The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy полностью

As he read, the rain slackened, and by the time he had finished, the black sky, as though it were a solid, had moved away, all in one piece, and could be heard trundling away into another region.

There was a hush in the Court until an anonymous voice cried out – ‘Switch off this fiendish light!’

This peremptory order was obeyed by someone equally anonymous, and the lanterns and the lamps came into their own again: the shadows spread themselves. The Magistrate leaned forward.

‘What are you reading, my friend?’ he said to Muzzlehatch. ‘If the furrow between your eyes spells anything, I should guess it spells news.’

‘Why, yes, your Worship, why, yes, indeed. Dire news,’ said Muzzlehatch.

‘That scrap of paper in your hands,’ continued the Magistrate, ‘looks remarkably like a note I handed down to my Clerk, creased though it is and filthy as it has become. Would it be?’

‘It would,’ said Muzzlehatch, ‘and it is. But you are wrong; he isn’t. No more than I am.’

‘No?’

‘No!’

‘Isn’t what?’

‘Can you not remember what you wrote, your Worship?’

‘Remind me.’

Muzzlehatch, instead of reading out the contents of the note, slouched up to the Magistrate’s bench and handed him the grubby paper.

‘This is what you wrote,’ he said. ‘It is not for the public. Nor for the young prisoner.’

‘No?’ said the Magistrate.

‘No,’ said Muzzlehatch.

‘Let me see … Let me see …’ said the Magistrate, pursing his mouth as he took the note from Muzzlehatch and read to himself.

Ref.: No. 1721536217

My dear Filby,

I have before me a young man, a vagrant, a trespasser, a quite peculiar youth, hailing from Gorgonblast, or some such improbable place, and bound for nowhere. By name he admits to ‘Titus’, and sometimes to ‘Groan’, though whether Groan is his real name or an invention it is hard to say.

It is quite clear in my mind that this young man is suffering from delusions of grandeur and should be kept under close observation – in other words, Filby, my dear old chap, the boy, to put it bluntly, is dotty. Have you room for him? He can, of course, pay nothing, but he may be of interest to you and even find a place in the treatise you are working on. What was it you were calling it? ‘Among the Emperors’?

O dear, what it is to be a Magistrate! Sometimes I wonder what it is all about. The human heart is too much. Things go too far. They become unhealthy. But I’d rather be me than you. You are in the entrails of it all. I asked the young man if his father were alive. ‘No,’ he said, ‘he was eaten by owls.’ What do you make of that? I will have him sent over. How is your neuritis? Let me hear from you, old man.

Yours ever,

Willy.

The Magistrate looked up from his note and stared at the boy. ‘That seems to cover it,’ he said. ‘And yet … you look all right. I wish I could help you. I will try once more – because I may be wrong.’

‘In what way?’ said Titus; his eyes were fixed on Acreblade, who had changed his seat in the Court and was now very close indeed.

‘What is wrong with me, your Worship? Why do you peer at me like that?’ said Titus. ‘I am lost – that is all.’

The Magistrate leaned forward. ‘Tell me, Titus – tell me about your home. You have told us of your father’s death. What of your mother?’

‘She was a woman.’

This answer raised a guffaw in the Court.

‘Silence,’ shouted the Clerk of the Court.

‘I would not like to feel that you are showing contempt of Court,’ said the Magistrate, ‘but if this goes on any longer I will have to pass you on to Mr Acreblade. Is your mother alive?’

‘Yes, your Worship,’ said Titus, ‘unless she has died.’

‘When did you last see her?’

‘Long ago.’

‘Were you not happy with her? – You have told us that you ran away from home.’

‘I would like to see her again,’ said Titus. ‘I did not see very much of her; she was too vast for me. But I did not flee from her.’

‘What did you flee from?’

‘From my duty.’

‘Your duty?’

‘Yes, your Worship.’

‘What kind of duty?’

‘My hereditary duty. I have told you. I am the last of the Line. I have betrayed my birthright. I have betrayed my home. I have run like a rat from Gormenghast. God have mercy on me.

‘What do you want of me? I am sick of it all! Sick of being followed. What have I done wrong – save to myself? So my papers are out of order, are they? So is my brain and heart. One day I’ll do some shadowing myself!’

Titus, his hands gripping the sides of the box, turned his full face to the Magistrate.

‘Why was I put in jail, your Worship,’ he whispered, ‘as though I were a criminal? Me! Seventy-Seventh Earl and heir to that name.’

‘Gormenghast,’ murmured the Magistrate. ‘Tell us more, dear boy.’

‘What can I tell you? It spreads in all directions. There is no end to it. Yet it seems to me now to have boundaries. It has the sunlight and the moonlight on its walls just like this country. There are rats and moths – and herons. It has bells that chime. It has forests and it has lakes and it is full of people.’

‘What kind of people, dear boy?’