The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

‘We have the details,’ said Bellgrove in so quick and relieved a voice, that it was no wonder that Barquentine darted at him suspiciously.

‘And what’s your bloody joy in that?’ he hissed. ‘By hell, there’s perfidy somewhere!’

‘My joy,’ said Bellgrove twice as slowly and ponderously, ‘springs from the knowledge which my staff must share with me, as men of culture, that a considerable poem is in store for them this afternoon.’

Barquentine made a noise in his throat.

‘And the boy, Titus,’ he snapped. ‘Does he know what is expected of him?’

‘The seventy-seventh earl will do his duty,’ said Bellgrove.

This last retort of the headmaster’s had not been heard by Titus for the boy had found behind him in that darkness that, where he had thought the wall of the corridor would support him as he leaned back in a sudden tiredness – there was no wall at all. In breathless silence he had got to his hands and knees and crawled into emptiness, through a narrow opening, and when he had come to a damp barrier of stones, had found that a tunnel led to his right, a tunnel that descended in a series of shallow stairs. He did not know that a few minutes later, Barquentine was to strike his way down the centre of the corridor of statues, the staff dividing to let him pass, nor that after the staff had disappeared in their original direction, that Bellgrove had returned alone, and had whispered thickly, ‘Come out, Titus, come out at once and report to your headmaster,’ and receiving no response had himself worked his way behind the stone only to find himself baffled and defeated in the empty darkness.

TWENTY-FOUR

The floor of the quadrangle was of a pale whitish-yellow brick, a pleasant mellow colour, soothing to the eye. The bricks had been laid so that their narrow surfaces faced upwards, a device which must have called for twice as many as would otherwise have been necessary. But what gave the floor of the quadrangle its peculiar character was the herring-bone pattern which the artificers had followed many hundred years ago.

Blurred, and worn as the yellow bricks had become, yet there was a vitality about the surface of the quadrangle, as though the notion of the man who had once, long ago, given orders that the bricks were to be laid in such and such a way, was still alive. The bricks had breath in them. To walk across this quadrangle was to walk across an idea.

The pillars of the cloisters had been painted, a dreadful idea, for the dove grey stone of which they were constructed could not have harmonized more subtly with the pale yellow brickwork from which they seemed to grow. They had, nevertheless, been painted a deep and most oppressive red.

It is true, that on the following day, an army of boys would be set to work in scraping the colour off again, but on the one day of the year when the quadrangle came into its own as the setting for the poet’s declamation, it seemed doubly outrageous to smother up the soft grey stone.

The Poet’s Rostrum set against the red pillars glowed and darkened only to glow again in the afternoon sunlight. The branch of a tree fluttered across the face of the sun, so that the quadrangle which was filled with benches appeared on the move, for the flickering shadows of the leaves swam to and fro as the high branch swayed in the breeze.

The silent congregation, seated solemnly on their benches, stared over their shoulders at the gate through which the Poet would, at any moment, make his entrance. It was a year since anyone present had caught sight of that tall and awkward man, and then it was at this same ceremony, which, on that previous occasion, had taken place in a thin and depressing drizzle.

The Countess was seated in advance of the front row. Fuchsia’s chair was to her mother’s left. Standing beside them, with the sweat of irritable anxiety pouring down his face, was Barquentine with his eyes fixed (as were the eyes of the Countess and Fuchsia) not upon the Poet’s gate, but upon a small door in the south wall of the quadrangle through which Titus, who was over twenty minutes late, should long ago have come running.

Behind them in a long row, as though their yellow bench was a perch for black turkeys, sat the professors. Bellgrove, at their centre, in his zodiac gown was also staring at the small door in the wall. He took out a big grubby handkerchief and mopped his brow. At that moment the door was pulled open and three boys ran through and came panting up to Barquentine.

‘Well?’ hissed the old man. ‘Well? Have you found him?’

‘No, sir!’ they panted. ‘We can’t find him anywhere, sir.’

Barquentine ground the foot of his crutch against the pale bricks as though to ease his anger. Suddenly Steerpike appeared at his side as though out of the mellow ground. He bowed to the Countess while a shadow undulated across the irregular terrain of the scores of heads that filled the quadrangle. The Countess made no response. Steerpike straightened himself.

‘I can find no trace of the seventy-seventh earl,’ he said, addressing Barquentine.

‘Black blood!’ The voice of the cripple forced its way between his teeth. ‘This is the fourth time that the …’

‘That … the … what?’ The Countess launched the three short words as though they were made of lead. They fell heavily through the afternoon air.

Barquentine gathered his red rags of office about his stunted body, and turned his irritable head to the Countess who stared at him with ice in her eyes. The old man bowed, sucking at his teeth as he did so.

‘My lady,’ he said. ‘This is the fourth time in six months that the seventy-seventh earl has absented himself from a sacred …’

‘By the least hair of the child’s head,’ said the Countess, interrupting, in a voice of deadly deliberation – ‘if he should absent himself a hundred times an hour I will not have his misdemeanours bandied about in public. I will not have you mouth and blurt his faults. You will keep your observations in your own throat. My son is no chattel that you can discuss, Barquentine, with your pale lieutenant. Leave me. The occasion will proceed. Find a substitute for the boy from the tyros’ benches. You will retire.’

At that moment a murmur was heard from the populace behind them, for the Poet, preceded by a man in the skin of a horse, and with that animal’s tail trailing the bricks behind him as he paced slowly forwards, was to be seen emerging from the Gate. The Poet in his gown, with a beaker of moat water in his left hand and his manuscript in his right, followed the figure in the horse’s hide, with long awkward paces. His face was like a wedge. His small eyes flickered restlessly. He was pale with embarrassment and apprehension.

Steerpike had found a boy of about Titus’ age and height and instructed him in his role, which was simple