The Doctor Looked at Me

This story started with a challenge to write something original beginning with the line: "The doctor looked at me - he wasn't smiling".

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The Doctor looked at me. He wasn’t smiling. Laughing his head off would be a more accurate description.

“Are you serious?” he said, “You want to hire the Tardis and me for a day so that you can give William Shakespeare a history lesson?”

“That’s the plan”, I said. “Dear old Bill wrote some wonderful plays, but he was a bit wayward with his facts. I think it would help him to see things in perspective if he knew what really happened. I’m not suggesting that we get him to rewrite his plays, merely that we snatch him from a time shortly before he died – after he had finished writing – and let him know the truth so that he doesn’t die in ignorance.”

So that’s what we did. We parked the Tardis round the back of his house in Stratford-on-Avon in April 1616 and surprised him when he popped out for a quick visit to the privy.

“Who the Hell are you?” he said, having apparently forgotten to speak in Shakespearean English.

“This is the Doctor and I’m just some bloke from the 21^st century”, I said. Oddly enough, he seemed to find this statement far less puzzling than I would have expected. I suspect that he had been getting seriously sozzled on ale for the preceding hour or two - hence the need for the privy visit – and so was able to take such extraordinary statements at face value.

“What’s this odd-looking box?” he asked. “Is it a new sort of privy? I really need a pee.”

“Pop inside and have a look”, said the Doctor, “It’s the second door on the left and mind you flush it when you’ve finished”.

As soon as William had disappeared through the door of the Tardis the Doctor and I followed him in and therefore had him trapped when he had finished in the loo. Once we had calmed him down and got him used to the idea of the Tardis being bigger on the inside than the outside, I told him that the plan was to put him right over some of his historical facts.

I had originally thought about going back to the time of Julius Caesar and showing him that clocks didn’t strike three or any other hour in Ancient Rome, on the grounds that they hadn’t been invented yet, but this seemed a bit negative to me and not a very good use of the Tardis, so I reckoned on starting with a trip to London in pursuit of the truth about King Richard III and the Princes in the Tower.

We therefore landed in a pleasant looking room in the Constable’s house at the Tower of London, which was where King Richard’s two nephews, Edward and Richard, were being looked after in a reasonable degree of comfort. When the Tardis door opened there were the two princes, staring in astonishment at the mid-20^th century Police telephone box that had suddenly appeared in their room.

Naturally we had to go through the same explanations for the princes that we had for William Shakespeare, and they also wanted to use the onboard loo, but once all that was done we needed to explain a few things to them about their likely fate if they stayed where they were.

“But I’m the King”, said young Edward. “Uncle Richard has just placed us here so that all the arrangements can be made for my coronation. I shall have a long and glorious reign as King Edward V.”

“But what you don’t know”, I said, “is that your lovely Uncle Richard is – as we speak – getting Parliament to pass a law that says that your mummy and daddy weren’t really married and that therefore the two of you are - pardon the word – bastards”.

“What?” said Edward, “So you mean to say that he’s going to be King instead of me? The bastard!”

“To be perfectly accurate”, said William, “He’s not the bastard – you are.”

 “And it also proves”, he said, turning to me, “that I wasn’t wrong about King Richard. He did seize the throne and murder the princes.”

“Murder?” said young Prince Richard. “But I don’t want to die. What can we do?”

“You can escape”, I said, “courtesy of the good Doctor here and this box, which is called the Tardis, by the way.”

We therefore hustled the boys aboard and soon whisked them away from the Tower to freedom.

“You see”, I said to Bill Shakespeare, “history only relates that the boys disappeared from the Tower. You, and many other people, assumed that they had been murdered but there was never any proof. Now you know what really happened.”

“I see”, said William, “but what happened to them after they escaped?”

“I’ll show you,” I said. “I think you’ll like this bit”.

We landed in a forest somewhere in the heart of England. We ushered the boys off the Tardis and I gave them instructions about what they should do next. I told them that it was essential that they forgot all about their past lives and told nobody who they really were. They should also split up, because there was too great a risk of them giving the game away if they were overheard talking to each other and let slip some incriminating details.

They didn’t much like the last bit, but accepted it as necessary for their safety.

We watched from a safe distance as the boys wandered off and were met by two families who were taking a stroll in the woods. Before long the boys had gone off with them, one to each family.

“So are they safe now?” asked William. “Is that the end of the story?”

“Not quite”, I said. “You see, the boys are going to be adopted by those families, whose names are Shakespeare and Arden. Young Edward Shakespeare will grow up and have a family of his own, as will Richard Arden. They will have grandchildren – John and Mary – who will marry each other and a have a child called …”

“William!” said William. “You mean that I am descended from the Princes in the Tower? That’s wonderful news!”

William buzzed with excitement as we made the journey back to his own time.

“You know”, he said, “when you arrived I was just about to go down to the pub to meet my old playwriting mates Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton. I can’t wait to tell them my news. Perhaps we can write a new play between us that tells the true story about the princes and William Shakespeare’s ancestry.”

But of course that never happened. That was the day on which William Shakespeare was taken violently ill – maybe the result of too much alcohol and over-excitement – and he died a few days later without having had the chance to tell anybody.

Thus the story never got told – until now, that is.

© John Welford