The Eyre Affair

‘If it was me, and if I know me, I’d be hiding somewhere close by. Oh yes, look! Look there!’

He pointed to a corner of the garden where a figure was hiding in the shadows behind the potting shed. He narrowed his eyes and thought through the most logical train of events.

‘Let’s see. I must have offered to do you a favour, done it and come back but a little out of time; not uncommon in my line of work.’

‘What favour would I have asked you to do?’ I ventured, still confused but more than willing to play along.

‘I don’t know,’ said my father. ‘A burning question that has been much discussed over the years but has, so far, remained unanswered.’

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 on to 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 realisation 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 LiteraTecs 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 new-found friend before agreeing to have a quiet word with him.

‘Good result, eh? Balls to the Bronte 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!’