Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [59]
Sabbath was overweight, though not grossly so: he’d chosen to become the spider in the centre of the web, and by 1782 simply didn’t regard his physical appearance as an issue. His figure is described, in several accounts, as ‘powerful’ (or, as one acquaintance put it, ‘he casts a grate shadoe wherever he walks’). His bulky body was built of muscle as well as fat, though since his youth the balance had shifted towards the plump side. He had, by all accounts, fists like great hams, and it was impossible to imagine him hurrying anywhere. Though he doesn’t seem to have been overly tall, his presence was such that he struck those few people he met as being as big as the room around him. When he spoke it was in a low rumble, the words rolling around in his stomach before finally arriving at his mouth, something which led many people to follow his commands without stopping to think about them.
Yet he was also, without doubt, a man of great wit. Despite the menace in his voice and in his presence, there was a distinctly dry irony in his words. There was said to be a sense of amusement in everything he said, as if there were subtle layers of meaning in every sentence and he found himself entertained by the fact that nobody understood it all. His features reflected this, although it’s unfortunate that no actual portrait of him was ever painted. His face was pale and fleshy, but not at all unattractive as he entered early middle age. In his youth he was, allegedly, a master of seduction as well as the other arts in which the Service trained their agents. The famous Covent Garden celebrity Fanny Murray was rumoured to have fallen for his charms as early as 1762, and his history with Scarlette has already been mentioned. The amusement he displayed at those around him was most evident in his mouth, which was often fixed in a slight half-smile on the left side of his lips. Most importantly, there were his eyes. Universally described as ‘dark’ and ‘deep-sea’ (Rebecca says brown, Lisa-Beth says dark green, the only discrepancy in the accounts), they were said to perpetually ‘twinkle with intelligence’, though whether this was literally true or just eighteenth-century romantic folly is hard to say.
Rebecca describes his appearance on the warship as remarkable. It must have struck her as notable that his head had been shaved. Though not bald there was only a thin layer of dark hair on his scalp, perhaps what in modern terms might be called a ‘skinhead’, but which at the time was unknown outside of any monastery. It’s possible that Sabbath had just decided that hair was a waste of time and effort. His clothes, too, were notable. His portly figure was covered with a loose grey overcoat, of the kind famously worn by military men like (again) Napoleon. Once more, there’s a sense of irony here. Sabbath is known to have considered the military – with its insistence on protocol and uniform – as absurd, so the greatcoat was almost certainly intended as a form of joke. Sabbath was the captain of this ship, but it was a ship of idiotic, drooling animals, and the idea of any form of decorum being observed must have amused him greatly.
So it was that the two men faced each other for the first time, the Doctor on one side of the room, a casual, intelligent Napoleon on the other, and it’s worth noting how often descriptions of the two overlapped. Both of them having something of the charlatan in them, both of them realising it was all part of a greater game in which symbols were their most effective weapons. Just as the Doctor had Juliette as a form of apprentice, Sabbath had Tula Lui, the Mayakai amazon, whose importance had yet to become clear.
And Sabbath’s first words to the Doctor were reported to be: ‘I’d be more impressed, Doctor, if most of the people who use that