Flay waits as she approaches. His bony head is quite still. His loose hands hang gawkily at his sides. He realizes the crime he has committed, and as he waits his world of Gormenghast – his security, his love, his faith in the House, his devotion – is all crumbling into fragments.
She is standing within a foot of him. The air is heavy with her presence.
Her voice is very husky when she speaks. ‘I was going to strike him down,’ she says heavily. ‘That is what I intended to do with him. To break him.’
He lifts his eyes. The white cat is within a few inches of him. He watches the hairs of its back; each one has become a bristle and the back is a hummock of sharp white grass.
The Countess begins to talk again in a louder voice, but it has become so choked that Flay cannot understand what she is saying. At last he can make out the words: ‘You are no more, no more at all. You are ended.’
Her hand, as it moves gently over the body of the white cat, is trembling uncontrollably. ‘I have finished with you,’ she says. ‘Gormenghast has finished with you.’ It is hard for her to draw the words from her great throat. ‘You are over … over.’ Suddenly she raises her voice. ‘Crude fool!’ she cries. ‘Crude, broken fool and brute! Out! Out! The Castle throws you.
Flay lifts his small bony head higher into the air. He cannot comprehend what has happened. All he knows is that it is more dreadful than he can feel, for a kind of numbness is closing in on his horror like a padding. There is a greenish sheen across the shoulders of his greasy black suit, for the morning light has of a sudden begun to dance through the bay window. Steerpike, with a blood-drenched handkerchief wound about his face, is staring at him and rapping the top of a table with his nails. He cannot help but feel that there is something very fine about the old creature’s head. And he had been very quick. Very quick indeed. Something to remember, that: cats for missiles.
Flay moved his little eyes around the room. The floor is alive and white behind the Countess, around whose feet lies the stilled froth of a tropic tide, the azure carpet showing now here and now there. He feels he is looking at it for the last time and turns to go, but as he turns he thinks of the Breakfast. He is surprised to hear his own mirthless voice saying: ‘Breakfast.’
The Countess knows that her husband’s first servant must be at the Breakfast. Had he killed every white cat in the world he must still be at the Breakfast in honour of Titus, the 77th Earl of Gormenghast, to be. Such things are cardinal.
The Countess turns herself about and moves to the bay window after making a slow detour of the room and picking up from a rack near the fireplace a heavy iron poker. As she reaches the window her right arm swings slowly back and forward with the deliberation of a shire-mare’s bearded hoof as it falls into a rain pool. There is a startling split and crash, a loud cascading of glass upon the flag-stones outside the window, and then silence.
With her back to the room she stares through the star-shaped gap in the glass. Before her spreads the green lawn. She is watching the sun breaking through the distant cedars. It is the day of her son’s Breakfast. She turns her head. ‘You have a week,’ she says, ‘and then you leave these walls. A servant shall be found for the Earl.’
Steerpike lifts his head, and for a moment he ceases to drum on the woodwork with his fingernails. As he starts tapping again, a kestrel, sweeping through the star of the shattered pane, alights on the shoulder of the Countess. She winces as its talons for a moment close, but her eyes soften.
Flay approaches a door in three slow, spidery slides. It is the door that opens into the Stone Lanes. He fumbles for his key, and turns it in the lock. He must rest in his own region before he returns to the Earl, and he lets himself into the long darkness.
The Countess, for the first time, remembers Steerpike. She moves her eyes slowly in the direction where she had last seen him, but he is no longer there nor in any part of the room.
A bell chimes from the corridor beyond the Room of Cats and she knows that there is but a short while before the Breakfast.
She feels a splash of water on her hand, and, turning, sees that the sky has become overcast with a blanket of ominous dark rose-coloured cloud, and of a sudden the light fades from the lawn and the cedars.
Steerpike, who is on his way back to the Earl’s bedroom, stops a moment at a staircase window to see the first descent of the rain. It is falling from the sky in long, upright and seemingly motionless lines of rosy silver that stand rigidly upon the ground as though there were a million harp strings strung vertically between the solids of earth and sky. As he leaves the window he hears the first roar of the summer thunder.
