The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

Meanwhile, hiding behind a turn in the passage, Nannie Slagg, with Titus in her arms, was being soothed by Keda as she waited for her call.

‘Now, now be quiet, Mrs Slagg, be quiet and it will be over soon,’ said Keda to the little shaking thing that was dressed up in the shiniest of dark-green satin and upon whose head the grape hat arose in magnificent misproportion to her tiny face.

‘Be quiet, indeed,’ said Nannie Slagg, in a thin animated voice. ‘If you only knew what it means to be in such a position of honour – oh, my poor heart! You would not dare to try to make me quiet indeed! I have never heard such ignorance. Why is he so long? Isn’t it time for him to call me? And the precious thing so quiet and good and ready to cry any minute – oh, my poor heart! Why is he so long? Brush my dress again.’

Keda, who had been commanded to bring a soft brush with her, would have been brushing Nannie’s satin dress for practically the whole morning had the old nurse had her way. She was now instructed by an irritable gesture of Mrs Slagg’s hand to brush her anew and to soothe the old woman she complied with a few strokes.

Titus watched Keda’s face with his violet eyes, his grotesque little features modified by the dull light at the corner of the passage. There was the history of man in his face. A fragment from the enormous rock of mankind. A leaf from the forest of man’s passion and man’s knowledge and man’s pain. That was the ancientness of Titus.

Nannie’s head was old with lines and sunken skin, with the red rims of her eyes and the puckers of her mouth. A vacant anatomical ancientry.

Keda’s oldness was the work of fate, alchemy. An occult agedness. A transparent darkness. A broken and mysterious grove. A tragedy, a glory, a decay.

These three sere beings at the shadowy corner waited on. Nannie was sixty-nine, Keda was twenty-two, Titus was twelve days old.

Lord Sepulchrave had cleared his throat. Then he called:

‘My Son.’

‘TITUS IS CHRISTENED’

His voice moved down the corridor and turned about the stone corner, and when he first heard the sound of Mrs Slagg’s excited footsteps he continued with that part of the procedure which Sourdust had recited to him over their breakfast for the last three mornings.

Ideally, the length of time which it took him to complete the speech should have coincided with the time it took Nannie Slagg to reach the door of the Cool Room from the darkened corner.

‘Inheritor of the powers I hold,’ came his brooding voice from the doorway, ‘continuer of the blood-stock of the stones, freshet of the unending river, approach me now. I, a mere link in the dynastic chain, adjure you to advance, as a white bird on iron skies through walls of solemn cloud. Approach now to the bowl, where, named and feted, you shall be consecrate in Gormenghast. Child! Welcome!’

Unfortunately Nannie, having tripped over a loose flagstone, was ten feet away at the word ‘Welcome’ and Sourdust, upon whose massive forehead a few beads of perspiration had suddenly appeared, felt the three long seconds pass with a ghastly slowness before she appeared at the door of the room. Immediately before she had left the corner Keda had placed the little iron crown gently on the infant’s head to Nannie’s satisfaction, and the two of them as they appeared before the assembly made up for their three seconds’ tardiness by a preposterous quality that was in perfect harmony with the situation.

Sourdust felt satisfied as he saw them, and their delay that had rankled was forgotten. He approached Mrs Slagg carrying his great book with him, and when he had reached them he opened the volume so that it fell apart in two equal halves and then, extending it forward towards Nannie Slagg, he said:

‘It is written, and the writing is adhered to, that between these pages where the flax is grey with wisdom, the first-born male-child of the House of Groan shall be lowered and laid lengthways, his head directed to the christening bowl, and that the pages that are heavy with words shall be bent in and over him, so that he is engulfed in the sere Text encircled with the Profound, and is as one with the inviolable Law.’

Nannie Slagg, an inane expression of importance on her face, lowered Titus within the obtuse V shape of the half-opened book so that the crown of his head just overlapped the spine of the volume at Sourdust’s end and his feet at Mrs Slagg’s.

Then Lord Sepulchrave folded the two pages over the helpless body and joined the tube of thick parchment at its centre with a safety-pin.