Peake, Mervyn - 02 Gormenghast

And Titus watching longed with his whole being to be anonymous - to be lost within the core of such a breed - to be able to live and run and fight and laugh and if need be, cry, on his own. For to be one of those wild children would have been to be 'alone' among companions. As the Earl of Gormenghast he could never be alone. He could only be lonely. Even to lose himself was to be lost with that other child, that symbol, that phantom, the seventy-seventh Earl of Gormenghast who hovered at his elbow.

Fuchsia had signalled him to jump from the platform, and together they had raced into the chestnut woods immediately behind, and for a moment or two, in the darkness, they had held each other in the deep shadows of the trees and had heard one another's hearts beating.

'It was wicked of me,' said Fuchsia at last, 'and dangerous. We are supposed to have our midnight supper at the long table, with mother. And we must go back soon.'

'You can if you like,' said Titus, who was trembling with a deep hatred of his status. 'But I'm leaving.'

'Leaving?'

'Leaving for ever,' said Titus. 'For ever and ever. I am going into the wild, like... Flay... and like that...'

But he could think of no way to describe that wisp of a creature who had floated through a forest of gold oaks.

'You can't do that,' said Fuchsia. 'You would die and I wouldn't let you.'

'You couldn't stop me,' cried Titus. 'Nobody could stop me -' and he began to tear off the long grey tunic, as though it were in his path.

But Fuchsia, her lips trembling, held his arms to his sides. 'No! no!' she whispered passionately. 'Not now, Titus. You can't...'

But with a jerk he freed himself, but immediately tripped in the darkness and fell upon his face. When he raised himself, and saw his sister above him he pulled her down, so that she knelt at his side. In the distance they could hear the cries of the children by the lake, and then, suddenly, the harsh ringing of a bell.

'That is for supper,' whispered Fuchsia, at last, for she had waited in vain for Titus to speak, 'and after supper we will go along the shore together and see the cannon.'

Titus was crying. The long day he had spent alone, the lateness of the hour, the excitement, the sense of his essential isolation - all these things had worked together to weaken him. But he nodded. Whether Fuchsia saw his silent answer to her question or not, she made no further remark, but lifting him from the ground, she dried his eyes with the loose sleeve of her dress.

Together they picked their way to the edge of the wood, and there were the bonfires again and the crowds and the lake with the chestnut trees beyond, and there was the platform where he had sat alone, and there was their mother at the long table with her elbows on the moonlit linen, and her chin in her hands, while before her, and seemingly unnoticed, for her gaze was fixed upon the distant hills, the customary banquet lay spread in all its splendour, a rich and crowded masterpiece, the gold plate of the Groans burning with a slow and mellow fire and the crimson goblets smouldering at the moon.

FIFTY-ONE

I

And all the while the progress of the seasons, those great tides, enveloped and stained with their passing colours, chilled or warmed with their varying exhalations, the tracts of Gormenghast. And so, as Fuchsia wanders across her room in search of a lost book, the south spinneys below her window are misty with a green hesitation, and a few days later the sharp green fires have broken out along the iron boughs.

II

Opus Fluke and Flannelcat are leaning over the verandah railing above the Professor's quadrangle. The old quadman is sweeping the dust thirty feet below them. It is thick and white with heat, for the spring has long since passed.

'Hot work for an old fellow!' shouts Fluke to the old man. The ancient lifts his head and wipes his brow. 'Ah!' he calls up in a voice that could not have been used for weeks. 'Ah, sir, it's a dry do.' Fluke retires and in a few minutes has returned with a bottle which he has stolen from Mulefire's apartment. This he lowers on a length of string to the old man, far below in the dust.

III

In his study, and locked away from the world, Prunesquallor, lying rather than sitting in his elegant arm chair, reads with his crossed feet resting just below the mantelpiece.

The small fire in the grate lights up his keen, absurdly refined, and for all its weirdness of proportion, delicate face. The magnifying lenses of his spectacles, which can give so grotesque an effect to his eyes, gleam in the firelight.

It is no book of medicine that he is so absorbed in. On his knee there is an old exercise book filled with verses. The hand-writing is erratic but legible. Sometimes the poems are in a heavy, ponderous and childish hand - sometimes in a quick, excited calligraphy, full of crossings-out and mis-spellings.

That Fuchsia should have ever asked him to read them was the most thrilling thing that he had ever experienced. He loved the girl as though she were his own daughter. But he had never sought her out. Little by little, as the times went by she had taken him into her confidence.

But as he reads, and while the autumn wind whistles in the branches of the garden trees, his brow contracts and he returns his gaze to the four curious lines which Fuchsia had crossed out with a thick pencil- How white and scarlet is that face, Who knows, in some unusual place The coloured heroes are alight With faces made of red and white.

IV

It is a cold and dreary winter. Once again Flay, who is now as much at home in the Silent Halls as he had been in the forests, sits at the table in his secret room. His hands are deep in his ragged pockets. Before him is spread a great sail of paper that not only covers the table, but descends in awkward folds and creases to the floor on every side. A portion near its centre is covered with markings, laboriously scripted words, short arrows, dotted lines, and incomprehensible devices. It is a map; a map which Mr Flay has been working upon for over a year. It is a map of the district that surrounds him - the empty world, whose anatomy, little by little, he is piecing together, extending correcting, classifying. He is, it seems, in a city that has been forsaken and he is making it his own; naming its streets and alleys, its avenues of granite, its winding flights and blackened terraces - exploring ever further its hollow hinterlands, while over all, like a lowering sky, as continuous and as widespread are the endless ceilings and the unbroken roof.

He is no master of graphology. A pen sits awkwardly in his hand. But both while engaged upon his expeditions and when adding with painful slowness to his map, during the long days his life in the pathless woods is standing him in good stead.

With no stars to help him, his sense of orientation has become uncanny. Tonight he will keep watch upon Steerpike's door as has become his custom in the small hours, and if the opportunity arises, he will follow him upon whatever business he is bent. Until then he has seven hours in which to push forward with this task of reconnaissance which has now become a passion.

He takes his hands out of his pockets and with a scarred and bony forefinger he traces for himself the path he proposes to follow. It takes a northward course sweeping in a number of arcs before it zig-zags through a veritable cross-hatching of narrow alleys to reappear as a twelve foot corridor with a worn pavement on its either side. This corridor heads undeviatingly to the north and fades out in a series of small, hesitant dots that part of Mr Flay's paper that has all but overlapped the table. It has reached the margin of his knowledge to the north.