The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

that. It’s not respectful.’ She gazed. As the death-throes weakened in the sky, she watched with big, perplexed eyes. Then she smiled for the first time. ‘Do you give names to other things like that?’

‘Sometimes,’ said Steerpike. ‘I have a disrespectful nature.’

‘Do you give people names?’

‘I have done.’

‘Have you got one for me?’

Steerpike sucked the end of his swordstick and raised his straw-coloured eyebrows. ‘I don’t think I have,’ he said. ‘I usually think of you as Lady Fuchsia.’

‘Do you call my mother anything?’

‘Your mother? Yes.’

‘What do you call my mother?’

‘I call her the old Bunch of Rags,’ said Steerpike.

Fuchsia’s eyes opened wide and she stood still again. ‘Go away,’ she said.

‘That’s not very fair,’ said Steerpike. ‘After all, you asked me.’

‘What do you call my father, then? But I don’t want to know. I think you’re cruel,’ said Fuchsia breathlessly, ‘you who said you’d stop cruelty altogether. Tell me some more names. Are they all unkind – and funny?’

‘Some other time,’ said Steerpike, who had begun to feel chilly. ‘The cold won’t do your injuries any good. You shouldn’t be out walking at all, Prunesquallor thinks you’re in bed. He sounded very worried about you.’

They walked on in silence, and by the time they had reached the castle night had descended.

‘MEANWHILE’

The morning of the next day opened drearily, the sun appearing only after protracted periods of half-light, and then only as a pale paper disc, more like the moon than itself, as, for a few moments at a time it floated across some corridor of cloud. Slow, lack- lustre veils descended with almost imperceptible motion over Gormenghast, blurring its countless windows, as with a dripping smoke. The mountain appeared and disappeared a score of times during the morning as the drifts obscured it or lifted from its sides. As the day advanced the gauzes thinned, and it was in the late afternoon that the clouds finally dispersed to leave in their place an expanse of translucence, that stain, chill and secret, in the throat of a lily, a sky so peerless, that as Fuchsia stared into its glacid depths she began unwittingly to break and re-break the flower-stem in her hands.

When she turned her head away it was to find Mrs Slagg watching her with such a piteous expression that Fuchsia put her arms about her old nurse and hugged her less tenderly than was her wish, for she hurt the wrinkled midget as she squeezed.

Nannie gasped for breath, her body bruised from the excess of Fuchsia’s burst of affection, and a gust of temper shook her as she climbed excitedly onto the seat of a chair.

‘How dare you! How dare you!’ she gasped at last after shaking and wriggling a miniature fist all around Fuchsia’s surprised face. ‘How dare you bully me and hurt me and crush me into so much pain, you wicked thing, you vicious, naughty thing! You, whom I’ve always done everything for. You, whom I washed and brushed and dressed and spoiled and cooked for since you were the size of a slipper. You … you …’ The old woman began to cry, her body shaking underneath her black dress like some sort of jerking toy. She let go of the rail of the chair, crushed her fists into her tearful, bloodshot eyes, and, forgetting where she was, was about to run to the door, when Fuchsia jumped forward and caught her from falling. Fuchsia carried her to the bed and laid her down.

‘Did I hurt you very much?’

Her old nurse, lying on the coverlet like a withered doll in black satin, pursed her lips together and waited until Fuchsia, seating herself on the side of the bed, had placed one of her hands within range. Then her fingers crept forward, inch by inch, over the eiderdown, and with a sudden grimace of concentrated naughtiness she smacked Fuchsia’s hand as hard as she was able. Relaxing against the pillow after this puny revenge, she peered at Fuchsia, a triumphant gleam in her watery eyes.

Fuchsia, hardly noticing the malicious little blow, leant over and suffered herself to be hugged for a few moments.

‘Now you must start getting dressed,’ said Nannie Slagg. ‘You must be getting ready for your father’s Gathering, mustn’t you? It’s always one thing or another. “Do this. Do that.” And my heart in the state it is. Where will it all end? And what will you wear today? What dress will look the noblest for the wicked, tempestable thing?’

‘You’re coming, too, aren’t you?’ Fuchsia said.

‘Why, what a thing you are,’ squeaked Nannie Slagg, climbing down over the edge of the bed. ‘Fancy such an ignorous question! I am taking his little LORDSHIP, you big stupid!’

‘What! is Titus going, too?’

‘Oh, your ignorance,’ said Nannie, ‘“Is Titus going, too?” she says.’ Mrs Slagg smiled pityingly. ‘Poor, poor, wicked thing! what a querail!’ The old woman gave forth a series of pathetically unconvincing laughs and then put her hands on Fuchsia’s knees excitedly. ‘Of course he’s going,’ she said. ‘The Gathering is for him. It’s about this Birthday Breakfast.’

‘Who else is going, Nannie?’

Her old nurse began to count on her fingers.

‘Well, there’s your father,’ she began, placing the tips of her forefingers together and raising her eyes to the ceiling. ‘First of all there’s him, your father …’

As she spoke Lord Sepulchrave was returning to his room after performing the bi-annual ritual of opening the iron cupboard in the armoury, and, with the traditional dagger which Sourdust had brought for the occasion, of scratching on the metal back of the cupboard another half moon, which, added to the long line of similar half