shoulders merely seeing to it that she should not break more bones than was necessary. In point of fact she broke none, her peerless flesh sustaining only a few purple bruises.
Steerpike had now three figures in a row among the cold ferns. While he was swarming back, Fuchsia was saying, ‘No, I don’t want to.
‘Silence, you child,’ answered the Countess. ‘Don’t waste time. As I tell you, girl! as I tell you! At once.’
‘No, Mother, no –’
‘Fuchsia dear,’ said Prunesquallor, ‘you will be out in a brace of shakes and ladders! ha, ha, ha! It will save time, gipsy! Hurry now.’
‘Don’t stand there gawping, girl!’
Fuchsia glanced at the Doctor. How unlike himself he looked, the sweat pouring from his forehead and running between his eyes.
‘Up you go! up you go,’ said Prunesquallor.
Fuchsia turned to the ladder and after missing her foothold once or twice disappeared above them.
‘Good girl!’ shouted the Doctor. ‘Find your Nannie Slagg! Now, then, now, then, your Ladyship, up you go.’
The Countess began to climb, and although the sound of the wooden stubs being broken on either side of the pole accompanied her, yet her progress towards the window held a prodigious inevitability in every step she took and in every heave of her body. Like something far larger than life, her dark dress shot with the red of the fire, she ploughed her way upwards to the window. There was no one on the other side to help her, for Steerpike was in the library, and yet for all the contortions of her great frame, for all the ungainliness of her egress, a slow dignity pervaded her which gave even to the penultimate view – that of her rear disappearing hugely into the night – a feeling rather of the awesome than the ludicrous.
There remained only Lord Sepulchrave, Prunesquallor, Flay and Steerpike.
Prunesquallor and Steerpike turned to Sepulchrave quickly in order to motion him to follow his wife, but he had disappeared. There was not a moment to lose. The flames were crackling around them. Mixed with the smell of the smoke was the smell of burning leather. There were few places where he could be, unless he had walked into the flames. They found him in an alcove a few feet from the ladder, a recess still hidden to some extent from the enveloping heat. He was smoothing the backs of a set of the Martrovian dramatists bound in gold fibre and there was a smile upon his face that sent a sick pang through the bodies of the three who found him. Even Steerpike watched that smile uneasily from beneath his sandy eyebrows. Saliva was beginning to dribble from the corner of his Lordship’s sensitive mouth as the corners curved upwards and the teeth were bared. It was the smile one sees in the mouth of a dead animal when the loose lips are drawn back and the teeth are discovered curving towards the ears.
‘Take them, take your books, your Lordship, and come, come quickly!’ said Steerpike fiercely. ‘Which do you want?’
Sepulchrave turned about sharply and with a superhuman effort forced his hands stiffly to his sides and walked at once to the pine ladder. ‘I am sorry to have kept you,’ he said, and began to climb swiftly.
As he was lowering himself on the far side of the window they heard him repeat as though to himself: ‘I am sorry to have kept you.’ And then there was a thin laugh like the laugh of a ghost.
There was no longer any time for deciding who was to follow whom; no time for chivalry. The hot breath of the fire was upon them. The room was rising around them, and yet Steerpike managed to keep himself back.
Directly Flay and the Doctor had disappeared he ran up the pine-bole like a cat, and sat astride the window ledge a moment before he descended on the far side. With the black autumn night behind him he crouched there, a lurid carving, his eyes no longer black holes in his head but glittering in the blood red light like garnets.
‘Nice work,’ he said to himself for the second time that night. ‘Very nice work.’ And then he swung his other leg over the high sill.
‘There is no one left,’ he shouted down into the darkness.
‘Sourdust,’ said Prunesquallor, his thin voice sounding singularly flat. ‘Sourdust has been left.’
Steerpike slid down the pole.
‘Dead?’ he queried.
‘He is,’ said Prunesquallor.
No one spoke.
As Steerpike’s eyes became accustomed to the darkness he noticed that the earth surrounding the Countess was a dusky white, and that it was moving, and it was a few moments before he realized that white cats were interweaving about her feet.
Fuchsia, directly her mother had followed her down the ladder, began to run, stumbling and falling over the roots of trees and moaning with exhaustion as she staggered on. When after an eternity she had reached the main body of the Castle she made her way to the stables, and at last had found and ordered three grooms to saddle the horses and proceed to the library. Each groom led a horse by the side of the one he rode. On one of these, Fuchsia was seated, her body doubled forward. Broken by the shock she was weeping, her tears threading their brackish paths over the coarse mane of her mount.
By the time they had reached the library the party had covered some distance of the return journey. Flay was carrying Irma over his shoulder. Prunesquallor had Mrs Slagg in his arms and Titus was sharing the warbler’s nest in the Countess’s bosom. Steerpike, watching Lord Sepulchrave very closely, was guiding him in the wake of the others, deferentially holding his Lordship’s elbow.
When the horses arrived the procession had practically come to a standstill. The beasts were mounted, the grooms walking at their sides holding the bridles, and staring over their shoulders with wide, startled eyes at the raw patch of light that danced in the darkness like a pulsating wound between the straight black bones of the pine trees.
During their slow progress they were met by indistinguishable crowds of servants who stood to the side of the
