‘They were completed last night, sir.’
‘Under your guidance, for what it’s worth?’
‘Under my guidance.’
They were approaching the first landing of the walnut stairs. Steerpike, as he trod behind Barquentine, took a pair of dividers from his pocket, and using them as though they were tongs, lifted up a hank of the old man’s hair from the back of his head, to reveal a neck as wry as a turtle’s. Amused by his success at being able to raise so thick a bunch of dirty grey hair without the cripple’s knowledge, he repeated the performance while the harsh voice continued and the crutch clack-clack-clacked down the long flight.
‘I shall inspect them immediately after breakfast.’
‘Quite so,’ said Steerpike.
‘Has it occurred to your suckling-brain that this day is hallowed by the very dirt of the castle. Eh? Eh? That it is only once a year, boy, once a year, that the Poet is honoured? Eh? Why, the lice in my beard alone know, but there it is, by the black souls of the unbelievers, there it is, a law of laws, a rite of the first water,
‘Quite the darkest,’ said Steerpike. ‘Any darker and it would have been black.’
‘By hell, it had better be,’ said Barquentine. ‘And the rostrum?’ he continued after crossing the gnarled landing of black walnut with its handrail missing from the banisters and the banisters themselves leaning in all directions and capped with dust as palings are capped with snow in wintertime.
‘And the rostrum?’
‘It is set and garnished,’ said Steerpike. ‘The throne for the Countess has been cleaned and mended, and the high chairs for the gentry, polished. The long forms are in place and fill the quadrangle.’
‘And the Poet,’ cried Barquentine. ‘Have you instructed him, as I ordered you? Does he know what is expected of him?’
‘His rhetoric is ready, sir.’
‘Rhetoric? Cat’s teeth! Poetry, you bastard, Poetry.’
‘It has been prepared, sir!’ Steerpike had re-pocketed his dividers and was now holding a pair of scissors (he seemed to have endless things in his pockets without disturbing the hang of his clothes) and was clipping off strands of Barquentine’s hair where it hung below his collar, and was whispering to himself in an absurd undertone, ‘Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor’ as the matted wisps fell upon the stairs.
They had reached another landing. Barquentine stopped for a moment to scratch himself. ‘He may have prepared his poem,’ he said turning his time-wasted visage to the slender, high shouldered young man, ‘but have you told him about the magpie? Eh?’
‘I told him that he must rise to his feet and declaim within twelve seconds of the magpie’s release from the wire cage. That while declaiming his left hand must be clasping the beaker of moat-water in which the Countess has previously placed the blue pebble from Gormenghast river.’
‘That is so, boy. And that he shall be wearing the Poet’s Gown, that his feet shall be bare, did you tell him that?’
‘I did,’ said Steerpike.
‘And the yellow benches for the Professors. Were they found?’
‘They were. In the south stables. I have had them re-painted.’
‘And the seventy-seventh earl, Lord Titus, does the pup know that he is to stand when the rest are seated, and seat himself when the rest are standing? Does the child know that – eh – eh – he is a scatterbrained thing – have you instructed him, you skinned candle? By the gripes of my seventy years, your forehead shines like a bloody iceberg!’
‘He has been instructed,’ said Steerpike.
Barquentine set out again on his descent to the eating-room. Once the walnut stairs had been negotiated, the Master of Ritual stuttered his way down the level corridors like something possessed. As the dust rose from the floor at each bang of the crutch, Steerpike, following immediately behind his master, amused himself by the invention of a peculiar dance, a kind of counterpoint to Barquentine’s jerking progress – a silent and elaborate improvisation, laced, as it were, with lewd and ingenious gestures.
TWENTY-THREE
The long summer minutes dragged by for Titus as he sat at his desk in the schoolroom where Professor Cutflower (who had once made a point of being at least one mental hour ahead of his class in whatever subject he happened to be taking, but who had long since decided to pursue knowledge on an equal footing with his pupils) was, with the lid of his high desk raised to hide his activity, taking a long pull at a villainous looking bottle with a blue label. The morning seemed endless …
But, for Barquentine with a score of preparations still to be completed, and with his rough tongue victimizing the workmen in the south quadrangle, the hours sped by with the speed of minutes.
And so, after what seemed an infinity to Titus and a whisk of time’s skirt to Barquentine, the morning that was both fleet and tardy, fructified and like a grape of air, in whose lucent body the earth was for that moment suspended – that phantom ripeness throbbed, that thing called
Before it had awoke to die on the instant of its waking, a score of bells and clocks had shouted midday and for a minute after its death, from near and far the clappers in their tents of rusted iron clanged across Gormenghast. It was as though no mechanism on earth could strike or chain that ghost of time. The clocks and the bells stuttered, boomed and rang. They trod with their iron imprint. They beat with their ancient fists and shouted with archaic voices – but the ghost was older.
Noon, ripe as thunder and silent as thought, had fled unfingered.
When every echo had died from even those clocks in the western outcrops, whose posthumous tolling was proverbial, so that the phrase, ‘late as a western chime’ was common in the castle – when every echo had died, Titus became aware of another sound.
