Then Fuchsia came up to her old nurse and stared at her brother. The feeling of aversion for him had disappeared, and though as yet the lilac-eyed creature had not affected her with any sensation of sisterly love, nevertheless she had got used to his presence in the Castle and would sometimes play with him solemnly for half an hour or so at a time.

Nannie’s eyes followed Fuchsia’s.

‘His little Lordship,’ she said, wagging her head, ‘it’s his little Lordship.’

‘Why do you love him?’

‘Why do I love him! oh, my poor, weak heart! Why do I love him, stupid? How could you say such a thing?’ cried Nannie Slagg. ‘Oh my little Lordship thing. How could I help it – the innocent notion that he is! The very next of Gormenghast, aren’t you, my only? The very next of all. What did your cruel sister say, then, what did she say?

‘He must go to his cot now, for his sleep, he must, and to dream his golden dreams.’

‘Did you talk to me like that when I was a baby,’ asked Fuchsia.

‘Of course I did,’ said Mrs Slagg. ‘Don’t be silly. Oh, the ignorance of you! Are you going to tidy your room for me now?’

She hobbled to the door with her precious bundle. Every day she asked this same question, but never waited for an answer, knowing that whatever it was, it was she who would have to make some sort of order out of the chaos.

Fuchsia again turned to the window and stared at the Mountain whose shape down to the least outcrop had long since scored its outline in her mind.

Between the castle and Gormenghast Mountain the land was desolate, for the main part empty wasteland, with large areas of swamp where undisturbed among the reedy tracts the waders moved. Curlews and peewits sent their thin cries along the wind. Moorhens reared their young and paddled blackly in and out of the rushes. To the east of Gormenghast Mountain, but detached from the trees at its base, spread the undulating darkness of the Twisted Woods. To the west the unkempt acres, broken here and there with low stunted trees bent by the winds into the shape of hunchbacks.

Between this dreary province and the pine wood that surrounded the West Wing of the castle, a dark, shelving plateau rose to a height of about a hundred to two hundred feet – an irregular tableland of greeny-black rock, broken and scarred and empty. It was beyond these cold escarpments that the river wound its way about the base of the Mountain and fed the swamps where the wild fowl lived.