The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [323]
II
The week that followed was the longest Titus ever spent, in spite of Fuchsia’s illicit visits to the Lichen Fort. She had found an obscure and narrow window through which she passed what cakes and fruit she could, to vary the adequate but uninteresting diet which the warder, luckily a deaf old man, prepared for his fledgeling-prisoner. Through this opening she was able to whisper to her brother.
Barquentine had lectured him at length: had stressed the responsibility that would become his; but as Titus held to the story that he had, from the outset, lost himself and could not find his way home, the only crime was in having set out on the expedition in the first place. For such a misdemeanour several heavy tomes were fetched down from high shelves, the dust was blown and shaken from their leaves and eventually the appropriate verses were found which gave precedent for the sentence of seven days in the Lichen Fort.
During that week the wrinkled and altogether beastly face of Barquentine, the ‘Lord of the Documents’, came before him in the darkness of the night. No fewer than four times he dreamed of the wet-eyed, harsh-mouthed cripple, pursuing him with his greasy crutch; of how it struck the flagstones like a hammer; and of the crimson rags of his high office that streamed behind the pursuer, as they hurried down unending corridors.
And when he awoke he remembered Steerpike who had stood behind Barquentine’s chair, or climbed the ladder to find the relevant tomes, and how the pale man, for so he was to Titus, had winked at him.
Beyond his knowledge, beyond his power of reason, a revulsion took hold of him and he recoiled from that wink like flesh from the touch of a toad.
One afternoon of his imprisonment he was interrupted at his hundredth attempt at impaling his jack-knife in the wooden door, at which he flung the weapon in what he imagined was a method peculiar to brigands. He had cried himself to a stop during the morning, for the sun shone through the narrow window-slits and he longed for the wild woods that were so fresh in his mind and for Mr Flay and for Fuchsia.
He was interrupted by a low whistle at one of the narrow windows, and then as he reached it, Fuchsia’s husky whisper:
‘Titus.’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s me.’
‘O, good!’
‘I can’t stay.’
‘Can’t you?’
‘No.’
‘Not for a little, Fuchsia?’
‘No. Got to take your place. Beastly tradition business. Dragging the moat for the Lost Pearls or something. I should be there now.’
‘Oh!’
‘But I’ll come after dark.’
‘O, good!’
‘Can’t you see my hand? I’m reaching as far as I can.’
Titus thrust his arm as far as he could through the window slit of the five-foot wall, and could just touch the tip of her fingers.
‘I must go.’
‘Oh!’
‘You’ll soon be out, Titus.’
The silence of the Lichen Fort was about them like deep water, and their fingers touching might have been the prows of foundered vessels which grazed one another in the subaqueous depths, so huge and vivid and yet unreal was the contact that they made with one another.
‘Fuchsia.’
‘Yes?’
‘I have things to tell you.’
‘Have you?’
‘Yes. Secrets.’
‘Secrets?’
‘Yes, and adventure.’
‘I won’t tell! I won’t ever tell. Nothing you tell me I’ll tell. When I come tonight, or if you like when you’re free, tell me then. It won’t be long.’
Her fingertips left his. He was alone in space.
‘Don’t take your hand away,’ she said after a moment’s pause. ‘Can you feel anything?’
He worked his fingers even further into the darkness and touched a paper object which with difficulty he tipped over towards himself and then withdrew. It was a paper bag of barley sugar.
‘Fuchsia,’ he whispered. But there was no reply. She had gone.
III
On the last day but one he had an official visitor. The caretaker of the Lichen Fort had unbolted the heavy door and the grotesquely broad, flat feet of the Headmaster, Bellgrove, complete in his zodiac gown, and dog-eared mortar-board, entered with a slow and ponderous tread. He took five or more paces across the weed-scattered earthen floor before he noticed the boy sitting