by Gisèle Baxter
I see the downfall of our house. (Richard III II.iv)
Part One
Shortly after she began teaching Magnus, during the hours she spent scouring through books, Meredith found her eyes growing tired far too rapidly and she developed blinding headaches that were difficult to conceal. You're taking this work far too seriously, Fuchsia told her one afternoon, and insisted she and Magnus accompany her on one of her frequent visits to the doctor's garden. While mother and son chased each other around the shrubbery, Prunesquallor examined Meredith, having her attempt to read charts pinned to the wall, and peering into her eyes with a lamp.
"Your problem, my dear," he said brightly, "is one shared by my sister and myself, though your degree is far closer to mine than hers. You're nearsighted. And you've aggravated it of course. Magnus is five years old: he doesn't need the equivalent of a university degree at his age. I'm sure it's immaterial to his mother. Frankly I think he should go to school; he has no chance to see children his own age. If you think you're being overworked, remember that his grandmother can overrule his parents and insist that he go: he is, after all, a Groan."
"I'm not overworked," said Meredith, who felt a vague inner terror of losing her position. "I enjoy tutoring Magnus." This by now was true, for it gave her an education as well.
So Meredith was required to wear spectacles; the thin gold wire frames and small round lenses made her seem even older and plainer than she already looked, she thought, and yet she persisted in her secret life, gradually making her way through the male staff in the household in spite of their surly reticence, and beginning to cast glances at the secretarial staff. Her lovers realized their temporariness: she had long ago decided she would never marry and she was unable to reproduce. She still felt a sort of shy warmth towards Fuchsia, and this desire to talk openly with her. And she adored Magnus although she sometimes wondered how he would fare as an adult. He would not after all be attractive; what had been charming in a small child would simply become eccentric.
Part Two
Magnus had two ways of conversing with people. One was to ask a barrage of questions, generally all on the same topic but not always, and often punctuated by speculative attempts at answers prefixed by "do you think." The other was a report of what other people had to say on subjects that interested him: increasingly these were prefixed by "Meredith says," until Steerpike pointed out that virtually everything Meredith imparted came from something she had read. Then the prefix became, "Meredith says that in this book it says that." He was encouraged in his curiosity. Fuchsia either invented fanciful answers to his more abstract questions, answers that were as good as stories, or suggested he ask his father or Meredith. Steerpike kept their conversations focused, concrete and specific (also relatively infrequent). Meredith introduced him to the rudiments of research and tried to have her own reading keep pace with his insatiable knowledge-appetite. And Magnus quickly learned certain questions were not permitted: why certain of the Groan household retainers had in his hearing called his father a servant, or why he had no brothers and sisters.
In midwinter, on a morning shortly before Magnus's eleventh birthday, he and his mother went riding. The day was cold but clear and they galloped wildly through the forests, almost to the foothills of the mountain, returning to the castle in midafternoon, when Magnus would be turned over to Meredith for the rest of the day. So they were not surprised to see her at the stables, though she was accompanied by one of the men from the secretarial office, who bowed to Fuchsia as she dismounted, and said gravely, "Ladyship, I have been directed to take you immediately to the Countess."
"What does my mother want?" Fuchsia wondered.
"We'd better just go," said Meredith. "You too, Magnus."
Neither member of staff seemed inclined to talk, and Magnus sensed this was not a time to ask questions, but Fuchsia was almost breathless with curiosity and yet an instinctive dread kept her from speculating. Their destination was the throne room, where Gertrude waited with Prunesquallor and Steerpike; oddly enough, the doctor's sister and her husband the headmaster were there as well, and several of the principal members of the castle staff. Gertrude sat calmly, wearing a black gown. And there was a very old man there, with a wrinkled face and clear blue eyes, with closely cropped iron-gray hair; he wore travelling clothes, part of which seemed to be a sort of cleric's gown.
Everyone looked very serious. No one, it seemed, was able to look directly at her, except her husband, who nodded to his assistant, then gestured her over beside him, so that she stood between him and the doctor. At that point she realized Prunesquallor's face was wet and his eyes still brimming; she reflexively touched his arm but he could not look at her.
"Mother, what is it," she managed, increasingly frightened.
Gertrude swallowed. She seemed to debate rising and reaching out to her daughter but could not and at the same time say what she had to say. She swallowed again, and said softly, "Fuchsia, your brother is dead."
The room held its breath. But Fuchsia did nothing for what seemed like a very long moment, although she became completely rigid, and then she actually smiled. "He's not here. We can't know that." She raised her voice. "I won't have him declared dead the way you did my father. I don't care how long he's been gone. He wouldn't even be thirty. And he will come back."
"No, Fuchsia," Gertrude said, even more softly. "He is dead. This gentleman has travelled well over a month to bring us this news." She indicated the elderly cleric, who bowed to Fuchsia.
Fuchsia felt as if she were trapped in a tube of light: she could see imperfectly around her, could feel the auras of people she recognized in her vicinity, but could connect with absolutely nothing. She felt as if she touched anyone, her hand would go through that person. She felt as if she had to address people with the greatest of deliberation. And so she trained her gaze on Mr. Axforth, who stood forward slightly.
"Is this true," she whispered flatly.
"My dear ladyship, it is," he replied in his kind, cultured voice. And he patiently explained the circumstances again although they seemed no more real to Fuchsia than the presence of anyone else in the room. She stood in the light, they in translucent shadows. She lost all sensation of herself, even, and so without any warning, suddenly closed her eyes and sank backwards in a faint. The doctor caught her and managed to get her to a chair.
**********
Left to his own devices the day Titus's death was announced, Magnus trailed after his father to the Master of Ritual's office and wandered in, unimpeded, among the secretarial party. Steerpike made straight for his desk and began turning pages of the book of the law, at the same time opening two manuals of crossreference. Only when he had to shift his gaze to look at something did he realize his son was in the room, and for a moment they stared at each other as if for the first time. Steerpike was now past forty: his adult appearance was spare and angular and slightly haggard, in a way that was oddly impressive against his well-tailored black suit. He seemed at once to be both clenched and cold, and poised and confident. Magnus had never found him really approachable, yet had never doubted his loyalty to his own household. For his part, Magnus at ten was small enough that he still looked like a little boy, but was acquiring already a preadolescent gawkiness. He had taken to wearing his father's coats when their infinitesmal flaws could no longer be repaired to Steerpike's demanding satisfaction, and put them through centuries of abuse in a matter of months through his strenuous explorations of the castle and its environs (in fact, for all the doctor's concern, Magnus had several friends his own age, various of the castle children he encountered on his expeditions, although he had inherited the talent for solitude of both his parents). The coats ended well below his knees and had to be turned up at the cuffs, but he was despite his youth compelling in them, with his wild black mop of hair and fierce dark eyes.
Steerpike gestured his son around the desk and lifted him up into the tall chair he sometimes used when he had to scrutinize the book for extended periods of time. Gathering a significant amount of Magnus's wild hair, he lifted it up off his forehead, regarded his son gravely, then dropped the hair back into place: an unsubtle hint that Magnus was not yet ready to take.
"Oh, it is you," Steerpike observed drily, as he always did, then asked, "Where's your mother?"
"She's with Grandmother and the doctor and that Mr. Axforth," said Magnus. "Meredith is waiting for her." Magnus looked vaguely puzzled in the way he often did before a barrage of questions. "Mummy seems very upset: why? Uncle Titus was gone all the time I can think of and he never sent a letter and she never talked about him. How could he leave when he was the earl? Wasn't he supposed to stay and rule Gormenghast? How long had he been the earl? When did my grandfather die? What was Uncle Titus like? Did you know him? Did he and Mummy get on? Does she become the ruler now?"
Steerpike drew a sharp breath in through his teeth and said, "All things in time. Now I have a lot of work to do, so either go wait with Meredith, or go home."
Occasionally, members of staff were mildly alarmed that this small child would be sent off without accompaniment, but Magnus never got lost and seemed completely fearless. He climbed down from the chair himself. Taking a circuitous route, when he arrived home it was quite dark, and he found Meredith in the parlour sewing a button on one of his coats.
"Your mother is asleep," Meredith said. "I suppose you want to know everything." When Magnus nodded, she sighed, gestured him onto the sofa beside her, and answered his various questions about Titus Groan, who had scarcely acknowledged her as a presence in the Groan household, and about whom she had almost no opinion. Not so Fuchsia, for whom the dam had broken and years of resentment that he had deserted her, that he had disapproved of her marriage, even in a way that he had escaped, had come out in an exhaustingly vitriolic bout of dangerous hysteria. And then she had grown quite calm, had apologized for this harrowing outburst, and had promptly fallen asleep, still in most of her riding suit, on the bed. Meredith told none of this to Magnus. She did not dare to speculate on how Gormenghast might be governed from this point.
By the time Steerpike returned to his household, the night had turned cold and very clear; he stood in the courtyard to smoke and stared up at the stars like glittering powder on the velvet of the night, and he breathed out smoke rings among clouds of condensation. When he went inside, he found Magnus on the floor of the parlour, drawing an intricate map. Meredith slept amidst her stack of books on the sofa, her spectacles tipped onto the bridge of her nose. She sat up abruptly at the arrival, blinked and rubbed her eyes; she must have been dreaming vividly because she seemed to have utterly lost her bearings and simply gathered up the books and hurried from the room. Magnus looked seriously up at his father.
"She had a very hard time with Mummy," he explained.
"And how is your mother now?"
Magnus shrugged. "All right. We all ate dinner upstairs in my room. I think there's some stuff left but it's been put away."
Steerpike made an inspection of the map, nodded approval, then rolled it up and told Magnus brusquely, "Go to bed now."
By this point Magnus was tired enough that he actually would turn down his lamps and throw his clothes on the floor and crawl into his narrow bed or the hammock he had slung in a corner near the best of his windows. Otherwise, he might be just as apt to close the door but unroll the map and continue drawing, or sit up reading, or continue the elaborate ongoing game he had established on a broad rectangular table, involving small clay figures and buildings and props he made from odds and ends he scavenged while on his expeditions. Sometimes whoever went in to check on him in the morning would find him curled up over his game or drawing, wrapped in a blanket, sound asleep. But tonight he was already yawning, so he took his rolled-up map, let his father absently rumple his mop of hair (it was as close to a gesture of affection as they had), and trudged upstairs.
The remains of the nursery feast were in the larder. As always they seemed to be nothing resembling a proper meal, though there was some bread and cheese and fruit to be had, also half a bottle of wine. You could at least eat at the table, Steerpike told himself as he consumed the late meal ravenously while standing by the sideboard. Moreover, you do know how to cook, he went on, though he grimaced at the thought: he would on occasion make tea or coffee but the idea of chopping or mixing things physically repelled him and he had never actually seen the kitchen part of his house. He poured the remainder of his wine into a large crystal glass then went upstairs, loosening his collar en route.
Fuchsia was sitting up in bed, reading. She was past forty herself now and had become almost heartbreakingly beautiful. The exaggeration of her features had become more sensual, especially in their increased definition, and her hair had only a few lines of iron in it. There was something different about her, something subtle. She looked up at her husband's arrival and immediately set aside her book; he crossed the room and bent to kiss her, and she took his face between her hands.
"You've been eating dates," she told him once she withdrew her mouth from his.
He nodded, handed her the glass of wine and sat on the side of the bed to pull off his boots. "The last of your dinner, I'm afraid."
"We had dinner in Magnus's room. We played at being explorers on an island where we'd been shipwrecked. Meredith can't quite get in the spirit of these things, so we made her the lookout and she got to scan the horizon for approaching ships we could signal."
She was animated; that was the difference. She was like someone who has snapped out of a period of hypnosis and is elated. And this on the day she had learned of her brother's death and had been frighteningly hysterical. Moreover, she had clearly been anticipating Steerpike's return; despite the chilly night she wore the sleeveless red gown that matched her robe.
**********
"I can read your mind," Fuchsia announced much later, smiling enigmatically in the darkness, staring up at her husband from where she lay, still wrapped around him, chin resting on his chest.
Steerpike was still breathing heavily (he had discovered, in these latter years of their marriage, that he enjoyed letting her seduce him, but her vigour was almost frightening), and seriously desirous of sleep. Although on some subterranean level he wondered, can she, he merely replied, "Is that a fact."
"You've wanted to establish Gormenghast as a Protectorate rather than a Regency ever since Titus first left. True?"
Steerpike decided to evade the short answer. "Gertrude will have to designate Magnus the next heir. There's no precedent for a female ruler. But the strict line ends because he's only half royal and Gertrude would die rather than elevate my class status. Actually, you could be regent or he could be earled immediately. My own feeling is he should complete his education first, and the break in the strict lineage permits some space for precedent. Yes, you're quite right, I believe Gormenghast could do with an interregnum: a chance to restructure things."
Fuchsia said, "Now you read my mind. Tell me what I want."
"I know what you want. And you know we can't."
Part Three
In the crisp early morning Gertrude walked around the castle grounds, catching frost on the hem of her skirt. It was going to be a bright day and the sun gradually penetrated the edges of these shadows, glistening on the stones. Trailed by her retinue of cats, she made her usual circuit undisturbed until finally she found herself face to face with a boy who had just jumped down from a perilously high tree branch. He was at the age when his adult appearance was being established, though nothing yet seemed in proportion: his hands were too big, his limbs too long and narrow, his face still a caricature. He wore an old, oversized black coat over a faded jumper and trousers torn at one knee and scuffed boots; his uncombed black hair fell in his face and had to be shoved back frequently. And yet there was such an utter confidence about him that the state of his garments could go unnoticed. He made a sort of bow that was more a sort of awkward jerking nod, then stared directly at her, and Gertrude nodded in return, and when he turned to leave, directed him to stay.
"You're not afraid of me, are you, Magnus?" she wondered.
Magnus shook his head. "Not at all," he replied. "You're my grandmother. Why should I be afraid of you?"
She tossed her head slightly. "I'm never quite certain what reputation I hold in your household. How old are you by now? Your birthday must be soon."
"Two weeks. I'll be eleven."
"If you're not expected at home, you might walk with me," the countess suggested, and Magnus complied, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his coat and taking his place beside her among the cats. "I don't think we've said six words to each other in all the time you've been alive."
"My mother wishes you knew me better," said Magnus. "I'm not expected anywhere till eight. Then I have breakfast with my tutor and we'll get on with the first lesson of the day."
"You have breakfast with Meredith?"
Magnus nodded. "Mummy sometimes joins us but often she sleeps late. My father's long gone by then."
"And what sort of education have you had," Gertrude went on. "I was rather alarmed at your parents' decision not to send you to school though I suppose I should be proof against such things."
Magnus glanced sideways at her. "Well, I can read and write," he said. "Meredith decided I'd get a cross-section of academic subjects formally and be responsible for the rest myself, so she and I read philosophy, astronomy, natural sciences and physics, mathematics and literature. She also taught me fencing." (On a whim, Steerpike had taught Meredith the art and she had become proficient, against all expectation.) "Mummy taught me how to draw and how to ride. My father and I are reading castle history and law, and he taught me how to read music; I can sing and play piano not bad and violin quite well, the doctor says."
"I had no idea your father was musical," said Gertrude.
"He said he picked it up when he was in the doctor's household, whenever that was. My parents don't talk about themselves much. Anyway, he's technically very good but actually doesn't enjoy music much."
"And do you get on with your parents?"
"Yes. My father said you disapproved of their marriage."
Now it was Gertrude's turn to cast a sideways glance, but there was no accusation in the boy's expression. She drew a heavy sigh. "Did he happen to explain why?"
"Well, yes, because I asked." (Somehow, Gertrude had no doubt of this.) "He said you didn't want my mother to marry a servant, and he said he had never considered himself a servant and anyway he wanted to marry Mummy and she wanted to marry him. Is that why you won't come visit?"
**********
Gertrude sat in the parlour of Prunesquallor's house, even more incongruous than usual in her shabbily ornate black velvet mourning gown. The doctor nervously eyed the birds that had flown in after her as his valet set a tray containing an exquisite decanter of sherry and two small glasses, on a low oval table, polished to mirrorlike brilliance. When the valet had departed, he sat on the edge of a pale lemon brocade chair and poured out the sherry, handing the Countess one of the tiny glasses.
"He's such an odd child," she said. "He talks and talks."
The doctor assumed she was thinking of the alternate sullenness and volatility of her own children in her presence; she had never encouraged conversation so they took it elsewhere: to him; to each other.
"He's an exceptionally bright young man," said the doctor.
"He's the image of his father," Gertrude returned. "Yet when I look at him I see Fuchsia. It's not just the black hair and the shape of the eyes. It's almost frightening. It's almost as if she and his father were fused in this boy."
"I suppose technically they are," the doctor commented, smiling with his teeth. "But I see what you mean: a hybrid creature, with all of his cunning and all of her passion. I like Magnus. He's completely honest and unconceited. In spite of our concerns, I think he's also had a good life so far: he believes himself to be loved and certainly his welfare is provided for and he has the freedom to discover things. I have a little trepidation about the amount of responsibility he'll have to take on eventually, not because he's incapable of any of it, but because he's never had any real restrictions on his time."
Part Four
About a week after their daybreak encounter, Gertrude sent word to her daughter that she wished to invite Magnus to tea. Fuchsia, who received the message while helping to paint a large mural in Magnus's room, transmitted it somewhat more imperatively: your grandmother expects you for tea at four o'clock tomorrow. She was slightly hurt at not being invited herself and felt again that she was growing isolated in this familiar yet strange place. The nightmare-aftermath or dreamstate-collapse feeling still clung to her, and if she could not focus her energies on more children as Magnus grew increasingly independent, she was not sure what she was going to do. For the first time she felt the physical limitations of Gormenghast, and of her so far fairly safe and predictable life within it, and she wished there were other places one could go and visit, where the people looked and acted differently, where things still happened. Perhaps Titus had found such places but she was training herself not to think of Titus more than absolutely necessary, for after all, Titus had abandoned her.
However, she liked the idea of Magnus going: it was the sort of proof she liked Gertrude to have.
Magnus had seen his mother's old attic: she had taken him there not that long ago. On his own, he had by this point seen a considerable amount of the castle. Even this did not quite prepare him for Gertrude's room; he stared straight up at the vine-covered bird-filled red walls, and scanned the dust and moss but also the tapestries and linens and the battered but intricate brocaded coverings of the furniture, the old woven carpets. Gertrude, meanwhile, calmly studied him: a pale skinny boy with wild black hair and unsettlingly intense dark eyes, dressed badly in clothes that had once been fine. She had seen him often enough in public. but until their recent encounter she had never looked at him.
He did not bow; he simply said, "Hello, grandmother; I'm here." She wished he didn't look quite so much like his father, and looked more like a Groan, but then in thinking of her husband, and their children, and her sisters-in-law, she wondered if there was, in fact, a Groan image to resemble. She did not smile at him or make any gesture of affection, replying, "So there you are. Why don't you sit in that big chair over there." The chair in question was a velvet-covered armchair in garish purple, once quite fine but pecked and clawed to threadbare patches and even areas where the stuffing was beginning to emerge. It dwarfed little Magnus, who nevertheless sat calmly in it, legs dangling over the edge, while his grandmother uncovered the tea things.
But as soon as she seated herself in her favourite red armchair, he had built up sufficient velocity to launch the barrage of questions: "Where are all your cats? Do they come in here? Do you let any of them sleep on your bed? My mum says you have a special room for them. What does it look like? Can I see it? Do you suppose the cats ever try to get at the birds? Do you name any of the birds? Do you think of them as wild or tame? Do you ride? The stables are brilliant. I wish they weren't so far from my house. My father says it's very important to know how to ride well, and he has a beautiful black horse that he let me name and I called him Nightmare. Mum rides really well too; she says you taught her when I was very little so she could teach me. Meredith is learning."
Gertrude poured out two broad, large cups of hot green tea, then indicated the various sweets and savouries on exquisite plates on the round brass-topped table between them. "You certainly do ask many questions," she observed. "I suppose eventually I might answer some of them but I did ask you here to talk about a few more specific issues."
"With me?" Magnus asked pointedly. Like all boys he was perpetually hungry. However, Meredith had begun to add lessons on deportment to her repertoire (at the request of Steerpike during one of their regular meetings on Magnus's education). She used a dreadful book acquired from Irma Bellgrove and conducted these lessons stiffly and precisely, without interest or appreciation: all of her own impeccable manners she had learned through observation. Of course, Magnus demanded reasons for all of this behaviour. The book had a theory about social mobility and acceptability; Meredith simply said, because one day you'll be among the most important people here and everyone will watch you. Magnus was unconvinced and bored. (Meredith had confronted Steerpike over this apparently pointless grind which did not seem to apply to Fuchsia, whose manners were indifferent at best, and was about to express her hope that it would not extend to reducing her function to nagging at Magnus over his uncombed hair and untidy room, when she suddenly checked herself and simply asked Steerpike where he had learned his own social graces. He arched an eyebrow, and replied, largely from that book.) Consequently, despite his ravenous appetite, Magnus took only three items from the tea tray to begin, following Gertrude's lead.
"Magnus, what do you see as your future?" Gertrude asked.
"I finish my education then become Assistant Master of Ritual," Magnus replied dispassionately.
"Things have changed somewhat with the death of your Uncle Titus," said the Countess. "I wish to designate you as the male heir to the earldom of Gormenghast. You are not the direct heir, although you are the grandson of the seventy-sixth earl, my late husband. Do you realize what this means?"
"No," said Magnus.
The Countess sighed. "It means your household becomes the royal household of Gormenghast. It also means that the direct line of the Groans ends after centuries, since you are of the house but you are not Magnus Groan. It also means I shall have to give your father some sort of title. I have no choice."
"And when do I become the earl?" Magnus wondered.
"Your mother decides that since you are a minor," the Countess replied, knowing with those words that Gormenghast as she had known it and as generations of her ancestors had known it, was if not cancelled then threatened, for Fuchsia would accept her husband's counsel in this, and Steerpike would insist Magnus wait until he reached the age of majority.
"What if that's not what I want?"
For a moment, Gertrude stared off into a distance Magnus was still too young to see, then she picked up one of her cats and held it to her shoulder, and looked back at him seriously, but not unkindly. "You're too young to know what you want. And surely you weren't brought up to believe you have any choice in your future. Your fate now is determined by your mother's line rather than your father's position. There's a vast difference in terms of what is now expected of you, but there's no more element of choice."
**********
The commemoration of Titus Groan, seventy-seventh earl of Gormenghast, last of the direct line, was a solemn occasion, placing the castle in a three-month period of official mourning, during which various statues and banisters were draped in black, the entirety of the royal family, leading citizenry, and principal bureaucracy was required to wear sombre garments, and all servants wore black armbands. The ceremony itself involved a lengthy elegy composed by the poet, and read in the main courtyard during a pelting downpour. The choir sang a funerary ode, during which Prunesquallor wept profusely and Bellgrove kept blowing his nose, and Fuchsia looked straight ahead at nothing, her depth of grief inexpressible and twofold, since only the doctor and Meredith knew that the previous week she had suffered a miscarriage, only shortly into a pregnancy she had only begun to guess at. (Prunesquallor privately considered this fortunate, since he felt she would not survive another delivery, but Fuchsia persisted in a private belief that perhaps she could. She had never accepted his diagnosis following Magnus's birth. In fact, it was her husband who became cautious, and in those moments when he permitted himself to contemplate such things, Steerpike wondered why it mattered so much to him. There seemed no end in sight to this terrifying ardour that had characterized their relationship from the outset, so living together separately was not an option. It was not sentiment; it was nothing he would go so far as to call love. Fuchsia, like Magnus, had become part of the arrangement of things. He simply found himself unable to imagine their displacement.)
The following day, in a ceremony necessarily muted by the circumstances although it was glaringly bright and mild, so that the mist from the previous day's rain rose like golden clouds in the morning sun, Steerpike was elevated to Governor of Gormenghast and Lord Protector in the minority of Magnus as seventy-eighth earl designate. It was all he could do not to grin broadly during Gertrude's stern invocation, yet his speech in response was almost obsequiously deferential.
Magnus was eleven. That gave Steerpike almost seven years in which to remake Gormenghast into something closer to his own image.
Part Two | Part Three | Prequel | Table of Contents
Copyright 2001-04 by Gisèle Baxter; all rights to original narrative, characters and characterizations reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Last updated 2 August 2003 by G.M. Baxter.