The short trip to the non-fiction section of the Great Library was an easy jump for Miss Havisham, and from there we fworped back into her dingy ballroom in Great Expectations, where the Cheshire cat and Harris Tweed were waiting for us, talking to Estella. The cat seemed quite relieved to see us both, but Harris simply scowled.
‘Estella!’ said Miss Havisham abruptly ‘Please don’t talk to Mr Tweed.’
‘Yes, Miss Havisham,’ replied Estella meekly.
Havisham replaced her trainers with her less comfortable wedding shoes.
‘I have Pip waiting outside,’ said Estella slightly nervously. ‘If you will excuse me mentioning it—Ma’am is a paragraph late.’
‘Dickens can just flannel for a bit longer,’ replied Havisham. ‘I must finish with Miss Next.’
She turned to me with a grim look; I thought I’d better say something to soothe her—I hadn’t yet seen Havisham lose her temper ‘like Vesuvius’, as the Red Queen had so graphically described it, and I was in no hurry to do so.
‘Thank you for my rescue, ma’am,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m very grateful to you.’
‘Humph!’ replied Miss Havisham. ‘Don’t expect salvation from me every time you get yourself into a jam, my girl. Now, what’s all this about a baby?’
The Cheshire cat, sensing trouble, vanished abruptly on the pretext of some ‘cataloguing’, and even Tweed mumbled something about checking Lorna Doone for grammasites and went too.
‘Well?’ asked Havisham again, peering at me intensely.
I didn’t feel quite as frightened of her as I once did, so I told her all about Landen and why I went into The Raven to begin with.
‘For love? Pah!’ she responded, dismissing Estella with a wave of her hand in case the young woman got any odd ideas. ‘And what, in your tragically limited experience, is that?’
‘I think you know, ma’am. You were in love once, I believe?’
‘Stuff and nonsense, girl!’
‘Isn’t the pain you feel now the equal to the love you felt then?’
‘You’re coming perilously close to contravening my rule two, girl!’
‘I’ll tell you what love is,’ I said ‘It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter!’
‘That was quite good,’ said Havisham, looking at me curiously. ‘Could I use that? Dickens won’t mind.’
‘Of course.’
‘I think,’ said Miss Havisham after five minutes of silent thought as I stood waiting, ‘that I shall categorise your complex marital question under widowed, which sits with me well enough. Upon reflection—and quite possibly against my better judgment—you may stay as my apprentice. That’s all. You are needed to help retrieve Cardenio. Go!’
So I left Miss Havisham in her darkened chamber with all the trappings of her wedding that never was. In the few days I had known her I had learned to like her a great deal, and hoped someday I might repay her kindness and fortitude.
30. Cardenio Rebound
‘PageRunner: Name given to any character who is out of his or her book and moves through the back-story (or more rarely the plot) of another book. They may be lost, vacationing, part of the Character Exchange Programme or criminals, intent on mischief. (See: Bowdlerisers.)
Texters: Slang term given to a relatively harmless PageRunner (q.v.) (usually juvenile) who surfs from book to book for adventure, rarely appears in the front-story but who does, on occasion, cause small changes to text and/or plot lines.’
Harris Tweed and the Cheshire cat took me back to the Library. We sat on a bench in front of the Boojumorial and Harris stared at me while the cat—who was nothing if not courteous—went and bought me a pasty from the snack bar just next to Mr Wemmick’s storeroom.
‘Where did she find you?’ snapped Harris. I was getting used to his aggressive mannerisms by now. If he thought as little of me as he made out, then I wouldn’t be here at all. The cat popped its head up between us and said:
‘Hot or cold pasty?’
‘Hot, please.’
‘Okay, then,’ he said, and vanished again.
I explained Havisham’s leap from the Goliath vault to the washing label; Tweed was clearly impressed. He had been apprenticed to Commander Bradshaw many years previously, and Bradshaw’s accuracy in book-jumping was as poor as Havisham’s was good—hence the commander’s interest in maps.
‘A washing label. Now that is impressive,’ mused Harris. ‘Not many PROs would even attempt to jump blind into less than a hundred words. Havisham took quite a risk with you, Miss Next. Cat, what do you think?’
‘I think,’ said the cat, handing me a steaming-hot pasty, ‘that you’ve forgotten the Moggilicious cat food you promised, hmm?’
‘Sorry,’ I replied. ‘Next time.’
‘Okay,’ said the cat.
‘Right,’ said Harris, ‘to business. Tell me, who are the chief players in Cardenio’s, discovery?’
‘Well,’ I began, ‘there’s Lord Volescamper, an hereditary peer—he said he found it in his library. Amiable chap—bit of a duffer. Then there’s Yorrick Kaine, a Whig politician who hopes to use the free distribution of the play to sway the Shakespeare vote in his favour at tomorrow’s election.’
‘I’ll see if I can find which book they’re from—if any at all,’ said the cat, and vanished.
‘Is that really likely?’ I asked. ‘Volescamper has been around since before the war, and Kaine has been on the political scene for at least five years.’
‘It means nothing, Miss Next. Mellors had a wife and family in Slough for two decades and Heathcliff worked in Hollywood for three years under the name of Buck Stallion—no one suspected a thing in either case.’
‘So tell me about Cardenio,’ I said. ‘It is the Library’s copy, yes?’
‘Without a doubt. The disappearance a month ago was quite embarrassing—despite elaborate security arrangements someone managed to swipe it from under the cat’s whiskers. He’s very upset about it.’
‘Did you saying fig or whig?’ enquired the cat, who had reappeared.
‘I said Whig,’ I replied; ‘and I wish you wouldn’t keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy.’
‘All right,’ said the cat; and this time he vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of his tail and ending with his grin.
‘He doesn’t seem terribly upset,’ I observed.
‘Looks can be deceptive—in the cat’s case, trebly so. The news of Cardenio’s discovery in your world nearly gave the Bellman a fit. He was all for putting together one of his madcap and typically boojum-ridden expeditions. As soon as I found out that Kaine was going to make Cardenio public property, I knew we had to act and act fast.’
‘But listen,’ I said, my head spinning slightly with all this new intelligence, ‘why is it so important that Cardenio remains lost? It’s a brilliant play.’
‘I wouldn’t expect you to understand,’ replied Tweed, ‘but once a play or book is lost, it’s lost. There is always a reason. Besides, if the rest of the book world figures out there is something to gain by swiping library books, then we could be in one hell of a state.’
I mused over this for a moment.
‘Okay, so why am I here?’
‘Clearly, this is no place for an apprentice but you know the layout of Vole Towers as well as having met the key suspects—do you know where Cardenio is kept?’