EIGHT

Cora and Clarice, although they did not know it, were imprisoned in their apartments. Steerpike had nailed and bolted from the outside all their means of exit. They had been incarcerated for two years, their tongues having loosened to the brink of Steerpike’s undoing. Cunning and patient as he was with them, the young man could find no other foolproof way of ensuring their permanent silence on the subject of the library fire. No other way – but one. They believed that they alone among the inhabitants of the castle were free of a hideous disease of Steerpike’s invention, and which he referred to as ‘Weasel plague’.

The twins were like water. He could turn on or off at will the taps of their terror. They were pathetically grateful that through his superior wisdom they were able to remain in relative health. If a flat refusal to die in the face of a hundred reasons why they should, could be called health. They were obsessed by the fear of coming into contact with the carriers. He brought them daily news of the dead and dying.

Their quarters were no longer those spacious apartments where Steerpike first paid them his respects seven years ago. Far from them having a Room of Roots and a great tree leaning over space hundreds of feet above the earth, they were now on the ground level in an obscure precinct of the castle, a dead end, a promontory of dank stone, removed from even the less frequented routes. Not only was there no way through it, but it was shunned also for reason of its evil reputation. Unhealthy with noxious moisture, its very breath was double pneumonia.

Ironically enough, it was in such a place as this that the aunts rejoiced in the erroneous belief that they alone could escape the virulent and ghastly disease that was in their imaginations prostrating Gormenghast. They had by now become so self-centred under Steerpike’s guidance as to be looking forward to the day when they, as sole survivors, would be able (after due precautions) to pace forth and be at last, after all these long years of frustration, the unopposed claimants to the Groan crown, that massive and lofty symbol of sovereignty, with its central sapphire the size of a hen’s egg.

It was one of their hottest topics: whether the crown should be sawn in half and the sapphire split, so that they could always be wearing at least part of it, or whether it should be left intact and they should wear it on alternate days.

Hot and contested though this subject was, it stirred no visible animation. Not even their lips were seen to move, for they had acquired the habit of keeping them slightly parted and projecting their toneless voices without a tremor of the mouth. But for most of the time their long, solitary days were passed in silence. Steerpike’s spasmodic appearances – and they had become less and less frequent – were, apart from their wild, bizarre and paranoiac glimpses of a future of thrones and crowns, their sole excitement.

How was it that their Ladyships Cora and Clarice could be hidden away in this manner and the iniquity condoned?

It was not condoned; for two years previously they had been as far as Gormenghast was concerned buried with a wealth of symbolism in the tombs of the Groans, a couple of wax replicas having been modelled by Steerpike for the dread occasion. A week before these effigies were lowered into the sarcophagus, a letter, as from the twins, but in reality forged by the youth, had been discovered in their apartments. It divulged the dreadful information that the sisters of the seventy-sixth Earl, who had himself disappeared from the castle without a trace, bent upon their self-destruction, had stolen by night from the castle grounds to make an end of themselves among the ravines of Gormenghast Mountain.

Search parties, organized by Steerpike, had found no trace.

On the night previous to the discovery of the note, Steerpike had conveyed the Twins to the rooms which they now occupied upon some pretext connected with an inspection of a couple of sceptres he had found and regilded.

All this seemed a long time ago. Titus had been a mere infant. Flay but lately banished. Sepulchrave and Swelter had melted into air. Like teeth missing from the jaw of Gormenghast, the disappearance of the Twins, added to those others, gave to the Castle for a time an unfamiliar visage and an aching bone. To some extent the wounds had healed and the change of face had been accepted. Titus was, after all, alive and well – and the continuation of the Family assured.

The Twins were sitting in their room, after a day of more than usual silence. A lamp, set on an iron table (it burnt all day), gave them sufficient light to do their embroidery; but for some while neither of them applied herself to her work.

‘What a long time life takes!’ said Clarice at last. ‘Sometimes I think it’s hardly worthy encroaching on.’

‘I don’t know anything about encroaching,’ replied Cora; ‘but since you have spoken I might as well tell you that you’ve forgotten something, as usual.’

‘What have I forgotten?’

‘You’ve forgotten that I did it yesterday and it is your turn today – thus.’

‘My turn to what?’

‘To comfort me,’ said Cora, looking hard at a leg of the iron table. ‘You can go on doing it until half-past seven, and then it will be your turn to be depressed.’

‘Very well,’ said Clarice: and she began at once to stroke her sister’s arm.

‘No, no, no!’ said Cora, ‘don’t be so obvious. Do things without any mention – like getting tea, for instance, and laying it quietly before me.’

‘All right,’ answered Clarice, rather sullenly. ‘But you’ve spoilt it now – haven’t you? Telling me what to do. It won’t be so thoughtful of me, will it? But perhaps I could get coffee instead.’

‘Never mind all that,’ Cora replied, ‘you talk too much. I don’t want to suddenly find it’s your turn.’

‘What! For my depression?’

‘Yes, yes,’ her sister said irritably: and she scratched the back of her round head.

‘Not that I think you deserve one.’

Their conversation was disturbed, for a curtain parted behind them and Steerpike approached, a swordstick in his hand.

The Twins rose together and faced him, their shoulders touching.

‘How are my lovebirds?’ he said. He lifted his slender stick and, with ghastly impudence, tickled their ladyships’ ribs with its narrow ferruled end. No expression appeared on their faces, but they went through the slow, wriggling motions of Eastern dancers. A clock chimed from above the mantelpiece, and as it ceased the monotonous sound of the rain appeared to redouble its volume. The light had become very bad.

‘You haven’t been here for a long while,’ said Cora.

‘How true,’ said Steerpike.

‘Had you forgotten us?’

‘Not a bit of it,’ he said, ‘not a bit of it.’

‘What happened, then?’ asked Clarice.

‘Sit down!’ said Steerpike harshly, ‘and listen to me.’ He stared them out of countenance until their heads dropped, abashed, and they found themselves staring at their own clavicles. ‘Do you think it is easy for me to keep the plague from your door and to be at your beck and call at the same time? Do you?’

They shook their heads slowly like pendulums.

‘Then have the grace not to interrogate me!’ he cried in mock anger. ‘How dare you snap at the hand that feeds you! How dare you!’

The Twins, acting together, rose from their chairs and started moving across the room. They paused a moment and turned their eyes to Steerpike in order to make sure that they were doing what was expected of them. Yes. The stern finger of the young man was pointing to the heavy damp carpet that covered the floor of the room.

Steerpike derived as much pleasure in watching these anile and pitiful creatures, dressed in their purple finery, as they crawled beneath the carpet as he got from anything. He had led them gradually, and by easy and cunning steps, from humiliation to humiliation, until the distorted satisfaction he experienced in this way had become little short of a necessity to him. Were it not that he found this grotesque pleasure in the exercise of his power over them, it is to be doubted whether he would have gone to all the trouble which was involved in keeping them alive.

As he stared at the twin hummocks under the carpet he did not realize that something very peculiar and unprecedented was happening. Cora, in her warren-like seclusion, crouched in the ignominious darkness, had conceived an idea. Where it came from she did not trouble to inquire of herself, nor why it should have come, for Steerpike, their benefactor, was a kind of god to her, as he was to Clarice. But the idea had suddenly flowered in her brain unbidden. It was that she would very much like to kill him. Directly she had conceived the idea she felt frightened, and her fear was hardly lessened by a flat voice in the darkness saying with empty deliberation: ‘So … would … I. We could do it together, couldn’t we? We could do it together.’