Flesh Wounds Read online

  ‘She has never shown any respect for the traditions of her family,’ Scarabold continued. ‘And now this unseemly fuss over her Maidenhood Ceremony. She should be pleased to mark her passage into womankind in so firm a fashion.’

  ‘If it please Your Grace,’ coughed Ratchet cautiously, ‘perhaps the Lady Ginansia has deduced the identity of her suitor and is less than happy to allow him admission.’

  Scarabold’s face crumpled as completely as if it had been drawn on paper and crushed into a ball. Valets had no opinions, and if they did they should never be allowed to voice them, and even if they did voice them should never, ever mention subjects of such indelicacy.

  ‘I mean,’ stammered Ratchet, sensing the heat of the royal glower upon his vulnerably thin neck, ‘how fiercely she cast her glance aside when introduced to Earl Carapace in the Cathedral of Pons Minor.’

  ‘I do not give a maggot’s egg what you think of my choice, you oafish seamster,’ he blasted. ‘The land is much changed since last they met. Carapace’s armies are now the finest warriors in the Dunghills and make better allies than enemies. He has long shown an interest in the youthful glory of the princess.’

  The withered valet remembered only too well. During Ginansia’s confirmation, on her thirteenth birthday, Carapace had barely been able to tear his gaze from the pale flesh of her bare shoulders. Ratchet gave an involuntary shudder as he recalled the eerie clicking sound the earl made with his throat when considering matters of a carnal nature. Even now he was beetling toward the castle in his iridescent ebony armour to claim the soon-to-be supine body of the princess.

  As Scarabold’s eruptions, anal and oral, continued unabated, Ratchet returned to work, despairing the fate of females born into nobility. Many years ago he had been employed by the gracious Lady Dwindoline, and look what had happened to her, poor thing, forced to become the Great Wound’s second wife because Mater Moribund had failed to secure him a son. Three girl babies had been ceremonially drowned before Dwindoline had finally given birth to the milksop Leperdandy. As the golden needle slithered through his gnarled fingers, Ratchet considered the night that now lay ahead for the princess and her suitor. It was well known that Carapace never travelled without his skittering ‘courtiers’. He prayed that Ginansia would somehow find the strength to survive her grim ordeal.

  The Great Clock Of Fascinus would have been easier to interpret if it had still sported hands. Unfortunately a slow-turning central spindle and a racing quarter-second arm were all that remained of the timepiece’s horological abilities. Ginansia kept it mounted above her bed because the mother-of-pearl face shifted like a sunlit sea. But now the remembrance that Fascinus was a phallic god brought fresh qualms.

  ‘I don’t understand why you’re so reluctant to help me escape,’ she sighed, staring up at the shimmering clock face.

  Leperdandy moved the princess’s lolling leg and perched himself on a corner of her purple coverlet. ‘I don’t want you to incur Scarabold’s wrath. You know how slow he is to forgive, and a matter such as this bears great importance to him.’

  ‘What about its importance to me?’ she cried.

  ‘I mean that the congress carries political weight.’

  ‘And the intrusion upon my body does not.’ She sat up sharply and narrowed her eyes. ‘Do you know the identity of my despoiler?’

  ‘I have my suspicions.’ He coughed awkwardly into his fist.

  ‘Dando, you must tell me the truth. Is it someone I abhor?’

  Her half-brother’s cough turned into a hacking fit.

  ‘Not that awful man who smelled like a pond and was covered in mud, Plum-somebody …’

  Leperdandy, crimson cheeked, shook his head and spluttered.

  ‘Or the fat little king who paid court to Mother, the one with the leaky eye …’ She froze with a sudden thought. ‘Not Carapace.’

  There was a horrible, confirming silence.

  ‘No, Dando, not the Lord Of Beetles …’

  ‘He campaigned long and hard for you,’ admitted the boy. ‘Scarabold won’t be moved from his ruling, and if you fail to abide by his decision he’ll treat it as a matter of treason …’

  ‘Treasoners must be entombed for life. He wouldn’t do that –’

  ‘You are not his blood daughter, Ginansia,’ warned Leperdandy, who had once visited the grim, stinking dungeons beneath the castle to see for himself the pitiful bone creatures captured as prisoners of war by the king. These weary albinos with flaking skin and wheedling voices had been forgotten by all except Fumblegut, the jailer, who was rumoured to play elaborate sexual games with his charges in return for food and water.

  ‘Then you must find a way to save me,’ she cried desperately.

  Her half-brother fidgeted with the quilt, running the fronds of a crimson tassel between his bony fingers. ‘There is a way, but you’d be on your own beyond the castle walls. I couldn’t come with you.’

  ‘I wouldn’t ask you to,’ she said, her face softening. ‘Just take me to the broad night sky, and I will do the rest.’

  At eight o’clock, Dwindoline knocked at the bedroom door and asked to sit a while, but her offer was curtly refused. Ginansia hated to offend but feared that sharing the plan of her escape would place those she loved at risk. Besides, she was not entirely sure that her secret would be safe. As she prepared, she found herself bearing no malice toward Scarabold. Her stepfather had no desire to hurt any member of his extended family, but it was necessary for him to place duty before affection.

  At a quarter past eleven, Ginansia rose from her dressing table in a high-necked robe of plain green silk that whispered across the flagstone floor, curling about her like a cubicle. She raised the hook of a slim lead-glass case containing three lit candles and left her apartment, locking the bedroom door behind her, not daring to glance back at her lifelong home.

  Tonight the corridors of the West Quadrant seemed alien and friendless. Fewer lamps had been lit than usual, and the leaping shadows were of a deeper hue. The entire edifice was sealed in darkness and cold air like a refrigerator, with the servants waging an eternal battle against rising damp and leaking ramparts. Yet there were pockets of warmth within the castle, and the princess knew them as well as the kitchen cat. She measured her tread to the funereal drumbeat that sounded within the Chapel Of Consummation. The sexangular stone room held a comfortable curtained bed and a basin of warm spring water on an iron stand, having been designed for a single purpose. Mater Moribund had – quite illegally – slept there on those nights when her husband had returned victoriously drunk and muck-encrusted from his pubic skirmishes in the sink towns of the lowlands. As Ginansia approached it now, her heart sank.

  The mater was already in attendance, talking softly with Dr Fangle as she watched him wiping his pudgy hands on a strip of linen cloth. Ginansia balked at the chamber entrance. What if Leperdandy had fallen asleep? Consciousness slipped from the sickly youth as easily as an oilskin cloak. She was forever nudging him awake during the Wednesday sermon. What if he failed to keep their finely timed appointment?

  ‘Come, child,’ beckoned Moribund, her amethyst wristlets chattering. ‘Let Dr Fangle examine you.’

  The short, wart-bedecked physician, an unwelcome temporary replacement for Scarabold’s dropsical family doctor, revealed an arrangement of yellow teeth and strummed his hand across his housecoat before offering it to shake.

  Seated in a wooden-stirrupped chair that seemed to have been designed for the sole purpose of internal examination, Ginansia gave an involuntary shudder as his freezing fingers touched the insides of her thighs. She was frightened that her mother, peering over the doctor’s shoulder, would spot the heavy woollen travelling clothes hitched up beneath her gown. A sudden sly icicle ran across her exposed aperture. Fangle grinned into her face. ‘Intacta, veritably,’ he whispered. ‘Most encouraging.’ He reluctantly removed his digit and ran it beneath his nostrils like a fine cigar.

  ‘That’s enough, Fangle. Your jo
b here is finished.’ Moribund pushed him aside as Ginansia hastily dropped her gown.

  ‘But surely the princess must be taught how to avoid conception and infection,’ pleaded the doctor, still staring at her veiled cleft with his forefinger extended.

  ‘Carapace is responsible for the former, and there shall be no need for the latter,’ snapped Moribund. ‘The earl is also undergoing examination. On your feet, child. You have little time to spare.’

  Sweating from her layers of clothes, Ginansia clambered to an upright position. She longed to run screaming into the torch-lit corridor but forced deliberation into her movements so that nothing should seem amiss. In a few minutes she would be on her way to freedom. She took her leave of the ogling physician and fell in behind her mother, who was already retreating from the chamber.

  ‘Of course you’re nervous, just as I was long ago,’ intoned the mater, swinging her beads. ‘Before my coring I presumed all kinds of painful pleasures lay in store. Imagine my disappointment when the great sweating brute dropped upon me like a felled tree and tore at my flowerpot of femininity with a fleshy little twig that discharged its sap and promptly vanished into the shrubbery. No danger of that happening to you, though, as I understand from Carapace’s physician that the earl’s maleness could steer a tea clipper if raised as a mast.’

  Ginansia thought it best not to comment. The fireplace was approaching.

  It was common knowledge within the castle that the chimney breasts of all the fireplaces in the Western Quadrant were linked to a central passage lined with ceramic bricks. The original idea had been to light one large fire in the basement boiler and so provide gusts of warm, dry air from fireplaces on every floor, but this plan had been abandoned when the Squeam’s mother perished after she fell into the boiler trying to light it. Leperdandy was even now pushing through the elasticated cobwebs of one such passage that ran parallel to the hallway along which Ginansia followed the queen. Separated by a mere three feet of stone, he strained to catch the sound of their progress but could discern nothing.

  ‘I was sure I’d be able to hear them. Bumscuttle!’ He blundered into a whiskery nest of spiders, batted the skittering insects from his vision and wiped the webbing from his eyelids. He could hardly see a thing. How would he be able to time his emergence from the fireplace in order to snatch Ginansia?

  On the other side of the wall the princess slowed her pace, gradually dropping behind. She needed to put as much distance as possible between herself and Moribund before reaching the great carved maw of the fireplace.

  ‘Don’t dawdle, girl!’ The queen looked back. ‘Carapace is not a man to be kept waiting.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mother. My hem is caught.’ She stopped and affected making a study of her ankle. Leperdandy, hearing the exchange, drew a great breath, burst from beneath the marble mantelpiece in a cloud of soot and grabbed his stepmother, who screamed and stabbed him through the shoulder with one of the many silver hatpins she kept concealed upon her person to deal with Scarabold.

  ‘You’ve killed me!’ gasped Leperdandy, clutching at the protruding pin, his great white eyes bulging out of his sooted face like night-time sea beacons.

  ‘You stupid, stupid boy,’ screamed Moribund, whipping the pin from his stinging flesh and tossing it aside. ‘This is no time for your idiotic japes!’ And with that she seized Ginansia by the wrist and thrust her into the chamber ahead.

  ‘Dando!’ Ginansia flung the cry back plaintively as she was swept inside and the door boomed shut behind her. Horrified by his failure, the boy limped into shadow to nurse his burning shoulder.

  Moribund was nowhere to be seen.

  Her role as procuress completed, she had slipped beyond one of the six chamber walls, leaving her daughter alone with the earl. Carapace stood between a pair of flickering lanterns, barely discernible in his oiled black armour. The susurration of his breath was punctuated with tiny clicks, like an insect rattling its mandibles. Ginansia felt the chill splinters of the door at her back. There were no windows in the cell. Only a bed, a bowl of water, and a freshly sliced lemon set upon the stand ‘to cleanse and heal your wound’ as Moribund put it. As her eyes adjusted in the gloom, she registered a shimmering movement behind Carapace, as though the purple counterpane was attempting to escape the bed. The earl removed his gloves with deliberation, the leather creaking over his knuckles, and began to unbutton his glistening tunic with a series of little cracking sounds.

  ‘Come closer into the light, my little one,’ he croaked, his throat lacquered with lust.

  Ginansia took a small step forward and studied the figure before her. His uncorseted belly hung above his ebony codpiece, but his features were more handsome than she had expected. A goatee hung on his bone-white face like a small black shovel. Elaborate silver rings adorned the rims of his ears. Whatever happened, she would not speak to him. How could the older ladies of the castle have allowed themselves to undergo such an abhorrent ritual? It had no purpose, save to satisfy some ancient law laid down by long-dead ancestors.

  There was definitely something moving beneath the coverlet on the bed. As Carapace seated himself in order to remove his leggings and boots, the cloth shifted and rippled around him.

  ‘Come, let me touch you. You have nothing to be afraid of. I am a gentle man.’ He raised his arms to receive her. Like a clockwork doll Ginansia shifted forward, her legs moving in tiny spasms.

  ‘If I must be penetrated for the sake of my family,’ she stated clearly, ‘I will receive no overtures of affection from you.’

  ‘Penetration!’ he cried. ‘Who taught you to think of love in so clinical a fashion?’

  Ginansia was incensed. ‘This mockery, sir, has nothing to do with love!’

  ‘But I have loved you from the first moment I saw you, on your thirteenth birthday. I would have broken your hymen upon your communion dais.’

  ‘Oh, this is blasphemy!’

  He stopped the shocked oval of her mouth with a searing perfumed kiss. One icy hand slipped into her bodice and cupped her breast, the calloused thumb brushing across the thimble top of a nipple. She tried to pull herself free as he tilted the pair of them back onto the bed.

  ‘This is too intimate – I was not warned –’

  ‘Stay your fears,’ he whispered. ‘The night is young and we are enormous. We have plenty of time to acquaint ourselves.’

  ‘The night! I was told that the ceremony would last but a few minutes!’

  His snickering laugh followed her down as he cantilevered her onto the counterpane. Through the eider feathers she could feel things moving, hard-shelled creatures the size of gravy boats shifting this way and that. Reaching out in puzzlement, she seized a corner of the quilt and peeled it back. Hundreds of black beetles filled the mattress, their polished wing-cases flickering over each other. Recoiling in horror, the princess fought away from the pulsing morass of segmented bodies.

  ‘My courtiers are here to further our conjugal ecstasy,’ he hissed, dipping his hand into the heavy, chittering insects and allowing them to run across his arm. ‘Now we must obey the natural impulse of their bodies.’ One of the beetles was upon his neck, its feelers tentatively entering his mouth.

  ‘Repugnant barbarian!’ she screamed, punching at his chest. Her gown tore in his grasp, and the woollen travelling dress beneath slipped free from its silken shell. She fell back from the bed, her shoesoles popping and crunching on the squirming, living floor. Reaching the far wall, she searched for the handle to the door.

  ‘Listen to Lady High-A-Mighty,’ laughed Carapace, sitting back on the bed so that the insects could fill his bared lap. ‘As if you could afford to choose a suitor for yourself.’

  ‘I will give myself to whomsoever I please!’ she shouted, close to tears, scrabbling for the inset brass ring which refused to turn.

  ‘You might try, but who would have you? Who would want someone from Britannica Castle? The door is locked, so calm yourself.’

  She turned to fa
ce him, sliding her body along the wall. The hidden exit through which her mother had vanished, that was the only answer now. If she could find the door itself she could locate the catch. All secret passageways within the castle opened similarly.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. ‘Our family is the finest in the land, generations of warriors brave and fair –’

  ‘Is that what they told you? What does the castle look like from outside?’

  She caught her breath. ‘They speak of golden spires and colonnades so fine that only –’

  ‘They speak? They speak? You have never seen the building from beyond it, and do you know why? Because it is not safe for you to leave this edifice. You would be murdered in the winking of an eye. You are prisoners here, outcasts, lepers, Jews. We have left you to peter out, to breed inwards and die. For us to speak with you is taboo, to touch you is punishable by death. Do you know what I risked to be with you tonight?’

  ‘You’re lying!’ she cried. ‘I will not listen to such lies!’

  Carapace leaped from the bed in a shower of beetles and pinched her face so hard she squealed. ‘Then learn for yourself. Ask your stepfather about your family name, ask him about the noble family from which you are descended. You will find nothing noble beyond the escutcheon that bears your arms.’

  ‘The Baynes are an ancient family, good and wise, just and kind.’ She knew this to be true. It was the foundation of all she believed. But she spoke for another purpose; to hold the earl in conversation was to hold him at bay.

  ‘Arrant nonsense, my dear little Ginansia,’ he spat, his phlegm-flecked lips an inch from hers. ‘Answer me something else. If none of the serving maids dares to enter or leave the castle, how do you think you survive here? What do you live on? What feeds and fattens you?’

  ‘The livestock beyond the river –’

  ‘– are all dead of lung rot and have been for years. No, my dear, you cannot beg the question quite so easily. But surely it is time for you to discover the truth for yourself. Remove the lids of the kitchen cauldrons and look inside if you dare. Or listen to me.’