The Eyre Affair, Page 33

  I thought for a moment.

  “How about the authorship of the Shakespeare plays?”

  He smiled. “Good point. I’ll see what I can do.”

  He finished his drink.

  “Well, congratulations again to the two of you; I must be off. Time waits for no man, as we say.”

  He smiled, wished us every happiness for the future, and departed.

  “Can you explain just what is going on?” asked Landen, thoroughly confused, not so much by the events themselves as by the order in which they were happening.

  “Not really.”

  “Have I gone, Sweetpea?” asked my father, who had returned from his hiding place behind the shed.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Well, I found out what you wanted to know. I went to London in 1610 and found that Shakespeare was only an actor with a potentially embarrassing sideline as a purveyor of bagged commodities in Stratford. No wonder he kept it quiet— wouldn’t you?”

  This was interesting indeed.

  “So who wrote them? Marlowe? Bacon?”

  “No; there was a bit of a problem. You see, no one had even heard of the plays, much less written them.”

  I didn’t understand.

  “What are you saying? There aren’t any?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying. They don’t exist. They were never written. Not by him, not by anyone.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Landen, unwilling to take much more of this, “but we saw Richard III only six weeks ago.”

  “Of course,” said my father. “Time is out of joint big time. Obviously something had to be done. I took a copy of the complete works back with me and gave them to the actor Shakespeare in 1592 to distribute on a given timetable. Does that answer your question?”

  I was still confused.

  “So it wasn’t Shakespeare who wrote the plays.”

  “Decidedly not!” he agreed. “Nor Marlowe, Oxford, De Vere, Bacon or any of the others.”

  “But that’s not possible!” exclaimed Landen.

  “On the contrary,” replied my father. “Given the huge timescale of the cosmos, impossible things are commonplace. When you’ve lived as long as I have you’ll know that absolutely anything is possible. Time is out of joint; O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right!”

  “You put that in?” I asked, always assuming he was quoting from Hamlet and not the other way round.

  He smiled.

  “A small personal vanity that I’m sure will be forgiven, Thursday. Besides: Who’s to know?”

  My father stared at his empty glass, looked around in vain for a waiter, then said:

  “Lavoisier will have locked onto me by now. He swore he’d catch me and he’s good. He should be; we were partners for almost seven centuries. Just one more thing: how did the Duke of Wellington die?”

  I remembered he had asked me this once before.

  “As I said, Dad, he died in his bed in 1852.”

  Father smiled and rubbed his hands.

  “That’s excellent news indeed! How about Nelson?”

  “Shot by a French sniper at Trafalgar.”

  “Really? Well, some you win. Listen: good luck, the pair of you. A boy or a girl would be fine; one of each would be better.”

  He leaned closer and lowered his voice.

  “I don’t know when I am going to be back, so listen carefully. Never buy a blue car or a paddling pool, stay away from oysters and circular saws, and don’t be near Oxford in June 2016. Got it?”

  “Yes, but!—”

  “Well, pip pip, time waits for no man!”

  He hugged me again, shook Landen’s hand and then disappeared into the crowd before we could ask him anything more.

  “Don’t even try to figure it out,” I said to Landen, placing a finger to his lips. “This is one area of SpecOps that it’s really better not to think about.”

  “But if!—”

  “Landen!—” I said more severely. “No!—”

  Bowden and Victor were at the party too. Bowden was happy for me and had come easily to the realization that I wouldn’t be joining him in Ohio, as either wife or assistant. He had been offered the job officially but had turned it down; he said there was too much fun to be had at the Swindon Litera Tecs and he would reconsider it in the spring; Finisterre had taken his place. But at present, something else was preying on his mind. Helping himself to a stiff drink, he approached Victor, who was talking animatedly to an elderly woman he had befriended.

  “What ho, Cable!” Victor murmured, introducing his newfound friend before agreeing to have a quiet word with him.

  “Good result, eh? Balls to the Brontë Federation; I’m with Thursday. I think the new ending is a wiz!” He paused and looked at Bowden. “You’ve got a face longer than a Dickens novel. What’s the problem? Worried about Felix8?”

  “No, sir; I know they’ll find him eventually. It’s just that I accidentally mixed up the dust covers on the book that Jack Schitt went into.”

  “You mean he’s not with his beloved rifles?”

  “No, sir. I took the liberty of slipping this book into the dust cover of The Plasma Rifle in War.”

  He handed over the book that had made its way into the Prose Portal. Victor looked at the spine and laughed. It was a copy of The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.

  “Have a look at page twenty-six,” said Bowden. “There’s something funny going on in ‘The Raven.’ ”

  Victor opened the book and scanned the page. He read the first verse out loud:

  Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,

  o’er a plan to venge myself upon that cursed Thursday Next—

  This Eyre affair, so surprising, gives my soul such loath despising,

  Here I plot my temper rising, rising from my jail of text.

  “Get me out!” I said, advising, “Pluck me from this jail of text—

  or I swear I’ll wring your neck!”

  Victor shut the book with a snap.

  “The last line doesn’t rhyme very well, does it?”

  “What do you expect?” replied Bowden. “He’s Goliath, not a poet.”

  “But I read ‘The Raven’ only yesterday,” added Victor in a confused tone. “It wasn’t like this then!”

  “No, no,” explained Bowden. “Jack Schitt is only in this copy—if we had put him in an original manuscript then who knows what he might have done.”

  “Con-g’rat-ula’tions!” exclaimed Mycroft as he walked up to us. Polly was with him and looked radiant in a new hat.

  “We’re Bo’th Very Hap-py For You!” added Polly.

  “Have you been working on the bookworms again?” I asked.

  “Doe’s It Sh’ow?” asked Mycroft. “Mu’st Dash!”

  And they were off.

  “Bookworms?” asked Landen.

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “Mademoiselle Next?”

  There were two of them. They were dressed in sharp suits and displayed SpecOps-12 badges that I hadn’t seen before.

  “Yes?”

  “Préfet Lavoisier, ChronoGendarmerie. Oé¹ est votre pé¨re?”

  “You’ve just missed him.”

  He cursed out loud.

  “Colonel Next est un homme tré¨s dangereux, mademoiselle. Il est important de lui parler concernant ses activités de trafic de temps.”

  “He’s my father, Lavoisier.”

  Lavoisier stared at me, trying to figure out whether anything he could say or do would make me help him. He sighed and gave up.

  “Si vous changez votre avis, contactez-moi par les petites annonces du Grenouille. Je lis toujours les archives.”

  “I shouldn’t count on it, Lavoisier.”

  He mulled this over for a moment, thought of something to say, decided against it and smiled instead. He saluted briskly, told me in perfect English to enjoy my day, and walked away. But his younger partner also had something to say:

  “A piece
of advice to you,” he muttered slightly self-consciously. “If you ever have a son who wants to be in the ChronoGuard, try and dissuade him.”

  He smiled and followed his partner in their quest for my father.

  “What was that son thing about?” asked Landen.

  “I don’t know. He looked kind of familiar, though, didn’t he?”

  “Kinda.”

  “Where were we?”

  “Mrs. Parke-Laine?” asked a very stocky individual, who stared at me earnestly from two deep-set brown eyes.

  “SO-12?” I asked, wondering quite where the little beetle-browed man had sprung from.

  “No, ma’am,” he replied, seizing a plum from a passing waiter and sniffing at it carefully before eating it, stone and all. “My name Bartholomew Stiggins; with SO-13.”

  “What do they do?”

  “Not at liberty to discuss,” he replied shortly, “but we may have need your skills and talents.”

  “What kind of—”

  But Mr. Stiggins was no longer listening to me. Instead, he was staring at a small beetle he had found on a flowerpot. With great care and a dexterity that belied his large and clumsy-looking hands, he picked the small bug up and popped it in his mouth. I looked at Landen, who winced.

  “Sorry,” said Stiggins, as though he had just been caught picking his nose in public. “What the expression? Old habits die hard?”

  “There’s more in the compost heap,” said Landen helpfully.

  The little man grinned very softly through his eyes; I didn’t suppose he showed much emotion.

  “If interested, I’ll be in touch.”

  “Be in touch,” I told him.

  He grunted, replaced his hat, bid us both a happy day, inquired about the whereabouts of the compost heap and was gone.

  “I’ve never seen a Neanderthal in a suit before,” observed Landen.

  “Never mind about Mr. Stiggins,” I said, reaching up to kiss him.

  “I thought you’d finished with SpecOps?”

  “No,” I replied with a smile. “In fact, I think I’m only just beginning! . . .”

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s Imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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