by Mervyn Peake
‘Yes,’ said Cora, who had reached the edge of the chair and was stroking her smooth heliotrope knees in quick, continual movements which Clarice emulated.
‘One must choose where to strike,’ said Steerpike, ‘and it is obvious that to strike at the most vulnerable nerve centre of the opponent is the shrewdest preliminary measure. But there must be no half-heartedness. It is all or nothing.’
‘All or nothing,’ echoed Clarice.
‘And now you must tell me, dear ladies, what is your brother’s main interest?’
They went on smoothing their knees.
‘Is it not literature?’ said Steerpike. ‘Is he not a great lover of books?’
They nodded.
‘He’s very clever,’ said Cora.
‘But he reads it all in books,’ said Clarice.
‘Exactly.’ Steerpike followed quickly upon this. ‘Then if he lost his books, he would be all but defeated. If the centre of his life were destroyed he would be but a shell. As I see it, your Ladyships, it is at his library that our first thrust must be directed. You must have your rights,’ he added hotly. ‘It is only fair that you should have your rights.’ He took a dramatic step towards the Lady Cora Groan; he raised his voice: ‘My Lady Cora Groan, do you not agree?’
Cora, who had been sitting on the extreme edge of her chair in her excitement, now rose and nodded her head so violently as to throw her hair into confusion.
Clarice, on being asked, followed her sister’s example, and Steerpike relit his pipe from the fire and leaned against the mantelpiece for a few moments, sending out wreaths of smoke from between his thin lips.
‘You have helped me a great deal, your Ladyships,’ he said at last, drawing at his stubby pipe and watching a smoke-ring float to the ceiling. ‘You are prepared, I am sure, for the sake of your own honour, to assist me further in my struggle for your deliverance.’ He understood from the movements of their perched bodies that they agreed that this was so.
‘The question that arises in that case’, said Steerpike, ‘is how are we to dispose of your brother’s books and thereby bring home to him his responsibilities? What do you feel is the obvious method of destroying a library full of books? Have you been to his library lately, your Ladyships?’
They shook their heads.
‘How would you proceed, Lady Cora? What method would you use to destroy a hundred thousand books?’
Steerpike removed his pipe from his lips and gazed intently at her.
‘I’d burn them,’ said Cora,
This was exactly what Steerpike had wanted her to say; but he shook his head. ‘That would be difficult. What could we burn it with?’
‘With fire,’ said Clarice.
‘But how would we start the fire, Lady Clarice?’ said Steerpike pretending to look perplexed.
‘Straw,’ said Cora.
‘That is a possibility,’ said Steerpike, stroking his chin. ‘I wonder if your idea would work swiftly enough. Do you think it would?’
‘Yes, yes!’ said Clarice. ‘Straw is lovely to burn.’
‘But would it catch the books’, persisted Steerpike, ‘all on its own? There would have to be a great deal of it. Would it be quick enough?’
‘What’s the hurry?’ said Cora.
‘It must be done swiftly,’ said Steerpike, ‘otherwise the flames might be put out by busybodies.’
‘I love fires,’ said Clarice.
‘But we oughtn’t to burn down Sepulchrave’s library, ought we?’
Steerpike had expected, sooner or later, that one of them would feel conscience-stricken and he had retained his trump card.
‘Lady Cora,’ he said, ‘sometimes one has to do things which are unpalatable. When great issues are involved one can’t toy with the situation in silk gloves. No. We are making history and we must be stalwart. Do you recall how when I first came in I told you that I had received information? You do? Well, I will now divulge what has come to my ears. Keep calm and steady; remember who you are. I shall look after your interests, have no fear, but at this moment sit down, will you, and attend?
‘You tell me you have been treated badly for this and for that, but only listen now to the latest scandal that is being repeated below stairs. “They aren’t being asked,” everyone is saying, “They haven’t been asked.”’
‘Asked what?’ said Clarice.
‘Or where?’ said Cora.
‘To the Great Gathering which your brother is calling. At this Great Gathering the details for a party for the New Heir to Gormenghast, your nephew Titus, will be discussed. Everyone of importance is going. Even the Prunesquallors are going. It is the first time for many years that your brother has become so worldly as to call the members of his family together. He has, it is said, many things which he wishes to talk of in connexion with Titus, and in my opinion this Great Gathering in a week’s time will be of prime importance. No one knows exactly what Lord Sepulchrave has in mind, but the general idea is that preparations must be begun even now for a party on his son’s first Birthday.
‘Whether you will even be invited to that Party I would not like to say, but judging from the remarks I have heard about how you two have been thrust aside and forgotten like old shoes, I should say it was very unlikely.
‘You see,’ said Steerpike, ‘I have not been idle, I have been listening and taking stock of the situation, and one day my labours will prove themselves to have been justified – when I see you, my dear Ladyships, sitting at either end of a table of distinguished guests, and when I hear the glasses clinking and the rounds of applause that greet your every remark I shall congratulate myself that I had long ago enough imagination and ruthless realism to proceed with the dangerous work of raising you to the level to which you belong.
‘Why should you not have been invited to the party? Why? Why? Who are you to be spurned thus and derided by the lowest menials in Swelter’s kitchen?’
Steerpike paused and saw that his words had produced a great effect. Clarice had gone over to Cora’s chair where now they both sat bolt upright and very close together.
‘When you suggested so perspicaciously just now that the solution to this insufferable state of affairs lay in the destruction of your brother’s cumbersome library, I felt that you were right and that only through a brave action of that kind might you be able to lift up your heads once more and feel the slur removed from your escutcheon. That idea of yours spelt genius. I appeal to your Ladyships to do what you feel to be consistent with your honour and your pride. You are not old, your Ladyships, oh no, you are not old. But are you young? I should like to feel that what years you have left will be filled with glamorous days and romantic nights. Shall it be so? Shall we take the step towards justice? Yes or no, my dear ladies, yes or no.’
They got up together. ‘Yes,’ they said, ‘we want Power back.’
‘We want our servants back and justice back and everything back,’ Cora said slowly, a counterpoint of intense excitement weaving through the flat foreground of her voice.
‘And romantic nights,’ said Clarice. ‘I’d like that. Yes, yes. Burn! Burn,’ she continued loudly, her flat bosom beginning to heave up and down like a machine. ‘Burn! burn! burn!’
‘When?’ said Cora. ‘When can we burn it up?’
Steerpike held up his hand to quieten them. But they took no notice, only leaning forward, holding each other’s hands and crying in their dreadful emotionless voices:
‘Burn! Burn! Burn! Burn! Burn!’ until they had exhausted themselves.
Steerpike had not flinched under this ordeal. He now realized more completely than before why they were ostracized from the normal activities of the castle. He had known they were slow, but he had not known that they could behave like this.
He changed his tone.
‘Sit down!’ he rapped out. ‘Both of you. Sit down!’
They complied at once, and although they were taken aback at the peremptory nature of his order, he could see that he now had comple
te control over them, and though his inclination was to show his authority and to taste for the first time the sinister delights of his power, yet he spoke to them gently – for, first of all, the library must be burned for a reason of his own. After that, with such a dreadful hold over them, he could relax for a time and enjoy a delicious dictatorship in the South Wing.
‘In six days’ time, your Ladyships,’ he said, fingering his gold chain – ‘on the evening before the Great Gathering to which you have not been invited – the library will be empty and you may burn it to the ground. I shall prepare the incendiaries and will school you in all the details later; but on the great night itself when you see me give the signal you will set fire at once to the fuel and will make your way immediately to this room.’
‘Can’t we watch it burn?’ said Cora.
‘Yes,’ said Clarice, ‘can’t we?’
‘From your Tree,’ said Steerpike. ‘Do you want to be found out?’
‘No!’ they said. ‘No! No!’
‘Then you can watch it from your Tree and be quite safe. I will remain in the wood so that I can see that nothing goes wrong. Do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ they said. ‘Then we’ll have Power, won’t we?’
The unconscious irony of this caused Steerpike’s lip to lift, but he said:
‘Your Ladyships will then have Power.’ And approaching them in turn he kissed the tips of their fingers. Picking up his swordstick from the table he walked swiftly to the door, where he bowed.
Before he opened it he said: ‘We are the only ones who know. The only ones who will ever know, aren’t we?’
‘Yes,’ they said. ‘Only us.’
‘I will return within a day or two,’ said Steerpike, ‘and give you the details. Your honour must be saved.’
He did not say good night, but opened the door and disappeared into the darkness.
‘PREPARATIONS FOR ARSON’
On one excuse or another Steerpike absented himself from the Prunesquallors’ during the major part of the next two days. Although he accomplished many things during this short period, the three stealthy expeditions which he made to the library were the core of his activities. The difficulty lay in crossing, unobserved, the open ground to the conifer wood. Once in the wood and among the pines there was less danger. He realized how fatal it might prove to be seen in the neighbourhood of the library, so shortly before the burning. On the first of the reconnaissances, after waiting in the shadows of the Southern wing before scudding across the overgrown gardens to the fields that bordered the conifers, he gathered the information which he needed. He had managed after an hour’s patient concentration to work the lock of the library door with a piece of wire, and then he had entered the silent room, to investigate the structure of the building. There was a remoteness about the deserted room. Shadowy and sinister though it was by night, it was free of the vacancy which haunted its daylight hours. Steerpike felt the insistent silence of the place as he moved to and fro, glancing over his high shoulder more than once as he took note of the possibilities for conflagration.
His survey was exhaustive, and when he finally left the building he appreciated to a nicety the nature of the problem. Lengths of oil-soaked material would have to be procured and laid behind the books where they could stretch unobserved from one end of the room to the other. After leading around the library they could be taken up the stairs and along the balcony. To lay these twisted lengths (no easy matter to procure without awakening speculation) was patently a job for those hours of the early morning, after Lord Sepulchrave had left for the castle. He had staggered, on his second visit, under an enormous bundle of rags and a tin of oil to the pine wood at midnight, and had occupied himself during the hours while he waited for Lord Sepulchrave to leave the building in knotting together the odd assortment of pilfered cloth into lengths of not less than forty feet.
When at last he saw his Lordship leave the side door and heard his slow, melancholy footsteps die away on the pathway leading to the Tower of Flints, he rose and stretched himself.
Much to his annoyance the probing of the lock occupied even more time than on the last occasion, and it was four o’clock in the morning before he pushed the door open before him.
Luckily, the dark autumn mornings were on his side, and he had a clear three hours. He had noticed that from without no light could be observed and he lit the lamp in the centre of the room.
Steerpike was nothing if not systematic, and two hours later, taking a tour of the library, he was well satisfied. Not a trace of his handiwork could be seen save only where four extremities of the cloth hung limply beside the main, unused, door of the building. These strips were the terminals of the four lengths that circumscribed the library and balcony and would be dealt with.
The only thing that caused him a moment’s reflection was the faint smell of the oil in which he had soaked the tightly twisted cloth.
He now concentrated his attention upon the four strips and twining them together into a single cord, he knotted it at its end. Somehow or other this cord must find its way through the door to the outside world. He had on his last visit eventually arrived at the only solution apart from that of chiselling away through the solid wall and the oak that formed the backs of the bookshelves. This was obviously too laborious. The alternative, which he had decided on, was to bore a neat hole through the door immediately under the large handle in the shadow of which it would be invisible save to scrutiny. Luckily for him there was a reading stand in the form of a carven upright with three short, bulbous legs. This upright supported a tilted surface the size of a very small table. This piece stood unused in front of the main door. By moving it a fraction to the right, the twisted cord of cloth was lost in darkness and although its discovery was not impossible, both this risk and that of the faint aroma of oil being noticed, were justifiable.
He had brought the necessary tools with him and although the oak was tough had bored his way through it within half an hour. He wriggled the cord through the hole and swept up the sawdust that had gathered on the floor.
By this time he was really tired, but he took another walk about the library before turning down the lamp and leaving by the side door. Once in the open he bore to his right, and skirting the adjacent wall, arrived at the main door of the building. As this entrance had not been used for many years, the steps that led to it were invisible beneath a cold sea of nettles and giant weeds. He waded his way through them and saw the loose end of the cord hanging through the raw hole he had chiselled. It glimmered whitely and was hooked like a dead finger. Opening the blade of a small sharp knife he cut through the twisted cloth so that only about two inches protruded, and to prevent this stub end slipping back through the hole, drove a small nail through the cloth with the butt of his knife.
His work for the night now seemed to be complete and, only stopping to hide the can of oil in the wood, he retraced his steps to the Prunesquallors’, where climbing at once to his room he curled up in bed, dressed as he was, and incontinently fell asleep.
The third of his expeditions to the library, the second during the daylight, was on other business. As might be supposed, the childishness of burning down Lord Sepulchrave’s sanctum did not appeal to him. In a way it appalled him. Not through any prickings of conscience but because destruction in any form annoyed him. That is, the destruction of anything inanimate that was well constructed. For living creature he had not this same concern, but in a well-made object, whatever its nature, a sword or a watch or a book, he felt an excited interest. He enjoyed a thing that was cleverly conceived and skilfully wrought, and this notion, of destroying so many beautifully bound and printed volumes, had angered him against himself, and it was only when his plot had so ripened that he could neither retract nor resist it, that he went forward with a single mind. That it should be the Twins who would actually set light to the building with their own hands was, of course, the lynch-pin of the manoeuvre. The advantages to himself which would accrue from
being the only witness to the act were too absorbing for him to ponder at this juncture.
The aunts would, of course, not realize that they were setting fire to a library filled with people: nor that it would be the night of the Great Gathering to which, as Steerpike had told them, they were not to be invited. The youth had waylaid Nannie Slagg on her way to the aunts and had inquired whether he could save her feet by delivering her message to them. At first she had been disinclined to divulge the nature of her mission, but when she at last furbished him with what he had already suspected, he promised he would inform them at once of the Gathering, and, after a pretence of going in their direction, he had returned to the Prunesquallors’ in time for his midday meal. It was on the following morning that he told the Twins that they had not been invited.
Once Cora and Clarice had ignited the cord at the main door of the library and the fire was beginning to blossom, it would be up to him to be as active as an eel on a line.
It seemed to Steerpike that to save two generations of the House of Groan from death by fire should stand him in very good stead, and moreover, his headquarters would be well established in the South Wing with their Ladyships Cora and Clarice who after such an episode would, if only through fear of their guilt being uncovered, eat out of his hand.
The question of how the fire started would follow close upon the rescue. On this he would have as little knowledge as anyone, only having seen the glow in the sky as he was walking along the South Wing for exercise. The Prunesquallors would bear out that it was his habit to take a stroll at sundown. The twins would be back in their room before news of the burning could ever reach the castle.
Steerpike’s third visit to the library was to plan how the rescues were to be effected. One of the first things was, of course, to turn and remove the key from the door when the party had entered the building, and as Lord Sepulchrave had the convenient habit of leaving it in the lock until he removed it on retiring in the small hours, there should be no difficulty about this. That such questions as ‘Who turned the key?’ and ‘how did it disappear?’ would be asked at a later date was inevitable, but with a well-rehearsed alibi for himself and the twins, and with the Prunesquallors’ cognizance of his having gone out for a stroll on that particular evening, he felt sure the suspicion would no more centre upon himself than on anyone else. Such minor problems as might arise in the future could be dealt with in the future.