by Mervyn Peake
‘Are … all … your … rooms … like … this …?’ she muttered. She had just seated herself in a chair.
‘Well, let me see,’ said Prunesquallor. ‘No, not exactly, your Ladyship … not exactly.’
‘I … suppose … they’re … spotless. Is … that it … eh?’
‘I believe they are; yes, yes, I quite believe they are. Not that I see more than five or six of them during the course of a year; but what with the servants flitting here and there with dusters and brooms, and clanking their buckets and wringing things out – and what with my sister Irma flitting after them to see that the right things are wrung and the wrung things are right, I have no doubt that we are all but sterilized to extinction: no tartar on the banisters: not a microbe left to live its life in peace.’
‘I see,’ said the Countess. It was extraordinary how damning those two words sounded. ‘But I have come to talk to you.’
For a moment she stared about her ruminatively. The cats, with not a whisker moving, were everywhere in the room. The mantelpiece was heraldic with them. The table was a solid block of whiteness. The couch was a snowdrift. The carpet was sewn with eyes.
Her ladyship’s head, which always seemed far bigger than any human head had a right to be, was turned away from the doctor and down a little, so that her powerful throat was tautened: yet ample along the near side. Her profile was nearly hidden by her cheek. Her hair was built up, for the most part, into a series of red nests and for the rest smouldered as it fell in snakelike coils to her shoulders, where it all but hissed.
The doctor twirled about on his narrow feet and flung open a silkwood cabinet door with a grandiose flourish, bringing his long white hands together beneath his chin and tossing a mop of grey hair from his forehead. He flashed his brilliant teeth at the Countess (who was still presenting him with her shoulder and about an eighth of her face), and then with eyebrows raised –
‘Your Ladyship,’ he said, ‘that you should decide to visit me, and to discuss some subject with me, is an honour. But first what will you drink?’
The doctor in flinging open the door of his cabinet had revealed as rare and delicately chosen a group of wines as he had ever selected from his cellar.
The Countess moved her great head through the air.
‘A jug of goat’s milk, Prunesquallor, if you please,’ she said.
What there was in the doctor that loved beauty, selectivity, delicacy and excellence – and there was a good deal in him that responded to these abstractions – shrank up like the horn of a snail and all but died. But his hand, which was poised in the air and was halfway to the trapped sunlight of a long-lost vineyard, merely fluttered to and fro as though it was conducting some gnomic orchestra, while he turned about, apparently in full control of himself. He bowed, and his teeth flashed. Then he rang the bell, and when a face appeared at the door –
‘Have we a goat?’ he said. ‘Come, come, my man – yes or no. Have we, or haven’t we, a goat?’
The man was positive that they had no such thing.
‘Then you will find one, if you please. You will find one immediately. It is wanted. That will do.’
The Countess had seated herself. Her feet were planted apart and her heavy freckled arms were along the sides of her chair. In the silence that followed even Prunesquallor could think of nothing to say. The stillness was eventually broken by the voice of the Countess.
‘Why do you have knives sticking in your ceiling?’
The doctor recrossed his legs and followed her impassive gaze which was fixed on the long bread-knife that suddenly appeared to fill the room. A knife in the fender, on a pillow, or under a chair is one thing, but a knife surrounded by the blank white wasteland of a ceiling has no shred of covering – is as naked and blatant as a pig in a cathedral.
But any subject was fruitful to the doctor. It was only a lack of material, a rare enough contingency in him, that he found appalling.
‘That knife, your ladyship,’ he said, giving the implement a glance of the deepest respect, ‘bread-knife though it be, has a history. A history, madam! It has indeed.’
He turned his eyes to his guest. She waited impassively.
‘Humble, unromantic, ill-proportioned, crude as it looks, yet it means much to me. Indeed, madam, it is so, and I am no sentimentalist. And why? you will be asking yourself. Why? Let me tell you all.’
He clasped his hands together and raised his narrow and elegant shoulders.
‘It was with that knife, your ladyship, that I performed my first successful operation. I was among mountains. Huge tufted things. Full of character; but no charm. I was alone with my faithful mule. We were lost. A meteor flew overhead. What use was that to us? No use at all. It merely irritated us. For a moment it showed a track through the fever-dripping ferns. It was obviously the wrong one. It would only have taken us back to a morass we had just spent half a day struggling out of. What a sentence! What a vile sentence, your Ladyship, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Where was I? Ah, yes! Plunged in darkness. Miles from anywhere. What happened next? The strangest thing. Prodding my mule forward with my walking-cane – I was riding the brute at the time – it suddenly gave a cry like a child and began to collapse under me. As it subsided it turned its huge hairy head and what little light there was showed me its eyes were positively imploring me to free it from some agony or other. Now agony is an agonizing thing to happen to anyone, your Ladyship, but to locate the seat of the agony in a mule in the darkness of a mountainous and fever-dripping night is – er … not easy (Lytotis), ha, ha, ha! But do something I must. It was already upon its side in the darkness – the great thing. I had leapt from its collapsing spine and at once my faculties began to do their damndest. The brute’s eyes, still fixed on mine, were like lamps that were running out of oil. I put a couple of questions to myself – pertinent ones, I felt at the time – and still do; and the first was: IS the agony spiritual or physical? If the former, the darkness wouldn’t matter, but the treatment would be tricky. If the latter, the darkness would be hell: but the problem was in my province – or very nearly. I plumped for the latter, and more by good fortune or that curious sixth sense one has when alone with a mule, among tufted mountains, I found almost at once it to have been a happy guess: for directly I had decided to work on a carnal basis I got hold of the mule’s head, heaved it up, and swivelled it to such an angle that by the glow of its eyes I was able to illumine – faintly, of course, but to illumine, none the less – with a dull glow, the rest of its body. At once I was rewarded. It was a pure case of “foreign body”. Coiled – I couldn’t tell you how many times – round the beast’s hind leg, was a python! Even at that ghastly and critical moment I could see what a beautiful thing it was. Far more beautiful than my old brute of a mule. But did it enter my head that I should transfer my allegiance to the reptile? No. After all, there is such a thing as loyalty as well as beauty. Besides, I hate walking, and the python would have taken some riding, your Ladyship: the very saddling would tax a man’s patience. And besides …’
The doctor glanced at his guest and immediately wished he hadn’t. Taking out his silk handkerchief, he wiped his brow. Then he flashed his teeth, and with somewhat less ebullience in his voice … ‘It was then that I thought of my bread-knife,’ he added.
For a moment there was silence. And then, as the doctor filled his lungs and was ready to continue –
‘How old are you?’ said the Countess. But before Doctor Prunesquallor could readjust himself there was a knock at the door and the servant entered with a goat .
‘Wrong sex, you idiot!’ As the Countess spoke she rose heavily from her chair and, approaching the goat, she fondled its head with her big hands. It strained towards her on the rope leash and licked her arm.
‘You amaze me,’ said the doctor to the servant. ‘No wonder you cook badly. Away, my man, away! Unearth yet another, and get the gender right, for the love of mammals! Sometimes one wonders what kind of a world one is living in – by all
things fundamental, one really does.’
The servant disappeared.
‘Prunesquallor,’ said the Countess, who had moved to the window and was staring out across the quadrangle.
‘Madam?’ queried the doctor.
‘I am not easy in my heart, Prunesquallor.’
‘Your heart, madam?’
‘My heart and my mind.’
She returned to her chair, where she seated herself again and laid her arms along the padded sides as before.
‘In what way, your Ladyship?’ Prunesquallor’s voice had lost its facetious vapidity.
‘There is mischief in the castle,’ she replied. ‘Where it is I do not know. But there is mischief.’ She stared at the doctor.
‘Mischief?’ he said at last. ‘Some influence, do you mean – some bad influence, madam?’
‘I do not know for sure. But something has changed. My bones know it. There is someone.’
‘Someone?’
‘An enemy. Whether ghost or human I do not know. But an enemy. Do you understand?’
‘I understand,’ said the doctor. Every vestige of his waggery had disappeared. He leaned forward. ‘It is not a ghost,’ he said. ‘Ghosts have no itch for rebellion.’
‘Rebellion!’ said the Countess loudly. ‘By whom?’
‘I do not know. But what else can it be you sense, as you say, in your bones, madam?’
‘Who would dare to rebel?’ she whispered, as though to herself. ‘Who would dare? …’ And then, after a pause: ‘Have you your suspicions?’
‘I have no proof. But I will watch for you. For, by the holy angels, since you have brought the matter up there is evil abroad and no mistake.’
‘Worse,’ she replied, ‘worse than that. There is perfidy.’
She drew a deep breath and then, very, slowly: ‘… and I will crush its life out: I will break it: not only for Titus’ sake and for his dead father’s, but more – for Gormenghast.’
‘You speak of your late husband, madam, the revered Lord Sepulchrave. Where are his remains, madam, if he is truly dead?’
‘And more than that, man, more than that! What of the fire that warped his brilliant brain? What of that fire in which, but for that youth Steerpike …’ She lapsed into a thick silence.
‘And what of the suicide of his sisters; and the disappearance of the chef on the same night as his Lordship your husband – and all within a year, or little more: and since then a hundred irregularities and strange affairs? What lies at the back of all this? By all that’s visionary, madam, your heart has reason to be uneasy.’
‘And there is Titus,’ said the Countess.
‘There is Titus,’ the doctor repeated as quick as an echo.
‘How old is he now?’
‘He is nearly eight.’ Prunesquallor raised his eyebrows. ‘Have you not seen him?’
‘From my window,’ said the Countess, ‘when he rides along the South Wall.’
‘You should be with him, your Ladyship, now and then,’ said the doctor. ‘By all that’s maternal, you really should see more of your son.’
The Countess stared at the doctor, but what she might have replied was stunned for ever by a rap at the door and the reappearance of the servant with a nannygoat.
‘Let her go!’ said the Countess.
The little white goat ran to her as though she were a magnet. She turned to Prunesquallor. ‘Have you a jug?’
The doctor turned his head to the door. ‘Fetch a jug,’ he said to the disappearing face.
‘Prunesquallor,’ she said, as she knelt down, a prodigious bulk in the lamplight, and stroked the sleek ears of the goat, ‘I will not ask you on whom your suspicions lie. No. Not yet. But I expect you to watch, Prunesquallor – to watch everything, as I do. You must be all aware, Prunesquallor, every moment of the day. I expect to be informed of heterodoxy, wherever it may be found. I have a kind of faith in you, man. A kind of faith in you. I don’t know why …’ she added.
‘Madam,’ said Prunesquallor, ‘I will be on tip-toe.’
The servant came in with a jug, and retired.
The elegant curtains fluttered a little in the night air. The light of the lamp was golden in the room, glimmering on the porcelain bowls, on the squat cut-glass vases and the tall cloisonné ware: on the vellum backs of books and the glazed drawings that hung upon the walls. But its light was reflected most vividly from the countless small white faces of the motionless cats. Their whiteness blanched the room and chilled the mellow light. It was a scene that Prunesquallor never forgot. The Countess on her knees by the dying fire: the goat standing quietly while she milked it with an authority in the deft movement of her fingers that affected him strangely. Was this heavy, brusque, uncompromising Countess, whose maternal instincts were so shockingly absent: who had not spoken to Titus for a year: who was held in awe, and even in fear, by the populace: who was more a legend than a woman – was this indeed she, with the half-smile of extraordinary tenderness on her wide lips?
And then he remembered her voice again, when she had whispered: ‘Who would dare to rebel? Who would dare?’ and then the full, ruthless organ-chord of her throat: ‘And I will crush its life out! I will break it! Not only for Titus’ sake …’
EIGHT
Cora and Clarice, although they did not know it, were imprisoned in their apartments. Steerpike had nailed and bolted from the outside all their means of exit. They had been incarcerated for two years, their tongues having loosened to the brink of Steerpike’s undoing. Cunning and patient as he was with them, the young man could find no other foolproof way of ensuring their permanent silence on the subject of the library fire. No other way – but one. They believed that they alone among the inhabitants of the castle were free of a hideous disease of Steerpike’s invention, and which he referred to as ‘Weasel plague’.
The twins were like water. He could turn on or off at will the taps of their terror. They were pathetically grateful that through his superior wisdom they were able to remain in relative health. If a flat refusal to die in the face of a hundred reasons why they should, could be called health. They were obsessed by the fear of coming into contact with the carriers. He brought them daily news of the dead and dying.
Their quarters were no longer those spacious apartments where Steerpike first paid them his respects seven years ago. Far from them having a Room of Roots and a great tree leaning over space hundreds of feet above the earth, they were now on the ground level in an obscure precinct of the castle, a dead end, a promontory of dank stone, removed from even the less frequented routes. Not only was there no way through it, but it was shunned also for reason of its evil reputation. Unhealthy with noxious moisture, its very breath was double pneumonia.
Ironically enough, it was in such a place as this that the aunts rejoiced in the erroneous belief that they alone could escape the virulent and ghastly disease that was in their imaginations prostrating Gormenghast. They had by now become so self-centred under Steerpike’s guidance as to be looking forward to the day when they, as sole survivors, would be able (after due precautions) to pace forth and be at last, after all these long years of frustration, the unopposed claimants to the Groan crown, that massive and lofty symbol of sovereignty, with its central sapphire the size of a hen’s egg.
It was one of their hottest topics: whether the crown should be sawn in half and the sapphire split, so that they could always be wearing at least part of it, or whether it should be left intact and they should wear it on alternate days.
Hot and contested though this subject was, it stirred no visible animation. Not even their lips were seen to move, for they had acquired the habit of keeping them slightly parted and projecting their toneless voices without a tremor of the mouth. But for most of the time their long, solitary days were passed in silence. Steerpike’s spasmodic appearances – and they had become less and less frequent – were, apart from their wild, bizarre and paranoiac glimpses of a future of thrones and crowns, their sole excitement.
How was it that their Ladyships Cora and Clarice could be hidden away in this manner and the iniquity condoned?
It was not condoned; for two years previously they had been as far as Gormenghast was concerned buried with a wealth of symbolism in the tombs of the Groans, a couple of wax replicas having been modelled by Steerpike for the dread occasion. A week before these effigies were lowered into the sarcophagus, a letter, as from the twins, but in reality forged by the youth, had been discovered in their apartments. It divulged the dreadful information that the sisters of the seventy-sixth Earl, who had himself disappeared from the castle without a trace, bent upon their self-destruction, had stolen by night from the castle grounds to make an end of themselves among the ravines of Gormenghast Mountain.
Search parties, organized by Steerpike, had found no trace.
On the night previous to the discovery of the note, Steerpike had conveyed the Twins to the rooms which they now occupied upon some pretext connected with an inspection of a couple of sceptres he had found and regilded.
All this seemed a long time ago. Titus had been a mere infant. Flay but lately banished. Sepulchrave and Swelter had melted into air. Like teeth missing from the jaw of Gormenghast, the disappearance of the Twins, added to those others, gave to the Castle for a time an unfamiliar visage and an aching bone. To some extent the wounds had healed and the change of face had been accepted. Titus was, after all, alive and well – and the continuation of the Family assured.
The Twins were sitting in their room, after a day of more than usual silence. A lamp, set on an iron table (it burnt all day), gave them sufficient light to do their embroidery; but for some while neither of them applied herself to her work.
‘What a long time life takes!’ said Clarice at last. ‘Sometimes I think it’s hardly worthy encroaching on.’
‘I don’t know anything about encroaching,’ replied Cora; ‘but since you have spoken I might as well tell you that you’ve forgotten something, as usual.’