and make tentative plans to meet contingencies for the others have no responsibilities except to the ritual of the place and never have had a case of this transference kind so unpleasantly actual for though the depersonalization has set in for good that is the lesser thing for the hooting is outside the range of science yet what started the whole thing was the burning undoubtedly oh yes undoubtedly for it was only melancholia up till then but thanks and praise be to all the bottle gods and powder princes that I had the drugs and that I guessed the strength well enough for the moment but he must go back to bed immediately the breakfast is over and have someone in the room with him whenever I have to go for meals but they might be brought to me in his room better idea still and perhaps Fuchsia might do it though the sight of her father might be too much for her but we cannot tell yet and must be careful bless her dear heart poor girl she looks so mournful and she is holding my finger so sadly I would rather she gripped it desperately it would be more symptomatic of an honest panic in her. I must comfort her if I can though what in the name of tact can I say to calm an intelligent and sensitive child who has seen her father hooting from a mantelpiece but care must be taken great care and perhaps Irma will get a room ready for her in the house but the next few hours will tell and I must be on the alert for the Countess is no help with her mind in the clouds, and Irma is of course Irma and nothing but undiluted Irma for now and ever and must be left where she is, and Steerpike remains who is an enigma to me and of whom I have doubts very definitely and in whose presence I find less and less amusement and more and more a sense of evil which I can base upon no power of rational reasoning save that he is obviously out for himself and himself alone but who isn’t? and I will bear him in mind and dispense with him if I can but a brain is a brain and he has one and it may be necessary to borrow it at short notice but no no I will not by all that’s instinctive I will not and that settles it I’ll handle whatever needs to be handled myself well well I don’t remember quite such a strong presentiment in my old carcase for a long time we must wait and see and the waiting won’t be long and we’ll hope the seeing won’t be long either for there is something very unhealthy about all this by all that’s bursting into flower in an April dell there most undeniably is and my languorous days seem to be over for the time being but bless me the gipsy girl is squeezing a bit harder and what on earth is she staring at his mouth is slipping and it’s coming on again …

There is a thud on the table beside him …

REVERIE OF FUSCHIA

… what can I do oh what can I do he is so ill and pale like the thin face that he has got that is broken all alone but he is better better than he was oh no the sickness in me no I mustn’t think of eyes oh who will help me who will you must look now Fuchsia be brave you must look Fuchsia look how he is better now while he is here at table he is quite close to me my father and so sad why does he smile smile oh who will save him who will save me who will be the power to help us father who will not let me be near and let me understand which I could and he is better remember he is better than oh Fuchsia be brave for the roundness of his eyes is gone gone but oh no I mustn’t why were they round round and yellow I do not understand oh tell me my trees tell me my trees and rocks for Nannie won’t know oh doctor dear you must tell me and I will ask you when we’re alone oh quick quick this horrible breakfast quickly go and I will take care of him for I understand because the tower was there the tower was over his long lines of books his books and its shadow fell across his library at morning always always father dear the Tower of Flints that the owls live in oh no I do not understand but I know dear father let me comfort you and you must never be like that again never never never and I will be your sentry for always always your sentry and will never talk to other people never only you my dear pale man and none will come near you only perhaps the doctor when you want him but only when you do and I will bring you flowers of every kind of colour and shape and speckled stones that look like frogs and ferns and all the beautiful things I can find and I will find books for you and will read to you all day and all night and never let you know I’m tired and we shall go for walks when you are better and you will become happy happy if only you could be if only sad thin broken face so pale and none else would be there not my mother nor anyone not Steerpike no no not him, he is too hard and clever not like you who are more clever but with kindness and not quick with clever words. I can see his mouth his mouth oh Dr Prune quick quick the blackness and he’s going far away and the voice Dr Prune quick the voice is going far away of Barquentine is going far away I cannot see no no oh black my Dr Prune the black is swaying … swaying …

A darkness is closing its midnight curtains across her mind and the shapes before her of her mother, Nannie, Clarice and the Earl recede into floating fragments, while like the echo of an echo the voice of Barquentine stammers on and on. Fuchsia cannot feel the Doctor’s finger any longer in her palm except as an infinitely far away sensation, as though she were holding a thin tube of air. In a final wave the blackness descends once and for all, and her dark head, falling forward, strikes the table with a thud.

REVERIE OF IRMA PRUNESQUALLOR

… and I’d very much like to know what advantage I am getting out of having spent so long a time in the bath and preparing myself for them so exquisitely for my swan-white throat is the most perfect one in Gormenghast though I wish my nose weren’t quite so pointed, but it is velvet white like the rest of my skin and it’s a pity I wear spectacles with black lenses too I suppose but I am positive my skin is snow white not only because I can see it dimly in the mirror when I take my spectacles off although it hurts my eyes but also because my writing paper is perfectly white when I’ve got my glasses on and look at my face and throat in the mirror and then hold a piece of my white writing paper next to my face I can see that my skin and the stationery are exactly the same tone of grey and everything else in the mirror all around me is darker and very often black but what’s the use of writing-paper with crinkled edges to me for there’s no one to write to us there used to be when I was younger not that I was more attractive then for after all I am still a virgin but there was Spogfrawne who had had so many beautiful adventures among the people he redeemed from sin and he appreciated me and wrote me three letters on tissue paper although it was a pity that his pen-nib used to go right through it so often and make it difficult for me to read the passionate parts where he told me of his love in fact I couldn’t read them at all and when I wrote and asked him to try and remember them and write me a fourth letter just putting in only the passionate sentences which I couldn’t read in the first three of his beautiful letters he wouldn’t answer me and I think it was because I asked him in my last message to him to either write more carefully on the tissue paper or to use ordinary paper that he became shy poor silly stupid glamorous Mr Spogfrawne who I will always remember but he hasn’t been heard of since and I am still a virgin and who is there to make love to me tenderly and to touch the tip of my snowy hands and perhaps just a tiny touch on my hip bone which juts out so magnificently as Steerpike mentioned that evening when Alfred was called away to get a fly out of that Slagg woman’s eye for Steerpike bless the boy has always been most observant and I know how it broke my heart to see him so miserable on the day he left us and now I never see him and it is a pity that he is not a little older and taller but once he speaks to me and fastens his eye on me in that respectful way he has noticing the beauty of my skin and hair and the way my hips come out so excitingly then I do not wish him any different but feel a little queer and realize how impelling he is for what is age anyway but years and years are nothing if not silly and ridiculous man made things which do not understand the way of delicate women with the years coming so unkindly and how could they be so many in my case all forty of them that have never had their due or why I am unmarried I do not know when I take so much care over my cleanliness but who is there who is there oh my emptiness is all alone and with Alfred who can be so silly though he’s really clever but doesn’t listen to me and falls asleep like he is doing now and I wish he wouldn’t keep looking at the Earl who after all isn’t someone to be stared at although there is something very strange about him tonight and how chilly it is in this big and empty and horrible hall which is so famous but what use is it if we don’t talk to each other and there are no men to watch every gracious movement of my throat and I will be glad to be back in my house again where I will go on reading my book, and it won’t be so cold and perhaps I can write a note to Steerpike and ask him to supper yes I will do that Alfred said he won’t be in tomorrow evening and …

Her thoughts are broken by a thud to her left.

THE REVERIE OF LADY CLARICE

Her thoughts have been identical with those of her sister in every way save only in one respect, and this cleavage can best be appreciated by the simple process of substituting Cora’s name for her own wherever it appears in the reverie of the former.

REVERIE OF GERTRUDE THE COUNTESS OF GORMENGHAST

… at any rate the old Sourdust would have taken longer over this job than this one and it won’t be long before I can have my white cat who is crying at my heart again may the fiends wrack the long servant’s bones and I’ve left enough water in the basin for the ravens’ bath and can see to the sandpipers’ wing directly I get away from here and my white cat is comforted but the stupid man has about fourteen pages to get through yet thank heaven I don’t have many of these things to attend and there won’t be another child if I know anything about it but now here is a son for Gormenghast which is what the Castle needed and when he is older I will teach him how he can take care of himself and how to live his own life as far as it is possible for one who will find the grey stones across his heart from day to day and the secret is to be able to freeze the outsider off completely and then he will be able to live within himself which Sepulchrave does in the wrong way for what use are books to anyone whose days are like a rook’s nest with every twig a duty and I shall teach the boy to whistle birds out of the sky to his wrist which I have never taught Fuchsia because I have kept my knowledge for the boy and if I have the time before he is twelve years old and if it’s a pleasant evening I might take him to the pool that is as green as my malachite ring with the silver setting and let him watch the lesser-fly-spotted-wag-catchers building their soft grey nests out of moth wings and dew twine but how do I know he will be observant and careful with birds for Fuchsia disappointed me before she was five with her clumsiness for she used to ram the flowers into the glass vases and bruise the stalks although she loved them but it is my son I wish to teach for there is no use in my revealing my secrets to a girl but he will be so useless for a long time and must be kept away from my room until he is about five at least when he will be able to absorb what I tell him about the skies’ birds and how he can keep his head quite clear of the duties he must perform day after day until he dies here as his fathers have done and be buried in the sepulchre of the Groans and he must learn the secret of silence and go his own way among the birds and the white cats and all the animals so that he is not aware of men but performs his legendary duties faithfully as his father has always done whose library was burned away along with old Sourdust and how it started I have very little idea except that the Steerpike youth was very quickly upon the scene and though he was the means of our escape I do not like him and never shall with his ridiculous little body and slimy manners he must be sent away for I have a feeling he will do harm and Fuchsia must not be with him for she is not to mix with so cheap and ignoble a thing as that sharp youth she converses too often with Prunesquallor with whom I saw her talking twice last month for he is not of the blood and as for the murderous and devilish Flay who has hurt my poor defenceless cat so much that all the other white glories will be uneasy through the black hours of night and feel the pains which he feels as he is curled in my arms for Flay has broken himself with his ghastly folly and shall be banished whatever Sepulchrave may say whose face has changed tonight and has been changed on the three occasions on which I have seen him since the burning of his books and I will tell the Doctor to attend him constantly for I have a presentiment of his death and it is good that Titus is born for the line of the Groans must never be broken through me and there must be no ending at all and no ending and I shall tell him of his heritage and honour and of how to keep his head above the interwoven nest and watch the seasons move by and the sounds of the feathered throats …

A thud upon the table immediately opposite her causes the Countess to lift her eyes slowly from the table cloth.

REVERIE OF NANNIE SLAGG

… yees yees yees it’s all so big and wonderful I suppose it is oh my poor heart this lovely rich breakfast which nobody eats and the little precious boy in the middle of the cutlery bless his little heart for he hasn’t cried once not once the tiny morsel and with everybody around him too and thinking about him for it’s his breakfast my pretty precious and Nannie will tell you all about it when you’re a big boy oh my poor heart how old I’ll be by then and how cold it is a good thing I wrapped the little boy in his wrap which is under all the lilac windings yees yees and he mustn’t sneeze oh no but be still though I am so cold and his great heavy mother beside me so that I feel I don’t matter at all and I suppose I don’t matter at all for nobody takes any notice of me and nobody loves me except my darling caution but even she sometimes forgets but not the others who never think of me except when they want me to do something for them for I have to do everything and oh my poor heart I’m not young any more and strong and I get tired and even Fuchsia never remembers how tired I get even now I’m tired for having to sit so long in the cold so far beneath the huge Countess who doesn’t even look at her little boy who’s being so good and I don’t think she could ever love him like I love him but oh my poor heart it’s a good thing the Countess can’t hear me thinking about her like this though sometimes I think she can tell when I think against her because she’s so silent and when she looks at me I don’t know what to do or where to go and I feel so little and weak and I feel like that now but how cold it is and I’d rather have my own simple kind of breakfast by the fire in my own small room than look at all this food on the table getting cold although it’s all here for the little boy bless him and I will look after him as long as I have any strength in my poor bones and make him a good boy and teach Fuchsia to take care of him and she is loving him more than ever she did before though she doesn’t like to hold him like I do and I am glad because she might drop him the clumsy caution and oh my poor heart if he should ever fall and be killed oh no no never she must never hold him for she is so ignorant of how to be careful of a little baby she doesn’t look at him now in the middle of the table any more than her mother or any of the others do but just stares at her father with her naughty dark face so sad what can it be for she must tell me and tell me everything leaving nothing out about why she looks so mournful the silly girl who can have no trouble at her age and hasn’t got all the work to do and the trials which I have on my old shoulders all the time and it is silly for her to be so sad when she is only a child and doesn’t know anything bless her.

Nannie is startled by a thud upon the table nearly opposite her.

REVERIE OF SEPULCHRAVE, 76th EARL OF GORMENGHAST

… and there will be a darkness always and no other colour and the lights will be stifled away and the noises of my mind strangled among the thick soft plumes which deaden all my thoughts in a shroud of numberless feathers for they have been there so long and so long in the cold hollow throat of the Tower and they will be there for ever for there can be no ending to the owls whose child I am to the great owls whose infant and disciple I shall be so that I am forgetting all things and will be taken into the immemorial darkness far away among the shadows of the Groans and my heartache will be no more and my dreams and thoughts no more and even memory will be no longer so that my volumes will die away from me and the poets be gone for I know the great tower stood above my cogitations day and night through all the hours and they will all go the great writers and all that lay between the fingered covers all that slept or walked between the vellum lids where for the centuries they haunted and no longer are and my remorse is over now and forever for desire and dream has gone and I am complete and longing only for the talons of the tower and suddenness and clangour among the plumes and an end and a death and the sweet oblivion for the last tides are mounting momently and my throat is growing taut and round round like the Tower of Flints and my fingers curl and I crave the dusk and sharpness like a needle in the velvet and I shall be claimed by the powers and the fretting ended … ended … and in my annihilation there shall be a consummation for he has come into the long line and is moving forward and the long dead branch of the Groans has broken into the bright leaf of Titus who is the fruit of me and there shall be no ending and the grey stones will stand for always and the high towers for always where the rain-drifts weave and the laws of my own people will go on for ever while among my great dusk haunters in the tower my ghost will hover and my blood-stream ebb for ever and the striding fever over who are these and these so far from me and yet so vast and so remote and vast my Fuchsia dusky daughter bring me branches and a field mouse from an acre of grey pastures …

HERE AND THERE

Swelter’s thoughts were glued upon Flay’s death at his own hand. The time was ripe. He had practised the art of silent and stealthy movement until he could no longer hear even the breath-note of his own footstep which over the stretch of the last fortnight he had striven to stifle. He now moved his bulk across the earth as silently as the passing of a cloud through the dusk. His two-handed cleaver had an edge to it which sang with the voice of a gnat when he held it to his fungus of an ear. Tonight he would leave a small pink wafer at the top of the last flight of stairs, within a bare twenty feet of the thin man. It would be a dark night. He listened to the thrumming rain and his eyes turned to the lake on the cold floor, far down the Dining-hall. He stared at but did not see the bleared reflection of the flanking cherubs a hundred feet above the steel-grey veneer of water. His eyes were unfocused. He would do the work he had waited to do tomorrow night. Tomorrow night. As his tongue emerged from between his lips like a carrot and moved from side to side, his eyes moved from the water to Flay, and the vagueness was at once gone from them. In his stare was the whole story; and Flay, lifting his eyes from the top of his master’s head, interpreted the vile expression.

He had known that the attack upon his life was imminent. The coloured cakes when he had found them on the three preceding occasions had been successively closer to him. Swelter was trying to wreck him by torturing his mind and twisting his nerves and he had not slept for many nights but he was ready. He had not forgotten the two-handed cleaver in the green light and had found in the armoury an old sword, from which he had removed the rust and had sharpened to a point and an edge in the stone lanes. Compared to the edge which Swelter had given to the cleaver the sword was blunt but it was murderous enough. In Swelter’s expression he could read the nearness of the night encounter. It would be within a week. He could not tell which day. It might be this very night. It might be any night of the next seven.

He knew that Swelter could not see him until he was practically upon him at his Master’s door. He knew that the Chef could not know that he had read his eyes so clearly. He also knew that he was banished from the Castle grounds. Swelter must not know this. Gertrude would see that he, Flay, was not at Lord Sepulchrave’s door from now onwards, but he could return in the night and follow the monster as he crept upwards to the passageway on his lethal mission.

That is what he would do. He would wait every night in the cloisters until the huge body stole by him and up the stairs. Not till then would he decide where and when to strike. He only knew that he must lead his foe away from his sick master’s door and that the death must take place in some remote part of the castle, perhaps in the room of spiders … or under the attic arches, or even among the battlements themselves. His thoughts were broken by the thud of Fuchsia falling forward and he saw the Doctor rise to his feet and stretch across the table for a glass, his left hand moving around Fuchsia’s shoulder as he did so.

On the table itself young Titus began to kick and struggle and then with a high thin cry poor Mrs Slagg watches him kick the vase of flowers over, and tear at the lilac-coloured velvet with his hands.

* * *

Steerpike hears the thud above him and taking his cue from the varying contortions of the legs which hem him in is able to guess pretty accurately what is happening. There are only two legs which do not move at all and they are both Gertrude’s. Fuchsia’s only visible leg (for her right is still curled beneath her) has slipped sideways on the boards as she slumps forward. Nannie’s are struggling frantically to reach the floor. Lord Sepulchrave’s are swinging idly to and fro and are close together like a single pendulum. Cora and Clarice are going through the motions of treading water. The Doctor’s have straightened out into unbroken lengths and his sister’s have entered upon the last stages of a suicide pact, each one strangling the other in an ivy-like embrace.

Swelter is shifting the soft, dace-like areas of his feet backwards and forwards, a deliberate and stroking motion, as of something succulent wiping itself on a mat.

Flay is rubbing the cracked toe-cap of one of his boots rapidly up and down his shin bone immediately above the ankle, and, this done, Steerpike notices that his legs begin to make their way round the long table towards Fuchsia’s chair detonating as they go.

During this short space of time while the screaming of Titus is drowning the barking of Barquentine, Prunesquallor has dabbed a quantity of water over Fuchsia’s face with a napkin and has then placed her head gently between her knees.

Barquentine has not ceased a moment in the administration of his duties as the occasional lulls in Titus’ howling testify, for during the short intervals of what might have been rain-filled silence the dry, acid tongue of the Librarian stutters on and on.

But it is nearly over. He is laying his tomes aside. His withered stump which, since Fuchsia’s faint and the howling of Titus has been scratching at the boards with an irritability such as might suggest that its ugly termination was possessed of teeth instead of toes and was doing its best to gnaw its way through the oak boarding below it – this stump is now setting about another business, that of getting itself and the rest of Barquentine upon the seat of the chair.

Once aboard the long, narrow table it is for him to march up and down it from end to end seven times regardless of the china and golden cutlery, regardless of the glassware, the wine and the repast in general, regardless of everything in fact save that he must be regardless. Mrs Slagg snatches the year-old baby from before the approaching crutch and withered leg, for Barquentine has lost no time in complying with tradition and the ferrule of his crutch strikes jarringly upon the polished oak, or cracks among the china plates or splinters the cut glass. A dull soggy note followed by a squelch betrays the fact that his withered leg has descended ankle deep in a tureen of tepid porridge, but it was not for him to turn aside in the promulgation of his duty.

Doctor Prunesquallor has staggered away with Fuchsia in his arms, having instructed Flay to escort Lord Sepulchrave to his room. The Countess strangely enough has taken Titus from Nannie Slagg and having descended from the platform to the stone slabs below is walking heavily to and fro with the little boy half over her shoulder. ‘Now then, now then’, she says. ‘No use crying; no use at all; not when you’re two; wait till you’re three. Now then, now then, wait till you’re bigger and I’ll show you where the birds live, there’s a good child, there’s a … Slagg … Slagg,’ she bellows suddenly, interrupting herself. ‘Take it away.’ The Earl and Flay have gone and so has Swelter after casting a baffled eye over the table and at the wizened Barquentine as he stamps into the exquisitely prepared and despoiled breakfast.

Cora and Clarice are left watching Barquentine with their mouths and the pupils of their eyes so wide open as to cause these caverns to monopolize their faces to the extent of giving to their countenances an appearance of darkness or of absence. They are still seated and their bodies beneath their straight dresses are perfectly rigid while their eyes follow the ancient’s every movement, leaving him only momently when a louder sound than usual forces them to turn their eyes to the table to observe what the latest ornament to be broken may be.

The darkness in the great hall has deepened in defiance of the climbing of the sun. It can afford to be defiant with such a pall of inky cloud lying over the castle, over the cracked toothed mountain, over the entire and drenching regions of Gormenghast from horizon to horizon.

Barquentine and the Twins trapped in the shadows of the hall which is itself trapped within the shadows of the passing clouds are lit by one lone candle, the others having guttered away. In this vast, over-arching refectory these three – the vitriolic marionette in his crimson rags and the two stiff purple puppets, one at either end of the table – look incredibly minute, tiny fierce ribs of colour glinting on their clothes as the candle-flame moves. The broken glass on the long table darting forth a sudden diamond from time to time. From the far end of the Hall near the servants’ door, and looking down the inky perspective of stone pillars, the spectacle of the three at the table would seem to be taking place in an area the size of a domino.

As Barquentine completes his seventh journey, the flame of the last candle stumbles, recovers, and then sinks suddenly in to a swamp of tallow and the Hall is plunged into a complete obscurity, save where the lake in the middle of the Hall is a pattern of darkness surrounded by depths of another nature. Near the margin of this inner rain-fed darkness an ant is swimming for its life, its strength failing momently for there are a merciless two inches of water beneath it. From far away near the high table comes a scream, and then another and the sound of a chair falling to the stone slabs seven feet below the platform, and the sound of Barquentine cursing.

Steerpike, having observed the legs disappearing out of the door, and to whom they belonged, has wriggled from his hammock under the table. He is groping his way to the door. When he reaches it, and has found the handle, he slams it violently and then, as though he has just entered the room he shouts:

‘Hello there; what’s happening there! What’s the trouble?’

On hearing his voice the twins begin to scream for help, while Barquentine yells ‘Light! light! fetch a light you dotard. What are you waiting for?’ His strident voice rises to a shriek and his crutch grinds itself on the table. ‘Light! scumcat! light! curse and split you!’

Steerpike, whose last hour and a half has been a dire disappointment and boring in the extreme, hugs himself for joy at their shouts.

‘Right away, sir. Right away,’ he dances out of the door and down the passage. He is back in less than a minute with a lantern and helps Barquentine off the table who, once on the ground, batters his way without a word of thanks down the steps and to the door, cursing as he goes, his red rags glowing dully in the lantern light. Steerpike watches his horrid body disappear and then raising his high sharp shoulders still higher he yawns and grins at the same time. Cora and Clarice are on either side of him and are both breathing very loudly, their flat bosoms rising and falling rapidly like hatchways. Their eyes are glued upon him as he escorts them through the door, down the corridor and all the way to their apartments, which he enters. The windows are streaming with the rain. The roof is loud with it.

‘My dear ladies,’ says Steerpike, ‘I feel that some hot coffee is indicated, but what do you feel?’

PRESAGE

Towards evening the heavy sky began to disintegrate and a short time before sundown a wind from the west carried the clouds away in dense and shambly masses and the rain with them. Most of the day had been spent in ceremonial observance of multifarious kinds, both in the castle and in the downpour culminating in the pilgrim-like procession of the forty-three Gardeners headed by Pentecost, to Gormenghast Mountain and back, during which time it was their duty to meditate upon the glory of the House of Groan and especially on the fact that its latest member was twelve months old, a subject (however momentous) they must surely have exhausted after the first mile or so of the soaking and rock strewn paths that led them over the foothills.

Be that as it may, Barquentine, lying exhausted on his dirty mattress at eight o’clock in the evening and coughing horribly as his father had done so convincingly before him, was able to look back with sour satisfaction on a day of almost undiluted ritual. It had been an irritating thing that Lord Sepulchrave had been unable to attend the last three ceremonies, but there was a tenet in the law which exonerated his absence in the case of dire illness. He sucked his beard and his withered leg lay quite still. A few feet above his head a spider scrawled itself across the ceiling. He disliked it but it did not anger him.

Fuchsia had regained consciousness within a short while and with Mrs Slagg had bravely taken her part in the day’s observances, carrying her small brother whenever the old nurse grew weary. Prunesquallor, until late in the evening when he left Flay with his lordship, had kept a strict watch upon his patient.

An indescribable atmosphere of expectancy filled Gormenghast. Instead of Titus’ birthday bringing with it a feeling of completion or climax as it should have done, there was, conversely, a sense of something beginning. Obscure forces were, through the media of the inhabitants of the castle, coming to a head. For some, this sensation was extremely acute although unrecognizable and was no doubt sharpened and conditioned by their own personal problems. Flay and Swelter were on the edge of violence. Sepulchrave was moving at the margin of climax and Fuchsia hardly less so, being consumed with fear and anguish at the parental tragedy. She also was waiting; they were all waiting. Prunesquallor was suffering no little strain and was eternally on the watch and the Countess having held interview with him and having heard as much as Prunesquallor dared tell her, and having guessed a good deal more, was remaining in her room and receiving hourly bulletins as to her husband’s condition. Even Cora and Clarice could tell that the normal, monotonous life of the castle was not as heretofore and in their room they sat silently – waiting also. Irma spent most of her time in her bath and her thoughts were constantly returning to a notion new to her and shocking to her, and even terrifying. It was that the House of Groan was different. Different. Yet, how could it be different? ‘Impossible! I said Impossible!’ she repeated to herself through a lather of fragrant suds, but she could not convince herself. This idea of hers was creeping about Gormenghast insidiously, remaining for the most part unrecognized save as a sensation of uneasiness.

It was only Irma who put her finger on the spot. The others were involved with counting the portentous minutes before their own particular clouds broke over them, yet at the back of their personal troubles, hopes and fears, this less immediate trepidation grew, this intangible suggestion of change, that most unforgivable of all heresies.

A few minutes before sunset the sky over the castle was a flood of light and the wind having dropped, and the clouds vanished, it was difficult to believe that the mild and gilded atmosphere could ever have hallowed such a day as began so darkly and continued with such consistent violence. But it was still Titus’ birthday. The crags of the mountain for all their jaggedness were draped in so innocent a veil of milk and rose as to wholly belie their nature. The marshlands spread to the North in tranquil stretches of rush-pricked water. The castle had become a great pallid carving, swarmed here and there by acres of glittering ivy whose leaves dripped diamonds.

Beyond the great walls of Gormenghast the mud-huts were gradually regaining the whitish colour of their natural earth as the late sunlight drew out the moisture. The old cactus trees steamed imperceptibly and beneath the greatest of these and lit by the slanting rays of the sun was a woman on horseback.

For a long while there seemed to be no movement either in her or her mount. Her face was dark and her hair had fallen about her shoulders. The pale light was on her face, and there was a mournful triumph and an extreme loneliness. She bent forward a little and whispered to the horse who raised his forefoot on hearing her and beat it back into the soft earth. Then she began to dismount and it was not easy for her, but she lowered herself carefully down the wet grey flank. Then she took the basket from where it had been fastened to the rope bridle and stepped slowly forward to the horse’s head. Running her fingers through the tangled and dripping forelock, she moved them over the hard brow beneath. ‘You must go back now,’ she said slowly, ‘to the Brown Father, so that he may know that I am safe.’ Then she pushed the long wet, grey head away from her with a slow and deliberate movement. The horse turned itself away, the rain bubbling up in the hoofmarks and forming little gold pools of sky. It turned back to her once, after a few paces. Then lifting its head very high it shook its long mane from side to side and the air became filled with a swarm of pearls. Then suddenly it began to pace along the track of its own hoofmarks and without a moment’s abatement in its pace or the least deviation from its homeward course, it sped from her. She watched it as it appeared, disappeared, only to reappear again, as the undulations of the region gave cause, until it was almost too small to observe. At last she saw that it was about to reach the ridge of the last stretch of upland before its descent to the invisible plain. As she watched, it suddenly came to a dead halt, and her heart beat rapidly, for it turned about and stood for a moment motionless. Then lifting its head very high as it had done before, it began to move backwards step by step. They were facing one another over that vast distance as the grey horse was at last swallowed beneath the horizon.

She turned towards the mud-huts lying below her in a rose red light. A crowd had begun to gather and she saw that she was being pointed out.

With the warm glow of the dying light upon them, the mud dwellings for all their meanness and congestion had something ethereal about them, and her heart went out to them as a hundred re-awakened memories flew to her mind. She knew that bitterness was harboured in the narrow streets, that pride and jealousy leaned like ghosts against the posts of every carver’s doorway, but for a fleeting moment she saw only the evening light falling across the scenes of her childhood, and it was with a start that she awakened from this momentary reverie to notice how the crowd had grown. She had known that this moment would be like this. She had foreseen such an evening of soft light. She had foreseen that the earth would be glassed with rain and she had the overpowering sensation of living through a scene she had already enacted. She had no fear although she knew she would be met by hostility, prejudice and perhaps violence. Whatever they did with her it would not matter. She had suffered it already. All this was far wan history and archaism.

Her hand moved to her brow and pushed away a cold lock of hair that clung blackly to her cheek. ‘I must bear my child,’ she said to herself, her lips framing the soundless words, ‘and then I shall be complete and only myself and all will be over.’ Her pupils grew vast. ‘You shall be free. From the very beginning you shall be free of me, as I shall be free of you; and I shall follow my knowledge – ah, so soon, so soon into the julip darkness.’

She folded her hands and moved slowly towards the dwellings. High on her right hand the great outer wall had become colder; its inner face was draped with shadow and in the depths of the castle Titus sending forth a great tear-filled cry began to struggle with an unnatural strength in the old nurse’s arms. All at once an eyelid of the rich dusk lifted and Hesper burned over Gormenghast as under Keda’s heart her burden struggled.

IN PREPARATION FOR VIOLENCE

The twelve month cycle was ended. Titus had begun his second year – a year which, though hardly fledged, was so soon to bring forth violence. There was a sickness in the atmosphere.

Of all this suspicion and restlessness, he knew nothing, and he will have no memories of these days. Yet the aftermath of all that was happening in his infancy will soon be upon him.

Mrs Slagg watched him querulously as he tottered in his efforts to keep balance, for Titus had almost learned to walk. ‘Why won’t he smile?’ she whispered. ‘Why won’t his little Lordship ever smile?’

The sound of Barquentine’s crutch echoed down the hollow corridors. His withered leg padded beside it and the red sacking flapped its tatters in hot gusts. His edicts went forth like oaths.

Drear ritual turned its wheel. The ferment of the heart, within these walls, was mocked by every length of sleeping shadow. The passions, no greater than candle flames, flickered in Time’s yawn, for Gormenghast, huge and adumbrate, out-crumbles all. The summer was heavy with a kind of soft grey-blue weight in the sky – yet not in the sky, for it was as though there were no sky, but only air, an impalpable grey-blue substance, drugged with the weight of its own heat and hue. The sun, however brilliantly the earth reflected it from stone or field or water, was never more than a rayless disc this summer – in the thick, hot air – a sick circle, unrefreshing and aloof.

The autumn and winter winds and the lashing rain storms and the very cold of those seasons, for all their barbarism, were of a spleen that voiced the heart. Their passions were allied to human passions – their cries to human cries.

But it was otherwise with this slow pulp of summer, this drag of heat, with the incurious yellow eye within it, floating monotonously, day after day.

At the river’s edge the shallow water stank and mists of insects drifted over the scum, spinning their cry of far forgotten worlds, thinner than needles.

Toads in the green ooze belched. In the river’s bosom the reflection of the topmost crags of Gormenghast Mountain hung like stalactities, and in the scarcely perceptible motion of the water appeared to crumble momently – yet never to diminish or to disintegrate for all their crumbling. Across the river a long field of sparse grey-green grasses and dove-grey dust lay stretched as though stunned between its low flint walls.

Little clouds of the fine dust were rising at the every footfall of a small mottled horse, on whose back sat a man in a cape.

At every fifth step forward of his mount’s left leg the rider stood up in his stirrups and placed his head between the horse’s ears. The river wound beside them, the fields undulating and fading in a blur of heat. The mottled horse and the capped rider moved on. They were very small. In the haze to the extreme north the Tower of Flints arose like a celluloid ruler set floating upon its end, or like a water-colour drawing of a tower that has been left in the open and whose pigment has been all but washed away by a flirt of rain.

Distance was everywhere – the sense of far-away – of detachment. What might have been touched with an outstretched arm was equally removed, withdrawn in the grey-blue polliniferous body of the air, while overhead the inhuman circle swam. Summer was on the roofs of Gormenghast. It lay inert, like a sick thing. Its limbs spread. It took the shape of what it smothered. The masonry sweated and was horribly silent. The chestnuts whitened with dust and hung their myriads of great hands with every wrist broken.

What was left of the water in the moat was like soup. A rat floundered across it, part swimming, part walking. Thick sepia patches of water were left in the unhealthy scum where its legs had broken through the green surface.

The quadrangles were soft with dust. It had settled along the branches of the nearby trees. Footmarks were left deeply until the dry gusts came again. The varying lengths of stride – the Doctor’s, Fuchsia’s, the Countess’s, Swelter’s, could all be measured here, crossing and recrossing one another as though at the same time, yet hours, days and weeks divided them.

In the evening the bats, those fabulous winged mice, veered, tacked and slid through the hot gloom.

Titus was growing older.

It was four days since the Dark Breakfast. It was one year and four days since he was born in the room of wax and birdseed. The Countess would see no one. From daybreak to sunset she turned her thoughts, like boulders, over. She set them in long lines. She rearranged their order as she cogitated upon the Burning. She watched from her window as figures passed below. She turned her impressions over heavily. She was pondering all who passed by. From time to time Steerpike passed, as she sat at her window. Her husband was going mad. She had never loved him and she did not love him now, her heart being awakened to tenderness only by her birds and her white cats. But though she did not love him for himself, her unthinking and rooted respect for the heritage which he personified and her dumb pride in the line of his descent had filled her since her discovery of his illness.

Flay had gone, at her orders, to what lay beyond the great walls. He had gone, and though she would no more have thought of recalling him than of ceasing to tend the cat which he had bruised, yet she was aware of having uprooted a part of Gormenghast, as though from an accustomed skyline of towers one had been broken down. He had gone – but not altogether. Not for a little while, completely.

On the five nights following the day of his banishment – Titus’ first birthday – he had returned unobserved when light had fallen.

He had moved like a stick-insect through the grey star-pricked, summer night, and knowing every bay, inlet and headland of the great stone island of the Groans, of its sheer cliffs, of its crumbling outcrops, he had pursued his way without hesitation on a zig-zag course. He had only to lean against the cliff face and he was absorbed. For the five last nights he had come, after long, sultry days of waiting among the skirting trees of the twisted woods, through a gap in the castle walls to the western wing. In his banishment he had felt the isolation of a severed hand, which realizes that it is no more part of the arm and body it was formed to serve and where the heart still beats. As yet, for him, the horror of his ostracization was too close for him to grasp – only the crater-like emptiness. The stinging nettles had not had time to fill the yawning hollow. It was loneliness without pain.

His loyalty to the castle, too deep for him to question, was his heart’s background: to all that was implied by the broken line of the towers. With his knees drawn up to his chin he pored upon that skyline as he sat at the base of an outcrop of rock among the trees. At his side lay the long sword he had sharpened. The sun was going down. In another three hours he would be on his way, for the sixth time since his banishment, to the cloisters he had known since his youth. To the cloisters in whose northern shadows was an entrance to the stairhead of the wine vaults and the kitchens. A thousand recollections attached themselves to these cloisters alone. Sudden happenings – the awakening of ideas that had borne fruit or had withered at his touch – the memories of his youth – of his infancy even, for a brightly coloured vignette at the back of his dark skull recurred from time to time, a vignette of crimson, gold and grey. He had had no recollection of who it was who led him by the hand, but he recalled how, between two of the southerly arches, he and his guardian were stopped – how the air had been filled with sunshine – how a giant, for so he must then have appeared to the child, a giant in gold had given him an apple – the globe of crimson which he had never released from his mind’s empyric grasp, nor the grey of the long hair that fell across the brow and over the shoulders of his first memory.

Few of Flay’s memories were as colourful. His early years had been hard, grinding and monotonous. His recollections were associated with fears and troubles and hardships. He could remember how beneath the very cloister arches to which he was so soon to make his way he had received in grim silence, insult and even violence, no less than twinges of pleasure. He had leaned there, against the fourth pillar, on the afternoon following his unexpected summons to Lord Sepulchrave’s study, where he had been told of his advancement – of his being chosen as the Earl’s first servant; of how the Earl had noticed and approved of his silent and taciturn bearing, and of his reward. He had leaned there, his heart thumping; and he recalled how he had for a moment weakened, wishing he had a friend to whom he might speak of his happiness. But that was long ago. Clicking his tongue he dismissed recollections from his mind.

A gibbous moon was rising and the earth and the trees about him were dappled and striped with slowly shifting blotches of black and pearlish white. Radiance, in the shape of an oyster, moved across his head. He turned his eyes to the moon among the trees and scowled at it. This was no night for a moon. He cursed it, but in a childlike way for all the grim formation of his bones, stretching out his legs, on whose knees his chin had been supported.

He moved his thumb along the edge of his sword, and then unrolled a misshapen parcel at his side. He had not forgotten to bring some food with him from the castle, and now, five nights later, he made a meal upon all that was left of it. The bread had gone dry, but it tasted sweet to him after a day’s abstinence, with the cheese and the wild blackberries he had gathered in the wood. He left nothing but a few crumbs on his black trousers. There was no rational reason why he should feel, as he finished the berries, that horror lay between his last mouthful and his next meal – whenever it might be, and however he might acquire it.

Perhaps it was the moon. On his five previous nocturnal journeys to the castle there had been no light. Thick rainless clouds had provided a perfect cover. Schooled to adversity he took it as a sign that the hour was approaching. Indeed, it seemed more natural that Nature should be his enemy.

He rose slowly, and from beneath a heap of ferns he drew forth into the moonlight great lengths of cloth – and then began a most peculiar operation. Squatting down, he began, with the concentration of a child, to bind the cloth about his knees, around and around endlessly, until they were swathed to a depth of five thick inches, loosely at the joint and more tightly as they wound below and above it and as the binding thickened. This business took him the best part of an hour, for he was very scrupulous and had several times to unwind long swathes to adjust and ease the genuflexions of his knees.

Finally, however, all was ready and he got to his feet. He took a step forward; then another, and it seemed as though he was listening for something. Was there no sound? He took three more paces, his head lowered and the muscles behind his ears working. What was that that he heard? It was like a muffled clock that ticked three times, and stopped. It sounded very far away. There were a few lengths of cloth left over and he bound his knees to another half inch of thickness. When he next stepped forward the silence was absolute.

It was still possible for him to move with comparative freedom. His legs were so long that he had become accustomed to use them as stilts, and it was only with the slightest bending of the knee that they were wont to detonate.

The moonlight lay in a gauze-like sheet of whiteness over the roof of the Twisted Woods. The air was hot and thick, and the hour was late when he began to move towards the castle. To reach the cloisters would take him an hour of rapid walking. The long sword gleamed in his hand. At the corners of his lipless mouth was the red stain of blackberries.

The trees were left behind and the long slopes where the juniper bushes crouched like animals or deformed figures in the darkness. He had skirted the river and had found a clammy mist lying like a lover along its length, taking its curves and hugging its croaking body, for the bull-frogs had made the night air loud. The moon behind the miasmic wraiths swam and bulged as though in a distorting mirror. The air was sickly with an aftermath of the day’s heat, as lifeless as though it had been breathed before, thrice exhaled and stale. Only his feet felt cold as they sank ankle-deep in the dew. It was as though he trod through his own sweat.

With every step he became more conscious that he was narrowing the distance between himself and something horrible. With every step the cloisters leapt forward to meet him and his heart pounded. The skin was puckered between his eyes. He strode on.

The outer wall of the castle was above him. It mouldered in the moon. Where colonies of lizards clung to its flaking surfaces it shone.

He passed through an arch. The unchecked growth of ivy which clung about it had almost met at the centre of the aperture, and Flay, bending his head, forced his way through a mere fissure. Once through and the grounds of Gormenghast opened balefully out with an alien intimacy as though an accustomed face should, after confining itself for years to a score of cardinal expressions, take on an aspect never known before.

Keeping as much in the shadows as he could, Flay made rapid progress over the uneven ground towards the servants’ wing. He was treading on forbidden ground. Excommunicated by the Countess, each footfall was a crime committed.

During the final stages of his progress to the cloisters he moved with a kind of angular stealth. At times he would come to a halt and genuflect in rapid succession, but he could hear no sound; then he would move on again, the sword in his hand. And then, suddenly, before he realized it, he was in the servants’ quadrangle and skirting the wall to the cloisters. Within a minute and he was part of the charcoaled shadow of the third pillar where he had waited so patiently for the last five moonless nights.

BLOOD AT MIDNIGHT

Tonight the atmosphere was alive – a kind of life made even more palpable by the torpor of the air – the ghastly summer air of Gormenghast. By day, the heat of the dead light; by darkness, the vomitings of the sick room. There was no escaping. The season had come down.

As Mr Flay waited, his shoulder-blades against the stone pillars, his thoughts flowed back to the day of the Christening when he had slashed at the great soft face – to the night when he had watched the rehearsal of his murder – to that horrible sack that had been he – to the day of the debauchery of the Great Kitchens – to the horrors of the hooting Earl – to a hundred memories of his tormentor, whose face in his imagination opened out before him in the darkness like something septic.

His ears were strained with listening and his muscles ached. He had not moved for over an hour, save to turn his head upon his neck. And then, suddenly, what was it that had changed? He had shut his eyes for a moment and on opening them the air had altered. Was the heat even more horrible? His torn shirt was stuck to his shoulders and belly. It was more than that – it was that the darkness was omnipresent. The quadrangle was as inky as the shadows in which he had been shrouded. Clouds had moved over the moon. Not even the bright sword in his hand could be seen as he moved it out into what had been moonlight.

And then it came. A light more brilliant than the sun’s – a light like razors. It not only showed to the least minutiae the anatomy of masonry, pillars and towers, trees, grass-blades and pebbles, it conjured these things, it constructed them from nothing. They were not there before – only the void, the abactinal absences of all things – and then a creation reigned in a blinding and ghastly glory as a torrent of electric fire coursed across heaven.

To Flay it seemed an eternity of nakedness; but the hot black eyelid of the entire sky closed down again and the stifling atmosphere rocked uncontrollably to such a yell of thunder as lifted the hairs on his neck. From the belly of a mammoth it broke and regurgitated, dying finally with a long-drawn growl of spleen. And then the enormous midnight gave up all control, opening out her cumulous body from horizon to horizon, so that the air became solid with so great a weight of falling water that Flay could hear the limbs of trees breaking through a roar of foam.

There was no longer any necessity for Flay, shielded from the rain by the roof of the cloisters, to hold his body in so cramped a manner. What little sound he made would be inaudible now that the falling rain hissed and drummed, beat across the massive back of Gormenghast and swarmed down its sides, bubbling and spurting in every cranny of stone, and swilling every niche where had lain for so long the white dust.

Even more so now had he to listen for the sound of approaching paces, and it is doubtful whether he would have been able to disengage the sound of the chef’s feet from the drumming background. What he had never expected happened and his heart broke into an erratic hammering, for the impalpable darkness to his left was disturbed by a faint light, and, immediately after, the source of this hazy aura moved through the midnight. It was a strip of vertical light that appeared to float on end of its own volition. The invisible bearer of the octagonal lantern had closed all but one of the shutters.

As Flay edged his fingers more firmly along the butt of his sword, the glow of the lantern came abreast of him and a moment later had passed, and at this same moment, against the pale yellow glow could be distinguished the silhouette of Swelter’s upper volume. It was quite simple. It curved up and over in one black dome. There seemed to be no head. It must have been thrust down and forward, an attitude that might have been imagined impossible in one whose rolls of lard coloured fat filled in the space between the chin and the clavicles.

When Flay judged the silhouette a good twelve paces distant he began to follow, and then there began the first of the episodes – that of the stalk. If ever man stalked man, Flay stalked Swelter. It is to be doubted whether, when compared with the angular motions of Mr Flay, any man on earth could claim to stalk at all. He would have to do it with another word.

The very length and shape of his limbs and joints, the very formation of his head, and hands and feet were constructed as though for this process alone. Quite unconscious of the stick insect action, which his frame was undergoing, he followed the creeping dome. For Mr Swelter was himself – at all events in his own opinion – on the tail of his victim. The tail did not happen to be where he supposed it, two floors above, but he was moving with all possible stealth, nevertheless. At the top of the first flight he would place his lantern carefully by the wall, for it was then that the candles began and continued at roughly equal distances, to cast their pale circles of light from niches in the walls. He began to climb.

If Mr Flay stalked, Mr Swelter insinuated. He insinuated himself through space. His body encroached, sleuth-like, from air-volume to air-volume, entering, filling and edging out of each in turn, the slow and vile belly preceding the horribly deliberate and potentially nimble progress of his fallen arches.

Flay could not see Swelter’s feet, only the silhouetted dome, but by the way it ascended he could tell that the chef was moving one step at a time, his right foot always preceding his left, which he brought to the side of its dace-like companion. He went up in slow, silent jerks in the way of children, invalids or obese women. Flay waited until he had rounded the curve of the stairs and was on the first landing before he followed, taking five stone steps at a time.

On reaching the top of the first flight he moved his head around the corner of the wall and he no longer saw the silhouette of his enemy. He saw the whole thing glowing by the light of two candles. The passageway was narrow at this point, broadening about forty to fifty feet further down the corridor to the dimensions of a hall, whence the second flight led up to Lord Sepulchrave’s corridor.

Swelter was standing quite still, but his arms were moving and he appeared to be talking to someone. It was difficult for Flay to see exactly what he was doing until, a moment after he had heard the voice saying: ‘And I’ll make you red and wet, my pretty thing,’ he saw the dim bulk half turn with difficulty in the constricted space of the passageway and he caught the gleam of steel, and a moment later a portion of the shaft and the entire murderous head of the double-handed cleaver. Mr Swelter was nursing it in his arms as though he was suckling it.

‘Oh, so red and wet,’ came the moss soft voice again, ‘and then we’ll wipe you dry with a nice clean handkerchief. Would you like a silk one, my pretty? Would you? Before we polish you and tuck you up? What, no answer? But you know what Papa’s saying, don’t you now? Of course, you do – after all that he has taught you. And why? Because you’re such a quick, sharp baby – oh, such a sharp baby.’

And then Mr Flay was forced to hear the most disgusting sound – as of some kind of low animal with gastric trouble, Mr Swelter was laughing.

Flay, with a fair knowledge of low life, was, nevertheless, unable to withhold himself and, kneeling down quickly upon the great pads at his knees, he was silently sick.

Wiping the sweat from his brow as he rose to his feet he peered again about the angle of wall and saw that Swelter had reached the foot of the second staircase where the corridor widened. The sound of the rain, though less intense, was perpetually there. In the very sound of it, though distant, could be felt an unnatural weight. It was as though the castle were but the size of a skull over which a cistern of water was being rapidly emptied. Already the depressions and valley-like hollows in the castle grounds were filled with dark lakes that mounted momently, doubling and trebling their areas as their creeping edges met. The terrain was awash.

A closer degree of intimacy had been established in the castle between whatever stood, lay, knelt, was propped, shelved, hidden or exposed, or left ready for use, animate or inanimate, within the castle walls. A kind of unwilling knowledge of the nearness of one thing to another – of one human, to another, though great walls might divide them – of nearness to a clock, or a banister, or a pillar or a book, or a sleeve. For Flay the horrible nearness to himself – to his own shoulder and hand. The out-pouring of a continent of sky had incarcerated and given a weird hyper-reality of closeness to those who were shielded from all but the sound of the storm.

Lying awake, for none could hope to sleep, there was not one in all the dark and rattling place who had not cogitated, if only for a moment, on the fact that the entire castle was awake also. In every bed there lay, with his or her lids apart, a figure. They saw each other. This consciousness of each other’s solid and individual presences had not only been engendered by the imprisoning downpour but by the general atmosphere of suspicion that had been mounting – a suspicion of they knew not exactly what – only that something was changing – changing in a world where change was crime.

It was lucky for Flay that what he had relied on, the uncommunicative character of the Countess, held true, for she had not mentioned his banishment to a soul, although its cause still smarted in her prodigious bosom.

Hence Swelter’s ignorance of the fact that, as he made his first few porridge-like paces along Lord Sepulchrave’s ill-lit corridor, he was approaching a Flay-less darkness, for immediately before the door there was impenetrable shadow. A high window on the left had been blown in and glass lay scattered and, at the stairhead, glittered faintly by the light of a candle.

Mr Flay, in spite of the almost unbearable tension, experienced a twinge of ironic pleasure when, having mounted the second flight, he watched the rear of his enemy wavering into the darkness, in search of his own stalker.

There was a shallow alcove across the passageway from the top of the stairs – and with two strides Mr Flay had reached it. From there he could watch the darkness to his left. It was purposeless to follow his enemy to the door of his master’s room. He would wait for his return. How would the chef be able to aim his blow in the darkness? He would prod forward with the cleaver until it touched the panels of the door. He would take a soft pace backwards. Then, as he raised the great instrument above his head, a worm, wriggling its bliss through his brain, would bring the double-handed cleaver down, like a guillotine, the great blade whetted to a screaming edge. And as this picture of Mr Swelter’s methods illumined the inside of Mr Flay’s darkened skull, those very movements were proceeding. Concurrently with Flay’s visualization of the cleaver falling – the cleaver fell.

The floorboard beneath Mr Flay’s feet lifted, and a wooden ripple ran from one end of the passageway to the other, where it broke upon a cliff of plaster. Curiously enough, it was only through the movement of the boards beneath his feet that Mr Flay knew that the chef had struck, for at the same moment a peal of thunder killed all other sound.

Swelter had brought the cold edge downwards with such a concentration of relish that the excruciating sense of consummation had dulled his wits for a moment, and it was only when he attempted to work the steel away from what gripped its edge that he realized that something was amiss. It is true that he had expected the blade to slide through the ‘prostrate’ beneath him as through butter, for all the thin man’s osseous character – but not, surely – not with such ease – such liquid ease. Could it be that he had given to the double-handed cleaver such an edge as set up a new sensation – that of killing, as it were, without knowing it – as lazes through long grass the lethal scythe. He had not prodded forward with his toe to make doubly sure – for it had never occurred to him that he who had lain there, night after night, for over twelve years, could be elsewhere. In any event he might have wakened the long scrag by so doing. What had gone wrong? The orgasmic moment he had so long awaited was over. The cleaver was difficult to shift. Perhaps it was caught among the ribs. He began to run his hands down the shaft inch by inch, bending his knees and trunk as he did so, hot tracts of hairless clay redistributing their undulations the while. Inexorably downwards moved his fingers until they itched for contact with the corpse. Surely his hands must by now be almost at the boards themselves, yet he knew how deceptive the sense of distances can be when darkness is complete. And then he came upon the steel. Sliding his palms greedily along either edge he gave a sudden loud, murderous hiss, and loosing his fingers from the edge of the cleaver he swung his bulk about as though his foe were close behind him – and he peered back along the passage at the faint light at the stairhead. There seemed to be no one there, and after a few moments of scrutiny he wiped his hands across his thighs, and turning to the cleaver, wrenched it from the boards.

For a short while he stood fingering his misused weapon, and during this space Mr Flay had conceived and acted, moving a few yards further down the corridor where an even more favourable ambush presented itself in the shape of a sagging tapestry. As he moved out into the darkness, for he was beyond the orbit of the candles’ influence, the lightning struck again and flared bluishly through the broken window so that at one and the same moment both Swelter and Flay caught sight of one another. The bluish light had flattened them out like cardboard figures which had, in the case of the chef, an extraordinary effect. Someone with an unpleasant mind had cut him out of an enormous area of electric-blue paper the size of a sheet. For the few moments that the lightning lasted his fingers and thumbs were like bright blue sausages clasped about the cleaver’s handle.

Flay, presenting no less the illusion of having no bulk, struck not so much a sense of horror into Mr Swelter as a fresh surge of malice. That he should have dulled the exquisite edge of his cleaver upon Flay-less boards, and that he who should now be lying in two pieces was standing there in one, standing there insolently in a kind of stage lighting as a tangible criticism of his error, affected him to the extreme of control, and a horrid sweat broke from his pores.

No sooner had they seen one another than the darkness closed again. It was as though the curtain had come down on the first act. All was altered, Stealth was no longer enough. Cunning was paramount and their wits were under test. Both had felt that theirs was the initiative and the power to surprise – but now, for a few moments at least, they were equated.

Flay had, from the beginning, planned to draw the chef from Lord Sepulchrave’s doorway and passage, and if possible to lure him to the storey above, where, interspaced with wooden supports, for the roof was rotten, and with many a fallen beam, mouldered the Hall of Spiders at whose far end a window lay open to a great area of roof, terraced with stone and turreted about its sheer edges. It had occurred to him that if he were to snatch the candle from the stairhead he might lure his enemy there, and as the darkness fell he was about to put this idea into operation when the door of Lord Sepulchrave’s bedroom opened and the Earl, with a lamp in his hand, moved out into the corridor. He moved as though floating. A long cloak, reaching to his ankles, gave no hint of legs beneath it. Turning his head neither to left nor right, he moved like the symbol of sorrow.

Swelter, flattening himself as much as he was able against the wall, could see that his lordship was asleep. For a moment Mr Flay had the advantage of seeing both the Earl and the chef without being seen himself. Where was his master going? Swelter was for a few moments at a loss to know what to do and by that time the Earl was almost abreast of Mr Flay. Here was an opportunity of drawing the chef after him without the fear of being overtaken or slashed at from behind, and Flay, stepping in front of the Earl, began to precede him down the passage, walking backwards all the while so that he could see the chef over his Lordship’s shoulder as the dim figure followed. Mr Flay was well aware that his own head would be lit by the Earl’s lamp whereas Swelter would be in semi-darkness, but there was no great advantage to the chef in that – for the creature could not get at him for fear of waking the Earl of Gormenghast.

As Flay receded step by step he could not, though he tried to, keep his eyes continually upon the great cook. The proximity of his Lordship’s lamp-lit face left him no option but to turn his eyes to it, rapidly, from time to time. The round, open eyes were glazed. At the corners of the mouth there was a little blood, and the skin was deadly white.

Meanwhile, Swelter had narrowed the distance between the Earl and himself. Flay and the chef were staring at one another over their master’s shoulder. The three of them seemed to be moving as one piece. Individually so much at variance, they were, collectively, so compact.

Darting an eye over his shoulder, as though without reference to the head that held it, Flay could see that he was within a few feet of the stairway, and the procession began the slow ascent of the third flight. The leader, his body facing down the stairs the while, kept his left hand on the iron banister. In his right the sword glimmered – for, as with all the stairways of Gormenghast, there were candles burning at every landing.

As Flay reached the last step he saw that the Earl had stopped and that inevitably the great volume of snail-flesh had come to a halt behind him.

It was so gentle that it seemed as though a voice were evolving from the half-light – a voice of unutterable mournfulness. The lamp in the shadowy hand was failing for lack of oil. The eyes stared through Mr Flay and through the dark wall beyond and on and on through a world of endless rain.

‘Good-bye,’ said the voice. ‘It is all one. Why break the heart that never beat from love? We do not know, sweet girl; the arras hangs: it is so far; so far away, dark daughter. Ah no – not that long shelf – not that long shelf: it is his life work that the fires are eating. All’s one. Good-bye … good-bye.’

The Earl climbed a further step upwards. His eyes had become more circular.

‘But they will take me in. Their home is cold; but they will take me in. And it may be their tower is lined with love – each flint a cold blue stanza of delight, each feather, terrible; quills, ink and flax, each talon, glory!’ His accents were infinitely melancholy as he whispered: ‘Blood, blood, and blood and blood, for you, the muffled, all, all for you and I am on my way, with broken branches. She was not mine. Her hair as red as ferns. She was not mine. Mice, mice; the towers crumble – flames are swarmers. There is no swarmer like the nimble flame; and all is over. Good-bye … Good-bye. It is all one, for ever, ice and fever. Oh, weariest lover – it will not come again. Be quiet now. Hush, then, and do your will. The moon is always; and you will find them at the mouths of warrens. Great wings shall come, great silent, silent wings…. Good-bye. All’s one. All’s one. All’s one.’

He was now on the landing, and for a moment Mr Flay imagined he was about to move across the corridor to a room opposite, where a door was swinging, but he turned to the left. It would have been possible, indeed it would have been easier and more to Flay’s advantage to have turned about and sped to the Hall of Spiders, for Lord Sepulchrave, floating like a slow dream, barred Swelter’s way; but at the very idea Mr Flay recoiled. To leave his sleeping master with a prowling chef at his shoulder horrified him, and he continued his fantastic retreat as before.

They were about halfway to the Hall of Spiders when, to both Flay’s and Swelter’s surprise, the Earl moved off to the left down a narrow artery of midnight stone. He was immediately lost, for the defile wound to the left after the first few paces and the guttering of the lamp was quenched. His disappearance had been so sudden and unexpected that neither party was prepared to leap into the vacuum left between them and to strike out in the faint light. It was in this region that the Grey Scrubbers slept and some distance down there was suspended from the ceiling a broken chandelier. Towards this light Mr Flay suddenly turned and ran, while Swelter, whose frustrated blood-lust was ripe as a persimmon, thinking the thin man to have panicked, pursued him with horribly nimble steps for all the archless suction of his soles.

Covering the flagstones with a raking stride, Mr Flay was for all his speed little more than nine feet in advance of Swelter as he broke his way into the Hall of Spiders. Without losing a moment, he scrambled over three fallen beams, his long limbs jerking out fantastically as he did so, and turned when he had reached the centre of the room to discover that the door he had entered by was already filled with his enemy. So intent had they been on their game of wits and death that it had not occurred to them to wonder how it was that they were able to see one another in what was normally a lightless hall. They found no time for surprise. They did not even realize that the fury had died out of the storm and that the only sound was of a heavy, lugubrious droning. A third of the sky was clear of cloud and in this third was the humpbacked moon, very close and very white. Its radiance poured through the open wall at the far end of the Hall of Spiders. Beyond the opening it danced and glittered on the hissing water that had formed great walled-in lakes among the roofs. The rain slanted its silver threads and raised spurts of quicksilver on striking water. The Hall itself had the effect of a drawing in black, dove-grey and silver ink. It had long been derelict. Fallen and half-fallen beams were leaning or lying at all angles and between these beams, joining one to another, hanging from the ceiling of the floor above (for most of the immediate welkin had fallen in), spreading in every direction taut or sagging, plunged in black shadow, glimmering in half-light, or flaming exquisitely with a kind of filigree and leprous brilliance where the moon fell unopposed upon them the innumerable webs of the spiders filled the air.

Flay had broken through a liana of shadowy webs, and now, in the centre of the room – watching the cook in the doorway, he clawed away the misty threads from his eyes and mouth with his left hand. Even in those areas of the hall where the moonbeams could not penetrate and where great glooms brooded, the darkness was intersected here and there by glittering strands that seemed to shift their position momently. The slightest deflection of the head drew forth against the darkness a new phenomenon of glittering twine, detached from its web, disarticulated, miraculous and transient.

What eyes had they for such ephemera? Those webs to them were screens to aid or hinder. To snare with or be snared by. These were the features of Death’s battleground. Swelter’s shadowy moonless body at the door was intersected by the brilliant radii and jerking perimeters of a web that hung about halfway between himself and Mr Flay. The centre of the web coincided with his left nipple. The spacial depths between the glittering threads of the web and the chef seemed abysmic and prodigious. He might have belonged to another realm. The Hall of Spiders yawned and shrank, the threads deceiving the eye, the distances, shifting, surging forward or crumbling away, to the illusory reflectings of the moon.

Swelter did not stay by the door longer than it took him to gain a general impression of the kind of hovel in which the thin man chose to protect his long bones. Seeping with malice, yet the chef was not inclined to under-rate the guile of his antagonist. He had been lured here for some reason. The arena had not been of his choosing. He swivelled his eyes to left and right, his cleaver poised before him. He noted the encumbrances – the haphazard beams, dusty and half decayed, and the omnipresent awnings of the spiders. He could not see why these should be more to his disadvantage than to the man he intended to sever.

Flay had never had a concrete reason for his choice of the Hall of Spiders. Perhaps it was because he imagined that he would prove more agile among the webs and beams; but this he now doubted, having found how swiftly the chef had followed him. But that he had fulfilled his intention of inveigling his enemy to the place of his own choosing must surely infer that the initiative once again lay with him. He felt himself to be a thought ahead of the cook.

He held the long sword ahead of him as he watched the great creature approach. Swelter was sweeping aside the webs that impeded him with his cleaver, keeping his eyes upon Mr Flay and shifting his head on his neck from side to side in order to improve his view. He came to a halt and with his eyes perpetually fixed on Mr Flay began to drag away the clinging cobwebs from the blade and handle of his weapon.

He came forward again, sweeping the cleaver in a great arc before him and treading gingerly over the slanting timbers, and then seemed about to halt once more in order to repeat the unwebbing process when, with an obvious change of purpose, he moved forward as though no obstacles were in his path. He seemed to have decided that to be continually reconditioning himself and his weapon during the blood-encounter was ill-advised and untimely, not to say an insult to the occasion.

As pirates in the hot brine-shallows wading, make, face to face, their comber-hindered lunges, sun-blind, fly-agonied, and browned with pearls, so here the timbers leaned, moonlight misled and the rank webs impeded. It was necessary to ignore them – to ignore them as they tickled the face and fastened themselves about the mouth and eyes. To realize that although between the sword and the hand, the hand and the elbow, the elbow and the body, the silvery threads hung like tropical festoons, and although the naked steel was as though delivered in its caul, that the limbs were free to move, as free as ever before. The speed of the swung cleaver would in no way be retarded. The secret was to ignore.

So Swelter moved forward, growing at each soft, deft pace more and more like something from the deeps where the grey twine-weed coils the sidling sea-cow. Suddenly stepping into a shaft of moonlight he flamed in a network of threads. He peered through a shimmering mesh. He was gossamer.

He concentrated his entire sentience on the killing. He banished all irrelevancies from his canalized mind. His great ham of a face was tickling as though aswarm with insects, but there was no room left in his brain to receive the messages which his nerve endings were presumably delivering – his brain was full. It was full of death.

Flay watched his every step. His long back was inclined forwards like the bole of a sloping conifer. His head was lowered as though he was about to use it as a battering ram. His padded knees were slightly bent. The yards of cloth were now redundant, but there was no opportunity for him to unwind them. The cook was within seven feet of him. Between them lay a fallen beam. About two yards to Swelter’s left its extremity had settled into the dust, but to the right, the relic of an old iron box supporting it roughly at its centre, it terminated about three feet up in the air, spilth’d with fly-choked webs.

It was towards the support of this beam that Swelter made his way, beating the filigreed moonlight to his knees where it sagged and flared. His path could be traced. He had left behind him from the door, to where he stood, the web-walled canyon of a dream. Standing now, immediately behind the broken box, he had narrowed the distance between them to just over the measure of his arm and cleaver. The air between them was a little clearer. They were closer now than they had ever been this raining night. That dreadful, palpable closeness that can only be felt when there is mutual hatred. Their separate and immediate purposes were identical. What else had they in common? Nothing but the Spiders Hall about them, the webs, the beams, the by-play of the spangling moon and the drumming of the rain in their ears.

At any other time the chef would have made play with his superior wit. He would have taunted the long, half-crouching figure before him. But now, with blood to be spilt, what did it matter whether or not he incensed his foe? His wit would fall in a more concrete way. It would flash – but in steel. And let his final insult be that Flay could no longer tell an insult from a lamb-chop – unless with his body in two pieces he were still able to differentiate.

For a moment they stood, moving a little up and down on their toes. With his sword before him Mr Flay began to move along his side of the fallen beam, to the left, in order presumably to come to closer grips. As Swelter moved his little eyes to the right following every movement of the other’s body, he found that his vision was being impeded by so heavy an interfusion of ancient webbing that it would be unwise for him to remain where he was. In a flash he had both taken a sideways pace to his left and switched his eyes in the same direction. Flay at once crept in upon him, his face half shrouded by the thick webs through which he peered. His head was immediately above the lower end of the beam. Swelter’s rapid glance to his left had been fruitful. He had seen the lifted end of the beam as his first true friend in a hall of hindrances, and when his eyes returned to his thin foe his fat lips twisted. Whether such a muscular obscenity could be termed a ‘smile’ he neither knew nor cared. Mr Flay was crouching exactly where he had hoped that he might lure him. His chin was, characteristically, jutting forwards – as though this habit had been formed for Mr Swelter’s convenience alone. There was no time to lose. Swelter was three feet from the raised terminal of the long beam when he sprang. For a moment there was so much flesh and blood in the air that a star changed colour under Saturn’s shoulder. He did not land on his feet. He had not intended to. To bring the entire weight of his body down upon the beam-head was all that mattered. He brought it down; and as his underbelly struck, the far end of the beam leapt like a living thing, and, striking Mr Flay beneath his outstretched jaw, lifted him to his full height before he collapsed, a deadweight, to the floor.

The chef, heaving himself grotesquely to his feet, could hardly get to the body of his victim quickly enough. There he lay, his coat rucked up at the level of his arm-pits, his lean flank exposed. Mr Swelter raised the cleaver. He had waited so long for this. Many, many months. He turned his eyes to the web-shrouded weapon in his hands, and as he did so Mr Flay’s left eyelid fluttered, and a moment later he had focused the chef and was watching him through his lashes. He had not the strength to move at that horrifying moment. He could only watch. The cleaver was lifted, but he now saw that Swelter was peering quizzically at the blade, his eyebrows raised. And then he heard the sponge-like voice for the second time that night.

‘Would you like to be wiped, my pretty one?’ it said, as though certain that a reply would be forthcoming from the brutal head of steel. ‘You would, wouldn’t you – before you have your supper? Of course. And how could you ever enjoy a nice warm bath with all your clothes on, eh? But I’ll soon be washing you, little blossom. And I must wipe your face, dear; wipe it blue as ink, then you can start drinking, can’t you?’ He held the lean metal head at his bosom. ‘It’s just the thing for thirsty ones, my darling. Just the very nightcap.’ There followed a few moments of low gastric chuckling before he began to drag the webbing from the cleaver’s blade. He was standing about two feet away from the prostrate figure of Flay, who was half in and half out of moonlight. The demarcation line lay across his bare flank. Luckily for him it was his upper half that was in shadow and his head was all but lost. As he watched the overhang above him and noted that the chef had all but cleared the blade of cobwebs, his attention became focused upon the upper segment of the face of his foe. It was veiled, as indeed was the rest of the face and body, with the ubiquitous webs, but it seemed that above the left ear there was something additional. So accustomed had Swelter become to the tickling of the webs across his face and to the hundred minor irritations of the skin, that he had not noticed that upon his right eye there sat a spider. So thickly had his head been draped that he had accepted this impediment to his vision as being part of the general nuisance. Flay could see the spider quite clearly from where he lay, but what he now saw was something fateful. It was the spider’s mate. She had emerged from the grey muddle above the left ear and was taking, leg by leg, the long, thin paces. Was she in search of her husband? If so, her sense of direction was sound, for she made towards him.

Swelter was running the flat of his hand along the steel face of his weapon. It was naked for use. Putting his blubber lips to the moonlit steel he kissed it, and then, falling a short step back, he lifted the cleaver with both hands, grasping the long handle high above his lowered head. He stood upon tip-toe, and, poised for a moment thus, went suddenly blind. His left eye had become involved with a female spider. She sat upon it squarely, enjoying the rolling movement of the orb she covered. It was for this precise instant that Flay had been waiting ever since he had caught sight of the insect a few seconds previously. It seemed that he had lain there stretched vulnerably beneath the murderous cleaver for an hour at least. Now was his moment, and gripping his sword which had fallen beside him when he fell, he rolled himself with great rapidity from beneath the belly of the cook and from the cleaver’s range.

Swelter, sweating with irritation at being baulked for the second time in this business of climax, imagined nevertheless that Flay was still below him. Had he struck downwards in spite of the spiders on his eyes it may be that Flay could not have escaped. But Mr Swelter would have considered it a very sorry ending after all his pains to find he had made slaughter without having been able to see the effect. Outside Lord Sepulchrave’s door it was different. There was no light, anyway. But here with a beautiful moon to illumine the work it was surely neither the time nor the place to be at the mercy of a spider’s whim.

And so he lowered the cleaver to his bosom and, freeing his right hand, plucked the insects from his eyes, and he had started to raise the weapon again before he saw that his victim had gone. He wheeled about, and as he did so he experienced a white-hot pain in his left buttock and a searing sensation at the side of his head. Screaming like a pig, he wheeled about, raising his finger to where his ear should have been. It had gone. Flay had swiped it off, and it swung to and fro in a spider made hammock a foot above the floorboards at the far end of the room. And what voluptuary ever lolled with half the langour of that boneless thing!

A moonbeam, falling on the raddled lobe, withdrew itself discreetly and the ear disappeared into tactful darkness. Flay had, in rapid succession, jabbed and struck. The second blow had missed the skull, but he had drawn first blood; in fact, first and second, for Swelter’s left rump bled magnificently. There was, in point of fact, an island growing gradually – a red island that had seeped through to the white vastness of his cloth rear. This island was changing its contours momentarily, but as the echo of Swelter’s scream subsided, it very much resembled in its main outline the inverted wing of an angel.

The blows had no more than gored him. Of Swelter’s acreage, only a perch or two here and there might, if broken, prove vulnerable loam. That he bled profusely could prove little. There was blood in him to revitalize an anaemic army, with enough left over to cool the guns. Placed end to end his blood vessels might have coiled up the Tower of Flints and halfway down again like a Virginia creeper – a vampire’s home from home.

Be that as it may, he was blooded, and the cold, calculating malice had given way to a convulsive hatred that had no relation to the past. It was on the boil of now, and heading into the webs that divided them, he let loose a long scything blow at Mr Flay. He had moved very rapidly and but for the fact that the moonlit webs deceived him as to the distance between them, so that he struck too soon, it is probable that all would have been over bar the disposal of the body. As it was, the wind of the blow and the hiss of the steel were enough to lift the hairs on Mr Flay’s head and to set up a horrible vibration in his ears. Recovering almost at once from the surprise, however, Flay struck in return at the cook, who was for a moment off his balance, catching him across the bolster-like swelling of his shoulder.

And then things happened very rapidly, as though all that had gone before was a mere preamble. Recovering from the flounder of his abortive blow, and with the fresh pain at his shoulder, Swelter, knowing he had, with his cleaver extended, the longer reach, gripped the weapon at the extreme end of the handle and began to gyrate, his feet moving with horrifying rapidity beneath his belly, not only with the kind of complicated dance movement which swivels the body around and around at great speed, but in a manner which brought him nearer every moment to Mr Flay. Meanwhile, his cleaver, outstretched before him, sang on its circular path. What remained of the webs in the centre of the room fell away before this gross, moon-dappled cyclone. Flay, nonplussed for the moment, watched in fascinated horror, the rapid succession of faces which the swivelling of Swelter conduced; faces of which he had hundreds; appearing and re appearing at high speed (with an equal number of rear-views of the huge head, interlarded, in all literalness). The whirr of steel was approaching rapidly. The rotation was too speedy for him to strike between the cycles, nor was his reach long enough were he to stand his ground.

Moving backwards he found that he was being forced gradually into a corner at the far end of the room. Swelter was bearing down on him with a kind of nightmare quality. His mind was working, but the physical perfection of his footwork and the revolving of the steel had something of the trance about them – something that had become through their very perfection detached and on their own. It was difficult to imagine how the great white top could stop itself.

And then Mr Flay had an idea. As though cowering from the oncoming steel, he moved back further and further into the corner until his bent backbone came into contact with the junction of the two walls. Cornered of his own choosing, for he would have had time to leap for the rain-filled opening of moonlight had he wished, he raised himself to his full height, prising his spine into the right-angle of the walls, his sword lowered to his feet – and waited.

The scything cleaver spun nearer momently. At every glimpse of the chef’s rotating head he could see the little blood-shot eyes focused upon him. They were like lumps of loathing, so concentrated was his every thought and fibre upon the death of Flay that, as he whirred closer and closer, his normal wits were in abeyance, and what Flay had hoped for happened. The arc of the long weapon was of such amplitude that at its left and right extremes it became all of a sudden within a few inches of the adjacent walls and at the next revolution had nicked away the plaster before, finally, as the walls – so it seemed to Swelter – leapt forward to meet him, the chef discovered the palms of his hands and forearms stinging with the shock of having taken a great section of the mouldering wall away. Flay, with his sword still held along his leg, its point beside his toe-tap, was in no position to receive the impact of Swelter’s body as it fell forward upon him. So sudden and so jarring had been the stoppage of his murderous spinning, that, like a broken engine, its rhythm and motivation lost, its body out of control, Swelter collapsed, as it were, within his own skin, as he slumped forwards. If Flay had not been so thin and had not forced himself so far into the corner, he would have been asphyxiated. As it was, the clammy, web-bedraggled pressure of Swelter’s garments over his face forced him to take short, painful breaths. He could do nothing, his arms pinned at his sides, his visage crushed. But the effects of the shock were passing, and Swelter, as though suddenly regaining his memory, heaved himself partially from the corner in a tipsy way, and although Mr Flay at such close range was unable to use his sword, he edged rapidly along the left hand wall and, turning, was within an ace of darting a thrust at Swelter’s ribs when his foe staggered out of range in a series of great drunken curves. The giddiness with which his gyrations had filled him were for the moment standing him in good stead, for reeling as he did about the Hall of Spiders he was an impossible target for all but mere blood-letting.

And so Flay waited. He was acutely aware of a sickening pain at the back of his neck. It had grown as the immediate shock of the blow to his jaw had subsided. He longed desperately for all to be over. A terrible fatigue had entered him.

Swelter, once the room no longer span around him and his sense of balance was restored, moved with horrible purpose across the Hall, the cleaver trembling with frustration in his hand. The sound of his feet on the boards was quite distinct, and startled Flay into glancing over his shoulder into the moonlight. The rain had ceased and, save for the dolorous whispering of Gormenghast a-drip, there was a great hush.

Flay had felt all of a sudden that there could be no finality, no decision, no death-blow in the Hall of Spiders. Save for this conviction he would have attacked Swelter as he leaned, recovering from his giddiness, by the door at the far end of the room. But he only stood by the moon-filled opening, a gaunt silhouette, the great cloth rolls like malformations at his knees, and waited for the chef’s advance, while he worked at the vertebrae of his aching neck with his long bony fingers. And then had come the onrush. Swelter was upon him, his cleaver raised, the left side of his head and his left shoulder shiny with blood, and a trail of it behind him as he came. Immediately before the opening to the outer air was a six-inch step upwards which terminated the flooring. Beyond this there was normally a three-foot drop to a rectangular walled-in area of roof. Tonight there was no such drop, for a great lake of rain-water lapped at the dusty board of the Hall. To a stranger the lake gave the appearance of profound depth as it basked in the moon. Flay, stepping backwards over the raised strip of boarding, sent up a fountain of lemon-yellow spray as his foot descended. In a moment he was spidering his legs backwards through water as warm as tea. The air, for all the downpour, was as oppressive as ever. The horrible weight of heat was undispersed.

And then the horror happened. Swelter, following at high speed, had caught his toe at the raised lip of the opening, and unable to check his momentum, had avalanched himself into warm water. The cleaver sailed from his grasp and, circling in the moonlight, fell with a fluke of flame in the far, golden silence of the lake. As Swelter, face down and floundering like a sea-monster, struggled to find his feet, Flay reached him. As he did so, with a primeval effort the cook, twisting his trunk about, found, and then lost again, a temporary foothold and, writhing, fell back again, this time upon his back, where he floated, lashing, great washes of water spreading on all sides to the furthermost reaches. For a moment he was able to breathe, but whether this advantage was outbalanced by his having to see, towering above him, the dark, up reaching body of his foe – with the hilt of the sword raised high over his head, both hands grasping it and the point directed at the base of his ribs, only he could know. The water about him was reddening and his eyes, like marbles of gristle, rolled in the moonlight as the sword plunged steeply. Flay did not trouble to withdraw it. It remained like a mast of steel whose sails had fallen to the decks where, as though with a life of their own, unconnected with wind or tide, they leapt and shook in ghastly turbulence. At the masthead, the circular sword hilt, like a crow’s nest, boasted no inch-high pirate. Flay, leaning against the outer wall of the Hall of Spiders, the water up to his knees and watching with his eyes half-closed, the last death throes, heard a sound above him, and in a shudder of gooseflesh turned his eyes and found them staring into a face – a face that smiled in silver light from the depths of the Hall beyond. Its eyes were circular and its mouth was opening, and as the lunar silence came down as though for ever in a vast white sheet, the long-drawn screech of a death-owl tore it, as though it had been calico, from end to end.

GONE

In after years Mr Flay was almost daily startled to remembrance of what now ensued. It returned in the way that dreams recur, suddenly and unsolicited. The memory was always unearthly, but no less so than the hours themselves which followed upon Swelter’s death – hours as it were from a monstrous clock across whose face, like the face of a drum, was stretched the skin of the dead chef – a clock whose hands trailed blood across and through the long minutes as they moved in a circular trance. Mr Flay moved with them.

He would remember how the Earl at the window was awake; how he had held his rod with the jade knob in his hand, and how he had stepped down in the lake of rain. He had prodded the body and it had twisted for a minute and then righted itself, as though it were alive and had a positive wish to remain staring at the moon. The Earl then closed the cook’s eyes, moving the two petals of pulp over the irrespective blood-alleys.

‘Mr Flay,’ Lord Sepulchrave had said.

‘Lordship?’ queried his servant, hoarsely.

‘You did not reply to me when I saluted you.’

Flay did not know what his master could mean. Saluted him? He had not been spoken to. And then he remembered the cry of the owl. He shuddered.

Lord Sepulchrave tapped the hilt of the sword-mast with his rod. ‘Do you think that they will enjoy him?’ he said. He parted his lips slowly. ‘We can but proffer him. That is the least we can do.’

Of the nightmare that followed it is needful to say only that the long hours of toil which followed culminated at the Tower of Flints to which they had dragged the body, after having steered it between a gap in the battlements through which the lake was emptying itself. Swelter had descended in the two hundred-foot cascade of moon-sparkling water and they had found his body, spread to the size of a sheet and bubbling on the drenched gravel. A rope had been procured and a hook attached and the long drag had at last been effected.

The white silence was terrible. The moonlight like a hoar frost on the Tower of Flints. The shell of the library glimmered in the distance far down the long line of halls and pavilions, and of domed, forsaken structures. To their right the lit pine-woods were split with lines of midnight. About their feet a few cones, like ivory carvings, were scattered, anchored to the pale earth by their shadows.

What was once Swelter glistened.

And the Earl had said: ‘This is my hour, Flay. You must go from here, Mr Flay. You must go away. This is the hour of my reincarnation. I must be alone with him. That you killed him is your glory. That I can take him to them is mine. Good-bye, for my life is beginning. Good-bye … good-bye.’ And he had turned away, one hand still holding the rope, and Flay half ran and half walked for a short distance towards the Castle, his head turned over his shoulder, his body shuddering. When he stopped, the Earl was dragging the glistening thing behind him and was at the time-eaten opening at the base of the Tower.

A moment later and he was gone, the flattened weight undulating as it slithered up and over the three steps that led into the corroded entrance, the form of the steps showing in blurred contour.

Everything was moving round and round – the Tower, the pines, the corpse, the moon, and even the inhuman cry of pain that leapt from the Tower’s throat into the night – the cry, not of an owl, but of a man about to die. As it echoed and echoed, the lank and exhausted servant fell fainting in his tracks, while the sky about the Tower became white with the lit bodies of circling owls, and the entrance to the Tower filled with a great weight of feathers, beaks and talons as the devouring of the two incongruous remains proceeded.

THE ROSES WERE STONES

Alone among the Twisted Woods – like a branch himself, restless among the rooted trees, he moved rapidly, the sound of his knees becoming day by day familiar to the birds, and hares.

Ribbed with the sunlight where the woodlands thinned, dark as shadows themselves where no sun came, he moved as though pursued. For so long a time had he slept in the cold, lightless corridor that waking, as it were, with no protection from the dawn, or stretching himself for sleep, defenceless before the twilight and sundown, he was at first unable to feel other than nakedness and awe. Nature, it seemed, was huge as Gormenghast. But as time went on he learned to find the shortest and most secret ways of hill and woodland, of escarpment and marshland, to trace the winding of the river and its weed-bound tributaries.

He realized that though the raw ache for the life he had lost was no less with him, yet the exertions he was obliged to make for his own preservation and the call that such a life made upon his ingenuity, had their compensations. He learned, day by day, the ways of this new world. He felt proud of the two caves which he had found in the slopes of Gormenghast Mountain. He had cleared them of rocks and hanging weeds. He had built the stone ovens and the rock tables, the hurdling across their walls to discourage the foxes, and the beds of foliage. One lay to the south at the fringe of the unexplored country. It was remote and very thrilling to his bones – for the mountain lay between him and the far Castle. The second cave was in the northern slope, smaller, but one which on rainy nights was more likely to prove accessible. In a glade of the Twisted Woods he had constructed a shack as his primary and especial home. He was proud of his growing skill at snaring rabbits: and of his successes with the net he had so patiently knotted with lengths of tough root fibre; and it was sweet to taste the fish he prepared and ate alone in the shadow of his shack. The long evenings were like blond eternities – stifling and silent save for the occasional flutter of a wing or the scream of a passing bird. A stream which had all but dried moved past his doorway and disappeared in the shadows of the undergrowth to the south. His love of this lost glade he had selected grew with the development of a woodland instinct which must have been latent in his blood, and with the feeling that he possessed something of his own – a hut he had made with his own hands. Was this rebellion? He did not know. The day over, he would sit at the door of his cabin, his knees beneath his chin, his bony hands clasping his elbows, and stare ruminatively (a stranger would have thought sullenly) before him as the shadows lengthened inch by inch. He had started to turn over in his mind the whole story of Gormenghast as it had affected him. Of Fuchsia, now that he could see her no longer, he found it painful to reminisce, for he missed her more than he could have imagined possible.

The weeks went by and his skill grew, so that he had no longer to lie in wait for half a day at a time at the mouths of warrens, a club in his hand; nor waste long hours by the river, fishing the less hopeful reaches for lack of lore. He could devote more and more of his time to conditioning his shack against the approaching autumn and inevitable winter; to exploring further afield, and to brooding in the evening sunlight. It was then that the vile, nightmare memory would most often return. The shape of a cloud in the sky – the sight of a red beetle – anything might suddenly awake the horror; and he would dig his nails into the palms of his hands as the recollection of the murder and of the subsequent death of his master discoloured his brain.

There were few days in which he did not climb the foothills of the Mountain, or pick his way to the edge of the Twisted Woods, in order to see the long broken line of Gormenghast’s backbone. Hours of solitude in the wood were apt to detach him from the reality of any other life, and he would at times find that he was running gawkily through the boles in a sudden fear that there was no Gormenghast: that he had dreamed it all: that he belonged to nowhere, to nothing: that he was the only man alive in a dream of endless branches.

The sight of that broken skyline so interwoven with his earliest recollections reassured him that though he was himself ejected and abandoned, yet all that had given him purpose and pride in life was there, and was no dream or fable, but as real as the hand which shielded his eyes, a reality of immemorial stone, where lived, where died, and where was born again the lit line of the Groans.

On one such evening, after scanning the Castle for some while, and moving his eyes at last across the corruscation of the mud-huts, he rose to his feet and began his return journey to the glade, when suddenly changing his mind, he retraced a hundred or so of his steps and set off to his left, penetrating with astonishing speed a seemingly impenetrable valley of thorns. These stunted trees gave way at length to sparser shrub, the leaves, which had all but fallen with drought, hanging to the brittled branches only by reason of the belated refreshment which the sudden storm had given to their roots on the night of the murder. The incline on either side could now be seen more clearly, and as Flay picked his way through the last barrier of shrubs, ash-coloured slopes lifted unbroken on his either hand, the grass as sleek and limp as hair, with not a pale blade upright. There was not a breath of wind. He rested himself, lying out upon his back on a hot slope to his right. His knees were drawn up (for angles were intrinsic to his frame in action or repose) and he gazed abstractedly over the small of his outstretched arm at the sheen on the grasses.

He did not rest for long, for he wished to arrive at his northern cave before dusk. He had not been there for some while, and it was with a kind of swart enjoyment that he surrendered to the sudden whim. The sun was already a far cry from its zenith, hanging in haze, a few degrees above the horizon.

The prospect from the northern cave was unusual. It gave Mr Flay what he imagined must be pleasure. He was discovering more and more in this new and strange existence, this vastness so far removed from corridors and halls, burned libraries and humid kitchens, that gave rise in him to a new sensation, this interest in phenomena beyond ritual and obedience – something which he hoped was not heretical in him – the multiformity of the plants and the varying textures in the barks of trees, the varieties of fish and bird and stone. It was not in his temperament to react excitedly to beauty, for, as such, it had never occurred to him. It was not in him to think in terms. His pleasure was of a dour and practical breed; and yet, not altogether. When a shaft of light fell across a dark area his eyes would turn to the sky to discover the rift through which the rays had broken. Then they would return with a sense of accomplishment to the play of the beams. But he would keep his eye upon them. Not that he supposed them to be worth looking at – imagining there was something wrong in himself for wasting his time in such a fruitless way. As the days went by he had found that he was moving to and fro through the region in order to be at one place or another in time to watch the squirrels among the oaks at noon, the homecoming of the rooks, or the death of the day from some vantage point of his finding.

And so it was this night that he wished to watch the crags as they blackened against the falling sun.

It took him another hour of walking to reach the northern cave, and he was tired when he stripped himself of his ragged shirt and rested his back against the cool outer wall. He was only just in time, for the circle, like a golden plate, was balancing upon its rim on the point of the northernmost of the main crags of Gormenghast Mountain. The sky about it was old-rose, translucent as alabaster, yet sumptuous as flesh. And mature. Mature as a soft skin or heavy fruit, for this was no callow experiment in zoneless splendour – this impalpable sundown was consummate and the child of all the globe’s archaic sundowns since first the red eye winked.

As the thin man’s gaze travelled down the steep sides of this crag to the great heart-shaped gulch beneath it where what vegetation there was lay sunk in a sea of shade, he felt rather than saw, for his thoughts were still in the darkness, a quickening of the air about him and lifting his head he noticed how, with a deepening of the rose in the sky, all things were tinted, as though they had awaited the particular concentration of hue which the sky now held, before admitting the opinions of their separate colours to be altered or modified. As at the stroke of a warlock’s wand the world was suffused – all things saving the sun, which, in contradiction to the colour of the vapours and the forms that it had raddled, remained golden.

Flay began to untie his boots. Behind him his swept cave yawned, a million prawn-coloured motes swaying against the darkness at the entrance. He noticed, as he worked his heel free of the leather, that the crag was biting its way into the sun and had all but reached its centre. He leant his bony head backward against the stone, and his face became lit and the stubble of his first beard shone, its every hair a thread of copper wire, as he followed the course of the crag’s crest in its seemingly upward and arrow-headed journey, its black barbs eating outwards as it climbed.

Inexorable as was its course, there was, that summer evening, more destiny in the progress of another moving form, so infinitesimal in the capacious mountain dusk, than in the vast sun’s ample, spellbound cycle.

Through her, in microcosm, the wide earth sobbed. The star-globe sank in her; the colours faded. The death-dew rose and the wild birds in her breast climbed to her throat and gathered songless, hovering, all tumult, wing to wing, so ardent for those climes where all things end.

To Flay, it was as though the silence of his solitude had been broken, the senses invading each other’s provinces, for on seeing the movement of something the size of the letter ‘i’, that moved in silhouette against the gigantic yellow plate, he had the sensation of waking from a dream which took hold of him. Distant as it was, he could tell it for a human form. That it was Keda it was not in his power to realize. He knew himself for witness. He could not stop himself. He knelt forward on his knees, while the moments melted, one into the next. He grew more rigid. The tiny, infinitely remote figure was moving across the sun towards the crag’s black edge. Impotently, he watched, his jaw thrust forwards and a cold sweat broke across his bony brow, for he knew himself to be in the presence of Sorrow – and an interloper upon something more personal and secret than he had the right to watch. And yet impersonal. For in the figurette was the personification of all pain, taking, through sliding time, its final paces.

She moved slowly, for the climb had tired her and it had not been long since she had borne the child of clay, like alabaster, the earthless daughter who had startled all. It was as though Keda was detached from the world, exalted and magnificently alone in the rose-red haze of the upper air. At the edge of the naked drop to the shades below she came to a standstill, and, after a little while, turned her head to Gormenghast and the Dwellings, afloat in the warm haze. They were unreal. They were so far, so remote. No longer of her, they were over. Yet she turned her head for the child’s sake.

Her head, turning, was dimensionless. A thong about her neck supported the proud carvings of her lovers. They hung across her breasts. At the edge of age, there was a perilous beauty in her face as of the crag’s edge that she stood upon. The last of footholds; such a little space. The colour fading on the seven-foot strip. It lay behind her like a carpet of dark roses. The roses were stones. There was one fern growing. It was beside her feet. How tall? … A thousand feet? Then she must have her head among far stars. How far all was! Too far for Flay to see her head had turned – a speck of life against that falling sun.

Upon his knees he knew that he was witness.

About her and below lay the world. All things were ebbing. A moon that climbed suddenly above the eastern skyline, chilling the rose, waned through her as it waxed, and she was ready.

She moved her hair from her eyes and cheekbones. It hung deep and still as the shadow in a well; it hung down her straight back like midnight. Her brown hands pressed the carvings inwards to her breast, and as a smile began to grow, the eyebrows raised a little, she stepped outwards into the dim atmosphere, and falling, was most fabulously lit by the moon and the sun.

‘BARQUENTINE AND STEERPIKE’

The inexplicable disappearance of both Lord Sepulchrave and Swelter was, of course, the burden of Gormenghast – its thoughts’ fibre – from the meanest of the latter’s scullions to the former’s mate. The enigma was absolute, for the whereabouts of Flay was equally obscure.

There was no end to the problem. The long corridors were susurrous with rumour. It was unthinkable that so ill-matched a pair should have gone together. Gone? Gone where? There was nowhere to go. It was equally unthinkable that they should have gone singly, and for the same reason.

The illness of the Earl had, of course, been uppermost in the minds of the Countess, Fuchsia and the Doctor, and an exhaustive search had been organized under the direction of Steerpike. It revealed no vestige of a clue, although from Steerpike’s point of view it had been well worth while, for it gave him occasion to force an entry into rooms and halls which he had for a long while hoped to investigate with a view to his own re-establishment.

It was on the ninth day of the search that Barquentine decided to call a halt to exertions which were going not only against his grain, but the grain of every rooted denizen of the stone forest – that terraced labyrinth of broken rides.

The idea of the head of the House being away from his duties for an hour was sufficiently blasphemous: that he should have disappeared was beyond speech. It was beyond anger. Whatever had happened to him, whatever had been the cause of his desertion, there could be no two ways about it – his Lordship was a renegade, not only in the eyes of Barquentine, but (dimly or acutely perceived), in the eyes of all.

That a search had to be made was obvious, but it was also in everyone’s thoughts that to find the Earl would cause so painful, so frantically delicate a situation that there would be advantages were his disappearance to remain a mystery.

The horror with which Barquentine had received the news had now, at the end of the ninth day, given place to a stony and intractable loathing for all that he associated with the personality of his former master, his veneration for the Earl (as a descendant of the original line) disassociating itself from his feelings about the man himself. Sepulchrave had behaved as a traitor. There could be no excuses. His illness? What was that to him? Even in illness he was of the Groans.

During those first days after the fateful news he had become a monster as he scoured the building, cursing all who crossed his path, probing into room after room, and thrashing out with his crutch at any whom he considered tardy.

That Titus should from the very beginning be under his control and tutelage was his only sop. He turned it over on his withered tongue.

He had been impressed by Steerpike’s arrangements for the search, during which he had been forced to come into closer contact with the youth than formerly. There was no love lost between them, but the ancient began to have a grudging respect for the methodical and quickly moving youth. Steerpike was not slow to observe the obscurest signs of this and he played upon them. On the day when, at Barquentine’s orders, the searchings ceased, the youth was ordered to the Room of Documents. There he found the ragged Barquentine seated on a high-backed chair, a variety of books and papers on a stone table before him. It was as though his knotted beard was sitting on the stone between his wrinkled hands. His chin was thrust forward, so that his stretched throat appeared to be composed of a couple of lengths of rope, several cords and a quantity of string. Like his father’s, his head was wrinkled to the brink of belief, his eyes and mouth when closed disappearing altogether. Propped against the stone table was his crutch.

‘You called for me?’ queried Steerpike from the door.

Barquentine raised his hot-looking, irritable eyes and dropped the cross-hatched corners of his mouth.

‘Come here, you,’ he rasped.

Steerpike moved to the table, approaching in a curious, swift and sideways manner. There was no carpet on the floor and his footsteps sounded crisply.

When he reached the table and stood opposite the old man, he inclined his head to one side.

‘Search over,’ said Barquentine. ‘Call the dogs off. Do you hear?’

He spat over his shoulder.

Steerpike bowed.

‘No more nonsense!’ barked the old voice. ‘Body of me, we’ve seen enough of it.’

He started to scratch himself through a horrible-looking tear in his scarlet rags. There was a period of silence while this operation proceeded. Steerpike began to shift the weight of his body to his other leg.

‘Where do you think you’re going to? Stand still, you rat-damned misery, will you? By the lights of the mother I buried rump-end up, hold your clod, boy, hold your clod.’ The hairs about his mouth were stuck with spittle as he fingered his crutch on the stone table.

Steerpike sucked at his teeth. He watched every move of the old man in front of him, and waited for a loophole in the armour.

Sitting at the table, Barquentine might have been mistaken for a normally constructed elder, but it came as a shock even to Steerpike to see him clamber off the seat of the high-backed chair, raise his arm for the crutch and strike a path of wood and leather around the circumference of the table, his chin on a level with its surface.

Steerpike, who was himself on the small side, even for his seventeen years, found that the Master of Ritual, were he to have brought his head forward for a few inches, would have buried his bristling nose a hand’s breadth above the navel, that pivot for a draughtsman’s eye, that relic whose potentiality appears to have been appreciated only by the dead Swelter, who saw in it a reliable saltcellar, when that gentleman decided upon eggs for his breakfast in bed.

Be that as it irrelevantly may, Steerpike found himself staring down in to an upturned patch of wrinkles. In this corrugated terrain two eyes burned. In contrast to the dry sand-coloured skin they appeared grotesquely liquid, and to watch them was ordeal by water; all innocence was drowned. They lapped at the dry rims of the infected well-heads. There were no lashes.

He had made so rapid and nimble a detour of the stone table that he surprised Steerpike, appearing with such inexpectation beneath the boy’s nose. The alternate thud, and crack of sole and crutch came suddenly to silence. Into this silence a small belated sound, all upon its own, was enormous and disconnected. It was Barquentine’s foot, shifting its position as the crutch remained in place. He had improved his balance. The concentration in the ancient’s face was too naked to be studied for more than a moment at a time. Steerpike, after a rapid survey, could only think that either the flesh and the passion of the head below him was fused into a substance of the old man’s compounding; or that all the other heads he had ever seen were masks – masks of matter per se, with no admixture of the incorporeal. This old tyrant’s head was his feeling. It was modelled from it, and of it.

Steerpike was too near it – the nakedness of it. Naked and dry with those wet well-heads under the time-raked brow.

But he could not move away – not without calling down, or rather calling up the wrath of this wizened god. He shut his eyes and worked his tongue into a tooth-crater. Then there was a sound, for Barquentine, having exhausted, apparently, what diversion there was to be found in the youth’s face as seen from below, had spat twice and very rapidly, each expectoration finding a temporary lodging on the bulges of Steerpike’s lowered lids.

‘Open them!’ cried the cracked voice. ‘Open them up, bastard whelp of a whore-rat!’

Steerpike with wonder beheld the septuagenarian balancing upon his only leg with the crutch raised above his head. It was not directed at himself, however, but with its grasper swivelled in the direction of the table, seemed about to descend. It did, and a thick dusty mist arose from the books on which it landed. A moth flapped through the dust.

When it had settled, the youth, his head turned over his shoulder, his small dark-red eyes half closed, heard Barquentine say:

‘So you can call the dogs off! Body of me, if it isn’t time! Time and enough. Nine days wasted! Wasted! – by the stones wasted! Do you hear me, stoat’s lug? Do you hear me?’

Steerpike began to bow, with his eyebrows raised by way of indicating that his ear drums had proved themselves equal to the call made upon them. If the art of gesture had been more acutely developed in him he might have implied by some hyper-subtle inclination of his body that what aural inconvenience he experienced lay not so much in his having to strain his ears, as in having them strained for him.

As it was, it proved unnecessary for him to ever complete the bow he had begun, for Barquentine was delivering yet another blow to the books and papers on the table, and a fresh cloud of dust had arisen. His eyes had left the youth – and Steerpike was stranded – in one sense only – in that the flood-water of the eyes no longer engulfed him, the stone table as though it were a moon, drawing away the dangerous tide.

He wiped the spittle from his eyelids with one of Dr Prunesquallor’s handkerchiefs.

‘What are those books, boy?’ shouted Barquentine, returning the handle of his crutch to his armpit, ‘By my head of skin, boy, what are they?’

‘They are the Law,’ said Steerpike.

With four stumps of the crutch the old man was below him again and sluicing him with his hot wet eyes.

‘By the blind powers, it’s the truth,’ he said. He cleared his throat. ‘Don’t stand there staring. What is Law? Answer me, curse you!’

Steerpike replied without a moment’s consideration but with the worm of his guile like a bait on the hook of his brain: ‘Destiny, sir, Destiny.’

Vacant, trite and nebulous as was the reply, it was of the right kind. Steerpike knew this. The old man was aware of only one virtue – Obedience to Tradition. The destiny of the Groans. The law of Gormenghast.

No individual Groan of flesh and blood could awake in him this loyalty he felt for ‘Groan’ the abstraction – the symbol. That the course of this great dark family river should flow on and on, obeying the contours of hallowed ground, was his sole regard.

The seventy-sixth Earl should he ever be found, dead or alive, had forfeited his right to burial among the Tombs. Barquentine had spent the day among volumes of ritual and precedent. So exhaustive was the compilation of relevant and tabulated procedure to be adopted in unorthodox and unforeseen circumstances that a parallel to Lord Sepulchrave’s disappearance was at last rooted out by the old man – the fourteenth Earl of Groan having disappeared leaving an infant heir. Nine days only had been allowed for the search, after which the child was to be proclaimed the rightful Earl, standing the while upon a raft of chestnut boughs afloat on the lake, a stone in the right hand, an ivy-branch in the left, and a necklace of snail-shells about the neck; while shrouded in foliage the next of kin and all who were invited to the ‘Earling’ stood, sat, crouched or lay among the branches of the marginal trees.

All this had now, once again, hundreds of years later, to be put in hand, for the nine days were over and it was in Barquentine that all power in matters of procedure was vested. It was for him to give the orders. In his little old body was Gormenghast in microcosm.

‘Ferret,’ he said, still staring up at Steerpike, ‘your answer’s good. Body of me, Destiny it is. What is your bastard name, child?’

‘Steerpike, sir.’

‘Age?’

‘Seventeen.’

‘Buds and fledglings? So they still spawn ’em so! Seventeen.’ He put a withered tongue between his dry, wrinkled lips. It might have been the tongue of a boot. ‘Seventeen,’ he repeated in a voice of such ruminative incredulity as startled the youth, for he had never before heard any such intonation emerge from that old throat. ‘Bloody wrinkles! say it again, chicken.’

‘Seventeen,’ said Steerpike.

Barquentine went off into a form of trance, the well-heads of his eyes appearing to cloud over and become opaque like miniature sargassos, of dull chalky-blue – the cataract veil – for it seemed that he was trying to remember the daedal days of his adolescence. The birth of the world; of spring on the rim of Time.

Suddenly he came-to, and cursed; and as though to shake off something noxious he worked his shoulder-blades to and fro, as he pad-hopped irritably around his crutch, the ferrule squeaking as it swivelled on the carpetless floor.

‘See here, boy,’ he said, when he had come to a halt, ‘there is work to do. There is a raft to be built, body of me, a raft of chestnut boughs and no other. The procession. The bareback racing for the bagful. The barbecue in the Stone Hall. Hell slice me up, boy! call the hounds off.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Steerpike. ‘Shall I send them back to their quarters?’

‘Eh?’ muttered Barquentine, ‘what’s that?’

‘I said shall I return them to their quarters?’ said Steerpike. An affirmative noise from the throat of strings was the reply.

But as Steerpike began to move off, ‘Not yet, you dotard! Not yet!’ And then: ‘Who’s your master?’

Steerpike reflected a moment. ‘I have no immediate master,’ he said. ‘I attempt to make myself useful – here and there.’

‘You do, do you, my sprig? “Here and there,” do you? I can see through you. Right the way through you, suckling, bones and brain. You can’t fool me, by the stones you can’t. You’re a great little rat but there’ll be no more “here and there” for you. It will be only “here”, do you understand?’ The old man ground his crutch into the floor. ‘Here,’ he added, with an access of vehemence; ‘beside me. You may be useful. Very useful.’ He scratched himself through a tear at his armpit.

‘What will my salary amount to?’ said Steerpike, putting his hands in his pockets.

‘Your keep, you insolent bastard! your keep! What more do you want? Hell fire child! have you no pride? A roof, your food, and the honour of studying the Ritual. Your keep, curse you, and the secrets of the Groans. How else could you serve me but by learning the iron Trade? Body of me – I have no son. Are you ready?’

‘I have never been more so,’ said the high shouldered boy.

BY GORMENGHAST LAKE

Little gusts of fresh, white air blew fitfully through the high trees that surrounded the lake. In the dense heat of the season it seemed they had no part; so distinct they were from the sterile body of the air. How could such thick air open to shafts so foreign and so aqueous? The humid season was split open for their every gush. It closed as they died like a hot blanket, only to be torn again by a blue quill, only to close again; only to open.

The sickness was relieved, the sickness and the staleness of the summer day. The scorched leaves pattered one against the next, and the tares screaked thinly together, the tufted heads nodding, and upon the lake was the stippled commotion of a million pin-pricks and the sliding of gooseflesh shadows that released or shrouded momently the dancing of diamonds.

Through the trees of the southern hanger that sloped steeply to the water could be seen, through an open cradle of high branches, a portion of Gormenghast Castle, sun blistered and pale in its dark frame of leaves; a remote façade.

A bird swept down across the water, brushing it with her breast-feathers and leaving a trail as of glow-worms across the still lake. A spilth of water fell from the bird as it climbed through the hot air to clear the lakeside trees, and a drop of lake water clung for a moment to the leaf of an ilex. And as it clung its body was titanic. It burgeoned the vast summer. Leaves, lake and sky reflected. The hanger was stretched across it and the heat swayed in the pendant. Each bough, each leaf – and as the blue quills ran, the motion of minutiae shivered, hanging. Plumply it slid and gathered, and as it lengthened, the distorted reflection of high crumbling acres of masonry beyond them, pocked with nameless windows, and of the ivy that lay across the face of that southern wing like a black hand, trembled in the long pearl as it began to lose its grip on the edge of the ilex leaf.

Yet even as it fell the leaves of the far ivy lay fluttering in the belly of the tear, and, microscopic, from a thorn prick window a face gazed out into the summer.

In the lake the reflections of the trees wavered with a concertina motion when the waters ruffled and between the gusts slowed themselves into a crisp stillness. But there was one small area of lake to which the gusts could not penetrate, for a high crumbling wall, backed by a coppice, shielded a shallow creek where the water steamed and was blotched with swarms of tadpoles.

It lay at the opposite end of the lake to the steep hanger and the castle, from which direction the little breeze blew. It basked in the northerly corner of the lake’s eastern extremity. From west to east (from the hangar to the creek) stretched the lake’s attenuate length, but the north and south shores were comparatively close to one another, the southern being for the main part embattled with dark ranks of conifers, some of the cedars and pines growing out of the water itself. Along the north shore there was fine grey sand which petered out among the spinneys of birch and elder.

On the sand, at the water’s edge, and roughly in the centre of the northern shore, was spread an enormous rust-coloured rug, and in the centre of the rug sat Nannie Slagg. Fuchsia lay upon her back, close by her, with her head upon one side and her forearm across her eyes to protect them from the sun. Tottering to and fro across the hot drab sand was Titus in a yellow shift. His hair had grown and darkened. It was quite straight, but made up for its lack of curls by its thickness and weight. It reached his shoulders, a dark umber, and over his forehead it hung in a heavy fringe.

Stopping for a moment (as though something very important had occurred to him) in the middle of a tiny, drunken totter, he turned his head to Mrs Slagg. His eyebrows were drawn down over the unique violet of his eyes, and there was a mixture of the pathetic, the ludicrous, and the sage in the expression of his pippin face. Even a suspicion of the pompous for a moment as he swayed and sat down suddenly having lost his balance – and then, having collapsed, a touch of the august. But, suddenly, in a sideways crawl, one leg thrusting him forward, his arms paddling wrist-deep through the sand and his other leg making no effort to play its part, content only to trail itself beneath and behind its energetic counterpart, he forsook the phlegmatic and was all impetuousness; but not a smile crossed his lips.

When he had reached the rust-coloured rug he sat quite still a few feet from Mrs Slagg and scrutinized the old lady’s shoe, his elbow on his knee and his chin sunk in his hand, an attitude startlingly adult and inappropriate in a child of less than eighteen months.

‘Oh, my poor heart! how he does look,’ came Mrs Slagg’s thin voice. ‘As though I haven’t loved him and toiled to make him joyous. Worn myself out to the marrow for his little Lordship, I have, day after day, night after night, with this after this and that after that piling ag’ny on ag’ny until you’d think he would be glad of love; but he just goes on as though he’s wiser than his old Nannie, who knows all about the vacancies of babies,’ (‘vagaries’, she must have meant), ‘and all I get is naughtiness from his sister – oh, my weak heart, naughtiness and spleen.’

Fuchsia raised herself on her elbow and gazed at the brooding conifers on the far side of the lake. Her eyes were not red from crying: she had cried so much lately that she had drained herself of salt for a little. They had the look of eyes in which hosts of tears had been fought back and had triumphed.

‘What did you say?’

‘That’s it! that’s it!’ Mrs Slagg became petulant. ‘Never listens. Too wise now to listen, I suppose, to an old woman who hasn’t long to live.’

I didn’t hear you,’ said Fuchsia.

‘You never try,’ replied Nannie. ‘That’s what it is – you never try. I might as well not be here.’

Fuchsia had grown tired of the old nurse’s querulous and tearful admonishments. She shifted her gaze from the pines to her brother, who had begun to struggle with the buckle of one of her shoes, ‘Well, there’s a lovely breeze, anyway,’ she said.

The old nurse, who had forgotten she was in the middle of chastening Fuchsia, jerked her wizened face toward the girl in a startled way. ‘What, my caution dear?’ she said. And then remembering that her ‘caution’ had been in her disfavour for some reason which she had forgotten, she pursed her face up with a ridiculous and puny haughtiness, as much as to say: ‘I may have called you “my caution dear”, but that doesn’t mean that we’re on speaking terms.’

Fuchsia gazed at her in a sullen sadness. ‘I said there’s a lovely breeze,’ she repeated.

Mrs Slagg could never keep up her sham dignity for long, and she smacked out at Fuchsia, as a final gesture, and misjudging the distance, her blow fell short and she toppled over on her side. Fuchsia, leaning across the rug, re-established the midget as though she were setting an ornament and left her arm purposely within range, for she knew her old nurse. Sure enough, once Nannie Slagg had recovered and had smoothed out her skirt in front of her and reset her hat with the glass-grapes, she delivered a weak blow at Fuchsia’s arm.

‘What did you say about the breezes, dear? Nothing worth hearing, I expect, as usual.’

‘I said they were lovely,’ said Fuchsia.

‘Yes, they are,’ said Nannie, after reflection. ‘Yes, they are, my only – but they don’t make me any younger. They just go round the edge of me and make my skin feel nicer.’

‘Well, that’s better than nothing, I suppose,’ said Fuchsia.

‘But it’s not enough, you argumentary thing. It’s not enough when there’s so much to do. What with your big mother being so cross with me as though I could help your poor father’s disappearance and all the trouble of the food in the kitchen; as though I could help.’

At the mention of her father Fuchsia closed her eyes.

She had herself searched – searched. She had grown far older during the last few weeks – older in that her heart had been taxed by greater strains of passion than it had ever felt before. Fear of the unearthly, the ghastly – for she had been face to face with it – the fear of madness and of a violence she suspected. It had made her older, stiller, more apprehensive. She had known pain – the pain of desolation – of having been forsaken and of losing what little love there was. She had begun to fight back within herself and had stiffened, and she began to be conscious of a vague pride; of an awakening realization of her heritage. Her father in disappearing had completed a link in the immemorial chain. She grieved his loss, her breast heavy and aching with the pain of it; but beyond it and at her back she felt for the first time, the mountain-range of the Groans, and that she was no longer free, no longer just Fuchsia, but of the blood. All this was cloud in her. Ominous, magnificent and indeterminate. Something she did not understand. Something which she recoiled from – so incomprehensible in her were its workings. Suddenly she had ceased to be a girl in all save in habits of speech and action. Her mind and heart were older and all things, once so clear, were filled with mist – all was tangled. Nannie repeated again, her dim eyes gazing over the lake: ‘As though I could help all the troubles and the badnesses of people here and there doing what they shouldn’t. Oh, my weak heart! as though it were all my fault.’

‘No one says it’s your fault,’ said Fuchsia. ‘You think people are thinking what they don’t. It hasn’t been anything to do with you.’

‘It hasn’t, has it – oh, my caution dear, it hasn’t, has it?’ Then her eyes became focused again (as far as they were able). ‘What hasn’t, darling?’

‘Never mind,’ said Fuchsia. ‘Look at Titus.’

Nannie turned her head, disapproving of Fuchsia’s answer as she did so, and saw the little creature in his yellow shift rise to his feet and walk solemnly away, from the great rust-coloured rug and over the hot drab sand, his hands clasped before him.

‘Don’t you go and leave us, too!’ cried Nannie Slagg. ‘We can do without that horrid, fat Mr Swelter, but we can’t do without our little Lordship. We can do without Mr Flay and –’

Fuchsia rose to her knees, ‘we can’t! we can’t! Don’t talk like that – so horribly. Don’t talk of it – you never must. Dear Flay and – but you don’t understand; it’s no good. Oh, what has happened to them?’ She sank back on her heels, her lower lip quivering, knowing that she must not let the old nurse’s thoughtless remarks touch on her open wounds.

As Mrs Slagg stared open-eyed, both she and Fuchsia were startled by a voice, and turning they saw two tall figures approaching them through the trees – a man – and, could it be? – yes, it was – a woman. It had a parasol. Not that there would have been anything masculine about this second figure, even were it to have left the parasol at home. Far from it. The swaying motion was prodigiously feminine. Her long neck was similar to her brother’s, tactlessly so, as would have been her face had not a fair portion of it been mercifully obscured by her black glasses: but their major dissimilarity was manifest in their pelvic zone. The Doctor (for it was Prunesquallor) showed about as much sign of having a pair of hips as an eel set upon its end, while Irma, in white silk, had gone out of her way, it appeared, to exhibit to their worst advantage (her waist being ridiculously tight) a pair of hips capable of balancing upon their osseous shelves enough bric-a-brac to clutter up a kleptomaniac’s cupboard.

‘The top of the morning to you, my dears,’ trilled the Doctor; ‘and when I say “top” I mean the last cubic inch of it that sits, all limpid-like on a crest of ether, ha, ha, ha.’

Fuchsia was glad to see the Doctor. She liked him, for all his windy verbiage.

Irma, who had hardly been out of doors since that dreadful day when she disgraced herself at the Burning, was making every effort to re-establish herself as a lady – a lady, it is true, who had lapsed, but a lady nevertheless, and this effort at re-establishment was pathetically ostentatious. Her dresses were cut still lower across her bosom; her peerless, milky skin appearing to cover a couple of perches at least. She made even more play with her hips which swayed when she talked as though, like a great bell, they were regulated and motivated by a desire to sound, for they did all but chime as her sharp, unpleasant voice (so contrasted to the knell her pelvis might have uttered) dictated their figure-of-eight (bird’s-eye view, cross section) patternations.

Her long, sharp nose was directed at Fuchsia.

‘Dear child,’ said Irma, ‘are you enjoying the delicious breeze, then, dear child? I said are you enjoying the delicious breeze? Of course. Irrefutably and more so, I have no doubt whatever.’ She smiled, but there was no mirth in her smile, the muscles of her face complying only so far as to move in the directions dictated, but refusing to enter into the spirit of the thing – not that there was any.

‘Tut tut!’ said her brother in a tone which implied that it was unnecessary to answer his sister’s conventional openings; and he sat down at Fuchsia’s side and flashed her a crocodile smile with gold stoppings.

‘I’m glad you’ve come,’ said Fuchsia.

He patted her on the knee in a friendly staccato way, and then turned to Nannie.

‘Mrs Slagg,’ he said, laying great emphasis upon the ‘Mrs’ as though it was some unique prefix, ‘and how are you? How’s the blood-stream, my dear, invaluable little woman? How’s the blood-stream? Come, come, let your doctor know.’

Nannie edged a little closer to Fuchsia, who sat between them, and peered at the Doctor around her shoulder.

‘It’s quite comfortable, sir … I think, sir, thank you,’ she said.

‘Aha!’ said Prunesquallor, stroking his smooth chin, ‘a comfortable stream, is it? Aha! v-e-r-y good. V-e-r-y good. Dawdling lazily ’twixt hill and hill, no doubt. Meandering through groves of bone, threading the tissues and giving what sustenance it can to your dear old body, Mrs Slagg. I am so glad. But in yourself – right deep down in yourself – how do you feel? Carnally speaking, are you at peace – from the dear grey hairs of your head to the patter of your little feet – are you at peace?’

‘What does he mean, dear?’ said poor Mrs Slagg, clutching Fuchsia’s arm.

‘Oh, my poor heart, what does the Doctor mean?’

‘He wants to know if you feel well or not,’ said Fuchsia.

Nannie turned her red-rimmed eyes to the shock-headed, smooth-skinned man, whose eyes behind their magnifying spectacles swam and bulged.

‘Come, come, my dear Mrs Slagg I’m not going to eat you. Oh, dear no. Not even with some toast to pop you on, and a little pepper and salt. Not a bit of it. You have been unwell, oh dear, yes – since the conflagration. My dear woman, you have been unwell – most unwell, and most naturally. But are you better – that’s what your doctor wants to know – are you better?’

Nannie opened her puckered little mouth. ‘I ebbs and I flows, sir,’ she said, ‘and I falls away like.’ Then she turned her head to Fuchsia very quickly as though to make sure she was still there, the glass grapes tinkling on her hat.

Doctor Prunesquallor brought forth a large silk handkerchief and began to dab his forehead. Irma, after a good deal of difficulty, presumably with whalebones and such like, had managed to sit down on the rug amid a good deal of creaking as of pulleys, cranks, hawsers and fish-hooks. She did not approve of sitting on the ground, but she was tired of looking down on their heads and decided to risk a brief interlude of unladyness. She was staring at Titus and saying to herself: ‘If that were my child I should cut his hair, especially with his position to keep up.’

‘And what does your “ebbing” consist of?’ said the Doctor, returning his silk handkerchief to his pocket. ‘Is it your heart that’s tidal – or your nerves – or your liver, bless you – or a general weariness of the flesh?’

‘I get tired,’ said Mrs Slagg. ‘I get so tired, sir. I have everything to do.’ The poor old lady began to tremble.

‘Fuchsia,’ said the Doctor, ‘come along this evening and I’ll give you a tonic which you must make her take every day. By all that’s amaranthine you really must. Balsam and swansdown, Fuchsia dear, cygnets and the eider bird, she must take it every day – syrup on the nerves, dear, and fingers cool as tombs for her old, old brow.’

‘Nonsense,’ said his sister. ‘I said nonsense, Bernard.’

‘And here,’ continued Doctor Prunesquallor, taking no notice of his sister’s interjection, ‘is Titus. Apparisoned in a rag torn from the sun itself, ha, ha, ha! How vast he is getting! But how solemn.’ He made clucking noises in his cheek. ‘The great day draws near, doesn’t it?’

‘Do you mean the “Earling”?’ said Fuchsia.

‘No less,’ said Prunesquallor, his head on one side.

‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘it is in four days’ time. They are making the raft.’ Then suddenly, as though she could hold back the burden of her thoughts no longer: ‘Oh, Doctor Prune, I must talk to you! May I see you soon? Soon? Don’t use long words with me when we’re alone, dear Doctor, like you sometimes do, because I’m so … well … because I’ve got – I’ve got worries. Doctor Prune.’

Prunesquallor languidly began to make marks in the sand with his long white forefinger. Fuchsia, wondering why he did not reply, dropped her eyes and saw that he had written:

‘9 o’clock tonight Cool Room.’

Then the long hand brushed away the message and at the same moment they were conscious of presences behind them and, turning, they saw the twins, Fuchsia’s identical aunts, standing like purple carvings in the heat.

The Doctor sprang nimbly to his feet and inclined his reedy body in their direction.

They took no notice of his gallantry, staring past him in the direction of Titus, who was sitting quietly at the lake’s edge.

From the sky’s zenith to where he sat upon the strip of sand it seemed that a great backcloth had been let down, for the heat had flattened out the lake, lifted it upright on its sandy rim; lifted the sloping bank where the conifers, with their shadows, made patterns in three shades of green, sun-struck and enormous; and balanced in a jig-saw way upon the ragged edge of this painted wood was a heavy, dead, blue sky, towering to the proscenium arch of the vision’s limit – the curved eyelid. At the base of this staring drop-cloth of raw phenomena he sat, incredibly minute; Titus in a yellow shift, his chin once more in his hand.

Fuchsia felt uncomfortable with her aunts standing immediately behind her. She looked up sideways at them and it was hard to conceive that they would ever be able to move again. Effigies, white-faced, white-handed, and hung with imperial purple. Mrs Slagg was still unaware of their presence, and in the silence a silly impulse to chatter gripped her, and, forgetting her nervousness, she perked her head up at the standing Doctor.

‘You see, excuse me, Doctor sir,’ she said, startling herself by her own bravery, ‘you see, I’ve always been of the energetic system, sir. That’s how I always was since I was a little girl, doing this and that by turns. “What will she do next?” they always said. Always.’

‘I am sure they did,’ answered the Doctor, reseating himself on the rug and turning to Nannie Slagg, his eyebrows raised, and a look of incredulous absorption on his pink face.

Mrs Slagg was encouraged. No one had ever before appeared to be so interested in anything she said. Prunesquallor had decided that there was a fair chance of the twins remaining transfixed as they were, for a good half-hour yet, and that to hang around on his elegant legs was neither in his interests, physically, nor in accord with his self-respect, which, although of peculiar brand was nevertheless deep-rooted. They had not acknowledged his gesture. It is true they had not noticed it – but that was not his fault.

‘To hell with the old trouts,’ he trilled to himself. ‘Breastless as wallpaper. By all that’s sentient, my last post-mortem had more go in it than the pair of ’em, turning somersaults.’

As he held forth, inwardly, he was paying, outwardly, the most passionate attention to Mrs Slagg’s every syllable.

‘And it’s always been the same,’ she was quavering, ‘always the same. Responserverity all the time, Doctor; and I’m not a little thing any more.’

‘Of course not, of course not, tut, tut; by all that’s shrewd you speak nobly, Mrs Slagg – very nobly,’ said Prunesquallor, considering at the same time whether there would have been enough room for her in his black bag, without removing the bottles.

‘Because we’re not as young as we were, are we, sir?’

Prunesquallor considered this point very carefully. Then he shook his head. ‘What you say has the ring of truth in it,’ he said. ‘In fact, it has every possible kind of ring in it. Ring-ting, my heart’s on the wing, as it were. But tell me, Mrs Slagg – tell me in your own concise way – of Mr Slagg – or am I being indelicate? No – no – it couldn’t be. Do you know, Fuchsia? Do you? For myself, I am at sea over Mr Slagg. He is under my keel – utterly under. That’s queer! Utterly under. Or isn’t it? No matter. To put it brutally: was there a – No, no! Finesse, please. Who was – No, no! Crude; crude. Forgive me. Of Mr Slagg, dear lady, have you any … kind of – Good gracious me! and I’ve known you all this long while and then this teaser comes – crops up like a dove on tenterhooks. There’s a “ring” in that – ha, ha, ha! And what a teaser! Don’t you think so, dear?’

He turned to Fuchsia.

She could not help smiling, but held the old nurse’s hand.

‘When did you marry Mr Slagg, Nannie?’ she asked.

Prunesquallor heaved a sigh. ‘The direct approach,’ he murmured. ‘The apt angle. God bless my circuitous soul, we learn … we learn.’

Mrs Slagg became very proud and rigid from the glass grapes on her hat to her little seat.

‘Mr Slagg,’ she said in a thin, high voice, ‘married me.’ She paused, having delivered, as it seemed to her, the main blow; and then, as an afterthought: ‘He died the same night – and no wonder.’

‘Good heavens – alive and dead and halfway between. By all that’s enigmatic, my dear, dear Mrs Slagg, what can you possibly mean?’ cried the Doctor, in so high a treble that a bird rattled its way through the leaves of a tree behind them and sped to the west.

‘He had a stroke,’ said Mrs Slagg.

‘We’ve – had – strokes – too,’ said a voice.

They had forgotten the twins and all three turned their startled heads, but they were not in time to see which mouth had opened.

But as they stared Clarice intoned: ‘Both of us, at the same time. It was lovely.’

‘No, it wasn’t,’ said Cora. ‘You forget what a nuisance it became.’

‘Oh, that!’ replied her sister. ‘I didn’t mind that. It’s when we couldn’t do things with the left side of us that I didn’t like it much.’

‘That’s what I said, didn’t I?’

‘Oh no, you didn’t.’

‘Clarice Groan,’ said Cora, ‘don’t be above yourself.’

‘How do you mean?’ said Clarice, raising her eyes nervously.

Cora turned to the Doctor for the first time. ‘She’s ignorant,’ she said blankly. ‘She doesn’t understand figures of eight.’

Nannie could not resist correcting the Lady Cora, for the Doctor’s attention had infected her with an eagerness to go on talking. A little nervous smile appeared on her lips, however, when she said: ‘You don’t mean “figures of eight”, Lady Cora; you mean “figures of speech”.’

Nannie was so pleased at knowing the expression that the smile remained shuddering in the wrinkles of her lips until she realized that she was being stared at by the aunts.

‘Servant,’ said Cora. ‘Servant …’

‘Yes, my lady. Yes, yes, my lady,’ said Nannie Slagg, struggling to her feet.

‘Servant,’ echoed Clarice, who had rather enjoyed what had happened.

Cora turned to her sister. ‘There’s no need for you to say anything.’

‘Why not?’ said Clarice.

‘Because it wasn’t you that she was disobedient with, stupid.’

‘But I want to give her some punishment, too,’ said Clarice.

‘Why?’

‘Because I haven’t given any for such a long time … Have you?’

‘You’ve never given any at all,’ said Cora.

‘Oh yes, I have.’

‘Who to?’

‘It doesn’t matter who it was. I’ve given it, and that’s that.’