The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [552]
“The phone’s been ringing all day. Aubrey somebody-or-other about death threats or something?”
“I’ll call him. How was the zoo?”
“Ooh!” she cooed, touched her hair and tripped out of the kitchen. I waited until she was gone then knelt down close to Friday.
“Did Bismarck and Gran . . . kiss?”
“Tempor incididunt ut labore,” he replied enigmatically, “et do-lore magna aliqua.”
“I hope that’s a ‘definitely not,’ darling,” I murmured, filling up his beaker. As I did so, I caught my wedding ring on the lip of the cup, and I stared at it in a resigned manner. Landen was back again. I clasped it tightly and picked up the phone.
“Hello?” came Landen’s voice.
“It’s Thursday.”
“Thursday!” he said with a mixture of relief and alarm. “What happened to you? I was waiting for you in the bedroom, and then I heard the front door close! Did I do something wrong?”
“No, Land, nothing. You were eradicated again.”
“Am I still?”
“Of course not.”
There was a long pause. Too long, in fact. I looked at my hand. My wedding ring had gone again. I sighed, replaced the receiver and went back to Friday, heavy in heart. I called Aubrey as I was giving Friday his bath and tried to reassure him about the missing players. I told him to keep training and I’d deliver. I wasn’t sure how, but I didn’t tell him that. I just said it was “in hand.”
“I have to go,” I told him at last. “I’ve got to wash Friday’s hair and I can’t do it with one hand.”
That evening, as I was reading Pinocchio to Friday, a large tabby cat appeared on the wardrobe in my bedroom. He didn’t appear instantly, either—he faded in from the tip of his tail all the way up to his very large grin. When he first started working in Alice in Wonderland, he was known as the Cheshire Cat, but the authorities moved the Cheshire county boundaries, and he thus became the Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat, but that was a bit of a mouthful, so he was known more affectionately as the Cat formerly known as Cheshire or, more simply, the Cat. His real name was Archibald, but that was reserved for his mother when she was cross with him.
He worked very closely with us at Jurisfiction, where he was in charge of the Great Library, a cavernous and almost infinite depository of every book ever written. But to call the Cat a librarian would be an injustice. He was an überlibrarian—he knew about all the books in his charge. When they were being read, by whom—everything. Everything, that is, except where Yorrick Kaine was a featured part. Friday giggled and pointed as the Cat stopped appearing and stared at us with a grin etched on his features, eagerly listening to the story.
“Hello!” he said as soon as I had finished, kissed Friday and put out the bedside light. “I’ve got some information for you.”
“About?”
“Yorrick Kaine.”
I took the Cat downstairs, where he sat on the microwave as I made some tea.
“So what have you found out?” I asked.
“I’ve found out that an alligator isn’t someone who makes allegations—it’s a large reptile a bit like a crocodile.”
“I mean about Kaine.”
“Ah. Well, I’ve had a careful trawl, and he doesn’t appear anywhere in the character manifests, either in the Great Library or the Well of Lost Plots. Wherever he’s from, it isn’t from published fiction, poetry, jokes, nonfiction or knitting patterns.”
“I didn’t think you’d come out here to tell me you’ve failed, Chesh,” I said. “What’s the good news?”
The Cat’s eyes flashed, and he twitched his whiskers. “Vanity publishing!” he announced with a flourish.
It was an inspired guess. I’d never even considered he might be from there. The realm of the self-published book was a bizarre mix of quaint local histories, collections of poetry, magnum opuses of the truly talentless—and the occasional gem. The thing was, if such books became officially published, they were welcomed into the Great Library with open arms—and that hadn’t happened.
“You’re sure?”
The Cat handed me an index card. “I knew this was important to you, so I