The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

candlestick. I do not know why but he started at my entrance, as though I had surprised him, but when he turned his head back again, after cursing me – but he meant no harm to me for all his irritability – he misjudged his distance from the flame, his beard swept across it and a moment later was alight. I rushed to him but his hair and clothing had already caught. There were no rugs or curtains in the room with which to smother the fire. There was no water. But I beat the flames with my hands. But the fire grew fiercer and in his pain and panic he caught hold of me and I began to burn.’

The pupils of the young man’s dark eyes dilated as he recounted the partial fabrication, for Barquentine’s grip upon him had been no dream, and his brow began to sweat again, and a terrible authenticity appeared to give weight to his words.

‘I could not escape, Doctor; I was caught and held against his burning body. Every moment the fire grew fiercer – and my burns more terrible. There was only one thing I could do to get away. I knew I must reach the water that lay below his window. And so I ran. I ran with his arm gripping me. I ran to the window and jumped into the moat – and there in the cold black water, his hands at last gave way. I could not hold him up. It was all I could do to reach the side of the moat, and there, I think I fainted – and when I came round, I found I was naked and I came to your door … but the moat must be dragged and the old man must be found … in the name of decency he must be found and given a true burial. It is for me to carry on his work. I … I … cannot tell … you more … I am … not …’

He turned his head on the pillow, and in spite of his pains fell asleep. He had played his card and could afford to rest.

FORTY-THREE

‘My dear,’ said Bellgrove, ‘it is surely not for your betrothed to be kept waiting quite so long even though he is only the Headmaster of Gormenghast. Why on earth must you always be so late? Good grief, Irma, it isn’t as though I’m a green youth who finds it romantic to be drizzled on by the stinking sky. Where have you been for pity’s sake?’

‘I am inclined not to answer you!’ cried Irma. ‘The humiliation of it! Is it nothing to you that I should take a pride in my appearance – that I should make myself beautiful for you? You man, you. It breaks one’s heart.’

‘I do not complain lightly, my love,’ replied Bellgrove. ‘As I say, I cannot stand bad weather like a younger man. This was your idea of a place of rendezvous. It could hardly have been worse chosen, with not so much as a shrub to squat under. Rheumatism is on its way. My feet are soaked. And why? Because my fiancee, Irma Prunesquallor, a lady of quite exceptional talents in other directions – they always are in other directions – who has the entire day in which to pluck at her eyebrows, harvest her sheaves of long grey hair, and so on, cannot organize herself – or else has grown shall we say casual in regard to her suitor? Shall we say casual, my dear?’

‘Never!’ cried Irma. ‘O never! my dear one. It is only my longing that you should find me worthy that keeps me at my toilet. O my dearest, you must forgive me. You must forgive me.’

Bellgrove gathered his gown about him in great swathes. He had been staring into the gloomy sky while he had spoken but now, at last he turned his noble face to her. The landscape all about them was hazy with rain. The nearest tree was a grey blur two fields away.

‘You ask me to forgive you,’ said Bellgrove. He closed his eyes. ‘And so I do, and so I do. But remember, Irma, that a punctual wife would please me. Perhaps you could practise a little so that when the time comes I will have nothing to complain of. And now, we will forget about it, shall we?’

He turned his head from her, for he had not yet learned to admonish her without grinning weakly with the joy of it. And so, with his face averted, he bared his rotten teeth at a distant hedgerow.

She took his arm and they began to walk.

‘My dear one,’ she said.

‘My love?’ said Bellgrove.

‘It is my turn to complain, is it not?’

‘It is your turn, my love!’ (He lifted his leonine head and shook the rain happily from his mane.)

‘You won’t be cross, dear?’

He raised his eyebrows and closed his eyes.

‘I will not be cross, Irma. What is it that you wish to say?’

‘It’s your neck, dearest.’

‘My neck? What of it!’

‘It is very dirty, dear one. It has been for weeks … do you think …’

But Bellgrove had stiffened at her side. He bared his teeth in a snarl of impotence.

‘O stinking hell,’ he muttered. ‘O stinking, rotten hell.’

FORTY-FOUR

Mr Flay had been sitting for over an hour at the entrance to his cave. The air was breathless and the three small clouds in the soft grey sky had been there all day.

His beard had grown very long and his hair that was once cropped close to the skull was now upon his shoulders. His skin had darkened with the sun and the last few years of hardship had brought new lines to his face.

He was by now a part of the woods, his eyesight sharp as a bird’s, and his hearing as quick. His footsteps had become noiseless. The cracking of his knee joints had disappeared. Perhaps the heat of the summer had baked the trouble out of them for his clothes being as ragged as foliage his knees were for the most part bare to the sun.

He must surely have been made for the woods, so congruously had he become dissolved into a world of branches, ferns and streams. And yet for all his mastery of the woods, for all that he had been absorbed into the wilderness of the endless trees, as though he were but another branch – for all this, his thoughts were never far from that gaunt pile of masonry that, ruinous and forbidding as it was, was nevertheless, the only home he had ever known.

But Flay, for all his longing to return to his birthplace was no sentimentalist in exile. His thoughts when they turned to the castle were by no means in the nature of reveries. They were hard, uneasy, speculative thoughts which far from returning to his early memories of the place were concerned with the nature of things as they were.