“Colonel Phelps?” I stammered. The driver smiled and saluted briskly as the penny dropped. Phelps had said he would send a car for me to appear at his talk, and he had.

I looked out of the door. We had pulled up outside Swindon Town Hall, and a vast crowd of people were staring at me.

“Hello, Thursday!” said a familiar voice.

“Lydia?” I asked, caught off guard by the sudden change of events.

And so it was. But she wasn’t the only TV news reporter; there were six or seven of them with their cameras trained on me as I sat sprawled inelegantly in the footwell. I struggled to get out of the car.

“This is Lydia Startright of the Toad News Network,” said Lydia in her best reporter’s voice, “here with Thursday Next, the SpecOps agent responsible for saving Jane Eyre. First let me congratulate you, Miss Next, on your successful reconstruction of the novel!”

“What do you mean?” I responded. “I loused it all up! I burned Thornfield to the ground and half-maimed poor Mr. Rochester!”

Miss Startright laughed.

“In a recent survey ninety-nine out of a hundred readers who expressed a preference said they were delighted with the new ending. Jane and Rochester married! Isn’t that wonderful?”

“But the Brontë Federation—?”

“Charlotte didn’t leave the book to them, Miss Next,” said a man dressed in a linen suit who had a large blue Charlotte Brontë rosette stuck incongruously to his lapel.

“The federation are a bunch of stuffed shirts. Allow me to introduce myself. Walter Branwell, chairman of the federation splinter group ‘Brontë for the People.’ ”

He thrust out a hand for me to shake and grinned wildly as several people near by applauded. A battery of flashguns went off as a small girl handed me a bunch of flowers and another journalist asked me what sort of a person Rochester really was. The driver took my arm and guided me into the building.