Startled at her own outburst she stood up beside the bed rigidly. Then her eyes turned to the nurse. Keda had been so much alone in her reverie that it seemed natural to her to find that the old woman was asleep. She moved to the window. The afternoon light lay over the towers. In the straggling ivy beneath her a bird rustled. From far below a voice cried faintly to some unseen figure and stillness settled again. She breathed deeply, and leaned forward into the light. Her hands grasped the frame of the window on her either side and her eyes from wandering across the towers were drawn inexorably to that high encircling wall that hid from her the houses of her people, her childhood, and the substance of her passion.
FLAY BRINGS A MESSAGE
Autumn returned to Gormenghast like a dark spirit re-entering its stronghold. Its breath could be felt in forgotten corridors – Gormenghast had itself become autumn. Even the denizens of this fastness were its shadows.
The crumbling castle, looming among the mists, exhaled the season, and every cold stone breathed it out. The tortured trees by the dark lake burned and dripped, and their leaves snatched by the wind were whirled in wild circles through the towers. The clouds mouldered as they lay coiled, or shifted themselves uneasily upon the stone skyfield, sending up wreaths that drifted through the turrets and swarmed up the hidden walls.
From high in the Tower of Flints the owls inviolate in their stone galleries cried inhumanly, or falling into the windy darkness set sail on muffled courses for their hunting grounds. Fuchsia was less and less to be found in the castle. As, with every day that passed, the weather became increasingly menacing, so she seemed to protract the long walks that had now become her chief pleasure. She had captured anew the excitement that had once filled her when with Mrs Slagg, several years before, she had insisted on dragging her nurse on circuitous marches which had seemed to the old lady both hazardous and unnecessary. But Fuchsia neither needed nor wanted a companion now.
Revisiting those wilder parts of the environs that she had almost forgotten, she experienced both exaltation and loneliness. This mixture of the sweet and bitter became necessary to her, as her attic had been necessary. She watched with frowning eyes the colour changing on the trees and loaded her pockets with long golden leaves and fire-coloured ferns and, indeed, with every kind of object which she found among the wood and rocky places. Her room became filled with stones of curious shapes that had appealed to her, fungi resembling hands or plates; queer-shaped flints and contorted branches; and Mrs Slagg, knowing it would be fruitless to reproach her, gazed each evening, with her fingers clutching her lower lip, at Fuchsia emptying her pockets of fresh treasures and at the ever-growing hoard that had begun to make the room a tortuous place to move about in.
Among Fuchsia’s hieroglyphics on the wall great leaves had begun to take residence, pinned or pasted between her drawings, and areas of the floor were piled with trophies.
‘Haven’t you got enough, dear?’ said Nannie, as Fuchsia entered late one evening and deposited a moss-covered boulder on her bed. Tiny fronds of fern emerged here and there from the moss, and white flowers the size of gnats.
Fuchsia had not heard Nannie’s question, so the little old creature advanced to the side of the bed.
‘You’ve got enough now, haven’t you, my caution? Oh, yes, yes, I think so. Quite enough for your room now, dear. How dirty you are, my … Oh, my poor heart, how unappetising you are.’
Fuchsia tossed back her dripping hair from her eyes and neck, so that it hung in a heavy clump like black seaweed over the collar of her cape. Then after undoing a button at her throat with a desperate struggle, and letting the corded velvet fall to her feet, she pushed it under her bed with her foot. Then she seemed to see Mrs Slagg for the first time. Bending forward she kissed her savagely on the forehead and the rain dripped from her on to the nurse’s clothes.
‘Oh, you dirty thoughtless thing! you naughty nuisance. Oh, my poor heart, how could you?’ said Mrs Slagg, suddenly losing her temper and stamping her foot. ‘All over my black satin, you dirty thing. You nasty wet thing. Oh, my poor dress! Why can’t you stay in when the weather is muddy and blowy? You always were unkind to me! Always, always.’
‘That’s not true,’ said Fuchsia, clenching her hands. The poor old nurse began to cry.
‘Well,
‘I don’t know. I don’t know at all,’ said Nannie. ‘Everyone’s unkind to me; how should I know?’
‘Then I’m going away’, said Fuchsia.
Nannie gulped and jerked her head up. ‘Going away?’ she cried in a querulous voice. ‘No, no! you mustn’t go away.’ And then with an inquisitive look struggling with the fear in her eyes, ‘Where to?’ she said. ‘Where could you go to, dear?’
