The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [758]
10. “I’ll explain it all when we meet. Sorry to have to communicate with you in footnotes but I’m due in court in ten minutes. Don’t speak to anyone at all about the case and I’ll see you on Thursday, Thursday. That’s quite funny, that. ‘Thursday . . . Thursday.’ Hmm. Maybe not. Got to go. Remember: Speak to no one about the case, and if you have a moment, see if you can find out anything about that Flakk girl’s domestic arrangements. Well, chin-chin and toodle-pip.”
1. “Thursday, for heaven’s sake what have you done?!”
2. “I told you not to talk to anyone about your case!”
3. “How can I be expected to help you if you go and blab everything to the prosecution?”
4. “Why Hopkins, you idiot! You pretty much confessed there and then on your own doorstep. This is going to really screw things up for us. Don’t speak to anyone about anything, for Christ’s sake—do you want to spend the next thousand readings imprisoned in Castle Doubting or something?”
5. “No time. I’ll speak to you before we go in to court. Remember: Don’t talk to anyone at all about the case. By the way, did you manage to find anything out about that delightfully odd Flakk girlie?”
6. “Really? That is interesting news. Well, must dash. Pip pip.”
1. “Miss Next? Havisham speaking!”
2. “I hope you didn’t say what I thought I heard you say!”
3. “I am here, young lady, but I am shocked by your coarse language!”
4. “Really? Well, I will not hear it from my apprentices. But I forgive you, I suppose. I need you to attend to me right now. Norland Park, Chapter Five, paragraph one—you’ll find it in the travelbook Mrs. Nakajima left for you.”
1. “Loud and clear, whiskers pressed, fed and watered, boots on and laced, ready to—”
2. “Not yet—none of the names appear in the register of fictioneers— I’m just going through the reams of unpublished characters from the Well of Lost Plots—it might take some time.”
3. “I hope I’m mistaken but you’ve got the Questing Beast approaching from the southeast—one hundred yards and closing.”
4.“He’s in Middlemarch at the moment. I’ll try him on the footnoterphone—but you know how deaf he is.”
5. “He’s not answering. Do you know, this reminds me of the time the Demogorgon met Medusa in the 1923 Miss Loathsome competition—”
6. “Coming up!”
7. “Any second now, Tweedy.”
1. “. . . This is WOLP-12 on the Well of Lost Plots’ own footnoterphone station, transmitting live on the hour every hour to keep you up-to-date with news in the Fiction Factory . . .”
2. “. . . After the headlines you can hear our weekly documentary show WellSpeak, where today we will discuss hiding exposition; following that there will be a WellNews special on the launch of the new Book Operating System, UltraWord™, featuring a live studio debate with WordMaster Xavier Libris of Text Grand Central . . .”
3. “. . . here are the main points of the news. Prices of semicolons, plot devices, prologues and inciting incidents continued to fall yesterday, lopping twenty-eight points off the TomJones Index. The Council of Genres has announced the nominations for the 923rd annual BookWorld Awards; Heathcliff is once again to head the Most Troubled Romantic Lead category, for the seventy-eighth year running . . .”
4. “. . . A new epic poem is to be constructed for the first time in eighty-seven years. Title and subject to be announced, but pundits reckon that it’s a pointless exercise: skills have all but died out. Next week will also see the launch of a new shopping chain offering off-the-peg narrative requisites. It will be called Prêt-à-Écrire . . .”
1. “. . . Visit Aaron’s Assorted Alliteration Annex, the superior sellers of stressed-syllable or similar-sounding speech sequences since the sixteenth century. Stop soon and see us situated on floor sixteen, shelf six seventy-six . . .”
2. “. . . Visit Bill’s Dictionorium for every word you’ll ever need! From be to antidisestablishmentarianism,