Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [56]
The methods Sabbath used to pull off his own mammoth ‘trick’ may be arguable, but the Service must have been familiar enough with them for the rat-catchers to board the vessel. What’s less vague is the nature of the ship itself. There are many accounts of the warcraft, but the thing every single description agrees on is that the ship was a monstrosity.
For a battleship, it wasn’t large, a device of metal twenty yards long and no more than a dozen across. But its form, to the eighteenth-century mind, was unthinkable. Ships were things of grace and romance, yet Sabbath’s vessel was a testament to efficiency, to brooding, blunt-nosed need. To build an all-metal ship would have been an uncanny enough idea in itself, but it was as if the designer had deliberately set out to demonstrate that the showiness of His Majesty’s navy was of no importance whatsoever. The metal was grey, although in the water it looked black, the overlapping plates making the body appear sharp and jagged. A black rail ran around the smooth iron deck, the struts ‘as fine as razors’ (Scarlette), giving the impression of ‘a machine trapped by piano-wire’ (Lisa-Beth: ‘trapped’ meaning ‘booby-trapped’ rather than ‘stuck’). There were no sails. There were four metal domes welded to the surface of the deck, laid out in a square, each one seven feet tall and housing stairways that led down into the machine’s guts. Cannons were mounted along each side, giving the ‘appearance of teeth’. It was, in short, a ship like no other on the face of the Earth.
Overall it seems to have struck those who saw it as being a darkness, the kind of jagged silhouette one might see at an eastern shadow-puppet show. Small for a battleship, perhaps, but so unthinkable in its nature – so like a creation of a gothic fantasy, like one of the death-machines of Sade – that many who saw it felt themselves to be overwhelmed, or even ‘absorbed’ (Lisa-Beth again), by its metallic mass. At this point even Robert Fulton himself (the man who would, in the following decades, offer Napoleon the designs for the first submarine) was still years away from creating his early steamships, having failed to find the funding for anything larger than a model.
Then again, funding wouldn’t have been much of a problem for the owner of this particular vessel.
Sabbath
It reads almost like a fairy tale. The Doctor, facing a horde of hostile beasts with no weapons other than his wits and only Rebecca at his side; the apes, like storybook monsters, hissing from the balconies; the doorway on the other side of the chamber, the only way to reach the heart of the warship. Faced with such a situation, most people would probably have turned back and run.
But the Doctor’s response was quite different. What he did, according to Rebecca, was step forward into the room as if there were no threat whatsoever. And instead of heading for the doorway into the next chamber, he calmly moved towards the nearest of the bodies.
One of the apes was perched over the corpse as the Doctor approached, and it was from that particular cadaver that the animal had ripped the bloody thigh-bone which it was now wielding as a weapon. Perhaps the Doctor felt that the death of the rat-catcher needed to be acknowledged, but his move towards the body wasn’t just a case of saying last rites. Later, the Doctor would make disturbing, brooding sketches of that corpse: they survive, in a creased and yellowed form, among the papers left at Henrietta Street. The drawings are anatomical in nature, but the face of the man on the page is blurred rather than masked. The pictures are the work of someone with a lot playing on his mind. There are detailed illustrations of the wounds, and next to them are scrawled, almost illegible notes comparing the scars to those which might be caused by the known ape species. And it’s in