Pandora's Box: The Deleted Scenes

Three

(From Chapter Fourteen)

Algernon materialised in the London dusk, taking a few moments to gather his thoughts after the sudden transportation. The process of finding the trail left by Constance's own disappearance was a comparatively simple one, but once she had continued her journey on foot, he would not be able to follow her by magic and would have to rely on his own eyesight and common sense to tell him where she had gone, and neither of these faculties were Algernon's strong point. He stepped out of the alley where he had appeared and looked around his foreign surroundings. For a moment he thought that he had got the trail wrong and had ended up on a completely alien planet, but then he caught sight of Tower Bridge in the distance and satisfied himself as to his whereabouts. The bridge, he decided, would be the perfect vista from which to try and find Constance – a quick spell to conjure some extremely powerful binoculars would soon overcome the problem of his eyes deceiving him.

There was, Algernon found as he hurried down the streets of the city, just one problem. Algernon had never before visited London, and his navigational skills were sub-par at the best of times. He was sure that all the road signs were taking him in completely the opposite direction to the one in which he needed to go and as such he nearly found himself walking under a bus in his desperation to keep the bridge – which seemed to be getting further and further away – in his sights. After walking in and out of a subway entrance three times without realising that he was not actually advancing anywhere, Algernon decided that he was going to have to admit defeat.

In the words of someone, possibly related to Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged that any man in possession of a shoddy sense of direction must be in want of a map. Unfortunately for the male of the human species, there is something ingrained in his genetic make-up that makes it impossible for him to buy a map without suffering extreme embarrassment and an acute sense of failure; a failure to master the mental Sat-Nav that all men believe themselves to have been born with.

It was for this reason that it took Algernon nearly half an hour to buy a map from a small 24 hour kiosk in Tower Street tube station, and a further hour and a half to negotiate his way from the kiosk to the bridge itself, a journey that the average tourist could undertake within a few minutes. Upon reaching the bridge, Algernon was about to accept the heart-sinking realisation that he was going to have to further navigate the perils of the capital to find Constance when he saw something that made his heart do a triple loop-the-loop of joy. Constance was standing in the centre of the bridge looking rather stiff and cold, her expression one of utter contempt.

"Where on Earth have you been?" she exclaimed on seeing Algernon hurrying towards her. "Some knight in shining armour you are."

Algernon quickly hid the A-Z behind his back, but his action was not swift enough, and Constance rolled her eyes.

"Next time," she muttered, as she reluctantly allowed Algernon to take her upper arm and guide her off the bridge, "Davina's coming to rescue me. At least she's got sense enough to ask for directions if she's lost…"

Come on, we were all thinking it – Algernon is hardly the world's most obvious saviour…