A Thursday Next Digital Collection: Novels 1-5 by Jasper Fforde

far end of the concourse. The last time I was in Swindon the airship park had been simply a grass field with a rusty mast. I guessed that much else had changed too.
    I waited five minutes, then stood and paced impatiently up and down. The Will-Speak machine—officially known as a Shakespeare Soliloquy Vending Automaton—was of Richard III . It was a simple box, with the top half glazed and inside a realistic mannequin visible from the waist up in suitable attire. The machine would dispense a short snippet of Shakespeare for ten pence. They hadn’t been manufactured since the thirties and were now something of a rarity; Baconic vandalism and a lack of trained maintenance were together hastening their demise.
    I dug out a ten-pence piece and inserted it. There was a gentle whirring and clicking from within as the machine wounditself up to speed. There had been a Hamlet version on the corner of Commercial Road when I was small. My brother and I had pestered our mother for loose change and listened to the mannequin refer to things we couldn’t really understand. It told us of “the undiscovered country.” My brother, in his childish naé¯veté, had said he wanted to visit such a place, and he did, seventeen years later, in a mad dash sixteen hundred miles from home, the only sound the roar of engines and the crump-crump-crump of the Russian guns.
    Was ever woman in this humor wooed? asked the mannequin, rolling its eyes crazily as it stuck one finger in the air and lurched from side to side.
    Was ever woman in this humor won?
    It paused for effect.
    I’ll have her, but I’ll not keep her long . . .
    â€œExcuse me?—”
    I looked up. One of the students had walked up and touched me on the arm. He wore a peace button in his lapel and had a pair of pince-nez glasses perched precariously on his large nose.
    â€œYou’re Next, aren’t you?”
    â€œNext for what?”
    â€œCorporal Next, Light Armored Brigade.”
    I rubbed my brow.
    â€œI’m not here with the colonel. It was a coincidence.”
    â€œI don’t believe in coincidences.”
    â€œNeither do I. That’s a coincidence, isn’t it?”
    The student looked at me oddly as his girlfriend joined him. He told her who I was.
    â€œYou were the one who went back, ” she marveled, as though I were a rare stuffed parakeet. “It was against a direct order. They were going to court-martial you.”
    â€œWell, they didn’t, did they?”
    â€œNot when The Owl on Sunday got wind of your story. I’ve read your testimony at the inquiry. You’re antiwar.”
    The two students looked at one another as if they couldn’t believe their good fortune.
    â€œWe need someone to talk at Colonel Phelps’s rally,” said the young man with the big nose. “Someone from the other side. Someone who has been there. Someone with clout. Would you do that for us?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    I looked around to see if, by a miracle, my lift had arrived. It hadn’t.
    . . . Whom I, continued the mannequin, some three months hence, stabbed in my angry mood at Tewkesbury?
    â€œListen, guys, I’d love to help you, but I can’t. I’ve spent twelve years trying to forget. Speak to some other vet. There are thousands of us.”
    â€œNot like you, Miss Next. You survived the charge. You went back to get your fallen comrades out. One of the fifty-one. It’s your duty to speak on behalf of those that didn’t make it.”
    â€œBullshit. My duty is to myself. I survived the charge and have lived with it every single day since. Every night I ask myself: Why me? Why did I live and the others, my brother even, die? There is no answer to that question and that’s only just where the pain starts . I can’t help you.”
    â€œYou don’t have to speak,” said the girl persistently, “but better for one old