Джаспер Ффорде - One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

“Ma’am?”

“Is Whitby downstairs?”

“Yes, ma’am. He’s waiting in the kitchen with a bunch of flowers the size of the Amazonian Basin.”

“Would you send him my apologies and ask him to leave? Politely, of course.”

“Ma’am?”

“I need to keep an eye on Carmine. It’s her first day, and I need to stand by in case of mishaps.”

“Miss Carmine is doing very well, by all accounts, ma’am, and Mr. Jett seems happily effusive over the prospect of an evening with you. I believe that his conduct has all the hallmarks of . . . love, ma’am.”

“Sprockett,” I said, “ just do this for me, would you? Tell him I’m busy and I’ll meet him for lunch tomorrow.”

“Very good, ma’am. Where shall I say you will be meeting him?”

“I’ll call him.”

I came downstairs twenty minutes later to find the flowers on the hall table. I sighed at my own foolishness, then walked into the book and found Carmine about to play the croquet match in The Well of Lost Plots . I told her my date was canceled and that I’d take over from her. I think she was secretly relieved.

“Don’t forget there’s a party tonight at Castle of Skeddan Jiarg ,” I told her. “The queen said to drop in anytime.”

“I think I might just do that,” she said with a smile. “I could get hyphenated, let my hair down and chat up a goblin or something.”

I didn’t like the sound of this.

“I don’t mean to seem judgmental. Actually, come to think of it,” I said, changing my mind, “I do mean to seem judgmental. You mustn’t bring goblins home. Quite apart from the hygiene and theft issues, Pickwick can be a real prude. She’ll be plocking on about it for months, and frankly, I could do without her endless complaints.”

She winked.

“I will be most discreet. Why don’t you join me when you’re done? I know goblins aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but what they lack in physical beauty they make up for in endurance.”

I told her I didn’t really feel like going to a party or dancing all night, and she gave me a hug before skipping off.

Reading-wise, it wasn’t such a bad evening. The Ph.D. student gave up pretty soon to watch Deal or No Deal , a popular woodworking program in the Outland, and the new readers were for the most part forgiving, with only a few of them requiring extra attention to get them over some of the more wayward plot points. As for the rereads, they pretty much looked after themselves and added a useful amount of feedback, too—the curtains had never looked brighter, and Pickwick positively shone.

I was up and about while everyone else in the book was still sleepily inactive. There had been no readings at all since 2:00 A.M., and I wanted to be in costume and ready on the off chance that anyone read a few pages before breakfast. It paid to keep at a state of readiness, just in case. There had been trouble inside Captain Corelli’s Mandolin when a sudden reinterest in the book caught everyone napping—the first hundred pages or so have yet to fully recover.

I walked about the settings of the series, checking to make sure everything was ready to go. My tour wasn’t just a technical housekeeping exercise either—it was about a sense of pride. Despite the lack of readers and a certain “dissatisfaction” from particular members of the cast who suggested that I might improve the readability by spicing up the prose with a bit more sex and violence, I still wanted to keep the books going as well as I could—and to win Thursday’s approval, which was more important than the author’s.

Once I had made sure that everything was to my satisfaction, I called Whitby to apologize for standing him up. He took it better than I had expected, but I could sense he was annoyed. I told him I would definitely be free for lunch, suggested the expensive and needlessly spacious Elbow Rooms, then pretended that Pickwick had broken something, so I could end the conversation.

I drew a deep breath, cursed myself for being so stupid, took a pager with me and walked down the road to Stubbs, the outrageously expensive coffee shop on the corner.

“Could I not have a coffee?” I said, meaning I wanted an empty cup. Stubbs had become so expensive that no one could afford the coffee, but since the ambience in the café was so good and the establishment so fashionable, it was always full.

“What would you not like?” asked Paul, who wore a black gown and a wig due to a syntactical head cold that made him unable to differentiate himself between a barista and a barrister.

“Better not give me a latte,” I replied, “and better not make it a large one.”

“How did the date with Whitby go?”

“So-so.”

Paul raised an eyebrow, made no comment and handed me an empty cup. I went to a booth at the back of the store and sat down. I came here most mornings and usually read the paper over my noncoffee. I scanned the headlines of The Word , but if Thursday was missing, they didn’t know about it. Oversize Books had gained a victory at the council. Constantly irked by snide comments about taking more than their allotted shelf space, they had sought to have their own genre and succeeded. A representative for Oversize Books had praised “common sense” and said that they looked forward to “moving to their own island as soon as one big enough was made available.”

There was more about Racy Novel, with Speedy Muffler claiming that troop movements near his borders were “an act of aggression.” In rebuttal, Senator Jobsworth of the Council of Genres reiterated that there would be no troop movements ahead of the peace talks on Friday.

“If Thursday is missing,” I said to myself, “there won’t be any peace talks.”

“Mumbling to yourself?”

I looked up. It was Acheron Hades, the designated evildoer and antagonist from The Eyre Affair . Inside the book he was a homicidal maniac who would surgically remove people’s faces for fun, but outside the book he collected stamps and wrote really bad poetry.

“Peace talks,” I said, showing him the paper.

“I’m not going to hold my breath,” he remarked. “Speedy Muffler is the master of brinksmanship. Any deal on the table will be unraveled the following morning—military intervention is the only thing that will stop him.”

Acheron’s attitude was not atypical. There were few who didn’t think an all-out genre war between Women’s Fiction and Racy Novel was pretty much inevitable. The more absorbing question was, Will it be broadcast live? And then, Will it involve me or damage my own genre?

“Dogma will almost certainly be dragged into the fray,” I said gloomily.

“And Comedy to the south,” added Acheron, “and they won’t like it. I don’t think they were joking when they said they would defend their land to the last giggle.”

The door opened, and the king and queen walked in. They looked a little worse for wear. I nodded a greeting, and they ordered a cappuccino each, which placed Paul in something of a panic—I don’t think he’d ever made one before.

“By the way,” said Acheron, “I think Lettie is the best understudy yet.”