The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy (134 page)

He opened the door by degrees. On his right was the janitor’s cubicle. Directly he heard the sound of sand-paper scraping away behind the woodwork he recognized the breathing of the same old man who had held this watch-dog office from the early days and he knew that he was safe enough from that quarter.

But how to recognize the Earl? He had no light. Apart from the breathing of the janitor the dormitory was in absolute silence. There was no time for anything but to put his first notion into operation. There were two rows of beds that stretched away to the south-west. Why he turned to the right hand wall he did not know, but he did so without hesitation. Feeling for the end-rail of the first bed, he leaned over. ‘Lordship!’ he whispered. ‘Lordship!’ There was no reply. He turned to the second bed and whispered again. He thought he heard a head turn upon a pillow but that was all. He repeated this quick, harsh whisper at the foot of every bed. ‘Lordship … lordship! …’ but nothing happened and the time was slipping by. But at the fourteenth bed he repeated the whisper for a third time, for he could feel rather than hear a restlessness in the darkness below him. ‘Lordship! …’ he whispered again. ‘Lord Titus!’

Something sat up in the darkness and he could hear the catch in a boy’s breathing.

‘Have no fear,’ he whispered fiercely and his hand shook on the bedrail.

‘Have no fear. Are you Titus, the Earl?’

Immediately there was a reply. ‘Mister Flay? What are you doing here?’

‘Have you a coat and stockings?’

‘Yes.’

‘Put them on. Follow me. Explain later, lordship.’

Titus made no reply but slid over the side of his bed and after fumbling for his shoes and garments, clasped them like a bundle in his arms. Together they tip-toed to the dormitory door and, once without, walked rapidly in the darkness, the bearded man with his hand upon the boy’s elbow.

At the head of a staircase Titus got into his clothes, his heart beating loudly. Flay stood beside him and when he was ready they descended the stairs in silence.

As they drew nearer to the quadrangle Flay in short broken phrases was able to give Titus a disjointed idea of why he had been woken and whisked out into the night. Much as Titus sympathized with Flay’s suspicions and with his hatred of Steerpike, he was becoming afraid that Flay himself had gone mad. He could see that it was a very odd thing for Steerpike to spend the night leaning against a thorn tree, but equally there was nothing criminal in it. What, he wondered, in any event, was Flay doing to be there himself? and why should the long ragged creature of the woods be so anxious to have him with him? There was no doubt about the excitement of it all and that to be sought out was deeply flattering, but Titus had but a vague idea as to what Flay meant by needing a
witness
. A witness to what, and to prove what? Deeply as Titus suspected Steerpike of being intrinsically foul, yet he had never suspected him of actually doing other than his duty in the castle. He had never hated him for any understandable reason. He had simply hated him for being alive at all.

But when they reached the cloisters and when he peered along Flay’s outstretched arm as they lay upon the cold ground, and saw, all at once, after a long and abortive scrutiny of the thorn, the sharp profile, as angular as broken glass save for the doming forehead, then he knew that the gaunt man lying beside him was no more mad than himself, and that for the first time in his life he was tasting upon his tongue the acid of an intoxicating fear, of a fearful elation.

He also knew that to leave Steerpike where he was and to return to bed would be to deliberately turn away from a climate of sharp and dangerous breath.

He put his lips to his companion’s ear.

‘It’s Doctor’s quadrangle,’ he whispered.

Flay made no reply for several moments, for the remark made little sense to him.

‘What of it?’ he replied in an almost inaudible voice.

‘Very close – on our side,’ whispered Titus, ‘just across the quadrangle.’

This time there was a longer silence. Flay could see at once the advantage of yet another witness and also of a double bodyguard for the boy. But what would the Doctor think of his reappearance after all these years? Would he countenance this clandestine return to the castle – even in the knowledge that it was for the castle’s sake? Would he be prepared, in the future, to deny all knowledge of his, Mr Flay’s, return?

Again Titus whispered, ‘He is on our side.’

It seemed to Mr Flay that he was now so deeply involved that to argue each problem as it posed itself, to study each move would get him nowhere. Had he behaved in a rational way he would never have left the woods, and he would not now be lying upon his stomach, staring at a man leaning innocently against a tree. That the figure’s profile against the saffron dawn was sharp and cruel was no proof of anything.

No. It was for him to obey the impulse of the moment and to have the courage to risk the future. This was no time for anything but action.

The dawn, although fiercer in the east, was yet withheld. There was no light in the air – only a strip of intense colour. But at any moment a diffusion of the sunrise would begin and the sun would heave itself above the broken towers.

There was no time to lose. In a matter of minutes the quadrangle might become impossible to cross without attracting Steerpike’s attention, or Steerpike, judging himself to have sufficient light for whatever journey he wished to make, might slip away suddenly into the gloom and be irreparably lost among a thousand ways.

The Doctor’s house was on the far side of the quadrangle. To get there would necessitate a
détour
around the margin of the quadrangle for the thorn tree was at the centre.

Obeying Flay’s instructions Titus took off his shoes, and, like Flay with his boots, tied the laces together and slung them around his neck. It was Flay’s first idea that they should go together, but they had no sooner taken the first few silent paces than the sudden disappearance of Steerpike reminded Flay that it was only from the particular place where they had been lying that they could keep a check upon his movements. From the Doctor’s side of the quadrangle there would be no way of knowing whether or not he were still beneath the tree.

It was a full minute before Flay knew what he ought to do; and then, it was only because one of his hands, thrust deep into a ragged pocket, came upon a piece of chalk that a solution occurred to him. For a piece of white chalk meant only one thing to him. It meant a
trail
. But who was to blaze it? There was only one answer, and for two reasons.

In the first place, if one of them were to remain where he was and keep Steerpike under observation, and in the event of Steerpike’s moving away from the thorn tree, of following him and leaving chalk marks upon the ground or upon walls – then it were best for Flay to perform this none too simple function, not only because of his experience of stalking in the woods and of the danger of being discovered, but because secondly, in learning of what was afoot the Doctor would more readily and speedily accompany the young Earl than Mr Flay, the long lost exile, with whom a certain amount of time-wasting explanation would be a preliminary necessity.

And so Flay explained to Titus what he must do. He must waken the Doctor, silently. How this was to be done he did not know. He must leave this to the boy’s ingenuity. He must impress upon the Doctor that there was no time to be lost. It was not the moment in which to warn him that the whole venture was based upon guess-work – that in sober fact there was no cause to rouse the Doctor from his bed. That in the open air, there was not a leaf that was not whispering of treachery, not a stone but muttered its warning, was not the kind of argument to impress anyone wakened of a sudden from their sleep. And yet he must impress the Doctor with a sense of urgency. They must return across the quadrangle to where they were now crouching, for only from this position could they tell whether Steerpike were still beneath the tree, unless, as might have happened, the sun had suddenly risen. Had it not done so, and if Steerpike was still there beneath the thorn, then they would find Mr Flay where Titus had left him; but if Steerpike had gone, then Mr Flay would also have disappeared and it was for them to move swiftly to the thorn tree, and if there were enough light, to follow the chalk trail which Flay would have begun to blaze. If, however, it were still too dark to see the marks, they were to follow them directly there was enough light. It was for them to move sufficiently rapidly to be able to overtake Mr Flay, but absolute silence was the prime essential, for the gap between Flay and Steerpike might, for reasons of darkness, be, of necessity, perilously narrow.

Feeling his way from pillar to pillar, Titus began to make a circuit of the quadrangle. His stocking’d feet made no noise at all. Once a button on the sleeve of his coat clicked against an outcrop of masonry and sounded like the snapping of a twig, so that he stopped dead in his tracks and listened for a moment or two anxiously in the silence, but that was all and a little afterwards he was standing beneath the Doctor’s wall.

Meanwhile Flay lay stretched out beneath the pillar on the far side of the square, his bearded chin propped by his bony hands.

Not for a moment did his eyes wander from the silhouette of the head against the dawn. The yellow band had widened and still further intensified so that it was now not so much a thing that might be painted as a radiance beyond the reach of pigment.

As he watched he saw the first movement. The head raised itself and as the face stared up into the branches the mouth opened in a yawn. It was like the yawning of a lizard; the jaws, sharp, soundless, merciless. It was as though all thought was over, and out of some reptilian existence the yawn grew and opened like a reflex. And it was so, for Steerpike, leaning there, had, instead of pitying himself and brooding upon his mistakes, been tabulating and re-grouping in his scheduled brain every aspect of his position, of his plans, of his relationship not only with Fuchsia but with all with whom he had dealings, and making out of the maze, of these relationships and projects a working pattern – something that was a masterpiece of cold-blooded systemization. But the plan of action, condensed and crystallized though it was, was nevertheless, for all its ingenuity, somehow less microscopically careful in its every particular than usual. He was prepared for the first time to take risks. The time had come for drawing together the hundred and one threads that had for so long been stretched from one end of the castle to another. This would need action. For the moment he could relax. This dawn would be his own. Tonight he must bewilder Fuchsia; dazzle her, awake her; and if all failed, seduce her so that, compromised in the highest degree, he would have her at his mercy. In her present mood she was too dangerous.

But today? He yawned again. His brainwork was done. His plans were complete. And yet there was one loose end. Not in the logic of his brain, but in spite of it – a loose end that he wished to tuck away. What his brain had proved his eyes were witless of. It was his eyes that needed confirmation.

He ran his tongue between his thin, dry lips. Then he turned his face to the east. It shone in the yellow light. It shone like a carbuncle, as, breaking suddenly out of the darkness, the first direct ray of the climbing sun broke upon his bulging brow. His dark red eyes stared back into the heart of the level ray. He cursed the sun and slid out of the beam.

It was lucky for Titus that when the Doctor started from his sleep he immediately recognized the boy’s shape against the windowpane.

Titus had climbed the thick creeper below the Doctor’s window and had with difficulty forced up the lower sash. There had been no other way to enter. To knock or ring would have been to have lost Steerpike.

Dr Prunesquallor reached for the candle by his bed but Titus bent forward in the darkness.

‘No, Dr Prune, don’t light it … it’s Titus … and we want your help … terribly … sorry it’s so early … can you come? … Flay is with me …’

‘Flay?’

‘Yes, he has come from exile – but out of concern for Fuchsia, and me, and the laws … but quickly, Doctor, are you coming? We are trailing Steerpike – he’s just outside.’

In a moment the Doctor was in his elegant dressing gown – had found and put on his spectacles, a pair of socks and his soft slippers.

‘I am flattered,’ he said, in his quick, stilted, yet very pleasant voice. ‘I am more than flattered – lead on, boy, lead on.’

They descended the dark stairs; on reaching the hall the Doctor vanished but reappeared almost at once with two pokers: one long, top-heavy brass affair with a murderous club-end and the other a short heavy iron thing with a perfect grip.

The Doctor hid them behind his back. ‘Which hand?’ he said. Titus chose the left and received the iron. Even with so crude a weapon in his grip the boy’s confidence rose at once. Not that his heart beat any the less rapidly or that he was any the less aware of danger, but the feeling of acute vulnerability had gone.

The Doctor asked no questions. He knew that this strange business would unfold its meaning as the minutes went by. Titus was in no state to give an explanation now. He had begun breathlessly to tell the Doctor of how Flay would leave a trail of chalk, but had ceased, for there was no time to act and to explain together. Before they opened the front door Dr Prunesquallor drew the blind of the hall window. The quadrangle though still extremely dark was no longer a featureless and inky mass. The buildings on the far side loomed, and a blot of ebony blackness that appeared to float in the gun-grey air showed where the thorn tree grew.