Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [53]
And meanwhile, Rebecca and the Doctor were busy boarding Sabbath’s battleship. If this seems like a big jump in the narrative, it’s only because of the distracted, non-linear nature of Rebecca’s stories (although the sudden appearance of the ship is something that will be dealt with shortly). Suffice to say that Rebecca soon found herself staring up at a great ‘wall of metal’, as the little rowing boat drifted up alongside the vessel in shallow waters. The Doctor obviously had some difficulty boarding the vessel, as the deck was a good five yards above him, and he noted at the time that the rat-catchers had obviously come prepared for this with boarding-ropes. The ship was eventually accessed by a method that seems as remarkable as everything else in Rebecca’s unpredictable tale. The Doctor pulled a device from his pockets, she says – a certain glass-tipped item fashioned in his basement workshop – and, with a smell ‘like the burning of a forge’, set about attacking one of the metal plates at the side of the ship. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that he attacked the material which held the plates together.
The space below the decks of the metal ship was dark, but what Rebecca found most notable was the noise of it all. There was a kind of humming in the walls, something she’d never heard of in any of the wooden ships of the day. As she headed through the darkened spaces inside, right on the Doctor’s coat-tails, she admits to having been greatly disorientated: as if the noise, the vibration and the all-pervading smell of gunpowder had been designed deliberately to throw her off-balance. When they got closer to the heart of the ship, it grew lighter, revealing dirty steel walls held together by ‘big bolts and lines of purest black’.
The warship can’t have been more than twelve yards across, so it couldn’t have taken as long as Rebecca suggests to find the first of the Servicemen. He was dead by the time the Doctor stumbled across him.
When it came to death, Rebecca tended to swing between disturbing casualness and utter silence, and on this occasion she inclined towards the former. There was blood, more of the ‘fire vitae’ described at the Cambridge slaughter. The Doctor knelt over the corpse with some concern, although he can hardly have been feeling for a pulse: the man had been virtually disembowelled. Rebecca described his face, or rather the absence of it, a hood pulled over his head in the manner of an executioner with a golden triangle sewn into the forehead, clearly modelled on the Masonic hood. The Doctor didn’t uncover the man’s face. He believed the wounds to have been caused by an animal, which had presumably come at the man out of the humming darkness and torn into him with its fingers. There was a blood trail nearby, suggesting that either the animal or another rat-catcher had gone away wounded.
Regardless, they carried on into the bowels of the ship. Given what they later found, it’s almost certain they would have heard something of what they were about to walk into.
It’s best at this point to take a step back and consider the whole picture. Despite the best efforts of the Service, the rat-catchers’ attack on the ship clearly wasn’t unexpected. Indeed, by the time the Doctor found the first body another of the small rowing-boats had already been lowered out of the warship, carrying one of Sabbath’s envoys – the young Mayakai – in response to the Servicemen’s assault. Had the Doctor known this, he might have reflected that the survival of himself and Rebecca depended on the discretion of the ship’s owner.
At some point during the exploration, Rebecca saw the Doctor stop dead in the gloom ahead of her. They’d reached a larger area, a full-sized chamber rather than the narrow iron passages they’d seen so far. The Doctor, Rebecca later recalled, stood for a few moments observing the scene in front of him. At more