The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [165]
He still lived at the Prunesquallors’ but was making secret plans for moving into a long, spacious room with a window that let in the morning sun. It lay on the same floor as the aunts in the South Wing. There was really very little reason for him to stay with the Doctor, who did not seem sufficiently aware of the new status he had acquired and whose questions regarding the way he (Steerpike) had found the pine tree, already felled and lopped for the Rescue, and various other details, though not difficult to answer – for he had prepared his replies to any of the possible questions he might be faced with – were, nevertheless, pertinent. The Doctor had had his uses. He had proved a valuable stepping-stone, but it was time to take up a room, or a suite of rooms, in the Castle proper, where knowledge of what was going on would come more easily.
Prunesquallor, ever since the burning, had been, for him, strangely voiceless. When he spoke it was in the same high, thin, rapid way, but for a great part of each day he would lie back in his chair in the sitting-room, smiling incessantly at everyone who caught his eye, his teeth displayed as uncompromisingly as ever before, but with something more cogitative about the great magnified eyes that swam beneath the thick lenses of his spectacles. Irma, who since the fire had been strapped in her bed, and who was having about half a pint of blood removed on alternate Tuesdays, was now allowed downstairs in the afternoons, where she sat dejectedly and tore up sheets of calico which were brought to her chair-side every morning. For hours on end she would continue with this noisy, wasteful and monotonous soporific, brooding the while upon the fact that she was no lady.
Mrs Slagg was still very ill. Fuchsia did all she could for her, moving the nurse’s bed into her own room, for the old woman had become very frightened of the dark, which she now associated with smoke.
Titus seemed to be the one least affected by the burning. His eyes remained bloodshot for some time afterwards, but the only other result was a severe cold, and Prunesquallor took the infant over to his own house for its duration.
Old Sourdust’s bones had been removed from the marble table among the charred remains of woodwork and books.
Flay, who had been assigned the mission of collecting the dead librarian’s remains and of returning with them to the servant’s quadrangle, where a coffin was being constructed from old boxes, found it difficult to handle the charred skeleton. The head had become a bit loose, and Flay after scratching his own skull for a long while at last decided that the only thing to do would be to carry the rattling relics in his arms as though he were carrying a baby. This was both more respectful and lessened the danger of disarticulation or breakage.
On that particular evening as he returned through the wood the rain had fallen heavily before he reached the fringe of the trees, and by the time he was halfway across the wasteland which divided the pines from Gormenghast, the rain was streaming over the bones and skull in his arms and bubbling in the eye sockets. Flay’s clothes were soaking, and the water squelched in his boots. As he neared the Castle the light had become so obscured by the downpour that he could not see more than a few paces ahead. Suddenly a sound immediately behind him caused him to start, but before he was able to turn, a sharp pain at the back of his head filled him with sickness, and sinking gradually to his knees he loosed the skeleton from his arms and sank in a stupor upon the bubbling ground. How many hours or minutes he had been lying there he could not know, but when he recovered consciousness the rain was still falling heavily. He raised his great rough hand to the back of his head where he discovered a swelling the size of a duck’s egg. Swift jabs of pain darted through his brain from side to side.