The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [151]
The bird rose into the air, startled, and Lord Sepulchrave stopped on his passage to the table and turned irritably to the line of noisy figures; but as he did so a faint smell of smoke making itself perceptible for the first time caused him to raise his head and sniff the air in a slow, melancholy way. At the same time Fuchsia felt a roughness in her throat. She glanced about the room and wrinkled her nose, for smoke though still invisible was infiltrating steadily through the library.
Prunesquallor had risen from beside the Countess and with his white hands wound about each other and with his mouth twisted into a quizzical line he permitted his eyes to move rapidly around the room. His head was cocked on one side.
‘What’s the matter, man?’ asked the Countess heavily from immediately below him. She was still seated.
‘The matter?’ queried the Doctor, smiling more emphatically but still keeping his eyes on the move. ‘It is a case of atmosphere, as far as I can dare to judge at such very, very short notice, your Ladyship, as far as I dare to judge. ha, ha, ha! It is a case of thickening atmosphere, ha, ha!’
‘Smoke,’ said the Countess heavily and bluntly. ‘What is the matter with smoke? Haven’t you ever smelt it before?’
‘Many and many a time, your Ladyship,’ answered the Doctor. ‘But never, if I may say so, never in here.’
The Countess grunted to herself and settled deeper into the chair.
‘There never is smoke in here,’ said Lord Sepulchrave. He turned his head to the door and raised his voice a little:
‘Flay.’
The long servant emerged out of the shadows like a spider.
‘Open the door,’ said Lord Sepulchrave sharply; and as the spider turned and began its return journey his Lordship took a step towards old Sourdust, who was by now doubled over the table in a paroxysm of coughing. His Lordship taking one of Sourdust’s elbows beckoned to Fuchsia, who came across the room and supported the old man on the other side, and the three of them began to make their way to the door in Flay’s wake.
Lady Groan simply sat like a mountain and watched the little bird.
Dr Prunesquallor was wiping his eyes, his thick glasses pushed for the moment above his eyebrows. But he was very much on the alert and as soon as his spectacles were again in place he grinned at everyone in turn. His eye lingered for a moment on his sister Irma, who was systematically tearing an expensively embroidered cream-coloured silk handkerchief into small pieces. Behind the dark lenses of her glasses her eyes were hidden from view, but to judge from the thin, wet, drooping line of her mouth and the twitching of the skin on her pointed nose it might be safely assumed that they were making contact with, and covering the inner side of, the lenses of her spectacles with the moisture with which the smoke had filmed them.
The Doctor placed the tips of his fingers and thumbs together and then, separating the tapering extremities of the index fingers, he watched them for a few seconds as they gyrated around one another. Then his eyes turned to the far end of the room where he could see the Earl and his daughter, with the old man between them, approaching the library door. Someone, presumably Flay, seemed to be making a great deal of noise in wrestling with the heavy iron door handle.
The smoke was spreading, and the Doctor, wondering why in the devil’s name the door had not been thrown open, began to peer about the room in an effort to locate the source of the ever-thickening wreaths. As he took a step past Nannie Slagg he saw that she was standing by the table from whose marble surface she had plucked Titus. She was holding him very closely to herself and had wrapped him in layers of cloth which had completely hidden him from view. A sound of muffled crying could be heard coming from the bundle. Nannie’s little