The Devil's Acre

by Matthew Plampin

They shook hands. Hastings was plainly delighted to think of Paget being threatened with a gun; the two men were fierce rivals of long standing.

  ‘Not exactly, Tom,’ he replied. ‘We disagreed, is all.’

  Hastings grinned. ‘A subject best saved for another time, perhaps.’ He directed Sam towards the ministers. ‘Here, come and meet these fine gentlemen.’

  Clarendon and Newcastle were somewhat reserved, as might have been expected, but they proved open enough to Sam’s conversation and soon became curious to learn more of the revolver factory at Bessborough Place and its many innovations. Sam invited both to take a tour, thinking that he would send them each a pair of the finest engraved Navys that same night. It was looking good, in short, very good indeed; then an English lady, clad in black silk and lace, appeared between the ministers.

  ‘Excuse me, Lord Clarendon – Lord Newcastle – Commodore Hastings,’ she said with an incline of her head, her voice surprisingly deep and full of confidence.

  Sam was immediately vexed. Could she not see that business was underway? Was such a thing beyond her cosseted mind to perceive? He almost ordered her to leave them alone, to get back to her gossiping, but managed to restrain himself and turn towards her with terse civility. This lady was perhaps fifty and more heavy-featured than he usually cared for, but not without allure. There was an appealing energy there; was she a widow, he wondered, who had devoted herself to charitable works? She was looking back at him coldly. Although she had not yet said his name, it was plainly him that she had come over to speak with.

  ‘Lady Wardell,’ said Newcastle with a bow.

  ‘Cecilia,’ murmured Clarendon. ‘How very nice to see you.’

  There was definite apprehension in the Foreign Secretary’s tone. At once, Sam knew that this Lady Wardell was the campaigning sort. She was there to confront him.

  ‘And you, sir,’ she announced sternly, ‘must be the American gentleman who plans to flood the streets of London with repeating pistols.’

  The skin around Sam’s right eye tightened with irritation. These people were always so goddamn self-important; every one of them seemed to believe that he’d never heard their particular line of garbage before. ‘I am Colonel Colt, ma’am, certainly,’ he said. ‘What is it that you have to say to me?’

  The woman lifted her nose in the air; as with so many of these rich Bulls, haughtiness came to her as naturally as drawing breath. ‘Only, sir, that you are quite unquestionably a merchant of death!’

  This remark was made bluntly and bitterly, less as an accusation than a statement of fact, and it killed all other conversation within a wide radius. Newcastle and Clarendon glanced about in furtive embarrassment, as if they’d been caught smoking cigars without their host’s permission and were looking for somewhere quietly to dispose of their butts.

  Sam, however, was a picture of unconcern. ‘Only that, ma’am?’

  Her lips formed a resolute line. This was a veteran, a sturdy old cruiser with a long record of skirmishes behind her, and she would not be easily vanquished. ‘Your dastardly wares are designed to kill, and to kill in greater numbers than ever before. This cannot be denied. How can you possibly reconcile this with your Christian conscience, sir? How can you bear to profit from such copious bloodshed?’

  ‘Ma’am,’ said Sam with a sigh, readying his standard defence, ‘I think we can agree that the people of this world are very far from being satisfied with one another. I call my guns peacemakers: yes, peacemakers. They are tools expressly designed for preserving the peace. If every man had a revolver on his belt, who on earth would dare draw one?’

  Hastings, God save him, made a low sound indicating concurrence; the ministers, however, were drifting off like untethered barges on a canal, slowly distancing themselves from the gun-maker and the attention he was attracting.

  The fractious noblewoman was unconvinced by Sam’s solid reasoning. ‘You cannot honestly believe that, Colonel. Surely you must understand that firearms generate violence in the exact way that liquor generates drunkenness. Put a revolver in a man’s grasp and he will long to use it at the very first opportunity!’

  There was no curtailing her now. On and on she went, enlarging on her theories about Sam and his business with furious vigour. Growing more angry, he considered mentioning the Kaffir War, and how much easier it might have been on the British Army if they’d had his revolvers; or perhaps the efficacy of the Colt six-shooter in the ongoing American struggle against the barbarian red men. He thought better of this, though. It was pretty certain that the self-righteous drab before him would not be won over by talk of proficient savage-killing.

  ‘You must agree, somewhere within you,’ she was saying now, almost imploringly, ‘that it is the religious duty of men of ingenuity and engineering skill – men such as yourself, Colonel Colt – to aid the peoples of the world, not provide the means for them to destroy one another.’

  The ministers were gone now, swallowed up by the company; Sam’s speedy path to the higher levels of government, such an unlikely stroke of goddamn luck, had closed. Hastings had stuck loyally by the gun-maker’s side, but was entirely cowed by this lady and therefore useless. Colt’s tolerance for his aristocratic adversary, this creature of England’s grandest houses and rolling private parks, suddenly left him.

  ‘Unfortunately, precious few of the world’s troubles will find a solution in these fine sentiments alone,’ he declared with an air of curt finality. ‘As I’ve said, ma’am, my revolvers are tools, that’s all, designed and manufactured to the best of my ability, and intended to help disputing parties reach a condition of peace as quickly as possible.’

  The woman stared back at him in horror; Sam thought for a second that she was about to strike him with her fan. ‘The only peace to be attained by revolvers will be due to one of the parties being dead!’ she spluttered. ‘How on earth can you stand here and –’

  ‘It’s all very well and good for you to take issue with me,’ Sam interrupted again, sticking his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, ‘but I’ll wager that you ain’t never had to really struggle for anything. You’ve never reached your end through sheer perseverance, have you, ma’am, or earned your due through honest goddamn effort? I am a businessman, and guns are my business. And that’s all there is to be said.’

  The lady had nothing with which to counter this thumping rebuttal, her pale, wide-set eyes registering her defeat. She was clearly not used to being addressed with such simple honesty. Sam felt a certain shortness of breath, and hotness around his ears. He noticed the bank of staring faces behind her, every one slack-jawed with shock, and realised that he might have been shouting. That milksop Buchanan was drawing near, no doubt to rush in and mollify the blasted woman – to apologise for the unspeakable rudeness of Colonel Colt. Sam decided that he wouldn’t stay to witness this. He wouldn’t be made to feel shame for defending himself.

  Hastings was standing very quietly at his elbow.

  ‘Enough of this, Tom,’ he said, turning away. ‘I’m leaving.’

  The gun-maker’s exit from the reception room and descent down to the entrance hall passed in a wrathful blur. Only the form of a short, blond, neat-looking Englishman, inserted directly in his path at the base of the stairs, prevented him from storming straight out into the night. Sam drew up, taking in the fellow irascibly. He was no servant, but no lord either. Was he a lackey of one of the ministers, come to upbraid him – or an embassy man, laden with the Ambassador’s chidings? Not caring to hear either, Sam made to push past, bellowing for his surtout and hat, wishing to God that he had some whiskey.

  ‘That should not have been permitted, Colonel,’ this blond man said, ‘the way you were treated up there. Lady Wardell should not have been allowed to have been so impertinent towards a businessman of your standing. Mr Buchanan really should have intervened.’

  This won him another moment of Sam’s time. He stood, wordlessly challenging the man to hold his interest.

  ‘She is
something of a fanatic,’ he continued dryly, ‘always toiling in the service of some great cause or other – and only content when raising funds for the religious education of the poor, or the dispatching of missionaries to distant cannibal isles. You are most fortunate, as an American, that she did not also take you to task over the dreadful unwholesomeness of slavery.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘I cannot help but suspect, in fact, that she only came here tonight in search of trouble.’

  ‘Yes, well, some women ain’t all maple sugar,’ Sam answered warily. ‘What the devil d’you want?’

  The blond man made no reaction to this hostile tone. ‘My name is Lawrence Street, Colonel, and I am a long-standing admirer of your inventions. I was deeply impressed by the pistols included in the display of the Great Exhibition, and have followed your fortunes closely ever since.’

  Sam’s surtout and hat arrived. He put them on, thanking this Mr Street for his kind remarks, genuinely welcoming the approbation after his mauling by Lady Wardell.

  ‘I wished to say, also, that you must not fret over the loss of your chance with Clarendon and Newcastle,’ Street went on. ‘You must realise that our government, like your own, is rather out of sorts at present. The Earl of Aberdeen, although a fine man by all accounts, is a most unsatisfactory Prime Minister, and he has staffed his cabinet with men as ill-suited to their posts as he is to his. Not, of course, that those two upstairs would be particularly suited to any; but they certainly have no notion whatsoever of the pressures of the international stage, or of the changing nature of modern conflict. Many feel that when a war of any magnitude arrives – and the sense among us is very much that it will, before too long – Great Britain will be found sorely lacking, thanks largely to the glaring inefficacy of our Lords Clarendon and Newcastle.’

  This speech was delivered swiftly and softly, and heard only by Sam; Street had made it inaudible even to the servants standing directly behind them. It had the clear ring of expertise. This was an operator of the smartest variety. Sam regarded his companion anew. Mr Street was about his age, with cold, rather inexpressive eyes and a head of the most astonishing white-blond hair. There was something jerky and puppet-like about him, which his small stature served only to accentuate; he was plainly a political, desky type who’d spent his years within the cramped confines of the city, well away from wood, field and stream. But his calm, calculating face, framed by the full whiskers of an intellectual Englishman, told Sam that Lawrence Street was also someone with whom he could talk seriously – and who might well prove useful.

  They walked together towards the embassy doors. Sam’s mind was occupied now by a vision of a vast marching army, of two or three marching armies in fact, thousands upon thousands of men, each and every one of them wearing a new Colt Navy upon his belt.

  ‘Mr Street, did I hear you say that there is to be war in Europe?’

  Street nodded. ‘It is believed so; in Europe or on her fringes. And Great Britain will not be ready. We need your guns, Colonel, and soon. Yet you have just seen for yourself how lightly our ministers wear their duty – and how easily they are distracted from it.’

  ‘I’ll regain their interest soon enough.’

  They went outside. Sam welcomed the evening’s chill; it felt like fresh freedom after the stifling ordeals of the embassy. He left the surtout unbuttoned as he descended to the pavement of Grosvenor Square.

  Street had stopped at the top of the steps. He was shaking his head. ‘Forgive me, Colonel, but I must say that such a course would be a poor use of your time. There are others of equal standing and influence who have a true interest in your endeavours. They see the potential of your factory and your weapons, and the advantages they offer over anything already produced in this country – over the pistols of Mr Adams, say. They would have you succeed here, supplying our forces with all the revolvers you could manufacture. Don’t take any further trouble with Clarendon and his ilk.’

  Sam realised then that Street was at the ambassadorial residence that evening with the express purpose of meeting with him and having this talk. He was a proxy, most likely; a plan of some sort was being put into motion. ‘By thunder, Mr Street, who are these people?’ he exclaimed. ‘And how do they propose that this is to be achieved?’

  A faint shadow of amusement passed over Street’s features. ‘First of all, we need your factory to work properly. The main engine, I hear, is underpowered, and causing the machinery to drag most terribly.’

  Sam frowned. His orders were that no one outside the Colt Company was to be told of the factory’s troubles, but word had obviously leaked out. He opened his mouth to dispute Street’s confident assessment, but said nothing. The man was utterly sure of his information – and furthermore, it was correct. This is a devious critter indeed, the gun-maker thought. He’s trying to unbalance me, to set me on the back foot so that I will fall more easily into his wider scheme.

  ‘Once the factory is running your friends can help you,’ Street continued. ‘Commodore Hastings upstairs, for instance, and also those to whom I have already alluded. All will be in a better position to make your case, and at the very highest levels.’

  ‘Who the devil are these men, these mysterious friends of mine?’ Sam demanded. ‘This cloak-and-dagger horseshit don’t butter no parsnips with me, Mr Street! I will know, damn it, or I will forget we’ve ever met!’

  The little blond fellow crossed his arms, taking in the dark square, unmoved by Sam’s show of anger. ‘May I ask you a question, Colonel?’

  Sam glanced up at the embassy windows. Someone was looking out at them; they pulled back abruptly. He gestured his assent.

  ‘Why did you decide to establish your factory in London? Why not Paris, or Berlin, or Amsterdam?’

  Rather impatiently, Sam began to reel off the list of reasons for his choice – the reputation he had acquired at the Great Exhibition, the frequent steamers crossing between New York and Liverpool, the common tongue that meant his engineers could quickly train up new operatives – when Street stopped him.

  ‘Was it not because of the bond that you feel between my country and your own? The powerful sense that we are brethren, sprung from the same Anglo-Saxon stock, not only speaking the same language, as you say, but possessing the same enlightened feelings – the same civilising impulse? Did you not wish specifically to endow Great Britain’s armed forces with the spectacular advantage of your revolver?’

  Colt considered this for a moment. He could see the angle, and it was a damn sharp one. ‘I…was conscious of such a bond, yes – an Anglo-Saxon bond, exactly as you describe it.’ He felt himself warming to the theme. ‘The Colt Company is in the process of taking on English hands as we speak. It has always been my goal, Mr Street, to give this venture of mine a transatlantic character. Why, two of my closest London employees, my personal secretary and my press agent, are Englishmen, taken on for their knowledge of how things are over here.’

  Street seemed to approve of all this. ‘You must repeat these sentiments often, Colonel, and loudly. It will detract from those who cite your nationality as the primary reason to reject your inventions – and they will remain our most tenacious opponents, I promise you.’

  This unaccountable man then looked back briefly at the embassy doors, which were being held ajar for him; he’d got what he wanted from Sam and was about to go back inside. He came halfway down the steps, jerking along in that peculiar way of his, and extended his hand. Sam went back up to meet him and they shook firmly.

  ‘Know that you have your London allies,’ Street said, producing a card and laying it across Sam’s palm. ‘We shall speak again when your cause is more advanced. Good night to you, Colonel.’

  The doors shut solidly behind him. Sam muttered in bemusement, pulling on fine calfskin gloves as he turned towards the square. Carriages lined the black oval of lawn in its centre, their lamps out, waiting for the reception’s end. He spotted his own quickly enough, despite the sooty gloom; its superiority was apparent even amo
ng the conveyances of Buchanan’s noble guests. His coachman was not expecting to be called for at least another hour, and would probably be dozing on his box.

  The gun-maker took out a screw of Old Red and cut a generous plug. As he ground it between his teeth, feeling the rich tobacco set his mind afire and his fingers tingling inside his gloves, he ran through what had just transpired on the embassy steps. Something satisfactory had been achieved, of that he was certain; although now he thought hard about it he couldn’t say exactly what it might be. It had to be admitted, also, that he’d allowed himself to be put off the scent. Street had sidestepped his demands for information with professional efficiency. The identity of the Colt Company’s unseen supporters, of these men who supposedly watched his progress with such close interest, remained unknown.

  Starting over to his carriage, Sam paused beneath a street lamp and flipped over the card. Hon. Lawrence Street, MP, it read; Lord Commissioner of the Treasury, Whitehall.

  3

  Bolted down in its brick cradle, the engine was like a captive whale exhausted after a long struggle with the harpoon, emitting great sighs of white steam and the occasional high-pitched ping. It had been idling for the past two hours, but was still scalding hot; Martin heard Mr Quill curse as he brushed against the shining side of its copper boiler. The time was almost upon them. He looked over at Pat, Jack and the rest. They were hefting their shovels, ready to work. The warmth and closeness of that engine room was something devilish, and it was filthy too, grease, sweat and coal-dust mingling on every face and pair of arms to form a slick second skin. Darkness had fallen outside, and the factory lamps were lit. To Martin’s right, through the short passageway that led from the engine room to the forging shop, he could see a shadowy row of drop-hammers, standing before their clay ovens like so many giant corkscrews. The mass of operatives had been gone now for over an hour, and away from the wheezes of the engine the building was quiet. Martin had stayed on, as he did every night. Mr Quill welcomed this diligence, and he was pledged to do whatever was necessary to secure the chief engineer’s trust.