The Devil's Acre

by Matthew Plampin

  Norris was regarding him shrewdly. ‘So you expect me to believe that your man’s presence in the Devil’s Acre was merely a coincidence?’

  The moment for the pay-off had arrived. Sam wrote out a banker’s draft for two hundred pounds and slipped it inside one of the half-dozen cases of presentation Navys he kept beside his desk.

  ‘Accept these,’ he said, holding it out to Norris, ‘as a token of my deep and abiding esteem for the London constabulary. And be aware that if I ever hear of this unfortunate event being in any way connected with me, I’ll know at whose door to lay the blame. I appreciate you bringing this to me, Inspector, truly I do, but I ain’t a man you want to cross.’

  Norris raised his eyebrows, acting as if Sam’s matter-of-fact bribe was an unforeseen and rather impertinent thing; but he took it all the same, and as he lifted the lid he could not hide his greedy pleasure. ‘Well, Colonel,’ he announced, picking up his hat and rising to his feet, ‘it’s plain enough what happened here. The Irish gangs around Old Pye Street have been feuding of late. These deaths’ll be to do with that. It’s a commonplace sort of event, in truth, and soon forgotten. Worse than rabid dogs, these blasted micks are.’ Sliding the pistol case beneath his arm, he undid Noone’s manacles and then hung them on his belt. ‘I’ll take up no more of your time.’

  Once Norris had gone, taking his chortling underlings with him, Sam crossed the room, poured himself another bourbon and sat down upon his plush red divan. He looked coldly at Noone.

  ‘What did you do with Ben Quill?’

  The watchman was rubbing his wrists, sore from the policeman’s bracelets. ‘Colonel, we ain’t done with –’

  ‘An answer, Mr Noone, damn you.’

  ‘Weighted him. Sunk him further out in the mud.’ Noone stared at the floor – almost sadly, it seemed. ‘He won’t come up again.’

  Sam considered this, chewing his tobacco mechanically. ‘How the devil d’you know where those Irishmen were?’

  ‘I been in that rookery a good deal, while you were busy with your lords and celebrities. I got people I can ask.’

  The gun-maker caught the bitterness in his tone. ‘Mr Noone, I ain’t a goddamn gangster, seeking to rule through terror – and neither am I some kind of policeman serving out justice. I’m in this city to make guns and to sell ‘em, you hear me, not to wage your little war.’

  Noone met his gaze. ‘It ain’t over. One of them cocksuckers got away from me – the ringleader, it was. I clipped his leg but he got away. Two more days, Colonel, and I could –’

  ‘You ain’t listening,’ Sam interrupted. ‘You’re done, Mr Noone. I’m sending you back to Hartford.’

  The watchman hesitated. ‘You firing me, Colonel?’

  Sam shook his head; Christ, the fellow knew far too much Colt business ever to be fired. ‘You’ll be given a place at the works. Good pay. Light duties. Just two thousand goddamn miles from London.’

  Noone lifted his chin, proud and angry, those fierce eyes sparking like a lit twist of fuse-paper. He was as unrepentant as ever; Sam supposed that a man who’d done the things he had couldn’t have much room in his heart for regret. ‘Your boy was there as well, y’know,’ he snapped, trying to inflict a little vengeful discomfort, ‘the English secretary. Taking the dead girl up in his arms. I was right about them, just like I was right about Ben Quill’s assistant.’

  ‘Well, many thanks,’ snarled Sam sardonically, downing his whiskey, ‘but that I’d already figured out for myself. Mr Lowry was heading for the door. He weren’t the man I took him for at all. It’s often the case for an employer of labour. A fellow can’t be getting sentimental in such situations.’

  ‘Ain’t you going to do nothing, then?’ Noone was incredulous. ‘Goddamn it, I could go out and fetch him right now, bring that cocksucker back here for –’

  Sam’s patience ran out. ‘By thunder, Mr Noone, I don’t believe that you ever really grasped our purpose here. Your head’s full of honour, ain’t it, that soldier’s pride of yours, but this is business. You’ll take your leave, I’ll get me another watchman, and we’ll see if he can’t keep my men and my machines safe – which you never quite managed to do, did you, despite all the goddamn Irishmen you killed.’

  Noone’s lips were pursed, and his lined forehead crumpling up like corrugated iron. Sam could tell that he was biting his tongue. ‘Colonel, I –’

  ‘Get out of here, go on. I’ll wire Hartford, tell them to expect you.’

  The watchman strode from the room without so much as glancing in Sam’s direction, and slammed the door mightily behind him. He’ll calm down sooner or later, the gun-maker thought – he’d damn well have to. There was no chance on earth of any other respectable employer giving him a position.

  Rising from the divan, Sam strolled to a window, pulled back a pearl-grey curtain and looked out at the lamps of Piccadilly. A new chapter was beginning for the Colt Company. The difficult introduction to a fresh territory, after a long year of struggle and strife, was finally at an end. Some useful men had been lost along the way, it was true; Ben Quill’s fate, in particular, was a goddamn shame. Edward Lowry prompted more conflicted feelings. Who could honestly say what had happened there? Given a fine opportunity for self-advancement, the boy had somehow fallen in with criminals and worked against the very man who’d sought to help him. It was truly inexplicable behaviour. That would teach him to put an unknown, a foreigner, in such a privileged post. Sam could only be thankful that he’d never let the boy in on the company’s more sensitive operations.

  Both, however, were easy enough to replace. Lou Ballou would get the engine running again, and there were a few promising juniors in Connecticut who could be tranfered to Pimlico to aid him. The workforce would be reinvigorated. It was a real chance to start over. Spitting his spent tobacco plug into an empty vase, Sam reflected upon his remaining London employees. There was definitely still some dead wood among them, and this was the time to chop it down. He went to his desk, reached for pen and paper and started to write a list.

  EPILOGUE

  1

  Three weeks after the shootings, quite penniless, Edward returned to London. Climbing from the train at Fenchurch Street with Katie in his arms, he was convinced that he would be arrested at once. The constable they passed on their way out to the street, however, ignored them completely. Edward’s intention was to leave the child with his mother and then go abroad, borrowing the money for his passage from Saul Graff; but when they arrived at her house at Sydenham Hill he was astonished to discover that there had been no mention at all of the dust-yard slaughter in the newspapers. No description of him had been circulated. Not a single policeman had called, asking his whereabouts. Neither had there been any sign of a grizzled, gimlet-eyed Yankee in a military-style cap. It was as if it hadn’t happened.

  They’d been hiding in Margate, in a small suite of rooms at the top of a deserted seaside boarding house. The proprietor was told that they were uncle and niece – that Katie had recently become Edward’s ward after the untimely death of both her parents. The man had been happy to believe this, reassured by Edward’s respectable appearance and the five pound note he’d produced before writing ‘Mr Benjamin Quill’ in the register.

  At first the child would not talk or engage with him in any way; she just sat listlessly on the floor, staring at nothing. Next came the screaming fits, striking at all hours, when she would call out for her mother and father in the most piteous tones. Utterly out of his depth, Edward relied upon simple kindness and a steady supply of sweetmeats – and lemonade laced with a drop of gin to ease her off to sleep. He came to realise that she was not as scared of him as might have been expected. The only explanation for this he could think of was that she must have seen him with her aunt in those last awful moments in the Devil’s Acre. By the time the money from the pawned gun had run out, the child was reaching for his hand as she tottered timidly along the windswept seafront; and meeting his eye when sharing her murmure
d, semi-intelligible confidences.

  Edward’s mother was glad to see her son safe and well, if rather drawn, but could not hide her shock at the sight of the two-year-old girl resting against his shoulder, her arms thrown around his neck. He told her only that he’d lost a close friend and suffered a dramatic rupture from his employer in the same dreadful afternoon; that the child had been entrusted to him by this friend before she died, and had no one but him to look after her. He was too tired to be able to tell precisely what his mother made of this half-story. She stepped back from the door readily enough, though, welcoming them both inside.

  With the child out of his immediate care, the grief that had been held in suspension above Edward fell down upon him like a smothering shroud. He found that he could no longer bear to look out on the world, to dress himself and shave his face, to leave his room or even rise from his bed. As well as the constant pulse of sorrow, he was assailed by a terrible self-loathing, tormented by thoughts of everything he could have done but did not do. Lying on his back, he spent his days raking through the day of the Dickens visit, from beginning to bloody end, upbraiding himself severely at every juncture. Why did you stay in the factory after you saw Ben Quill’s corpse? he would demand, striking his head with his palm. Why did you not go straight into the rookery and hunt her down – run from street to street shouting out her name?

  His memories of Caroline were so clear that he felt he could almost summon her form before him, to the point of being able to run his hand along the smooth undulation of her side; knowing all the while that she wasn’t there, that she couldn’t be there. At night, stirring from a fitful sleep, he’d swear that he could make her out in the darkness, watching him from over by the window. Sitting up, fumbling with a Lucifer match, he’d say her name out loud, his voice loaded with a strange, fearful hope. The flame would flare, revealing nothing; and he’d lie back among the sweat-dampened sheets, gazing numbly at the ceiling, listening to the frenetic thuds of his heart slowly subside.

  Eventually, of course, Edward began to recover. He obtained a clerical position in a local architect’s office, working on a string of new churches that were to be erected across the burgeoning villages to the south of London, and found sanctuary of a sort in the discipline and efficiency it required of him. Outside his working hours he set about discovering the fate of Katie’s mother. Amy Rea had been convicted of robbery, he learnt, and sentenced to two and a half years in Brixton Prison – although what she had stolen and from whom was not specified. Edward wrote to her, reporting that her child was safe and being well looked after. He had no idea if the letter would be given to her, or even if she was capable of reading it, but he had to make the attempt.

  As for Caroline and her brother-in-law, there was not a single earthly trace. No mention had been made anywhere of a shooting in the Devil’s Acre. Edward couldn’t even find a reference to their deaths. They had been erased.

  Sitting in the reading room of a public library with a wealth of newspapers and periodicals at his disposal, Edward inevitably found himself investigating the continued fortunes of the Colt Company. Alfred Richards’s regular postings in the armaments trade press revealed that most of the senior London staff had been replaced, Walter Noone among them. Edward dared to think that he might be safe.

  The pistol works itself was flourishing, by the press agent’s somewhat hyperbolic account at least. Over the summer of 1854, as the Army’s expeditionary force camped out in Bulgaria and the Navy patrolled disputed waters in search of the enemy, the demand for Colt’s revolvers underwent a steady rise. Orders in the thousands were placed for the Black Sea fleet, and dispatched with all haste to Constantinople. The Colonel, Richards claimed, had taken his rightful position as the armourer of the Empire; the formidable American eagle perched upon Britannia’s shoulder, ready to lend its tearing talons to her cause. Robert Adams and his partners were still on the scene, expanding their works, insisting on fresh comparative trials and agitating at the Board of Ordnance, but Colt’s remained the larger operation – and the significantly cheaper product. It was hinted that Army contracts, the really huge ones for which the Colonel had held out for so long, were sure to arrive soon.

  Edward read all this with growing consternation. That the world was to become so filled with these firearms, these deadly devices that had already killed Caroline and countless others, now seemed to him like nothing short of insanity. He knew that this was not a rational reaction, and tried to remind himself that Samuel Colt was merely a businessman providing an effective tool – a model of highly successful entrepreneurship and self-promotion, in fact, to whose example he had once aspired. Yet Edward became increasingly convinced that this wasn’t the complete picture. He recalled the numerous anomalies of his time as the Colonel’s secretary, from the mysterious correspondence forwarded from Liège to that huge stockpile of unproved weapons Caroline had discovered down in the warehouse cellar, for which he’d never actually found an explanation. Something untoward was going on at the Pimlico pistol works. He resolved to keep up his watch on it.

  With the end of summer came the commencement of the long-promised war. The nation looked on as that which they had cheered for so loudly stumbled to miserable disaster in the space of a few weeks. Reports from The Times, the Courier and a host of other papers left no doubt as to the chaos on the front lines, and the dire suffering of the troops. Cousin Arthur wrote Edward a rather peevish letter detailing how his Navys had rusted solid in the heavy Crimean rain, and now served him only as paperweights.

  By the time winter arrived the campaign had ground to a complete standstill. The heavily fortified port of Sebastopol was under siege, and would not fall without a far greater assault than the Allied armies were able to muster. Certain quarters of Parliament became progressively more discontented, maintaining that the Army was failing because it was badly led and poorly equipped. There were calls for immediate and sweeping change at the very summit of the hierarchy. This, in Edward’s estimation, all played directly into Colt’s hands. Great Britain’s patriotic fervour and lust for war could be made to work for the gun-maker – but so, surely, could her defeat. The beleaguered British troops needed to be given whatever advantages could be secured for them, as a matter of urgency. It would take only a little Colt ballyhoo to ensure that revolving pistols were added to such an inventory.

  But the Colonel was nowhere to be seen. He gave no more well-publicised tours of the factory to prominent personages; there were no boastful announcements or grand claims in the press. The yellow carriage was absent from London’s frozen, foggy streets. He was in America, it was rumoured, meeting with some of President Pierce’s men in Washington – or in Egypt, seeking the custom of the new viceroy.

  Then came the letter. Published in The Times, it had been written by an Englishman who had recently stopped in St Petersburg. There were a good many Americans in the city at present, he wrote, working on the Moscow railway; but also among them was a Colonel Samuel Colt, travelling with specimens of his machine-made repeating arms.

  The newspaper’s thin pages began to quiver in Edward’s fingers as he thought it all through. The gun-maker was selling to Russia, Great Britain’s enemy – aiming to provide revolvers to the very soldiers Cousin Arthur was being pitted against. Colt had been working towards this from the first sign of hostilities between the two countries. The defaced stamp on that letter forwarded from Liège had been the imperial eagle of Tsar Nicholas I. Those crates piled up in the warehouse cellar had been put aside for the Russian market – which was why their existence had to be kept from the British Government and its official proving rooms. And here, Edward surmised, lay the reason behind the Colonel’s unaccountable interest in raw cotton after that trip to mainland Europe. The bulky bales were to serve as the means of conveyance. Each one could hold a decent-sized crate of smuggled pistols; and the European trade routes he’d taken such care to develop could be used as an effective conduit to this clandestine customer. It sudd
enly seemed so damned obvious – shameless even. Edward snorted, drawing glances from those sitting around him in the library. So much for the Anglo-Saxon bond!

  Word of Colt’s visit to St Petersburg spread rapidly, the flames fanned by his gleeful rivals. We have nourished a snake, they cried, a venomous Yankee snake in the heart of our very own metropolis! This American, loyal only to his balance-sheet, is using English steel and English machine-hands to make guns that will be used to shoot down English soldiers on the field of battle! This is what happens when foreign entrepreneurs are permitted to operate unchecked on our soil, and given preference over our own craftsmen!

  Yet just when things were looking impossibly bleak for Colonel Colt, sheer good fortune – or the hand of a powerful, unseen ally – came to his rescue. A fortnight after the publication of the damaging Times letter, the Board of Ordnance awarded him the largest revolver contract it had ever drawn up: five thousand pistols for the Army, for the officers and sergeants leading men across the battlefields of the Crimea, against the Russians with whom he was being accused of colluding. Colt could now claim to be the official supplier of repeating firearms to the entire British war machine. Emboldened, he decided to defend himself, penning a letter of his own to The Times from his stronghold in Hartford. Yes, he admitted, he had indeed been in St Petersburg, but only to visit the US ambassador, Mr Thomas Hart Seymour, an old friend of his. No weapons had been sold; no negotiations conducted. And as no one could prove otherwise, his opponents were forced to back down. He’d dodged it.