Peake, Mervyn - 02 Gormenghast

'Fuchsia! it was for you. My violence was for you. My roughness was the roughness of love. I had no time to do other than to save you. Have you not heard the footsteps? She has just gone by. One moment later and your light would have brought her to this door. And you know the punishment. Of course you do, the punishment, which by ancient law is meted out to those daughters of the line who consort with the mere outsiders. It is too awful to think about. And that is why our plans have been so secret, our rules so rigorous. And you know this. And you have been meticulous. But tonight you misjudged the time, did you not? You were four minutes early. O that was risky enough. But to add to such a peril the lighting of your candle. And then, as always happens, it was precisely when all this was happening that your mother should follow me.'

'My mother?' Fuchsia's voice was a whisper.

'Your mother. I had led her away for I knew that she was near. I doubled back. I crossed my tracks. I doubled back again and yet she was there, and moving slowly - I cannot understand it - but I came as I intended to this door with the length of the corridor between us - the length of the corridor and the odd twenty feet that would give me the chance of whipping into our room in time - but no, it wasn't this that I was going to do. No. For what would have been more likely than for you to have met her - and then...'

Steerpike dropped his hands from his face where they had been all this time.

His voice had been running on with a certain charm for he had managed to vary it with a kind of stutter - not so much nervous in effect as eager and candid.

'But what happened, Fuchsia? Well, you know that as well as I do. I turned the north corner with your mother the length of a corridor behind - and there you were, like a bonfire, the length of the corridor before me. Put yourself in my place. One cannot have all the noble emotions at the same time. One cannot mix up desperation with being a perfect gentleman. At least I can't. Perhaps I should have been given lessons. All I could do was to save the situation. To hide you. To save you. You were there too early; and Fuchsia, it made me angry. I have never been angry with you before as you know. I could never imagine being angry with you. And perhaps even now, it wasn't really you I was angry with, but fate, or destiny or whatever it is that might have upset our plans. And it was because our plans have always been so carefully prepared - so that there shall be no risk, and you shall come to no harm - that my rage boiled up. You were no longer Fuchsia to me, at that moment. You were this thing that I was to save. After I had got behind the door, then you would be Fuchsia again. Had I waited for a moment before stifling your light or getting you through the door, then our lives might indeed have been ruined. For I love you, Fuchsia. You are all I ever longed for. Can't you see that it was because of this that I had no time to be polite? It was a boiling moment. It was a maelstrom. I called you "fool", yes "fool", out of my love for you - and then,... and then... here in this room again, it all seemed so unbelievable and it does so still, and I am half ashamed of the gift I had brought you and the writing I have done for you - O Fuchsia - I don't even know if I can show it to you now...' he turned abruptly with his hand clenched at his forehead, and then as though to say he would not give way to his despair, 'Come on then, Satan,' he whispered. 'Come on, my wicked boy!' and the monkey leapt on to Steerpike's shoulder.

'What writing?' said Fuchsia.

'I had written you a poem.' He spoke very softly, in a way that had often proved successful but he was a step too far in advance of his progress.

'But perhaps now,' he said, 'you will not wait to see it, Fuchsia.'

'No,' she said after a pause. 'Not now.'

Her inflection was so strange that it was impossible to tell whether she meant 'not now' in the sense of it being no longer possible for her to do anything so intimate as to read a love poem; or not now, but some other time.

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

I

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.

II

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.

Fuchsia and Steerpike? What could it mean? The blasphemy of it! The horror of it! He ground his teeth in the darkness.

The castle was as silent as some pole-axed monster. Inert, breathless, spread-eagled. It was a night that seemed to prove by the consolidation of its darkness and its silence the hopelessness of any further dawn. There was no such thing as dawn. It was an invention of the night's or of the old-wives of the night - a fable, immemorially old - recounted century after century in the eternal darkness; retold and retold to the gnomic children in the tunnels and the caves of Gormenghast - a tale of another world where such things happened, where stones and bricks and ivy stems and iron could be seen as well as touched and smelt, could be lit and coloured, and where at certain times a radiance shone like honey from the east and the blackness was scaled away, and this thing they called dawn arose above the woods as though the fable had materialized, the legend come to life.

It was a night with a bull's mouth. But the mouth was bound and gagged. It was a night with enormous eyes, but they were hooded.

The only sound that Flay could hear was the tapping of his heart.

III

It was later. and at an indeterminate hour of the same night, or inky morning, that Mr Flay, long after passing the door in the passage, came to an involuntary halt as he was about to cross a small cloistered quadrangle.

There was no reason why he should have been startled by the single band of livid yellow in the sky. He must have known that the dawn could not have been much longer delayed. He was certainly not held by its beauty. He did not think in that way.