The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [281]
‘Silence!’ shouted The Fly, interrupting Crust, who had not realized he had been sitting so close to a colleague until he heard Cutflower’s affected accents beside him. Everyone knew that Crust had no wife in exile, ill or otherwise. They also knew that his endless requests were not so much because he was poverty-stricken but were made in the desire to cut a dashing figure. To have a wife in exile who was dying in unthinkable pain appeared to Crust to give him a kind of romantic status. It was not sympathy he wanted but envy. Without an exiled and guttering mate what was he? Just Crust. That was all. Crust to his colleagues and Crust to himself. Something of five letters that walked on two legs.
But Cutflower, taking advantage of the smoke, had slipped from the table. He took a few dainty steps to his left and tripped over Mulefire’s outstretched leg.
‘May Satan thrash you purple!’ roared an ugly voice from the floor. ‘Curse your stinking feet, whoever you bloody are!’
‘Poor old Mulefire! Poor old hog!’ It was yet another voice, a more familiar one; and then there was the sense of something rocking uncontrollably, but there was no accompanying sound.
Flannelcat was biting at his underlip. He was overdue for his class. They were all overdue. But none save Flannelcat was perturbed on that score. Flannel knew that by now the classroom ceiling would be blue with ink: that the small bow-legged boy, Smattering, would be rolling beneath his desk in a convulsion of excited ribaldry: that catapults would be twanging freely from every wooden ambush, and stink-bombs making of his room a nauseous hell. He knew all this and he could do nothing. The rest of the staff knew all this also, but had no desire to do anything.
A voice out of the pall cried: ‘Silence, gentlemen, for Mr Bellgrove!’ and another … ‘Oh, hell, my teeth! my teeth!’ … and another … ‘If only he didn’t dream of stoats!’ … and another: ‘Where’s my gold watch gone to?’ and then The Fly again: ‘Silence, gentlemen! Silence for Bellgrove! Are you ready, sir?’ The Fly peered into Deadyawn’s vacant face.
In reply Deadyawn answered: ‘Why … not?’ with a peculiarly long interval between the ‘Why’ and the ‘not’.
Bellgrove read:
Edict 1597577361544329621707193
To Deadyawn, Headmaster, and to the Gentlemen of the Professorial Staff: to all Ushers, Curators and others in authority –
This – day of the –th month in the eighth year of the Seventy-seventh Earl, to wit: Titus, Lord of Gormenghast – notice and warning is given in regard to their attitude, treatment and methods of behaviour and approach in respect of the aforementioned Earl, who now at the threshold of the age of reason, may impress Headmaster, gentlemen of the professorial staff, ushers, curators, and the like, with the implications of his lineage to the extent of diverting these persons from their duty in regard to the immemorial law which governs the attitude which Deadyawn, etc., are strictly bound to show, inasmuch that they treat the seventy-seventh Earl in every particular and on every occasion as they would treat any other minor in their hands without let or favour: that a sense of the customs, traditions and observances – and above all, a sense of the duties attached to every branch of the Castle’s life – be instilled and an indelible sense of the responsibilities which will become his when he attains his majority, at which time, with