After sitting down in the restaurant, they’d been about to order—Griffin’s hunger getting the better of his resolution to never eat food from the future again— when Rupert took one look at the prices listed on the menu and let out a gasp.
“Fourteen pounds for fish and chips!” he exclaimed.
Griffin was astonished too. After doing a quick conversion of British pounds to American dollars in his head, he realized that the price of the meal was close to twenty dollars! It was a small fortune in 1903.
He whistled softly. Of course, neither he nor his uncle had brought such an extravagant amount with them.
Rupert proposed that they order and then just use the time machine to go back to their present, but Griffin reminded him that that was stealing and forced his grumbling uncle to reconsider.
They decided they needed a new plan of attack. They’d tried to stop Moriarty from stealing the book in the future and failed. “The only thing to try now is to journey to the past. If we could arrive right here at our apartment on the night that Miss Pepper stole the time machine, maybe we could stop her!” Griffin said.
Rupert looked doubtful. “What you continually fail to realize, dear nephew, is that this machine is inaccurate. As I’ve said before, I was about to create a regulatory system for it so that a date and time could be specifically calibrated, but I became consumed with other things,” he said pointedly.
Griffin remembered that the other “things” his uncle was talking about were his own arrival and the last case they worked on.
“But what if we tried pushing the knob back just a little into where it says ‘Past’ and not all the way?” Griffin said, indicating the lever on the side of the teapot that pointed to “Past,” “Present,” and “Future.”
Rupert scratched the side of his nose. “I don’t know. It might work, but it still could be way off. Remember, you’re wanting to arrive at a very specific date and time. It’s nearly impossible.”
Griffin smiled at his uncle. “But, Uncle, like you said, we have all the time in the world. We can keep trying as long as we want, and when we finally hit it, no time will have elapsed.”
Rupert smirked. “Good point,” he said. And then, just as the waitress was approaching to take their orders, the two clasped hands and Rupert firmly gripped the teapot’s handle.
“Ready . . . one, two, THREE!”
And with a flash, the two disappeared from the year 2012 and hurtled back into the past.
The waitress who had been sent to wait on their table happened to be looking down at her mobile phone when the two of them disappeared. She wasn’t startled at all when she looked up and noticed that they were gone.
Instead, with a shrug, she continued texting her best friend.
The waitress continued to ignore the impatient stares and frustrated waves of the other restaurant patrons trying to get her attention. She was busy conversing with her friend Tabitha, who had recently bought another Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt and had had a very unusual experience with two LARPers she’d met on the road near Stonehenge.
It took exactly one thousand one hundred and twenty-three attempts to find the date and time that Griffin had specified to his uncle. In the various tries, Griffin and Rupert had gained a very interesting perspective on the evolution of Baker Street and its surroundings. While traveling back and forth, bumping along through time, they’d encountered a troop of hostile Romans, some wild boars, a close call with a volcanic eruption, and finally, after far too many tries, ended up inside their apartment with exactly five minutes to spare.
Rupert set the teapot down on the table in the kitchen and breathed a sigh of relief. “I really must get started on improving this blasted thing as soon as possible,” he said. “It was pure luck that we found this particular time. The odds of doing it again are—”
“Exactly 2.47 billion to one,” Griffin whispered, putting a warning finger to his lips and then pointing down the darkened hall. “I had time to figure it out while we were bouncing around. We must be quiet, Uncle. We don’t want to alert Miss Pepper to our presence.”
Rupert nodded. Griffin could tell his uncle felt as completely exhausted as he did. Rupert tried to pull a dining room chair quietly from the table so that he could sit down, but unfortunately, due to the clutter that was ever present in the flat, the chair’s leg banged against a stack of books, sending several thudding to the floor.
Griffin winced. But then he suddenly realized that he recognized the sound! When he’d heard it before, it had been muffled, but it reminded him very much of the sound that he’d heard while upstairs on the night he’d tried to catch the thief.
Next he heard the almost imperceptible pad of his other self ’s feet upstairs, carefully avoiding the creaky floorboards in his bedroom. With a strange feeling of déjà vu, he peered around the corner from the kitchen and watched as a very familiar figure descended the stairs with his sword cane, looking pale and frightened in the moonlight.
It’s me, Griffin thought, feeling amazed. And then, because he was so awestruck, he failed to act as quickly as he’d planned. That was when he heard a rustle and the sound of the front door closing, sounds he remembered hearing from his bedroom on the night of the theft. Recalling how narrowly he’d missed capturing Miss Pepper before, he sprang into action.
“Now!” he said, grabbing his uncle by the sleeve.
“Crikey!” Rupert growled, pausing only to snatch the time-traveling teapot from the table as the two of them leapt into action, chasing after Griffin’s own retreating figure.
It’s a strange thing to see oneself frightened. But it’s an even stranger thing to be the person frightening yourself. As Griffin and Rupert dashed past his own scared figure, Griffin forgot that earlier he’d swung his sword at what he’d thought were agents of Moriarty and had wounded one of them in the process.
The person whose cheek he’d grazed at that moment with the razor-sharp edge of his cane-sword was him!
Griffin let out a cry as the sword whistled past, narrowly missing cutting off his head, and opened a small wound on his cheek. He followed Rupert out the window.
Charlotte Pepper was just dashing behind a building on the corner, and together they chased the lady’s retreating shadow through the cobblestone streets, running as fast as they were able.
The Griffin Sharpe who chased Charlotte Pepper thought of his other self at the moment, the one who had now swung his sword at Watts and dented his shiny metal surface. He suddenly wished that he could have talked to his other self and warned him about all that was going to happen and advise him about how he might do things differently.
But alas, their hands were full at present. And unfortunately, because of his hurt leg, Griffin couldn’t keep up with his uncle as he chased the retreating figure; he soon fell behind, leaning heavily on his stick for support.
Rupert Snodgrass, on the other hand, was running as fast as his thick legs could carry him, huffing and puffing like a broken-down steam engine.
Maybe it was because he’d grown as accustomed as Griffin to eating Mrs. Tottingham’s delicious scones, or perhaps it was because he’d spent much more time in his inventing room than getting regular exercise, but he soon found that a pain had erupted in his side and his once youthful vigor had long since departed.
Breathless and sweating, he chased the lithe figure in boys’ clothing down a nearby alleyway.
“Stop . . . you!” he wheezed.
Suddenly, Rupert felt his ankle twist beneath him and he stumbled, crying out as he fell. And then, to his utmost horror, he felt the teapot fly from his outstretched fingers and watched as it soared through the still night air.
“No!” Rupert gasped.
But it was too late.
As Rupert’s stocky frame crashed to the cobblestone street, a second crash sounded from not too far away. And it was a sound that Griffin, even though he was lagging behind, couldn’t help but identify.
It was the sound of a million tiny pieces of delicate machinery hitting the bricks and the shattering of the pottery that surrounded it. And to Rupert it was the sound of twenty-five years of painstaking labor, methodically creating his own parts from scratch and composing complicated mathematical formulae, gone!
Griffin limped up in time to help his uncle, whose trousers were ripped at the knee, pick up the larger pieces of the destroyed time machine. And as they collected the remains, Rupert said, in a very choky-sounding voice, “Well, that’s it, boy. We’re ruined.”