The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy (58 page)

‘Yes, oh yes, Ladyship? Yes … yes, your Ladyship?’

The Countess does not turn her head to speak, but stares past herself in the cracked mirror, her elbows resting on the table, her head supported in the cups of her hands.

‘Is the child ready?’

‘Yes, yes, just ready, just ready. Ready now, your Ladyship, bless his little smallness … yes … yes …’

‘Is the sword fixed?’

‘Yes, yes, the sword, the –’

She is about to say ‘the horrid, black sword’, but she checks herself nervously, for who is she to express her feeling when ritual is involved? ‘But it’s so
hot
for him,’ she continues hurriedly, ‘so hot for his little body in all this velvet – though, of course,’ she adds, a stupid little smile working in and out of the wrinkles of her lips, ‘it’s very pretty.’

The Countess turns slowly in her chair. ‘Slagg,’ she says, ‘come over here, Slagg.’

The old woman, her heart beating wildly, patters her way around the bed and stands by the dressing-table. She clasps her hands together on her flat chest and her eyes are wide open.

‘Have you still no idea of how to answer even simple questions?’ asks the Countess very slowly.

Nannie shakes her head, but suddenly a red spot appears in either cheek. ‘I
can
answer questions, I
can
!’ she cries, startling herself with her own ineffectual vehemence.

The Countess does not seem to have heard her. ‘Try and answer
this
one,’ she murmurs.

Mrs Slagg cocks her head on one side and listens like a grey bird.

‘Are you attending, Slagg?’

Nannie nods her head as though suffering from palsy.

‘Where did you meet that youth?’ There is a moment’s silence.

‘That Steerpike?’ the Countess adds.

‘Long ago,’ says Nannie, and closed her eyes as she waits for the next question. She feels pleased with herself.

‘
Where
is what I said:
where
, not
when
,’ booms the voice.

Mrs Slagg tries to gather her thoughts together. Where? Oh, where was it? she wondered. It was long ago … And then she recalled how he had appeared with Fuchsia suddenly at the door of her room.

‘With Fuchsia … Oh, yis … yis, it was with my Fuchsia, your Ladyship.’

‘Where does he come from? Answer me, Slagg, and then finish my hair.’

‘I never do know … No, not ever … I have never been told. Oh, my poor heart, no. Where
could
the boy come from?’ She peers at the dark bulk above her.

Lady Gertrude wipes the palm of her hand slowly across her brow. ‘You are the same Slagg,’ she says, ‘the same brilliant Slagg.’

Nannie begins to cry, wishing desperately that she were clever.

‘No use crying,’ says the Countess. ‘No use. No use. My birds don’t cry. Not very often. Were you at the fire?’

The word ‘fire’ is terrible to Mrs Slagg. She clutches her hands together. Her bleary eyes grow wild. Her lips tremble, for in her imagination she can see the great flames rising about her.

‘Finish my hair, Nannie Slagg. Stand on a chair and do it.’

Nannie turns to find a chair. The room is like a shipwreck. The red walls glower in the candle-light. The old woman patters her way between stalactites of tallow, boxes and old sofas. The Countess whistles and a moment later the room is alive with wings. By the time Mrs Slagg has dragged a chair to the dressing-table and climbed upon it, the Countess is deep in conversation with a magpie. Nannie disapproves of birds altogether and cannot reconcile the habits of the Countess with the House of Groan, but she is used to such things, not being over seventy years old for nothing. Bending a little over her ladyship’s locks she works with difficulty to complete the hirsute cornice, for the light is bad.

‘Now then, darling, now then,’ says the heavy voice below her, and her old body thrills, for she has never known the Countess speak to her in such a way before; but glancing over the mountainous shoulder she sees that the Countess is talking to a bedraggled finch and Nannie Slagg is desolate.

‘So Fuchsia was the first to find him, was she?’ says the Countess, rubbing her finger along the finch’s throat.

Mrs Slagg, startled, as she always is when anyone speaks, fumbles with the red hank in her hand. ‘Who? Oh, who do you mean … your Ladyship? … Oh, she’s always a good girl, Fuchsia is, yis, yis,
always
.’

The Countess gets to her feet in a monumental way, brushing several objects from the dressing-table to the floor with her elbow. As she rises she hears the sound of sobbing and turns her head to the lavender roll. ‘Go away, Slagg – go away, and take him with you. Is Fuchsia dressed?’

‘Yis … oh, my poor heart, yis … Fuchsia is all ready, yis, quite ready, and waiting in her room. Oh yis, she is …’

‘His Breakfast will soon be beginning,’ says the Countess, turning her eyes from a brass clock to her infant son. ‘Very soon.’

Nannie, who has recovered Titus from the fastnesses of the bed, stops at the door before pattering out into the dawn-lit corridor. Her eyes stare back almost triumphantly and a little pathetic smile works at the crinkled corners of her mouth, ‘
His
Breakfast,’ she whispers. ‘Oh, my weak heart, his
first
Breakfast.’

Steerpike has been found at last, Fuchsia colliding with him as he rounds a corner of the staircase on his way down from the aunts. He is very sprucely dressed, his high shoulders without a speck of dust upon them, his fingernails pared, his hair smoothed down over his pasty-coloured forehead. He is surprised to see Fuchsia, but he does not show it, merely raising his eyebrows in an expression both inquiring and deferential at the same time.

‘You are up very early, Lady Fuchsia.’

Fuchsia, her breast heaving from her long run up the stairs, cannot speak for a moment or two; then she says: ‘Doctor Prune wants you.’

‘Why me?’ says the youth to himself; but aloud he said: ‘Where is he?’

‘In my father’s room.’

Steerpike licks his lips slowly. ‘Is your father ill?’

‘Yes, oh yes, very ill.’

Steerpike turns his head away from Fuchsia, for the muscles of his face cry out to relax. He gives them a free rein and then, straightening his face and turning to Fuchsia, he says: ‘Everything I can do I will do.’ Suddenly, with the utmost nimbleness, he skips past her, jumping the first four steps together, and races down the stone flight on his way to the Earl’s bedroom.

He has not seen the Doctor for some time. Having left his service their relationship is a little strained, but this morning as he enters at the Earl’s door he can see there will be neither space nor time for reminiscences in his own or the Doctor’s brain.

Prunesquallor, in his lime-green dressing-gown, is pacing to and fro before the mantelpiece with the stealth of some kind of vertical cat. Not for a moment does he take his eyes off the Earl, who, still upon the mantelpiece, watches the physician with great eyes.

At the sound of Steerpike at the door the round eyes move for a moment and stare over the Doctor’s shoulder. But Prunesquallor has not shifted his steady, magnified gaze. The roguish look is quite absent from his long, bizarre face.

The Doctor has been waiting for this moment. Prancing forward he reaches up with his white hands and pins the Earl’s arms to his sides, dragging him from his perch. Steerpike is at the Doctor’s side in a moment and together they carry the sacrosanct body to the bed and turn it over upon its face. Sepulchrave has not struggled, only emitting a short stifled cry.

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.

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.