5
‘Colt!’ Sam roared as he burst through the doors of Mivart’s Hotel. ‘Colt is the name! Where the hell is he?’
The startled clerk did his best to halt the gun-maker’s furious charge, but it was like setting pasteboard before a typhoon. ‘It is against hotel policy to reveal such details,’ he protested, ‘and quite out of –’
‘Mr James Colt.’ Sam gripped the edge of the counter as if he was about to tear it free and use it to hammer the clerk into the floor. ‘Directions to his room, right this instant – or by thunder I will see you removed from your post and tossed out into the street like so much goddamn garbage.’
James was installed on the top floor, of course, five storeys up; Sam was leaning heavily against the sumptuous mahogany banister by the time he reached it. Staggering on through the carpeted hush of the corridor, he beat his fist against his brother’s door. Sam had sent no word of the precise time of his arrival in London to anyone, preferring as always to catch his people unawares; accordingly, James was most surprised to see him standing there, red-cheeked and panting with necktie loosened, his eyes starting out like black spikes from his head. The gun-maker pushed his brother aside and walked into the middle of a large, well-furnished sitting room, all rich drapery, polished sideboards and upholstered chairs, with a fine view of the copper and gold treetops of Berkeley Square. It was early evening, about five o’clock; coals glowed softly in a wide stone fireplace and a moulded gas fitting hissed away between the two large windows. The overall effect was one of elegant, costly comfort.
‘What’s this here, then,’ he growled, his first words to his younger brother in nearly four years, ‘the most expensive set of rooms in the hotel? In the entire goddamn city?’
He’d given James a few seconds to think since opening the door; the rascal had realised that there was to be a clash between them. Somewhere inside him he must surely have been expecting it. ‘It is important, Sam,’ he said now, as coolly as ever, ‘to make a display of wealth. You know as well as I that no one at all will buy from a shabby or desperate-looking salesman.’
Sam spun around so hard that the thick rug on the floor bunched up beneath the heel of his boot. ‘Oh, ain’t you wise, all of a sudden! Ain’t you the noble authority, the voice of goddamn experience! Desperate-looking indeed! How d’you think we look right now, Jamie? How d’you think I look after three months of your wondrous stewardship?’ He shouted out a couple of oaths before putting a hand to his brow, trying to calm himself to the point where he was capable of normal speech. ‘You tell me about Major Dyce’s wife. I want to hear it from you, from your own lips.’
James stiffened defensively, the fatuous grin dropping from his face. He had a plump, well-rested look to him; his clothes were new and distinctly English in style. This fellow has been playing at being a London dandy these past weeks, Sam thought, and on the Colt Company’s dime. ‘Then let me say that I was not at fault – not at fault at all. Major Dyce is a jealous lunatic, Sam. I’ve crossed his sort before, back in St Louis – they can’t bear the sight of anyone they don’t know so much as talking to their wives. And I was talking only. I swear it on Mother’s grave.’
Sam was not convinced. ‘Improper attention is what I heard, you unmannerly dogger, which I take to mean that you were making your oily advances on this woman before a roomful of people – whose number just happened to include not only her goddamn husband but also several of his close friends from the Woolwich Arsenal! The Woolwich Arsenal, Jamie! What in Christ’s name is wrong with you?’
His brother was smiling bitterly, shaking his head. ‘Well, you may have heard that, Sam, but it was not the case. I merely took Amelia through to the garden for –’
‘Amelia, is it? Lord God Almighty!’ Sam considered crossing the room and giving James the resounding slap he so deserved, as he would have done in their youth; but instead he just cursed some more and looked about for a drink. Several decanters were arranged upon a corner table. He went over and poured himself three fingers of bourbon. ‘What of the works?’
James followed him, affecting concern. ‘You look worn right out, Sam. How long have you been back in London?’
The gun-maker drank down his liquor in one swallow. This was a fairly transparent bit of evasion. He didn’t feel that it deserved a reply.
‘You must tell me how things are in Hartford,’ James tried next. ‘Did you see Father? Or Miss Jarvis?’
Sam had forgotten that James knew about his engagement. It vexed him to be reminded of this. ‘I saw ‘em both.’
James reached for the whiskey decanter, knocked a little by this terse reply; his older brother’s tone had left no doubt that nothing more was forthcoming. He was visibly wracking his flabby brain for another topic. ‘And what of the dyke?’ he asked at last.
‘It’s going ahead, full steam. Those self-appointed bores could not stand against me. The South Meadow will be drained and the Hartford factory will be extended. It’s already well underway, in fact.’
‘I knew it.’ James was grinning again. ‘I knew you would prevail, Sam. You always do.’
That was it. The boundary had been crossed. Sam slammed down his glass. ‘Do I now, Jamie? Do I really?’ he yelled. ‘What of my slogan, then, painted so boldly across the roof of the London works so that every ship passing down the mighty Thames would see it? What of my slogan, you worthless son of a bitch? Have I prevailed there, would you say?’
James blanched. He replaced the whiskey on the table without pouring himself any. ‘That was…unfortunate, I’ll admit. But you didn’t hear the case that was made against us. Lady Wardell and her –’
‘You gave in to that harpy? That John Bull bitch so puffed up with her own righteous authority over the rest of us – professional men just trying to turn a bit of business?’
‘There were others with her, Sam,’ James came back weakly, ‘a Mr Cubitt, for one, who accused us of bringing down his neighbourhood, and –’
‘Cubitt’s a blasted builder, that’s all, a fellow with a seriously overblown sense of his own importance. He ain’t nothing to us. That there slogan was a prime piece of ballyhoo – one that I’ll struggle to replicate.’ Sam walked to a window. ‘And you’ve barely been in the city since, I hear – after you’d mortally offended half the goddamn British army, that is.’
His brother frowned, as if affronted by this suggestion of negligence on his part. ‘Who told you that?’
‘I’ve already been out to Pimlico. I’ve talked to the foreman, the overseers, the engineers. They gave me a full account of your tenure as manager, if it can rightly be so described. Did you honestly not realise?’
James swallowed. ‘Everyone of quality leaves the city during the summer. There was quite literally no one useful left for me to talk with.’
‘Horseshit,’ Sam declared. ‘What about Lawrence Street?’
The name elicited only a blank look. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to –’
Sam plucked a vase of dried flowers from a shelf and hurled it into the fireplace. It broke apart in a puff of dust and old pollen, scattering brittle purple blooms across the hearth. James’s instructions regarding Street had been plain to the point of bluntness. It had been stressed in several letters that the fellow was possibly the most important man in all London for the Colt Company. For a weapons manufacturer, Sam had written, politicians were the real prize, of more worth than any number of soldiers or ordnance officials. Yet James had failed him here as well. Sam glared into the fire, the energy draining out of him.
‘This is my own doing, I suppose,’ he admitted. ‘I should’ve known that you’d be useless for a delicate piece of work like this – Christ, way worse than useless.’
There was a creak off to his left. Sam looked around to see that the door to one of the apartment’s adjoining rooms was open just a crack; an eye withdrew from it swiftly, and a pair of dainty feet danced away across the floorboards.
The gun-maker stared at James in
disbelief. ‘Tell me you ain’t bringing back whores to a place like this.’
‘She ain’t no whore, Sam. That’s –’
‘By Heavens, Jamie, you really are dumb as a pile of goddamn rocks.’ Sam paced over to his brother, stopping only when their faces were a few inches apart. The idiot had to be dispensed with before he could do any more damage. ‘You listen to me, and you listen well. Keep away from Bessborough Place from now on. Don’t even think of showing yourself there, nor over at the sales office neither. D’you hear me?’
James’s expression, clearly intended as a wry, defiant smile, came out half-cocked; he seemed almost on the verge of tears. ‘Are – are you ordering me back to America, Sam? Is this how it is to end?’
Sam started for the hotel corridor. ‘I don’t give a good goddamn where you go, Jamie,’ he replied, without looking back. ‘Just keep the hell away from my factory.’
The left paddle-wheel began to reverse, sending black smoke belching from the steamer’s single chimney as the vessel turned against the current of the river. There was a sudden retreat of passengers from the rail as a gush of noxious foam splattered up the side of the hull; Sam watched a leathery turd the size of a brick arc through the evening air and slap wetly against the deck planks. The dank stone arches of London Bridge passed overhead, and the long double row of stationary traffic that stood forever stranded upon it came into view, hooting and whistling in useless complaint. Off across the Thames, a short distance downriver, stood the battlements of the Tower, with that pale, pepperpot fortress rising in its centre. Sam gave this ancient stronghold a moment’s contemplation, gazing out across the greenish waters and the boats that swarmed about them. That was where his state-of-the-art firearms were being sent to be subjected to the indignity of government tests – to be picked over by hare-brained British smiths and branded with crowns and suchlike, as if they belonged to Queen Victoria rather than Samuel Colt, their inventor and manufacturer. He couldn’t help but resent it.
On the other side of the vessel, along the river’s southern bank, stretched a row of plain brown buildings, warehouses and tanning shops from the look of them. The top hats pressed in around Sam began to stir; newspapers were being folded tightly and stowed under arms. These were the men of modern London, departing their workplaces at the day’s end to ride locomotives back out to suburbs and villages, and they were preparing to fight their way onto the shore – to barge aside their fellows so that they could catch that train, win their preferred seat in the carriage, secure themselves a few more minutes of precious rest. The crowd jostling upon the wharf seemed a mirror image of the one on the deck of the steamer; Sam almost expected to see his own smart blue coat reflected among the wall of black. He carved a path through them without difficulty, leaving the quayside and starting along Tooley Street, a busy avenue of shops of the more modest, practical variety.
The place he sought was in an alley about fifty yards down. Its frontage was humble enough; it could have been the premises of a carter, or perhaps an undistinguished instrument maker. Only the revolving pistol rendered upon the sign – a double-action model, lacking a hammer, drawn with expert precision – gave any indication of what went on within. He went through the door without announcing himself. The interior was no more impressive. It reminded Sam of his own very first pistol manufacturing venture, in fact, which he’d set up in a Hartford attic more than ten years earlier. The tables were fitted out with crude clamps and pedal-drills – pedal-drills, for Christ’s sake! Small wonder that the son of a bitch’s guns didn’t shoot straight!
Sam’s timing was good; the bulk of the workforce had already retired for the day. Only one other person was in there, a skinny boy who had been sweeping the floor and was now gaping at him in obvious recognition. Without daring to utter a word, he gave his forelock a tug, dropped his broom and rushed up an open wooden staircase set against the far wall. Left alone for a moment, Sam took the chance to make a closer study of the main shop. Over in a far corner stood several huge crates, of the sort used to transport pieces of steam-driven machinery. He was walking over to them, thinking to look for a maker’s stamp, when he noticed that an internal wall had recently been demolished and the area beyond cleared. The meaning of all this was plain. Mr Robert Adams of London Bridge was planning an expansion.
‘Colonel Colt,’ declared a slow voice, marked with a rustic-sounding burr. ‘An unexpected pleasure.’
Sam turned; a stout, long-nosed man in sober clothes was descending the stairs: his English competitor, in the flesh. The fellow looked like an apple farmer in a borrowed coat – a simple soul ill suited to the vigorous cut and thrust of the armaments business – but Sam knew from experience that this impression was deceptive.
‘Mr Adams,’ he replied with a civil nod. ‘How long has it been? Two years, ain’t it – that test at Woolwich?’
Adams stopped three feet from the bottom of the staircase. ‘I’d invite you up to my office,’ he said, ignoring Sam’s question, ‘but I’m afraid that I have none at present. The company of Deane, Adams & Deane is undergoing a few changes.’
‘I can see that, Mr Adams.’ Sam nodded towards the crates. ‘What are these, chucking lathes? Drop-hammers, perhaps? Are we mechanising at last?’
A scoundrelly smile twitched at his rival’s face. ‘We must remain competitive, Colonel, must we not?’
‘Indeed you must, Mr Adams,’ Sam answered, marvelling at the fellow’s shamelessness, ‘indeed you must. Now, as you might know, I have only recently returned to your delightful city after a stay in America. Imagine my dismay when my watchman told me that over the summer he was obliged to weed out a couple of your employees from my factory floor – spies, Mr Adams, who’d burrowed their way into my works like ticks, with the intention of copying my machine designs and committing acts of sabotage.’
Adams was shaking his head in flat denial.
‘I’ve come down here as an act of courtesy,’ Sam continued, strolling off between the tables, ‘one gun man to another, to give you the chance to explain yourself. There was some trouble between our people back in the spring, I believe – but that had reached a natural resolution. Why the devil are you setting your sights on me again?’
‘Colonel Colt,’ Adams came back, cool as a cucumber, ‘I don’t know how things are done in America, but an Englishman would blush to come to another’s place of business and make such wild allegations. What proof do you have that these villains were in my employ? You’re prepared to take them at their word, are you?’
‘My watchman found ‘em convincing enough.’
Adams shook his head again. ‘Nay, sir – this is a common enough circumstance in London, believe me. They were but thieves, throwing my name out either to keep your torturers at bay or to stir up a bit of trouble as revenge for their capture. That’s all it was.’
Sam grinned up at him. A rehearsed answer, plainly – the devious bastard had been ready for this. ‘You’re quite right, Mr Adams. I have no proof at all that you sent ‘em. But you should know that I am now in a position to bankrupt you utterly – to have you run out of this cosy little shop into the goddamn street. You no doubt think of the competition between us as a sort of David-meets-Goliath situation from which you’ll eventually emerge the plucky victor. That, sadly, just ain’t the case. My machines are going full pelt, with a thirty-horse engine behind ‘em. Fifty Colt pistols a day will very soon be a reality.’
To Sam’s satisfaction, Adams squirmed ever so slightly as he listened to this. Like all accomplished liars, he knew the truth when he heard it.
‘Here’s what I propose. Keep things between us on the level from now on – no more beatings, or spies – and I’ll give serious thought to buying you out while your firm is still worth something.’
‘On the level, you say?’ Adams remained composed, but a blotch of angry red had broken across his cheek. ‘Since you came to London, Colonel Colt, several of my men have vanished – vanished into thin bloody air. Can
you explain that, sir, given that you are so very much on the level?’
Sam narrowed his eyes; he didn’t know what the fellow was on about. ‘Perhaps they saw better opportunities elsewhere, in a company with a more stable future.’
‘You can take your condescending offers,’ Adams pronounced firmly, ‘and feed them to the cat. I will meet you, sir, on the field of commerce. Don’t you be doing me any special favours. You might have your hundreds of men and great rows of machinery, but I have my friends; I have the national interest; and I have a superior weapon.’
‘Do you now?’ Sam couldn’t help laughing at the Englishman’s nonsensical pride. ‘A superior weapon, Mr Adams? Is that so?’
‘It is. There can be no agreement between us, Colonel Colt.’
‘Ah well,’ Sam sighed, ‘you’re correct there, at least. In my heart, I knew it all along.’ He made for the shop door, fishing out his screw of Old Red and opening up his clasp-knife. ‘Interesting times ahead, Mr Adams. Interesting times indeed.’
First had been the oysters, great platters of New York natives shipped over live in barrels of brine and served raw, stewed and fried. Then came the terrapin soup, so devilish spicy it made your nose run; then American pork and beans, baked in the Yankee style; then, to applause, a pair of enormous American turkeys, their skin roasted to a rich golden hue; then a healthy round of rare American beef, so much more tender and flavoursome than the grey, stringy British stuff on which John Bull placed such unwarranted value. And finally, when all were at the point of gastronomic exhaustion, there had been half a dozen glazed, canvas-backed ducks, which Sam had permitted to be carried on with the sweets in the usual English fashion.
The Devil's Acre Page 24