by Mervyn Peake
‘No!’ cried the Countess in so loud and husky a voice that Titus drew back on his elbow. She turned to him.
‘Then we have him.’ Her eyes were narrowed. ‘Did you not have to crawl across the Coupée – the high knife-edge? How else could you have returned?’
‘I did,’ said Titus. ‘That is how I came.’
‘From the North Headstones?’
‘Is that what it is called, mother?’
‘It is. You have been in the North Headstones beyond Gory and the Silver Mines. I know where you’ve been. You’ve been to the Twin Fingers where Little Sark begins and the Bluff narrows. Between the Twins would be water now. Am I right?’
‘There’s what looks like a bay,’ said Titus. ‘If that’s what you mean.’
‘The district will be ringed at once! And on every level!’
She rose ponderously to her feet, and turning to one of the men – ‘Have the Search Captains called immediately. Take up the boy. Couch him. Feed him. Give him dry clothes. Give him sleep. He will not have long to rest. All craft will patrol the Headstones night and day. All search parties will be mustered and concentrated to the south side of the Coupée neck. Send out all messengers. We start in one hour from now.’
She turned to look down at Titus who had risen to one knee. When he was on his feet he faced his mother.
She said to him:
‘Get some sleep. You have done well. Gormenghast will be avenged. The castle’s heart is sound. You have surprised me.’
‘I did not do it for Gormenghast,’ said Titus.
‘No?’
‘No, mother.’
‘Then for whom or for what?’
‘It was an accident,’ said Titus, his heart hammering. ‘I happened to be there.’ He knew he should hold his tongue. He knew that he was talking a forbidden language. He trembled with excitement of telling the dangerous truth. He could not stop. ‘I am glad it’s through me he’s been sighted,’ he said, ‘but it wasn’t for the safety or the honour of Gormenghast that I’ve come to you. No, though because of me he’ll be surrounded. I cannot think of my duty any more. Not in that way. I hate him for other reasons.’
The silence was thick and terrible – and then at last her millstone words. ‘What … reasons?’ There was something so cold and merciless in her voice that Titus blanched. He had spoken as he had never dared to speak before. He had stepped beyond the recognized border. He had breathed the air of an unmentionable world.
Again the cold, inhuman voice:
‘What reasons?’
He was altogether exhausted but suddenly out of his physical weakness another wave of nervous moral strength floated up in him. He had not planned to come out into the open, or to give any hint to his mother of his secret rebellion and he knew that he could never have voiced his thoughts had he planned to do so but finding now that he had shown himself in the colours of a traitor, he flushed, and lifting his head he shouted:
‘I will tell you!’
His filthy hair fell over his eyes. His eyes blazed with an upsurge of defiance, as though a dozen pent up years had at last found outlet. He had gone so far that there was no return. His mother stood before him like a monument. He saw her great outline through the blur of his weakness and his passion. She made no movement at all.
‘I will tell you! My reasons were for this. Laugh if you like! He stole my boat! He hurt Fuchsia. He killed Flay. He frightened me. I do not care if it was rebellion against the Stones – most of all it was theft, cruelty and murder. What do I care for the symbolism of it all? What do I care if the castle’s heart is sound or not? I don’t want to be sound anyway! Anybody can be sound if they’re always doing what they’re told. I want to live! Can’t you see? Oh, can’t you see? I want to be myself, and become what I make myself, a person, a real live person and not a symbol any more. That is my reason! He must be caught and slain. He killed Flay. He hurt my sister. He stole my boat. Isn’t that enough? To hell with Gormenghast.’
In the unbearable silence the Countess and those present could hear the sound of someone approaching rapidly.
But it was an eternity before the footsteps came to rest and a distraught figure stood before the Countess and waited with head bowed and trembling hands for permission to give his message. Dragging her gaze from the face of her son she turned at last to the messenger.
‘Well,’ she whispered, ‘what is it, man?’
He raised his head. For a few seconds he could not speak. His lips were apart but no sound came, and his jaws shook. In his eyes was such a light that caused Titus to move towards him with sudden fear.
‘Not Fuchsia! Not Fuchsia!’ he cried with a ghastly knowledge, even as he framed the words, that something had happened to her.
The man, still facing the Countess, said, ‘The Lady Fuchsia is drowned.’
At these words something happened to Titus. Something quite unpredictable. He now knew what he must do. He knew what he was. He had no fear left. The death of his sister like the last nail to be driven into his make-up had completed him, as a structure is completed, and becomes ready for use while the sound of the last hammer blow still echoes in the ears.
The death of the Thing had seen the last of his boyhood.
When the lightning killed her he had become a man. The elasticity of childhood had gone. His brain and body had become wound up, like a spring. But the death of Fuchsia had touched the spring. He was now no longer just a man. He was that rarer thing, a man in motion. The wound-up spring of his being recoiled. He was on his way.
And the agent of his purpose was his anger. A blind white rage had transformed him. His egotistic outburst, dramatic enough, and dangerous enough on its own account, was nothing to the fierce loosening of his tongue, that like a vent for the uprush of his rage and grief, amazed his mother, the messenger and the officers who had only known him as a reserved and moody figurehead.
Fuchsia dead! Fuchsia, his dark sister – his dear sister.
‘Oh God in Heaven, where?’ he cried. ‘Where was she found. Where is she now. Where? Where? I must go to her.’
He turned to his mother. ‘It is the skewbald beast,’ he said. ‘He has killed her. He has killed your daughter. Who else would kill her? Or touch a hair of her head, O braver than you ever knew, who never loved her. Oh, God, mother, get your captains posted. Every weapon’d man. My tiredness has gone. I will come at once. I know the window. It is not yet dark. We can surround him. But by boat, mother. That is the quickest way. There is no need for the North Headstones. Send out the boats. Every one. I saw him, mother, the killer of my sister.’
He turned again to the bearer of the shattering news.
‘Where is she now?’
‘A special room has been prepared by the Doctor near the hospital. He is with her.’
And then the voice of the Countess, low and deep. She was speaking to the Head Officer present.
‘The Carvers must be informed that they are needed, and every watertight boat finished or unfinished. All boats already in the castle to be drawn up alongside the west wall. All weapons to be distributed at once,’ and then, to the messenger who had spoken of where Fuchsia lay, ‘Lead the way.’
The Countess and Titus followed the man. No word was spoken until they were within a stone’s throw of the hospital, when the Countess without turning to Titus said:
‘If it were not that you were ill …’
‘I am not ill,’ said Titus, interrupting.
‘Very well, then,’ said the Countess. ‘It is upon your head.’
‘I welcome it,’ said Titus.
While he could feel no fear, he was at the same time surprised at his own audacity. But it was so small an emotion compared with the hollow ache with which the knowledge of Fuchsia’s death had filled him. To be brave among the living – what was that compared with the bonfire of his rage against Steerpike at whose door he laid the responsibility for Fuchsia’s death? And the tides of the loneliness that had surged over him, dro
wned him in seas that knew no fear of the living, even of a mother such as his own.
When the door was opened they saw the tall thin figure of Dr Prunesquallor standing at an open window, his hands behind his back, very still and unnaturally upright. It was a small room with low rafters and bare boards on the floor, but it was meticulously clean. It was obvious that it had been freshly scrubbed and washed, boards, walls and ceiling.
Against the wall to the left was a stretcher supported at either end upon wooden boxes. On the stretcher lay Fuchsia, a sheet drawn up to her shoulders, her eyes closed. It seemed hardly her.
The Doctor turned. He did not seem to recognize either Titus or the Countess. He stared through them, only touching Titus’ arm in a gentle way as he passed, for he had no sooner seen the mother and the brother of his favourite child than he had begun to move to the door.
His cheeks were wet, and his glasses had become so blurred that he stumbled when he reached the door, and could not find the handle. Titus opened the door for him and for a moment caught a glimpse of his friend in the corridor outside as he removed his glasses and began to wipe them with his silk handkerchief, his head bowed, his weak eyes peering at the spectacles in his hand with that kind of concentration that is grief.
Left together in the room the mother and son stood side by side in worlds of their own. Had they not both been moved it might well have been embarrassing. Neither knew nor cared what was going on in the breast of the other.
The face of the Countess showed nothing, but once she drew the corner of the sheet up a little further over Fuchsia’s shoulder, with an infinite gentleness, as though she feared her child might feel the cold and so must take the risk of waking her.
SEVENTY-SEVEN
Knowing that he had several hours to wait before it would be dark enough for him to venture forth, Steerpike had dropped off to sleep in the canoe. As he slept the canoe began to bob gently on the inky water a few feet from where the flood swam through the window entrance. This entrance, seen from the inside of the ‘cavern’, was like a square of light. But the breast of the great bay, which, from the dark interior of Steerpike’s refuge, appeared luminous was, in reality, as the moments passed, drawing across its nakedness shawl after shawl of shadow.
When Steerpike had slid from the outer world, and through the brimming window, seven hours earlier, he had of course been able to see exactly what kind of a room he had entered. The light striking through the window had glanced upwards off the water and lit the interior.
His first reaction had been one of intense irritation for there were no corridors leading from the room and no stairways to the floor above. The doors had been closed when the flood had filled the room so that they were immovable with the weight of water. Had the inner doors been open he might have slid through their upper airways into ampler quarters. But no. The place was virtually a cave – a cave with a few mouldering pictures hanging precariously a few inches above high-water mark.
As such he suspected it from the first. It was no more than a trap. But to paddle out of its mouth and across the open water seemed to him more dangerous than to remain where he was for the few hours that remained before darkness fell.
A breeze was stirring the surface of the wide freshwater bay, blowing from the direction of the mountain and a kind of gooseflesh covered the surface of the water. These ripples began to move into the cave, one after another and the canoe rocked with a gentle side-to-side motion.
On either side of the ‘bay’ the two identical headlands, with their long lines of windows, had become silhouetted against the dusk.
Between them the ruffled waters faced the sky with an unusual agitation – a shuffling backwards and forwards of its surface which, though by no means dangerous in itself either to the smallest craft or even to a swimmer, was nevertheless peculiar and menacing.
Within a minute the breathless quiet of the evening had become something very different. The hush of dusk, the trance of stone-grey light was broken. There was no break in the silence but the air, the water, the castle and the darkness were in conclave.
A chill breath from the lungs of this conspiracy, stealing across the gooseflesh water must have moved into the cave-like chamber where Steerpike slept, for he sat up suddenly in his canoe and turning his face at once to the window, the small hairs rose along his spine and his mouth became the mouth of a wolf, for as the blood shone behind the lenses of his eyes, his thin and colourless lips parted in a snarl that extended like an open gash a mask of wax.
As his brain raced, he plucked at the paddle and whisked the boat to within a few feet of the window, where, in absolute darkness himself he could command a view of the bay.
What he had seen had been the reflections only of what he now stared at in their entirety – for from where the canoe had been stationed the upper section of the window had been hidden by a hanging sail of wallpaper. What he had seen had been the reflections of a string of lights. What he now saw were the lanterns, where they burned at the bows of a hundred boats. They were strung out in a half-circle that even as he watched was drawing in his direction thick as fireflies.
But worse than all this was a kind of light upon the water immediately outside the window. Not a strong light, but more than he could account for by the last of the day. Nor was it natural in colour. There was something of green in the faint haze from which he now turned his eyes again. For with every moment the boats were narrowing the distance between themselves and the castle walls.
Whether or not there were other interpretations of the spectacle before him it was not for him at this critical moment to give them the shadow of a thought. It was for him to assume the bloodiest and the worst.
It was for him to suppose that they were not only ranged across the bay in search of him – that they knew he was in hiding somewhere close at hand between the twin headlands – but more than this, that they knew the very window through which he had passed. He must assume that he had been seen as he entered this trap and that not only were his pursuers fanned out across the water and eager for his blood, but the cold sheen upon the water immediately ahead of him was cast from lanterns or torches that were even now burning from the window above his head.
Whether or not his only hope was to slip out of the cave and, risking a fusillade from the window above, make all speed across the waters of the bay before the approaching boats not only closed their ranks as they converged, but made the cave-mouth livid with the concentration of their lights – whether he should do this, and by so doing and gaining speed in the dusk, fly like a swallow across the face of the bay and swerving to and fro as only this canoe had power to do – hope to pierce the lanterned ring, and so, running his boat alongside one or other of the creepered headlands, climb the coarse foliage of the walls – whether he should do this or not, it was now, in any event, too late for a brilliant yellow light was shining outside the window and danced on the choppy water.
A pair of heavy castle-craft, somewhat the shape of barges, creeping in along the lapping walls, from either side of Steerpike’s window, were the cause of the yellow light which the murderer had observed to his horror as it danced upon the water, for these heavy boats bristled with torches; sparks flew over the flood and died hissing upon its surface. The scene about the opening of the cave had been transformed from one of dark and anonymous withdrawal to a firelit stage of water, upon which every eye was turned. The stone supports of the window, weather-scarred and ancient as they were had become things of purest gold, and their reflections plunged into the black water as though to ignite it. The stones that surrounded the windows were lit with equal brilliance. Only the mouth of the room, with the firelit water running through and into the swallowing blackness of the throat beyond, broke the glow. For there was something more than black about the intensity of that rough square of darkness.
It was not for these barges to do more than to remain with their square noses in line with the stone edges of the window. It was for them to make the
place as bright as day. It was for the arc of lanterned boats to close in and to form the thickset audience, armed and impenetrable.
But those that manned the barges and held the torches aloft, and those that rowed or paddled the hundreds of boats that were now within a stone’s throw of the ‘cave’ were not the only witnesses.
High above the entrances to Steerpike’s retreat the scores of irregularly positioned windows were no longer gaping emptily as when Titus stared up at them from the canoe and felt the chill of that forsaken place. They were no longer empty. At every window there was a face: and every face directed downwards to where the illuminated waves rose and fell to such an extent that the shadows of the men upon the barges leapt up and down the firelit walls, and the sound of splashing could be heard below them as combers of rainwater ran and broke upon the castle walls.
The wind was making, and certain of the boats that formed the chain found it difficult to keep in position. Only the watchers from above were unaffected by the worsening weather. A formidable contingent had travelled by land. There were few who had been that way before and none who had travelled so far afield as the Coupée and the Headstones of Little Sark, within the last five years.
The Countess had journeyed by water but it had been necessary for Titus to travel overland at the head of the leading phalanx, for it was no easy itinerary with the dusk falling and the innumerable choices to be made at the junctures of passages and roof tops. With his return journey fresh in his mind he had no choice but to put his knowledge at the disposal of the many hundreds whose duty it would be to scour the Headstones. But he was in no condition to make that long journey again on the same day, without assistance. While the officials were casting about for some appropriate conveyance Titus remembered the chair on poles in which he was carried, blindfolded, on his tenth birthday. A runner was despatched for this, and some time later the ‘land army’ moved to the north with Titus leaning back in his ‘mountain chair’, a jug of water in the wooden well at his feet, a flask of brandy in his hand and a loaf of bread and a bag of raisins on the seat beside him. At different times during the journey, when crossing from one roof to another or when climbing difficult stairways, he would descend from the chair and continue on foot – but for most of the way it was possible for him to lean back in the chair, his muscles relaxed, merely giving fierce instructions to the Captain of the land searchers when occasion arose. A dark anger was gaining strength in him.