The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [335]
Titus stood there trembling as the noise of many feet approached from the west, and a crutch from the east. He fought away the knowledge that he must have been seen by the professors. He clung to the empty hope that they had all had their eyes cast to the ground and had never seen him running ahead of them; had never seen him dive behind the statue and, more fervent still, the passionate hope that Barquentine had been too far away to notice any movement in the corridor. But even as he trembled he knew his hope was based on his fear and that it was madness for him to stay where he was.
The noise was all about him, the heavy feet, the whisking of the gowns, the clanging of the iron-like crutch on the slabs.
And then the voice of Barquentine brought everything to a standstill. ‘Hold!’ it cried. ‘Hold there, headmaster! By the pox, you have the whole spavined staff with you, hell crap me!’
‘My very good colleagues are at my back,’ said the old and fruity voice of Bellgrove. And then he added, ‘My very good colleagues,’ as though to test his own courage in the face of the thing in red rags that glared up at him.
But Barquentine’s mind was elsewhere. ‘Which was it?’ he barked, taking a fresh hop in Bellgrove’s direction. ‘Which was it, man?’
Bellgrove drew himself up and struck his favourite position as a headmaster, but his old heart was beating painfully.
‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘No idea whatsoever, as to what it can be to which you are referring.’ His words could not have sounded heavier or less honest. He must have felt this himself, for he added, ‘Not an inkling, I assure you.’
‘Not an inkling! Not an inkling!’ Barquentine cried. ‘Black blood on your inklings!’ With another hop and a grind of the crutch he brought himself immediately below the headmaster.
‘By the reek of your lights, there was a boy in this corridor. There was a boy just now. What? What? There was a slippery pup just now. Do you deny it?’
‘I saw no child,’ said Bellgrove. ‘Slippery or otherwise.’ He lifted the ends of his mouth in a smirk, where they froze upon his own little joke.
Barquentine stared at him and if Bellgrove’s sight had been better the malice in that stare might have unnerved the old headmaster to the brink of his undoing. As it was, he clenched his hands under his gown, and with a picture of Titus in his mind – Titus whose eyes had shone at the sight of the marbles in the fort – he held on to the lies he was telling with the grip of a Saint.
Barquentine turned to the staff who were clustered behind their headmaster like a black chorus. His wet, ruthless eyes moved from face to face.
For a moment the idea crossed his brain that his sight had played him false. That he had seen a shadow. He turned his head and stared along the line of silent monuments.
Suddenly his spleen and frustration found vent and he thrashed out with his stick at the stone torso at his side. It was a wonder that his crutch was not broken.
‘There was a whelp!’ he screamed. ‘But enough of that! Time runs away. Is all prepared, what? What? Is all in readiness? You know your time of arrival? You know your orders. By hell, there must be no slips this afternoon.’
‘We have the details,’ said Bellgrove in so quick and relieved a voice, that it was no wonder that Barquentine darted at him suspiciously.
‘And what’s your bloody joy in that?’ he hissed. ‘By hell, there’s perfidy somewhere!’
‘My joy,’ said Bellgrove twice as slowly and ponderously, ‘springs from the knowledge which my staff must share with me, as men of culture, that a considerable poem is in store for them this afternoon.’
Barquentine made a noise in his throat.
‘And the boy, Titus,’ he snapped. ‘Does he know what is expected of him?’
‘The seventy-seventh earl will do his duty,’ said Bellgrove.
This last retort of the headmaster’s had not been heard by Titus for the boy had found behind him in that darkness that, where he had thought the wall of