The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [151]
“How’s the PR stuff going, Thursday?”
“More tedious than Spenser, sir.”
“That bad, eh? Saw you on the telly last night. Rigged, was it?”
“Just a little.”
“I hate to be a bore, but it’s all important stuff. Have a look at this fax.”
He handed me a sheet of paper, and Bowden read over my shoulder.
“Ludicrous,” I said, handing the fax back. “What possible benefit could the Toast Marketing Board get from sponsoring us?”
Victor shrugged.
“Not a clue. But if they have cash to give away we could certainly do with some of it.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Braxton’s speaking to them this afternoon. He’s very big on the idea.”
“I bet he is.”
Braxton Hicks’s life revolved around his precious SpecOps budget. If any of us even thought of doing any sort of overtime, you could bet that Braxton would have something to say about it—and something in his case meant “no.” Rumor had it that he had spoken to the canteen about giving out smaller helpings for dinner. He had been known as “Small Portions” in the office ever since—but never to his face.
“Did you find out who’s been forging and trying to sell the missing ending to Byron’s Don Juan ?” asked Victor.
Bowden showed him a black-and-white photo of a dashing figure climbing into a parked car somewhere near the airship field. He was extravagantly dressed according to “the Byron Look”—it was quite popular, even amongst non-Byrons.
“Our prime suspect is a fellow named Byron2.”
Victor looked at the picture carefully, first through his spectacles, then over the top of them.
“Byron number two, eh? How many Byrons are there now?”
“Byron2620 was registered last week,” I told him. “We’ve been following Byron2 for a month, but he’s smart. None of the forged scraps of Heaven and Earth can be traced back to him.”
“Wiretap?”
“We tried, but the judge said that even though Byron2’s surgery to make his foot clubbed in an attempt to emulate his hero was undeniably strange, and then getting his half sister pregnant was plainly disgusting, those acts only showed a fevered Byronic mind, and not necessarily one of intent to forge. We have to catch him inky-fingered, but at the moment he’s off on a tour of the Mediterranean. We’re going to attempt to get a search warrant while he’s away.”
“So you’re not that busy, then?”
“What had you in mind?”
“Well,” began Victor, “it seems there have been a couple more attempts to forge Cardenio. I know it’s small beer for you two but it helps Braxton with his damnable statistics. Would you go and have a look?”
“Sure,” replied Bowden, knowing full well I would concur. “Got the addresses?”
He handed over a sheet of paper and bade us luck. We rose to leave, Bowden studying the list carefully.
“We’ll go to Roseberry Street first,” he muttered. “It’s closer.”
3.
Cardenio Unbound
Cardenio was performed at court in 1613. It was entered in the stationer’s register in 1653 as “by Mr. Fletcher and Shakespeare” and in 1728 Theobald Lewis published his play Double Falsehood, which he claimed to have written using an old prompt copy of Cardenio. Given the uneven Shakespearean value of his play and his refusal to produce the original manuscript, this claim seems doubtful. Cardenio was the name of the Ragged Knight in Cervantes’ Don Quixote who falls in love with Lucinda, and it is assumed Shakespeare’s play followed the same story. But we will never know. Not one single scrap of the play has survived.
MILLON DE FLOSS,
“Cardenio”: Easy Come, Easy Go
AFEW MINUTES LATER we were turning into a street of terraced houses close by the new thirty-thousand-seat croquet stadium. Cardenio scams were the three-card trick of the literary world; the bread and butter for literary lowlife. Since there were only five signatures, three pages of revisions to Sir Thomas More and a fragment of King Lear, anything that might conceivably have been near Shakespeare in his lifetime had big money attached to it. The rediscovery of Cardenio was the Holy Grail of the small-time antiquarians,