Every now and again Barquentine would be reflected immediately behind the hollow mouthway of the engraved Tower of Flints where an angled mirror in the shaft sent down his image to another and then another – mirror glancing to mirror – until Steerpike, reclining at the base of the chimney, with a magnifying glass in his hands peered amusedly at the terminal reflection and saw in miniature the crimson rags of the dwarfish pedant as he raised the boulder in his hands and flung it through the ring.
If Barquentine rose early from his hideous couch, Steerpike in a secret room of his own choosing, a room as spotless and bright as a new pin, arose earlier. This was not a habit with him. He had no habits in that sort of way. He did what he wanted to do. He did what furthered his plans. If getting up at five in the morning would lead to something he coveted, then it was the most natural thing in the world for him to rise at that hour. If there was no necessity for action he would lie in bed all morning reading, practising knots with the cord he kept by his bedside, making paper darts of complicated design which he would float across his bedroom, or polishing the steel of the razor-edged blade of his swordstick.
At the moment it was to his advantage to impress Barquentine with his efficiency, indispensability and dispatch. Not that he had not already worked his way beneath the cantankerous crust of the old man’s misanthropy. He was in fact the only living creature who had ever gained Barquentine’s confidence and grudging approval.
Without fully realizing it, Barquentine, during his daily administrations, was pouring out a hoard of irreplaceable knowledge, pouring it into the predatory and capacious brain of a young man whose ambition it was, when he had gained sufficient knowledge of the observances, to take over the ceremonial side of the castle’s life, and, in being the only authority in the minutiae of the law (for Barquentine was to be liquidated), to alter to his own ends such tenets as held him back from ultimate power and to forge such fresh, though apparently archaic documents, as might best serve his evil purposes as the years went by.
Barquentine spoke little. In the pouring out of his knowledge there was no verbal expansiveness. It was largely through action and through access to the Documents that Steerpike learned his ‘trade’. The old man had no idea that day after day the accumulating growth of Steerpike’s cognizance and the approach of his own death moved towards one another through time, at the same pace. He had no wish to instruct the young man beyond the point of self-advantage. The pale creature was useful to him and that was all, and were he to have known how much had been divulged of Gormenghast’s inner secrets through the seemingly casual exchanges and periodical researches in the library, he would have done all in his power to eliminate from the castle’s life this upstart, this dangerous, unprecedented upstart, whose pursuit of the doctrines was propelled by a greed for personal power as cold as it was tameless.
The time was almost ripe in Steerpike’s judgement for the Master of Ritual to be dispatched. Apart from other motives the wiping out of so ugly a thing as Barquentine seemed to Steerpike, upon aesthetic considerations alone, an act long overdue. Why should such a bundle of hideousness be allowed to crutch its way about, year after year?
Steerpike admired beauty. It did not absorb him. It did not affect him. But he admired it. He was neat, adroit, slick as his own swordstick, sharp as its edge, polished as its blade. Dirt offended him. Untidiness offended him. Barquentine, old, filthy, his face cracked and pitted like stale bread, his beard tangled, dirty and knotted, sickened the young man. It was time for the dirty core of ritual to be plucked out of the enormous mouldering body of the castle’s life and for him to take its place, and from that hidden centre – who knew how far his tangent wits might lead him?
It was a wonder to Barquentine how Steerpike was able to meet him with such uncanny precision and punctuality sunrise after sunrise. It was not as though his lieutenant sat there waiting outside the Master’s door, or at some landing on the stairs by which Barquentine made his way to the small eating-room. O no. Steerpike, his straw-coloured hair smoothed down across his high globular forehead, his pale face shining, his dark red eyes disconcertingly alive beneath his sandy eyebrows, would walk rapidly out of the shadows and, coming to a smart halt at the old man’s side, would incline himself at a slight angle from the hips.
There was no change this morning in the dumb show. Barquentine wondered, for the hundredth time, how Steerpike should coincide so exactly with his arrival at the top of the walnut stairs, and as usual drew his brows down over his eyes and peered suspiciously through the veils of unpleasant moisture that smouldered there, at the pale young man.
