The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

‘There’s nearly always clouds on top of the Mountain,’ said Fuchsia.

‘Aren’t there any, dear?’

‘No,’ said Fuchsia. ‘Why aren’t there?’

Fuchsia realized that Mrs Slagg knew virtually nothing, but the long custom of asking her questions was a hard one to break down. This realization that grown-ups did not necessarily know any more than children was something against which she had fought. She wanted Mrs Slagg to remain the wise recipient of all her troubles and the comforter that she had always seemed, but Fuchsia was growing up and she was now realizing how weak and ineffectual was her old guardian. Not that she was losing her loyalty or affection. She would have defended the wrinkled midget to her last breath if necessary; but she was isolated within herself with no one to whom she could run with that unquestioning confidence – that outpouring of her newest enthusiasms – her sudden terrors – her projects – her stories.

‘I think I’ll go out,’ she said, ‘for a walk.’

‘Again?’ said Mrs Slagg, stopping for a moment the rocking of her arms. ‘You go out such a lot now, don’t you? Why are you always going away from me?’

‘It’s not from you,’ said Fuchsia; ‘it’s because I want to walk and think. It isn’t going away from you. You know it isn’t.’

‘I don’t know anything,’ said Nannie Slagg, her face puckered up. ‘But I know you never went out all the summer, did you dear? And now that it is so temper-some and cold you are always going out into the nastiness and getting wet or frozen every day. Oh, my poor heart. Why? Why every day?’

Fuchsia pushed her hands into the depths of the big pockets of her red dress.

It was true she had deserted her attic for the dreary moors and the rocky tracts of country about Gormenghast. Why was this? Had she suddenly outgrown her attic that had once been all in all to her? Oh no; she had not outgrown it, but something had changed ever since that dreadful night when she saw Steerpike lying by the window in the darkness. It was no longer inviolate – secret – mysterious. It was no longer another world, but a part of the castle. Its magnetism had weakened – its silent, shadowy drama had died and she could no longer bear to revisit it. When last she had ventured up the spiral stairs and entered the musty and familiar atmosphere, Fuchsia had experienced a pang of such sharp nostalgia for what it had once been to her that she had turned from the swaying motes that filled the air and the shadowy shapes of all that she had known as her friends; the cobwebbed organ, the crazy avenue of a hundred loves – turned away, and stumbled down the dark staircase with a sense of such desolation as seemed would never lift. Her eyes grew dim as she remembered these things; her hands clenched in her deep pockets.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I have been out a lot. Do you get lonely? If you do, you needn’t, because you know I love you, don’t you? You know that, don’t you?

She thrust her lower lip forward and frowned at Mrs Slagg, but this was only to keep her tears back, for nowadays Fuchsia had so lonely a feeling that tears were never far distant. Never having had either positive cruelty or kindness shown to her by her parents, but only an indifference, she was not conscious of what it was that she missed – affection.

It had always been so and she had compensated herself by weaving stories of her own Future, or by lavishing her own love upon such things as the objects in her attics, or more recently upon what she found or saw among the woods and waste lands.

‘You know that, don’t you?’ Fuchsia repeated.

Nannie rocked Titus more vigorously than was necessary and by the pursing of her lips indicated that his Lordship was asleep and that she was speaking too loudly.

Then Fuchsia came up to her old nurse and stared at her brother. The feeling of aversion for him had disappeared, and though as yet the lilac-eyed creature had not affected her with any sensation of sisterly love, nevertheless she had got used to his presence in the Castle and would sometimes play with him solemnly for half an hour or so at a time.

Nannie’s eyes followed Fuchsia’s.

‘His little Lordship,’ she said, wagging her head, ‘it’s his little Lordship.’

‘Why do you love him?’

‘Why do I love him! oh, my poor, weak heart! Why do I love him, stupid? How could you say such a thing?’ cried Nannie Slagg. ‘Oh my little Lordship thing. How could I help it – the innocent notion that he is! The very next of Gormenghast, aren’t you, my only? The very next of all. What did your cruel sister say, then, what did she say?

‘He must go to his cot now, for his sleep, he must, and to dream his golden dreams.’

‘Did you talk to me like that when I was a baby,’ asked Fuchsia.

‘Of course I did,’ said Mrs Slagg. ‘Don’t be silly. Oh, the ignorance of you! Are you going to tidy your room for me now?’

She hobbled to the door with her precious bundle. Every day she asked this same question, but never waited for an answer, knowing that whatever it was, it was she who would have to make some sort of order out of the chaos.

Fuchsia again turned to the window and stared at the Mountain whose shape down to the least outcrop had long since scored its outline in her mind.

Between the castle and Gormenghast Mountain the land was desolate, for the main part empty wasteland, with large areas of swamp where undisturbed among the reedy tracts the waders moved. Curlews and peewits sent their thin cries along the wind. Moorhens reared their young and paddled blackly in and out of the rushes. To the east of Gormenghast Mountain, but detached from the trees at its base, spread the undulating darkness of the Twisted Woods. To the west the unkempt acres, broken here and there with low stunted trees bent by the winds into the shape of hunchbacks.

Between this dreary province and the pine wood that surrounded the West Wing of the castle, a dark, shelving plateau rose to a height of about a hundred to two hundred feet – an irregular tableland of greeny-black rock, broken and scarred and empty. It was beyond these cold escarpments that the river wound its way about the base