by Mervyn Peake
Even so, she seemed strangely incongruous in that tasteful and orderly trap. For Steerpike could not entirely destroy the reflection of his own coldness. She seemed too much alive – alive in so different a sense from the glittering and icy vitality of her companion – too much alive in the way that love like an earthquake or some natural and sinless force, is incompatible with a neat and formal world. However quietly she sat back in her chair, her black hair about her shoulders, she was potentially disruptive.
But she admired what she saw. She admired all that she was not. It was all so different from Gormenghast. When she remembered her old untidy attic and the rooms she now occupied with the floor littered with poems, and the walls with drawings, she supposed that there must be something wrong with her.
When she remembered her mother, she felt, for the first time, embarrassed.
One night when she tapped upon the door with her fingertips there was no reply. She tapped again, glancing apprehensively along the corridor on either side. The silence was absolute. She had never before had to wait for more than the fraction of a second. And then a voice said, ‘Be careful, my lady.’
Fuchsia had started at the sound as at the touch of a red iron. The voice had come from nowhere. There was no sound of a step. In fear and trembling she lit the candle she carried in her hand – a rash and risky thing to do. But there was no one. And then, in the far distance, something began to approach her rapidly. Long before she could see Steerpike she knew it was he. It was but a few moments before his swift, narrow, high-shouldered form was upon her and had snatched the candle from her hand and crushed out the flame. In another moment his key had been turned in the lock and she had been hustled through the door. He locked it from the inside, in the darkness, but he had already whispered fiercely ‘Fool.’ With that word the world turned over. Everything changed.
The delicate balance of their relationship was set in violent agitation – and a dead weight came down over Fuchsia’s heart.
Had the crystalline and dazzling structure which Steerpike had gradually erected, adding ornament to ornament until, balanced before her in all its beauty, it had dazzled the girl – an outward sign of his regard for her – had the exquisite structure been less exquisite, less crystalline, less perfect, then its crash upon the cold stones far beneath would never have been so final. Its substance, brittle as glass, had been scattered in a thousand fragments.
The short, brutal word, and the push which he had given her had turned her on the instant from a dark and eager girl into something more sombre. She was shocked and resentful – but less resentful, for those first moments, than hurt. She had also become, without her knowing it, Lady Fuchsia. Her blood had risen in her – the blood of her Line. She had forgotten it when love was tender, but now in bitterness she was again the daughter of an Earl.
She had known, of course, that to light a candle outside the very door was against all their strictest rules of care and secrecy. But she had been frightened. Maddening as it would have been for their rendezvous to have been discovered, yet there had been no sin in it, save that of her conducting her affairs in secret, and of allowing herself to be the close friend of a commoner.
But his face had been ugly with anger. She had never known that he could so lose that perfect, that chiselled quietness of pose and feature. She had never known that his clear, neat and persuasive voice could have taken on a tone so savage and cruel.
And to have been pushed! To have been thrust forwards in the darkness. His hands, which once, like those of a musician, had been so thrilling in their delicate strength, had been rough as the claws of an animal. As surely as the change of his voice, as surely as the word ‘fool’, this shove in the darkness had woken her to a reality both bitter and galling.
But, as she trembled, there was, mixed with the mortification, the ghostly and exciting memory of that voice out of nowhere. It had evolved out of the darkness and at no more distance from her than a few feet, but there had been no one there. She had no more idea of how it had originated than of the intention or meaning of its warning. She only knew now, that she would not seek assistance from Steerpike; she would not confide her fear of this inexplicable ‘voice’ in someone who had degraded her. All the Lords of Gormenghast were at her shoulder.
She turned on her heel, in the darkened room, and before he had lit the lamp, ‘Let me out of here,’ she said. But almost immediately the familiar room was filled with the gold lamp-light and she saw upon the table, sitting with its face cupped in its wrinkled hands, a monkey. It was dressed in a little costume of red and yellow diamonds. On its head was a small velvet hat, like a pirate’s, with a violet feather curling from the crown.
Steerpike had covered his face with his hands, but he was watching Fuchsia through the slits between his fingers. He had lost command. The sight of a flame, where it had no cause to be, had struck at him like a lash. He had not been burned for nothing and fire was his only fear. Once again he had failed.
But he did not know how seriously. He watched her through his fingers.
She stared at the monkey with an expression quite indefinable. What surprise she felt was not in evidence. The turmoil and the shock of having been so roughly treated was still too strong in her for any other emotion to supplant it, however bizarre the stimulus might be. But when the vivid little animal rose to its feet and took off its hat, and when it replaced it after scratching its head and yawning, then, for an instant, something less sad suffused her face with a fleeting animation.
But it was impossible for her mood to be swung so rapidly from one extreme to another. A part of her mind was fascinated by the oddness of it all, but nothing touched her heart. It was a monkey dressed up and that was all. What would once have inflamed her with excitement, left her now, at this paralysing moment, quite frozen.
Steerpike had gained a moment or two but what could he do with them? She had commanded him to let her go from the room when the monkey had caught her eye.
Once again she turned her gaze to him. Her black eyes appeared quite dead, the lustre drained away. Her lips were tightly closed.
She saw him with his hands across his face. And then she heard his voice.
‘Fuchsia,’ he said. ‘Allow me one moment, only one, in which to tell you of the danger from which we have just escaped. There was no time to be lost and though there could never be any excuse, and although I can never ask for forgiveness, yet you must allow me a short moment in which to explain my violence.
‘Fuchsia! it was for you. My violence was for you. My roughness was the roughness of love. I had no time to do other than to save you. Have you not heard the footsteps? She has just gone by. One moment later and your light would have brought her to this door. And you know the punishment. Of course you do, the punishment, which by ancient law is meted out to those daughters of the Line who consort with the mere outsiders. It is too awful to think about. And that is why our plans have been so secret, our rules so rigorous. And you know this. And you have been meticulous. But tonight you misjudged the time, did you not? You were four minutes early. O that was risky enough. But to add to such a peril the lighting of your candle. And then, as always happens, it was precisely when all this was happening that your mother should follow me.’
‘My mother?’ Fuchsia’s voice was a whisper.
‘Your mother. I had led her away for I knew that she was near. I doubled back. I crossed my tracks. I doubled back again and yet she was there, and moving slowly – I cannot understand it – but I came as I intended to this door with the length of the corridor between us – the length of the corridor and the odd twenty feet that would give me the chance of whipping into our room in time – but no, it wasn’t this that I was going to do. No. For what would have been more likely than for you to have met her – and then …’
Steerpike dropped his hands from his face where they had been all this time. His voice had been running on with a certain charm for he had managed to vary it with a kind of stutter – not
so much nervous in effect as eager and candid.
‘But what happened, Fuchsia? Well, you know that as well as I do. I turned the north corner with your mother the length of a corridor behind – and there you were, like a bonfire, the length of the corridor before me. Put yourself in my place. One cannot have all the noble emotions at the same time. One cannot mix up desperation with being a perfect gentleman. At least I can’t. Perhaps I should have been given lessons. All I could do was to save the situation. To hide you. To save you. You were there too early; and Fuchsia, it made me angry. I have never been angry with you before as you know. I could never imagine being angry with you. And perhaps even now, it wasn’t really you I was angry with, but fate, or destiny or whatever it is that might have upset our plans. And it was because our plans have always been so carefully prepared – so that there shall be no risk, and you shall come to no harm – that my rage boiled up. You were no longer Fuchsia to me, at that moment. You were this thing that I was to save. After I had got behind the door, then you would be Fuchsia again. Had I waited for a moment before stifling your light or getting you through the door, then our lives might indeed have been ruined. For I love you, Fuchsia. You are all I ever longed for. Can’t you see that it was because of this that I had no time to be polite? It was a boiling moment. It was a maelstrom. I called you “fool”, yes “fool”, out of my love for you – and then … and then … here in this room again, it all seemed so unbelievable and it does so still, and I am half ashamed of the gift I had brought you and the writing I have done for you – O Fuchsia – I don’t even know if I can show it to you now …’ he turned abruptly with his hand clenched at his forehead, and then as though to say he would not give way to his despair, ‘Come on then, Satan,’ he whispered. ‘Come on, my wicked boy!’ and the monkey leapt on to Steerpike’s shoulder.
‘What writing?’ said Fuchsia.
‘I had written you a poem.’ He spoke very softly, in a way that had often proved successful but he was a step too far in advance of his progress.
‘But perhaps now,’ he said, ‘you will not wait to see it, Fuchsia.’
‘No,’ she said after a pause. ‘Not now.’
Her inflection was so strange that it was impossible to tell whether she meant ‘not now’ in the sense of it being no longer possible for her to do anything so intimate as to read a love poem; or not now, but some other time.
Steerpike could only cry, ‘I understand,’ and placed the monkey on the table where it walked rapidly to and fro, on all four legs, and then leapt onto one of his cabinets.
‘And I will understand, if you have no wish for Satan.’
‘Satan?’ her voice was quite expressionless.
‘Your monkey,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you would rather not be bothered. I thought he would please you. I made his clothes myself.’
‘I don’t know! I don’t know!’ cried Fuchsia suddenly. ‘I don’t know, I tell you, I don’t know!’
‘Shall I take you to your room?’
‘I will go myself.’
‘As you please,’ said Steerpike. ‘But recall what I have said, I implore you. Try and understand; for I love you as the shadows love the castle.’
She turned her eyes to him. For a moment a light came into them, but in the next moment they appeared empty once more; empty and blank.
‘I will never understand,’ she said. ‘It is no good however much you talk. I may have been wrong. I don’t know. At any rate everything is changed. I don’t feel the same any more. I want to go now.’
‘Yes, of course. But will you grant me two small favours?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Fuchsia. ‘What are they? I’m tired.’
‘The first one is to ask you from the bottom of my heart to try to understand the strain which was put upon me, and to ask you whether, even if it is for the last time, you will meet me, as we have done for so long, meet me that we can talk for a little while – not about us, not about our trouble, not about my faults, not about this terrible chasm between us, but about all the happy things. Will you meet me tomorrow night, on those conditions?’
‘I don’t know!’ said Fuchsia. ‘I don’t know! But I suppose so. O God, I suppose so.’
‘Thank you,’ said Steerpike. ‘Thank you, Fuchsia.’
‘And my other request is only this. To know, whether, if you have no use for Satan, you will let me have him back – because he is yours … and …’ Steerpike turned his head from her and moved away a few paces.
‘You would like to know, wouldn’t you, Satan, to whom you belong …’ he cried in a voice that was intended to sound gallant.
Fuchsia turned on him suddenly. It seemed that she had now realized the natural edge of her own intellect. She stared at the skewbald man with the monkey on his shoulder and then her words cut into the pale man like knives. ‘Steerpike,’ she said. ‘I think you’re going soft.’
From that moment Steerpike knew that when she came on the following night he would seduce her. With so dark a secret to keep hidden, the daughter of the Countess would indeed be at his mercy. He had waited long enough. Now, upon the heels of his mistake, was the only time for him to strike. He had felt the first intimation of something slipping away beneath his feet. If guile and coercion failed him, then there could be no two ways about it. This was no time for mercy – and though she proved a tigress he would have her – and blackmail would follow as smoothly as a thundercloud.
FIFTY-SEVEN
I
When Flay heard the door open quietly below him he held his breath. For a few moments no one appeared and then a shape still darker than the darkness stepped out into the corridor and began to walk rapidly away to the south. When he heard the door close again he lowered himself from the great stone shelf that stretched above Steerpike’s doorway and with his long bony arms outstretched to their full extent he dropped the odd few inches to the ground.
His frustration at being unable to gain any clue as to what had been going on inside the room was only equalled by his horror at finding that it was Fuchsia who had been the clandestine visitor.
He had sensed her danger. He knew it in his bones. But he could not have persuaded her, suddenly, in the night, that she was in peril. He could not have told her what kind of peril. He did not know himself. But he had acted on the spur of the moment and in whispering to her out of the darkness he hoped that she might be put upon her guard, if only for reasons of supernatural fear.
He followed Fuchsia only so far as to be sure that she was safely upon her way to her own rooms. It was all he could do not to call after her, or overtake her, for he was deeply perplexed and frightened. His love for her was something quite alone in his sour life. Fond as he was of Titus, it was the memory of Fuchsia, more than of the boy, or of any other living soul, that gave to the flinty darkness of his mind those touches of warmth which, along with his worship of Gormenghast, that abstraction of outspread stone, were seemingly so foreign to his nature.
But he knew that he must not speak to her tonight. The distracted way in which she moved, sometimes running and sometimes walking, gave him sufficient evidence of her fatigue and, he feared, of her misery.
He did not know what Steerpike had done or said but he knew he had hurt her, and if it were not that he felt upon the brink of gaining some kind of damning evidence, then he would have returned to that room from which Fuchsia had emerged, and on the reappearance of Steerpike, at the doorway, he would have plucked the skewbald face, barehanded, from the head.
II
As he returned in the direction of the fateful corridor, a heavy pain lay across his forehead and his thoughts pursued one another in a confusion of anger and speculation. He could not know that with every step he was travelling, not nearer to his room but further from it – further in time, further in space, nor that the night’s adventures far from coming to a close were about to begin in earnest.
By now the night was well advanced. He had returned with a slow and somewhat dragging pace, li
ngering here and there to lean his head against the cold walls while his headache hammered behind his eyes and across his angular brow. Once he sat down for a hour upon the lowest step of a flight of age-hollowed stairs, his long beard falling upon his knee, and taking the sharp curve of them and falling again in a straggle of string-like hair to within a few inches of the floor.
Fuchsia and Steerpike? What could it mean? The blasphemy of it! The horror of it! He ground his teeth in the darkness.
The castle was as silent as some pole-axed monster. Inert, breathless, spreadeagled. It was a night that seemed to prove by the consolidation of its darkness and its silence the hopelessness of any further dawn. There was no such thing as dawn. It was an invention of the night’s or of the old-wives of the night – a fable, immemorially old – recounted century after century in the eternal darkness; retold and retold to the gnomic children in the tunnels and the caves of Gormenghast – a tale of another world where such things happened, where stones and bricks and ivy stems and iron could be seen as well as touched and smelt, could be lit and coloured, and where at certain times a radiance shone like honey from the east and the blackness was scaled away, and this thing they called dawn arose above the woods as though the fable had materialized, the legend come to life.
It was a night with a bull’s mouth. But the mouth was bound and gagged. It was a night with enormous eyes, but they were hooded.
The only sound that Flay could hear was the tapping of his heart.
III