The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [456]
“Yes, my mind’s made up,” I said, smiling. I looked at Bradshaw, the Emperor and Mrs. Tiggy-winkle. For all their faults, I’d enjoyed working with them. It hadn’t been all bad. Whilst at Jurisfiction I had seen and done things I wouldn’t have believed. I’d watched grammasites in flight over the pleasure domes of Xanadu, felt the strangeness of listeners glittering on the dark stair. I had cantered bareback on unicorns through the leafy forests of Zenobia and played chess with Ozymandias, the King of Kings. I had flown with Biggles on the Western Front, locked cutlasses with Long John Silver and explored the path not taken to walk upon England’s mountains green. But despite all these moments of wonder and delight, my heart belonged back home in Swindon and to a man named Landen Parke-Laine. He was my husband, the father of my son; he didn’t exist, and I loved him.
2.
No Place Like Home
Swindon, Wessex, England, was the place I was born and where I lived until I left to join the Literary Detectives in London. I returned ten years later and married my former boyfriend, Landen Parke-Laine. He was subsequently murdered at the age of two by the Goliath Corporation, who had decided to blackmail me. It worked, I helped them—but I didn’t get my husband back. Oddly, I kept his son, my son, Friday—it was one of those quirky, paradoxical time-travel things that my father understands but I don’t. Two years further on, Landen was still dead, and unless I did something about it soon, he might remain that way forever.
Thursday Next, Thursday Next: A Life in SpecOps
It was a bright and clear morning in mid-July two weeks later that I found myself on the corner of Broome Manor Lane in Swindon, on the opposite side of the road to my mother’s house with a toddler in a stroller, two dodos, the Prince of Denmark, an apprehensive heart and hair cut way too short. The Council of Genres hadn’t taken the news of my resignation very well. In fact, they’d refused to accept it at all and given me instead unlimited leave, in the somewhat deluded hope that I might return if actualizing my husband “didn’t work out.” They also suggested I might like to deal with escaped fictionaut Yorrick Kaine, someone with whom I had crossed swords twice in the past.
Hamlet had been a late addition to my plans. Increasingly concerned over reports that he was being misrepresented as something of a “ditherer” in the Outland, he had requested leave to see for himself. This was unusual in that fictional characters are rarely troubled by public perception, but Hamlet would worry about having nothing to worry about if he had nothing to worry about, and since he was the indisputable star of the Shakespeare canon and had lost the Most Troubled Romantic Lead to Heathcliff once again at this year’s BookWorld awards, the Council of Genres thought they should do something to appease him. Besides, Jurisfiction had been trying to persuade him to police Elizabethan drama since Sir John Falstaff had retired on grounds of “good health,” and a trip to the Outland, it was thought, might persuade him.
“ ’Tis very strange!” he murmured, staring at the sun, trees, houses and traffic in turn. “It would take a rhapsody of wild and whirling words to do justice of all that I witness!”
“You’re going to have to speak English out here.”
“All this,” explained Hamlet, waving his hands at the fairly innocuous Swindon street, “would take millions of words to describe correctly!”
“You’re right. It would. That’s the magic of the book imagino-transference technology,” I told him. “A few dozen words conjure up an entire picture. But in all honesty the reader does most of the work.”
“The reader? What’s it got to do with him?”
“Well, each interpretation of an event, setting or character