Steerpike could only cry, 'I understand,' and placed the monkey on the table where it walked rapidly to and fro, on all four legs, and then leapt onto one of his cabinets.
'And I will understand, if you have no wish for Satan.'
'Satan?' her voice was quite expressionless.
'Your monkey,' he said. 'Perhaps you would rather not be bothered, I thought he would please you. I made his clothes myself.'
'I don't know! I don't know!' cried Fuchsia suddenly. 'I don't know, I tell you, I don't 'know'!'
'Shall 1 take you to your room?'
'I will go myself.'
'As you please,' said Steerpike. 'But recall what I have said, I implore you. Try and understand; for I love you as the shadows love the castle.'
She turned her eyes to him. For a moment a light came into them, but in the next moment they appeared empty once more; empty and blank.
'I will never understand,' she said. 'It is no good however much you talk. I may have been wrong, I don't know. At any rate everything is changed. I don't feel the same any more. I want to go now.'
'Yes, of course. But will you grant me two small favours?'
'I suppose so,' said Fuchsia. 'What are they? I'm tired.'
'The first one is to ask you from the bottom of my heart to try to understand the strain which was put upon me, and to ask you whether, even if it is for the last time, you will meet me, as we have done for so long, meet me that we can talk for a little while - not about us, not about our trouble, not about my faults, not about this terrible chasm between us, but about all the happy things. Will you meet me tomorrow night, on those conditions?'
'I don't 'know'!' said 'Fuchsia. 'I don't know! But I suppose so. O God, I suppose so.'
'Thank you,' said Steerpike. 'Thank you, Fuchsia.'
'And my other request is only this. To know, whether, if you have no use for Satan, you will let me have him back - because he is yours... and...'
Steerpike turned his head from her and moved away a few paces.
'You would like to know, wouldn't you, Satan, to whom you belong...' he cried in a voice that was intended to sound gallant.
Fuchsia turned on him suddenly. It seemed that she had now realized the natural edge of her own intellect. She stared at the skewbald man with the monkey on his shoulder and then her words cut into the pale man like knives. 'Steerpike,' she said. ''I think you're going soft'.'
From that moment Steerpike knew that when she came on the following night he would seduce her. With so dark a secret to keep hidden, the daughter of the Countess would indeed be at his mercy. He had waited long enough. Now, upon the heels of his mistake, was the only time for him to strike. He had felt the first intimation of something slipping away beneath his feet. If guile and coercion failed him, then there could be no two ways about it. This was no time for mercy - and though she proved a tigress he would have her - and blackmail would follow as smoothly as a thundercloud.
FIFTY- SEVEN
When Flay heard the door open quietly below him he held his breath. For a few moments no one appeared and then a shape still darker than the darkness stepped out into the corridor and began to walk rapidly away to the south. When he heard the door close again he lowered himself from the great stone shelf that stretched above Steerpike's doorway and with his long bony arms outstretched to their full extent he dropped the odd few inches to the ground.
His frustration at being unable to gain any clue as to what had been going on inside the room was only equalled by his horror at finding that it was Fuchsia who had been the clandestine visitor.
He had sensed her danger. He knew it in his bones. But he could not have persuaded her, suddenly, in the night, that she was in peril. He could not have told her what kind of peril. He did not know himself. But he had acted on the spur of the moment and in whispering to her out of the darkness he hoped that she might be put upon her guard. if only for reasons of supernatural fear.
He followed Fuchsia only so far as to be sure that she was safely upon her way to her own rooms. It was all he could do not to call after her, or overtake her, for he was deeply perplexed and frightened. His love for her was something quite alone in his sour life. Fond as he was of Titus, it was the memory of Fuchsia, more than of the boy, or of any other living soul, that gave to the flinty darkness of his mind those touches of warmth which, along with his worship of Gormenghast, that abstraction of outspread stone, were seemingly so foreign to his nature.
But he knew that he must not speak to her tonight. The distracted way in which she moved, sometimes running and sometimes walking, gave him sufficient evidence of her fatigue and, he feared, of her misery.
He did not know what Steerpike had done or said but he knew he had hurt her, and if it were not that he felt upon the brink of gaining some kind of damning evidence, then he would have returned to that room from which Fuchsia had emerged, and on the reappearance of Steerpike, at the doorway, he would have plucked the skewbald face, barehanded, from the head.
As he returned in the direction of the fateful corridor, a heavy pain lay across his forehead and his thoughts pursued one another in a confusion of anger and speculation. He could not know that with every step he was travelling, not nearer to his room but further from it - further in time, further in space, nor that the night's adventures far from coming to a close were about to begin in earnest.
By now the night was well advanced, He had returned with a slow and somewhat dragging pace, lingering here and there to lean his head against the cold walls while his headache hammered behind his eyes and across his angular brow. Once he sat down for a hour upon the lowest step of a flight of age-hollowed stairs, his long beard falling upon his knee, and taking the sharp curve of them and falling again in a straggle of string-like hair to within a few inches of the floor.
