The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [494]
The Countess went down on her knees as though she was going to pray. Her heart had gone dead in her. This was the moment, if ever there was one, for an enemy of Gormenghast to be caught and slain. Now, with the eyes of the world focused upon his capture and his punishment. And yet the man had cried ‘Only a room full of water’.
But something in her would not have it that so great a preparation, so formidable a massing of the castle’s strength should prove abortive – and more than this, there was something in her, at a deeper level, that refused to believe that the certainty, the quite irrational certainty that this was the day of vengeance, was but her wishfulness.
She lowered herself to her elbows and dropped her head below the level of the floor.
At the first glance it was desperately true. There was nowhere to hide. The walls were blank, save for a few mouldering pictures. The floor was nothing but water. She turned to the man below.
It was true that it was difficult for him to contend with the restless swell of the waves in the cave, but at the same time it seemed odd that this volunteer made no effort to dart a single glance towards the roof where he knew his audience lay and watched expectantly.
She had seen him step into his boat some time earlier and paddle his way between the barges. She had gazed down from the window, the rain striking her face, and had wondered what he would find. She had had no doubt that Steerpike would be waiting for him. It was this certainty which still lingered in spite of the emptiness below which prompted her to stare again at the man who had found nothing but water.
When it struck her that he was of slighter build than she had thought her notion brought no suspicion in its trail. But her eyes, which had left the volunteer again and were following the curve of the wall, now came to rest on something which she had previously missed. The shadows were darker to the right of the single window and she had failed to detect that there was something hanging from the ceiling. At first she could make nothing of it, save that it appeared to be suspended from a joist and that it was about six feet in length, but gradually, as her eyes became used to the peculiar vibrations of the reflected light, and as now one part and now another of the object became illuminated by a glancing beam, so she became at last aware that she was looking at Titus’ canoe … the canoe which Steerpike had stolen … and in which he had entered this very room. Then where was he? The room was empty of life, empty of everything save the water, the canoe and the volunteer. And there was no way to escape on foot and no reason why he should have wished to do so with so slight and safe a vessel at his command. Whatever the cause of Steerpike’s disappearance, why should the canoe be hanging from the ceiling?
When she turned her eye back to the broad-brimmed hat below her and noted the shoulders beneath it, and saw the nervous strength and agility with which the man handled the boat, she was affected by the first shadow of a suspicion that this volunteer below her had altered in some subtle and curious way from the solid boatman she had seen from the window. But her suspicion was so tenuous that she had no grasp upon its implications. Yet that a kind of disturbance, a kind of suspicion, had been aroused, however vague, was enough for her to draw a deep breath and then, in a voice of such power and volume that the figure below her started at the sound –
‘Volunteer!’ she roared.
The man beneath her appeared to be in such trouble with his boat that it was impossible for him to keep her from shipping water and to look up at the Countess at the same time.
‘My Lady?’ he cried up, wielding his paddle feverishly, as though to keep immediately below her, ‘Yes, My Lady?’
‘Are you blind?’ came the voice from the ceiling. ‘Have your eyes rotted in your head?’ What could she mean by that? Had she seen …? ‘Why have you made no report on it?’ boomed the voice. ‘Have you not seen it?’
‘Very … difficult … keep afloat, My Lady, let alone