Slattery wasn’t interested. He strode past the ovens and off through a door on the room’s far side. Martin exchanged a look with Jack Coffee. The three of them, Martin, Jack and Pat, had known each other since before the Hunger. They’d seen Pat in this mood many times before. He was about Molly’s business – nothing else concerned him.
Despite this dedication, however, he didn’t have the first idea where he was going. Martin alone knew his way around the warehouse; he’d been in there with Mr Quill, who’d been called in several times to advise on engineering matters. He followed Slattery through into an open workshop area. This was Colonel Colt’s proving room, where the testing of the freshly manufactured London revolvers would be carried out. A series of long tables was covered with intricate measuring instruments, arranged in order of size. Ammunition was there also, and in great quantities: neat cartons of pre-made pistol cartridges, flasks of powder, boxes of conical bullets and percussion caps in their thousands, heaped in circular tins like so many tiny copper coins. On one side of the room were a pair of heavy steel tubes, about three feet across and mounted at chest height. It was within these tubes that each new pistol would receive its first firing, offering protection for those nearby should one of them burst – ‘but that, Mart,’ Mr Quill had said during one of their inspections, ‘is next to a goddamn impossibility.’ Past these, along the far end of the room, was a simple firing range, a twelve-yard stretch with a thick piece of hardboard at its end.
There was no trace of the revolvers themselves, though. As in the blueing room, the overall impression was of an exhibition of modern Yankee gun-making, rather than an establishment where it actually took place.
Slattery turned towards him. ‘So, Martin,’ he said, ‘where are the bleedin’ parts?’
Martin pointed over at a rusted spiral staircase in the proving room’s far corner. ‘Upstairs. In the polishing shop.’
As they reached it, however, footfalls clanged upon the steps above, slow and regular, descending to meet them. First they saw a pair of shining boots; then a pair of infantryman’s trousers, blue with black piping on the side of each leg; then a short military shell-jacket, left open to show the revolver tucked within.
Mr Noone stopped about halfway down, leaning against the rail, showing no surprise at finding them in there. ‘The finishing department is out of bounds for all you Londoners,’ he said.
The Mollys lowered their heads, shifting apprehensively, not knowing how much Noone had overheard or guessed for himself. Martin came forward, delivering the tale he’d prepared for just such an emergency. Mr Quill had suddenly realised that one of the firing tubes was loose, he said, and had asked him to gather some men from the forge and see to it before the Kossuth tour reached the proving room. The engineer had taken several hard blows to the skull during their beating, and was still having trouble ordering his thoughts. They’d talked about this particular matter after their latest check, and Quill probably wouldn’t be able to recall if he’d issued such an instruction or not. Should he be confronted by Noone, Martin’s bet was that the engineer would cover for his assistant rather than feed him to the watchman.
It was difficult to tell what Noone made of this story. He continued to study them closely, barely moving, his hand close to the stock of his gun. He said nothing.
‘We’ve dealt wi’ it now, though,’ Martin concluded. ‘Tube’s bolted in tight as a drum.’ He glanced over at the factory, visible through the warehouse’s tall windows. ‘The Colonel and his guest’ll be over here soon, will they not?’
Noone made a disgruntled noise, relaxing very slightly and walking down another couple of steps. ‘The goddamn tube could be the wrong way around,’ he growled, ‘and that dumb Hungarian bastard would be none the wiser.’
Seeing that they were in the clear, the Mollys let out a conspiratorial chuckle.
‘The son of a bitch calls himself a freedom fighter, a revolutionary,’ Noone continued scornfully, ‘yet he crawls to these Bulls like a dog on its belly – these Bulls who keep up the biggest, bloodiest empire in the whole goddamn world.’
Martin saw that anger had been building in the watchman all morning, throughout the preparations for the visit and the fanfare that had greeted Kossuth’s arrival. ‘We’re all Irish here, Mr Noone,’ he muttered. ‘You don’t need to remind us of the sins of the British. Every man you see before you has lost kin to their misrule.’
Noone stared at him for a moment, looking at the pattern of damage across his face. ‘The Colonel has his reasons for asking this Hungarian to visit us,’ he said, ‘and I’ll not question his planning. But by God, it sticks in my craw. You hear the speech? That John Bull cocksucker could talk a cat off a fish-cart, and every last word of it was as phoney as can be.’
The Irishmen grumbled in agreement. Thady Rourke, one of the Mollys Slattery had recruited since their arrival in London, asked the watchman what exactly had happened over on Lupus Street the previous night.
Noone’s wrath grew yet further. ‘They got three Bulls from the machine floor,’ he answered. ‘Easy enough to replace, but the message it sends is plain. There’s someone out there who thinks they can come at us, at the Colt Company, and suffer no consequences at all.’
There was applause out in the yard; the factory door was sliding back to release Colt, Kossuth and their entourage. Seeing that time was short, the watchman stepped down to the floor of the proving room and addressed the Irishmen in a forceful, confidential tone.
‘Now listen good,’ he said, his small, yellowed eyes sparking beneath the brim of his cap. ‘One of you Irish has been worked over already. Any of the rest of you could be next. We ain’t going to stand by and let this go on. I can’t allow it. The Colonel don’t want to know, but that don’t mean that nothing can get done.’ He straightened his shell-jacket and began to fasten the brass buttons on its front. ‘So I’m calling you micks up for some extra labour. You’ll be well suited to it, I believe. Meet me and my boys tonight at eleven o’clock, just along from the lodging house on Tachbrook Street. We’ll see if we can’t set this nonsense straight.’
The cellar was dark; all Martin could see of Jack was the red eye of his pipe bowl, bobbing and winking over on the other side of the room. It was still open to the elements, rain blowing in through a yawning hole in its front, the night sky beyond only a touch lighter than the black walls that enclosed them. Martin was sitting on a stack of floor tiles, twisting his right hand around with his left, cursing softly whenever he reached a point where the pain made him stop.
There was a coarse, rustling sound: Jack scratching at that carroty beard of his. ‘You hang back, Mart,’ he whispered in the gloom, ‘when it gets started, like. You ain’t right yet. No sense risking any further mischief.’
Such solicitude was typical of Jack. That night, Martin found it irritating; he wanted no allowances made for him.
‘Don’t you be a-worrying,’ he said. ‘I can carry meself, remember?’
A boot scraped against some brickwork, and a shape moved across the rectangle of sky above them; and Pat Slattery dropped in, bringing with him the smell of cheap sailor’s rum. Settling between Jack and Martin, he struck a match to light his pipe, throwing a split-second’s illumination over the small cellar and its occupants. Hunched down in their hiding place, neckerchiefs ready to be pulled over their mouths, they looked like nothing more than a gang of footpads. Slattery even had a club laid across his lap.
‘Jesus,’ murmured Martin, shaking his head, ‘how in God’s name can we be doing this?’
‘Ah, what are you on about, ye bugger?’ said Pat. ‘This’ll be good for us. Making pals with the Yankees – weren’t that once your own favoured course o’ action? Surely you can see that if we get the favour of the watchman, everything could be a whole lot easier later on.’
‘Aye,’ replied Martin doubtfully. Molly was quiet in him that night. He didn’t like to think about what this might mean. ‘I suppose so.’
Sl
attery drew on his pipe. ‘We’ll get there, brothers,’ he declared; Martin could sense him grinning in the darkness. ‘The Gael will get his righteous vengeance upon the Saxon fiend. The Harp and Shamrock will trample down the Lion and the bleedin’ Unicorn. Us country boyos will do a truly great thing in the name of our Molly Maguire. They’ll be singin’ songs about us afore the year’s end.’
A shrill whistle sounded somewhere outside – the signal that they were needed. Slattery and Jack knocked out their pipes and the three of them clambered up the slope that led to the street, pulling on their masks. Not a lot could be seen in Cubitt’s Pimlico that night, the heavy clouds overhead reducing everything to a few dark shades of grey. They crossed a muddy pathway, entering the beginnings of a smart city square. The other Mollys and a couple of Colt watchmen were making straight for its centre, rushing over the cobblestones and disappearing beneath a stand of newly planted trees. As Martin drew nearer he heard the sounds of a savage, unrestrained fight. A boot squelched in loose earth, and then a body charged into him from the shadows, slamming against his flank. It was a skinny, foul-smelling boy in the garb of a working man – not one of theirs. Martin grabbed hold as best he could but the boy squirmed like an eel, flailing his bony arms around in panic. The scab on Martin’s jaw was torn off, and he felt hot blood lick the underside of his chin. Then the injured wrist flared up, catching fire, paralysing his hand completely. He swore; the boy sprang from his failing grasp, darting away into Pimlico, yapping out a cockney oath as he went.
Up ahead, the shutter was slid back on a bull’s-eye lantern, projecting a narrow beam of light onto the battle. Four workmen had been caught, jumped on as they moved in to attack two of Noone’s people, who’d been wandering the area for the past hour talking loudly in their Yankee accents, serving as bait. The captives were putting on a decent enough show – as Martin watched, one drove a fist into Slattery’s stomach – but they were both surrounded and outnumbered. Their cause was a hopeless one.
Noone strode into the light, taking off his military cap and passing it to one of his men. Something flashed in his hand; he’d drawn his revolver and was spinning it around in his palm, expertly reversing it so that the stock was foremost. He moved on the largest and fiercest of the four cornered workmen, who was swinging a wooden club about while damning them all to hell. Sidestepping a swipe from the club, Noone hit the fellow squarely across the forehead with his pistol, dropping him at once. The watchman planted a foot on either side of his opponent, bringing down the revolver again with precise, brutal speed. Around them, the other brawls had halted; all eyes were on Noone. He struck the unfortunate workman at his feet five more times, with ever greater force, sending a crazy shadow leaping across the tree-trunks behind him. At the penultimate blow, the thud of the stock’s impact became a wet crunch, and the fallen man’s protests – disbelieving, gasping screams at how much harm was being done to him – abruptly ceased. Noone stopped, examining his handiwork for a moment with a professional air before wiping his gun clean on his victim’s shirt. He then turned to the remaining workmen, who were now being held firmly in place by those they had been fighting off a minute earlier.
‘I’ve killed that there cocksucker,’ he told them, completely calm, ‘and by God I’ll do you three as well if you don’t tell me pretty damn quick who sent you against Sam Colt.’
‘B-Bob Adams!’ blurted one immediately, panic-stricken. ‘Mercy, sir, do not murder me! I am but nineteen, sir! It were Bob Adams!’
Noone paused, considering this piece of information. ‘Know that from this point on, anything you pitch at Colt will come back at you Adams boys double. This dumb bastard here will be just the goddamn start of it.’ He looked away. ‘Let ‘em go.’
The Adams men were released, and given a couple of kicks apiece. They made their escape as quickly as they could. Martin saw one stumble in the mud at the square’s edge, lose his cap, and not even bend to pick it up after he’d righted himself. Noone’s face showed no emotion: lines deepened by the lamplight, the eye lost in shadow and mouth set in an expression of unreflecting, unflinching sternness, it looked like the profile of an ancient carving.
Slattery approached him, tugged down his mask and started to offer advice on the disposal of the body in a gruff, comradely manner. ‘Grosvenor Canal’s the best place in this part o’ town,’ he said. ‘If we weight him properly, he’ll find his way out into the river without once breaking the surface – and then he’s lost to all men.’
Listening to his brother say these things, staring at the corpse sprawled in the mud, Martin felt a sickening sense of shame. They had abetted in an unjust killing. Molly Maguire had no love for those who did such things. This was why she was staying away – why she would neither move among them nor make so much as a single sound. From where he was standing, he could see something of the dead man’s face. The poor fellow had been young, not much older than his nineteen-year-old companion. His neck and brow were pocked with furnace burns.
Noone didn’t react to Slattery’s advice. Instead, he took the lantern from whoever was holding it and swivelled the thing around so that Slattery and a couple of the other Mollys, Joe and Owen it looked like, were lit up by its beam. Martin tensed. There was another purpose to this mission.
‘So you see what happens,’ the watchman said, in the same disconcertingly level tone he’d used on the Adams men, ‘to them that cross Colonel Colt.’
The Molly Maguires had been played for fools. Noone knew exactly what they were about – and he’d brought them out to this deserted square for a confrontation. Martin counted the dark shapes around the lantern. There were three other Yankees beside Noone, all doubtlessly armed with six-shooters. A half-dozen Mollys would pose no problem for them.
‘Did you think I’d let you Papist motherfuckers steal from us? Did you honestly think it would be that goddamn easy?’
Slattery was squinting in the bull’s-eye’s light, squaring up his shoulders, seemingly unworried by this sudden reversal. ‘Papist, is it?’ he said with menacing lightness. ‘You got sump’n to say about the Holy Father there, have ye?’
The lantern moved nearer. When Noone spoke his voice was different, lower yet buckling with violence. ‘Let me tell you about that miserable cunt you call a Holy Father,’ he spat. ‘I was born near Donegal. That’s right, you dumb micks – I was Irish. We were forced to leave our home after a gang of Catholics, devoted followers of your blasted Pope, strung up my father on the public highway. His crime, as you people had the sheer goddamn nerve to describe it, was only to be an organiser of the local Orangemen. I was but five years old. We cursed Ireland, my mother and me, we sailed across the Atlantic Ocean without a backward glance, and we became Americans.’ There was a clicking sound: the cocking of a revolver. Martin went cold. ‘I am an American, damn you, and a Colt man. You Papist sons of whores can go fuck yourselves.’
Slattery was shaking his head, laughing softly. The Mollys knew what this meant. They seized hold of him just as he launched himself towards the watchman, wrestling him back, and managed to march him from the square. The Yankees followed them with the lantern’s beam, but did not open fire; a couple sniggered. Shivering with fury, Slattery twisted halfway around and started to shout something. Just in time, Martin clamped a hand over his mouth, and he fought hard to keep it there.
Gage Stickney was waiting for them at the forge doors when they arrived to start their shift six hours later. As they started across the yard he ambled forward, raising up a palm as broad as a spade-head. Behind him, two of the Americans from the square were leaning against the wall of the factory building, smoking cheroots. Both had Navy revolvers hanging from their belts.
‘Stop there,’ commanded Stickney, ‘and turn your grimy mick asses back around. As of right now you’re no longer in the employ of Colonel Colt. You ain’t allowed in here no more.’
The hulking foreman delivered this news with a smirk, taking a bully’s pleasure in using his authority to
squash those beneath him, but it came as no surprise to the Mollys. After being denounced by Noone, the Irishmen had slunk back into the Devil’s Acre. Settling in their regular bolt-hole, Brian O’Dowd’s Holy Lamb off Orchard Street, they’d sunk a few flasks of poteen and made an honest assessment of the situation. Although they hadn’t actually stolen anything yet, and Noone had no proof of any wrongdoing, it was plain that his suspicion was enough; that he despised the Catholic Irish and would surely see them ejected from the works. The plan, as it had stood, was finished. At the break of day, however, they’d risen from the table as one, all knowing exactly what they were going to do. It was not the Molly Maguires’ way to hand their foes victory. If Noone wanted to expel them from the Colt factory, they would go there and have him do it. They’d filed from the tavern, passing old Brian snoring behind the bar, and joined the early morning tide of costermongers, labourers, beggars and pickpockets that was gushing over the mouldy stones of Westminster into the neighbouring quarters of the city.
Slattery had stayed uncharacteristically quiet since his confrontation with the watchman, keeping out of the conversation in the Holy Lamb, concentrating on his drink. Now, though, at the sight of Stickney standing in his path, he seemed to come back to himself. ‘Why has this been done?’ he demanded, taking two more steps forward. ‘What reason is given?’
They faced each other for a few seconds, Pat Slattery and this great giant of a foreman, like a bandy little monkey before a ragged brown bear. Then Stickney cast a glance back at the gunmen, who duly prised themselves from the wall and tossed their cheroots onto the cobbles.
‘There ain’t no union here, pal,’ he said wearily. ‘You ain’t going to receive no letter of goddamn explanation from the Colt Company. Just get yourself gone, or we’ll fetch the police and have you arrested.’
At this Slattery snorted in disgust, sidestepped the foreman and strode into the centre of the yard. ‘Noone!’ he bellowed, wheeling around, glaring at the long rows of windows as if his enemy lurked behind each and every one. ‘Noone, ye Orange bastard, there’ll be a reckoning for this! D’ye hear me? We’ll find you, and we’ll –’
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