The Devil's Acre

by Matthew Plampin

  Edward attempted to absorb what he had seen. She had no liking for these disreputable Irishmen, that much was plain, but there was a connection between them – a connection that in all likelihood involved serious wrongdoing. And what was more, Mr Quill’s assistant, whom the good-natured engineer had personally saved from dismissal, was caught up in it too. These were important discoveries indeed, and most unwelcome ones. Where this left his original intentions in following Miss Knox from the gun works Edward couldn’t say, but he knew that he would not leave the Devil’s Acre without learning what they’d gone into this low tavern to discuss. He’d been into such establishments before, around his rooms on Red Lion Square; they were dingy places, chopped up into a multitude of tiny dens by screens and partitions. The secretary was confident that he’d be able to sneak in, locate a secluded stool and eavesdrop without fear of exposure. He stepped out from behind the beam and started for the tavern’s stoop.

  The blow knocked off his hat and pushed him into a quick, stunning collision with a pair of iron scaffolding poles. He tried to turn but a body barrelled against his back, throwing something over his head – a length of rope. It came to rest in the depression between the base of his jaw and his Adam’s apple and was then drawn in with terrifying force. Edward’s entire being focused upon this rope, upon getting his fingertips beneath it and forcing it from his neck, but it was no use. The garrotte was already too tight, and was growing tighter; he felt a hot bloating of blood in his ears, and a dreadful pressure building deep within his skull, dizzying and deadening. His best shout emerged as only a helpless gargle.

  Everything grew darker. He was being dragged backwards, through a doorway. There were floorboards overhead, covered with creamy blossoms of mould. Another person was moving in front of him, rifling through his pockets, taking his watch, his money and the pin on his necktie. His throat was wet – was it bleeding? Was he about to be strangled – murdered? The thief was plucking at his boots now, making to remove them. Finding a last urgent reserve of strength, Edward began to thrash about, determined that he would not meet his death in stockinged feet. The garrotte constricted further, sending a white-green bolt across his sight; his bulging eyes seemed to be on the verge of popping from their sockets like a pair of champagne corks.

  One of his frenzied kicks hit its target. There was a grunt of pain. ‘Bugger this,’ said an Irish voice, ‘boots ain’t worth it anyhow. Let’s be off.’

  Edward was pushed to his knees, the garrotte whipping away like the string on a spinning top, twisting him to the floor. Gasping and coughing, he fought to take in air, frantically feeling his burning throat, convinced that it must have been slit to be hurting so much; but no, although scraped and bloody, the skin was intact.

  The secretary lay still for a minute. One side of his sweat-sheened face was pressed against a drift of loose earth. He lifted his head, a heavy coating of dirt sticking to his cheek; and a sudden, blinding ache was driven into him like a mason’s nail through the temple. Trying vainly to blink it away, he took in his surroundings. He lay in a narrow, flyblown room – and he was not alone. Four small children were watching him intently from a dark corner. They were gaunt and filthy, their hair overgrown, making it impossible to tell their ages or genders. A couple held mackerel heads in their straw-thin fingers, taken from a heaped box of the things that sat against the wall. These unsavoury scraps of waste were plainly a great prize; the children were nibbling at them with hungry relish as they regarded the well-dressed man sprawled out before them.

  Edward scrambled to his feet and fled, leaving the tumble-down alley at an unsteady run. It seemed highly likely at that moment that his robbers would decide that boots were worth it after all, and perhaps jacket and trousers as well – cases of footpads stripping their victims down to their undergarments were far from unknown. He headed back down the main thoroughfare towards safety, attracting a few mocking catcalls as he loped by, bloody collar flapping loose, shirt-tails trailing down from under his jacket, but most of the Acre’s inhabitants were indifferent. The robbed were hardly a rare sight in that lawless district.

  As he crossed back into Millbank, Edward slowed to a walk, and then stopped at a recently lit lamp-post, leaning heavily against it and spitting out a thick coil of rust-coloured mucus. He shook his throbbing head, breathlessly cursing his naivety – how the devil could he have been so stupid? They’d clearly been tracking him from the moment he’d entered the rookery, waiting until he was at its very heart and thus beyond all possible aid before making their move. For the first time in weeks Miss Knox left his mind completely, supplanted by an excruciating mixture of shame and annoyance at the ease with which he had been overcome. That watch had been a gift from his mother, a token of her pride when he had first been taken on at Carver & Weight’s, and now it was gone for good, given over to the enrichment of base villains.

  Gingerly, the secretary laid a palm against his clammy, stinging throat. His thoughts turned towards another gift that he’d been given, rather more recently – the Colt Navy revolver. Leaning against that lamp-post, ripped clothes stained with his own blood, he found himself wishing more than anything else in the world that he’d had the pistol with him when he’d ventured into the Devil’s Acre. When that cord had gone around his neck he could have pulled it from his belt; loosed his first shot into the ceiling, as a warning; his second perhaps into the garrotter’s shin; his third into the air as he chased them away down the lane. By God, how differently things would have gone!

  2

  Caroline glanced at her knuckle. Beneath the usual persistent smear of gun grease, it was bright red and swelling steadily. She had hit Pat Slattery rather harder than she’d intended and would be bruised as a result. He would have a fine cauliflower ear, though, a real beauty; this thought consoled her somewhat as she took a place at the bar of their rank cave of a tavern, feeling a fetid draught across the back of her neck as the door swung open to admit them.

  It was fiercely hot in the Holy Lamb. There was a strong smell of dried-out damp and cess-pools; sticky moisture was gathering in a great dripping patch overhead. Everything in the Lamb was wooden, warped and old beyond estimation. Its low ceiling was crossed with thick beams, making the well-weathered taproom resemble the hold of a river barge. The few pieces of oft-repaired furniture were covered with blemishes and scorch marks, and clearly saw regular use in brawls. Tarnished farming implements, souvenirs of lost lives lived among fields and hay-barns, hung upon the walls. A curling map of Ireland had been mounted behind the bar and garlanded with withered wildflowers, leaving no doubt as to whose place this was. The ale pumps stuck up like a row of worm-eaten vegetables, swollen and discoloured; and behind them lurked the publican, a beady-eyed, hedgehog-like creature, who was regarding her with silent dissatisfaction, as if having a woman on his premises, and an Englishwoman to boot, was a grave affront.

  ‘Don’t you gawp at me like that, cock,’ Caroline snapped. ‘D’you honestly think I’d come into this wretched pit of me own choosing?’

  ‘She’s wi’ us, Brian,’ said one of the Irishmen sleepily, settling against the bar with a suggestive grin. ‘Nothin’ at all to worry about here.’

  Caroline turned towards him, ready to let him know exactly what she thought of his easy manner, when Slattery barged between them, his hand still clamped over his bruised ear.

  ‘Off wi’ ye, Brian,’ he muttered at the publican. ‘Just for a minute, lad.’ The hedgehog shuffled off obediently to a back room. They were alone. Slattery glanced at her with angry dislike. ‘What d’you have, then?’

  She studied him for a moment – the hawkish cast of his features, the black hair greying a little at the whiskers, the pocked skin of his cheek. He mightn’t have been a bad-looking fellow once, but he seemed corrupted somehow, moon-struck and dangerous, a nasty threat made flesh. Close up, it was easy to see why Amy had been so upset simply by the sound of his name. Caroline took the revolver cylinder from the pocket of her apron, s
et it on the bar and rolled it towards him like a barrel. The surface was uneven, covered with dents and nicks, and the cylinder soon went off course; Slattery stopped it with his free hand, looking at her uncomprehendingly. There was a weird flatness to his gaze, but Caroline stared straight back at him, refusing to become intimidated. She would not give this man another bloody inch.

  ‘This is all?’

  Martin spoke up from over by the door. Unlike the rest of them, he’d kept his cap on, and seemed scarcely more comfortable with the situation than Caroline. ‘You know what it’s like in there, Pat – damn hard to get anythin’ out. The Yankees watch you every moment.’

  Slattery angled his head in Martin’s direction. ‘Aye, Mart, you are right, I do know – full to the rafters wi’ gun parts is what it’s like. That bastard Colt has a stock room fit to burst its seams. Yet you and Miss bleedin’ Prize-fighter here have got us but three of these damn things in a bleedin’ fortnight. What the devil is that about, eh, Mart? Tell us that, if you can!’

  Caroline looked at the row of black bottles behind the bar. All is not well, she thought, between Martin and Pat Slattery.

  ‘We’ll work quicker, Pat.’

  ‘By the Holy Mother, Mart, you’d better. That’s all I’ll say. You’d bleedin’ better. You know what stands against us here – what’ll happen if we don’t get some complete pistols together in the near bleedin’ future.’ Those flat eyes swivelled back to Caroline. ‘You can blame me for this bit o’ trouble all ye like, Missy, but we’ll all suffer if it ain’t sorted out. D’ye follow? All of us.’

  With that he secured the cylinder in his green canvas jacket and left the tavern, his dozy-looking comrades following after him, exchanging a few words in the strange, thick tongue of their homeland. Only Martin and Jack Coffee remained behind. Jack had sat himself on a stool at the other end of the bar and was scratching vacantly at his red beard.

  ‘They’re off to the docks,’ her brother-in-law explained, nodding after Slattery and the others. ‘There’s a chance of some night work at Limehouse.’

  Caroline glared at him. She loathed Martin more than any of them. Slattery might be a fiend but he’d never pretended to be anything else: he was a fiend in the Acre, a fiend in the Colt works, and had doubtlessly been a fiend back in Ireland. Martin Rea, however, was a deceiver – a stinking liar. He’d known of this mysterious debt when he first came to London, when he met Amy in Covent Garden that day; when he chose to court her, marry her and sire two children with her. Throughout, he’d been aware that this doom-laded blow would eventually fall, but he’d taken on responsibilities nonetheless, and tied the fate of others, of innocents, to his own. It was the fulfilment of every doubt that Caroline had ever harboured about him – and now she was being made to risk herself as well. When she thought of what might happen if she were caught thieving for these Irishmen she felt sick with fright. Not even Mr Lowry, who continued to watch out for her despite everything and had saved her neck that very morning, would be able to keep Walter Noone off her then.

  Martin came in closer, bringing with him the familiar coal-smoke odour of the Colt forging shop. ‘I hear that you’re up in the packing room now.’

  Caroline nodded.

  ‘This is good news. You’ll be far better placed to remove a complete gun. These random parts will get us nowhere. We’d need hundreds o’ them, and complete sets too – it’d take years. And Pat knows this as well.’ He hesitated, growing embarrassed, the lines at the sides of his mouth deepening; he was about to say something he didn’t particularly want to. ‘What of the secretary, Caro?’

  She scowled. ‘What of him, Martin? I did as you asked, God help me. Not so much as a word has passed between us since that night you sent Amy to fetch me from the Eagle.’

  ‘Has he made it difficult? Pestering you and the like?’

  ‘He –’ Caroline stopped, thinking of his many attempts to place himself in her path, each and every one of which she’d sidestepped with heartbreaking ease. ‘Why d’you ask?’

  Martin shrugged, looking towards the door. ‘He were following you just then, up on St Anne’s Street.’

  Caroline started, moving away from the bar. ‘He was here – in the Acre? But he’ll be eaten alive! We must go out to look for him, we must –’

  ‘He’s gone now,’ Martin interrupted, ‘back to his rightful region. I got some pals to see to that.’

  ‘What – what did they do to him?’

  ‘Nothin’ much. Got him out is all. Just tell me he didn’t know where you was headed, or what you was coming here for.’

  ‘No, Martin,’ she replied, alarmed by his bluntness. ‘How could he? I told you, I ain’t spoke to him!’

  He wasn’t reassured. ‘We can’t have you romancing the Colonel’s secretary, Caro. It’d make you the talk o’ the factory. Half the Yankees already hate that poor bugger for the favour he’s gained wi’ Colt – if they see you and him walking out together it’ll bring a load o’ notice upon you. The bastards’ll be looking out for something just like this thing we have here.’

  Caroline grew exasperated. ‘How many times can I say it? I have not –’

  ‘He must be put off completely, d’ye understand? The fellow can’t be let alone to trail after you like a lovesick swan. You must see to him, Caro. If you won’t then you can be certain that I will. For the sake of my little ones.’

  She didn’t respond. Martin made an impatient sound, tugged his cap low over his brow and said that he had to get home to Amy. Caroline doubted this, thinking it far more likely that he was heading off to yet another tavern, perhaps to meet with Ben Quill; but she stayed quiet, too stung by the brutal instruction she’d been given for any more quarrelling. Halfway through the Lamb’s door he paused, asking Jack if he’d see her back to Millbank. Jack nodded his assent.

  Caroline looked down at the floor, at her scuffed work-boots, feeling Jack’s eyes upon her. She was fairly certain that he’d been sweet on her at one stage, but had been too shy ever to act. This suited Caroline; it had saved her from having to put him off. During her years in service she’d heard many stories of the doomed and difficult marriages of the other maids’ sisters, cousins and friends, all of which had made her determined only to give herself to a man of brains and ambition – a man who might lift her out of her present circumstances rather than mire her in them forever. Jack Coffee was most certainly not that man.

  The publican emerged from his bolt-hole with a tallow candle in his hand, which immediately made the rest of the tavern seem much darker. ‘Will ye drink then, Jack?’ he rasped.

  Caroline glanced up. Jack was looking over to her for guidance. There was a distinct awkwardness in him; he hadn’t liked the hard treatment he’d just seen her receive from Martin and Pat Slattery.

  She felt drained, dog-tired and thoroughly ashamed of herself. ‘I’m finished for today, Jack. Will you just take me home?’

  Jack got to his feet at once; he was so tall that he had to duck to avoid knocking his head against the beams. After pulling on his cap, he retrieved a large sack from the floor, bade farewell to the publican and led her back out into the evening. A small fire was burning in the middle of the lane, encircled by ragged bodies, a loose spiral of insects and embers winding away above it. Caroline looked around for any indication that Mr Lowry had been there. In the fading light, beside some scaffolding poles, she saw a stamped-down hat, once smart but now broken and dirtied beyond repair, its colour lost in the dust. Had she seen a similar hat on the secretary’s head? It was too badly damaged to tell.

  Jack was adjusting his hold on his sack, preparing to heave it onto his shoulder. Caroline asked him what it held. He broke into a grin, his awkwardness vanishing.

  ‘These here, Caro,’ he announced with some pride, ‘are me murphies.’ He opened the sack’s mouth. Inside were dozens of huge potatoes, encrusted with mud; a good number were well past eating, being rotten or covered in sprouting white tendrils.

  Sh
e smiled back. ‘What d’you need so many for, you blockhead? You selling ‘em or something?’

  ‘Doin’ me turn at Rosie McGehan’s, ain’t I.’ He chuckled. ‘No dock work for Jack Coffee, no ma’am! I am a performin’ artiste, if ye please!’

  Caroline had heard of this place, a stable on the rookery’s northern border that had been converted by an enterprising Irishwoman into a penny gaff, now famous throughout the city for tuppeny variety bills and lurid, blood-soaked melodramas. ‘And what the devil are you going to do at Rosie McGehan’s, Jack, with a sackful of bloody potatoes?’

  They reached St Anne’s Street. Hundreds still milled about, their faces lit by the flickers of second-hand lamplight that fell from the many open doors and windows – and a more sickly-looking horde Caroline had never seen. She’d heard it said that only six or seven years ago the Devil’s Acre used to empty itself over the summer, as London’s poor made for the countryside to work in fields and orchards, and thus avoid the diseases that stirred amid the filth of the city. This plainly happened no longer. It was the Irish, she supposed, driven over by the Famine. They had neither the knowledge of England nor the ready coin to transport themselves down to the farms of Kent or Surrey – and as a result were stuck crammed together in the festering rookery as the heat continued to rise.

  ‘I will show you,’ Jack declared, removing his cap. ‘A special performance, Miss Knox!’

  With that he lumbered onto a bare patch of ground and began to appeal to those drifting about the street to gather round, launching into a coarse, tongue-tied imitation of a theatre-host’s patter. Caroline giggled uncertainly. A handful of rookery people, children mostly, assembled before him in an expectant yet slightly sceptical line. Jack selected an especially large, lumpy potato, the size of two fists placed side by side, cast a meaningful glance around his little audience – and then hurled it straight up into the air with all his strength.