'It is a truth universally acknowledged,' observed the younger Miss Bennet pointedly, 'that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.'
She waited for some appropriate response, but none came. The visitor, she observed, was looking out of the window.
'Would you not agree, Mr Skinner?' she said.
'Yeah,' the visitor replied, and Miss Bennet made a mental note that she was probably wasting her time. Nevertheless, she persevered. Mr Skinner might be middle-aged and fat and have the manners of a dung-beetle but even so he was a young Greek god compared to the curate.
'The young gentleman who has taken Netherfield Park...' she started to say; but before she could develop the theme, Mr Skinner exclaimed loudly, using a word she wasn't familiar with but whose general meaning she could deduce from context, threw himself under the big mahogany table and drew from inside his coat something that looked like some sort of gun. Miss Bennet edged forward slightly on her chair, intrigued. This sort of thing, she couldn't help feeling, rarely happened at Longbourn.
'The young gentleman who has taken...' she repeated; and then the door flew open and the tall, better-looking one burst in, a book in one hand and Papa's fowling-piece in the other. He seemed flustered, and Miss Bennet's first instinct was to offer him tea.
'Get down, for Chrissakes,' screamed Mr Skinner. A moment later, the glass in the window shattered. Mr Regalian (a foreign-sounding name, Miss Bennet reflected, although the gentleman didn't seem particularly out of the ordinary) hurled himself under the table, waited for a moment, stood up and fired the gun out of the window. Probably, Miss Bennet said to herself, he's seen a partridge or something. Gentlemen, she knew, take sport very seriously and sometimes act 'unaccountably while under its influence.
'The young gentleman who has taken Netherfield...' she said.
'This is more like it,' said a small, metallic sounding voice from under the table. Miss Bennet raised an eyebrow. She was certain that the voice emanated from neither of the two gentlemen, and yet she had heard it quite distinctly. Would it, she wondered, be polite to ask for an explanation?
'Shut up, you,' snapped Mr Skinner irritably. 'And this time, do as you're damned well told.'
(His language, Miss Bennet said to herself, was not quite the thing; but no worse than some of the things she had overheard when the foxhounds had met at Netherfield the year before last. Gentlemen, she told herself, have a certain licence in these matters when indulging in sporting pursuits.)
'Can I offer either of you gentlemen some refreshment?' she volunteered. They ignored her.
'How do you load these things?' Mr Regalian said, staring at the gun in his hands.
'Right,' replied the metallic voice. 'First, take your powder flask...
'What's a powder flask?'
'Oh for crying out loud.'
There were footsteps on the stairs. Goody, said Miss Bennet to herself, more visitors. This is turning out to be quite an eventful day.
'They're coming,' Mr Regalian hissed. 'Oh my God!'
'I thought you were supposed to be a hero?'
'There's heroism,' Mr Regalian replied, 'and there's getting killed sitting under a table. I'm afraid I've always specialised in forms of heroism where getting killed wasn't obligatory.'
'Here,' replied the metallic voice, 'grab a hold of my grips. You'll soon get the hang of it. He's useless.'
Mr Regalian reached over and took the peculiar-looking gun from Mr Skinner, who didn't seem to mind in the least. Then the door opened again. It was not, as Miss Bennet had feared, the curate. Instead she saw a large, swarthy man with a grin on his face and another peculiar-looking gun in his hand. Gosh, thought Miss Bennet, perhaps the partridge has got into the house, like the time the fox ran into the drawing-room at Arnscot and the hunt chased it three times round the room before it escaped through the window.
There was a very loud bang.
The new, arrival - could this, she wondered, be the mysterious Mr Derwent, who was supposed to have bought the Shirefield estate and have four thousand a year from his uncle in the West Indies? - ducked down behind the chaise longue, and shortly afterwards there was another loud bang. The teapot - best Wedgwood -disintegrated into small pieces. But there was no sign at all of any partridge.
'The young gentleman who has taken...' said Miss Bennet, but the rest of her sentence was drowned out by further loud bangs. A French clock, a mirror and the portrait of Sir Joshua Bennet over the fireplace went the way of the teapot.
The door opened yet again, and Miss Bennet saw, with an involuntary flutter of the heart, that Mr Darcy had entered the room. He didn't, she noticed, look his usual immaculate self. In fact, his clothes were crumpled and muddy, and he was holding a bloodstained handkerchief to the side of his head and looked pale as death. Oh dear, thought Miss Bennet, he's fallen off his horse again.
Displaying an impressive turn of speed, the swarthy man (who Miss Bennet had decided probably wasn't Mr Derwent) jumped up, grabbed Mr Darcy round the neck and poked the muzzle of his gun in his ear.
'Okay,' he said. 'Lose the iron or the dude gets it.'
Mr Regalian swore loudly, stood up and threw his gun to the ground. He must have forgotten to uncock it first, however, because it immediately went off, and a moment later the man who wasn't Mr Derwent was hopping round the room on one foot shouting horribly, while the metallic voice was saying something about if you want a job done properly you might as well do it yourself. Grabbing the gun with one hand and Mr Skinner's ear with the other, Mr Regalian rushed out of the door, and Miss Bennet heard the sound of running footsteps on the stairs. She turned to Mr Darcy and the stranger, who was now sitting in the coalscuttle holding his left foot and moaning.
'The young gentleman who has taken Netherfield Park,' she said, 'seems little inclined towards society. Yet I have not altogether .given up hope of our seeing him shortly at Longbourn.'
She paused. Nobody seemed to be paying her the least attention. As the youngest of five daughters, however, this was something she could easily relate to. She decided to stay with it and see what happened.
'It is a truth universally acknowledged ...' she said.
The laws of reality are bad enough. The laws of fiction are downright terrible.
In reality, things generally get worse, nothing ever goes entirely right, there is no free lunch, people fall out of love, pay taxes and die.
In fiction, right triumphs over wrong, long-lost brothers are united in improbable circumstances, everything works out all right in the end, and boy meets, loses and finally gets girl. Whether the participants like it or not.
The laws of fiction are unbendable, and there are no loopholes. Furthermore, even the timetable is beyond the control of the people involved, because things happen at the aesthetically correct time; not a page early, not a paragraph late. There are some things even the author can do nothing about.
One of them is about to happen to Skinner.
'Talk,' whined the Scholfield, 'about a goddamn shambles. I was so ashamed I didn't know what to do with myself. You guys had better get your act together, or-'
'Shut up,' Skinner said, 'or I'll saw your barrel off. Now then,' he went on, turning to Regalian, 'what do we do now?'
Regalian scowled. 'How the bloody hell am I supposed to know?' he replied, sitting down heavily under a chestnut tree, taking his left boot off and shaking it. 'You think I do this sort of thing all the time?'
'You're a hero. Heroes are supposed to know these things.'
'Get stuffed,' replied the hero.
'You're formulating a plan of campaign, aren't you?'
'Get real. I'm trying to get this poxy chunk of gravel out of my - ah, that's got it. Right, where were we?'
Skinner sat down beside him. 'The next step.'
'That's what I wanted the book for,' Regalian said. 'Not that I'm admitting for one second that I have got a plan, mind. It's just that, the moment I saw it in the library there, I tho
ught it might come in handy.'
'What book?'
'This one,' Regalian said, and held the volume out to Skinner. It was a first folio Shakespeare. Skinner recoiled as if he'd been handed a toad.
'Absolutely no way,' he said vehemently. 'I absolutely refuse to set foot in there. It's full of lunatics with damn great swords talking blank verse. The life expectancy of the guys in Shakespeare's about on a par with the first day of Ypres.'
'Actually,' Regalian replied quietly, 'I was thinking we could take it to a bookshop somewhere and sell it. It's a first edition, and I gather they're quite valuable.'
'Oh.'
'I thought some money might come in handy, you see. For food and things.'
'Yes, quite. Sorry.'
'Don't mention it.
Idly, Skinner opened the book. Shakespeare had always bored him silly, but a first folio isn't something you come across all that often, and ...
Idly, Skinner opened the book and began turning the pages, his mind slanting back to those days long ago when he had sat in the little timber-framed schoolhouse in Dalhoxie County and listened to Miss Withers, the schoolmarm, reciting her favourite speeches. He could almost hear her high, shrill voice dwelling on the metre and the cadences, bringing to that small, remote building a faint echo of the wooden 0, and beyond it, the field of Agincourt, the ramparts of Dunsinane, the wood near Athens ...
'Oh shit!'
That, by the way, isn't the horrible, inevitable, artistically necessary thing that happens to Skinner. That comes later. Soon, but later.
CHAPTER SIX
'Of all the woods,' said Skinner, 'in all the plays in all the world, we have to end up in this one. Thanks a heap.'
'Not my fault,' Regalian snapped, lashing out at the brambles with a heavy stick. 'I didn't say open the bloody thing. I didn't say start reading. If you had as much common sense as a bloody lemming, you'd have known better than to open the ...
Not far away, they could hear strange, disturbing sounds, half-animal, half-human. Possibly it was just lemurs, but somehow Skinner doubted it. He had a horrible feeling he knew exactly what was making that noise.
'There may,' Regalian went on, between grunts of effort, 'be an advantage to be had here, if we use our brains. Fantasy setting. Could be any time, anywhere. If only we could find some jumping-off point, we should be able to go anywhere from here.'
'We should live so long,' Skinner snarled back. 'Listen to the noisy sons of bitches. They're following us, you realise.'
'You're paranoid.'
'No I'm not. Why are you trying to make out I'm paranoid all of a sudden?'
Regalian glanced up at what was visible of the sky though the branches of the trees. 'I reckon it's about four-thirty in the afternoon, so assuming it stays light till say ten...'
'What are you drivelling on about?'
'Midsummer Day,' Regalian replied. 'The one thing we can be sure of is which day of the year it is.'
Skinner stopped in his tracks. 'Hang on,' he said. 'Midsummer Day.'
'Exactly,' Regalian replied, gently bending a low branch out of his way. 'It's still day. 'Which means the play hasn't started yet. Which means we're probably safe until dark. So if we get a move on and find our way out of this bloody wood, we can get to Athens and find a library, and then-'
'Safe? Are you sure?'
Regalian scowled. 'Well, I'm not about to swear any affidavits, but it could be worse. One thing I do know about fairies is, they don't come out during the day.'
'How do you know that?'
'I work in fantasy, remember? I know fairies from nothing, and they're strictly nocturnal, trust me. Which means that apart from bears and wolves and outlaws and quick-sands and the like, I think we're fairly-'
He vanished. Skinner froze in his tracks, which was probably what saved him. He looked round.
'Hello?' he said.
'Up here.'
Skinner looked up. Regalian was hanging upside down about fifteen feet up in the air. A rope, attached to his ankle, connected him to the top of a thick, tall green sapling.
'I think,' he said, 'I stepped in some sort of trap.'
'Looks that way,' Skinner agreed.
'Fine. Look, do you think you could see your way clear to getting me down? Or do you want to wait until autumn and see if I come down with the apples?'
'Sorry.' Skinner looked round. 'What we need,' he said, trying to keep his head, 'is something like an axe or a saw.'
'Left them in my other jacket,' Regalian snapped. 'Can you hurry it up, please? I think my brain's trying to get out of my ears.'
'You could shoot through the rope,' suggested the Scholfield helpfully. 'At this range, if you rested on something, with a bit of luck-'
'I've warned you already.'
'I'm just trying to be positive,' the gun replied, hurt. 'Nobody else has come up with anything, have they?'
'Be quiet.'
'I-'
'I said be quiet.'
'But-'
'QUIET!'
It was then that Skinner registered the feel of a very sharp pricking at the back of his neck. Very slowly, he turned his eyes hard right, and caught sight of something luminous directly behind him, at the absolute limit of his vision.
'I was just trying to tell you,' said the Scholfield smugly, 'that there was this guy with a knife creeping up behind you. But you appear to have found that out for yourself.'
'Okay,' said the fairy. 'Which one of you scumbags is the weaver?'
'Look, fellas,' protested Skinner, some time later, 'don't get me wrong, I sympathise with what you're trying to achieve here and I'll be delighted to do anything I can to help. I don't have a problem with any of it, I promise. But are the ears absolutely necessary?'
'Yes.'
'Are you sure you're not just erring ever so slightly on the over-literal side here? I mean, we're into some pretty deep symbolism here, the donkey motif and all that, I mean, it's a common element in Western European literature right through from Apuleius, so couldn't we just take it as read and let the metaphor kind of do its thing without hammering it into the ground and having actual physical donkey's ears?'
'No.'
'I really don't want to seem in any way obstructive here, but the words "hopelessly jejune" are sort of hovering about over our heads, and you've got such a wonderful situation going here, I'd hate for you to spoil it by-'
'Co-operate,' growled the fairy, 'or I cut your nose off. Okay?'
'Okay.'
Bloody marvellous, Skinner thought as they stumbled their way through the wood in unhappy convoy. The one time when a bit of initiative from that poxy gun might come in handy, and it just sits there in the holster, rusting. Now if only...
'And if you're expecting your friend to help you,' said the fairy, 'forget it.'
'Friend?'
'The metal guy with the long nose,' the fairy replied. 'The one you carry around with you. We've put a hex on him so strong it's taking him all his time not to turn into a bunch of daffodils.'
Skinner shrugged. 'Oh well,' he said, 'dark cloud, silver lining. In fact, if you could just jot the spell down on a scrap of paper sometime, I have a feeling it could well come in very useful in the future.'
'Shut up.'
'Okay.'
They had reached a clearing; well, more than a clearing. One tries to avoid the expression whenever possible, but there are times one has to call a glade a glade.
'Right,' said the fairy. 'Puck.'
'Stub your toe, did you?'
'Puck,' continued the fairy, 'you hide in that tree there. I'll just hunker down behind this bush. You lot, make with the music.'
The fairies vanished, leaving Skinner standing in the middle of the glade with his hands in his pockets, feeling extremely conspicuous. Well, he consoled himself, at least they were only joshing when they said about the donkey's
He felt a curious sensation, which reminded him of the time when he was a boy and had voluntarily swallowed
a live worm in order to join Lumpy Flannagan's gang. If the worm had been made of burning mercury and coated in sugar, there would have been a striking resemblance.
And suddenly he could hear. Not just hear, but really hear. For example, half a mile away a rabbit sneezed. The shock nearly knocked Skinner over.
Unwillingly, he put a tentative hand to the side of his head, and felt fur.
'You ba-' he started to say; and then the pile of leaves in front of him quivered slightly, and turned somehow into a tall, slim, scantily dressed young woman with silver skin.
'What angel,' she said, rubbing her eyes, 'wakes me from my flowery bed?' She rolled on to her side and squinted. 'Just a minute,' she went on, 'you're not the usual chap.'
Skinner realised that he was staring. Either she was extremely absent-minded and had forgotten to put on the rest of her clothes, or she didn't feel the cold at all. He looked away and made a sheep-clearing-its-throat noise.
'Um,' he said. It came out different to the way it had sounded in his head; more a sort of guttural honk. Of course, he realised, completely different bone structure on a donkey, larynx in a different place. He smiled feebly. He felt like Cyrano de Bergerac in the distorting mirrors booth at the fair, and his ears itched like buggery.
The girl was staring too, and it suddenly occurred to Skinner that whoever usually did this job must look really ghastly, because it was the sort of stare that has a hidden agenda of pink hearts and gypsy violins. A fly landed on his nose and began to buzz.
'Hi,' he said. 'My name's Skinner, and I'm not really stopping, we don't really have to go through with this, so...'
'Hi,' replied the girl, in a voice you, could have iced a cake with. 'I'm Titania, but my friends call me-'
'Quite. As I was saying, I'm sure you're only too aware by now that you're being made the victim of a cruel practical joke, and since I have no wish to participate in this degrading exhibition, perhaps you'd-'
My Hero Tom Holt. Page 8