The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

‘Cheeta,’ they shouted, ‘where are you? We’re going riding.’

‘Then go!’ said Cheeta, between her pretty teeth.

Great blond men were draped over the banisters, two floors below.

‘Come on, Cheeta,’ they yelled. ‘We’ve got your pony ready.’

‘Then shoot the brute,’ she muttered.

She turned her head from Titus for a moment, and all her features, orientated thus, provoked a new relationship … another beauty.

‘Leave her alone,’ cried the young ladies, who knew that with Cheeta alongside there would be no fun for them. ‘She doesn’t want to come … she told us so,’ they squealed.

Nor did she. She sat quite upright, her eyes fixed upon the young man.

SEVENTY

He had been found lying asleep in an outhouse several days previously by one of the servants on his midnight round. His clothing was drenched, and he was shivering and babbling to himself. The servant, amazed, had been on his way to his master, but had been stopped in his tracks by Cheeta on her way to bed. Being asked why he was running, the servant told Miss Cheeta of the trespasser and together they made their way to the outhouse and there he was, to be sure, curled up and shuddering.

For a long while, she had done nothing but stare at the profile of the young man. It was, taken all in all, a young face, even a boyish face, but there had been something else about it not easy to understand. It was a face that had looked out on many a scene. It was as though the gauze of youth had been plucked away to discover something rougher, something nearer the bone. It seemed that a sort of shade passed to and fro over his face; an emanation of all he had been. In short, his face had the substance out of which his life was composed. It was nothing to do with the shadowy hollow beneath his cheekbones or the minute hieroglyphics that surrounded his eyes; it was to her as though his face was his life …

But also, she had felt something else. An instantaneous attraction.

‘Say nothing of this,’ she had said, ‘do you understand? Nothing. Unless you wish to be dismissed.’

‘Yes, madam.’

‘Can you lift him?’

‘I think so, madam.’

‘Try.’

With difficulty he had raised Titus in his arms and together the three of them made their midnight journey to the green room at the end of the east wing. There, in this remote corner of the house, they laid him on a bed.

‘That will be all,’ said the scientist’s daughter.

SEVENTY- ONE

Three days had passed since that night when she had tended him. One would have thought that he must surely have opened his eyes if only because of his nearness to her peculiar beauty, but no, his eyes remained shut, or if not, then they saw nothing.

With an efficiency almost unattractive in a woman so compelling, she dealt with the situation, as though she were doing no more than pencilling her eyebrows.

It is true that on the second day of her patient’s fever she was amazed at the farrago of his outpourings, for he had struggled in bed and cried out again and again, in a language made almost foreign by the number of places and of people; words she had never heard of, with one out-topping all … Gormenghast.

‘Gormenghast.’ That was the core and gist of it. At first Cheeta could make nothing of it, but gradually in between the feverish repetition of the word, were names and phrases that slowly fell into place and made for her some kind of picture.

Cheeta, the sophisticate, found herself, as she listened, drawn into a zone, a layer of people and happenings, that twisted about, inverted themselves, moved in spirals, yet were nevertheless consistent within their own confines. From the cold centre of elegance and a life of scheduled pleasure she was now being shown the gulches of a barbarous region. A world of capture and escape. Of violence and fear. Of love and hate. Yet above all, of an underlying calm. A calm built upon a rock-like certainty and belief in some immemorial tradition.

Here, tossing and sweating on the bed below her, lay a fragment, so it seemed, of a great tradition: for all the outward movement utterly still in the confidence of its own hereditary truth. Cheeta, for the first time in her life, felt in the presence of blood so much bluer than her own. She ran her little tongue along her lips.

There he lay in the dusk of the green room, while the voices of the house below him rang faintly down the corridors, and the riding horses stamped in their impatience.

‘Can you hear me … O can you hear me … Can you …?’

‘Is that my son …? Where are you … child?’

‘Where are you, mother …?’

‘Where I always am …’

‘At your high window, mother, a-swarm with birds?’

‘Where else?’

‘Can no one tell me …?’

‘Tell you what …?’

‘Where in the world I am …’

‘Not easily … not easily.’

‘You were never easy with your sums, young man. Never.’

‘O fold me in the foul folds of your gown, O Mr Bellgrove, sir.’