Free A Thursday Next Digital Collection: Novels 1-5 by Jasper Fforde Page A

from the driver of the car had been most specific: Take the LiteraTec job in Swindon! Perhaps the vision had been real after all; the gazette with the job offer had arrived after the visitation by the car. If it had been right about the job in Swindon, it stood to reason that perhaps the news about Hades was also correct. Without any further thought, I had applied. I couldn’t tell Paige about the car; if she had known, friendship notwithstanding, she would have reported me to Boswell. Boswell would have spoken to Flanker and all sorts of unpleasantness might have happened. I was getting quite good at concealing the truth, and I felt happier now than I had for months.
    â€œWe’ll miss you in the department, Thursday.”
    â€œIt’ll pass.”
    â€œ I’ll miss you.”
    â€œThanks, Paige, I appreciate it. I’ll miss you too.”
    We hugged, she told me to keep in touch, and left the room, pager bleeping.
    I finished packing and thanked the nursing staff, who gave me a brown paper parcel as I was about to leave.
    â€œWhat’s this?” I asked.
    â€œIt belonged to whoever saved your life that night.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œA passerby attended to you before the medics arrived; the wound in your arm was plugged and they wrapped you in their coat to keep you warm. Without their intervention you might well have bled to death.”
    Intrigued, I opened the package. Firstly, there was a handkerchief that despite several washings still bore the stains of my own blood. There was an embroidered monogram in the corner that read EFR . Secondly the parcel contained a jacket, a sort of casual evening coat that might have been very popular in the middle of the last century. I searched the pockets and found a bill from a milliner. It was made out to one Edward Fairfax Rochester, Esq., and was dated 1833. I sat down heavily on the bed and stared at the two articles of clothing and the bill. Ordinarily I would not have believed that Rochester could have torn himself from the pages of Jane Eyre and come to my aid that night; such a thing is, of course, quite impossible. I might have dismissed the whole thing as a ludicrously complicated prank had it not been for one thing: Edward Rochester and I had met once before . . .

6.
Jane Eyre : A Short Excursion into the Novel
    Outside Styx’s apartment was not the first time Rochester and I had met, nor would it be the last. We first encountered each other at Haworth House in Yorkshire when my mind was young and the barrier between reality and make-believe had not yet hardened into the shell that cocoons us in adult life. The barrier was soft, pliable and, for a moment, thanks to the kindness of a stranger and the power of a good storytelling voice, I made the short journey—and returned.
    THURSDAY NEXT
— A Life in SpecOps
    I T WAS 1958. My uncle and aunt—who even then seemed old—had taken me up to Haworth House, the old Brontë residence, for a visit. I had been learning about William Thackeray at school, and since the Brontës were contemporaries of his it seemed a good opportunity to further my interest in these matters. My Uncle Mycroft was giving a lecture at Bradford University on his remarkable mathematical work regarding game theory, the most practical side of which allowed one to win at Snakes and Ladders every time. Bradford was near to Haworth, so a combined visit seemed a good idea.
    We were led around by the guide, a fluffy woman in her sixties with steel-rimmed spectacles and an angora cardigan whosteered the tourists around the rooms with an abrupt manner, as though she felt that none of them could possibly know as much as she did, but would grudgingly assist to lift them from the depths of their own ignorance. Near the end of the tour, when thoughts had turned to picture postcards and ice cream, the prize exhibit in the form of the original manuscript of Jane Eyre greeted the tired