The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [164]
Across the stoniness of his eyes a strange light would pass for a moment, as though the moon were flaring on the gristle, and his lips would open and the gash of his mouth would widen in a dead, climbing, curve.
Steerpike had foreseen that madness would sooner or later come to the Earl, and it was with a shock of annoyance that he heard of Barquentine and of his ruthless efficiency. It had been part of his plan to take over the duties of old Sourdust, for he felt himself to be the only person in the Castle capable of dealing with the multifarious details that the work would involve – and he knew that, with the authority which could hardly have been denied him had there been no one already versed in the laws of the Castle, he would have been brought not only into direct and potent contact with Sepulchrave, but would have had opened up to him by degrees the innermost secrets of Gormenghast. His power would have been multiplied a hundred-fold; but he had not reckoned with the ancientry of the tenets that bound the anatomy of the place together. For every key position in the Castle there was the apprentice, either the son or the student, bound to secrecy. Centuries of experience had seen to it that there should be no gap in the steady, intricate stream of immemorial behaviour.
No one had thought or heard of Barquentine for over sixty years, but when old Sourdust died Barquentine appeared like a well-versed actor on the mouldering stage, and the slow drama of Gormenghast continued among shadows.
Despite this set back in his plans, Steerpike had managed to make even more capital out of his rescue work than he had anticipated. Flay was inclined to treat him with a kind of taciturn respect. He had never quite known what he ought to do about Steerpike. When they had coincided a month previously at the garden gate of the Prunesquallors’, Flay had retired as from a ghost, sullenly, glancing over his shoulder at the dapper enigma, losing his chance of castigating the urchin. In Mr Flay’s mind the boy Steerpike was something of an apparition. Most fathomless of all, the lives of the Earl, the Countess, Titus and Fuchsia had been saved by the whelp, and there was a kind of awe, not to say admiration, mixed with his distaste.
Not that Flay unbent to the boy, for he felt it a grievance that he should in any way admit equality with someone who had come originally from Swelter’s kitchen.
Barquentine, also, was a bitter pill to swallow, but Flay realized at once the traditional rightness and integrity of the old man.
Fuchsia, for whom the fine art of procedure held less lure, found in old Barquentine a creature to hide from and to hate – not for any specific reason, but with the hatred of the young for the authority vested in age.
She found that as the days went on she began to listen for the sound of his crutch striking on the floor, like the blows of a weapon.
FIRST REPERCUSSIONS
Unable to reconcile the heroism of Steerpike’s rescue with his face as she had seen it beyond the window before she fell, Fuchsia began to treat the youth with less and less assurance. She began to admire his ingenuity, his devilry, his gift of speech which she found so difficult but which was for him so simple. She admired his cold efficiency and she hated it. She wondered at his quickness, his self-assurance. The more she saw of him the more she felt impelled to recognize in him a nature at once more astute and swift than her own. At night his pale face with its closely-set eyes would keep appearing before her. And when she awoke she would remember with a start how he had saved their lives.
Fuchsia could not make him out. She watched him carefully. Somehow he had become one of the personalities of the Castle’s central life. He had been insinuating his presence on all who mattered with such subtlety, that when he leapt dramatically