'Hello, Mr Starboard,' said Bradshaw to the holesmith, who gave a wan smile of recognition.

'Commander Bradshaw!' he muttered slightly hesitantly. 'What a truly delightful honour it is to meet you again, sir. Mrs Bradshaw quite well?'

'Quite well, thank you. This is Miss Next – new at the department. I'm showing her the ropes.'

The holesmith shook my hand and made welcoming noises.

'I closed a hole in Great Expectations the other day,' I told him. 'Was that one of your books?'

'Goodness me no!' exclaimed the young man, smiling for the first time. 'Holestitching has come a long way since Dickens. You won't find a holesmith worth his thread trying the old "door opens and in comes the missing aunt/father/business associate/friend, etc.", all ready to explain where they've been since mysteriously dropping out of the narrative two hundred pages previously. The methodology we choose these days is to just go back and patch the hole, or more simply, to camouflage it.'

'I see.'

'Indeed,' carried on the young man, becoming more flamboyant in the light of my perceived interest, 'I'm working on a system that hides holes by highlighting them to the reader, which just says: "Ho! I'm a hole, don't think about it!", but it's a little cutting-edge. I think,' added the young man airily, 'that you will not find a more experienced holesmith anywhere in the Well; I've been doing it for more than forty years.'

'When did you start?' I observed, looking at the youth curiously. 'As a baby?'

The young man aged, greyed and sagged before my eyes until he was in his seventies and then announced, arms outstretched and with a nourish:

'Da-daaaa!'

'No one likes a show-off, Llyster,' said Bradshaw, looking at his watch. 'I don't want to hurry you, Tuesday, old girl, but we should be getting over to Norland Park for the roll-call.'

He gallantly offered me an elbow to hold and I hooked my arm in his.

'Thank you, Commander.'

'Stouter than stout!' Bradshaw laughed, and read us both into Sense and Sensibility.

10

Jurisfiction session number 40319

'JurisTech: Popular contraction of Jurisfiction Technological Division. This R&D company works exclusively for JunsFiction and is financed by the Council of Genres through Text Grand Central. Owing to the often rigorous and specialised tasks undertaken by Prose Resource Operatives, JurisTech is permitted to build gadgets deemed outside the usual laws of physics – the only department (aside from the SF genre) licensed to do so. The standard item in a PRO's manifest is the TravelBook (q.v.), which itself contains other JurisTech designs like the Martin-Bacon Eject-O-Hat, MV Mask, Textmarker, String™ and textual sieves of vanous porosity, to name but a few.'

UA OF W CAT – The Jurisfiction Guide to the Great Library (glossary)

The offices of Jurisfiction were situated at Norland Park, the house of the Dashwoods in Sense and Sensibility. The family kindly lent the ballroom to Jurisfiction on the unspoken condition that Jane Austen books would be an area of special protection.