“Exactly so. The vyrus was rampant before Agent Johnson’s Dictionary in 1744,” added Perkins. “Lavinia-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary keep it all in check, but we have to be careful. We used to contain any outbreak and off-load it in the Molesworth series, where no one ever notices. These days we destroy any new vyrus with a battery of dictionaries we keep on the seventeenth floor of the Great Library. But we can’t be too careful. Every mispeling you come across has to be reported to the Cat on a form S-12.”

There was the raucous blast of a car horn from outside.

“Time’s up!” Perkins smiled. “That will be Miss Havisham.”

Miss Havisham was not on her own. She was sitting in a vast automobile, the bonnet of which stretched ten feet in front of her. The large-spoked and unguarded wheels carried tires that looked woefully skinny and inadequate; eight huge exhaust pipes sprouted from either side of the bonnet, joined into one and stretched the length of the body. The tail of the car was pointed, like a boat, and just forward of the rear wheels two huge drive sprockets carried the power to the rear axle on large chains. It was a fearsome beast. It was the twenty-seven-liter Higham Special.

8.
Ton-Sixty on the A419

The wealthy son of a Polish count and an American mother, Louis Zborowski lived at Higham Place near Canterbury, where he built three aero-engined cars, all called Chitty Bang Bang. But there was a fourth: the Higham Special, a car he and Clive Gallop had engineered by squeezing a twenty-seven-liter aero-engine into a Rubery Owen chassis and mating it with a Benz gearbox. At the time of Zborowski’s death at Monza behind the wheel of a Mercedes, the Special had been lapping Brooklands at 116 mph—but her potential was as yet unproved. After a brief stint with a lady owner whose identity has not been revealed, the Special was sold to Parry Thomas, who with careful modifications of his own pushed the land speed record up to 170.624 mph at Pendine sands, south Wales, in 1926.

THE VERY REVEREND MR. TOREDLYNE,

The Land Speed Record

HAS SHE BEEN boring you, Mr. Perkins?” called out Havisham.

“Not at all,” replied Perkins, giving me a wink, “she has been a most attentive student.”

“Humph,” muttered Havisham. “Hope springs eternal. Get in, girl, we’re off!”

I paused. I had been driven by Miss Havisham once before, and that was in a car that I thought relatively safe. This beast of an automobile looked as though it could kill you twice before even reaching second gear.

“What are you waiting for, girl?” said Havisham impatiently. “If I let the Special idle any longer, we’ll coke up the plugs. Besides, I’ll need all the fuel to do the run.”

“The run?”

“Don’t worry!” shouted Miss Havisham as she revved the engine. The car lurched sideways with the torque, and a throaty growl filled the air. “You won’t be aboard when I do—you’re needed for other duties.”