The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy (122 page)

Prunesquallor made no immediate reply but took the swathed creature’s pulse – listened to the heart and then after a while – ‘You will tell me about it tomorrow,’ he said.

‘Doctor,’ said Steerpike, ‘I would rather tell you now. I am weak and I can only whisper, but I know where Barquentine is. He lies dead in the mud outside the window of his room.’

‘And how did he get there, Master Steerpike?’

‘I will tell you.’ Steerpike lifted his eyes, loathing the bland physician – loathing him with an irrational intensity. It was as though his power of hatred had drawn fresh fuel from the death of Barquentine. But his voice was meek enough.

‘I will tell you, Doctor,’ he whispered. ‘I will tell you all I know.’ His head fell back on the pillow and he closed his eyes.

‘Yesterday, or last week, or a month ago, for I do not know how long I have been lying here insensible – I entered Barquentine’s room about eight o’clock, which was my habit every evening. It was at that hour that he would give me my orders for the next day. He was sitting on his high chair and as I entered he was lighting a candlestick. I do not know why but he started at my entrance, as though I had surprised him, but when he turned his head back again, after cursing me – but he meant no harm to me for all his irritability – he misjudged his distance from the flame, his beard swept across it and a moment later was alight. I rushed to him but his hair and clothing had already caught. There were no rugs or curtains in the room with which to smother the fire. There was no water. But I beat the flames with my hands. But the fire grew fiercer and in his pain and panic he caught hold of me and I began to burn.’

The pupils of the young man’s dark eyes dilated as he recounted the partial fabrication, for Barquentine’s grip upon him had been no dream, and his brow began to sweat again, and a terrible authenticity appeared to give weight to his words.

‘I could not escape, Doctor; I was caught and held against his burning body. Every moment the fire grew fiercer – and my burns more terrible. There was only one thing I could do to get away. I knew I must reach the water that lay below his window. And so I ran. I ran with his arm gripping me. I ran to the window and jumped into the moat – and there in the cold black water, his hands at last gave way. I could not hold him up. It was all I could do to reach the side of the moat, and there, I think I fainted – and when I came round, I found I was naked and I came to your door … but the moat must be dragged and the old man must be found … in the name of decency he must be found and given a true burial. It is for me to carry on his work. I … I … cannot tell … you more … I am … not …’

He turned his head on the pillow, and in spite of his pains fell asleep. He had played his card and could afford to rest.

‘My dear,’ said Bellgrove, ‘it is surely not for your betrothed to be kept waiting
quite
so long even though he is only the Headmaster of Gormenghast. Why on earth must you always be so late? Good grief, Irma, it isn’t as though I’m a green youth who finds it romantic to be drizzled on by the stinking sky. Where have you been for pity’s sake?’

‘I am inclined not to
answer
you!’ cried Irma. ‘The humiliation of it! Is it nothing to you that I should take a pride in my appearance – that I should make myself beautiful for you? You
man
, you. It breaks one’s heart.’

‘I do not complain lightly, my love,’ replied Bellgrove. ‘As I say, I cannot stand bad weather like a younger man. This was your idea of a place of rendezvous. It could hardly have been worse chosen, with not so much as a shrub to squat under. Rheumatism is on its way. My feet are soaked. And why? Because my fiancée, Irma Prunesquallor, a lady of quite exceptional talents in other directions – they always
are
in
other
directions – who has the entire day in which to pluck at her eyebrows, harvest her sheaves of long grey hair, and so on, cannot organize herself – or else has grown shall we say
casual
in regard to her suitor? Shall we say
casual
, my dear?’

‘Never!’ cried Irma. ‘O never! my dear one. It is only my longing that you should find me worthy that keeps me at my toilet. O my dearest, you must forgive me. You must forgive me.’

Bellgrove gathered his gown about him in great swathes. He had been staring into the gloomy sky while he had spoken but now, at last he turned his noble face to her. The landscape all about them was hazy with rain. The nearest tree was a grey blur two fields away.

‘You ask me to forgive you,’ said Bellgrove. He closed his eyes. ‘And so I do, and so I do. But remember, Irma, that a punctual wife would please me. Perhaps you could practise a little so that when the time comes I will have nothing to complain of. And now, we will forget about it, shall we?’

He turned his head from her, for he had not yet learned to admonish her without grinning weakly with the joy of it. And so, with his face averted, he bared his rotten teeth at a distant hedgerow.

She took his arm and they began to walk.

‘My dear one,’ she said.

‘My love?’ said Bellgrove.

‘It is my turn to complain, is it not?’

‘It is your turn, my love!’ (He lifted his leonine head and shook the rain happily from his mane.)

‘You won’t be cross, dear?’

He raised his eyebrows and closed his eyes.

‘I will not be cross, Irma. What is it that you wish to say?’

‘It’s your neck, dearest.’

‘My neck? What of it!’

‘It is very dirty, dear one. It has been for weeks … do you think …’

But Bellgrove had stiffened at her side. He bared his teeth in a snarl of impotence.

‘O stinking hell,’ he muttered. ‘O stinking, rotten hell.’

Mr Flay had been sitting for over an hour at the entrance to his cave. The air was breathless and the three small clouds in the soft grey sky had been there all day.

His beard had grown very long and his hair that was once cropped close to the skull was now upon his shoulders. His skin had darkened with the sun and the last few years of hardship had brought new lines to his face.

He was by now a part of the woods, his eyesight sharp as a bird’s, and his hearing as quick. His footsteps had become noiseless. The cracking of his knee joints had disappeared. Perhaps the heat of the summer had baked the trouble out of them for his clothes being as ragged as foliage his knees were for the most part bare to the sun.

He must surely have been made for the woods, so congruously had he become dissolved into a world of branches, ferns and streams. And yet for all his mastery of the woods, for all that he had been absorbed into the wilderness of the endless trees, as though he were but another branch – for all this, his thoughts were never far from that gaunt pile of masonry that, ruinous and forbidding as it was, was nevertheless, the only home he had ever known.

But Flay, for all his longing to return to his birthplace was no sentimentalist in exile. His thoughts when they turned to the castle were by no means in the nature of reveries. They were hard, uneasy, speculative thoughts which far from returning to his early memories of the place were concerned with the nature of things as they were. No less than Barquentine he was a traditionalist to his marrow. He knew in his heart that things were going wrong.

What chance had he had of taking the pulse of the halls and towers? Apart from the marshlight of his intuition and the native gloom of his temperament, on what else was he basing his suspicions? Was it merely his ingrained pessimism and the fear which had understandably grown stronger since his banishment, that, with himself away, the castle was the weaker?

It was this, and very little more. And yet had his fears been mere speculations he would never have made, during the last twenty days, his three unlawful journeys. For he had moved through the midnight corridors of the place – and although as yet he had made no concrete discoveries, he had become aware almost at once of a change. Something had happened, or something was happening which was evil and subversive.

He knew full well that the risks involved in his being found in the castle after his banishment were acute, and that his chances of discovering in the darkness of sleeping halls and corridors, the cause of his apprehension, was remote indeed. Yet he had dared to flaunt the letter of the Groan law in order, in his solitary way, to find whether or not its spirit, as he feared, was sickening.

And now, as he sat half hidden among the ferns that grew at the door of his cave, turning over in his mind those incidents that had in one way or another, over the past years, caused his suspicions of foul play to fructify, he was suddenly aware that he was being watched.

He had heard no sound, but the extra sense he had developed in the woods gave warning. It was as though something had tapped him between his shoulder-blades.

Instantly his eyes swept the scene before him and he saw them at once, standing motionlessly at the edge of a wood away to his right. He recognized them instantaneously although the girl had grown almost out of recognition. Was it possible that they did not recognize him? There was no doubt that they were staring at him. He had forgotten how different he must look, especially to Fuchsia, with his long hair, his beard and ragged clothes.

But now, as they began to run in his direction, he stood up and began to make his way towards them over the rocks.

It was Fuchsia who first recognized the gaunt exile. Just over twenty years old, she stood there before him, a swarthy, strangely melancholy girl, full of love and fear and courage and anger and tenderness. These things were so raw in her breast that it seemed unfair that anyone should be so hotly charged.

To Flay, she was a revelation. Whenever he had thought of her it had always been as a child, and here suddenly she stood before him, a woman, flushed, excited, her eyes upon his face, her hands upon her hips, as she regained her breath.

Mr Flay lowered his head in deference to his visitor.

‘Ladyship,’ he said – but before Fuchsia could answer Titus came up, his hair in his eyes.

‘I told you!’ he panted. ‘I told you I’d find him! I told you he had a beard and there’s the dam he made and there’s his cave over there and that’s where I slept and where we cooked and …’ he paused for breath, and then … ‘Hullo, Mr Flay. You look wonderful and wild!’

‘Ah!’ said Flay. ‘Most likely, lordship, ragged life and no doubt of it. More days than dinners, lordship.’

‘Oh, Mr Flay,’ said Fuchsia. ‘I am so happy to see you again – you were always so kind to me. Are you all right out here, all alone?’

‘Of course he’s all right!’ said Titus. ‘He’s a sort of savage. Aren’t you Mr Flay?’

‘Like enough, lordship,’ said Flay.

‘O, you were too small and you can’t remember, Titus,’ said Fuchsia. ‘I remember it all. Mr Flay was father’s first servant – above them all, weren’t you, Mr Flay – until he disappeared …’

‘I know,’ said Titus. ‘I’ve heard it all in Bellgrove’s class – they told me all about it.’

‘They don’t know anything,’ said Flay. ‘They don’t know anything, ladyship.’ He had turned to Fuchsia and then, dropping his head forward again, ‘Humbly invite you to my cave,’ he said, ‘for rest, for shade and fresh water.’

Mr Flay led the way to his cave, and when they had passed through the entrance and Fuchsia had been shown the double chimney and they had drunk deeply from the spring, for they were hot and thirsty, Titus lay down under the ferny wall of the inner cave and their ragged host sat a little way apart. His arms were folded about his shanks; his bearded chin was on his knees – while his gaze was fixed upon Fuchsia.

She, on her side, while noticing his childlike scrutiny, gave him no cause to feel embarrassed, for she smiled when their eyes met, but kept her gaze wandering about the walls and ceiling, or turning to Titus asked him whether he had noticed this or that on his last visit.

But a time came when a silence fell upon the cave. It was the kind of silence that becomes hard to break. But it was broken in the end, and, strangely enough, by Mr Flay himself, the least forthcoming of the three.

‘Ladyship … Lordship,’ he said.

‘Yes, Mr Flay?’ said Fuchsia.

‘Been away, banished, many years, ladyship,’ he opened his hard-lipped mouth as though to continue, but had to close it again for the lack of a phrase. But after a while he commenced again. ‘Lost touch, Lady Fuchsia, but forgive me – must ask you questions.’

‘Of course, Mr Flay, what sort of questions?’

‘I know the sort,’ said Titus – ‘about what’s happened since I was last here and what’s been discovered, isn’t it, Mr Flay? And about Barquentine’s being dead and …’

‘Barquentine dead?’ Flay’s voice was sudden and hard.

‘Oh yes,’ said Titus. ‘He was burned to death, you know, wasn’t he, Fuchsia?’

‘Yes, Mr Flay. Steerpike tried to save him.’

‘Steerpike?’ muttered the long, ragged, motionless figure.

‘Yes,’ said Fuchsia. ‘He is very ill. I’ve been to see him.’

‘You haven’t!’ said Titus.

‘I certainly have and I shall go again. His burns are terrible.’

‘I don’t want you to see him,’ said Titus.

‘Why not?’ the blood was beginning to mount to her cheeks.