The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [622]
“By the way,” I said as I had an unrelated thought, “can you knit?”
“Is this part of my assessment?”
“A simple yes or no will suffice.”
“Yes.”
I handed her Pickwick’s half-knitted sweater. “You can finish this. The dimensions are on that piece of paper. It’s a cozy for a pet,” I added as Thursday5 stared at the oddly shaped stripy piece of knitting.
“You have a deformed jellyfish for a pet?”
“It’s for Pickwick.”
“Oh!” said Thursday5. “I’d be delighted. I have a dodo, too—she’s called Pickwick5.”
“You don’t say.”
“Yes—how did yours lose her plumage?”
“It’s a long story that involves the cat next door.”
“I have a cat next door. It’s called…now, what was her name?”
“Cat Next Door5?” I suggested.
“That’s right,” she said, astonished at my powers of detection. “You’ve met her, then?”
I ignored her and pushed open the doors to the ballroom. We were just in time. The Bellman’s daily briefing was about to begin.
Jurisfiction’s offices were in the disused ballroom of Mr. and Mrs. John Dashwood’s residence of Norland Park, safely hidden in the backstory of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Wagging and perhaps jealous tongues claimed that it was for “special protection,” but I’d never seen any particular favors shown myself. The room was painted pale blue, and the walls, where not decorated with delicate plaster moldings, were hung with lavish gold-framed mirrors. It was here that we ran the policing agency that functioned within books to keep order in the dangerously flexible narrative environment. We called it Jurisfiction.
The offices of Jurisfiction had long been settled at Norland. It had been many years since they had been used as a ballroom. The floor space was liberally covered with tables, chairs, filing cabinets and piles of paperwork. Each desk had its own brass-horned footnoterphone, a typewriter and an in-tray that always seemed larger than the out. Although electronics were a daily part of life in the real world, here in fiction there was no machine so complicated that it couldn’t be described in a line or two. It was a different story over in nonfiction, where they had advanced technology coming out of their ears—it was a matter of some pride that we were about eight times more efficient with half the workforce. I paused for a moment. Even after sixteen years, walking into the Jurisfiction offices always gave me a bit of a buzz. Silly, really, but I couldn’t help myself.
“Just in time!” barked Commander Bradshaw, who was standing on a table so as to be more easily seen. He was Jurisfiction’s longest-serving member and onetime star of the Commander Bradshaw colonial ripping adventure stories for boys. His jingoistic and anachronistic brand of British Empire fiction wasn’t read at all these days, which he’d be the first to admit was no great loss and freed him up to be the head of Jurisfiction, or Bellman, a post he was unique in having held twice. He and Mrs. Bradshaw were two of the best friends I possessed. His wife, Melanie, had been Friday and Tuesday’s au pair, and even though Jenny was now ten and needed less looking after, Mel was still around. She loved our kids as if they were her own. She and Bradshaw had never had children. Not surprisingly, really, since Melanie was, and had always been, a gorilla.
“Is everyone here?” he asked, carefully scanning the small group of Jurisfiction agents.
“Hamlet’s dealing with a potentially damaging outbreak of reasonable behavior inside Othello,” said Mr. Fainset, a middle-aged man dressed in worn merchant navy garb. “He also said he needed to see Iago about something.”
“That’ll be about their Shakespeare spin-off play Iago v. Hamlet,” said the Red Queen, who was actually not a real queen at all but an anthropomorphized chess piece from Through the Looking Glass. “Does he really think he’s going to get the Council of Genres to agree to a thirty-ninth Shakespeare play?”
“Stranger things have happened.” Bradshaw sighed. “Where are Peter and Jane?”
“The new feline in The Tiger Who Came to Tea got stage fright,” said Lady Cavendish, “and after that they