The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next 1)

“Did he?”

“No.”

I checked in with Pickwick, who seemed to have settled in well. He made excited plock plock noises when he saw me. Contradicting the theories of experts, dodos had turned out to be surprisingly intelligent and quite agile—the ungainly bird of common legend was quite wrong. I gave him some peanuts and smuggled him up to my room under a coat. It wasn’t that the kennels were dirty or anything; I just didn’t want him to be alone. I put his favorite rug in the bath to give him somewhere to roost and laid out some paper. I told him I’d move him to my mother’s the following day, then left him staring out of the window at the cars in the car park.

“Good evening, miss,” said the barman in the Cheshire Cat. “Why is a raven like a writing desk?”

“Because there is a ‘B’ in ‘both’?”

“Very good. Half of Vorpal’s special, was it?”

“You must be kidding. Gin and tonic. A double.”

He smiled and turned to the optics.

“Police?”

“SpecOps.”

“Litera Tec?”

“Yup.”

I took my drink.

“I trained to be a LiteraTec,” he said wistfully. “Made it to cadetship.”

“What happened?”

“My girlfriend was a militant Marlovian. She converted some Will-Speak machines to quote from Tamburlaine and I was implicated when she was nabbed. And that was that. Not even the military would take me.”

“What’s your name?”

“Chris.”

“Thursday.”

We shook hands.

“I can only speak from experience, Chris, but I’ve been in the military and SpecOps and you should be thanking your girlfriend.”

“I do,” hastened Chris. “Every day. We’re married now and have two kids. I do this bar job in the evenings and run the Swindon branch of the Kit Marlowe Society during the day. We have almost four thousand members. Not bad for an Elizabethan forger, murderer, gambler and atheist.”

“There are some who say he might have written the plays usually attributed to Shakespeare.”

Chris was taken aback. He was suspicious too.

“I’m not sure I should be discussing this with a Litera Tec.”

“There’s no law against discussion, Chris. Who do you think we are, the thought police?”

“No, that’s SO-2 isn’t it?”

“But about Marlowe—?”

Chris lowered his voice.

“Okay. I think Marlowe might have written the plays. He was undoubtedly a brilliant playwright, as Faust, Tamburlaine and Edward II would attest. He was the only person of his age who could have actually done it. Forget Bacon and Oxford; Marlowe has to be the odds-on favorite.”