The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [209]
“What happened?”
“Never heard from him again. Two fellow booksplorers went in after him. One lost his breath, and the other, well, poor Ahab went completely bonkers—thought he was being chased by a white whale. We suspect that Ambrose was either walled up with a cask of Amontillado or buried alive or suffered some other unspeakable fate. It was decided that Poe was out of bounds.”
“So Antoine de St. Exupéry, he disappeared on assignment too?”
“Not at all; he crashed on a reconnaissance sortie.”
“It was tragic.”
“It certainly was,” replied the Cat. “He owed me forty francs and had promised to teach me to play Debussy on the piano using only oranges.”
“Oranges?”
“Oranges. Well, I’m off now. Miss Havisham will explain everything. Go through those doors into the library, take the elevator to the fourth floor, first right, and the books are about a hundred yards on your left. Great Expectations is green-bound, so you should have no trouble.”
“Thanks.”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” said the Cat, and with a wave of his paw he started to fade, very slowly, from the tip of his tail. He just had time to ask me to get some tuna-flavored Moggilicious for him the next time I was home before he vanished completely and I was alone in front of the granite Boojumorial, the quiet tapping of the mason’s hammer echoing around the lofty heights of the library vestibule.
I took the marble stairs into the library and ascended by one of the wrought-iron lifts, walked down the corridor until I came across several shelves of Dickens novels. There were, I noted, twenty-nine different editions of Great Expectations from early draft to the last of Dickens’s own revised editions. I picked up the newest tome, opened it at the first chapter and heard the gentle sound of wind in the trees. I flipped through the pages, the sounds changing as I moved from scene to scene, page to page. I located the first mention of Miss Havisham, found a good place to start and then read loudly to myself, willing the words to live. And live they did.
17.
Miss Havisham
Great Expectations was written in 1860–61 to reverse flagging sales of All the Year Round, the weekly periodical founded by Dickens himself. The novel was regarded as a great success. The tale of Pip the blacksmith’s apprentice and his rise to the position of young gentleman through an anonymous benefactor introduced readers to many new and varied characters: Joe Gargery, the simple and honorable blacksmith; Abel Magwitch, the convict Pip helps in the first chapter; Jaggers, the lawyer; Herbert Pocket, who befriends him and teaches him how to behave in London society. But it is Miss Havisham, abandoned at the altar and living her life in dreary isolation dressed in her tattered wedding robes, that steals the show. She remains one of the book’s most memorable fixtures.
MILLON DE FLOSS,
“Great Expectations”: A Study
IFOUND MYSELF in a large and dark hall which smelt of musty decay. The windows were tightly shuttered, the only light from a few candles scattered around the room; they added little to the room except to heighten the gloominess. In the center of the room a long table was covered with what had once been a wedding banquet but was now a sad arrangement of tarnished silver and dusty crockery. In the bowls and meat platters dried remnants of food were visible, and in the middle of the table a large wedding cake bedecked with cobwebs had begun to collapse like a dilapidated building. I had read the scene many times, but it was somehow different when you saw it for real—for a start, it was more colorful—and there was also a smell of mustiness that rarely comes out in the readings. I was on the other side of the room from Miss Havisham, Estella