love, and her brother Anton, who became his best friend. During the disastrous battle which became known as the "Charge of the Light-Armoured Brigade", Anton was killed and Landen lost a leg. During the subsequent inquest, Landen, after much agonizing, admitted that Anton had made an error that had led to the destruction of their unit. As a result, Thursday left him and refused to speak to him for ten years. They came back into contact during the events of The Eyre Affair, during which Thursday was finally able to forgive Landen and agreed to marry him. Despite his missing leg, he is relied upon in dangerous situations. During the events of Lost in a Good Book, Landen is eradicated from history by a rogue member of the Chronoguard, acting on behalf of the Goliath Corporation, who wish to blackmail Thursday into returning their operative Jack Schitt. He then appears only in Thursday's memories until reactualised during Something Rotten. His name is one of Fforde's trademark puns: in the British edition of the board game Monopoly, Park Lane is the second-to-last street on the board and consequently one of the most expensive. As additions to this pun, Landen's late father is named Billden Parke-Laine and his mother is named Houson Parke-Laine. Pickwick Thursday's pet dodo, brought to life by genetic engineering. Originally she was believed to be male, but revealed to be female during the events of Lost in a Good Book, when she lays an egg. This ultimately hatches, producing her son, Alan. The name is a reference to Dickens's Pickwick Papers. Jack Schitt Head of the Goliath Corporation's internal security service and their Advanced Weapons Division, and thus a man of great power. He showed great interest in Mycroft Next's Prose Portal, hoping to use it to retrieve fictional weaponry, having utterly failed to make the equivalent weapon work in the real world, to the extent that he was willing to work with the criminal Acheron Hades in order to gain access. Once Hades was defeated within Jane Eyre, Schitt used the Prose Portal to enter what he thought was the manual for the plasma rifle that he wanted to retrieve, only to discover that Bowden Cable had slipped a copy of "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe inside the manual's dust cover instead. The Portal closed behind him, trapping him there. He was ultimately retrieved by Thursday