The Devil's Acre

by Matthew Plampin

  Every eye followed the potato as it rocketed past the rookery’s rooftops, a spinning black shape against the flawless purple-pink of the late evening sky. He’s going to juggle, Caroline thought, to toss up another after this one, and then another; but no, Jack had left the sack at his feet. Watching the potato as closely as anyone, he was bracing his legs and back as if readying himself to catch it.

  The potato struck his forehead with a splitting crack, smashing apart into many pieces. For an instant Caroline thought it was an accident; but then the children around her let out a wild shriek of laughter. Jack wiped his eyes and looked out at them, beaming wide.

  ‘And there it is, me fine friends, Roscommon Jack and his bonce of iron, to which a four-pound murphy is – is snow as a soft-flake – soft as a snow-flake! Performin’ at Rosie McGehan’s six weeks a night, twice on Saturdays!’

  There was applause, and some of the children darted forward to fetch themselves bits of the splattered potato, which they proceeded to gobble down raw. Passers-by were attracted by the commotion; Roscommon Jack’s crowd grew.

  ‘Do it again, Mister, please!’

  ‘Aye, Paddy, I missed it, do it again!’

  Jack winked at Caroline, a red welt emblazoned across his brow, his features shining with the potato’s cloudy juice. She gaped back at him in astonishment. He plucked out a second potato and prepared to throw.

  Mr Churn came through the packing-room door sideways, pushing it open with his shoulder, a bulging roll of oilskin in his arms. He went over to Fran, the oldest of the women at work in there, who’d been granted an informal authority over the rest of them, set down the oilskin and started to unravel it. From the corner of her eye, Caroline could see that inside this roll were yet more Navy revolvers – plain, service-standard pieces, black as pokers, seemingly identical to the twenty or so that were laid out across the table opposite.

  ‘Special task for you, my darlin’,’ he said. ‘Pack these up separate from the rest, in a single box of ten, and leave ‘em by the door. Priority job.’

  Fran was not the sort to stand for nonsense. She looked at the pistols and put a hand on her hip. ‘But they’re exactly the same as all the rest.’

  The packing room had been running for nearly a week now. Mr Churn was the Yankee who’d been appointed to watch over the women. He was a short, flat-nosed fellow of around forty, whose good-humoured manner formed a poor disguise for the truly spiteful soul beneath. The women had disliked him at once, thinking him a craven spy; and Fran made a point of expressing this unanimous aversion in their exchanges.

  Mr Churn sighed. ‘Oh Frances, I didn’t ask you to think on it, did I? Could you drop the sharkish tone just this once and do as I ask? I’ll be back for ‘em at noon.’

  And with that he left the room. Fran pulled a face at his retreating back and then surveyed the tables, comparing the girls’ progress. ‘How you doin’ there, Caro? Almost done with that one?’

  Caroline nodded, tapping home a final tiny nail. It was simple enough work, screwing down hinges and brackets, slotting in partitions and pasting on labels – less arduous, certainly, than operating Colonel Colt’s machines. These were only military-grade cases, made for mass sales. No velvet trimming or fine varnish was needed here, just a secure berth for the weapon and its accessories.

  The packing room was a small, cramped cell up in the rafters of the warehouse, in which three narrow tables were piled with pre-cut case components, assorted tins of screws or glue, and a jumbled spread of tools and sanding blocks. The mood among the dozen women who toiled there, though, was light-hearted indeed; most of them were still giddy with delight at having been kept on. Caroline played along with all this, joining in the jokes and the chatter, but she was uneasy. This was the one room in the entire works where London employees were permitted to handle the finished guns – the only place the arms stopped on their way to the heavily fortified stockroom at the other end of the warehouse’s upper floor – and the Yankees were taking no chances. A single doorway opened straight into the bustle and inevitable Yankee scrutiny of the polishing shop. The windows were so high and narrow that even if you managed to sling something out through one of them you’d have no way of telling where it might land. The opportunities for thievery that Martin had predicted had yet to reveal themselves to her.

  Fran rested a finger against her lower lip, considering the guns Mr Churn had brought in as Caroline walked over. ‘I don’t understand it. They really are exactly the bloody same. Why the hurry?’ She shrugged, losing interest, turning back to her own half-built case. ‘Pack ‘em up, dear, would you?’

  Caroline took two of the revolvers back to her place at the end of the leftmost table. Even after five days of packing them she couldn’t get accustomed to the sight and feel of these gleaming weapons – the leaden heaviness, the deadly possibility of the completed gun. They were made for killing men. You couldn’t look upon the perfect shaping of the stock, or the poised hook of the trigger, or the way that long barrel stretched out so purposefully from the cylinder, and be left in any doubt about this. For her first couple of shifts in the packing room Caroline had found herself imagining the usage that might await the virgin revolvers that were passing through her hands. This one might be drawn in Ireland, she’d mused, to drop the ringleaders of a food riot; this one discharged into a savage in distant Africa as he rushed forward with his spear; this one shipped east to the waters around Turkey, to be ready for use against Britain’s newest enemy, the Russians. It soon became too wearying, however, to be thinking constantly of slaughter, so Caroline did her best to put it from her mind.

  She set one of the pistols down beside the finished case and turned the other over in her hands, making a final check for blemishes. Fran was right – at first glance they seemed no different from the others. By the time they arrived in the packing room the guns had gone through an official proving by the British Government in the Tower of London, as well as the exhaustive tests performed on them by the Yankees themselves. Minute symbols had been stamped on them at each stage in this lengthy journey, attesting to the various procedures that had been carried out. Most prominent among these was the Colt serial number, etched onto each individual part prior to the pistols’ first full assembly. This number was the means by which the flow of weapons from the factory was recorded and monitored, and a serious obstacle before the would-be gun thief. The parts Caroline had taken from the machine floor had all been freshly made, unnumbered and thus off the company books; whereas a numbered weapon, even a part from a numbered weapon, would be missed immediately.

  Caroline noticed that the number on this pistol was far higher than any other she’d seen. So far they’d all been under 1,000, only three digits long; yet this weapon was marked ‘103300’. It lay well outside the sequence that had been observed in the London works up to that point. Frowning, unable to account for this, she studied it a little more closely – and made a significant discovery.

  The meaning of many of the other symbols on the guns was lost on her, but there was one that she knew. It pictured a crown atop a ‘V’, and was usually found on the barrel just beneath the lug. It was the mark pressed on in the Tower – the proof mark of the British Government – and it was missing. This pistol hadn’t been proved in the Tower. It hadn’t been entered into the Government’s records. They didn’t know that it existed.

  Her thoughts racing, Caroline fitted the pistol in the case as if nothing at all was wrong and reached for the other one. It was numbered ‘103301’; it was also missing the London mark. She placed it next to the first, packed in a handful of fine straw from the bale set at the table’s end, and then went back across the room for the rest.

  The outbuilding clung to the side of the warehouse like a knot on a log, forming a small interruption in the rear alley that ran between the premises of the Colt Company and the Equitable Gas-Works. There was a padlock on the door, but it was a crude one; using a screwdriver she had taken from the packing room,
Caroline loosened part of the mount without much difficulty. She looked back along the alley behind her to check that she hadn’t been followed and then slipped inside.

  When Mr Churn had made his collection at noon, Caroline had been out in the polishing shop replenishing her supply of nails and screws. She’d watched discreetly as he took the crate of illegitimate guns down the corridor, past the fortified stock room to the warehouse staircase, and pounded his way down into the yard. As she’d emptied a scoop of packing nails into her tray those heavy footfalls had come back into earshot, almost directly below her. Stealing a glance from a nearby window, she’d seen Mr Churn entering this forgotten outbuilding with the crate still in his arms, and had decided right away that this deserved further investigation.

  The door opened onto a stone staircase that wound down underneath the Colt warehouse. Caroline followed it into a low, close cellar. She could hear steady dripping and the scratching of rats; and above, through the vaulted ceiling, the blunted pops of revolvers being test-fired in the proving room. A couple of pavement grates on the Ponsonby Street side let in a dribble of sallow evening light, enabling her to make out some forgotten stacks of lumber and a row of mould-blackened barrels.

  The pistol crates stood in a far corner – a dozen ten-piece boxes, including the one she had made earlier that day, piled up on a cleared patch of earth. Colt’s men had plainly been bringing them down here since production had begun a month or so earlier, skimming them off the surface of the factory’s output and hiding them away. Caroline couldn’t say for certain why this was being done. The smuggler’s motive, perhaps – the evasion of trade duties? Were the Yankees sending them back to America, and resented being taxed by the British Government for shipping arms to their own people?

  It hardly mattered. Caroline laid her hands on top of the crates. This hoard could be the answer to her problems. Colt’s men were adding to it frequently, that much was obvious; the way that the floor had been cleared suggested that a good many more boxes were to be put down there in the coming months. A few small thefts probably wouldn’t be noticed until the crates had arrived at their destination – by which time Martin’s debt would be paid off, Amy and the children would be safe, and Caroline would have left the Colt factory for employment elsewhere. It would be a clean escape. Even if the stealing was discovered, this little operation here in the cellars was secret and in all likelihood unlawful. The Yankees might not even risk seeking out those responsible for fear of drawing attention to it, and just move the crates to another place.

  Without any further deliberation, Caroline shifted the boxes about until she could get at the bottom one. Using her screwdriver, she prised up a slat from its lid and took out a revolver. Sure enough, it had a six-figure serial number and no proof mark. Arranging the straw to disguise its absence, she replaced the slat and put the pistol in the pocket of her apron.

  She left at fast as she could, screwing the padlock mount back on behind her, shivering with fearful exhilaration. Feeling light as a dandelion seed, her head entirely empty of thoughts, she walked back down the shady alley and out into the main yard, trying to keep her pace even and inconspicuous. It was not so late that her still being in the works would be thought odd. Girls often stayed an extra ten minutes to finish off a case; she herself had done so. No one would think anything of it. Darkness was still an hour or two away, but the lights were already lit on the ground floor of the factory block. Work in the engine room would carry on long into the night. Another Yankee engineer, a real master it was said, had arrived in London the week before to help Mr Quill fine-tune the engine. Martin would be in there, of course, toiling alongside them; Caroline longed to see the look on her brother-in-law’s face, on Pat Slattery’s face, when she produced the prize that neither of them had been able to obtain.

  As she was passing by the water trough she noticed a single figure leaning against the wall just by the foundry door, smoking a cigar. It was Mr Lowry. He was looking over at her, his eyes hidden in shadow. They still hadn’t spoken; she’d disregarded Martin’s instruction, deciding that an outright rejection wasn’t necessary. He’d got the message clearly enough. His attempts to talk with her had ceased completely, and he made no effort to approach her now, merely tipping his top hat and drawing on his cigar. He didn’t look well, his face pale and lined as if he’d been robbed of his rest. Caroline could see something on his neck, a bruise of some kind, partly concealed by a loose necktie. She had little doubt that Martin’s friends had driven him from the Acre with menaces and blows, of which this injury was a probable result, but she couldn’t afford any guilt, or regret, or sympathy. Too much was in the balance. Besides, she’d told herself, he was better off not having anything to do with her now. This severance, unpleasant as it might be, would serve to protect Mr Lowry from any accusations that he too had been involved in the Irishmen’s scheme.

  The pistol in her apron seemed to grow heavier as she passed him, straining against the cotton, forcing its outline into the thin cloth. She dropped him an awkward curtsey, fitting the weapon against the curve of her belly. This was easily done; the Colt revolver was clearly designed to sit closely against the human form. She hurried through the gates and on towards Westminster.

  The Holy Lamb was shut up, the door barred from the inside. Caroline hammered against it and looked in through the windows; she thought she could see people inside, hunched around a single candle, but they did not respond to her calls. She stepped back onto the stoop, casting a glance around the derelict lane, and felt a sudden sense of peril. Being with Martin or Jack had shielded her from the worst of this place. Without them, she was as much at risk as anyone.

  Caroline started towards St Anne’s Street, becoming quite desperate to get the stolen gun out of her apron. She could really feel the weight of it now, pulling on the cord around the back of her neck. Only one option presented itself: Crocodile Court. She could leave it with Amy. Martin would surely seek her out double-quick once he’d come home to a complete revolver. Then she could tell him what she’d found, they could make their plans, and the whole wretched business would be brought that much nearer to its end.

  A high-sided cart, of the sort used by tradesmen to move goods, had stopped about halfway down St Anne’s Street, a short distance from the mouth of Crocodile Court. Unusually, it had not attracted a crowd; in fact, the inhabitants of the Acre were keeping their distance. As she drew closer, Caroline saw why. A team of workmen, white scarves bound around their faces, were unloading pine coffins from the back of the cart, laying them in the road and removing their lids. Two well-starched, top-hatted gents stalked this grim line, offering direction and reciting passages of scripture. They were the organisers of this undertakers’ mission, charitable folk doing God’s work among the poor and diseased of the metropolis – for it was an outbreak of disease, Caroline realised with mounting horror, that had brought them there. This was why the Lamb was closed; why the streets themselves were so much emptier than usual. Cholera had arrived in the Acre.

  Slowly, the dead began to emerge from the tenements, carried out by friends and relations who were mostly too unwell themselves to make any demonstration of grief. Caroline saw just one of these corpses – wrapped up in a dirty sheet, its grey face beset with flies – before averting her eyes and quickening her pace. The stout piebald mare yoked up to the coffin-cart shook her head in distress at the dreadful smells gathering around her, stamping at the dusty ground.

  Crocodile Court was deathly quiet. There was not a single woman at its windows, or cardplayer in its doorways, or ragged child in its gutters. Sickness lay in the bed of the alley like an acrid fog. Caroline ran down to Amy’s building and went inside. The stairway was as crowded as ever, and the reek of vomit almost overpowering. Her sleeve pressed against her nose and mouth, she climbed up as swiftly as she could. The hard, flat sound of nails being driven into cholera coffins, rising from St Anne’s Street and coming in through the open window, greeted her as she walk
ed into the dark stillness of her sister’s room. She saw Katie first, over on the pallet, playing half-heartedly with the remains of a paper carnation. Amy sat in her usual place before the fireplace, but she wasn’t at work on her flowers. Instead, she stared numbly at a nest of old blankets laid out on the floor before her, arranged around the tiny form of Michael, her baby son. The child was listless and only half-awake. His skin was an awful colour, a sort of pinkish grey, and he was wheezing terribly, letting out little constricted coughs. There could be no doubt. He had the disease.

  ‘Dear God,’ Caroline whispered.

  Amy looked at her and began to sob, trying to speak but losing the words in a fit of stammering.

  Caroline crossed the room, taking her sister’s head against her shoulder and squeezing her tightly. ‘Come,’ she said, ‘we’ll find him a doctor. Listen to me. There’s still time.’

  She released Amy and went to Michael, leaning over him. Even at a foot’s distance she could feel the heat glowing from his feverish skin. Gently, she ran an arm beneath his lolling head and another under his legs, bending forward to lift him up.

  There was a rattling thump from somewhere beneath her; startled, she glanced down towards it. The stolen Colt Navy had slid from her apron pocket, landing stock-first against the floorboards and clattering onto its side.

  3

  Reaching the end of the British Munitions Gazette, Edward frowned and turned back to the front page, checking the date. He had the right issue. The piece on the Colt factory it was supposed to be carrying, however, detailing the latest advances being made in the engine room and giving some updated production forecasts, was nowhere to be found. Richards had failed to meet his deadline again – for the third time, in fact, since the Colonel had left to see to his dyke. Edward sighed, folding the magazine’s thin pages in half and dropping it to the ground.