by Mervyn Peake
This was of more immediate consequence: How was he to rescue the family of Groan in a manner reasonably free of danger to himself and yet sufficiently dramatic to cause the maximum admiration and indebtedness?
His survey of the building had shown him that he had no wide range of choice – in fact, that apart from forcing one of the doors open by some apparently superhuman effort at the last moment, or by smashing an opening in the large skylight in the roof through which it would be both too difficult and dangerous to rescue the prisoners, the remaining possibility lay in the only window, fifteen feet from the ground.
Once he had decided on this window as his focus he turned over in his mind alternative methods of rescue. It must appear, above all else, that the deliverance was the result of a spontaneous decision, translated at once into action. It did not matter so much if he were suspected, although he did not imagine that he would be; what mattered was that nothing could later be proved as prearranged.
The window, about four feet square, was above the main door and was heavily glazed. The difficulty naturally centred on how the prisoners were to reach the window from the inside, and how Steerpike was to scale the outer wall in order to smash the pane and show himself.
Obviously he must not be armed with anything which he would not normally be carrying. Whatever he used to force an entrance must be something he had picked up on the spur of the moment outside the library or among the pines. A ladder, for instance, would at once arouse suspicions, and yet something of that nature was needed. It occurred to him that a small tree was the obvious solution, and he began to search for one of the approximate length, already felled, for many of the pines which were cleared for the erection of the library and adjacent buildings were still to be seen lying half buried in the thick needle-covered ground. It did not take him long to come upon an almost perfect specimen of what he wanted. It was about twelve to fifteen feet long, and most of its lateral branches were broken off close to the bole, leaving stumps varying from three inches to a foot in length. ‘Here’, said Steerpike to himself, ‘is the thing.’
It was less easy for him to find another, but eventually he discovered some distance from the library what he was searching for. It lay in a dank hollow of ferns. Dragging it to the library wall, he propped both the pines upright against the main door and under the only window. Wiping the sweat from his bulging forehead he began to climb them, stamping off those branches that would be too weak to support Lady Groan, who would be the heaviest of the prisoners. Dragging them away from the wall, when he had completed these minor adjustments, and feeling satisfied that his ‘ladders’ were now both serviceable yet natural, he left them at the edge of the trees where a number of felled pines were littered, and next cast about for something with which he could smash the window. At the base of the adjacent building, a number of moss-covered lumps of masonry had fallen away from the walls. He carried several of these to within a few yards of the ‘ladders.’ Were there any question of his being suspected later, and if questions were raised as to how he came across the ladders and the piece of masonry so conveniently, he could point to the heap of half hidden stones and the litter of trees. Steerpike closed his eyes and attempted to visualize the scene. He could see himself making frantic efforts to open the doors, rattling the handles and banging the panels. He could hear himself shouting ‘Is there anybody in there?’ and the muffled cries from within. Perhaps he would yell: ‘Where’s the key? Where’s the key?’ or a few gallant encouragements, such as ‘I’ll get you out somehow.’ Then he would leap to the main door and beating on it a few times, deliver a few more yells before dragging up the ‘ladders’, for the fire by that time should be going very well. Or perhaps he would do none of these things, simply appearing to them like the answer to a prayer, in the nick of time. He grinned.
The only reason why he could not spare himself both time and energy by propping the ‘ladders’ against the wall after the last guest had entered the library was that the Twins would see them as they performed their task. It was imperative that they should not suspect the library to be inhabited, let alone gain an inkling of Steerpike’s preparations.
On this, the last occasion of his three visits to the library, he once again worked the lock of the side door and overhauled his handiwork. Lord Sepulchrave had been there on the previous night as usual, but apparently had suspected nothing. The tall book stand was as he had left it, obstructing a view of and throwing a deep shadow over the handle of the main door from beneath which the twisted cloth stretched like a tight rope across the two foot span to the end of the long book shelves. He could now detect no smell of oil, and although that meant that it was evaporating, he knew that it would still be more inflammable than the dry cloth.
Before he left he selected half a dozen volumes from the less conspicuous shelves, which he hid in the pine wood on his return journey, and which he collected on the following night from their rainproof nest of needles in the decayed bole of a dead larch. Three of the volumes had vellum bindings and were exquisitely chased with gold, and the others were of equally rare craftsmanship, and it was with annoyance, on returning to the Prunesquallors’ that night that he found it necessary to fashion for them their neat jackets of brown paper and to obliterate the Groan crest on the fly-leaves.
It was only when these nefarious doings were satisfactorily completed that Steerpike visited the aunts for the second time and re-primed them in their very simple rôles as arsonists. He had decided that rather than tell the Prunesquallors that he was going out for a stroll he would say instead that he was paying a visit to the aunts, and then with them to prove his alibi (for somehow or other they must be got to and from the library without the knowledge of their short-legged servant), their story and that of the Doctor’s would coincide.
He had made them repeat a dozen or so times: ‘We’ve been indoors all the time. We’ve been indoors all the time,’ until they were themselves as convinced of it as though they were reliving the Future!
THE GROTTO
It happened on the day of Steerpike’s second daylight visit to the Library. He was on his return journey and had reached the edge of the pine woods and was awaiting an opportunity to run unobserved across the open ground, when, away to his left, he saw a figure moving in the direction of Gormenghast Mountain.
The invigorating air, coupled with his recognition of the distant figure, prompted him to change his course, and with quick, birdlike steps he moved rapidly along the edge of the wood. In the rough landscape away to his left, the tiny figure in its crimson dress sang out against the sombre background like a ruby on a slate. The midsummer sun, and how much less this autumn light, had no power to mitigate the dreary character of the region that surrounded Gormenghast. It was like a continuation of the castle, rough and shadowy, and though vast and often windswept, oppressive too, with a kind of raw weight.
Ahead lay Gormenghast Mountain in all its permanence, a sinister thing as though drawn out of the earth by sorcery as a curse on all who viewed it. Although its base appeared to struggle from a blanket of trees within a few miles of the castle, it was in reality a day’s journey on horseback. Clouds were generally to be seen clustering about its summit even on the finest days when the sky was elsewhere empty, and it was common to see the storms raging across its heights and the sheets of dark rain slanting mistily over the blurred crown and obscuring half the mountain’s hideous body, while, at the same time, sunlight was playing across the landscape all about it and even on its own lower slopes. Today, however, not even a single cloud hung above the peak, and when Fuchsia had looked out of her bedroom window after her midday meal she had stared at the Mountain and said: ‘Where are the clouds?’
‘What clouds?’ said the old nurse, who was standing behind her, rocking Titus in her arms. ‘What is it, my caution?’
‘There’s nearly always clouds on top of the Mountain,’ said Fuchsia.
‘Aren’t there any, dear?’
‘No,’ said Fuchsi
a. ‘Why aren’t there?’
Fuchsia realized that Mrs Slagg knew virtually nothing, but the long custom of asking her questions was a hard one to break down. This realization that grown-ups did not necessarily know any more than children was something against which she had fought. She wanted Mrs Slagg to remain the wise recipient of all her troubles and the comforter that she had always seemed, but Fuchsia was growing up and she was now realizing how weak and ineffectual was her old guardian. Not that she was losing her loyalty or affection. She would have defended the wrinkled midget to her last breath if necessary; but she was isolated within herself with no one to whom she could run with that unquestioning confidence – that outpouring of her newest enthusiasms – her sudden terrors – her projects – her stories.
‘I think I’ll go out,’ she said, ‘for a walk.’
‘Again?’ said Mrs Slagg, stopping for a moment the rocking of her arms. ‘You go out such a lot now, don’t you? Why are you always going away from me?’
‘It’s not from you,’ said Fuchsia; ‘it’s because I want to walk and think. It isn’t going away from you. You know it isn’t.’
‘I don’t know anything,’ said Nannie Slagg, her face puckered up. ‘But I know you never went out all the summer, did you dear? And now that it is so temper-some and cold you are always going out into the nastiness and getting wet or frozen every day. Oh, my poor heart. Why? Why every day?’
Fuchsia pushed her hands into the depths of the big pockets of her red dress.
It was true she had deserted her attic for the dreary moors and the rocky tracts of country about Gormenghast. Why was this? Had she suddenly outgrown her attic that had once been all in all to her? Oh no; she had not outgrown it, but something had changed ever since that dreadful night when she saw Steerpike lying by the window in the darkness. It was no longer inviolate – secret – mysterious. It was no longer another world, but a part of the castle. Its magnetism had weakened – its silent, shadowy drama had died and she could no longer bear to revisit it. When last she had ventured up the spiral stairs and entered the musty and familiar atmosphere, Fuchsia had experienced a pang of such sharp nostalgia for what it had once been to her that she had turned from the swaying motes that filled the air and the shadowy shapes of all that she had known as her friends; the cobwebbed organ, the crazy avenue of a hundred loves – turned away, and stumbled down the dark staircase with a sense of such desolation as seemed would never lift. Her eyes grew dim as she remembered these things; her hands clenched in her deep pockets.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I have been out a lot. Do you get lonely? If you do, you needn’t, because you know I love you, don’t you? You know that, don’t you?
She thrust her lower lip forward and frowned at Mrs Slagg, but this was only to keep her tears back, for nowadays Fuchsia had so lonely a feeling that tears were never far distant. Never having had either positive cruelty or kindness shown to her by her parents, but only an indifference, she was not conscious of what it was that she missed – affection.
It had always been so and she had compensated herself by weaving stories of her own Future, or by lavishing her own love upon such things as the objects in her attics, or more recently upon what she found or saw among the woods and waste lands.
‘You know that, don’t you?’ Fuchsia repeated.
Nannie rocked Titus more vigorously than was necessary and by the pursing of her lips indicated that his Lordship was asleep and that she was speaking too loudly.
Then Fuchsia came up to her old nurse and stared at her brother. The feeling of aversion for him had disappeared, and though as yet the lilac-eyed creature had not affected her with any sensation of sisterly love, nevertheless she had got used to his presence in the Castle and would sometimes play with him solemnly for half an hour or so at a time.
Nannie’s eyes followed Fuchsia’s.
‘His little Lordship,’ she said, wagging her head, ‘it’s his little Lordship.’
‘Why do you love him?’
‘Why do I love him! oh, my poor, weak heart! Why do I love him, stupid? How could you say such a thing?’ cried Nannie Slagg. ‘Oh my little Lordship thing. How could I help it – the innocent notion that he is! The very next of Gormenghast, aren’t you, my only? The very next of all. What did your cruel sister say, then, what did she say?
‘He must go to his cot now, for his sleep, he must, and to dream his golden dreams.’
‘Did you talk to me like that when I was a baby,’ asked Fuchsia.
‘Of course I did,’ said Mrs Slagg. ‘Don’t be silly. Oh, the ignorance of you! Are you going to tidy your room for me now?’
She hobbled to the door with her precious bundle. Every day she asked this same question, but never waited for an answer, knowing that whatever it was, it was she who would have to make some sort of order out of the chaos.
Fuchsia again turned to the window and stared at the Mountain whose shape down to the least outcrop had long since scored its outline in her mind.
Between the castle and Gormenghast Mountain the land was desolate, for the main part empty wasteland, with large areas of swamp where undisturbed among the reedy tracts the waders moved. Curlews and peewits sent their thin cries along the wind. Moorhens reared their young and paddled blackly in and out of the rushes. To the east of Gormenghast Mountain, but detached from the trees at its base, spread the undulating darkness of the Twisted Woods. To the west the unkempt acres, broken here and there with low stunted trees bent by the winds into the shape of hunchbacks.
Between this dreary province and the pine wood that surrounded the West Wing of the castle, a dark, shelving plateau rose to a height of about a hundred to two hundred feet – an irregular tableland of greeny-black rock, broken and scarred and empty. It was beyond these cold escarpments that the river wound its way about the base of the Mountain and fed the swamps where the wild fowl lived.
Fuchsia could see three short stretches of the river from her window. This afternoon the central portion and that to its right were black with the reflection of the Mountain, and the third, away to the west beyond the rocky plateau, was a shadowy white strip that neither glanced nor sparkled, but, mirroring the opaque sky, lay lifeless and inert, like a dead arm.
Fuchsia left the window abruptly and closing the door after her with a crash, ran all the way down the stairs, almost falling as she slipped clumsily on the last flight, before threading a maze of corridors to emerge panting in the chilly sunlight.
Breathing in the sharp air she gulped and clenched her hands together until her nails bit at her palms. Then she began to walk. She had been walking for over an hour when she heard footsteps behind her and, turning, saw Steerpike. She had not seen him since the night at the Prunesquallors’ and never as clearly as now, as he approached her through the naked autumn. He stopped when he noticed that he was observed and called.
‘Lady Fuchsia! May I join you?’
Behind him she saw something which by contrast with the alien, incalculable figure before her, was close and real. It was something which she understood, something which she could never do without, or be without, for it seemed as though it were her own self, her own body, at which she gazed and which lay so intimately upon the skyline. Gormenghast. The long, notched outline of her home. It was now his background. It was a screen of walls and towers pocked with windows. He stood against it, an intruder, imposing himself so vividly, so solidly, against her world, his head overtopping the loftiest of its towers.
‘What do you want?’ she said.
A breeze had lifted from beyond the Twisted Woods and her dress was blown across her so that down her right side it clung to her showing the strength of her young body and thighs.
‘Lady Fuchsia!’ shouted Steerpike across the strengthening wind. ‘I’ll tell you.’ He took a few quick paces towards her and reached the sloping rock on which she stood. ‘I want you to explain this region to me – the marshes and Gormenghast Mountain. Nobody has ever told me about it. You kno
w the country – you understand it,’ (he filled his lungs again) ‘and though I love the district I’m very ignorant.’ He had almost reached her. ‘Can I share your walks, occasionally? Would you consider the idea? Are you returning?’ Fuchsia had moved away. ‘If so, may I accompany you back?’
‘That’s not what you’ve come to ask me,’ said Fuchsia slowly. She was beginning to shake in the cold wind.
‘Yes, it is,’ said Steerpike, ‘it is just what I’ve come to ask you. And whether you will tell me about Nature.’
‘I don’t know anything about Nature,’ said Fuchsia, beginning to walk down the sloping rock. ‘I don’t understand it. I only look at it. Who told you I knew about it? Who makes up these things?’
‘No one,’ said Steerpike. ‘I thought you must know and understand what you love so much. I’ve seen you very often returning to the castle laden with the things you have discovered. And also, you look as though you understand.’
‘I do?’ said Fuchsia, surprised. ‘No, I can’t do. I don’t understand wise things at all.’
‘Your knowledge is intuitive,’ said the youth. ‘You have no need of book learning and such like. You only have to gaze at a thing to know it. The wind is getting stronger, your Ladyship, and colder. We had better return.’
Steerpike turned up his high collar, and gaining her permission to accompany her back to the castle, he began with her the descent of the grey rocks. Before they were halfway down, the rain was falling and the autumn sunlight had given way to a fast, tattered sky.