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Once upon a time, around the year 1850, the Doctor and his companion, Clara Oswald, sat down to enjoy a bowl of cock-a-leekie soup in a remote farmhouse, somewhere in the Highlands of Scotland.
I say “around” because the owner of the farmhouse was an elderly fellow who, other than getting occasional visits from his son who lived “in town,” kept to himself and thought calendars were the devil’s work. He used to keep track of time by counting the sunsets as they came and went, until one evening he got distracted when one of his sheep lost an argument with a gate and had to be sheared in situ in order to be freed, and he subsequently lost count.
Clara had never tried cock-a-leekie soup before. Or, at least, she thought she hadn’t tried it before. It actually tasted very familiar, which did little to distract her from… well, more on that later.
The Doctor, for his part, preferred hairst bree, but he was funny that way. He dug in to the cock-a-leekie soup without complaint.
“So, lass, you say you’re from England,” the old farmer asked. “What in God’s name made you decide to come all the way up here with your father?”
The Doctor started to choke on his soup. “Actually, he’s not my father. He’s my husband,” Clara explained.This didn’t help with the Doctor’s choking fit. Clara patted him on the back. “I’d always wanted to see the Highlands in the nineteenth … er … I always wanted to see the Highlands, so we decided to take a trip. But our horses … uh … died and we found ourselves walking.” The Doctor rolled his eyes. By Clara-lie standards, that one was pretty weak.
“Terrible thing to lose a horse. Still, you came to the right place, though I can’t promise to provide you much besides a meal and a bed for the night. And I only have the one horse.”
The Doctor finally found his voice again. “That’s all we can ask for, sir. Shelter, that is.”
“You’re Scots?”
“Aye, that I am,” the Doctor replied (making a mental note to never say “Aye, that I am” ever again). “From Glasgow.”
“Heathen,” was the muttered reply from the old man. “So, what do you do for a living?” He addressed that question to the Doctor, of course.
But Clara answered instead. “I run a factory. Albert helps me with the paperwork.”
The old man gave Clara a confused look. A woman, running a factory? Unheard of!
The Doctor gave Clara a confused look. Albert?
Clara gave them both a confused look. Why the hell did I say that?
***
Then:
You’re probably wondering why Clara and the Doctor found themselves enjoying cock-a-leekie soup in the Highlands of Scotland with a Glasgow-hating elderly sheep farmer who thought calendars were the work of the devil and who guesstimated the year to be 1850.
First, you’ll be happy to know this story does not actually involve any deceased horses; that was just Clara’s attempt at covering up the fact that the TARDIS had broken down soon after landing in a field some miles from the farmhouse.
Clara’s statement about wanting to see the Highlands was the truth, however—her grandfather had come from Scotland—and the Doctor had happily obliged, especially after she’d emerged from the TARDIS wardrobe wearing an eye-catching Clan Wemyss tartan skirt. The sight had rendered the Time Lord speechless.
“Too much?” she’d asked.
“Just perfect,” he’d managed to reply.
Moments later, the TARDIS broke.
Well, the ship didn’t break exactly. But it glitched. As the alarm sounded, and after checking the diagnostic at the main console, the Doctor likened it to someone getting the flu. You’re fine one minute and then—sneeze!—you’re sick as a dog.
This “flu” forced the TARDIS to go into a variant of siege mode; she didn’t completely shut down and condense into a tiny cube like she did back in Bristol, but she would have to reboot her desktop and other systems, which would make the interior of the ship uninhabitable for roughly twenty hours. The Doctor and Clara barely had time to grab an umbrella and a couple of energy bars before they were temporarily evicted and locked out of the TARDIS. In the middle of the Highlands of Scotland. Miles from anywhere. The location tracker had been one of the first systems to shut down, so, beyond it being Scotland, the Doctor didn’t have much more to go on in terms of where and when they were.
To say he was annoyed would be the understatement of the year.
Clara, on the other hand, couldn’t have been happier.
“No Daleks, no vikings, no underwater ghosts, no one trying to take over the earth, no students—I love it,” she’d gushed.
“The TARDIS been doing this sort of thing too much lately.”
“Doctor, let her reboot in peace. She’ll be fine. Let’s go explore!”
The Doctor licked his finger and stuck it into the dirt at his feet. “Definitely Scotland.” He withdrew the digit and examined it. “Mid-nineteenth century.” He wiped the finger clean with his handkerchief. “There’s not much to see, Clara. Just long stretches of flat land, and not a Tesco’s in sight.”
Clara laughed. “Exactly!”
The Doctor had to admit that seeing Clara so happy filled him with warmth. It had been a rough few weeks for her.
There had been The Drum, the underwater research base (ironically, it was also located in Scotland, but in the twenty-second century) where she had been trapped, believing the Doctor had died a century earlier. She’d tearfully demanded that he come back to her, Laws of Time be damned. And he had, of course. Not long after that was the trip to the Viking village where they’d met Ashildr. It all worked out well in the end with the girl (maybe), but Clara—who was already under the weather when they arrived, having picked up a bug from her time in the spider mines during an earlier adventure—became deathly ill soon after returning to the TARDIS, forcing her to spend a week in bed. And, on top of it all, she’d returned to Coal Hill School to find she had received a negative Ofsted review. It wasn’t Clara’s fault she looked and taught like she hadn’t slept in a week the morning the evaluator happened to time her classroom-assessment visit. Of course Clara hadn’t slept for a week; she and the Doctor had prevented a Tereleptil uprising on Titan in the eighty-second century. Who needed sleep when there were worlds to save?
What concerned the Doctor was how Clara didn’t seem to care about the negative review. “They fire me, they fire me,” she had told him. He’d noticed a decrease in her interest in teaching ever since she said goodbye to Danny via the dream crabs and returned to his side. She seemed to want to be with him more and more and on Earth less and less. Someday, he’d have to talk to her about it.
But, right at that moment, Clara was happy, smiling, her eyes dancing, and the Doctor knew he’d have to do some self-reflection about what he was feeling himself. It was a trap, and he was falling into it. Again. And he knew from experience it wouldn’t end well.
It still stung a little to remember how annoyed Clara was the last time he told her he had a duty of care for her. Funnily enough, there was a time when he might have just shrugged and ignored it. Not anymore. But now was not the time to think about that. Clara was happy. And he knew that, in 1850, the nearest Dalek was causing havoc more than twenty thousand light years away (1860 would have been a bad year to visit Scotland, however). So all was right with the world. Their world.
Scotland being Scotland, it wasn’t long before rain threatened. Returning to the TARDIS wasn’t an option; eighteen hours of lockdown remained and, even if they could open the doors, the two realized they couldn’t properly remember the way back. The Doctor blushed at the admission. He normally was quite good at remembering where he parked the TARDIS, not unlike how some motorists possess a sixth sense when it comes to remembering where they leave their vehicles in car parks the size of Monaco. But this time he had been distracted by a certain five-foot-two human with captivating eyes. Once the TARDIS came back online, of course, her tracking beacon would make her easy to locate, so there was no panic. But, until then, the Doctor and Clara needed alternative arrangements.
“So this means we have to find a friendly Highlander who’ll give us room and board for the night?” Clara asked. “Someone who looks like Ewan McGregor or Robert Carlyle, I hope.”
“Dream on, my friend,” the Doctor said.
The rain gods smiled upon the couple as they soon found the first sign of human habitation they’d seen in hours—the aforementioned farmhouse, located next to a small shed where a nondescript, bored-looking horse totally failed in his duty as a guard dog and let the intruders walk right by without so much as a snort. The modest number of rather apathetic-looking sheep hanging about in a nearby enclosure were no less useful. The Doctor couldn’t help but compare them to a set of wool socks that had been through the wash cycle once too often.
“Let me do the talking,” Clara said as they approached the door.
“Excuse me?” The Doctor looked affronted. “I’ve been doing this sort of thing since before your ancestor’s ancestors had ancestors.”
“Doctor, we’ve talked about this before-” Clara began.
“-your face,” they completed in unison.
“You’re learning,” Clara laughed as the Doctor playfully stuck his tongue out at her. She raised her hand to rap on the door.
The Doctor waited to hear the knock. But there was nothing to hear because she hadn’t done anything.
“Clara, the object of knocking is actually to make physical contact with the door,” the Doctor said.
Clara’s hand was frozen in place, an inch from the wood, a peculiar look playing across her eyes. She put her hand down. “I’m sorry, I … I just had the strangest feeling. Like I’ve done this before.”
“I assume you have, or are you more a doorbells-only kind of a person?”
“That’s not what I mean.” Clara looked around at the scenery, then back at the house. “I mean this—in the Highlands, lost, weather rolling in, a farmhouse.” She looked down at herself. “But I was in a pink dress. There was a horse. Two horses. I was with somebody. A young man. I think I was in love with him.”
The Doctor frowned. “Was it Danny, maybe? Or, uh, Bow Tie Me?”
“No, no it wasn’t Danny or you. It was like-”
The door swung open and the elderly farmer glared at them. “Who’s doin’ that noise? I’m trying tae sleep and I hear you chattering away out here like two brownies.”
After an awkward introduction—the Doctor chose to use his new Basil alias, while Clara just stuck with Clara—the farmer allowed his uninvited guests in and offered them a meal. The farmhouse was modest, with a fireplace, a side room with a bed, and a few chairs and a table. Clara was impressed to see he possessed a few books, too.
“Can’t read them,” the man dismissed. “My son thinks I should be educated and learn to read, but you don’t need to know how to read to mind sheep.” In the light of the fireplace, he took a closer look at Clara. “You’re a wee beauty, if you don’t mind me saying so. You remind me of a portrait I saw once of…” He didn’t finish the sentence because a piece of burning log sparked out of the fire and landed on the floor; he took a poker and flipped it back into the flames. “Have a seat, please. I’ve made more than enough soup for myself, plenty to share. It’s almost as if I knew I might be having guests!”
***
Now:
“You know my name is Basil, Clara,” the Doctor said with a distinct, “I spend hours coming up with an amusing alias after you tell me that John Smith is so 1970s and you can’t even show me the courtesy of remembering it” tone in his voice.
“Sorry, I meant Basil,” Clara said. She leaned towards the farmer. “Albert, uh, was my ex.”
The old man had no idea what “ex” meant, but he had a bigger concern. “Women shouldn’t run businesses. It’s not right.”
The Doctor caught sight of a potential anachronism-generating glint in Clara’s eye and jumped in. “It’s a family business. She inherited it because she had no brothers.”
“Like Her Majesty?” the farmer replied.
Clara shook her head. “Pardon?”
“Her Majesty, the Queen. She’d never have been on the throne at all if her father or King William had done their duty and produced a proper male heir.”
“You don’t sound like an admirer of the Queen,” Clara said.
“Her Majesty? I love her. Can’t change the past. And there’s talk that she might even buy property not far from here. And I’d rather a lady on the throne than someone from away.” The farmer gave Clara a closer look. “You know, miss, you remind me of a drawing I saw of her once, from when she first came to visit.”
“I don’t look like Queen Victoria,” Clara said, dismissively. “All grumpy and old.”
The Doctor gently elbowed her. “She isn’t grumpy and old in 1850, Clara,” he whispered.
Clara began to ask a question, but, when she opened her mouth, the farmer cut her off. “I hate to do this to ye,” he said, “but I have to be in bed so I can be out tending my sheep in the morning. We can clean up the dishes later. I’ll sleep by the fire. You’re welcome to use my bed,” he said, before adding, after a moment, “just for sleeping, though, please.”
***
The side room was little more than an alcove. There was a bed shoved up against the curtainless window, with enough room to sit on the edge. There was an unlit candle on the sill, but enough moonlight came through the window to allow Clara and the Doctor to see each other, so it wasn’t needed. A thick curtain was drawn across the opening to the rest of the house, offering them a small amount of privacy and, the Doctor judged, soundproofing, albeit at the cost of blocking a lot of the heat from the fireplace.
Even though the chill made her shiver a little, Clara insisted on removing her tartan skirt. “I’m not going to wreck this by sleeping in it,” she’d proclaimed. The Doctor warned her that it could be uncomfortable sleeping without something covering her legs and offered his trousers, but she politely declined.
“Doctor, I’m wearing tights. Didn’t you notice? I knew we were going to be wandering around in Scotland, after all. I’m a control freak, not a dummy.”
After draping her skirt over the end of the bed, Clara sat down next to the Doctor, who kept his eyes politely averted.
“Doctor,” Clara whispered, “you don’t have to stare at the ceiling. I’m wearing more than I had on when I talked you into trying yoga with me and Nina.”
The Doctor relaxed a little, then remarked, “The only downward dog I ever want to see again is K9 rolling down a hill.” They laughed. “So I’m your husband now? I’m moving up in the world.”
“I was waiting for you to react to that,” Clara chuckled. “I’m tired of people assuming you’re my dad, just because you have a few wrinkles. And we were less likely to give the poor man a heart attack than if I’d gone with boyfriend. If our new friend, or anyone, has a problem with me calling you my husband, that’s their loss.”
The Doctor smiled at Clara. “I’m flattered. All right, my ‘wife,’ we better get some sleep. It’ll be a long hike back to the TARDIS. Or should I say to our dead horses?”
“I was thinking on the fly, so sue me!” Clara laughed, softly.
The Doctor got up off the bed and motioned for Clara to crawl in ahead of him.
“Why do I have to sleep against the wall again, Albert?” Clara griped. “You sleep against the wall this time.”
The Doctor and Clara froze and stared at each other. For just a moment, her Blackpool accent had totally vanished, replaced by a clipped, regal voice. And she’d called him Albert again.
“Doctor, that wasn’t me talking.”
“Yes, it was.”
“OK, yes, it was. But that wasn’t my voice, was it? Worried now. I saw another memory, plain as day just now. Me and … Albert? … climbing into a bed like this one. I got snarky because I ended up against the wall.”
The Doctor put his hands on Clara’s shoulders and softly steered her to sit down on the bed again. He sat next to her. “I have a feeling about what’s happening here.” He took out his mobile. “Give me a moment.” He called up a browser and started tapping at the screen.
Clara gave a half-smile. “How much are your roaming charges, Doctor?”
“No idea. I just send the bill to UNIT and let them worry about it. Now, I’m going to show you an image. Tell me what you see?”
Clara nodded. The Doctor turned the screen towards her. She narrowed her eyes to focus, and then they widened. “Oh no,” she said.
The portrait of Queen Victoria, committed to canvas sometime in the early 1840s, was unmistakable. As was the fact that, even allowing for the painter's artistic licence, there was no doubt that she was a dead ringer for Clara.
“Oh yes,” the Doctor said, putting the phone away.
“This doesn’t make sense, Doctor. I’ve been looking at images of Queen Victoria all my life—not just old Victoria, young Victoria, too—and I never once thought she looked like me. Never. Nor has anyone else. Or at least they never told me.”
The Doctor nodded. “If it makes you feel any better, I never saw the similarity before, either. And I actually met her; she banished me from England for a while. Long story.”
“Was I ... she ... old? Grumpy?”
“Well-seasoned. Not too grumpy; well, except for the banishing me bit. She also founded Torchwood, which I guess is a whole other level of grumpy.”
“You haven’t answered my other question.”
“Time makes up the rules as she goes along, and she has unique ways of keeping paradoxes from happening. I could pass a future or past version of me on the street and I wouldn’t necessarily notice; we have to make an effort to cross our timelines. Same with you; if I dropped you off at Coal Hill a day too early, you could run into yourself. More likely, though, you’d somehow ignore each other. It’s like a natural version of the perception filter that keeps people from wondering what a big blue police box is doing in the middle of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.”
“So you’re saying Time made me and everyone else see a different face all these years?”
“Time made you simply not notice the similarities. It’s like how you might buy a brand-new car with a glossy, perfect surface. You can look at it a hundred times and see nothing but a glossy, perfect surface. And then somebody points out a tiny scratch. The scratch might have been there from the day you bought the car, but now that you know about it, you always see that wee scratch from then on.”
“But my echoes were created years ago, Doctor. I know I’ve seen pictures of Victoria since then.”
“Good point,” the Doctor said, before sitting in silence for a moment, contemplating. He snapped his fingers as an idea struck him. “Winnie Clarence.”
“What about Winnie?” She’d been one of Clara’s echoes—and the first whom Clara had actually met in person.
“Before Winnie, you assumed, you believed, that all your echoes died trying to save me. Winnie survived, and went on to live a long, happy life.”
“I don’t think you realize how that made me feel,” Clara said.
The Doctor stroked Clara’s cheek. “Trust me, I know. You were overjoyed for the both of us. The point being, you never noticed Victoria earlier because you assumed all your echoes died, so it never occurred to you that someone like her could have been one of you. I mean, yes, Victoria did kick the bucket eventually, but she lived to a ripe old age—and that was years after she helped me. Through Winnie, Time pointed out that scratch to you.”
Clara took a deep breath and exhaled. “Ooo-kay, so one of my echoes was Queen Victoria. Not bad. Better than finding out that one of me was Lizzie Borden. But what’s with the déjà vu? It’s not like I find myself telling you about Karaoke nights on the Starship Alaska.”
“Well, you’ve never set foot on the Alaska, have you?”
“I just know about it from what you told me about Oswin and some info the TARDIS had stored away. I wanted to see it in person, but you told me that would be a bad move.”
“Too many risks. Hold on a moment, I just got an idea.” The Doctor pulled out his mobile again. “I need to look something up.”
Clara nearly burst out laughing. “You’re googling something in 1850? I thought you knew everything, Doctor.”
“If I knew everything, Clara, I’d never bother to leave the house. OK, I typed a few search terms in and …”—he scanned the information that appeared on the screen—“… just as I expected.” He put the phone away.
“What?”
“There’s a story that, during their first trip to Scotland, Victoria and Albert got ahead of their handlers, zigged instead of zagged during an outing, and ended up semi-intentionally lost in the Highlands. All their valets and assistants had a collective fit, of course, and their host, the Duke of Atholl, thought parliament would come down around his ears for losing the monarch. Turned out OK in the end; Vicky and Al were found safe and sound the next morning, laughing and giggling like two schoolchildren who finally won a proper game of hide and seek. Now, guess where they spent the night?”
Clara fell back on the bed with a sigh. “A remote farmhouse where they shared the farmer’s bed and she got annoyed at having to sleep against the wall. I … she also learned how to darn a sock. Albert learned how to cook fish. And we … they seriously debated disappearing from history altogether. They felt free for the first time in their lives.”
“It’s all coming back to you, eh?” the Doctor said, flopping on his back next to her.
“Sort of. Including … wow.” Clara was staring at the ceiling and, even with only moonlight coming through the window for illumination, the Doctor could tell she was blushing.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Um, uh… we did establish that Victoria and Albert were married, yeah? And they nearly had enough kids to strike a football team? Well, um … I’m remembering more than socks and fish at this moment. Again … wow.”
The Doctor looked confused. What else could she be … “Oh, uh…” he sat bolt upright. “Sorry, not really much I can do about that.” He looked like he was trying to find a place to hide.
Clara sat up and hugged his arm. “Don’t be silly. It’s a pleasant memory. In fact, that whole excursion was one of Victoria’s favourite days ever. And it really stuck in her mind, all through her life.”
“I’m so glad.”
“In fact …” She ran a finger down his arm. “There’s nothing saying we can’t recreate the moment ourselves…”
The Doctor looked over to see Clara with her eyebrow cocked and a mischievous smile on her face.
He started to stammer. “I’m … not sure. I mean … I don’t know. If you want but … won’t the old guy be upset that we used his bed for not-sleeping?” The Doctor’s face was nearly crimson.
But Clara just laughed and give him a quick kiss on the shoulder before getting off the bed. “I’m only teasing you,” she said as she felt the Doctor nearly deflate with relief. “Besides, mid-nineteenth century, rainy night, no central heating—I don’t know how they managed.”
The Doctor nodded in agreement and sidled across the bed towards the wall side, leaving his companion ample room to lie down.
Clara continued: “I mean, I guess I do know how they did it. I’m a bit impressed. I didn’t think Victoria was able to-”
“Goodnight, Clara.”
Clara giggled as she lay down. “Oh, OK then, please yourself.” She rolled on her side to look at him. He was on his back, but turned his head to look at her. “Doctor, thank you.”
“For what?”
“The echoes. I mean, I know some of them didn’t end well, but once I found out about Winnie surviving, and there was also that old lady we read about in the introduction to Amy’s novel, and now Queen Victoria … I … I feel really … blessed.”
“Blessed?”
“All these people who lived out their lives, all because you ended up picking a fight with a sentient A.I. back in the 1890s. They wouldn’t have existed without you.”
“But you were the one who made the leap of faith to save me from the Great Intelligence. Where would we be without Queen Victoria? The Duke of Cumberland might have become king and the world would have turned out a lot different with that Dr. Evil clone on the throne.” The Doctor laughed.
Clara took the Doctor’s hand and squeezed it. “I guess we’ll have to agree to share the credit, then,” she said through a yawn.
“Goodnight, my queen.”
“Goodnight, Lord M,” Clara murmured back in Victoria’s voice as she closed her eyes.
“Lord M?”
Clara just nodded.
The Doctor lay still as he listened to Clara’s breathing take on the rhythms of sleep.
Three times, he thought he’d lost her forever. After the moon hatched. After he thought she’d decided to stay with Danny after the Nethersphere. On Skaro when he thought she’d been … No, he never wanted to lose her again. Of course, he rationalized, it had to happen eventually. That damned Curse of the Time Lords. For a moment, he was angry at himself for giving away the second Mire healing device, the companion to the one that had saved Ashildr's and made her functionally immortal. He should have kept it for Clara, as he had intended. Maybe he’d have another chance. The curse didn’t have to strike again. He was the Doctor. He always won. Almost always.
He found it very difficult to call to mind what his life as like before the impossible girl sleeping beside him came into it. He had a life before her, of course, but that life belonged to some other man (or, in his case, series of men). What are you doing, Doctor? he thought. You need to rest.
The Doctor realized that Clara had fallen asleep while still holding his hand. I feel blessed too, Clara, he thought.
As he allowed sleep to overtake his own consciousness, the Doctor felt his hand entwine his fingers with Clara's. The Doctor finally accepted, that, no matter what, he could never let go.