The Woman Who Died a Lot: A Thursday Next Novel (18 page)

Mother Daisy was indeed calming down, and after another five minutes the others thought it safe to stop sitting on her and she got to her feet, covered in grass clippings and a bit bruised. She smoothed her habit, took a deep breath and approached us both.

“Welcome to the Sisterhood of the Lobsterhood Salisbury Plain Chapter,” she said in a sedate and measured manner. “My Name is Mother Daisy. I do apologize for the attempted murder. It is not how we usually welcome distinguished guests. Can you find it in your heart to forgive me?”

“Of course,” I said, suddenly realizing who she was and why she’d tried to kill me, “think no more of it. May I present Head of Antiquities James Finisterre of the Swindon All-You-Can-Eatat-Fatso’s Drink Not Included Library?”

She shook his hand. “Welcome, Mr. Finisterre. Your expertise and reputation precede you. Just one question: Why did you have to . . .
bring that lying man-stealer with you?!?
”

She had screamed the last line and in an instant had her hands around my throat. We toppled over backward, and I felt myself fall unconscious, but in an instant I was gasping for air as the two nuns who looked suspiciously male had dragged her from me.

“Shit,”
I said, sitting up.

“Are you okay?” asked Finisterre.

“Annoyed,” I said, giving him my hand so he could heave me to my feet.

“Yes, I should imagine being attacked by a nun might be annoying.”

“It’s not that,” I said, coughing and rubbing my throat. “It’s just that even six months ago I would have been fast and aggressive enough to have
her
on her back before she’d even grabbed me. And earlier?”

“Yes?”

I tapped the center of my forehead. “I’d have planted one right here before she got to fire the second shot.”

“I’m very glad you didn’t,” said Finisterre with a shudder. “It might have put a damper on getting access to their library.”

“She could have killed us both.”

“Life is short, art is long, Thursday. You and I are passing through history; the contents of this library
is
history.” He thought for a moment. “You came to a convent tooled up?”

“I’m
always
tooled up.”

“I’m
so
sorry about that,” said Mother Daisy, who seemed once again to have recovered her composure. “My only companion from the outside world during nineteen years of isolation has been my personal hatred of Thursday Next. It’s kind of like the old me suddenly taking over, and I promised myself that this was how I would act if I ever saw you.”

“I have the same thing, but with Tom Stoppard,” I said.

“You’d kill Tom Stoppard?”

“Not at all. I promised myself many years ago that I would throw myself at his feet and scream ‘I’m not worthy!’ if I ever met him, so now if we’re ever at the same party or something, I have to be at pains to avoid him. It would be undignified, you see—for him and for me.”

“I can see that,” said Mother Daisy, “and since I demonstrably can’t control myself, I have allocated Sister Henrietta as your bodyguard.”

One of the more masculine nuns bobbed politely and took up station beside me.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Don’t mention it,” replied Sister Henrietta in a deep voice.

“I’m impressed that the Sisterhood has embraced inclusivity regarding its adherents,” I said as we walked toward the main doors.

“What do you mean?” asked Mother Daisy.

“That you now count men among the Sisterhood.”

She stopped and looked around suspiciously. “You think there might be men present in our sanctuary?”

“Oh,” I said, suddenly realizing that it might be a secret, “just idle talk from Swindon, I suspect.”

“Hmm. Worth looking into. Sister Henrietta, would you conduct a gender check tomorrow? Nothing intrusive. Just find out if there is anyone who doesn’t know the name of Jennifer Grey’s character in
Dirty Dancing.
”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Sister Henrietta, staring daggers in my direction as soon as Mother Daisy looked away.

“And what news of Swindon?” asked Mother Daisy. “We have no radio, no TV, and only
The Toad on Sunday
once a month.”

“There’s a new roundabout in the Old Town, Acme Carpets is having another sale, SpecOps is to be reformed—oh, and part of the city is to be wiped from the earth by a cleansing fire on Friday.”

“An Acme Carpets sale?”

“Forty percent off everything, I heard—with free installation, but you have to pay for the underlay.”

“Worth a look. And a smiting, you say? What level?”

We were now at the reception desk in the lobby. She indicated the visitors’ book for me to sign. I noted that the last visitor had been admitted in 1974.

“A Level III,” I said, “to punish Joffy for his impertinence, we think. That is,” I added, “unless my daughter Tuesday can perfect her anti-smite device.”

Mother Daisy reached behind the counter and picked up a length of lead pipe that happened to be there. She made a swipe in my direction.

“A daughter that should have been mine, you scarlet Jezebel!!”

I was quicker this time and took a step back. Sister Henrietta was on the ball, too, and had Daisy around the waist and grappled to the floor in less than a second.

“The Sisterhood likes to scrap, don’t they?” said Finisterre as the pair of them wrestled on the ground, with Mother Daisy howling and scratching and biting while Sister Henrietta attempted to calm her down. She did calm, eventually, and once more apologized for her conduct and asked for my forgiveness.

This I gave, although less readily, as one can take just so much of nun violence. We moved into the main part of the convent, a large room that served as living space and refectory. To either side of the chamber were smaller cells for the sisters to live in. All about us was the lobster motif that the order lived beneath, a constant reminder of the mildly deluded notion that the world would one day be unified under a single lobster of astonishing intellect, and all ills, sorrow, hunger and thermidor would be banished forever. Although this might seem peculiar— even when compared to other, equally wild religions—my father had often traveled into the distant future and learned that there
was
indeed a time when the earth was dominated by the arthropods. Two hundred million years away, he said. But any notion that the Sisterhood might be planning for this was doubtful— there would be only six species of mammal on the earth at that time, and none of them with a higher intellect than a confused hedgehog.

“How is he?” asked Daisy through half-gritted teeth.

“He’s . . . very well,” I said warily, making sure there was a reasonable distance between us. Sister Henrietta had guessed that this was over a man and had placed herself in a position where it would be most easy to intervene.

“A bestselling writer by now, I expect?”

“Not
quite,
” I replied slowly, as Landen’s career since winning the coveted Armitage Shanks Literary Prize had been in a somewhat downward trajectory.

“Why?” she asked.

“I guess he was looking after me,” I replied, as honestly as I could, “and the kids.”

“I would never have allowed that if he were
my
husband,” she scolded. “You should be ashamed of yourself. Has he still got one leg?”

I stared at her. “It’s not likely to have grown back.”

“He . . . he might have lost the other one.”

“He’s not that careless.”

“You had children?”

“Two.”

“What sort?”

“One of each.”

“A boy and a girl?”

“No, an ant and a whale.”

She glared at me, and a vein in her neck pulsed. “There’s no cause to be snippy.”

“I’ll stop being snippy if you stop making inane observations.”

“You were the one who stole my husband at the altar.”

I stared at her for a moment. Before she was Mother Daisy, she had been Daisy Mutlar and had almost ensnared Landen into marriage.

“He didn’t love you. He loved me, and technically speaking he was
never
your husband.”

“Only because of a short, meddling, plain-as-wallpaper, delusional ex-girlfriend with relationship issues and a borderline-personality disorder.”

“I’m
not
short.”

I could see Sister Henrietta tense, expecting another attack. There wasn’t one, however, and we moved on through a wide stone arch to the large building that I had seen attached to the tower. It was, as previously stated, enormous—perhaps more than seven hundred feet long and one hundred twenty feet to the roof. But what I hadn’t expected was that the interior was pretty much hollow and made of a delicate latticework of wood and steel that seemed to have an air of temporariness about it. Around the periphery of the chamber were workshops, rooms, scaffolding and the evidence of recently abandoned industry. Tools lay about, and large blocks of stone were lying on trolleys half finished. The focus of the centuries-old toil lay in the center of the room.

“Is that what I think it is?” asked Finisterre.

The sculpture was about the size and shape of a carrier-class airship, but more flattened and clearly designed for longevity, not flight. At one end the sculpture had only just been begun, with the inner foundations constructed of blocks of limestone, while up near the finished end the limestone had been clad with delicately carved Portland stone, each piece set into position so finely it was difficult to see where the individual blocks lay. The surface was mottled, lumpy, and it was hard not to see what it was—the claw of an enormous rock-hewn lobster.

“Tremble before the might and majesty of the Great Lobster,” breathed Mother Daisy. “We had planned to build the entire Lobster. It would have been over a mile in length and made the pyramids at Cairo look like the work of uninspired amateurs.”

“How long did this take?” asked Finisterre.

“Five centuries. As soon as we were done with the claw, we were going to move the building shed to begin on the antennae and feeding mandibles. We estimated the whole thing might have been finished in as little as five thousand years.”

“It seems a shame,” I said, “after five centuries of toil.”

“Yes,” replied Daisy stoically, “we’ll grind it up and sell it as motorway hardcore. Shame, but . . . well, there you go. This way.”

We arrived at a large, steel-belted door. There was a bunch of keys on the rope tied around Daisy’s waist, and she paused, waited until Sister Henrietta wasn’t watching, then threw a punch in my direction.

I was more wary of her now and expertly sidestepped the blow, although it was so close I felt the air move on my face. She shrugged, cursed at me below her breath, then placed a key in the lock. It turned easily, and she pushed it open to reveal a long staircase that led upward into the gloom. Blast. Stairs.

I think there might have been at least a hundred of them, and they wound slowly up for what seemed like an age, while my leg and back throbbed and shouted at me. I told them to move on ahead and was helped eventually by Henrietta, who wasn’t Henrietta at all but an ex-physicist from Manchester named Henry who was trying to find meaning in an otherwise empty existence by pretending to be a nun.

We reached the top of the stone steps in due course and entered the lowest tier of the libraries. There were books here in abundance, and Finisterre was already looking through the dusty tomes. I pulled one out at random and found an obscure treatise on accountancy dating from the tenth century. Of interest to those obsessed with the history of finance, but not much of anyone else.

“There is an index here,” said Daisy, pointing to a younger book. “The older stuff is on the top floor.”

“Aeschylus’s
The Spirit of Pharos,
” murmured Finisterre, peering through the gazetteer, “which is argued to be the first ghost story. Have you read it?”

“Sister Georgia translated it for us,” said Daisy. “It’s not
totally
rubbish. The ghosts turn out to be the lighthouse keepers in disguise, to prevent people from discovering their illegal trade in stolen amphorae.”

“So
that’s
where the Scooby-Doo ending originated,” I murmured. “Scholars have been hunting for the primary source of that for years.”

“It’s one of only two known copies anywhere in the world,” said Finisterre, “although the other copy is fragmentary. But you’re right about primary sources: When we discovered the second volume of Aristotle’s
Poetics,
it ended a lot of academic contention on who devised the format for
Columbo.
”

“There’s little new in literature,” I added. “For many years William Shatner’s depiction of Kirk in
Star Trek
was considered unique, until it was discovered that an identical character pops up in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses 2: Fat Foreigners Are Funny
all the time.”

“Horace wrote truly
filthy
limericks,” added Mother Daisy. “We recite them on special occasions. There was a very good one about a young man from Australia who painted his arse like a dahlia. Do you want to hear it?”

“No thanks.”

“Well,” said Finisterre, who was in no doubt as to the unique value of the library, “I’d like to catalog all this in situ, then take the books to my team of conservators to be copied and—”

He stopped because there was a sharp report far below in the convent.

“What was that?”

“A shot,” I said, “but then we
are
in the middle of a firing range.”

“Range fire is softened by distance,” replied Daisy expertly. “closer ones are a
crack
— and that was a
crack.
Sister Henrietta, close the scriptorium door and defend the library to the death.”

“We use a similar oath in the Wessex Library Service,” murmured Finisterre. “Thursday, do you still carry two pistols?”

“On my right ankle—but you’ll have to get it. I can’t bend that far. Landen has to put on my socks these days.”

“Isn’t he just the perfect husband?” murmured Daisy sarcastically. She was herself searching through the folds of her habit and produced a very ancient-looking Colt.