The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [513]
“I don’t think Gibson does bad guys,” I conceded. “You’d probably be played by Geoffrey Rush or someone.”
“That wouldn’t be so bad. Is that cake going begging?”
“Help yourself.”
Zhark cut a large slice of Battenberg, took a bite and continued, “Okay, here’s the deal: we managed to get the Polonius family to attend arbitration over their unauthorized rewriting of Hamlet.”
“How did you achieve that?”
“Promised Ophelia her own book. All back to normal—no problem.”
“So . . . I can send Hamlet back?”
“Not quite yet,” replied Zhark, hiding his unease by pretending to find a small piece of fluff on his cape. “You see, Ophelia has now got her knickers in a twist about one of Hamlet’s infidelities—someone she thinks is called Henna Appleton. Have you heard anything about this?”
“No. Nothing. Nothing at all. Not a thing. Don’t even know anyone called Henna Appleton. Why?”
“I was hoping you could tell me. Well, she went completely nuts and threatened to drown herself in the first act rather than the fourth. We think we’ve got her straightened out. But whilst we were doing this—there was a hostile takeover.”
I cursed aloud, and Zhark jumped. Nothing was ever straightforward in the BookWorld. Book mergers, where one book joined another to increase the collective narrative advantage of their own mundane plotlines, were thankfully rare but not unheard of. The most famous merger in Shakespeare was the conjoinment of the two plays Daughters of Lear and Sons of Gloucester into King Lear. Other potential mergers, such as Much Ado About Verona and A Midsummer Night’s Shrew, were denied at the planning stage and hadn’t taken place. It could take months to extricate the plots, if it could be done at all. King Lear resisted unraveling so strongly we just let it stand.
“So who merged with Hamlet?”
“Well, it’s now called The Merry Wives of Elsinore, and features Gertrude being chased around the castle by Falstaff while being outwitted by Mistress Page, Ford and Ophelia. Laertes is the king of the fairies, and Hamlet is relegated to a sixteen-line subplot where he is convinced Doctor Caius and Fenton have conspired to kill his father for seven hundred pounds.”
I groaned. “What’s it like?”
“It takes a long time to get funny, and when it finally does, everyone dies.”
“Okay,” I conceded, “I’ll try to keep Hamlet amused. How long do you need to unravel the play?”
Zhark winced and sucked in air through his teeth in the same manner heating engineers do when quoting on a new boiler. “Well, that’s the problem, Thursday. I’m not sure that we can do it all. If this happened anywhere but in the original, we could have just deleted it. You know the trouble we had with King Lear? Well, I don’t see that we’re going to have any better luck with Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.”
I sat down and put my head in my hands. No Hamlet. The loss was almost too vast to comprehend.
“How long have we got before Hamlet starts to change?” I asked without looking up.
“About five days, six at the outside,” replied Zhark quietly. “After that, the breakdown will accelerate. In two weeks’ time, the play as we know it will have ceased to exist.”
“There must be something we can do.”
“We’ve tried pretty much everything. We’re stuffed—unless you’ve got a spare William Shakespeare up your sleeve.”
I sat up. “What?”
“We’re stuffed?”
“After that.”
“A spare William Shakespeare up your sleeve?”
“Yes. How will that help?”
“Well,” said Zhark thoughtfully, “since no original manuscripts of either Hamlet or Wives exist, a freshly penned script by the author would thus become the original manuscript—and we could use those to reboot the Storycode Engines from scratch. It’s quite simple, really.”
I smiled but Zhark looked at me with bewilderment. “Thursday, Shakespeare died in 1616!”
I stood up and patted him on the arm. “You get back to the office and make sure things don’t get any worse. Leave the Shakespeare up to me. Now, has anyone figured out yet which book Yorrick Kaine is from?”
“We’ve got all available resources working on it,