One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (Thursday Next 6)

I stood up. I had to get her to Gray’s Anatomy as soon as possible. There was an umbrella in a stand at the door, and I picked it up.

“Thursday? I’m going to fetch someone who can carry you out of here. My butler. I’ll be ten minutes.”

“You have a butler?” she managed.

“Yes,” I replied in a chirpy voice in order to hide my concern. “Everyone needs a butler.”

41.

The End of the Book

About the author: Commander Bradshaw has been one of the stalwarts of Jurisfiction for over fifty years and has been the Bellman an unprecedented eight times. Hailing from a long-unread branch of British imperialist fiction, he now divides his time between Jurisfiction duties, his lovely wife, Melanie, and continually updating the BookWorld Companion, which remains the definitive work on the BookWorld and everything in it.

Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (17th edition)

I flew the Hovermatic home from Gray’s Anatomy two hours later, but Sprockett and I said nothing on the trip. I was quiet because I was thinking about Thursday, and what a close call it had been. She had a fractured skull, a broken femur and eight breaks to her left arm and hand. There were multiple lacerations, a loss of blood, fever and a concussion. Henry Gray himself took charge and whisked her into surgery almost the moment I arrived. Within ten minutes the waiting room was full of concerned well-wishers, Bradshaw and Zhark amongst them. I knew she was in good hands, so I’d quietly slipped away as soon as I heard she was out of danger.

I was quiet also because I had averted a war and saved many lives today, and that’s a peculiar feeling that’s difficult to describe. Sprockett was quiet, too—but only because I had inadvertently allowed his spring to run down, and he had shut off all functions except thought, and he was thinking mildly erotic thoughts about bevel gears and how nice it might be to have a flywheel fitted in order to give him a little more oomph in the mornings.

The first thing I saw when I got back to my house was Bowden, dressed up as me.

“This isn’t how it appears,” he said in the same tone of voice he’d used when I found him looking through my underwear drawer the year before. He told me then that he’d “heard a mouse,” but I didn’t believe him.

“How should it appear if you’re dressed up in my clothes?”

“Carmine’s goblin ran off with a goblinette, and she locked herself in the bathroom again. I’m standing in for her. You. I’ve just done a scene with myself. It was most odd.”

“How many readers we got?” I asked.

“Six.”

“You can handle it.”

“Oh!” said Bowden, in the manner of one who is pretending to be disappointed but is actually delighted. “If I must. But who will play me?”

“I will,” came a voice from the door. I turned to find Whitby Jett standing there.

“Whitby?”

“How’s my little Thursday?”

“She’s good. But . . . what about the nuns?”

“A misunderstanding,” he said. “I hadn’t set fire to any of them, as it turned out.”

I stepped forward and touched his chest. I could feel that the guilt had lifted. He’d managed to move the damaging backstory on.

“I’m going to mix some cocktails,” announced Sprockett, and he buzzed from the room.

“Make mine a Sidcup Sling, Sprocky old boy,” said Jett. “Bowden—where are my lines?”

“Here!” said Bowden, passing him a well-thumbed script.

“Whitby?”

“Yes, muffin?”

“Are you busy right now?”