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…that I knew he had felt what was in the air; I knew he suspected, at last, what had been kept out of sight.

The next thing Lisa-Beth knew, he was running. He’d turned away from his magical box and headed along the length of Henrietta Street, tails flapping in the cold wind, bounding out of sight away from the House. There was silence in the salon, the women knowing what was going to happen even as Fitz was poking his head out of the TARDIS.

Lisa-Beth’s account of the day ends there. But there’s another source, another journal, just as detailed. Because on February 13, while his companions could only look on, the Doctor rushed through the streets of Covent Garden towards Cranbourn Street, towards the same area where Juliette had met her woman-in‐black. What impulse guided him is impossible to say. All that can be said, from the journal which survives, is that when he reached Leicester Place he found somebody waiting there. A woman, clothed in red from head to tails, her black-booted feet planted firmly on the cobbles and her hands folded behind her back. Possibly she’d felt him approaching, even as he’d sensed her waiting there… waiting for him to leave, so that she could return to the House.

Their conversation, as it’s recorded in her diaries, was long and convoluted. What follows is a summary, a simplification, stripped of all its symbolism and romance except where it’s absolutely necessary. It’s enough to say that they would have stood there for some while, facing each other in the London cold, before the Doctor finally spoke.

DOCTOR: I knew. I knew you were there. I could tell.

SCARLETTE: Then it’s true. Something still joins us. For richer or poorer, in sickness or in health.

DOCTOR: They told me you –

SCARLETTE: I can only tell you that I’m sorry. It was… only right.

DOCTOR: Right?

SCARLETTE: Did you think the two of us could go through what we did, without my knowing you well enough to understand you? Do you really believe I could hold you to this world and no other?

DOCTOR: I’m sorry?

SCARLETTE: You required a world of your own. You have no heart, now. No heart that protects you.

DOCTOR: The TARDIS will protect me. It always has done.

SCARLETTE: Nevertheless. The Earth is your home now. But only your home, not the limit of your domain. Your purpose is to protect far more than one single world.

DOCTOR: You pretended to be –

SCARLETTE: I had to. So that you could leave this place. This Earth. DOCTOR: I’m sorry…?

SCARLETTE: How could you ever fulfil your purpose, knowing that the two of us were bound together? How could you ever leave?

DOCTOR: We are bound together.

SCARLETTE: I know. And you have more to consider than my world.

DOCTOR: But –

SCARLETTE: Go to your business, Doctor. Please. Just as I’ll go to mine.

DOCTOR: You did all this? This… lie? Just so I’d want to leave?

SCARLETTE: Just so you could. It’s in your nature that you should go. It’s not the place of anyone to stand in the way of that. Not myself, and not even you.

DOCTOR: But I don’t have to leave you.

SCARLETTE: I dearly wish you didn’t even have to think of such things. As long as we have each other’s favour, this will be your home. You can be assured of that much, I’m certain.

DOCTOR: We held a funeral, you know. You would have liked it.

SCARLETTE: I’m told it was a little too sombre, thank you.

Nobody chose to record how the conversation ended, how the two of them left each other. Nobody could even say whether they kissed, or at least, whether the Doctor kissed Scarlette’s forehead (as was his custom). So it’s not possible to say whether it was harder for him or for her, when he turned back towards the shelter of his TARDIS. Nor is it possible to say what Scarlette felt as he vanished into the crowds and the thoroughfares of Covent Garden.

These stories have a tendency to be unreliable, or incomplete at least.

* * *

FICTION

‘The object of the obscene ceremonies was to invest the king with the necessary magical powers to combat the demoniacal forces