The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [570]
“Mr. Shgakespeafe, this is the hedgehog I was telling you about.”
He shut his notebook and stared at Mrs. Tiggy-winkle. He wasn’t the slightest bit afraid or surprised—after the abominations he’d dodged on an almost daily basis in Area 21, I suspect a six-foot-high hedgehog was something of a relief.
Mrs. Tiggy-winkle curtsied gracefully. “Delighted to make your acquaintance, Mr. Shgakespeafe,” she said politely. “Will you come with me, please?”
“Who was that?” Landen called out as he walked downstairs a little later.
“It was Mrs. Tiggy-winkle picking up a William Shakespeare clone in order to save Hamlet from permanent destruction.”
“You can’t ever be serious, can you?” he laughed as he gave me a hug. I had smuggled Shgakespeafe into the house without Landen’s seeing. I know you’re meant to be honest and truthful to your spouse, but I thought there might be a limit, and if there was, I didn’t want to reach it too soon.
Friday came down to breakfast ten minutes later. He looked tousled, sleepy and a bit grumpy.
“Quis nostrud laboris,” he moaned. “Nisi ut aliquip ex consequat.”
I gave him some toast and rummaged in the cupboard under the stairs for my bulletproof vest. All my stuff was now back in Landen’s house as if I had never moved out. Sideslips are confusing, but you can get used to almost anything.
“Why are you wearing a bulletproof vest?”
It was Landen. Drat. I should have put it on at the station.
“What bulletproof vest?”
“The one you’re trying to put on.”
“Oh, that one. No reason. Listen, if Friday gets hungry you can always give him a snack. He likes bananas—you may have to buy some more, and if a gorilla calls, it’s only that Mrs. Bradshaw I was telling you about.”
“Don’t change the subject. How can you go to work wearing a vest for ‘no reason’?”
“It’s a precaution.”
“Insurance is a precaution. A vest means you’re taking unnecessary risks.”
“I’d be taking a bigger one without it.”
“What’s going on, Thursday?”
I waved a hand vaguely in the air and tried to make light of it. “Just an assassin. A small one. Barely worth thinking about.”
“Which one?”
“I can’t remember. Window . . . something.”
“The Windowmaker? A contract with her and stick to reading short stories? Sixty-seven known victims?”
“Sixty-eight if she did Samuel Pring.”
“That’s not important. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I . . . I . . . didn’t want you to worry.”
He rubbed his face with his hands and stared at me for a moment, then sighed deeply. “This is the Thursday Next I married, isn’t it?”
I nodded my head.
He wrapped his arms around me and held me tightly. “Will you be careful?” he whispered in my ear.
“I’m always careful.”
“No, really careful. The sort of careful that you should be when you have a husband and son who’d be supremely pissed off if they were to lose you?”
“Ah,” I whispered back, “that sort of careful. Yes, I will.”
We kissed and I Velcroed up the vest, put my shirt over the top of it and my shoulder holster on top of this. I kissed Friday and told him to be good, then kissed Landen again.
“I’ll see you this evening,” I told him, “and that’s a promise.”
I drove to Wanborough to find Joffy. He was officiating at a GSD civil-union ceremony, and I had to wait in the back of the temple until he had finished. I had some time before I had to deal with Cindy, and looking more closely into St. Zvlkx seemed like a good way to fill it. Millon’s idea that Zvlkx wasn’t a seer but a rogue member of the ChronoGuard involved in some sort of timecrime seemed, on the face of it, unlikely. You couldn’t hide from the ChronoGuard. They would always find you. Perhaps not here and now, but then and there—when you least expected it. Long before you even thought about doing something wrong. Plus, the ChronoGuard left no trace. With the perpetrator gone, then the timecrime never happened either. Very neat, very clever. But with the historical record so closely scrutinized and the ChronoGuard itself giving Zvlkx the seal of approval, how on earth did Zvlkx—if he was a fake—get around the system?
“Hello, Doofus!