The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next 1)

She nodded, scribbled a note and gave me a sad smile before departing.

Bowden looked at me with interest. He would have guessed eventually that I was ex-military. I wore it badly.

“Crimea veteran, eh? Did you know Colonel Phelps was in town?”

“I bumped into him on the airship yesterday. He wanted me to go to one of his rallies.”

“Will you?”

“You must be kidding. His idea of the perfect end to the Crimean conflict is for us to fight and fight until there is no one left alive and the peninsula’s a poisoned and mined land no good for anything. I’m hoping that the UN can bring both governments to their senses.”

“I was called up in ’78,” said Bowden. “Even got past basic training. Fortunately it was the same year the czar died and the crown prince took over. There were more pressing demands on the young emperor’s time, so the Russians withdrew. I was never needed.”

“I was reading somewhere that since the war started, only seven years of the one hundred and thirty-one have actually been spent fighting.”

“But when they do,” added Bowden, “they certainly make up for it.”

I looked at him. He had taken a sip of water after offering the carafe to me first.

“Married? Kids?”

“No,” replied Bowden. “I haven’t really had time to find myself a wife, although I am not against the idea in principle. It’s just that SpecOps is not really a great place for meeting people and I’m not, I confess, a great socializer. I’ve been short-listed for a post opening the equivalent of a Litera Tec office in Ohio; it seems to me the perfect opportunity to take a wife.”

“The money’s good over there and the facilities are excellent. I’d consider it myself given the opportunity,” I replied. I meant it too.

“Would you? Would you really?” asked Bowden with a flush of excitement that was curiously at odds with his slightly cold demeanor.

“Sure. Change of scenery,” I stammered, wanting to change the subject in case Bowden got the wrong idea. “Have you . . . ah . . . been a Litera Tec long?”

Bowden thought for a moment.

“Ten years. I came from Cambridge with a degree in nineteenth-century literature and joined the LiteraTecs straight away. Jim Crometty looked after me from the moment I started.”

He stared out of the window wistfully.

“Perhaps if I’d been there—”

“—then you’d both be dead. Anyone who shoots a man six times in the face doesn’t go to Sunday school. He’d have killed you and not even thought about it. There’s little to be gained in what ifs; believe me, I know. I lost two fellow officers to Hades. I’ve been over it all a hundred times, yet it would probably happen exactly the same way if I had another chance.”

Lottie placed the soup in front of us with a basket of freshly baked bread.

“Enjoy,” said Lottie, “it’s on the house.”

“But!—” I began. Lottie silenced me.

“Save your breath,” she said impassively. “After the charge. After the shit hit the fan. After the first wave of death—you went bac

k to do what you could. You went back. I value that.” She turned and left.

The soup was good; the rojoes cominho even better.

“Victor told me you worked on Shakespeare up in London,” said Bowden.

It was the most prestigious area in which to work in the LiteraTec office. Lake poetry was a close second and Restoration comedy after that. Even in the most egalitarian of offices, a pecking order always established itself.

“There was very little room for promotion in the London office so after a couple of years I was given the Shakespeare work,” I replied, tearing at a piece of bread. “We get a lot of trouble from Baconians in London.”

Bowden looked up.