The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

The cactus trees stood hueless between the long tables. The Dwellers were all in their places again. Mrs Slagg ceased to interest them. There were no shadows save immediately below every object. The moon was overhead. It was a picture painted on silver. Mrs Slagg’s companion had waited with her quietly. There was a kind of strength in the way she walked and in the way she kept silent. With the dark cloth hanging to her ankles and caught in at her waist with the thong of jarl root; with her bare legs and feet and her head still holding the sunset of her darkened day, she was in strange contrast to little Nannie Slagg, with her quick jerky walk, her dark satin dress, her black gloves, and her monumental hat of glass grapes. Before they descended the dry knoll towards the archway in the wall, a sudden guttural cry as of someone being strangled, froze the old woman’s blood and she clutched at the strong arm beside her and clung to it like a child. Then she peered towards the tables. They were too far for her to see clearly with her weak eyes, but she thought she could make out figures standing and there seemed to be someone crouching like a creature about to spring.

Mrs Slagg’s companion appeared, after glancing casually in the direction of the sound, to take no more notice of the incident, but keeping a firmer grip this time on the old lady, propelled her forward towards the stone gate.

‘It is nothing,’ was the sole reply which Mrs Slagg received and by the time the two were in the acacia avenue her blood had quietened.

When they were turning from the long drive into the doorway of Gormenghast through which Nannie had stepped out into the evening air so surreptitiously an hour or so before, she glanced up at her companion and shrugging her shoulders a little, contrived to take on an expression of mock importance.

‘Your name? Your name?’ she said.

‘Keda.’

‘Well, Keda, dear, if you will follow me, I will take you to the little boy. I’ll show you him myself. He is by the window in my room.’ Nannie’s voice suddenly took on a confidential, almost pathetic note. ‘I haven’t a very big room’, she said, ‘but I’ve always had the same one, I don’t like any of the other ones,’ she added rather untruthfully, ‘I’m nearer Lady Fuchsia.’

‘Perhaps I shall see her,’ said the girl, after a pause.

Nannie suddenly stopped on the stairs. ‘I don’t know about that,’ she said, ‘oh no, I’m not sure about that. She is very strange, I never know what she’s going to do next.’

‘To do?’ said Keda. ‘How do you mean?’

‘About little Titus.’ Nannie’s eyes began to wander. ‘No, I don’t know what she’ll do. She’s such a terror – the naughtiest terror in the castle – she can be.’

‘Why are you frightened?’ said Keda.

‘I know she’ll hate him. She likes to be the only one, you know. She likes to dream that she’s the queen and that when the rest are dead there’ll be no one who can order her to do anything. She said, dear, that she’d burn down the whole place, burn down Gormenghast when she was the ruler and she’d live on her own, and I said she was wicked, and she said that everyone was – everyone and everything except rivers, clouds, and some rabbits. She makes me frightened sometimes.’

They climbed up remaining steps, along a passageway and up the remaining flight to the second floor in silence.

When they had come to the room Mrs Slagg placed her finger at her lips and gave a smile which it would be impossible to describe. It was a mixture of the cunning and the maudlin. Then turning the handle very carefully she opened the door by degrees and putting her high hat of glass grapes through the narrow opening by way of a vanguard, followed it stealthily with all that remained of her.

Keda entered the room. Her bare feet made no noise on the floor. When Mrs Slagg reached the cradle she put her fingers to her mouth and peered over it as though into the deepest recesses of an undiscovered world. There he was. The infant Titus. His eyes were open but he was quite still. The puckered-up face of the newly-born child, old as the world, wise as the roots of trees. Sin was there and goodness, love, pity and horror, and even beauty for his eyes were pure violet. Earth’s passions, earth’s griefs, earth’s incongruous, ridiculous humours – dormant, yet visible in the wry pippin of a face.

Nannie Slagg bending over him waggled a crooked finger before his eyes. ‘My little sugar,’ she tittered. ‘How could you? how could you?’

Mrs Slagg turned round to Keda with a new look in her face. ‘Do you think I should have left him?’ she said. ‘When I went to fetch you. Do you think I should have left him?’

Keda stared down at Titus. Tears were in her eyes as she watched the child. Then she turned to the window. She could see the great wall that held in Gormenghast. The wall that cut her own people away, as though to keep out a plague; the walls that barred from her view the stretches of arid earth beyond the mud huts where her child had so recently been buried.