The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

vagabond? He had never from the first supposed the boy to be insane: though there were some in the Court who were convinced that Titus was mad as a bird, and had come for no other reason than to indulge a morbid curiosity.

No; Muzzlehatch had attended the Court because, although he would never have admitted it, he had become interested in the fate and future of the enigmatic creature he had found half drowned on the water-steps. That he was interested annoyed him for he knew, as he sat there, that his small brown bear would be pining for him and that every one of his animals was at that moment peering through the bars, fretful for his approach.

While such thoughts were in his head, a voice broke the stillness of the Court, asking permission to address the Magistrate.

Wearily, his Worship nodded his head, and then seeing who it was who had addressed him, he sat up and adjusted his wig. For it was Juno.

‘Let me take him,’ she said, her eloquent and engulfing eyes fixed upon his Worship’s face. ‘He is alone and resentful. Perhaps I could find out how best he could be helped. In the meantime, your Worship, he is hungry, travel-stained, and tired.’

‘I object, your Worship,’ said Inspector Acreblade. ‘All that this lady says is true. But he is here on account of serious infringement of the Law. We cannot afford to be sentimental.’

‘Why not?’ said the Magistrate. ‘His sins are not serious.’

He turned to her with a note almost of excitement in his tired old voice. ‘Do you wish to be responsible,’ he said, ‘both to me and for him?’

‘I take full responsibility,’ said Juno.

‘And you will keep in touch with me?’

‘Certainly, your Worship – but there’s another thing.’

‘What is that, madam?’

‘The young man’s attitude. I will not take him with me unless he wishes it. Indeed I cannot.’

The Magistrate turned to Titus and was about to speak when he seemed to change his mind. He returned his gaze to her.

‘Are you married, madam?’

‘I am not,’ said Juno.

There was a pause before the Magistrate spoke again.

‘Young man,’ he said, ‘this lady has offered to act as your guardian until you are well again … what do you say?’

All that was weak in Titus rose like oil to the surface of deep water. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you, madam. Thank you.’

FORTY-ONE

At first what was it but an apprehension sweet as far birdsong – a tremulous thing – an awareness that fate had thrown them together; a world had been brought into being – had been discovered? A world, a universe over whose boundaries and into whose forests they had not dared to venture. A world to be glimpsed, not from some crest of the imagination, but through simple words, empty in themselves as air, and sentences quite colourless and void; save that they set their pulses racing.

Theirs was a small talk – that evoked the measureless avenues of the night, and the green glades of noonday. When they said ‘Hullo!’ new stars appeared in the sky; when they laughed, this wild world split its sides, though what was so funny neither of them knew. It was a game of the fantastic senses; febrile; tender, tip-tilted. They would lean on the window-sill of Juno’s beautiful room and gaze for hours on end at the far hills where the trees and buildings were so close together, so interwoven, that it was impossible to say whether it was a city in a forest or a forest in a city. There they leaned in the golden light, sometimes happy to talk – sometimes basking in a miraculous silence.

Was Titus in love with his guardian, and was she in love with him? How could it be otherwise? Before either of them had formed the remotest knowledge of one another’s characters, they were already, after a few days, trembling at the sound of each other’s footsteps.

But at night, when she lay awake, she cursed her age. She was forty. A little more than twice as old as Titus. Next to others of her age, or even younger, she still appeared unparalleled, with a head like a female warrior in a legend – but with Titus beside her she had no choice but to come to terms with nature, and she felt an angry and mutinous pain in her bosom. She thought of Muzzlehatch and how he had swept her off her feet twenty years earlier and of their voyagings to outlandish islands, and of how his ebullience became maddening and of how they were equally strong-headed, equally wilful, and of how their travels together became an agony for them both, for they broke against one another like waves breaking against headlands.

But with Titus it was so different. Titus from nowhere – a youth with an air about him: carrying over his shoulders a private world like a cloak, and from whose lips fell such strange tales of his boyhood days, that she was drawn to the very outskirts of that shadowland. ‘Perhaps,’ she thought, ‘I am in love with something as mysterious and elusive as a ghost. A ghost never to be held at the breast. Something that will always melt away.’

And then she would remember how happy they sometimes were; and how every day they leaned on the sill together, not touching one another, but tasting the rarest fruit of all – the sharp fruit of suspense.

But there were also times when she cried out in the darkness biting her lips – cried out against the substance of her age: for it was now that she should be young; now above all other times, with the wisdom in her, the wisdom that was frittered away in her ‘teens’, set aside in her twenties, now, lying there, palpable and with forty summers gone. She clenched her hands together. What good was wisdom; what good was anything when the fawn is fled from the grove?

‘God!’ she whispered. – ‘Where is the youth that I feel?’ And then she would heave a long shuddering sigh and toss her head on the pillow and gather her strength together and laugh; for she was, in her own way, undefeatable.

She lifted herself on her elbow, taking deep draughts of the night air.